That sentence from Mouloud Feraoun's JOURNAL, 1955-1962 summarizes the Algerian War of Independence as he experienced it. JOURNAL is one of the major, if lesser-known, eyewitness accounts of the political atrocities that marked the twentieth century. It belongs in the same group of books as Primo Levi's "If This Is a Man" and Eugenia Ginzburg's "Journey into the Whirlwind". Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's Gulag are much better known, but for many Muslim Algerians caught up in the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), life was almost as hellish.
Feraoun lived through that maelstrom as a Muslim Berber from Kabylia. In November 1955 he began writing a journal from the maw of the War of Independence. He was one of the most respected writers in colonial Algeria and a friend of such noted figures as Emmanuel Robles and Albert Camus. He also was a schoolteacher, living in Fort-National, in the middle of Kabylia. In July 1957, due to the death and mayhem that had overwhelmed the Kabylie, Feraoun and his family moved to a suburb of Algiers. (That was during the Battle of Algiers, but still Algiers was safer, less violent, than was Kabylia.) Feraoun continued to live in the vicinity of Algiers until March 15, 1962, when he was assassinated by the fascist OAS just days before the cease-fire ending the French-Algerian war.
Reading JOURNAL, 1955-1962 is profoundly depressing. It contains a litany of barbarities; it is a testament of inhumanity. Time and again, it documents physical torture. Example: A friend tells Feraoun: "What got me talking more than anything else is the spring * * *. It is a tool that is introduced into the anus and that increases in size when they push on the spring. Then they pull it out brutally, and you feel your entrails tear." Torture leads to false confessions, which lead to more arrests and more torture and more deaths. JOURNAL also documents psychological torture, both of individuals and of entire towns and, indeed, of all native Algerians.
Who are the native Algerians? The French wanted to think that Algeria was part of France and that there were such people as "French Algerians". Feraoun would have none of that. "This people of eight million men is not French, and on its soil the French * * * are battling for the sole purpose of deciding the manner in which they are going to continue to impose their will upon it, to continue to live there, to continue to exploit and despise it, in the name of imperishable principles, in order to fulfill a highly civilizing mission."
But Feraoun's world was not an either/or world. His implacable anti-colonialism did not place him in the camp of the FLN. In January 1956, he wrote: "The rebels' expectations are both excessive and disappointing. They include prohibitions of all kinds, nothing but prohibitions, dictated by the most obtuse fanaticism, the most intransigent racism, and the most authoritarian fist. In a way, this is true terrorism." In March 1956, he asked: "Can people who kill innocents in cold blood be called liberators? If so, have they considered for a moment that their 'violence' will engender more 'violence,' will legitimize it, and will hasten its terrible manifestation?"
Curiously, JOURNAL, 1955-1962 was written in French. (Feraoun, who was born in 1913, was one of the Muslim elite of Algeria and he was educated within the French system. He also spoke Tamazight, the native Kabyle language, but he did not speak or write Arabic. There was, in fact, much friction and some violence between the Berbers and the Arabs, but Islam and anti-colonialist sentiments tended to unite the two groups. Certainly, the French looked down on and exploited both of them.) JOURNAL has long been known to be one of the seminal documents of the Algerian War of Independence. Alistair Horne lists it as one of his sources for his classic account of the War, "A Savage War of Peace". But it was only in 2000, with the publication of this volume, that it was made available in English.
James D. Le Sueur, a French professor of history, contributes a useful forty-page introduction. In it, he compares Feraoun and his JOURNAL with Frantz Fanon and his "Wretched of the Earth". Le Sueur discusses how Feraoun and Fanon "held antithetical views on violence." "For Feraoun, the question was not whether violence could be used, when need be, as a response to colonial oppression but was a matter of when violence should stop and what the effects of violence were." Feraoun feared that the unrestrained, often unprincipled, violence of the FLN would result in a new "colonization" and a social environment that would breed yet more violence after independence. In this regard, Feraoun was prescient. Le Sueur concludes: "Because [Feraoun] was alive and writing throughout the war, his insights into the apocalyptic violence of decolonization are far more revealing than theories written about the conflict out of harm's way, especially the observations written by Fanon in 'The Wretched of the Earth' and celebrated by Sartre in his preface to that book."
It is not always easy to follow Feraoun. Often his reactions to events happening around him -- in his town, outside his house on the street, to people he knows -- are raw. Sometimes his writing is impressionistic. Sometimes he is not altogether logical, and occasionally he contradicts himself. He often refers to people by a single initial, and one also has to deal with a kaleidoscopic alphabet stew of organizations -- FLN, SAS, ALN, CRUA, MNA, SAU, OAS, etc. But the book is not inordinately difficult, and it is very rewarding. Certainly any student of the Algerian War of Independence should read it.
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