The Misdemeanor of Hospitality
In the summer of 2021, Algeria and the Mediterranean Basin (as well as other regions in the world) experienced a massive wave of forest fires. Entire mountains were burned. That summer was difficult, even for those in the big cities. The heat, humidity, and ash arrived in the form of dust, and the water crisis had just begun. Drought and dry weather throughout the year left the reservoirs almost empty. This came a year after the pandemic. The year before that, the Intifada happened. It was then that the climate crisis appeared clear as day to everyone.
I spent those days helping two friends prepare for their wedding. They lived in a neighborhood that sat atop the high and haughty area of Hydra. Their neighborhood consisted of two large buildings that intersected in an L-shape, built by the French a few years before they left the country. They lived on the eighth floor and had no elevator, only a strenuous staircase. Apart from these two buildings, the area contained only luxurious homes, embassies, and residences for diplomatic missions.
During the water crisis, among the hundreds of apartments and houses scattered around and inside the two buildings, the only place that had water on tap was a miserable place, underground, where a group of Malian refugees lived “in the shadows.” Every day, they peeled crates of potatoes, chopped them up, and packed them in large plastic boxes, all for the benefit of an Algerian trader who later sold the produce to restaurants.
The group contained men, women, and children. How and why they had running water 24/7, while the rest of the area either had no access at all, or only in the early morning, before it was cut off, nobody knew. But it was to them we ran with all our empty plastic bottles, and buckets. It was a strange sight, even to those who refused to consider it: we, the "natives," who mostly didn’t speak to or even approach these people, suddenly lined up before them, begging for their generosity.
For more than a decade, tens of thousands of people have poured in from the Sahel towards North Africa, fleeing drought, terrorism, and poverty, under the harshest, often impossible conditions, hoping to continue their odyssey towards the southern coasts of Europe by using the same means the North Africans used to cross: barges and small boats whose motors often betrayed them midway through the journey. Hundreds were lost or lost their lives in the vast desert, others died on the sidewalks of cities, and thousands drowned in a sea they had just seen for the first time. As for those who survived the desert but did not go to sea for one reason or another, these were mostly women and children, living in groups on highway shoulders, near the rush hours’ congestion points. They would spread around the cars to beg, or head towards the big streets, hands outstretched. Others, the men among them, worked on construction sites for a pittance, and lived without papers, insurance, or schools for their children, many of whom were born in Algeria, spoke our dialects, understood the logic of humor and seriousness in the of Algerians’ speech patterns, and even began to imitate them, as we could see on TikTok.
Yet our standing at the threshold of Malians was an ordinary thing, a customary request among humans to ask for hospitality and generosity, just as in the ancient Arab and African tales: “If on a summer afternoon a stranger …” But the matter is more complicated nowadays. These immigrants came to Algeria seeking hospitality, and they still are, but they found themselves in a gray area between conditional and unconditional hospitality.
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How can we translate the English word “home” to Arabic?
Here are some suggestions:
وطن Country?
موطن Habitat?
بيت Dwelling?
منزل House?
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I first heard about Zaki Hannache during the 2019 Hirak demonstrations in Algeria. I had read his Facebook posts, and more than one fellow journalist told me about the work of this young man, who took up civil law during the demonstrations of February 22, 2019. In short, Zaki was documenting all the arrests and detainments of citizens during or after the anti-government protests. He was alone, a simple employee in a municipality on the outskirts of Algiers, a traveling human rights office. He would record, collect information, then publish it online -- and had nothing to his name but his words and the facts.
It is not difficult for anyone today to imagine the hardships of a young man anywhere in the world who decides to devote his life to volunteering and activism, especially in a country like Algeria, where individual and collective freedoms are not guaranteed, and the press is not independent. I didn't get to know Zaki, we never got the chance, but I heard that in 2022 he was arrested and imprisoned on serious charges. He spent a few months behind bars, then got out. I met him by chance with a friend on a street in the capital. We talked about the movement that was halted by the coronavirus, about repression, about mistakes in organization, about failed revolutions, about hope and despair.
I caught a glimpse of him again in a bar downtown. Then I heard that he fled -- no one knows how -- across the border into Tunisia.
However, going to Tunisia is not a safe solution. Since its political and economic crises in the era of President Qais Saeed, it has virtually become part of Algeria, and it is now much easier to hand over individuals fleeing political detention. Months later, I read on Zaki's Facebook page that he had presented himself to the Tunisian office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and obtained refugee status, living in secrecy to protect him from being deported back to Algeria while he waits for a certain country to accept his request for asylum.
He wrote that day that he had lived through the most difficult experience of his life: "I cried terribly, and I am still crying (...) I have been through many painful situations in my life, and I always got over them, but this situation still hurts me and breaks my heart day after day. I have become a little child, crying whenever I hear the word ‘Algeria’. I could not accept the idea that I am exiled from my homeland. Fire is raging in my heart.”
Before he became a refugee and during the months of political upheaval and hope, I had read on Zaki Hannash's Facebook page a post shared diligently by loyal novices about the difference between "irregular immigration" and "illegal immigration." He says that the second term, used by the press and the people, is "incorrect and misleading,” and that immigration may be irregular or clandestine, but it is not illegal… because immigration is a human right.
Today, Zaki is far from his homeland, a few hundred kilometers away, waiting for a call that will determine his fate and take him somewhere even farther.
In his essay collection One-Way Street, in a section titled “Ordinary People” and a paragraph titled “An Old Geographical Map,” Walter Benjamin writes: “The majority search in love for an eternal home. But others, very few, search for the eternal journey. The latter are melancholics who must dread contact with the motherland. The being they are looking for is the one who removes the melancholy from the motherland. They are loyal to him. The medical books in the Middle Ages know the melancholy of this type of people after long journeys.” [1]
I read this and think about the difference between “homeland” (أرض الوطن) and “motherland” (الأرض الأم). We certainly can use the term “motherland” to refer to where we were born, or where our family is from, but “homeland” may be somewhere else... It is not necessarily the “mother” -- and the same applies to language. There is a mother tongue and there is a chosen tongue.
I mention Zaki’s story as a kind of public declaration that perhaps even those who have experienced the regime's worst and most arbitrary injustice have not forgotten that there are refugees among us too. We are not the only ones who had to suffer from incomplete citizenship. Some have it worse, with no papers or a roof over their heads. In front of the dream of immigration, regular or otherwise, everyone is equal, whether they are from Algeria or beyond the desert.
We as Algerians experienced the long night of colonialism, massacres, civil wars, and asylum -- before and after independence -- but we tend to forget this in the midst of daily life, and many of us get too comfortable in the role of the victim, or let's say the complainer, and not the recipient of complaints.
We forget, as Algerians, that “food of one is enough for two,” and much of the time we get preoccupied with our petty little wars about identity and how the crumbs of wealth are distributed. The State and its institutions oppress us one hour and neglect us the next. We should not forget, in front of all those who live among us and whom we pretend to not notice on the sidewalk, before whose hands we roll up our car windows, that we are not full-time victims. We should take the time to share with these people what we have -- and we have a lot.
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Do we say “refugee” or “immigrant”?
Do we call those who arrive in Algeria from the south “Africans” (as if we are not Africans ourselves), or do we call them by their nationalities, or do we use the loose term subsaharien?
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A few days ago, we heard about the death of Alfred Kaminsky (1925-2023), the French photographer and forger, born in Argentina to Russian Jews. Kaminsky did a great service to the National Liberation Front (NLF) throughout the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) by providing forged passports and papers to fighters. After independence, he received a “Mujahid Card” like any other Algerian who took up arms or participated in the war. He then moved to live in Algeria, stayed there for ten years, married an Algerian woman, and had a daughter and son with her.
After Kaminsky’s death, in the state’s official narrative he was recognized as a “friend and supporter of the Algerian Revolution.” A government publishing house released an Algerian edition of Sarah Kaminsky’s biography of her father. This does not concern Kaminsky alone, who left Algeria in the eighties and returned to France. Rather, it concerns almost all the militants of the Algerian Revolution who were not of Arab-Berber origins, or "indigenous peoples,” as the French colonialists used to call them.
But when did this distinction between "revolutionaries" and "friends of the revolution" begin?
One version is given by an Algerian friend of European origins, whose parents were mujahideen in the war, Algerians loyal to the cause and contributors to building the country after independence: today, after their passing, they are simply referred to as "friends of the revolution," even in the small hospital on Pasteur Street in the center of the capital that bears their names, where on a marble plaque by the entrance we can read, “Two friends of the revolution, Claudine and Pierre Chaulet.” The phrase began to appear in the late eighties, from the pens of journalists on one hand and from the mouths of politicians on the other... Someone would use the term “friend of the revolution” and someone else would repeat it, until it was adopted in official discourse. Thus, everyone was expelled from the purely "Algerian" party, so that we would remain alone and among ourselves, or as the popular proverb says, "We’ll do us and let the outsider forgive us.”
On the subject of the outsider, let us go back in time a little, to before Algeria's independence, not to talk about the outsider/stranger Albert Camus, but about someone else, a contemporary of the French writer also born in Algeria – that is, to a Jewish family of Algerian origin -- and set out to conquer the world: the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Derrida was born into an Algerian Sephardic Jewish family, whose existence preceded French colonialism, but who, unlike the Muslim Algerians, and like the rest of the Algerian Jews, obtained citizenship by virtue of the 1870 Crémieux Decree. He grew up in Al-Abyar, between the Hydra area, where my story of the Malian immigrants took place, and the center of Algiers, where the Claudine and Pierre Chaulet hospital is, before moving to France at the end of the forties and from there to the wider world. Algeria became independent in 1962, and the Jews left with the European colonialists, for reasons that it would take too long to explain.
Derrida would return to Algeria only once, in the seventies, at which point he permanently cut himself off from his ancestral homeland. And the homeland itself would be cut off from many of his followers, who for a long time shaped his image and identity.
Derrida wrote very, very, very much… (and here I want to ask, with the reader’s permission: where did he find all that time, he who wrote a book titled Given Time, to write everything he wrote?). Among the many topics this Jewish boy who used to speak the Algerian-Jewish dialect and lived in a colonial society touched on, his book Monolingualism of the Other deals with his relationship with the French language. Derrida talks at length about what was permitted and prohibited in the French school at the time of Vichy and the Nazi occupation. He also raises the Jewish-Algerian issue and the linguistic differences that the Sephardic Jews encountered later in France when they met the Ashkenazi Jews. Many questions also revolve around the subject of hospitality. Who hosts whom? And in which language?
"What is the future of a country, a culture, and a language when we dare to speak of 'a misdemeanor of hospitality' (جنحة الضيافة), when hospitality, in the eyes of the law and its representatives, becomes a misdemeanor?" Derrida asks at an event in solidarity with refugees and French citizens who opened their homes to them, thus making themselves guilty of "misdemeanor of hospitality."
Since the eighties, Derrida has been working on the issue of hospitality in language, drawing from experiences of writers of the Maghreb, such as Assia Djebar and Abdelkebir Al-Khatibi. He was interested in the intersection of languages in their works written in French, the language of the former colonizer.
There is generosity and goodwill in the immigrant who visits the cities of others and learns their language. Derrida himself came from Algeria to Paris in the fifties and experienced alienation and exile, in body and language.
When I started writing poetry as a child, I tried to imitate the Arabic poets of the twentieth century, especially Nizar Qabbani and early Mahmoud Darwish. I never left the word "homeland" out of my poems. I used to cry about this “homeland,” but its meaning was cloudy in my head. Sometimes I meant Algeria and sometimes I meant “the Arab homeland,” a homeland I knew only in books. With time, with the diversification of my readings and my discovery of a new kind of poem that is more modern in structure and simpler in terms of writing -- here I mean the prose poem of Sargon Boulos, Wadih Saadeh, and Salah Abdel Sabour, even though he was older -- the word “homeland” in my poems was slowly replaced by “city.” As I progressed in writing from poems to short stories, then to the practice of journalism, the geographical area of my homeland kept getting smaller until it became the size of the neighborhood in which I live. The homeland might even become a one-way street, with my house at its end.
Returning to the Malian refugees: months after the water incident, whenever I visited my friends’ house, I noticed that the store that had been occupied by the Malians was closed. When I asked, I was told they left: the security forces had come and evacuated the place. Was this shop, I wondered, their "temporary homeland”? They were certainly "temporary" for the residents of the neighborhood. They lived in obscurity and did not mix with the Algerians. I only remember their children, no more than two years old, playing in the small yard in front of the shop and moving with hesitant steps between their families who were busy at work and the people sitting in the café. The Algerians did not speak the Malians’ language and the Malians did not speak the Algerian darija. Only the children, being born here and more accustomed to the language, grew up uttering a few words.
I imagine the journey of that group: women, children, and men, the oldest of whom may have been at most 35. Throughout my years as a journalist, I have tried to reconstruct the storyline of their deportation based on what I read in NGO reports and statements by the Algerian Ministry of Interior.
Security forces raid places where immigrants gather or work. They are loaded into buses and driven in convoys by the Algerian Red Crescent to Tamanrasset, 1,200 miles south of the capital, and from there to a place called "Point Zero" on the Algeria-Niger border. They are then dumped in the desert, in the middle of nowhere. Most of the time, this is done without coordination with the Nigerian authorities, and the deportees are left to get lost and die as they walk towards the village of Asamaka, where migrants gather.
There is no difference between a Nigerian, a Burkinabé, an Ivorian or a Senegalese person when they return to Point Zero. In the eyes of the forces that collect them from cities all around Algeria to then ship them across the border, they are all "Africans." According to the Algerian Red Crescent, during the "expulsion journey,” refugees and their children are guaranteed medical treatment and vaccinations for infants. And farewell.
Point Zero. That is what all the reports call it. After these immigrants cross Algeria, a country the size of a small continent from the south to the north, some of them staying for years and others for months, they are returned to Point Zero, as if their journey farther south would be taking them into the negatives. Below zero. Is this the homeland? What's above zero? Is everything below no longer homeland? What about those who live below zero within the borders of the country?
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Who has the right to open the door?
Who has the right to hospitality?
Who can be prosecuted for a misdemeanor of hospitality?
Who has the right to close the door?
Who has the right to evict a guest? Is there a right to evict a guest?
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Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Rajeh
[1] Translator’s note: in the author’s Arabic rendition of Benjamin’s German.
Salah BADIS lives and works in Algiers, where he is a language worker, a storyteller-journalist-podcaster through text or sound, at times poet & short story writer. Among his publications are the poetry volume ضجر البواخر [Ship Weariness] (2016) and the 2019 story collection هذه أمور تحدث [Things Happen…] as well as translations into the Arabic of Jean Sénac, Joseph Andras, and Eric Vuillard. He is a producer at a regional Arabic-language slow journalism platform.