Colonial Trauma. Karima Lazali
experience of alterity plays a decisive role as it serves as a compass for navigating between internal and external reality. The outside appears as a potential source of comfort. If this Other fails to appease the child or if he or she is malicious, it can have devastating effects on the child. The only option then is to appeal to a higher power, one that is greater than humankind, since the “trust” in humans has been effectively shattered. It is worth noting that the term “trust” has taken on a negative connotation in Algeria today: it points to a significant phenomenon that dates back to the Internal War, namely, the failure of the (internal/external) Other to be a figure of comfort and security. Regular discussions with patients confirm this widespread inability to trust others, including the institutions of healthcare, law, and education. These institutions have thus seemingly lost their status as mediators in a country whose staunchly socialist government once made healthcare, education, and legal protections accessible to all at no cost. This breakdown in trust suggests that the outside and the inside are themselves sources of constant threats, and that overcoming this is anything but straightforward.
But patching over widespread despair with an overzealous display of faith isn’t enough to appease a profound feeling of danger. There is a growing sense of destitution and insecurity. Let’s not forget that Algeria has a long history of turning to religion as a remedy for human despair amid a political crisis. Recent events (the Internal War, natural catastrophes, “malvie”) have only reinforced this tendency. Mohammed Dib wrote as early as 1970: “Placing our trivial concerns in the hands of God, isn’t that wonderful? Only we could come up with such insights.”5 Elsewhere, he makes his point clear: “Our desire to also put ourselves in God’s place knows no bounds.”6
An excess of religious zeal goes hand in hand with a rising sense of danger and an absence of “trust.” The subject sees itself in peril with no one to turn to, and, as a result, it multiplies its offerings to a supposed divine power and demonstrates its faith in a more conspicuous manner. In this way, these visible displays of faith are like so many unanswered calls. It is as though the very lack of divine response led to a dramatic increase in the need for religion. For these demonstrations of “belief” in the social sphere rarely produce the desired results, since “God chose to let us deal with his absence and our state of abandonment on our own.”7 Is this display a way of reassuring God about His own existence while trust in Him in the private sphere is thrown into doubt?
Where can one seek help if God, who remains at the helm, struggles to steer private and public life? And where can we turn when the institutions designed to protect us run aground on the shores of despair? Would secularization make our institutions more robust and trustworthy?
The power of religion and the religion of power
Today’s institutions are in a severe state of disrepair for several reasons: lack of resources, corruption, an egregiously unregulated market as national socialism gave way to an anarchic capitalism, and the need to manage the crises provoked by the Internal War and natural disasters. These institutions are perceived as the site and cause of a new danger. They undermine their own purported goals of providing aid, safety, and care. There is a profound neglect of one’s basic needs, not to mention one’s desires. A litany of minor, everyday complaints pervades the speech of subjects, who feel their existence has become inconsequential. In this context, many shy away from institutions out of fear and apprehension. Subjects don’t see them as a source of shelter, far from it. Governed by chance and confusion, institutions have become the unregulated site of an agonizing social order.
Institutions reproduce and exacerbate the tears in the social fabric, wreaking even more untold havoc by re-enacting practices of violence. This leaves the citizen powerless. Emergency exits are blocked off, from both the inside and the outside. It is therefore up to each and every individual to use the widespread art of gfasa, namely, finding ways out through resourcefulness and creativity. Although at times producing astounding feats, this practice tends to further discredit institutions. With each individual potentially inventing his or her own rules and laws, this may lead to ingenious discoveries as well as various forms of abuse: corruption, authoritarianism, harassment. An already threadbare social fabric and the rapid erosion of foundational institutions signal that the function of an independent mediator is in crisis. Touchstones of tradition are vanishing, including the family, whose conventional structure has been challenged by new modes of familial organization: divorce, single-parent families, the new predominance of the nuclear family.
These violent and brutal changes occurred at a pace that left no time (in the sense of duration) for new touchstones to be established to make sense of them. The construction of the psyche in children, as developing subjects, has been affected as a result. Some child psychiatrists have observed in their private practices many parents who, finding themselves all alone, are left to struggle without any institutional support. In traditional societies, the extended family served this function, whereas in modern societies, institutions play this role. However, as previously mentioned, “trust” in these institutions has vanished in Algeria, where they are seen as instruments of oppression and in part responsible for one’s internal sense of insecurity. The outside is as threatening as the inside, leaving no safe breathing space, which is precisely what institutions are supposed to offer their citizens. What’s more, civil society is struggling to fill the gap left by the failure of institutions.
Thus, religion is called upon to treat several levels of despair: private, political, social. The visible display of faith supplants foundering institutions that can no longer protect and care for individuals. The “power above” is an expression rarely uttered but frequently used in one’s body language, such as by raising one’s eyes to the sky. This suggests two things in Algeria: God and the state. This confusion between government and divine power is nothing new. It is in fact behind the origin myth of a young Algerian nation. It is worth asking, however: what God are we talking about? Since, although the Qur’an states there is only one God, multiple Gods appear in practice and in speech, depending on the place and purpose God occupies for the speaker. Gesturing toward “a power above” suggests that the designator must be “down below.” Thus, a division is created between heaven and earth, between decision-makers “from above” and those living here “below,” between God and humankind. Despite this apparent configuration, the gesture indicating the “power above” more often than not is made with a knowing smile, suggesting that this is a matter of playacting. The fight over who gets to occupy the places “down below” rages on without involving the “power above.” This implies that the “power above” is invisible and, notably, unidentifiable. A tension thus arises between a visibility that is at once excessive and absent, which reverses the material expressions of power and religion: on the one hand, an absent and therefore invisible political power; on the other, a religious power blindingly visible.
The decision-makers are called “them” (houma) and, as such, are unnameable as individuals in the decision-making process, whereas God is for His part called “Him” (houwa). This difficulty of naming and identifying covers everything in a thick haze. Confusion and bewilderment serve very different purposes for the individual and for those in power. The cult of the invisible is a state matter while religion is concerned with the visible. In the Algerian context, the fields of the visible and invisible are flipped in order to hide the boundaries of religion and power.
The power of religion and the religion of power merge and feed into each other. The absence of secularism cannot alone explain this reversal of the fields of the visible. To be sure, the religious signifier is exploited for matters of governance, and this contributes to the current reversal; but it is also due to a form of governance that has merged history, languages, and religion together to serve its totalizing agenda. The individual effects this has had on the public raise a serious question: how does the deliberate blurring of boundaries make use of an interstitial space – between “down below” and “the power above,” between the visible and the invisible – to better remain unseen?
In this space, which belongs to no one, there is as much corruption as there is subversion. And the recent rise of an Algerian literature that explores contemporary social problems and brings the years of the Internal