Women, Resistance and Revolution (39 page)

The commandant grunted and extracted something from between Nefissa’s legs: he allowed the bloody cylinder of cotton wool to fall to the pavement.

‘The investigation is completed,’ the commandant announced. He took the handkerchief from his right sleeve and wiped his fingers; then he returned it to his sleeve.

‘You may go now, children,’ he told them. ‘You see that you have nothing to fear from French justice as long as you are innocent.’

Francis Fytton, Excerpts from ‘Manifestation’, a short story based on the demonstration for an independent Algeria,
Stand
, vol. 6, no. 3

Nefissa’s encounter with the forces of order took place in the context of a larger demonstration which Francis Fytton reports in his story ‘Manifestation’. It occurred on the evening of 17 October 1961 and was part of a whole series of violent instances which marked the
course of the war in France. More generally it is a metaphor of the way in which Algerian women in the F.L.N. encountered their colonizers. Nefissa distinguishes herself from the ‘wives’; she rejects womanhood because this implies passivity. Her consciousness comes as a militant, by identifying with the liberation movement, not from her femaleness. To the men though she remains a woman. With the ‘flics’ her submission is brought home to her. Under cover of routine and legality they humiliate her racially as an Algerian and sexually as a woman. She is completely helpless. Her only act of aggression is the traditionally feminine gesture with her shoe. Hanna is impotent. He cannot protect her as a ‘man’ by his own definition. Emasculated by the white men he is forced to collude with them in viewing her humiliation. He is included among the other men – he observes. He is congratulated on his desire to be French – he collaborates. Commitment to the F.L.N. is the only way in which he can regain dignity and self-respect. But Nefissa is stranded by her sex. Even if Hanna had been of her cell he would not have menstruated. Her sex, her thighs, the hand of the flic thrusting inside, the tampax, her whimper. ‘They will ask you about menstruation – say it is a hurt.’ It is her hurt – a hurt she holds between her legs, hobbling down the road while the flic wipes the blood from his hand.

The French colonization of Algeria held many ambiguities. The colonizers had many faces. The official façade was of progress, enlightenment, western culture. Official colonialism was shocked by the situation of Algerian women – veiled, confined in the home, without any say in whom they would marry, completely subordinate to men. The French made laws against polygamy and child marriages, campaigned against the veil and said girls should go to school. They started to erode with these western liberal concepts of emancipation certain points in traditional Algerian culture which had kept women completely subordinate. ‘Emancipation’, however, was completely imposed from outside – it was part of the take-over bid, part of the modernization of the firm.

Fanon describes how European employers put pressure on the man in industry. They were not content to own him at work, they extended their occupation into his home. They asked him if his wife wore the veil, if he took her out. Finally they suggested that he should bring her to the office or factory party:

The firm being one big family, it would be unseemly for some to come without their wives, you understand? Before this formal summons, the Algerian sometimes experiences moments of difficulty. If he comes with his wife, it means admitting defeat, it means ‘prostituting’ his wife, exhibiting her, abandoning a mode of resistance. On the other hand, going alone means refusing to give satisfaction to the boss; it means running the risk of being out of a job.
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There is something at once infuriating and enticing about the passivity and fatalism of the Algerian woman for the colonizer. They recognized that the older women possessed a particular kind of power to keep things as they were, and that the younger women’s acceptance of their men as masters prevented Algerian men from really bowing to their colonizers. The Algerian man remained sure of his manhood because he controlled his own women so completely. Fanon describes the significance of the veil in the psyche of the colonizers. Here the hidden reality of exploitation and domination appears. The veil persistently appears as a symbol of rape. ‘Emancipation’ to the European male meant the possession by western culture of the Algerian woman. He wanted her to see herself through his eyes, to decorate herself according to his standards. He wanted to give her the facial movements, the language, the façade of his own women. Then he wanted to take her. In the private world of sexuality she became again one of the subjected – Algerian. The European women connived indirectly in this, because while the Algerian aspired to be like them their superiority was confirmed. For the Algerian girl to become Europeanized meant sometimes a relative freedom. She moved into a territory marked by different boundaries. But essentially she exchanged one subordination for another and colonization scored a tiny but significant victory:

Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defence were in the process of dislocation, open and breached. Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer.
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The Algerian man, regardless of his political sympathies, sensed this. Cut off from the normal ties of the traditional family the
Algerian workers in France represented the profound uprooting of colonialism. At home the women were left to hold things together. The colonized man became somehow extraneous. The Algerian in Paris, rather like the Irish immigrant in London, was living in predominantly masculine company and in an alien culture. He lived in poor parts of the town or in the corrugated iron shacks which developed around building sites in the suburbs. He was restless, aggressive, easily insulted. He was filled with self-hatred in a society where superiority and dignity belonged to his colonizers.

The Algerian in his fantasy became a thief at night. He tried to steal back his manhood from the European woman because he was not able to confront her man. He was obsessed with revenge. He tantalized himself with sneaking encounters on the street at night, enjoying her fear as he closed the gap between them, walking faster with her sliding into the wall. He enjoyed too the vehemence of her rejection. He felt a momentary elusive sense of power as he cornered her and forced her loathing and contempt into his face. He waited patiently for consummation, when he could hold a white woman down as object, reduce her far below any Algerian woman, when his hands on her neck and mouth stifled her screams, and his hands forced her legs apart and her justice was powerless to save her. But this stolen sexual vengeance cheated the colonized man terribly. He realized he was becoming even more enmeshed in the structure of his oppressors. He was a cultural parasite. As the movement against the French became more violent, his allegiance became clearly polarized. His conception of revenge became politicized. The liberation movement was intimately related to hope of self-esteem and the qualities he identified with his manhood. The role of Algerian woman was most ambiguous. He wanted to reclaim her rather than liberate her.

The decision to involve women in 1955 was not taken easily. It was a product rather of urgency and necessity. They had helped the guerrillas in the mountains, but they had not borne real responsibility themselves. At first the wives of militants were approached, then widows or divorced women. Then young unmarried girls persisted in volunteering and finally forced the F.L.N. to accept support from all women. The women, still veiled, operated as messengers within the Kasbah, but as activities shifted into the European part of the town the veil made her conspicuous. It was unusual for a
young veiled Algerian woman to leave the Kasbah. Because of political commitment she started to go unveiled. She appeared as a European, flirting with the French soldiers and facing the insults and obscenities of Algerian men as she stood watch outside a meeting. From 1956 she was carrying bombs, revolvers, grenades. She had a false identity, and was responsible for people’s lives. Her actions and bearing mattered vitally. She was thrown out of her normal enclosures.

Fanon describes how her relationship to her own body changes. She walked differently now she was no longer contained and effaced by traditional clothing. But it has been by her own choice. It is frightening but it is not rape:

She has the anxious feeling that something is unfinished, and along with this a frightful sensation of disintegrating. The absence of the veil distorts the Algerian woman’s corporal pattern. She quickly has to invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control. She has to create for herself an attitude of unveiled-woman-outside. She must overcome all timidity, all awkwardness (for she must pass for a European) and at the same time be careful not to overdo it, not to attract notice to herself. The Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion.
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When the authorities started to search women without veils, the women wore veils again as a conscious political step. The symbolism of the veil was transformed. Originally the distinguishing mark between wives and concubines in the towns, it became the emblem of the Algerian woman’s confinement, and finally a revolutionary instrument.

Political activity changed the woman’s relationship to her family. She was forced to travel to other towns, sleep in strange places. It was only because of the urgency of the political situation that fathers and husbands were not overcome with shame. They knew that their acquaintances were sharing a similar experience. Young girls started to admire the women who suffered death and who were imprisoned for the liberation movement. They not only took off their veils and put on make-up, they joined the maquis living in the mountains with the men. They returned with new identities, full of ideas and arguments; and as for their virginity, how could their father question them about that when their very lives were in danger and they risked
more than he did. Gradually during the war the father’s control slipped. Marriages were no longer arranged. A new mode of women’s liberation evolved out of the national liberation front. This was not imposed like the colonizers’ emancipation; it came out of a situation which men and women made together and in which they needed and depended upon one another in new ways.

Militancy was not without pain, psychological and physical. Fanon mentions puerperal psychoses, particularly in the refugee camps. In the report of French atrocities in Algeria, published under the title
Gangrene
, the torture women were subjected to is described. Pain came also between men and women. Fanon describes the case of one of his patients whose wife was raped by the French. He had never really loved her, and he knew such violations were common. He’d seen peasants drying the tears of their wives after they’d been raped before their eyes. He knew too that she had protected him and his organization; she hadn’t talked. It had been his political involvement which had implicated her:

And yet she didn’t say to me, ‘Look at all I’ve had to bear for you.’ On the contrary, she said, ‘Forget about me; begin your life over again, for I have been dishonoured.’ And really he felt he had been dishonoured, but experienced guilt because he felt this way. His wife and child seemed rotten to him, he could not have intercourse with other women without being repulsed by the thought, ‘She’s tasted the French.’
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Conflict which is out in the open can at least be resolved. This inner conflict and pain consumed people in a different way. It was not observable on the surface; it effected an interior war of consciousness. It is not surprising that after independence the women militants received contradictory messages from the party. The party after all was predominantly masculine and the men did not stop feeling as men because they became militants. The inner structure of consciousness remained profoundly hostile to the liberation of women regardless of official pronouncements. Ben Bella might maintain that women’s liberation was not a secondary aim, that the solution to women’s oppression was a precondition for socialism. But the practical world of the Algerian woman presented a very different reality. She operated in an atmosphere which was completely defined and controlled by men. She was subjected continuously to sexual jokes,
paternalism and polite indifference. If she spoke in front of a room full of men on the suppression of polygamy there were likely to be roars of laughter. The temptation to glide back behind her veil, to hold herself back, not to push herself into the hostile barrage of male revolution, was intense. This was of course self-reinforcing. Although the party piously promised women posts, when each instance arose the men automatically decided the women were still too backward, too inexperienced, not sufficiently educated.

These were by no means problems peculiar to Algeria. However, the circumstances of the Algerian situation combined to stop women from breaking through the strength of male resistance. Politically, the enforcement of segregation after independence of male/female cells prevented the women from confronting the men at a local level. Moreover, the revolutionary government did not introduce laws which changed the laws relating to marriage and the family. Men could still divorce their wives by simple repudiation. The resulting insecurity meant that women were very afraid of resisting their husbands’ will. The internalization of women in the household was particularly strong and male suspicion of female emergence consequently very potent. The saying: ‘La femme fasse le couscous et nous la politique’ (’Women make food and we make polities’) carried a real force. This combined with the determination of the men to recover the power colonization had taken from them.