Doagh Famine Village, Doagh Island, Donegal, 11 August, 2009

© Joseph McGonagle, 2009

Star of the Sea Church, Malin Head, Donegal, 10 August, 2009

© Joseph McGonagle, 2009

Malin Head, Donegal, 10 August, 2009

© Joseph McGonagle, 2009

Malin Head, Donegal, 10 August, 2009

© Kathleen McGonagle, 2009

Malin Head, Donegal, 10 August, 2009

© Joseph McGonagle, 2009

Culdaff, Donegal, 9 August, 2009

Departure (1), 7 September, 2009

And so the case is about to depart on the next stage of its journey, via its owner. It’s my final week with the case, although its presence will linger in my mind long after its stint in Manchester is over. Rather than store it away in a room upstairs behind a closed door, the case has now remained by the front door in my hallway since June and given me much food for thought. I now realise why: during all this time in between my travels it has been the first thing I have seen every time I returned home. I’m actually going to miss it.

I’ve neglected to write any notes on the time I spent with it between arriving back from Algiers and now, when the case had to travel mentally with me as I went on family holidays to Italy and Ireland in August. Instead I offer John some photos from Donegal, mostly taken on the rare days when it didn’t rain.

Image & Text © Joseph McGonagle, 2009

Le Temps de la France, 25 September, 2009

© Réda Samy Zazoun, 2008

Hi John

I wanted to send you another link to the pied-noir poet Jean Sénac: there’s a photograph on our research project website by my friend and photographer Réda Samy Zazoun that links back to Sénac’s life:

http://www.france-algeria.net/gallery/gallery_1/rsz-05.htm

I find the texture of this image very evocative and admire the fact that Réda Samy managed to combine within one image both a French colonial street sign (not terribly unusual, in fact, in contemporary Algiers) and a pre-1962 advertisement poster: the latter only revealed because of cleaning works that took place last year.

Apart from the meditation on time that the inclusion of the watch obviously encourages, the supposed connotations of ‘élégance’ and ‘précision’ with Europeanness – facilitated by the use of French – were, of course, not merely of incidental importance for the formation of Algerian identities, either pre-1962 or in the post-colonial era. The rediscovery of this advertisement poster thus provides a fragile and ephemeral trace of the past in post-colonial Algiers but also, more prosaically, epitomises the continuing influence French language and culture still has within Algiers today.

The sense of time and of being out of kilter with time – whether literally or metaphorically – is further nurtured by the strapline just discernable at the top. Asking simply: ‘Êtes-vous à l’heure?’ – ‘Are you on time?’ – it also plays on the French for one’s watch being ‘à l’heure’:  being ‘right’ or ‘keeping time’.

Such a banal incitement for viewers to purchase this product becomes something rather different when you realise that this was the road where Sénac was murdered in 1973.

Indeed, the street sign uncannily raises the spectre of his life and death: as Réda Samy reminded me, Elisée Reclus was a geographer and anarchist, and in French the word ‘reclus’ can mean ‘cloistered’ or a ‘recluse’ – chillingly foretelling the fate of Sénac himself, who by his death lived alone in a tiny cellar on this small, hidden-away street, increasingly ostracised and in fear of his life.

It’s tempting therefore to interpret the miraculous reappearance of this poster here as a return of the repressed – historically and culturally – and thus read the photograph as a strangely fitting epitaph to Sénac, whose place in the newly independent Algeria was finally deemed anachronistic by those who engineered his murder.  Ultimately, it might also provide a timely warning to Algerian society: who belongs in post-colonial Algeria, who decides, and at what cost?

All the best

Joe

Cimetière chrétien de Bologhine, Algiers, 7 July,2009

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009

Cimetière chrétien de Bologhine, Algiers, 7 July, 2009

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009

Cimetière chrétien de Bologhine, Algiers, 7 July, 2009

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009