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Daughters of Diaspora: two Algerian sisters, one in Texas, one in Paris
Djida waited until just before they left their home in Algiers to tell her 10-year-old daughter, Nada, that they were going to a new life in France.
You can take one thing with you, she told her. A neighbor, a police officer, was waiting in his car to ensure they made it to the airport safely.
It was June 18, 1994, and Algeria was in the third year of what would become known as the Black Decade, a savage civil war that broke out after the government invalidated elections set to be won by the Front of Islamic Salvation. While the government would eventually win the war, the death toll mounted to more than 150,000 civilians.
Women had become easy prey in a battle of competing visions of what Algeria should be — observant or secular — and some were brutally killed for wearing the veil, while others paid the same price for refusing it.
Djida — an accomplished doctor and a divorced single mother who would never accept the veil for herself — was an obvious target. So were many of the people in her world. Each day Djida saw friends, acquaintances and other professionals murdered, some of them her patients, dying in the days between their last and next appointments at her clinic. Yet people said the worse was still to come.
Were it just Djida alone, she would have assumed the risks and stayed. She loved Algeria. Though she had traveled and even worked abroad, every separation was borne with the intent to return home. Unlike her sister Nora, who left before Algeria’s descent into blackness and who always dreamed of moving to America, Djida wanted to stay.
Her daughter, though, deserved a better life where such violence wasn’t the norm.
Now Djida rushed her to pick something to take to France; their neighbor was waiting.
Nada chose a sweater knitted by her grandmother, a keepsake that showed on its front a squirrel, an apple tree and a little girl — Nada — all rendered in yarn.
Bordj, December 2014
Though Nada Fridi’s grandmother and grandfather passed away years earlier, their house in the Kabylie Mountains still belonged to the family, and Nada returned to spend the 2014 winter holidays in Bordj Bou Arréridj, in eastern Algeria. Her American cousin Meriem Bekka flew in from the U.S. to join her.
Nada, now 30, had become an architect and urban planner in Paris. Meriem, 25, the daughter of Djida’s sister Nora, was born in Texas and was a specialist on Syria at the Carter Center in Atlanta.
As girls and young women, each had sampled the other’s country, and they were fluent in both cultures. When Nada was a teenager, her mother — who worked long hours in France — sent her to sister’s house in Texas for high school, feeling it would be better for her daughter to be part of a happy nuclear family. In turn, when Meriem went to college, she attended Sciences Politiques (known in the French vernacular as Sciences Po) at a specialized campus in the southeast of France with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa.
Source: america.aljazeera.com