Inside the Battle of Algiers

Samia reminded her that “Camus is fully French, while we are ‘natives,’ that is to say beings with inferior rights, with no access to citizenship or French nationality. And since we are colonized, we also don’t have the right to be Algerian. In short, we are neither French nor Algerian; we are ‘nothing’ to the French government. We are a people denied even its essence and its existence, a people that has undergone a system of absolute and intolerable domination for 126 years! To top it all off, this system declares that Algeria is part of France. Which means that the Europeans and Camus are at home here and that we are strangers in our own land.”

Whenever we arrived we were greeted warmly, with humility and unshakable dignity. Never did any of the women—our sisters, bound by shared destiny—let us leave without insisting (by invoking God, his Prophet, our sacred bonds of sisterhood, and our principles of hospitality) that we taste some small treat, a cake or jam, lovingly prepared in their home. Ah those maqrouts, so warm and dripping with honey, and those sweet orange jams!

Some went so far as to block the exits of their abodes while swearing that as long as we had not “tasted the salt”—which could be as simple as sipping a coffee—they forbade us from leaving. The salt, oh, the salt! It symbolized one’s word given and never taken back, sisterhood sealed and never undone, and especially the commitment that the secret we shared would never be betrayed. I will never stop paying homage to these women: they not only maintained the fire in the hearth of our hearts so that our flame would never be extinguished even in the worst of storms, they also served as our rear guard. We were nothing without them—without them being the first to confront the noise and fury of the French soldiers, their police, and the harki traitors who collaborated with them.

From one day to the next, from mother to daughter across an unbroken chain of generations, they maintained the vast, deep garden of our history—in the face of regular and methodical devastation by our enemy, going back to 1830—weaving and reweaving the fine threads of our collective memory. They taught us that we had indeed existed as a people, that we existed today as brothers, and that we would exist as a future nation of free citizens. Of course, they could neither read nor write, but they held immensely rich, diverse knowledge of life that no historian, no anthropologist, no academic could challenge, much less dispute. Algerian women from Belcourt to the Casbah, Saint-Eugène to Tiaret, Vialar to Constantine, Skikda to the Djurdjura, the Aurès to the Sahara, from east to west and from north to south, made their mark for all eternity on our land, our history, our friends and our enemies alike.

Enlightenment, the history of the French Revolution, and the 1793 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” which we recopied by hand and which Samia even learned by heart for the fun of it. Mimi took sometimes to Danton, sometimes to Saint Just. As for me, after tackling Montesquieu, I received an article by Clémenceau