Page 22 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

porality. This latter could also take many forms.
Every year at the same time, on the same Ascen-
sion Day, in ‘Oranîmes’, ‘here became there,’ and
‘yesterday, now’, a ritual time that can be per-
formed in any space. Each year, the same event
began again without being an exact repetition
of the previous one. This event is in preparation
throughout the year and organises the ordinary
year to return to this gathering day.
While evoking their fulfilment and a bet-
ter life in France compared to Algeria or Egypt,
these displaced people mobilised the present sit-
uation of these countries. However, each time
22
Figure 6: ‘Ici c’est là-bas’ (meaning ‘Here is down there’), they expressed their current difficulties of life in
Oranîmes, 1996 (source: Michele Baussant Personal France, they used as a point of comparison yes-
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 11 (2023), številka 2 / volume 11 (2023), number 2
Archive) terday’s Algeria or Egypt, the present here and ti
the past there becoming contemporary (Ragaru
ing root, circulating, linking transposed land- 2010, 58).
10
scapes, extraterritorial, duplicated, sedimented. Trips back are the yardstick for gauging a
The transmitted practices make them live in the stop in time for the countries they left behind ta
heart of memory environments; places and their while they have continued to evolve elsewhere:
names symbolise districts, then cities that ap-
pear to be regions that refer to countries, which We left Algeria with people we knew, and
are enlarged to metropolises and former colonial then when we go back, we do not know any- di
spaces, operating unequally between the differ- one! [...] I went back to the courtyard where I
ent territories. The particularity of these cartog- used to live [...]. It moved me. Where my par-
raphies of time and space that shaped daily life ents used to live, an Arab was living there, a
also lay in this succession of multiple mobilities Moroccan who let me in. My mother’s furni-
over the medium term, whether integral parts ture was still there, they kept it, even the pic-
of a life project or imposed by force. It blurred ture frames. [Interlocutor François]11
the relationship between here and elsewhere, at For François and others, displacement is a here
once a place of settlement, a cultural homeland, posteriori, a pause in time and a bifurcation of
the land of birth, the land of ancestors, a land of time: that of the people in Algeria, trapped in ‘an
passage (Ragaru 2010), in a temporality and a immobile, regressive temporality’ (Ragaru 2010,
relationship to space operating translations but 57), and that of the displaced people, who have
never the possibility or the projection of a re- remade their lives elsewhere.
turn. There was nowhere to return to. Even if Nevertheless, this perception sometimes
they could dream of being ‘retrieved’, this dream coexists with an opposite feeling, the impres-
takes the form of a disavowal, as Brodsky notes, sion that they have remained frozen in time and
as ‘they will never retrieve you’ (Brodsky 1995, space, out of place, out of time, without place or
quoted in Heller-Roazen 2008, 50). time, as is typical of those who are absent. As
These different strata of consciousness and Daniel Heller-Roazen stressed (2021), there are
their multidimensional spaces have taught me to many ways to be absent and then many catego-
question the evidence of a shared past with fixed ries of absentees who compose, in fact, a mul- studiauniversitatis
and assured content, and the elasticity of tem- titude: they could be the missing persons, per-
10 Like the castle of Julhans in Roquefort la Bédoule, which 11 François, born in Oran in 1934, lives in Nîmes. Former civ-
would symbolise an extraterritorial past Algeria. il servant. Interviewed in Nîmes, in 1997.