Tag: Colonisation

Of Knaves and Knights and the Long In-Land Road

by Michelle Hamadache THE FIRST BORDJ There’s an alchemy that dissolves time and divisions and brings to the surface like the city of Atlantis from the waters of our mind, from the liquid space of what we know and of what we forget, instantiated moments. An arcane compound that is geographic, as much as synaptic, imperial, incantatory, an inheritance and a newborn thing, inhuman, as much as human. The first time I heard Amine refer to me as roumia, followed by his mother concurring that, yes, the roumi do have some strange ideas, I lost perspective, my sub specie aeternitatis…

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The Love Between

by Michelle Hamadache There are two men who share my heart. One is my husband, Amine, and the other is Albert Camus. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re both Algerian, and though I’d never tell my husband, I wonder if I’d have fallen in love with him, if I hadn’t have fallen in love with Camus first. Amine and I met on New Years Eve 1991 on the steps of San Lorenzo, a medieval cathedral in Perugia, Italy. His lion-eyes, blue-black hair and fighter’s stance—poised, open-chested, heart first—were enough to tempt me down from the church steps and…

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