Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [31]
It was hard enough to have been forced to leave Algeria, our house and gardens and servants and friendships (with the servants) there. But the French were killing the Algerians, body and soul, and the Algerians grew sick of being treated worse than dogs. They fought back. There seemed to be a rising tide of blood across the land, and even clergymen like my father were not exempt. We left in tears, for we considered ourselves Algerians. French Algerians, of course. Members of the ruling class and race, bien sûr. The elite. And yet I, especially, felt native to the land, because I was. I was born there. Hot sun even now is the kind I prefer. I am never so happy as when enveloped by a scorching Parisian summer, when most true Parisians make sure to be someplace else. Someplace cooler. The ocean or the mountains.
There were places—restaurants, nightclubs, schools, neighborhoods—the Algerian natives could not go. The old colonial story. And yet the people were so beautiful, hospitable as Africans are always, especially our servants and playmates. The children taught me games, and they and their parents taught me Arabic.
There was no way I could understand what was happening, when they arrived for work with their eyes veiled, even hostile, and their faces swollen from grief. Some loved one would have been picked up by the French security forces in the night, grilled, imprisoned, tortured, killed.
Loving my nurse, my playmates and the servants, I naturally hated France. And then suddenly to have to “return” there, as the newspapers said of us. I protested to my parents that France was a place I’d never been; how, therefore, could I “return”? My parents, like most settler parents, had no answer. They were far from happy about the turn of events themselves. They’d left France in the first place because French society had no place for them; all prominent spots, my father joked, having been occupied; and though in Algeria my father suffered as a Christian minister surrounded by a world of Moslems, he felt he’d discovered and enlarged a niche for himself that was rewarding. He had more power in Algeria, and a more conspicuous place in society, than he ever could have had in France.
I liked to watch my father with petit Pierre, his namesake. They were physically much alike, short, thin-bodied and serious, rather slow and low-key among the coffee-crazed, perpetually cranky Parisians. I know that when my father looked at Pierre he saw the innocent, that is to say, apolitical, Algerian boys of his congregation whom he’d left behind to an uncertain fate, caught as they were between the French security forces, to whom all Arabs looked alike, and the Maquis, the NLA and the more militant Moslem fanatics, to whom Christian Arabs looked not at all like themselves: which is to say, like true Arabs. The young boys who had appeared deeply moved by the nonviolence preached by the Jesus Christ of my father’s church. The Jesus they inevitably identified as a rebel Algerian, for not only did the Jesus Christ of the Christian religion look like an Algerian, but for a long time there was a tradition of Arab martyrdom in Algeria, of which they were well aware, as young “Arab terrorist” after young “Arab terrorist,” sometimes boys no older than themselves, went up, barehanded or with stones and rusty swords, against the machine guns and hand grenades of the French.
Petit Pierre, appearing years later, after my parents had resettled completely into French life, and I had settled for the first time, became both our remembrance of our Algerian experience, which in