How curated am I ?

Inès Hasna Yahyaoui - 2020

 

I have always found memories of childhood incredibly precious. Hearing my loved ones’ reminiscence of what their life was like made me appreciate what they were even more. 

 

The way they would portray in various and often biased way this short careless period of life said a lot about them. The importance of memory and memoirs of the past are an endless subject, some would agree on the incidence it has on our current life, while others - which I vividly disagree with - can’t understand why we need to be reminded of a dead time when we have a future to build. It comes down to a much bigger matter : identity. Wether we decide it or not, agree or disagree, our identities are forged by our experiences. Experiences belong to the past, the individual’s past, but the historical past as well. Moving on from experiences that embedded your view of yourself and the world is perhaps admitting they did.

 

Growing up away from Africa was never something that I thought as a loss. I didn’t think, or have the space to think about what it meant at all. And even though something was always missing, even if I could sense it in every way, I never truly know what it was. Growing up away from home also meant that I would always have blurry memories. When my friends would tell me stories about how their parents met, how their grandparents bought a house in the countryside of France, able to go so far back in history, I would often pray that they wouldn’t ask me. I didn’t know. How would I ever know ? North Africa was marked in my mind by the oppressor’s view of it : empty without their saviorism. I didn’t know my grandparents, and my mum who was born when the Algerian’s independence was won, at least, on the papers, would never talk about home. 

 

When they were talking about their childhood, I’ve always asked myself where mine was?I knew France was supposed to be, surely, but no one really agreed with this idea. How could someone whom’s parents had such a strong accent come from here? I was forever the lucky one, the one that was benefiting from the generosity of the state. When I grew up, I would often try and connect the dots, or rather, gaps, between what people thought North Africa was and what I remember from it. It was, and still is, an endless battle of heart and mind. 

 

How could I properly remember something deeply hidden by decades of erasure and replacement?