In the Name of Truth
Plastrik, S.
Here are two books—neither very large—both fitting quite easily into the pocket of one's jacket. Both deal with worlds far removed one from the other, and equally apart from our own world: in...
...Everything that touches their home consoles or wounds them...
...They are the ones who are watched, on whom the suspicion falls...
...I know why now...
...No excuses, in his own or his mates' eyes, justifies less than his quota...
...On the women's faces, tears have worn channels like gutters in eroded earth...
...They do not betray, nor do they forgive...
...They are, of course, cowardly and forgetful, like all men...
...His book emerges unquestionably as the most moving condemnation of the French in Algeria and the finest explanation of what the struggle is about...
...the writing is superb and the translation does it justice...
...To this list there now ought to be added Jules Roy's beautiful account of his return to his native land in the summer of 1960...
...I am thinking of Germaine Tillion's writings, of the Algerian playwright and novelist, Kateb Yacine, whose Faulknerian novel, Nedjma, has just been published in English...
...So many tears I shed, but you did not cry...
...Clancy Sigal, a young American writer has written, among other things, a first-class account of the American air force in Britain and some provocative studies of young London de linquents...
...The reader is drawn deeply by the spiritual drama of Davie, the young miner-artist who cannot tear himself away from the mine and whose very awkwardness in expressing his feelings about his life, his wife and family, his friends and Sigal himself, reveals the complex emotional web of Dinlock life...
...For this alone it is an exceptional example of documentary writing...
...This is a personal document...
...I believe Jules Roy's book had a great importance in bringing the French to realize that their struggle to keep Algeria was hopeless and that independeuce must come...
...His objectivity and preciseness are fired by a righteous anger...
...There was no need to ask...
...They incarnate the memory of insults inflicted in their person upon life...
...it is he and he alone who is the ultimate judge of how a particular wall or shelf shall be attacked...
...Weekend in Dinlock presents the village, its people, their way of life with compassion and understanding...
...anxious for their own safety, their politics are sometimes deceitful...
...The need to know how to handle his pick in such a way as to reduce a wall of coal four feet six inches deep by four feet six inches high by eight yards, the structure and consistency of whose mass can change from hour to hour, to a pile of coal rubble, of the required chunk sizes, weighing 17 tons in such a way as not to endanger the safety of himself and his mates nor impede the production total of his or the following shift, having in many cases to allow for the failures of the previous shift to properly prepare the coal face, and doing this on shifts of seven hours or more each day in team combinations which can change from week to week so that he may never be able to plan a sane personal existence, and knowing that this is the way it will be for the duration of his natural working life, this requires a fine and well-paced paying out of sheer brain power unmatched by almost any industrial operation I know...
...I am a stranger here...
...But the more I watch the more I see that to be a competent collier requires a substantial degree of both intelligence and skill...
...in the other, the most murderous and long-drawn-out nationalist war of our time...
...What griefs have they silently endured...
...Here he has written an account of two visits, separated by six months, to Dinlock, an imaginary coalmining village in Yorkshire...
...The power of the book — I am tempted to call it a novel—is measured by the tension set up between its author and young Davie...
...The men have their reasons, I suppose—often too many and too good...
...If the tone of both books is the tone of compassion, the trap of the sentimental fallacy is skirted because of each author's competence and knowledgeability...
...No doubt it is intended that way, and the filial scene—confrontation, rather—is set in Dinlock's mine...
...Jules Roy grasps every side of the Algerian tragedy...
...Berber song of Kabylia Algerian independence can no longer be held off, no matter what doubts one may have as to the regime that will come...
...Thus, both writers have produced works of superior political journalism often bordering on imaginative writing at its best...
...What anguish lay concealed there...
...In Dinlock he stays with a young miner friend who is also a talented, "natural" artist...
...Let me cite a passage written after Sigal has watched the colliers at work for an entire day...
...Small though it may be alongside the accumulated suffering the war has piled up over the years, there has come out of this war a store of writing and literature that will not be forgotten...
...At the face he is designer, organizer and executor in a task which must involve all the imperatives of production, schedule, personal idiosyncrasies and mood, the ever-changing grain of the face itself and the nuances of safety for himself and his comrades...
...Both deal with worlds far removed one from the other, and equally apart from our own world: in one case, Weekend in Dinlock, a miners' village in Yorkshire, England...
...they are the ones who are jailed or tortured, and who must choose their attitude...
...Here is why: Toward noon we reached a third village which, I was told, was a privileged one...
...I was assured it had not suffered excessively from repressions and exactions, nor known the great emigrations of terror, the flux and reflux of families...
...A mere argument with someone of higher rank, a whim, an impulse of jealousy sometimes persuades them to change sides and even to change back later on, when remorse or new fears torment them...
...The nen and children waved at us, but the women's glances were heavy with suspicion, and some openly turned their backs...
...But not the women who are incapable of subterfuge, except in love...
...Because both clearly come out of an intense search for the truth, out of a desire to see things clearly, with precision and honesty...
...Yet, despite this difference, I feel drawn to reviewing them together, to urging the reader to read them if not simultaneously then at least close to one another...
...Jules Roy, a third-generation FrenchAlgerian, novelist, playwright and former pilot in the French Air Force, does not discuss the big battles or the political maneuverings on top...
...He is uniquely responsible...
...For, in the last resort, the collier at the face knows that he, and he alone, is responsible for his quota...
...He writes of his family and his friends, of Algerian villages caught in the war, of a night patrol along the AlgerianTunisian border, of conversations with French officers, Algerian refugees in Tunisia, of people involved on both sides of a pitiless struggle...
...For one thing, the collier, unlike most industrial workers, actually plans his own work...
...Several—motionless terra-cotta statues—seemed not to see us, their eyes fixed and empty...
...For me, a village that had not suffered too much or that no longer suffered was one where men came out of their houses to wave at the soldiers...
...But Sigal goes beyond this...
...Clancy Sigal knows what he is talking about...
...More easily than one supposes, the men sell their brothers, giving ten times more information than is expected of them...
Vol. 8 • April 1961 • No. 2
