Lately, I have been talking with our ancestors

Abstract

This ‘letter to my children’ is part of the author’s book in progress Algerian Letters: The Jewelers of the Ummah. Through her engagement with different addressees (her ancestors and children, scholars, political theorists and law-makers active in Algeria, France, and Palestine) and reflecting on the history of her paternal family life in Algeria, she questions the seemingly irreversible nature of the process through which, in less than a century, an offspring of an indigenous Algerian Jew could no longer find it possible to say ‘I’m Algerian.’ Her assumption is that the French colonization of Algeria in 1830, and forcing the Jews who lived there to become French citizens in 1870, marked the destruction of their world. Is this process reversible? What would such a reversal require? More than just a personal reckoning, family history, or an implied return, this inquiry interrogates the structures of colonial dispossession, charting processes of world-loss and asking what kind of repair – that is increasingly called ‘decolonization’ – is possible. Beyond the physical and emotional world loss of the Arab–Berber–Jews of North Africa, this series of letters prompted her inquiry into the role of both the colonizing powers in North Africa and the colonial (Israel) and post-colonial (France) nation-states and into how citizenship operates in preparing groups of people to detach themselves from objects to which they are attached and in which they are invested, and to be ready for migration and assimilation in a foreign, supposedly superior, culture and emancipation project.