Sur les traces d’un père : « La quête harkéologique » de Dalila Kerchouche

Abstract

This article proposes a textual analysis of Dalila Kerchouche's non-fictional work, Mon père, ce harki (2003). Struggling to accept and pardon her father's decision to side with the French during the Algerian War, Kerchouche explores the aftermath of the war on her family and on the harki community who fell victim to post-independence violence in Algeria and to racial discrimination in France. Born in 1973 in Bias, an internment camp in southwestern France, Kerchouche embarks on a journey through time and space. Her objective: to read her family's history and the history of the harkis in physical traces left on the French and Algerian landscapes. As the youngest member of her family, Kerchouche must engage with parental and archival memories as well as visit harki sites of memory in order to constitute her own (post)memory of the harki experience. Throughout this article, I argue that while Kerchouche's quête harkéologique fails to find and catalogue physical traces of the past, it succeeds in creating an oral archive capable of rewriting national history and of reconciling father and daughter.