Fermin Cabanillas |
Granada (EFE).- Orly Airport (Paris), 2005. A woman waits impatiently for her father to take a flight to Oran together. I would not cease to be one of the thousands of people who boarded that day with different destinations if it were not for the birth of a novel that, almost 20 years after that flight, still has its author immersed in a journey to her origins with the immigration and rootedness as a background.
The author is Anne Plantagenet and she is the same woman who was waiting for her father that day, and almost eight years later ‘Three days in Oran’ was born, a book that has as an “excuse” to tell the story of almost a million people with French roots. settled in Algeria who in 1962 were repatriated to France. Her father was one of those people.
In 2005, the trip was a kind of gift from Anne to him, as he explained in an interview with EFE Plantagenet in Granada, where he participates in ‘Letras Mediterráneas’, organized by the Fundación Tres Culturas.
He was then able to construct a story “from a story that in France is not entirely seductive, because the issue of black feet is something complicated and painful for many people.”
One Blackfeet: Daughter, Granddaughter, and Great-Granddaughter
Although the history of people who had to return to their country or the country of their parents has made rivers of ink flow, the writer assures that when she wrote the book “there was not much published about the inheritance of the next generation. I am not a blackfoot, I am a daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter and there were not many books about this, but for me it was important to talk about that heritage, that pain.
“I didn’t know if I had that pain inside me, I didn’t know if it belonged to me or not”, says Anne Plantagenet, who does emphasize that, for her, “it was important to make the trip to the land of origins, to the roots of my family and my own roots, and write the story of that trip”, in a journey between two shores that led her to explore issues such as uprooting, the search for roots and the need to delve into family identity.
And, as usually happens in many facets of life, the book was born almost by chance, since eight years after the trip, and after having carried out other publications, he handed over the manuscript of his next work to his publisher, “and when he read it He told me that I had to remove the first 80 pages, that it was after 80 when I told what I wanted to tell, which was the story of my family”.
“Algeria obsessed me since childhood. When my paternal grandmother died, who for me was a very important figure in family history -she is always quoted in the book with her first and last name-, I decided to make the trip, and I thought, doing it with my father, my obsession It was going to end,” he says.
His vision of Algeria
This vision of the African country was reflected in his book, although “sometimes I doubted, because I thought that I had no right to talk about Algeria because I was not born there, even some people told me so.”
But the result was that almost ten years later the book is not only still on sale, but some of the author’s notes have even been modified based on the letters she received from readers who had it in their hands at some point.
Plantagenet is very satisfied with the work that came out of his hands, which was very well received in France, provoking “different and sometimes contradictory reactions”, because, still in his country, “the link with Algeria is complicated”.
And, even, more than 60 years after the independence of the Algerians “there is a relationship of pain, love,… There were more than a million French in Algeria who were repatriated in 1962, and all those people had children, grandchildren, and now in France there are many people who have Algerian origins and there is a very strong immigration of Algerians”.
The writer born in Joigny in 1972 has published a dozen books in which she delves into topics such as her roots or exile, and in ‘Three days in Oran’ her own roots are the ones that come to light from the first pages.
She ends the talk by explaining that her father, almost 80 years old, is no longer the man he once was, but she is very satisfied to have shed some light not only on her origins, but on those of thousands of people in Algeria who have a much of his personal and family roots.