The Suffering of the Immigrant

Abdelmalek Sayad, David Macey

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509534043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Discrimination et relations raciales

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the condition of the immigrant and it will transform the reader's understanding of the issues surrounding immigration. Sayad's book will be widely used in courses on race, ethnicity, immigration and identity in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, politics and geography.

• an outstanding and original work on the experience of immigration and the kind of suffering involved in living in a society and culture which is not one's own;
  
• describes how immigrants are compelled, out of respect for themselves and the group that allowed them to leave their country of origin, to play down the suffering of emigration;
  
• Abdelmalek Sayad, was an Algerian scholar and close associate of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu - after Sayad's death, Bourdieu undertook to assemble these writings for publication;
  
• this book will transform the reader's understanding of the issues surrounding immigration.

1
The Original Sin and the Collective Lie

The text we are about to read is a translation, which is as literal as possible, of the discourse of a Kabyle emigrant recorded in France in 1975 on two different occasions: before and after a holiday in Kabylia. The commentary that is offered on it is not there to attenuate, thanks to linguistic or ethnographic notes, the opacity of an authentic discourse that mobilizes all the resources of an original language and culture in order to express and explain experiences of which that culture and language know nothing, or which they reject. The opacity of a language that is not immediately comprehensible is perhaps the most important piece of information – or at least the rarest kind of information – we could hope for at a time when so many well-intentioned spokesmen are speaking on behalf of emigrants.

‘I was orphaned at a very young age. In reality, I am the son of an old man – or, as the saying goes, a “son of a widow”.¹ It was my mother who brought me up, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. My father “left” me when I was eight – so I am the last of the brood – Even then, before my father died – he was very old – it was my mother who took care of everything; she was already “the man of the house”! In any case, an old man’s wife is always an old woman! I don’t know how old my mother is, but she is much younger than my father, she’s younger even than my elder sisters [who are in fact his half-sisters]; my father was married three times, I think, or at least had children by two different women.’

‘I am the son of a widow’

‘As far back as I can remember, I’ve always seen my mother working both inside and outside the house – and that’s the way it is to this very day: she never stops. I remember my father only as an old man who never went any further than the doorstep.

‘My mother is difficult; that’s what they say, that’s the reputation she has, but I think she needed to gain that reputation to defend herself, so as not to be “eaten” alive by others. A widow who remains at the mercy of her brothers-in-law, who has to wait for her son to grow up for there to be a man entering and leaving the house, is definitely not in a good position. If she doesn’t defend herself, they eat her, rob her. For her part, she didn’t do anything to humour them. I can say it now: which of my uncles hasn’t at the very least insulted her? How many times has she been beaten? And always by her closest relatives, not by strangers. If the man who is most closely related to you doesn’t harm you, a perfect stranger is not going to harm you. Where would someone who isn’t a close relative come from? As for a complete stranger, it’s not worth talking about; he would be afraid, because she is still the Xs’ woman. But what does a relative have to fear? He can always say: she’s our woman; and it then becomes something between relatives: the closer he is, the more he can let himself go. A lad like El – and it has to be said that he’s calmed down a lot – what’s there to hold him back? Do you think that “shame would eat his face,” that he would say to himself: “My uncle [the immigrant’s father was still alive at this time] is old, he has nothing, he has nothing, he can do nothing, he’s only got her and, fortunately for us, she’s there, it’s she who makes sure ‘his house is full’ ”? Not a bit of it…

‘When I compare the earliest years of my childhood with a few years later, I can even say that perhaps they showed my mother greater respect after my father died than during his lifetime. It’s true, you’d think that “hearts” have changed since then …. That’s what the life of a “son of a widow” is like! At a very early age, I had my fair share of troubles, cares and worries. It’s not age that makes men, it’s what happens over their heads; a man makes himself through his actions, and not because he’s received a name from his ancestors. He may well be so and so – and yet, what if there is nothing inside him, what if “his market is empty”?’

‘You didn’t get up early, so why are you going to the market?’

‘… Do you think that in their day [the allusion is to events going back to the years 1942–4 and to people who died, one in 1954 and the other in 1958] my uncles M.E. and N.L., who robbed my father of the only bit of land he owned, and which he ceded to them as a security against his debts, during the hard years of elboun [i.e. the years during the Second World War, when the system of ration cards was in force], so as to be able to buy, according to what people say – it was before I was born – barley in order to survive; do you think that they would have done what their children are doing today? “You want to build a house?” “OK, here’s half a plot of land, we’ll give you it, go and dig the foundations.” With them, such a thing would have been impossible. Is it because hatred has left their hearts, or because stomachs are fuller these days? First, now that you can find no one to quarrel with, there is no more reason to quarrel. The insults, the screams, the hatred, the blows of the past – what was it all about? Someone walked through someone else’s field, broke down the fence around his neighbour’s field or diverted water from the canal when it was his turn to irrigate his own field. That was what fuelled the quarrels “part already there, part added”. All that, all the hatred, all the ill feeling, those rages, those ancestral enmities handed down from father to son, as they say – it was all about land. Now that there is no one left to take care of the land, there are no longer any pretexts for quarrels. Why hold anything against a woman these days? Especially when you then have to go and ask her to take care of land that no one wants any more. All those who, in the past, couldn’t tolerate my mother going near their trees, the fences around their fields, now beg her to work their land even though she doesn’t even own a chicken. Peace has returned to earth; even though there are still reasons for men to quarrel, the women are kept out of it.

‘The mother of a “son of a widow” is forgotten only when he has proved himself to be a man; otherwise, he will always be the son of such and such a woman. Under those conditions, how do you expect him not to be in a hurry? But when you are in a hurry, you can’t do anything: you don’t know where you’re going; it might be “light” [success, happiness], just as it might be “darkness” [failure, misfortune]. It takes courage. How do you put an end to this situation? how do you get out of it?

‘All I could do was work. At the beginning, I worked a lot. I could see that my mother never stopped working, and I started work as soon as I could. I’ve worked everywhere, for everyone, done everything, for money, for charity [without being paid]; I’ve ploughed, I’ve harvested the fields for all my relatives; I didn’t even wait for them to come and ask me, I offered my services myself. What could I lose? I was paid in one way or another. Better do that than twiddle your thumbs. And I really was paid for my trouble; I’ve been paid in money, in services rendered, in kind, and especially in food. I could bring in the harvest for all my relatives; they couldn’t refuse me that because I didn’t spare any effort. I was encouraged on all sides. On all sides, they used to say: “M. is a worker – he still takes care of the land.”

‘I was a sharecropper – I even had a pair of oxen, and that had never been seen before in the house; no one could remember ever seeing an ox cross the threshold, and I’m not talking about the door that is there now. I mean the door of our ancestors. So in the space of a few years, I became a real fellah. But that did not last long, only until I woke up and realized that even the condition of a fellah [thafalahth] was my lot only because it had been neglected by all the rest of them. As the saying goes: “You didn’t get up early, so why are you going to the market?” So I said to myself: “Have a rest!”’

‘I became a “casual fellah”’

‘I was overcome by lassitude. Why should I make such an effort? I’m just like everyone else. Am I any better than all those people who own land, but who look at it only from afar, and entrust it to me to work it? Their arms aren’t paralysed, after all. There are moments when I catch myself saying: “You’re the biggest fool of all; while you are wearing yourself out, he [the owner of the field] is living a life of ease, a comfortable life, doesn’t give a damn (‘a hundred come in and a hundred go out’). And what do you get out of it?”

‘I was surprised to find myself behaving like everyone else. I became a casual fellah, working just as a last resort, when I was forced to do so. Bit by bit [gradually], I found myself, in only a short time, in trouble because of all the habits I’d got into, all the past commitments, all the land I’d accepted. For her part, my mother started following me around too; she was furious with me, and never stopped complaining, day or night, to my face when we were together, behind my back when she could find a sympathetic ear. She thought she could put pressure on me by giving up a lot of the outside jobs she did. “If you don’t want to do anything any more, I’m fed up with it too; it’s no longer worthwhile working myself to death all by myself. When you were little I made you a house, but now that you are grown up, it’s up to you; whether you want to have a full house or an empty house; it’s up to you. I don’t want to do it any more.” She actually got rid of all the patches of land she was renting, keeping only the garden and a little patch of land close to the house. That became her domain, and she looked after it by herself.

‘Our country is fine for anyone who asks only to live [feed himself], as long as they are willing to live “according to the state of the land”: you work all the days without counting, all the days that God sends, you bring in what you need to live on and what you bring in is all you have to live on. Everything else is ruled out. If you are satisfied with that, so much the better; if not, you have to start running. It’s not as if it was just a matter of a hungry belly. It’s true that no one goes hungry these days; but hunger is not just about what you need to put in your belly; it is also a hungry back [which has to be clothed], hungry feet [which need shoes], a pain in the stomach [which has to be cured], a hungry roof [which has to be mended], a hungry head [children who have to go to school]. It’s not just a matter of: if you have no salt you eat tasteless food, or if you have no kerosene you go to bed in the dark! So you mustn’t want anything, and above all you mustn’t need money. But it is money that everyone needs; even in the village, you have to buy everything, like in the city. It’s become the elfilaj village.’

‘France is the only door’

‘It wasn’t because I’d got rid of everything to do with agriculture, sold the oxen and the donkey and handed back the land to its owners, that it was all over and that I stopped work altogether. No, I went on working, but in a different way – different things, anything. If I have to work in someone else’s fields, it’s either because I want to do him a favour and work one, two or three days; or, it’s as a day labourer and then, in the evening, he has to put down my day [day’s wages] in front of me. It’s obvious. Working on the land is like any other kind of work, so long as it brings in some money. It’s no harder than working with the masons, or on a truck, and I’ve already done that … What haven’t I done to earn money? I’ve even gone so far as to accept slaps² because it earned me 11,000 francs [he still reckons in old francs, even when he is talking about dinars].

‘My mother also got involved; it’s as though she wanted to follow me in everything I did; she got out her sewing machine again, even though she said she was sick of it; she went back to her prosperous trade with the women, and started selling anything: eggs, the material that her brother – another “real snake” – brought back for her from France, jewellery, sometimes real, sometimes fake, but usually “copper and lies”.³ We too began to “glean small change”; our only problem was how to pick it up.

‘Despite all the effort my mother and I put into chasing after money, we were always short of it. I never stopped working, I had calluses on my back, but I still didn’t have any money, I didn’t even have enough to buy cigarettes. Why work when that’s all you get out of it? My head was full of troubles, and not much money was coming in. I was smoking more and more, I needed more and more money, and I had less and less of it. In no time at all, and without knowing how, I found myself with debts of 450,000 francs. 450,000! Just 50,000 more, and it’s half a million! That’s a lot of money. At that point, I became frightened, I felt totally discouraged! What could I do? Where could I find a place to lay my head? Where could I find the money to repay my debts? There was no way out of this situation; no escape, the only “door” that was left was France – it was the only solution left. All those who have money, those who...