‘Oranîmes’ – Susan Slyomovics’ interview with Pierre Claverie

Published by Fiona Barclay at January 17, 2020

‘Oranîmes’ - Susan Slyomovics’ interview with Pierre Claverie

Susan Slyomovics is Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at UCLA. She spent the autumn semester of 2019 in Marseille, researching a book on the afterlives of French colonial monuments. During this time she also reflected on previous time spent in both Nîmes and in Oran, urban centres linked by the presence of Notre-Dame de Santa Cruz. Here, she kindly shares details of her interactions with Pierre Claverie, the Bishop of Oran:

Between June 1990 and June 1992, I managed to spend as much time as possible in Oran on six successive Algerian cultural visas. Much of the time I stayed in the hostel attached to the Cathedral of Sainte-Marie, the seat of the diocese of Oran in El Maqqari (ex-St. Eugène). I owe my housing and much more to Pierre Claverie, who was the Bishop of Oran from 1981 until his assassination from a bomb placed near his car in 1996 that also took the life of his chauffeur, Mohamed Bouchikhi.

I can still hear his voice, literally, because I tape-recorded an initial interview and I continue to follow his writings. It took me decades to listen to him again and not without tears. I had given him my first draft in French of my 1995 article on the pilgrimage of the Virgin of Santa Cruz of Oran in Nîmes.* He had spoken to me of growing up in a « colonial bubble » (bulle coloniale), a topic he wrote about in letters to his family.** I had asked him about the « pied-noir » culture of Nîmes, since we both participated in the pilgrimage of the Virgin of Santa Cruz in the early 1990s during a time when attendance had peaked at over 100,000 pilgrims. The interview below has been edited and includes French transcription and my English translation. Since it occurred in Oran, the terms « here » (ici) and « there » (là-bas), as the pied-noir community usually deploys them, are reversed. Not « là-bas » for somewhere south over the Mediterranean Sea, but rather ici is « here » rooted in the space of Algeria.

‘Oranîmes’ – Susan Slyomovics’ interview with Pierre Claverie

Notre-Dame de Santa Cruz, Nîmes: Facing the war memorial, the Sanctuary space still not built up, 1991

Notre-Dame de Santa Cruz, Nîmes; Facing the landscaped Sanctuary, 2019

New structures to welcome pilgrims

Père Claverie : C’est très difficile comment évaluer cette culture pied noir et comment elle s’exprime. Ce n’est pas une question que je me suis posée […] Elle n’est plus importante pour moi ici, elle le redevient quand je suis plongé dans cet univers qui est le mien et en même temps pas le mien. Je sens certaines affinités et je sens surtout l’immense souffrance de gens qui n’ont rien compris, qui ont subi quelque chose même s’ils ont été des acteurs même violents de ce drame, mais qui ont été complètement à côté des enjeux réels. De ce qu’il se passait pour la génération des gens qui avaient la trentaine d’années au moment de l’indépendance qui en ont maintenant soixante et qui tiennent les mêmes discours complètement aberrants sur ce qu’ils ont vécu, aucune notion de l’histoire aucune notion de la différence culturelle même, puisqu’ils leur ont effacé de leur paysage. Ils n’acceptent quand ça s’intègre, ça fait partie de leur conception du monde, pour moi ça reste tout à fait la bulle coloniale que j’ai connue dans mon enfance et qui n’est pas encore défaite, cela me fait souffrir de voir des gens comme ça. [It is very difficult to evaluate this pied-noir culture and how it is expressed. It is not a question that I asked myself […] It is no longer important for me here, it becomes so again when I am immersed in this universe which is mine and at the same time not mine. I feel certain affinities and I especially feel the immense suffering of people who did not understand anything, who suffered something even if they were violent actors in this drama, but who were completely alongside the real issues. What was happening to a generation of people who were in their thirties at the time of independence who are now sixty and who keep the same completely aberrant discourse about what they experienced, no notion of history not even a notion of cultural difference, since they erased them from their landscape. They do not accept when it is integrated, that is part of their conception of the world, for me it remains completely the colonial bubble that I knew in my childhood and which is not yet defeated, it hurts me to see people like that.]

Susan: Parce que peut-être ils pensent que vous avez les mêmes avis et que vous êtes resté ici? [Because maybe they think you have the same opinions and that you stayed here?]

Père Claverie: C’est ça. Pour moi je m’efforce toujours dans le discours que je tiens publiquement de souligner le fait qu’il y a des chrétiens ici et qu’il est important qu’il y en ait. La présence chrétienne n’est pas uniquement française et qu’il est normal que les chrétiens vivent en dehors de leur cercle chrétien, ce sont les idées que je développe. [That's it. For my part, I always try in my public speeches to emphasize the fact that there are Christians here and that it is important that there should be. The Christian presence is not only French and it is normal for Christians to live outside their Christian circle, these are the ideas that I develop.]

The significance of Ascension and Assumption

Père Claverie instructed me that Catholic teaching distinguishes between the Ascension of Jesus and the Assumption of Mary, while the pilgrimage of the Virgin of Santa Cruz of Oran is conducted in the name of the Ascension of Mary, a confusion and conflation of holy figures and doctrines. In 1950, Pope Pius XII issued a dogma of faith explicitly defining the doctrine of assumption in Munificentissimus Deus of November 1, 1950.*** This doctrine of Mary's Assumption clarifies that Jesus lifted Mary up to heaven:

Mary's body had been assumed into heaven along with her soul. … [Article 25] … out of filial love for his mother, Jesus Christ has willed that she be assumed into heaven. They base the strength of their proofs on the incomparable dignity of her divine motherhood and of all those prerogatives which follow from it. These include her exalted holiness, entirely surpassing the sanctity of all men and of the angels, the intimate union of Mary with her Son, and the affection of preeminent love which the Son has for his most worthy Mother.”

In contrast, the Ascension of Jesus refers to Jesus raising himself up while the Assumption of Mary is because Jesus raised her up. These doctrinal distinctions influence dates of the pilgrimage in the church calendar because Assumption and Ascension are held on different days. In other words, the Ascension of Jesus was transformed into the Ascension of Mary for the Catholic community originally in Oran and then brought with them to Nîmes. In a sense, this places the Nîmes pilgrimage as practised by the repatriates (rapatriés) from Oran, Algeria out of step with church doctrine, certainly since 1950, as for example in article 45 of the same 1950 doctrine of assumption:

Hence if anyone, which God forbid, should dare wilfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith.

As I report in my recent article, during Père Claverie’s tenure as Bishop of Oran from 1981-1996, this misalignment of Mary with Ascension Day instead of Assumption Day was “rectified in the 1980s by the Catholic Church of Algeria. Instead, the Virgin Mary was integrated into the local Oran diocesan masses that fell on Pentecost. In every way, the church in Algeria has undergone organizational, affective and spiritual transformations from triumphal colonialism to a church of witness and Muslim–Christian attempts at dialogue.”+

During the interview, Père Claverie speculated about changes to the Nîmes pilgrimage, some of which have in fact occurred after his untimely death. He believed that local church politics intended a slow eventual ‘integration’ of the repatriate community into the Catholic parishes of Nîmes. The pilgrimage of the Virgin of Santa Cruz as it existed in the 1980s and the 1990s was certain to be altered, if not diminished for the next generations. Already in addition to the Ascension Day pilgrimage held on May 29-30, 2019, the Sanctuary also celebrated the Assumption of the Virgin which took place on August 15, 2019 and included inhabitants of Nîmes with no attachments to Algeria. There have been even more transformations. As a result of security concerns, pilgrimages for several years have been confined to the actual perimeter of the Sanctuary guarded by a visible police presence. This means that the surrounding streets no longer host secular events. Given that pilgrim numbers have plummeted to approximately 8,000 in 2018 and 5,000 in 2019, what remains of the festive crowds, food stands, memorabilia, merchants, music, association meetings and reunions was easily moved within the Sanctuary grounds. Finally, anthropologist Dionigi Albera has documented the growth in the population surrounding the Nîmes Sanctuary, in particular the replacement of pieds-noirs by an influx of residents of Maghrebi Muslim background such that a new mosque was erected down the street from the Sanctuary of the Virgin Mary.++

Mosque of Al-Khalil

In our interview, Père Claverie returned to the early days of the original pilgrimage in Oran. Within the European settler colonial population in nineteenth-century Oran, there were cleavages between the French clergy and the predominantly Spanish worshippers that even their shared Catholic faith could not mask. These differences were reflected in the two statues of the Virgin Mary that reside on Mount Murdjajo : the Virgin on top of the Basilica made from the same mould as the Virgin Mary of Fourvières in Lyon and the smaller Spanish wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in the lower grotto that actually launched the first pilgrimage :

Père Claverie: Il y a eu l’événement difficile à interpréter dans son origine. C’est la suite qui est importante et la suite a été voulue par les pieds noirs pour établir à Oran un lieu d’authenticité non algérienne. Nous sommes là nous transportons avec nous notre foi, notre légitimité presque divine sur ce territoire et cette statue qui est là est une Vierge espagnol. Je parle de la vierge du miracle, on rencontre justement toute l’opposition et la récupération sur toute la légitimité populaire religieuse qui est espagnole et qui tire ses symboles, et ses conduites religieuses de l’Espagne avec le pèlerinage, comme les pois chiches dans les souliers et tout cela était vraiment caractéristiques. Et de l’autre côté les cadres de l’église qui ont voulu perpétuer ce pèlerinage lui ont donné une légitimité française avec toute l’opposition qui a couru tout le long de la période coloniale entre l’église espagnole et l’église française et l’état français qui imposait à l’église française de franciser l’église espagnole et la population espagnole. Donc la récupération par notre dame de Fourvière de Lyon est lourde. C’est aussi la légitimité étatique presque qui s’imposait à la légitimité populaire. C’est resté une manifestation populaire et ils se sont réinstallés en France avec leur symbole espagnol, parce que lorsqu’on regarde tout ce qu’il y a dans le sanctuaire autour. [This was a difficult event to interpret at its origin. It is the continuation which is important and a continuation was desired by the pieds-noirs to establish in Oran a place of non-Algerian authenticity : We are here, we carry with us our faith, our almost divine legitimacy over this territory and this statue which is here is a Spanish Virgin. I'm talking about the Virgin of the miracle, where we meet precisely all the opposition and recuperation about the entire popular religious legitimacy which is Spanish and which derives its symbols, its religious practice from Spain with the pilgrimage, like chickpeas in the shoes and all that was really characteristic. And on the other side, the hierarchy of the church which wanted to perpetuate this pilgrimage, gave it French legitimacy with all the opposition that ran throughout the colonial period between the Spanish church and the French church and the French state which required the French church to make French the Spanish church and the Spanish population. So the recuperation by Our Lady of Fourvière of Lyon is weighty. It is also the legitimacy of the state that almost imposed itself on the popular legitimacy. It remained a popular manifestation and they resettled in France with their Spanish symbol, because when you look at all that there is in the surrounding sanctuary.]

By 'all that there is', Père Claverie was referencing the astounding accretion of statues and associated religious artifacts brought or donated to Nîmes drawn from churches throughout the three former French Algerian provinces of Oran, Algiers, and Constantine as well as replicas fabricated locally to replace those remaining objects that the pieds-noirs left behind in Algeria. Such complex movements of statues, church bells, war memorials, and archives are the subject of my next book project.

NOTES
* Susan Slyomovics, “Algeria Elsewhere: The Pilgrimage of the Virgin of Santa Cruz in Oran, Algeria and Nimes, France,” in Folklore Interpreted: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes, edited by Regina Bendix and Rosemary Levy Zumwalt, 337-354 (New York: Garland Press, 1995).
** Pierre Claverie, Là où se posent les vraies questions: Lettres familiales 1975-1981 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2012).
*** The apostolic constitution is available on the Vatican website at http://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-xii_apc_19501101_munificentissimus-deus.html
+ Susan Slyomovics, “The Virgin Mary of Algeria: French Mediterraneans En Miroir.” Special issue: Remapping Mediterranean Anthropology, edited by Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Heath Cabot, and Paul A. Silverstein, History and Anthropology, in press for printed copy. Online pre-publication link: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1684912
++ Dionigi Albera and Jean-François Robert, La Vierge d’Oran et la Mosqué d’Abraham. DVD. Directed by Dionigi Albera and Jean-François Robert (Aix-en-Provence: IDEMEC, 2009); and Dionigi Albera,“The Virgin Mary, the Sanctuary and the Mosque: Interfaith Coexistence at a Pilgrimage Centre,” in Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage, edited by Catrien Notermans, 193–208 (London: Routledge, 2012). 

Susan Slomovics
Marseille, December 2019

‘Oranîmes’ – Susan Slyomovics’ interview with Pierre Claverie

‘Oranîmes’ - Susan Slyomovics’ interview with Pierre Claverie

Mosque of Al-Khalil

Fiona Barclay

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