Mon paradis perdu. Une enfance algérienne. Oran 1954 - 1962. Préface de Maurice Calmein

I could have been happy...

I slept next to the fairies. They bloomed on the windowsill of my room on the ground floor of our house. The "grown-ups" said they were just flowers, fuchsias, but with that name, I knew they were extraordinary.

Moreover, they had told me so... while I was asleep.

I could have been happy...

But I was born on May 9, 1954, in Oran, in French Algeria. And I could not have known that barely six months later, the war for independence would begin.

And then my grandmother reigned over our family, imposing her tyranny.

It was to escape the fear she inspired in me that I found a reason to live in art, piano, dance, and especially writing.

I saw the pure sky of my childhood fill with shadows, worries, the black clouds of fires, and bursts of machine-gun fire.

And the Mediterranean represented the threat of an exile that stalked us like Destiny.

Destiny was fulfilled, and the paradise of my childhood was lost forever.

I had to wait about fifty years to find the strength to face these memories.

I am still the child before a vast sea, leaning against a dead tree in the face of History.

Story of a broken childhood

Monique Clavaud was born in Oran in 1954, six months before the start of an insurrection that would change the destiny of a people. In her child's gaze, there mingle the family, loved ones, games and daily little misfortunes, the images and scents of the country but also, in the background, the events shaking Algeria. From time to time, they make a fleeting and brutal incursion into the life of this little girl who does not understand their meaning, until the day of the tearing away, in 1962. This rupture left a part of this childhood on the other side of the Mediterranean, but the other part is frozen in the heart of the adult, with an intact sensitivity. It is this sensitivity that Monique Clavaud expresses in this story of a broken childhood, caught up by the madness of the grown-ups, in the story of a family caught in the storm of the exodus and a great page of history torn apart.

100 pages - with 8 photos