Amrouche=s Life Story
Christopher L. Bennett
There is no shortage of theory and analysis pertaining to the experiences of colonized peoples under imperialist rule. Many scholars have produced extensive verbiage on the subject. Increasingly over the past few decades, the experiences of women have been included in this analysis -- one of the seminal works in this regard being Frantz Fanon=s 1959 essay AAlgeria Unveiled.@ However, many or most of these scholars have examined their subjects from the outside. Their theories can fall short of expressing the everyday experiences of the average woman under colonial rule. This is the value of Fadhma Amrouche=s autobiography, simply titled My Life Story. The memoirs of this Algerian woman, a Christian Berber educated in French schools, depict a life which is affected by colonialism and the clash between French and Algerian cultures. But Amrouche=s role in those interactions, her priorities, and her definition of herself substantially differ from Fanon=s theoretical depiction of Athe Algerian woman.@
Amrouche is indebted to the French authorities of colonial Algeria from the very beginning. When she is conceived out of wedlock, her mother seeks the government=s protection against the native custom which demands the death of the mother-to-be.[1] The illegitimate child is ostracized in her community, so her mother again turns to French help, enrolling young Fadhma in a Catholic convent. If anything, though, the child is treated even more brutally by the nuns than by her own people.[2] Her mother quickly pulls her out of the convent, but this does not prevent her from later enrolling Fadhma in a secular girls= school administered by the French government.
In Fanon=s view, the French effort to educate the women of Algeria represents an insidious attempt to undermine native culture, an Aadoption of the well-known formula >Let=s win over the women and the rest will follow.=@[3] Yet Amrouche=s experiences do not bear this out. She tells of how her school was Avisited by a succession of members of the French government;@ but this widespread interest was misleading. Overall, the colonial administration did little to encourage the school. Though education for boys was mandatory, Amrouche states that girls= schooling was not enforced by law, and that her school was the only secular learning facility offered to girls by the state. Indeed, before long the government cut funding to the school, leading ultimately to its closing. This hardly seems consistent with a master plan to co-opt Algerian women to remake their whole society in the European image.[4]
Amrouche=s upbringing provides her with a basically French, Catholic identity. Her family retains these affiliations throughout her life. She puts off undergoing baptism until just before marrying Belkacem-ou-Amrouche,[5] but baptizes her children upon their birth.[6] Several of her children end up moving to Paris,[7] and her husband Belkacem makes two pilgrimages to the Catholic holy site of Lourdes, with Amrouche accompanying him on the second.[8] This identity makes her an outsider in the Algerian and Tunisian communities where she lives. Amrouche cites numerous instances of Muslim disapproval of her apostasy. Her husband=s family looks down on her as Athe renegade, who had denied her religion and cast a spell on the favorite son.@[9] Often, her choice not to wear a veil in public is frowned upon by her community, and she must make roundabout journeys to avoid being seen.[10] In Algeria in 1903, her husband is barred from a teaching job because he is Catholic.[11]
This hardly made Amrouche and her family welcome members of French society, however. Throughout her life, she encounters contempt and poor treatment from the French authorities she encounters, beginning with the previously cited abuse she underwent at the convent. On more than one occasion, her attempts to seek French medical care for her children are met with callousness.[12] Once in Tunisia, she must plead to have her sick infant admitted to a hospital, since the government will not pay for a non-French child=s care. The infant is admitted, but is horrendously treated and ultimately dies.[13]
In Frantz Fanon=s view, an Algerian woman is either a Muslim dedicated to preserving her cultural identity or a Europeanized convert who has lost that identity. If she wears the veil, it is an expression of her Algerian-ness, and if she is persuaded to abandon it then she is in the hands of the conqueror. Alternatively, she is a freedom-fighter who has made the difficult choice to go unveiled as a form of camouflage in the resistance effort. AThe absence of the veil,@ he asserts, Adistorts the Algerian woman=s corporal pattern;@ that is, she sees it as a part of herself.[14] The veil is a part and a symbol of the broader life pattern of Athe Algerian woman,@ wherein she chooses to isolate herself from the world outside the home. Fanon argues against the European view that this seclusion is an unjust restriction imposed on unwilling women, but he does not clearly explain just what function it does serve. The one explanation he provides is in terms of revolutionary ideology: AThe Algerian woman... in choosing a form of existence limited in scope, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat.@[15]
Fadhma Amrouche does not fit this essentialist depiction of Athe Algerian woman.@ Though she speaks French, worships Christ and goes unveiled, her domestic life and customs are largely those of her native Berber community. She does not condemn any other woman=s choice to go veiled, or proselytize them to abandon concealment. Indeed, she largely accepts her community=s insistence that she avoid being seen in public, despite the inconvenience. She is not a tool of the colonizer, but neither is she a champion of nationalism. She is simply a wife and mother, and the responsibilities of those roles mean more to her than any ideology. In fact, she smoothly integrates elements of both French and Berber cultures into her life, and does not accept either wholeheartedly. She asserts that there is Asome good to be found in all religions,@ and that she Adidn=t think [she] was ever truly convinced@ by Catholic doctrine.[16] Her 1953 pilgrimage to Lourdes leaves her unimpressed.[17]
Perhaps this adaptability comes from the fact that Amrouche was always an outsider, even an outcast -- for being born out of wedlock, for marrying without familial approval, for being Catholic, for being Berber instead of Arab or European. She calls herself Athe eternal exile, the woman who has never felt at home anywhere.@[18] Amrouche was never embraced as a member of any group, and so she never learned to define herself solely in terms of group affiliation. Thus she was able to pick and choose those elements of identity which suited her and to live comfortably in between cultures. It may seem that this position was far from comfortable, given the intolerance she faced from both directions. But her observation of her exile status is added as an afterthought to her biography, and the cultural clashes are only a background theme in a tale of everyday domestic priorities. Fadhma Amrouche=s life was defined by home and family, but this made her neither a victim of oppression or a sacrificing fighter for the cause. States may battle for power, revolutionaries may struggle for high ideals, but children still need to be cared for and homes still need to be kept liveable. No one can justly say that such responsibilities are any less profound than those of politicians and soldiers. And the view of real, everyday, shades-of-grey life which Amrouche provides is a valuable antidote to the simplified polemical abstractions of Frantz Fanon.
[1]Amrouche, Fadhma, My Life Story: The Autobiography of a Berber Woman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 5.
[2]Ibid., 7-8.
[3]Fanon, Frantz, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 37.
[4]Amrouche, 15-18 passim.
[5]Ibid., 59.
[6]Ibid., 114.
[7]Ibid., 144ff.
[8]Ibid., 152, 166.
[9]Ibid., 75.
[10]Ibid., 64, 75.
[11]Ibid., 88.
[12]For instance ibid., 94, 132.
[13]Ibid., 111.
[14]Fanon, 58-9.
[15]Ibid., 66.
[16]Amrouche, 46-48.
[17]Ibid., 166.
[18]Ibid., 159.