Colonial war fragmented the Algerian family and individualized its members

Evidence

A woman led away by soldiers who comes back a week later—it is unnecessary to question her to understand that she has been violated dozens of times. A husband taken away by the enemy who comes back with his body covered with contusions, more dead than alive, his mind stunned. Children scattered to the winds, innumerable orphans who roam about, haggard and famished. When a man welcomes his wife who has spent two weeks in a French camp and he says hello to her and asks her if she is hungry, and he avoids looking at her and bows his head—when such things are a daily occurrence, it is not possible to imagine that the Algerian family can have remained intact and that hatred of colonialism has not swelled immeasurably. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 391 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

A one-sided interpretation of the main changes observed must, however, be avoided. The war waged by French colonialism obliges the Algerian people to be constantly and wholly engaged in the battle. Confronted by an adversary who has sworn to keep Algeria, even without the Algerians, it is difficult to remain oneself, to maintain preferences or values intact. Feminine society undergoes change both through an organic solidarity with the Revolution, and more especially because the adversary cuts into the Algerian flesh with unheard-of violence. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 385 (#expands, via linked claim)

At no time do we find a really painful clash. The father stood back before the new world and followed in his son’s footsteps. It was the young Algerian who swept the family into the vast national liberation movement. Sometimes, however, the situation was more difficult. The father might be a notorious collaborationist with the colonialist administration. In the very exercise of his profession, this man would find himself cornered into making an irrevocable choice: being a caïd (a police agent), a bachagha (an official holding office by virtue of a rigged election), he would be both rejected and condemned by the new Algeria that his son embodied. Very often he would resign. However, it might happen that the contamination was such that he was no longer able to free himself from the colonialist embrace. The long succession of compromises was so imposing that there could be no turning back. Several Algerian families have experienced those atrocious tragedies in which the son, present at a meeting that had to decide the fate of his father who was a traitor to his fatherland, had no other choice but to support the majority and accept the most irrevocable judgments. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 359 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial violence against families forged Algerian national unity through shared suffering; Modern Algeria is inseparably the child of wartime Algeria; Combat in 1956 stripped both Arabic and French of their fixed colonial meanings (+5 more)

Related

• Colonial violence against families forged Algerian national unity through shared suffering (similarity 0.91)
• Routine war trauma sundered the Algerian family’s internal bonds (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial violence itself, not just revolutionary solidarity, reshaped Algerian feminine society (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial collaboration trapped Algerian fathers in a web they could not escape (similarity 0.87)
• Modern Algeria is inseparably the child of wartime Algeria (similarity 0.86)
• Internment of men left Algerian women to sustain families alone (similarity 0.85)
• Pacification devastated rural Algerian demographics, leaving eight women per two men (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial violence forced Algerian leaders to adopt women as combatants (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial confinement degraded Algerian women’s bodily mobility and assurance (similarity 0.82)
• Revolution transformed the Algerian couple from a family contract into a revolutionary unit (similarity 0.82)
• Algerian women’s traditional seclusion made them the hardest nucleus of anti-colonial resistance (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial ethnographers claimed a hidden matriarchy lay beneath visible Algerian patriarchy (similarity 0.80)
• The Algerian war was simultaneously a war of peace and one of extreme savagery (similarity 0.80)
• Algeria’s war was primarily anti-colonial, not religious. (similarity 0.80)
• The revolution affected Algerian women’s lives more profoundly than any other domain (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Routine war trauma sundered the Algerian family’s internal bonds #corroborates (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 391
• Colonial violence itself, not just revolutionary solidarity, reshaped Algerian feminine society #expands (0.60) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 385
• Colonial collaboration trapped Algerian fathers in a web they could not escape #expands (0.55) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 359