A Year in America 1956–1957 81
together, which has been for me the newest thing in my whole
life, I feel I’ve been caught up in the world, and I’m struggling
with all my strength, shedding my blood even, against every-
thing that is of the world, everything which, in the world,
constitutes a trap. The prototype is the ‘family’. But I always
talk in gloomy, strained terms of what is the greatest joy. [.. .]
I guess you are still in Dinan. I hope you never come to
Algiers. The sight of the young soldiers in Algiers really upsets
me. Whether careworn or heroic, whistling at the girls or ill-
treating the Arabs in the streets, they always look out of place,
absurd. My poor Michel, what would they make you do?^2In another letter, to Louis Althusser, Derrida described the
Algerian situation with remarkable precision:
I still have ten days to spend in this terribly paralysed country.
Nothing happens, nothing, nothing that might indicate any
political movement or the development of a situation. Just
daily attacks, deaths to which you get used, and which people
talk about as if they were just an unwelcome shower of rain.
But the lack of political awareness, the blindness, are still the
same. I’ve learned nothing from this stay in Algiers, except
how to breathe in an air that I wasn’t very familiar with. It was
apparently the same in the cities of Indochina: frenzy, intensi-
fi ed dynamism, an accelerated orgy of trade, speculation on a
future that deceived nobody, a fake cheerfulness; the beaches,
the cafés, the streets are all full of people. Between the tanks and
the armoured cars, there are more and more American cars; the
city looks like a magnifi cent construction site that indicates the
coming of the most peaceful and prosperous future.^3A month later, on 30 September 1956, two time bombs would
explode in the heart of Algiers, on the crowded terraces of the
Milk-Bar, on the place d’Isly, and of the Cafétéria, on rue Michelet,
causing several casualties. These two attacks marked a turning-
point in the Algerian War. They led to the Djamila Bouhired aff air:*
the young woman was defended, aggressively, by Jacques Vergès,
and sentenced to death, then reprieved after a trial that fi ercely
divided public opinion.^4
- Djamila Bouhired was a militant in the Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria,
and part of the ‘bomb network’. She was captured, tortured, and sentenced to death,
but Jacques Vergès campaigned on her behalf, and a large swathe of public opinion,
alerted to the mistreatment of dissidents by the French army, supported her eventual
release in 1962. – Tr.