“We were ghosts in this country when the settlers were exploiting it and bestowing on it their church bells and cypress trees and swans. And today? Well, it’s just the opposite! They come back sometimes, holding their descendants’ hands on trips organized for pieds-noirs or for people affected by their parents’ nostalgia, trying to find a street or a house or a tree with initials carved in its trunk. I recently saw a group of French tourists standing in front of a tobacco shop at the airport. Like discreet , mute specters, they watched us - us Arabs - in silence, as if we were nothing but stones or dead trees.”
Harun relates the affiliation between the Arabs and the French before and after independence. The pre-independence epoch is characterized by the unwarranted mistreatment of the Arabs. The French employ Christianity when exploiting and subduing the Arabs. In the post-independence epoch, the French whom Harun encounters at the airport are still aloof from the Arabs. The French’s apathetic stares inform Harun that the French do not regard Arabs as humans. The manifestation of French tourists in Algiers provokes the Arabs’ nostalgia about the tyrannical colonial epoch.
“So, Mr. Investigator, I repeat , nothing unusual. Later, of course, I thought about it, and little by little, I concluded that there must be - among the thousand versions Mama offered, among her memory fragments and her still-vivid intuitions - there must be one version truer than the others.”
Harun relies on his mother’s shifting explanations to reconstruct the circumstances of his brother’s death. His mother’s remembrance is not clear-cut for it bids a number of clashing versions. Palpably, human retention is not explicitly flawless.
“Look around a little, here in Oran or elsewhere. It’s as though people have a grudge against the city and they’ve come here to trash it and plunder it; like a kind of foreign country. People treat the city like an old harlot, they insult it, they abuse it, the fling garbage in its face, they never stop comparing it to the pure, wholesome little town it used to be in the old days.”
The city dwellers purposefully adulterate the city as if it were their adversary. They are not sensitive to the caustic upshots of wrecking the city. Garbage is pervasive for the dwellers litter unremittingly. The dwellers are not utterly environmental- conscious. Likening the city to the ‘little town’ conjectures that its growth underwrote to its pollution. The emblematic harlot implies that all categories of refuse are indiscriminately discarded in the city.
