The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  You’re implicated in feeding a world that’s hungry for dead bodies, enamoured of victims and grotesque death in all its forms, while the macabre, voyeuristic dictatorship under which you live presents you, against your will, with more and more maimed corpses.

  They want pictures with warm blood. So you’re constantly worried lest your pictures cool off, lest the blood that stains them coagulate and harden before you send them off to the spigot from which images of human annihilation spew forth to news agencies everywhere.

  In the meantime, the dead can either go to cemeteries or wait in cold storage. In either case, death has brought them to a halt, and you’ll never know whether, by capturing their images, now frozen eternally on your lens, you’ve immortalised them, or killed them all over again.

  The only thing that mitigates your guilt is the fact that, situated as you are behind the camera, you’re also photographing the possibility of your own death. Still, you aren’t absolved of suspicion. In fact, everyone suspects you: ‘Who are you working for?’ ‘Are you here to glorify the murderers’ achievements and whitewash them in the media? Or, by publicizing their crimes, are you trying to pass others off as innocent and justify their claim to remain in power?’ ‘Which party of the victims do you belong to?’ ‘Which of the murderers are you helping by sending your pictures to the enemy?’

  You’ll spend your time apologizing for sins you didn’t commit, for a prize you didn’t try to win, for the fact that you have a decent house to live in while other journalists have none, for a friend of yours who was killed, and for another who, last 13 June, murdered his wife and then committed suicide after failing to become a picture broker.

  I’ve always believed that a good shot, like love, is something that comes your way when you least expect it. Like all rarities, it’s the gift of happenstance.

  Happenstance is what led me to a certain village one morning while, against the advice of some, I was driving with a colleague from Constantine to the capital. Our attention was arrested by a village that hadn’t awakened from its nightmare yet. It was still in shock over its losses.

  We personally didn’t have any reason to be afraid, since death had retreated with its booty and its virgin captives into the thick forests nearby and would only reappear to launch night raids on some other village. The criminals had chosen primitive instruments of death with the declared intention of mutilating their victims, since a so-called Islamic legal ruling had been issued to the effect that the ‘freedom fighters’ would win a greater heavenly reward if they used rusty axes, swords and cleavers to cut off heads, slit bellies, and slice newborns to pieces. Only rarely did they come to the same place twice, since only rarely did they leave behind any sign of life. Even a village’s farm animals would be found inert next to their owners, having died a death that at last placed them on a par with human beings.

  Algerian villages seemed to invite me to photograph them, perhaps because of the nostalgic pull they’d exerted on me since my visits to them in the 1970s. University students would come in bus caravans to celebrate the inauguration of this or that village, an event that was usually attended by the head of state as part of the One Thousand Socialist Villages programme being carried out at the time.

  I’d always felt as though I knew each villager individually, and this made it especially painful to photograph them in their wretched deaths, their corpses heaped around me in plastic bags. These were people who had treated us to veritable banquets out of the little they had. And now I had the unhappy task of serving as a witness, through photography, of ‘banquets’ that consisted of their severed heads.

  During a time of visible obsession with massacres and heinous, premeditated deaths, who could be expected to trust in the good intentions of a photographer whose profession entitled him to hunt down the corpses of the slain? Governed not by the ethics of chivalry but those of the professional picture-taker, a photographer might prefer to immortalise your tragedy rather than save your life.

  In an attempt to capture death in its most photogenic moment, the photographer-sniper can go on shooting his flashes at dead bodies in search of ‘the winning picture’. He knows that death, like other things, can be divided into various classes, and that people may enjoy privileges dead that they didn’t alive. So, you have first-class corpses that belong on magazine covers. Then you have second-class corpses that belong on the inside pages, and still others that wouldn’t catch anybody’s eye and whose picture nobody would want to buy. These are the pictures whose subjects’ misfortune goes on haunting you.

  Death lies spread out before you as far as the eye can see. So rise, O photographer, and photograph!

  Then I saw him.

  What was he doing there, this little boy sitting dazed by the roadside?

  Everyone else was too busy burying the dead to pay him any mind. There were forty-five bodies – more than a village cemetery could hold – so they took some of them to be buried in a neighbouring town.

  After the Bentalha massacre, they had needed three village cemeteries in order to bury the more than three hundred bodies. So had death been kinder this time? Had it been so sated that it had let some souls escape from its clutches?

  The little boy went on sitting there in a daze. Someone told me he’d been found under the narrow metal-frame bed that his father used to sleep on. He had stolen away from the spot on the floor that he shared with his mother and two brothers and slid under the bed to hide. Or maybe his mother had pushed him under the bed to save him from being massacred. It was a trick that didn’t always fool the killers. A mother in a neighbouring village had hidden her daughters under a bed, but the attackers had discovered their hiding place, since the bed took up fully half of the tiny room. The intruders pulled the girls out by their feet and dragged them into the outer courtyard, where they killed them and mutilated their bodies.

  What might that little boy have seen, to be too sad to cry?

  Silence had clapped its hand over his mouth, and the only language he had left consisted in blank stares at something he alone could see. He hadn’t even noticed his dog, which the criminals had poisoned to ensure that it didn’t bark. Its carcass lay nearby, waiting for people to finish burying their human dead before doing the same for their animals.

  He sat hugging his little knees to his chest, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of shame, since he had wet himself as he lay under the bed, the effects being visible on his tattered trousers.

  He was leaning against a wall on which someone had written, in his family’s warm blood, slogans that he would have been too young to decipher. And because he hadn’t ventured out of his hiding place, he would never know in which of his family members’ blood the murderers had signed their crimes. The words had been scrawled across the wall in poor handwriting, some of their letters still dripping. Was it the blood of his mother? His father? One of his brothers?

  He would never know a thing. He didn’t even know by what miracle he had escaped death’s clutches, only to fall into the clutches of life. I myself don’t know by what force, or for what reason, I left death somewhere nearby and, post-mortem, began taking photos of objects’ stillness, the noiseless din of destruction, and the tears of survivors forever struck dumb.

  I wasn’t photographing what I saw myself but, rather, what I imagined the child to have seen before losing his ability to speak.

  As I took that little boy’s picture, I thought of something an American photographer had once said in a similar situation: ‘How do you expect us to focus our cameras when we’ve got tears in our eyes?’ I had yet to realise that in order to take your most ‘successful’ picture, what you need isn’t a high-resolution camera but, rather, a scene that makes you cry so hard that you can’t focus the lens.

  You don’t need advanced techniques for getting your colours just right. All you need is some black-and-white film. After all, you’re here to document not objects but feelings.

  When I found out I’d won an international prize f
or ‘Best Press Photograph of the Year’, the first thought that came to me was to go back and look for that little boy. The idea of seeing him again pressed itself upon me with increasing urgency as the days went by. Sometimes it took on a humanitarian dimension, and at other times it took the form of photographic projects that involved taking pictures of the village as it came back to life.

  Even before receiving the prize money, I’d decided to devote half of it to helping that little boy overcome the shock of being orphaned, and to sponsor him to the best of my ability for as long as I lived.

  I didn’t know what had caused me to sympathise so deeply with this particular little boy. Was it our shared orphanhood? Or the fact that he’d become my camera’s adopted son?

  And why had I been in such a hurry to dissociate myself from money that smelled suspiciously of a crime when my only part in it had been to document the atrocities of others? Maybe I’d wanted to whitewash it, to purge it of the blood that clung to it, by sharing it with the victim.

  Of course, I thought about the story of my colleague Hocine who, four years earlier, had won the ‘Best Press Photograph of the Year’ award for his picture of a weeping woman. With her headscarf slipping down around her shoulders as she cried out in pain, she appeared at once beautiful, proudly defiant, and defenceless in the face of death. Like Michelangelo’s Pietà, the sight of her was enough to make you weep.

  When he reached the village of Bentalha, Hocine was faced with more than three hundred corpses laid out in their shrouds. He headed for the Ben Mousa Hospital, where he took a picture of a woman who suddenly broke into sobs, and who was described to him as having lost her seven children in the massacre.

  Later, after the picture had gained worldwide circulation, Hocine discovered that the woman hadn’t been the children’s mother, but their maternal aunt.

  He had taken a picture of death at the height of its deceptiveness. All the absurdity of war was summed up in the photograph of a woman who had ended up by chance in front of a photographer’s lens, and children who had ended up by chance in the clutches of Death.

  Death, like love, entails a lot of meaningless details. And both are masterful ruses born of happenstance.

  This woman took no legal action against the butchers who had slaughtered her seven young relatives, nor did she demand that the government prosecute them. However, when she discovered that pictures enjoy rights in the West that even their subjects lack in the Arab world, she allowed herself to be persuaded to press charges against the photographer who’d become rich and famous by exploiting her tragedy. Certain organisations came forward to sue the international magazines that had published the photograph, purportedly in defence of the dignity of an Algerian citizen whose privacy had been violated as she wept in death’s shadow. The hardest thing in the world for some Algerians is to see one of their countrymen succeed. For people like this, succeeding is the worst crime you could possibly commit against them. They might forgive a murderer for his crimes, but they would never forgive you for your successes.

  The closer you are to such people – whether professionally or geographically – the more reasons they have to hold a grudge against you, since they can’t understand how you, who seem to be like them in every way, could have succeeded where they’ve failed. Take, for example, the neighbour you grew up with and played with as a child. If he saw you drowning, he’d risk his life to save you. However, you graduated from high school while he dropped out. You’re going to university, while he slouches against the wall of failure. And one of these days, out of his revolver will come the bullet that leaves you dead, shrouded in your successes.

  The news of my having won the award appeared at the bottom of the front page of the country’s most widely circulating newspaper under the title ‘Algerian Dog’s Carcass Wins Prize for Best Photo in France’. When this was followed the next day by an article in a French-language newspaper entitled, ‘France Prefers to Honour Algeria’s Dogs,’ I realised that some sort of plot was being hatched, and that it went beyond a mere agreement on points of view. In short, the curse of success had descended upon me.

  However, some time had to pass before I realised that behind all this bitter animosity lay, of all things, the efforts of a ‘friend’. I had put in a good word for a neighbour of mine in Constantine so that he could come work in the capital at the same newspaper I worked for. With friends like that, who needs enemies? Now that I’d done somebody enough favours to make an enemy out of him, I could see more loyalty in that poor dog’s carcass than I could in a world full of so-called ‘friends’.

  However, the issue came up for me again in the form of a question: Had they awarded me the prize for a photo of a little boy, or for a photo of a dead dog?

  Now that we’d exported our massacres for so many years, inuring people to the sight of our slain, what if the body of a dead dog had come to arouse more feeling in them than the sight of our own dead bodies? What if, given its relative rarity, the sight of a lifeless animal had become more heartrending than the sight of a lifeless human being?

  Wouldn’t it be a tragedy if modern-day people’s consciences were stirred to life by the sight of a dead dog that reminded them of their own pet, while remaining unmoved by the dead body of a fellow human being in whom they saw no resemblance to themselves, since he was from a world they viewed as different, backward, a world of dead bodies at war with one another?

  Questions like these disturbed me so much that I decided in the end to go back to that village in search of answers.

  One morning I headed for the village with a colleague of mine. We prepared ourselves, of course, for unpleasant surprises by not taking any professional identification with us in the event that we came to a sham security checkpoint. The murderers had taken to setting up bogus checkpoints as a way of hunting down people who had no choice but to travel certain roads. In particular, they targeted individuals who worked for the ‘infidel state’ – in other words, anyone who carried a card that bore an official stamp, even if he happened to be a rubbish collector who worked for the municipality. In fact, if they didn’t like somebody’s looks and they had no need for him, they would slit his throat. If, on the other hand, he was someone whose services they could make use of, they might take him back to their lair.

  Fake checkpoints were now rampant, and the terrorists who set them up had mastered the art of looking exactly like the security officials whose military uniforms and weapons they had stolen. The situation was causing major confusion. If people showed their real IDs at a given checkpoint, they might find out after it was too late that it was fake, and be killed. One day a certain elderly man approached a checkpoint that he felt sure was official. ‘So,’ he said jovially, ‘I see the bastards aren’t here today!’

  In reply, one of the people manning the checkpoint shot him, saying, ‘We’re the bastards!’

  If, on the other hand, people hadn’t brought identification with them for fear of meeting a bogus checkpoint which then turned out to be real, they were accused of being terrorists and treated as such, since terrorists also went around without identification papers, claiming to be government employees or military recruits. Even so, weighing up the two dangers, people had started going from place to place without any identification whatsoever in their possession – no ID card in their pocket, no professional ID, and no calendar that might reveal their appointments and the names of their associates.

  My safe arrival in the village after an uneventful journey was, in and of itself, an accomplishment that I took as a good omen. Once there, however, I found nothing I’d been looking for. People’s hearts were shut up tight, just like the houses of their dead. I felt lost, blown to and fro by questions, and I wondered how I’d find the house I was looking for when every dwelling looked as miserable as every other.

  How would I recognise the wall that little boy had been leaning against now that, in an attempt to purge the village’s memory of its people’s blood, all the walls had been washed
down for fear of what secrets they might tell?

  Who would I ask about the boy? And what was the use of asking when the answers I got, for all their brevity, were so contradictory? Somebody said he’d been taken under the care of a charity for orphans. Someone else said a relative had come and taken him to another village. Others swore the child had disappeared in a fright after he’d seen people take away the dog’s body to bury it in an outlying field. One person said he’d never heard of the boy. Or maybe he just didn’t want to deal with me, and had no time for my curiosity.

  Shock always causes us to lose something, and the loss plunges us into silence. No one there did any chattering. Even the walls, which had once ranted deliriously about the murderers, had been struck dumb since being painted over with lime.

  It saddened me to see that the villagers who had once welcomed strangers were now afraid of them. The same people who, in the 1970s, had gathered gregariously around visitors now just stood gaping at them as if they’d come from another planet. You didn’t even know what to say to them, as though you no longer had a language in common. And, in fact, theirs was a new language, a language invented for them by subjugation, poverty and mistrust. It was the language of those who feel helpless and at a loss since discovering what Fate has dealt them.

  It’s the lay of the land that determines your fate when, at a time when human beings are more beastly than humane, geography places you at the foot of a mountain or at the edge of a forest or jungle. Once that happens, you’re just a destiny’s throw away from your demise.

  In their isolation from the rest of the world, the inhabitants of these remote villages had come to have a single set of features, a single language, and a single fate that could well land them in a single cemetery, where they would be buried on the same day after a night raid wiped them out to the last man, woman and child.