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Mustapha Marrouchi
Post-Colonial into Colonial, back to the Future of my Algeriance

    "Since Algiers," I have always said to my mother. "Since Algiers," being for both of us the major demarcation in my life. I gave up Algiers to go to university in La Métropole, although I had made my last visit in 1994, after an absence of something like half my life, before I had returned as a melancholy tourist who stayed in Algiers for the first time in his life. Thus a second visit in the summer of 1996 might have been to any large third-world city, so sprawling and demographically uncontrolled had Algiers become, its services untidy, its immense mass so dusty and so crumbling. I stayed for a week, too unhappy to last any longer. I left.

    One of my most vivid impressions of the city, where I was born and spent all my childhood, was of decay: of crumbling buildings, torn-up sidewalks, sewage on the street. Mosques were now everywhere, and the line between Algiers's less Islamic haves and its more Islamic have-nots had become more sharply defined. One could not escape the impression that the old multicultural, cosmopolitan, secular Algeria was slipping away. So forlorn was the city without its great hybrid intellectual community, so apparently without a mission, so reduced to minimal existence as a cut-rate resort that it filled me with sadness. Crowds mobbed once-attractive shopping streets like La Rue Michelet, intent on bargains from stores that had been divided and sub-divided into garishly over-stocked slits where cheap shoes and plastic beach toys hung from the ceiling in tasteless abundance. The one or two little islands of Levantine refreshment - the restaurant Santa Lucia and Le Nègre Coste, the café frequented half a century ago by Gide, Camus, Cixous, Derrida and others - were mostly empty.

    Sadder still was a chance encounter with a middle-aged pied-noir acquaintance who had returned to the city a year earlier from Belgium, where she had lived most of her life. Her father had been ill, she said, and needed to have her nearby, so she had left her job and taken one in Algiers. A month or two later he died, and (for reasons she did not specify) she simply stayed on. She lived alone in a five-room house filled with the European paintings and knick-knacks of bygone times, trying - impossibly but bravely - to consider herself in the "old" Algiers. She spoke only French and English, though no one except an occasional visitor like myself knew anything but Arabic and Tamazight. Her loneliness convinced me that Algiers was in fact over: the city celebrated by European travel writers with decadent tastes had vanished in the mid-1950s, one of the casualties of nationalism and violence which had drowned the foreign communities in its wake. One of the few meaningful glimpses of the old Algiers is a little quasi-monument to Camus, the great novelist and essayist and a native of Algiers, that exists more or less secretly on the second floor of a guarded house built in the Moorish style. The late Algerian poet Tahar Djaout had advised me before I left to go to the house and ask to see the Camus room, but at the time I had not paid much attention. Since Algiers boasts no easy available telephone directory (another sign of its abandonment), I was left to fend for myself when I finally recalled our conversation. It took half a day to find the house, though it stands right across from the University of Algiers Medical School in what used to be Le Jardin d'Essai, a section of the modern city about a mile west of Belcourt.

    The caretaker, a cross Berber woman with better things to do than to speak to unannounced passers-by like myself, told me I could not expect to come in just like that, and then more amiably suggested that I return in an hour. I did not leave, for fear that the house might disappear; I parked myself on the staircase with Camus's Noces suivis de l'été. After an hour I was shown up to a spacious room in which some of the writer's quotidian objects lay undisturbed. There was a sun hat, a pipe, an umbrella, a worn-out pair of shoes, two empty bottles of coca-cola, a desk, and a chair Camus apparently used to write his most acclaimed novel, L'Etranger, the lady later told me. They were unrevisited and mostly uncared for. In the bookshelves there were about half a dozen of French, English, and Latin works, many of them annotated by the writer, all of them handsomely bound. In the center of the room were several glass cases exhibiting manuscripts, correspondence between Camus and other writers (including Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir), first editions and photographs. The bright young Algerian attendant told me that the small group of chairs and tables came from 4, Chemin du Lavoir de Grand-Mère, Camus's last home in Algiers before he left for Lourmarin (France). Other visitors to the city have reported that when they went to 4, Chemin du Lavoir, they were approached with offers from people who had "Camus furniture" to sell, so one cannot know whether the pieces at the Camus house really belonged to the novelist. Nevertheless the house's melancholy situation, hidden away in a city that has no other recollection of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, corresponded perfectly with what I had already discovered: that those few parts of Algiers's past which have not disappeared completely have been consigned to decay.

    In Algiers you could see evidence of many broken narratives, identities, histories, most of them only partially there, many of them now either ragged or diminished.

    Part of the city's hold over my memory was the clearness of its nearly incredible divisions, divisions almost completely obliterated by new, ugly, sprawling villas and high rises in new development areas and places owned by the nouveaux riches whose life style is monstrously ugly. While I was growing up in the city in the 1950s, a decade earlier, however, its Arab and Islamic dimensions could be ignored and even suppressed, so strong was the hold over the city of various European interests, each of which created an enclave within all the others. Thus, there was, of course, French Algiers: its center was Jeanne D'Arc, whose extensions covered La Promenade, Montplaisir, Mutuelleville, Notre Dâme, Le Jardin d'Essai where recreational activities were held on a weekly basis and Le Théâtre Municipal d'Alger where recitals, fashion shows, and readings took place. Spanish Algiers was there too, a useful foil and opposition for its historical competitor, found in schools, salons, theaters, ateliers.

    So malleable did the city seem, so open to expatriate colonies existing in separate structures. At its heart there was an Algerian, a Spaniard, a Jew, a Greek, an Italian, a Turk, a Malthese, a Corsican, each dependent on all the others,¹ each manipulated or indulged by the major colonial power that was France. Italian Algiers was limited in our awareness to Le Village des Italiens; Jewish Algiers to H_rit Lihoud; Arab Algiers to the Medina. We lived about two blocks from the fabled Montfleury, an enchanted place the likes of which I have never seen anywhere else in the world, a pure creation of the colonial imagination: there were gardens, all perfectly tended by armies of Algerian daily workers whose intensive labors kept the places at a level of beauty and calm designed to reproduce someone's idea of a vast and noble meadow baking in the sun of a French summer day insulated from the outside world of the natives, bustling kasbahs, the decaying souks, and generally tiresome realities. White was the prevailing color of dress. White made me feel the absence of color, and white made me long for color. White also made me understand that the space between "us" and "them" was blank and was waiting to be filled up - with color. With a color so definite (white) as if it wished to dispel any doubt that might arise in regard to this particular quality (its color, white).

    I used to sit on a white stone step observing the workers, reveling in my delicious position of living comfortably, enjoying especially the privilege of being a child oblivious to all the troubles of the world. A feeling no native can ever afford to have, I used to think to myself.

    The colonial labyrinth encouraged me, I remember, to feel that the logic of the place and what it stood for overruled what to me seemed like the unforgivable messiness of my true reality. Only in that Algiers, at that time, could my family and I have made sense, with our carefully subdivided existence and absurdly protected minority status as Berbers. Both my parents were Berbers, he from Tizzi Ouzzo, she from Touggourt. My guess was that both their families had converted to Islam long ago. My father became stolidly pious, whereas my mother who came from a wealthier family (land owners) than my father's - slightly more adventurous - did not bother about religion.

    The comic, not to say the ironic, results of such a situation for me are now beginning to be apparent. For the colonial power, as for the parents and schoolteachers, native Algiers was assumed to be a potential danger of the extreme sort. Crowds, for example, were believed to be disease-carrying and rabidly nationalistic extremists. Left to itself, native society was supposed to be irreducibly corrupt - lazy, sexually promiscuous, irresponsible, dedicated only to pleasure and sin. Hence the badly fitting boxes which were placed around me and in which I lived, unconsciously for the most part. My life was generally, if not in every detail, French. I read André Gide, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Madame Bovary; I listened to French music (Georges Brassens, Serge Régiani), amused myself buying Paris Match - and I did all this without direct acquaintance either with any of their Arabic equivalents or of France. I went through French boarding schools in Algiers, each of which was modeled on the general idea of the French lycée as had been laid down by Napoleon himself.

    As I threaded my way through this crowded but highly rarefied cultural maze, my contact with the Algiers that was neither Roman nor French was like contact with nature. Everything in my strange minority and paradox-ridden world of privilege was processed, prepared, insulated, confined, except for the native Arabs I everywhere encountered in fleeting moments of freedom on the streets, in taxies, movie theaters, demonstrations and public occasions. And with this quasi-natural life I communicated in the language I have loved more than any - the spoken Algiers patois of Arabic, virtuosically darting in and out of solemnity, colonial discipline and the combination of various religious and political authorities, retaining the quick, irreverent wit of the language, its incomparable economy of line, its sharp cadences, and abrupt rhythms.

    Further away than the European city, stood, I thought, a world I could only dream of perilously, the disorderly palimpsest of Algiers's carnivalesque history, some of which I later recognized in Kateb Yacine, but whose astonishingly fluent passages of adventure, sexuality, and magic turn up with a great deal of their raw force in some of The Arabian Nights and that endless stream of consciousness which is the Algerian drama one finds in bustling hammams, souks, bazaars. A cohabitation of Islamic, Mediterranean, and Latin erotic forms, the latent promiscuity of this semiunderground Algiers, is what I believe I was kept from as I was growing up and what I can easily imagine that European colonists were attracted to, drew on, and - for their own safety - kept at bay, with their schools, missions, social seasons and rigid hierarchies of rank and caste. The traffic between Europe and this Algeria is being deformed, alas, today for the boundaries are being drawn in the most rigid of manners between believers and non-believers!

    I saw the last and for me the best result of the traffic in Mademoiselle Ruby Bouisson, a tiny Jewish woman who came to Algiers in the 1940s, attracted by the city's warmth and possibilities in contrast to what had come to Europe. She was a lazy, wonderfully precious, and bright-eyed spinster with secret tastes and unknown pleasures, who taught English at my school. I was a student of hers for several years and still remember with startling vividness how she taught us English literature and language using elaborate drawings on the blackboard. She is now retired in a small house outside of Algiers. "I'm Algerian, too," she told me. "Here I'm special; there many people are like me. Besides," she added, "I love Algiers." We then joked about my rambunctious behavior when I was at school then talked about our memories, putting ourselves in time to when Algiers, our lost city, was more ours - cosmopolitan, relatively peaceful, full of wonderful things - than it has become today. We commented relentlessly but fondly as we sat together drinking mint tea and eating the renowned pastry Baqlawa,² she as a hyphenated French-Algerian, I as a hyphenated Algerian-Canadian, on the years that had gone by, our hopes, the future. Both of us were present as participants and observers, of course. Yet we were worried that that joyful moment was being mutilated by the passing of time. For a brief moment then, the meeting of ultra-Jewish and ultra-Berber cultures brought forth a highlighted image that typified the Algiers of my early years. Where such pictures have since gone I do not know, but part of their poignancy for me is that they have never faded away. Perhaps the habits of being transplanted individuals could not be changed as far as we ourselves were concerned: but for a short, non-stop-talking spell, our memories and the Algiers of the cultural crosscurrents of the 1950s were alive and full of nostalgia. "Yes, an epoch has resolved itself to a finale.... Our country is as good as gone," Mademoiselle Bouisson told me. "I really must go, I have a plane to catch," I intoned. We then parted, wishing each other well.

    It is best just to accept that even that moment of repose was short-lived. For soon the present would turn ugly. We had just reached La Place des Martyrs de la Révolution on the way to the airport when my shared taxi was flagged down at a police checkpoint. We had already been blocked by a herd of goats licking the grass remains right in the middle of the road. One of the Algerian officers asked me for ID. I handed him my Canadian passport. He looked at it, nodded his head in a way that suggested he had discovered something significant and ordered me to get out while mumbling "un oiseau rare." I was perplexed but did not think there was any reason to worry. I knew there were periodic security alerts in Algeria. General Liamine Zeroual, in power then, was refusing to bow to religious terrorism. It was for this reason that independent Algerian journalists were regularly detained, maimed or killed and their newspapers impounded. I also knew that crows, locusts, whiffs of sandalwood, tastes of tamarind juice and blood-all these interrupted Algeria's earnest efforts to determine its present. Especially blood, which is made to carry so many metaphorical meanings that it loses all sense as it spills across the pages.

    "What is your profession?" the policeman asked, leafing through my passport while manipulating a cigarette on the ends of his lips.

"Professor... at the university," I said.
"What do you teach?"
"English," I said. "La littérature anglaise." I tried to find the right words.
He shook his head, dismissed my driver, and pointed to a police van parked in the shade of a tree on the other side of the road.
"Get inside," he said in a deep voice, putting my passport in his pocket and turning his back to me.

    The van was occupied by half a dozen riot policemen eating lunch. They indicated the back seat. One or two of them looked bemused. I was a Kabyle, after all, almost a white man, unlike the assorted street hawkers they had rounded up in the course of a busy morning and who were now squatting on their haunches under the blazing midday sun with their wares: calculators, watches, leather belts, cigarettes, boiled eggs, live rabbits, hens, roosters. Soon the policemen finished eating and belching, strapped on their smart green helmets and piled out. The hawkers were directed to get in, and off we went.

    It was a short drive to the first police station. We were taken to the charge room and told to sit on the bales of hay that ran along the walls. To one side was a cell filled to capacity with some thirty or more young men, standing room only. Policemen wandered in and out pretending not to notice me, so I just stared out the window and affected nonchalance. I was in fact pressed for time but there was nothing I could usefully say or do until I knew what was going on.

    An hour passed. Other young men were ushered in, until the room could hardly contain any more. By now my shirt was soaked with perspiration. A little while later I caught the sound of vehicles in the yard outside. One of the policemen told us to stand up and form a line. The man at the front was instructed to bend over and reach between his legs with his right hand to grasp the left hand of the man behind, who was to do the same with the man behind him and so on down the line. I refused to comply and the policeman did not push it as they led all sixty of us to three parked vans, my fellow culprits shuffling awkwardly, much to the amusement of the onlookers.

    We set off toward the city center and soon reached the main boulevard that ran parallel with the sea on our left. I noted a couple of hotels along the way that looked as if they might be reasonably priced. I had visited Algiers only once before, two years back, but I could not remember where I had stayed. It had not yet occurred to me, as we pulled into the central police station, that I might be detained overnight, and I could miss my flight even as we were instructed to remove our shoes and drop our bags and file into an empty cell.

    It was big - it could have easily contained twice our number, and as soon as I saw the bucket in the far corner I decided to refrain from eating or drinking for the duration of my stay. It took two hours for the bucket to fill up, and that was before we discovered that one of our fellows was suffering from diarrhoea. The police, for their part, ignored us until five o'clock, four hours after our arrival, when we were suddenly ordered to form three lines. The desk sergeant, a neat, handsome man in a freshly-pressed uniform, began taking down our particulars in a ledger: name, address, nationality, and profession. I was the last. Fortunately, his English was good.

"But where is your ID?" he asked, shuffling through the assorted documents in the drawer.
"I don't know," I said, "you people took it."
He wrote down something in the book.
"Your profession?"
"Professor ... at the university."
He looked up.
"Books, literature, Shakespeare," I said. There was a short silence as he paused over the appropriate column and then one of my fellow inmates said: "Monsieur est professeur."
He closed the ledger.
"Perhaps now you can explain what I am doing here," I said, but he ostentatiously ignored me and went back to his own desk in the far corner. I withdrew to the back.
A few minutes later, three policemen entered the station supporting a man in handcuffs.
"Ya-Rabbí (oh my God!) Who is going to help me now, who is going to help me now?" he wailed over and over. I could tell by his accent that he was a Berber. One of the policemen shoved him into a chair. The man was getting hysterical.
"Ya-Rabbí (oh my God!) Ya Sidi Muhammad! Who will help me, who will help me?"
"Shut up!" the desk sergeant barked, moving toward him.
"Ya-Rabbí (oh my God!) Ya Sidi Muhammad, I didn't know the money was counterfeit, please Sidi Muhammad, help me, help me."

    One of the policemen fetched him a slap across the back of the head which almost toppled him, whereupon the man started screaming. This was the signal for the other policemen to pile in. They beat him about the head and body, scrambling over each other in their haste, and then dragged him off the chair across the concrete floor and through to the back, out of sight.

"These people are animals," the man next to me said in French under his breath.
"You're Algerian?" I asked.

    He nodded. We fell to talking. He told me that he had been living in Algiers for the last two years, that he and his brother imported second-hand clothing from Germany and that he had been on his way to the docks that morning when he was arrested at a checkpoint because he had inadvertently left his ID at home. Lack of papers was the main reason people were being detained, he said, including the majority of our inmates, almost all of whom were from neighboring Constantine. They come to the capital in search of work, he added. They were used to being picked up, which was why they did not appear too concerned.

    "They are very backward," he said, "they don't understand that they have rights." This seemed a little daring but I let it pass. I was pleased to have found an ally, and thought he might turn out to be useful - he told me his brother had been with him when he was arrested and was even now working for his release.

"But I don't understand why they arrested me," I said.
He shrugged. "Money, what else?"
"So why haven't they asked me for any?"
"They want you to sweat first," he replied. "That's all it is, you know. They have to supplement their income. The Government even encourages it because they can't pay them properly."
"They've made a mistake this time," I said, only half convincing myself. I wrote my Toronto telephone number on a scrap of paper.
"Call this number if you get out before me and tell the person who answers the phone to get in touch with the Canadian Embassy. Her name is April." I gave him 20 Dollars.

    By now it was getting dark. The desk sergeant asked if anybody wanted to buy bread from the woman inside, another policeman fetched drinking water in plastic containers from the standing tap outside. We were obviously there for the night.

    Time dragged. It would have been nice to follow what was on the television but the desk sergeant deliberately turned the set away from us and lowered the volume in his ledgers. As soon as he finished with one he produced another from his drawer and started all over again. He used a red ballpoint to draw the vertical lines with a ruler and a blue biro for the writing, pausing occasionally to admire his work. And all the while he pretended that we didn't exist.

    By about nine o'clock most of my fellow inmates were sleeping soundly on the bare floor. I made fitful conversation with my new-found friend, whose main topic was the Arab world's irredeemable backwardness. Even so, he couldn't think of going anywhere else. That is why he had come to Algiers from Blida to better himself in the first place and why, despite the abuse of human rights, he would remain in the capital after his release.

    Shortly after midnight, a van pulled into the yard outside and disgorged a man dressed only in a pair of khaki shorts. He was quickly followed by four policemen who pushed and punched him into the station and then set about beating him until we feared for his life. What was especially eerie was his complete silence. He never uttered a sound as he fell to the ground and was hauled up and fell down again. It was as if the beating was no more than expected, deserved even, and the greater his compliance, the better his chances of survival would be. He might as well have been a punch bag: certainly that was how the police appeared to see him. By now the others were wide awake and we simply stood there watching, unable to say or do anything until, semi-conscious, he was dragged off in the same direction as the man who had been beaten up earlier. One of my cell-mates said something in French, perhaps an attempt at a joke, but nobody responded.

    About an hour later, two pretty young women of eighteen or thereabouts were ushered in. One was dressed in a mini-skirt and a halter top that showed a lot of midriff. The other wore a cotton dress that emphasized the outline of her body. Both wore cheap high heels and red nail polish. The desk sergeant checked their ID's.

"From Oran," he said, as though this fact by itself was enough to incriminate them. Clearly, he didn't like non-conformists.
"So this is how you girls come to Algiers and practice your business in the capital," he sneered. For a moment I thought he was going to slap them, and for a moment they thought so too, and cringed, but instead he took the keys from the nail and opened the door of our cell.
"Get in," he said.
They hesitated.
"Get in," he repeated rather angrily, and gave them a shove. Then he turned off the main light and stretched out on a bench.

    Inside the cell the women clung to the bars and studiously ignored the men behind them. They conversed in low voices, but self-consciously. They knew perfectly well that every man in the cell was looking at them, mentally undressing them, even weighing up their chances, as perhaps the desk sergeant was encouraging them to do. It didn't matter that they tried to keep still, as though to minimise the space they occupied. Their presence was enough; and then there were the clothes, worn for the very reason that was now working against them.

    "What if they decide to rape them?" my friend whispered, indicating the other prisoners. In fact, a few of the rougher-looking men - the dock workers - attempted to engage the women in conversation, but too many of the others were awake for them to risk taking it any further, at least until they could be reasonably certain of getting away with it. As time went by and the others started falling asleep, the pushier men seemed to become more emboldened, but by then it was too late. The morning shift arrived with the first hint of daybreak and the desk sergeant roused himself from his slumber. One of the newcomers, a round man with a pleasant smile, came over.

    "Where is the Canadian man?" he said. I stood up. He said something in Arabic but I shrugged to indicate that I didn't understand. He shook his head and turned away. The desk sergeant opened the cell and ordered the women out. He couldn't resist the lecture, which went on for a good five minutes, after which he handed each of them a broom and ordered them to sweep out the station as well as make a pot of fresh coffee for him and his men. He then turned his attention to us and barked out an order. Everybody stood up and formed three lines, just like before. I sat where I was with my back to the wall. The smiling policeman looked at me and told me to join one of the lines. I jumped up and started shouting that they had detained me without so much as an explanation and that they thought they were going to get away with it then they were badly mistaken and who the hell did they think they were, anyway? I was more upset than I'd realized; I was shaking with rage.

    "Okay, okay, go and sit down," the desk sergeant said with a placatory gesture, and then busied himself counting off the others on his ledger. He was the perfect bureaucrat, though I wondered whether he really believed some of us had escaped while he slept.

    As I had suspected, my friend from Blida was eventually released at eight o'clock, along with a third of the others. I saw the money change hands but nobody had yet said anything to me. It was about an hour later that one of those left behind, ID-less and pot-less, asked me why I, too, didn't just pay the 20 dinars and go.

    "Why should I?" I retorted petulantly, but after another two hours, hungry, thirsty and beginning to wonder whether my friend hadn't absconded with the money I had given him, I was tempted to make a deal. Before I caved in, help arrived in the person of the Canadian Honorary Consul.

    The Honorary Consul - "Yes, just like the Graham Green novel," she confirmed - was waiting for me in the police chief's office. The police chief, a pleasant-looking man in his forties, shook hands with me and pointed to a chair.

"What happened?" he asked.
"Why are you asking me?" I replied. "I thought this was meant to be your station."
"Perhaps you'd just better tell him the facts," the Honorary Consul admonished. "That's how we do things here."

    I bit my lip and did as I was told, but stressing the fact that at no time did any of his officers explain why I was being held. I also mentioned the beatings I had witnessed and the two women who were locked in a cell with sixty men for the night. When I had finished he opened the passport on the page with my photograph.

"You see, Votre Excellence," he began by way of explanation to the Honorary Consul, "if you look closely, you will notice that the photograph doesn't exactly cover the space for it. That is why my men were suspicious. They thought that it might be counterfeit. We tried to get in touch with the Canadian Embassy in order to clarify the matter but unfortunately we could not get an answer on the telephone."
"Why should anybody want a dodgy Canadian passport?" I asked, my sarcasm tempered by the suspicion that he was telling the truth.
"And there was a security alert," the police chief said, ignoring me.
"Chef," I said, "I have only one question to ask you. How long are you permitted to hold a person before charging them?"
"Forty-eight hours," he said without hesitation.
"It's really a nice country," the Honorary Consul said as we walked out of the station. And so I was free, 24 hours later, to the dismay of the Chef and his men, who, in the end, got no money out of me.

    I said good-bye to the Honorary Consul and went straight back to my hotel. Waiting in the lobby for the doorman to bring in my suitcase and acting on an impulse, I opened an old yellowed telephone book and looked for my father's name. And, amazingly, there it was; our old address, the unchanged telephone number, as if we had never gone away to the unmentionable country across the border. It was an eerie discovery. I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions, and that this continuity was the reality. Then I went to visit the family house in the photograph I had brought with me and stood outside it, neither daring nor wishing to announce myself to its new owners. I was overwhelmed. The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and my memory, feeding on such images as this one, had begun to see my childhood in the same way, monochromatically. The colors of my history had seeped out of my mind's eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by the colors, by the vividness of the French red tiles, the whiteness of the baked walls, the yellow-edged green of cactus-leaves, the brilliance of the bougainvillaea creeper, the delicate white of jasmine petals. When I realized how much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not the faded greys of old family-album snapshots, but whole, in Cinema Scope, it was too late. Dwelling on the present was my only brief respite from the past.

    It may be that writers in my position, exiles and émigrés, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge - which rises to profound uncertainties - that our physical alienation from the "homeland" almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, "imaginary homelands," in Salman Rushdie's totemic formula, Algerias of the mind.

    Writing this essay in Toronto, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the one I was imagining on paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been, unaffected by the distortions of memory) what I was actually doing was an essay of memory and about memory, so that my Algeria was just that: "my" Algeria, a version and no more than one version of all the millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honorable and suspect, and I knew that my Algeria may only have one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Algiers never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged.

    Set against the background of the past, one attempts to reconcile a knowledge of the world(s) one inhabits as well as the ones that inhabit him and without which life would not make sense. This remembrance I have done with an intimate devotion to the enrichment of the inner life through the medium of time and then the question begs itself: Does this mean the return of the biographical "I"? In a sense, it undoubtedly does. For in using memory to construct the presence of my past in this way, I found myself adopting an ethical position, namely that of contrasting the disarray of the world and of the self with the unending search for that lost, invisible temple, which is the "felt time of our subjective memories."³

    The felt time in which the reader is now invited to participate is one of ruses and betrayals, friendships and enmity, daring and cowardice. In the process, the balance between the violence implicit in the marginal status of the narrator and/or the author as well as the grateful capacity for re-creating a world, a place of communion in time, is locked in one's memory. It is this fragile balance that I seem to have lost for ever. In time, I had willy-nilly to accept the principle of annulment of which Theodor Adorno speaks so perceptively in Minima Moralia:

The past life of émigrés is, as we know, annulled. Earlier it was the warrant of arrest, today it is intellectual experience, that is declared non-transferable and unnaturalisable. Anything that is not reified cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist. Not satisfied with this, however, reification spreads to its own opposite, the life that cannot be directly actualized; anything that lives on merely as thought and recollection. For this a special rubric has been invented. It is called "background" and appears on the questionnaire as an appendix, after sex, age and profession. To complete its violation, life is dragged along on the triumphal automobile of the united satisfactions, and even the past is no longer safe from the present, whose remembrance of it consigns it a second time to oblivion.⁴

    Partial pasts and presents and beings, in all the sense of that phrase. Meaning (of each one of them) is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old photographs, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of the past, not to mention the future; of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.

    Narratives of reconstruction of the past may reject such myths of transformation; memory may seek its meanings through a sense of causality that negotiates the recurrence of the image of the past while keeping open the question of the present. "The importance of such retroaction lies in its ability to reinscribe the past, reactivate it, relocate it, resignify it. More significant, it commits our understanding of the past, and our reinterpretation of the future, to an ethics of "survival" that allows us to work through the present. And such a working through, or working out, frees us from the determinism of historical inevitability-repetition without a difference. It makes it possible for us to confront that difficult borderline, the interstitial experience, between what we take to be the image of the past and what is in fact involved in the passing of time." In the end, we only marvel at the way the journey is for us an exercise of memory; a way of remembering our own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is our own and the past as it is indirectly related to us.

Notes:

1. I am indebted to Edward Said for the formulation of this idea.

2. A Baqlawa is a flat cake folding in hazelnuts and honey.

3. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 2, trans. C.K. Scott
   Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981) 189.

4. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans.
   E.F.N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974) 211.