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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4102-7 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4103-4 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lazali, Karima, author. | Smith, Matthew B., translator.
Title: Colonial trauma : a study of the psychic and political consequences of colonial oppression in Algeria / Karima Lazali ; translated by Matthew B. Smith.
Other titles: Trauma colonial. English | Study of the psychic and political consequences of colonial oppression in Algeria
Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Series: Critical South | “Originally published in French as Le trauma colonial. Une enquête sur les effets psychiques et politiques contemporains de l’oppression coloniale en Algérie © Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2018.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A powerful account of the subjective dimension of colonial domination”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020026070 (print) | LCCN 2020026071 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509541027 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509541034 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509541041 (epub) | ISBN 9781509545780 (adobe pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Algeria--Colonization--Psychological aspects. | France--Colonies--Africa--Psychological aspects. | Algerians--Mental health. | Psychoanalysis and colonialism. | Political violence--Algeria--History. | Post-traumatic stress disorder--Algeria.
Classification: LCC DT295 .L32513 2020 (print) | LCC DT295 (ebook) | DDC 965/.03--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026070
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026071
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Dedication
To my son, Badri.
Epigraph
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Foreword Mariana Wikinski
In their ways of arresting time and encompassing space, these novels are not only irreplaceable tools of contextualization; they also create meaning out of the opacity of this colonial war and its afterlives. How can historians do their work without having read them?
Benjamin Stora, from his preface to the book Memoria(s) de Argelia. La literatura francófona-argelina y francesa al servicio de la historia
When children hear the voice of the dead, these are most often the voices of those who died without burial, without a rite.
Lionel Bailly, quoted by Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière in History beyond Trauma
Suddenly a phrase interrupts the rhythm of my reading and forces me to pause. Its familiarity surprises me: “to kill death.” “Matar la muerte”: this is the title of a text published in Buenos Aires in 1986 by the Argentine psychoanalyst Gilou García Reinoso and cited by Karima Lazali in its French translation (as “Tuer la mort,” 1988). I begin this foreword in what might be an excessively self-referential way, inevitably, in order to give an account of what it meant for me to feel such a surprisingly strong sense of familiarity in the very place where I was expecting to undergo a certain estrangement.1 My practice as an Argentine psychoanalyst, working with a human rights organization and in a post-dictatorship context since 1984, and Karima Lazali’s practice, working in Paris and Algeria since 2002 and 2006, respectively, converge all of a sudden in this eloquent phrase, which alludes to the wretched phenomenon that is the systematic disappearance of persons. “To kill death” thus functions symbolically as a historical and geographical bridge between two experiences that are politically very different: the Argentine and the Algerian. And it is precisely the differences between these experiences that prompt two acknowledgments. The first of these is that, anywhere on the planet, the setting to work of a psychoanalytic apparatus requires us to think the subject in the context of its moment and its historical and political determinations, to prevent blanks in the subject’s psychic constitution from being replicated in the form of “holes” within the therapeutic process.2 The second acknowledgment is that the effects of the systematic method involving the disappearance of persons, both in Algeria and in Argentina, have been devastating; we are dealing with a biopolitical tool of domination, a tool for the control of subjectivities and bodies in systems of terror. With profound sensitivity, Lazali shows that the disappearance of persons always generates an erasure at the level of memory that cuts across generations and corrosively impedes the work of mourning.
But does this allow us to conclude that Argentina’s history and Algeria’s are somehow homologous? Definitely not. In this, her second book, written after La parole oubliée (2015), Lazali unravels the elements of Algeria’s specificity: the traces of trauma and the psychic transpositions of the destruction that French colonialism left in Algerian society.
French colonialism and its dramatic historical consequences – events that were scandalous in their scale, their cruelty, and their persistence – left an indelible mark on Algerian history. This history is also marked – and this makes it radically different from the history of Argentina – by the absence of investigations into and justice for the innumerable crimes committed under colonialism, during the War of Liberation and the civil wars, and even today: disappearances, genocide, the mutilation of bodies, expropriations, and the disappearance of children. These are deaths, Lazali indicates, that are deprived of bodily integrity, becoming unrecognizable. The disappearance of persons is thus not only a matter of the spectral condition of what cannot be seen; it also results from what is excessively visible but not identifiable: disfigured and mutilated bodies, deprived of any possibility of being granted an identity.
If we could think of reality itself as a laboratory functioning at the planetary scale, then comparing the subjective effects of the systematic disappearance of persons in
