LCCS Literatures & Cultures Seminar Series: Amy Hubbell, Scandalous Memory: Terrorism Testimonial from the Algerian War
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- Zohra Drif, one of the notorious heroices of the Front de Libération Nationale’s independence movement during the Algerian War, has in the last fifteen years been frequently recreated in literature and film. Drif, who is now a retired lawyer and politician in Algeria as well as the author of her own memoires, planted a bomb in the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956 which killed three people, wounded fifty and left twelve maimed – all were civilians. This terrorist act, famously depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film La Bataille d’Alger is often viewed as a heroic measure instrumental in the eventual independence of Algeria. The 2008 documentary film Les Porteuses de feu directed by Faouzia Fékiri engages Algerian women including Drif who testify to their willingness to participate in the FLN’s terrorist activities in their fight for independence from France (1954-1962). But two of the Milk Bar bombing victims have been grappling with its effect for most of their lives, and these depictions cause aftershocks that do not allow the trauma to dissipate. Nicole Guiraud and Danielle Michel-Chich were both children in the Milk Bar on the day of the attack. Guiraud, age ten, lost her left arm and saw her father gravely wounded; Michel-Chich was five when her leg was amputated and her grandmother was killed. Guiraud frequently depicts the trauma in her artwork but she sued France 3 in 2009 for “préjudice moral” after airing Les Porteuses de feu. Michel-Chich published an open letter to Zohra Drif in 2012 in an attempt to express to her attacked what she endured. Guiraud and Michel-Chich both willingly and publicly recount the traumatic moment of their loss, but they remain at odds with each other about how this memory should be confronted. This paper seeks to understand how traumatic memory is contested by those directly affected and how it continues to provoke scandal on a national level in France.
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