The other day the charm of a poster beguiled me into visiting Musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac for an exhibition called Peintures du lointain, paintings of exotic subjugated people and places by Europeans of the colonial era.
It’s an odd truth that everything turns to metaphor as time goes on. Also, many things advertised as one thing just turn out to be quite another, no metaphors involved: Peintures, for instance, is about colonialism, mostly in North or West Africa – places like Algeria or Senegal, as rendered, mostly, in paint, charcoal and encre de Chine. And though it may, much, much later, turn out to be a handsome metaphor, for now the exhibition is definitely just a squib.
Worse than mere esthetic disappointment, Peintures provoked vague moral depression in me – as my late brother used to say, there was the whiff of brimstone but no devil in the damned thing. As I wandered through, I could just smell, off-stage, the sickly night-sweat of Rimbaud beguiled into gun-running and slave dealing by the urge to respectability, hear the revolver’s echo just out of earshot, but, though respectability did, has done, does so much to propel cruel and bootless enterprise, there was no actual reference to it and its relation to the notion of exotic in the exhibition…
Luckily, synchronicity is at work in my life. Yours, too, maybe.
When I got home from Peintures, I was cheered up to find a package in the mailbox. I took it on upstairs and while anxiously tearing off the tough plastic stuff the sender had wrapped it in, I banged into the bookshelf. The resulting jiggle caused Ferdinand the Bull, a book that reminds me of the delight of reading to my young son, to tumble to the floor, along with Algérie, c’est beau comme l’Amérique, a graphic novel by Olivia Burton very charmingly illustrated by Mahi Grand, which will be published in a few days in the US as Algeria is Beautiful like America. I keep Algérie around because it moves me; I love the character of Djalla, the guide.
A photo of Jacques Chirac – former mayor of Paris, former President of the Republic – which I cut out of a newspaper long ago now, fluttered from between the pages of Ferdinand, preternaturally settled on the coffee table.
I pick it up.
Despite all manner of earthly honors, titles and rewards, and ‘though he died at home in bed, respectability, as for Rimbaud, always eluded Chirac. I can’t really say and, as far as I know, Chirac never rudely went at a photographer with his sword-cane, but I believe responsibility for this lies in a combination of the odd look on wife Bernadette’s face and a certain slouch he seemed to bear as he strolled through life.
Chirac is the very image of mensch in the photo, lolling in a chair, pinching a fattish cigarette.
No doubt, it’s a strong, foul-smelling Gauloise cigarette – Au Plaisir de Vivre! Tabernac!
Before Chirac stretches a demolished repast; his own goblet yet half-full, the table is cluttered with empty wine bottles of many different shapes, sizes and shades.
He seems to be amicably chatting, perhaps making a questionable deal possibly involving the doubtful use of public favors or funds…
As I gaze, I feel, as I have before felt, that maybe Chirac was, really, as his supporters claimed at the time, dismayed by the second Iraq war. I mean, not just astonished by the sheer stupidity of it, not just flabbergasted by the political folly of it, but dismayed, as a mensch should be, by heartless cruelty, but without being particularly surprised by it; we can imagine Voltaire’s buttless, but wised-up, Cunégonde feeling such unsurprised dismay, for instance.
If you don’t count the Peintures exhibition on paintings about places such as Algeria at the museum that bears his name, unsurprised dismay, which we may also call “pro-active acceptance”, is what, in my mind, spiritually-, intellectually-speaking, mainly synchronizes Chirac and Burton’s novel.
Chirac didn’t give in about that particular god-damn war and Burton doesn’t give in to nostalgia or romanticism in her illustrated story of her voyage to her family’s native Algeria, either.
That’s “native Algeria” since, European ethnic origin aside, by the 1950s, when the family left the countryside for Algiers and, finally, for France, it was certainly as “native” for them as, say, Minnesota was for immigrant Swedes.
And, for most Algerians, “rapatriés” (ethnic Europeans, called Pieds noirs) and “réfugiés” (ethnic North Africans) alike, cruelty, present, perfect, continuous and past, petty and big, made their experience of “emigration” and “immigration” as one of “dispossession” and “dislocation”: the burning of the Burton family’s farm, its fear, the expropriation of its city property, are just examples among many others of the injustices of Algeria’s colonial period, the anti-colonial struggle and its post-colonial period that, since, have fueled so much burningly resentful rosy nostalgia.
In France, between 1962-65, Burton’s family joined more than a million other “repatriates” and “refugees” for a fairly snarly unwelcome.
Burton told me she “was taken aback” when the publisher offered to put Algeria is Beautiful like America on the US market. But there are few Americans – even those of us who can think of themselves only as natives – who won’t understand the resentful rosy nostalgia that informs almost any consideration of immigration or who doesn’t know that the choice to emigrate isn’t always much of a choice at all.
However, it’s really the unsurprised dismay tone or, just to put it simply, the sense of acceptance I’ve mentioned that really makes Algeria is Beautiful like America into a good read for anybody, not just Americans.
Acceptance, an utter lack of anger with or judgment upon the human beings around her, whether her pied noir relatives or her Algerian hosts, combined with her balanced, unsentimental story-telling, sets it apart from most other search-for-roots stories.
Which does not mean Algeria is Beautiful glosses anything over or emits rosy reports and comfortable conclusions when there's nothing much to be rosy and/or comfortable about.
The Algeria that Burton’s mother is always looking for and can never find in France, is currently run by the successors to the authoritarian “nationalists” who won out against everybody else in the long, painful post-independence struggle for power. These, in the fullness of time, constituted a ramshackle and despotic kleptocracy strong enough to choke but not to completely strangle the “Islamic terrorists” who had won elections during an aborted period of attempted social and economic reform.
Burton’s conjuration of the place manages to make me imagine it as a place where everybody, except the heavily-armed, twitchy, vaguely corrupt white paramilitary police, is, nervously, African-American.
The woman who is living in Burton’s family’s expropriated apartment sequences all this before, after and present political stuff thus:
“All that, neither you or I are responsible for it. We have to move on. You were right to come.”
If all that is good in Algeria is Beautiful could be summed up in a single character, that would be in Burton’s guide, the chain-smoking Djaffa.
Djaffa is a personality so true to itself that I can’t help identifying around it, off of it, in spite of it.
Of the same generation as Burton’s mother, of whom his sister is a friend, Djaffa lives in France, too, also as a result of the same events that brought the mother there, too, demonstrating the quantum corollary that the same events generate optics as different as the causes, or experiences, are similar.
Djaffa is as off-putting as he is charming and, of course, his center of gravity is himself. But this self-centering is not by egoism, though he is egoistic, but, rather, because he, Djaffa, is the only thing he, Djaffa, really does know he, Djaffa, knows something about.
Knowing something about himself, Djaffa knows whom he loves and who loves him is the most signifying of all knowledge assembled on earth (or in heaven), now and forever.
Like Burton, readers only meet Djaffa after much sensitive personal reflection and growth, someplace between pages 50 and 70. After an off-hand analysis of Algeria’s catastrophic politics that is not-exactly-calculated to deflate Burton’s sense of having better-understood herself, her own folks and Algeria itself, Djaffa gets to the point:
Ah! Ah! Look, I thought you were coming here to look for your roots? My sister told me ‘This is my friend’s daughter, you have to take care of her.’ What are you looking for?
- Nothing special… I …
So, you don’t know what you’re looking for?!
- Sure I do! I want to put some images on names, in the country and in Algiers, find people who knew my family and can talk about them.
Ha! You’re right! That’s a lot nicer and faster than 10 years of psychoanalysis!
A moment passes, Djaffa carries on.
Algiers is easy. But the countryside, the Aurès? That’s far, not likely to be safe…
- I can do it myself, then! There are trains in this country, yes? Hotels, too, yes?
Are you nuts? Are you crazy? What will your mother say if I let you go all alone by train? And my sister! Do you want her to kill me?
I came to understand that Djaffa, like a dear, old, now-dead, friend of mine, also Algerian, once “liberation fighter”, once “dissident”, finally doesn’t think there really is that much difference between the things that we “do” and the things that “happen”.
In other words, in Djaffa’s world – though Burton is too clever a writer to ever allow him to declare something like it, I think – there is really not much difference between hurricanes and human beings, like in a Grimm’s folk tale. This is what acceptance, unsurprised dismay, finally is: to accept that we humans are phenomena.
My old dead friend used to say, typically, as he cooked up couscous-enough for 46, “If we aren’t phenomena, happening, like everything else, how is it that we affect the world around us? The climate, or even the weather, for instance?” He’d pause, leer, sneer, “Or maybe you believe Allah’s doing it all while you’re not looking?”
I’d deny the accusation.
My friend would segue to something like, “Once you admit we are like other phenomena, maybe you can see it might be a good idea to deal with humans as we deal with hurricanes, say, or wolf populations... The time to deal with a hurricane is before and after it happens; the time to take care of wolf populations is before they start devouring everything in sight or after they’ve eaten: you don’t get far plunging in during a kill.”
Between times, my friend would claim, a sensible person hunkers down and takes responsibility for his or her little patch of space, hopefully pacified space – “you just make a fool of yourself ‘battling’ or letting your ‘failure to win’ or your ‘loss’ clog up your limited mental space.”
So, for me – above and beyond the ambivalences and ambiguities of the immigrant experience, above and beyond the shared mountain majesties and fruited plains and wide open spaces – it’s this sense of human beings as phenomena that makes Algeria beautiful like America.
That and a sense of what a human person is for. In Djalla’s view, I think, maybe in Burton’s, humans are for each other; this was certainly the view of my old, dead, friend, too.
A “sense of human nature” isn’t also a “dream”. But no dream is possible without a sense of what people are what they are for; the angry frustration of success that never seems to succeed which now has America by the scruff of its collective neck makes this plain enough.
A sense of what we are and what for kept my old dead friend going, made it possible to keep a dream of a better day going, leads Djalla to show Burton an Algeria beautiful like America: a modest “Algerian dream” with a grandeur all its own. Which makes me to wonder, is America beautiful like Algeria?
This article is outstanding. Thank you
Posted by: Mary Ann More | April 11, 2018 at 09:25 PM