14 Jackie 1930–1962
I vividly remember being really upset, upset at being separated
from my family, from my mother, my tears, my yells at nursery
school, I can still see the teacher telling me, ‘Your mother’s
coming to fetch you,’ and I’d ask, ‘Where is she?’ and she’d
tell me, ‘She’s doing the cooking,’ and I imagined that in this
nursery school [.. .], there was a place where my mother was
doing the cooking. I can remember crying and yelling when I
went in, and laughing when I came out. [.. .] I went so far as
to make up illnesses to get me off school, I kept asking them to
take my temperature.^11The future author of ‘Tympan’ and The Ear of the Other mainly
suff ered from repeated attacks of earache, which aroused consider-
able anxiety in his family. He was taken from one doctor to another.
Treatment at the time was aggressive: rubber syringes fi lled with
warm water that pierced the eardrum. On one occasion, there was
even talk of removing his mastoid bone, a very painful but in those
days quite common operation.
A much more serious and dramatic event occurred during this
period: Derrida’s cousin Jean-Pierre, who was a year older, was run
over by a car and killed, outside his home in Saint-Raphaël. The
shock was made even worse by the fact that, at school, Jackie was
at fi rst wrongly told that it was his brother René who had just died.
He would always be scarred by this fi rst bereavement. One day, he
would tell his cousin Micheline Lévy that it had taken him years to
understand why he had wanted to call his two sons Pierre and Jean.
At primary school, Jackie was a very good pupil, except when it
came to his handwriting, which was deemed impossible to read, and
would remain so. ‘At break, the teacher, who knew that I was top
of the class, would tell me, “Go back and rewrite this, it’s illegible;
when you go to the lycée you’ll be able to get away with writing like
this; but it’s not acceptable now.” ’^12
In this school, doubtless like many others in Algeria, racial prob-
lems were already very much to the fore: there was a great deal of
brutality among the pupils. Still very timid, Jackie viewed school
as hell – he felt so exposed there. Every day, he was afraid that the
fi ghts would get worse. ‘There was racist, racial violence, which
spread out all over the place, anti-Arab racism, anti-Semitic, anti-
Italian, anti-Spanish racism... All sorts! All forms of racism could
be encountered... .’^13
There were many ‘native’ youngsters at primary school, but they
tended to disappear when it was time to enter the lycée. Derrida
would describe the situation in Monolingualism of the Other; Arabic
was considered to be a foreign language, and while it was possible
to learn it, this was never encouraged. As for the reality of life in