While the Agadir earthquake marked an ending for Jacques Bensimon, Algerian poet and novelist Habib Tengour has written a short memoir in which the 1954 earthquake marks the beginning of a coming of age story. Writing from the perspective of an adult academic who works and writes in both Constantine and Paris, Tengour establishes distance between his transnational adult perspective and the world of his childhood with a startling opening sentence that offers an explanation for the earthquake: “At that time, the earth was like a flat plate. It rested on the horn of a bull calf that was standing, precariously balanced on the tail of a fish. When the fish would move it made the earth tremble.”54
For Tengour, the earthquake was not an obvious point of rupture. It struck when he was seven years old, causing minor damage and waking some of the residents of his hometown of Mostaganem, 130 kilometers from Orléansville.
Tengour’s opening phrase “at that time”55 designates a period of his Algerian childhood that continued after the earthquake, with schoolyard games and memories of his grandfather. His initial, mythological explanation of the earth-quake is seamlessly followed by his grandmother’s invocation of God’s protec-tion and his grandfather’s search for the family Koran, and by an understated, realist description of broken crockery and an overturned water jug. His opening locates his account of this period in the realm of mythology, and he describes his childhood Algeria as a world of stories—religious stories told by his grandfather and received with slight skepticism by the precocious boy, stories told by children during recess, and stories told by the people of the town.56
Within this mythic context, Tengour relates local explanations of the divine causes of the disaster, as fantastic as balancing fish and bull calves. According to one story, God was punishing the city because people had brought wine into a mosque; according to another, it was because a Muslim scholar (“mufti”) had gone to a brothel with a Koran in his coat pocket. There were also tales of orgies at religious sites. In yet another version of this story, it was said that prominent individuals in Orléansville “moistened their couscous with wine sauce and that, under the pretext of celebrating the Night of Error, they devoted themselves to fornicating with women and young men.”57
It is clear that the adult Tengour, the writer, does not believe these expla-nations; they are stories. It is less clear whether the reader is meant to believe that these were actual explanations circulating in Mostaganem, or whether, like the story of the fish, these stories are the writer’s interventions or importations from other contexts.58 Tengour, like Khaïr-Eddine, avoids equating memory with truth.
Tengour’s account of his idyllic childhood begins with the earthquake but is distant from the epicenter and destruction. This childhood idyll is later dis-rupted by the violence of decolonization, which produces a turning point within his narrative. It emerges, later in the account, that Tengour’s father was a politi-cal prisoner of the French and was tortured, an event which apparently caused the young Tengour to suffer from stress-induced illness, interpreted as the “evil eye.” Yet the nationalist struggle does not define Tengour’s experience or mark the end of his childhood innocence. Rather, the intrusion of adult perspectives comes both through his awareness of his father’s struggle—portrayed as distant and abstract—and his growing knowledge of individuals like the family’s Jewish neighbors, the Senkmans, and French settlers, the Delages, whose decency and humanity disrupts local anti-Semitic beliefs (e.g. that “Jews wake up every morn-ing with their mouths full of worms”) and nationalist/imperialist dichotomies.59
Tengour portrays the Algerian Revolution as a common suffering, which brings the Muslim and Jewish families closer, as fellow victims of oppression.
“Today, you are like us,” says Mrs. Senkman to Tengour’s grandfather, relating the Jewish experience to the colonial oppression of Muslims.60 Tengour’s father is made a prisoner; the Senkmans’ son Albert is conscripted for service in the French army, and the suffering of the Senkmans’ son, who after his demobili-zation hides in his room for years, seems to parallel Tengour’s stress-induced ailments related to the imprisonment of his father. The penultimate paragraph in Tengour’s account of his youth ends with his grandfather’s words, “Madame Delage and her husband are good human beings. You must learn to open your heart to goodness, no matter where it comes from. Your father is fighting for the country’s independence. The French who torture him are not human beings.” 61 This story of Algerian childhood which began with the earthquake ends with the juxtaposition of universal humanity with the inhuman violence of colonial-ism. The final paragraph turns to the boy’s eagerness to explore Paris, where the family relocated in 1959,62 Unlike Khaïr-Eddine, Tengour portrays this exile uncritically, as a liberation that marks the end of the story of his childhood.
Tengour’s memoir, “Childhood,” (in an anthology of Algerian memoirs of childhood) presents both his early years in Mostaganem and his coming of age in Paris in positive, even nostalgic terms. His nostalgia for his early childhood is uncomplicated by the knowledge that these were the years of French rule in Algeria: the pre-adolescent Tengour seems initially unaware of the French; they are not part of his world. Moreover, this whole period of his life, “at that time”
is pushed into the realm of mythology by the account of the fish and the bull.
Between this idyllic beginning and the happy ending, Tengour’s memoir is a re-alistic account, focusing on his growing awareness of the meaning of colonialism and decolonization.
How does the earthquake fit into this story? Tengour’s decision to begin the narrative with the 1954 earthquake stands in contrast with the narrative focus on decolonization as a coming-of-age story. Tengour’s inability to omit the seis-mic event, which otherwise fits ill with the themes and structure of his memoir, demonstrates the prominence of the natural disaster in his memory of this time of war. For many writers, a story that begins with Algeria in 1954 is assumed to begin on the night of October 31. For Tengour, however, the earthquake of September could not be separated from the story that he tells: the earthquake marked the beginning of a series of violent events in the land of his childhood.