France has certainly made the most of her colonial connections, particularly Algeria, the nation that perhaps caused France's faltering imperial dreams the most anguish.
Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser were born in Algeria, as was Albert Camus. Camus's brilliant The Stranger gives a great feeling of the systemic differences between the native Arab population and the pied-noirs that inevitably led to civil unrest and then a bloody war for independence in the mid twentieth century.
Zinedine Zidane was not born in Algeria (he was born in Marseille), but in French society he may as well have been born in Algeria. The memories of that war and its aftermath linger into the present as Zidane, who was born in 1972 -- ten years after Algerian independence, found himself denying rumors that his father was a harki -- Algerian muslims who advocated continued French rule and who were considered after independence as traitors and were often killed.
Zidane's outrageous headbutt of Italian Marco Materazzi is supposedly linked to Materazzi's allusion to Zidane's ethnic connections as well of course to standard playground insults of wife and mother, although Materazzi admits only to insulting Zidane's wife. Lip readers apparently think a bit more happened, although they aren't all in agreement on exactly what was said. There's all sort of speculation out there...
Zidane himself claims he will reveal Materazzi's insult as soon as he feels "comfortable" with it.
In the end, though, Zidane -- who has certainly had more of the same throughout his career -- lost his cool and got sent off, perhaps costing France the World Cup.
2 comments:
It was the end of his brilliant career. The ends of most things are not graceful, but still!
I really wonder what was said...
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