The Seine was Red: Paris, October 1961

Mildred Mortimer's introduction to this novel calls it an anamnesis...a memory. It's a perfect term since, despite the fictional nature of the plot, the story serves to establish a communal recollection of October 17, 1961 when Parisian police killed perhaps as many as 200 peacefully-demonstrating Algerians, many of whose bodies were hurled into the Seine. Notwithstanding the enormity of the event, the government remained close-lipped about it and the press largely declined to cover it.

Amel is a young French woman of Algerian descent. She knows that her grandparents were imprisoned by the French for dissidence but they have always declined to tell her what happened. When she finally learns the truth from a documentary file produced by a show more friend, she and an Algerian acquaintance, Omer, take a tour through Paris, visiting the sites that figured both in the events of that day and the Algerian war for independence in general.

The story draws explicit parallels between the actions of Algerian citizens reacting to the de Gaulle administration’s oppressions, and French citizens reacting to those of the Nazi administration. For example, in an attempt to materialize memory, Omer uses graffiti to extend the plaques on monuments, memorializing the Algerian protestors alongside the memories of the French protestors.

Sebbar accomplishes her objective, illuminating an event that should never have been hidden. It is not an easy task to get through it, however. Sebbar’s style is deliberately opaque. People speak in fragments. Conversations are jammed together without benefit of paragraphs or any direct indication of who is speaking. One must read closely and then re-read in order to be certain who is expressing which thought. I couldn’t find any particular meaning in this choice and it struck me as unnecessary.

In the final balance, this is a book worth trying if you are interested in Algeria or the backdrop of French colonial history, but I wish she had made it slightly more accessible. show less

Paris, 17 October 1961: Tens of thousands of French Algerians descended upon Paris to engage in a peaceful protest against a curfew imposed upon them by Maurice Papon, the infamous Prefect of Police. The curfew was a response to a bombing campaign against the French police by members of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during their resistance movement near the end of the Algerian war for independence, which took place between 1954 and 1962. Papon, who would later be convicted and imprisoned for his role in the deportation of over 1600 French Jews to concentration camps during the Second World War, vowed to suppress the Algerian resistance once and for all, and planned a coordinated and brutal response against the illegal show more protest, promising his troops that they would not be prosecuted for their actions. Algerian protesters by the thousands, including women and children, were beaten unconscious or shot, and their bodies were dumped into the Seine, resulting in several hundred deaths. The massacre did not receive much coverage in the French or international press, and historical accounts of the war have suppressed or ignored what happened on that day.

My full review is in issue 10 of Belletrista: http://www.belletrista.com/2011/Issue10/reviews_15.php show less