Karima Lazali - Colonial Trauma

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The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Series editors: Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay

Leonor Arfuch, Memory and Autobiography

Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia, Seven Essays on Populism

Aimé Césaire, Resolutely Black

Bolívar Echeverría, Modernity and “Whiteness”

Celso Furtado, The Myth of Economic Development

Eduardo Grüner, The Haitian Revolution

Karima Lazali, Colonial Trauma

María Pia López, Not One Less

Pablo Oyarzun, Doing Justice

Néstor Perlongher, Plebeian Prose

Nelly Richard, Eruptions of Memory

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa

Tendayi Sithole, The Black Register

Karima Lazali

Translated by Matthew B. Smith

polity

Originally published in French as Le trauma colonial. Une enquête sur les effets psychiques et politiques contemporains de l’oppression coloniale en Algérie © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2018

This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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To my son, Badri.

Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

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. 1My 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. 2The 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.