Of Algeria: Childhood and Fear

[B]arely understanding my world ... I too could begin only with the externals of things. To do more, as I soon had to, since I had no idea or illusion of a complete world waiting for me somewhere, I had to find other ways. (V.S. Naipaul, Reading & Writing) Alger est une ville verticale, qui echoue lentement sur les rives de la Mediterranee, ville determinee entre collines et mer. A Alger, il y a des zones interdites, "non netoyees". A Alger, il y a un port de peche et un port de bateaux marchands, face aux voutes sedentarisees. A Alger, on parle une langue qui brasse l'Arabe dans une tonalite berbere, avec des emprunts au francais. A Alger, il y a une multitude d'escaliers qui defient la rectitude de n'importe quelle montage. (Safaa Fathy, Tourney les mots) If he examined his own behavior, Arrouj could only surmise that as a child he was dissatisfied with his relationship with the adult community, and this is a genesis of a mild form of dissent, that of a child sitting in judgment on adults over whom he had no power. He found adults lacking in originality incapable of providing answers to the pressing questions he had; with them, it seemed, most human activities were devoid of sense. When he asked how children were born and why; when he saw meaning in the movement of a vulture's head; when he called attention to the quick descent of a hawk on its prey; when he inquired about a crow hopping about as though something were the matter with one of its feet; when he wondered whether his father was really his father; when he wanted to know why did Sallouha have three breasts instead of just two; when he lighted on a new idea-when he asked about such things he was told to be quiet. This is how he grew up: neither as a replica of his parents nor of the once colonial ruler. Later he discovered that his line of questioning uncovered the brutal circumstances of his origins. But as Sallouha used to say, we die anyway, origins are a messy business, and the truth of who we are may not be found in legends of birth. Like other children in the colonies dependent on France, he too, had to learn about "nos ancetres les Gaulois"-those spurious ancestors who had somehow buried the genetic ancestors in nonhistory. He also had to read the same "classics" of Western literature, probably encountering what he would like to think of as the great book of Mediterranean intelligence, the Odyssey, at precisely the same moment in his development as every French schoolboy in La Metropole. And, like other intellectually promising youths in the 1950s, prepared to become "plus royal que le roi," his own odyssey, his errantry, took him from Algeria to pursue education to its farthest reaches. By the time he got to Le Grand College at age eight, Arrouj was already hopelessly paradoxical to himself. He had exhausted the resources of the tiny school at Bab Al-Oued. This meant that he really knew much more than that school could offer him. He could sense from the beginning of his life that he would know things when he needed to know them, he had known a long time ago that he could trust his own instincts about things, that if he were in a difficult situation, if he thought about it long enough a solution would appear to him. That there would be limitations to having such a view of life he could not know, but in any case, his life was already small and limited in its own way. When he enrolled at Le Grand, as it was called then, Arrouj was given the school handbook, a series of regulations governing every aspect of school life-the kind of uniform he was to wear with a number embroidered on the inside of each garment (he was allotted number 565), what clothes were needed for sports, the dates of school holidays, and so on. But Le Grands first rule, emblazoned on the opening page of Le Cahier de Texte, read: "Le Francais est la langue officielle de l'ecole. Aucune autre langue ne sera toleree." There were no native French-speakers among the pupils. …