Between enduring hardships and fleeting ideals

Abstract

Strangely enough, it is a life full of antagonisms and ambiguities (the environment’s, the people’s, even my own), of lacks and shortages (in the Algerian society, and in my family), of difficulties and tensions (in my own educational and professional trajectory as a young man in the making, as a citizen and as a university teacher) that gave meaning to my personal development. Having experienced injustice in its most extreme form, namely that of colonialism, it would also be unjust on my part not to acknowledge certain feelings and emotions that are supposedly incompatible with the plight of the ‘colonised’, so-well depicted by Franz Fanon, a psychiatrist born in the West Indies, Martinique, who defended the cause for an independent Algeria, and who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks. In a world of violence, there was also tolerance (advocated by the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) in which I bathed because of the neighbours around us. The French, the Spaniards and the Algerian Jews were part of my world, a world of an open Sunni Islam that did not build borders but bridges towards the Others who were not that alien. In a world of paradoxes, it seemed to me that I learnt more with my parents, as much as with the neighbours (Chamika, the Perez family, El Ghalmia, the Guttierez) than with the primary schoolteachers I had at l’École Bastrana then l’École Paul Doumer . But it was my mother who stated to me the very equation that allowed me to understand the stakes for a free, young, timid Algerian: ‘Learn at school and you’ll be successful in life’. Was she not rueing the fact that she did not go to school? Or, did she realise that school was the key to total independence? Language-wise, multilinguism was a reality my parents, as many other ‘indigenous’ people, handled with some expertise. My mother is illiterate, while my late father had some years of schooling that allowed him to write in French. Both mastered three languages: Arabic, French and Spanish. In comparison, today’s generations suffer from a deep semilinguism: neither good in Arabic nor in French. It is through my parents that I developed a liking for languages. But, it was school that helped me increase my French and introduced me to the English language from the age of 11. At three, I went to a religious school led by les Soeurs Blanches where I started learning French. As a way to balance my education, my parents sent me to the Koranic School of our district: Sidi Lahouari, named after the saint of the city. Belonging to that district helped me get on the map of my country with some pride. I had an identity, rather complex, as it was an addition of cultural elements which later in my life enlarged my identity: I am a Mediterranean, well beyond the limits of political borders, or religious entities, rich with different educations (informal, formal and even non-formal). It is true that, part of my social upbringing was my membership to the scouting movement where I learnt while playing: another way of enriching my personality and my ideas on how education could help individuals free themselves from a stronger enemy: illiteracy. But it was the military service that gave me the sense of belongingness and responsibility. When I furthered my studies in Britain, thanks to the financial backing of the State and the moral support of my wife, I experienced other feelings which I hoped to make mine in the future: the sense of punctuality (something, we, Mediterraneans, seem not to be friends with!) and the sense of conciseness (something my Arab and French cultures did not give me). Going abroad has been a blessing built on a linguistic and cultural bedrock I owe to so many people, and at the forefront an illiterate old lady, still full of energy, who taught me self-reliance, and a very kind man (may God bless his soul) who transmitted to me his open mindedness and his tolerance.