This Strange Eventful History

The novel’s most important and overt theme concerns the fraught politics of colonial (and post-colonial) identity. Wherever they live, the Cassar family members experience the disorienting feelings of displacement and rootlessness, and their search for belonging characterizes both the family and the history of the pieds-noirs as a cultural group. The author pays particular attention to how cultural displacement and rootlessness create identity confusion and result in a never-ending search for belonging and home, making it difficult to hold on to familial and cultural traditions.

The first characters to struggle with identity as a result of having been born French Algerian and having to flee Algeria are Gaston and Lucienne. More than their children, they feel deeply connected to France through values, history, beliefs, and religion but also identify distinctly as French Algerian because they were born and raised in North Africa. Of his parents, the young François observes:

Maman and Papa had always talked about how much they loved Algiers, how much a part of them it was, how he and Denise would love it too, the most beautiful city on earth, its shining white buildings rising in a crescent around the glittering Mediterranean. But when they got there, he’d hardly noticed what it looked like, just that it was very hot (10).

François notes that French Algeria (now Algeria) is “a part” of his parents’ identity and will remain so even after they’re displaced by the Algerian war for independence. In a sense, they see themselves through the framework of both French cultural identity and their role within French colonialism. Gaston later acknowledges colonialism’s problematic nature, but both he and his wife see themselves as having been part of a grand, “civilizing” project meant to extend the boundaries of French geopolitical control. Their daughter, Denise, inherits this mindset and never fully recovers from the collapse of colonialism. Gaston, Lucienne, and Denise identify closely with being both French and French Algerian, and they’re proud of both aspects of their identity. Denise, however, feels the sting of being a pied-noir when she returns to France. She struggles throughout her life with the fact that her identity isn’t legible within a mainstream French framework. François too experiences discrimination because of his status as a French Algerian. His fellow French students are somewhat mystified by him, and he realizes that “Algeria featured barely more clearly in the French consciousness than did Puerto Rico or Guam for the Americans” (73). During the colonial period, the Cassars and other pieds-noirs feel, within their community, a strong sense of identity within their community but outside of French Algeria are often stigmatized.

The search for identity ties closely to the Cassar family’s search for home and belonging. They settle in Argentina, Australia, Canada, the US, and then back in the Mediterranean in Toulon, France, but never truly feel at home anywhere. François feels out of place in the US, within his own family unit, and in Europe. Denise finds friends and French communities while living abroad but feels the most at “home” later in life, in her father’s Toulon apartment in the company of a North African cleaning woman. The setting and the company remind her of her youth in Algeria, and only then does she truly seem to let go of her unhappiness. Even Chloe struggles to find a sense of home and belonging. Her generation grows up steeped in the family’s history as French Algerians in exile, but her connections to both France and Algeria are tenuous. For Chloe, belonging comes from time spent with her grandparents and, like Denise, she ultimately decides that “home” is with her grandparents, both in Toronto and in their house in Toulon.

Another key aspect of rootlessness and displacement that characterizes both the Cassar family’s experiences and those of the pieds-noirs as a cultural group is the struggle to maintain connections to familial and cultural customs in exile. The Cassars manage to preserve the importance of family as a value, and each of them, in one way or another, is deeply devoted to their family members. Gaston and Lucienne place an high value on family and successfully teach their children that value as well. Catholicism is another key Cassar family value, though it’s harder for the younger generations to connect with. Gaston, Lucienne, Denise, and later Chloe find that their faith links them to both French and French Algerian identity, and their religious beliefs help them hold onto crucial pieces of their identities. However, for François, Catholicism has little appeal. He describes his beliefs as “willful godlessness,” and after a few attempts to attend mass while living abroad, he gives up. This demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining ties to a home culture in exile, although Chloe’s interest in religion illustrates that preserving traditions across generations is possible.