For a long time, journalist Dorothée-Myriam Kellou (who regularly collaborates with Le Monde) did not know much about Algeria, her other country which too often rhymes with nostalgia and forgetting. French mother, Algerian father, she is a mixture of two cultures as her compound first name testifies. When she introduces herself, she says she is “French-Algerian.” “French with an Algerian hyphen,” she explains. I like the balance that this hyphen brings. It’s comfortable, but it separates. What if I replaced it with an asterisk? (…) I am French*Algerian. ” And for the rest ?
From Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), Kabylia seems so far away. As a child, at home, her father spoke neither Arabic nor Berber with his two daughters. Without knowing it, there is a break – silent – ??with the country of origin. No matter, Dorothée-Myriam Kellou likes, unlike her big sister, to claim her “DZ” side (abbreviation of Djazaïr, Algeria in Arabic), especially in front of her friends. But one day, at college, one of her classmates pointed out to her that she didn’t even speak Arabic. ” For what ? », she will ask her father reproachfully. “You know your mother’s language, French,” he replies. You can learn Arabic from books. »
The message has been sent: she is going to “Arabize”, delve into this language where the sentences stretch and emerge gracefully under the stroke of the pen. She seeks to know everything about the meaning of letters when they are linked together; she wants a more intimate acquaintance with verbs and expressions. “The Arabic language is very rich in words. To say love, al-houb, there are sixty variations which refer to different degrees of this feeling,” she underlines. She lists a few of them: attraction (al-hawa), burning love (al-najwa), love that drives you crazy (al-hoyam)… Learning this language will take her to Egypt , in Palestine and even in the United States. What about Algeria then?
Terrifying monument
In a very personal book, Nancy-Kabylie, Dorothée-Myriam Kellou is interested in the history of this country, looks at Frantz Fanon, Martinican psychiatrist and major figure in the fight against colonialism, or even on the American intellectual -Palestinian Edward Saïd, thinker of orientalism. And what does she know about her family’s history in Algeria? About his father’s childhood? Not much…
Malek Kellou, television director – who became French around thirty years ago – still seems captive of a distant and painful past. This father, born in 1945 during French Algeria, never told his children. It is not out of modesty, denial or the desire to hide the past from them: his memory has drawn a blank, seeking to put aside the horrors experienced during the Algerian war (1954-1962).
One Christmas evening in 2010, he offered his children a documentary film project entitled Letter to My Daughters. Dorothée-Myriam Kellou is 26 years old and learns that a silhouette has been erased from her father’s memories, that of a bronze man, with a small chiseled mustache, a menacing face and a bayonet on his shoulder. This is the statue of Sergeant Blandan, who died during the colonial conquest in 1842 in Boufarik, not far from Algiers. As a child, this monument which stood on the road leading to his village “terrified” Malek.
In his film project, he says that one morning in April 1990, while he was producing a program for FR3, he came face to face with this statue which had just been erected in a new location at Nancy. “The memory, until now more or less controlled, of my childhood, hit me hard,” he wrote in his letter, specifying that this statue reminded him of “the war, the smell of napalm and the regroupments…” .
Soothe traumatic memories
During the war, the French army emptied entire villages, often difficult to access, to cut off all support for the National Liberation Front (FLN). The populations were then grouped in camps under surveillance and direct influence of France. In total, more than 2.35 million Algerians were forced to settle there. Among them, a 10-year-old boy named Malek.
Malek Kellou comes from a hamlet of Mansourah, a village in small Kabylia; he was moved to a camp surrounded by electrified barbed wire where permits were required to cultivate the fields. “I have never returned to my village since that time. I never saw my house again, I never saw my friends from Mansourah again. Today, it is my dearest dream to return there,” he wrote. This dream will become that of his daughter. Together, they will direct it and will even make a documentary, In Mansourah, you separated us.
Nancy-Kabylie tells the temporal and sentimental journey of a father and a daughter in search of their roots. The journalist will thus soothe traumatic memories of her father, reclaim this forgotten memory and tame the missing part of her family history. The strength of this intimate story, constructed like a documentary, is to show that the wounds of a parent can also be transmitted despite silences. And become an obsession. Dorothée-Myriam Kellou chose her pain, that of bearing her father’s Algerian torments to better free herself from them. Understand them and understand each other too.
