Wassyla Tamzali, was a lawyer in Algiers for ten years. Beginning in 1980, and for twenty years she has directed the program on women's status by Unesco, France. Brown returned to Algiers, she continues to lead many battles for equality women, secularism, democracy or the Mediterranean Dialogue.
Qu: Can we call you a "feminist"?
Ms. Tamzali answered that "certainly but specifies that the adjective has made perfect sense for it only after the revolutions of 1968 in France that have affected the academic Algeria which she belonged.
Thus it explains the need, on the eve of Independence, to establish a global revolution, that is to say a revolution which affect all layers of society, not a "sectarian strife" that would divide the Algerian nation when all of this was essential. This global revolution, which aimed to achieve a greater equality between men and women, is the first disappointment of the author and revolutionary women, who, after participating physically and energetically to the revolution Algerian people, saw their memory scorned in the new State Constitution. Ms. Tamzali likewise emphasizes the "need Liberties without which "the joy of living in a nation no longer exists." Thus it raises the issue of women, but also the paradox of "superiority" of "men who are victims even if they have."
The author notes also the Algerian crisis due to the patriarchal system in which citizens are victims but also the universality of this problem worldwide. In France or Europe discrimination against women exists but "good laws protecting women," unlike the Arab-Muslim countries. She further notes, it means as the "pyramid structure of social hierarchies, where there are fewer and fewer women, the higher up the hierarchy. This pyramid system is reflected not only in economics but also in the arts in general. We return once more to the book, explaining the lack of rights for women, said a general lack of rights of citizens.
The author revisits the past and described his generation: the "independence generation" a generation driven by a dream that projected into the future a fraternal, egalitarian and free. It focuses particularly on the "difference between liberation and freedom" that can not find meaning by turning over the leaves of a dictionary, but rather due to disillusionment. "The liberation of the Algerian people in 1962 did not result in his freedom," says Ms. Tamzali.
Qu: Do you could explain the place that takes your family in your book?
"I have decided to say" I "" Mrs. Wassila answer. Indeed, she insists on the difficulty to say "I" in an Algerian family in which "honor requires the collective before the individual". A problem which, as discrimination against women is universal. Indeed, according to her family "is the first constraint. A moral constraint but also physical coercion, where sexual fulfillment is the first barrier, especially in nations still rooted in ancient cultural traditions. "If there is no" I "there is no freedom," says the author, who emphasizes the difficulty but the need to follow his own path.
Qu: You are from a rich family of notables, but you were not naturalized and you fight in the Algerian independence movement, why this choice?
Tamzali ensures that the Idea of Independence of Algeria was at the time, a modern idea. Indeed, until France occupied Algeria, the Algerian nation did not exist. Thus the new state was born in the anti-colonialist idea.
The bourgeoisie, who begins to occupy the cities, is the first educated. The son of schoolteachers, the son of railroad or the son of postal workers are the first groups to enjoy the French education and thus began, with this intellectual history, imagining nationalism. "If France had applied seamatus Consul Napoleon III, independence was given to the first World War and not WWII. These classes were nationalists but defended the gains that France had provided them. "The entire Algerian people dreamed of back to the national identity does not disappear in France" and "only allowed access to knowledge does not disappear," says Ms. Tamzali us.
Qu: Your father was assassinated by a young recruit of the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front) when you were about 15 years. Is what you could tell us a little more?
"This murder has not been sponsored by the FLN but was the result of a personal vendetta." Wassyla recounts his meeting with the best friend of her late father, in tears, tells him his detention by the DST, the French secret service. "The FLN killed your friend Hafid" he told the officers. Do not believe them, they simply said "You'll spend the night with her killer." Finding himself in the same cell as a child barely sixteen, the father's friend asks him "Did you kill a man? "Yes" "What was his name? "I do not know," replied the frightened child. The teenager said he wanted him to go underground to fight and that he was ordered to kill a man in order to go. "Out of loyalty to a man 49 years old who was killed by a child of his country without knowing why," the author told us, as to the meaning she wanted to give his life. She asked why violence and she was treated as such time and today and found the answer in education that inculcates that "violence is necessary and justifiable." Unwilling to accept this argument, Tamzali, like Camus before it, believes that "violence is necessary but is never justifiable."
On the question of our future, we, students of today and tomorrow's citizens, "the revolutionary" offers us a "burst our bubble," which protects us from reality, apparently distant that we do not want to see. And we said there will always be " breadcrumbs "showing the way as Tom Thumb, not to get lost in the machinery of terrorism still fertile. To the question of hope and faith in a free Algeria, egalitarian and fraternal and not Algeria to 30 million martyrs, she will simply say "all rivers flow to the sea."
Interview by Chan ...
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