Excerpts from “His Lives in Africa”

Three biographical excerpts from a Jewish lineage, transplanted between Algeria and France, are what philosopher François-David Sebbah offers us here. He himself is at the end of the story, in the guise of a child. It is by becoming a child again that he has written the book “His Lives in Africa”, from which these few pages are taken. He did so in order to better understand and reveal what has been secretly preserved and displaced within him from his eminently French Sephardic memory. We see that he himself is suspended in the manner of a paragraph attached to a longer text, impossible to unify, however, and therefore destined to appear in fragments.

 

 

Ashes

The father’s mother looked at everything with detachment, sunk into an armchair or perhaps a kind of chaise longue, her legs stretched out. She rarely moved, except to make herself a coffee, and always barefoot. She spoke little, and her eyes said she was “far away.” Perhaps not elsewhere; not “there” in any case: she was much further away than any nostalgia.

She neglected herself. She sometimes neglected to get dressed and stayed in her dressing gown, neglected to wash the soles of her feet regularly—feet that she had slowly dragged across the slightly dusty brick-red tiles that covered the floor of the apartment. She wasn’t jaded—that really wasn’t the right word—perhaps she had seen it all. She was tired, a tiredness that now defined her whole being. This tiredness, which he sensed was much more than the tiredness of age, remained somewhat enigmatic to the child. He didn’t know, or not really, that this woman abandoned in her armchair, somewhere in a small apartment in Marseille, had raised four brothers without a father—children born to a man who had come late into her life and died soon after, a man who was little more than a passing footnote. He didn’t know that her French citizenship had been revoked for about three years, that her husband, like her, had become an “indigenous Jew” and had to gradually sell the few “precious” items in the house so that they could survive a little better during those long months: between the Vichy laws, which designated Jews as second-class citizens, and the abolition of the Crémieux decree, which stripped Jews in Algeria of their French cititenship, life became more difficult for all Jews in varying degrees (businesses confiscated, civil servants dismissed, exclusion from school, etc.). The child did not know, and therefore even less how “it” had specifically affected his family—but that something terribly difficult (is that enough of a word? what word would suffice?) had happened was as evident from his grandmother’s behavior as it was puzzling. And yet, he did not know that one should not dream that the sun would suddenly rise after a dark night; he did not know that the Crémieux decree had only been reinstated with great difficulty, after long months of procrastination (procrastination on the part of those who did not want to hurt Muslims, who were doomed “for eternity” to the indigenous status by the French state—very understandable. But also, how could one doubt it, that this stemmed from a small antisemitic impulse, from which “Free France” was certainly not exempt. Nor did he know that later, the woman he saw lying there all the time had had to find a menial job at more than forty years of age to support her family (taking care of two little devils, her two younger brothers), while giving up a late love and refusing to remarry a “Catholic”—ah, the walls separating communities! He didn’t really realize either, that she had suddenly lost her “home”, no one had said anything—a small apartment in a city in North Africa—and crossed the sea to find herself, before she was even sixty, already ageless, in this other small apartment on Rue Georges in Marseille.

One could understand her fatigue. (A depressive tendency, one might say now, using somewhat medical terminology.)

She wasn’t jaded—that really wasn’t the right word—perhaps she had seen it all. She was tired, a tiredness that now defined her whole being.

She smoked cigarette after cigarette, all day long, day after day, an ashtray carelessly placed not far from the armchair where she lay. In the infinite distance of her gaze, there was no anger, and the indifference that characterized her was not really indifference: there was—at least that’s how it seemed to the child—still gentleness and kindness in that infinite distance.

Slumped in the deep armchair, her right arm slightly bent, her right hand languishing with two fingers (the index and middle fingers stained by tobacco) about to drop the cigarette, which nevertheless regularly and miraculously found its way back to her mouth, she was beautiful in her own way.

Often, the ash from the cigarette, which had been burning for too long and had accumulated into a precarious cone, would eventually collapse and fall onto her clothes and into the depths of the armchair. She didn’t care. Ashes.

The Father, known as “the leader”

He is still just a child, playing soccer with a deflated ball or fighting in the streets of the city by the suspension bridge (sometimes armed with his belt!). The Jewish Scouts of France have chosen the child who will become the patrol leader. He will undoubtedly remain so throughout his life in a sense, despite the distances, or through them.

In the early 1940s, objects disappear from the house—they are sold by the father of the father (the father when he was a child), little by little. Loss of French citizenship, of employment, of school. The Father never spoke of this loss, of this return to the status of “indigenous Jew”—never in front of him, here, in what is now metropolitan France.

The Father did not make anyone jealous: he said nothing about the torture and massacres perpetrated by the French army, nor about the abuses of the Organization of Algerian Soldiers (OAS) or the National Liberation Front (FLN) (the bombs in cafés… there is also the story of young people kidnapped in the courtyard of the building and found with their throats slit and castrated in the alleys – has anyone told that story before?).

My father never lamented independence, never showed nostalgia, never criticized the new Algerian state or what it had become. Nor did he particularly extol independence or show any obvious sympathy for Algeria’s suffering in the 1980s and 1990s, the bloody years of the “civil war.” Nothing. The son did not see this phantom limb, anesthetized—there/not there: this continent.

The Father wavered in the naivety of his Enlightenment – but it was courage, in his own way: he believed that the dietary restrictions of kashrut had a hygienic virtue (allowing the wise men of old to prevent the people from eating foods that were dangerous to their health), and he had once declared that full French citizenship should have been granted to all Muslims in Algeria long ago. This had not been done. There was absolutely nothing to say about what followed—liberation for some, tragedy for others.

All that was left was to look elsewhere, if we were ever there…

I want to believe that he was happy, at least for a while; poor and happy, a student, a regular at the Bar du Métro in the Latin Quarter, near Mabillon—far from all that, far from “there” (while remaining so close); he was entitled to it, every human being is entitled to lightheartedness. I dream that for him.

Perhaps he even met a young woman, blonde, with blue eyes, tall, who naively believed that Levi was an Italian name?

How did he deal with his ghosts, he who never spoke of them, he who seemed to have done everything in his life to free himself from them? Did he succeed in his own way? Or was that distant, vague look—cigarette after cigarette—that I knew so well when he wasn’t busy with work, that look that said something more “far away” than exile and nostalgia, like the risk of melancholy (with the object of his longing now lost)?

Liberation or melancholy? Perhaps both, undoubtedly—not opposites, no “or”…

Cigarette after cigarette, his eyes lost in thought—whenever he wasn’t working—like his mother in her small apartment in Marseille, so far from the city with the suspension bridge.

It’s hard to say—like that name on the “suspension bridge” (over what abyss?) that he insisted on: François(-)David (since the son must bear the Hebrew first name of his father’s father as his middle name. And since the mother thought that “David” wasn’t bad after all, more “acceptable” than Ephraim or Mardochai, at least “here and now” in the France of the 1960s, where people would go in groups to the Orly airport to watch the planes take off for fun—just a bunch of friends, students or former students having a good time—far away from “there”.

It seems to me that he didn’t have the slightest accent, nothing—except when he spoke with people from “there”; then “it” came back a little: it’s a very common phenomenon. And he never gave any hint of “nostalgia” (to use a buzzword already coined and passed on by Derrida), never.

“His ghosts are his, mine are mine”: I am fond of this phrase, which is salutary and necessary, yet already implies its own complication: “his are (also) mine,” transformed, certainly, by the passage of a generation, but tough, indestructible in their own way, if I judge by the way that, against my will (what a strange expression), I am already passing them on to the next generation… I, who have hardly any identifiable accent, at least I think so…

The child who comes after

In the specific situation expressed in these short stories, there is a singular tone.

Coming after does not imply—no longer, at least—a direct nostalgia for exile. There is no sense of painful loss, of being torn away—a loss that could still be dreamed of, at least on some level, as something that could be compensated for: as if it hurt, and as if something like a return were, if not possible (the lucidity of the obvious—what has been is no longer), at least desirable. “The desirable.” : to find one’s home again, the colors, the landscapes, the smells, the atmospheres – to desire to find again. For those who come after, after exile itself, there is nothing to find; they cannot desire to return. And yet. And yet!

Arriving just after. Surviving in the shadows, the echo of survival. Here too, nothing could be more universal: even those who lived through an event – “the events” (not to say a war) – had already survived, since birth, only in the echo of so many other echoes that were the echo of so many others (the beginning, even the empirical beginning, is always already lost—we could fictionally go back to the first group of humanoids, somewhere in time and space—the established imagination will suggest “a cave”—but where, when, why “them”?). To be part of a story, to inherit, to pass on—beyond any voluntary act of this kind, by the mere fact of existing—is to experience that we only begin in hindsight, that every beginning is hindsight. For the father already, history, at least his history in relation to history, was such that the “point of no return” was accepted, and without regret: his Algeria, his childhood world, was a phantom limb: “there,” “not there” – “there” as “not there” definitively, abolished in reality as in the space of desire. The body schema cannot completely cancel out the presence of the missing limb, even though it acknowledges the irreducibility and definitive nature of this absence… still present in its own way, in this strange way. The presence of an absence without real nostalgia.

Neither exile nor nostalgia, no violent, identifiable, circumscribed suffering – no “I ache for Algeria,” no “nostalgia” – and yet, and yet… feeling this inherited phantom limb, still irritated…

What does it mean to inherit a phantom limb?

Coming after does not imply – no longer, at least – a direct nostalgia for exile. For those who come after, after exile itself, there is nothing to find; they cannot desire to return. And yet. And yet!

In the same way that the rooms of a house or the height of the ceilings seem immense from a child’s height and from “above,” of a child’s gaze, the past—which one has not lived—is immense when one has only a handful of years of existence: then, ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years ago, converge in a kind of thickness that is ultimately bottomless and abstract. An abstraction of the past that seems to cancel it out in the great present of childhood. And yet, what is this unknown knowledge that makes children always feel that their present is not just a surface or a point, that “everything” is there, an indistinct but ever-present “whole,” a whole with a depth so densely concrete and infinitely overflowing the immediate surface of their lives?

Later, in retrospect, “we” will begin to order things according to before and after along a sufficiently public and shared temporal axis. “We” will know, for example—with a knowledge that is much more like what is officially called “knowledge” — that the Algerian War took place so close to the date of his birth, “one” will “understand” that the actors of the Second World War were part of his own world, in his seemingly shallow childhood “present” – “we” will understand the meaning of the number tattooed on the arm of the old watchmaker whose shop was a little further down the street, etc. As children, we knew nothing, but now we know, with a knowledge that is articulated, aspiring to clarity and distinction.

Or rather, as children, we knew everything—but differently… And without any connection to that knowledge, even today, would we ever know anything?

So we arrive later: almost nothing remains, just a few scattered crumbs, shards, fragments. And we know even less because these painful crumbs are, of course, covered up, unspoken, repressed, etc. Things and beings have been broken; and we arrive later—and the echo of destruction and uprooting curls up and repeats itself in the most intimate part of ourselves.

However, two apprehensions of time come into conflict. One demands repair; simply putting the pieces back together—leaving the scars and the irreplaceable and forever missing parts visible. How could it be otherwise? There is an insistent evidence of this tendency toward repair (always literal before it is ethical). Yet, on the other hand, there is a deep feeling that time does not work this way, that “everything” is indeed there, even if “nothing” is there for our eyes that want to see with clarity and distinction (“partes extra partes”): there/not there; there as if not there; everything or nothing, everything and nothing… and nothing… and… everything… and… in an elusive flash.

Whether they are vestiges, traces hinting at loss, or, on the contrary, the density of an invisible presence, these fragments cannot easily be gathered from the floor of memory as if it were enough to bend down; that said, the effort to remember is futile: they simply “come.” Perhaps one just has to make oneself available. There are few of them, a few fragments—which we wait for a long time, which are very modest, can be summed up in a few lines—almost nothing… and yet, almost everything…

Should we imagine them within ourselves, then, with an imagination that tells the truth? And can this liberate us, liberate defeated pasts, give them a space to exist and relaunch the future (mine, ours)? This, rather than the repetitive parroting of trauma?

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François-David Sebbah