Love of betrayal and ambiguous nostalgia

There are writers born from the womb of the earth, and you see them glorifying it even in the darkness of its nights, and there are other writers who emerge from the womb of the earth itself, but they spend their lives searching for the nearest window to escape from.

Boualem Sansal is in the second category.

That man who grew up in Algeria, educated in its schools, advanced in its administrations, and climbed the ranks of senior positions in its high offices, and then suddenly, in a moment of suspicious clarity, discovered that he was French because he was born in “French Algeria”!

Simply, without shame, without confusion, and without even giving us a chance to swallow our amazement.

Oh Sansal… How can a person betray his memory?

How could he bite the hand that fed him and left on his fingers the scent of the bread of the martyrs?

Questions rush through my chest, collide with each other, and then return to me like a wounded echo.

Strange?

What a shame!

This is a country that shed tons of blood so that it could walk on its soil without kneeling to any French officer.

This country that created an identity for him, liberated him from enslavement, and gave him a status worthy of free people… How did all of this become a burden on him?

How did the homeland he created become merely a “historical mistake” in his mind?

He says he is free.

He says he writes whatever he wants.

Before you, we seek freedom, and even glorify it, but we reserve the selective memory that bastards like you insist on. He criticizes Algeria for not treating him like a spoiled child, but he is completely blind to France, which did not give him anything significant, except temporary applause in cold halls, filled with haters and disaffected Black Pieds who continued to drink the bitterness of Algeria’s independence.

This sandal, and in that environment, he expresses his strange longing for France, which did not give him bread, nor gave him a pillow, nor a grant, nor a job, while he harbors hatred for Algeria, which fed him milk, fed him from hunger, and tickled him with salaries he had never dreamed of, a position he did not expect, and a size greater than his size.

Here this sad groan comes out of me: O Sansal, why do you hate Algeria?

Some say that a man loves Morocco with a love unlike any other.

Perhaps, because his father’s roots extend there. There is no problem with that, because loving Morocco is not a shame. What is shameful is that you prefer one country over another by flogging your first homeland and accusing it of all evils. What is shameful is that you use the memory of colonialism as an umbrella to justify your love for France, which displaced an entire people. What is shameful is that you look at the Algerians with condescension and say about them as if they were a group of angry people who did not understand French civilization.

French civilization?

Oh man!

This civilization killed one and a half million of your people, stole their land, erased their language, and desecrated their history. Where does this gratitude come from?

In the end, you will realize, now in the middle of your life, that you were chasing a wisp of smoke, which you will not realize, no matter how arrogant you are.

One day you will know that Algeria did not need you, but you, despite your hatred for it, needed it, and you will continue to need a homeland that you will not find in the future, because France, in short, is not a homeland for you..