Algiers, or Arretez!

•

The women remove their headscarves,
brush their hair for the last time.
What took years, they cut off in an instant.

Three Arab children and their mother sleep
on rue d'Thebes in the Muslim Quarter of Algiers.
Their father has been arrested for shooting
a police officer in the back.
Each day there are four such attacks.
A bomb is placed in front of the house.

The women bleach and bob their hair
to pass among the French of the European Quarter.
The women prepare to be murderers, too.

Larbi Ben M'Hidi said to Ali Ammar la Pointe:
             Hard to start a revolution.
             Harder to sustain it.
             Hardest to win it.

The women take the bombs in Western-style purses
to the market square, to the Café du Paris,
to the dance hall. They set them before they enter.
                                                                                 600…599…598…597…

The barman at the Café is Arab. This is unfortunate,
but the woman with the treacherous purse
accepts it as a consequence of freedom.
She sips at a cognac,
knowing no one will ever rebuke her
one forbidden taste.                                               60…59…58…57…

A child sips a Coca-Cola in the Café.
He is French. It is 1956, and he has 50 seconds left
to enjoy his soda.                                                   49…48…47…46…

A Frenchwoman sitting                                          9…8…7…
behind a pillar in the back                                     2…1…
of the Café                                                             0

miraculously survives. She will remember
lying with her head sideways on the floor,
not feeling her body below her neck,
seeing in front of her a boy's ear on tile fragments,
an ear that heard the cracking of Algiers
then nothing.

Ben M'Hidi told la Pointe
             Acts of violence do not win a war or a revolution.
             Terror is a start, but people must rise up all together.

A man who runs out of ammunition dies.

A man in a chair with electrode earrings.
An apology in French.
A switch is thrown.
A soldier's hands shake little.

A man's nostrils are plugged.
He is bent backward,
swallows water, then throws it up.

A man is bound to a board hanging from the ceiling.
The officers burn his back with cigarettes,
take a drag:     burn, drag.
                                                  Burn.
                                                             Drag.
Their technique survived
Auschwitz and Buchenwald with them.

A man must stay silent for twenty-four hours.
His information is already useless.

Colonel Yves Godard allows Ben M'Hidi to give an interview.

Colonel:
             The word torture is not in our orders.
M'Hidi:
            Trade us your bombers for our baskets.

M'Hidi will later hang himself in his cell
though he is bound head-to-foot.

A wedding is held in the back courtyard
of a house in the Northern Quarter.
Bride and groom shyly exchange first full looks.
The families are proud. La Pointe
and the National Liberation Front conduct
the business of revolution; La Pointe leaves.
Seventeen die. The bride dies scarlet.

The wheel of sharp weapons:
            Rage.
            Retaliation.
                          Proportional Response.
                          Pre-emptive Strike.
                                      Rage.   Revenge.
                                                   Response.

September 1957, La Pointe hides in a foxhole
behind a false tile front in the wall behind his bed.
A woman, a child, and a man are with him.
Soldiers surround the house.
They attach a bomb to the wall behind the bed.
La Pointe will not come out, will not speak.
The women stand on the terraces of the surrounding houses.
They already mourn.
The French believe the insurgency is over.
The head is off the tapeworm.

1961, twelve thousand stars and crescents
hang from every window and terrace in Algiers.
Not flags-rags, painted overnight.
Day and night the Muslim Quarter rings.

The women and the men
believe one should stay, believe one should go,
believe one way is right, believe freedom is coming.
The women and the men know God is with them. The wheel spins.
The women and the men spin with it
and are dismembered.

The women and the men believe in afterlife:
women are virgins; men are kings;
occupiers are removed. In Paradise
all the free are dead.