Though there was no violence, there was, as Le monde April 30, put it, "considerable pressure. While insisting on the right of free speech, the mayor of Louviers tried to calm the protestors and finally managed to clear the house so that the play could be performed.
Protests continued. Though the protest and the ensuing case are of little significance in the annals of French law, they do raise a number of questions about the Harkis. Who were the protesters? Why did they protest? What did they expect to gain from their protests? The text and its performance were clearly not neutral. Was the reaction they generated simply a question of content? The power or the failure of representation? Was it a question of publicity?
By an outsider? To me, as to many members of the audience, its author, its publisher, and the director, The Name of the Father did not depict the Harkis pejoratively. I found it sensitive to the paradoxical situation in which they find themselves.
Both the play itself and the Harkis' reaction to it raise questions about the identity of an ostracized people living in a modern nation-state. The Harki response points to the role of memory, wound, and pain in the struggle to preserve that identity. Possession, I argue, is one of the ways in which memory resists the treachery of its historical existence—the ultimate failure of its own memorialization.
Clearly, memory—its representation and memorialization—must be understood in terms of both its origin and its own history. Part 1: The Harkis At the end of ten years of this regime, the people in the camp saw a judge arrive: he came to see whether the Harkis were mature enough to become French.
