Tag: France

In Sickness and in Health

SoutherlyBlog

 by Tara June Winch We’re home now; I’m at that vantage point, sorting boarding pass stubs into the recycling, shaking the sand out of bag linings, looking back at photographs, at diary entries without dates; looking back with the fogginess of a fresh return. Earlier this week in the AirBnb on the headland in Tamarama, I wrote: “Disney channel is on in the background. There is nowhere to hide on the road. There is no time, no length of quiet in my mind to write. We’ve been sick too, I couldn’t write then also, but I didn’t fight through that…

… read more

A thousand tiny fettered steps

SoutherlyBlog

by Michelle Hamadache  I The mother in me is horrified at that little boy holding onto the pigeon. I’m thinking psittacosis. Mostly I adore his swag, debonair in adidas, his rakish lean against the walls of the kasbah, and his friend stage right eyeing the bird with such adult circumspection. Pigeon and boy front and centre, both bird and boy with me firmly in their sights. Does the pigeon looks happier than might be expected, given her situation? Louiza Ammi took that photo. She’s brilliant and she’s brave. She’s taken photos of riots and of graves. She’s taken photos of…

… read more

Of Knaves and Knights and the Long In-Land Road

SoutherlyBlog

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…

… read more

The Love Between

SoutherlyBlog

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…

… read more