Discretion by Faïza Guène

Author:Faïza Guène
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saqi

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

COMMUNE OF AÏN KIHAL

WILAYA OF AÏN TÉMOUCHENT

ALGERIA, 1978

Yamina felt as if Algeria had lost a father.

It was the month of December, and she was finishing off an order of a dozen turtleneck sweaters, plus long socks, to be sent to immigrant worker cousins in Grenoble. Everybody knew the winters came harsher in France. Yamina found her thoughts turning to these men when she had to defrost the freezer. She who had never seen snow.

‘No other president,’ Mohamed Madouri liked to remind his family, ‘will ever achieve the stature of Boumediene.’ But was he really a good and righteous man? A patriot who wanted to build a future for his freshly liberated country? No one in the family ever asked such questions: Boumediene had arrived as a saviour, and that put a stop to any challenges.

So, Yamina took her father’s and brothers’ word for it, admiring this man with his fierce expression. She was unaware of the fratricidal war that had taken place, and far from imagining that Algeria would live under a fratricidal sky for a long time to come.

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