This evening I have written the fifteenth post for This Place of Happiness. It is not long until it gets published, and I am naturally apprehensive about the reviews.
My friend Muriel has commented on the posts, and leaves a like or a comment every day. I am very grateful to her. I am also very aware that she was born in France, and that the war in my novel is Algeria’s War of Independence, fighting the French. Because she is my friend I am particularly careful about how I write, and what I write; in the same way that I try to be careful and accurate about the place and people I have read about and written about.
There are very few French people mentioned in the novel, but I have tried to write the novel from the point of view of the women of Algiers and more widely Algeria. I have tried to show the good and the bad, and doing that am unable to avoid writing about the humanity and the hatred.
When I was a teenager I was a student nurse in London and I had Algerian friends. They treated me with affection and respect, and made me feel very welcome when I spent time with them. (The young Algerian men I met were very sweet and were always asking if I had sisters! They were very friendly!) I saw nothing that merited the awful reputation they had in London at the time.
I can remember sitting in a McDonalds in the middle of London, listening to two managers from the store discussing the interviews they were to hold later in the day. The older manager was telling the younger how to spot an Algerian, and said that he ’shouldn’t touch them with a barge pole’. It made me feel incredibly sad.
In the end, when I split up my my Algerian boyfriend, I didn’t treat him very well, and offered no explanations for my behaviour; but that is one of the reasons I have tried so hard to understand where he came from and what had happened to the women in his family during the second half of the 20th Century and during French Occupation. It is in a way, my apology.
I have made every effort to avoid stereotypes and imagine the stories that the strong brave women who came before could have told us; but it is possible that I have failed in this. Please know that I tried.
