To Be Oneself: The Tragicomedy of an Unfinished Life History Volume 1

© 2008 Abdallah Nacereddine. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 7/30/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4343-0029-4 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008901768

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1

Krima, Kabylia, Algeria

(1939–1951)

CHAPTER 2

Bougaa (ex-Lafayette), Algeria

(1951–1959)

CHAPTER 3

Constantine, Algeria

(1955–1960)

CHAPTER 4

Paris, France (1)

(July - September 1960)

CHAPTER 5

Bonn, Germany

(September 1960)

CHAPTER 6

Rome, Italy

(September 1960)

CHAPTER 7

Tunis, Tunisia

(October 1960)

CHAPTER 8

The Algerian National Liberation Army (ALN)

(October 1960-January 1963)

CHAPTER 9

East Berlin, German Democratic Republic

(January 1963)

CHAPTER 10

Athens, Greece

(January - April 1963)

CHAPTER 11

Belgrade, Yugoslavia

(April 1963)

CHAPTER 12

Algiers, Algeria

(April - October 1963)

CHAPTER 13

Paris, France (2)

(October 1963 - January 1965)

CHAPTER 14

Essen, Germany

(January 1964)

CHAPTER 15

Frankfurt, Germany

(January - April 1964)

CHAPTER 16

Cairo, Egypt

(January - June 1965)

CHAPTER 17

Geneva, Switzerland (1)

(July 1965 - December 1967)

CHAPTER 18

New York, USA (1)

(December 1967 - March 1970)

CHAPTER 19

Atlantic City, NJ, USA

(July 1969)

CHAPTER 20

Tokyo, Japan (1)

(March - July 1970)

CHAPTER 21

Hong Kong

(July 1970)

CHAPTER 22

Bangkok, Thailand

(July - August 1970)

CHAPTER 23

New Delhi, India

(August 1970)

CHAPTER 24

Karachi, Pakistan

(August 1970)

CHAPTER 25

New York, USA (2)

(September 1970 - June 1971)

CHAPTER 26

Dearborn, MI, USA

(June 1971)

CHAPTER 27

Tokyo, Japan (2)

(June - August 1971)

CHAPTER 28

Los Angeles, CA, USA (1)

(August 1971 - July 1972)

CHAPTER 29

A Flying Visit to Algeria

(February - March 1972)

PREFACE

Did I plan to write this story of my life? Not really, for several reasons: I did not think I had much to say about myself; if I had, I thought it might not be interesting; or, even if it was, I was certain nobody would be interested in reading it. People are only interested in reading the life stories of great men and women. They think ordinary people have nothing special to offer. One can learn nothing from them. All they say is very trivial, unimportant, just like the idle chat one hears aboard a bus, a train, in waiting rooms, restaurants, etc.

I, myself, have read many biographies, but only of great people from Antiquity to modern times, from the East and the West, to mention but two: Chuang Tzu (between 399 and 295 BC) and Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962). However, over the past ten years, I have read dozens of case histories of ordinary people like myself in several psychology books. The texts are of different lengths, going from a few paragraphs to several pages. I learned many interesting things from these little people that I have not learned from the great men, as the Arab saying goes,

One finds in the river what one doesn’t in the sea.

I felt closer in many aspects to, and sympathetic with them. I used to complain not to anyone else, but to myself, of loneliness. As I started to get more and more in contact with such suffering people, and there were so many of them, one day I said to myself, That is right,

I am alone.

But I am not the only person

Who feels alone.

Nearly everyone does nowadays

All over the world

And throughout History.

Therefore, I am not alone.

I feel in union and communion

With all those solitary people.

In 1999, right after my retirement, I went through a very serious crisis due to burnout, as I had worked for twenty-two-and-a-half years at a stretch seven days a week throughout the year, for my work was my hobby, and my hobby was my work. I had to undergo therapy in Los Angeles, California. When I filled out the application, I was asked by my therapist to supply him not quite with an autobiography, but an account of mainly my childhood and adolescence. It was not to be published in a book, but just for his information to put in my file. I immediately did as I was asked. It was indeed painful reliving all those childhood traumas. However, in the end, I felt relieved. I did not know exactly why and how until I read, by chance, in Emotional Alchemy: how the Mind can Heal the Heart, by Tara Bennett-Goleman, that ‘just getting these feelings out had surprisingly beneficial effects’ (New York: Harmony Books, 2001, p. 186). The author referred to a book entitled, Opening Up: the Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, by James W. Pennebaker (New York: Guilford Press, 1990). Then I came across another book called, Writing as a Way of Healing: how Telling our Stories Transforms our Lives, by Louise DeSalvo (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). Reading these books, and passages expressing the same ideas in various other books, led and encouraged me to go on writing, not necessarily in order to publish a book, but for myself, for my own good. So I reasoned, Even if I publish the book, and nobody reads it, it will still be worthwhile. I will be happy to be both the writer and the only reader. I took the account, consisting of about ten pages, as the basis for my book, which ended up as several hundred pages. I did not plan it so at all. I could say that

The book of a thousand pages started with ten pages.

Just as, according to the Chinese proverb:

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

My first name means ‘Servant of God’, but in my mind I added ‘and of Men’, and acted accordingly. I naively thought for sixty years that that was my destiny, whether I was happy about it or not. So I devoted all my life to the community, to other people, since I was a child, in all the places I worked, to the detriment of my health. I did everything to please others, but nothing to please myself. If I ever did something to improve myself, from which I drew great pleasure, that was in order to be more efficient and proficient, in other words more suitable and serviceable. During my last medical checkup at the UN right before my retirement, the physician for the first time was very annoyed regarding my health. She did not want to frighten me, but she had to announce to me that I had a heart problem. But I was not bothered at all. She wondered why. I just looked at her and replied, That is impossible.

Astonished, she said, But heart disease is very common nowadays.

That is right, but I don’t have a heart.

I was not exaggerating, because all my life I had paid attention to other people’s heartbeat, not to my own. Nevertheless, the doctor was sure right, because I did have a heart problem, which started right at that time. However, it was all due to stress. Therefore, a cardiologist was not the right person to consult, but someone else, a social worker, a therapist to help me relax, calm down. Yet she stressed that I should immediately consult a cardiologist, which I did. But the cardiologist – who happened to be my family doctor - could do nothing about it because, like the UN physician, he did not know that it was not organic. ‘It was’, so to speak, ‘all in my head,’ just as for years I thought I had headaches, but ‘it was all in my stomach.’

Up till then, my attention had been directed outwardly towards other people. Finally, the day came when there was nobody around to serve and to interact with. For this reason, I had to look inwardly in order to know who I was, and attend to my own needs. It was as if I was dealing with a stranger. The first question I asked was, Who am I? Even though I had been well acquainted for a long time with the Socratic saying, ‘Know thy self,’ however, like everybody else, I do not think I had asked myself such a question seriously before.

We accomplish ninety percent of all our daily activities automatically. We may be mindful of only ten percent of our doings, if not less. Likewise, according to psychologists, we only use ten percent of our potential. Men are not created equal. There are geniuses and idiots and, in between, the majority of the population, with higher, lower or average intelligence. As far as I was concerned, I did not know if I had any potential at all. The only thing I was sure of was that there was always something cooking in my kitchen. There were all kinds of ideas and thoughts. I had to discover what they were and put them in order. So I resolved,

I must explore and exploit

This gold mine of mine,

As well as this oil well,

I have hidden in my mind.

Or else, God forbid, I explode.

Whether I like it or not,

That, for sure, is my lot.

I have no other alternative, no other choice,

Except to listen carefully to my inner voice,

And accept myself right as I am and rejoice.

Going through the table of contents the reader may get the impression that the book is a travel guide. But it is not. Instead of simply numbering the chapters, I chose to give them - apart from a few - the names of all the cities around the world where I lived or visited for a shorter or a longer period.

The poems I quote come from my books Etre Soi-même. Geneva: Poésie Vivante, 1967; Rule of Life. Geneva: Poésie Vivante, 1969; Lightning. New York: Vantage Press 1970; and mainly from a recent book, Reflections. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2004.

The quotations from the Koran are all taken from ‘Ali, ‘Abdallah Yusuf. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an. 8th ed. Beltsville, MD, Amana Publications, 1996. Those from the Bible are from The Living Bible. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1984.

Sometimes, in the references, I give a more recent edition of a book than the one I actually read. This is because I may have borrowed the book from a library or lost, in the course of my travels, my own copy. As regards, for example, Spengler and Schopenhauer, where the original texts are in German, references are given to the French translations, because they were the versions I read or possess.

In the text, I have introduced a number of Arabic or Berber words, the meaning of which is explained when they are used for the first time. To help the reader, all these terms have been grouped in a Glossary at the end of Volume 2. They are also listed in the Index.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my publisher, AuthorHouse, and all its team for publishing this book, as well as the two previous books, just as I wanted them. I am especially grateful to Timothy Murphy, my Author Advocate, for his kindliness. I appreciate his always being available to answer my phone call or reply to my e-mails, whenever I want to talk or write to him or need his advice. It was really a pleasure to meet him personally several times upon my two visits to Bloomington. He was always there ready to welcome me, when I asked to meet him.

Above all, I must express my deep gratitude to my wife, Felicity, for the great work she admirably undertook to make this book fit and ready for publication.

Long before sending the book to the publisher, she kindly offered to revise and edit it. But I did not want to burden her with more work. Knowing it was a long-term job, I was sure she would have no time to spare for working on it, given the cultural travels and various activities she is involved in.

When I submitted the book for publication, the copyediting was taken care of by the publisher. As soon as I received the edited manuscript for review, and my wife took a look at it, she insisted that she revise the book no matter how long it would take her. This she did with devotion and minute scrutiny, taking all the necessary time. She took care of grammar and spelling mistakes, to begin with, and word order, but most important of all, she rephrased passages when needed, and refined the text. She made different little touches here and there, such as organizing the table of contents, checking the quotations, and bibliographical entries. It was her suggestion to include a glossary. Whenever possible, she found the right equivalent English proverb, adage or saying, to replace the one I used when I had translated literally from French. She paid careful attention if I used an English word, which is the same in French, but with a different meaning. No other editor would have accomplished the work she has done, because she very often had recourse to rewriting passages, after consulting with me first to make sure that she did the right thing. I do not think she is a mind reader, yet she could read in my mind, for example, when she was able to guess that I wrote one thing and meant something else, and to clarify what I made unclear. She took the book and the work very seriously, much more than I did, I admit. I do not mean that I took my writing lightly, but, at the beginning, it started only as a private journal, not intended for publication. For this reason, I was not very careful about the way I expressed my feelings, thoughts, and emotions, nor did I mind when I made myself unclear. Since I was writing only for myself, I knew very well what I meant. Unfortunately, even after I decided to publish the work, I went on writing with the same attitude in mind, because I often forgot that I was no longer writing for myself but for other people, for the public at large.

That was where, Felicity, my wife intervened. She had experience of editing work during her professional life and she knows me well. She could guess what I meant and what I did not mean. Moreover, she put herself in the place of the ordinary reader who does not know who I am and who, therefore, has no other alternative but to take my writing literally.

I take this opportunity to thank her also for all the help she has indefatigably extended to me for nearly three decades. This is the longest, but not the first, editing job she has done for me. She already helped me with the editing of two books in particular on Arabic Grammar, in English and French, which I prepared for my UN students a long time ago, as well as with all sorts of other texts throughout the years. In sum, she was always available whenever her help, encouragement, advice, and moral support were sought.

Geneva, December 2007 A.N.

CHAPTER 1

Krima, Kabylia, Algeria

 (1939–1951)

The Early Peaceful Years - The Reign of Terror - Aspects of Life: (i) Subduing a husband - (ii) Allah Speaks to Us - (iii) If You Have Faith, You Can Cross a Torrent - (iv) Casting Out Demons - (v) The Temporary Ban on Picking Figs - (vi) Tell Us What the Martian People Are Like - (vii) Marriage - Life in General - References

* * *

The Early Peaceful Years

My parents were Berbers or, more precisely, they were Kabyles, from the Arabic Kaba’il, which is the plural of kabila, meaning tribe.

"The name Berbers refers to the descendants of the pre-Arab populations of North Africa from the Egyptian frontier to the Atlantic and from the Mediterranean coast to the Niger. The term comes from the derogatory Greek word for non-Greek and was taken into both Latin and Arabic, yielding the English term barbarian. Berbers are Caucasoid, showing a fairly high incidence of blondness, and speak variations of a single language, Berber, which belongs to the Hamito-Semitic language family. They call themselves by some variant of the word amazigh, which means ‘free man,’ and have no sense of community or ethnic unity beyond their tribal affiliations, which notably include the Kabyle of Algeria, the Riffians and Shluh of Morocco, and the Tuareg of the Sahara.

Although their origins are unknown, Berber-speaking peoples are thought to have moved into North Africa, probably from the Near East, before 2000 BC. From 600 BC, Berber lands were invaded by various groups, including Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, and Turks. With the Arab conquest of North Africa in the second half of the 7th century, the Berbers converted to Islam. For a while they fought alongside the Arabs and extended the frontiers of Islam into Spain but later began to break away from both orthodox Islam and Arab hegemony. They chose a heresy known as Kharijism, which is still practiced in parts of Tunisia and Algeria. Many features of early pagan religion have also survived in Berber religious customs under the guise of orthodox Islam. Christianity disappeared among them in the 12th century, but Judaism, which made proselytes before Christianity, has survived to the present day.¹

This is about the Berber people. What about the Berber languages?

"Also called Berbero-Libyan languages, a group of languages that make up one of the constituent branches of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family; the other branches are Egyptian, Semitic, Cushitic, and Chadic. The Berber languages are spoken in scattered areas throughout northern Africa from Egypt westward to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Niger River northward to the Mediterranean Sea. Altogether some 11,000,000 people speak Berber languages.

The Berber (Berbero-Libyan) branch is represented by a multitude of New Stage Berber dialects distributed all over North Africa, from the Siwa Oasis in the Arab Republic of Egypt to Senegal (about 11,000,000 speakers). The more important dialect clusters are Tamashek (Tuareg), in the central Sahara and south of the Niger; Shawia and Kabyle (Zouaouah), both in Algeria; Rif and Tamazight, predominantly in Morocco; Shluh (Tashel Rayt or Shilha), in Morocco and Mauritania; and Zenaga, in Mauritania and northern Senegal. Little is known of ancient Libyan, also called Numidian. It is attested by inscriptions found in Tunisia, Algeria, and elsewhere, dating from the times of the Roman Empire and written in a native consonantal quasi-alphabetic script still surviving in a modified form among the Tuaregs of Sahara. Whether the extinct language of the Guanches in the Canary Islands and of the Iberians of Spain belonged to the Berber branch or even to Hamito-Semitic is doubtful."²

Often, in order to avoid explaining over and over what the words Berber and Kabyle mean, I would always tell those who asked that my parents were Indians, by which I mean North African Indians. When I started to compare Berbers to the Indians, it was a long time ago. At that time, I had not yet then heard of the anthropologist, Ruth Benedict. I read her book, Patterns of Culture³, only a few years ago. I found some similarities shared by both peoples, the Berbers and the American Indians. I was pleased that I was not wrong after all in my comparison.

What I mean is a mere comparison between the Berbers, who were the earliest inhabitants of North Africa, before they were conquered by the Romans, the Arabs, the Ottomans, and the French, and the American Indians as the earliest inhabitants of America before they were conquered by the Europeans. But to my surprise, after I became more interested in anthropology and read Ruth Benedict’s works, I realized that Berbers had not only some affinities in common with the American Indians but with other primitive tribes in New Guinea, Melanesia, and elsewhere as well. This I learned through other anthropologists such as Franz Boas⁴ and Margaret Mead⁵.

Ruth Benedict’s studies, as well as those of all the other anthropologists, were based on observations in their fieldtrips, whereas I had the privilege of having lived as a primitive among those semi-primitives myself as a little boy and teenager. For this reason, when I speak about the primitives and primitive life, I know well whom and what I am talking about.

My family was considered to be wealthy, and they belonged to a religious noble family. We had several servants and owned land, cattle, and farms in different places, which were inherited from our ancestors and shared with other tribes’ members. When I was a child, my parents lived together with my grandparents and my uncle’s family. In addition, there were two other couples and their families and parents, with whom we shared a courtyard. Before intermarriage, my family members were very close family-wise because my uncle’s wife was my mother’s sister, and my mother and aunt were my grandmother’s daughters-in-law and her nieces. They were also close relatives of my grandfather.

My first name was not chosen by my parents; nor was it chosen by my paternal grandparents, who were still alive when I was born. My maternal grandparents chose it, even though they had died several years before I was born. But how can that be possible? In other words, how could a dead person choose a name for a newborn baby or do anything for anybody? In my case, that was certainly possible. This is how it happened. The custom was, when a person died, whether a man or a woman, his or her name was given to the next newborn baby. In other words, I was given the name of my uncle, my mother’s brother, who had died just before I was born. His name was, of course, chosen by his parents, who were my maternal grandparents.

My great-uncle was a great scholar; he was well known and respected throughout the land because he belonged to the Algerian Moslem Scholars Association. He was blond, fair-skinned, and had blue eyes, whereas, his brother, my grandfather, was dark-skinned. He was a gardener. As one could guess, they were very different both physically and intellectually. I never saw them even once get together. They were like strangers to each other, each one living in his own world; one buried in his books or lecturing here and there, the other living in his garden, never leaving it. He was like a plant among plants. In spite of this great difference in personality, I think they were not hostile toward each other. I am not certain they liked each other, but they respected each other at a distance.

My great-uncle lived on another farm, three hours away from us on foot or riding on a donkey or a mule. He lived with his wife and six children of different ages; the eldest son was almost my father’s age, and the youngest was one year younger than me. He often came to Krima, which was the main estate, not to socialize but I guess to consult the library. Curiously, he was the only one to use it. He from time to time had around him my uncle and two other relatives, who were brothers, to lecture to them. I attended almost all those valuable lectures, but I understood nothing of what he was talking about. I was only around ten years old. He conducted his lectures using classical Arabic. I only heard a few words in Berber now and then. He was not telling them little stories; he was teaching them lessons on topics I was too young to grasp anyway.

My grandfather had very little education, I assume, but he was a very wise man. Gardening was more of a hobby—a vocation for him—than a mere job because, like any other family member, he did not need to work to survive. In fact, he had a young man employed as a full-time worker to help him, and he could have made him do all of the gardening. He was a very good man, not only toward the family but also to the entire hamlet. He was a judge, and often couples or other people came to him in order to settle their disputes. He was also a doctor, and the sick would come with headaches and other minor problems to cure. His main medicine was a glass of water over which he whispered and murmured a few verses of the Koran. He then spit in it and handed it to the sick person. The sick person drank the water. Immediately, just in seconds, the patient would feel relieved, give thanks to my grandfather, and then go about his business for the rest of the day. He not only was a judge and a doctor, he was also something like a Salvation Army captain to the community. He cared for the sick, the widows, the orphans, the disabled, and the needy of the village. I witnessed all of this because I was constantly in his company as a child. We were together in the garden during the day. I ate and slept with him at night.

There was a young man. I cannot tell his age. All I knew was that he was much older than I. He could have been in his late teens. His mother was working for other relatives who were also our neighbors. He was always hanging around us (my grandfather and myself). He must have had an accident when he was very, very young, perhaps when he was one year old or so. He had two legs and two feet like everybody else’s but of a different size. One of the legs was extremely short with a tiny foot hanging that he naturally could not use. So he did not walk like everyone else; he hopped. It did not seem like it bothered him much. He could manage as well as he could with two feet almost. One would wonder how, just like animals that use four feet may wonder how we humans manage to walk only on two.

Finally my grandfather took pity on him and had a bright idea: he made crutches for him, which the young man appreciated very much. However, he got used to walking on one foot. It must have been a relief for him in the end to move more smoothly and easily with the crutches, even though he might have had some difficulty getting used to them. It never occurred to me to question him or anybody else about what happened to his little foot. One thing I realized was that if a person does not use one or several of his organs or mental faculties, they do not grow—do not develop. On account of this, he will never be fully-grown but will be a diminished man physically and mentally all his life.

That young man had lived with his brother and widowed mother. They were extremely poor. He was starving. He was asking me daily to bring him a piece of bread, which I did without fail. He always promised to do some great things for me in return. He never did anything. But I did not mind. I still fed him daily. My grandfather was always watching over us both. To tell the truth, as I belonged to rather a well-to-do family, I never knew what the word starving meant. I only learned the meaning when I went hungry myself a few years later, when I left my biological family and lived with another poor one at the age of twelve-thirteen years old in Bougaa (ex-Lafayette), where I attended the French primary school.

In addition to being a doctor, a judge, etc., my grandfather was also a craftsman. In other words, he did not use only his brain; he was very clever using his hands as well. He supplied the family with all the necessary utensils, namely wooden spoons and small and large plates. He also made wooden shoes to walk on the snow in the cold winter season. Those wooden shoes were very popular. That is why they had a special name in Berber; they were called Iqavqaven.

When I said that my grandfather made spoons, I meant that we used spoons as everybody else did. But that was apparently not the case. Because one day (everyone in the village knew about it), my grandfather’s uncle went to Bougaa and took with him a manservant gardener, certainly not as a companion, but for carrying some of his belongings. Yet he took him to a restaurant and sat side by side with him and they ate together. When the man came back home, for days afterwards he recounted the many marvels he had seen, as if he had been on another planet, but the only thing I myself still retained was his relating, When I went to that place to eat, I was given a shovel and a pitchfork to use for eating, a miniature of his gardening tools. Only then did I learn that all the neighboring tribes did not use spoons. Decades later I learned that many peoples in the Middle East and Asia did not use spoons either, but ate with their hands.

Comparing him to his brother, who was a scholar, I said that my grandfather had very little education. But how much? I have no idea. To tell the truth, one might think he was illiterate. We had a large cabinet full of books and very valuable manuscripts. But I never saw him read a book, not even the Holy Koran. He was of course a very religious man. He fasted, gave alms, and said his five daily prayers. That is why every day of his week (no rest day) started at dawn. He had to rise early in the morning to say his first prayer after he had made his ablutions, of course with cold, if not icy, water in winter. The first thing he did when he got up in the morning, before his prayers, was to make a good fire to warm up. He then drank his coffee with sugar and no milk, and ate nothing. As matches were very scarce, in order to start a fire, he, like everyone else, depended on the embers left from the previous fire of the day before. He went very early to bed at night, right after his last night prayer due one hour after sunset. That is why he did not use any lighting, even though we had oil lamps. But not for him; he did not need it, since his day started at daybreak and ended at nightfall, like almost everybody else.

I never saw him read. But I have seen him write a great deal daily. He was a public letter-writer. Since nearly every family in the village had one or more of its members working in France for support, they had to write to them. And as they were all, with no exception, illiterate, they came to him to write their letters, which he did of course with no charge. He not only did not charge them, he often did not let them go home empty-handed. He gave those needy people, mostly widows, vegetables and fruit. One day, an old lady came to him for some reason. It was late afternoon. Before she took leave, she informed him that she would be coming the next day for him to write a letter to her son in France. She was only informing him; she was not making an appointment, since such a word did not exist in Berber. First come, first served. He should have invented the word, because he had all kinds of people parading into his gurbi (hut) all day long for different reasons. But each waited his or her turn. They were patient. They had no choice anyway.

Now let us go back to our lady. When she came the following day for her letter, he told her that he had already written the letter and mailed it to her son. There was nothing surprising about that. He knew all their needs and problems. They were always the same stories, the same problems. People wrote mostly to ask for money, to convey some happy tidings, such as a marriage, the birth of a child, or when struck by a calamity, such as a fatal illness, death, which was hovering around all the time. The lady was very satisfied. I would not say he saved her time, because time did not exist for them either; therefore, it had no value. But he spared her the paper, the envelope, and the stamp, which he provided for her.

Let me cite another case to attest how wonderful he was to everyone. One day a desolated man (he must have been the same age as my father since he had a son almost my age) came to him with tears in his eyes, seeking comfort and consolation. His widowed mother had just passed away. He addressed him: Ah! Si Mohand Chérif, now that mother has passed away, I trust you will be taking her place. He had a long talk with him. But the only sentence I remember was that he said, To take the place of my mother instead of saying my father, who had died long before. That is why he barely remembered him, I assume. If I had not been there to witness the way my grandfather lived and worked for the public welfare, nobody would have heard of him. Everybody had heard of Mother Teresa (1910–1997). Unfortunately, there were not many—perhaps one in a million—anonymous people like my grandfather, whom nobody heard of. But that was not important for all those good people since they did what they did only for heaven and God’s sake, not for fame and glory.

* * *

Now that I have spoken about my great-uncle and grandfather, let me speak about my uncle and father. I start with my father because I do not have much to say about him. First of all, I did not call him father; I called him by a diminutive name preceded by the prefix zi as a title of respect, the same way as any boy would address another male person older than him, whether he was a boy or a man. He was never around anyway, in order for me to address and talk to him. I saw very little of him when I was a child, because he spent all his time wandering around, visiting friends or relatives in other places. From time to time, he stopped over to visit the family for a day or two, like an unwanted guest, and then left again. It would have been better if he had never come home because, each time he did, it was only for trouble. Thus, he never cared for his wife and children. He was not supposed to get married in the first place. But in the tribe there was no such a thing as a single man. There were single women all right—mostly old widows. But men—every man, young or old—must get married, whether he liked or not, or else he became an outcast. As [at Zuñi], there are no bachelors, spinsters or abandoned children.⁶

He was very unfriendly with everyone in the family and was proud to exhibit his hostility. But nobody paid attention to his misconduct. They totally ignored him. In fact, he was a sick or mad person, or both at the same time. He used to talk to himself out loud all the time. He did not really speak to himself; instead he seemed like he was talking to some kind of an invisible man or woman, gesticulating, shouting at, and arguing with him or her. Nobody said or did anything about it. There was nothing to say or do. Nobody wanted to say anything to him, in order to avoid getting into trouble. Of course, his parents or anybody else could not heal him, because there were no doctors, no hospitals, and no medicine—just nothing of the kind. He was inactive; he never worked in his life until he was fifty years old or so. But when he started to work, so to speak, guess what his job was? He was a muezzin, an announcer of prayer time. It is very hard to guess how much time that took him every day. But if you happen to know what the word muezzin means, it would be very easy to guess. It took him not more that half-an-hour a day. Later on he became an Imam (a man who leads the prayers in a mosque). Even that did not take much time. To lead five prayers a day, I am sure, did not take him more than two hours a day in addition to an extra hour for the Friday sermon. He did not have to prepare but only to read it, because it was already prewritten and sent to him by the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

When I visited my family in 1972, I was then living in California. I was surprised when he told me that he had a job. I had not seen him for six or seven years. He seemed happy to see me. That was what I imagined. However, the next morning, when he did not see me pray, he was furious.

He shouted at me, You did not pray!

I answered, No! So what? Maybe I did, maybe I did not. After all, that is a private matter. Whether I pray or not, that is not your concern. It is a matter between me and God.

He looked at me contemptuously and said, If you do not pray, all your knowledge equals zero.

I said nothing. All I did was leave the coming day. There was one thing he had forgotten, like all imams or muezzins who think they will go to paradise for their worship when they die, that they already get their rewards here on this Earth since they are paid for their prayers.

My father was the eldest son. I had two uncles. The younger died at an early age. He was epileptic. He had an accident and his brain was damaged. I do not know much about the circumstances of his accident, like how, when, where, or why it happened. When he died, I was about ten or eleven years old. But I remember very well watching him each time he had his epileptic attack. I had no recollection of him doing anything between his attacks, apart from reading the Koran. He was gentle. He did not bother anybody. But I do not know how conscious he was of himself and of what was going on around him. His death was a big relief for himself and for everyone, I assume. Death, after all, was not a very sad thing for many people. They did not anticipate it by killing themselves, for I think the word suicide did not exist, since I never heard it. But in some circumstances when death came, it was most welcome. For this reason I do not remember having seen anyone showing any sign of relief or grief. It was very hard to tell. They were not indifferent. They hid their feelings most of the time, not only to others but even to themselves. There was all the time someone dying or being born. I had, for example, an elder brother who died at seven or eight years old. I barely remember him. I had a younger sister who died when she was three years old and another younger brother born a twin with a sister and who died at birth. As I said, there were simultaneously deaths and births. When there was a birth, perhaps only neighbors heard about it. But when there was a death, the whole village had to hear about it. The men who carried the dead body to the cemetery chanted all the way for quite a while, There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger in a very sad and monotonous tone.

That annoyed me very much, as well as the many births I witnessed around me in our family and the neighbors’ because of the crying of the newborn babies. I wondered why they had to cry coming into this world. That was what I was doing myself in those days: crying all the time because I was miserable. But they did not know the world they came into; therefore, they had not experienced any unhappiness as yet. There was, however, one thing I learned: children have to learn everything from A to Z. They have to learn how to walk, talk, smile, and laugh. But they do not have to go to the trouble of learning how to cry. They are very good at it, except that they cry without tears. That is perhaps the only thing that is innate in them.

My mother, like any other woman in the tribe, was illiterate. She was hard working, completely different from my father. She was older than him. That was unconventional. Usually wives were younger than their husbands. She was very wise. She knew many proverbs, both in Berber and Arabic, even though she did not speak Arabic and never wanted to learn it. She was very rigid and tough. She never took care of me. I have no recollection of her touching me, kissing me, hugging me—not even washing me.

Do I really blame her for that, at any rate, consciously? No, because I assume she never had anything herself. Together with her sister and brother, she was an orphan. She never spoke of her parents. I assume she barely knew them. Therefore, she could not give me, her son, what she had never received from her parents herself as a daughter.

Do I blame her for not having toilet-trained me? No. The reason is that there were no toilets whatsoever.

Do I blame her for not having helped me with my school homework? No, because there was no school.

Do I blame her for not reading a little story for me before I went to bed? No, because she was illiterate, even though curiously we had a few such books for children, I discovered later. I could have read them myself, but it was too late. I was not a child any longer when I started to learn how to read in Arabic. I was eighteen years old.

Do I blame her for not giving me a bath from time to time? No, because there was no such a thing as a bath, and water was very scarce.

Do I blame her for not reminding me to brush my teeth after each meal? No, because there were neither toothbrushes nor toothpaste.

Do I blame her for not giving me any pocket money? No, because I had no pockets and there was no money.

Do I reproach her for not giving me love? No, because she had none. She was an orphan, together with her sister, raised by their uncles, from whom she received no love. Therefore, she could not give me something she did not have.

I spoke about not being loved by anybody. What about me? Did I love anyone? Maybe I did not; maybe I did, but unconsciously. I cannot tell, because I did not know what love was. It is as simple as that. I had never heard of love. Had I heard someone speak about it, I would have asked that person, What is love? Just as Helen Keller asked her teacher, Miss Sullivan, What is love? The difference is that Helen Keller did not know what the word love meant, but she had had plenty of it since she was a baby. Miss Sullivan, she related, put her arm gently round me and spelled into my hand, ‘I love Helen.’ ‘What is love?’ I asked. She drew me closer to her and said, ‘It is here,’ pointing to my heart, whose beats I was conscious of for the first time. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything unless I touched it.⁷

* * *

Just as I did not call my father father, I did not call my mother mother either. I called her, as I did with my father, by a diminutive name preceded by the prefix La as a title of respect, the same way any girl would call another female person older than her, whether she was a girl or a woman. The reason I think I did not call them father and mother is that they were never around for me to address them. I was left completely alone. How can you call anyone by his name when he is always absent?

To tell the truth, living among such a family of six adults—my grandparents, my parents, my uncle, and his wife, who was also my aunt (my mother’s sister)—I could not really tell who was who, who raised me, or who did what. However, I was sure of one thing: I was engaged to my cousin before I was born. How could that be possible? Yes, that was possible. As was the custom, it was often arranged between the members of families that if such-and-such couple had a son and another had a daughter, they would marry them.

There were customs and habits that were common to all tribes and others that were particular to each one of them, especially if they lived far away from one another. At the time, I was informed at a very early age that I was engaged to my cousin. I may have thought that I was the only one and that no one else even next door was to be subjected to that law, until I found out decades later that the same custom was practiced by another tribe very far away; that is, by the Ifugao tribe in the Philippines, as related by an Arab anthropologist.⁸

My cousin was four years my junior. The whole family kept on reminding us that we were engaged to each other since we were very little. It was like fate. There was no escape from it. It was awful. We were like brother and sister, living under the same roof. In addition to being my double cousin, she was really like a sister, because for some reason I was told that her mother, my aunt, had breast-fed me. In Europe and in other primitive cultures, marriage between parallel cousins (mother’s sister’s and father’s brother’s children) is considered incest.

Parallel cousins are often treated as brothers and sisters. They address one another as such, and marriage rules apply to them exactly as if they were blood siblings.⁹

So I considered the matter myself, being doubly parallel cousins, even though I had no word for it. I do not know if the word incest has an equivalent in Berber. The whole family could not wait for us to be of age to join us together as husband and wife. They were so naive that everything would happen just as they had planned it. I said nothing. Instead I let them dream. My only wish was to flee that stifling environment and go far—very far—away from all of them, as soon as I could afford it. Thus, when I was nearly twenty years old, my uncle let me know, through his cousin who came from another place especially to give me the message, that it was time for me to get married to his daughter. I said, No, thank you, I have other projects in mind. He was really furious. He just could not swallow it.

* * *

I do not remember having spent any time with my mother. As I have already mentioned, all I remember was the time spent with my grandfather, when I was around five years old. What about all the time before? I do not remember any of it. Perhaps it was too painful to remember—too traumatic to retain on a conscious level. I still want to know what happened in those critical years, no matter how tragic they were. All the suffering I have endured and am still enduring now is partly due to those years I remember nothing of. I am trying hard to surmount all my difficulties. However, unless I learn what exactly happened during those critical years, I will be unable to heal myself fully. It is essential for me to know what exactly happened during those years, for all psychologists agree that the human personality is formed at the age of four or five. I cite one leading psychologist, Alfred Adler: In the style of life, formed at the age of four or five, we find the connection between remembrances of the past and actions of the present.¹⁰

As I grew up, I started to feel very different from everyone and, therefore, very lonely. Everything and everybody seemed so strange to me. I really felt like I was living in a foreign country and the family I lived with was like an adopted one, even though I had nothing to compare it with. One cannot make a judgment about something and say that it is good, beautiful, or big, unless one compares it with something that is bad, ugly, and small. However, I could compare people to themselves (e.g., their sayings with their deeds, how they were at one time and at another). I could compare the way they behaved with one person and the way they behaved with someone else, and things like that. For example, sex was something one must never speak about. So, I wondered, if it is something that bad, why do they do it then? Not only that, but when I heard children of the other tribes speaking about sex (children with whom I was not supposed to mix), they did not say, Such and such a boy or a man made love to such and such a girl or woman. They said instead, He did a shameful thing to her. So I wondered again, They make one disgusted of it, yet they take pleasure in doing it.

There was another custom, perhaps only in the family. I found it also very odd that couples were not supposed to call or even to refer to each other by their names. They communicated very little, if they did at all. When they had to call each other, they said, Oh, you. When they spoke to someone else about each other, they referred to him or her as he or she. I have never heard my parents or any other spouses pronounce their respective names. I was very intrigued. I often thought to myself, What really would happen if one spouse pronounces the name of another? I was curious and eager to find out. Of course that meant taking risks. But I was ready for anything, for the experience.

One day I thought of a trick. In the evening I was in the neighbors’ home in the presence of a large gathering. I was only seven or eight years old. I asked a newly wedded young lady to say something for me. I spoke her husband’s name, Khaled; I cut it into two: Kha-led. I inverted the two parts to make it led-kha. Then I asked her to repeat it continuously. She agreed and nobody else objected. They did not expect anything funny to happen. She immediately started doing it. In her mind she was repeating led-kha, which made no sense to her. But for the audience, without realizing it, she was going on repeating her husband name, Khaled. I looked around and saw everyone was so embarrassed, their faces became all red, as if she was saying some horrible thing. Then someone sitting near me slapped me. Afterward they all left the room one by one. All this may seem silly and ridiculous. But that is what most of the customs are all about everywhere. While they are taken very seriously by one type of society, they are held as silly by another. I thought that was only a custom in my tribe in that locality, but I was astonished to read about more or less the same custom in the Manus Island in the Admiralty Group of Papua New Guinea, as related by Margaret Mead:

He [Kilipak] must avoid his bride’s name and the names of all her relatives, and he must lie hidden if his canoe goes through her village.¹¹

And further:

Also, the presence of children at ceremonies made the adults uneasy. The name taboos meant that everyone should be on the alert, so as not to pronounce inadvertently the name of someone else’s brother-in-law, or more seriously still that of his mother-in-law or his spouse. There were many such circumlocutions, and the children, particularly the boys, were careless and ill-informed about them.¹²

It seemed as if there was some hostility between couples in general in our large family because of the way they behaved with one another. That also made me wonder, If they hate each other so much all the day long, why then do they sleep together all through the night? There were many things about the customs and behavior that really disgusted me. Nearly everything was forbidden—was a sin. It was almost a sin to live. Yet to them everything was normal and they seemed to accept it wholeheartedly. They were not pretending since they did not show any objection. I seemed to be the only one who was rebellious to all those customs I deemed absurd. It was very obvious there were too many contradictions.

In 1988, when my mother passed away, I went to Algeria for her funeral. Almost all the members of the tribe were present to take part in the funeral. They came from all over. While I was sitting and chatting in the gathering of over twenty persons whom I had not seen for a long time, some of them with whom I spent my childhood I did not even recognize.

One of the ladies—she was my parents’ cousin—asked me, Do you remember what you had said to us when you were seven or eight years old?

I replied, No. How in the world do you expect me to remember what I had said about forty years ago?

She was surprised I had no recollection of it. "But I remember very well," she emphasized.

I felt amused. I thought it could be some kind of a joke. I said, So let all of us then hear what I said.

When I stared at her before she started to talk, she looked very solemn. She frowned, as if to warn me that it was very serious. Then she bluntly announced, in front of everyone, You said, ‘When I grow up, I will take a plane and piss on you all.’

I felt very embarrassed. I retorted, I have never said such a thing.

She said, Oh, yes, you did, and I have a witness. My husband was with me then.

But, you see, I have not done it. Not yet. I assured her, I never will.

She was not convinced.

* * *

One may wonder what kind of parents I had and why they didn’t bother to take care of me or teach me anything. Birds of the air, fishes in the water, and cats teach their little ones how to fly, swim, and clean themselves, but my parents did absolutely nothing for me. Primitive children, as anthropologists have pointed out, learn mostly by imitation—by following an example, a model. But what if there is no one around to imitate, or worse still, there are bad examples? What can one do? A child has to learn everything: how to smile, how to walk, how to talk, how to eat, etc. Otherwise a child will never grow up to be a full human being. It will grow up as a wild beast, like the wild boy of Aveyron in France or like Kaspar Hauser in Germany. I do not remember having been taught one single thing. All I was taught, by my uncle, as I have already mentioned, was the Koran—the whole Koran, nothing but the Holy Koran. Even that I do not call teaching; I did it myself, but it put me in very difficult conditions during six long years, with no respite.

Did I hold a grudge against them for not having done anything for me? If I recall well, I did not. I thought that was my lot; I could do nothing about it. I asked myself no questions at those crucial times and questioned it only decades later, when I could compare myself with the way other children were raised. In those days, I thought that the way I was evolving was no different from the upbringing of any other child on Earth, but I was completely wrong, not realizing that not only other children but also even animals were treated more humanely. Only after I had lived so long in the West did I start