Fadhma Aït Mansour, a child born out of wedlock, was the mother of poet Jean Amrouche and of Marie-Louise Taos Amrouche*, and was one of Algeria’s first francophone novelists. Entrusted in 1885 to the White Sisters of Ouadhia, but withdrawn one year later for ill-treatment, she separated completely from her family after the death of her mother, and worked at the hospital of the White Sisters of Aït Mangueleth. There she met Belkacem Amrouche, a converted Catholic, whom she married. His own conversion made his relationship difficult with the Amrouche family, who remained faithful to Islam, and forced the couple to emigrate to Tunisia. The author’s life will then be marked by births, but also by mourning: out of her eight children, only three survived after the war, including Jean and Taos. It was with them that she began, in 1930, to translate Kabyle songs and tales inherited from her ancestors. These songs were immortalised by Taos’ voice, who also reproduced the tales, proverbs and poems in “Le Grain magique” ([The Magic Seed], 1966). In 1940, F. Aït Mansour composed poems which she dedicated to the memory of her three sons who had disappeared that year. Her essential work, however, remains “Histoire de ma vie” [Story of My Life], written in 1946 and published posthumously in 1968. Through this autobiographical, modest and moving story of a woman in search of herself and her origins, all the violence of colonisation shows through.
