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Harkis and their son: the trauma and transmission Volume 93, issue 2, Février 2017

Authors
1 Centre d’histoire des sociétés, des sciences et des conflits, Université de Picardie, Amiens, France
2 35 rue Saint Geoffroy, 80000, Amiens, France
* Correspondance

This article stems from the study of interviews conducted firstly with a Harki, and secondly with three sons of Harkis. The aim was to understand the nature of the trans-generational trauma in the context of a paternal filiation that has been adversely affected by the exile, the scorn and the degradation of the fathers. This amounts to question the conditions in which the fathers’ life stories have been transmitted as well the ways they now live with their sons. Contextualizing the stories in colonial history, and taking into account the treatment the Harkis received as they moved to France, lead us to assume the existence of a structural relationship between the trauma of the fathers and the psychological difficulties observed in some of their sons. Patterns involving shame affects recur as we cross-reference the different stories. The fathers were subjected to circumstances which compromised the paternal function. This produced a ripple effect on the sons, whose sense of identity and narcissism had also been affected. The absence of representation during the war and the beginning of the exile made lasting imprints on the family memory. The snippets of representation brought out of the stories correspond to traces from the affected which remain enigmatic. Moreover, the mental disturbances the interviewees showed bear the trademark of actual identity disorders. These are the elements which indicated that what prevents collective creation, on the political level, also prevents the deconstruction and then the transformation of the trauma, on an individual scale.