Читать книгу Colonial Trauma - Karima Lazali - Страница 15

I’m asking God, who, by the way, no longer believes in me, for forgiveness.

Sarah Haider, 2013¹

One can get over the disappearance of the past.

But we cannot recover from the disappearance of the future.

Amin Maalouf, 2012²

Caught in a continual tension between servitude and freedom, Algerian society is a mix of contradictions. Since 1962, it has seen progress in a variety of areas: schooling for children; treatment of women, who are much more visible now in public spaces; access to free healthcare, and so on. On top of all this remains an unfulfilled desire to regain a sense of belonging after the colonial order has laid waste to one’s ties to the past (destroying languages, traditions, communities). Despite this progress, pain is still constantly felt and expressed by individual subjects, regardless of their sex, language, profession, or cultural belonging. This pain, expressed by numerous patients during the course of my psychoanalytic practice in Algeria, is rarely viewed as part of a larger historical and political context. Individuals feel as though they are gasping for air, suffocating, being crushed under an unbearable weight. A sense of inertia is palpable and conveys the feeling of a “foreclosed” future.

This pain manifests itself – and is recognized – through the body. But rarely is it related to a subjective history. It is hard to ignore this physical torment when so many women and men repeatedly complain about it. It becomes bigger than the individual subject who bears it in his or her personal life and begins to speak on a public stage. The one-on-one session soon gives way to a much larger social stage where the subject feels threatened. Far from inviting participation from subjects, the social order triggers their retreat. The relation between the individual and the community is troubled. On the one hand, they are divided by a radical incompatibility, since one (the community) almost cancels out the other (the individual), and, on the other hand, they are bound by a profound and inextricable solidarity. This solidarity is masked by grievances and other demands such that no one can perceive the role the subject plays in the social bond that overwhelms it and hastens its disappearance. How, then, can one make what is clearly present in psyches legible and translatable when it has left no traces, apart from what remains in public memory?