Scandalous Memory: Terrorism Testimonial from the Algerian War

ABSTRACT

Zohra Drif, a heroine of the Front de Libération Nationale's independence movement during the Algerian War, planted a bomb in the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956, which killed three people, wounded fifty, and maimed twelve civilians. The 2008 documentary Les Porteuses de feu directed by Faouzia Fékiri engages Algerian women, including Drif, who testify to their willing participation in the FLN's terrorist activities in their fight for independence from France (1954–1962). But two of the Milk Bar bombing victims have grappled with the effects throughout their lives, and these depictions cause aftershocks that do not allow the trauma to dissipate. Nicole Guiraud, age ten, lost her left arm and saw her father gravely wounded; Danielle Michel-Chich was five when her leg was amputated and her grandmother was killed. Guiraud and Michel-Chich willingly and publicly recount the traumatic moment of their loss in spoken and written testimony, but they remain at odds about how this memory should be confronted. This article explores how traumatic memory, even sixty years onward, is contested by those directly affected, creating scandalous debate in France.

KEYWORDS:

• Algerian War
• trauma
• Zohra Drif
• Danielle Michel-Chich
• Nicole Guiraud
• autobiography

Notes

1. Valerie Orlando explains, “Before 1962, Algerian authors’ storylines tended to promote the voice of a collective “we” at the expense of a single “I” as the only literary way to rebel against French domination (…) This “we” would counter the French's efforts to divide and conquer the population of Algeria” (179).

2. Djamila (Jamila) Bouhired similarly stated in a 1971 interview, “I'm not really sure why all the publicity ended up centering on me. For there were many women in the prison with me, subjected to the worst kinds of torture, and they didn't betray their comrades either. Each of them deserves pages and pages from the poets. All of us, all of us Jamilas were parts in the whole. Individuals don't make a cause you know…” (qtd. in Cooke 129).

3. See Gerard Lehmann's public attack against Drif in his article “Les Messagères de l'enfer: Article critique sur les poseuses des bombes (et le documentaire Les Porteuses de feu).” Personal correspondence. 24 March 2012.

4. For a detailed study of Guiraud's writing and art, see “Unspoken Algeria: Transmitting Traumatic Memories of the Algerian War” (by Amy Hubbell. In The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art. Eds. Névine El Nossery and Amy L. Hubbell. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 305–324.) and “Accumulated Testimony: Layering French Girls’ Diaries on the Algerian Exodus” (by Amy Hubbell. In Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literatures. Guest Eds. Natalie Edwards and Amy L. Hubbell, 38.2 (2014).).

5. Despite her research, in Dominique Fargues’ Mémoires de Pieds-Noirs (Flammarion, 2008) Guiraud identifies her assailant as Djamila Bouhired (101).

6. See Cixous’ “Lettre à Zohra Drif” (Lectora 7 (2001): 183–188) and her novel Si près (Galilée, 2007) which Brigitte Weltman-Aron studies alongside Michel-Chich's and others’ readings of terrorism in “Lectures de Zohra Drif” (L'Esprit Créateur 54.4 (Winter 2014): 51–63.).

7. Michel-Chich's book was published just prior to the publication of Mémoires d'une combattante which gives Drif's personal account of the war.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy L. Hubbell

Dr. Amy L. Hubbell is Lecturer in French at the University of Queensland where she teaches and researches French and Francophone identity, exile, and trauma writing. She is author of Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity and Exile (U of Nebraska Press, 2015) and has coedited several volumes including Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (U of Nebraska P, 2011), The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art (2013), and “Self and Stuff: Accumulation in Francophone Literature and Art” (Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literatures no. 38.2 2014).