I Dream of Kabylia

Alone and adrift, I took a full-time job for a remodeling contractor. Long, sweaty days of finish carpentry, putting up drywall, and setting kitchen tile filled my days with enough exertion to distract me from missing Claudine. Most jobs ended by 3:30 p.m. I used the afternoons and evenings to hang out in North Beach cafes scribbling sheaves of mediocre poetry, thinking myself part of San Francisco’s edgy literary scene. As soon as new acquaintances heard my accent, typical conversations went like this:

“Are you French?”

“No, Berber, from Algeria.”

“Berber? Isn’t that some kind of rug?”

This association with carpeting, something people walk on, began to wear at my nerves. Why didn’t I just say I’m French Canadian and be done with it? No one I met had any idea what or who Berbers were and though I had little notion either, I stubbornly clung to it as my identity. It was the only way I could define myself ethnically, as something I was rather than what I was not. Now, in addition to being not Canadian, French, Arab, Muslim, or Christian, I was not American. While San Francisco is full of non-Americans of all sorts, most of them are from places the natives have heard of, like Mexico, China, Russia, or the Philippines.

Having overstayed my visa by several years, I also became increasingly uneasy about my “illegal alien” status and was considering a return to Canada when the 1986 amnesty program gave me the chance to apply for a green card. Legal once more, I returned to San Francisco State and took history and English classes at night. I wanted to know more about the Berbers and learn to write better. Eventually, I accumulated enough credits for a BA and entered a master’s program at UC Berkeley.

By this time, I had come to believe that unearthing the details of my origins, and perhaps finding some artifacts connecting me to my real home, would change me, would somehow lead to purpose, meaning, wisdom, enlightenment, inner peace. This became the true mission of my graduate studies – to equip me for this private quest, to discover and perfect my real self and then create a public persona that was congruent with that self, whoever he turned out to be. I got a grant to spend a semester in Algeria researching my thesis about Berber influences on the dominant cultures of North Africa; of course, the real purpose of the journey was to see if I could find any remnants of my family.

On my thirtieth birthday, I fly to Paris, take a train to Marseilles and then a small passenger ship south along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, stopping briefly at Barcelona, then Oran, debarking finally at Algiers.

My timing is wretched, but ironically apt. I left in utero amid a chaotic revolution and return to a nation on the brink of civil war. The Berber rebels whose resistance succeeded in expelling the French in 1961 and setting up a new government are themselves being challenged now by Arab interests. I wonder if my father rests in peace, and if I will ever see his grave. Algiers assaults all my senses at once, a pungent, swirling cacophony 100 times more vivid than my little ex-pat community in Montreal. I hear that a car bomb exploded last week just three blocks from my hotel, a politician assassinated in front of his children. I understand viscerally now why my Montreal neighbors left this city. Here I don’t feel Algerian, but Canadian. The morning after I arrive, my contact at the University is unaccountably absent and no one knows where he is. Taking this excuse to postpone my academic mission in favor of my personal one, I prevail on a secretary to tell me how to get to the village in the Atlas Mountains where my Grand-mère grew up.

A jolting train trip followed by a harrowing bus ride winding over mountain passes, hairpin curves and switchbacks perched on sheer drop-offs brings me at last to the state of Kabylia. Miraculously, it seems, after the urban fray and tension of Algiers, my should-have-been home is just as I’d seen it in my daydreams. Dry, rock-strewn peaks jutting some 8,000 feet into a cloudless sky, massive hills dotted with grazing sheep and goats, fields of beans and buckwheat, orchards swelling with olives and figs.

In the village at the end of the bus line, I buy a sugary bottled soda and ask the shopkeeper in my halting Tamazight if he can direct me to the place my Grand-mère occasionally spoke of as her family home. He looks surprised that an obvious foreigner would know of such a tiny hamlet. When I explain my interest, he warms immediately and offers his son as chauffeur, if I don’t mind riding in a donkey cart. Elated, I forget the grit and fatigue of my journey and gratefully accept. A bumpy three kilometers later, the silent teenager deposits me and my backpack at a dusty crossroad. At first, he won’t take the small bill I offer as thanks (he only did as his father ordered), but I insist and he shoves the money into his pocket with a shy smile. I may need his services again and I want him to be willing.

A few low adobe block buildings with tiled roofs huddle against a late afternoon sun. Is this my ancestral home? In a bean field beyond, two men stoop between rows, maybe weeding. An older woman in a loose tan dress with red and blue embroidery at the top tosses some sort of grain on the ground, and a dozen squawking chickens scurry round and start pecking. She does not raise her head, but I’m sure she’s aware of me standing at her fence. She murmurs something to the chickens then limps slowly into the small house. Could she be my aunt? A moment later, a man saunters out and squints in my direction. He’s about my height, sturdy build, weathered face, older than I. My cousin? I nod deferentially and muster my best Tamazight.