I have not written this letter. It is still there. Speechless, present, shy, it is my letter to Zohra Drif. It stays with me, unwritten, patient. I have a blank letter that does not leave. It is addressed to Zohra Drif. But it is held back. This letter has its reasons. For not writing itself. For not vanishing. It has been addressing Zohra Drif in Algeria on my behalf for decades. What halts it just before the paper and suspends it between my shores, my countries, is a long story. The loss of words I never had.

It all began in January 1957. When I wanted to write my letter to Zohra Drif. Such an impulse broke out in me. I was reading in the Paris newspapers what was happening in Algeria. The birth war raged. The war I had despaired of, and which had bloomed at last on the day of my despair, in November 1954, the great quake of time, the shackled country had finally broken its fetters, and it shook the pillars of the metropolitan temple at last! The day before, I had left, I had fled this earth in pain that I could neither caress nor help nor call my mother without offending it. I arrive in France, a foreign distinguished elegant country. I arrive in France, I thought. There I am not. I can’t get my footing. This country is not my country. I am savage, a bit furious, alarmed, overwhelmed to the point of being crushed by its constructions and its customs, I can’t manage to arrive. I go nuts, I goat and ram. [Je deviens chèvre et bélier.] I stumble on the carpets of the bourgeois buildings I who went barefoot yesterday. But no nostalgia. I had not been at home behind the fences of my native cradle.