My wonderful grandmother...

Mme Aguad and the journalist

I never believed in fate or destiny or in that stuff about your path already being chosen. I have always been convinced that when you show up, things happen, and that you're the only person responsible for the course of your life. Sometimes, I wonder what mine would have been if I hadn't moved to France, in that awful winter of 1954...

My name is Zahra Aguad. I was born on the 5th of November 1945 in Gdyel, Algeria, and my childhood was surely the happiest time in my life. I remember a bright landscape, a few houses, and, above all, the sun. I remember the heat, the olive trees, the beach, the smell of cilantro and of the couscous my mother Kheyla prepared while my sister Nadefa and I raced each other to wash our hands.

When I was nine, I thought I was a young girl just like all the others, and, yes, I figured the rest of my life was about taking care of the education of my ten brothers and sisters and of the cleanliness of the house. I had nothing to do with French people, no Algerian had anything to do with them; French law had built a sort of barrier between two peoples in the same country. But still, I was happy, carefree and rather naive…

Then everything changed. My father, Abdelkader, became increasingly worried. He kept saying over and over again that a war was going to happen and that we had to go before it broke out. In France, we could live in peace. So, we decided to move to Clermont-Ferrand, a town in the Auvergne. My father knew a few people who had gone there.

The crossing by boat was exhausting. We arrived in Marseilles on the evening of October 1954, tired and worried about our future. I remember this young blond French woman at the port. She was wearing a trench-coat. She came up to us with her polaroid and took a picture of my mother, my brother Monsour, and I. She was really interested in my mother because of her veil and photographed her many times. I was very thirsty and lost, in the middle of a place I didn't know, far from the sun of my native village...

We had to take shelter in a shanty town inhabited mostly by immigrants. And the worst period of my entire life began. Winter 1954 was horrible. I was a weak nine-year-old girl, starving and freezing, paralysed from the waist down because of the cold.

My father managed to find work in the coal industry, and later in a slaughter house. In the end, he earned enough money to enable us to get an education at a private school just like French children. We were saved from poverty.

School held a very important place in my life. My father always supported me. He kept saying that educated and intelligent women were rare and that he counted on me to make my way in society. He enrolled me in Fenelon, a prestigious Catholic private school in Clermont-Ferrand. I was very happy to study with the nuns because I really loved all the subjects: Literature, English, History, Philosophy, and the rest. I was the only one in my family who loved to learn more about the world around us.

But my mother didn't agree with this. She wanted me to stay at home and take care of the house and of my brothers and sisters, as I was the eldest, while she went out and did her business. When she came back home, I was obliged to hide my books if I didn't want to be beaten or receive forks on my head. But I didn't care. I wanted to become a nurse. I wanted to have a big house just like those Catholic French women who took their children to Fenelon.

The years passed. I succeeded in making my biggest dream come true: becoming a nurse and working in a hospital. But the values of my family caught up with me. I've always been there for them, for my brothers and sisters, paying for their studies, treating them well, making them think about their future. But I got tired. I was working nights at the hospital and my days were concentrated on my family.

When I raised my own children, Leïla, Karim and Mounir, I always said to them that they had to be open-minded and work, work, work to be happy: learn, read a lot, be curious, pay attention, make things happen…

When I think about my life, I smile. If I hadn't moved to France, maybe I would today be a housewife in Oran, convinced that I was living the life I'd always wanted to live. Maybe I wouldn't be able to quote geniuses like Zola, Hugo or Diderot. Maybe I wouldn't be here, talking to my granddaughter...

Article by Ilham AMJOD