TOMORROW THEY WILL NOT DARE TO MURDER US
By Joseph Andras
Translated by Simon Leser
France was never very good at dealing with its colonial past. Among the most stubborn ghosts to haunt the contemporary republic is the brutal war that waged in Algeria, its former colony, from 1954 to 1962. After the conflict, France long denied the human rights abuses committed in its name and censored countless works of fiction and non-fiction that expose facts to the contrary. This censorship had the effect of silencing the tangled personal and political realities that underlie the grand narrative of this anti-colonial struggle – the distinct and shifting investments of the communists; pieds-noirs, or European settlers born in Algeria; colonial soldiers and officers; pro-french indigenous Harkis; and Algerian militants, among others.
It is precisely this complexity that influences Joseph Andras’s electrifying debut novel, “Tomorrow, they will not dare to murder us.” Originally published in France in 2016, the novel won the Goncourt Prize for first novel (which Andras refused) and was heralded as a singularly vivid recreation of this tragic period of French and Algerian history. Andras gives a ruthless account of the capture and execution of the real-life revolutionary Fernand Iveton at the hands of the French army. Iveton, a pied-noir, a communist and defender of Algeria’s independence, planted a bomb in a factory outside Algiers in November 1956. He timed the bomb to detonate after hours, with the intention of avoiding victims, but was discovered and deactivated. Still, Iveton was savagely tortured, hastily tried and guillotined – the only European to have that fate during the Algerian War.
Andras is more interested in the intimate dimensions of this radical life. He hastens the first pages of his novel through Iveton’s alleged act of sabotage and his subsequent imprisonment, and then asks us to witness not only the painful details of his brutalization, but also the concatenation of family history, political conviction and love that finally took him to that “interrogation” room in the first place. Despite a translation that struggles to reproduce the tension and lyricism of Andras’ prose, the intensity of Iveton’s principles and the political moment in which he is involved still manage to shine. Alternating between the past and the present, Andras allows several voices on the same page – in the same sentence, even – and thus sketches the landscape of politics and emotions that sealed Iveton’s fate. In Andras’ narrative, it is Iveton alone who seems convinced that “barbarism cannot be overcome by emulation”, that “blood is not a response to blood”.
“I love France, I love France very much, I love France enormously, but I have no love for the colonialists,” Iveton told the presiding judge in the middle of his trial. This was an impossible position to take in the French imperial world of the mid-1950s. There was no France without its colonies. If Iveton only aspired to a future for Algeria that would see France “recognizing all its children, wherever they are”, as Andras says, the improbability of that humanist dream would become a reality is also clear. This moment in history had no place for the idealism that animated Iveton or others like him. The insidious poison of political cynicism firmly prevented fellowship and forgiveness during the Cold War.
The year 2022 will mark the 60th anniversary of the Algerian war of independence, and France has begun to prepare the necessary accountability rituals. In January, French historian Benjamin Stora presented President Emmanuel Macron with a 147-page report on “the progress made by France in memory of the colonization of Algeria and the Algerian War”, a report that Macron commissioned to signal his “willingness to promote reconciliation between the French and Algerian people. ”Macron made it clear that, although the” recognition “of this horrible story is on the table,” repentance is out of the question. ” Therefore, while the report appears to be a step forward in reconciling the French post-colonial present with its troubled colonial past, it is very likely to fall short of true reconciliation for those who have survived that past or who remain haunted by its ghosts. “Tomorrow, they will not dare to murder us” insists on investigating the thorniest details of the scandal in history, suggesting – convincingly – that certain truths are best revealed in fiction.