Page 20 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

exchanges, shared places and dichotomous envi-
ronments, ‘white spots’ on the physical and men-
tal maps of the colonial lived space.
Next to the copper tray, one of the few
objects my family brought back from Al-
geria, was the street of Dr. Trolard in Algi-
er, where my father used to live; from the liv-
ing room table, the street Michelet, not far
from the flat where my father’s family stayed;
from the stove, we found the street of Bab
Figure 3: Next to or under the copper tray, the Trolard Azoun, a place my paternal grandmother of-
Street in Algiers (source: Photomontage by Michele ten mentioned, asking me if I remembered
20 Baussant 2023) it too, even though I wasn’t born in Algeria.
Near the painting of the great-uncle, stood
Bab el Oued, where my mother grew up; in ti
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 11 (2023), številka 2 / volume 11 (2023), number 2
the bathroom, we were at La Marine, a work-
ing-class district of Oran; and with the smell
of oranges, revived La Redoute, the last neigh-
bourhood my family lived in before leaving. ta
More rarely, to evoke a distant expedition, in
the sand garden just in front of the building,
Tizi Ouzou, Foum Tataouine, towns in Alge-
ria that were regarded as very remote. I could
see that neither the rue de Bab Azoun nor the di
rue du Docteur Trolard were there, but I could
see that they were invisible, that they were not
there, and at the same time, that they were
a real presence that partly shaped our daily
space and our exchanges. The objects, build-
Figure 4: Algiers in Créteil (sketch by Michele Baussant ings, squares and shops that made up the new
2023) here
landscape grew out of the home. They partic-
haunting, ‘unlike trauma, has the particularity ipated in the production of time spaces put
of producing a something-to-be-done. It corre- into perspective, reshaped by an entre-soi, rela-
sponds precisely to that moment (which can last tionships that made it possible to read the new
a long time) when things are no longer in their world in which they had to rebuild everything
place, where cracks are revealed, and where dis- again.
turbed feelings can no longer be put aside’ (Gor-
don 2008, 18). Mirrored Time And Space
This doubt allowed neither blindness nor Something was broken definitively in Alge-
the anaesthesia of daily life. Other conscious- ria and continued simultaneously in France
ness strata took shape between the apartments’ over there. Everyone left Algeria, and Algeria
walls (Benvenisti 2002) without real spatial at- left everyone. And through this double move-
tachment in the here and now. Few or no images ment, they all found themselves in the middle studiauniversitatis
fed the imagination, only names, objects that en- of the Mediterranean, leaving and seeing them-
gaged the senses, encapsulated spaces engraved selves left. The Mediterranean became an elas-
with the memory of the intimacy of homes, daily tic space, the point from which my interlocutors