N ll carry within us our roots, our origins and our flesh falls into the history of our parents, our grandparents, our alumni. The echo of the deep wounds of the past still resonates in our daily lives. These injuries across generations and permeate.
How has permeated my body aches past? How was it accommodated to the violent and traumatic story of two families uprooted, my father and my mother? I who had a childhood so happy, so smiling.
There is in me a kind of constant stress, anxiety, that I will be exalted over time with age. It is a character that I share with my sisters, my mother, my father, my uncles. A family brand. Insomniacs are not lacking among us. And I am a worthy representative. There is also a continuing desire to give a good impression, to be accepted to do his best to run out sometimes.
We are too often anxiety eager, almost anxious. Circulates in us a kind of energy channeling ever, that must be mastered. Although we controlled the energy boosts, allows us to surpass ourselves. If it overwhelms us, when fatigue wins, that events are linked, it becomes poison.
I always wondered about this family-anxious, putting it on the back of heredity. There may be genes for anxiety, stress ... who knows?
And then the chance of life and through my profession, I had to deal with complex family histories, those children in care, in which we repérions deficiencies educational, emotional, cultural and generational. j''en will draw a lesson personal. The echo of important past hurts, secrets of families, act as an acid on the present generations. All unconsciously.
I I finally finished by turning to my own family history. In all families there are tearing past, secrets ... in mine too of course. And like a puzzle slowly j'imbriquais various parts of the story and then I realized where we wanted, at least in part, that character anxious, stressed and this desire to be accepted, this desire do well.
On my mother's family is a murky period of History of France, which comes into play. that of decolonization, the war Algeria. My grandparents lived happily in Oran. Photo albums testify. Memories of a life near the sea, a close family, a neighborhood, neighbors become friends. Life what. English origin, they were born in Algeria, but their parents were born near Valencia. Algeria was their homeland.
Then came the "events", the word "war" was seldom uttered in conversations. It spoke well "Events". At the age of 7 or 8 years old, my mother goes to school in a plaid Oran by soldiers, and sometimes has to hide, like his comrades, under the tables in her class, because there are gunshots or an alert.
At twelve years old my mother left Algeria in disaster, number plate around the neck, by air, with her grandmother. Destination Marseille and the Isere. It is 1962. My grandparents will follow a month later, leaving work, home, memories, friends, neighbors. What a small world scattered in a haphazard way. Is not come into city with two suitcases and nothing else. Ago my grandmother broke everything in it to leave nothing. Years later they will live in the south of France.
Uprooting is total, violent and ultimately rather unexpected. My grandparents never recover permanently from this exodus. The wound remains wide open and see the total lack poisonous until they die. My grandmother, in this departure, lost to reason, condemned then begin therapy all his life.
the side of my paternal family history is instructive. Almost romantic. And one could make a soap for the summer! In early 1950, in a small village in Castilla la Mancha, home of my paternal grandparents quixotic have every reason to be happy. They were married recently, and come from a wealthy family of farmers. They live in a big house in the middle of olive groves. Olive oil is wealth of these families and conservative Franco. My grandmother has a household staff and even a nurse. We are yet in a miserable Spain.
Then when a tragedy occurs, a tragedy, still treated today by my father, my uncles, as a absolute taboo. My grandfather, for some reason I can not know with precision, as the secret is heavy, has committed a homicide. It seems he fought with a man who tried to somehow the scam and during the fight, my grandfather would have killed the man by striking him on the head with a rock. It would have smashed his skull. This version is the one you gave me lip service.
begins a incredible mare. Father of two boys at a young age, my grandfather finds himself evading police and justice. In the run he gave up his wife and children. He fled to the French border and succeeds. He was then arrested by the French gendarmes who left him the choice between being delivered the English Guardia Civil and enlist in the Foreign Legion to go to war in Indochina. Between prison and he will choose the Indochina war, humidity, malaria. Suffering from terrible attacks of malaria, my grandfather returned to France shortly before Dien Bien Phu . At that time, He could not see his family for over three years.
My grandmother, wife of the fugitive, had to forfeit his passport. She could not leave Spain and join husband are in France. She had to use cunning. It's romantic episode. She used the passport of her younger sister, died at age 20 of heart disease to leave the country. She looked like two drops of water. She succeeded in this ruse to get through the cracks ... And the family was reunited in the south of France almost five years after being separated.
Again what violence, what torments, what dark secret .... How could it not be any sequels?
Thus, gleaning here and there a few souvenirs to bring out into some secrets of families, not least, I reported on the tumultuous past of my "clan." What we leave to our children, our grandchildren?
I was born in a town in southern France by accident, at the option of the desperate flight of a family and the painful exodus of another ... The trace of these events, invisible, is still etched into my flesh and echoes certainly an echo of the past. In any case what I believe.
