The Soldier of Koléa 1957–1959 95
Bianco had just been gripped by the book La Question,* written
by one of Maurice Audin’s companions, Henri Alleg, recently pub-
lished by the Éditions de Minuit and immediately censored.^6 In spite
of the risks, Lucien circulated the book as much as possible among
his acquaintances. These revelations of torture helped to harden his
position on the war. He hoped that after these months of separation,
Jackie and he were still occupying the same political position.
I don’t know how this war and all these sinister absurdities
strike you now, where you are. It seems to me that the only
outcome can be independence, after everything that’s hap-
pened, and our only hope is that this independence (which
won’t solve anything) will be proclaimed as soon as possible,
and the massacres stopped. Perhaps you completely disagree?
Give me a few thoughts on the subject, if it doesn’t sicken you
too much.^7Derrida did give him a few thoughts – much more than a few. For
events had suddenly accelerated: on 14 May 1958, he settled down
to write a letter sixteen dense pages long, relating hour by hour what
they were living through in Koléa. They had just experienced some
awful days, ‘with rage in our hearts and more alone than ever, in
prey to the surrounding stupidity, the most abject and malevolent
imaginable, a real nightmare’, a stupidity that was ‘pitiful when it
missed its aim’, but terrifying each time it threatened to be eff ective.
They had been really afraid, physically, and had taken refuge in
their room, glued to the radio. Jackie wrote to Lucien and his wife
now that peace and hope had returned, even if these still seemed
very fragile. He attempted to tell them about it all in detail, mainly
to ‘satisfy this need to exchange ideas and to talk, a need that has
been suppressed so much these last few days that it has made us
want to throw up’.
It had all started, for them, on 12 May, when the newspapers had
just announced the demonstration organized in Algiers for the fol-
lowing day, in memory of three soldiers of the contingent who had
been taken prisoner by the fellaghas (independence fi ghters) and
shot in Tunisia.
That evening, in the mess, the stupidity around us was par-
ticularly aggressive. Of course, although in general we showed
our disapproval only in a negative and silent way, we were
found out, and hostility towards us found a silent and hypo-
critical expression. There was an atmosphere of denunciation,- Translated as The Question, also in the sense of torture. – Tr.