Page 14 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

I, who received nothing but fear and secret and shame of myself
[...] I, who know nothing about myself except what is said about me
I, brought up now here, in sickness
I, who know nothing,
I, who feel I belong to no time, to no country
Between myself and myself lies an infinite distance
Between myself and myself lies my true country, Algeria

(Pascal Bouaziz, ‘Algérie’, 2021)

14
e are in the square in front of the
building where I grew up, in the ti
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 11 (2023), številka 2 / volume 11 (2023), number 2
Wsouth-eastern suburbs of Paris, in a
neighbourhood called Mont-Mesly. This neigh-
bourhood expanded at the same time as the ar-
rival in France of various populations resulting ta
from colonisation and decolonisation. Howev-
er, I remember that my grandmother, who lived
one floor below us, used to call the trip across the
street to the square ‘going to Foum Tataouine’. di
The few-metre walk seemed like an expedition
to a place named after another place in Tuni-
sia, which, when my family lived in Algeria, was
a metaphor for travelling to a faraway place. I
spent part of my childhood in Foum Tatouine
without ever going there. I grew up with the im-
age of a dual space and a divided consciousness here
passed on to me by the adults. They carried im- Figure 1: An afternoon in ‘Foum Tataouine’, Algiers,
ages, smells, sounds and ways of doing things so 1974, 1975? (source: Michele Baussant Personal Archive)
powerful that these marks were not erased dec-
ades after they had to rebuild their lives else- tween spaces and things that die in time. It re-
where (Benvenisti 2002), totally separated from minded us of a time independent of space.
1
Algeria. This article aims to highlight this linguis-
I could not share the meaning of their loss. tic, spatial and temporal cartography of attach-
I could not exchange memories about a coun- ments, how it shaped my understanding of the
try I never lived in. However, Algeria was like a world and my research interests as a descend-
shadow over the conversations, the tears and the ant of specific displaced people: people who have
laughter, intertwined with a sense of disarray, nothing to do with persecuted romantic heroes,
alienation and loneliness. It was always there, 1 This article takes up part of an article published in French studiauniversitatis
twisting the meaning of words, the so-called (Baussant 2023), but develops it considerably in thought
naturalness of practices, the evidence of distanc- and content. It is based on a research financially support-
ed by the CNRS Convergences MIGRATIONS Institute,
es between places, the existence of borders be- reference ANR-17-CONV-0001.