The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals (review)

Abstract

Vincent Crapanzano, The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 256 pp. Next year will mark 50th anniversary of end of French- Algerian war, a nearly eight-year conflict that resulted in independence of colonial Algeria at cost of as many as a million, mostly Muslim Algerian, lives and displacement of over a million more. If conflict was quickly subsumed into official, monolithic nationalist narratives- in France, as an unfortunate set of events best to be forgotten on road to a Europe-centric future; in Algeria, as sacrificial violence necessarily for foundation of a nation unified around victorious National Liberation Front (FLN)-it continued to live on in personal and family lives of its many victims. Indeed, over last 20 years seems to have been fought anew: whether in Algerian civil conflict of 1990s in which an Islamist insurgency took up arms against an FLN government it accused of neo-colonialism; in a burgeoning scholarship made possible by gradual opening up of wartime archives that has brought renewed attention to French military's crimes and FLN's within war against its revolutionary rivals; or in increasingly vocal activism of those unacknowledged victims who seek recognition and redress and call on French state to take responsibility for its colonial past. In this recently released book, Vincent Crapanzano introduces Anglophone readers to one such group: les Harkis, members of various Muslim auxiliary forces who participated in French effort and were abandoned to their peril at conflict's end. Crapanzano culls his open-ended and loosely phenomenological (6) narrative from reminiscences of various Harkis and their children from among approximately 85,000 who survived post-war massacres and were eventually repatriated to impoverished resettlement camps in France where they were effectively imprisoned until mid-1970s. The result is a heartrending tale of physical suffering and psychic pain that asks profound philosophical questions about limits of memory, enmity, agency, identity, and forgiveness. Over many years of research and writing, Crapanzano has developed a person-centered anthropology attuned to psychological dimensions of human experience. Whether focusing on a single person (e.g., his 1980 portrait of Moroccan Tuhami) or a set of interlocutors from a defined group (e.g., his 1985 ethnography of white South Africans), he has consistently resisted sociological impulse to treat individuals as exemplars of social types, insisting instead on depth revealed in particular (178). Such a methodology requires humility of ethnographer, a constant recognition that the mind, subjective experience, of other always remains opaque (6), and a self-reflexive mode of exposition that highlights researcher's own limits, confusions, and dialogical development. Working with Harkis and their children posed a further set of challenges with which Crapanzano actively and insightfully contends throughout book. If many of older generation have embraced silence regarding their past suffering as a duty of perseverance (sabr, in Arabic), a submission to God's will (qadar or mektub), and a token of masculinity (84), their children's memories are fragmented, insisting, and often harrowing. Having witnessed extremes of FLN torture and mass murder in immediate post-war Algeria and betrayal of French state in miserable conditions and racism of resettlement camps, their outrage offers no possibility for reconciliation or revenge. With no homeland to which to return or build nostalgia around, they have little but their narratives of past suffering to unite them into a mnemonic (193). Since early 1990s, activist associations and scholars from Harki families have collected testimonies, documented family histories, published community studies, and organized protests where they publicly retell their tragic saga. …