The Representation of Trauma during a War of Decolonization

“If there is no precipice of inhumanity over which nations and men will not throw themselves, then, why in fact do we go to so much trouble to become, or remain men?”2
On March 18th 1962 the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria was formed. The struggle for national independence was fought over the span of eight years. Algeria’s national consciousness was born out of struggle, and has a very unique place in the history of violent nation building. Algeria fought its colonial ruler France, who had conquered Algeria and made it a French territory in 1848. The decolonization of Algeria was particularly a problem for the French Consciousness, because when Algeria was made into a French territory in 1848 it was not a protectorate like Morocco of Tunisia, it became an integral part of France, as much a part as Normandy or Maine.
The liberal usage of torture destroyed the prestige of the supposedly ‘liberal’ French government. The Intelligentsia was almost completely alienated from the army as the left rose in total condemnation around the question of torture. It was particularly appalling, the use of torture in a France just recently recovering from the Second World War. The French had been victims of the brutal tortures, summary executions, and other traumatic experiences of the Nazi regime. How could they engage in such remarkably similar things? Sartre asks in his preface to Henri Alleg’s The Question, “Is fifteen years long enough to turn victims into executioners?”3 In the French case it would seem true, the fifteen years since France fought the Third Reich was enough time for them to give up the liberal causes they had fought for. The victims of the horrific acts of inhumanity during the Second World War became the new torturers. For the Algerians this struggle for independence would find its way against an enemy who would liberally, and without greater thought engage in acts of torture as a more expedient solution.
The way torture is represented in the struggle for national consciousness in the post-colonial period is the launching point of defining the post-colonial identities of both peoples. The fact is that both sides broke all conventional military codes of conduct in a war of preservation (or independence). In chapter seventeen of Alistair Horne’s book on the Algerian war, A Savage War of Peace he quotes Pierre Nora a French Historian saying that “Fascism, (…) and torture, (...) are France in Algeria.”4 In Algeria, France abandoned any liberal trappings of the mainland and became a violent manifestation of both colonial prejudices and a greatly emasculated culture that was itself struggling for identity in the post-Second World War Word. The strangest point of this fact was that both sides saw it as a war with everything to lose. The Algerians if they lost would lose loose their one chance at self-determination. French reprisals for the insurrection would be unimaginably harsh. The French have a long history of brutally putting down colonial insurrections. In 1945 the citizens of a small town in Algeria called Setif rose up against the French occupation, and the French army responded with the indiscriminate execution, bombing and shelling of small villages all around in total killing between 600-1000 Muslim citizens.5 Any Algerian uprising if failed would mean a great cost in blood. French settlers would not be appeased very easily.
The poor Algerians would be decimated in a campaign of indiscriminate extermination like Frances entrance into Algeria 130 years earlier. Algeria was invaded by France in 1830; the Turkish military suzerainty was toppled and replaced by a French military occupation force.6 One particular story of the brutality of France’s entrance into Algeria is described in chapter two of A Savage War of Peace, “fires had been lit at the mouth of a cave where 500 men, women, and children had taken refuge, asphyxiating all but ten of them.”7 If the French had been that brutal in their entrance into Algeria it would be hard to imagine how viciously they would hold on to the country. So the Algerians fought the war as if it would be victory or extermination. There is an interesting allegory in Henri Alleg’s The Question, a word with a particularly different meaning in France than in America. In France when one speaks of putting the question it is synonymous with torture, as the expression goes once the question is put forth it is impossible to take it back. The insurrection was in its own way a question, but it was a very different one, once it began it was impossible to go back, the only question then could be, how far could it really go?
The French soldiers who fought had less to lose, at least it would seem, yet the stakes were still very high. In mainland France there had always been a stark division between the intelligentsia and the military. The French intellectuals always saw the military as a corrupting force that was damaging to the prestige of French thought. The wars of decolonization, like the war in Indochina had already damaged the French army’s prestige. There had been an insurrection in Indochina lead by the guerillas know as the Vietminh. It had upset the delicate balance of the imperial prestige of France that had been declining since the Vichy. The famous defeat of the Indochina war was known as Dien Bien Phu. The French strategy in 1953 was simple, “the plan was to lure the Vietminh forces into a pitched battle and destroy them.”8 This of course didn’t work at all because the forces of the guerillas so vastly outnumbered the French even the best strategy couldn’t hope to succeed. The French lost 13,000 men defending Dien Bien Phu.9 According to Alistair Horne the defeat was to have the deepest reaching psychological effects on the French troops, “there was no more devastating a defeat ever inflicted on a Western regular army by a colonial resistance movement.”10
The scenes of the Algerian war are dramatized in the American film, “Lost Command” the French had just been emasculated in Indochina and now were being shipped off to Algeria to stop the colonial insurrection.11 The film begins as the French forces, lead by Lt. Col. Raspeguy (Anthony Quinn) are captured and taken to a POW camp of the Vietminh. There is a very important sequence when the Vietminh soldier addresses the Arab soldier; he tells him “Dien Bien Phu is also a victory for Arabs under the heels of the French”.12 The Arab soldier addressed later in the film joins the FLN and leads a band of rebels that Raspeguy has to deal with. The plot of the film follows Raspeguy as he goes to Algeria to try to recover his lost pride that he feels robbed of leaving Indochina. The irony of one scene in the movie is that Raspeguy complains to a historian for the army that they lost Indochina because the military wouldn’t listen. Raspeguy is made the scapegoat of the failure in Indochina and told that the only way he can recover his honor is to go to Algeria and fight for France. Raspeguy is a character much like the General Mathieu of Gillo Pontecorvo’s work. Raspeguy is a comic representation of generals during this war. The comedic tone of the film is strange when juxtaposed to the story. Reciprocal horrors are perpetrated on each side. As revenge for the desecration of dead French soldiers the French burn a town to the ground and indiscriminately kill civilians. The whole film functions in a way to explain a war that if it had a meaning it was not easy to find. The men in Raspeguy’s unit are volunteers and some of which are drunks. For the French the very real consequence of the war is the loss of French manhood. It would mean a second defeat. That meant if the men could not go home as heroes then they felt like they could not really go home. The film does a good job representing the dimensions of the struggle. A radical war represented in radical ways. Each side had their own stakes and their own way of giving meaning to the causes that they fight for. Some fought for personal glory, others for the right of a nation to self determination. The particular cruelty of the war becomes evident when discussed in the context of the very real horror of a negative outcome.
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The Algerian side of the struggle for national independence was lead by the organization Front de Liberation Nationale, or the FLN. The FLN was the voice of the people and the actual revolutionary government when Algeria declared it purposed independence from France. The organization spanned all over the Algerian nation lead by the famous “chefs historiques”, the groups original nine leaders; Ait Ahmed, Mohamed Boudiaf, Belkacem Krim, Rabah Bitat, Larbi Ben M'Hidi, Mourad Didouch, Moustafa Ben Boulaid, Mohamed Khider, and Ben Bella. The men who were part of this group were integral parts of the overall war. Each man brought his own strategy to the struggle. Ben Bella kept the French occupied with victories in the countryside, and Yacef was the mastermind behind the urban warfare.
Saadi Yacef under Ben M’Hidi was the military chief of Zone Autonome d'Alger. Yacef as a reprisal of the French’s guillotining FLN members began a campaign of terror which gripped the city of Algiers. The great innovation was the use of women bombers to place bombs around the French section of Algiers. The bombings occurred September 30th 1956. They included the bombings of Air France, a dance hall, and the Milk Bar, depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo’ film “The Battle of Algiers”. This became the defining moment of the FLN Algiers branch; they took the Casbah by storm. Because of the success of the FLN’s terror campaign the attention of the French military was drawn in. The French Paratroopers were sent in to handle the city. They rounded up, ruthlessly, anyone the suspected of any involvement with the FLN. The strategy worked the French were able to wipe out the FLN in Algiers. In Pontecorvo’s film the end of the FLN is symbolized as the hero of the story Ali le Pointe is found by the French. Ali le Pointe was Yacef’s right hand man, and the film ends as the French take his life with a bomb. The Algiers branch was eventually hunted down and routed out by the French government, but Yacef escaped with his life. The resort to torture of the Algerians by the French authority is explained as the only way to quickly and efficiently shut down the FLN in Algiers. Depicted in “The Battle of Algiers”, M’hidi was captured by accident and in his pajamas by the French paratroopers during a routine search. He was executed by the French soldiers; who claimed it was suicide. Ben Bella was able to continue his great guerilla campaigns in the country with great success, and his victories continued to strain French resources. Seen in the picture below from the French Media Library of Defense, a government archive containing many photographs from the conflict, General Massu, the same man responsible for leading the French machine of torture is shaking some pied noirs hands. They are members of a basketball team, and evidence of the lack of seriousness the French really gave the war. The Algerians understood that the French thought very lightly of the prospective of an Algerian victory, and they used it to their advantage.
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The liberation was a contradiction. The Algerians had emancipated themselves from colonial tyranny but they now were faced with ruling elites. Specifically one of the largest groups of these new elites was the Armée de Libération Nationale which became the National and Popular Army. The ALN had been the rebels that fought with Ben Bella in the countryside against the French. These former guerillas became the new standing army of the Algerian state. Ben Bella the leader of the rebel army became Algeria’s first president. The FLN are still the current occupiers of the seat of power in the Algerian administration. They have lost democratic approval. After deciding to try and hold elections in the 90s the FLN was not the winning party. The winning party the Front Islamique du Salut, or the FIS on December 27th 1991 was banned from holding political office on the grounds of their participation in certain terroristic activities. After the suspension of elections a bloody ten year civil war crippled Algeria. The victory of the FIS shows a radical change in the way things in Algeria work. The FLN’s loss of popular approval is a scene that illustrates the same inability the French had to recognize the separate aspirations of the ruling elite and the people. The FLN’s failure to recognize political trends, especially the Kabyle nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist movements proves an ignorance of the current political times, and may spell the end of the FLN. For the Kabyles it had always been sort of a slap in the face, that having fought so hard during the revolution they were not given much in the outcome. Their language was banned, their culture was looked upon with disdain as a whole, it seemed like they defeated French colonialism, but now the Kabyles would be subjects under Arab or FLN colonialism.
Albert Camus, a French existentialist author famous for such works as The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus was also a pied noir, he was half Spanish and half French, and born in Algeria in Oran, November 7th 1917. Camus was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1957. He never could really conquer his colonial mind. Camus could never imagine an Algeria that was not a part of France, because as far as he knew France and Algeria were once and the same. He felt more at home in the Algerian sun than the cold metropolitan cities of France. In his works you begin to get the feeling that to Camus, in Algeria there were two peoples, the “lump Arabs” always relegated to backdrop, and the French, who are the real subjects of his works, he never seems to make mention of the Arabs except as props in his stories, never a long consideration, but only as something of a scenery that a tourist might see. Arabs in some of his stories are totally vacant. In his novel The Plague the entire town of Oran seems vacant of any Arabs at all. In fact the entire book makes no reference to them. The problem was that Camus could never see beyond this union between Algeria and France. Camus’s Algeria was not a union of Arabs and French, but Camus’s Algeria was inseparable from France, because the Algerian he would refer to were essentially French, “pied noirs”. Alistair Horne quotes Jules Roy, another pied noir, and close friend of Albert Camus, Roy talks about how a pied noir boy is raised, they were told that “Arabs belonged to a different race” and it was an inferior one to the French. Roy then goes on to say that after being told these things for so long “their condition could not disturb me” and he finishes with a chilling statement, “who suffers seeing an oxen sleep on straw or eat grass.”15 The pied noir mind had been trained not to recognize the Arabs of Algeria as people, but as something else. Even the great moral crusader Albert Camus could not decolonize his mind, and come to terms with the injustice of colonialism.
The term “pied noir” means literally “black feet” in French, because there feet had been burned by the North African sun. The term was used to describe a difference between mainland French and colonial French. These “pied noirs” are also known as “colons”. They are the settlers which France after its military successes sent to exploit the native Arab-Berber populations. These settlers are briefly romanticized in Camus’s the first man as brave pioneers, with nothing to build a civilization on but sand. French Historian de Tocqueville has a little different interpretation. He said “the Muslim society in North Africa was not uncivilized” and he believed that the French presence in Algeria has “rendered Muslim society much more miserable and much more barbaric than it was before it became acquainted with us.”16 The Pied Noirs became rabid defenders of French interests in Algeria. One practice of the “pied noirs” was something called the “ratonnades” these were usually lynching, acts of terror perpetrated by “normal” French. The rat hunts would sometimes include the illegal breaking into Muslim’s houses, the stealing of property, general acts of cruelty, and in many occasions it would end in death for the poor victims. Sometimes the colons would even set bombs in civilian places killing many woman, and children indiscriminately.
In “The Battle of Algiers”, the pied noirs bomb the “rue de Thebes” a district of the Arab section of Algiers, the Casbah. The bombing of the “rue de Thebes” was cited as the reason for Yacef’s famous bombings. The pied noirs responsible for the Rue de Thebes bombing were never arrested; this further strained the administrative power of an already unaccredited and popularly disdained martial government. These pied noirs are different from Camus in their liberal use of violence and belief in the supremacy of coercive behavior as intent to solve the crisis at hand. In his writings Camus portrays his pied noirs as an unruly bunch of partisans, but they were still open to reason. In his novel the first man, Jacques, Camus’s representation of himself saves a young Arab’s life. There is a bombing down the road. A group of young pied noirs see a young Arab boy walking down the street, so they begin to chase him. Jacques helps the boy escape into a dinner where an old childhood friend works. Jacques is a great representation of Camus’s feelings on the entire issue; he honestly does not know where he stands. On the one hand there is his childhood, where the only Arab he could remember was the pastry vendor and the dog catcher. On the other hand, Camus is faced with a question he never can come up with a real answer for. So Camus falls short of ever looking into the question at all. Camus becomes morally paralyzed when the question is put fourth.
The French authority and the perpetrators of torture were the Paratroopers lead by General Jacques Massu. In 1956 General Massu took his 10th parachute division into Algiers with the task of maintaining order. He led the French military’s terror campaign, the secret round ups, and the torture interrogations. Pontecorvo pokes fun at Massu with his character Mathieu, this representation of Massu reaches its depths of irony during his famous line, “We aren't madmen or sadists, gentlemen. Those who call us Fascists today, forget the contribution that many of us made to the Resistance. Those who call us Nazis, don't know that among us there are survivors of Dachau and Buchenwald. We are soldiers and our only duty is to win.”17 The irony is really apparent when one thinks back to the trials of former Nazis at Nuremburg. The most famous pleas were always, that they were just doing there job, or always someone was a bigger Nazi than them. The creation of the other as something less than human is the unfortunate legacy of colonialism. Another interpretation of why Mathieu feels he hasn’t stepped over any boundaries is to return to what Jules Roy said earlier in this paper. The way they were raised was not to see these colonial subjects as people, “who suffers seeing oxen sleep on straw or eat grass.”18 The fact that they were people is not even acknowledged as a possibility by Mathieu he is only a true capitalist machine. He was sent their and told to do things with a bureaucratic efficiency. Whether he was becoming as he was accused of, a Nazi doesn’t seem to matter. Mathieu is much like Raspeguy in the sense that his own quest for personal victory and glory will swallow up everything in its way. The reality seems to escape Mathieu.
Another film concerning the Algerian war is Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat. This French film describes the dark behind the scenes aspect of this war. Bruno Forestier is a deserter of the regular French army. He fled to Geneva to escape prison or worse, being sent to Algeria. The film begins with him in Geneva; he seems like a very ordinary sort of man. Forestier poses as a photographer, but his real job is much more sinister. Bruno Forestier works for the French Right Wing Terrorist Organization known as the OAS. He recalls with some irony that “our anti-terrorist group was financed by an ex-parliamentarian who had been pro-Vichy.”19 It really adds to the question of how many degrees of separation really do separate the French right, and the fascists. In reality the OAS was a fascist organization that contained “bankers, parachutists, car salesmen, (and) prodigal sons”.20 They were waging a secret war against all pro-FLN organizations, and even those who would speak out on behalf of the FLN. The coldness of the antihero Bruno Forestier is really felt when he describes the death of a comrade, “They found him in a bathtub Tuesday at Bristol Hotel. They’d cut his tongue out.”21 He repeats it with a cool indifference that haunts you as the words role off his tongue. They ask Forestier to kill a FLN sympathizer, a radio host who had been broadcasting some anti-French messages on his show. Bruno refuses, and the game is on. He tries to kill the man. He leaves his house with his pistol which he describes as “black, mysterious, and incorruptible.”22 As he fails with every attempt to kill this man he comes to a realization that, “no one can force a soldier to kill” and “maybe freedom begins with remorse.”23 Bruno realizes he can not kill the man. He is not the hero of any story. Not the hero of the OAS or the FLN he just doesn’t care. Bruno is apathetic to the point he even describes the difficulty he has killing the man like “fouling up a suicide.”24 Bruno is everything you need to hate. He has no respect for anything, and no desire, but to please himself. The character symbolizes the easily corruptible youth. It was said that the prisons in Algeria became vast machines of corruption, where young soldiers would go in sane, and come out sadists.
Bruno’s apathy coupled with self-interest lead him to flee for a safer haven. This is when he is picked up by the FLN. He is kidnapped, and drug up a flight of stairs as he recounts the aspect of being tortured he opens with an absurdity, “I forgot to count the stairs to know where we were.”25 They placed him on the floor and began to ask him a few questions. The initial stages of the torture were amazingly mundane. Something you would see a normal police officer in the United States engaged in. Then they show him a few pictures of some of the OAS members they had killed. He remarks callously after seeing one of them, “Poor Etienne. He’d lowered his head to protect his throat resulting in his catching the razor full on the chin.”26 At this point it is still easy to hate this apathetic antihero who cares for nothing at all. The torture scene begins with Bruno cuffed to the bathroom fixture. Bruno narrates as the scenes of the torture are shown. They begin by burning his hand, and then they spray him with hot water. He remarks concerning the torture Bruno’s only desire is to escape it. He tries to focus on anything but the torture going on at hand. Bruno declared, “think of anything to avoid the pain. The sea, the beach, the sun.” For Bruno torture was only something to be escaped. He eventually is brought back out to the main room of the apartment after passing out. They try to interrogate him again, but as far as he is concerned he will do anything to escape. The scene that follows shows Bruno jumping thru the window, not knowing which floor he is on and not caring. The torture of Bruno, an OAS operative, a deserter of a real army, and a secret one, seems to represent only the pointlessness felt at times when the war was thought about. The way Godard chooses to represent Bruno is very important when the players of the conflict are thought of. Bruno lives a pointless life, he has no reason to be involved, but he is forced. Bruno’s apathy represents a major flaw in the will of the colonizers. They fought because they were told to, is Godard’s argument. They fought a monotonous and pointless war imbued with pain. Godard accuses the entire conflict of meaninglessness, as his character Bruno represents.
Alleg, a survivor of the Paras’s devices of torture feels a stronger meaning after being personally tortured. Alleg was a European Jew who during the Second World War had fled the dangerous mainland to Algeria to escape Vichy collaboration, and Nazi persecution. Alleg was arrested by the Paratroopers in 1957. Alleg was accused of being an Algerian sympathizer. He was a communist, and was in support of the movement of independence, but he didn’t play a very important role in the actual conflict. He was held for a month of interrogation. After on reads his account of a month in the hands of the paras the immediacy of the line, “Who can tell of all the other atrocities that I have not seen?” Alleg wrote of the events that happened to him. His account cannot hope to really analyze the depths of the French machine of terror during this conflict. We are left to think of the fate of the poor Arabs who didn’t have the privilege of being Europeans and receiving “special treatment”, as opposed to the “Wogs” who the French would brutally and savagely beat, and torture. 27 For Alleg, the Paras openly proclaim “this is the Gestapo here!”28His Paras are in direct dialogue of argument with the image Massu tries to paint of his men. Referring to the image of Massu above where Massu is portrayed as a figure of kindness, shaking the hands of a basketball team. For Henri the paras are a secret police, a band of fanatical tormentors bent on extracting a confession from the victim “amid its screams and its vomiting up of blood”. The meaning of the torture escapes Alleg, but he doesn’t want a meaning Alleg has gone beyond meaning. Alleg desires action.
Pontecorvo’s Paras seem to deny as much as they can and for C. S. Brosmon, the author of “Torture and Terrorism: Jules Roy Answers General Massu” the war meant that Massu’s “misguided patriotism” further alienated the French intelligentsia, and drove a deep wedge between the French state and the army.29 The French military and intellectuals had never been close. The war gave rise to the left showing gigantic amounts of disdain for the conflict. Figures like Sartre openly denouncing the barbarous treatments of the poor Algerians. Sartre felt so strongly against the conflict he even wrote a preface to not only Henri Alleg’s work, but he wrote one to the young doctor, and nationalist writer Frantz Fanon. The growing separation between the desires of the people and the army began cemented the victory for the FLN.
The Algerian war was a stage for the Algerian people to turn back France’s domination and “cultural obliteration” that had been “made possible by the negation of national reality”.30 For Algeria the rebirth of a national consciousness predetermined victory. When France entered Algeria it destroyed hundreds of years of culture routed in a way of life that would never be the same. The French presence in Algeria was not only a colonial penetration, but it was an attempt to replace Berber, and Arab culture with French. As Ben M’hidi said in Pontecorvo’s film when asked what chance Algeria had of defeating France he responded, “The FLN has more of a chance of defeating the French army than the French have of changing the course of history.” 31 M’hidi in Pontecorvo’s film represents the belief that Algeria had since the fall of Hitler. The idea was proven by the victory of the Vietminh in Indochina. The age of colonialism was at an end. On every front the colonial powers of France and Britain were being beaten back. Pontecorvo speaks of a new era through M’hidi. Pontecorvo talks about the post-colonial world.
In Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth it is the national struggle that “leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history”32 national consciousness is the most elaborate form of culture. So the struggle then goes beyond the battlefields of the Kabyle countryside and the streets of Constantine and Algiers, but now the location of struggle is to liberate the minds of the people not just from the literal colonial power, but from the very concept of colonialism. The Algerians will no longer be identified as a subject people, but rather as people of the Algerian nation.
Mouloud Feraoun was a Kabyle school teacher during the war of liberation. Feraoun was a close personal friend of Albert Camus, and was assassinated in 1962 by the French OAS, the Organisation Armée Secrète a right wing terrorist group of pied noirs. He wrote down a journal which was published in 1962 after the official peace was signed. His journal, Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French Algerian War is remarkable in its stark honest discussion of the ordinary life of a Kabyle school teacher during the chaotic events of a national war for independence. Feraoun opens his work with a claim that before the war started everyone had “settled into a truly orderly and peaceful existence” it was “a tolerable life” that had been “structured by necessities, needs and daily tasks”.33 These ordinary lives to Feraoun were “so miserable” that he believes it was shockingly evident that they had suffered enough.”34 Feraoun observes the day to day goings of both sides, with loyalty to his people’s cause but fear of what could become of it. He never averts the critical eye. The rebels of the countryside are called Fellagha. This term is Arabic for outlaw. Feraoun talks about the flight of Algerian teachers from the countryside to the capital because they “believe their lives are seriously in danger” in Algiers there is a “reasonable withdrawal indemnity awaiting them”.35 As the war rages on Feraoun’s thoughts become more radical. He comments that “the reign of brutality and barbarism has replaced the reign of submission, hypocrisy, and hatred”36 Feraoun comes to the conclusion that “there is no room for anything except force.” Feraoun believes that it has become impossible due to the French definition of rebel, for any Kabyle to not be a rebel. The completely unarmed revolutionaries cover the entire Kabyle population. It is no doubt in his mind that every Kabyle is beginning to awaken to a national consciousness.
Djebar’s Children of the New World, explains the ironic diminishing of strong gender positions during the war, the fluidity of identity which did not live long passed the actual war. Djebar illustrates good revolutionary woman, juxtaposed to good Islamic woman. Pontecorvo’s work was a documentary style film, which creatively and pretty true to the reality represents the struggles both sides experience during the “Battle of Algiers”. For Alleg it was terror, he was captured tortured and made into something less than human. For Alleg the torturer acts as if “it were not possible for both sides to belong to the human race”.37 For Assia Djebar the writer of Children of the New World, the entire war is fought in radical juxtaposition.
The entire war was in fact fought by radically juxtaposed sides, so close as to assume a comparison, but something essentially different. Illustrated in the photos from “La Collection ‘Algérie’” The French “normal” soldiers and the Algerian guerillas, un-gender confined freedom fighters, irregular soldiers fighting proper French military. Women began to occupy new space in the struggle for liberation.
Yacef knew this well as was illustrated by his choice to use female bombers in his terrorist activities in Algiers. In Pontecorvo’s film a reporter as Ben M’hidi if it is cowardly to use women’s baskets to hide bombs, M’hidi’s response, “Give us your bombers sir, and you can have our baskets.” The fact that women can play an active part in this revolution shows its totality. A woman as a revolutionary actor is only a part of the temporary reorganization of gender during the “War of Liberation”. For men the gender lines became more opaque as well. Pontecorvo humorously depicts Yacef’s plan for escape as the members all put the women’s robes on to attempt to sneak by the French forces. Of course in Pontecorvo’s film the men still wear the male shoe as opposed to the defined proper female shoe, and the notice of this vestige of male identity gives away there clever disguise. The choice to depict a vestige of masculinity even in a disguise is to bring home the idea that there can be no total emancipation from gender roles for the Algerian people. There will always be a return to the previous vestiges.
Djebar understands the mass of contradictions in the definition of “Algerian Womanhood”. Djebar’s characters all illustrate the cross-purposed roles of the Algerian women during the war of liberation. Lila, the abandoned lover of a member of the resistance, carves out an identity beyond the proper, Arab Middle classed up bringing she was raised with. She meets with a European hotel owner, and “passes” as a European herself. She stays alone in a beaten down half abandoned hotel.
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The hotel Lila chooses to stay in lied with “a southern exposure” and “sun all day long” on one side and on the other, something that was expected that you would avert your eyes “from the plot of wasteland and the wretched shacks.”40
The entire war is fought amidst a mass of contradictions. Algeria’s national conscience is born out of struggle, as Frantz Fanon the great articulator of resistance said, “Culture is not put into cold storage during conflict”41.
Sartre found an easier voice owing to his proxemic separation from the reality of the war. Sartre claims to know the truth on the grounds of the victims “calm courage” and “modesty and lucidity”. Through this he claims we discover the strength of the victim and discover the victim’s truth.42 Sartre was a needed voice, for both the French condemners and the Algerian people. Like Alleg, Sartre wanted to reach the “Good French” who the Algerians do not confuse with their torturers. Sartre merely asks that the French people consider “what is done in their name.”43 His words became reality as the victims rose up against their torturers and eventually through bloodshed won independence.
The Algerian war is a narrative infused with suffering, and the way it is represented suggests more than just juxtaposition. Representation suggests inter-relatedness with the reality of conflict. The reality of Algeria’s current state of affairs should bring home these questions to everybody. The Algerian revolution needs to be seen as an essential part in the wars of decolonization. It was a watershed in colonial history, a subject people had risen up and dethroned the colonial occupiers, and established through struggle and violence a new nation that was completely separate from the chains of colonialism. “At the moment when the executioner went to the condemned, as in the absolute solemn silence, which followed it, the soul of Algeria vibrated. Its tears, shining in the darkness, fell across the bars of my cell.”44 The Algerian War of Liberation established a new independent Algerian nation separate in all ways from France. It not only collapsed the Fourth French Republic, but the Algerian War of Liberation set into motion the death of colonialism.
In a war of representation there is never really a clear victory or defeat. The Algerian war never really ended. It only changed faces. The French never really left, the FLN merely became a doppelganger version of the old colonialist regime. The FIS fought against this for their own views and lost. In France the legacy of this brutal war is still hard to get their minds around. The legacy of a way of this magnitude is long and continues. Algeria one its independence from France but sold it to the FLN. The measures both sides sunk to in their unique attempts to win this war were horrifying. The way these measures have been depicted by film and literature following the conflict are equally arousing to the mind. The conflict was definitely a new dimension of warfare, and a great warning for what wars of the 20th century would really look like. France would never regain her lost colonial legacy, and Algeria would never really heal their wounds. The current nation is not the utopia the revolutionaries gave their blood for. The reason all great utopian projects fail is made pretty obvious in all the texts. Each piece that represents the war represents it in its very own way. Each way is radically different from each other. When one switches from each account sometimes it becomes hard to believe they are even accounts of the same struggle. The Algerian war was fought in many unconventional ways and in many unconventional places. Each person experience of the war was profoundly different from the last. No two people really remember the same war. For Algeria the war is still not over. There is still infighting, and civil wars. The war will never end. In France the attempt to come to terms with its vicious colonial past is hard, but attempts are made. The entire war is still partially a mystery as people begin to question, are the lengths that each part went to for their hope of victory really worth the cost? The only answer can be found in the wealth of representations were each individual experience of the war tells part of the story.


Works Cited
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Fanon, Frantz. “Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom” The Wretched of the Earth Pelican Publication 1959 Accessed online at http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/national-culture.htm

Feraoun, Mouloud. Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French Algerian War Edited and with an introduction by James D. Le Sueur. Translated by Marry Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade. University of Nebraska Press 2000

Godard, Jean-Luc. Le Petit Soldat, 1963

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Pontecorvo, Gillo. The Battle of Algiers: Criterion Edition, 1967

Robson, Mark. Lost Command, 1966