Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War. Amy L. Hubbell. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2020.
Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War by Amy Hubbell is concerned with the contested memories and historical legacies of the Algerian War of Independence 1954-1962. Hubbell leverages the concept of hoarding as an analytical frame for multiple, contested, and overlapping historical memories of the Algerian conflict. Hubbell contends, in essence, that past trauma can best be understood in ways similar to the psychological disorder of compulsive hoarding.[1] Hubbell contends this hoarding ultimately inhibits community healing and commemoration. In contrast to curation, Hubbell argues, memory hoarding results in the accretion of an increasing number of impenetrable layers of historical memory. Further drawing on the metaphor of hoarding, Hubbell asserts the hoarding of items of memory does not help people remember. Instead, it contributes to loss and forgetting. In actuality, historical memory is multi-directional and subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing.[2]
In tandem with the Vichy Syndrome, the specter of the Algerian War looms over contemporary France.[3] The Algerian War of Independence and its memory and commemoration in France garnered widespread interest in the wake of the so-called Memory Wars. Benjamin Stora coined the phrase to describe the contemporary, ongoing controversy regarding the Algerian War, which was given additional purchase in the wake of 2005 French law requiring the teaching of positive impacts of colonialism. Indeed in 2021, Emmanuel Marcon appointed Stora to write the official report on a “memories and truth” commission on the Algerian War.[4]
In three separate chapters, Hubbell examines three authors—Marie Cardinal, Leila Sebbar, and Benjamin Stora—with a fourth chapter devoted to several visual artists. The first three authors’ work reflects their memory of the fractured and disputed relationship between France and its Algerian past passed from their parents.[5] As traced by Hubbell, all three personally experienced loss due to the Algerian War and use their writings to recall memories of a lost homeland. Autobiographical anecdotes heavily imbue their collective works, further reinforcing their accumulated memories and the inability to come to terms with the past. Unlike the preceding authors, the graphic artists are from a younger generation with little direct memory of Algeria. Moreover, all authors analyzed left Algeria for France and wrote exclusively for a Francophone audience.
The first chapter explores the work of Marie Cardinal. An autobiographical and fictional focus on memory and rupture define Cardinal’s works, reflecting her experience leaving Algeria. Hubbell’s focus on Pieds-Noir memory and hoarding is best exemplified in Cardinal’s autobiography Les Pieds Noirs.[6] Cardinal replaces the loss of French Algeria with compulsive, accumulating memories of her childhood at the expense of confronting the past. Cardinal’s second novel, Le Mule de Corbillard, exemplifies the hoarding of memories and an obsession with the past. A seventy-year-old woman lives on a farm at an unspecified point on the Mediterranean coast. Tellingly, the author does not reveal on which side of the Mediterranean the farm is located.[7] The protagonist ritualistically repeats traumatic losses from her life, including her parents, partner, and land, every day. Tellingly, Cardinal’s work is silent on the Algerian voices and perspectives. This deliberate silence reinforces Hubbell’s theme of hoarded memory as siloed and mutually exclusive.
The third chapter covers Leila Sebbar, an author known for her extensive collection of fictional and autobiographical works. Born to an Algerian father and French mother, Sebbar refers to herself as bigaree (multicolored) rather than Pieds-Noir, Maghrebi, or Beur. Like many others, Sebbar left Algeria for France during the War of Independence to pursue her university studies. Similar to Cardinal, Sebbar suffuses her Algerian exile experiences throughout her writing. She has stated, “Exile gives me structure and still inspires me.”[8] However, as illustrated by Hubbell, exile requires sustained feelings of loss and fragmentation.[9] For Hubbell, Sebbar’s voluminous written collections are themselves quintessential manifestations of hoarding. Her website lists eighty-four autobiographical works published between 1977 and 2012, along with additional novels, short stories, plays, and other associated works.[10] The sheer volume of her written works necessarily means that summary analysis of themes and arguments is virtually impossible. In common with other hoarding authors, Sebbar’s works blur the line between fiction and autobiography. Her works speak of multiple “Algerias” and “Frances;” however, this leads to the steady accumulation of memories that can never be thoroughly analyzed and reconciled.
Chapter four covers the works and life of the eminent Algerian historian Benjamin Stora, far and away the most famous of the authors analyzed by Hubbell. Stora is an Algerian born to a Jewish family from Constantine and lived in Algeria until the 1962 conclusion of the war. He almost exclusively focuses his academic work on remembrance of the Algerian War, with his most famous book, La gangrène et l’oubli: la memoire de la guerre d’Algerie (Gangrene and Forgetting: The Memory of the Algerian War). His works have been some of the first academic analyses of the willful French silence on the previously taboo subject of the Algerian War of Independence. Members of the Pieds-Noir community published much of the previous literature and memories, focusing on nostalgic pre-war Algeria memories. As almost sixty years have passed since the end of the Algerian War, the first generation of Pieds-Noir has passed away. Consequently, the corpus of autobiographical memories has shifted from nostalgia to a focus on traumatic memories.[11]
Stora’s work represents the first scholarly attempt by a French author to come to terms with la guerre sans nom through the exploration of the process of forgetting. France’s Memory Laws, particularly the 2005 law mandating the teaching of the positive aspects of colonization, has further cemented Stora’s reputation among the general public as France’s foremost expert on Algeria. While Hubbell concedes that Stora is acutely aware of the pitfalls of memory and history vis-à-vis Algeria; however, she contends Stora still exhibits the symptoms of hoarding memory. These symptoms manifest themselves in several ways. Not only is Stora a prolific author, but he tends to insert himself into the historical narrative. A biased perspective is problematic as Stora claims to examine memories from French and Algerian perspectives but is almost entirely reliant upon French historical sources. The work, Algerie, formation d’une nation (Algeria, the Birth of a Nation) exemplifies this tension and reflects Stora’s trauma into the broader historical narrative. As Stora self-consciously inserts his memories vis-à-vis the history of French Algeria, Hubbell contends that his works serve to block alternative accounts, particularly those created in Algeria.[12] Moreover, Stora’s personalization of Algerian and French history has opened him to criticism from his academic peers.
Stora’s historical hoarding manifests itself in other ways, as seen in his Algerie 1954-1962: Lettres, carnets et recits des Francais et des Algeriens dans la guerre (Algeria 1954-1962: Letters, Notebooks, and Stories from the French and Algerians in the War). In this work, Stora compiles a host of primary source documents as a means to explore the painful memories of French Algeria. The author inserts images of the documents throughout the text in an overlapping and hodgepodge manner. As illustrated by Hubbell, ostensibly, this presentation purports to be a neutral, archival-based retelling of history; however, the approach is problematic as the presented materials overlap and otherwise visually impedes the reader from comprehensively analyzing the documents.[13] For Hubbell, the compilation and presentation of these documents are quintessential examples of the concept of hoarding. Despite his acknowledgment of the issues of hoarding memory, in practice, Stora has proven himself unable to take the necessary step to curate and discriminate between historical memories.
Hubbell’s fifth and final chapter examines the work of a host of visual artists, a divergence from the previous four chapters. In comparison, through different artistic media, Nicole Guiraud, Patrick Altes, and Zineb Sedira express their trauma through hoarding and layering. Guiraud survived the Algiers Milk Bar bombing on September 30, 1956, which left her physically maimed and mentally traumatized.[14] Unsurprisingly, her artwork reflects her trauma and represents the trauma suffered by the Pieds-Noir community as a whole. Hubbell examines her installation, La Valise à la mer, the suitcase in the sea, tossed open with seemingly random objects collected from her Algerian past, including photos, newspaper clippings, seashells, and sand. Similar to Hubbell’s analysis of the authors in the first four chapters, these objects merely pile up and are bereft of any context or curation. Similarly, Altes’ work, exhibited on the book’s cover, combines a host of discordant images and memories, including the Michelin Man, a West African soldier, and the Basilique Notre-Dame d'Afrique in the background. The very fact that these images overlap each other is a literal manifestation of hoarding according to Hubbell. Zineb Sedira, born in France to Algerian parents, is known for her video installations, including family interviews of their Algerian War experiences. According to Hubbell and similar to Stora’s writings, Sedira’s interviews transform personal memory into a memory of the Algerian War writ large. All three artists reflect the often jumbled, non-linear ways in which traumatic memory emerges.[15]
Pied Noir Cowboy (Patrick Altes)
Overall, Hubbell’s work illustrates how literature, history, and art refract the memory of the Algerian War. These memories are multiple, varied, and ultimately accretive, which impedes healing and progress for both French and Algerians across both sides of the Mediterranean. Finally, Hoarding Memory validates Ernest Renan’s notion of national memory and forgetting. Renan contended, “Forgetting, and I would say even historical error, is an essential element in the creation of a nation, and that is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger for the nation itself.”[16]
The only quibble I have with Hubbell’s work is that she exclusively examined Francophone literature and history, which is biased towards the Pied-Noir and Beur perspectives. It would be interesting to contrast the Algerian historical memories, particularly in light of the Front National Liberation’s (FLN) political hegemony until the Black Decade (1991-2002), during the Algerian civil war and subsequent Islamist insurgency. Indeed, this would be a fascinating field for future research, particularly as Algeria continues to experience political transformation and conflict as evidenced by the Hirak movement and the succession of its longest-serving president, Abdelazziz Bouteflika by Abdelmadjid Tebboune. Notwithstanding these admitted quibbles, Hubbell’s book will be of great interest not only to scholars of France and Algeria, but also to anyone examining memory, trauma, and contested historical narratives.
Evan Procknow is a consultant on national security and defense matters. He holds an M.A. from Georgetown University in History. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Soldiers of the National Liberation Army during the Algerian War of Independence. Algeria, 1958. (Zdravko Pečar/Belgrade Museum of African Art)
Notes:
[1] Amy L. Hubbell, Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 13-14.
[2] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 10.
[3] Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Vichy Syndrome refers to France’s struggle with historical memory of its German collaborationist government named after the spa town, Vichy, that served as the seat of the government (Etat francais) from 1940-1944.
[4] Remise du rapport sur la mémoire de la colonisation et de la guerre d’Algérie. | Élysée (elysee.fr)
[5] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 107.
[6] Pieds-Noir literally “Black Feet” in French refers to the population of French and European origin who settled in Algeria during the colonial period (1830-1962).
[7] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 37.
[8] “Leila Sebba, l’exil en heritage.” UNSA Education (website). Accessed November 29, 2021 Leïla Sebbar. ENTRETIENS AVEC LEÏLA SEBBAR SUR INTERNET (swarthmore.edu)
[9] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 56.
[10] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 58.
[11] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 79.
[12] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 87.
[13] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 103.
[14] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 108.
[15] Hubbell, Hoarding Memory, 126.
[16] Ernest Renan, What is a Nation?, 1882.