It is, of all things, a pub in Provence where Ali feels recognized for the first time in decades. From the village policeman. He points to the "7 kilos of non-ferrous metal" on the chest of Ali's French uniform and asks for one of the medals. "Monte Cassino" - "There I was", he says and falls around Ali's neck.
It is the year 1963, Ali has been in France for a year. He is a Frenchman, born in Algeria, has fought for France in World War II, a veteran with pension claims. That makes him one of the "Harkis". And they are spurned, persecuted, rejected.
When the Revolutionary War of 1962 ended after eight bloody years, many who survived fled across the Mediterranean to the Republic. They are strangers and not at the same time, "France does not call them or only rarely". Even when Ali puts on his old uniform to prove that he is one of them, bumping into a beer shop in the village pub, the landlord calls the policeman. But with a look of his existence and his memory, he pays tribute to Ali, which never happened in either Algeria or France. His story is visible for that brief moment. A scene that tells more about being lost than many a novel.
Until about 50 years later, Ali is long dead, his granddaughter Naïma just that story again in the light. That's what Alice Zeniter, herself a descendant of Harkis, does in her fourth novel "Losing Art": She tells a story that was not told. And that will finally allow the family of Ali, his children and grandchildren, decades after migration to arrive. Themselves. As Frenchmen who emigrated to their own land that was not theirs. Those still on colonial maps learned "that the Mediterranean crosses France like the Seine Paris".
Astrid di Crollalanza / Flammarion / Piper
Alice Zeniter
Although Zeniter, awarded the Prix Goncourt de Lycéens, tells about the consequences of France's colonial heritage, every story about flight, migration and expulsion echoes: how timeless are the atrocities of not arriving, of living in camps, not accepted to be like Ali without "elsewhere to which he could return". Because "they want a whole life, not a survival." And how big and heavy are the black holes that are passed down from generation to generation. Until a person like Naïma sits in Paris in the 21st century and adds to her list of fears of life: "Afraid to be mistaken for a terrorist." In the chapter "Paris, a feast for life", Hemingway quote and reverence to the terrorist attacks at the same time.
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Zeniter sets up an apparently conservative structure for her novel - three parts, one generation after another: Ali, landowner with olive groves in the ridges of the Kabyles, sipping Anisette with other veterans until the National Liberation Front (FLN) turns up, to the war New beginning 1962 of the family in Provence and Normandy. Hamid, his eldest, who reads "Five Friends" during the holidays as "Instructions for Little Blond Children" beginning to call racism from teachers by name, after Abi stays in Paris marrying a white Frenchwoman. And Naïma, his daughter, who works in a gallery in her mid-20s and one day sees herself confronted with the history of her family for a retrospective of an Algerian artist: because she realizes that she has no idea - neither of the family history, nor of Algeria ,
She is the first to return there. No one was ever there again. From the "later, later," became a dumb "Never", Harkis were further murdered. Only to Morocco ventured a daughter, "where she rubbed herself on the border like an old cat on a upholstered furniture".
DISPLAY
Alice Zeniter:
The art of losing
translated by Hainer Kober
Berlin publishing house; 560 pages; 25 euros
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Zeniter keeps Naïma's voice appearing in this trisection, and now and then a surprising "me." It is these outside voices that fall into the story like sugar crumbs in tea. They keep the story together and at the same time as open as necessary: whoever speaks here, whether Naïma, an indefinite narrator or Zeniter himself, it is inextricably on the move. Unfinished as memory.
"To really forget this country, you would have had to offer him a new one," says Ali. This universal story has the power to lose - and to maintain respect. At some point Ali takes the drawer with his "seven kilos of non-ferrous metal" and goes into the kitchen. He dumps them in the trash, on the potato peels.