A Memoir by Madeleine Godard, Montpellieraine

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A friendly review of Memoire de l’Ombre: Une Famille Francaise en Algérie 1868-1944

By Madeleine Touria Godard

Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. 301 pp. 29 Euros.

Quelle ne fut pas ma surprise, par un matin ensoleillé de découvrir dans ma boite à lettres d’Amsterdam, une envelope aux allures anonymes: elle contenait un portrait photographique ancien. J’avais reçu auparavant, d’une relation éloignée, un arbre généalogique de la branche paternelle de ma famille, obscure jusque là, mais je l’avais égaré sous ces monçeaux de papiers si soigneusement classés, qu’on ne les consulte qu’en de rares occasions. J’avais cependent relevé la fréquence de prénoms desuets et de patronymes aux sonorités germaniques, vraisemblablement alsaciennes, mais ces inconnus familiaux m’indifféraient alors, leur passé n’effleurant en rien mon présent.

So begins expertly the superb family saga Memoire de l’Ombre by Madeleine Godard, world traveler, poet and essayist (born in Algiers, Algeria).

(First a short confession!) This book has been on my shelves nearly three years! If I take it out now, can the reason be anything but guilt? I’ll confess there’s not a little of that quantity in my motives but also genuine interest in work well done that deserved more attention than I could give it when it was published. Unfortunately, these days, I have little time to read let alone review anything.

Now a short digression. It struck me this afternoon that what I really liked doing in my free time was thinking & talking about books, but hate sitting in my dreary hotel room trying to discipline myself into some boring routine—while fantasizing about the great outdoors – such as the fun to be had at the Hilton or Danat swimming pools – and so this afternoon, exasperated by my confinement in the drab Arab business hotel room -- I took Memoire de l’Ombre and my writing equipment to the Hilton, and after ordering a cool pint of Stella sure enough rediscovered my enthusiasm for this book. Indeed, how dreadful it is to read in a desolate, lonely Poesque chamber… how enlivening on the contrary to bring a text into daily life at its best – the Hilton family pool which in response to the first really scorchingly hot day of this not particularly cool “spring” was absolutely buzzing with joyous splish-splashing and other acquatic activities for which less clothing is de rigueur whether one’s dress code is Muslim, Catholic or protestant.

French culture is perhaps more lively than most precisely for that reason – that it allows a mixture of fun, work and play in the same place – the street café. Other countries have tried to imitate it but it only exists truly in France.

The fact is that Memoire de l’Ombre is worth one read at the very least and here I am giving it a second at the swimming pool. That must say something about the solid appeal of the tome.

First, why should I, why should anyone be interested in Memoire de l’Ombre? The fact is it is not simply a family memoire – of which we find so many these days – rather it is the narration of a long personal exploration by the author into (for her) mysterious wartime events suffered by her parents with the key event being the death of her father during WWII in Algeria. [This setting, or one just next door, produced one of the greatest romances of all time, Casablanca.] Godard who was born toward the end of that cataclysm has always nourished a huge amount of curiosity about the circumstances of that event which reshaped so much of the world – and not only her small part of it in France.

As she already knew, however, from her mother's lifelong silence on the question, participants of that era, whether military or not, are often reserved about discussing it frankly with those who didn’t experience it. Why this is so depends – but often it seems the horrors of WWII were so intense that they are indescribable to non participants, and upsetting to those who try to recount them.

The author moreover is not only interested in the personal stories of her relatives but also in the broader context of world history, such as WW II and French colonialism in Algeria, in which their destinies were worked out. Some of her most interesting material deals with how, when and why the French colonized northern Africa: the project began in the early 19^th century as a result of quite a few causes, but an important one was--an aggressive government colonial policy to allay unemployment in Alsace and restore national pride after the disasters of the Franco Prussian War.

Godard traces in detail the path of that side of her family who originated in Alsace, migrated to Algeria, established themselves and became part of the French colonial community. Her father Edouard Dard was the grandson of one of the original settlers. The other side of her family came from Brittany, not a colonial family at all –rather a normal middle class family that reluctantly approved of their daughter Anne’s decision to move to Algeria to teach in a French government school. The author’s parents met in Algeria, fell in love, got married and had two children (Paul-Edmond and Madeleine).

Using historical French military archives and voluminous family correspondence, Godard recounts both her parents’ courtship and romance and the wartime events flying thick around them.

She is motivated by a desire to uncover what was for her a deep mystery – the taboo her mother placed on speaking of anything concerning the war and particularly her father; more specifically the facts of her father’s death were kept from her. This is the “Memoire de l’Ombre” of the title. After her mother’s death in France, a relative who happened to be a historian contacted her with hints of the existence of archives – containing both family and French Colonial documents—that might be of interest to her. These documents included a complete record of her mother’s correspondence with her father.

The author in fact tells us in her foreword that the whole book is an endeavor to meet her father for the first time. What she discovers is that her father was in charge of an Algerian battalion, trained them (he spoke French and Arabic), was moved close to the battle-lines in France, but after the French defeat by the Nazis was sent back to North Africa. Edouard died of TB while being treated in a wartime military hospital. She has a faint memory of visiting him but of course didn’t understand what it was all about. 

She deals gingerly and with a light hand with the romance of her parents recounted thru the huge correspondence they sent each other. They reveal themselves as sensitive, literate (both were deeply interested in literature), optimistic, brave and humorous. She also uncovered the medical records of her father and is able to put together a painfully complete account of his final days.

Godard’s historical research is far from superficial to my mind – it filled me in on many aspects of history (recent and otherwise) I was totally ignorant of –especially the rich description of lives of both French and indigenes during the French colonial period in Algeria; secondly and just as gripping WW II’s disastrous affects on France and its colony Algeria, which France, after a bloody civil war, finally liberated in 1962.

In the aftermath of these cataclysms – Godard describes her own distanced feelings toward that period; though a descendent of the pied noir tribe, famous for their “ultraist” sentiments, she has never sympathized with the ex-colonial rightists; first, Godard didn’t live in Algeria long enough to remember it well; second, her parents, as we see here, were always on the liberal side of politics in Algeria. Edouard, in an internal wartime report, recommended Algerian Independence.

(If I'm any judge of French style) the book is crisply and concisely written; the author maintains a distanced point of view, keeping her personal comments to a minimum; yet when necessary does allow herself to enter the story. After all, as the daughter of the two subjects portrayed, she is a part of the story. Godard also shows herself the heir of her parents’ literary leanings, including a treasury of literary references, particularly of poetry produced during the resistance period.

As for the greatest mystery in the book at least for the author—the reasons for her mother’s strict censorship of all knowledge of her father and his death, the author comes to realize that part of the silence came from a touchingly human motive: her mother’s refusal to accept the simple fact of his death.