“I was always convinced that I was from here until one day in May 1993 when I found myself in Algeria. I had gone there with a total ignorance of what was happening there. I wanted to cross the country from east to west and try to find my family. My father, with whom I had an appointment the day before my departure so that he could give me information, did not come.

I thus disembarked in Algiers with in my pocket the name of the village where he was born and the address of the cousin of a friend, too afraid to see me disembark alone without knowing where to go. I found myself in El Harrach, a suburb of Algiers from where, every day, I took the train to go to the city, suddenly plunged into a world in madness: incessant police searches and controls, armed “Ninjas” crisscrossing Algiers in their 4×4, sounds of explosions and gunfire at night. Knowing only my father’s birthplace, I finally found myself one day in a small village in the Setif region, surrounded by women in tears, shocked to see, forty years after my father’s departure, his son knocking at their door.

A few days after this meeting, my father called me at my aunt’s house in Sétif. After a few words, I put him through to his sister, Nouara, to whom he spoke for the first time in so long. When I returned to France, I was totally shocked, first of all to have found my family again, but also to have been confronted with this violence that I could not explain to myself. For the next three years, I did not go back, even losing interest in the evolution of the situation there to the point where I came to wonder if I had not dreamt of this trip. It was in the fall of 1996 that my father and I decided to go back there together.

A few days before the departure, I began to feel a certain apprehension. Were these the words of our family, of our friends who, upon learning of our departure, tried to dissuade us from leaving, reminding us of all the alarming information reported by the press, radios or TVs about Algeria? Was it simply the many unknowns that this trip entailed?

Was it because, for the first time, my father and I would be leaving alone together? Or was it simply my imagination that amplified the dangers? This trip was an opportunity for my father to dive back into his history but also into mine. I remember his uneasiness towards me when his sisters called him by his real first name, Lemaouche, even though he had always demanded that I and others call him Jean-Claude. I realized that the forty-five years my father had spent in France had given him total amnesia. I learned that he had a brother and that he didn’t even know that he had died tortured by the French. It was during this stay that I realized that my destiny was linked to the history of my father and thus to that of Algeria. My father told me that when I was born, he was gone and that my grandfather, not being able to bear the fact that his daughter was pregnant by a young Algerian, in the middle of the Algerian war, took me away from my mother and had me placed for more than a year in an institute for illegitimate children.