A Semite

A Memoir of Algeria

Denis Guenoun, Ann Smock, William Smock

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231537247
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

In this vivid memoir, Denis Guénoun excavates his family's past and progressively fills out a portrait of an imposing, enigmatic father. René Guénoun was a teacher and a pioneer, and his secret support for Algerian independence was just one of the many things he did not discuss with his teenaged son. To be Algerian, pro-independence, a French citizen, a Jew, and a Communist were not, to René's mind, dissonant allegiances. He believed Jews and Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity and could only realize a free future together.

René Guénoun called himself a Semite, a word that he felt united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected a shared origin. He also believed that Algerians had the same political rights as Frenchmen. Although his Jewish family was rooted in Algeria, he inherited French citizenship and revered the principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French lycée in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. His steadfast belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity led him into trouble, including prison and exile, yet his failures as an activist never shook his faith in a rational, generous future.

René Guénoun was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle East during World War II. At the same time, Vichy barred him and his wife from teaching because they were Jewish. When the British conquered Syria, he was sent home to Oran, and in 1943, after the Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought in Europe. After the war, both parents did their best to reconcile militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands of work and family. The Guénouns had little interest in Israel and considered themselves at home in Algeria; yet because he supported Algerian independence, René Guénoun outraged his French neighbors and was expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary Organisation Armée Secrète. He spent his final years in Marseille. Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into his father's life and times, Denis Guénoun re-creates an Algerian past that proved lovely, intellectually provocative, and dangerous.

DECEMBER 1, 1940

1

On December 1, 1940, my father was in prison in Damascus, Syria. It was his birthday. He wrote to his mother. Twenty-eight years old, Mama. You like to recall how the midwife who brought me into the world one Sunday at noon read my character: this boy, she said, born on a Sunday at noon, he’s here to stroll the boulevards. Did she also picture your son in jail in Asia at twenty-eight, maybe for five years? What a fate, Mama.

I found this letter in a little box, a crude, threadbare chest among some limp filing folders that my brother put away after our parents died. Everything is at his house, in Marseille. When I was asked to write a few lines about my father, I went to Marseille, to my brother’s house to open the boxes and look at the letters. I read everything.

His mother was a strong, ample woman. Erect. Daughter of a theologian who had had five girls and two boys that died too young. The five girls remained—tall women, with solid hips and wide feet. I knew her in her old age, still planting the same weighty step upon the earth. She said to me: do you know why Arab women go barefoot? (Not her. Arab was not the word used to speak of us.) So that the force in the earth—you know, the force that makes the trees grow: if trees grow upward, there has to be a force in the earth pushing them—it’s so this force can pass from the earth into their feet and rise up into them through their legs.

My father’s mother went all out, powered from her hips to her neck to her gaze by the energy that her times set free: she was completely attached to the archaic world—through her body, if you will—but also stretched taut, like a bow, toward the New. She was a schoolteacher. How can I convey what that meant? Her father spoke mainly Arabic; it may have been his only language. He dressed in the Arab style: blousy trousers, turban, embroidered shirt, white beard. For ages I saw his portrait, at her house, looming over family meals. She was utterly forthright in her devotion to his memory. It was said he was a sage, a rustic saint. We descended straight from him, buoyed by our intelligence, and above all by that uncompromising, unsparing moral standard that was our trademark. Only later did I learn, and even then I didn’t entirely take it in, that as a young girl she had clashed with him in all the violence of their combined fury, that he had cursed her, that she had fled him, outraged, screaming. Nothing of this wild, buried violence showed through the imperturbable veneration she bore the ancestor who presided over holiday meals.

Schoolteacher meant: cloaked in the illustrious language of France. The village pioneer. She had her high school diploma. Thus: a woman—an Arab woman, judging by her legs and neck, her idioms, aphorisms, singing, her yoo-yoos at joyful moments; feline, a princess of the desert. And a primary schoolteacher (in training), a foundation stone of public education, reading Hugo, declaiming Corneille, intoxicated with alexandrines, featured attraction of the beaches and the wide blue sea. I have her notebooks, her lesson plans—insects (figure 12, roots, seeds, stamens, different species of birds, the common rabbit and the lop-eared rabbit, the common pigeon and the peacock pigeon), the course on moral values (keeping something you found is stealing, family unity, a mother’s courage—a burning house—a six-year-old rescuer), the beginning science lesson (bubbles; breathe into water with a straw, a whistle, a bicycle pump, don’t you see the air rise through the water in the form of bubbles?)—everything is in the boxes in Marseille.

In 1915 my father was three: his mother was in the village, his father at war. She wrote him every day. The letters lie sleeping in Marseille (not all of them, some have been destroyed). She said: I am your worshiper, your love slave. I am nothing without my husband, without you my angel, my lighthouse in the night. I want you, I love you. Remember the dark splendor of our nights. I am nothing, woman is nothing without the man who obsesses her. Come, I’m waiting for you. Why are you still at war? Get sick. Hurt yourself, and come home. Look at the others: they know how to get what they want. Cheat. You don’t love me enough, you can live with the war, and with being gone. You’ve gotten used to it. If you wanted me as much as I want you, you wouldn’t give them a moment’s peace until they let you go. You’re a coward, you put war over your wife.

She recorded the epic of the three children: two girls, the eldest four years old, the last a baby, and the boy—who will be my father—in the middle. She would say: the children want their father. Him above all, without cease. The boy is imperious, like you. There, he’s complaining. It’s so hot. Unlucky me, I have three children to support, I teach every day, with that worthless harpy who hates me and wants my job, but I’ll get her, I’ll go to the Mayor and tell him she drinks. No one leaves a child with a woman who drinks, who doesn’t take care of herself, who’s dirty and can barely stay on her feet. She wants to be the principal, but that job is for me, it’s mine. I’m still a trainee? You wait, I’ll get my Certificate of Professional Aptitude, I’ll be a good principal for the village, dedicated, hardworking, and clean, who prepares all her classes meticulously down to the tiniest detail, you can see in my notebooks, the Inspector can see when he comes, the Mayor can see, I am absolutely conscientious about everything, even with three children to take care of and my husband away at the war. The war devours our men. Here they say that in Belgium, where you are, bombs hit like thunderbolts and kill everything for two kilometers in all directions, nobody is safe, not even hospitals. War doesn’t respect anything, it burns everything. These German monsters are tearing France to pieces, oh France, our beautiful country. Whereas the Harpy is dirty, she’ll ruin our children, I’ll say it right out, I won’t let her get the job that by rights belongs to me.

She writes him every day. A single day without writing and she feels guilty. She receives his letters four or five at a time, some get lost. She wants some every day; one day without a letter is a betrayal. What stuns me is her way of loving him, pouring her passion into those long, flawless lines. Wife, husband, sisters, and cousins—they are all like that: all calligraphers. Writing is a solemn vow. Thousands of pages offered up, with never an error or a smudge. It is here they engrave their devotion to France. The style is measured, not too flowery. Careful, clear writing is an art that penetrates their very being. France inhabits their pens tracing the highways and byways of grammar. They write. With smooth, unhurried strokes, wrists poised. They write relentlessly, for hours at a time, a sacred trust, the sacrament of letters, to which they aspire as others aspire to expert swordsmanship. What stuns me in this flood of prose is how she goes about loving him. Sometimes reading her I feel she is the repository of a kind of education that no longer exists.

He answers every day. At the front, his wife’s letters arrive irregularly, out of order. Those dated from the twenty-second to the twenty-sixth come before the ones from the seventeenth to the twenty-first. When they stop he is outraged: not a single day without a missive. Let’s blame the post office. Better the postal service fall short than that she should let one day go by without writing. That would be intolerable. For his part he never misses, he insists, he swears it. If some letters get lost, it’s on account of the mail. He writes from the front, then from the hospital after his wound—in the arm, not serious. In reply she proclaims: this wound is a gift. He must get wounded, that is a duty. Do not recover too quickly. A neighbor stopped by, she relates, to tell the story of a woman who learned that her husband at the front had had both arms amputated; this woman had said: I would rather he died. Do you realize what that means? Without arms, he’ll have to be fed, washed. He won’t be able to do a thing. And then she writes: what I would choose is my husband, without arms and legs, as long as I still have him, my beloved, my man, the father of my three angels.

My grandfather is the eldest of eleven. Several of them are mobilized, the two youngest at the front. Or: one on the firing line, the other in jail, this point is unclear. A shadow hangs over the two youngest brothers. To his wife he writes: don’t make too much trouble with the Harpy, keep quiet for a while. You aren’t good at keeping quiet. You’ll get a bad reputation. Stick to the children and your class. I don’t want my son to cry so much. Do something about it. Don’t let him cry. A child doesn’t cry for no reason, it’s not normal for a child to cry. Stop calling that Malbois who comes to the house all the time, takes your money, and doesn’t cure anything. I don’t like the idea of Malbois coming to see you when I’m far away, wounded. Malbois is courting you. Do you like that? Are you taking advantage of it? Five days after that she roars in beautiful cursive, How dare you? I so much as look at a man? I have given everything to you. My life is nothing anymore. Have you forgotten our nights? O my love, waiting for you is killing me. I am collapsing. My life is a ruin. My lover is far away. And suspects me, whereas here I am protecting our future, dying of longing, burdened by three children as handsome as he is, who cry and call for their father and never give me a minute to prepare my class and the inspection that could come tomorrow. (I read, I know she is telling the truth.)

He answers in four endless pages of impeccable penmanship. He copies out a passage from Zola. A man and his wife undress. The moonless night sky is covered with stars so bright and pure that the vast countryside expands limitlessly beneath a soft blue light. She undresses first, heedless of the open window. Pauses a moment—her dress, petticoat, corset fallen, her entire splendor repeated in the mirror. Then she lies down in bed, pure white. The husband remains seated at the table, he is worried. She calls him: come, don’t delay, happiness is waiting for you to blow out the lamp. He undresses, then pauses (naked?), listens, is afraid he hears a child’s cry, advances, pauses in the middle of the room, but it is nothing. He joins her in bed, puts his arms around her, and says: go to sleep, all is well, close your eyes. He feels her breathing quicken against his skin. Her satiny nudity, the perfume of her soft skin and long hair. Outside, through the open window, the indistinct murmur is nothing now but the trembling of eternal fecundities. Desire, the insatiable desire that created the galaxies. They embrace, he takes her, he enflames her, and they experience, as Zola puts it, the superb improvidence. It is the jolt that brings forth a world. It shoots through them and they resonate. Ah, drunkenness, now the cry, the seed cast in the furrow. And he adds: I wonder if Zola wasn’t somewhere very near, hidden, spying on us. She will answer: yes, I love this letter so much, it is true that Zola looked in on us. He writes: my love, splendor of womanhood, your suspicion is unbearable. I swear that not once have I looked at a woman during all the months since I left you. I have eyes only for you, my wife, mother of my angels, black idol of my nights. (But I haven’t found the letter where she suspects him. There are gaps, some torn scraps, someone has stolen some of the story.)

He too is a schoolteacher. Or he will be later, there is still some uncertainty about this. The letters shed no light on it. He was a cobbler according to one family legend. Another paints him as a gymnast. He won trials and competitions in Belgium. He’s an athlete of a long-ago kind: mustache, long trousers, his build just slightly rotund. Between the two of them I sense an asymmetry, a competition. When she is studying for her Certificate of Professional Aptitude, he gives her advice. She doesn’t put much store in it: in one letter (which has disappeared, I only have the answer) she says: if you want to help me with the different subjects on the exam, send me material by published authors, don’t try to cover the material yourself, you have to have a real knack for it. He balks, it’s a slap in the face and he howls with the smart of it. And perhaps, yes, perhaps sometimes she betrays (Oh my love, my revered husband, my idol) the slightest tinge of scorn, of disdain, of skepticism about his intellect or his worthiness of France. Maybe not: do I sense this because of what I already know and because I am about to tell what happened later?

Later. For now she comes out with a horrendous secret. Your wife weighs seventy-five kilos.¹ I am getting fatter by the day, I don’t know what’s happening. But I am white. Whereas you are getting darker under the sun of war. You’ll see, we’ll face off and I’ll win. In love’s battle I have the edge. I’m a champion, you take second place. Get ready because when we finally grapple I’ll overwhelm you, I am your master. He answers: I’m glad you’re gaining weight. Remember Zola, and the wife’s figure filled out by motherhood. I want you round, I want you fat. But give up: you’ll find me white as milk. It’s just the face that tans. My body is tender, spotless. In love’s skirmish I’ll subdue you. Dragon, await your slayer.

(A distant light summons them. An imperative, a moral magnet. Truth, and the picture they glimpse of an ennobled humanity warms their blood. It is this that France calls them to, this next rung on the ladder of glorious achievements. No self-interest is involved, no venal calculation. He asks her to send money orders. She is thrifty, prudent, saves up. But not for herself. For the truth that will come. Aside from that, all is passion, all is fire: the beauty of the children, nocturnal desire, hatred for the Harpy, love for Zola. Everything goes into the text. The world is a letter. We no longer write this way. Every missive bears its distinctive flourish, its lament, heeds the call of the future, the overt or secret obligations that swirl around in the crater of things. The churning, rumbling lava of meaning, ready to erupt. There, amid the red mud and clouds of ash, they face each other, two Titans, legs apart, giants in struggle, organs distended, brow to brow.

And he, the little boy who will be my father, looks at one, then the other and does his best to follow the action. In 1916 the husband returns. He is in a barracks—because of the wound? Two hours away by road, but they can see each other on Sundays. So during the week they keep writing to each other, which is how I know. Often he keeps the boy, and entrusts him overnight to relatives who live close by. But during the day—strange barracks—he can keep his son for a while. He says: my son has a lot of character, he’s like me, he won’t let anyone get the better of him. The boy goes from father to mother, observes them. What does he see? Which one wants him, which one pushes him away? What is incubating in that little head, in the wide eyes locked on two epic wrestlers and their fearsome combat?)

After 1917, no more sheaves of letters. He must have gotten home. I don’t find the divorce settlement: did she discard it? My father grew up with her, the divorcee, far from the father. He followed her, the lovely Kamra (or rather Camille), revered and also hated her, without failing for an instant in the duties, the servitude of a son, right up till her death, which came late—she was a vigorous woman. So the papers my brother filed away came down to us from her. My grandfather’s repose elsewhere, with a remote and hostile bloc of the family. Schisms are part of our inheritance too. Did she get rid of the settlement, destroy the judge’s statement of the grounds for settlement, which would have included some harsh assertions? Only the document which authorizes a pension remains in a ragged folder. Tersely it names the amount of the monthly payments: nothing about fits of rage or moral failings.

In 1924 my father was twelve. In another folder a letter has been slipped in among his diplomas. Four legal-size sheets of scratch paper, folded over twice and smoothly covered with impeccable longhand. His father congratulates him for getting his primary school certificate. This success proves that he is serious and does his work. Above all his father hopes that his mind (here he starts a new line, indents to the middle of the page, and writes in very big, underlined letters, like a headline on a poster)

IS BECOMING RECEPTIVE TO THOUGHT

He wants to give three indispensable pieces of advice to his son (far away, separated from him, by the divorce I know though he doesn’t say it): First, do not smoke. (When my father died there was cancer in his lungs.) Do not drink, do not gamble. (He never drank, it’s true, sober as a Quaker. But a passion for cards consumed him. It wasn’t the money but the cards, the game itself.) Third: never love any woman. (Yes, that is what the father wrote to his faraway twelve-year-old son. Never. Not any. This is how I understand it: not as a recommendation to love men or remain chaste. What he means is: take a woman, do with her as you must—but never give her any love. I loved too much. I was stupid. She trapped me, and made me bellow like a sacrificial ox.)

A few scattered pages remain from 1922, the year of the divorce. Feverish notes for a memorandum to the prosecutor. She writes fast, there are many cross-outs. (1) He is a brute. Sn. N. relations—(What does Sn. N. stand for? Or is it V?)—my parents, who were more discerning than me, didn’t want anything to do with him. I come from a family that has never had a single brush with the law, not even with a policeman. I was forced into marriage (here I just barely make out an added phrase written above the line: by means of questionable acts? what questionable acts?) to a man who threatened me with his revolver: if you don’t marry me, you can be sure your dealings … (the whole last sentence is crossed out). I brought this former cobbler who slept in his parents’ stable up to my own level. I educated him, I made a man of him, and now he turns on me like the snake in La Fontaine’s fable. (2) He took all my money. I simply signed my (illegible), he cashed them and kept everything, in his wallet. He took everything. The investigation will prove that all winter I shivered without so much as a scarf. (Etc. I leave out a great deal. Savings account, the cost of provisions, thriftiness. The numbers on the bankbooks, the total in each, the sale of two goats, a share in the co-op, a money order for fifty francs.) Debts. One day two deluxe frames arrived with enlarged photos. I had to pay a hundred and fifty francs. The photos were of two of his brothers (cross-out, cross-out). When I demanded to know (illegible) the argument became violent and he attacked me, slapped me, and the blow tore my earring out. It cut my ear and went rolling on the ground. (More about the brothers. Now it’s I who omit things, cross them out. I cannot say everything.) He has no common sense; especially in recent times, when he thought he had become quite the somebody, he subjected me to his whims, his false opinions, and if I didn’t go along there was insane fury, he smashed everything, tore everything up—here is some incriminating evidence: a piece of oilcloth (added above the line: brand new) ripped in one of his rages. He always concluded these scenes with the words: I’ll have to kill you; so what if they don’t acquit me, I’ll do a few years in prison like my brother but at least it will all be over (crossed out) I will start another life. Faithful wife (underlined) my husband never had anything of that sort to reproach me with. I’m healthy too, he never had...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Epigraph
• List of Chronology of French/Algerian History
• I. December 1, 1940
• II. June 22, 1961
• III. November 6, 1989