In Safia’s name

My father gave me the name of his sister Safia, who, he would say, had been killed by French soldiers during the Algerian war. When my father died, I decided to go looking for this other Safia about whom I knew almost nothing. Over the course of a journey that takes me from Brussels to Paris then to Kabylia, I draw the threads of a personal but also collective story, thus deconstructing the factory of silence which has confined women including those in my family, here and there, in shame and guilt.