A Family Story About Colonialism and its Aftereffects

To tell a story is to place a frame around wayward events. The storyteller points to scenes unfolding within the frame and says, This is important. The implication is that what transpires beyond those borders is less consequential, or not so at all. Susan Sontag offered a similar assessment in one of the final speeches she gave before her death: “To tell a story is to say: This is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.”

In the United States, many of our recent cultural battles about history are actually conflicts over where to place the frame. Does the American story start with a group of English pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620? Or with the arrival of slaves at the British colony of Virginia a year before? Should we merely admire an ancient artifact we encounter in a museum, or extend our imagination to consider how it came to be there in the first place? In many fields—artistic, historical, political—people find themselves on opposite sides of a widening divide: those who believe that the frames we’ve inherited capture reality effectively, and those who believe that they must be expanded, adjusted, or perhaps jettisoned altogether.

Claire Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, can be read in the context of this cultural shift. In many ways, it is a traditional tale, a multigenerational narrative that stretches from 1927 to 2010, and takes place across multiple continents, following the life and times of the Cassars. They are a French family from Algeria, part of the large expatriate community that arrived with the colonization of the country starting in 1830 and became known as pieds-noirs. (The novel, as Messud reveals in her author’s note, is based on her own family history.)

The pieds-noirs owed their presence to a conflict between France and Algeria tracing back to 1827. As a character in Messud’s novel puts it: “Basically, France owed a good deal of money to Hussein Dey, the Algerian leader, and rather than pay it, especially after he insulted us by hitting our consul with a fly whisk, we invaded the country.” The Indigenous population endured brutal treatment from the French (famously documented by Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism) and eventually instigated a revolution in 1954. The conflict raged until 1962, when Algeria achieved independence.

[Read: The patron saint of political violence]

This Strange Eventful History is set, at least initially, against this backdrop, and its contours suggest a story that has been told by many artists, such as Graham Greene in The Heart of the Matter and Sydney Pollack in the film adaptation of the memoir Out of Africa: an elaborate narrative about the travails of a relatively privileged colonial family whose members feel both connected to and estranged from the distant metropole. In these stories, the native people, living just beyond the borders of the frame, remain unacknowledged, or appear intermittently as background characters. Yet at the outset of her book, Messud hints at her intention to gently expand the limits of her novel to include perspectives that are not central to her story but nevertheless shape the lives and world of her main characters. Throughout this unfailingly ambitious work, Messud oscillates between modes, from a saga about a family that is defined by the loss of their adopted home to one that, in fits and starts, moves beyond the confines of its frame.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of This Strange Eventful History is Messud’s seeming ambivalence about how to start it. The prologue announces her theory of storytelling through Chloe, the novel’s narrator and the character who serves as Messud’s stand-in. In a formulation that seems to contradict Sontag’s, Chloe says: “A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.” She then describes how this perspective complicates her work: “And so this story—the story of my family—has many possible beginnings, or none … all and each a part of the vast and intricate web. Any version only partial.”

Messud passes back and forth before several possible doors through which she might enter her novel, all of them entryways to potentially rich and meaningful stories. The door that she spends the most time considering opens to her family’s remorse about its past and origins:

I could begin with the secrets and shame, the ineffable shame that in telling their story I would wish at last to heal. The shame of the family history, of the history into which we were born. (How to forget that after attending the birth of his first grandson, my father, elderly then, tripped on the curb and fell in the street, a toppled mountain, and as he lay with the white down of his near-bald head in the gutter’s muck he muttered not “Help me” but “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”?)

It’s an arresting scene; the elderly man, brought low by gravity and maybe guilt as well, seems to be arriving at a kind of end-of-life awareness—if not comprehension of his direct culpability for the history into which he was born, then, perhaps, a flicker of understanding that his relative comfort might have come at the expense of others. Yet Messud-as-Chloe does not elaborate, and quickly moves on. This is emblematic of her approach throughout the novel; she does not focus solely on the story of the colonizers or the colonized, but does something more subtle. During the period of French rule in Algeria, the Indigenous population was subjected to appalling abuse (in A Dying Colonialism, Fanon describes “the overrunning of villages by the [French] troops, the confiscation of property and the raping of women, the pillaging of a country”). Messud’s decision to foreground the struggles and sorrows of the Cassars amid these circumstances doubles as a recognition of how humans metabolize suffering: Our particular experiences assume paramount importance, while political events are often folded into our personal dramas.

Messud eventually chooses an entry point—she opens in 1940 with a character named François, who is based on her father, writing a letter to his own father, who lives in Greece. François has recently traveled from Greece to Algeria with his younger sister, Denise; his mother; and his aunt. His father, a French naval officer, sent them away because of the rapidly accelerating conflict between the Allied and Axis powers. The children have never lived in Algeria, though their parents consider it home. As his mother makes clear to a young François, “This was where his family belonged, and where they had been from for a hundred years.”  

In the next section, the novel dashes ahead several years; François, as a college student in Massachusetts, reminisces about his childhood in Algeria, a place he too now considers home. For the most part, This Strange Eventful History proceeds accordingly, skipping years and darting across the map, charting the stories of its central characters’ lives as they move around the world; as they get married, have children, and contend with life’s various trials.

[Read: A redacted past slowly emerges]

Yet there are notable moments when Messud widens her frame. In the following chapter, we meet an older Denise, now a law student in Algiers. One day, she writes to François in America about how she and her friends were recently struck by a car as they were gossiping outside a coffee shop. As Messud describes it:

The car attacked her from behind like a shark, a blue Deux Chevaux, it mounted the curb and took a bite, as it were, and then slipped back into the ocean, back onto the road—but the car wasn’t going fast—it could really have injured her if it had been going fast, right? It was perfectly calibrated—the speed, the silence, the suddenness—as if the driver had planned the whole thing, maybe a joke, but maybe to terrify, or terrorize her, if you’d rather, to make her afraid just to walk down the street laughing with her friends. To make her afraid to be. Why would someone do that? To Denise, who wouldn’t hurt a fly?

Denise is initially unsure whom she sees in the passenger seat of the departing car, but she suspects it is a “Berber girl from the provinces” whose name she cannot remember. By the time she recalls the girl’s name, however, she wonders if she is thinking of the right person: “Zohra, yes, Zohra, the name came back to her even as her certainty evaporated; maybe it hadn’t been her?” Only years later, after Zohra achieves notoriety as a resistance fighter, does Denise “insist that she had definitely seen Zohra Drif in the Deux Chevaux that morning.”

Messud’s decision to include this anecdote is essential for many reasons. First, the sudden appearance of the blue car represents a literal incursion into the blithe and serene reality that Denise and her friends inhabit, untroubled by the profound anguish of their Indigenous Algerian neighbors, such as Drif herself (the real Drif, now in her 80s, spoke with The Washington Post in 2021 about her time as a resistance fighter). It also represents a narrative incursion into the story of a pied-noir family that, despite its own desire for freedom and happiness, largely seems unable to recognize the struggles of Indigenous Algerians to achieve the same. And it is notable that Denise remains unsure about Drif’s presence at the scene of the crash until Drif’s fame motivates Denise to become the star of her own personal drama, an innocent who survived an “early salvo of the insurgency” with “only torn stockings and a constellation of bruises.” In her self-mythologizing, Denise narrows the “spread and simultaneity” of narrative possibilities—including the possibility that Drif wasn’t there—until she is the only person staring at us from the frame.

Messud’s strange and eventful novel leaps across space and time occasionally and subversively, including episodes that reveal the larger backdrop against which the lives of her characters take shape. Throughout, Messud seems to be transmitting a message to her readers about our contemporary relationship with stories: As our understanding of history becomes more complicated and nuanced, so too must the stories we tell about the past, and the way we tell them.