Living Together
VALLS-RUSSELL, JEANNETTE
Perspectives LIVING TOGETHER BY JEANNETTE VALLS-RUSSELL SOREDE FOR CENTURIES, wars and massacres were rooted mainly in religious and/or seigniorial disputes. You might be English, your feudal...
...Even the notorious, almost caricaturally picturesque Casbah of Algiers—a labyrinth of ancient alleyways filled with shops—tolerated non-Muslims who behaved decently and did not display jewelry or feminine flesh...
...When I told them that we weren't...
...He gave her three and the next morning she returned them, saying she would think it over...
...Her mother, a French woman, had died young, and the girl had been brought up by her mother's sister in the open French way...
...My husband was invited to the men's quarters...
...Where...
...Algeria was a French colony until 1962...
...Muttering the appropriate greetings to these tough mountain villagers and desert nomads, we never felt the slightest fear...
...The biggest shop was a hardware store owned by a pleasant Spanish family...
...One night in the 1950s my husband...
...Most were founded only a few decades ago by the political chiefs of assertive groups who, with the connivance of ex-imperial officers, bullied minorities intojoining them in founding arbitrary kingdoms, emirates and republics...
...Pessimistic Europeans speculate whether the massacres may be God's or Nature's way of slowing down population growth...
...JEANNETTE VALLS-RUSSELL, who now lives in a small French town at the foot of the Eastern Pyrenees, is a new contributor...
...In one vicious triangle, the Turks have been abetting their recent adversary Saddam Hussein by crushing the Kurds of northern Iraq, whom they see as allied with their own Kurdish separatists...
...We would take a shortcut across a caravansary and push our way through groups of Arabs and Berbers who were loading and unloading camels that managed to look haughty even though kneeling...
...Are they, he asks, scared of real Africans...
...The town also had an Arab restaurant and an Arab cafe that admitted European women (if they had a male escort) but barred Arab women...
...Most Arab parents withdrew their daughters from school at puberty, veiled them and obliged them to marry the highest bidder—who might be a young rake or a graybeard...
...She lived just outside a busy market town and my aunt often sent us shopping there...
...The French Revolution and the invention of economics changed the rules...
...The alternate summers my mother and I fled Algiers' heat to a delightful hill town surrounded by orchards and streams, over-lookingtheChelif Valley...
...Neither did a second cousin of mine who taught at a government school in an oasis town that was 400milesbybus from Algiers...
...WHATEVER THE CASE, the notion of diverse communities living in harmony now seems a fantasy...
...An English journalist wonders why they aren't touring African trouble spots, denouncing the cruelty and corruption, preaching common sense, and bringing aid...
...Before a seemingly uncaring world, Rwandans indulged in the most brutal massacres since Stalin...
...More than once I wept with a pupil as she begged me to hide her or find her employment with a French family so that she could escape the servitude Arab society inflicted on women...
...On the whole, I have been told, the members of that government were decent people...
...The idea was not given a fair shake in Yugoslavia, a fragile mobile built to suit Tito's personal ambitions...
...As we walked up a winding street of steps, feeling like extras in Julien Duvivier's superb Pepe le Moko, we were greeted by two French policemen on patrol surprised to encounter Europeans after dark...
...Formerly one of the most advanced nations in Africa, it has been reduced to a disaster area...
...In Sudan, an endless slaughter continues to pit Muslims against Christians, and browns against blacks...
...It was my impression that relations among all of these people were good...
...The policemen wished the bridegroom many sons, downed some fresh orange juice and departed...
...Obvious models are North America, the European Union, Switzerland, and Australia...
...IN DUE COURSE, I left to marry (voluntarily) a journalist covering the Middle East—where nationalist and religious chauvinism was delighting the merchants of death, capitalist and Communist alike...
...Ours was the godliest quarter, with a mosque, a Catholic church and a little synagogue...
...The next time the family comes, just say: Ahmed, I need three blankets...
...A few months later she made the same request...
...For the first 20 years of my life, however, it was a reality to me...
...He taught me the virtues of public service, and I became a teacher in the French educational network for Arab girls...
...In a Mediterranean country with fine mountain and coastal scenery, fecund agriculture, petroleum, and tourist potential—whose military and religious leaders have somehow managed to bankrupt it and make its name synonymous with fundamentalism and murder...
...You now died for abstractions like the Nation and the Gross National Product...
...Few "nation-states" are what they pretend to be...
...Like the other women, I sat on a floor cushion beside a low table and was served couscous with a fiery red sauce locally considered aphrodisiac, then cakes dripping with honey, and then mint tea...
...I recall hearing, for example, of the Catholic owner of the hardware store having to put up several relatives for a night in midwinter...
...He felt unjustly forbidden to catch so much as a glimpse of the young bride...
...but, for internal party reasons, the post of Foreign Secretary went to Ernest Bevin, a blustering ignoramus whose Mideast-ern policy was made for him by a cynical cabal that included pro-Soviet elements...
...In the local shops one could find a Mozabitedraper, a Jewish grocer andcob-bler, a Corsican hairdresser, and a char-cutier from Alicante...
...Similarly splendid fare was not enough to console my husband downstairs...
...Yes, Algeria...
...We followed them through a maze of narrow corridors to a big old house, ablaze with lights and throbbing with North-African music...
...One summer in two my father, a postal official, took us to the French mainland...
...MY LEFT-LEANING father had suffered in a gas attack during World War I, but he clung to his belief that, given a fair chance in life, human beings were fundamentally good...
...Some European observers are surprised by the apparent indifference to these horrors among influential United States citizens who call themselves "African Americans...
...A short while ago, Arab nationalists sought to destroy the culture of the Berbers, the true natives of Algeria...
...Whatever their shortcomings, they are the world's most civilized?and most envied—entities...
...Many of its best-educated, most skilled citizens have emigrated to France...
...who to this day can't resist mysterious passageways in Arab or Spanish towns, took me there for a stroll...
...She lived amid Arabs, Berbers and Mozabites (who are considered heretics by other Muslims), celebrated their fetes and learned about their family life from the inside...
...I knew members of all three religions, as well as some teachers, other civil servants and a doctor who were agnostics...
...You might be English, your feudal lord Norman-French, and your king German (like England's rulers from I714to 1952) —it didn't matter...
...I was led upstairs to the women's floor...
...After 1945, a British Labor government even found itself promoting oil-linked Arab nationalism at the expense of the Middle East's oil-less Jews, Christians and Kurds...
...Their youngest daughter earned one franc (then worth about three U.S...
...Isn't it time to try for a less dingy world order, based on federal or corresponding groupings marked by a healthy mix of ethnic elements...
...So she told the Mozabite draper she was thinking of buying some blankets and asked if he would let her take a few home to see what looked best...
...On the threshold of the 21st century, "nationalist" and "ethnic" have become dirty words...
...Neither her tears nor the entreaties of her mother's family were able to move him...
...cents) a month by switching off the synagogue lights every Friday evening...
...I often visited my pupils' mothers in their homes...
...Having studied Arabic for six years rather than English in the French gymnasium I attended (it didn't occur to me that English might be useful one day), I was able to pay my respects to the bride—a small, tense teenager whose face the groom had not yet seen unveiled...
...He had decided she must marry a friend of his, a man in his 60s...
...EVERY YEAR as a child, I spent a week or two with a cousin in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains...
...After 1918, impressed by the toxicity of nationalism, politicians and prelates alike prostrated themselves before it...
...Money, not love, was the decisive factor in such unions...
...Some fathers came to see me, usually to urge me to beat obedience into their daughters...
...Today, nationalist and religious hatreds are the cause of much bloodshed in vast stretches of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Caucasus and the Balkans...
...At 18, she passed her baccalaureate exams and was ready to go on to a university when her father said: "No...
...but that in all my years in Algiers I had never been in the Casbah, one of them asked: "Would you like to come with us to a wedding...
...They inquired if we were lost...
...and at present it is being torn asunder by a ferocious struggle between Muslim fanatics anda secularist government...
...The draper grinned and said: "Look Madame Portillo, you don't have to invent a story...
...Good anticolonialist Americans may be skeptical, but when I was growing up Europeans and Muslims generally felt safe in each other's company...
...my fatherjoined us on weekends...
...Whether the king was squabbling over a bishopric or a concubine, it was the lord's duty to fill the ranks of his armies, and your duty to kill or be killed wherever you were sent...
...Yet this is mild stuff compared with events in central Africa, where murder has become almost a matter of policy...
...One of my first postmarital acts was to put a revolver in my handbag...
...I remember vividly the despair of a young woman whose father was a wealthy, high-ranking Arab dignitary...
...That perspective is denied male specialists on Islamic affairs, and no doubt explains why their social observations tend to be superficial...
Vol. 78 • July 1995 • No. 6
