My mother’s lullabies, it’s war!

I didn’t want to write about the war. This text imposed itself on me like this urban war from another age that is inflicted on the Ukrainian people under our helpless eyes!

I’m glued to the television screen, my eyes haggard, my heart sinking at the idea of ​​seeing more dead people among the gutted buildings of Mariupol, Kharkiv or Kyiv. Images that mark you forever. As marked in 2015, the remains of little Aylan Kurdy, aged 3 during the war in Syria.

Wars all have the same face: corpses of children, shredded bear cubs, disfigured pregnant women, distraught old people…

Despite their geographical remoteness, these facts traumatize us. What about those who experience them closely!

Mom has watery eyes, she watches the news with me and stammers inaudible words in Kabyle! She is curled up in a ball, she is even smaller than usual! Suddenly, my mother is no longer 70 years old; she is a little girl terrified by the bombardments of her village in Kabylie, Algeria, at the end of the 1950s. I know this because these are the only stories she knows how to tell. Bombs, fear, hunger are the lullabies that rocked her childhood before inevitably becoming the lullabies she hummed to her offspring. She tells them to us in scenarios that she has adapted to make stories of courage, but with age, we have understood that it is above all to exorcise her traumas. Stories that I know in detail!

She was barely 5 years old, it was “child’s play” which consisted with her little brother Vouvkar, in delivering food to their imprisoned father “galka” (in the camp). They had to get into big pipes and wait until the light from the searchlights was gone to avoid being spotted by the sentries on duty. Then, they reached a place in the camp where they had to place a piece of bread behind a bush. Their father, almost naked, was lying nearby. At night, the soldiers had to take him out of the barrel of soapy water. He spent all his days there. He only came out at night, under the guard of the soldiers. Mom has vivid memories of the bruises and shreds of skin that hung from her father’s body and the traces of electric torture… My grandfather paid, through torture, the price for the commitment of all his brothers and uncles who joined the maquis to fight against the French colonial army. Women and children have also paid the price for this commitment.

Mom doesn’t like the sound of sirens, it reminds her of the sound of French soldiers, which meant that the women and children of her village had to gather in the mosque or in the village square. To ward off the risk of rape during these gatherings, the women did everything to make themselves ugly, dirtying their faces with the still hot ashes of traditional fireplaces; some even went so far as to smear themselves with cow dung to smell bad, while others put their babies in the arms of young girls, asking them to pinch their buttocks to make them cry as hard as possible. It was necessary at all costs to repel the threat of rape, used as a weapon of war against the people in revolt. First of all, those who have chosen to fight with arms in hand!

My mother saw all these events from the height of her 5 years, without really understanding the meaning.

In our house in Algeria, my mother showed me several times the black and white photos of her uncles who died in the maquis. She recited their names, almost ceremoniously, without forgetting that of Ali, “the youngest and the most beautiful”… who has never been photographed.

Of his grandfather’s six boys, only one will survive the war. His grandmother calls him “Al Houcine Idaja l’guira”: Al Houcine that the war has left us!

I remember an anecdote that still bothers me today… My mother had just arrived in Quebec. A Haitian friend came to visit me… and she screamed as she opened the door for him. I didn’t know where to put myself… “Since when are you racist, when we ourselves are Africans? I tell him. She excuses herself and answers me in her style of a frightened little girl: “It brought me back to the time of the war, the French army had sent Senegalese skirmishers to my village. They were brutes who had the mission to destroy everything and kill! »

At 70, everything brings my mother back to this childhood conditioned by fear and trauma.

We do not emerge from wars unscathed. His traumas prevent people from living and his wounds cross generations. Let us remember it, while we are, today, experiencing one live.