by Annie Hawes
So were Ismail’s cousins right? I ask now, as I sip my café-crème. Are there really a lot of old nostalgics coming back to look at the Algeria of their youth?
Guy doesn’t think there can be many. Not to judge by the vile racist publications his father receives from various organizations of ex-pieds-noirs. Half of them are still convinced that the Algerians have no right to this country, that if the French army had stood firm, if the settlers hadn’t been sold down the river, they would still be living a life of luxury here in their very own Promised Land. And decent people like his parents are too ashamed of the past behaviour of that lot to return, even for a visit.
And were they really sold down the river? Did they never think of just staying here and sharing the country with the Algerians, as equals?
Guy can’t believe my ignorance. The French state collapsed over the loss of Algeria; not just the government, the state itself. All Paris was watching for the skies to darken with planes and paratroopers: the pro-settler generals were threatening a military coup. De Gaulle, retired since World War II, had to be wheeled in to save the country – like Boudiaf here today. And people in England know nothing of all this?
I apologize. But no, we don’t. Or I don’t, at any rate.
Well, it was the settlers’ own fault that they lost everything, Guy says. The Algerians had promised, signing the cease-fire, that all French property honestly come by would be safe, and the settlers could stay on if they wished – under majority rule. Maybe it was the words ‘honestly come by’ that bothered the pieds-noirs? Or was it ‘majority rule’? Once the French army was set to withdraw, the hard-liners set up an Organisation Armée Secrète, made up of moonlighting pro-settler soldiers.
To give me a flavour of the thing, Guy says, it may be enough to mention that Jean-Marie le Pen was involved. The OAS faked Algerian ‘outrages’, trying to force the regular army to stay and fight on. There was no hope after that. The pieds-noirs had broken the peace agreement themselves. And when their plan failed, there was nothing left for them but to run.
I can’t say I envy Guy going to meet the Algerian residents of his old family home. Rather him than me. I’ve decided not to go with Gérard to visit his school teacher, either. It’s a beautiful sunny day, I’m not going on to Mali anyway, and I fancy a walk through this beautiful city on its immense blue bay. Truth to tell, I also fancy being on my own for a few hours. I’ll buy myself a picnic, I say, and go and eat it on the port.
Somewhere behind and above us are the high walls and narrow alleys of the ancient casbah, the old fortress city. The Algiers population had overflowed from here well before the French left, and many miles of quartiers populaires – working-class areas, I suppose, is the best translation for this phrase – stretch out beyond the city centre today. A couple of hours from now, through a series of mishaps, I will find myself in the heart of one of these run-down ghettoes – a grimy, rubbish-strewn area of grey blocks of flats, of unemployed youths leaning against graffiti’d walls, of dust blowing through empty streets. In short, in exactly the kind of place Samir was so sure I would never have any reason to visit.
I potter off through a street market full of beaky-handkerchief ladies, buy myself some camembert, a baguette, and a bag of luscious-looking oranges, and set off, humming happily, all alone. Thinking private thoughts to myself, in lovely limpid English. No hunting about for not-quite-the-right-word. That, I am sure, is the cause of my present tangles-in-the-brain sensation. When you’re constantly speaking a foreign language, you’re constantly bumping into things you don’t quite know how to say, half way through a sentence: you have to quickly come up with a circumlocution. If it’s a tricky subject, you may find you’re doing a circumlocution off a circumlocution off a circumlocution – and now you can’t remember what you were trying to say in the first place. Tangled brain. But not today! Just me, all alone. Liberation!
Somehow or other, in my joyful abstraction, far from ending up down on the main port in the centre of town, I follow signs to what I realize, some time later, is actually the industrial port: not what I was aiming for at all. I start guessing something is amiss when I find myself on an endless and featureless four-lane boulevard. It is horribly hot, not a hint of a cooling breeze, my head is already at boiling point, and there is no sign of any shade for what looks like miles up ahead. Should I turn back? But I’ve already walked for fifteen minutes. There has to be a turn-off down to the water soon . . .
Eventually, here it is. A grey, dusty, industrial-looking road with a welcome sea-breeze blowing up it – a road which turns out to lead, not to the pretty harbour of my imagination, nice place for a picnic, full of picturesque fishing boats, triremes of Nineveh, apes and ivory, but to an even greyer industrial zone of oil-slicked flotsam and rusting jetties. And of endless, leering propositions from groups of jellaba’d men. Dockers waiting for work, maybe, though some of them seem to have given up the idea and are trying to catch fish off the end of one of the piers, chatting to some other men in a small rowing boat, bobbing down below them. But I shouldn’t have looked at them. More catcalls and suggestive muttering. It is a shock to realize, all of a sudden, how dependent I am on Gérard and Guy’s presence for safety – or at least for comfort and normal friendly relations with other people. Not such a liberation to be without them after all. If they’d been here, the leerers certainly wouldn’t leer. They would get chatting, let us catch fish from the pier with them, give us a ride in the row-boat, whatever . . . And probably be nice people, too.
You don’t get the camaraderie if you’re a lone female, but you don’t get to sit down in peace and eat your picnic, either. I can’t face walking all that way back in defeat, away from the breeze, under that blazing sun. I veer off towards another pier, well away from the men. There must be somewhere quiet to sit down and dangle my feet over the water, even if it is rather unappetizing-looking water. No. Another bunch of men, climbing up a ladder from some boat down below. It dawns on me that this is a pretty unlikely place for a tourist to be walking about. It isn’t too surprising, is it, if all these men think I’ve come here on purpose to tantalize them? To make them commit faults in spite of themselves, even . . . ?
An idiotic situation. I am hot and tired and hungry, and there is an enormous amount of open space here, but I can’t use any of it. Eventually I spot a sort of rusting-dead-end jetty, nobody about. Walk right to the end, sit down facing the water with my back to any chance passers-by – not that there should be any, on a dead end – and get out my bread and cheese. Within minutes, voices are heading my way. Never mind, I’m not going anywhere. I shall just sit here and ignore them. Or explain in a polite, friendly manner that I’m lost, that I’m just having a quiet sandwich.
Minutes later, four men appear and stand right by me, saying things I can’t understand – which are obviously not any kind of normal friendly overture. Angrily, I tell them I don’t want any company, thank you. Either they don’t speak French, or they don’t care. At the next knowing grin and suggestive mutter, I lose my rag completely, jump to my feet, sandwich going straight into the water, and roar at the perpetrator in English to go away and leave me alone. He and his friends find this hilarious; they leer and mutter even more. Suddenly I burst into tears. I am so terrified and so angry – with myself, with them, with everything – that I don’t care what happens next. I hurl the rest of my bread into the nearest man’s face, follow it up with the bag of oranges, aimed randomly at all of them, and shout some more.
My victims, luckily for me, do not retaliate in kind. They merely throw up their hands in perplexity – what did I expect, a woman alone, coming down here? – and go off, sniggering, to join a group of yet more men at the landward end. Now I can’t even leave without having to walk right past the whole crowd of them. I stand facing out to sea, sobbing with rage and self-pity, for a few moments; then brace myself and set off back the way I came. Surely they wouldn’t harass a woman with tears streaming down her face?
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p; Yes, they would. Jeers and sniggers. But at least they don’t try to physically stop me. Safely past them, I wander off back towards the main road, feeling suicidal, fearing footsteps behind me, not daring to look. It seems I’ve come miles though this wasteland; there is no sign of any other human presence. Another access of rage comes over me: now I have several hours to kill till I’m due downtown to meet up with my travelling companions. Maybe I should go and sit on my own in the hotel room till then? But that would be admitting utter defeat. Voluntarily imprisoning myself! Exactly what the Islamists want!
No, I’m being idiotic. This doesn’t have anything to do with Islam. The same thing could happen to, say, some foreign tourist woman lost on the industrial docks of Portsmouth. Come to think of it, Muslim women, unlike us Westerners, have a solution to this problem: hide yourself in a haik. Maybe I should just walk back into town and buy myself one?
I am walking miserably on, snivelling as I go, when all of a sudden, a small hand slips into mine from behind.
I take you my aunt, says a child’s voice, in halting French. Not cry. I am Mohammed.
I have noticed the boy shadowing me for some time, flitting behind lorries and concrete posts and chickenwire fences. And imagined he was enjoying witnessing my discomfiture. Maybe he was, at that . . . Does he really have an aunt, even? Is he infant outrider for a gang of murderers, kidnappers or intégristes? I couldn’t care less. At least he isn’t leering. And he cares whether I cry or not. Or pretends to, which is better than nothing.
I don’t even answer, just let him lead me on, out of the docks and into a maze of narrow back-streets. Where are we going? No point asking: I don’t know anywhere in Algiers, do I? And he hardly speaks any French anyway. And I have no energy left to worry about it.
Half an hour and later we are God-only-knows where, a place that seems nothing but one huge grim council estate after another, hardly anyone about in the streets, though we do pass a group of young men I take for fierce tribesmen in from some wild part of the country, in short tunics over loose baggy trousers, wide canvas belts slung round their hips, straggly black beards and scarily piercing eyes. As they draw level with us, I realize they are wearing kohl. That’s why their eyes look like that. Mohammed holds my hand more tightly. Not wild tribesmen at all, but city boys dressed up in full intégriste regalia. The so-called Afghans.
At last we turn into a narrow side-street. Then into the entrance of a decrepit grey block of flats. Ten long flights of stairs later – lift from Russia, not possible mend, Mohammed explains – we are at Hamida’s front door, which she opens with a lovely, welcoming smile. Then, listening appalled to her nephew’s excited account, in Arabic, of the circumstances of our meeting, she throws her arms around me, causing me to burst into tears again, and rushes me into her living room, where she cossets me with fig cakes, sweet mint tea, and perfect French, till at last I think maybe it’s not so bad being a woman after all, and am in a fit state to speak without sniffling.
Mohammed, too, has eaten his fill of fig cakes. His aunt is extremely proud of his presence of mind in bringing me here. Little Mohammed has seen so many crying women here at her home, she says, that he automatically assumes, clever boy that he is, that if he finds a woman in tears, this is the logical place to bring her. Though I am certainly the first crying European to cross her threshold!
This flat, she explains – where she lives with her father and her own aunt and uncle, as well as a couple of cousins – has become, over the years, an impromptu help-and-advice centre for women in distress. Hamida and her aunt have turned their home into a safe haven for women fleeing violent husbands, or left alone through widowhood or divorce. They are able to do this, she says, because they are protected, in the neighbourhood, by the reputations of the men of the house. Her father and uncle are both well-known local heroes of the War of Liberation, and with state pensions to prove it!
I am surprised to hear that helping widows, divorcees and victims of violence could be bad for a household’s reputation, but it is so. In the eyes of the Islamists, it is tantamount to encouraging the breakdown of the family. A woman living alone, without male protection, becomes what they call a source of discord. That is the sin of fitna: intentionally creating discord in the community. She is tempting men to commit faults in spite of themselves. And if they do, the fitna – and the fault – is hers. If her husband has left her, or died, she should return to her father’s protection, or that of her brothers or uncles. Failing that, to her husband’s family. The Islamists refuse to see that this may not always be possible – or desirable. That a woman may not want to uproot her children and leave her home, or to throw herself on the mercy of relatives she may never have met – or who may live hundreds of miles from everything she knows. A few months ago a fundamentalist commando set fire to a woman’s house because she was living alone with her seven children. One of her sons was burnt to death. She was a danger to the community, a source of discord. Some weeks later, she turned up here – with the remaining six children.
Hamida, unlike almost everyone we’ve talked to so far, does not agree that the Front for Islamic Salvation are innocent, that only a few mad extremists are to blame for the growing violence. The FIS have been active round here in the quartiers populaires for a good five years, she says, and the atmosphere of terror has been growing all that time. The Sons of Hatred, she calls them: Fils de la Haine. They chose the acronym FIS, she says, because it sounds identical to the word fils – son – in French. They wanted to suggest, by this, that they were the true inheritors of the Algerian Revolution, the legitimate sons of the old and honourable FLN. But they are no such thing, according to Hamida. The legitimate heirs are people like her father, her aunt and uncle: good people who are open to reason and debate – and able to put themselves in other people’s shoes! It is hopeless to try and discuss the situations of the women they help with the local Islamists. All they do is parrot verses from the Koran – and when anyone suggests that these words are open to interpretation, they simply close their ears and recite another.
Sounds just like those Christians who come banging at your door on a Sunday. Come to think of it, Christians have their own Army of Salvation, too, don’t they? Funny how innocuous the word seems in that context: the Salvation Army. It has such a positively cuddly brass-band ring to it that I’ve not even noticed the connection till now.
Why, though, I ask, do so many men find this fundamentalism so irresistible? What on earth attracts them so to oppressing and harassing other people?
Because, says Hamida, suddenly looking me fiercely in the eye, an unemployed young Algerian – which means most young Algerians! – feels oppressed and harassed himself. Not just powerless and despised like any unemployed person; on top of that he has an internalized French colon sneering at him from the mirror. Independence or not, she says, every young Algerian aspires to the culture of France – the lifestyle, the fashions, not to mention the wages! But he knows in his heart that France has no regard for him. All the more so if he actually goes there – and how many millions of Algerians had that experience, before this country sank so low in France’s esteem that she stopped the flow? So, she says, first imagine that despised bougnoule of an immigrant – that’s what the French racists call us North Africans – then contrast it to the image of the Holy Islamic Warrior, a man with a self-respect based on values that have nothing to do with the West. An image with the power to scare the West – to turn the tables! Now our haitiste, our wall-propper, can put on a romantic street-fighter’s tunic – instead of yearning for a pair of designer jeans he can’t afford that will be two years out of date in French eyes, anyway, by the time he gets them – and be looked up to by his fellow men. Moreover, he’s a man of religion now, and if by any chance they don’t treat him with respect, he has every right to terrorize them – in the name of God! Of course, it’s very seductive, very addictive. And it really is like a drug: they goad one another on, lose all sense of pity or compunction. La
st month, sweet, harmless old Aziz, who sat every afternoon at a little table outside his home, taking the sun, drinking his half-bottle of wine, and playing cards with any of his cronies who happened to pass by, was killed. A drive-by shooting. Two crimes: alcohol and gambling. Now he is dead.
Mohammed has crept closer to her on the divan and slipped his arm through hers. She laughs, apologizes for getting carried away. But she is so sick of them. You can never get away from them. Women are arriving here at this flat, in the last couple of months, from as far away as the small farming towns of the Mitidja plains south of Algiers, where intolerance is growing by the day. The Islamists scare them out, and they make a beeline for Algiers, hoping to find a home and some work. But Algiers is running out of places for them. Every home is full to bursting.
These days the FIS de la Haine, she tells me, have loudspeakers up on the roofs of every block in the area, a sort of extra muezzin, from which they harangue people at every prayer time, with long, rambling moral lessons and exhortations not to fall into evil ways: ordering women to be modest, and men to be firm and manly – they might as well just tell them straight out to beat up their wives, daughters and sisters if they don’t wear the hijab, she says. These days even the smallest little boy who passes you in the street thinks he has the right to ask you what you’re doing out and about, why you’re not back home in the kitchen! Not like her little Mohammed, she says, giving him a squeeze. He has been properly brought up, and has a mind of his own!
Mohammed says something to Hamida in Arabic. He wants her to tell me about the boy who was beaten up because of the speakers. It was a young neighbour of Hamida’s, a couple of blocks away, only a few days after the system had been put up. He had just worked a night shift at the bakery, he was trying to get some sleep, and the dawn harangue about how much better it was to pray than to sleep was driving him mad! He got out of bed and went up to the roof, fought his way bleary-eyed through the washing lines, found the speaker, pulled the wires out, and went back to bed in peace and quiet. They gave him a pair of broken ribs next day – for disrespecting God. Told him he should thank Allah’s mercy that they’d let him live – he wouldn’t be so lucky next time. That’s how sure they are of themselves – they can’t tell the difference between disrespecting them and disrespecting Allah!