The Battle of Algiers/Bataille d'Alger

It is 1958. There are French soldiers at every street corner in Algiers, the parachutists of the Foreign Legion. The soldiers have a look of menace on their thin faces, ready to shoot with their puny rifles. The Arab residents of Algiers are afraid of the parachutists, but they hate them too. You can still see the hate in their eyes. The Algerians will always remember.

Algeria is in open revolt against the French, the partisans for the independence of Algeria against the Foreign Legion. Will will win the war, the Algerians or the French?

Marguerite is a French student on vacation with her fiancé, Marcel, paying a visit with Marcel's family in Algiers. Marguerite is twenty-three years old, with a degree from the Sorbonne. She is from a good family in France, but she sympathizes with the rebels. The cause of the FLN is the cause célèbre among the partisans of the left: Marguerite and Marcel consider themselves to be good Marxists.

One day, while Marguerite and Marcel are at the Arab market in the Casbah, there is a big riot, like a Tsarist pogrom against the Jews in Russia. They don't believe it!Drunk and disorderly, a crowd of French colons have attacked the Arabs at the market, having broken some windows, having overturned the tables of merchandise while the police and the soldiers do nothing.

In fear for their lives, Marguerite and Marcel duck into a little alley, in the doorway of a tenement. When they see a crowd of colons running up and down the alley, they frantically knock on the door. Fortunately, someone inside opens the door and lets them in.

There is a family of five Arabs inside, huddled together in a corner of the kitchen awaiting death. When they realize that Marguerite and Marcel are French, most of the family members want to turn them back out onto the street, but the father overrules them. "But they have asked us for our hospitality," he says firmly. "We must give it to them."

Marguerite and Marcel will spend five terrible days with this Arab family, who will share their meagre food with them. Sometimes, however, it's impossible to cook on the stove in the kitchen, because of the gunfire outside: a stray bullet could hit somebody inside.

During these dark days in the corner of the kitchen, the youngest of the family, a little girl whose name is Fatima, huddles up against Marguerite, who holds her in her arms and lets her put her head on her shoulder. The little girl speaks a little French, because she has been to school.

Little Fatima asks Marguerite, "Why do those people want to hurt us?"

"I don't know, my dear," Marguerite replies. "I don't know..."

Then she gives the little one two pecks on the head.

"Why are you with us rather than with your own people?" asks Hassane, the second child of the family. Hassane is about thirteen years old.

"They are not my people," Marguerite replies firmly. "You are my people now. I want to fight against the French, too."

Marcel, who is Marguerite's fiancé, is shocked. Even thoush he is a Marxist, he is also French. In his eyes, Marguerite is contemplating treason against her own people. As well, he doesn't like the Arab family very much, and they don't like him very much, either. He isn't very impressed with their meagre apartment, and he think that the Arabs are dirty.

As well, he has seen signs of affection between Marguerite and Mousine, the eldest child of the family. He is very jealous of Mousine, who is a student like him.

After some days, after the riots have died down, Mousine asks Marguerite, "Do you want to join us? We want you to be our comrade in arms."

Marguerite nods her head, breaking with Marcel right then and there. For four long years, she will fight against the French as a guerrilla in the mountains for the independence of Algeria. Then, after Algeria has won it's independence, she marries Mousine and becomes a Muslim, spending the rest of her life in Algeria. She will never see her family again, because her family in France has disowned her.

Marcel still sympathizes with the cause of Algerian independence. As a journalist, he will help expose the French atrocities of the French against the Algerians, sometimes at the risk of his own life. The members of the Secret Army Organization will even try to assassinate him with a plastic bomb, but without success.

But the woman that he has lost loves another: he has lost his heart during the battle of Algiers.

*****

C'est 1958. Il y a des soldats français à chaque coin de rue en Alger, les parachutistes de la légion étrangière. Les soldats ont l'air de menace dans leurs maigres visages, prêts à tirer de leurs fusils maigres. Les citadins arabes d'Alger ont peur des parachutistes, mais il les haïssent aussi. On peut voir toujours la haïne dans leurs yeux. Les Algériens se souviendront toujours.

L'Algérie est en grande revolte contre les Français, les partisans pour l'indépendance de l'Algérie contre la légion étrangière. Qui va gagner la guerre, les Algériens ou les Français ?

Marguerite est étudiante française qui est en vacanses avec sa fiancé Marcel, en rendant visite chez la famille de Marcel en Algiers. Marguerite a vingt-trois ans, ayant un diplôme de la Sorbonne. Elle est de bonne famille à la France, mais elle s'accorde des rébelles. La cause du FLN est la cause célèbre parmi les partisans de la gauche : Marguerite et Marcel s'estiment à être bons Marxistes.

Un jour, pendant que Marguerite et Marcel sont au marché arabe dans le Casbah, il y a une grande émeute, comme un pogron tsariste contre les Juifs en Russie. Ils ne s'en reviennent pas ! Ivres et turbulents, une foule de colons français ont assailli les Arabes au marché, ayant caché des fenêtres, ayant renversé des tables de marchandises, tandis que la police et les soldats ne font rien.

De peur de leurs vies, Marguerite et Marcel se cachent dans une petite allée, dans l'entrée d'un logement. En voyant la foule de colons qui courent en haut et en bas de l'allée, ils frappent à la porte frénétiquement. Heureusement, quelqu'un en dedans ouvre la porte pour les laisser entrer.

Il y a une famille de cinq Arabes en dedans, blottis ensemble dans un coin de la cuisine, en attendant la mort. En se rendant compte de Marguerite et Marcel être français, la plupart des membres de famille veut les mettre à la porte dans la rue, mais son avis est annulé par le père. « Mais ils nous ont demandés de la hospitalité, dit-il ferme. Nous devons leur le donner. »

Marguerite et Marcel passeront cinq jours terribles avec cette famille arabe, qui partagera leur nourriture maigre avec eux. Parfois, pourtant, c'est impossible de faire cuisiner sur la poêle dans la cuisine, à cause des coups de feu en dehors : l'une entre des balles perdues pourrait couper quelqu'un en dedans.

Pendant ces journées effrayantes au coin de la cuisine, la cadette de la famille, une jeune fille qui s'appelle Fatima, se blottit contre Marguerite, qui la serre dans ses bras et la permet à mettre la tête sur son épaule. La jeune fille parle le français un peu, en raison d'elle être allée en école.

La petite Fatima demande à Marguerite :

— Pourquoi les gens-là veulent-ils faire mal à nous ?

— Je ne sais pas, ma chérie, répond Marguerite. Je ne sais pas...

Puis elle donne à la petite deux becs sur la tête.

— Pourquoi es-tu avec nous, plutôt qu'avec ton peuple ? demande Hassane, l'enfant deuxième de la famille. Hassane a environ treize ans.

— Ils ne sont pas mon peuple, répond Marguerite, ferme. C'est vous qui est mon peuple maintenant. Je veux me battre contre les Français aussi.

Marcel, le fiancé de Marguerite, est choqué. Quand même il est marxiste, il est français aussi. Dans ses yeux, Marguerite envisage de faire une véritable trahisson contre son propre peuple. Aussi, il n'aime pas très bien la famille arabe, qui ne l'aime pas très bien non plus. Il ne s'impressionne pas grand-chose de ses maigres appartements, en croyant les Arabes être sales.

Aussi, il a vu des signes d'affection entre Marguerite et Mousine, l'aîné de la famille. Il se jalouse beaucoup contre Mousine, qui est étudiant comme lui.

Après quelques jours, après des émeutes avoir diminué, Mousine demande à Marguerite : « Voulez-vous vous inscrire avec nous ? Nous voulons que vous soyez notre camarade en armes. »

Marguerite fait signe de oui, en se rompant avec Marcel sur-le-champ. Pendant quatre longues années, elle se battra contre les Français comme une partisane dans les montagnes pour l'indépendance de l'Algérie. Alors, après de l'Algérie avoir gagné son indépendance, elle se marie avec Mousine et devient musulmane, passant le rest de sa vie en Algérie. Elle ne va jamais revoir sa famille, en raison de sa famille à la France l'ayant reniée.

Marcel, il s'accorde toujours de la cause de l'indépendance algérienne. Comme un journaliste, il aide exposer les atrocités françaises contre les Algériens, au risque de sa vie parfois. Les membres de l'Organisation de l'armée secrète essayeront même de l'assassiner d'un plastiquage, mais sans réussite.

Mais la femme qu'il a perdue, elle aime un autre : il a perdu son cœur pendant la bataille d'Alger.

Wandering Canadian

I look to the North where I can see
the colours of the Aurora Borealis
perfectly in my mind's eye

if I follow the North Star
long enough
I will arrive at Hudson Bay
where the Northern Lights run amok
where red and blue and violet
spill like wine from a drunk's decanter

I will follow the North Star
not as a runaway
but as a migratory bird

in the Mont aux Basques region of Quebec
my first ancestor in North America landed
he landed there in 1734

at a bend in the Ottawa River
my great-grandfather was blown to smithereens
he died there two centuries later
and was brought home in a box

somewhere in my genealogy
is a fur trapper who lied
with an aboriginal maiden

twice an ancestor named George Joanisse
married a woman
whose nom was Proulx

I am a métis,
as variable in colour
as the Aurora Borealis

I will return
to the land of my ancestors
where the restaurant hostess
pronounces my name correctly
when my table is ready

I will return
like the snow bird
like the dream of the Canadien errant

like a puck trapped
in the neutral zone
I will find the net

I will come back and blend
with the woods and the streams
the mountains and the rivers
the parks and the churches
streets and subways

I will stand in every doorway in Canada

I will lie down on the forest floor
like the maple leaf in autumn
I will grow in the fields
like the Madonna lily in spring

my blood will be potted in every garden

and when my time is come
I will die here
a Wandering Canadian
who has come home

this land knows me

Go Ask Andrew

I used to write an advice column, called "Go Ask Andrew," for one of those canards, or rags, where the best thing about it was that it didn't cost the reader anything at the newsstand; the advertisers paid for everything, including my salary (which was a meagre ten thousand dollars a year).

Then, one day, I found in my letter bag, this letter from one of my readers:

Dear Andrew,

I am nineteen years old now, and for the past two years, I have been involved in a hot relationship with this girl who's two years younger than me. The problem is that she's my sister. I know it's wrong to have sex with your sister, but I can't help it. Whenever I come home from university, she won't leave me alone. The last time we did it was over Christmas. I felt guilty about it afterwards, but it was some of the best sex of my life. What should I do? Should I see about an operation that will make my penis shorter so that she won't want it so much? There have been other girls since I started university, but I am—

Still into Sister.

The first thing I did after reading this letter was roll my eyes and laugh out loud. Surely, this guy must be joking, right? So what I do is fire off a response, because I needed something for my column. I wrote:

Dear SIS,

How do you expect me to respond to this letter? Do you expect to warn you about the likelihood of going to jail if you get caught? Do you expect me to say, "Stop, or you'll go to hell!" I am not a priest or a lawyer. I am just an advice columnist. So here's my advice.

When people read this letter, they are going to be laughing their asses off in public places like restaurants and bars. The moment that somebody discovers your identity, you will be held up to ridicule for the rest of your life, like Michael Jackson and Oscar Wilde.

You know that it's wrong to do it, but you do it anyway. Advice is freely given and seldom taken, but here's my advice: Keep on doing it, because she won't leave you alone until she no longer wants it. Trust me— that's just the way women are. In a year or two, she will be in university just like you are now, and she will meet lots of guys and lose interest in you. It always happens. Then, after she has met a few jerks like you, she will join some feminist consciousness-raising group on campus and claim that she was the victim of incest with her brother. You get more sympathy if you're perceived as the victim.

Until then, keep plugging away, because there's no way you can win at this game. Incest is like nuclear war: the best way to win is to not play the game in the first place.

Yours truly, Andrew.


Well, my column somehow got past the copy editor without anybody calling me to the mat, because it appeared in the next edition pretty much the way that I wrote it. When the managing editor, Marshall, saw the next edition, however, he hit the roof. The moment that he called me into his office, I knew that it wasn't going to be pleasant.

The first thing he tells me to do is sit down in the chair in front of his desk. Marshall is seated at his desk, with a photo from the 1970s of him shaking hands with Burton Cummings of the Guess Who on the wall behind him. Standing to his right is his secretary, Jennifer, a tall blond in her mid- to late-twenties with icy blue-grey eyes and squared features underneath her wire-framed glasses. She's beautiful, the perfect Aryan, but she is noted for the ruthless efficiency with which she carries out her duties, like firing people. They are also sleeping together, but that's another pair of sleeves. Jennifer is Marshall's Valkyrie, more or less, carrying away the dead at the end of the battle.

Marshall starts our meeting by throwing down the magazine in front of me, turned to my column. "What's the meaning of this?" he asks, angrily.

I shrug my shoulders and reply, "Some guy wrote a letter for my column, and I responded to it. I thought it was a joke."

He rises in his seat, his face up close to mine, and shouts, "So you think incest is a joke? You think some guy fucking his sister is a joke?"

I remain seated in my chair, but I reply just as calmly as I can, "You can't take these people too seriously, Marshall. Some of them are really nut cases."

Marshall concludes our little meeting by standing up and saying, "I want you to clean out your desk, Andrew. We have already hired a new advice columnist."

Before I leave Marshall's office, Jennifer shoots me a dirty look from underneath her wire glasses. If looks could kill, there might be a lot more dead Taliban in Afghanistan right now.

The newspaper that I worked for was willing to embrace any radical cause in Montreal. If a group of anarchists wanted to protest the razing of low-cost housing in the Plateau because some developer wanted to build new condos for the yuppies, they found a forum in our paper. However, we were dependent on advertisers. I was shown the door because I offended one of our biggest advertisers, some gentlemen's club on Papineau Street. At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

So I was out of a job. Not that it was a great job: I had to share my desk with the woman that wrote the horoscope for the paper, Esmerelda, who was everything that her name implied: original, free-spirited, about forty-five and still single. I said to her as I was cleaning out my half of the desk, "I guess I should have read my horoscope this morning, eh, Ez?"

Esmerelda shrugs her shoulders and replies, "Your life is what you make of it, Andrew. The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves..."

But she's nice about it , not at all judgmental, and she gives me a hug before I finish packing my things and go.

*****

A couple days later, I walk into the Krispy Kreme on Sherbrooke East while the green neon light advertising a free donut is still flashing. I like to go into those fast food places in downtown Montreal because I might get to practise my French. However, the person behind the counter will address you in English, if he or she hears the person in the queue next to you speaking in English; it happens to me all the time. You can get by in Montreal without speaking French, though that's not the best way make friends who are Francophones. I didn't have very many Francophone friends.

When I get to the front of the queue, the girl waiting on me asks, in slightly accented English, "Aren't you the guy who writes that column? I thought I recognized you from your picture..."

"Used to be," I reply. "I got sacked a couple days ago. It was about a column that I wrote."

She looks down, as if she's embarrassed, and says, "That's too bad."

Then she says, haltingly, "My shift ends in twenty minutes. I want to talk to you, if you please..."

Then she gives me my free donut, a glazed maple sugar donut. I order a medium Pepsi or a medium Coke to go with it.

For the next twenty to thirty minutes, I sit watching her as she waits on other customers. She's tall, maybe a little less than 182 centimetres in height, about five-foot ten or five-foot eleven inches. But she's really thin, maybe sixty kilos in weight, her body almost without contours: her breasts are small and her hips are very narrow; she has enough of an ass to sit on, that's about it. I figure that maybe her body will fill out once she has had children. Some women look cute when they are pregnant, you know, and she might be one of them. She has a pretty face even now, with a small nose and small, dark-brown round eyes deep-set in her square face. Her skin is pale and her hair is auburn, down past her shoulders. She has some allure.

When her shift is over, she sits down in front of me. She sits almost like a man, her right ankle on top of her left thigh. I notice that she isn't wearing any makeup either, or very little makeup. When she introduces herself, she daintily extends her right hand to me and says, "My name is Anne..."

She talks about herself for a few minutes; she says she's a psychology major at the University of Montreal. Her movements are nervous and birdlike, her phrases, clipped and open-ended. She fidgets with her hair from time to time, or combs it with her fingers; it's all very distracting. She speaks in a very soft and low voice, like she wants no one else to hear except me. Then she gets back to her sheep.

"I am the sister of the guy who wrote you that later," she confesses, almost in a whisper. "I was the victim of rape and incest..."

Of course, I don't believe it. Surely, this must be a joke, right? But like any good journalist, I try to keep my scepticism in check. You don't want to ruin a good interview. So I try not to pass judgment and encourage her to open up a little bit. I ask her if she would like to go somewhere else, where there's more privacy, thinking that the Krispy Kreme where she works might be a little too public. When she nods her head yes, we leave the Krispy Kreme and walk towards the Museum of Fine Arts.

"How did it happen?" I ask, once we are outside.

After a moment's hesitation, she replies, "I was fifteen years old then, he was seventeen. I am eighteen now. He starts to come on to me. At first, I think he's only joking, but I soon realize that he's very serious. I try to put him off, but in the end, he takes me by force. Nobody was home but him and me. It soon became a regular thing."

"Did you ever tell anybody about it?" I ask.

She bit her lip, shook her head, and said no. "People don't talk about things like that," she said, almost in a whisper. "When you tell people that you have been raped, some people think that you did it willingly. Whenever a woman is raped, Andrew, there are always people who think that the woman wanted it, no matter how violent or how forcible it may be. If you tell your parents that your own brother has raped you, they are shocked; they don't want to believe it. So I didn't tell them, because they wouldn't have believed me anyway."

"But didn't they suspect?" I asked, incredulous.

She stopped walking, looked at me hard, and said, "I think they must have suspected, but I think that they didn't want to know about it."

"This went on, what, three years?" I asked.

"Yes..."

"Anne," I said, as gently, as I could, "you must have stopped resisting at some point. It's not like you were a child while your brother was an adult, because you are close to each other in age."

When I stopped talking, she said nothing, waiting for me to continue.

"The guy who wrote me that letter," I continued, "complained of his sister coming on to him. She wouldn't leave him alone, he said. I'm thinking now that maybe his sister turned the tables on him. She started to flirt with him; she started to come on to him. Feeling powerless at first, maybe she suddenly realized that she had a great deal of power over him and started to use it. She became very aggressive sexually, whereas before, she was very passive, and he got intimidated. In the end, they were drawn to each other, because they found it mutually satisfying, but they also felt a sense of power. Power can be very intoxicating, you know."

We were now standing outside the Museum of Fine Arts. Then I did something Esmerelda the astrologist might have done: I took both of her hands, looked into her eyes, and said, "Tell me about it, Anne. Was it as good for you as it was for him? Did you enjoy it, and do you have any regrets now?"

Without averting her eyes, she looked at me a moment, and then she admitted, "Sometimes, it was good, very good. I enjoyed it. It all started with masturbation, when I was about twelve years old. The first time that I saw him ejaculate, it was incredible— I couldn't believe it! But we didn't start to have sexual intercourse until a few year later."

Then she added, "You must remember something, Andrew: having sex with a brother or a sister is like having sex with anybody else, once you start doing it. You don't think about the consequences of what you have done until later, maybe much later, in life. Then there's the shame when you realize that it's unacceptable, and that people will hate you for it. I think that maybe the shame is worse than the actual act itself. That's why I am trying not to have any regrets, so that I can recover from the shame and move on."

Since we are standing outside the Museum of Fine Arts, I suggest to her, "Hey, let's go inside and look at some dirty pictures."

So we go into the Museum of Fine Arts and walk around for a couple of hours, looking at paintings and sculptures. Then, when we are standing outside the Museum of Fine Arts again, Anne smiles slyly at me and says, "Hey, come see my Japanese etchings!"

Then she kisses me tenderly on the lips. I respond by kissing her back. When we kiss for a third time, we bump noses and laugh over it.

We ride the Metro back to her apartments in the Old City, somewhere off St. Denis Street, that she is sharing with a roommate. The first thing we do at her place is smoke a joint. Then we gradually strip naked as we make out on the sofa. With me sitting on the sofa, her eyes are really dilated, she slowly drops to her knees to give me a blowjob— you can tell that she's really high. But no matter how I try, I can only see her sucking her brother's cock. Not that it stops me from enjoying it: she sucks me off until I ejaculate into her mouth and swallows all of it. It's the best blowjob that I have ever had.

Then she stands up and runs the nails of her left down her left breast from the top to the nipple. Then she wipes her mouth with the back of her right hand, takes me by the hand, and leads me into her bedroom, where we explore each other's bodies with both our hands and our mouths. But no matter what I do, I see her brother's image hovering over us like a ghost. Of course, I don't know what her brother looks like, but I imagine him eating her pussy when it's really me eating her pussy. And when she cries out for the first time, I imagine that it's for her brother that's she's crying out, even though she comes at least three times with me, through my fingers, through my mouth, and through my cock.

When you make love to a woman for the first time, you might like to think that her body is virgin territory, but you are really having sex with all the previous partners that a woman has had before you. During the time that we are together, her brother continues to hang over us like the Angel of Death, until I realize that I can be anyone I want to be while I am with her: I can be her brother if I want, and she can be my sister; we can commit incest together, if we want. The mind is a very powerful thing, you know.

We fall asleep in each other's arms, scratch marks from her fingernails still on her left breast, little purple welts from my lips up and down her neck and on her breasts. Her skin is very pale, almost translucid, with little freckles above her breasts.

When she wakes up, she cooks me breakfast. It becomes a reguliar thing, for a while.


*****

The next week, I go to work to pick up my last pay cheque. Esmerelda, the astrologist, the one who does horoscopes for the magazine, notices that I was in form and asks me why, so I tell her. "You're young," she replies, shrugging her shoulders. "You're, what, twenty-three years old?"

Then Esmerelda tells me that Marshall has already replaced me with somebody else, some guy who will use his column to tell the world about his "husband" and preach gay marriage. The way I see it, he's way out in the potatoes, but that's another pair of sleeves.

That magazine was just a canard anyway.

Before we parted, Esmerelda kissed me on the lips twice. Then she smiled and repeated, "You're young, Andrew. You're young..."

I think she could taste Anne on my lips.