On Learning to Love Your Mother-in-law: Remembering La Ménage in Colonial and Postcolonial Algeria

ABSTRACT Before my mother-in-law Fatima comes to visit us from Algiers, a monumental cleaning of our already relatively tidy home occurs. The cleaning begins weeks before her arrival, and the day before her flight lands is one of anxiety and arguments as each member of the family blames another for their failures of cleanliness and order. Fatima keeps house with a ferocity that is matched only by her stamina, and she expects us to do the same. It might sound as though Fatima is cleaning house the way women have cleaned houses for generations before her, but this is not the case. Fatima is Kabyle Algerian and a first generation born in Algiers centreville. Her own mother learned to keep house from a French colon, while Algeria was still a colony of France (1830–1962). Fatima is nearing eighty, so my desire to record her relationship with la ménage is a way of documenting a life that might otherwise seem less than extraordinary. Biography, historical research and memoir combine in this essay where I interrogate intimate domestic spaces and their intersections with historical and political events, forming a feminist inquiry into the way women negotiate power in colonial and patriarchal societies, challenging myths of passivity and subjugation and complicating ideas about gendered domestic spaces.