In 1962, following Algerian independence, my family left the country for the first time since they had settled there at the beginning of the colonial occupation. Sixty years later, after several attempts to talk about it all with my father, I realised that the well-known unspoken aspects of colonisation at state level also existed within my family. To question the erosion of this memory that is not passed on, and to understand its foundations, I am looking elsewhere for its traces.