An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
or affectionate mother. She did not just keep her poker face for the card table.
The Algeria into which he was born was, in 1930, in the midst of an ambiguous celebration. Ten days before his birth was Le Centenaire de l’Algérie française, the hundredth anniversary of French colonial rule. There had been six months of celebrations, artistic, cultural and sporting.
The French president, Gaston Doumergue, unveiled a metre monument on the beach at Sidi Ferruch, 30 kilometres west of Algiers, the spot where 34,000 French soldiers commenced their invasion in 1830. The monument featured two entwined female figures, one representing France, looking maternal and protective, and the other representing Algeria, seeking guidance and protection. In his speech Doumergue said, ‘The celebration of the centenary will show in a decisive fashion the human, peaceful, just and beneficial character of the French colonization methods and of the work of civilization she is pursuing.’ The new Musée des Beaux Arts was opened in Algiers, as was an exhibition in Oran – each pavilion on its five hectares allowing people to tour all of Greater France in a day. Even Charlie Chaplin had, it was rumoured, been invited, but could not attend as he was shooting City Lights. The commissioner general of the Centenary, Gustave Mercier, saluted ‘another France, barely a hundred years old, already strong, full of life and future, uniting in its happy formula Latin races and indigenous races, in order to make them all French races.’4
Eighty thousand tourists visited Algeria in the course of the year, attending its old and new attractions, indulging in the Orientalist thrill. As James McDougall writes in The History of Algeria, settlers ‘saw their security of livelihood, home and person as dependent on the continued subjugation of Algerians, the “native peril” whom they saw through a confused combination of racial and religious stereotypes, exotic fantasies, imagined paternal benevolence and, from time to time, hysterical terror.’5 Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais psychiatrist and political philosopher who would chronicle the Algerian independence struggle, would go further, noting it is always the coloniser who is seen to make history: ‘His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is the absolute beginning. A compartmentalized Manichean and immobile world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who conquered the country, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge.’6 By contrast, the natives were part of the landscape, and thus dehumanised.
The question of where the Juifs d’Algérie, the community into which Jackie was born, fitted into Algerian society was, inevitably, a complex one. Derrida’s family were Sephardic, and claimed roots from Toledo in Spain. In 1870, Algerian Jews were granted French citizenship by the Crémieux Decree, which brought their rights in line with the rest of the pied-noir (black-foot, i.e. wearing shoes) population of Algeria. The majority Muslim population had no such rights, and were subject to the Code de l’indigénat, which gave them, at best, second-class status before the law. Although tensions had not reached the scale that would lead to and accompany the Algerian War, they were already present. At the same cinemas where Aimé and Georgette had watched Chaplin, Algerians ‘clapped and cheered when the hero made stirring speeches about Swiss independence in William Tell and when the Foreign Legionnaire heroes in Le Hommes Sans Nom (The Men with No Name) were shot by Moroccan insurgents.’7
In addition, the Jewish population’s relationship with the rest of the pied-noir population often mirrored tensions present in France: as one account puts it, for European settlers, ‘anti-Semitism tapped into […] perceptions of themselves as ordinary, hard-working people. Jews were held up as a rich and exploitative breed intent on dominating French Algeria.’8 Derrida’s grandmother, for instance, had to marry ‘clandestinely in the back courtyard of a town hall in Algeria, because of the pogroms (this was in the middle of the Dreyfus affair).’9 Despite the clandestine wedding, Jackie’s grandmother was part of an ‘extraordinary transformation of French Judaism in Algeria’. Where the generation before had been close to the Arab population in language and customs, she was ‘already raising her daughters like bourgeois Parisian girls (16th Arrondissement good manners, piano lessons, and so on)’.10 Then, writes Derrida,
came my parents’ generation: few intellectuals, mostly shopkeepers, some of modest means and some not, and some who were already exploiting a colonial situation by becoming the exclusive representatives of major metropolitan brands: with a tiny little office and no secretary, one could, for example, become the sole distributor of all the ‘Marseille soap’ in Northern Africa (I’m of course simplifying a bit). Then came my generation (a majority of intellectuals: liberal professions, teaching, medicine, law, etc.).11
This gradual assimilation – and, indeed, embourgoisement – of the Jewish population into Algerian French life saw forenames gallicised and Jewish religious sites and practices Christianised: ‘an insidious Christian contamination’, Derrida later called it. The synagogue was called the temple, bar-mitzvah called first communion and circumcision called baptism. Derrida later spoke of a quasi-subgroup, ‘indigenous Jews’, who could identify neither with the ‘models, norms or values’ of the French population, nor those of the Arab.12
This ‘disorder of identity’ could be staggering in its complexity. ‘In the milieu where I lived,’ Derrida wrote, ‘we called all non-Jewish French people “Catholics”, even if they were sometimes Protestants, or perhaps even Orthodox: “Catholic” meant anyone who was neither a Jew, a Berber nor an Arab.’ At the same time, settler anti-Semitism in Algeria fed anti-Semitism in France – Algerian Jews were seen as part of the ‘native peril’ – ‘Arabs of the Jewish faith.’13
It is, of course, biographically reductive to see in this mélange of identities, politics of naming, contested languages, contested selves and overlapping boundaries the origin of deconstruction – leaving aside Derrida’s problematising of ‘origin’. Asked in 1983 ‘where it all began’, Derrida responded, ‘Ay, you want me to say things like “I-was-born-in-El-Biar-on-the-outskirts-of-Algiers-in-a-petty-bourgeois-family-of-assimilated-Jews-but…” Is that really necessary? I can’t do it.’14
But he himself recognised precisely this question, writing in Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, ‘A Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian genealogy does not clarify everything, far from it. But could I explain anything without it, ever? No, nothing.’15 Just as with every birth, the element of chance remains irreducible, so ‘a series of contingencies have made of me a French Jew from Algeria born in the generation before the “war of independence”: so many singularities, even among Jews, and even among the Jews of Algeria.’16 Identity, Derrida noted, ‘is never given, received or attained: only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures.’
Derrida would write that his ‘selfhood’ was thrice dissociated, fractured by three ‘interdicts’:
(1) First of all, it was cut off from both Arabic or Berber (more properly Maghrebian) language and culture. (2) It was also cut off from French, and even European language and culture, which, from its viewpoint, only constituted a distanced pole or metropole, heterogeneous to its history. (3) It was cut off, finally, or to begin with, from Jewish memory, and from the history and language that one must presume to be their own, but which, at a certain point, no longer was. At least not in a typical way for the majority of its members, and not in a sufficiently ‘lively’ and internal way.17
Life was elsewhere, and
elsewhere … meant in the Metropole. In the Capital-City-Mother-Fatherland. Sometimes, we would say ‘France,’ but mostly ‘the Metropole,’ at least in the official language, in the imposed rhetoric of discourses, newspapers, and school. As for my family, and almost always elsewhere, we used to say ‘France’ among ourselves. (‘Those people can afford vacations in France’; ‘that person is going to study in France’; ‘he is going to take the waters in France, generally at Vichy’; ‘this teacher is from France’; ‘this cheese is from France.’) … A place of fantasy, therefore, at an ungraspable distance. As a model of good speech and good writing, it represented the language of the master.18
And not the language of his neighbours ‘the Arabs’, their