Screen Memories & Invisible Legacies: The "Chaâba" Revisited

Abstract

In the dialect of the northeastern Algerian province of Sétif, the word "Chaâba" refers to an isolated and desolate place, far from urban centers and lacking any such infrastructures as roads, electricity, bathrooms, or running water. Popularized by Azouz Begag's debut novel, Le Gône du Chaâba (1986), the Chaâba describes a compound of self-built tin and wooden shacks in the outskirts of Lyon, where the Begag family and several dozen Algerian families lived, from 1949 to 1967, in the most destitute conditions and appalling poverty. For many of them, the space of the "bidonville" has come to symbolize a "non-lieu" turned into a site of memory that bears the traces of their lived experiences. Thirty years after Begag's first autobiographical novel, a recent documentary, Chaâba: Du Bled au Bidonville (2016), sets out to shed new light on the lives and experiences of those who built the Chaâba into a home-space. As the specter of death looms closer, an urgent need to rescue their memories from the depthless well of oblivion arises. In inscribing their voices and stories in a documentary film format, not only does the filmmaker, Wahid Chaïb, give visibility to a faceless generation, but he also engages in a historicizing process whereby migrant narratives are recast and re-examined from within a larger social and national history. The filmmaker records unseen faces telling unspoken stories in their own words, inviting the viewer to an intimate journey into uncharted territories of French collective memory and national history. By "memorializing a temporality of the-not-there", to borrow Homi Bhabha's words, Chaâba : Du Bled au Bidonville goes beyond simple testimonial to enact a memorializing process that seeks to collapse the temporal distance between past silences and present history.