Last night I saw an amazing movie, "Days of Glory," about the unheralded contribution North African Arabs from the colonies made in freeing France during World War II. The movie's French titles is "Les Indigenes--the Natives--and I guess someone thought it would market better as a war picture than as a picture fundamentally about racism. My father was raised in Morocco, the son of a French civil servant, and it addressed things that matter to me. The movie tapped into a vein that's been hurting for a long while, that of the rampant racism of the French toward the Arabs, and the way the US has caught this fever so quickly. The movie is beautifully shot, the story line riveting, the acting impeccable. I don't want to give any of it away, except that I will point out what happened to all the pensioners from those countries (don't continue reading if you don't want it spoiled).
Sitting with a New York audience of (from what I could judge) mostly those of white European extraction, who were laughing during the first half hour at almost everything going on onscreen, in the way that audiences who want to pretend that they "get" a picture laugh knowingly, I felt this deep anger starting to rise. There were a few gently humorous points being made, but what was at stake waas clear right from the start of the picture: that these men, many of whose families had been massacred in the name of "pacification," were fighting to free their oppressors, and in many cases beuing used as cannon fodder before the "real" French were sent in. Some Arabs did it for money, others identified with the French (France was "the motherland"), others were career Army men, some passing as white ("pieds noirs"--black feet--was the French nickname for White French who lived in North Africa), others were fighting for "freedom" from Nazism.
I tried to undersatnd this need to laugh. Part of it comes from New Yorkers wish to seem sophisticated, but I think a lot of it comes from uncomfortability. This was probably the first movie I've ever seen (sorry, haven't seen "Battle of Algiers") in which the situation of those in the French colonies, whose children have in recent years made the bourgeoisie so upset by rioting in the streets, was brought home so vividly, in which white European attitudes toward "wogs" was so brilliantly presented, and in which a group of Arabs and Muslim/Christian issues were the core of the story onscreen, and in a fully human way.
These are the "terrorists" we fear, supposedly, revealed, of course, to be good and bad as "we" are, with mothers and lovers and homes and worries and conflicted feelings about being involved in a war which some of them question why they are fighting. And I think the laughter that persisted well after there was any real cause for it was due to this uncomfortable hitting home in the audience of "These are the people we are killing and whose homes we have destroyed in the name of "freedom."
I got a double whammy of French guilt at the end of the film, where scrolling text informs us that these Arab pensioners (from all North African countries) were cut off from the funds all French soldiers of Worls War II received in 1959, when Algeria won its freedom. In 2002, after decades of legal fighting, the funds were legally restored, and yet the French giovernment has managed to delay payment. It's 60 years after the war--they are basically stalling as these men die off.
There is a kind of racism that comes from a lack of understanding of others, of a fundamentalk inability to put yourself in their shoes and see the kind of history they have had and the choices that they face. My father always spoke fondly of the Arabs, and romantically of their culture--he admired their acceptance of the vicissitudes of life--and yet there was a fundamental racism there, is, "he was a very intelligent Arab," as if this were less common for Arabs than the French. But my grandfather, who came from extreme poverty and humiliation in Paris (he was illegitimate, his mother was a seamstress, and they shared one room in the Marias, the old Jewish quarter), never spoke of them in this fashion, either romantically or damning with faint praise. He had become a civil servant and elected Morocco as a station because in France he would have had a harder time advancing because of his lack of connections. After the French left Morocco he was asked to stay on, where he developed a system of community silos so that Moroccan farmers would not have to sell all their crops at the harvest to the lower prices of flooded markets.
Maybe the movie hit me so hard because of my own lineage, but both my daughter and I, sitting watching this movie, burst into tears at the end. This stupid racism that allows us to kill hundreds of thousands and deisplace one in ten Iraqis in the old imperialist need for power and natural resources--it's the same old same old--we are the new imperialists, and we are just as murdurous and disgusting as the French, Beligiums, and British were.
See the movie--it's beautiful if intense.