Part One: Stories of a Different Kind
They say at birth you begin your death. They even whisper loudly the call of the funeral prayer into the ears of wailing babes coming out fresh from the raw warmth of the womb—a sobering moment for mothers. But when the time does come, and it always will come, it is the final moments that encapsulate this life’s journey.
Though it was the beginning of his final moments, and he already knew it, his room remained rife with students, lining hospital halls soaking any last bits of cerebrations from him.
But he did not die inside those walls or in the land of the undertaker. He left France on his death bed, and was able to fly home to Algiers to bid a final farewell to his daughters — my mother and her sisters — who were old enough to know it was goodbye, but perhaps too young to know what goodbye meant.
A few days after his arrival to Algiers, on October 31, 1973, just before midnight, and poetically, just before the sound of the cannons commemorating the million and a half deaths of the November 1st Algerian independence war, Malek Bennabi died.
Fifty years later, his ideas remain alive.
Growing up hyphenated, my bedtime stories were not of the Aesop variety. Instead, under blankets and over bottomless cups of tea, my mother narrated to us her childhood.
Through her painted words, we traveled across time into the reawakened world of 1960s Algiers — a world just learning to breathe again after violently shedding its coarse colonial skin. She led us down winding lanes of white-washed walls and celadon roofs where we could almost smell the warmth of the salty sea breeze, and that’s when she brought him back — her Papa.
I liked to imagine him standing over his bureau, gazing through the sea-facing window, wearing the same pensive expression he wears in the picture hung on our living room wall. Sometimes I’d imagine him laughing with my mother or whispering the small secrets they kept with each other. I imagined his words, his books, his long sighs, and the bend of his shoulders when he sat to write — he was always writing, my mother would say.
Story after story, it seemed perfectly normal that kidnapping, assassination, and revolution were a natural function of my mother’s life. Those stories fascinated us. They were a far cry from our Californian nineties suburban childhood and we relished them.
But it’s the less glamorous stories, the ones not written into the books but into the hearts of my mother and her sisters, that impacted me most. I find myself living these stories in the subtleties of my everyday life. They are the lessons from a man of much rumination to his most precious audience — his daughters.
These are their stories. The stories that raised me.
