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  I come from a line of wounded innocence. Like so many others, it was war that chased me from my country. The generals know that hope that inspires soldiers. Knowing that, they set fear against hope. And it’s enough to pretend to be an executioner to actually become one. So they live on. Since then, men have ruled through contempt, lies, and terror in the land where I was born. I would have to have lived there. There was no hope there. When there’s no more hope, you have to flee. And France, which was the partial cause of this horror, couldn’t turn me away.

  Coming to France was my father’s fault. He’d been banished from Algeria. Banished like so many others had been, and like so many more would be. Banished, stripped of a name, a soldier of the colonial army, a traitor to his country. They were the banished, the silent participants of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Iraq, and elsewhere, the comrades of the losers of these wars, waiting to drag their shame home. That was my father. He was one. Otherwise, he wasn’t my father. He was only the man who had impregnated my mother. I never knew what to call him. I never had a father. The war had stolen mine. I know I’m alive. Not him. He never seemed alive. You could say that he was the living dead. He had never had his own life. He was born dead. A man whose human dignity had been stolen from him when just a child. It was never given back. But like all those who are dead but live on, he never became anything. He couldn’t. Stricken by the memory of the crimes that had been forced upon him, he became nothing. He didn’t want to be anything. He was nothing. Nothing. He committed suicide. It was in this act that he’d expressed his protest. I didn’t have a father, or a country, or a religion. I thought that these struggles, made newly mine upon his death, would have been enough to justify, and serve as bond for, my life on this new continent—Europe—that was now my own. But, no. The very smallest thing drew their suspicions. They remade me as they wished. They gave me a father, a religion, and a way of life. And a Name. “Muslim”—a name without end. I had a way out. I was given the Name. Ever watchful, confused, I fled in front of them.

  I KNEW ABOUT THE NAME from the age of ten. It was late, and, as usual, I wanted to watch television. But it was forbidden for many reasons, and so it was in secret, at night, that I gave myself over to it, to its images and its voices. The film Night and Fog said, “There were nine million men and women killed. Killed because they were …” Here, in this country. For the first time I realized the extent of the horror. For me, it wasn’t just Germany but France, where I was living, as well. I thought about what this place was, and I listened, and I understood that in the vast expanse of Europe, some people took others and led them to the slaughterhouse and, here, where I was living, they took others and led them to their deaths, and behind this I heard one phrase, “We don’t want them, we don’t want others, not them …”

  They had just one Name. One Name. And no one suspected the evil inside them, no one bore witness to this evil, the thing that they were referring to when they said, “We don’t want them, we don’t want others, not him, not her, not them.” And this always brought to mind the scenes of trains leaving for Poland.

  “The most wretched of the excuses that intellectuals have come up with for executioners—and in the last decade they have not been idle in finding them—is that it was an error in the victim’s thinking that led them to being murdered.”1

  In that, there was one phrase that struck me. One phrase that I seized upon in order to live, “it was an error in the victim’s thinking that led them to being murdered.” Since then, I’ve been wary. I’ve been wary of the pack and its lies. And when the pack begins to hunt men again, when it’s you they debase and degrade, then you have to flee. Flee the pack and its preoccupations. So I left.

  I wanted only one thing. That I would have time. I found time. I knew that I would never go back. I would have liked the life that others spoke of. But it was denied me. I came from nowhere. Neither fish nor fowl—but from nowhere, anyhow. I’m nothing special. A thing who came here, never got what she wanted, but who lived on. So I left, I wanted to live elsewhere, and to hold up my humble head with dignity. I wanted a life. Another life. They wouldn’t be able to hunt me down, if I was alone. And I found that life. It lasted only several years. Then they found me again. They stopped me. They questioned me. And my identity was again at stake. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “Where’re you from?” “A country where I couldn’t remain.”

  Since then, I’ve been waiting in this camp.

  —

  HOW HAVE I LIVED these past days? Everyone wants me, everyone condemns me. “Are you one of theirs?” “No.” “Are you one of ours?” “No.” Then you’re a Muslim!

  Those who used this Name against me have got what they wanted. From the age of ten, I knew what the Name meant. And when Muslim is used, as it often is, as though in order to eradicate an odor, I feel like I have a tooth infection. This way of talking, I tell myself, is like a toothless man who longs for dentures. It’s a bad way of thinking, and it’s in bad faith. He thinks that if he can have my skin, his smile will return. A little patching up, and everything will be all right. He’ll have his old nasty attitude, and his mouth will be like new. Until then, he still has the infection. I’m the source of the evil. I can exist as “Muslim.” But the toothless man wouldn’t have that. He refused to give me that life. You’re Muslim. That’s your Name. He knows how he had made this word, and why he insists on calling me that. And, if need be, he’ll dig up my father’s grave. He’ll say to me, “He knew he was a dead man.” How many times have countries, under the guise of important principles, played this game? They name, they denounce, kill, and destroy. They kill, they destroy, and they leave. Contempt, violence, lies. Murder, forgetting, and the future. Who can believe in miracles any longer? In promises?

  When you’ve seen a people subjugated, you don’t return to the scene. It’s like a murder without an alibi, a farce. The body is already cold on the floor, and the actors are without roles. The curtain is drawn. It’s over. And I have to live with this unhappiness. It may be that others live what I’m living. I’m not what they say I am, and yet they call me what they want. More than anything, I know how hate lies hidden in the Name they have given me. It leads to murder. This Name that I inherited, that I can’t avoid, but that makes me a murderer, they try to simplify it again and again. But why? We’ve done away with the sacred. We misprize rituals. Now we kill God. For what purpose, if by the overwhelming noise of fury, we’ve destroyed the memory of our last voiceless hymn?

  I became “Muslim.” I couldn’t get rid of it. From the mire of the capitalist world, the muddy oil flats, came the merchants of death, the Manipulators of the planet. Men with faces like pit bulls, whose machinery perverts and enrages, met men in black balaclavas full of their own violence and stupidity. They made me their prey. These two types want me dead. Just me, dead. The death of my world to profit them. They destroyed what had been my world. And I couldn’t protect it. They made a suit to fit me into. They call me “Muslim.” They call me this over and over again. I’m their hostage, their witness to the revenge they enacted always in my Name. And because I’m the enemy for one, and the witness for the other, I’m tortured, mistreated, scorned, and maligned. How can I walk confidently through the world now? I never had the life I should have had. I left Europe. But where on earth, other than the desert, would still have welcomed me?

  On the open road, should the capitalist god of money meet the one true God of the children of Hagar, the slave, it will be a practical and spiritless meeting. He will pretend to choose for these children the least bad option. “They must be like me,” he will say, “and yet I’ve made them mortal. Look at where they come from. They say they’re part of our family! Look at how they live! But we can’t kill them all. They’re useful to us. We should just humiliate them. Humiliate them more.”

  When you take from people all of their possessions and all of their land, when you starve them down to the bone, when you take from them their dignity,
when you denounce them, when you strip them naked, it’s because you don’t want to see them as human but as rats. And there are many places in the world where plague and cholera are at home. And nothing is done about it and conditions get worse. The mythological telos has lost its way in plasma screens, and, in the name of good, the iron dragons chase down the bodiless demons that terrorize people in the name of evil. Humanity is again in crisis. And the dream of solidarity is dead. The god of the Dollar has won the first battle. And if this god thinks he’s the lone master of the oil tanker, he doesn’t understand what he’s encouraging. Those who ignore plague ignore rats. And rats adapt quickly. And so the species gave birth to a hybrid race. Some of these rodents already eat iron. They’ll turn the ship into flotsam.

  I am “Muslim.” I couldn’t escape this.

  1. My translation is a modified version of the English translation by Edmund Jephcott of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung [1944] (S. Fischer Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1969). For reference, see Jephcott, trans., Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, California, 2002).

  ACT II

  THE LITTLE POUCET AND THE MAGIC NUT

  MY CHILDHOOD LED ME to this place. From that time, I have only one image. A photo. I was in Kabylie. I was old enough to walk, and yet my mother was carrying me on her back in a shawl, with a scarf tied around my head. She told me later that she used to put tiny potatoes in the shawl to help my headaches. “Did I get headaches a lot when I was a child?” “I didn’t have any medicine,” she told me. “I had headaches a lot?” “All the time,” she told me.

  Suddenly I’m overcome again. I remember how my brother burned his arm when he was no more than five years old. I’ve never been able to forget his screams and his writhing while we pulled his little green polo shirt from his chest, the acrylic shirt onto which he had overturned a pot of boiling milk. His skin peeled off with the shirt. His screams remind me of when I was very young. Once I was so crazy with hunger that I wanted to steal something from the plate of hot food resting in front of my cousin, my constant playmate. She pushed me back onto the frying pan full of oil where her mother had just cooked her mouthwatering doughnuts. The burn was so bad that it lasted months. Now it’s a thing of the past, but I still remember my screams. At the time I vowed to take my revenge. But she became deaf and mute. And then her physical degeneration became mental as well. I couldn’t stand to be around her anymore. Her unhappiness reminded me too strongly of our family and its history. I came to understand that the hurt I had wished upon her was meant as a punishment. To punish them all for how they made me feel. There was nothing holy there. Don’t think otherwise. Meeting her made me upset. It made me think about our childhoods, our poverty, and our fathers who forgot about us because of the war. She became mute. She stopped talking.

  Once I went with her to Paris. She had to go to a center that took care of children like her. Both of our fathers were there. The two of us went into a room full of tables and headphones. We played together with the headphones. We were six years old; we had been in the country for only a few months. She had become mute. She had left us. Her disease was accelerating. We ran tests on her. The center was run by nuns. There was also a doctor. We sat facing them, behind her, while they made her repeat, very slowly, the letter “e.” Heu, heu, said the nuns. Eux, eux, my cousin repeated. It was 1968. Paris was in a state of revolt. Its youth had invaded the streets. The spirit of revolution led them on, promising good things. “Freedom lies beneath our feet!” the cry went up. The slogans offered a way forward, and our fathers went to the pharmaceutical factories, where they were encouraged to join the strikes and demonstrations. They began to fear again for their lives. We were children. Little girls bearing more misery than we knew how.

  She didn’t return home with us. We left her alone in that facility for deaf and mute children. Outside in the courtyard there were other girls. Big girls. They were all bigger than her. And my cousin, who was deaf and mute, who wanted to have nothing to do with this country and its language, was left behind. We left her. Her parents didn’t have any choice.

  No more words. No more melody. Just several bland tones. That is what my cousin became—the child who would not speak.

  Once she grew up, she returned home. They said she was a little better. I went to see her. She wore a resigned smile. She forced several words from her mouth. Broken words. She was no longer mute. But even a stutterer spoke better than her. Seeing her, I understood what had happened, what they had done to her.

  Nothing could console us for what had happened.

  WHEN I WAS FIVE, I left behind what I had known in order to learn on my own how to leave a community that didn’t accept me as I had been born—separate. If I had never come here, I would have only been a massive sadness known for my silence.

  Ten years later, I remember going to my mother to ask her, in her language, why I was always having the same nightmare. Old women were chasing me. She said, “Those aren’t old ladies. They’re children.” I pointed to the scar above my eye, and I asked her who had done this to me. She said, “Kids.” I shook my head, “No, it was old women. Old women who were chasing me with sticks.”

  Then the nightmare stopped. It stopped after I learned to say to her in her language, “I’m running. I’m running very fast. I turn around, and the old women are chasing me, I scream, I yell insults at them, I run ahead, I’m running very fast, I scream, I tell them they’ll never catch me, and just as they are about to catch me, I open the door, the door to our house, I enter inside, I shut the door, and I wake up, exhausted. The old women are on the other side of the door.”

  “It’s kids chasing you,” my mother would say. “Sometimes you would leave the courtyard to go outside. You would go up to the kids just to say that your father was coming home soon. They’re the ones who threw stones at you. What you have above your eye is from them. Why do you insist it was old women?” “It wasn’t kids. It wasn’t girls like me.”

  But my mother didn’t agree. She only said, “You used to live with women and children like you. Women, mothers who had grown old from suffering and death. They cried over their dead ones, and you got back your father, who had been imprisoned, a harki, but alive. They wanted him dead.”

  I was marked. I was born in 1962 in a society between times. In Algeria, there had been deaths, martyrs, soldiers. It was necessary to extinguish the all too human light that remained in everyone else, the “survivors,” in that period between wars. I was expelled. I was aggrieved, but I knew I wasn’t the only one. I learned to talk to my mother in her language. For ten years, I hadn’t managed one word, and then, suddenly, I could speak. I was no longer alone and abandoned. Time had healed me. I stood tall again, and I claimed my birthright. Those old women never again disturbed my sleep.

  Why did I stop talking my language several months after I left Algeria, and why then did it come back to me ten years later?

  I was in France. I spoke, I learned a new language. That of the school. There was a new country, a new language, but above all else there was school. This new world that leaned over me and demanded that I learn. It leaned over me, and a finger pointing to the word. “Say, ‘the.’” “Say, ‘the.’” “‘The little.’” “Say, ‘the little boy.’”

  I weighed almost nothing. I had never eaten in Kabylie. The Little Poucet was the youngest child, like me, of a family that had become extremely poor. The Little Poucet. I was like him, and then my father returned. Skinny and sad, but he was there. I hadn’t eaten for five years. I was waiting, I was waiting for him to return. He came back. No, he came. I had never known him. He had been in prison when I was born. I hadn’t seen him once in five years, and then he was there. He had escaped. So we fled. We left Algeria for this country. My father came back, but he didn’t look at me. I had waited for him, and yet he couldn’t do anything for me.

  Finally I stretched out my hand toward the woman at school. She took my hand.
She took my hand every day, and I had her by my side. “Read. Read, my dear,” said Mrs. Boulanger. She was like an angel arriving at the moment when the Little Poucet, who loved his poor brothers, met on the road the gluttonous bird that would lead him astray. I learned to speak the language of Europe in one day. The day that the Little Poucet lost his way was for me the Night of the Elephants. I learned the language of that little boy. I left what I had known to join him. My companion of misfortune, like me, had been betrayed by his own. He became my constant company. He and his brothers could join me to form a family. I wanted never to leave the forest. I listened during the day to the birdcalls from the forest, and during the evening, I loved it when the shadows descended. One more night, one more night with them. I climbed the trees, leaping wildly, declaring to the heavens what our future would be. I didn’t want anything to interrupt our time together. I gathered miracles to build a stick hut. Lying on top, we raised our eyes toward the stars, and as we cast them down to the ground, we watched them light up the ground around us and the life of the night. I came to understand this new world through the language of the Little Poucet.