Shifting Positions: Amputation, Prosthesis, and the Embodied Memory of Algeria

Abstract

By exploring the autobiographies of two childhood amputees, Nicole Guiraud and Danielle Michel-Chich, who were maimed in the Battle of Algiers in 1956 as Algeria fought for independence from France, the article addresses the varied positions of these women with relationship to France’s colonial history and within writing itself.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 While the attacks on civilians were part of the resistance movement to liberate Algeria led by the Algerian Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), Guiraud and many members of the Pied-Noir community consistently refer to the bombings as terrorist attacks.

2 G. Thomas Couser, “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005): 605.

3 Danielle Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D. (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 56.

4 All translations of this text are by the author of this essay.

5 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 49.

6 Tamara West, “Remembering Displacement: Photography and the Interactive Spaces of Memory,” Memory Studies 7, no. 2 (2014): 177.

7 See Amy Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015) for a more complete study of French autobiography and fiction rooted in Algerian memory.

8 Mieke Bal, introduction to Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), x.

9 Niall Richardson, Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 165. The medical nature of the amputations for both Guiraud and Michel-Chich is highlighted in their testimony. Until the Algerian War, civilian victims of war, including children, were considered in the same category as wounded soldiers. Guiraud’s and Michel-Chich’s fathers both worked to have their children recognized as war victims so they could be compensated. The medical community was previously unfamiliar with how to deal with child amputees, who presented medical difficulties because of their growing bodies that changed in relation to their protheses.

10 In “Family Pictures: Maus, Morning and Post-Memory,” Marianne Hirsch explains the term “sur-vived” as living beyond the expected frame: “She is the survivor who announces that she has literally ‘sur-vived,’ lived too long, outlived her intended destruction, the survivor who has a story to tell.” Marianne Hirsch, “Family Pictures: Maus, Morning, and Post-Memory,” Discourse 15, no. 2 (Winter 1992–93): 5.

11 Nicole Guiraud, Survivre (Montpellier: Colleccio Font Nova, 2012), 33–49.

12 See Hubbell, “Unspoken Algeria: Transmitting Traumatic Memories of the Algerian War,” in The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art, ed. Névine El Nossery and Amy L. Hubbell (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), 305–324, for a more detailed study of Guiraud’s art and the expression of trauma, and “The (Narrative) Prothesis Re-Fitted: Finding New Support for Embodied and Imagined Differences in Contemporary Art” by Amanda Cachia, Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (2015): 247–264, doi:10.3828/jlcds.2015.21, for an exploration of disabled embodiment in contemporary art.

13 Guiraud, Survivre, 7.

14 Quoted in Dominique Fargues, Mémoires de Pieds-Noirs (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 190–191. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

15 Fargues, Mémoires, 102.

16 Fargues, Mémoires, 264.

17 Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria, 208.

18 Nicole Guiraud, Algeria 1962: Diary of the Apocalypse, trans. Amy Hubbell and Muhib Nabulsi (self-published), 30, tinyurl.com/yxluv3ko.

19 Guiraud, Algeria 1962, 43.

20 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 34. Translation originally published in Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria, 259.

21 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 34.

22 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 79.

23 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 73.

24 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 73–74.

25 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 37.

26 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 37.

27 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 78.

28 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 78–79.

29 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 82.

30 In “Scandalous Memory: Terrorism Testimonial from the Algerian War,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 22, no. 1 (2018): 49–57, I analyze the ways in which Guiraud, Michel-Chich, and Drif contest each other’s versions of the Milk Bar bombing.

31 Michel-Chich uses the term “concurrence de la mémoire,” which could also be translated as “memory competition.”

32 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prothesis: Disability and Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 48.

33 Couser, “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation,” 603.

34 Couser, “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation,” 604.

35 This resonates with Judith Butler’s proposal in Giving an Account of Oneself that the account is offered in response to an allegation, as an “I” either owning up to or defending against it, “even if, in a given instance, the self may not have been the cause of the suffering in question.” (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, 11–12.)

36 Couser, “Disability, Life Narratives, and Representation,” 604.

37 David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 2.

38 On one of the panels in Masseube, Guiraud and other war survivors, notably Simone Gautier, whose husband was killed in the Rue d’Isly massacre, shared their personal experiences in a collective forum.

39 Danielle Michel-Chich, “Algérie-France: comprendre le passé pour mieux construire l’avenir,” conference presentation, June 30, 2012, Sénat Vidéo.

40 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 84.

41 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 54.

42 Wills, Prosthesis, 9.

43 In “An Amputated Elsewhere: Sustaining and Relieving the Phantom Limb of Algeria,” Life Writing 4, no. 2 (October 2007): 247–262, I explore how phantom limb pain functions in a similar way to the absence of Algeria in Pied-Noir literature.

44 Guiraud, Algeria 1962, 100.

45 Guiraud, Algeria 1962,100.

46 Guiraud, Algeria 1962, 97.

47 Guiraud, Algeria 1962, 97. The original photographs from 1956–57 depicting the four maimed children were reprinted on January 24, 2008 in a Jeune Pied Noir newsletter contesting the film Les Poseuses de feu shown on France 3.

48 In personal correspondence, Cuesta stated that the booklet was sent to each deputy in 1998 from the Pieds-Noirs in Nice but that they were not taken seriously.

49 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 31.

50 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 33.

51 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 32, 34.

52 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 94.

53 Roberta Culbertson, “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-Establishing the Self,” New Literary History 26, no. 1, Narratives of Literature, the Arts, and Memory (Winter 1995): 169.

54 Edwards, Natalie, Amy L. Hubbell and Ann Miller, Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 10.

55 See Nicole Guiraud, “Lettre ouverte de Nicole Guiraud à Danielle Michel-Chich,” D’Algérie – Djezaïr: Mouvement de reconciliation, 16 Mar. 2012, tinyurl.com/y38g5xhg.

56 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 9.

57 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 12.

58 Culbertson, “Embodied Memory,” 169.

59 Culbertson, “Embodied Memory,” 169.

60 Michel-Chich, Lettre à Zohra D., 72.

61 Nicole Guiraud, personal interview, June 29 to July 2, 2012.

62 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 10.

63 See Nicole Guiraud, “Lettre ouverte de Nicole Guiraud à Danielle Michel-Chich,” D’Algérie—Djezaïr: Mouvement de reconciliation, 16 Mar. 2012, tinyurl.com/y38g5xhg.