Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile 1800859910, 9781800859913

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Autofiction A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 80

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 64 Naïma Hachad, Revisionary Narratives: Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts

70 Erin Twohig, Contesting the Classroom: Reimagining Education in Moroccan and Algerian Literatures

65 Emma Wilson, The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin

71 Keith Reader, The Marais: The Story of a Quartier

66 Margaret Atack, Alison S. Fell, Diana Holmes, Imogen Long, Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies 1975–2015 67 Ruth Cruickshank, Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction 68 Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, Lydie Moudileno, Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France 69 Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan, What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th and 21st-century French Literature and Thought

72 Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy, Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond 73 Lia Brozgal, Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 74 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945–1960 75 Edward J. Hughes, Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative

A N TON I A W I M B U S H

Autofiction A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2021 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2021 Antonia Wimbush Antonia Wimbush has asserted the right to be identified as the author of this book in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-80085-991-3 epdf ISBN 978-1-800 85-801-5 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Beyond Exile and the Limitations of Postcolonial Paradigms in Francophone Women’s Writing

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1 Exile, Autofiction, and Women’s Writing

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2 Exile, Métissage, and Family Estrangement in Kim Lefèvre’s Autobiographical Narratives

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3 Exile as a ‘Forced Choice’: War and Migration in Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia 83 4 The Four Problems of Nina Bouraoui

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5 Madagascar: ‘A No-Woman’s-Land’? Exile and Errance in Michèle Rakotoson’s Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar

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6 Return as Exile in Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père

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7 Transgenerational Exile in Abla Farhoud’s Autofiction

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Conclusion 221 Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone who has supported me during the preparation of this book. At the University of Birmingham, I am especially grateful to Louise Hardwick for all her guidance, encouragement, patience, and advice. Colleagues and friends in the Department of Modern Languages, and especially Marie-Béatrice Boucheny, Sarah Fishwick, Steven Forcer, Sophie Gavrois, Agnès Gower, Berny Sèbe, and Emma Wagstaff, offered valuable support and friendship. At the University of Bath, I would like to thank Sandrine Alegre, Sandra Daroczi, Christina Horvath, and Steve Wharton for their friendship and interest in my work, and I must also thank my students at Birmingham and Bath who have helped to shape my own insights into the authors and their narratives. I am grateful to colleagues at the University of Liverpool for their friendly encouragement in the final stages of the project. I particularly thank Charles Forsdick for his invaluable guidance and support. At Liverpool University Press, I would like to thank Chloe Johnson for all her editorial assistance and support, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the proposal and the manuscript for their constructive advice and feedback. I am hugely grateful to the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies for providing me with a supportive network and creating opportunities for me to disseminate my research. Special thanks must go to Charlotte Baker, Natalie Edwards, Claire Griffiths, Chris Hogarth, Julia Waters, and Kate Marsh, whose untimely death in 2019 was a huge loss to the community of French and Francophone Studies. I would also like to thank Nicki Hitchcott and Jean-Xavier Ridon for their intellectual guidance throughout this project. I am hugely grateful to Véronique Tadjo for generously giving her time to discuss her literary career with me. This research was funded by a three-year doctoral award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Midlands3Cities

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Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

Doctoral Training Partnership. I am indebted to the AHRC for providing me with additional funding to undertake fieldwork in Martinique and present my work at a number of national and international conferences. I was also awarded travel funding by the Society for French Studies. For this financial assistance, I am truly grateful. My family and friends have been a tremendous source of encouragement, and special thanks must go to Polly Galis and Maria Tomlinson for all the fun and friendship they have given me during our ‘Imagining the Body’ projects. My grandparents and uncles have always supported me in everything I have done. For their unfaltering love, I thank my sisters Felicity Wimbush and Heather Wimbush, and my parents Angela and Tim Wimbush, who have always believed in me. Sections of Chapter One and Chapter Four draw on my previous work on Nina Bouraoui. My article ‘Memory and Exile in Nina Bouraoui’s Autobiographical Narratives’ was published in Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in 2015, and my chapter ‘“Effacer mes mauvaises pensées”: Memory, Writing, and Trauma in Nina Bouraoui’s Autofiction’ appeared in Memory and Postcolonial Studies: Synergies and New Directions (2019), edited by Dirk Göttsche. Chapter Two builds on my earlier article ‘Métissage and Exile in Kim Lefèvre’s Autobiographical Narratives’, published in Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in 2017. I would like to thank the editors for their permission to use this material.

Introduction Beyond Exile and the Limitations of Postcolonial Paradigms in Francophone Women’s Writing Introduction The twenty-first century is an era of globalization and mobility. In an increasingly globalized world, national borders are becoming erased as a growing number of people from diverse countries and social backgrounds are moving away from their native land, whether by force or through choice. This mobility takes many forms: exile, asylum, forced migration, economic migration, tourism, and travel. What these modes of displacement all have in common, however, are the urgent questions they provoke concerning national identity, home, belonging, acceptance, and exclusion. In the Francophone postcolonial context, France’s colonial past adds an additional complexity, as the concept of the nation-state of France is constantly being refigured by the arrival of people from France’s former colonies. This preoccupation with migration and mobility is a core concern of Francophone postcolonial literature, and authors from a diverse array of cultural backgrounds have produced now canonical works about migration towards and away from the metropole, including Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) by Martinican Aimé Césaire, Bleu, blanc, rouge (1998) by Congolese Alain Mabanckou, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (1999) by Guadeloupean Maryse Condé, and Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (2003) by French-Senegalese Fatou Diome.1 Above all, these texts reveal that France’s colonial past intersects with the theme of displacement in the present. 1 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 2nd edn (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956 [1939]); Alain Mabanckou, Bleu, blanc, rouge (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1998); Maryse Condé, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (Paris: Laffont, 1999); Fatou Diome, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (Paris: Anne Carrière, 2003). The Cahier was first published in the Parisian journal Volontés in 1939; it was then rewritten and republished in 1947 and again in 1956.

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Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

Responding to the timeliness of questions surrounding migration, this study explores the ambiguities and complexities of different models of exile and displacement as developed by Francophone postcolonial women writers, thereby bridging a gap in the critical literature on exile in the Francophone postcolonial world. Scholars have engaged widely with the literary representation of exile, although previous analyses have not always taken into account the modalities of gender, sexuality, and the fluidity of cultural identities as factors altering experiences of exile. By focusing explicitly on exile as a geographic displacement, these studies produce an overtly masculine reading that risks reinforcing phallocentric understandings of exile. This book draws attention to the gender ‘blind spots’ where existing writing on migration and displacement neglects to consider women’s experiences adequately. As Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré observe, ‘it is astonishing to note that just as human mobility has become increasingly conventional in life as in literature, women’s mobility has remained decidedly marginal in the latter’.2 This study, therefore, continues the work of Averis and Hollis-Touré, who reconceptualize categories of movement and mobility in writing by Francophone women from a diverse range of geographic and cultural contexts, while Averis’s sole-authored monograph, which examines female experiences of exile and mobility in a comparative Francophone/Hispanic framework, 3 also acts as a point of departure. Furthermore, the book draws on arguments put forward by Élodie Carine Tang, who interrogates connections between migration and identity in fictional works by selected female Francophone authors,4 and by F. Elizabeth Dahab, who studies writing by Canadian authors of Arabic origin for whom exile is a common theme.5 However, this book advances these discussions of Francophone exilic literature in a unique manner by bringing genre in both its forms—gender and literary genre—to bear on expressions and articulations of exile, arguing that the reconceptualization of categories of mobility occurs specifically in 2 Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing’, in Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing, ed. by Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016), pp. 1–14 (p. 1). 3 Kate Averis, Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (Oxford: Legenda, 2014). 4 Élodie Carine Tang, Le Roman féminin francophone de la migration: emergence et identité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015). 5 F. Elizabeth Dahab, Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature (Lanham, MD; Plymouth: Lexington, 2009).

Introduction

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women’s autofictional writing. The book thus places women at the centre of discourses of exile by analysing exile as a gendered, sexual, racial, and/ or linguistic otherness. Exile is not only a unique and complex mode of migration but also a constellation of knowledge that shifts depending on geographical position, social status, gender, age, and ethnicity. What does exile signify for a set of contemporary women authors from a geographically diverse cross-section of the Francophone world, who span the formerly colonized locations of Vietnam, Guadeloupe, Algeria, Madagascar, Côte d’Ivoire, and Lebanon? How do their autobiographical narratives exemplify and at times challenge notions of gendered exile? Taking into account the diverse historical, geographical, cultural, and linguistic specificities of each location, this book addresses questions of identity, nationality, and crosscultural transmission for Kim Lefèvre, Gisèle Pineau, Nina Bouraoui, Michèle Rakotoson, Véronique Tadjo, and Abla Farhoud. It focuses specifically on their autofictional writing, revealing the potential of the autofictional genre to provide a feminine space for the discussion of exile in the Francophone postcolonial context. The book brings together these six authors for the first time, combining analyses of established Francophone authors, such as Pineau and Bouraoui, with less prominent writers who have not received sufficient critical attention in the Anglophone academy, such as Rakotoson and Farhoud. It widens the scope of analysis to examine peripheral locations of the Francophone world that are not habitually the subject of academic study, such as Madagascar and Vietnam. In addition, it incorporates the geographic space of Quebec into discussions concerning postcolonial migration. The postcolonial status of Quebec has been fiercely contested in recent years. Amaryll Chanady questions whether we should ‘even talk about postcoloniality in the case of a predominantly white settler society which is itself seen as a colonizer by the marginalized native peoples, many of whom do not consider themselves as Québécois, or even as Canadians’, 6 and therefore it is crucial to interrogate how the specificity of Quebec’s political status impacts upon Farhoud’s gendered experiences and expressions of exile from Lebanon. By analysing underexplored spaces and locations, this book project adheres to Charles Forsdick and David Murphy’s appeal that

6 Amaryll Chanady, ‘Rereading Québécois Literature in a Postcolonial Context’, Quebec Studies, 35.1 (2003), 31–44 (p. 31).

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Francophone postcolonial studies as a discipline should address ‘the full diversity of the Francophone world’.7 The central argument of the book is that current models and definitions of exile do not fully explain the complexity of situations of the six authors under consideration. They do not have a determined ‘home’ and ‘host’ country, because the boundaries between these two places are constantly being questioned and redefined by their life experiences. These boundaries are further blurred by the slippage between colonial past and postcolonial present that shapes and dictates each of the authors’ individual trajectories. In fact, these six women writers can be more accurately defined as privileged, ‘cosmopolitan’ intellectuals: they have a certain degree of freedom in their ability to travel back and forth between different locations. Their identity, always in flux, is shaped by their mobility. While cultural scholars have celebrated such hybridity, the six authors in this study draw attention to the ambiguity of their status as cosmopolitan, hybrid travellers who live a rootless existence and struggle to come to terms with their multiple identities. While ensuring not to trivialize the very real difficulties faced by those whose exile is not a matter of choice, the book argues that the six authors also experience their hybridity as both a literal exile, and moreover and in multiple ways as a metaphorical exile, which is simultaneously a source of creativity and trauma. The autofictional mode of writing becomes a means for the authors to resolve the multiple personal conflicts that arise from their migration. For the selected corpus of women writers, then, exile is a common thread that unites them and reveals shared experiences, just as it also discloses significant differences between them. To understand how their gender influences their experiences of exile, which in turn impacts on their choice of narrative genre, it is important to consider the vocabulary of migration in greater detail. Exile, Diaspora, and Cosmopolitanism: A Question of Terminology The proliferation in the number of migrants moving across the world has led to a growth of academic work surrounding migration and 7 Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, ‘Introduction: The Case for Francophone Postcolonial Studies’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 1–14 (p. 11).

Introduction

5

displacement in the social sciences and the humanities, and scholars have adopted many different labels to define this movement. While terms such as ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’, and ‘refugee’ offer disparaging connotations of ‘unreliability and transience’ and often refer to people at the bottom of the social hierarchy, as Azade Seyhan notes, 8 others, including ‘exile’, ‘cosmopolitan’, and ‘traveller’, carry more positive undertones of wealth, privilege, and success. Seyhan argues that the meaning of these terms has been so frequently expanded that they have lost their theoretical specificity, and she calls for the creation of value-free terms that are underpinned by real-life experiences of migration.9 Arjun Appadurai, in contrast, posits that these new idioms must specifically deal with the interests of ‘translocal solidarities [and] cross-border mobilizations’ in the contemporary postnational world.10 This postnational world advocated by Appadurai is far from being a reality, however, as current articulations and expressions of belonging continue to centre on the notion of a shared national identity. Heavily criticized by postcolonial writers for its binary opposition between ‘here’ and ‘there’ and its lack of attention to the contemporary world of rootlessness and movement, the term ‘exile’ originates from the Latin exsilium and the Old French exil, both referring to a condition of banishment. The Oxford English Dictionary defines exile as ‘prolonged absence from one’s native country or a place regarded as home, endured by force of circumstances or voluntarily undergone for some purpose; banishment to a foreign country’.11 Exile, therefore, is primarily conceived as a punishment for illicit political or social activity committed against the state, and inherently involves the crossing of national borders. This rigid definition is held up by Edward Said in his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’ (2001), considered to be the cornerstone of theoretical works on exile. Said defines exile as ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place’, arguing that it is a condition that can never 8 Azade Seyhan, ‘The Translated City: Immigrants, Minorities, Diasporans, and Cosmopolitans’, in The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, ed. by Kevin R. McNamara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 216–32 (p. 218). 9 Seyhan, p. 217. 10 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Patriotism and Its Futures’, Public Culture, 5.3 (1993), 411–29 (p. 418). 11 ‘Exile’, Oxford English Dictionary, sections 1.a. and 1.b, , December 2015 [accessed 16 April 2020].

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be overcome.12 For Said, even if exiled individuals are allowed to return to the homeland, they will never be full and active participants in the society of their home country. Other theorists offer a much broader definition of the term. Hamid Nacify argues that banishment can occur within a country itself, reading imprisonment, confinement within the family home, and long-term unemployment as forms of exile because they prevent individuals from fully participating in society.13 While this definition demonstrates that exile can affect all citizens, whether they are in a situation of migration or not, the term risks losing its critical value if exile is used to refer to any kind of oppression, as Seyhan warns, and its application must be carefully nuanced. Can an individual choose to go into exile? The primacy of the phrase ‘endured by force of circumstance’ in the dictionary definition suggests that this movement is typically involuntary, an implication that disregards the many people who, under threat of penal banishment or execution, have undergone a self-imposed exile that, strictly speaking, has not been enforced upon them. However, the definition also acknowledges that exile can also be caused by multiple factors (including war, violence, social instability, and religious persecution) and can, in addition, be the result of a personal choice, a fact that heightens feelings of guilt at having willingly chosen to abandon the many others who continue to suffer in the homeland. This voluntary aspect of exile contradicts Said’s rather extreme view that ‘exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you’.14 Although Said’s remark problematically evacuates all agency from the exiled communities, it is questionable how much choice exiled individuals and groups really do have when faced with persecution and violence in the country of origin. Averis takes issue with this dichotomy between forced and voluntary exile, arguing that relating exile to the exercise of will forces a distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ exile, whereby ‘“forced” (political or economic) exile constitutes a “true” exile, as distinct from “voluntary” (cultural or intellectual) exile deemed somehow arbitrary, as 12 Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2001), pp. 173–86 (p. 173). 13 Hamid Nacify, ‘Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre’, in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 119–44 (p. 123). 14 Said, p. 184.

Introduction

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though a kind of self-immolation rendered meaningless because wilfully induced’.15 It is neither respectful nor productive to pass judgement on an individual’s motivations for exile; rather, scholarly work should focus on the wide-reaching consequences of different forms of displacement. Existing definitions of exile are also problematic for their masculine focus. Said completely disregards the enforced banishment, movement, and alienation of women; all the literary figures and intellectuals he analyses are male, and he does not consider how issues of gender might complicate experiences of exile. His insistence that exile is a punishment for political and intellectual activity does not pay due attention to other forms of exile that women experience within colonial and patriarchal frameworks. Women and children may well have been driven into exile from France’s former colonies to escape from war, violence, or persecution, but not necessarily due to their own political activism; they may have accompanied male political exiles in their flight and so, although living in exile, might not be considered exiled subjects in their own right. Exile may also be a solution that allows women to escape from a restrictive, male-dominated society, and therefore it is essential to consider exile as a catalyst for political, sexual, and artistic liberation for women, alongside its more traumatic consequences. Said does acknowledge that exile can be a productive condition because it provides a sense of detachment from the native culture, but this consideration is taken from a masculine standpoint. Since exiled people have an awareness of at least two cultures, they understand that life in the host country occurs against the memory of life in their homeland: ‘this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal’ [original emphasis].16 Arguing that exile is a permanent condition that provides intellectuals with a critical perspective from which they can question and interrogate, Said admits that exile has provided him with a space of mental refuge. Yet he does not consider how women in particular are able to secure their physical and intellectual freedom through exile. Moreover, exile as a theoretical category has drawn criticism for overlooking the forced displacement of the masses because it is implied that exile is only granted for people with some degree of status of recognition, for those who are deemed ‘worthy’ of exile. In other words, ‘exile is reserved for those who count’, as Thomas Pavel observes in his 15 Averis, p. 13. 16 Said, p. 186.

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critical work on exile.17 Although Said argues for a greater understanding of the migration of ordinary people, he in fact fails to do this. In the essay he addresses almost exclusively the banishment of distinguished, male canonical Western writers, including Joseph Conrad, Georg (György) Lukács, and James Joyce. The exile of literary and intellectual figures is inherently privileged and stands in contrast to that of ordinary people. Said could therefore be accused of being somewhat indifferent to people of lower social class, although, as Caren Kaplan points out, it is essential to avoid considering these people as the ‘ultimate victim, pinned in lumpen opposition to the recoverable memoirs and fictions of the exiled, bourgeois modernist’.18 Do exiled individuals want to return to their homeland? John Durham Peters argues that the desire to return to a ‘homeland that is distant and for the time being unapproachable’ is strong, suggesting, however, that this goal is out of reach.19 Paulo Bartoloni agrees, asserting that the greater the time and distance between the country of origin and the country of migration, the greater the exiled person’s sense of loss, and so the desire to return to the homeland grows stronger. 20 Yet a return to one’s birth country can be just as traumatic as the initial departure. Gerise Herndon analyses the return to the homeland as a form of exile, because this return ‘involves a recasting of identity’, the exiled subject having been transformed by migration. 21 Theorizing this return ‘home’ as exile in specifically Latin American contexts, Uruguayan journalist and poet Mario Benedetti coined the neologism ‘desexilio’ in an article for El País newspaper in 1983. 22 Developing this concept further in his 1984 17 Thomas Pavel, ‘Exile as Romance and as Tragedy’, in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 25–36 (p. 27). 18 Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 121. 19 John Durham Peters, ‘Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon’, in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. by Hamid Nacify (New York; London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 17–41 (p. 31). 20 Paolo Bartoloni, On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), p. 103. 21 Gerise Herndon, ‘Returns to Native Lands, Reclaiming the Other’s Language: Kincaid and Danticat’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 3.1 (2001), 54–62 (p. 54). 22 Mario Benedetti, ‘El “desexilio”’, El País, 18 April 1983, [accessed 1 February 2021]. 23 Mario Benedetti, El desexilio y otras conjunturas (Madrid: El País, 1984). 24 Philip Schlesinger, ‘W.G. Sebald and the Condition of Exile’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21.2 (2004), 43–67 (p. 46). 25 Steven Vertovec, ‘The Political Importance of Diasporas’, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working Paper Number 13 (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2005), 1–11 (p. 1). 26 Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 11.

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not’. 27 Even though they may not fully identify with their host country, they take comfort from the unity and camaraderie that living among other members of their community grants them. Diasporans also share affinities with other groups from their homeland living across the world, an element that distinguishes this trope from exile. Nacify observes that belonging to a diaspora is a collective experience that unites the people both to the original homeland and to other diasporic communities living elsewhere. He describes diasporic consciousness as ‘horizontal and multisited’; exile, in contrast, ‘entails a vertical and primary relationship’ with the homeland. 28 This explains why diasporic groups are characterized by diversity and hybridity: although they can be isolated from their host societies, they often find solace in their new communities and encourage one another to shape the culture of their new land. However, Rogers Brubaker criticizes this theoretical discourse by terming it a ‘“diaspora” diaspora’, explaining that the expansion of its lexical field has resulted in ‘a dispersion of the meanings of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space’. 29 He thus levels a similar criticism as that levelled against the term ‘exile’. While ‘exile’ and ‘diaspora’ are used to denote single movements between two fixed locations, then, ‘cosmopolitanism’ suggests a series of displacements between different sites and spaces. Susanne Lachenicht and Kirsten Heinsohn define cosmopolitans as ‘diasporas without a homeland’, 30 implying that cosmopolitans have no place at all to call home, whereas diasporic communities have multiple locales of attachment. The three models of displacement also differ in the degrees of choice that they imply. Whereas exile is often, although not always, a displacement imposed on an individual by external forces, and diaspora is the result of a choice taken across a community to migrate to another

27 Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 15. 28 Hamid Nacify, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 14. 29 Rogers Brubaker, ‘The “Diaspora” Diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28.1 (2005), 1–19 (p. 1). 30 Susanne Lachenicht and Kirsten Heinsohn, ‘Diaspora Identities: Exile, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Past and Present: An Introduction’, in Diaspora Identities: Exile, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Past and Present, ed. by Susanne Lachenicht and Kirsten Heinsohn (Frankfurt; New York: Campus Verlag, 2009), pp. 7–15 (p. 13).

Introduction

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land, cosmopolitanism is characterized by a refusal to actively participate in the life of a single nation-state. Cosmopolitanism has been theorized in different ways in recent decades: as a socio-cultural condition of hybridity and transnational identity; a philosophical outlook; a political project involving transnational institutions, such as the European Union; a global citizenship; an attitude; and a form of behaviour. 31 Vertovec and Robin Cohen challenge the common stereotype that cosmopolitanism is only available to the elite few who can afford to travel and explore new countries and cultures. While historically cosmopolitans were the bourgeois few, nowadays the world has been opened up by cheap air travel, easy access to global communication, and a desire for cross-cultural contact, and therefore increasingly more people are able to adopt a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Of course, however, local and global movement has been halted during the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning that people are having to negotiate new identities within their home space, wherever that may be. Vertovec and Cohen distinguish between these new cosmopolitans and those who John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge term ‘cosmocrats’, an elite group who ‘attend business-school weddings around the world, fill up the business-class lounges at international airports, […], and through their collective efforts, probably do more than anyone else to make the world seem smaller’. 32 While it is true that for many people, a cosmopolitan lifestyle is a financially viable and desirable option that enables individuals to have multiple allegiances and identities, it is also true that for many more, a life of repeated travel and displacement is not the result of a cosmopolitan desire to belong to a global community, but, rather, a necessity to escape from persecution, violence, and precarity. Cosmopolitanism, like exile, thus remains associated with the top strata of society. Through this discussion of terminology, it becomes clear that contemporary forms of migration cannot all be analysed as forms of exile. Michael Hanne has warned of the problems of conflating exile with every form of geographic displacement, such as economic 31 Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, ‘Introduction: Conceiving Cosmopolitanism’, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 1–22 (pp. 8–14). 32 John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (London: Times Books, 2000), p. 229.

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Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

migration, asylum, and expatriation. He argues that ‘such diversity of human experience cannot readily be conveyed by a single term, such as “exiles”’ because this term overlooks the motives that drive people to migrate to another country and implies that such diverse forms of migration affect people in the same way. 33 Yet the authors addressed throughout this book push the boundaries of existing definitions of exile in their autofictional narratives, discussing what it means to have an unstable understanding of home and origin. Their diasporic existence does not prevent them from feeling lost, confused, and alienated, which suggests that they experience their diasporic identity as a form of exile and estrangement, rather than as an empowering, enriching condition. The following section explores these theoretical overlaps in more detail. Postcolonial Theories of Exile and Diaspora Postcolonial strategies of resistance and resilience are both appropriated and challenged by the female authors in this corpus in order to shed light on the intersections between gender, exile, and diaspora. While postcolonial feminists have explored specifically female experiences of exile and gender in detail, they primarily focus on questions of female agency and empowerment, overlooking the challenges that mobility brings to women. Most famous for her 1988 essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in which she interrogates the extent to which women, as the subaltern, can retrieve their voices from oppression, 34 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has also published widely on the diasporic experiences of women. In ‘Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World’, published in 1997, Spivak introduces a new type of diaspora that ‘is shrinking the possibility of an operative civil society in developing nations’. 35 For her, the term has been 33 Michael Hanne, ‘Creativity and Exile: An Introduction’, in Creativity in Exile, ed. by Michael Hanne (Amsterdam, New York: Éditions Rodopi, 2004), pp. 1–12 (p. 4). 34 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL; Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313. 35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World’, in Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, ed. by Amitava Kumar (New York; London: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 87–116 (pp. 90–91).

Introduction

13

transformed by a new transnational capitalist model, in which workers from developing countries are forced to migrate to Europe to participate in a global economy. Factors such as religious oppression, slavery, and war, which previously contributed to the spread of diasporic peoples, are no longer the sole causes of migration; Spivak explains that in contemporary society, the imperialistic process of globalization and the emergence of a transnational economy also force people to cross borders, yet she questions how fundamentally different these diasporas truly are. In her opinion, the only significant difference is that women play a crucial role in this new diaspora because they make up a significant part of the workforce of transnational corporations. Although she recognizes that these women are disenfranchized because they are trapped within transnational capitalism and are therefore forced to work for extremely low wages in very poor conditions, she is optimistic that women as a collective will gain agency once they are given access to higher education. She therefore asks women to ‘think of themselves collectively, not as victims below but agents above, resisting the consequences of globalization as well as redressing the cultural vicissitudes of migrancy’.36 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have also critiqued traditional theories of globalization and transnationalism, arguing that insistence upon ‘transnationalism from above’ and ‘transnationalism from below’ excludes minority subjects, and particularly women from minority backgrounds. 37 Instead, they call for an analysis of ‘minor transnationalism’, which allows ‘the minor and the major [to] participate in one shared transnational moment and space structured by uneven power relations’. 38 Lionnet and Shih’s examination reveals how working horizontally to unite minority subjects across nations frees these peoples from oppression and allows them to be accepted within the dominant culture. They suggest that a new model of transnationalism between minor cultures, which they term ‘cultural transversalism’, 39 is required to achieve Spivak’s aim of resistance. Anglophone scholars have been instrumental in shaping feminist postcolonial debate. In Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations 36 Spivak, ‘Diasporas Old and New’, p. 94. 37 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, ‘Introduction: Thinking Through the Minor, Transnationally’, in Minor Transnationalism, ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1–23 (p. 6). 38 Lionnet and Shih, p. 7. 39 Lionnet and Shih, p. 8.

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Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

of the Subject (1994), Carole Boyce Davies discusses the migratory nature of black women’s subjectivities, arguing that identity is not fixed or static but in constant motion, and that similarly, black women’s writing crosses multiple boundaries of time and space.40 She argues that a diasporic existence can be particularly enriching for women as it allows them to reclaim the agency they have previously been denied, and so they are able to assert a new identity, free from oppression and subjugation. In an argument reminiscent of Said’s discussion of exile but one that also makes up for his gendered blind spot, she contends that diasporic communities can be productive spaces, or ‘desired location[s] out of which they can create’, because they give diasporic people, and particularly women, a sense of detachment from their homeland and enable them to be critical about the culture they have left behind.41 Valérie Orlando makes a similar claim for the productivity of exile in the context of women’s exile, albeit in specifically Francophone cultural production, in her study Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (1999).42 In addition, Elleke Boehmer has been instrumental in shaping contemporary postcolonial discourse by engaging with issues of colonization, migration, and diaspora through a feminist lens. The central thesis of her work is that more needs to be done to raise awareness of the issues faced by women living in the diaspora to avoid gender being treated ‘in a tokenistic way, or as subsidiary to the category of race’.43 For Boehmer, this lack of engagement with gender remains a critical blind spot of contemporary postcolonial theory as advocated by scholars such as Homi Bhabha. Indeed, Bhabha’s contributions have been criticized for being ‘remarkably free of gender, class, [and] identifiable political location’.44 Despite omitting to study how differences in gender and social class complicate the experience of living in the diaspora, Bhabha has produced new ways of considering culture and identity within the diasporic context. Bhabha’s work can thus be considered an example of 40 Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London; New York: Routledge, 1994). 41 Boyce Davies, p. 114. 42 Valérie Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999). 43 Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 7. 44 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality’, Race and Class, 36.3 (1995), 1–20 (p. 13).

Introduction

15

twentieth-century theory that makes important insights while failing to address key aspects of postcolonial experience. In The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha introduces the concepts of ambivalence, mimicry, and hybridity, with which formerly colonized peoples, including those living in the diaspora, are able to displace colonial authority and gain agency. According to Bhabha, national identity is not a pure, fixed concept but is fluid and changeable, formed at the boundary of cultures that he terms the ‘interstitial space’. He argues that ‘it is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated’ [original emphasis].45 These interstices are spaces of both convergence and displacement, bringing cultures that are perpetually transforming into contact with one another. For Bhabha, then, cultures are always inherently hybrid, and he claims that this hybridity empowers people living in the diaspora, giving them a sense of solidarity and community. Métissage is another important postcolonial strategy of identity formation, and one put forward by Francophone thinkers. Édouard Glissant was one of the first cultural critics to adopt the term in Poétique de la relation (1990), and he distinguishes between three methods of conceptualizing cultural encounters: métissage, creolization, and Relation.46 Françoise Lionnet, in contrast, focuses on the racial implications of métissage—a term that, she argues, emerged during the French colonial period—before adopting it as an aesthetic concept and reading practice.47 Françoise Vergès also examines métissage as both a biological and ideological phenomenon within the context of the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. She privileges the concept over other postcolonial identity constructions because métissage developed in the colony itself as a tool of resistance, ‘a response to European racism and the discourse of mono-ethnicism, of blood and nation’.48 However, a critical reading of métissage, which foregrounds its historical implications, is 45 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge Classics, 2004 [1994]), p. 2. 46 Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). 47 Françoise Lionnet, ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage’, in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison, WI; London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 325–36. 48 Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 9.

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Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

required because, as Roger Toumson explains, the concept is directly influenced by colonial thought.49 In Poétique de la relation, Glissant also advocates for a new way of travelling that he terms ‘errance’. Unlike the notion of exile, errance breaks from the binary notion of centre/periphery and privileges the ‘erasure’ of traditional, stable, homogenous identities as a productive space for cross-cultural encounters. Yet, as this study shows, lived experiences of such a nomadic lifestyle are often not productive but alienating, and this is particularly the case for women. This book builds on these existing theories of exile and postcolonial identity to develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of female identity politics. In order to do this, alongside a thorough examination of ‘literal’ exile, given that the authors studied in this book are all geographically displaced from the places of their birth, I advance a metaphorical understanding of exile. Here, I expand the framework of exile to create a more complete understanding of female experiences, drawing on David Bevan who argues that ‘exile, viscerally, is difference, otherness’. 50 I argue that postcolonial models of diasporic identity are in fact experienced by the female authors as different forms of metaphorical exile. Yet I also remain sensitive to the risk of appropriating the concept of exile and overlooking the situation of geographically exiled subjects who are forced to abandon their homes and families and settle in a country that is often alien to them, as examined in the following section. Metaphorical Exile Further to its geographical connotations, then, exile can be understood as a metaphor that indicates a sense of otherness, in which issues of race, language, gender, sexuality, class, religious affiliation, and generational differences contribute to segregating the exiled subject from the rest of society. Here, exile is a feeling of not belonging to, or not participating in, a particular community; it therefore does not automatically require a geographical displacement, either within or outside the national borders 49 Roger Toumson, Mythologie du métissage (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). 50 David Bevan, ‘Introduction’, in Literature and Exile, ed. by David Bevan (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 3–4 (p. 3).

Introduction

17

of a country. A person can feel exiled in multiple ways even before leaving their home, as is the case with the authors in this study. My use of the term ‘metaphorical exile’ to refer to the experiences of a group of Francophone writers is underpinned by Julia Kristeva’s threefold theory of exile. In ‘Un nouveau type d’intellectuel: le dissident’, an essay published in 1977 in Tel Quel, Kristeva analyses the gendered exile of women writers, arguing that such women are exiled in three ways. Not only are they exiled geographically, having been forced to flee their land of origin due to war, unrest, and poverty, but their gender also exiles them from society. According to Kristeva, a woman is ‘trop prise par les frontières du corps et peut-être aussi de l’espèce’, and consequently ‘se sent toujours en exil’ [original emphasis]. 51 Third, Kristeva considers the writer’s condition itself as a position of exile. She claims that ‘rien ne s’écrit sans quelque exil’ because, like exile itself, the act of writing uproots writers from reality and draws them into a world of imagination, into another time and space. 52 This book, therefore, demonstrates the ways in which metaphorical exile has added to the oppression of women writers living in the diaspora, and to their literary representation as ‘le singulier du singulier’, in Kristeva’s own terms. 53 My aim is to move towards a more inclusive interpretation of exile because metaphorical exile focuses on all experiences of exile, while paying particular attention to the plight of those women who undergo multiple forms of alienation without necessarily leaving their homeland. All women migrants, regardless of their profession, are twice exiled: in addition to being isolated for being migrants, they are also excluded by their gender that, particularly in low-income countries across the world, restricts their access to education, professional activities, and social mobility, and removes the possibility of self-governance. Their double exile, caused by both gender-based subordination and their migratory status, inevitably accentuates feelings of alienation and exclusion. Following Kristeva’s framework, then, the women migrant writers analysed in this study are thrice exiled: writing adds an additional layer to their exile because they are isolated from the rest of society as a consequence of their literary profession. 51 Julia Kristeva, ‘Un nouveau type d’intellectuel: le dissident’, Tel Quel, 74 (Winter 1977), 3–8 (p. 5). 52 Kristeva, p. 7. 53 Kristeva, p. 5.

18

Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

Experiencing metaphorical exile—whether uprooted from the country of origin or not—can often play out linguistically upon the exiled subject. Of course, geographic displacement is not always accompanied by a change of language, but often exiled individuals are forced to speak a new language and learn the different cultural codes that accompany this linguistic discourse. While becoming bilingual—or even multilingual— can be enriching, the initial sentiment of being cut off from society because of language can also be isolating and can render complete integration difficult. The six authors analysed in this study, and their literary counterparts, all have a complex relationship with language. Although their exile occurs within the wider boundaries of the Francophone world and does not automatically force them to learn a new language (except in the case of Farhoud, who had to learn French on her arrival in Quebec because Arabic was the only language she spoke in Lebanon), the French that they use is peppered with references to their respective indigenous cultures. As postcolonial women writers, the French they produce with native proficiency is itself a hybrid, inflected by knowledge of other languages, even before the moment of their departure. As their transnational trajectories take shape, language is a site of anxiety, and it consistently others them from the ‘mainstream’ society in which they find themselves, be it in metropolitan France or elsewhere. Madelaine Hron explores the intrinsic connection between language and exile further by analysing exile within the framework of translation. She argues that both exile and translation involve a process of modification and adaptation; exiled subjects are forced to translate themselves, ‘transform[ing] their images of home, their idealized notions of the new country, their former values, customs, and, above all, their culture, into the context of the target host country’. 54 This notion of translating exile assumes another meaning in fiction, as authors in exile must translate their experiences into prose to fit the norms of the target culture for their work to circulate within the target market. 55 Writers in exile not only cross linguistic borders but must also negotiate new values and expectations of the target audience, adapting their work to fit a new culture while simultaneously transforming themselves to integrate into their new society. In addition, Hron examines how the 54 Madelaine Hron, Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture (Toronto; Buffalo, NY; London: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. xv–xvi. 55 Hron, p. xvi.

Introduction

19

paradigm of translation exposes texts as market commodities, just as migrants are also considered in terms of their economic value, and she studies the translation of the pain of exile into language through Roman Jakobson’s lens of intersemiotic translation. 56 Jakobson’s theory posits that translation can occur between different semiotic codes, and so he argues that the source language can be interpreted through nonverbal systems and translated into art, music, dance, and drama. Hron inverts this concept in her study of the pain of exile, demonstrating how the nonverbal language of pain can be translated into writing. Jacques Derrida adds a particularly personal dimension to linguistic exile. In Le Monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine (1996), he explains how, as a monolingual French speaker, he has ‘qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la [s]ienne’. 57 French is the only language he speaks, yet he feels alienated from it because it is not really his: he was raised in Algeria, and, as a Jew, he had his French citizenship removed in October 1940. He then discusses how French was imposed on him through the education system. Arabic and Berber, which were the native languages of a large part of the Algerian population, were only allowed to be studied as an optional foreign language, a paradox that seems absurd to Derrida. He himself now feels ‘perdu hors du français’, as though this language does not belong to him. 58 Displacement throughout the Francophone world also forces the six writers, and their narrative personae, to encounter a new culture. The term ‘cultural exile’ was first coined by Argentinian novelist and essayist Julio Cortázar and referred to his exclusion from Argentina in the early 1970s because of the revolutionary nature of his writing. Interestingly, Cortázar’s situation of ‘cultural exile’ became such with political changes in his home country while he was living in Paris. He moved to Paris of his own accord in 1951, having already been arrested in Argentina for his participation in political protests. He began publishing his work in Paris but the Argentinian junta took exception to the political nature of his writing, and thus made his return impossible. The term has since been adopted by female Chilean and Chicana writers to designate a form of internal exile, an exclusion from mainstream culture. Central to the narratives examined in this book is the notion that ‘cultural trappings’ 56 Hron, p. 40. 57 Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), p. 13. 58 Derrida, p. 98.

20

Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

cause the protagonists to withdraw into a state of alienation. Even though the authors and characters migrate within the framework of the Francophone world, the cultural divergences between their different locations, which stem from France’s colonial project, are significant and thus cause a cultural exile. Conclusion Through a close reading of their autofictional narratives, this study emphasizes that exile means something different to each author: trauma, for Lefèvre; constant displacement, for Pineau; impossible return, for Bouraoui; political exile, for Rakotoson; travel, for Tadjo; and linguistic exile, for Farhoud. Following an introductory chapter that posits autofiction as the guiding principle connecting each author and their narratives of exile, the book takes a chronological approach in order to offer a diachronic analysis of recent Francophone postcolonial women’s writing of exile. In other words, beginning with Lefèvre’s autofictional writing and working through the texts in chronological order allows me to test whether the literature of these female Francophone postcolonial writers reveals some sort of progression in terms of literary innovation and political emancipation. While the focal point of each chapter remains the texts under detailed examination, I also make reference to additional texts in the authors’ corpus, alongside other works from a similar geographical and cultural location, in order to contextualize their work and enrich the analysis of exile. Furthermore, this wider discussion offers the opportunity to trace the development of the authors and/or narrators as their autobiographies assist them (to varying degrees) in articulating their status as exiled subjects. Chapter One, ‘Exile, Autofiction, and Women’s Writing’, sets up the comparative approach to the book by examining the similarities and differences between the six authors more closely. The chapter examines the ways in which they each engage with theories of autofiction in order to find their own voice and claim ownership of their life story of exile. Drawing on Serge Doubrovsky’s reflections on the genre, I argue that through autofiction, the six authors have the freedom to regain control of their difficult situation by erasing or fictionalizing particularly painful elements, while reflecting psychoanalytically upon their personal stories enables them to examine the many effects that migration has had on their complex, multiple identities.

Introduction

21

Chapter Two discusses exile and family estrangement in Lefèvre’s two autofictional works, Métisse blanche (1989) and Retour à la saison des pluies (1990). 59 It pays particular attention to the mixed-race identity of the narrator, a problematic and disruptive state that brings about her geographic and metaphorical exile. Lefèvre is the oldest author studied in this book, and she grew up during French colonial rule in Indochina. Her autobiographies, therefore, focus on this colonial era, meaning that while they were written in the postcolonial moment, they remain largely uninfluenced by postcolonial thinking. As this chapter demonstrates, Lefèvre’s autobiographies reproduce, to a certain extent, Orientalist paradigms that, as Said posits in Orientalism (1978), began during European colonial expansion.60 Examining the colonial dimensions of Lefèvre’s gendered exile within her family sets up a discussion of how the other authors deconstruct colonial paradigms and work within a new, postcolonial framework. Chapter Three moves the analysis to the French Caribbean through a close reading of Guadeloupean author Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia. 61 The central focus of this chapter is a study of the motives for the Pineau family’s migration from Guadeloupe to metropolitan France in the 1960s, and it is structured around the question of choice in exile. This chapter offers a new approach to L’Exil selon Julia, a narrative that has already attracted significant critical attention for its insights into exile and gender, by analysing the connections between war and displacement for the female members of the Pineau family. Chapter Four explores the intersections between exile, gender, and sexuality in three of Bouraoui’s autofictional narratives: Le Jour du séisme (1999), Garçon manqué (2000), and Mes mauvaises pensées (2005).62 Bouraoui’s writing is unique—she is the only author of this corpus to discuss how her sexual identity intersects with her experiences of exile in her work. Comparing the three texts offers the opportunity for a sustained discussion about how ideas of masculinity, femininity, 59 Kim Lefèvre, Métisse blanche, suivi de Retour à la saison des pluies (Paris: Phébus, 2008 [1989; 1990]). Both texts were first published separately by Barrault Éditions. In the edition used throughout this book, the texts are published together by Phébus. 60 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 4. 61 Gisèle Pineau, L’Exil selon Julia (Paris: Stock, 1996). 62 Nina Bouraoui, Le Jour du séisme (Paris: Stock, 1999); Garçon manqué (Paris: Stock, 2000); Mes mauvaises pensées (Paris: Stock, 2005).

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Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

and sexual desire become more prominent in Bouraoui’s writing as her narrative persona progresses into adulthood. Chapter Five discusses the political implications of exile, arguing that both Rakotoson’s initial exile from Madagascar to France in 1983 and her exilic experiences on her return in 2007—which are depicted within the narrative frame of Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar (2007)63 —arise because of her opposition to the political regime in power at that particular time. It draws connections between the concepts of exile and errance and suggests that these concepts are in fact more similar than postcolonial scholars tend to indicate. Chapter Six centres on exile in Côte d’Ivoire and argues that a return to the homeland for an individual, after living in the diaspora, does not always equate to a return home; rather, it can be experienced as a manifestation of exile. This is the case for Nina, Tadjo’s autofictional narrator of Loin de mon père (2010), 64 and, by extension, for the author herself. Her return to a country that is no longer home is aggravated by gender issues, and by the fact that she constantly views the way of life in Abidjan from a Western colonial perspective. The final analytical chapter is dedicated to experiences of exile in Quebec, and examines the intersections between ageing, education, and exile. Adopting a comparative approach between the texts, I trace exile over different generations of female characters as they are depicted in Toutes celles que j’étais (2015) and Au grand soleil cachez vos filles (2017), 65 questioning how women at different life stages, who have inevitably received differing levels of education, experience geographic and metaphorical exile as a form of estrangement. Farhoud’s autofiction is yet to be examined critically given its recent publication date. This chapter, therefore, makes an important contribution to scholarship on Farhoud’s writing and offers a unique analysis of literary experiences of exile beyond metropolitan France. As the analysis moves through different authors situated in different areas of the globe, and whose works cross space and generations, it demonstrates the urgent need for more nuanced understandings of gender and exile to emerge in Francophone postcolonial scholarship. 63 Michèle Rakotoson, Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar (Bordeaux: Elytis, 2007). 64 Véronique Tadjo, Loin de mon père (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010). 65 Abla Farhoud, Toutes celles que j’étais (Montreal: VLB, 2015); Au grand soleil cachez vos filles (Montreal: VLB, 2017).

Introduction

23

Focusing on the intersectional issues of gender, race, class, and language, this study argues for a reconsideration of the very concepts of exile, home, origin, and identity within the Francophone postcolonial world.

chapter one

Exile, Autofiction, and Women’s Writing Exile, Autofiction, and Women’s Writing

As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson observe, autobiographical fiction is particularly relevant in the postcolonial context, since it has ‘served as a tactic of intervention in colonial repression’; it allows the voice of the dominated culture to be heard and enables barriers between the colonizer and the colonized to be broken down.1 Although the imitation of this Western narrative genre that celebrates the life of the individual could be perceived as a threat to the collective, oral culture of the formerly colonized, Smith and Watson suggest that the postcolonial rewriting of autobiography has ‘both engaged and challenged the Western tradition of individualist life narrative’. 2 Postcolonial writers have sought to destabilize traditional forms of autobiography, manipulating the dominant European languages by integrating indigenous vocabulary and syntax and incorporating collective responses into the processes of memory and identity formation, creating a style of writing Caren Kaplan has called ‘out-law genres’. 3 For Kaplan, this term refers to hybrid feminist autobiographical texts that combine purely textual approaches with photography, film, music, and textiles in order to ‘rework and challenge conventional notions of critic and author’ and act as a form of resistance writing, granting agency to female postcolonial writers.4 Autobiographical literature, then, is a genre with which 1 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd edn (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 [2001]), p. 59. 2 Smith and Watson, pp. 59–60. 3 Caren Kaplan, ‘Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects’, in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiographical Practice, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 115–38. 4 Kaplan, p. 119.

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Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

subjects historically marginalized by the literary canon because of their gendered and ethnic minority status can use personal accounts to activate historical memories of exile that have too often been ignored. As Françoise Lionnet notes, autobiography is particularly useful for women, allowing them to reappropriate the past, claim ownership of their own life story, and ‘confront the images and stereotypes that have limited their choices’. 5 The genre, however, is not clearly defined and has been interpreted in numerous ways. In the French-speaking world, Philippe Lejeune has played a key role in theorizing autobiography; his ‘autobiographical pact’ needs little introduction, so seminal has it been in the field of autobiographical studies.6 Yet his work is not free from criticism. Claire Boyle questions the authority that Lejeune’s pact grants the autobiographer, arguing that it is the reader who seals this pact and determines that the text is autobiographical, rather than the author. According to Boyle, the reader projects an identity onto the author through images gained from the text that may or may not be accurate, which means that autobiography unexpectedly ‘appears as a place where the autobiographer experiences a loss of sovereignty over the self’.7 Within the feminist postcolonial context, Louise Hardwick argues that this primary focus on the self overlooks the many wider social, historical, and political issues that are often emphasized in postcolonial autobiographies, 8 while Natalie Edwards notes that Lejeune focuses almost exclusively on male-authored autobiographies, a further indicator that his model is inappropriate for the texts under consideration here.9 Moreover, Leigh Gilmore wonders whether this Eurocentric taxonomy of autobiography is truly appropriate for the discussion of postcolonial trauma. She argues that the autobiographical project presumes a legalistic definition of truth that carries with it a risk of judgement by the reader, who potentially could accuse the author of lying or manipulating the truth; 5 Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 94. 6 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 15. 7 Claire Boyle, Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), p. 8. 8 Louise Hardwick, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 6. 9 Natalie Edwards, Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2011), p. 16.

Exile, Autofiction, and Women’s Writing

27

these judgements ‘may be too similar to forms in which trauma was experienced’, and so the project actually contributes to the silencing of the traumatic experience.10 Other models of autobiographical fiction are therefore required for postcolonial narratives, in which exile and trauma are often a focal point of the narrator-protagonist’s experiences. Smith and Watson’s preferred term of ‘life narrative’ seems more applicable for postcolonial literature than Lejeune’s taxonomy because it engages specifically with questions of memory, experience, identity, space, embodiment, and agency, themes at the heart of postcolonial writing. However, this label alters the perspective of the genre because it encompasses all writing about a person’s life, including texts in which the biographical subject and the author are not necessarily the same person. It does acknowledge, though, that this mode of writing is not always strictly truthful or accurate, enabling a degree of distancing between the author and his or her traumatic experiences. Serge Doubrovsky’s term of ‘autofiction’, which first appeared in the blurb on the back cover of his novel Fils in 1977 to contradict Lejeune’s claim that a work whose author and narrator had the same name could not be a work of fiction, presents a more suitable methodology with which to analyse representations of exile and displacement. Initially invented to define this specific text rather than to outline the parameters of a new genre, autofiction, for Doubrovsky, represents a ‘fiction d’évènements et de faits strictement réels’, written by ordinary individuals, not by the ‘importants de ce monde au soir de leur vie’.11 Conceptualizing autofiction in his 1980 article ‘Autobiographie/vérité/ psychanalyse’, he places emphasis on the agency of the writer and acknowledges that autofiction, a mode that focuses on a particular time period rather than giving a chronological account of one’s life, provides space for a psychoanalytical examination of the self.12 A concept discovered by accident, Doubrovsky has never claimed to be the authoritative figure on autofiction; he recognizes that the theoretical framework has evolved since the publication of Fils, and his own conceptualization has developed in parallel. According to Philippe Gasparini, 10 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 3. 11 Serge Doubrovsky, Fils (Paris: Galilée, 1977), back cover. 12 Serge Doubrovsky, ‘Autobiographie/vérité/psychanalyse’, L’Esprit Créateur, 20.3 (1980), 87–97 (p. 96).

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Doubrovsky’s recent definitions encompass ‘tout le champ de l’écriture du moi contemporaine’.13 Doubrovsky, like Lejeune, continues to place importance on the names of the author, narrator, and protagonist, which must all correspond; in a departure from Lejeune’s framework, though, autofiction enables writers to be much more creative in terms of narrative form. While autofiction clearly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in life narratives and raises the question of whether a text can greatly manipulate autobiographical truth and still be categorized as a form of life writing, it must be remembered that all life narratives, whether autofictional or not, arguably incorporate some degree of fictionality. As Burton Pike remarks pithily, ‘not all fiction is autobiographical, but on this deeper level, all autobiography is fiction’ because the writing of the memory of a past event inherently involves a reinterpretation and fictionalization of that past.14 The genre has been critiqued and expanded in recent years, demonstrating its continued relevance for contemporary literature written in French. For instance, Vincent Colonna distinguishes between autofiction, which designates a fictional account of an author’s life, and autofabulation, a neologism that groups texts narrating fantastical, unbelievable events that have never happened to the author.15 Arnaud Schmitt, meanwhile, sees merit in Doubrovsky’s definition of autofiction but argues that the term itself is flawed because ‘as a substantive [it] lays stress on the non-referential part of the personal discourse, whereas Doubrovsky’s textual practice went rather in the opposite direction’.16 For Schmitt, the term does not successfully capture the definition, and he suggests that the English ‘self-narration’ is a more appropriate label. The multiplicity of these terms to designate similar generic structures is echoed by the current popularity of autofiction, as contemporary French-language writers such as Paul Nizon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marie 13 Philippe Gasparini, ‘De quoi l’autofiction est-elle le nom?’, Autofiction Conference, Université de Lausanne, 9 October 2009, [accessed 18 December 2019]. 14 Burton Pike, ‘Time in Autobiography’, Comparative Literature, 28.4 (1976), 326–42 (p. 337). 15 Vincent Colonna, Autofiction et autres mythomanies littéraires (Auch: Éditions Tristram, 2004), p. 77. 16 Arnaud Schmitt, ‘Making the Case for Self-narration Against Autofiction’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 25.1 (2010), 122–37 (p. 126).

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Darrieussecq, and Chloé Delaume all appropriate this label in their own way. Indeed, the term is often employed to refer to all kinds of first-person narratives, and while subsuming the complexities of Doubrovsky’s theory into a single, catch-all phrase is problematic, it does raise the profile of autobiographical writing more generally. In addition, recent scholarship on the theory and practice of autofiction, at one time a specifically French discipline, has transcended metropolitan borders. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf’s edited volume Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (2019) surveys the genre across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas,17 while Hywel Dix’s Autofiction in English (2018) identifies a distinctive corpus of autofictional writing in English.18 Moreover, the cross-cultural conference ‘Autofiction: Theory, Practices, Cultures – A Comparative Perspective’, held at the University of Oxford in October 2019, is further testimony of the popularity of autofictional writing across a range of national and linguistic contexts. The representations of exile and estrangement of the six authors studied in this book expose the limits of traditional models of autobiography highlighted above and instead call for a reimagining of the genre, in which the truth is distorted to enable them to step away from their trauma. The ability to manipulate reality, distort the chronology of experiences, and create a fragmented, layered text allows Kim Lefèvre, Gisèle Pineau, Nina Bouraoui, Michèle Rakotoson, Véronique Tadjo, and Abla Farhoud to gain control of their exile, suppressing or fictionalizing particularly painful elements. The internal commentary that they provide on the veracity of their experiences through the framework of autofiction signifies that they are in control of non-critical readers, giving them hints about what might or might not have happened to them. In this way, the authors finally gain agency over their lives; this freedom had previously been denied to them by the locations that they had left. Moreover, just as Doubrovsky places importance on the role of psychoanalysis in his theoretical writing, the six authors reflect upon the multiple consequences of exile in their narratives and attempt to come to terms with their condition, rather than becoming overly concerned with the factual circumstances of their migration. As the following section demonstrates, this is particularly advantageous for the authors 17 Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (ed.), Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (Boston, MA; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). 18 Hywel Dix (ed.), Autofiction in English (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

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of this corpus, given that, as women, they have not always had sufficient opportunity to analyse their migration critically because their voices have often been suppressed in a male-dominated, patriarchal society. In the Francophone postcolonial context, then, autofiction is not only a mode of reading but also a mode of writing, one that provides a feminist space for the discussion of exile. Autobiography, Autofiction, and Writing: An Identity Quest Autobiography and autofiction occupy a distinct place in each author’s œuvre. With the exception of Tadjo, each author has adopted the genre as a fundamental writing strategy with which to discuss their difficult postcolonial past, albeit in different ways. Tadjo, in contrast, is primarily a politically committed writer who is eager to ‘réfléchir sur ce qui s’est passé et sur ce que l’avenir pourra nous réserver’ through her writing.19 She engages particularly with issues of war, gender oppression, and environmental concerns that affect the African continent in texts such as L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda (2000), which originated in the 1998 ‘Écrire par devoir de mémoire’ project to commemorate the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, 20 and her recent work En compagnie des hommes (2017), a text that narrates the devastating effects of the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. 21 Tadjo’s concern for raising awareness of ecological and medical concerns has exceeded the textual boundaries of this novel, and in November 2018 she wrote an opinion piece for Le Point Afrique to denounce the approach to the Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 22 She has also commented in the media on the COVID-19 crisis, outlining the strategies she deems crucial for Africa’s recovery. Her novels, poetry collections, and children’s literature foreground the problems faced 19 Antonia Wimbush, ‘Véronique Tadjo et la solidarité humaine: An Interview’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 55.1 (2018), 246–58 (p. 250). 20 Véronique Tadjo, L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda (Arles: Actes Sud, 2000). 21 Véronique Tadjo, En compagnie des hommes (Paris: Don Quichotte Éditions, 2017). 22 Véronique Tadjo, ‘Pourquoi, face à Ebola, il faut changer les mentalités’, Le Point, 14 November 2018, [accessed 6 January 2020].

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by African communities but also celebrate Africa, and the author has confessed that she is ‘happy to contribute wherever [she] find[s] [her] self, but especially if it’s Africa’. 23 Tadjo has also written non-fiction, publishing biographies of Nelson Mandela and Léopold Sédar Senghor to educate young people about the leading political and intellectual figures of Africa’s history. 24 In fact, her only explicitly autobiographical text is Loin de mon père. For Tadjo, then, celebrating the richness and diversity of Africa through her poetic, simple, and accessible language, which is reminiscent of the oral style of traditional African literature she greatly admires, is more important than telling her own story. Bouraoui’s corpus stands in sharp contrast to Tadjo, as many of her texts, although not all, are autobiographical. In an interview in 2004, the author commented that writing is, for her, ‘une forme de quête identitaire’ in which she reveals intimate details about her life to help her to resolve her identitarian issues. 25 Her autobiographical writing can be split into two categories: her earlier work focuses on personal feelings of shame and guilt about her transnational background, her struggles with her sexuality, and her exile from Algeria, whereas later texts published from 2005 explore themes of love and desire in a more optimistic tone. She has also written fiction that is not directly personal: her first three texts, La Voyeuse interdite (1991), Poing mort (1992), and Le Bal des murènes (1996), are not autobiographical, and neither are her latest texts, Standard (2014), Beaux rivages (2016), and Otages (2020). 26 Following a cycle of autobiographical narratives, Bouraoui returns to writing fiction, inventing different characters and treating themes that transcend her own experiences, which suggests that she has achieved some sort of reconciliation with her difficult past. This reconciliation is 23 Stephen Gray, ‘Véronique Tadjo Speaks with Stephen Gray’, Research in African Literatures, 34.3 (2003), 142–47 (p. 143). 24 Véronique Tadjo, Nelson Mandela: ‘Non à l’apartheid’ (Arles: Actes Sud Junior, 2010). 25 Dominique Simonnet, ‘Écrire, c’est retrouver ses fantômes’, L’Express culture, 31 May 2004, [accessed 20 December 2019]. 26 Nina Bouraoui, La Voyeuse interdite (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Poing mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Le Bal des murènes (Paris: Fayard, 1996); Standard (Paris: Flammarion, 2014); Beaux rivages (Paris: JC Lattès, 2016); and Otages (Paris: JC Lattès, 2020). Otages was the inspiration for a play written by Richard Brunel and performed in Lyon in November 2019. The text was shortlisted for the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie 2020.

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never entirely complete, however, as evidenced by a return to autofiction in 2018 when she published Tous les hommes désirent naturellement savoir, 27 a text in which she tries to rid herself of the shame of being lesbian in a heteronormative society. Autobiography plays a fundamental role in Pineau’s corpus, too. Her novels and short stories address concerns of marginalization, gender oppression, and constant displacement between mainland France and the Caribbean, issues she has confronted during her life. While L’Exil selon Julia is her most personal narrative, Mes quatre femmes (2007), in which she traces the lives of her ancestor Angélique, her grandmother Julia, her aunt Gisèle, and her mother Daisy from a more detached viewpoint, sheds more light on the complex relationships within her family. 28 Pineau has also written novels for young adults, and she therefore invites comparisons with Tadjo; in contrast, Lefèvre, Bouraoui, and Farhoud only write for adults, while Rakotoson has published one book for children. 29 Whereas Tadjo’s texts for children are purely imaginative, Pineau’s are largely inspired by her own experiences. Novels such as Un papillon dans la cité (1992) are not autobiographies as such because Pineau introduces different characters as narrator/protagonist, which break Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, but they do explore the difficulties the author encountered growing up, torn between French and Creole cultures. 30 Likewise, many of Rakotoson’s texts are based on her own life. Her early novels and short stories are categorized as fiction in their paratextual material, but autobiographical features can certainly be read into them, particularly Elle, au printemps (1996), which tells the story of a young woman leaving Madagascar and settling in Paris. 31 Her writing then takes a political turn, corresponding to her period of political exile in France, and she echoes Tadjo in using her literary career to denounce the social injustices she witnesses in Madagascar from afar. She describes these texts that foreground issues such as poverty, slavery, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and violence as ‘des hurlements’, explaining further: ‘j’écris parce qu’il y a des choses que 27 Nina Bouraoui, Tous les hommes désirent naturellement savoir (Paris: JC Lattès, 2018). 28 Gisèle Pineau, Mes quatre femmes (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2007). 29 Michèle Rakotoson, Tovonay, l’enfant du Sud (Paris: Sépia, 2010). 30 Gisèle Pineau, Un papillon dans la cité (Paris: Sépia, 1992). 31 Michèle Rakotoson, Elle, au printemps (Paris: Sépia, 1996).

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je ne supporte plus’. 32 While she continues to be politically active, her recent writing has taken on a more introspective tone since she returned to live in Madagascar in 2008: Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar is followed by a similarly autofictional narrative Madame à la campagne: chroniques malgaches (2013), 33 suggesting that as an older woman, writing is as much a personal project as a tool of political denunciation. Engaging with autofiction is the cornerstone of Farhoud’s writing project, regardless of the genre in which she is writing, because it enables her to create a new identity for herself, one that is not bound to her immigrant status. Many of her early theatre plays centre on her own experiences of exile, growing up between Lebanon and Quebec. Her most well-known novel Le Bonheur a la queue glissante (1998) is a firstperson interior monologue that tells the story of 75-year-old Dounia, who recounts her struggles journeying between Lebanon and Quebec to her writer daughter Myriam, but it is unclear whether the book is Dounia’s story as mediated directly by Myriam, or whether the narrative is indeed driven by Dounia. 34 The slippery and ambiguous narration is mirrored by the text’s relationship to autobiographical truth. For some critics, Dounia is a fictionalized representation of Farhoud’s mother, 35 meaning that the text has more in common with the genre of biofiction than autofiction, 36 yet numerous parallels can also be drawn between Dounia and Farhoud herself: both were born in Beirut and now live in Montreal, both have experienced similar trajectories between Lebanon and Quebec, and both are at a similar stage in their lives. By playing with different notions of life writing, Farhoud distorts readers’ expectations to create complex and layered stories of women living far from their homes who share experiences of isolation and alienation. It is striking that all of Lefèvre’s texts—not only Métisse blanche and Retour à la saison des pluies—are autobiographical in nature. Her third 32 Lova Rabary-Rakotondravony, ‘Rencontre avec Michèle Rakotoson, écrivaine’, Indigo, July 2018, [accessed 5 November 2019][my transcript]. 33 Michèle Rakotoson, Madame à la campagne: chroniques malgaches (Antananarivo: Dodo Vole, 2013). 34 Abla Farhoud, Le Bonheur a la queue glissante (Montreal: L’Hexagone, 1998). 35 Mary Jean Green, Women and Narrative Identity: Rewriting the Quebec National Text (Montreal; London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 148. 36 See Michael Lackey, ‘Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction’, a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies, 31.1 (2016), 3–10.

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book, Moi, Marina la Malinche (1994), is a first-person biography of the indigenous female Mexican slave Malintzin Tenepal. 37 It is marketed as a novel through its subtitle ‘roman’, inadvertently placing the text within Doubrovsky’s parameters of autofiction. However, Michael F. O’Riley suggests that this text is both a biography about the slave Tenepal and an autobiography because ‘the work embeds an auto/biographical narrative—of the lives of both Lefèvre and her mother—through the writing of Malintzin’s life’. 38 This blurring of genres demonstrates Lefèvre’s thorough attachment to the autobiographical genre, even in texts that are seemingly factual. Her most recent book, Les Eaux mortes du Mékong (2006), recounts a fictional story but is clearly inspired by her past life in Vietnam. 39 Although the exilic, fragmented self is a core theme of each author’s corpus because of the autobiographical nature of their writing, it must be pointed out that all six authors are well established and have enjoyed commercial and critical success, an indicator of their bourgeois, cosmopolitan status. Lefèvre is the least well-known beyond the academy and she has not won any major literary prizes; nevertheless, the fact that each edition of Métisse blanche is prefaced by writer and academic Michèle Sarde endorses her text and grants it greater cultural capital than ordinarily it would have enjoyed. In contrast, Bouraoui has earned a place at the forefront of contemporary Francophone women’s literature, and she also occupies a central position in contemporary lesbian/queer writing in French, thanks to her unique writing style and her thorough exploration of contemporary themes of love, sexuality, and identity. La Voyeuse interdite won the Prix du Livre Inter in 1991, and she was also awarded the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2005 for Mes mauvaises pensées. Moreover, she has worked as a song writer for the high-profile French-speaking artists Céline Dion, Chimène Badi, and Garou. She has enjoyed considerable success in France: in January 2006, she was awarded the title of ‘Chevalier’ of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of her contribution to literature, and her work has been well received by French and Algerian readers. This status is compounded by her regular presence at literary festivals in France, on social media platforms, and in popular French women’s magazines such as Elle and Marie Claire. It is 37 Kim Lefèvre, Moi, Marina la Malinche (Paris: Stock, 1994). 38 Michael F. O’Riley, ‘“Métissage” and Autobiography in Kim Lefèvre’s Moi, Marina la Malinche’, The French Review, 78.5 (2005), 933–46 (p. 934). 39 Kim Lefèvre, Les Eaux mortes du Mékong (Paris: Flammarion, 2006).

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surprising that there has been little interest in her work beyond France and Algeria, given her status as an important woman writer who attracts considerable scholarly and media attention. A handful of her texts have been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, and Italian, but they have attracted little currency in literary circles. Remarkably, only three of Bouraoui’s narratives have been translated into English, and one only very recently: Forbidden Vision was published in 1995, Tomboy in 2007, and All Men Want to Know in 2020.40 Perhaps this lack of attention to her writing in other cultural contexts is a reflection of the complexity and specificity of her work that is so deeply embedded in the entangled relationship between France and Algeria. Similarly, only one of Lefèvre’s texts has been translated into English, thereby limiting her readership to a Francophone audience: Jack A. Yeager’s translation of White Métisse was published in 2018, almost 30 years after the publication of the original text.41 The under-translation of Bouraoui and Lefèvre is a real gap in women’s writing and hinders a translinguistic approach to their gendered accounts of exile and estrangement. While Pineau’s literary fame is mostly centered in France and the French Caribbean—she won the prestigious Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde for La Grande Drive des esprits (1993) in 1994,42 and was made ‘Officier’ of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in July 2006 (a higher status than Bouraoui’s ‘Chevalier’)—her influence has extended beyond the metropole through translation. Her emphasis on issues of language, identity, and belonging allows her novels to cross linguistic and cultural borders and speak to other communities and nationalities. At present, five of her texts have been translated into English by highly respected academics and translators,43 and a Spanish translation of L’Exil selon 40 Nina Bouraoui, Forbidden Vision, trans. by Melissa Marcus (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1995); Tomboy, trans. by Marjorie Attignol Salvodon and Jehanne-Marie Gavarini (Lincoln, NE; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); and All Men Want to Know, trans. by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (London: Penguin Random House, 2020). 41 Kim Lefèvre, White Métisse, trans. by Jack A. Yeager (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2018). 42 Gisèle Pineau, La Grande Drive des esprits (Paris: Le Serpent à plumes, 1993). 43 Gisèle Pineau, The Drifting of Sprits, trans. by J. Michael Dash (London: Quartet Books, 1999); Macadam Dreams, trans. by C. Dickson (Lincoln, NE; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); Exile According to Julia, trans. by Betty Wilson (Charlottesville, VA; London: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Devil’s Dance, trans. by C. Dickson (Lincoln, NE; London: University of Nebraska

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Julia, entitled El exilio según Julia, was published in 2017.44 This makes her one of the most translated Francophone Caribbean authors, with more published translations than other successful writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Raphaël Confiant. Only those authors with a much larger corpus of fictional and theoretical works have had more texts translated into English, such as Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, and Aimé Césaire. The fact that three different translators have rendered Pineau’s writing into English indicates that her work on gender, race, and hybrid identities resonates with contemporary readers from across the world. While Tadjo is perhaps not as widely recognized in France as Bouraoui or Pineau, she is highly celebrated as a leading intellectual and literary figure across the African continent, having won the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire in 2005 for Reine Pokou: concerto pour un sacrifice (2005)45 and the inaugural award of Le grand prix national Bernard Dadié de la littérature in 2016 for the entirety of her œuvre. A further indicator of her success is the interest in her work by translators: her children’s fiction has been translated into English, German, Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese (among other languages), and her novels have also been translated into English and other languages. These translations enable her work on African legends to spread far beyond Francophone and Anglophone borders. Rakotoson and Farhoud break this model of critical acclaim somewhat. Rakotoson’s work is well-known among the reading public in both France and Madagascar and her literary talent has been acknowledged by critics: she was awarded the Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2012 for her contribution to French-language literature. However, there is a notable absence of scholarship on her work. While she is attracting increasing attention in French-language research, this has not been matched within the Anglophone academy, a surprising omission given Rakotoson’s large corpus of novels, short stories, plays, and récits in French and in Malagasy, and her position as ‘a key figure in the renewal

Press, 2006); and A Taste of Eternity: A Novel, trans. by C. Dickson (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2014). 44 Gisèle Pineau, El exilio según Julia, trans. by Laura Ruíz Montes (La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 2017). 45 Véronique Tadjo, Reine Pokou: concerto pour un sacrifice (Arles: Actes Sud, 2005).

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of Malagasy literatures’, according to Pascale Perraudin.46 Her work has not yet reached international audiences via translation either—excerpts of her novels translated into English by Allison Charette have appeared in online literary magazines,47 but at the time of writing, no complete translation of her texts has been published in English or any other language. Equally, Farhoud’s work is underrepresented in translation: only one of her novels has been translated into English—Hutchinson Street, a translation of Sourire de la petite juive (2011), was published in 201848 —and although four of her plays have been translated into English, Spanish, and Catalan, they are not widely available. Farhoud has won literary awards for her plays and novels, including the Prix France-Québec for Le Bonheur a la queue glissante in 1999, but most of these prizes have been awarded by literary institutions from Quebec, rather than from France. Farhoud thus contributes to the decentring of French-language literature by demonstrating that successful Francophone writers are not necessarily bound to the Parisian capital. Despite all being successful writers, then, the six authors differ in the extent to which they have become part of the French literary canon. Nevertheless, analysing their ambiguous position within the prevailing literary movements of the cultural contexts in which they write reveals their acute sentiment of marginalization, because they do not feel that they belong to the literary elite. There appears to be a mismatch between the public and scholarly perception of these authors and the ways in which they view their own experiences of exile and alienation. As literary scholars, we are reminded to listen carefully to writers’ own voices and avoid pigeonholing them into strict and rigid literary categories without due attention to nuance. Pineau considers herself to be at the margins of the Francophone Caribbean literary scene that remains dominated by male voices, despite the success she has enjoyed there. She began writing in the wake of the movement of créolité initiated by Martinican writers Jean Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, and her work resonates clearly with the 46 Pascale Perraudin, ‘Theatrical Violence in Rakotoson’s Un Jour, ma mémoire’, Nottingham French Studies, 45.2 (2006), 77–85 (p. 77). 47 Michèle Rakotoson, ‘Lalana’, trans. by Allison M. Charette, EuropeNow,

[accessed 5 January 2019]. 48 Abla Farhoud, Hutchinson Street, trans. by Judith Woodsworth (Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, 2018).

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objectives of their literary manifesto Éloge de la Créolité (1989) in the celebration of Creole identity.49 For Sylvie Durmelat, Pineau is in fact ‘one of the first contemporary Caribbean women authors to explore these new Creole areas’ by incorporating untranslated Creole dialogue in her texts. 50 Yet in an interview in 2004, Pineau explained that although this movement has enabled her to use Creole freely in her texts, adhering to it unequivocally would restrict her to a nostalgic remembering of the past; in contrast to the créolistes, she prefers to write about contemporary Antillean identity. 51 Moreover, unlike Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, who all grew up immersed in Creole culture, Pineau ‘was a Black on a continent full of Whites’ and so ‘did not have the same experiences as the writers of the Creolity movement’. 52 She identifies more with the black African-American writers Richard Wright and Maya Angelou who, like her, grew up as minorities within a white society, and she therefore occupies an unusual position in the Francophone Caribbean literary sphere. Tadjo does not fully subscribe to Francophone African literary movements either. Despite her intense gaze on the African continent, she is also keen to extend her focus beyond Africa and explore issues that affect contemporary society all over the world. Tadjo explains that ‘quand on rencontre des gens, on s’aperçoit que, finalement, il y a des problèmes qui sont très semblables d’un pays à l’autre’. 53 She regards inequalities of class, race, and gender as those that transcend continents and that can only be resolved by working together as a unified global force towards a common goal. Her line of argument thus stands in contrast to the essence of the artistic and political movement of négritude, established during the 1930s in Paris by Césaire, Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas. Négritude aimed to unite black African peoples around the world to create a universal notion of black experience, raise 49 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, trans. by Mohamed B. Taleb-Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, 1993 [1989]). 50 Sylvie Durmelat, ‘Narrative of a “Return to the Non-Native Land”: Gardens and Migration in L’Exil selon Julia by Gisèle Pineau’, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 4.2 (2006), 109–18 (p. 110). 51 Nadège Veldwachter, ‘An Interview with Gisèle Pineau’, Research in African Literatures, 35.1 (2004), 180–86 (p. 184). 52 Veldwachter, p. 185. 53 Micheline Rice-Maximin and Koffi Anyinefa, ‘Entretien avec Véronique Tadjo’, The French Review, 82.2 (2008), 368–82 (p. 371).

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awareness of African heritage and traditions, and fight for cultural liberation from the European colonizers by emphasizing the contribution of black culture to global history. Tadjo is clearly writing in a very different historical context, but her standpoint seems to contradict this ideology: she argues that all peoples should come together to tackle issues of racial, cultural, and economic domination, regardless of their skin colour, and her writing focuses on similarities rather than differences in order to target a global readership, while also appealing to a local African audience with her work on African culture and traditions. Tadjo’s desire to raise global issues is unusual compared to other important Francophone African women writers, such as Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, and Mariama Bâ, whose political commitment is primarily limited to either the African continent or the African diaspora living in France. Farhoud displays a particularly ambivalent relationship to l’écriture migrante, a term used to define contemporary literature written by people living in Quebec of immigrant origin. Much has been written about the issues raised by this term. For instance, Susan Ireland and Patrice Proulx question whether the term refers ‘only to authors of immigrant origin—and for how many generations—or does it also include other writers who address issues related to immigration?’54 Farhoud adds to these criticisms by suggesting that the term does not do justice to her dual identity. Her writing is not solely inspired by her migrant status as she also draws on her experiences of living most of her adult life in Quebec: ‘les gens d’ailleurs qualifient mon écriture de québécoise et ils ont raison […], mon écriture est québécoise. Les Québécois disent que j’ai une écriture orientale et ils ont raison […], je suis orientale’. 55 While she acknowledges that much of her writing does discuss issues of exile and migration, she is reluctant to categorize herself as a migrant writer, preferring instead to let her texts speak for themselves. Her aversion to this rigid literary category provides echoes with her hostility towards autobiography in the strict sense of the term: she does not only want to 54 Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx, ‘Negotiating New Identities in Québec’s écriture migrante’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 13.1 (2009), 35–43 (p. 37). 55 Abla Farhoud, ‘Immigrant un jour, immigrant toujours ou comment décoller une étiquette ou se décoller de l’étiquette’, in D’autres rêves. Les écritures migrantes au Québec, ed. by Anne de Vaucher Gravili (Venice: Supernova, 2000), pp. 45–58 (p. 46).

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be known as a migrant from Lebanon living in Quebec, which is why she playfully manipulates the genre in her recent texts. The fact that Pineau, Tadjo, and Farhoud do not adhere to prevailing literary movements helps to explain their success, as they offer their reader an innovative experience. The same can be argued about Bouraoui. Her texts are situated within recent Algerian cultural production that, as James McDougall explains, ‘is often self-consciously preoccupied with the themes of separation, distance, and exile, both as contemporary realities grounded in a long history of African and Mediterranean patterns of mobility, and as idioms for reflection on the relation of past to present’. 56 At the same time, however, her texts explore such personal issues that, inevitably, she offers a different outlook on Franco-Algerian relations to authors such as Assia Djebar and Malika Mokeddem who have had more contact with Algeria in their later lives. Equally, although there are some similarities of theme and genre between Lefèvre and other Francophone Vietnamese authors, Lefèvre’s work seems more explicitly autobiographical, despite also speaking for other Vietnamese women who have been displaced who have not had the opportunity to tell their story. Rakotoson is probably the leading female writer of Malagasy origin, and therefore she paves the way in creating simultaneously personal and politically engaged literature. The originality of the six authors also means that they do not operate within the metropolitan, feminist framework of l’écriture féminine, despite the fact that, with the exception of Farhoud, they have developed their writing careers in mainland France and have published their work with prestigious Parisian publishing houses (Farhoud has worked within a Western publishing model, albeit in Quebec). While for Hélène Cixous feminine writing enables women to avoid being trapped by a patriarchal language that does not fully represent them, 57 for the writers analysed in this book l’écriture féminine is a Western, Eurocentric model, and its unmediated application would disrupt their intention of foregrounding the intersecting gendered and racial obstacles faced by women in the Francophone postcolonial world. Although in a 2003 interview Pineau affirmed her position as a feminist, 58 in this interview 56 James McDougall, ‘Social Memories “in the Flesh”: War and Exile in Algerian Self-Writing’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 30 (2010), 34–56 (p. 40). 57 Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc, 61 (1975), 39–54. 58 Christiane Makward, ‘Entretien avec Gisèle Pineau’, The French Review, 76.6 (2003), 1202–15 (p. 1207).

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she also admitted not being able to write in standard French because the language ‘ne correspondait pas à ce qu[’elle] avai[t] à dire’; 59 it would therefore be incongruous for her to adopt a metropolitan French model of women’s writing with which to express her femininity. Rakotoson’s feminist credentials are equally ambiguous; she claims that she once was ‘une féministe militante’ but that she has turned away from Western feminism since returning to Madagascar.60 Farhoud vehemently asserts her feminist credentials without explaining how or why she identifies with this movement. In contrast, Tadjo explicitly rejects Western feminist theory, explaining that the Eurocentric terminology is irrelevant for African women: ‘I don’t really buy into much of what is commonly thought of as orthodox feminism, the theory and the movement, outside Africa.’61 Lefèvre does not appear to subscribe to feminism either, most likely because her use of the French language has been informed by the French colonial project, rather than by radical French feminist thought. Bouraoui is possibly the only author examined in this study to begin to tap into the model of writing femininity offered by French feminism via l’écriture féminine. She focuses almost exclusively on female sexuality and representations of the female body in her writing, creating her own fragmented style of language to discuss these gendered issues. Her position towards l’écriture feminine early on in her career, even if now, in 2020, she is more reluctant to define her work in these terms, is a further indication of how she aligns herself increasingly with metropolitan French literary norms, rather than with the wider Francophone literary system. Genre: Blurring the Boundaries Just as migration means something different to each author, the ways in which they articulate their migration through the genre of autofiction also differ widely. Although there is not necessarily a linear progression from the oldest to the most contemporary texts in terms of literary innovation, it is my contention that Lefèvre is the most conventional regarding her literary style and most closely adheres to Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, 59 Makward, p. 1209. 60 Christiane Makward, ‘Entretien avec Michèle Rakotoson’, Women in French Studies, 7 (1999), 174–92 (p. 180). 61 Gray, p. 145.

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perhaps because she has not been influenced by postcolonial identity politics to the same extent as the other authors, given her upbringing in colonial Vietnam and the fact that she was writing her texts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the advent of the postcolonial turn in France. It seems, then, that blurring the boundaries of life writing is a form of literary innovation for the remaining authors, and is closely tied to a desire to ‘write back’ to the colonial centre, disrupting and distorting the neo-colonial politics of contemporary France. Lefèvre uses the autofictional genre to explain how her métissage derives from her mixed Vietnamese and white French heritage and triggers the rejection she experienced as a child in colonial Vietnam. On a textual level, both Métisse blanche and Retour à la saison des pluies appear to fulfil autobiographical norms. Both texts are first-person narratives, in which the narrator-protagonist corresponds to the identity of the author. Interestingly, in Métisse blanche there is only one reference to the name ‘Kim’ (the protagonist’s middle name) when she receives her birth certificate, taking her Chinese stepfather’s family name ‘Lam’ to become a legally recognized Vietnamese citizen named Lam Kim Thu (p. 173). A further textual ambiguity is the origin of her French surname ‘Lefèvre’. This is only confirmed in an article by Nathalie Nguyen, who notes that the surname ‘Lefèvre’ was acquired when the author married a Frenchman in 1962.62 Both texts are marketed as autobiographical by the publishers through the subtitle ‘autobiographie’ on the back cover of each edition, and Lefèvre positions Retour à la saison des pluies as a sequel to her first text by commenting on the influence of the publication of Métisse blanche in her desire to return to Vietnam (p. 357). The accounts appear to be biographically accurate: Métisse blanche is a chronological explanation of Lefèvre’s childhood in Vietnam, beginning with her birth in Hanoi before the outbreak of the Second World War and concluding with her departure to France in 1960, and Retour à la saison des pluies narrates her return to Vietnam, an event contemporaneous with the time of writing. Despite the informative nature of these accounts, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud reminds us that ‘the story emanates from Lefèvre’s memory and imagination’ because it is written approximately

62 Nathalie Nguyen, ‘Writing and Memory in Kim Lefèvre’s Autobiographical Narratives’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 5 (2001) [accessed 8 January 2020].

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30 years after she left Vietnam.63 In short, the author’s memory cannot be entirely trusted. Strikingly, however, the objectives behind her writing project put forward by Lefèvre in paratextual material contradicts this textual analysis. In an interview in 2001, when Nguyen asked her how she had decided what to include and what to omit, Lefèvre replied tout est vrai, mais tout ne s’est pas déroulé exactement de cette façon. Il y a des choses qui se sont déroulées exactement de cette façon, et c’est la plupart du temps, mais il y a un certain nombre de choses que j’ai exprimées autrement, soit en prenant mon cas, soit en prenant un autre cas que j’ai vu ou connu, parce que ça dit plus profondément ce que je voulais dire.64

Here, she admits that she has adapted the truth about her life, not as a therapeutic process of recovery and healing but for poetic effect. Writing is undoubtedly a creative practice that allows her to explore certain themes that have affected her life, enabling her to form a clearer sense of self and create connections with both France and Vietnam through her narratives. Nevertheless, she does not feel indebted to autofictional writing as a kind of personal therapy. Rather, expressing the sentiments of loneliness and alienation she felt as a child in a more emphatic manner enhances the empathy the reader feels towards the narrator-protagonist and enables her audience to relate to her story more easily. Lefèvre thus writes not only for herself but also for others, giving voice to other Vietnamese women who were rejected too because of their skin colour. In this same interview, Lefèvre confessed that she shares her life story with ‘des centaines de milliers de métis qui étaient au Viêt-nam à cette époque et puis même après, si on pense aux Amérasiens’.65 The texts are less of a personal identity quest and more of a collective project that speaks to all those who suffered from racial discrimination during a time of colonial oppression. Following a chronological sequence, the subsequent text in my corpus is Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia, and certain thematic and stylistic parallels can be found in the two writers’ works. In contrast to Lefèvre, though, 63 Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, ‘Métisse blanche: Kim Lefèvre and Transnational Space’, in Mixed Race Literature, ed. by Jonathan Brennan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 122–36 (p. 124). 64 Nathalie Nguyen, ‘Métisse blanche: entretien avec Kim Lefèvre’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 5 (2001) [accessed 9 January 2020]. 65 Nguyen, ‘Métisse blanche: entretien avec Kim Lefèvre’.

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Pineau uses autobiographical writing to reflect on the traumatic nature of her exile between France and the Antilles, an exile that has been deeply entrenched in her life since childhood. The child narrator is unnamed, but textual details about her migratory childhood correspond to bibliographic information Pineau provides in interviews, enabling the reader to deduce that the narrator is an imagined version of the author. Pineau manipulates the autobiographical genre further in the title of the narrative; the prepositional phrase suggests that it is her grandmother Julia’s exile, rather than the narrator’s, which is at the heart of the narrative, leading Beverley Ormerod Noakes to describe the book as ‘a tribute to [Pineau’s] grandmother’, rather than an autobiographical account of the author’s life.66 To a certain extent, L’Exil selon Julia is indeed a retrospective account of her family history, but Pineau simultaneously uses the textual space to explain how the memory of her family’s displacements has had important resonances for her own exile, thus complicating the essence of autobiographical writing. In addition, she is only too aware of the constant slippage between fact and fiction in her memories of her own exile and warns the reader in the epigraph of the role her emotions play when remembering her exilic experiences: Hasards de la mémoire, inventions? Tout est vrai et faux, émotions. Ici, l’essentiel voisine les souvenirs adventices. Il n’y a ni héros ni figurants. Ni bons ni méchants. Seulement l’espérance en de meilleurs demains. (p. 9)

Here, Pineau recognizes that the boundaries between fact and fiction are vague and flexible by describing her memories as ‘adventitious’. Hardwick points out that this unusual botanical metaphor recalls ‘memories growing at random in the spaces and cracks between more fundamental episodes’, 67 imagery that anticipates how Pineau intersperses her distant childhood memories with factual details of her family history, while also exposing her engagement with the Antillean environment. The juxtaposition of the opposing adjectives ‘vrai’ and ‘faux’ reveals the ambiguity 66 Beverley Ormerod Noakes, ‘The Parent–Child Relationship in Gisèle Pineau’s Work’, in The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture, ed. by Gertrud Aub-Buscher and Beverley Ormerod Noakes (Kingston, Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, 2003), pp. 137–50 (p. 138). 67 Hardwick, p. 144.

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at play between memory and imagination as she briefly informs the reader that while her narrative is based on true facts in her life, it inevitably contains ‘inventions’ due to the passing of time. The tone at the conclusion of the epigraph is one of hope and optimism: Pineau is convinced that through the fictionalization of her life story she will experience a better, more tolerant future. Pineau’s epigraph resonates with Doubrovsky’s work on autofiction— for whom an author has the liberty to alter and manipulate the truth of his or her life in order to carry out an internal identity quest—and her comments in interviews support this textual engagement with the genre. She explains that L’Exil selon Julia is a translated account of true events that have shaped her life, but it is not restricted by factual accuracy: ‘mon univers romanesque est la traduction de ma propre expérience et de mes espérances’.68 Such comments reveal that Pineau intentionally plays with fact and fiction, thereby suggesting that the concept of autofiction is an appropriate model with which to analyse this text. Debra Popkin defines the text as a ‘semi-autobiographical memoire’ without explaining the interplay between fact and fiction, 69 while Hardwick argues that the text lies between the novel, the autobiography, and the récit d’enfance, a form of autobiography prevalent in turn-of-the-century Francophone Caribbean literature, in which the author’s childhood, schooling, and adolescence take centre stage.70 Although Hardwick does observe that the autobiographical pact is not as apparent here as in other Francophone Caribbean autobiographies, due to a degree of distancing between the author on the one hand, and the narrator-protagonist on the other, her analysis does not place sufficient emphasis on the playful interaction between fact and fiction, a crucial narrative strategy in L’Exil selon Julia. For Pineau, then, autofiction creates a degree of detachment between herself and her exile as she fictionalizes and exaggerates certain elements of her experiences. Furthermore, this ‘in-between’ genre, neither entirely 68 Geneviève Belugue, ‘Entre ombre et lumière, l’écriture engagée de Gisèle Pineau’, Notre Librairie, 138–39 (September 1999–March 2000), 84–90 (p. 89). 69 Debra Popkin, ‘Growing Up with Julia: Gisèle Pineau and her Grandmother, a Caribbean Girl’s Journey to Self-Discovery’, in Francophone Women Coming of Age: Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence from France, Africa, Quebec and the Caribbean, ed. by Debra Popkin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 34–50 (p. 35). 70 Hardwick, p. 141.

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factual nor fictional, represents the narrator’s status as ‘in-between’ French and Antillean culture, a position reminiscent of Bhabha’s notion of ‘in-between spaces’. She is neither entirely ‘ici’ in France or ‘là’ in Guadeloupe because of her continuous physical and psychological displacements between the two locations and her inability to integrate fully into either society. Autofiction, for Bouraoui, facilitates a fusion of the personal and the political: she expresses her own identitarian issues in addition to illustrating the acuity of suffering within the wider Algerian context of exile and mass displacement. In this regard, she upholds Debra Kelly’s argument that while postcolonial narratives should be valued for their aesthetic qualities, they also ‘privilege a political agenda as well as a personal one’.71 A word of caution: Bouraoui rejected the term ‘autofiction’ in a 2011 interview, admitting that ‘c’est un mot qui me révulse un peu car je ne le comprends pas’,72 although she does acknowledge in this interview that her writing mixes real-life elements with fictional events, and she has employed the label to describe her work on other occasions.73 This aversion towards the autofictional genre is a further example of how the author refuses to be labelled and categorized, and this refusal is mirrored in the treatment of gender, sexuality, and national identity in her narratives. Le Jour du séisme is a first-person narrative, but the identity of the ‘je’ is never disclosed to the reader. A close reading of this text alongside Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées reveals, however, that the narrative persona of all three texts is the same person. Bouraoui makes several references in Mes mauvaises pensées to her experiences 71 Debra Kelly, Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), p. 7. 72 Adeline Journet, ‘Nina Bouraoui et Sara Stridsberg: “L’Écrivain est un marginal”’, L’Express culture, 9 May 2011, [accessed 20 December 2019]. 73 See, for instance, an article written by Bouraoui for The Guardian on 16 September 2020. In this article, Bouraoui explicitly defines her early texts as autofictional: ‘After that I wrote three auto-fictional novels, bringing together my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood’. Nina Bouraoui, ‘Top 10 Books of Autofiction’, trans. by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, The Guardian, 16 September 2020, [accessed 16 September 2020].

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of the earthquake that shook northern Algeria on 10 October 1980 (the principal focus of Le Jour du séisme), thereby implying that the narrator of Le Jour du séisme has undergone the same experiences as the narrators of the other two texts. While this could suggest that Le Jour du séisme is framed as autobiographical, the fact that Bouraoui incorporates fictional characters Arslan and Maliha—whose strange episodes render the text mystical and supernatural in part—situates the text more firmly in the realm of autofiction. Garçon manqué, in contrast, is the most faithful to Lejeune’s definition of autobiography. The narrator-protagonist of Garçon manqué is given the name ‘Nina’, echoing the identity of the author. Bouraoui’s literary surrogate is a child version of herself: the text recounts her childhood in a mostly chronological order, opening with her time in Algeria as a young girl and concluding with her departure to France as an adolescent. While inherently personal, the narrative also makes an important statement about the large-scale movement of people between France and Algeria in the aftermath of the Algerian War of Independence. Mes mauvaises pensées is the most inventive of the three texts in terms of distorting literary norms, and is perhaps a reflection of the progression Bouraoui has undergone in her own career; she no longer feels restricted to conforming to rigid conventions. She continues to be inspired by her own life, however: Mes mauvaises pensées depicts a woman’s ongoing psychotherapy sessions, and is based on the psychotherapy treatment that Bouraoui herself underwent in 2001 in Paris, according to Karen Ferreira-Meyers.74 This quintessentially French bourgeois activity implicitly reveals Bouraoui’s financial and social privilege. Doubrovsky notes that in autofictional writing, linear time is reconfigured because events are narrated in non-chronological order as they are remembered; indeed, flashbacks pervade Bouraoui’s text as the narrator’s multiple and opposing identities surface, and she relives her experiences as she recounts them, in no apparent order. The opening pages set up this constant intertwining of the past and the present. The text begins in the present, in Paris, as the narrator explains her motives for seeing her therapist, but she soon transports the reader back to her difficult past in Algeria. Bouraoui’s writing is repetitious and cyclical: she frequently returns to key episodes in her life, predominantly her 74 Karen Ferreira-Meyers, L’Autofiction d’Amélie Nothomb, Calixthe Beyala et Nina Bouraoui: de la théorie à la pratique de l’autofiction (Saarbrücken, Germany: Éditions universitaires européennes, 2012), p. 434.

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departure from Algeria, and her inability to belong within her family because of her lesbianism. This reconstruction of linear time represents, on the one hand, the narrator’s ongoing struggle with her identity, as the jumbled, disorganized tangle of her past and present, of her memories and imagination, reveals the difficulty she faces when trying to organize her thoughts about her exilic experiences, and her depiction of exile becomes particularly poignant because of the constant interplay between the personal and the political. Yet, on the other hand, the ability to control, fragment, and reorder her memories that this autofictional genre provides could be seen to grant Bouraoui’s narrator greater control over her trauma, control that the author lost when forced to leave her country following the Algerian War. Writing her trauma in this chaotic, disorganized manner, no matter how painful it may be, could be an attempt to overcome it. According to Rosie MacLachlan, Bouraoui’s autofictional project also has a wider significance: it acts as a form of therapy for the reader, too. She posits that Bouraoui’s texts provide ‘a role model for readers struggling with their own identity problems, and potentially prov[e] more broadly transformative for the social world in which her texts are published’.75 Rakotoson’s continuous movement back and forth in time in Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar, exploring how the lives of her parents and grandparents have impacted upon her own life, mirrors her status as a constant wanderer, an errance she conceptualizes as a form of exile. Her adoption of the autofictional genre acts as another layer though which to read her identitiarian issues, as she uses this mode of writing to carve out a space beyond the rigid identity politics at work that define her as a highly mobile and empowered subject. Rakotoson closes the epilogue to her text, written from her ‘home’ in Châtenay-Malabry in the Parisian suburbs, by signing the text ‘Michèle Rakotoson, le 22 mai 2007’ (p. 203), thereby completing Lejeune’s autobiographical pact by explicitly revealing that the author, narrator, and protagonist are one and the same person. Yet behind this deceptively simple identification between the three narrative roles lies a slippage between a whole array of narrative modes: the diary, the travel narrative, the biography, and the rewriting of Madagascan history. Of the few scholars who have examined this text, the majority have focused their 75 Rosie MacLachlan, Nina Bouraoui, Autofiction and the Search for Selfhood (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2016), p. 160.

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gaze on only one of these narrative labels, thus neglecting to analyse how Rakotoson intersects these different genres to create a composite text. Catherine Fournet-Guérin defines the text as ‘un récit autobiographique’ without considering how Rakotoson manipulates generic boundaries,76 while Srilata Ravi defines the text as a chronical that charts Rakotoson’s return to Madagascar, thus locating it among other return narratives by Francophone African writers.77 While both these labels are valid in describing one particular element of the text, they do not do sufficient justice to Rakotoson’s larger project of fictionalizing her imposed, traumatic exile. She explicitly declares her intention to conceal difficult events in her life at the beginning of the narrative: ‘je n’ai plus envie de parler d’exil et de déplacement’ (p. 11). The aesthetics of the text illustrate Rakotoson’s internal struggle to belong anywhere. Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar features traditional songs and proverbs in Malagasy, which could suggest her attachment to her native Malagasy culture, but these are also translated into French, revealing the inherent power of colonial French culture that continues to dominate in Madagascar. Furthermore, photographs of family members frame the opening or closing of each chapter, but their identity is not revealed to the reader, limiting Rakotoson’s ability to position herself as part of her family history, while images of postcards, stamps, and other travel memorabilia emphasize the fact that her textual return is temporary, and could almost be considered as a vacation, away from the mundane activities of her existence in France. Rakotoson’s strategy of being creative with narrative form provides a nod to Doubrovsky’s conceptualization of autofiction, although their objectives differ widely; while Doubrovsky viewed autofiction as a means to give back agency to the author from the reader, Rakotoson uses the genre to reveal her confused identity and the problematic nature of her errance that prevents her from claiming any location as ‘home’. Tadjo, in contrast, privileges fiction over personal truth, and her writing is notably less intimate than the other texts analysed in this book. 76 Catherine Fournet-Guérin, ‘La figure du descendant d’esclave urbain dans les œuvres littéraires merina (Madagascar): quelles représentations pour cette assignation subalterne?’, in Citadinités subalternes en Afrique, ed. by Thomas Fourquet and Odile Goerg (Paris: Karthala, 2018), pp. 63–82 (p. 67). 77 Srilata Ravi, ‘Home and the “Failed” City in Postcolonial Narratives of “Dark Return”’, Postcolonial Studies, 17.3 (2014), 296–306 (p. 300).

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The distance Tadjo creates between her fiction and her own personal reality enables her to consider her own experience more objectively and relate it to the stories of all those across the world who have been displaced, whether through choice or not. Tadjo distances herself from her discussions of exile by writing her text in the third person. Indeed, it is the only book in this corpus to feature an omniscient third-person narrator, dissociating it firmly from the autobiographical genre. However, it would be inaccurate to define it a novel, as Amy Baram Reid does, although Tadjo does indicate its novelistic qualities through the subtitle ‘un roman’.78 The protagonist Nina is given a name that clearly distinguishes her from the author, a name void of national characteristics as it is neither traditionally French nor typically Baoulé (the mother tongue of her father’s family), thus allowing readers of all nationalities and ethnic groups to identify with her plight. However, the protagonist Nina does share certain similarities with Tadjo, and it is thus a fair assumption to assert that the author based her character on her own life: like Tadjo, Nina was born in France to a French mother and Ivorian father; she left Côte d’Ivoire as a young woman to settle in France for professional reasons; and she enjoys a creative career as a successful photographer who has exhibited her work all over the world. Tadjo has acknowledged in personal email correspondence that the term ‘autofiction’ is an appropriate generic label for Loin de mon père because the text marks ‘beaucoup de distance par rapport à la réalité’, but her own life acted as the point of departure.79 The first epigraph to Loin de mon père exemplifies the fusion between autobiographical truth and fiction. She states that while ‘cette histoire est vraie, parce qu’elle est ancrée dans la réalité’, it is simultaneously imagined because ‘elle est l’objet d’un travail littéraire où ce qui compte, ce n’est pas tant la véracité des faits, mais l’intention derrière l’écriture’ (p. 9). She further emphasized the fictionality of text, expressed so clearly in the above epigraph, in a public interview with Nicki Hitchcott at the British Library in 2016, when she admitted that it would be impossible to determine which parts of Loin de mon père correspond

78 Amy Baram Reid, ‘Afterword: Near or Far: Places of Translation in Far from my Father’, in Véronique Tadjo, Far from my Father: A Novel, trans. by Amy Baram Reid (Charlottesville, VA; London: University of Virginia Press, 2014 [2010]), pp. 133–48 (p. 136). 79 Véronique Tadjo, Email to Antonia Wimbush, 6 June 2016.

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to particular events that took place during her life.80 The fragmented, hybrid form of Loin de mon père is additional evidence of the playful interaction between fact and fiction, and a nod to Nina’s own racial hybridity. The narrative voice is frequently interrupted by extracts from emails from Nina’s sister Gabrielle, excerpts from her father’s diary, and quotations from books she finds in her father’s bedroom. While this factual information anchors the family’s life against an accurate social and political backdrop, the multiple textual perspectives are disorientating for readers as they attempt to discover which events are invented and which in fact took place. The fictional plot of Loin de mon père reveals just how familiar these feelings of non-belonging are for many people across the world, while the similarities between the author and protagonist reassuringly reminds the reader that Tadjo has also undergone such experiences and has succeeded in overcoming them. In contrast to Loin de mon père, in which exile forms the backdrop to a fictional plot, Farhoud’s Toutes celles que j’étais and Au grand soleil cachez vos filles both feature exile and return as their core preoccupation. Toutes celles que j’étais fits neatly within the autofictional model proposed by Doubrovsky. First, the first-person narrative bears the subtitle of ‘roman’, which contrasts sharply with the notion of autobiographical truth as suggested by the subject pronoun ‘je’ in the principal part of the title. How can a book that purports to reveal the multiple selves of Farhoud be in fact fictional? This important paratextual information immediately pinpoints the ambiguity at the heart of the autofictional genre: how can a text be simultaneously fictional and autobiographical? A further nod to autofiction appears in the name of the principal character Aablè. There is an almost exact correlation between the name of the author and her principal character, but not quite. Here, Farhoud plays with the reader’s expectations, revealing a part of her identity but also holding back at the same time. Perhaps Farhoud is trying to reclaim agency as a successful adult, an agency she has been denied several times throughout her life. Shunned in Quebec for being too Middle Eastern, the author was then rejected upon returning to Lebanon for being perceived as too Western, too liberal, and too forward thinking. 80 The interview took place at the British Library on 22 January 2016 for the ‘West African Literature and Thought in French: Translating Cultures’ study day. An extract from the interview was published in French Studies Library Group Annual Review, 11/12 (2014–2016), 42–46.

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Toutes celles que j’étais ends with Aablè and her siblings returning to Lebanon, a theme picked up in Au grand soleil cachez vos filles that begins with the arrival of the young women in Beirut. The connections between the two works are textually salient: the final line of Toutes celles que j’étais, which reads ‘je vais fermer mon cahier, et je l’ouvrirai la-bàs, au pays de mon père, là où on cache les filles’ (p. 302), is borrowed as part of the title of the second text. In an interview in 2018, Farhoud admits her intentions to link the two texts together so explicitly in order to foreground the leitmotif of return that had haunted her family for so long, explaining that ‘c’est le père qui veut tout le temps retourner, retourner, retourner. Et mon père aussi. Mon père était un vrai immigrant, c’est-à-dire celui qui veut toujours retourner parce qu’il pense toujours que c’est mieux là-bas’.81 However, Au grand soleil cachez vos filles is structurally different to her previous text. While the second book is narrated in the first person, like the first, Farhoud invents specific characters to tell her story of return. Chapters are dedicated in turn to siblings Faïzah, Adib, and Ikram Abdelnour, which means that in this text Farhoud breaks Lejeune’s autobiographical pact. While there seems to be some association between Farhoud and Ikram because of their shared interests in writing and acting, Farhoud has denied that Ikram is her exact alter-ego; rather, her life-story has informed the shape of each of her characters, or ‘[s]es personnages sont toujours une partie de [soi]’.82 By changing the names and identities of the protagonists, Farhoud is suggesting that exile in Quebec has been so fundamentally life-changing for them that they are unable to shed their exilic selves and return to their former lives when back in Lebanon. A return ‘home’ to Lebanon is simply not possible for them.

81 Monique Delisle and Anne-Marie Tézine, ‘Entretien avec Abla Farhoud’, Montpetit, 26 September 2018, [accessed 10 January 2019] [my transcript]. 82 Martine Latendresse Charon and Marjorie Rhéaume, ‘Coffret de Juin: Entrevue avec Abla Farhoud’, Le Fil rouge, 7 August 2017 [accessed 10 January 2020].

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Conclusion Autofiction enables all six authors to remember their displacement and alienation on their own terms. For Farhoud and Bouraoui, writing allows painful wounds to begin to be healed, in a process reminiscent of Suzette A. Henke’s term, ‘scriptotherapy’. In Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing (2000), Henke further develops the association between autobiography and psychoanalysis, arguing that autobiographers narrate ‘the unexpected irruption of repressed tales of traumatic experience’ in order to process their trauma verbally and eventually accept it.83 According to Henke, writing the traumatic event enables the author to access fragmented images of the trauma that, until then, had been too painful to process, following which the autobiographer can translate these images into language. However, Henke’s analysis implies that this reconciliation with the traumatic past is complete, which is not necessarily the case for the authors under consideration here. Bouraoui adopts the genre of autofiction in order to relive certain elements of her exile but omit others, suggesting that the resolution of her identity is continuous but incomplete, while Farhoud is yet to write a third text about her experiences of exile in her later adulthood. For Rakotoson, autofiction is a means with which to critique her experiences of errance, while Pineau writes autofiction to reflect upon and come to accept issues of racism, social integration, and gender inequalities. Tadjo, in contrast, learns to embrace the freedom and liberation of exile, both for herself and for her family. Her autofictional narrative focuses less heavily on her own life than the other texts examined here, demonstrating that exile affects many different people, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or social background. For Lefèvre, writing her life story is less of a therapeutic practice than a means to speak for those displaced Vietnamese women who have been denied a voice and an individuality. Through their life writing, these six women writers challenge existing tropes of displacement, opening up discussions about what it means to live in exile and the diaspora, and how these experiences impact upon their identity. Furthermore, as I will analyse in the chapters that follow, they draw attention to the ways in which gender and race intersect in their experiences and representations of migration. 83 Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. xii.

chapter two

Exile, Métissage, and Family Estrangement in Kim Lefèvre’s Autobiographical Narratives Kim Lefèvre’s Autobiographical Narratives ‘Tout en moi heurtait mes proches: mon physique de métisse, mon caractère imprévu, difficile à comprendre, si peu vietnamien en un mot.’ (Métisse blanche, p. 20)

This searing quotation from the opening pages of the first-person narrative Métisse blanche (1989), written by Franco-Vietnamese author Kim Lefèvre, powerfully articulates the experiences of exile that occur within the very family of the narrator Kim, Lefèvre’s textual self. It encapsulates the difficulties of growing up in colonial Vietnam during the 1940s and 1950s as an ‘illegitimate’ girl of mixed French and Vietnamese origins who is plagued by poverty, violence, and constant displacement. The emotive verb ‘heurter’ suggests that her physical difference is a particularly visceral affront to her family, while the repetition of the possessive adjective ‘mon’ implies an embodiment of this otherness by Kim herself. Furthermore, the quotation recreates Orientalist paradigms as critiqued by Edward Said in Orientalism, by suggesting a stark contrast between the complex, unpredictable, and headstrong French race, and the knowable, placid Vietnamese people. For Kim’s Vietnamese family, she is simply not Vietnamese enough. Métisse blanche and its sequel, Retour à la saison des pluies, thus reveal how her family relationships, particularly those with female family members, are affected by her exile. It is Kim’s métissage, and the forms of exile and estrangement within her own family that her mixed-race, gendered identity provokes, that this chapter sets out to examine. Kim is obsessed with and repulsed by the ‘impurity’ of her blood. In a poignant early passage of Métisse blanche, she describes her blood as ‘maudit’ (p. 20), and blames her

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subsequent familial problems on her mixed French and Vietnamese heritage; in Retour à la saison des pluies, in which the narrative time mirrors the period in which Lefèvre was writing in the late 1980s, she also reflects on the difficulties she faced as a girl ‘de sang mêlé’ (p. 469). This preoccupation with ‘pure blood’ is deeply influenced by colonial thought in Indochina. As Emmanuelle Saada explains, the term sang-mêlé was synonymous with métis throughout colonial Indochina and carried similar pejorative connotations of impurity and contamination.1 While the term métis was also used in the Maghreb and in West Africa in the colonial period, it was appropriated by the colonial subjects themselves as much as by the French, and this usage of colonial lexicon has continued in the postcolonial period in these locations. 2 Indeed, in Nina Bouraoui’s and Véronique Tadjo’s autobiographical works, the narrators actively reclaim the term, using it to define themselves in a process of active resistance. Lefèvre’s situation, however, is exceptional, and reflects the fact that Eurasians in colonial Indochina took offence at the term. The specific socio-political context of colonial Indochina in which Kim is born and raised means that she and those around her have espoused the French colonial thinking that associates métissage with inferiority. Kim’s métissage constitutes one of the multiple causes of her exiles, both literal and metaphorical, across Vietnam, and then in France. Exile, therefore, does not inherently involve a crossing of national borders, as it can occur within the boundaries of a single nation. Kim’s exile is particularly traumatic because she is banished from her home and kept at a distance by her own family, the very people whose duty it is to protect her. Because she is a métisse, she is effectively exiled and sent away to a French colonial orphanage, and then later to French colonial boarding schools across the country. This negative interpretation of métissage appears specific to Lefèvre’s generation who lived in colonial Indochina. Younger Francophone Vietnamese writers, such as Linda Lê, are not troubled by their composite identities and do not feel compelled to prove either their French or their Vietnamese identities. In fact, Lê seems to embrace what Gillian Ni Cheallaigh calls the ‘exilic, 1 Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie: les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), p. 25. 2 Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5.

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apatride identity’, referring to Lê’s feeling of statelessness that the author writes into her corpus [original emphasis]. 3 In contrast, the more recent female writers Kim Thúy and Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut prefer to adopt what Alexandra Kurmann defines as ‘the mobile subjectivity of a transdiasporic’ identity, and are not bound to a home/exile dichotomy in the same way as were earlier, late-twentieth-century writers, such as Lefèvre.4 Since Thúy and Tran-Nhut did not experience French colonization themselves, their understanding of métissage is less implicated in the denigration it suffered during the colonial period. For postcolonial scholars, métissage is a dynamic process of resilience and opposition against hegemonic practices because it undermines dichotomies of identity and privileges multiplicity and convergence. While Édouard Glissant, Françoise Lionnet, and Françoise Vergès construct paradigms that exalt the positive potential of métissage, Lefèvre’s narrator equates métissage with alienation rather than resistance. Her intersectional racial and gendered otherness, which originates in a specific colonial context, is perpetuated in postcolonial, independent Vietnam, and this forms an important narrative arc to both her autofictional texts. The narratives can function separately, as Retour à la saison des pluies repeats key events already described in Métisse blanche in sufficient detail to avoid disorientating a reader unacquainted with her life. However, a more complete representation of Kim’s exile can only be formed when the two texts are read in parallel because this reading generates new insights into how themes of isolation and alienation span the two autobiographies, revealing that her racial and gendered exile shapes both the colonial era and the postcolonial period. War, Exile, and Internal Displacement Exile, in Lefèvre’s writing, is a complex and interweaving mesh of internal displacement, overseas migration, familial alienation, and racial 3 Gillian Ni Cheallaigh, ‘Linda Lê’s Antigonal Refusal of Motherhood’, in Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature, ed. by Florence Ramond Jurney and Karen McPherson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 61–76 (p. 62). 4 Alexandra Kurmann, ‘Aller–retour–détour: Transdiasporic Nomadism and the Navigation of Literary Prescription in the Work of Kim Thúy and Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 55.1 (2018), 65–78 (p. 69).

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and linguistic difference. Like the other texts in this corpus, Lefèvre’s narratives are set against a backdrop of violence since her own story of exile began when Vietnam was engaged in a brutal war of decolonization against France from 1946 to 1954. Born at the end of the 1930s, she witnessed and experienced the struggle against the French colonial power, and the subsequent violence between North and South Vietnam, first-hand. These personal encounters with war have marked Lefèvre’s life-story profoundly. She, more than any of the other authors examined in this study, produces literature imbued with a first-hand experience of the effects of violent conflict on a country and its people. In Métisse blanche, the narrator describes war as ‘la vie interrompue’, equating it with insurmountable loss, fear, and flight: ‘c’est perdre d’un seul coup ce qu’on a mis toute une vie à construire’ (p. 114). War and occupation have defined Vietnamese history, from the Chinese occupation between 111 BC and 938 AD, to the struggles between the Vietnamese Ly and Tran dynasties, to the Portuguese arrival in 1516. Foreign control of the country continued into the nineteenth century when Vietnam was ruled as part of French Indochina. In 1887, the French colony of Cochinchine—the southern third of the country—was formally united to the French protectorates of northern Tonkin and central Annam in Vietnam, along with the protectorates of Laos and Cambodia, through the creation of the ‘Union indochinoise’. Nicola Cooper suggests that Indochina was not a unified political entity but rather an abstract grouping of territories that existed in a liminal, ‘undesignated “in-between” space, between India and China’. 5 Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, in contrast, challenge these readings of the colonial period as an artificial stage in Vietnam’s history and argue that the creation of French Indochina was the result of strategic planning on France’s part to gain more power and prestige in Southeast Asia.6 Lefèvre’s narrative points towards the former as she reveals the tensions between peoples from northern Tonkin and southern Cochinchine who do not consider themselves as belonging to a unified political territory governed by France. In Métisse blanche, it becomes apparent that 5 Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters (Oxford; New York: Berg Publishers, 2001), p. 1. 6 Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954, trans. by Ly Lan Dill-Klein, with Eric Jennings, Nora Taylor, and Noémi Tousignant (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 2009 [1994]), p. 9.

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according to people in the South, ‘les Tonkinois étaient avares et ne vivaient que pour la représentation sociale’ (p. 28), thereby eradicating any notion that France had succeeded in creating a coherent and united land. Kim’s very existence is brought about because of the French presence in the region. As she learns through letters written by her mother years later and inserted into Retour à la saison des pluies, her mother had an illicit sexual relationship with a French officer. While they had a romantic liaison, the narrator’s mother was forced to hide in the army barracks in S ơ n Tây, near Hanoi, because their relationship was strictly forbidden by the French army. The officer then abandoned her without any explanation; Kim’s mother does not reveal whether he knew that she was pregnant, but Kim suspects this to have been the case. Her mother may not have been sexually exploited by the officer, but she was emotionally manipulated by him: as Kim surmises, he had always known that ‘leur histoire était placée sous le signe de l’éphémère’ (p. 404) but nevertheless had seduced her. Kim embodies her mother’s perceived betrayal of the Vietnamese community through her mixed blood. Her French blood is figured as a symbol of her mother’s transgression of Vietnamese social norms by pursuing a sexual relationship with the French officer, and thereby colluding with the colonial enemy. Kim’s early recollections are therefore overwhelmed by ‘ce sentiment très tôt ressenti d’être partout déplacée, étrangère’ (Métisse blanche, p. 20). Rejected before she is even born by her father, she is also abandoned by her mother, who sends her away at the age of six because her mixed-race identity makes her eligible to live in a colonial French orphanage in Hanoi, run by Catholic nuns and funded by the French state. Her mother considers that there, Kim will receive a French education, a tool of social mobility. Indeed, France succeeded in imposing a Western-style administration on the region, making vast improvements to health care and educational facilities through the propagandist policy of mise en valeur, which developed the region in economic, cultural, and moral terms. Although the economy grew rapidly, the socio-economic improvements did not benefit the local rural population. Kim witnesses the extreme poverty faced by rural communities on one of her many journeys across the country in search of safety, and she equates poverty with humiliation: ‘je réalisai, à cette occasion, combien la pauvrété est dégradante’ (Métisse blanche, p. 99). The Vietnamese began revolting against colonial rule in protest against this precarity. The rise of nationalist movements was aided by the global economic depression,

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French defeat in the Second World War, and Japan’s subsequent occupation of Vietnam in September 1940. After Japan surrendered in August 1945, the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Ho Chi Minh, took control of the country, renaming it the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. France then retaliated in a bid to hold on to power. As Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee observe, the First Indochina War was extremely unpopular in mainland France because it symbolized ‘the possibility of independence to all of France’s colonies’.7 The war lasted seven and a half years, killing approximately 76,000 French soldiers.8 The Viet Minh, the national independence coalition, lost almost three times as many men, and an additional 150,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed.9 Kim is acutely aware of this violence that impacts on her daily life. In September 1945, she is forced to return to her family after only a few months at the convent in Hanoi because the escalation in fighting between the French and Viet Minh forces means that the city is no longer safe, and her daily routine becomes one of prayer, ‘récitant de longues prières afin que Hanoi fût débarassé des communistes’ (Métisse blanche, p. 60). The French troops eventually retreated in 1954, and the country was divided into two zones at the seventeenth parallel north, the line of latitude seventeen degrees north of the Equator. North of that line, the communist People’s Army of Vietnam was in control, supported financially and militarily by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was assisted by the United States of America, South Korea, and Australia. These alliances fought a long and costly conflict, seeking to impose their own ideology on the region. The Vietnam War ended on 30 April 1975 with the fall of Saigon to the communist Viet Cong and the People’s Army of Vietnam, and on 2 July 1976, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed. In the aftermath of the war, almost 1.5 million Vietnamese refugees fled by boat to Southeast Asia, the United States of America, Britain, and France between 1975 and 1992 because they were 7 Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee, ‘Introduction’, in France and ‘Indochina’: Cultural Representations, ed. by Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005), pp. 1–11 (p. 8). 8 Bernard B. Fall, Street without Joy: Insurgency in Indochina, 1946–63, 3rd edn (London; Dunmow: Pall Mall Press, 1963 [1961]), p. 367. 9 James A. Tyner, The Killing of Cambodia: Geography, Genocide and the Unmaking of Space (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), p. 38.

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faced with economic hardship, Western isolation, and a new threat of warfare against Cambodia.10 During this time, Kim continues to benefit from the French education system in Indochina while repeatedly being shunted across the country. She is educated at French schools, a fact that alienates her from her half-siblings, who are not of French blood and therefore are not permitted to attend the same institutions. Indeed, so great are her sentiments of alienation that by the end of Métisse blanche, she is delighted to leave Vietnam for France in her early adulthood in 1960, having won a prestigious scholarship to continue her studies in Paris. In Retour à la saison des pluies, which jumps forward to Kim’s first return to Vietnam at the end of the 1980s, the reader learns of Kim’s success as a teacher of French literature and a theatre actor. This success has come at a price, however, as she has completely cut herself off from the Asian community in Paris, and the first section of the narrative, ‘Le passé resurgi’, sees her reconnecting with the diasporic Vietnamese community. The older narrator also rebuilds an epistolary relationship with her family in Vietnam and learns how they have been directly affected by war. Her eldest sister Dung explains that her husband was sent to a re-education camp, a euphemism for a prison camp, for two years, following the fall of Saigon. As a teacher from South Vietnam, he was considered a threat to the communist regime; he was therefore interned and indoctrinated in communist philosophy. Dung was barely allowed to speak to him: she would travel for 15 kilometres to visit him ‘sans même quelquefois obtenir la permission de lui parler’ (pp. 416–17). These accounts of trauma haunt Kim as she endeavours to reconnect with her Vietnamese roots. The second section, ‘Le retour’, depicts the narrator’s physical return to Vietnam. Kate Averis remarks that this part is much shorter than the first, symbolizing that the return project is as much about a return to the past as the physical return to Vietnam.11 Rediscovering emblematic places of her childhood, she finally reconnects with Vietnam. The text, however, confirms the impossibility of Kim regarding the country as home. Her return is narrated as a tourist revisiting a forgotten location, who ultimately will return to her present life in France once her journey 10 Charles E. Neu, America’s Lost War: Vietnam, 1945–1975 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), p. 225. 11 Kate Averis, ‘Neither Here nor There: Linda Lê and Kim Lefèvre’s Literary Homecoming’, Women in French Studies, Special Issue ‘Women in the Middle’ (2009), 74–84 (p. 80).

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into the past is complete because, troubled by her cross-cultural identity, she prefers to leave her former Vietnamese self in the past. Lefèvre as Counter Model of Métissage: Métisse blanche Colonial Vietnamese society was deeply marked by race, and mixed-race individuals received particularly harsh treatment. While the French scorned them because they posed a threat to the purity of the French race, the Vietnamese population regarded them as a useful scapegoat who could be blamed for the inequalities of colonial society. As a young child in Métisse blanche, Kim shares this hatred of her mixed ethnic heritage, because of the discrimination it entails, and she even dreams about having an accident that would drain her of her French blood so that she can be ‘pure Vietnamienne, réconciliée avec [s]on entourage et avec [elle]-même’ (p. 20). The possessive adjectives here reveal that her entire sense of self is bound up with her Vietnamese identity, and not her French one. In fact, she fails to identify with France, even though legally, she is French. Contextual research has revealed that a decree published on 8 November 1928 in the Journal officiel de la République française granted French citizenship to métis children in Indochina who had been abandoned by their French father.12 Kim fits into this category, although, as I examine further, becoming a French citizen not only means forgoing her Vietnamese identity, but also abandoning ties to her Vietnamese family. Despite being a French citizen, then, the child despises France because she associates the country with her French father, a man she loathes for having abandoned her at birth. Although not illegal, interracial relations were discouraged by the colonial authorities, and it was common for French officers to abandon their offspring when they returned to France. Kim knows nothing about her father, and it is only when she returns to Vietnam as an adult that her mother finally reveals her father’s name, as documented in Retour à la saison des pluies. Even then, it is unlikely that her mother’s memory is entirely accurate, as she confuses Jean Tiffon, the narrator’s father, with Jean-Marcel Guillaume, another French officer who broke his promise to look after the family after Jean had abandoned them. When Jean-Marcel was called back to France in 1938, he wanted the narrator’s mother and their young son to accompany him but refused to take Kim too, expecting 12 Saada, p. 13.

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his lover to choose between her two children and abandon Kim. She desperately wanted to live a stable life with her lover and son, but she knew that nobody would look after her mixed-race daughter if she were abandoned, because of the highly gendered nature of Vietnamese society that privileged males. As she writes to Kim, ‘le plus difficile a été de renoncer à mon fils’ (p. 407), with whom neither Kim nor her mother have since had any contact. This additional information in the sequel, which does not appear in Métisse blanche, helps to explain why Kim is so troubled by her status as métisse, because she is aware of the specific, tragic gendered hardships and rejections it has inflicted on herself, and on her mother. This important detail is further evidence of the need to read the two texts together in order to gain a better understanding of Kim’s anxieties surrounding her mixed-race identity. For Lionnet, the term métis does not contain any adverse biological or sexual implications. Pointing out its etymological roots—the term stems from the Latin mixtus and refers to cloth made from different fibres—she explains that it emerged in the French colonial period and is culturally and geographically specific.13 In Canada, the word historically referred to a person of French and Native American descent; in Senegal, to people of French and African descent; in Indochina to people of mixed French and Vietnamese (and Laotian and Cambodian) origin; and in the island colonies of the French Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, to a variety of cultural mixings. Lionnet retains this term in French in her work on contemporary cross-cultural identities, arguing that the English equivalents, such as ‘half-breed’, ‘mixedblood’, or ‘mulatto’, carry negative connotations because ‘they imply biological abnormality and reduce human reproduction to the level of animal breeding’.14 However, in persisting in using this French term, she in fact overlooks its negative colonial implications, as the label contains very specific historical and moral judgements. It is striking that Jack Yeager has also decided to retain the French term in his 2018 translation of Métisse blanche. In the glossary, he explains this decision as one that avoids the detrimental connotations of English equivalents and retains the evocative imagery of ‘cloth woven (tissé) from two threads, linen and cotton’, which would be lost in translation.15 As Roger Toumson explains, métissage in the colonial period symbolized 13 Lionnet, ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage’, p. 328. 14 Lionnet, ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage’, p. 327. 15 Yeager, p. 268.

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‘animalité, hybridité, stérilité’, and other images associated with ‘la dégénérescence physiologique, intellectuelle et morale’.16 It is therefore problematic to associate métissage with an empowering and enriching cultural exchange for these groups without any consideration of this specific historical context. While writers of mixed cultural heritage who did not personally experience colonialism, such as Lê, revindicate and reappropriate this term, Lefèvre is unable to do so. In her writing, the loaded term signifies inferiority, a reflection of the colonial values imbibed in her narratives. In his critical analysis of Métisse blanche, Yeager claims that ‘as a child, the narrator is not really aware of her physical difference’.17 While it is true that she has no idea what she looks like, having avoided looking at her reflection in mirrors or puddles of water, Kim certainly understands, by the taunts she receives as a young child, that her status as métisse sets her apart from the other, ‘pure’ Vietnamese children: ‘je désirais farouchement oublier que j’étais métisse’ (p. 106). This quotation suggests that she is very much aware that her facial features are different to those of her mother and sisters, with negative consequences. Kim’s early childhood is characterized by abandonment and displacement as she spends the first few years of her life away from her mother and living in Hanoi with a wet-nurse, for whom she quickly becomes ‘un fardeau’ (p. 21). The family cannot afford to pay for the services of the wet nurse; indeed, the narrative does not state how this arrangement operated financially. Karl Ashoka Britto explicitly equates the narrator’s abandonment by her mother with her status as métisse, arguing that Kim’s métissage ‘provokes anxious and often violent reassertions of difference’, as ‘her aberrant body is suppressed, humiliated, disciplined’ by her mother.18 Although other reasons also motivate the mother’s departure—she is destitute and urgently needs to find work for financial security—Kim’s racial difference is the principal factor for the troubling way in which her mother treats her. Her 16 Toumson, p. 94. 17 Jack A. Yeager, ‘Blurring the Lines in Vietnamese Fiction in French: Kim Lefèvre’s Métisse blanche’, in Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, ed. by Mary Jean Green, Karen Gould, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Keith L. Walker, and Jack A. Yeager (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 210–26 (p. 212). 18 Karl Ashoka Britto, Disorientation: France, Vietnam, and the Ambivalence of Interculturality (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), p. 2.

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exile within her family continues when, aged four, she stays with her great-aunt and her 15-year-old male cousin, who sexually abuses her in the bed they share. Her great-aunt tires of looking after her, and so Kim returns to Saigon to live with her mother and her mother’s new husband. Kim poignantly recalls her loneliness during this period of her life: ‘cette période de ma vie avait une dominante: le vide’ (p. 27). She constantly feels unwanted: her Chinese stepfather resents her because she is a bodily reminder of her mother’s sexual transgression with the colonial enemy, and her mother, afraid of her husband and his ‘rancune tenace’ towards her and her daughter, is complicit in propagating this resentment through her silence (p. 28). Kim’s mother is financially dependent on her husband and is trapped in a perpetual cycle of poverty and fear: she can either send money to relatives for her daughter to be looked after away from her, or can keep her close by and care for her herself, but reduce her capacity to earn money and risk angering her volatile husband. The mother is eventually persuaded by her family to send Kim to a French colonial orphanage. As Tri, the mother’s half-brother declares, France has a financial and moral responsibility towards Kim, whereas ‘le futur Vietnam indépendant n’aurait pas besoin de ces enfants bâtards’ (p. 45) who are considered to betray Vietnamese values. James R. Lehning explains that it was common practice for the French colonial government to target métis children from rural areas in Vietnam and persuade their families to entrust them to French educational institutions, for France to create ‘“des Français d’âme et de qualité”’.19 Boys would be useful to France as civil servants and mediators, whereas girls would receive preparation for their future maternal roles. In fact, Christina Elizabeth Firpo estimates that more than 10,000 mixed-race children were sent to these educational institutions between 1890 and 1980 to reduce the threat of rebellion against the colonial authorities. 20 In Kim’s case, though, it is her family who wish to rid themselves of the burden of looking after her, revealing her subordinate position within her own family. This episode also reveals how her status as an illegitimate child and her métissage are closely intertwined. Before her family can send her to the orphanage, they must prove that her father is French. However, Kim does not have a birth certificate and therefore has no official legal status. When they 19 James R. Lehning, European Colonialism since 1700 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 145. 20 Christina Elizabeth Firpo, The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2016), p. 2.

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eventually organize the paperwork, they take her to the orphanage in Hanoi, where she is forced to shed her Vietnamese identity and embrace a French identity. She is given a French name—Éliane Tiffon—and is not permitted to speak in Vietnamese. She struggles to adapt to an entirely different linguistic and cultural context because, aged six, she is old enough to have already established an identity. Moreover, she feels bewildered on realizing that all the other girls are métisses, too. Rather than feeling comforted by living among young girls who share cultural and racial affinities with her, she feels ‘désorientée devant l’énigme de leur regard’ (p. 52) because she does not self-identify as an individual of mixed race, but rather as Vietnamese. The narrator’s national affiliation is questioned further when she learns about the possibility of being sent to France to escape the threat of war. Here, Lefèvre plays on the notion of ‘la mère patrie’, which linguistically combines the maternal symbolization of France with the fatherland. Kim is instructed to conceive of France as her ‘mère nourricière’ (p. 67), whose duty it is to defend and protect its citizens; yet for her, France is a cold, distant, and hostile country about which she has no knowledge. As Yeager comments, ‘the narrator associates Viet Nam with her mother, France with her father’; 21 it thus seems counterintuitive for her to associate the colonial power with a maternal, protective role because for Kim, it is Vietnam that has a duty to act as a mother figure and educate her, not France. Young Kim, therefore, does not subscribe to colonial ideology, and nor does she seek the kind of identity promoted by the mission civilisatrice. Although some girls are sent to the metropole, the narrator is eventually reunited with her mother and remains in Vietnam. Kim’s cultural métissage, then, is a direct cause of her early peregrinations across Vietnam, and her experiences can be interpreted as forms of exile. In Said’s theoretical discussions of exile, he posits that internal displacement does not equate to exile because it does not evoke the same uprootedness and sense of loss. Yet it certainly does for Kim, who lives her childhood as a ‘nuit d’exode’ (p. 20), in perpetual movement across Vietnam, and between French and Vietnamese cultures. In contrast, Hamid Nacify’s broader conceptualization of exile focuses on different groups in society. In a reading that explores the metaphorical potential of exile, he maintains that unemployment, incarceration, and confinement within the home could all be incorporated within understandings of exile because, like geographic exile, these three 21 Yeager, ‘Blurring the Lines in Vietnamese Fiction in French’, p. 215.

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conditions restrict participation in society. 22 In Métisse blanche, gender operates as a further catalyst for exile within the home. Kim’s internal imprisonment becomes a reality when the family move to her mother’s native village of Van Xa, south-east of Hanoi. She is even physically imprisoned, for her own protection, when her mother forces her to hide in the large earthenware jar used to collect rainwater after the Viet Minh army arrive in the village. The Viet Minh are seeking revenge for the massacres carried out on their communities by the French forces, making her mother believe Kim is in danger because she is half-French. As Nathalie Nguyen remarks, ‘the jar, in times of peace an ordinary household item, became a place of refuge but also a prison’.23 This episode is particularly traumatic for Kim; her fear is exacerbated by the fact that she experiences this imprisonment as another abandonment by her mother, who leaves her alone in the jar as she searches for her own place of safety. Home is not a location of security for the narrator but one of confinement and captivity. Kim’s confusion here offers poignant internal reflections on the arbitrary nature of identity. She cannot understand why she must hide, as she identifies with the Vietnamese community, not the French: ‘comment leur expliquer que j’étais d’abord vietnamienne, que les rares affections qu’on m’avait témoignées jusqu’ici étaient le fait de Vietnamiens?’ (p. 88). While the mother’s intentions are commendable, since she is trying to protect her daughter from being targeted by the Vietnamese communist forces, she simultaneously reinforces the dominant colonial ideology: Franco-Vietnamese mixed blood is a source of anxiety to be concealed, not embraced. This emotion is certainly shared by Kim’s Chinese stepfather, who simply ignores her presence; even when Kim steals money from him in a bid to gain his attention, he ‘posa sur [elle] un regard qui exprimait tout le dégoût qu’il éprouvait pour [s]a race bâtarde’, and then orders his own children, métis themselves, to avoid all contact with her (p. 108). Interestingly, his children do not suffer from racial discrimination, even though they are of mixed (Chinese and Vietnamese) race, too; it is thus the French colonial system that underpins these negative connotations of métissage. Even though the stepfather is Chinese, and therefore also 22 Nacify, ‘Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics’, p. 123. 23 Nathalie Nguyen, ‘Landscapes of War: Traumascapes in the Works of Kim Lefèvre and Phan Huy Duong’, in Land and Landscape in Francographic Literature: Remapping Uncertain Territories, ed. by Magali Compan and Katarzyna Pieprzak (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 88–103 (p. 92).

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part of a minority group in Vietnam, his attitude mirrors that of the French. As Vergès explains, French colonial society at large was afraid of the ‘transgression of the social colonial order’ by male métis, deemed potential revolutionaries who could climb the social hierarchy because of their ‘white’ blood. 24 Women of mixed race, in contrast, were defined as being ‘deviant, sexually loose, and perfidious’. 25 Kim explains that her stepfather’s aversion to her is compounded by the fact that she is a girl. He longs for a male descendant to continue his lineage, even considering taking a second wife to ensure he would have a son. Historical accounts of Vietnam indicate that in Chinese and Vietnamese communities in the early 1900s, boys were preferred to girls because they would be able to take care of their families when they were older, while girls had to live with their husband’s family once they were married. As Neil L. Jamieson explains, ‘a woman was supposed to be submissive to her father when young, to her husband when married, and to her oldest son when widowed’. 26 This statement rings true for Kim, who is highly subservient in her early relationships with men. When she is 15, the family move to Nha Trang, a coastal city in southern Vietnam. Kim joins the local choir, and she quickly becomes infatuated with the Vietnamese choirmaster Duc. He is much older and married, but they begin an affair. Kim is eager to preserve her virginity at all costs—she is constantly told by her mother, who wants to prevent her daughter from making the mistakes that she did, that ‘une femme n’a qu’un trésor, c’est celui de sa virginité’ (p. 110). Yet she craves affection so badly that she allows herself to be manipulated by Duc. Vulnerable and bewildered by her first experience of love, she allows him to advance their affair very quickly. In Métisse blanche, a small altercation between Kim and Duc is particularly illuminating for its insights into how métissage is perceived by men. One day he teases her about her racial difference. Realizing he has upset her, he quickly explains that he is attracted to her precisely because she is not completely Vietnamese: ‘quand je te regarde, tu m’es à la fois familière et étrangère. Et j’aime ça’ (p. 218). While Duc is not scornful towards her racial otherness, like her stepfather, he too is unable to see past her racial difference, and her métissage becomes an exotic 24 Vergès, p. 29. 25 Vergès, p. 30. 26 Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 18.

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fantasy for him. Vergès criticizes the contemporary positive ‘marketing’ of hybrid cultures that are presented as mysterious and exotic, and available for consumption by a largely white audience in Western cultures. She argues that urban centres are advertised and promoted in terms of their hybridity, which is celebrated as a high-value marker of the contemporary transnational world that is no longer divided by race, class, or ethnicity. 27 Métisse blanche reveals that the current exoticization of hybridity, which is not illustrative of the social realities for the groups being depicted, has its roots in the colonial period. This bodily objectification is damaging to the narrator, as she is reduced to her racial components and denied an individual subjectivity. Kim is deeply hurt when her lover articulates his fascination for her Eurasian beauty, asking him bewilderedly, ‘mais si je ne suis pas une Vietnamienne, comment pourrais-je te plaire?’ (p. 218). She cannot understand how her mixed Franco-Vietnamese identity can be a source of attraction for her lover, implying that she does not draw strength from her métissage but is rendered more vulnerable by it. However, her métissage enables her to access a French colonial education, and so as she becomes older, her mixed blood becomes a marker of her superiority. Indeed, her half-sisters do not even attend school until they are teenagers because, according to Kim’s stepfather, a bastion of patriarchal society, ‘la place d’une fille était à la cuisine’ (p. 169); when they do eventually attend school, they go to schools designed for the French by the Vietnamese. The French established a school system in Vietnam alongside their own French schools to curb Vietnamese resistance to colonial rule, avoid Chinese and Japanese intervention in the education system, and remove Vietnamese pressure on French schools. 28 Kim also attends a Vietnamese village primary school before she is sent to the French colonial orphanage, but she soon gets bored and plays truant, suggesting that a traditional Vietnamese education is not appropriate for her. The mother is determined to give Kim the French education to which she feels her daughter is entitled, even sending her to live with her Eurasian cousin Odile so that Kim can attend a prestigious French school run by a Catholic missionary society 27 Françoise Vergès, ‘Post-Scriptum’, in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 349–58 (pp. 356–57). 28 Gail Paradise Kelly, French Colonial Education: Essays on Vietnam and West Africa, ed. by David H. Kelly (New York: AMS Press, 2000), pp. 3–25 (p. 5).

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in Saigon. Kim is reluctant to attend a school run by people with whom she cannot identify at all. On seeing the uniform her mother has made for her, she screams that she ‘préférerai[t] mille fois rester annamite et ignorante que de [s]e montrer dans un accoutrement aussi ridicule’ (p. 152). The European style of dress does not sit well with Kim, who considers it a betrayal of the traditions of Annam, the region of Central Vietnam, which she holds so dear. Her mother is seen desperately attempting to teach her to associate being French with sophistication and intelligence; and being Vietnamese with ignorance and stupidity. Yet as a child, Kim resists the denigration of her maternal culture. Ching Selao suggests that métissage is a positive experience in the novel, arguing that the narrator’s blood ‘elevates her to this higher level rather than leading to degeneration’. 29 Yet it is not any métissage-induced multiplicity of identities that raises Kim’s social status in her mother’s eyes, but rather the fact that she represents France. Her mother subscribes to colonial stereotypes of the French as the ‘superior’, ‘enlightened’ race; the local Vietnamese people, however, are unworthy of a decent education, in her mother’s opinion, and must be content with their lot as uneducated peasants. For Kim and her family, then, upholding and observing métissage means choosing between two rigid colonial stereotypes, rather than resisting them through the celebration of a more hybrid alternative. Such a reading must be tempered, however, by acknowledging that these attitudes are likely the result of the family’s—conscious or unconscious— internalization of colonial racism and Orientalism. These racial prejudices are mirrored by the hostility towards the Vietnamese language in Lefèvre’s corpus. Critics have speculated on Lefèvre’s motives for writing her autobiographies in French, rather than in Vietnamese. Aurélie Chevant claims that Lefèvre wrote in French predominantly ‘to understand why her mother abandoned her and was inconsistent in her affection for her’. 30 There is no textual evidence, however, to support this claim: Kim never suggests that she adopts French rather than Vietnamese as a way to punish her mother for the lack of emotional 29 Ching Selao, ‘Tainted Blood: On Being Impure in Kim Lefèvre’s Métisse blanche and Retour à la saison des pluies’, in Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France, ed. by Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 213–21 (p. 215). 30 Aurélie Chevant, ‘Not my Father’s Tongue: Traditions, Mediations, and Conflicts in the Contemporary Vietnamese Novel in French’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California Santa Barbara, 2013), p. 163.

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attention she received as a child. There are obvious colonial undertones that explain why Kim was unable to express herself in Vietnamese, and her mother was complicit in propagating the notion that only a French education would guarantee Kim’s social progression. In contrast, for Pamela Pears, Lefèvre’s relationship with French is representative of the French father who abandoned her at birth, and thus Lefèvre must ‘reconcile the choice to write in the paternal, unknown language, instead of the maternal, familiar one’. 31 Yet again, there is no textual space in either of Lefèvre’s narratives that explores how Kim’s failed relationship with her father plays out in the language in which Lefèvre writes. Rather, the choice to write in French appears a natural consequence of her French education in Vietnam, and the fact that her entire writing career has developed in France. In Retour à la saison des pluies, Kim explains: ‘cela fait trente ans que je n’ai plus pratiqué ma langue, trente ans que je n’ai pas ouvert un livre vietnamien’ (p. 387). French is the only language available to her as an adult, and even though she speaks to her old friend An in Vietnamese, she finds it ‘une épreuve des plus fatigantes’ (p. 387). As a young child she was forced to ‘translate herself’, in Madeleine Hron’s terms, adapting to a new cultural environment and speaking only in French, thereby denying her Vietnamese identity. 32 As a reversal of this early linguistic exile, she now finds herself struggling to converse in Vietnamese because French has become her mother tongue. The formative years of her education are spent at the bourgeois colonial school, the Couvent des oiseaux Dàlat where her schooling takes place in French. In the colonial era, Dalat was used as a summer seat for the French government and a retreat for metropolitan settlers because of its cool, refreshing climate in North Vietnam. As Robert Templer explains, Dalat was designed by the French for the French; ‘the Vietnamese needed permission to live there and were confined to a few areas on the edges of the town’. 33 The narrator’s segregation from her family is thus reflective of a wider separation between French and Vietnamese peoples in colonial Indochina. With its temperate climate, pine forests, and French colonial villas, Dalat seems very French, and, ironically, completely alien to her at first. Kim slowly 31 Pamela Pears, Remnants of Empire in Algeria and Vietnam: Women, Words, and War (Lanham, MD; Oxford: Lexington, 2004), p. 125. 32 Hron, p. 40. 33 Robert Templer, Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 10.

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becomes accustomed to life in Dalat. She even teaches at the convent in exchange for free tuition when Madame N., a rich French lady who acts as her godmother, can no longer afford to pay for her studies in a further demonstration of her growing autonomy and recognized status. Yet following a long illness, her exile is reversed when she returns to her family during the summer to recuperate. She finds it extremely difficult to readapt to family life and treats them with condescension. Now, it is her family who provoke feelings of exile, as she continuously compares her life in Dalat with life with her family in Tuy Hoa. She wants to belong there but constantly feels ‘out of place’: ‘lorsque j’étais à Dalat, c’était ma famille et mon style de vie qui comptaient pour moi, et dès que je me retrouvais parmi eux, cette vie m’apparaissait sans intérêt’ (p. 288). Although she loves her mother and her sisters, she does not understand them nor the life they lead. Métisse blanche concludes with the narrator’s permanent departure to France, after moving to Saigon to train as a secondary school teacher of French literature. When Ho, a young Vietnamese man who tries to court her, persuades her to apply for a competitive scholarship to continue her studies in France, Kim is initially unconvinced. She is unsure whether she should remain in Vietnam, a country that has cruelly rejected her at every opportunity, or leave for France, a country she despises because it represents her father who had abandoned her. Her decision to leave demonstrates how greatly she has been affected by racial rejection, as moving to France is, realistically, her only option. Reminiscing about her past with her family before she leaves, her mother astutely predicts that her daughter will never return to Vietnam because she will finally feel at home within her own community in France. Perplexed by this, Kim replies: ‘mais de quelle race suis-je donc?’ (p. 343). She continues to be haunted by her mixed-race identity because it prevents her from belonging to Vietnamese society. Her mother’s predictions are accurate, but it is the mother who instils in her the notion that identity is a singular, fixed concept, and that Kim must privilege her Frenchness over her Vietnamese identity. It is by prioritizing her French identity, and thriving in the French educational system, that Kim becomes estranged from herself, her family, and her homeland. Even the title of the narrative evokes the rejection she experiences because of her Frenchness: in Vietnam, she is shunned for her whiteness, rather than for any racial markers that would identify her as Vietnamese. Yet once in France, it is her Vietnamese identity that she tries to conceal, as explored in the following section.

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Exile and Family Estrangement in Retour à la saison des pluies ‘Trente ans, c’est une mesure, une quantité. Mais pour moi, c’est une plage qui s’étend entre mes vingt ans et aujourd’hui. C’est une vie. Ma vie.’ (Retour à la saison des pluies, p. 355)

Retour à la saison des pluies opens with this evocative reflection on the narrator’s long absence from Vietnam. This introduction is peppered with short, disjointed phrases that convey the rupture that exile has had on Kim’s life. She compares her life in Vietnam to ‘un long fleuve dont l’amont serait si éloigné qu’il [lui] paraît à présent enveloppé de brume’ (p. 355), so hazy is the memory of her past. Yeager examines Lefèvre’s use of water imagery throughout the texts, positing that ‘in Southeast Asia water connects land masses and facilitates communication’ and suggests that the memory of water connects Kim to her family even when she is apart from them, particularly given the reference to water in the title of the second text. 34 Laura Dennis adds that water is connected with the idea of the Vietnamese homeland, because the equivalent in the Vietnamese language for ‘homeland’, ‘Dât-Nuoc’, signifies land and water. 35 Her interpretation thus suggests that for Lefèvre, water is a unifying metaphor that connects her to her Vietnamese past. Yet in the above passage, water is not a positive symbol of unity. The reference to a ‘long fleuve’, coupled with the negative adjective ‘éloigné’, suggests that the narrator feels extremely far removed from Vietnam, her own source. Furthermore, the mystic image of the source of the river, described through the poetic term ‘amont’ and shrouded by ‘brume’, indicates that while Vietnam reluctantly remains a cornerstone of her identity, she does not look favourably on her memories of Vietnamese life. In fact, as she later explains, Vietnam ‘[lui] a également rendu la vie intenable’ (p. 357). To protect herself from this traumatic past, Kim separates herself entirely from Vietnam, partly in a reaction against the rejection she suffered as a child due to her racial ‘impurity’. Selao uses the metaphor of skin to describe the narrator’s identitarian issues, arguing that Kim wants to ‘changer de peau’ when she arrives in France in order to efface 34 Jack A. Yeager, ‘Kim Lefèvre’s Retour à la saison des pluies: Rediscovering the Landscapes of Children’, L’Esprit Créateur, 33.2 (1993), 47–57 (p. 53). 35 Laura Dennis, ‘Myth and Mémoire in Kim Lefèvre’s Retour à la saison des pluies’, Kentucky Philological Review, 25 (2010), 12–18 (p. 14).

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her Vietnamese identity entirely. 36 This French idiom suggests a desire on Kim’s part to shed her old identity permanently and adopt new attitudes and behaviours, but the fact that she feels compelled to eradicate her Vietnamese self completely in order to become French suggests that the narrator’s French identity is less fixed and stable than is claimed in Retour à la saison des pluies. Kim’s spatial and psychological distance from Vietnam could also be interpreted as a punishment that she chooses to inflict on all those who shunned her because of her racial difference, and who had treated her so badly during her childhood in Vietnam. This explains why Kim intentionally avoids all contact with her former acquaintances from Vietnam who now live in Paris. She never ventures into the thirteenth arrondissement, an area with a growing Vietnamese community due to the mass arrival of the ‘boat people’ following the reunification of Vietnam in 1975. This district was renovated during the 1960s and large tower blocks were built around Porte de Choisy; the Asian refugees arriving between 1975 and 1980 were in fact the first communities to move into this area. Kim only begins to frequent this district once she has decided to return to Vietnam, following the publication of Métisse blanche. She explains this decision when she appears on Bernard Pivot’s Apostrophes on France 2 on 7 April 1989, the most influential French literary programme of the era. 37 Writing this interview about the publication of Métisse blanche into the sequel text, she explains how Pivot asked her whether she would ever visit her birth country again. She has travelled extensively around Asia during her adulthood and is now aware of having drawn ‘une sorte de cercle magique’ around her native country, yet she has never dared to confront her fears by returning (p. 433). She considers her affirmative response to Pivot—‘j’y songe, oui’ (p. 357)—as ‘un serment solennel’ to the television audience (p. 358). Her relationship with the Vietnamese community remains ambiguous, however. She is pleased to renew her relationship with former acquaintances, but she is also annoyed not to be in control of these spontaneous meetings, because they provoke a psychological 36 Ching Selao, ‘Deuils et migrations identitaires dans les romans de Kim Lefèvre et Linda Lê’, in Problématiques identitaires et discours de l’exil dans les littératures francophones, ed. by Anissa Talahite-Moodley (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2007), pp. 275–98 (p. 280). 37 This episode was entitled ‘L’Humiliation’, and Lefèvre spoke about the humiliation she endured as a mixed-race child alongside other French writers, including Jean-Marie Rouart and Charles Juliet.

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reaction for which she is unprepared. Until now, she has chosen to keep her Vietnamese acquaintances at a distance, out of fear that France will reject her if she reconnects with her Vietnamese identity, just as, in Métisse blanche, she was rejected in Vietnam for her Frenchness. Kim’s problematic stance towards her métisse identity becomes clear: in both texts, each identity, French and Vietnamese, remains separate and distinct, and only one can be assumed at a time, thwarting the established paradigm of métissage as a combination of identities. The narrator has lost all contact with her family since she has been living in France. While she occasionally wrote to them on arriving in Paris, she never received a response; she then moved house, and explains wistfully: ‘ma famille, même si elle l’avait souhaité, ne savait plus où j’habitais’ (p. 359). The alienation she experienced in Vietnam continues to affect her in France, and this is manifested in an emotional and physical estrangement from her family. The constant reminders of the narrator’s ill treatment during her childhood in Vietnam prevent her from forming a new relationship with her family as an adult during her 30-year absence from Vietnam. In Lefèvre’s texts, it emerges that in order to be accepted in France, Kim must remain estranged from both Vietnamese culture and her family. Problematically, though, she believes her integration into French society to be successful. Towards the end of Métisse blanche—and in a disruption of narrative time—the narrator comments on how willingly France, unlike Vietnam, has welcomed her: ‘car ce que le Vietnam m’avait refusé, la France me l’a accordé: elle m’a reçue et acceptée’ (p. 342). In France, she does not feel judged or excluded because of her racial difference. However, she seems unaware that she has paid a heavy price for this acceptance. To integrate into Parisian life, she has negated her Vietnamese identity and cut herself off entirely from her family and the Vietnamese diasporic community. France does not accept her as a métisse, but as French: the only way she has been successful in France is by conceiving of herself as two different people, ‘vietnamienne pendant [s]on enfance, française par la suite’ (p. 435). She still feels she has no other option but to prioritize one element of her identity over the other. In Vietnam, she was required to conceal her French identity. In France, even though her French identity is not imposed on her by legal or social frameworks, she believes she must eradicate her Vietnamese identity in order to integrate because of a lack of opportunities for Eurasian individuals at that particular time. At this stage of her life, she is aware of the negative experiences of other Vietnamese migrant women: her

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old friend Nam from Dalat, who had trained as a lawyer in Vietnam, is now working as a dinner lady in France because there are no other jobs available to her. Equating the narrator’s métissage with exile offers new perspectives on her life in France. Averis claims that Retour à la saison des pluies ‘affirms [Kim’s] new rootedness in France’;38 yet it is troubling to propose that Kim can feel rooted in France only through a model that requires her to neglect one side of her identity and cut herself off from Vietnam, no matter how badly she may have been treated there. Moreover, Kim’s rediscovery of significant locations of her childhood in Vietnam suggests the eruption of a latent, repressed need to reconnect with her country of birth, thereby destabilizing the French identity she has constructed for herself. Her return to Vietnam is motivated by her realization that she must face her traumatic memories of being rejected by her family: ‘il était temps pour moi, me semblait-il, d’oser retourner sur les lieux de mes terreurs enfantines’ (p. 358). She no longer feels satisfied living in the present but must confront her past, an act that has the potential to unite her French and Vietnamese selves. The fact that she equates Vietnam with fear and dread, and yet still intends to return, demonstrates just how great is her need to reconnect with her Vietnamese identity. For Eva Tsuquiashi-Daddesio, the narrator’s relationship with France contains neo-colonial undertones. She argues that Kim’s positive depiction of life in France, coupled with a more negative impression of independent Vietnam that emphasizes its poverty and corruption, indicates that ‘elle semble préférer effacer les avanies de la colonisation comme une sorte de geste de remerciement à la mère patrie’. 39 This assertion exposes the Orientalist attitude of Kim who represents Vietnam in patronizing tones as being economically, culturally, and morally inferior to France now that the country is no longer supported by the colonial system. Her thinking has thus not developed since her late childhood when her French identity was held up as a model through which she could become more sophisticated. Her sentiments of gratitude towards France are not reciprocated, however, as there she is expected to cut herself off from her former life in order to integrate fully into French society.

38 Averis, ‘Neither Here nor There’, p. 79. 39 Eva Tsuquiashi-Daddesio, ‘L’Empire maternel et colonial chez Kim Lefèvre’, Synergies Afrique Australe, 1 (2005), 47–53 (p. 49).

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Return and Reconciliation: Métisse blanche and Retour à la saison des pluies In Retour à la saison des pluies, Kim is eager to reconcile her relationship with her family and reconnect with her past life once she has promised herself that she will return to Vietnam. She actively seeks to engage with diasporic Vietnamese culture, exploring Asian supermarkets in the Porte de Choisy district of Paris for the first time. Just as the madeleine evokes childhood memories in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913), the pungent smell of a durian fruit reactivates a vivid memory of the first time, aged 15, she had eaten this emblematic fruit in Vietnam. She explains how, after her illicit affair with her music teacher, her mother had promised Kim’s hand in marriage to a young man from Saigon. It was with him that she ate this fruit. This episode reveals the limited prospects available to Vietnamese young girls: for her mother, marriage was the only way Kim could lead a prosperous life. Kim simply had no say in the matter; she was entirely at her family’s mercy, ‘compte tenu de [s]on inconduite’ with her schoolteacher (p. 374). It is surprising that there is no mention of this important life event, nor its outcome, in Métisse blanche (although Kim evidently did not marry him). This example reinforces the fact that reading the text together offers a more complete picture of the complexities of Kim’s life, and of the aesthetic and narratorial choices, and ambiguities, between the two texts. Back in the present, she rediscovers Vietnam in the Asian supermarket in Paris through her senses. Frustrated at the gaps in her memory, she asks one of the workers to help her remember the name of a familiar fruit. She receives the following response: ‘nous, on l’appelle gâc, mais le nom en français, on ne le connaît pas’ [original emphasis] (p. 376). Kim immediately notices how the young girl includes her within the Vietnamese community. Yet rather than feeling comforted, Kim feels that this comment alienates her from French society: ‘elle s’adresse à moi en disant “nous”, je suis donc “l’autre”’ (p. 376). Lily V. Chiu reads this episode more positively, remarking that Kim’s identity ‘here is presented as fluid’ because this incident suggests that she belongs to both French and Vietnamese communities.40 Chiu’s subsequent analysis 40 Lily V. Chiu, ‘The Return of the Native: Cultural Nostalgia and Coercive Mimeticism in the Return Narratives of Kim Lefèvre and Anna Moï’, Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 19.2 (2008), 93–124 (p. 111).

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of how the narrator reacts to the durian in France, however, reveals a less straightforward situation. On one occasion, Kim bought the fruit and left it in the kitchen, but a friend threw it away during her absence because of its potent, rotten-like odour. Chiu considers the durian as ‘a type of crucible, separating the Vietnamese (who can appreciate the fruit and all its qualities) from the French (who regard the fruit as rotting rubbish)’.41 Chiu’s remark here reinforces the irreconcilability of French and Vietnamese cultures, suggesting that it is not possible for Kim to belong to both communities. In Retour à la saison des pluies, Kim does not at any point appear to desire a fluid identity; she is repeatedly seen wanting to be French. Her discomfort at being included in the shop assistant’s ‘nous’ reveals both the distance she has placed between herself and Vietnamese culture, and the discrepancy between her own sense of identity and that which is imposed on her by others. In the second section of Retour à la saison des pluies, the setting moves to Vietnam. Ravi describes how the narrator is trapped in a perpetual return because Kim’s return occurs on various levels: [T]he narrative that positions a return (to her past) in another return (to her mother’s past) in yet another return (her fantasized physical journey to Vietnam) and finally in the actual arrival (her physical return to Vietnam) reflects the perpetual discontinuous state of being that the migrant embodies.42

Ravi’s comments reveal the never-ending cycle of migration and return, of belonging and non-belonging, and of hurt and forgiveness in which Kim is imprisoned. She seeks to rebuild her broken relationship with her family, but now their roles have been reversed, as her sisters cannot understand why they had been abandoned. Her youngest sister Yên cries out: ‘tu nous as délaissées pendant trente ans!’, incredulous because Kim was supposed to return to Vietnam after three years (p. 454). The narrator is struck by guilt: guilt at abandoning her family, but also for leading a comfortable life in France. This chasm is symbolized by the gifts she gives her family: her mother treasures the French cheese ‘comme s’il s’agissait d’un bijou précieux’, explaining that she has not eaten any since the reunification of the country in 1975 because communist Vietnam had been isolated from the rest of the world 41 Chiu, p. 111. 42 Srilata Ravi, ‘Consuming Alterity: Writing Vietnam in French’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 3.2 (2005), 51–76 (p. 64).

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(p. 456). The narrator is rapidly made aware of the privilege she has experienced in France, and how her diasporic existence has permanently altered her relationship with her family. She feels like a stranger among her own family and is ashamed of the material privilege that has been granted to her by assimilating into French society and abandoning her Vietnamese identity. Her success has been achieved at a cost because it has increased the already-significant gulf between herself and her family. By the end of the text, she does succeed in closing the chasm between herself and her family, and she proffers an emotional and affectionate outpouring to her mother. In this way, she keeps alive ‘the possibility of an emotional home’, as the affective ties to her mother mean that she remains connected to Vietnam in some way.43 Is a geographical home still available to her in Vietnam? On her return she realizes that she is no longer consciously searching for her roots, as she has successfully partitioned her French and Vietnamese identities, described as ‘deux couches successives’ (p. 435). The fact that she conceives of her identities as two distinct and separate layers demonstrates once again that she remains divided between France and Vietnam and is unable to bring both identities together to form a coherent whole. By actively revisiting her childhood haunts, such as her old boarding school, Kim indicates that her Vietnamese origins remain important to her. Yet rather than perceiving this as crucial to her sense of self, she approaches it with the distance of an archaeologist on a dig, examining a distant, past layer that has been entirely buried. Kim goes back to Vietnam as a tourist, intending to return to her privileged life in Paris once she has reconciled with her family. Her experiences thus coincide with what Lauren Wagner terms ‘diasporic strangeness’. Wagner explains that for diasporic visitors, ‘visiting the homeland, no matter how connected to it they might be, always involves a displacement’, and so their experiences of diasporic tourism are never entirely pleasurable.44 While tourists collect experiences at their destination to remember their trip when they return home, returnees recollect home at their destination through their memories that have 43 Srilata Ravi, ‘Diasporic Returnees and Francophone Travel Narratives’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing, ed. by Robert Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 65–78 (p. 75). 44 Lauren Wagner, ‘Diasporic Visitor, Diasporic Tourist: Post-Migrant Generation Moroccans on Holiday at “Home” in Morocco’, Civilisations, 57.1 (2008), 191–205 (p. 194).

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been shaped in the diaspora. The image of Kim as a diasporic visitor to Vietnam is repeated throughout Retour à la saison des pluies. She stays in a hotel rather than at her family’s house, claiming in a letter to them before her arrival that she did not want to intrude when they have so little space. In the narrative, she admits the real reason: she does not feel ready to cope with ‘un débordement affectif’ that would have overwhelmed her (p. 466). Her diasporic strangeness is also apparent even before she arrives in Vietnam. During her preparations for the trip, she is required to go to the Vietnamese consulate in Paris to obtain the correct documentation. Speaking to the official in French, she requests a tourist visa because she self-identifies as French; the officer, however, initiates the conversation in Vietnamese and assumes that she is a Vietnamese woman who now lives in France. She immediately feels uneasy and begins to question her identity herself, just as she had previously in the Parisian supermarket: ‘dès que je me trouvais officiellement devant un Vietnamien je ne savais plus qui j’étais, mon identité devenait floue et la peur d’être rejetée me reprenait’ (p. 434). As Siobhán Shilton comments, this episode reveals ‘the discrepancy between how the traveller is perceived and how she perceives herself’,45 and once again calls into question the extent to which Kim has successfully assimilated into French society, despite her own conviction that she is now French. Kim imitates certain French attitudes towards present-day Vietnam as an impoverished, corrupt, and primitive society, a portrayal of the country that dates back to the French colonial era. She makes an important remark on her family’s financial precariousness when explaining why she prefers to stay in a hotel on her return. The whole family live together in a small, cramped house, sharing two bedrooms between nine people. The family’s lack of material possessions contrasts sharply with the narrator’s relative wealth. Foregrounding the poverty of her family and of Vietnamese society, Kim perpetuates the notion that Vietnam is economically undeveloped as she uses the emotionally charged phrase ‘des taudis sur pilotis’ to describe the local housing (p. 452). Yet in the last decades of the twentieth century Vietnam has made enormous economic progress, and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon until 1976), where her family now live, is a large, bustling metropolis, not an economic backwater (although inequalities do exist between urban 45 Siobhán Shilton, ‘Contemporary Travel to Vietnam: Jean-Luc Coatalem’s Suite indochinoise and Kim Lefèvre’s Retour à la saison des pluies’, Studies in Travel Writing, 13.4 (2009), 345–55 (p. 350).

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elites and the rest of the population). Kim never mentions the economic successes of the city in her narrative, though, and once again reproduces Orientalist attitudes by portraying Vietnam as economically ‘inferior’ to France. She also lampoons the Vietnamese government for neglecting beautiful Dalat. Now a state-run university, the site of the convent has fallen into ruin. The lush garden is spoiled by the presence of small shacks, and Kim describes the area as a ‘camp de réfugiés’ (p. 497), a problematic description because this hyperbolic and insensitive phrase, referring to sites where thousands of people live in precarious tents and lack decent sanitation, implies a level of desperate poverty going beyond the situation with which she is faced. Kim is bewildered at the sight of her beloved convent in such a dilapidated state and remarks miserably that she ‘quitte ce lieu avec le sentiment d’avoir à jamais perdu quelque chose de précieux’ (p. 499). Neglecting to consider the social progress instigated by the Vietnamese government during the late 1980s, Kim focuses on the negative transformations that the country has undergone. Problematically, her conviction that Vietnam is incapable of providing political, social, and economic stability for its citizens, and granting them adequate resources and infrastructure, exhibits traces of the legacy of the colonial era, fuelled by her mother’s determination that she should receive a French colonial education; this, of course, was the catalyst for her departure to France. Vietnam is now an independent country, but it is evident in the narrative that the same neo-colonial attitudes prevail among French citizens. The ending of Retour à la saison des pluies reinforces Kim’s métissage as a form of exile. In the final paragraph, she explains how she has come to terms with the erasure of the Vietnam of her past: ‘lorsque je quitterai ce pays mon image s’effacera et je ne laisserai plus de trace dans ce paysage d’eau où il recommence à pleuvoir’ (p. 514). Retaining the water metaphor that runs throughout the text, Kim figures the rain as wiping out all traces of her previous life. Read with a focus on Kim’s family estrangement, the passage seems to be a pessimistic portrayal of betrayal and abandonment. Perhaps understandably given her previous experiences of rejection, Kim does not want any trace of her to remain in Vietnam, implying that she will cease to exist there once she leaves because her French identity supersedes her Vietnamese identity. After her long confrontation with her past, she still feels unable to be both French and Vietnamese.

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Conclusion In June 2010, in an interview with the Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie, Lefèvre’s attitude towards her own Franco-Vietnamese identity appears to reflect a positive stance of reconciliation and acceptance: ‘pour ma part, je suis en paix avec mon métissage’.46 Lefèvre had not developed this sentiment of optimism when writing Métisse blanche or Retour à la saison des pluies, however. In Lefèvre’s early autofictional narratives, métissage exiles the narrator-protagonist in several ways, particularly from her Vietnamese family. As a child in Vietnam she is shunted across the country because her family cannot cope with the burden of looking after a mixed-race child; she then severs all ties with her family on arriving in France; and even when she finally returns to Vietnam, their relationship is strained. It seems unlikely that the relationship will ever fully recover, despite her apparent conviction that she will not lose touch with them again. For Kim, métissage does not offer a dynamic and positive model of identity—rather, it is a painful and traumatic experience. Whereas in Métisse blanche, her grandmother suggests to her that she is ‘un alliage, ni or ni argent’ (p. 39), Kim is never able to embrace her métisse identity as a kind of blend, or alloy, but rather appears condemned to experience it as the impossible collision of two incompatible cultures, and the cause of separation, anxiety, and exile.

46 Kim Lefèvre, ‘Une parole francophone: Kim Lefèvre’, L’Assemblée Parlementaire de la Francophonie, 25 June 2010, [accessed 6 April 2020] [my transcript].

chapter three

Exile as a ‘Forced Choice’ War and Migration in Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia Exile as a ‘Forced Choice’ In the twentieth century, warfare was a significant driving force behind large-scale migration from the French Antilles to metropolitan France. During the First and Second World Wars, soldiers were recruited from France’s colonies, and after the Second World War, Antilleans were encouraged to settle in the metropole to help rebuild the infrastructure destroyed by war. Gisèle Pineau’s presentation of the Caribbean in L’Exil selon Julia emphasizes such conflict and displacement. The direct and indirect consequences of military life bring about the geographic displacement of the characters, male and female, between France, Africa, and the Antilles, while also causing them psychological distress. Their diasporic existence thus becomes a form of exile: their racial and linguistic otherness hinders their integration into French society, despite their legal status as French citizens. At the time of Pineau’s childhood, and therefore in the narrative time of the text, Guadeloupe was a département d’outre-mer (DOM); following constitutional reform in March 2003, it became a département et région d’outre-mer (DROM).1 This chapter connects the specific forms of alienation manifested by individual characters with their own experiences of war. By analysing the causal relationship between war and displacement for three generations of Pineau women, it becomes apparent that the mobility that arises as a result of warfare has complex, long-lasting, and, at times, even unexpectedly beneficial impacts on the family. Approaching Pineau’s best-known text through this lens allows for a more nuanced understanding of the intersections between colonialism, 1 Following further consultation, Martinique and French Guiana became collectivités territoriales in January 2016. See [accessed 12 January 2020].

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war, gender, and exile for the Antillean population, and for Antillean women more particularly. Such an analysis also reveals Pineau’s wider aims of writing Antillean women back into metropolitan French history and uncovering marginalized but crucial aspects of Antillean war history. The narrative structure of L’Exil selon Julia is complex and reflects the narrator’s migratory patterns through its ruptures and dislocations. The text begins in Paris before going back in time to describe her family history and early childhood in Guadeloupe and Africa. The action then crosses the Atlantic to explore the narrator’s alienation in mainland France before returning once again to the Antilles in 1970. In addition, shifts in narrative voice add to the disruptive potential of the text. The enigmatic main narrator is referred to by name only once as the quintessentially French name ‘Marie’, Pineau’s middle name, as Kathleen Gyssels notes. 2 At other moments, the narrative adopts the perspective of the narrator’s paternal grandmother Julia (named interchangeably as the Creole Man Ya) and her mother Daisy. It is unclear whether this perspective emanates directly from these women or is being mediated through the main narrator. The reader thus discovers the intimate thoughts of the principal female characters as they struggle to adapt to metropolitan French life. The active military participation of Asdrubal and Maréchal, two men who occupy roles as sons, husbands, and fathers, forms the impetus for the female family members’ migration from Guadeloupe to metropolitan France. The narrator suffers from a childhood of ‘amarrages et démarrages. Allées et virées’ (p. 28) as she is constantly uprooted by her father’s military career. Her constant peregrinations create a melancholic wistfulness in her and an impetus to recover something lost—history, identity, knowledge—expressed in an early passage: ‘j’ai longtemps gardé le sentiment d’avoir perdu quelque chose: une formule qui perçait jadis les geôles, un breuvage souverain délivrant la connaissance, une mémoire, des mots, des images’ (p. 20). Her father, in contrast, enjoys the freedom and glory his military service brings him, both during the Second World War and afterwards. He takes pride in being one of the ‘agents of French hegemony’ despite his racial difference,

2 Kathleen Gyssels, ‘L’Exil selon Pineau, récit de vie et autobiographie’, in Récits de vie de l’Afrique et des Antilles: exil, errance, enracinement, ed. by Suzanne Crosta (Sainte-Foy, Quebec: GRELCA, 1998), pp. 169–87 (p. 175).

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as Renée Larrier observes. 3 Pineau’s text thus reveals the harsh reality of life in the Hexagon for Antilleans, despite France’s rhetoric of equality. The family are French citizens, but they are not treated as such; instead, they encounter racism and discrimination. Their continuous ‘va-etvient’ between the Antilles and mainland France reflects the migration patterns of many Antilleans who travel between the two locations for personal and professional commitments, due to the incorporation of the Antilles into French administrative frameworks. Their initial move to Paris anticipates the mass immigration of Antilleans to the metropole through the BUMIDOM scheme, or the Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer, a scheme established in 1963 to reduce unemployment on the islands and create a workforce to rebuild France following the war. The recent surge in French-language cultural production that portrays the harsh realities of state-controlled migration between France and the French Caribbean is testimony to the urgent need to interrogate the social and cultural impacts of transatlantic migration in the post-war era.4 Exile as a ‘Forced Choice’ Pineau’s text offers the opportunity to investigate whether exile caused by war constitutes a forced displacement imposed on each family member, as Amy Kaminsky, who posits that exile ‘is always coerced’, 5 would argue, or whether some characters have more choice than others about when and how they leave Guadeloupe. Discourses of displacement typically categorize exile according to people’s motives for departure, distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary migration. Voluntary migration ‘results from a personal cost/benefit analysis that indicates 3 Renée Larrier, ‘“Sont-ils encore gens de Guadeloupe?” Departmentalization, Migration, and Family Dynamics’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 11.1–2 (2008), 171–87 (p. 178). 4 Prominent examples include Jean-Claude Barny’s film Le Gang des Antillais (Les Films d’ici, 2016); Estelle-Sarah Bulle’s novel Là où les chiens aboient par la queue (Paris: Liana Levi, 2018); and Jessica Oublié and Marie-Ange Rousseau’s bande dessinée Péyi an nou (Paris: Steinkis, 2017). See Antonia Wimbush, ‘Depicting French Caribbean Migration through Bande Dessinée’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 21.1/2 (2018), 9–29. 5 Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 9.

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relocation will maximize utility’, perceived as a rational decision based on a variety of economic, familial, or political reasons.6 Those who choose to leave their country of origin seek a better standard of living for themselves and their families. Involuntary exile, in contrast, is defined as a displacement enforced upon an individual or community, either by humanmade forces, such as armed intervention and political turbulence, or by natural disasters beyond human control. These people, who are either forcibly removed from their country of origin or pressured into leaving, are often unlikely to ever return to their native land because they deem it unsafe to do so. Yet L’Exil selon Julia exposes the fraught nature of this distinction between voluntary and involuntary exile, as matters of will and agency come to bear very openly on each character’s exile. The narrator herself raises this question when she scrutinizes her parents’ motives for voluntarily choosing a life of movement, exclusion, and ostracization, asking: ‘pourquoi ont-ils emmêlé leurs destins dans l’idée d’un exil?’ (p. 28). Kate Averis regards the distinction between enforced and voluntary exile as ‘a false dichotomy’, arguing that exile in terms of choice erroneously creates a moral hierarchy of exile, whereby a self-imposed, chosen departure is somehow less of an exile, a ‘phony’ exile.7 Moreover, for Averis, connecting exile with notions of will further problematizes the concept of guilt: while individuals from across the spectrum of displacement feel guilty for abandoning their homeland, this emotion is undoubtedly even more acute among those who choose to leave, because their departure stems from the result of a personal decision for which they alone are responsible.8 It is important to acknowledge, however, that some individuals do have more control than others over when and how they leave their native country, and even over where they live their new life in exile. Pineau was not banished from the Caribbean because of political dissidence or religious persecution—and such a fate was not experienced by the other five authors examined in this book either. When they were infants or young adults, they were either brought or encouraged to move to metropolitan centres to improve their life chances. They therefore enjoy a degree of privilege that is not shared by

6 Milica Z. Bookman, After Involuntary Migration: The Political Economy of Refugee Encampments (Lanham, MD; Oxford: Lexington, 2002), p. 8. 7 Averis, Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing, p. 11. 8 Averis, Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing, p. 14.

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all exiled people; they possess the political power and financial resources to leave and return when they so wish. Averis posits that it is more productive to examine exile through the lens of a ‘forced choice’. The term ‘forced choice’ originates from the field of research methodology, in which participants of an interview or survey are required to make a choice from a selection of alternative responses that is closest to his or her opinion or attitude, but that the participant might not have chosen had other options been available. Averis understands this concept as ‘a limited, yet nevertheless existing set of choices’.9 For Averis, this paradigm best suits experiences of exile because it takes into account that free will lies on a wide continuum, and that even those who seemingly choose a life of exile are often forced into this decision by political or socio-economic factors beyond their control. This is certainly the case for female members of Pineau’s family, whose displacement is firmly controlled by their husbands and fathers within the patriarchal family network, and the women must thus learn to negotiate their identity within this space of imposed exile. Conscription: ‘L’armée est leur credo’ (p. 12) The military engagements of the narrator’s father and grandfather represent the Pineau family’s first encounter with migration to Africa and Europe. In 1916, the narrator’s grandfather Asdrubal went to fight in the trenches in France during the First World War. Asdrubal was one of approximately 500,000 colonial subjects from across the empire who formed the ‘troupes indigènes’, deployed by the French army to serve on European battlefields.10 In 1914, the French empire covered approximately 12 million square kilometres and held control over 63 million colonial subjects.11 France used its extensive imperial force to its advantage, mobilizing men from the colonies across the world to bolster metropolitan troops, including from Guadeloupe. In 1914, the island was still a French colony—the loi de la départementalisation, which 9 Averis, Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing, p. 17. 10 Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 2. 11 Kenneth J. Orosz, ‘French Empire’, in Encyclopedia of the Age of Imperialism, 1800–1914, Volume One, ed. by Carl Cavanagh Hodge (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 2008), pp. 240–50 (p. 245).

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transformed its status from a French colony to a French department, was not passed until March 1946. Asdrubal’s enlistment in the French army, which brought about his displacement to northern France, would have been compulsory, since France’s 1905 conscription law was extended to the vieilles colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion on 7 August 1913. For many colonial soldiers, enlistment represented an enforced exile, as Richard S. Fogarty explains: they were forced to migrate to a new land where their racial and cultural difference ‘set them apart’ from metropolitan French soldiers ‘and made their full integration into the French nation, which official rhetoric insisted was their “adopted fatherland”, difficult, if not impossible’.12 Despite the difficulties to which Fogarty calls attention, Asdrubal’s experience was overwhelmingly positive. Although he was a conscript, it appears that he actively desired to be part of the popular movement to defend France against German forces. As the narrator points out, Asdrubal ‘n’était pas parti en guerre comme un chien fou. Juste pour imiter les autres’ (p. 115). Importantly, as Sylvie Durmelat remarks, his first name is a military name,13 which recalls the mighty King Hasdrubal of Carthage, the uncle of military commander Hannibal. His first name thus underscores his strength and military prowess. During his military service, Asdrubal proudly sees his surname on a map of France, in Charentes; the reference is cryptic as Pineau does not provide the surname, but as Louise Hardwick has observed, a metropolitan French reader would deduce that the narrator is referring to the aperitif ‘Pineau des Charentes’.14 Asdrubal thus feels a deep sense of belonging in metropolitan France and unquestionably accepts his military engagement as a means of protecting his motherland. He subscribes to France’s colonial ideology that was underpinned by the notion of the mission civilisatrice: believing itself to be culturally, intellectually, and morally superior to non-European races, France had ‘civilized’ its African and Caribbean colonies through colonization, so now it must be the turn of these colonies to save France. However, there was a wide gulf between the principle of the mission civilisatrice and the everyday realities of the subjugated peoples living in the colonies. As Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney explain, ‘the French commitment to assimilation was always more rhetorical than real: few resources 12 Fogarty, p. 2. 13 Durmelat, p. 110. 14 Hardwick, p. 142.

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were devoted to the “civilizing mission”, and the promise of political equality was perpetually deferred, since it was fundamentally at odds with the whole colonial system’.15 Yet Asdrubal is entirely convinced of the value of the colonial project: he feels proud to claim French rather than African ancestry and belong to the ‘superior’ race. Although his thoughts are mediated through the narrator’s voice, Asdrubal clearly believes he went to war in order to ‘secourir la Mère-Patrie, défendre la terre de ses ancêtres’ (p. 115), an ancestral link strengthened by his decidedly metropolitan French surname, ‘Pineau’, neither invented in the Caribbean after abolition nor representative of ‘un vestige d’Afrique’ (p. 115). Problematically, and in a gesture typical of French Caribbean behaviour and attitudes at the time of the First World War, Asdrubal uses his position in the French military to reclaim and consolidate his French identity and, by extension, to negate his Africanness. Despite feeling honoured to fight for France, the effects of his national service in the First World War are catastrophic for his family. Asdrubal undergoes a form of psychological exile on his return and is tormented by his experiences of war. The horrors he witnessed during the war pervade his dreams: his wife Julia remembers one night when ‘les défunts de la Sale Guerre sont encore venus visiter Asdrubal. Il a poussé ses cris de bête. Son corps pleurait la mort sur le grabat’ (p. 33). Here, the phrase ‘la Sale Guerre’ contrasts sharply with the more glorified epithet associated with the First World War, ‘la Grande Guerre’, suggesting that in Julia’s opinion, the war does not instil pride and glory in her family but becomes their source of suffering and violence. Asdrubal’s trauma manifests itself in extreme anger, which he releases through domestic violence. He beats Julia, seeking to find in violence ‘un soulagement pour son âme’ (p. 99), a deeply troubling example of gendered violence, which depicts his role as abuser as a direct consequence of his participation in European warfare. Parallels can be drawn here between Asdrubal’s psychological troubles and contemporary experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder that causes psychological and physiological reactions to recurrent memories of traumatic events. Like those who suffer from PTSD after participating in military combat, Asdrubal’s behaviour is impulsive and uncontrollable. 15 Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, ‘Introduction: The Post-Colonial Problematic in France’, in Post-Colonial Cultures in France, ed. by Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3–25 (p. 21).

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Moreover, his psychological stress is compounded by existing racial hierarchies in the French Caribbean. As a lighter-skinned black man, he justifies his violent actions by claiming to be racially superior to his wife, and the narrator recalls how Asdrubal insultingly calls his wife ‘cette Négresse Julia’ (p. 34). His family abandon him in Guadeloupe and move to Paris, taking Julia with them because of his abusive conduct. The narrative strongly implies that Asdrubal’s fierce temper and irrational mood swings are a direct consequence of both his participation in combat, and the colonial ethnoclass hierarchy—and, therefore, also a direct legacy of French colonialism. The entire Pineau family pay a high price for their colonial and postcolonial ties with France because Asdrubal uses violence against them as a release from the horrors of war, and this results in his physical and emotional separation from his wife and his wider family. For Asdrubal, conscription is twofold: it allows him to relocate temporarily to the motherland and demonstrate his pride in being a French citizen, but, decades later, it also causes him great long-term psychological distress and precipitates the near breakdown of his family. La Dissidence: Forced or Voluntary Exile? The military engagement of Maréchal, Asdrubal’s son, also merits closer attention. In a parallel with his father, Maréchal’s commitment to the military cause is underscored by his military name. However, Maréchal’s military involvement and subsequent displacements arise from a specific event: in 1943, he becomes a dissident to assist in the liberation of Occupied France.16 The French Antilles were placed under Maréchal Pétain’s authority in 1940 following the fall of France to Nazi Germany in July 1940, and the islands were governed locally by Admiral Georges Robert (High Commissioner for the Antilles), Constant Sorin (governor of Guadeloupe), and Louis Henri Bressolles (governor of Martinique). The Vichy regime soon imposed rigid authoritarian laws and regulations on the Antillean population, as they did in the metropole. Antillean resistance to the Vichy regime in the form of protests in Fort-de-France and Pointe-à-Pitre were quickly and violently repressed by the authorities. 16 For a more detailed analysis of the Dissidence in Pineau’s literature, see Antonia Wimbush, ‘La Dissidence in Gisèle Pineau’s Œuvre’, Journal of Romance Studies, 20.1 (2020), 159–78.

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From 1940 to 1943, between 4000 and 5000 black Antilleans, male and female, escaped to the neighbouring British non-occupied islands of Dominica and Saint Lucia.17 The journey was perilous: they were forced to leave in the middle of the night on small fishing boats and dinghies to avoid being captured by Vichy officials. On reaching Dominica and Saint Lucia they joined the Forces françaises libres and, after undergoing military training in Canada or the United States of America, crossed the Atlantic to fight alongside metropolitan soldiers in North Africa and France against Nazism. Martinican theorist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was among those who fled to join the French army in 1943, although as David Macey notes, he was sent back from Dominica to Martinique because, at 17, he was too young to enlist, and Robert had already been overthrown by local resistors.18 Antilleans were responding to their patriotic sense of duty to protect France, and to terrible conditions in their home islands. They were suffering from extreme hunger after Britain had established blockades against Admiral Robert’s troops, which prevented food imports from reaching the French Caribbean. Despite these hardships, the Antillean community came together, showing remarkable ingenuity and resourcefulness. Kristen Stromberg Childers explains that Antilleans learned to become self-sufficient because they were unable to import raw materials from France. They made shoes out of old tyres, used alcohol for fuel, cooked with coconut oil, and made bread out of manioc.19 While for some, this period represented ‘a time of authenticity and self-reliance that has been lost in the subsequent years of assimilation to a “French” way of life’, 20 others viewed the Vichy period as a return to slavery because universal male suffrage was abolished in Martinique and Guadeloupe in October 1940, and Antilleans risked losing their rights as French citizens. In L’Exil selon Julia, Maréchal joins the Antillean soldiers in crossing the Dominica Passage to become part of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French 17 Éric T. Jennings, ‘La Dissidence aux Antilles (1940–1943)’, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, 68 (2000), 55–72 (p. 60). 18 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 2nd edn (London; New York: Verso, 2012 [2000]), p. 87. 19 Kristen Stromberg Childers, Seeking Imperialism’s Embrace: National Identity, Decolonization, and Assimilation in the French Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 44. 20 Childers, p. 44.

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Forces. This is the first time he has left Guadeloupe, and acts as the catalyst for his future successful military career. It is interesting that Pineau does not describe Maréchal’s journey in great detail; indeed, the term ‘dissident’ only actually appears three times in the narrative. Pineau seems less concerned with the practicalities of his dangerous journey and more eager to reflect upon its long-lasting psychological impacts for her father and the rest of the family. In making this dangerous crossing, Maréchal is positioned as a brave hero who risks his life to save metropolitan France from Nazi rule. However, in a typically elliptical statement, the narrative explains that it was actually Julia, his mother, who persuaded him to join the dissidents, ‘pour pas qu’il lève la main sur son papa’ (p. 18). Maréchal’s heroic status is weakened by the suggestion that he joined the Resistance movement primarily to please his mother and avoid violent confrontation with his father, rendering the question of will and agency in his displacement ambiguous. Was Maréchal compelled to participate out of a sense of patriotic duty towards France, or did his mother persuade him to leave so that he no longer had to witness the domestic abuse to which Asdrubal subjected her? The reader is left wondering how much choice Maréchal himself had in his military action, and how much of the decision was made by his mother who, to mitigate family conflict, wanted him to return ‘dans la gloire du Seigneur’ (p. 18). The shifts in focus here—from the international events, to the national, and finally to the immediate family—reveal that exile is both a collective, shared experience within the Antillean community, and a very personal and individual decision, part of a complex network of family dynamics. Maréchal’s experiences as a dissident resonate more clearly with Averis’s concept of ‘forced choice’ than with notions of exile as either a voluntary or enforced action. Although ultimately the final decision to join the French Resistance and demonstrate that he is ‘jeune, brave, tellement pétri d’honneur’ (p. 23) lies with him, his choice is limited: his mother wants him to go to prove his dedication to the French nation and, as a young man, he is expected to choose to fight alongside his fellow Antillean compatriots. Nevertheless, his actions are a choice, as he is not targeted as an individual and banished from his home nor forced to leave by an authoritarian political regime or natural disaster. Maréchal is proud of the glory that his military engagements grant him, in addition to the personal relief that his departure presumably affords him. He is awarded numerous medals for his service, returning to Guadeloupe at the end of the war as a war hero. Yet through the narrator’s poignant

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lament, it is clear that these soldiers who risked their lives for France have received scant official recognition for their heroic actions and ‘n’ont connu qu’avec parcimonie le levain de la gloire’ (p. 14). Pineau’s text makes an important political statement because when L’Exil selon Julia was published in 1996, the struggles and hardships endured by Antillean soldiers during the two world wars had not been officially recognized by the French government. Until the 1980s, there was no mention of the French Caribbean contribution to the French Resistance in the French school curriculum, and few historical accounts of the period discuss the dissidents’ actions in any detail. In recent years, writers and film directors have engaged in cultural activism to raise public awareness about the sacrifices of the Antillean dissidents, filling the commemorative gap left by the French state who are yet to create an official memorial in either metropolitan France or the French Caribbean. In 2010, a small stele was erected in Les Trois-Îlets in Martinique, and a small plaque in memory of the dissidents was inaugurated in the courtyard of Les Invalides in Paris on 2 June 2014. As Nina Wardleworth observes, however, these monuments are located in peripheral spaces, thus erasing their commemorative potential. 21 Pineau follows in the footsteps of prolific Caribbean writers Raphaël Confiant and Daniel Maximin who have written about this crucial historic moment, 22 but while they have featured young, male characters who demonstrate great loyalty to the French nation by risking their lives to save France from defeat, Pineau has chosen to focus on the sacrifices women made during the Vichy era—women who fought alongside men, and women who remained on the islands to raise their families. Documentary filmmakers have also been active in fighting to recognize the achievements of the dissidents. In 2006, leading Martinican film director Euzhan Palcy brought their heroism into the public sphere with her documentary Parcours de dissidents, which was voiced by world-famous French actor Gérard Depardieu and screened at the Elysée Palace in June 2014 as 21 Nina Wardleworth, ‘The Documentary as a Site of Commemoration: Filming the Free French Dissidents from the French Antilles’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 25.2 (2018), 374–91 (p. 385). 22 Raphaël Confiant, Le Nègre et l’Amiral: roman (Paris: Grasset, 1988); La Dissidence (Paris: Écriture, 2002); Daniel Maximin, ‘Dissidences’, in The Caribbean Writer as Warrior of the Imaginary/L’Écrivain caribéen, Guerrier de l’imaginaire, ed. by Kathleen Gyssels and Bénédicte Ledent (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi), 3–18.

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part of an official commemoration. 23 Her struggle on behalf of their cause finally came to fruition in 2009 when Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president at the time, paid homage to the dissidents for the first time during an official visit to Martinique and Guadeloupe, granting the Légion d’honneur to 36 former dissidents. Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia, then, paved the way for greater recognition of Antillean soldiers and their role in France’s victory during the Second World War, although, remarkably, this aspect of her text has gone uncommented on by critics. African Adventures and French Flight After fighting for France’s liberation during the Second World War, Maréchal becomes a professional soldier in the French army. He is stationed in Senegal before meeting his wife Daisy back in their native Guadeloupe, and the couple are later posted to Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Chad, and Madagascar. A year before migrating to the metropole in 1961, the family live in an unnamed country in sub-Saharan Africa where Maréchal is stationed, after which they return to Guadeloupe for four months ‘de congé de fin de campagne’ (p. 31). During their time in Africa, Maréchal and Daisy remain within the confinements of the French military barracks and intentionally isolate themselves from the local people. They frighten their children with exotic accounts of African savagery, telling them stories about ‘tel lion qui massacra un village. Tel tigre qui dévora une famille jusqu’aux dents’ (p. 19). The narrator, who was only five at the time and cannot even remember in which country they were stationed, believes these ferocious stories. However, these mysterious tales are undoubtedly a figment of her parents’ imagination (or her incorrect recollections of her parents’ stories): tigers are not found in Africa, and while other animals such as lions, snakes, and elephants do inhabit African savannahs and grasslands, they are unlikely to be found around the army barracks where the family lived. The narrator’s parents thus exoticize Africa and play on French stereotypes of the continent as a wild and savage place that needs to be ‘tamed’ by civilized Western peoples. Her parents act in a similar manner to the French colonizers who deplored the brutality of the indigenous peoples and sought to 23 Parcours de dissidents, dir. by Euzhan Palcy (France 5/JMJ Productions, 2006).

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spread France’s cultural values and linguistic traditions to enlighten Africans through the mission civilisatrice. In the afterword to the English translation of the text, published in 2003, Marie-Agnès Sourieau remarks that Maréchal’s situation ‘exemplifies another irony of history’, because as France’s military representative in Africa (the continent of his ancestors), he willingly propagates the same civilizing mission that undermined the cultural identity of the land of his origins. 24 This pivotal example illustrates the cultural and political chasm between French Caribbean and French African subjects; the French colonial project was so longstanding in Guadeloupe that there, the mission civilisatrice was far more deeply embedded, as Fanon argues in Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). For Fanon, Antilleans are alienated from their traditional Caribbean community and from the very fact of their blackness because the colonial education system forces them to eradicate any other aspects of their identity: ‘le Noir n’a pas de résistance ontologique aux yeux du Blanc’. 25 The black man only becomes aware of his blackness, and how he has been historically constructed as black, when confronted with the white gaze. The narrator’s parents exhibit this typical black Antillean obsession with white metropolitan language and culture and suffer a self-imposed, colonizing exile. The narrator adopts a different attitude, however. As she looks back on her early childhood, she realizes in hindsight that she did feel she was missing something, and that she had very much wanted to participate in the local way of life as a young girl. Her memories of being fascinated with ‘des femmes en boubous’ and ‘des chasseurs d’ivoire’ (p. 19) suggest that she is in part complicit in her parents’ exoticization of African life, although they also reflect the fact that she was only a young child. Unlike her parents, however, she does not aspire to eradicate her blackness. Indeed, she is disappointed to learn from her mother that the colour of her skin did not create an inherent affinity with Africans because, as a ten-year-old child at the time of narration, she is beginning to embrace her black identity. She admits that ‘manman disait que l’Afrique nous avait pourtant toujours tenus à distance, comme si la couleur de la peau seule ne faisait pas la famille…’ (p. 20). Although Sourieau reads the narrator’s time in Africa as a positive experience because here ‘she has 24 Marie-Agnès Sourieau, ‘Afterword’, in Exile According to Julia, by Gisèle Pineau, trans. by Betty Wilson (Charlottesville, VA; London: University of Virginia Press, 2003 [1996]), pp. 171–87 (p. 183). 25 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), p. 89.

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learned that the colour of the skin does not define one’s identity’, 26 a fact that will be crucial to her survival in France, for the narrator this displacement, caused by her father’s military participation, is above all a painful manifestation of psychological exile, and a specifically Antillean kind of alienation. Even though the narrator shares a racial and historical heritage with Africa, she comes to recognize her difference due to her family’s social conditioning. This episode places Pineau’s narrator at odds with négritude, which privileges a shared black African identity for all people with black ancestry, because her narrative emphasizes that a shared racial identity does not equate to a shared culture. It might suggest the narrator (like Pineau herself) is more in line with créolité, which argues for the distinctiveness of a black Caribbean culture, although the author does not fully embrace this label, as I argued in Chapter One. In 1961, following their adventures in Africa, the family migrate to the metropole, first to rural Aubigné-Racan, and then to the densely populated Parisian suburb of Le Kremlin-Bicêtre. In keeping with the enigmatic tone of the text, no explicit reason is given for the family’s migration. A careful reading establishes that they arrive in France primarily because of Maréchal’s military activities, a move echoed by many other Antillean migrants in the late 1950s and early 1960s who take residence in France after a period of compulsory national service in the military. Maréchal is given a much-coveted post in Paris, after being awarded medals for his heroism, and is even ‘félicité par le Général en personne’ in recognition of his military service (pp. 32–33). It is likely, however, that the ambiguity created here is intentional, since it allows more open interpretations as to why the family moved to France, which increases the number of readers who can identify with the themes of the text. Their displacement in late 1961 anticipates the formal creation of the BUMIDOM scheme just over one year later, on 26 April 1963. This migration scheme, established following the success of military emigration, encouraged workers from the Antilles and Réunion to migrate to mainland France as a solution to the islands’ increasingly problematic demographic issues, caused by growing unemployment and rising birth rates. It was replaced in 1982 by the Agence Nationale pour l’insertion et la promotion des Travailleurs d’outre-mer (ANT), which favoured family reunification and integration projects over the recruitment of new workers, causing the number of Antillean migrants to fall. In 1961, however, few black people from the French Caribbean 26 Sourieau, p. 184.

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lived in Paris, causing the Pineau family to be an object of fascination and disgust simultaneously; children at school are fascinated by the narrator’s appearance, touching her braids and expressing amazement at ‘la face claire’ of her hands (p. 80), while also insulting her. Yet in 1963, France instigated mass migration from the Caribbean, and the majority of Antilleans settled in Paris. As Stephanie Condon and Philip Ogden note, these early arrivals were predominantly male workers who left their families behind in the Antilles, before the scheme was extended in order to recruit women and encourage family reunification. 27 The Pineau family’s migration could thus be read as a blueprint for this scheme, as military emigration ushered in the new era of the BUMIDOM; after witnessing the successful insertion of Antillean soldiers in the French armed forces, the government decided to extend the policy to Antillean workers. While Maréchal’s military activities are a source of unease and estrangement for his family, Maréchal, in contrast, appears grateful for the opportunities that migration has given him and is particularly indebted to the metropole and the mission civilisatrice, reinforcing his complicity in France’s colonial project. He feels honoured to be able to prove his Frenchness by fighting alongside metropolitan French soldiers and to contribute to military operations throughout the French territory overseas. In a switch of narrative voice, which, unusually, incorporates a masculine perspective, he comments that ‘lui, Maréchal, a voyagé. Il a vu comment vivent les gens’ in mainland France (p. 32), suggesting that he desires to emulate this behaviour because he believes the rhetoric that the metropolitan French are superior to Antilleans. As Brinda Mehta points out, though, France does not give him much back in return: his ‘national service is ironically rewarded by obscurity in the immigrant Parisian ghetto’, suggesting that France does not value its French Caribbean citizens as much as the country’s colonial rhetoric had proclaimed. 28 In Paris, Maréchal begins to feel that France has failed him. In one of the letters sent to Julia, who has already returned to Guadeloupe, the narrator writes that ‘Papa n’est plus le même non plus. Une partie de lui a perdu foi en l’armée, en la France, en la vie, en l’honneur’ (p. 163); he 27 Stephanie A. Condon and Philip E. Ogden, ‘Emigration from the French Caribbean: The Origins of an Organized Migration’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 15.4 (1991), 505–23 (p. 515). 28 Brinda Mehta, Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 102.

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is dismayed that the French values and ideals he fought for during the war are not extended to him as a black citizen. In fact, Maréchal finally decides that the family will move back to the Antilles in 1970 in a protest against de Gaulle’s resignation from power following the referendum of April 1969, when the French rejected his proposed constitutional reforms following the events of May 1968. De Gaulle was Maréchal’s hero; he admired him profoundly as ‘le Sauveur de la France’ (p. 162), the charismatic leader who rallied France in support of the Resistance and brought the country to victory in the Second World War. He even made his children distribute fliers to support de Gaulle in the referendum campaign. Maréchal’s disappointment at de Gaulle’s humiliating defeat was therefore felt on a very personal level. Even when the family return to the Antilles, their exile does not come to an end: once again, they remain enclosed within military barracks and are not free to choose where to live. Before transferring to Guadeloupe in 1973, the family are initially stationed in Fort Desaix in Martinique, formerly a fort built to safeguard against British attack in the eighteenth century, and now a military base where the headquarters of the French armed forces of the Antilles are located. The narrator is disappointed that Fort Desaix turns out to be a military base that does not live up to her romantic expectations, as she had imagined a fort to be a military stronghold like the ones she had seen in exciting cowboy films. The chaotic activity of the military base gives her the impression ‘d’être en guerre. En perpétuel état de siège’ (p. 175). On her return, the Caribbean, once a place of desire and longing, initially becomes an inhospitable, militarized space of confinement and imprisonment. Military service, then, both during and following the two world wars, acts as a channel for emigration from the French Antilles to metropolitan France in L’Exil selon Julia, providing new, prestigious opportunities but further complicating ideas of belonging and identity. It is even more challenging for the female family members to negotiate their own identity in mainland France, as the following section demonstrates. While Julia and Daisy seek to improve their own socio-economic situation by following their son and husband respectively on their military exploits, they are held back by their gender, and the lack of educational and professional opportunities that this entails, and thus their subaltern status becomes accentuated.

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Military Wives Daisy’s experiences of accompanying Maréchal on his military postings make her a ‘military wife’, a position that did not grant her any official recognition or status, even though her life was entirely shaped by the army. Many soldiers who fought for the French army during the twentieth century brought their spouses and families with them for company. It was often a difficult decision to take, as Betty Sowers Alt and Bonnie Domrose Stone explain: ‘those who stayed behind suffered the loneliness of separation; those who followed suffered the hardships (and had the adventure) of travel, camp living, and separation when husbands went into the field’.29 Becoming a ‘military wife’ thus meant a challenging life, with a heightened risk of adversity and psychological distress. Initially, however, Daisy is not aware of her condition as one of exile, as she represents the archetypal soldier’s wife who is proud of her husband’s achievements. Despite being attached to her native land, she had always wanted to leave rural Guadeloupe, even before meeting Maréchal. In a section of the narrative that articulates Daisy’s hopes and dreams prior to her marriage, the narrator notes how her mother, as a young woman, was eager for a life of adventure, excitement, and travel, and thus longed for European landscapes: ‘il lui faut des horizons d’hivers, des hirondelles pour ouvrir les printemps, des aubes rousses d’automne, des étés à Paris’ (p. 26). Here, the narrative passes ironic comment on the manner in which Daisy has become estranged from the Caribbean by her French education under the mission civilisatrice, as she yearns to visit the Europe she had learned about as a child in the French education system. Analysing Daisy’s plight through Julia Kristeva’s theory of women’s exile is insightful: Daisy’s exile is symptomatic of the fact that she remains enclosed by patriarchal structures, even within the mobility her status affords her. She only moves as a direct consequence of her marriage and her husband’s career. Kristeva argues that women are always inherently condemned to a life of marginalization and subalternity, regardless of their social position and financial status, because of their gender; they always feel ‘en exil dans ces généralités qui font la commune mesure du consensus social, en même temps que par rapport au pouvoir de généralisation du langage’ [original emphasis]. 30 29 Betty Sowers Alt and Bonnie Domrose Stone, Campfollowing: A History of the Military Wife (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991), pp. 3–4. 30 Kristeva, p. 5.

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Daisy is not officially registered as a participant in the BUMIDOM project; however, her reflections on migration offer striking parallels with the experiences of the thousands of Antilleans who were encouraged to migrate to the metropole between 1963 and 1982, a little later than the Pineau family. The state rhetoric was one of social promotion for unemployed Antilleans, and particularly for women, but promises to provide them with training and professional careers almost never came to fruition. Pineau has discussed this gendered aspect of post-war Caribbean migration in her testimonial narrative Femmes des Antilles: traces et voix: cent cinquante ans après l’abolition de l’esclavage (1998), co-authored with journalist Marie Abraham. In this text, Martinican woman Julétane has a bleak view of prospects in the Caribbean; she therefore subscribes to state rhetoric and expresses her gratitude to the BUMIDOM that ‘en a sauvé plus d’une, qui auraient mal tourné si elles étaient restées au pays, assises dans la case de leur manman, à attendre quoi? de trouver un homme et de tomber enceinte’. 31 Like Julétane, Daisy is proud to live and work alongside metropolitan citizens. Mediated through the narrator, Daisy tells her children that they should consider themselves lucky to live in France, which is, for Daisy, the country of respect, freedom, and possibilities: ‘enfants! Rien, il n’y a rien de bon pour vous au Pays […] Profitez de la France! Profitez de votre chance de grandir ici-là!’ (p. 28). Mary Gallagher explains the origins of the contradictory Creolism ‘ici-là’, noting that the term is formed by adding the French adverb ‘là’ as a suffix to the deictic adverb ‘ici’ and can be translated into English in a variety of ways: ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’, or ‘here–there’. 32 While Gallagher acknowledges the spatial instability at work in the phrase and the distancing it provokes between the local and the distant, she also recognizes the positive potential of the term, since it emphasizes the ‘connection and simultaneity’ between ‘here’ and ‘there’. 33 Pineau’s use of ‘ici-là’ at this instant in L’Exil selon Julia, however, reinforces the distance between France and the Antilles. Here, the term solely refers to the metropole rather than to a constant 31 Gisèle Pineau and Marie Abraham, Femmes des Antilles: traces et voix: cent cinquante ans après l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris: Stock, 1998), p. 112. 32 Mary Gallagher, ‘Introduction: Between “Here” and “There” or the “Hyphen of Unfinished Things”’, in Ici-là: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French, ed. by Mary Gallagher (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2003), pp. xiii– xxix (p. xiii). 33 Gallagher, p. xiv.

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back and forth between the overseas department, and Daisy sees huge discrepancies in the prospects offered by Guadeloupe, or ‘le Pays’, and France. Daisy’s migration to France elevates her social status, although in contradistinction, her mobility was not independently undertaken. Her position as the wife of a soldier in the French army enables her to fulfil her dreams of becoming one of the ‘grandes femmes libres’ in France (p. 14), a phrase that implies that life in France offers her more economic opportunities than she would have enjoyed in Guadeloupe during the 1960s. She is now able to earn a living, and she even owns her own car, a status symbol that gives her greater geographic mobility and demonstrates her heightened social position. It is never clear exactly what work Daisy undertakes, but the narrator comments in one of her letters to her grandmother (after Julia has returned to Guadeloupe) that her mother’s demanding work schedule does not allow her to cook traditional Antillean cuisine. Instead, she reveals, they rely on ‘des sachets de purée Mousseline et des raviolis’ (p. 154). Daisy’s increased economic independence is offset by her daughter’s perceptive realization that employment in the metropole results in distancing them from Guadeloupean customs and traditions; moreover, it is inferred that Daisy, by becoming a career woman, has less time for her family. There is no implication in this section of the narrative that because Daisy is now working too, Maréchal should share the domestic parental duties. L’Exil selon Julia thus intersects with wider contemporary gender debates about masculine and feminine roles within the family unit. Pineau’s concern for gender issues is similarly evoked through Daisy’s release from her ‘joug paternel’ (p. 14). Her migration to the metropole with Maréchal grants her the freedom to live her own life, away from the constraints of her oppressive family. She is no longer forced to conform to her father’s expectations and is able to travel, but only because of her husband’s military activities. In fact, she passes from one patriarchal structure to another by becoming a military wife. Travel, then, does not grant her the freedom and independence she anticipated because she does not discover new places in her own right, only through Maréchal. Her own experiences are always defined by her role as a wife, rather than self-determined. It is only with hindsight that Daisy realizes that her marriage—and her subsequent life of displacement—has been unfulfilling, and this realization shapes the opening pages of the text. She does appreciate that she and her female friends chose this life of exile themselves, since

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it was their decision to marry servicemen and follow the soldiers on their military activities. However, she is disappointed that the dreams of emancipation and freedom that they thought their military husbands and French adventures would grant them have not been translated into reality. Daisy’s alienation is apparent when she reflects on her colonial adventures while cooking and washing up for the soldiers with the other army wives in Paris, and this episode takes place in the traditionally female space of the kitchen. Here, she remains confined to a typically domestic role, reinforcing the argument that migrating to France has done nothing to eradicate deeply entrenched gender norms. Ironically, now Daisy yearns for her simple life in Guadeloupe before marriage, when the only thoughts that troubled her were the love stories she enjoyed reading, a time before she naively agreed to ‘l’exil, qui semblait aussi simple que changer de casaque’, as ventriloquized by the narrator (p. 14). This telling remark demonstrates that Daisy herself now considers her migration as a conventional understanding of ‘exile’, as a forced departure, as she relates her migration with unmistakable disappointment and ambivalence. In this episode, Daisy acknowledges her subaltern position: her presence in the metropole is entirely dependent upon her husband’s role in the French military. Her exile is particularly acute because she is not only confronted with the hostility of the metropolitan French community, but she must also come to terms with the fact that the course of her life is entirely controlled by her husband. Julia’s exile to the metropole in 1961 also arises indirectly from war. She does not fit the category of ‘military wife’ who follows her husband’s military deployments, although she is also literally a military wife who had to endure solitude when Asdrubal fought in the trenches in France during the First World War, following their marriage. Her migration to France is wholly planned and orchestrated by a male family member, and so she too is placed in a subordinate position, whose lack of agency is a direct result of being ‘prise par les frontières’ of her gender, in Kristeva’s terms. 34 Her son Maréchal plots a ‘calcul d’enlèvement’ (p. 32) to take her to live in France, so that she escapes the abuse she suffers at the hands of Asdrubal. On her way home from church one day, she is indeed kidnapped when, in a disturbing scene, Maréchal bundles Julia into his car without any explanation. Julia does not understand what is happening but simply gets in the car ‘sans se défier’ (p. 35). Ironically, 34 Kristeva, p. 5.

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she feels proud to travel in a car that was, at the time, a symbol of real social and financial privilege. As María Cristina Rodríguez comments, ‘others decide what is best’ for Julia. 35 Even though Maréchal believes he is acting with the best of intentions by protecting her from Asdrubal, telling the children that ‘c’est ça ou la mort au Pays’ (p. 18), he too eradicates Julia’s agency by removing her from Guadeloupe against her will. Sam Haigh argues that here, Pineau engages with the legacies of Antillean history because Julia’s imposed exile ‘has strong parallels with the way slaves were captured in Africa and transported, by ship, to the Caribbean’. 36 Although comparisons can be made between Julia and her slave ancestors—like them, she is forced to migrate by ship against her will, and dreams of returning to her land of origin—Julia is not financially exploited nor is she treated as chattel in metropolitan France, and such comparisons must be approached with caution. Haigh’s claim could be seen to trivialize the plight of transatlantic slaves by drawing comparisons between their oppression and that of Julia, two very different situations. Julia is not a slave, then, but nonetheless has no choice in her captivity and waits patiently to return home to Asdrubal. She is hidden away in a little house at Îlet Pérou, a village in the south east of Basse-Terre Island, until, two days later, she receives her first carte d’identité that will enable her to travel by boat from Guadeloupe to France. She is illiterate and so signs her name with a cross. This episode, which implies her lack of agency in her displacement, becomes engraved in Julia’s mind. She did not understand why she had to write a cross: ‘personne ne lui a dit le sens de cette croix-là, un peu bancale, posée au bas d’écritures muettes’ (p. 93). It is this aspect of her removal, which underscores her marginalization and helplessness, which provides some echo with the plight of her slave ancestors under colonialism, and a social commentary on the enduring postcolonial failure of France to empower its more vulnerable French Caribbean citizens. While Julia’s identity card confirms her French nationality, it does not guarantee her equality, nor does it provide her with opportunities to improve her standard of living. Rather, 35 María Cristina Rodríguez, What Women Lose: Exile and the Construction of Imaginary Homelands in Novels by Caribbean Writers (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 42. 36 Sam Haigh, ‘Migration and Melancholia: From Kristeva’s “Dépression nationale” to Pineau’s “Maladie de l’Exil”’, French Studies, 60.2 (2006), 232–50 (p. 245).

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her struggles and anxieties at leaving behind her Creole culture are aggravated by the second-class citizenship that she discovers in France. This is despite her confirmed legal status—symbolized by the rapid acquisition of her carte d’identité—as a French citizen. Although she is not technically an immigrant in Paris, then, having remained in France despite a transatlantic voyage, she is an exile. Indeed, the experiences of French Caribbeans in metropolitan France are almost always described as experiences of immigration. Julia is doubly exiled against her will, from both Guadeloupean and metropolitan culture and society. In Paris, she becomes depressed and withdrawn because she does not feel as though she belongs there, and at times she is unable to leave her bed. She misses her simple life back in Guadeloupe, particularly her Creole garden, which is crucial to the preservation of her identity. She even misses Asdrubal, despite his violent rages. Exile fails to rescue Julia from a life of violence and subordination. As the narrator comments, Julia ‘n’est pas délivrée’ by her exile (p. 38), as her family had anticipated; rather, her suffering is transformed, as she continues to feel imprisoned in metropolitan France, conveyed by the narrator’s comment that Julia ‘débarque tout juste en terre d’exil et cinq encablures de chaînes viennent d’être ajoutées à son existence’ (p. 38). Here, Pineau provides a deliberate echo with Guadeloupe’s haunting past of slavery through the imagery of incarceration and enchainment. Her homesickness for Guadeloupe is aggravated by the racist attitudes of the metropolitan French who look down on her because of her cultural and racial alterity. Julia’s cultural difference ‘mak[es] for several moments of poignant tragi-comedy which arise because she continues to behave in the same way as in Guadeloupe’, as Hardwick observes.37 One example of Julia’s misunderstanding of metropolitan French social codes occurs when she wears Maréchal’s military jacket and képi helmet to collect the children from school in the rain. This incident again reinforces the ostracizing effects of the military and further intermeshes the military and exile, albeit in an unexpected manner. The fact that Maréchal brought his old military uniform with him to Paris is a likely indication of his pride in his own military achievements. For Julia, wearing Maréchal’s large military jacket is a practical way to keep herself and the children dry. However, for this she is scorned and chastised by the French, who regard her as a threat to their community and a danger to their country. As Dawn Fulton has 37 Hardwick, p. 147.

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remarked, it is as though the former colonies are seeking revenge on France and ‘now infringing upon the internal terrain of the hexagon’ in a reversal of the colonization process. 38 This seemingly innocuous, eccentric moment rapidly escalates when Julia is then almost arrested for wearing military uniform. Civilians not enlisted in the French army can be punished by imprisonment of between six months and two years for wearing a uniform that falsely grants them military powers, as stipulated in article 259 of France’s Code pénal de 1810. 39 Julia is taken to the police station where she is humiliated and embarrassed, but once more she does not understand what is happening because she cannot speak or understand French. She is also completely ignorant of more obscure metropolitan French laws. Again, the social framework is completely alien to her: she presumes God is punishing her for leaving Asdrubal and imagines that he must have written to the French government to find her. While Rachelle Okawa reads this scene as one of subversion, arguing that ‘these small acts of resistance aid Man Ya in both destabilizing the force of the French policemen and exerting control over her own self and body in exile’,40 this reading grants Julia more agency than the narrative really allows. Julia is quite unaware that she is being rebellious, and she is depicted as confused and disorientated, which undermines the potential for resistance in this episode. Rather, the incident underscores Julia’s lack of understanding, power, and control over how she is treated by the metropolitan French, and their authorities. This key scene demonstrates how even when Julia is living in mainland France, a supposedly safer and more welcoming location for her, she is still physically and psychologically excluded from metropolitan society. A number of overlapping, rigid patriarchal hierarchies, from the military, to marriage, to the police, are the structures that engender and perpetuate her experiences of isolation and exclusion. Julia’s exile also manifests itself through language. In metropolitan France, Julia becomes trapped within the Creole language, and 38 Dawn Fulton, ‘The Disengaged Immigrant: Mapping the Francophone Caribbean Metropolis’, French Forum, 32.1/2 (2007), 245–62 (p. 255). 39 See ‘Code pénal de 1810’, [accessed 14 February 2020]. 40 Rachelle Okawa, ‘Humour in Exile: The Subversive Effects of Laughter in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49.1 (2013), 16–27 (p. 25).

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this clash between French and Creole echoes the inherent tensions between the metropolitan French and the Antillean communities. She struggles to become accustomed to France primarily because she does not speak nor understand French and therefore cannot communicate with those around her, not even with her own family. Her grandchildren speak French rather than Creole, her native language. Julia describes French as ‘RRRR dans leur bouche’ (p. 65), demonstrating her bewilderment towards the French language that she considers unnatural and exaggerated, since the ‘r’ phoneme is dropped in French Creole. Julia is hindered even further by the intersection of language and gender. It is revealed that she never received an education in Guadeloupe, her mother being too poor to send all her children to school. Julia, as one of her oldest children, had to ‘rester à veiller les cadets’ while her mother returned to work in the sugar fields (p. 94). This episode reinforces gender stereotypes— women are expected to stay at home and look after children, thus reducing their life opportunities, while men are allowed to pursue an education. Julia’s grandchildren try to teach her to write her name. They become frustrated with her lack of progress, and, in turn, she is embarrassed to be ‘à l’école de ses petits-enfants’ (p. 93) because she feels it should be her duty to impart knowledge to them, rather than the reverse. The lessons soon stop, leaving Julia to become even more isolated. In her work on the translation of pain in immigrant literature, Madeleine Hron argues that parallels can be drawn between the act of migration and the process of translation because both require the crossing of linguistic and cultural borders. Just as texts have to be reinterpreted and adapted for a different audience during translation, exiled people ‘must also translate themselves, changing, adapting, and recreating themselves in continua of transformation’ in order to integrate into their new society.41 Hron recognizes that this process is often difficult, but it is crucial for the exiled subject who must learn to negotiate new values, customs, and traditions, as well as a new linguistic code. Yet Julia is unable to translate herself, linguistically or culturally, which explains why she feels so isolated. Learning a new linguistic system is impossible for Julia; she is incapable of translating between French and Creole. She cannot replace her Guadeloupean customs and mannerisms with those of metropolitan France. In turn, however, this raises the question of 41 Hron, p. 40.

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whether it is fair or reasonable to expect all immigrants to shed their old identities, and become dynamic, adapting beings. Julia does begin to overcome her exilic condition in France, however, as demonstrated when she finds her way, unaided, to Sacré-Cœur, a location she had been keen to visit since arriving in France because she is a devout Catholic. Although the journey is not without its problems—she gets lost, nobody helps her to find her way, and she is met with hostility because of her inability to speak French—she is proud and delighted when she reaches the basilica. Upon her return, the narrator notices that ‘une lueur étrange brillait dans les yeux de Julia’, and in a passage that appears to voice Julia’s internal monologue, the old lady declares to herself ‘j’ai cru, j’ai vaincu! Je suis parée pour les autres épreuves…’ (p. 92). Julia now seems more prepared for the trials and tribulations of her life in France, even if later she does fall back into depression because of her nostalgia for Guadeloupe. Moreover, in an unpublished extract from the text, Pineau charts Julia’s evolution through a conversation with her old neighbour Xénia when she has returned to Guadeloupe. Julia informs Asdrubal that she ‘ne prendrait plus ses manières animales, qu’elle avait vécu en France sans volée, ni coups de pieds’, while Asdrubal welcomes her back and swears that her absence has softened his violent temper.42 Although in the published text Julia cannot translate herself fully into the target society, here she does succeed in translating herself back to fit into the Antillean way of life, and she has gained in strength through this act of personal transformation. These glimpses of a more resilient, assertive Julia indicate that exile has, after all, been a process of learning, adaptation, and evolution for her. Exile has instilled a sense of agency in her and has equipped her with the confidence to cope with challenges in life. Racial Hostility as War Does Julia pass down this emerging ability to cope and adapt to her granddaughter, or is the narrator overwhelmed by the racial prejudice she faces in the metropole? Her exile, like that of her mother and 42 Gisèle Pineau, ‘Extrait inédit de L’Exil selon Julia (1996)’, February 1997, [accessed 14 February 2020].

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grandmother, occurs within patriarchal, military frameworks: she follows her family on her father’s military operations. She is very young when the family’s migration occurs—she is only four when they live in Africa, and five when they return to France—so she is clearly not old enough to have any input into the decision to live a life of displacement that centres on her father’s military career. Warfare of a different kind helps to explain her suffering; she is fighting her own war against the hostility of racism, and the classroom is the location of her battleground. As Lawrence Blum explains, ‘racism’ is a loaded term that can refer to sentiments of inferiority and/or antipathy towards the racial other. Inferiorizing racists may not necessarily hate their targets: they may display tolerance or kindness towards them that is ‘demeaning, because the other is not seen as an equal, or even as a full human being’.43 At school, Pineau’s narrator becomes the target of both inferiorizing and antipathetic racists. She is bullied by the other children and considered intellectually and linguistically inferior to them, in a manner reminiscent of France’s colonial project. The racism to which she is subjected brings about her psychological exile. As Natalie Edwards observes, ‘Pineau represents such incidents in a comical way’; nevertheless, ‘her overt denunciation of racist ideologies is clear, direct and confronting’.44 At school, the narrator is constantly teased by her classmates because of her different physical appearance. These taunts—‘négro/négresse à plateau/blanche-neige/bamboula/charbon/et compagnie’ (p. 11)— appear at the beginning of the novel and recur as a leitmotif throughout the text, reinforcing the narrator’s sentiments of being overwhelmed by such hostility. For Tina Harpin, the vocabulary Pineau employs to describe the young girl’s reactions to these verbal attacks ‘évoque une guerre sale, de traitresses embuscades, un harcèlement au quotidien’, thereby explicitly equating her experiences of racism with warfare.45 She is isolated at school; she remarks poignantly that only one or two of her classmates would walk alongside her ‘sans honte’ (p. 80), since most of 43 Lawrence Blum, ‘I’m Not a Racist, But…’: The Moral Quandary of Race (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 10. 44 Natalie Edwards, Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves (New York: Routledge, 2019), p. 99. 45 Tina Harpin, ‘Menteries sur la patrie, violence et exils: la guerre selon les narratrices de Gisèle Pineau dans “Paroles de terre en larmes” (1987) et L’Exil selon Julia (1996)’, Études littéraires africaines, 40 (2015), 91–109 (p. 102).

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the children do not even consider that she too is a human being whose thoughts and feelings have as much value as those of the white French children in the class. She is particularly hurt when she is told to go back home. Ironically, she wants more than anything to return ‘dans [s]on pays. Mais quel pays?’ (pp. 139–40). She does not know where home is: France, Africa, or Guadeloupe? For her classmates, the narrator’s black skin labels her as African, but she does not feel African and she can barely remember the time she spent there. She does not know Guadeloupe, the land of her parents, as she was only four when she last visited; furthermore, Guadeloupe’s DROM status means that her ‘pays’ is in fact France, despite the other children’s insistence that she is not French. Her race and ethnicity are cruelly used by her classmates to exclude and belittle her. She is also humiliated by her teachers, who ironically represent the French educational establishment that is expected to promote values of respect, tolerance, and equality. She is initially praised when she learns to read and write faster than her classmates, but this praise is tinged with racism: the teacher’s praise arises due to her surprise that a black girl should be able to write in French, presuming that French is not her mother tongue. She tells the other children that ‘la Noire a déjà fini sa copie! Alors, vous pouvez le faire aussi!’ (p. 60). Inferiorizing racism is thus at work here: the narrator is reduced to her skin colour and expected to have a lower intellectual capability than the rest of the class simply because she is black. When she is older, another teacher, Madame Baron, forces the narrator to hide under her desk for supposedly misbehaving. According to the narrator, however, she is really punishing her because ‘elle n’aime pas voir [s]a figure de négresse’ (p. 152). The narrator is ashamed; she feels like a dog trapped in a kennel and has to endure the sweaty odour of her teacher’s feet, while none of her classmates come to her defence. Celia Britton explores parallels between the Jewish and black situations in this incident, arguing that in certain texts of French Caribbean literature, L’Exil selon Julia being one example, comparisons can be drawn between the confinement and imprisonment of Antilleans living in French cités and the incarceration of Jews in concentration camps during the Second World War.46 Britton further develops the connections between war and exile and considers how confinement, imprisonment, and immobility can 46 Celia Britton, ‘Exile, Incarceration and the Homeland: Jewish References in French Caribbean Novels’, in Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas, ed. by Michelle

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be perceived as another, very different form of exile to the mobility of migration. However, it is important to note the fundamental differences between these two historical situations, despite some physical overlap (for instance, during the Second World War the Drancy internment camp was used as a detention camp before Jews and other minorities were deported to Nazi concentration camps; following the war, Drancy was converted into a cité). Yet the narrator herself explicitly associates these two conditions because immediately after telling her grandmother about the incident in one of her letters, she compares herself to Anne Frank because they both suffer a double exile, exiled from their home and host communities. They are both imprisoned against their will, both write their life stories, and both have to ‘vivre dans un pays qui [les] rejette’ (p. 153). In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), Michael Rothberg argues against the notion of collective memory, instead proposing that ‘we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, crossreferencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative’ [original emphasis].47 He posits that collective memories are not separate, discrete entities, but emerge in tandem with each other. For the narrator of L’Exil selon Julia, the collective memory of the Holocaust acts as a vehicle through which she is able to articulate her own suffering, albeit on a much less traumatic scale. Britton’s analysis of the episode in which the narrator is forced to hide under her teacher’s desk does not sufficiently explore the anxieties that such a comparison provokes. The narrator’s humiliation at being ordered to sit under the desk operates on a very different scale to the trauma and horrors that Anne Frank, and the Jewish population, were forced to endure; the suggestion of mass forced deportation evokes a parallel with transatlantic slavery, although this is not explored in detail by Pineau’s novel. As the narrator grows up, she becomes more aware of just how deeply entrenched racial prejudice is in French society. Through these undercurrents of racism that subtly pervade her favourite television programmes, she realizes that life in the metropole is not as utopian as she had been led to believe by her parents. Moreover, her initial pride and excitement at seeing black people become successful in the French media Keown, David Murphy, and James Proctor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 149–67 (p. 154). 47 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 3.

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meets with disappointment. This is symbolized by the fate of Sylvette Cabrisseau, the Martinican newsreader who became France’s first black female television presenter in 1969. The narrator is outraged when Cabrisseau is taken off television because of hostility from the French public, and she suffers alongside Cabrisseau in sympathy and solidarity: ‘à la pensée de cette cabale qu’on avait déchaînée contre ta seule couleur, l’eau nous montait aux yeux’ (p. 103). She is physically affected by Cabrisseau’s ill treatment: she cannot eat because she is so upset and begins to realize that the resentment she faces every day at school is mirrored on a larger scale across the country, demonstrating that racial prejudice continually threatens Antilleans’ integration in France. The innocent narrator is unaware of the more complex events that caused Cabrisseau to leave the channel in 1970: she was sacked following an explicit photo shoot for the fashion magazine Adam in November 1970, and although she had a short-lived career as a singer and an actress in the early 1970s, she quickly disappeared from the French cultural scene.48 This series of events reveal the potent and harmful mixture of racism, sexism, and exploitation that proved destructive for Cabrisseau’s career. Through such instances, the narrator appears to be engaged in her own battle, her own daily war. Conclusion L’Exil selon Julia facilitates a greater understanding of the complex role of war in exile and displacement, revealing the many indirect and often subtle consequences of warfare upon Antillean migration to metropolitan France during the twentieth century. Active military participation brings the Pineau family to the metropole; yet warfare also engenders the psychological exile of the soldiers and the women who accompany them because it forces them to engage with a new language and culture, isolating them when they struggle to adapt. It is poignant that the child narrator is conscious of how greatly war has impacted upon her life even at such a young age. Although she is only 13 at the time, she remarks in one of her letters to Julia that ‘si papa n’était pas entré en dissidence […], où serions-nous à l’heure qu’il est?’ (p. 161). She 48 ‘Sylvette Cabrisseau, speakerine en 1969’, Le Parisien, 5 February 2012, [accessed 23 April 2020].

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is aware of the causal relationship between war and displacement and realizes that her father’s involvement with the dissidence movement in the 1940s acted as the catalyst for his military career and her own exile, years later. Although exile to France is extremely distressing for several members of the Pineau family, it is also, to some extent, a socially advancing condition. In a nod to Antillean patterns of constant migration from one side of the Atlantic to the other, the text ends with the family’s return to Guadeloupe. Julia appears much more confident because of ‘l’épreuve de solitude’ she experienced in the metropole (p. 215); the young narrator, though, initially struggles to adapt to life in Guadeloupe because she is ‘d’ici sans en être vraiment’ (p. 210). However, the final scene of the text, in which the children enjoy learning about Creole plants, food, and medicine in their grandmother’s garden, suggests that they vehemently desire to make Guadeloupe their new home. The narrator admits that she did not cry when her grandmother died because Julia lives on through memories: ‘elle n’est jamais partie, jamais sortie de mon cœur. Elle peut aller et virer à n’importe quel moment dans mon esprit’ (p. 219). Julia’s death symbolizes that regardless of the country in which the narrator subsequently lives, her grandmother’s Caribbean identity continues to live on. Throughout her experiences of exile, by engaging with the Creole heritage that Julia has imparted, the narrator is ultimately able to become increasingly resilient to racial discrimination and forge her own Creole feminine identity.

chapter four

The Four Problems of Nina Bouraoui The Four Problems of Nina Bouraoui

‘Tous les matins je vérifie mon identité. J’ai quatre problèmes. Française? Algérienne? Fille? Garçon?’ (Garçon manqué, p. 163)

This evocative quotation from Garçon manqué, Nina Bouraoui’s best-known work to date, epitomizes the identity quest that traverses much of her introspective, self-reflexive literature. Whether in Algeria or France, questions of national and gendered identity continue to haunt the narrator Nina, whom I read as a fictional representation of Bouraoui; to these can be added the relatively interlocking questions of sexual and linguistic identity. The fact that Nina explicitly associates her identity with a series of ‘problèmes’ is indicative not only of how she feels troubled by her own multifaceted identity that does not correspond to social expectations, but also of her frustration at these expectations that dictate that identity must be placed within discrete categories. The adverbial time phrase of repetition, ‘tous les matins’, suggests that Nina’s identity is in a continuous state of flux because every day she struggles with questions of how to define herself. The fact that she perceives her complex, hybrid identity as problematic rather than emancipatory suggests that, paradoxically, she desires to fit into one of these neatly defined categories of identity that she endeavours to denounce. Moreover, through the order in which these four adjectives are expressed, it appears that Nina associates Frenchness with a female identity, and, conversely, that she considers Algeria to be synonymous with masculinity. She thus risks becoming complicit in perpetuating restrictive associations between nationality and gender.

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For Bouraoui’s literary heroine, then, identity is not fixed and static but fluid and mobile, and her constantly changing identity contributes to her increasing sentiments of living in exile. Bouraoui’s writing seems to resonate with Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity. For Bhabha, hybridity designates the mixing of Eastern and Western cultures and acts as a subversive tool with which (formerly) colonized peoples may challenge colonial forms of oppression. In Bouraoui’s narratives, national identity is formed in the space ‘in-between’ French and Algerian culture, just as gendered identity is shaped at the intersection between masculinity and femininity. However, Nina’s experiences of hybridity in Garçon manqué—and indeed, the experiences of the unnamed narrators in Le Jour du séisme and Mes mauvaises pensées—contest Bhabha’s model. Whereas Bhabha argues that hybridity is a positive model of empowerment that is predicated on inclusion, for Bouraoui’s protagonist, hybridity equates to exclusion. She does not feel both French and Algerian, both masculine and feminine, but rather, none of these four identitarian labels. She is always defined by what she is not, which engenders a sense of lack and malaise. Gendered, national, sexual, and linguistic hybridity thus provoke in Bouraoui’s literary heroine an extreme sense of exclusion and alienation, mirrored by the author’s personal preoccupation with these themes. This more metaphorical understanding of gender as exile appears frequently in North African Francophone literature by canonical writers including Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, Maïssa Bey, and Tahar Ben Jelloun, who have all used gender as a motif to explore alienation. Le Jour du séisme, Garçon manqué, and Mes mauvaises pensées are not typically examined together. Mes mauvaises pensées is usually read alongside Bouraoui’s later works because, in the same vein as the texts she published later in her career, it considers themes of identity and sexuality in more positive ways;1 Le Jour du séisme, in contrast, has not received the same degree of scholarly attention as the other two narratives. However, a close reading of Mes mauvaises pensées reveals that it provides reflection on episodes and characters depicted in these earlier works. By bringing these texts into dialogue, a more complete, complex understanding of Bouraoui’s exile and alienation emerges. Through this discussion, it becomes evident, as Kinga Olszewska remarks, that exile

1 See Sylvain Montalbano, ‘Nina Bouraoui, martyr(s) de l’écho: de la blessure à une nouvelle sexualité par l’affect’, Études littéraires, 46.2 (2015), 147–62.

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is ‘a much broader term than the one that defines geographical distance. It is a cross-cultural, cross-territorial and cross-linguistic experience.’2 Contextualizing Bouraoui Bouraoui does not currently define her situation as one of exile—she now lives in Paris out of choice—and yet exile forms the backdrop to her family history. As her narrative surrogate Nina explains in Garçon manqué, her ‘corps se compose de deux exils’ (p. 20): during her childhood, the author was displaced from what had become her home on two separate occasions. First, she left France for Algeria in 1967 when she was only two months old, when Algeria was undergoing unprecedented and violent transformation in the wake of the Algerian War of Independence. She then returned to France in 1980 aged 14 because the situation for mixed-race families had become untenable: those of mixed Franco-Algerian heritage living in Algeria were forced to bear the burden of France’s colonial legacy and were blamed by Algerians for the atrocities committed against them during the war. Nina also embodies the different exiles of her parents. Rachid, her father, left Algeria to study economics at university in Rennes during the Algerian War of Independence. While at first glance this privileged displacement to complete his studies lies far from the traditional meaning of the term ‘exile’, according to the narrator of Garçon manqué he perceived his time studying in France as a period of exile, since there he was forced to face ‘les colères des uns et des autres’ (p. 127), and he longed to return to his family in Algeria. While studying in Rennes, Rachid met Bouraoui’s French mother, Maryvonne. After marrying in 1960, the couple became the victims of racial abuse in France, as Franco-Algerian relations deteriorated during the last years of a bitterly fought war. Rachid suffered daily humiliations and racist taunts, such as ‘melon, bicot, bougnoule’ (p. 127), pejorative terms used by the French to designate the North African population living in France. 3 Maryvonne was also frequently insulted for falling in love with an Algerian. Yet 2 Kinga Olszewska, Wanderers across Language: Exile in Irish and Polish Literature of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), p. 1. 3 Claude Liauzu explains in ‘Mots et migrants méditerranéens’, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 54.1 (1997), 1–14, that the origins of this vocabulary lie in the French conquest of North Africa (p. 12).

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there appears to be no hospitable place for this mixed-race couple at that historical moment. The couple’s decision to move to Algeria in 1968 is figured in Garçon manqué as not only a cultural exile but also a visible, physical difference, particularly for Maryvonne who, with her pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, immediately stood out as being physically different to Algerians and thus represented ‘un défi’ to Algerian national identity (p. 12). The couple’s exile was a specific reaction to political events after Algeria had gained independence from France in 1962. Most significantly, three years after the final Évian agreement was signed on 18 March 1962, Algerians living in France and the French living in Algeria had their dual nationality status withdrawn. Both groups were therefore forced to renounce either their French or Algerian citizenship. If they had not given up their Algerian nationality in France, the family would have suddenly found their political status altered to that of ‘des clandestins. Des étrangers. Sans travail. Sans argent’ (p. 133). Unwilling to reject his Algerian identity, her father renounced his French identity and was forced to return to Algeria to find work, and his family soon followed. While exile shapes the family’s past, at a national level it also determines Algeria’s collective contemporary history. As Helen Vassallo explains, Bouraoui’s texts reveal a ‘meshing of the family history and a political one’ as her own story coincides with the broader national narrative of war and exile.4 The triumvirate of texts studied here voice the complexity of exile within the specific context of Algeria’s two recent conflicts, fought from 1954 to 1962 and from 1992 to 2002. Marjorie Attignol Salvodon argues that the struggles are recognized as ‘the two most important historical references in the Algerian collective imaginary’, 5 while, on the contrary, Natalya Vince denounces what she considers as excessive attention to these two conflicts in Algerian cultural production that ‘contribut[es] to the caricature of Algeria as locked in an eternal, pathological cycle of violence’.6 Bouraoui’s sustained emphasis 4 Helen Vassallo, The Body Besieged: The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar (Lanham, MD; Plymouth: Lexington, 2012), p. 39. 5 Marjorie Attignol Salvodon, Fictions of Childhood: The Roots of Identity in Contemporary French Narratives (Lanham, MD; Plymouth: Lexington, 2008), p. 40. 6 Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 6.

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on both conflicts throughout the three texts suggests that she supports Salvodon’s assertion, although her corpus undoubtedly also works to create the more nuanced and original depiction of both Algeria and identity for which Vince calls. The Algerian War of Independence commenced on 1 November 1954 and represented ‘the beginning of the end of the long association with France that had lasted 130 years’, an association that had begun in 1830.7 Small attacks on French military installations within Algeria rapidly escalated into a national struggle to gain independence from the colonial regime. Nationalist parties and movements united to create the Front de libération nationale, which engaged in guerrilla warfare against the French. The French retaliated with tactics of extreme violence and torture. After several years of negotiations between the two countries, and following referendums in France and Algeria, independence was proclaimed on 3 July 1962, with the official celebration on 5 July. Both during the hostilities and in the aftermath, exile was commonplace. Approximately one million Pieds-Noirs were forced to leave Algeria for France in 1962, 8 because they were no longer welcome in an independent Algeria. Harki soldiers and members of the far-right group the Organisation armée secrète were also forced to return to France. Meanwhile, Algerians working in France, such as Bouraoui’s father, lost the right to live in France and so were driven back to Algeria. In total, the conflict ‘resulted in a half million deaths, a million exiles, and a million and a half displaced persons’, demonstrating the terrible and far-reaching consequences of this intense war of decolonization.9 Thirty years later, exile and mass displacement were also defining features of Algeria’s civil war. This period, which began in February 1992 and lasted for a decade, is known in Algeria as ‘la décennie noire’, a term that, as Martin Stone explains, emphasizes the atrocities committed on both sides and points towards the social unrest, poverty, and political corruption that brought about the conflict as Algeria unsuccessfully tried 7 Abdelkader Aoudjit, The Algerian Novel and Colonial Discourse: Witnessing to a Différend (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 163. 8 Jo McCormack, ‘Memory and Exile: Contemporary France and the Algerian War (1954–1962)’, in Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities, ed. by Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 117–38 (p. 117). 9 Edward R. Kantowicz, Coming Apart, Coming Together (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000), p. 219.

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to develop as an independent nation.10 The Front islamique du salut (FIS), a political coalition of Islamist groups, won 47 per cent of the votes in the legislative elections in December 1991, but rather than being invited to form a government, the incumbent government took the decision to annul the election results. This led to armed Islamist insurgency against the military-backed regime. The army quickly reacted to try to repress the Islamists, outlawing the FIS and cracking down on other military groups that supported them. Fighting continued well into the 2000s in the form of isolated attacks, despite the implementation of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation in September 2005, which granted amnesties and indemnifications in an attempt to bring peace to Algeria. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Algerians were killed during the conflict,11 and the displaced population was estimated at one million.12 War and conflict are themes that pervade Bouraoui’s narratives of exile. Le Jour du séisme does not describe the consequences of ‘la décennie noire’ overtly but does make several indirect references to this tragedy. The text focuses on the deadly earthquake that struck in 1980 in the northern city of El Asnam, a location that was renamed ‘Chlef’ after the earthquake in a collective attempt to move on from the catastrophe. Measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, the earthquake killed approximately 5000 people. The text narrates the wanderings of an unnamed child narrator across Algeria in search of safety. Her exile occurs within the boundaries of Algeria as she seeks refuge from the destruction wrought by the earthquake on her beloved landscape. She is overwhelmed with feelings of loss and confusion at having to abandon Algiers and consequently feels ‘désaxée’ (p. 11), suggesting that her movement is a kind of exile. She also undergoes an internal exile, creating an ‘other’ self to distance herself from the destruction of her land, and this is reflected in the way that the text is peppered with mystical supernatural incidents experienced by fictional characters Arslan and Maliha. There is more at work here, however, than first meets the eye. The narrator openly compares the earthquake to ‘une guerre’ (p. 46), and 10 Martin Stone, The Agony of Algeria (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1997), p. 94. 11 Miriam R. Lowi, ‘Algeria, 1992–2002: Anatomy of a Civil War’, in Understanding Civil War: Volume 1: Africa: Evidence and Analysis, ed. by Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2005), pp. 221–46 (p. 221). 12 Mohamed Benrabah, Language Conflict in Algeria: From Colonialism to Post-Independence (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2013), p. xiii.

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although the text does not refer to any specific war, the Arabic term used to discuss the earthquake, ‘el zilzel’ (p. 22), implies the presence of religious conflict because the word ‘signifies an apocalyptic end of the world in a well-known passage of the Koran’, as Salvodon explains.13 This religious allusion denotes the ideological conflict between secular and religious fundamentalists that characterized ‘la décennie noire’. The real-life earthquake, then, also acts as an allegory for the Algerian conflict of the 1990s. In contrast, Bouraoui’s subsequent text provides a discussion of the continued legacy of the earlier conflict, the Algerian War of Independence, on both populations, French and Algerian. Garçon manqué features a first-person homodiegetic narrator and is divided into four distinct sections, each placing emphasis on issues of identity and nationality. Garçon manqué is written from a child’s perspective, like Le Jour du séisme, although the narrator is now older. Set during the 1970s, the first part, subtitled ‘Alger’, charts the brutal racial prejudice Nina experiences as a mixed-race young girl living in Algiers. Vassallo explains that Nina is a bodily reminder of the violent colonial relationship between France and Algeria because her blood mixes ‘both colonizer and colonized, perpetrator and victim of violence’, although this observation is an oversimplification of Franco-Algerian relations.14 By depicting the entire French nation as guilty perpetrators of the colonial regime and all Algerians as innocent targets, Vassallo overlooks the violence committed by Algerians and the French who fought for a Free Algeria. In the second section, ‘Rennes’, Nina is displaced to France during the summer holidays to stay with her French maternal grandparents. This temporary departure is experienced by Nina as exile, as she admits that she ‘ne voulai[t] pas partir’ but was forced to by her parents (p. 99). This episode creates a sense of foreboding and foreshadows her permanent exile to Rennes in 1980, when her family seek refuge from the violence committed against Algerians living in France in the aftermath of the war. Back in France, however, she experiences rejection, as strong anti-Algerian sentiment is widespread. Garçon manqué closes with two short sections: ‘Tivoli’, in which Nina departs from Algeria for Rome, and ‘Amine’. In this final section, 13 Salvodon, p. 48. 14 Helen Vassallo, ‘Embodied Memory: War and the Remembrance of Wounds in Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 1.2 (2008), 189–200 (p. 190).

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written on her return to Algeria as a letter to her best friend Amine, Nina at last begins to accept her complex identity, but this is only possible after the liberation of life in Italy, which ushers in new perspectives. By removing herself from the physical spaces of France and Algeria, Nina is avoiding further direct confrontation with those who taunt and insult her, a temporary, rather than lasting, solution. Bouraoui’s narrator retains the emphasis on her personal involvement with the Algerian War in Mes mauvaises pensées. In an emotional identity quest, the unnamed narrator depicts important events that have shaped her life and contributed to her exile, such as her departure from Algeria, her move to France, and her complex relationship with her parents. Moreover, in this text, which eschews the childhood narrator of her other works on exile, she interrogates how her sexual identity acts as another form of othering. This first-person narrative adopts the form of an interior monologue, and, as Sara Leek observes, the absence of chapters and paragraphs creates ‘a very experimental streamof-consciousness style’ as Bouraoui lays bare her innermost thoughts and feelings.15 The text is cyclical and repetitive, and while at times it appears that she is making progress at accepting her hybrid identity, at other times she repeatedly claims that she remains haunted by her exile. The Trauma of Exile A current important trend in literary criticism is the use of Western trauma theory to analyse Francophone women’s life-writing. Kathryn Robson, for instance, defines trauma as a bodily and psychic injury ‘relived endlessly in the present’, which can be articulated and eventually overcome through self-writing.16 Stef Craps points out the problems of using Western trauma theory to analyse postcolonial narratives, namely that this theory fails to recognize the sufferings of minority groups through their own terms and in their own frame of reference;17 15 Sara Leek, ‘“L’Écriture qui saigne”: Exile and Wounding in the Narratives of Nina Bouraoui and Linda Lê’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 15.2 (2012), 237–55 (p. 240). 16 Kathryn Robson, Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women’s Life Writing (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2004), p. 11. 17 Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Basingstoke:

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it is therefore crucial to consider Bouraoui’s trauma in light of the specificities of her Franco-Algerian context. In Garcon manqué, exile is explicitly expressed in terms of trauma that has clear historical and political origins. The Algerian War of Independence continues long after 1962 for Nina, since the entrenched, unresolved tensions between the two countries are internalized by groups such as her child self who did not even participate in the conflict. No attempt is made to distinguish between the innocent individual and the collective group of the former colonizer, and she is punished unnecessarily as a representative of the colonial enemy, even though she was not even alive at the time. Reading Nina’s emotions through Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’—or how memories of traumatic events are passed down to subsequent generations who did not live through these events through stories, photographs, and cultural production18 —Mona El Khoury demonstrates how seeing a photograph of her uncle Amar who was reported missing during the war ‘catalyzes such a reaction of postmemory’ because ‘Bouraoui affectively invests the picture as if this image of Amar […] belonged to her own memory’.19 Although she has no memories of the Algerian War of her own, these transferred memories become an obsession for Nina, and are just as painful because their resonances continue to be felt long after the war has been resolved. Nina is completely innocent of such violence—she played no part in the war at all—and so the emotional charge of her family’s memories that she appropriates accentuates the trauma she experiences. Nina’s trauma is played out physically on her body. She wonders which part of her belongs to France and which to Algeria and asks how to ‘porter une identité de fracture. Se penser en deux parties. À qui je ressemble le plus? Qui a gagné sur moi? Sur ma voix? Sur mon visage? Sur mon corps qui avance? La France ou l’Algérie?’ (p. 19). The abundance of rhetorical questions in this passage, combined with the repetition of the preposition ‘sur’ and the possessive adjective ‘mon’, is indicative of her obsessive identity quest throughout the text, and in her wider œuvre. The verb ‘porter’ is repeated throughout the narrative, demonstrating Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 3. 18 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 5. 19 Mona El Khoury, ‘To Be or Not to Be Métis: Nina Bouraoui’s Embodied Memory of the Colonial Fracture’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 22.1 (2017), 123–35 (p. 127).

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how, as Vassallo remarks, ‘guilt, suffering and rejection are embodied in the author/narrator’; 20 Nina feels responsible for bearing the wounds of the war. It is thus unsurprising that Nina’s mixed origins are psychologically damaging for her, and are a cause of tension for both the Algerian and French populations. In Algiers, she and her friend Amine are racially insulted because of their Franco-Algerian background. They always feel like outsiders, ‘encore exclus d’un monde étranger, impossible et fermé’ (pp. 55–56), even though they are not ‘étrangers’, or foreigners, because they have spent most of their lives in Algiers. This exclusion becomes violent when Nina is almost kidnapped by an Algerian man when she is playing outside. Although the man does not harm her physically, this incident represents ‘le viol de [s]a confiance’ (p. 44), symbolizing the end of her childhood. Here, Bouraoui’s wordplay between the two near homonyms ‘vol’ (theft) and ‘viol’ (rape) is significant. By equating the stealing of Nina’s confidence and trust with a sexual attack, the narrative emphasizes Nina’s racialized and gendered vulnerability: her appearance marks her out for humiliation by Algerians, while her female gender puts her at increased risk of sexual assault in the tense post-war context, even as a young child. The fact that Nina is simultaneously attracted to this man—describing his physical appearance, she admits that ‘cet homme est beau’ (p. 43)—is problematic, because ‘what the man really embodies is Algeria’s desire to own her’, 21 and so her attraction to him reveals her complicity in Algeria’s control over her. It is notable that this kidnapping attempt is also evoked in Le Jour du séisme, as I examine later in the chapter. The emphasis on this distressing event in Bouraoui’s corpus reveals that the trauma of her exile is unescapable; it also confirms that events in Bouraoui’s narratives often echo from one text to another. Nina’s visit to Rennes to stay with her grandparents is no less isolating, which explains why she experiences this second displacement as an exile. Now it is the French who view her as the enemy. On the plane, she reflects on her loneliness as ‘une fille non accompagnée’ (p. 99). Although she is in a financially privileged position, as her family can afford to buy her and her sister Jami a plane ticket, her journey into exile is nonetheless emotionally and physically challenging. Struggling with 20 Vassallo, ‘Embodied Memory’, p. 194. 21 Banu Akin, ‘Exiles and Desire Crossing Female Bodies: Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué and Rabih Alemeddine’s I, The Divine’, The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, 10.2 (2017), 111–33 (p. 125).

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her large suitcase as the two girls travel by train to Rennes, she equates the transportation of her material possessions with the displacement of her identity as she acknowledges the difficulty of coping with ‘une identité à soulever. Une famille à déplacer, à emporter’ (p. 100). Even once they arrive in Rennes, before undergoing a further displacement to their grandparents’ holiday home in Saint-Malo, Nina feels unable to settle because she considers her departure as a betrayal of Algiers, so powerful is her embodiment of the city: ‘cette ville est dans le corps. Elle hante. La quitter est une trahison’ (p. 91). These sentiments expose her complex relationship with both countries: Nina felt that she had no choice but to leave Algeria, yet no sooner has she left than she wishes to return. Pamela Pears reads Nina’s relationship with the two countries through the dichotomy of the guest/host, two oppositional concepts that are grouped under the same term in French (l’hôte). She argues that while Nina is expected to be the host in Algeria, explicit in which ‘is the idea of being at home’, because she was brought up there, and the welcomed guest in France where she is staying with her grandparents, she actually feels uncomfortable with each status. 22 She therefore invents her own world in which ‘she can be the host and the guest’ [original emphasis]. 23 Pears’s argument here does not fully capture Nina’s situation. Pears claims that neither label is applicable to the narrator, while attesting simultaneously that Nina lives voluntarily as both the guest and the host, both the dweller and the visitor. Both these meanings of ‘l’hôte’ imply a sentiment of being accepted; yet in contrast, Nina does not feel welcome anywhere. She is certainly not the host in Algeria where she is shunned for her difference, but neither is she the guest in France because there she is still subject to racial abuse and violence. Instead, Nina is frequently singled out for her difference as the French make cruel remarks about her skin colour and Algerian origins. Moreover, she is constantly questioned about Algeria during her stay in France. The French appear to consider the country a distant, strange place, in which people live in poverty: ‘il fait toujours chaud là-bas? Et la misère? Elle est belle? Comme au Maroc ou en Tunisie? À peine visible avec le tourisme. Non? Pas de touristes en Algérie? Ah bon? Alors la misère doit être laide’ (p. 123). This denigration 22 Pamela Pears, ‘The Guest/Host Dichotomy of “L’Hôte” in Leïla Sebbar’s Marguerite and Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué’, Rocky Mountain Review, 66.1 (2012), 64–75 (p. 70). 23 Pears, p. 70.

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of Algeria angers Nina, particularly given her desire to return, and she wonders how people can be so prejudiced and narrow-minded about a country they do not even know, particularly a country whose history is so significant for France. This quotation also offers an important insight into French attitudes towards poverty and tourism in North Africa. For the French, Algeria is an impoverished, disadvantaged country in which there is no touristic value, unlike in Morocco and Tunisia, which were established tourist centres for French package holidays; since the Arab Spring, however, these naïve and blinkered assumptions have been robustly challenged. Nina’s complex affiliation with both the former colonizer and the colonized stands in sharp contrast to Bhabha’s theorization of hybridity. For Bhabha, the association between colonizer and colonized is not binary but slippery and illusory as the two cultures merge into a hybrid space, mutually dependent upon each other. Bhabha’s model suggests a relationship of co-dependency between colonizer and colonized that certainly seems applicable in the case of Algeria. Even after legal, political, and military efforts to separate Algeria and France, the two countries remain tightly intertwined. However, whereas Bhabha sees the creation of a cultural and racial hybridity as a positive step, allowing for ‘political empowerment’ of the formerly colonized peoples, 24 Nina’s experience differs. Her hybridity gives her a certain degree of agency because it acts as a catalyst for her creativity, but it also alienates her: ‘je suis tout. Je ne suis rien’ (p. 20). She is always representative of the ‘other’: in Algeria, she is accused of being too French, but when she settles in France, it is her Algerian identity that takes prominence. She feels neither wholly Algerian nor wholly French. For Lydie Moudileno, Nina’s identity quest is one specifically located in Brittany, her birthplace. Defining Brittany as a ‘postcolonial province’, or a site of migration following the collapse of France’s imperial project, 25 she argues that the narrator’s hybridity is complicated by her local status as a ‘Bretonne’, and so Nina not only has to negotiate her hybrid French/Algerian identity, but she also has to position herself in relation to the region of Brittany. Moudileno claims that Nina achieves this objective, because returning 24 Bhabha, p. 4. 25 Lydie Moudileno, ‘Nina Bouraoui’s Detoured Journey to the Métropole: Paris by Way of Brittany’, in Metropolitan Mosaics and Melting-Pots: Paris and Montreal in Francophone Literatures, ed. by Pascale De Souza and H. Adlai Murdoch (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 204–22 (p. 206).

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to Brittany offers her a ‘reconciliation with the familial territory of the local which grants the expatriate the cultural anchoring she needs in order to tackle the complexities of her difference’. 26 However, although Brittany plays an important role in her family history—it was where her parents met, and where she was born—Nina does not currently feel any strong ties to the region. It is not ‘local’ to Nina: she only lived in Rennes for a few months before moving to Algiers, and it is unclear in the text how regularly she goes back to visit her maternal grandparents. The repetition of the phrase ‘je suis à Rennes’ (p. 99) implies her total disorientation as she is constantly forced to remind herself of her current location. Her physical appearance makes her stand out at the beach once more, rendering her uncomfortable and embarrassed. She thus locates herself on the periphery of Brittany, inhabiting the ‘interstitial spaces’ between Algeria and France, but more specifically between Algiers and Brittany. Rather than providing her with political empowerment and a cultural grounding, as Moudileno implies in the above quotation, her return to Rennes only serves to emphasize her position ‘in-between’ the two regions, which constantly unsettles and alienates her. Nina’s situation also contradicts Bhabha’s claim that ‘interstitial spaces’ are not hierarchical, 27 because Nina is always reminded of her supposed inferiority. In Algeria, she is depicted as the colonizing enemy, and in France her status as ‘half-Algerian’ represents the formerly colonized, subjugated peoples. She is a constant, uncomfortable reminder of the connections and conflicts that bind France and Algeria together. In Mes mauvaises pensées, these sentiments of inadequacy continue to haunt the narrator, who tells her psychotherapist that c’est toujours cette histoire, au fond de moi, de venir de deux familles que tout oppose, les Français et les Algériens. Il y a ces deux flux en moi, que je ne pourrai jamais diviser, je crois n’être d’aucun camp. Je suis seule avec mon corps. (p. 52)

This passage foregrounds the loneliness provoked by her ‘deux flux’; rather than experiencing her hybridity as a positive phenomenon that allows her to access two cultures, she is overwhelmed by the feeling that she is always inferior to the dominant group in both France and Algeria. The war imagery in this passage is noticeable; she regards the French and the Algerians as being on contrasting sides, emphasizing opposition 26 Moudileno, pp. 210–11. 27 Bhabha, p. 5.

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rather than unity, and does not position herself in any political ‘camp’. Her hybridity does not empower her to deconstruct these bounded labels, but rather reinforces them by demonstrating her frustration at not corresponding neatly to these different identitarian categories. It is Nina’s uncomfortable relationship with her own hybridity that forces her to question where she belongs. John Durham Peters argues that exile involves a ‘pining for home’. 28 He claims that all those who have been forced to leave their land of origin, regardless of the circumstances of their departure, are nostalgic for a return, even if this return is impossible because of the danger it would entail. Garçon manqué presents an intriguing challenge to such theories. Nina feels more at ease with herself and her surroundings during her summer trip to Rome. In Italy, she finds the freedom to discover herself and feels liberated: ‘je n’étais plus française. Je n’étais plus algérienne. Je n’étais même plus la fille de ma mère. J’étais moi’ (p. 184). The Italian gaze does not read into Nina the entangled historical and social baggage for which she is relentlessly scrutinized in France and Algeria. Liberated from the Franco-Algerian tensions, in this neutral space, she is finally released from the violent historical burden of her Franco-Algerian heritage. Significantly, it is also here that Nina has the freedom to explore her gendered and sexual identity without the weight of familial and social pressures. She realizes that she is no longer defined by what she is or is not, but she can simply be. Yet this optimistic chapter, in which Nina finally gains agency over her life and finds somewhere to call home, even if only for a short period of time, does not completely shut down the themes of exile and alienation in the text because it is unlikely that her lifelong struggles to reconcile her French and Algerian identities can be adequately resolved by a short summer vacation. Moreover, Nina returns to Algeria following this apparent revelation in Rome, as she explains to Amine. Beyond Garçon manqué, the narrator decides as an adult to make France her home (she makes various references in Mes mauvaises pensées to well-known Parisian streets and landmarks, implying that she now lives permanently in Paris). It seems, then, that sub-consciously she still desires to belong to both France and Algeria, contradicting her claim that she is not tied to these national affiliations. In The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb (2014), Claudia Esposito plays on the word ‘médi-terra-née’ to argue that Nina’s identity is not associated with either France or Algeria; rather, it is formed in the Mediterranean, in the 28 Peters, p. 20.

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middle ground between both countries. 29 For Esposito, the sea acts as a space of safety, liberating Nina because she is ‘free to invent herself’ and be reborn, far from both French and Algerian constraints. 30 However, if Nina’s freedom is located in an in-between space between France, Italy, and Algeria, she has not eschewed the dichotomy of French or Algerian nationality. Her narrator’s identity remains defined by her proximity to, or distance from, the two locations. Movement beyond French and Algerian borders is thus not as emancipating as Esposito claims. Even when removed from the problematic spaces of Algeria and France, then, Nina still feels alienated, conforming to Edward Said’s assertion that exile ‘can never be surmounted’. 31 Le Jour du séisme and Mes mauvaises pensées move the discussion of trauma in a different direction by drawing attention to the loss provoked by exile. In Mes mauvaises pensées, the narrator reflects on the material possessions she is forced to leave behind when she moves to France: ‘je laisse ma chambre d’Alger, je laisse mes livres, je laisse mes vêtements, je laisse les sables et la mer, je laisse le vent et les fleurs, […], je laisse ma première vie’ (p. 97). The striking anaphoric repetition of the phrase ‘je laisse’ reinforces her feelings of being uprooted. Her nostalgia for her lost possessions is mirrored by her memorial loss of her past life in Algeria. Loss operates on an additional sexual level for the narrator, as Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani explains: ‘Algeria becomes primarily the place of lost sensuality; it is the place of the narrator’s first experiences of the beauty of the female body and of her later discovered homosexuality.’32 Le Jour du séisme offers a particularly poignant reflection on the loss of the human condition provoked by exile. Although the narrator recognizes that this loss is shared by all Algerians because the earthquake causes them to ‘perdre, l’enfance. Perdre, le pays. Perdre, les lieux’ (p. 53), her own exile is particularly painful because of her deep connection with the Algerian landscape. Throughout the text, the possessive adjective ‘mon’ is contrasted with destructive imagery as she loses ownership of 29 Claudia Esposito, The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb (Lanham, MD; Plymouth: Lexington, 2014), p. 73. 30 Esposito, p. 75. 31 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, p. 173. 32 Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, ‘Memorial Traces as Tropes of Postcolonial Hauntings in Robert Lalonde’s Sept Lacs plus au Nord and Nina Bouraoui’s Mes mauvaises pensées’, London Journal of Canadian Studies, 33.7 (2018), 94–110 (p. 105).

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her land. The text is punctured by short, staccato sentences written in the present tense that describe her exile across Algeria in an attempt to escape from the devastation caused by the earthquake. The brevity of these sentences conveys the speed and urgency of the young narrator’s flight and reflects her distress at being displaced from her home because she is unable to articulate her emotions adequately. Her identity is deeply embedded within the Algerian landscape, rendering her exile away from her beloved home all the more traumatic. She realizes that she is ‘marquée, à jamais’ (p. 9) by her experience of exile, suggesting that her exile is a permanent condition of trauma that she will never overcome. Reading the earthquake as an allegory for the ‘décennie noire’ adds an additional layer of trauma to exile in the text. During the conflict, communities were torn apart by brutal fighting and families were forcibly displaced across Algeria in search of safety; Bouraoui is therefore suggesting a similar fate for her narrative surrogate and her family. Exile: A Liberating Condition? Despite this intense focus on exile as a source of trauma that uproots the narrative persona into a state of homelessness, Le Jour du séisme, Garçon manqué, and Mes mauvaises pensées also all underscore that exile may be positive and life-affirming. The suffering the narrative surrogate faces at having to abandon her home, family, and material possessions is offset by the possibilities for freedom and creativity that exile offers. In addition, exile removes her from natural catastrophes and human violence. In Garçon manqué, attacks upon Nina and her family become increasingly vicious as tensions escalate after independence: they are sent anonymous parcels of poisoned food, stones are thrown at them, and a bucket of urine is thrown over Nina’s head as ‘une punition pour la fille de la Française’ (p. 81). Here, her femininity makes her as much of a victim as her Frenchness. These attacks cause her to realize that she must leave in order to ‘fuir le rêve des massacres. Le rêve d’acharnements. Fuir toutes les armes blanches qui brillent dans [s]a nuit’ (p. 87). Violence towards the French is so deeply embedded within the Algerian consciousness that Nina dreams about being threatened with the weapons that were used during the war. She has internalized this hostility and believes that her only option is to flee Algeria if she is to survive the bloody aftermath of the war. There is also a gendered

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and sexual element to her exile, as the ‘armes blanches’ function on a deeper level as phallic symbols. She is not only escaping from Algeria’s historical burden but also from threats of sexual violence against women that pervade patriarchal Algerian society. In Le Jour du séisme, exile preserves the narrator’s life, even though she feels lost and alone as she tries to find her way to safety. Her body becomes elided with the land that has been destroyed by the earthquake, and so she undergoes her own internal rupture. She imagines the earthquake creating a scission within her, making her ‘other’: ‘le séisme forme déjà l’exil et la différence. Il traverse le corps et impose une scission. Il dénature et fonde une autre origine. Il modifie les naissances. Il est immédiat et profond. Je deviens une autre’ (p. 61). The repetition of the masculine subject pronoun ‘il’ demonstrates the power and control the earthquake has over her body, and her subsequent lack of agency in this process. Moreover, she likens the earthquake to an act of physical violence, in terms that imply the sexualized violence of rape: je sens une main sur ma nuque. Elle serre et surprend. Elle modifie la couleur et le volume. Elle étrangle. Je résiste. Elle force sa prise. Je cède à sa violence. Elle relâche, à peine. Je reconnais la puissance d’un homme, ses ongles, ses doigts et son poignet. (p. 27)

Exile, therefore, enables her to escape from the violent Algerian landscape and from the violence of patriarchal society. The striking anaphora ‘elle… je…’ reinforces the power struggle at play. The assault carried out by the man on the young girl represents the control the earthquake has over the fragile landscape. Exploiting the inherent gendering in the French language, the object that inflicts violence, ‘la main’, is feminine, until it is revealed as masculine. ‘Elle’, replacing ‘la main’ of the man who assaults her, is always accompanied by a powerful verb of action, whereas ‘je’ is followed by a verb of reaction as she meekly succumbs to his violence. Rosie MacLachlan suggests that this imagery may allude to Algeria’s attempt to escape from France’s colonial grip because the man represents ‘the dynamic of imperial force as a strong, masculine, dominating presence, overempowering the weak, feminized, and colonized land’. 33 Yet a colonial reading is not appropriate here, given that the earthquake is an allusion to Algeria’s civil war because of the religious references throughout the text. Rather, as Laura Loth suggests, ‘by juxtaposing a very real natural catastrophe with other 33 MacLachlan, p. 87.

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traumatic events, such as rape, Bouraoui points to the pervasive presence of trauma in daily life’. 34 A connection can also be made here with the ‘évènement’, or near-rape, which occurred in Garçon manqué, a further reminder that reading these three texts together offers a more complete understanding of exile in Bouraoui’s work. Although a catalyst of trauma, then, exile can also be a means to escape from trauma: exile physically removes the narrator from the site of violence and ensures her safety. She is forced to mature and become more independent in her search for safety. Exile thus represents her passage from childhood to adulthood: ‘j’apprends à être une femme’ (p. 83). While she equates the losing of her beloved landscape with the loss of her childhood, exile also represents the opportunity to become independent and self-sufficient. She realizes that just as Algeria will be rebuilt, she will also survive the changes in her life: she ‘quitte [s]a fragilité’ (p. 82) and, despite the forced loss of her innocence, she becomes a strong, courageous, and resistant young woman. These representations of exile as a source of liberation and hope take a traumatic turn when their historical resonances are taken into account because they are replicated on such a wide scale during Algeria’s recent bloody history. Gendered and Sexual Exile One of the most striking elements of Bouraoui’s autofictional narratives is her emphasis on how gender and sexuality intersects with exile. Exile is not always a geographical movement for Bouraoui’s heroine: it also constitutes ‘a pervasive feeling of alienation, estrangement, or angst’, in Hron’s terms, 35 brought about by her failure to adapt to French and Algerian norms of gender and sexuality. Her ‘gender trouble’, to echo the title of Judith Butler’s foundational text on gender performativity, 36 is particularly prominent in Garçon manqué. In Algeria, Nina enjoys her status as a tomboy, and it is obviously an attempt to emulate her father whom she greatly admires. She replaces him as head of the family when 34 Laura Loth, ‘Traumatic Landscapes: Earthquakes and Identity in FrancoAlgerian Fiction by Maïssa Bey and Nina Bouraoui’, Research in African Literatures, 47.1 (2016), 21–38 (p. 32). 35 Hron, p. 12. 36 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York; London: Routledge, 1990).

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he goes away to Washington with work: he tells her that ‘tu veilleras sur la maison’ in his absence (p. 50). Moreover, she is always chosen to be on the boys’ team when playing football at school, admitting that she ‘joue contre [s]on camp’ (p. 17). She thus willingly challenges conventional norms of femininity by participating in what are deemed as ‘masculine’ pursuits, on a par with her male peers—and with their recognition. Furthermore, she alters her appearance to look more like a boy, cutting her hair, wearing the jeans her father brought back for her from America, and assuming a masculine gait. Her father is complicit in her adoption of masculine traits and participates in the subversion of her gender. He not only buys her clothes that, in 1970s Algeria, were associated with masculinity, but he also teaches her conventionally masculine pursuits, such as football, and gives her the male name ‘Brio’. However, she prefers the more powerful and virile name ‘Ahmed’, seeking to affirm her masculinity even more. She does not conform to the expectations of Algerian society about how a girl should behave, and so she actively decides to ‘perform’, in Butler’s terms, like a boy. Salvodon reads Nina’s desire to become a man as evidence of a ‘desire for freedom’, arguing that the narrator longs for another existence in which she is not held back, restricted, or exiled by her female gender. 37 This is particularly relevant in patriarchal Algeria where ‘être un homme en Algérie c’est devenir invisible’ (p. 37). Women, on the contrary, are only too visible because they are constantly judged and objectified by men. Adopting a masculine persona gives Nina the ability to become invisible, far from men’s piercing gaze. However, Bouraoui’s position in the text, and Salvodon’s reading of it, is problematic because it reinforces the gendered stereotypes that equate masculinity with strength, power, and freedom. By dressing and behaving like a boy in order to be liberated, Nina is not overturning the imposed gender norms, as Salvodon suggests, but rather, is playing into them. Nina continues to operate within these binaries in France, but here she must hide her masculine side because ‘[s]a grand-mère aime les vraies filles’ (p. 92). Seeking her grandparents’ approval, she alters her appearance again, wearing her hair long and dressing in skirts and dresses because she realizes that her masculine appearance will not be accepted in France. This exaggerated femininity does not sit well with Nina, though, and so she now feels ‘une fille ratée’ (p. 107), a phrase that inverts and plays with the title of the text, ‘garçon manqué’. 37 Salvodon, p. 65.

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It is interesting to note that Nina never self-identifies explicitly as a ‘garçon manqué’, and the term is only used in the narrative by her French grandmother (aside from in the title of the text), reinforcing Nina’s lack of agency to determine her own identity. The adjectives ‘ratée’ and ‘manqué’ both conjure negative connotations of failure and disappointment. As Ann-Sofie Persson remarks, the two gender labels suggest that ‘Nina ne réussit à être ni l’un ni l’autre’. 38 Her identity remains bound to these gender labels in France, though, because by underscoring her frustration at not conforming to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, she is actually perpetuating these stereotypes, rather than moving beyond or eradicating them. Scholars of Bouraoui’s writing have interpreted the creation of Nina’s masculine double Amine—who, on a superficial level, is Nina’s best friend, but it becomes apparent through Bouraoui’s use of the second-person subject pronoun ‘tu’ that she is addressing herself, and that he is her mirror image—as a means to subvert stereotypes of what it means to be a man or a woman in both Algeria and France. Martine Fernandes argues that Bouraoui’s characters exemplify Butler’s notion of performing gender because they demonstrate that categories of gender are not rigid and fixed but fluid and mobile;39 Nancy Arenberg reads the slippage between the two characters as a form of transvestism, as Nina abandons ‘her assigned biological role as a female to slip into male clothing’, shedding her sensitive feminine identity and instead adopting the dominant male role.40 However, the very act of creating a masculine double for her female character is a further indication that Bouraoui operates within the conventional gender norms, in which masculinity is equated to power and resistance, and femininity to meekness, oppression, and submission. A problematic outcome of this behaviour is that the text implies that women can only become emancipated by adopting male characteristics. Any agency Bouraoui might have granted her female protagonist by blurring the differences between definitions of masculinity and 38 Ann-Sofie Persson, ‘Pluralité et fragmentation dans Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui’, in This ‘Self ’ Which Is Not One, ed. by Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 15–33 (p. 21). 39 Martine Fernandes, ‘Confessions d’une enfant du siècle: Nina Bouraoui ou la “bâtarde” dans Garçon manqué et La Vie heureuse’, L’Esprit Créateur, 45.1 (2005), 67–78 (p. 70). 40 Nancy M. Arenberg, ‘Appropriating the Masculine in Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué’, Dalhousie French Studies, 105 (2015), 1–10 (p. 6).

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femininity is thus immediately undermined. Moreover, through the role reversal between Nina and Amine, in which Nina performs boyhood and Amine girlhood so that Nina can achieve greater freedom and conceal her homosexual desires, the heterosexual norm remains intact. Nina is now the active male who desires the submissive female: ‘ainsi, je quitte son ombre. Ainsi, je prends sa force. Je protégerai toujours Amine’ (p. 18). The characters thus still operate within a heteronormative society and are complicit in perpetuating the notion that same-sex desire is morally wrong. As Garçon manqué draws to its conclusion, however, Nina appears to embrace her feminine identity, paying more attention to her physical appearance on her return from Rome. Nina has become more comfortable with her status as a young woman and more reconciled to the idea of a homosexual feminine identity, just as she has also seemingly reconciled her struggles about her national identity. However, the text ends rather enigmatically with Nina admitting that ‘il restera toujours une trace de toi, Amine. Sur ma peau. Un petit tatouage bleu, comme le ciel d’Alger’ (pp. 188–89). On one level, this quotation is an endearing recognition of her close friendship with Amine, and of her strong bond with Algiers. If Amine acts as the narrator’s male double, though, what underlies this passage is the idea that Nina will never eradicate her masculine identity but will always be reminded of its presence. She remains troubled by her desires to be both masculine and feminine. In Mes mauvaises pensées, the narrator-protagonist continues to articulate her refusal to conform to traditional models of masculinity and femininity. The text presents episodes that will be familiar to the reader of Garçon manqué. When remembering a summer in France with her male cousin, she remarks that people assumed she was his brother because she has had ‘longtemps cette relation avec les garçons, l’imagemiroir’ (p. 38); her childhood was thus marked by a desire to play with gender norms. Moreover, while she has always respected her father, this admiration is taken to the extreme when she replaces him as head of the family while he remains in Algeria, imitating how he acts, speaks, and dresses: ‘je prends mon père pour modèle’, quite literally (p. 117). These unique relationships with male family members contribute to her alienation because they differ widely from social norms for women. The motif of drowning in Mes mauvaises pensées is a further marker of her desired masculinity. She frequently recalls an incident when she may have tried to drown a young girl in a swimming pool when she was staying with Madame B. (whose identity is never disclosed in the text) in

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Algeria because she is jealous that the girl has captured the attentions of the older woman. The details of the incident are vague, but it is implied that it was the narrator who pushed the girl into the pool and refused to pull her out; the narrator admits confusedly ‘je ne sais pas ce que j’ai fait’ (p. 132). This episode reveals the narrator’s overwhelming confusion and fear about her homosexual desires that, until now, she has been forced to conceal and suppress. Here, Mes mauvaises pensées responds to a discussion of drowning in Garçon manqué. Nina saves a young woman named Paola from drowning in the sea, after remembering how her father had tried in vain to save a young Algerian man from drowning. Her father is a role model for her, and she endeavours to become more masculine in her appearance and behaviour to emulate him. The fact that she later becomes the perpetrator in subsequent drowning incidents suggests a desire to become even more aggressive and virile in order to overcompensate for her femininity. Mes mauvaises pensées also addresses issues of sexuality in a more explicit manner than Garçon manqué. The older, more mature narrator describes her homosexual desires and her attraction to her female psychotherapist. Although she is becoming increasingly comfortable with her lesbianism, discussing encounters with her lovers honestly and openly, her sexuality still others her to a certain extent. Her family, particularly her grandparents, do not approve of her sexual identity, a fact that preoccupies her: ‘je ne sais pas si mes grands-parents ont honte de ce que je suis’ (p. 158). She feels overwhelmed with guilt for disappointing her family. While she herself is becoming more confident with her sexual identity, then, she appears to contribute to the othering of those around her who still subscribe to the ideals of a heteronormative society. In his examination of dissident desire in Maghrebi literature, William J. Spurlin comments that Bouraoui never uses the adjective ‘lesbienne’ to describe her narrator in Mes mauvaises pensées, but that ‘the very act of writing attempts to address and name the struggle to negotiate new forms of sexual subjectivity, while, at the same time, the struggle to write and sexual struggles are inextricably intertwined’.41 In this quotation Spurlin not only points to the role of writing in the creation of Bouraoui’s subjectivity, but he also makes an important remark 41 William J. Spurlin, ‘Contested Borders: Cultural Translation and Queer Politics in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb’, Research in African Literatures, 47.2 (2016), 104–20 (p. 117).

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about how the author invents new ways to formulate her sexuality. For Spurlin, the fact that Bouraoui moves away from defining her sexuality in very rigid terms liberates her because it allows her to conceive of her sexuality on her own terms, rather than adhering to labels imposed on her by others. However, it could also be argued that by refusing to define her sexuality in concrete terms, Bouraoui propagates the stereotypes she tries to denounce: the narrative persona does not proudly proclaim her sexuality, suggesting that subconsciously she still feels ashamed or afraid of it. In her more recent autofictional text Tous les hommes désirent naturellement savoir, however, Bouraoui does use specific terms with which to define her narrator’s homosexual desires. The opening pages set up the premise for the unnamed narrator’s identity quest, as she explains in very direct language: ‘je cherche dans mon passé des preuves de mon homosexualité, des reliquats’ (p. 12). This autofictional narrative was published in 2018, much later than the three texts under consideration here. As Bouraoui has grown older she has undoubtedly become more at ease with her sexual self, and therefore more willing to lay bare her sexual struggles through her writing. In addition, it is notable that Bouraoui only explicitly self-identifies as lesbian much later in her writing career. It is only as a well-established and successful writer that she feels comfortable in openly addressing female homosexual desire in her narratives, a subject that is still considered by many readers and literary critics as taboo. The title of this text, and a phrase that acts as its epigraph, is taken from the opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; this seminal philosophical work is a study of the universal principles of being, and therefore provides a nod to Bouraoui’s textual search for her self-identity. The novel is composed of short chapters, almost like vignettes, which offer a snapshot of her childhood in Algeria and Rennes and her adolescence in Paris. The titles of the chapters alternate between ‘savoir’, in which she imagines her family history of war and exile within the Algerian context; ‘se souvenir’, which contains memories of her early life and her desire to integrate into both Algerian and French society, depending on the location in which she is living; and ‘devenir’, in which she recounts her first experiences of desire, lust, and love at the Katmandou nightclub in Paris. Parallels can be drawn regarding Bouraoui’s writing style between Garçon manqué, Mes mauvaises pensées, and Tous les hommes désirent naturellent savoir: the narrator is not the older author looking back on her life, but rather represents the author at different stages of her

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life, meaning that the narrative persona lives through these experiences alongside the reader as she narrates them. The integration of different narrative voices (principally that of her mother) in the chapters on her family history suggest that the text does not fit the autofictional model quite as closely as the other three books analysed here, because at times it encroaches on the biographical genre. Yet these chapters do provide important information about the family’s exilic past that supports and complements information gleaned in Bouroaui’s earlier life writing, and that demonstrates just how greatly their lives have been disrupted by migration; for instance, we learn that the family’s permanent exile from Algeria in 1980 was preceded by an earlier departure in 1971, when the father was posted to a position in a bank in Paris, which he accepted, in fear for his family in Algeria ‘en tant que filles et métisses’ (p. 174). The text reveals the intertwinement of the narrator’s national and sexual identity quest, and the importance of writing to heal her emotional turmoil. Significantly, it is in the Parisian gay nightclub where she is able to become her true self. Although initially ashamed of her homosexual desires, she gradually comes to accept them, and the text concludes optimistically with two chapters entitled ‘être’ that recount her hopes for the future as a living and feeling being. Such an unexpectedly optimistic ending is reminiscent of the closing pages of Garçon manqué; here, however, these final chapters are framed by Bouraoui’s mature reflections on love and hope, thereby suggesting through the correlation between author and narrator that both have finally come to terms with their sexuality. While it seems, then, that Bouraoui is successful at distorting social stereotypes in her recent writing, this is not necessarily the case in her earlier texts. Linguistic Otherness Bouraoui’s recurring literary heroine has a difficult relationship with both Arabic and French. Despite attending compulsory Arabic lessons at school following the state policy of Arabization as a process of cultural decolonization in 1963,42 she is not proficient in spoken or written Arabic 42 The government imposed a strict language policy in an attempt to unite Algeria following independence. Only Modern Standard Arabic was permitted; French and local Arab and Berber dialects were banned. See Hafid Gafaïti, ‘The Monotheism of the Other: Language and De/Construction of National Identity in

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because she has been brought up immersed in French culture, passed down to her by her mother. She was also educated in French at school. It troubles her that she is unable to speak Arabic, a language described in Garçon manqué as ‘une magie’ (p. 8), because becoming proficient in this language would be a step towards her integration into her father’s culture. Her familial relationships affect her position towards language. She admires her father and longs to be strong, powerful, and virile like him; her desire for masculinity is echoed in her desire to speak Arabic. The French language, in contrast, is represented by her mother, who is depicted as weak, fragile, and in need of protection as a French woman living in Algeria in the aftermath of the war. The narrator tries to protect her mother in a role-reversal between parent and child, but she realizes that by looking after her mother, ‘c’est être sans [s]on père, sans sa force, sans ses yeux, sans sa main qui conduit’ (p. 20). In contrast, identifying with her father would mean living without maternal support. Just as Nina feels as though identifying with one of her parents brings about a betrayal of the other, privileging one language over the other also makes her feel guilty. She tries to practise speaking and writing in Arabic in order to emulate her father, but she struggles to understand the spoken language. At a party in Paris in Mes mauvaises pensées, she meets several young men who are talking in Arabic. Barely able to understand them, she experiences a flush of shame: ‘je m’en veux de cela’ (p. 93). She is thus forced to speak French, resenting the language for preventing her from integrating into Algerian life. Nina’s position here is reminiscent of Algerian poet and writer Malek Haddad, who wrote in his essay ‘Les Zéros tournent en rond’ (1961) that he feels ‘en exil dans la langue française’, referring to his realization of the distance between his French writing and the Arabic readership in Algeria.43 Nina is also exiled in the colonizer’s language because it cuts her off from other Algerians; French serves to remind the Algerians of the colonial exploitation that they seek to overcome. It is significant that even today, Algeria, the second largest French-speaking country in the world in terms of the number of speakers of French as a first or second language, does not participate in the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, a cultural and political organization that is still perceived Postcolonial Algeria’, in Algeria in Others’ Languages, ed. by Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 19–43. 43 Malek Haddad, ‘Les Zéros tournent en rond’, in Écoute et je t’appelle (Paris: François Maspero, 1961), pp. 1–47 (p. 21).

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in Algeria as a direct link with the colonial past. Nina explains: ‘je parle en français. Uniquement. Je rêve en français. Uniquement. J’écrirai en français. Uniquement’ (Garçon manqué, p. 167); her monolingualism limits her existence because there is a completely different side to her, her Algerian side, which she is unable to express, despite her vehement desires. She cannot express it in Arabic because she cannot speak the language confidently. Moreover, she cannot use the colonial language, French, to verbalize this aspect of her identity. This would be ‘une forme de trahison’ (p. 166) because she would be using the language of the colonizer to articulate her Algerian identity, imposing the formerly colonial relationship between powerful France and dominated Algeria upon a postcolonial situation. At school, she is segregated from the other children in the class because of her inability to speak Arabic, and labelled an ‘arabisant[e]’ by her teacher and the other pupils (p. 11), a term she finds insulting because it accentuates her alienation. However, she is partly complicit in her own linguistic exile because she later abandons her attempts to learn Arabic in order to give voice to this equally important element of her identity in its own language. In Mes mauvaises pensées, linguistic exile takes a different twist to reveal how writing itself is a site of exile. The narrator has an ambiguous, often violent relationship towards writing: at times, she compares it to a prison from which there is no escape—‘l’écriture est aussi une prison, je dois la justifier, je dois la réparer, je dois la supplier quand elle ne vient pas’ (p. 35)—while at other times, she recognizes its cathartic properties. It allows her both to heal the wounds of her personal history and removes her from her family who do not approve of her fascination with writing. A scene set in a restaurant in Rennes with her family in Mes mauvaises pensées illustrates the family tension concerning writing. During the meal, the narrator notices a guest book on the table. It has been brought to dinner by her maternal grandfather, and he asks her to write in it. She is reluctant to do so because she feels flustered and out of her depth. She then becomes angry: ‘la colère revient et ouvre mon ventre, elle revient parce que je ne suis pas à ma place, je ne sais pas faire l’écrivain, je ne sais pas faire la fille de la télévision’ (p. 153). Writing has removed her from her familiar private space into the public eye, isolating and exiling her: she does not feel like a writer who is expected to share intimate details about her life with her readers. For Kirsten Husung, writing is the only space where Bouraoui’s protagonist can freely express her identity,

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and she defines writing as the protagonist’s ‘seule demeure’.44 Yet in the above passage, writing does not allow her to feel ‘at home’; in contrast, it renders her uncomfortable and lonely because it emphasizes how different she is to the rest of her family. Here, she conforms to Kristeva’s argument that the female writer’s position is one of exile; Bouraoui’s heroine is catapulted through writing into another world, far away from all sense of familiarity. Yet writing also acts as a restorative process through which she articulates her multi-layered identity and no longer feels the need to negate either her French or her Algerian self. This process seems more fruitful in Mes mauvaises pensées than in the other two texts. In the former, the protagonist is actively involved in the process of re-claiming her identity through the rewriting of her psychotherapy sessions; in Le Jour du séisme and Garçon manqué, she simply describes her alienation and is not an active participant in the narrative action. Mes mauvaises pensées depicts how she begins to make sense of her thoughts and prevent them from suffocating her: j’ai toujours écrit, vous savez. Avant j’écrivais dans ma tête, puis j’ai eu les mots, des spirales de mots, je m’en étouffais, je m’en nourrissais; ma personnalité s’est formée à partir de ce langage, à partir du langage qui possède. (p. 12)

The sudden switch in tense from the past to the present in the powerful verb ‘possède’, though, suggests that her identitarian resolution is incomplete because language continues to take control of her. Writing has thus allowed Bouraoui’s narrator to begin to accept her past, but it also raises a succession of further questions about identity, gender, and sexuality that are not necessarily any closer to being resolved. Conclusion As Bouraoui herself commented in a candid interview for Le Monde in September 2018, ‘c’est si dur d’être différent’.45 Le Jour du séisme, Garçon manqué, and Mes mauvaises pensées all illustrate this attitude, 44 Kirsten Husung, Hybridité et genre chez Assia Djebar et Nina Bouraoui (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014), p. 252. 45 Annick Cojean, ‘Nina Bouraoui: “Quelle richesse, cette homosexualité qui fut un long chemin!”’, Le Monde, 23 September 2018, [accessed 9 February 2020]. 46 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, p. 173. 47 Bhabha, p. 162.

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perpetuating these narrow stereotypes of what it means to belong to a particular race, country, religion, gender, and family, for all her attempts to move beyond them.

chapter five

Madagascar ‘A No-Woman’s-Land’? Exile and Errance in Michèle Rakotoson’s Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar Madagascar

Je suis au pays, dans mon enfance retrouvée, dans l’odeur du pays, la réalité du pays. Et étrangement, l’errante que je suis devenue, l’éternelle voyageuse, sait que ce pays réel ne correspond pas à son pays rêvé ou son pays de cauchemar, celui qu’elle recompose à l’infini entre tendresse et rage. (Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar, p. 29)

Michèle Rakotoson’s experiences of mobility as narrativized in Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar are closely aligned with the concept of errance, both in terms of a wandering through space and a wandering through time. She explicitly defines herself in the above quotation as ‘une errante’, continuously engaged in spatial and temporal wanderings in search of a country that no longer exists—a country she yearns for because it was where she spent her happy childhood, yet simultaneously a land she rejects due to the poverty, violence, and corruption she witnesses in postcolonial Madagascar. The title of her autofictional account of her return from France to her country of birth immediately pinpoints how she errs between what she perceives as two conflicting social and cultural frameworks. Reminiscent of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal—suggesting a ‘filiation littéraire’ between Rakotoson and Césaire, according to Karin Schwerdtner,1 and thus a cultural 1 Karin Schwerdtner, ‘Retour aux sources: parcours, obstacles et passages dans Juillet au pays de Michèle Rakotoson’, in Migrations/Translations, ed. by

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proximity between the island spaces of the French Caribbean and the Indian Ocean—the title refers to the multiple return journeys Rakotoson makes to Madagascar every summer over a period of five years, from 2002 to 2007. While in Malagasy culture, July is a month of mourning, during which the Merina people from Antananarivo perform the famadihana ceremony to rebury the dead and reconnect with their ancestors, in French—and by extension, Western—culture July is a carefree month of rest, relaxation, and recuperation. The title underscores Rakotoson’s inability, and indeed reluctance, to reconcile the two elements of her cultural heritage, and she constantly finds herself wandering between ‘Western’ and ‘local traditions’, trapped in a space of non-belonging and exile because she cannot fully commit to either culture. Experiences of exile during the return to Madagascar are particularly traumatic for Rakotoson because they remind her of her initial exile to France in the 1980s. Indeed, Rakotoson differs considerably to the other five authors analysed throughout this book in terms of the motives of her exile: she is the only author to have been forced to leave her birthland for political reasons. She fled to France in 1983 to escape persecution because she actively opposed the authoritarian regime of President Didier Ratsiraka, and she was not allowed to return for 25 years, instead making her home in Paris. Her exile thus lies the closest to conventional understandings of exile as a forced banishment from the native land, providing a different perspective on gendered narratives of exile. Her autofictional writing reveals the long-lasting implications of her political exile from Madagascar on her construction of her self-identity. A close examination of Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar adds a further new dimension to the study of exilic writing by female Francophone postcolonial writers: it writes Madagascar into Francophone postcolonial studies. Madagascar holds a peripheral status: as Peter Hawkins points out, geographically the island lies closer to the African continent, yet the country shares many cultural characteristics with other Francophone island spaces of the Indian Ocean, and even with the French Caribbean islands, despite the

Maroussia Ahmed, Corinne Alexandre-Garner, Nicholas Serruys, Iulian Toma, and Isabelle Keller-Privat (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Ouest, 2016), pp. 169–81 (p. 170).

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significant geographical distance between them. 2 This means that cultural production from the island often falls between studies of African literature and literature from the Indian Ocean, occupying a ‘no-man’s-land’ of its own. Bringing Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar into conversation with other autofictional narratives of gendered exile from a range of geographical and cultural contexts thus foregrounds the diversity and complexity of literature from Madagascar and emphasizes the potential of island spaces in the discussion of exilic literature by women writers. Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar tells of the return to Madagascar of the narrator-protagonist Michèle, named only twice in the text: in the title of the first chapter in a diary-like entry, and in her signature at the end of the epilogue. It is during her multiple returns, as she wanders across the island in search of ‘home’, that she realizes she has lived in an in-between space, a ‘no man’s land tellement inconfortable’ all her life (p. 40). Having left her birthland for political motives, she has subsequently failed to settle fully anywhere else, due to a subconscious deep-rooted fear of expulsion, and her constant travelling is reminiscent of Édouard Glissant’s concept of errance. Yet her experiences of errance equate to a sentiment of metaphorical exile, and the narrative, therefore, problematizes Glissant’s analysis that focuses on the freedom and mobility granted by errance. Glissant’s concept does not take into account the specific circumstances surrounding women’s mobility, and certainly does not consider how women who have been forcibly removed from their country of origin experience movement across different borders. I argue that during her return to Madagascar, Rakotoson’s literary persona in fact inhabits a ‘no-woman’s-land’, as she depicts a land where women do not belong. Her travels across the country to revisit important spaces of her childhood, such as her grandfather’s village of Ampihirana and her old family home that is now inhabited by her distant cousins Lolona and Ralay, reveal the extreme difficulties faced by women in a country rich in culture and natural beauty but where violence, poverty, repression, and political instability are still rife. The text ends with Rakotoson’s return to her metropolitan ‘home’ in Châtenay-Malabry, in the southwestern suburbs of Paris; she is privileged (unlike the women she meets on her travels) because her errance provides her with a way to escape this violence, 2 Peter Hawkins, The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures and Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007), p. 2.

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but her nomadic status simultaneously prevents her from embracing Madagascar—or indeed any other locale—as home. Errance and Transgression: Michèle Rakotoson’s Political Exile Panivong Norindr interprets the semantically rich concept of errance not solely in spatial terms, but also metaphorically, as a form of transgression or error. For Norindr, the term ‘play[s] on the meaning of both swerving from the path of truth—as deviation or perversion— and wandering from one place to another’. 3 Rakotoson’s political exile resonates strongly with this notion of transgression, although it must be noted that Norindr’s concept of the wandering subject is centered on the colonial not colonized woman. Rakotoson’s openly critical attitude towards the Madagascan dictatorship in the post-independence era meant that she had transgressed the boundary of expected behaviour in a society where authoritarianism governed, and she had certainly contravened the rigid gender norms that are still latent in Madagascar today. She denounces these conventions textually through the character of Lolona who laments that ‘les paysans se font toujours avoir et nous les femmes, nous sommes obligées de travailler plus pour que les enfants puissent manger’ (p. 177). Lolona calls out the patriarchy at work in the country where men have the authority to make the political and financial decisions and women, who have more limited professional options available to them, support their husbands and provide for their families. As a politically engaged author, Rakotoson actively seeks to counter gender divisions by making her voice heard amidst a sea of male voices. Her political transgression, or errance, led to her flight for refuge in France, a displacement that reveals differences between her own real experiences and Norindr’s theoretical conceptualization. For Norindr, errance is ‘an accidental journey more than a forced displacement’,4 while for Rakotoson, it is in fact her forced displacement from Madagascar to France that lies at the roots of her physical errance across different geographic spaces during her later life. On several occasions in the narrative, the narrator-protagonist expresses her guilt at having the economic means to be able to leave Madagascar, 3 Panivong Norindr, ‘“Errances” and Memories in Marguerite Duras’s Colonial Cities’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 5.3 (1993), 52–79 (p. 54). 4 Norindr, p. 54.

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and so while she was forced to abandon her family and friends because of her political actions, she also recognizes her privilege, because she was not present in Madagascar ‘pendant les années difficiles’ (p. 77). In the text, she explains that she took her children to Paris with her: ‘je me suis enfuie en emmenant mes enfants avec moi, pour leur donner un avenir, une vie normale’ (p. 151). The active verb ‘s’enfuir’ hints at her gratitude at being able to escape violence, and she also acknowledges here that her children were able to lead a better life in exile in France. However, in an interview published in 1997, Rakotoson explained that in fact, she left alone and that her children joined her a year later;5 this mismatch between events as narrativized within the textual space and events as recounted in the peritext acts as a reminder of the autofictional nature of Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar. The specific events leading up to her exile also require some clarification; Srilata Ravi correctly associates Rakotoson’s exile with her desire to escape persecution because of her politically charged artistic work that openly criticized Ratsiraka’s regime,6 yet this analysis must be further nuanced, given the information gleaned both from Rakotoson’s autofictional narrative and from in-depth interviews with the author. In the text, the narrator-protagonist dates the origins of her exile back to 1978, when students at the lycée where she was teaching at the time were protesting against educational corruption: ‘une session spéciale du bac a été imposée, le frère d’un ministre a raté le sien, les gosses se mettent en grève, descendent dans la rue, se réunissent au stade’ (p. 151). These student protests were violently put down, and it was Rakotoson’s firm stance against this harsh repression, coupled with fear for her own life and that of her loved ones, which forced her to leave. This textual episode is mirrored by her comments in an interview for Malagasy literary magazine Indigo in July 2018, where she explains that she was traumatized by witnessing the shooting of one of her students during these protests.7 This interview is particularly illuminating because during the conversation Rakotoson discloses that this is only the second time she has openly discussed the trigger of her exile. It can thus be inferred from this comment that she first publicly acknowledged the cause of her exile 5 Renée Mendy, ‘“Nous avons une tradition de scolarisation des femmes qui date du XIXe siècle”’, Amina, 321 (1997), [accessed 5 November 2019]. 6 Ravi, ‘Home and the “Failed” City in Postcolonial Narratives of “Dark Return”’, p. 298. 7 Rabary-Rakotondravony.

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in Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar, an indicator of the healing potential of writing that has enabled her gradually to come to terms with the painful and traumatic circumstances of her political exile, an acknowledgment she has also made textually: ‘et j’écris, j’écris pour meubler le vide’ (p. 199). In the text there are numerous explicit references to the term ‘exil’—for instance, at the beginning of the narrative, exile is defined in graphic and embodied terms as ‘cette mutilation de soi, de sa mémoire, ce manque définitif qui vous colle à la peau…’ (p. 8). Yet on other occasions, Rakotoson’s protagonist is eager to distance herself from the nostalgic connotations of the term, asking herself whether she experienced ‘un exil ou un éloignement’ when she reflects on her absence from Madagascar during her visit to her grandmother’s house in rural Ambohitantely (p. 131). Rakotoson’s reluctance to openly discuss the motives for her departure from Madagascar within and beyond the narrative, and indeed to define her experiences specifically in terms of exile, could be interpreted as an acute acknowledgement of her own privilege. She is cautious not to offend other members of the Malagasy community who suffered differently, who were either direct victims of violence and persecution, or who lacked the financial means to leave Madagascar at the height of Ratsiraka’s repressive regime. This is not to denigrate her own experiences of displacement, but to acknowledge that her suffering was very different. Rakotoson was born in the capital city of Antananarivo in 1948, only a year after the anticolonial uprisings of 1947, which were fuelled by growing nationalist sentiment and mass public discontent following the conscription of approximately 40,000 Malagasy soldiers to fight alongside French troops in the Second World War.8 The insurrection broke out on 30 March 1947 when members of Madagascar’s first legally recognized party, Le Mouvement démocratique pour la rénovation malgache, joined forces with other clandestine groups to attack French army barracks and government offices; the uprising was violently repressed by the French authorities who reportedly killed 89,000 Malagasy soldiers, while the colonial troops lost approximately 1900 men.9 The insurrection marked the beginning of the political struggle for independence that was finally granted to the island on 26 June 1960, formally putting an 8 Tor Sellström, Africa in the Indian Ocean: Islands in Ebb and Flow (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015), p. 78. 9 Jean-François Zorn, ‘L’Insurrection malgache de 1947: implications et interprétations protestantes’, Histoire et missions chrétiennes, 14 (2010), 13–34 (p. 20).

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end to French rule that had lasted for only 63 years, although the island continued to maintain ties with France through its education system and its use of French as an official, constitutional language (alongside Malagasy). Certain parallels can thus be drawn between the early lives of Rakotoson and Lefèvre, despite divergences in the political structures at work in their respective countries of birth. They both lived through difficult periods of French colonization, political instability, and extreme violence, although they occupied different positions on the social hierarchies at work in their respective societies, meaning that they were affected by political events in different ways. Lefèvre was brought up in a poor, socially deprived family, in constant displacement across Vietnam in search of relatives who could protect her from violence; Rakotoson, in contrast, comes from a bourgeois Imerina family who valued education and literature (her mother was a librarian and her father a journalist). She therefore lived a relatively sheltered and carefree childhood away from the dangers in Antananarivo, a childhood described in the text in nostalgic and sentimental tones as ‘un cocon’ (p. 37). Madagascar’s first decade as an independent country under the rule of President Philibert Tsiranana was overshadowed by political protest. First, peasants from the south-eastern Tuléar region revolted in 1971 in reaction against an excessive tax regime during a period of famine; a year later, a student protest in favour of better working conditions escalated into a firm denunciation of the Tsiranana government. Tsiranana was forced to resign, handing over power to a transitional government that was headed by General Gabriel Ramanantsoa and later by Colonel Richard Ratsimandrava. When Ratsimandrava was assassinated on 11 February 1975, a military directorate was established, led by Ratsiraka who became head of state through a referendum on 21 December 1975. Ratsiraka’s repressive socialist regime in the 1980s was an economic failure, but his nationalistic cultural policy of ‘Malgachization’—which offers striking echoes with the ‘Arabization’ process Algeria had undergone two decades earlier—was successful in creating a sense of national pride. Ratsiraka held on to power until 1991 when he was ousted by Albert Zafy, but he later returned to the political scene between 1997 and 2002. Rakotoson opens her autofictional narrative with a reference to the deadly and destructive strikes of 2002 as Ratsiraka’s supporters became more and more violent towards the opponent Marc Ravalomanana—described in the narrative as ‘la pire des crises que le pays a traversée’ (p. 8)—and she closes the text with an illusion to Ravalomanana’s electoral success, noting her incredulity

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that ‘l’enfant du pays [qui] est devenu président de la République’ is inaugurating the local fair (p. 200). Her own experiences of exile and errance are thus closely intertwined with Madagascar’s political strife. Rakotoson’s geographic exile, then, was brought about by her strong sense of political justice, which has continued to inform her literary and other professional activities. Since returning to Madagascar definitively in 2008, she has been eager to establish Antananarivo as a literary centre to improve Madagascar’s literacy rate, strikingly low at an average of 71.2 per cent in 2018.10 She founded Opération Bokiko in 2007 and has organized book events and writing competitions to help young writers to launch their careers. This political engagement is mirrored in Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar, in which Rakotoson denounces the historical, social, and economic obstacles at the heart of Malagasy society during her multiple return trips to Madagascar. Indeed, she even admits that the primary motive for her return is to endeavour to understand what is happening to her native country through writing, a yearning emphasized by the triad of verbs of perception that close the following quotation: ‘je n’ai aucun programme, n’ai rien prévu, je sais juste que je voudrais écrire, comprendre ce qui se passe, entrevoir ce que l’avenir sera’ (p. 41). Only by exploring the places of her childhood can she even get a glimpse of the complex history of her country of birth, a history that had been censored and erased by the country’s (post)colonial leaders. She is confronted for the first time with the traumas of slavery, indenture, subjugation, and oppression, having never learned about Madagascar’s heavy historical burden at school, but as a woman who is perceived by those around her as a successful, financially privileged Western professional (an image of herself that she does not seem to share), she is forced to question her own positionality. This becomes apparent during her coach journey to rural Ambatomanga, where her grandparents used to live and where her father is buried. When she is asked about the purpose of her visit to Madagascar, she immediately gets out her dictaphone machine to reveal her journalist credentials. This prompts the other passengers to ask her to interview them about their precarious existence and about their family connections to the slave trade in Madagascar, so that she can relay this information to people back in France, filling in the gaps about Madagascar’s colonial and postcolonial history. As Schwerdtner remarks, Rakotoson’s textual self 10 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, [accessed 7 November 2019].

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‘se sent appelée à assumer le rôle d’opératrice de la transmission’;11 the narrator-protagonist echoes this sentiment herself in a later passage, in which she confesses that she returned to Madagascar principally ‘pour comprendre, connaître, renaître peut-être, écrire, témoigner, trouver les mots justes’ (p. 141). She bears a strong sense of responsibility to transcribe the stories of the Malagasy people she meets on her travels, bearing witness to their struggles and communicating them to diasporic communities living in the former colonial power. Yet her role of speaking on behalf of the Malagasy people also foregrounds her status as a wanderer, an outsider. She has the intellectual and political power to speak out against the injustices that are so apparent in Madagascar, which places her outside the sphere of a shared Malagasy identity, yet she too is struggling to define her own self-identity, as she cannot reconcile the Madagascar of her childhood with the Madagascar of today, nor can she reposition back in Madagascar the womanhood she constructed in France. Erring between the past and the present, she simultaneously wanders between two distinct cultural and political systems, neither feeling fully integrated into Madagascan life nor fully fulfilled in France. Her sense of alienation provoked by her metaphorical wandering becomes even more acute, as revealed in the following section, when she physically traverses the island, since she is confronted with a host of spaces, sites, and landscapes that are no longer familiar to her. Errance Through Space The text opens in Roissy (Charles de Gaulle) Airport as Rakotoson’s textual self prepares to board the plane to Antananarivo, described in almost exoticizing tones as a land of searing heat and luscious paddy fields—which then evokes her thoughts of Marguerite Duras’s 1975 film India Song that she loved as a young woman: ‘là-bas, il y a les rizières… Une femme danse en moi, danse, danse. India Song’ (p. 8). This nod to her youth establishes the temporal wanderings of Rakotoson’s writing project from the outset of the narrative, while the conflation she makes between the verdant landscape of Madagascar and Duras’s interpretation of India, two concepts textually separated only by ellipses that symbolize her train of thought, is somewhat problematic because 11 Schwerdtner, p. 177.

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these are two very different geographic spaces with hugely contrasting histories. She demonstrates more critical awareness in the following paragraph, when she encounters a middle-aged French bureaucrat on the plane who displays a derogatory attitude towards Madagascar, complaining about the lack of space in the cramped cabin and exclaiming sarcastically ‘on est bien à Madagascar’ (p. 9). While the narratorprotagonist is hostile towards such an openly condescending man who believes that he is superior to others around him simply because he is from France and they are from Madagascar, she is also aware of her own European privilege, and the political power this automatically grants her: ‘je me reconnais européenne, je fustige et je glisse, sûre de mon pouvoir… (p. 9). Rakotoson frequently employs ellipses throughout Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar to represent her constant and critical internal reflections; here, they seem to suggest her unease regarding her social and economic privilege, and she wonders why she has more authority than Malagasy people, simply because she lives in Europe. Positionality thus operates as a further indicator of her outsider status. Arriving in Antananarivo, she is met by her old friend Andry who drives her back to the house he shares with his wife Noro, and where Michèle is staying for the duration of her trip. She is elated to rediscover the city of her childhood, marvelling at the fertile land and the large villas on the outskirts of the city. As they approach the city centre, however, she is suddenly struck by such an open display of poverty, emphasized by a triad of clauses centred on verbs of action, which build up to create a negative image of the crowded urban landscape witnessed through a Eurocentric lens: ‘dans les rues adjacentes, la population grouille, les enfants courent partout, la population se hâte entre ses divers petits boulots pour survivre’ (p. 30). She is moved emotionally by the precarity, but also by the danger she witnesses, which then triggers in her mind a memory of living in Kinshasa when President Mobutu had been driven out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and when the Rwandan military had stormed the city. Her spatial wanderings across Antananarivo provoke her mental wanderings about other journeys she has made across Africa at different stages of her life, firmly cementing her nomadic status as a wanderer. In addition, the references to Kinshasa and N’Djamena, Chad, also highlight her pan-African affiliations. These initial spatial wanderings in Madagascar are mirrored on a much greater scale by the forced mass displacement of her enslaved ancestors to work on the plantations of Réunion and Mauritius and

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build transport networks there, a poignant realization she makes earlier in the text. On the plane, she sits next to a young French boy of Malagasy parents who is ‘returning home’ to Madagascar for the first time. She describes the Malagasy community, whose ancestors ‘furent mis dans des bateaux, pour construire les chemins de fer de l’Océan Indien’ (p. 11), as stateless nomads, and the three-fold repetition of the term ‘apatrides’ (‘ils sont apatrides depuis des générations, apatrides en France, apatrides à Madagascar, invisibles de toute façon’, p. 11) reveals her empathy towards those who do not share the same degree of political privilege that she now enjoys. Athough she is ‘une errante’, wandering between different geographic spaces and never firmly putting down roots, she is not stateless and never has been, even when she was first exiled to France because she was able to build a life there. Unlike so many, she now has the right to travel; she has the right to write; she has the right to express her freedom. Despite her privileged, bourgeois status, however, she feels overwhelmed when first travelling back to Andry’s house, because the sites that were once familiar to her now seem completely alien. She admits to herself that her perpetual errance, provoked by her forced departure from Madagascar, has been a source of anxiety for her. In her own words, her initial departure threw her into ‘un no man’s land perpétuel, peuplé de pages noircies tout au long des pauses et des haltes, dans tous ces lieux où [elle a] vécu deux jours, trois jours, une semaine, un mois, vingt ans’ (p. 30). The accumulation of time phrases at the end of this passage, which are united by commas rather than conjunctions to build up to a point of culmination, reveals her acute frustration at her inability to fully settle anywhere, despite the length of time spent in one particular place. Moreover, her experiences are described negatively in terms of erasure and blank space, further reinforcing the sense of absence afforded to her by her perpetual travel. Her experiences thus lie in stark contrast to the theoretical discourse surrounding errance. In Poétique de la Relation, Glissant explains that the concept advocates a decentring of the individual who is open to multiple and diverse identities. According to Glissant: La pensée de l’errance n’est ni apolitique ni antinomique d’une volonté d’identité, laquelle n’est après tout que la recherche d’une liberté dans son entour. Si elle contredit aux intolérances territoriales, à la prédation de la racine unique (qui rend si difficiles aujourd’hui les démarches identitaires), c’est parce que, dans la poétique de la Relation, l’errant qui n’est ni le voyageur, ni le découvreur, ni le conquérant, cherche à connaître la

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totalité du monde et sait déjà qu’il ne l’accomplira jamais – et qu’en cela réside la beauté menacée du monde.12

In other words, for Glissant, errance is not so much about rejecting the concept of rooted identity, but rather about rejecting the notion that there can only be one rooted identity. In this passage Glissant advocates a spatial and identitarian openness, distinguishing between wandering and other forms of travel that seek to pin down rather than open up. While for Glissant, then, wandering across multiple geographic spaces enables an individual to form an endless number of new identities that are productive in the construction of a new self, Rakotoson’s literary persona fails to find errance a generative process, because, as a woman in a ‘no man’s land perpétuel’, she first must free herself from the fixed and rigid gendered identity that has been pinned onto her by others, and reclaim her own individual sense of self. This is particularly difficult for Rakotoson’s protagonist, though. After being exiled from Madagascar, she spent 20 years trying to refashion a version of herself to adapt to life in France, where she was obliged to ‘faire partie d’une manière ou d’une autre de son histoire, y trouver une définition d’[elle]-même’ (p. 38). The implications of being forced to supplant one history for another are particularly fraught, given the colonial framework in which she was operating: she had to pass from being part of a history of colonial oppression and subjugation in Madagascar to identifying with the former colonizers themselves in France. Returning to her native land, she must now remake a new model of herself, a Malagasy model, in order to embrace her Madagascan heritage. Her errance around the sites of her childhood in Antananarivo is thus initiated by a transnational errance, as she is driven on by a desire to understand her individual and collective past. At the beginning of her journey, she struggles to comprehend Madagascan life because it is so far removed from French life, and simultaneously so different from the Madagascar of her childhood, and she continuously dissects the social problems she witnesses, be they poor transport systems, a lack of sanitation and clean water, or a penury of electricity. She is acutely aware of her rootless existence; for instance, on arriving at Andry and Vero’s house, she carefully tidies away her belongings, an action she describes as the ‘premier acte des éternels voyageurs’ who seek to pin themselves down to compensate for their lack of roots, even if only for a 12 Glissant, p. 33.

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brief period (p. 38). This action then prompts her to reflect on her own relationship with concepts of movement, rejecting the term ‘immigrée’ that does not correspond to her own reality because she does not have a specific point of departure or point of arrival. She is a lexical wanderer: she has no fixed identity, and neither does she claim a fixed term with which to define her identity. Being in constant displacement between different locales creates an extreme anxiety within her because she is not able to anchor herself to one particular social or cultural framework. She wonders ‘mais où s’arrimer et à quoi, pour ne pas dériver trop loin quand on est en déplacement constant?’ (p. 38). The nautical semantic field here, represented by the verbs ‘s’arrimer’ and ‘dériver’, reveals her obsession with travel and movement. Such rhetorical questions are recurrent in the text as the narrator endeavours to make sense of who she is and where she comes from. As she wanders across the capital city in search of clues to help her reposition her gendered and culturally ambiguous identity, she undergoes cross-cultural encounters with people from a range of social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. These meetings disorientate her; she thus inhabits an ‘unhomely space’, which provokes within her an ‘estranging sense of relocation of home and world that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations’, to quote Homi Bhabha.13 What these encounters reveal above all is her complex relationship with language, with both French and Malagasy. Listening to the news on the radio in Andry’s house, she is struck by the code switching that takes place between the two languages, and interprets this linguistic play not as a sign of intelligence, nor even a daily reality, but as a lack of education, and specifically a lack of professional training in radio broadcasting because the presenters are unable to pitch their programmes to a specific audience: ‘est-ce parce qu’ils n’ont pas de formation ou autre chose?’ (p. 41). She then remembers how, as a child, she would mock Malagasy people who used French between themselves as a symbol of their supposed superiority; although the official linguistic policy in the years immediately following independence was one of bilingualism, French continued to dominate among the political and intellectual elite, and even today there exists a clear linguistic divide between the urban and rural populations, the former communicating predominantly in French and the latter in Malagasy.14 She would call these people ‘les 13 Bhabha, p. 9. 14 Sellström, p. 57.

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Blancs en papier’ (p. 41), inverting the racial taunts used by the French against the Malagasy to assert her own superiority. Rakotoson adds into the text the insult in Malagasy (‘vazaha taratasy’) as a sign of her desire to reconnect with the language. It is somewhat ironic that as a child, she considered people from Madagascar who spoke in French to be ‘empruntés, emphatiques’ (p. 41), and yet, as an adult, she has dedicated her life to writing novels and plays primarily in French, the colonial language. She does show some awareness of the irony of her linguistic situation later in the text when conversing with Randria, the young man she drives to Behenjy to sell his madeleine cakes. During this encounter she remembers her bewilderment on struggling to learn French at school as a young girl. French was her language of instruction as she was educated at a French public school, but she was forbidden to speak in French at home by her mother who feared that she would lose touch with her native culture. Rakotoson contrasts this sense of confusion with the sarcastic statement ‘deux décennies après, je suis devenue “écrivain francophone”’ (p. 59). While her use of quotation marks here suggests a reluctance to engage fully with the term ‘Francophone’, she does not provide an alternative term with which to define her writing project. Rakotoson has commented at length in interviews about her decision to publish literary work for the most part in French. In an interview with Monique Hugon in 1992, she explained that in fact she first started writing in Malagasy as a form of political protest before later adopting both languages, but she switched to writing exclusively in French for practical reasons, following her exile to France: ‘mais ce n’est pas évident d’écrire tantôt en français, tantôt en malgache, surtout maintenant que j’habite en France’.15 In recent years, Malagasy has adopted an increasingly prominent position in her writing, even if French remains the principal language in which her texts are written. Discussing her literary career with Christiane Makward in 1999, she defines Malagasy as her ‘langue affective’; in other words, it is the vector through which she expresses the deeper level of her identity that is masked on the surface by French.16 Although the author thus seems to have a reconciliatory relationship with both languages, the same cannot be said for the protagonist of Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar,

15 Monique Hugon, ‘Entre deux langues: entretien avec Michèle Rakotoson’, Notre Librairie, 110 (1992), 76–78 (p. 76). 16 Makward, ‘Entretien avec Michèle Rakotoson’, p. 189.

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who constantly errs ‘entre deux langues, deux rhythmes, deux mémoires’ as she wanders through the physical spaces of the city (p. 44). While for the most part, her physical wanderings across Madagascar, and the internal psychological wanderings through her memories that her travels provoke, aggravate her sense of confusion and disorientation, at times she enjoys the sensation of being torn between two worlds. Neither a tourist discovering a new location for the first time, nor an inhabitant returning home, she is ‘profondément d’ailleurs, d’une autre vie, d’un autre temps…’ (p. 46). Rakotoson conflates time and space here, revealing that her literary persona is unable to fully comprehend the spatial dimensions of Madagascar without first making sense of the island’s complex and traumatic history. She then considers her errance to be an enjoyable form of protection, a shield that enables her to view her homeland more objectively as an outsider: Je redécouvre la magie de l’entre-deux glissée dans tous les interstices… Et je parcours les frémissements que je sens dans les rues, dans les regards que je croise de temps en temps, ceux des passants qui jettent un coup d’œil discret, sans jamais insister, extrême politesse et insolence qui se refuse. (p. 46)

This honest reflection is reminiscent of Said’s comments about exile being a productive paradigm of mobility that privileges objectivity and detachment, and points towards the similarities that exist between errance and exile. Perhaps, in Rakotoson’s case, errance can be interpreted as a specific form of exile, one that positions her as a social, linguistic, and cultural outsider, but simultaneously enables her to document the country’s forgotten (post)colonial history and bear witness to contemporary suffering in a bid to spotlight the poverty and precarity faced by the inhabitants of the island. Errance Through Time Michèle’s spatial wanderings across Madagascar are closely intertwined with her wanderings through time, as she is directly confronted with suppressed memories of her family history. These memories in turn trigger an affective and embodied desire to reconstruct the history of the island—a history from which she poignantly feels mutilated because of her prolonged absence: ‘pourquoi en moi cette impression étrange d’être dans et hors de l’histoire? Peut-être suis-je restée trop longtemps

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à l’étranger, tout en cultivant l’image de chez moi’ (p. 116). In this context, it is productive to analyse the complex relationship between Rakotoson’s textual self and individual and collective histories through the lens of errance, because while Glissant’s aesthetic is one of diversity, multiplicity, and celebration—which does not necessarily correspond to the experiences narrated in Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar—his imagination ‘is constructed around an unstable conception of time and space’, as J. Michael Dash points out.17 In contrast, other modalities of displacement, such as exile and nomadism, do not explicitly compare how movements through space impact upon movements through time, although Rosi Braidotti does explain that nomadic consciousness involves ‘the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes’,18 thus suggesting some sort of loose connection between time and space. Schwerdtner reads this elision between time and space in the narrative as a predominantly positive process of renewal and self-generation that allows the narrator-protagonist ‘non plus à vivre le présent sous le signe du passé, mais plutôt à tenter de “translater” le passé (d’en assurer la “réalisation effective”) dans l’actualité d’aujourd’hui’.19 While Schwerdtner’s observations ring true in terms of how Michèle attempts to fill her own lacunae of historical knowledge about Madagascar, learning about the island’s colonial past in order to better comprehend the postcolonial present, they seem to reflect less accurately her personal journey through her childhood memories. On the contrary, she finds it extremely painful to be constantly reminded of her bitter-sweet childhood, particularly given that her parents are no longer alive to share these memories with her. Her mother’s absence strikes her as soon as she arrives at the airport; she subconsciously looks for her mother in the arrivals hall before remembering with sadness that this ritual will never be repeated, and her grief is represented textually by a series of short, simple sentences that culminate in a single word (the deictic ‘ici’ followed by an ellipsis), as her devastation prevents her from expressing 17 J. Michael Dash, ‘Exile and Recent Literature’, in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Volume 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions, ed. by A. James Arnold (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1994), pp. 451–61 (p. 453). 18 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 22. 19 Schwerdtner, p. 172.

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her sentiments more articulately: ‘il manque un élément important dans le rituel d’arrivée. Ni elle, ni mon père ne seront plus jamais là. Leur mort me saute à la figure. En France, elle était virtuelle. Ici…’ (p. 18). She continuously recalls happy moments spent with her mother as she reacquaints herself with the urban landscape of Antananarivo. In one such episode, she makes a trip with Vero to the local market to buy some fabric to give to Noro the dressmaker to get a dress made, and she is immediately transported back to her youth. In wistful tones, she remembers visiting the market with her mother and other female family members in preparation for a local celebration or festival: Je me retrouve dans un univers connu, celui de mon enfance entre ma mère et mes tantes, les couturières pour les jours de fêtes, la machine à coudre qui ronronne, ma grand-mère qui maugrée car je n’ai jamais su faire un ourlet… (pp. 72–73)

Rakotoson’s sentence structure here differs greatly to the previous example, and many clauses are added together with commas rather than conjunctions, suggesting that the narrator is becoming overwhelmed by the thoughts of her childhood swirling around in her mind. Gender issues are salient here: it is notable that all the characters associated with the domestic chores of sewing, buying clothes, and looking after the children are women. Being obliged to adhere to strict gender norms continues to be a pressing concern for Michèle in the present as she is highly aware of the need for women to conform to conventional ideals of beauty in both France and Madagascar, but, simultaneously, she plays into these gendered stereotypes. She admits guiltily that she has neglected to take care of her physical appearance—‘là-bas, je n’ai jamais trouvé le temps de m’enduire de crème le visage et le corps et de le masser longtemps, jusqu’à ce que la peau brille, lisse et douce…’—but that she enjoys being made to feel ‘princière, la plus belle’ at the dressmakers (p. 71). Her mental peregrinations through her early life in Madagascar take her a step further back in time as she discovers unknown elements of her family history for the first time, realizing just how greatly her personal and collective memories inform her own sense of identity. One of the most striking examples is the chapter that bears the simple title ‘Histoire’, playing on the duplicate meanings of the French term that refers both to ‘history’ and ‘story’, and thus complicating notions of historical truth and objectivity. The chapter is dedicated to her great-grandfather, the image of whom has haunted her since she began to write the book the

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readers are holding in their hands. Rakotoson then proceeds to write a biographical account of her ancestors, weaving national and family histories as she explains how her family members lived through key moments of Madagascan history: her great-aunt was private tutor to Queen Ranavolona III, the last queen of Madagascar, and her greatgrandfather experienced the French military intervention of 1896 that formalized the beginning of French colonization. In this instance, the biographical genre can be added to Sarah Davies Cordova’s reading of the mix of genres in Rakotoson’s text; Cordova posits that the text ‘moves back and forth between autobiography, diary, travel journal, and an alternative history of Madagascar’, but she overlooks the important biographical elements that are interspersed within the narrative. 20 These are further emphasized by the photographs of her family that punctuate the writing, helping to situate her close family members within the lineage of her ancestry. However, Rakotoson does not include captions to explain who these images represent, leaving the reader to infer the identity of the person in the photograph from the surrounding text, and nor does she expand on the origin of these photographs. By not explicitly naming the identities of the photographed figures, Rakotoson disrupts the association between representation and reality, history and truth, and memory and fiction, and points towards a need to re-evaluate our understanding of different forms of personal histories. Photographs of old buildings, landscapes, coins, and stamps, which are often placed at the borders of the page or at the end of a diary entry, add an additional collective layer to her voyage through her genealogy. As Ravi argues, Rakotoson manipulates the page layout to reveal her commitment to uncovering forgotten histories: ‘the page layout is so conceived as to feature the paratext (proverbs and photographs) in the form of a palimpsest to reflect the layered colonial and postcolonial histories of Madagascar’. 21 This revisiting of Madagascar’s historical trajectory by piecing together her own family history becomes particularly uncomfortable for the narrator during her visit to Ambatomanga, where she is furious to find her cousins living in her grandparents’ old house. Initially 20 Sarah Davies Cordova, ‘Re-turning Transgressions from an Exi(s)l-ander: Michèle Rakotoson’s Juillet au pays’, Biennial Cultural Constructions Conference, University of Texas at Arlington, 2007, 1–16 (p. 2), [accessed 28 November 2019]. 21 Ravi, ‘Home and the “Failed” City’, p. 301.

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outraged that her grandparents’ personal documents have been thoughtlessly discarded, she eventually finds, in a large trunk in the garage, her grandfather’s old diaries that she devours, eager to discover more about him. She is stunned to find out the existence of two family slaves, dada Rabe and neny Razay, who were eventually sold to two different families. She suddenly becomes acutely aware of her family’s complicity in historical traumas and is flawed by this: ‘au premier abord, les mots semblent simples, c’est un constat, une phrase sans fioritures, juste une ligne. Puis les mots pèsent de plus en plus lourds’ (p. 196). Her complete lack of knowledge about her family’s role in the subjugation of people lower down in the social hierarchy means that she has been unable to position her own past within the national context of the island’s past, which accentuates her disorientation and bewilderment. In an earlier episode in the narrative, she laments the lack of official historical documents and textbooks that could have helped her to better grasp the chronology of historical events within which to situate her family history, asking ‘où sont les livres d’histoire, les explications, les mots qui aident à comprendre?’ (p. 60). These do not exist, according to the narrator, because of the censorship faced by writers and historians in a country ruled for so many years by political dictators. She must therefore wander around her childhood haunts to gain answers to her unrelenting questions, where she is confronted with the most urgent question of all, according to Cordova: ‘what is affirmed and what is denied and buried?’22 As she mentally wanders through pre-colonial society, French colonization, slavery, independence, and the recent political struggles for power, reflecting on how these phenomena have directly affected her own family, she endeavours to think through her own role as a writer and public intellectual in the diffusion of historical knowledge, acknowledging that ‘il faudra un jour éditer et diffuser cette part de notre mémoire pour que cesse la malédiction’ (p. 14). As Buata B. Malela and Cynthia Volanosy Parfait point out, she is subjected to a ‘devoir de mémoire individuel, familial certes, mais qui est transposé à l’échelle nationale, mondiale, moins pour une simple reconstitution que pour prévenir les immondices à venir’, 23 suggesting that Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar should be read primarily as a 22 Cordova, p. 11. 23 Buata B. Malela and Cynthia Volanosy Parfait, ‘Ethos de la conteuse dans le discours littéraire de Michèle Rakotoson et Scholastique Mukasonga’, Agon, 8.11 (2016), 372–407 (p. 392).

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politically engaged text that actively seeks to prevent the same historical errors from occurring in the future. The narrator-protagonist’s errance through historical time is mirrored textually by the temporal structure of the narrative. The novel opens in 2002 as she prepares for her first voyage back to Madagascar and closes with an epilogue written when she has returned to France. The epigraph is dated 2007 but refers to political events that took place in 2002, such as the mass strikes that brought ‘un million cinq cent mille personnes dans la rue’ (p. 203). Rakotoson thus blurs the linear chronology that is habitually associated with travel narratives, incorporating flashbacks and flash forwards into her writing to manipulate readers’ expectations and reclaim a degree of agency. Her desire to play with narrative time is also suggestive of an identity that is constantly in flux, as she has not yet succeeded in reconciling her French and Malagasy pasts to create a united identity in the present within the space of the text. This is despite the numerous references to Malagasy culture through the insertion of songs, proverbs, and poems. For Cordova, the fact that Rakotoson immediately translates each excerpt into French means that the French translation acts as a refrain that visually echoes the extract in Malagasy, emphasizing the musicality of Rakotoson’s writing and ‘allowing for the temporal perspectives of the past to be present on the page, in the current-ness of her diary’. 24 Yet a close reading of the text seems to suggest that the two languages—and thus the two facets of her past identity—are constantly competing with each other for attention. The quotations in Malagasy are offset and appear in grey blurred font to emphasize their uniqueness, but the French translation of these cultural items is then immediately reincorporated into the conventional French text. Even though Rakotoson’s narrator strongly desires to refashion and reclaim her past Malagasy identity, her Frenchness constantly wins out, reminding her of her difference as a Malagasy woman returning to Madagascar but who possesses a strong French cultural and linguistic heritage. Errance and Gender: A ‘No-Woman’s-Land’? Her sense of otherness on her return is heightened by the mismatch between the gendered identity she has fashioned for herself in France as 24 Cordova, p. 4.

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a successful writer and journalist, and the gendered identity she is forced to adopt in Madagascar. Gender disparities in terms of education and employment opportunities are prominent in contemporary Madagascar, despite the recent progress in support of women’s rights by politicians, public figures, and political organizations. Many women continue to have few options beyond the domestic sphere, and limited access to health care, sanitation, and education, particularly in poor rural areas. According to the 2018 Human Development Report produced by the United Nations Development Programme, Madagascar ranked 161 out of 189 countries in 2017 for its gender equality; women earned considerably less than men, although the estimated gross national income per capita was extremely low for both genders ($1173 for women compared to $1544 for men), and the female share of employment in senior and middle management positions was equally low, at 24.5 per cent. 25 Rakotoson calls out these gender inequalities in her writing, depicting Madagascar as an island where women are not granted the same rights and liberties as men. For Rakotoson, Madagascar is what I term a ‘no-woman’s-land’, a land where women’s presence must be concealed and erased. The narrator is witness to the social and economic misery faced by many Malagasy women when she first arrives at Andry’s house. She is greeted by Andry’s two female servants Vao and Rasoa who have been responsible for the upkeep of the house for the last 30 years. The fact that Andry and his wife can afford to employ servants to run their house for them positions them firmly within the privileged echelons of middle-class society, like the narrator. Michèle feels uneasy on seeing Vao and Rasoa again—although they are the same age as her, they could not be more removed from her in terms of social status. She attempts to convince herself that these servants are better off than the other women she encounters because at least they are respected and well looked after, but she is acutely aware that their sole function is to serve others who are higher up the social hierarchy: ‘j’ai beau me dire qu’elles sont mieux loties que les autres, sont correctement payées, ont leur logement, elles représentent quotidiennement la misère, celle qui oblige à loger chez les autres et les server pour survivre. L’esclavage’ (p. 37). The alliteration of the near homonyms ‘server’ and ‘survivre’ reinforces through sound 25 United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report, Madagascar,

[accessed 2 December 2019].

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the association that Rakotoson makes between the women’s attempts to get by and their role as serving their employers. Moreover, the explicit nod to the island’s traumatic history through the use of the single-word sentence ‘l’esclavage’ provides a further example of how Rakotoson not only interweaves the past and the present, but also how she demonstrates that the present is simply a repetition of the past within a different sociopolitical context. This ‘repeated past’ of the present day is particularly difficult to negotiate for women such as Vao and Rasoa who recognize their own complicity in sustaining a system of slavery and subordination, but who are forced to display a ‘bonheur manifeste’ in fulfilling their orders for fear of losing their home and livelihood (p. 37). It is noticeable that the travellers Rakotoson meets during her trip are predominantly male figures; for the most part, the women remain in the domestic space, simply waiting patiently for their husbands to return home. For instance, on her way to Behenjy she gives a lift to 30-year-old Randria, a young man who demonstrated remarkable courage and strength of mind when fighting against the dictatorship. The narrator meets many other men like Randria who ‘se débrouillent avec le peu qu’ils ont’—for Randria, this means building up his own farm in order to provide for his family (p. 58). In addition, when Michèle travels by bus to Ambatomanga, she is mostly accompanied by men who are returning to their native village for a local family festival. The passengers include two young civil servants dressed in elegant suits and a carpenter who claims to be a descendant of one of the workers of Queen Ranavolona I’s lover Jean Laborde. Travel means something completely different for these men than it does for Rakotoson’s narrator, who uses travel primarily as a means for her own cultural and intellectual interest. For Randria, it is a source of survival, as he travels in search of a market to sell his madeleine cakes to be able to earn a living. For the men journeying to Ambatomanga, travel equates to fulfilling their family duties and reconnecting with the ancient traditions of their ancestors. The chapter entitled ‘La petite garagiste’, however, provides an exception to the absence of women employed in professional activities in the narrative, and instead offers an honest and poignant account of the specifically gendered obstacles to life in Madagascar. Michèle meets the young woman who owns the open-air garage when she takes Noro’s car to be repaired, and she is struck by the obvious precarity of her existence. The family of nine live alongside the three employees of the garage in a makeshift dwelling composed of ‘quatre tôles qui servent de maison’ (p. 95). The garage owner then tells Michèle about the struggles

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she faced in her early life: she had no option but to flee her native village in the countryside to escape from forced marriage at the age of 15. She then became a servant in a large house before leaving to get married aged 20, and by the time she was 25 she had seven children. She succeeded in building the garage business with her husband but was obliged to let many of the workers go following the political crisis of 2002, which had driven up prices, meaning that it was impossible for her to continue to pay the workers. Despite such hardships, or indeed because of them, she is a resourceful and hard-working woman, determined that her children should receive a better education than she ever did. The conversation is interrupted by the narrator’s own reflections about the education system in Madagascar, in which she deplores the extremely high illiteracy rate in the country and condemns the school system as unfit for purpose, acknowledging that ‘pour avoir le pouvoir, il faut avoir fait ses études en France ou même aux États-Unis et surtout faire partie des bonnes familles’ (p. 98)—something that this poor garage owner would never be able to do. The narrator then thinks back to her own schooling, and the declension of the Latin noun ‘rosa’, meaning ‘flower’ is interspersed throughout her recollections, acting as a reminder of the narrator’s privilege because she received a good education and was taught Latin (pp. 98–99). The contrast between Latin, which denotes cultural and intellectual superiority, and the vernacular Malagasy language in which the garage owner is speaking, once again reinforces the significant class divide between the narrator and the other women she encounters during her travels. Despite the difficulties of the garage owner’s life, then, she seems relatively calm and contented with her lot. She is proud to be engaged in professional activities, not so that she can afford material luxuries, but rather to ensure that her children ‘vont à l’école et n’ont pas encore les angoisses du chômage’ (p. 100). In a way, Rakotoson envies the simple life of this young woman, and wonders whether Malagasy society should reject the Western, capitalist, and consumerist model of living and, instead, adopt a more family-oriented approach to life: ‘et si nous nous étions trompés en immitant l’Occident, en n’ayant de modèle de société que celui-là? Et s’il fallait se pencher sur ce que propose la petite garagiste et les siens?’ (p. 101). Here, the narrator seems to identify with the Malagasy community through the use of the inclusive first-person subject pronoun ‘nous’, distancing herself from the West and suggesting that she too is complicit in trying to emulate Western social and familial models. This is somewhat ironic, given that she has spent the last 20

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years living in France where she has lived a successful and comfortable existence, despite the initial pain of her political exile from Madagascar, although it does demonstrate a degree of critical awareness of her own positionality. In France, she succeeded in constructing her womanhood as an emancipated and empowered female writer and journalist, yet on returning to Madagascar she struggles to reposition herself as the same powerful woman because of the patriarchal norms to which women are continuously subjected. Even if, as Danielle N. Andrianjafy suggests, middle-class women such as Rakotoson were instrumental in the revival of the French-language literary scene in Madagascar during the 1980s, 26 which is suggestive of their own intellectual and social power, they continuously brush up against a system of patriarchal domination that reduces women to their domestic and child-bearing roles and removes any opportunity for self-development. Even the narrator’s mother, who was an elegant, confident, and self-assured young woman, became crushed under the yoke of patriarchy and was not able to escape her gendered oppression: ‘se ratatinant sur elle-même, [elle était] perdue dans ses problèmes d’argent, puis de survie, perdue dans une course de vitesse dans laquelle elle était vaincue d’avance, personne ne lui ayant donné les clefs pour comprendre’ (p. 88). Through these very personal examples, Rakotoson provides a powerful critique of a society that equates masculinity to power and success, and femininity to subjugation and oppression. Conclusion Towards the end of Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar, Rakotoson seems to conceptualize exile and errance as two binary, polarized concepts. The narrator claims that she has specifically chosen to embrace the nomadic lifestyle in order to prevent her exilic experiences from defining her sense of self: ‘ici, je suis chez moi, ce chez moi que j’ai recréé dans l’errance, pour refuser l’exil, livre après livre’ (p. 117). In this instance, errance thus seems to be a form of protection for her, a shield against a monolithic, imposed, and static identity that would bring about her cultural isolation, and she explicitly acknowledges here the significance of writing in fighting against her exile, opening herself up to 26 Danielle N. Andrianjafy, ‘Une septuagénaire toujours jeune’, Notre Librairie, 110 (1992), 99–104 (pp. 103–104).

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new ways of being and thinking through the reading and writing process. Yet at other times in the narrative, her spatial and temporal errance seems to further cement her exilic status, as she becomes increasingly aware that the identity she has fashioned for herself during her 20-year period of exile in France is at odds with the identity she would be forced to adopt were she to return permanently to Madagascar. Rakotoson’s narrator experiences errance as a form of linguistic, gendered, and cultural exile, meaning that postcolonial theories that posit errance as a positive and emancipatory model of identity construction do not quite hold up for female Francophone writers such as Rakotoson. It is striking that Rakotoson is the only author in this corpus to discuss her exile in terms of errance within the space of the text, and this is perhaps linked to her status as a political exile in the 1980s—having been forced to leave Madagascar because of her opposition to the political regime at the time, she is eager to reclaim some degree of agency through her subsequent displacements and distance herself from the traumatic memories of her initial exile. Ultimately, writing Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar before returning to settle permanently in Madagascar was, for Rakotoson, ‘une sorte d’exorcisme’ which allowed her to transcend her exilic status and adopt a reworked model of Malagasy identity. 27

27 Virginie Andriamirado, ‘Michèle Rakotoson: “L’écriture est devenue ma patrie”’, Africultures, 7 June 2011, [accessed 4 December 2019].

chapter six

Return as Exile in Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père Return as Exile in Véronique Tadjo’s

‘There’s no place like home.’

This emblematic phrase has become a key referent in Western popular culture—think of L. Frank Baum’s legendary children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), or the rock song by American band 4 Non Blondes. It encapsulates humanity’s emotional connection to the idea of home and considers geographies as emotionally invested social spaces. For Susan Stanford Friedman, the phrase is indicative of our desire for familiarity and comfort.1 She alters its meaning by placing emphasis on the negative particle ‘no’, concluding that home is an imagined concept that can never really exist: ‘home is utopia—a no place, a nowhere, an imaginary space longed for, always already lost in the very formation of the idea of home’.2 This questioning of the very meaning of home is a central trope in Véronique Tadjo’s autofictional narrative, Loin de mon père. For Tadjo’s Franco-Ivorian protagonist Nina, home is not a fixed and stable entity. Is her home Côte d’Ivoire, where she spent the formative years of her childhood? Or rather, is it France, the country in which she has chosen to settle as an adult? Is her return to Côte d’Ivoire to bury her Ivorian father, after living in the diaspora in Paris for six years to work as a professional photographer, a return home, or is it a form of exile, rendered all the more dangerous because it occurs in the aftermath of civil war? An intertextual collage of prose interspersed with extracts of documents, letters, and emails from Nina’s family members, Tadjo’s 1 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Bodies on the Move: A Poetics of Home and Diaspora’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 23.2 (2004), 189–212 (p. 192). 2 Friedman, p. 192.

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narrative of return is written in the third person, marking a break from the other texts analysed in this study that conform more closely to autobiographical conventions. The text is structured in two parts: the longer ‘Livre Un’ recounts her arrival in Abidjan and her subsequent cultural exile on being directly confronted with an array of religions, languages, and customs that are no longer familiar to her; while ‘Livre Deux’ depicts her gradual integration into Ivorian life as she prepares for her father’s funeral ceremonies. Although she does include several culturally specific lexical items referring to food and clothing, Tadjo employs the same direct, stripped-back, and accessible style of writing that characterizes her œuvre, thus enabling many Francophone readers to identify with Nina’s plight, regardless of their own cultural, geographical, or familial contexts. In Loin de mon père, Tadjo continues to develop the theme of exile in the same direction as Michèle Rakotoson does in Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar, as explored in the previous chapter. The narrative reveals that, paradoxically, exile can be experienced when migrating back to the country of birth, and that while a return is possible, it is undoubtedly challenging and raises as many questions about home and belonging as the initial departure. The two novels by Tadjo and Rakotoson fit within the trend of mostly male Francophone authors who write about a return to the homeland as a form of exile, a practice begun by Aimé Césaire with Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and continued to this day with texts by contemporary authors including Dany Laferrière and Alain Mabanckou. 3 Importantly, in writing return as exile, Tadjo (and Rakotoson) breaks this gendered literary pattern, which could be interpreted as a method of challenging gender inequalities through her writing. This chapter takes as its guiding methodological framework the psychologist Peter Adler’s five-stage process of culture shock as a lens through which to consider Nina’s complex emotional turmoil on arriving in Abidjan.4 Adler’s framework is not a specifically postcolonial 3 Dany Laferrière offers a similar plot to Tadjo in L’Énigme du retour (Montreal: Boréal, 2009). He narrates the ordeals of a man returning to Haiti after 30 years to bury his father. Alain Mabanckou’s Lumières de Pointe-Noire (Paris: Seuil, 2013) is an autobiographical account of his return to the Republic of the Congo that he left in 1989. 4 Peter Adler, ‘The Transitional Experience: An Alternative View of Culture Shock’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 15.4 (1975), 13–23.

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or gendered model of cultural exile, and the analysis also reveals its limitations, namely that it is usually used to map the experiences of individuals encountering a new culture for the first time. Yet Nina experiences similar sentiments of bewilderment, albeit at different stages of the return process. The narrative thus demonstrates that culture shock is not only experienced when individuals leave the homeland to settle in a new country, but may also occur when they return to their country of origin following a long absence. Her culture shock is rendered all the more complex by her experiences of diasporic life in Paris as a cosmopolitan young woman with a more privileged status than many an exiled individual. Although she believes she has successfully integrated into French life, she does not seem to engage with the diasporic community living in Paris. As Nico Israel points out, one way in which the paradigm of diaspora distinguishes itself from exile is in its ability to sustain a ‘minority group solidarity’ with others from the same diasporic community, 5 but Nina prefers to privilege the French over the Ivorian community, cutting herself off from the people, culture, and traditions of Côte d’Ivoire. Indeed, she regards these communities as discrete entities and does not acknowledge any overlap between them. She therefore reproduces French colonial perspectives in a postcolonial context, thereby enabling a critique to be made of postcolonial theories of displacement that fail to break or challenge the power relations between France and its former African colonies and that in fact reinforce the imbalances between the former colonizer and colonized. Analysing the overlaps and disparities between the paradigms of diaspora and exile and how they intersect with divisions of gender, it becomes apparent that it is Nina’s diasporic experience in France that aggravates her sentiments of estrangement and alienation when she returns to Abidjan, as she continuously compares the two locations, and this leads her to examine life in Abidjan from a Western, French perspective. Nina’s experiences act as a reminder of one of the key overarching arguments of this study: exile is not only a territorial displacement but also a state of mind.

5 Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 3.

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Contact: ‘Un gouffre nous sépare’ Adler’s transitional framework, also termed a U-curve model, begins with the ‘contact’ phase. On arriving in a new location, the individual ‘may be captivated and enchanted’ with the unfamiliar culture while still ‘view[ing] the new environment from the insularity of his or her own ethnocentrism’.6 However, Loin de mon père demonstrates the limits of Adler’s model, since Nina’s initial encounter with Abidjan within the space of the text is not her first experience of the city or its culture; nor is this cultural re-encounter exciting, but unsettling and troubling. The text opens with Nina’s plane journey to Abidjan, during which she reflects with extreme sadness on her personal grief following the death of her father, representative of an equally acute bewilderment at the demise of Côte d’Ivoire following the civil war that erupted in 2002. The lack of verbs in the text’s stark opening sentence—‘impossible de dormir’ (p. 13)—accurately depicts Nina’s emotional state as she is unable to articulate her thoughts more fully, and this opening line portrays her physical embodiment of her personal trauma and its collective reverberations. She even dreams that she is not allowed to enter the country, so great are her fears and anxieties about her return to a country that is no longer home: ‘pour qui te prends-tu? tu n’es rien. Ta maison a été rasée. Tes parents n’existent plus. Personne ne veut de toi, ici. Va-t’en!’ (p. 14). In a departure from the detached voice of the omniscient narrator, the reader learns of Nina’s heightened emotional response towards her return to the destroyed city; this rapid change in narrative voice is indicative of the sudden cultural and emotional upheaval experienced by the protagonist. Nina feels estranged from Abidjan and no longer recognizes the city when driving through the war-torn streets to reach the family home. Marzia Caporale points out that this estrangement is visible in the very language Tadjo employs to describe the return of her protagonist; her return is depicted in more neutral language as an arrival ‘à la maison’ (p. 13), rather than the more affective phrase ‘chez elle’.7 A Kristevan analysis is relevant here to elucidate notions of estrangement. For Julia 6 Adler, p. 16. 7 Marzia Caporale, ‘Language and Discourse in the Narrative of the Postcolonial Self in Loin de mon père’, in Écrire, traduire, peindre: Véronique Tadjo: Writing, Translating, Painting, ed. by Sarah Davies Cordova and Désiré K. Wa Kabwe-Segatti (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2016), pp. 157–72 (p. 160).

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Kristeva, individuals must first accept their own innate strangeness before being able to confront the strangeness of their surroundings and of other people. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, she explains in Étrangers à nous-mêmes (1988) that ‘l’étrange est en moi’, and she then goes a step further to suggest that if we are all strangers to ourselves, the concept of external strangeness breaks down: ‘si je suis étranger, il n’y a pas d’étrangers’.8 Nina, however, does not recognize her own internal strangeness, as Kristeva would indicate; rather, she feels estranged from life in Côte d’Ivoire because of her previous spatial and cultural distance from the country, an indicator of her Eurocentricity. It is striking that the narrative action takes place entirely in Côte d’Ivoire. On occasions the reader is privy to phone calls between Nina and her French boyfriend Frédéric with whom she lives in Paris, but these are always recounted from Nina’s perspective in Abidjan and the narration never moves to France to explore how Nina’s departure impacts on Frédéric’s daily life. Moreover, although Nina’s initial departure to France during her early adulthood is evoked implicitly when she regrets her long absence from her birth country, the lack of overt discussion of the reasons behind this initial migration and its psychological implications suggests that she perceives her return to Côte d’Ivoire as more distressing than her original departure. France is now her home, and her exile occurs on returning to Abidjan, not on moving to France. Her sentiments of exile are compounded by the fear that the realities of civil war will betray her bitter-sweet, childhood memories: ‘le pays n’était plus le même. La guerre l’avait balafré, défiguré, blessé’ (p. 13). Here, her country of origin is personified as being slashed and wounded by war; this personification demonstrates the enormous human costs of the conflict that will irreparably alter the future course of the country. The emotive verbs of violence, ‘balafrer’, ‘défigurer’, and ‘blesser’, underscore Nina’s own concern for and affection towards her birth country, even though it is simultaneously unfamiliar to her. The complexity of Nina’s situation is also underlined when her return is explicitly described as exile of a violent and unexpected kind: ‘l’exil la gifla de plein fouet et se jeta sur elle’ (p. 14). Here, exile adopts the position of the subject of the sentence, taking full control of Nina, the powerless object who has no agency over her situation. The personification of the condition of exile, which is experienced as slapping Nina

8 Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988), p. 284.

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with full force, demonstrates its confrontational and aggressive manner as Nina is unexpectedly assaulted by exile that pounces on her. As Loin de mon père was published in 2010, it is clear that any reference to civil war in the text denotes the First Ivorian Civil War. This conflict broke out on 19 September 2002 following a decade of political unrest after the death in 1993 of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Côte d’Ivoire’s first president since independence. As Amy Baram Reid observes in her afterword to her English-language translation of the text, published in 2014, the narrative is located in a very specific timeframe: remembering her final conversation with her father before his death, Nina references ‘the negotiations that led to a 2007 cease-fire between the government and rebel forces’, but that did not eradicate the very real threat of reprisals.9 Indeed, the country did relapse into another civil war following disputed elections in November 2010. Struggles between forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo (the president at the time) and those who supported former prime minister Alassane Ouattara escalated into a military conflict that was not resolved until April 2011 when Ouattara was announced as the legitimate president; in March 2020 he ruled out standing for a third term, thus reigniting fears that the country would be plunged into another battle for political succession during the October 2020 presidential elections.10 In August 2020, Tadjo joined forces with the Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo and the Cameroonian writer Eugène Ébodé to launch the manifesto ‘Halte à la présidence à vie en Afrique!’, denouncing Ouattara (and other African leaders, including his Guinean counterpart Alpha Condé) for deciding to run again for presidency, a decision that would break constitutional law and would risk imposing new dictatorships in West Africa.11 There were violent clashes between Ouattara’s supporters and opponents in the weeks leading up to the election, worrying signs of political and social polarization in Côte d’Ivoire. Even though the narrative action takes place as the First Ivorian Civil War is coming to an end, war and violence loom heavily throughout the 9 Baram Reid, p. 138. 10 RFI, ‘Cote d’Ivoire: Ouattara Rules Out Third Term, Kicks Off Succession Battle’, RFI, 6 March 2020, [accessed 11 March 2020]. 11 The manifesto was signed on 30 August 2020 and a petition for support was launched on the petition website change.org. See [accessed 8 September 2020].

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text, rendering Abidjan dangerous and unfamiliar. Until the electoral crisis of the 1990s, Côte d’Ivoire was considered a model of economic and political stability for other former French colonies in Africa. The struggle for power between Ouattara and Henri Konan Bédié, a popular member of the governing party, the Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire, brought about many strikes and protests as political reforms were abolished, and popular disaffection began to rise during a period of economic difficulty. In 1995, Bédié won a five-year term, but stability did not last long: on 24 December 1999, General Robert Guéï overthrew Bédié in a military coup and called for new elections to be held in 2000. Guéï rigged the election campaign so that only he and Laurent Gbagbo, leader of the centre-left Front populaire ivoirien, were eligible to stand for re-election in a bid to guarantee his success. Yet Guéï lost out to Gbagbo who became president in October 2000. Tensions between the two politicians came to a head on 19 September 2002 when officers from Guéï’s administration revolted in protest over their demobilization and subsequent loss of pay. This coup escalated into a civil war fought on linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines between the Muslim north and the Christian south. National and ethnic identity became a battleground when Bédié invented the label ‘ivoirité’ in 1995, creating ‘a new taxonomy of belonging’ and distinguishing between ‘Ivoiriens de souche multiséculaire’ and immigrants in order to segregate the population.12 This term also took on a political dimension when Bédié passed a law in 1995 that barred anybody whose parents were not born in Côte d’Ivoire from running for presidency. As Kathrin Heitz explains, these debates about national identity were further complicated by France’s involvement in attempting to curb the violence, revealing that FrancoIvorian tensions were far from being resolved, even after many decades following independence.13 Nina witnesses first-hand how the war is directly affecting the family in Abidjan. She is met by her cousins at the airport, and on the journey back to the family home she is shocked to encounter chaos: military checkpoints cause a standstill on the roads, and her cousin Hervé 12 Siddhartha Mitter, ‘Ebony and Ivoirité: War and Peace in Ivory Coast’, Transition, 12.4 (2003), 30–55 (p. 35). 13 Kathrin Heitz, ‘Through the Prism of the Cinquantenaire: Côte d’Ivoire between Refondation and Houphouët’s Legacy’, in Francophone Africa at Fifty, ed. by Tony Chafer and Alexander Keese (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 219–32 (p. 219).

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suspects that the soldiers are armed. Later in this early chapter of the text, during a family meeting at the house to discuss her father’s funeral arrangements, Nina talks of her concern about the fighting that has taken place on their own street: ‘papa m’a dit que des rebelles se sont battus avec des militaires, juste devant la maison. Il y a eu des échanges de coups de feu et des poursuites’ (p. 26). The impersonal structure at the end of this passage attributes responsibility for this attack to neither party. Tadjo does not make it clear which side of the conflict Nina supports, if any, but rather places emphasis on her bewilderment that the harmonious, peaceful, and economically prosperous country where she had spent a happy childhood has been transformed into a country of greed, corruption, exploitation, and violence. She simply cannot believe how rapidly Abidjan has spiralled out of control, wondering, according to the third-person narrator, ‘était-ce bien là Abidjan, cette ville dans laquelle elle s’etait toujours sentie en sécurité?’ (p. 21). Tadjo shares this sentiment of powerlessness and incredulity, admitting in an interview for TV5Monde in June 2012 that each time she returns to Côte d’Ivoire, she has ‘l’impression d’avoir perdu quelque chose, un pays qu’[elle] connaissai[t] qui a changé radicalement’ because of the civil war.14 Tadjo’s comment here acts as a further indication of the autobiographical status of Loin de mon père, revealing parallels between the legitimate concerns of Tadjo and those of her principal protagonist, and operates as a reminder that war is often a catalyst of exile and displacement, a theme that connects each narrative in this study. Nina’s experience of return in Loin de mon père resonates with Gerise Herndon’s analysis of the return to the homeland, which involves a similar ‘recasting of identity’ to the one that had to be undertaken on first arriving in the country of migration.15 Nina has to undergo a process of adaptation and transformation when she goes back to Côte d’Ivoire, and although the text does not explicitly mention the precise circumstances surrounding her initial departure to France, it can be presumed that she went through a similar process of modification, adapting her identity to conform to French life. Herndon explains that ‘on returning home, the native undergoes a re-migration, not home, but to a state of liminality’, as both the returnee and the country of origin have changed 14 Véronique Tadjo, ‘L’Afrique au long cours’, Journal télévisé, TV5Monde, 15 June 2012, [accessed 11 March 2020] [my transcript]. 15 Herndon, p. 54.

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so greatly that they no longer fit together.16 This is the case for Nina: Côte d’Ivoire has been transformed by war and conflict into a country that is totally alien to her, which greatly exacerbates her feelings of exile. She wonders where she belongs, and muses wistfully: ‘ai-je vraiment perdu mon pays?’ (p. 15). Interestingly, despite her long absence, and the many transformations the country has undergone, she still wants Côte d’Ivoire to be ‘[s]on pays’; the possessive adjective reinforces her underlying emotional connection to the local geographies of her country of birth. Yet she has changed too, and she now has more affective ties to France than to Côte d’Ivoire. Anna-Leena Toivanen remarks that ‘Nina is made to realize that her diasporic life has distanced her from the local realities’,17 causing her to live in a state of liminality on her return. It is significant that it is only upon her return to Côte d’Ivoire that she begins to question her diasporic existence and her comfortable, successful life in Paris, where she thought she had succeeded in putting down roots. For Nina, then, living in the diaspora is not as emancipatory as she had perhaps initially expected; it in fact limits her to a very restrictive and reductive understanding of Ivorian culture and therefore heightens her sentiments of estrangement when she does return to Abidjan. Her specific experiences of diasporic life differ to theoretical discussions that exalt its positive potential. She neither ‘shares a common belonging to a homeland’ that she has left behind, as Peggy Levitt claims diasporans do;18 nor does she ‘regard [herself] as being [one of many] participants in nations that have common ethnic and national traits, identities, and affinities’, in Gabriel Sheffer’s definition of diasporic communities.19 She does not actively seek out other members of Ivorian groups in Paris and does not enjoy the camaraderie of such a community. Nina’s experience of living in France thus has a greater resonance with the paradigm of exile than she first realizes. It engenders a sentiment of non-belonging, but she only understands that she has effectively been living in exile in France later in the text, when she starts to consider staying in Abidjan permanently. At this point in the narrative, though, she believes she 16 Herndon, p. 54. 17 Anna-Leena Toivanen, ‘Diasporic Romances Gone Bad: Impossible Returns to Africa in Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane, Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49.4 (2013), 432–44 (p. 441). 18 Levitt, p. 15. 19 Sheffer, p. 10.

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will return to her home in Paris: when the immigration officer asks her for how long she will stay in the country, she replies that she intends to stay for approximately one month and will return to France as soon as the funeral ceremonies are complete. Elisabeth Snyman comments on the hostility of the officers towards Nina’s presence: their endless questioning and impersonal manner ‘ne fait que renfoncer le sentiment qu’elle éprouve d’être devenue étrangère dans son pays d’origine’. 20 Analysing this episode further, it is noticeable that the officer adopts a more hospitable tone when he realizes she is the daughter of his friend Kouadio, handing over her passport ‘avec un large sourire qu’il voulait complice’ and welcoming her benevolently into the country (p. 17). This incident reinforces the fact that Nina’s Ivorian identity only gains legitimacy through her father; without him, she no longer has any ties to her former homeland. Gender issues are at play here: as a young woman arriving in the country, Nina is treated with condescension, and it is only her filial connection to Kouadio that facilitates a more welcoming exchange with the male officer. Nina is taken aback by such an open display of patriarchy, hesitating before replying to him ‘car elle n’arrivait pas à savoir où il voulait en venir avec toutes ses questions’ (p. 17). Such gender disparities, which are so visible in Côte d’Ivoire and yet so unexpected to Nina, add to her sentiments of exile and non-belonging. Until now, she has led an independent life in France, where patriarchy is manifested differently than in Côte d’Ivoire. Her diasporic experiences in France render her cultural and gendered exile on returning to her homeland even more pronounced. Although Nina yearns to return to France, she is simultaneously nostalgic for the Côte d’Ivoire of her childhood. Paolo Bartoloni points out that the nostalgia and longing that exiled people feel towards their country of origin is not specifically aimed at the country itself, but rather at their memories of their country and their participation in daily life there, and so this return can never actually take place. He asserts: ‘it is not the return to a present, actual home without us that we crave, but the return to a home that already contains us and in which we are already present’ [original emphasis]. 21 This yearning for her childhood memories certainly rings true for Nina, as the text is punctuated by flashbacks 20 Elisabeth Snyman, ‘Loin de mon père de Véronique Tadjo: la transformation du biographique en fiction porteuse d’espoir’, French Studies in Southern Africa, 45 (2015), 217–36 (p. 225). 21 Bartoloni, p. 102.

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to her childhood. Her parents did not always provide a model of a stable family relationship: for instance, she remembers how her parents would argue about her father’s irresponsible attitude towards money. Overall, however, it appears that she lived a carefree childhood among a close-knit, middle-class family, and that her early years in Abidjan were safe and enjoyable. Looking through family albums while sorting through her father’s belongings, she finds photographs of her and her sister Gabrielle playing, and she remembers games of hide-and-seek and outings to the cinema with her father who ‘ne leur refusait rien’ (p. 29). It is these memories of Ivorian life that Nina desires on her return: she wants to return to her family, and more specifically, to a time when her father was an idealized image. In the novel, she must come to terms with the reality: he was a complex and flawed man. She must also accept Gabrielle’s decision to cut herself off from the family. After falling in with the wrong crowd in Côte d’Ivoire, Gabrielle left home aged 17. Nina was profoundly upset by Gabrielle’s decision and felt she had been abandoned by her sister: ‘à partir de ce moment-là, Nina devint fille unique’ (p. 30). Gabrielle’s self-imposed exile into a debauched life certainly has important consequences for Nina now that their parents have both passed away: she feels overwhelmed with the burden of being the only person who can continue the family traditions. Gabrielle refuses to compromise her own beliefs and participate in a cultural system that she deems archaic and outdated. She does not attend her father’s funeral ceremonies as she does not believe in the ways in which the Akan people bury the dead. Gabrielle writes an email to Nina at the end of the book, an additional structural layer and an example of Tadjo’s textual assemblage. In this email, she describes the funeral ceremonies as ‘des événements pompeux’ that only serve to comfort the people who have been left behind (p. 178). She prefers to honour her father by remembering him while he was alive, rather than mourning his death. While Nina feels lonely and isolated by Gabrielle’s absence, she also envies her sister and wishes she could be as determined and honest as Gabrielle. Gabrielle, like Nina, rejects the culture of her homeland but does not endeavour to impose her own Western values and ideals onto her family; Nina, on the contrary, constantly reveals her disapproval of traditional Ivorian customs and traditions. Gabrielle prefers to stay silent and disappear from the family. The reader is given little information about Gabrielle’s current situation—there is no mention of where she is living, or of her state of mind—and so it is unclear whether she has succeeded

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in finding another country to call home. She seems to live a nomadic existence, telling Nina in an email that she is ‘toujours en voyage’ when her sister questions her whereabouts (p. 177). Perhaps her reluctance to settle down is a direct consequence of her own experiences of culture shock in Côte d’Ivoire as a child: she rejects the notion of being rooted in a specific location because of her inability to adapt to life in Abidjan when she was younger, an indication of her vulnerability and fragility. She now prefers to travel aimlessly from place to place and refuses to be tied down. Here, the text passes comment on how exile begets further exile: Gabrielle is unable to come back from exile because she has become addicted to her nomadic lifestyle. It is noticeable that both Gabrielle and Nina are strong, independent women who have become emancipated through their Western education and are now able to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated society. Nina is a successful photographer, and although Gabrielle’s profession is never explicitly stated in the text, she is certainly more financially privileged than the other female characters living in Abidjan, as she has the opportunity and financial means to travel. Furthermore, as Toivanen points out, the email correspondence between the siblings is evidence of their elevated social position, because ‘constant access to the virtual space signals class privilege’ in postcolonial African countries where less privileged communities are unlikely to have constant access to the Internet. 22 This financial success does not bring either of the sisters happiness and stability, though: Gabrielle refuses to have any relationship at all with her extended family because of the secrets her family concealed from her when she was young, while Nina struggles to modify her attitude towards the country, predicated on colonial frameworks. Loin de mon père thus indicates the problems associated with the postcolonial model of diasporic life, particularly for women. Nina and Gabrielle have both improved the material conditions of their lives by living away from Côte d’Ivoire. Yet their success has been achieved at the expense of maintaining relationships with their family back in Abidjan, heightening sentiments of cultural and emotional exile when they do return.

22 Anna-Leena Toivanen, ‘Emailing/Skyping Africa: New Technologies and Communication Gaps in Contemporary African Women’s Fiction’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 47.4 (2016), 135–61 (p. 148).

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Disintegration and Reintegration Adler defines ‘disintegration’ as a period of disorientation, during which ‘differences become increasingly noticeable as different behaviours, values, and attitudes intrude into the perceptual reality of the sojourner’. 23 He argues that as individuals are forced to confront these differences, they become withdrawn, depressed, and alienated, since they can no longer rely on their own cultural background to understand this new way of life. They thus begin to interrogate their own identity and question how they will ever be able to adapt to this new cultural framework. Yet culture shock in Tadjo’s Loin de mon père does not mirror Adler’s paradigm exactly. For Nina, the first two stages of culture shock overlap considerably: she displays increasing bewilderment and frustration towards the way of life in Abidjan as soon as she arrives. Her experiences demonstrate that in fact, these stages are not as fixed and rigid as Adler would suggest. Nina’s complex exilic situation manifests itself most strongly in her bewilderment at the complex funeral arrangements that test her emotionally and demonstrate the extent of her cultural estrangement. She struggles to understand the complex funeral rituals because the family’s strong Catholic beliefs contradict their dedication to the local customs of the Akan community. Moreover, overcome with grief, her need to question these local traditions is further aggravated. She is shocked to find that without telling her, her aunts Affoué and Aya have made an altar in the lounge to commemorate Kouadio, placing his photograph in the middle of the room and decorating it with fabric, candles, a Bible, and rosary beads. When Nina admits that ‘ce spectacle la désola’ (p. 54), her aunts reply that they have simply acted in keeping with Akan tradition. They also tell her, much to her confusion, that her father’s room must remain open so that his spirit can leave. While Nina is perplexed by what she perceives as a clash between Catholic and indigenous belief systems, in fact, in many West African communities, indigenous practices play a fundamental role in everyday life, and so it is not unusual for Nina’s aunts to turn to both religious practices in a time of turmoil. Critiquing local African traditions is indicative of Nina’s distantiation from traditions and beliefs to which she no longer feels (or indeed, never even felt) connected. Nina’s metropolitan outlook is particularly apparent when she is told that her father’s funeral will have to be postponed because it clashes 23 Adler, p. 16.

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with a local yam festival, during which it is forbidden for any funeral ceremonies to take place. The Fête des Ignames is a three-day festival of music, processions, and dancing, and a celebration of the new year, as the Akan people pay homage to the yam that saved them from famine when they fled from the invading Anoh tribe during the seventeenth century. 24 The event is of great significance to the family and to the village elders. Yet Nina cannot understand why nobody had thought about this festival before, angrily exclaiming ‘interdit, par qui? Enfin, soyons sérieux, dans quel siècle vivons-nous?’ (p. 104); the accumulation of interrogatory sentences here is indicative of her incredulity. Nina’s perspective here is rather alarming, as it echoes a pro-colonialist stance that disregards local African traditions as primitive. She dismisses Akan religious practices as unimportant and considers them to be less significant than her own personal loss. The intersection between her cultural and emotional exile is revealed: she refuses to let anyone interfere with her own bereavement and does not stop to consider the importance of these cultural traditions to her family. She accuses the family of being stuck in the past, feeling alienated from the culture into which she has been suddenly thrown as a modern, cosmopolitan young woman who has lived in France for many years. She believes that she should have the right to make decisions about her own father’s funeral, failing to understand that in Akan culture, the village elders have primary responsibility for the arrangements. Toivanen observes that ‘because her father was a prominent national figure, the funeral is not simply a private event’; 25 in fact, Nina is reminded during a family meeting that Kouadio ‘nous appartient biologiquement, mais pas socialement’ because of his public role in improving health care and sanitation in rural areas of the country (p. 27). Nina struggles to accept that the village elders have such a significant influence in the organization of her father’s funeral ceremonies because funeral ceremonies are very private events in metropolitan France. Frustrated with these unfamiliar traditions, she does not see how she would ever find her place back in Abidjan. 24 BBC News Afrique, ‘Nigeria: fête des ignames chez les Igbo’, 26 August 2015,

[accessed 3 May 2020]. 25 Anna-Leena Toivanen, ‘Daddy’s Girls?: Father–Daughter Relations and the Failures of the Postcolonial Nation-State in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 44.1 (2013), 99–126 (p. 121).

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The title of the narrative points towards her neo-colonial attitude as an underlying cause of her exile. Nina realizes that not only has she been geographically ‘loin’ from her father, thousands of miles away from him in another continent, but she has also been emotionally distant from him throughout her life because of her own Eurocentric stance towards her homeland. Loin de mon père thus provides an opportunity to problematize and criticize Eurocentric perceptions of Africa, through Nina’s somewhat judgemental views of Ivorian life. A cosmopolitan, socially mobile, and independent young woman, Nina continuously examines local culture from a Western perspective, demonstrating that she experiences exile from France, rather than from Africa. She imposes a colonialist viewpoint on these local traditions that her family endeavour to protect at all costs, regarding them as exotic, primitive, archaic, and ‘backwards’ in comparison to French ‘superior’, ‘modern’ traditions. Within a postcolonial context, she therefore reproduces the colonial mentality of the mission civilisatrice that underpinned the French colonial project and that the French used to justify colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean. Rather than breaking down barriers between the former colonizer and the colonized by bringing the two cultures into contact, Nina’s diasporic experience in fact recreates these barriers, experiencing an alienating clash between French and Ivorian culture. Her attitude prevents her from feeling at home in Abidjan because she constantly compares the two cultures, criticizing local traditions and holding up France as a model for the people to look towards, thereby perpetuating a relationship of dependency between Côte d’Ivoire and France and retaining the metropole as the central focus point within Ivorian identity politics. The critical attitude of her aunts, which borders on Eurocentrism, is particularly problematic. The text gives no indication that they have ever lived among the Ivorian diaspora in France; yet, like Nina, they idolize metropolitan French life and strive to become more Western. They talk with other family members about the benefits of sending their children to Europe for a more prosperous and financially secure lifestyle. Affoué even asks Nina to help her cousin settle in France and find a job there: ‘dis-moi, après les funérailles, il faudra aider ta cousine à venir en France. Si tu te portes garante, je suis sûre que ça marchera…’ (p. 118). The employment of the deictic verb ‘venir’, rather than its counterpart ‘aller’, suggests a move with the path directed towards the location of the speaker Affoué, indicating that subconsciously she shares identitarian connections with French communities. Even though she has no personal

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experience of living in France, she subscribes to attitudes prevalent during the colonial era: only the West could offer a good education and decent job prospects. This neo-colonial stance is countered, though, by other instances in which they adhere rigidly to Akan tradition, organizing the funeral ceremonies in keeping with local customs. In personal email correspondence, Tadjo describes the aunts as being ‘déboussolées’ by the rift between tradition and modernity, unsure whether they should continue to carry out the funeral rites according to ancient traditions, or try to adapt to what they perceive as a more modern, transnational society. 26 They perhaps also wish to retain the traditional Akan customs out of fear of losing their authority and position in society as the sisters of an influential elite. It is important to note here, though, that their status is governed entirely by their relationship with their brother Kouadio, so they too, like Nina, are unable to escape the patriarchy that is deeply embedded in Ivorian society. The Western outlook on life that Nina shares with her aunts engenders Nina’s increasing isolation from her deceased father. Early in the text, she is stunned to learn from her cousin Hervé that her father has a nine-year-old son named Koffi, and she becomes even angrier when she finally discovers from her aunts—who are reluctant to reveal the family’s shameful secret—the existence of her three other siblings. Adolescents Cécile and Roland live locally, whereas Amon, who is closer to her age, has settled in Montreal with his wife and young daughter. Here, the text makes another important statement about gender issues in Côte d’Ivoire: Nina’s older brother, who has a good job in an information technology company, is much more financially successful than the rest of the siblings. Moreover, when Amon and Nina finally meet at their father’s funeral, he tells her that Kouadio ‘m’a envoyé poursuivre mes études universitaires à Bordeaux’ (p. 172), suggesting that Koaudio actively encouraged him to pursue further studies and paid for him to receive a metropolitan education. It also becomes apparent from Nina’s frustrated email to Gabrielle that their father paid for Roland’s training to become an electrician, but Nina does not mention whether Cécile was given any financial support, and it is unclear how her own education was funded. It can thus be inferred that for Kouadio, it was more important to educate his illegitimate sons than his daughters. Nina’s distance from her father had already begun before she discovered details of his secret life because her gender signified that her father treated her differently 26 Véronique Tadjo, Email to Antonia Wimbush, 6 June 2016.

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to his male children. Her gender perhaps also explains her linguistic exile: Kouadio never taught his daughter his mother tongue of Baoulé, one of the 60 indigenous languages spoken in Côte d’Ivoire and used by the Akan community. Nina wonders whether this was a deliberate act on his part to keep her ‘coupée de ce qui se passait dans son entourage’ (p. 122), which was dominated entirely by men. She was raised to speak to her family in standard French, the official language of Côte d’Ivoire but considered the language of the elite, currently only spoken by approximately 1 per cent of the Ivorian population. 27 This linguistic difference intensifies her sentiments of being exiled from her family and perpetuates her position as an elite outsider who identifies with France, rather than with Côte d’Ivoire. While secret lovers and illegitimate children are clearly a global rather than an African phenomenon, in the novel Tadjo presents a nuanced version of polygamy in Côte d’Ivoire to shed light on Western representations of Africa and to emphasize the stark gender inequalities in Côte d’Ivoire. In an interview for the literary supplement of Les Dépêches de Brazzaville in 2010, Tadjo shared her own concerns for this new model of polygamy that has an impact on children’s rights; in contrast to traditional polygamous arrangements, in which the children of each wife have a neatly defined status, these new relationships are much more precarious, and the children have no social or financial stability. 28 In Loin de mon père, Kouadio takes several black African women as his ‘concubines’. In a telling narrative decision, they are not granted any visibility in the text: Nina catches a glimpse of Koffi’s young mother who is ‘penchée à sa fenêtre’ when she goes to meet her young brother for the first time (p. 41), but the other women are entirely absent, suggesting that these women are relegated to the home where they are forced to assume a domestic role. Nina is angry that her father, and indeed the rest of the family, had hidden this secret from her to preserve his reputation. The civil war perhaps also allowed certain family secrets to remain concealed because Nina’s aunts were more concerned with their own safety and preserving their own position in society than revealing the truth about her father. For Baram Reid, these new family frameworks 27 Remi Sonaiya, ‘Issues in French Applied Linguistics in West Africa’, in French Applied Linguistics, ed. by Dalila Ayoun (Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), pp. 425–49 (p. 433). 28 Vincente Clergeau, ‘Funérailles, questionnement et retrouvailles’, Les Dépêches de Brazzaville, 13 (June 2010), 4 (p. 4).

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are ‘not an African tradition per se’ but rather, the consequence of ‘shifting paradigms of family and of personal responsibility both in Africa and in the West’. 29 Yet for Nina, her father’s betrayal is deeply rooted in his African beliefs from which she feels far removed, and thus a consequence of patriarchal Ivorian society in which Kouadio could take numerous lovers, regardless of the consequences, simply because he was a prosperous male who had been ‘cloîtré dans son rôle de patriarche’ (p. 38). The fact that she refuses to consider how infidelity has a detrimental effect on families in the West is a further indication of her exile; she reduces all her problems to a dichotomy between Africa and Europe, even if, in reality, these differences are not as pronounced as she thinks. In fact, by deceiving her own partner Frédéric by having a sexual relationship with her former lover Kangha, she is guilty of the same mistake for which she condemns her father. Éloïse Brezault observes that ‘le mensonge occupe une part importante du récit’, as every major character is deceitful in some way. 30 Nina and Kangha have an affair, and Gabrielle lies to Nina by telling her that she will attend her father’s funeral, even though she clearly has no intention of doing so. Deceit is thus a human characteristic that is not bound to a particular location or culture; it is not a specifically Ivorian trait, as Nina appears to believe. Nina rejects Ivorian life in a phase reminiscent of ‘reintegration’, Adler’s third stage of culture shock, becoming ‘hostile to that which is experienced but not understood’. 31 Yet Adler argues that the rejection of the host culture can be helpful because it ‘becomes the basis for new intuitive, emotional, and cognitive experiences’ as the individual begins to show a greater awareness of this new culture. 32 This is also the case in Loin de mon père: Nina’s negative feelings begin to demonstrate a possibility of reconciliation with the seemingly unfamiliar culture of Côte d’Ivoire. Nina’s turning point is the argument she has with Kangha after an illicit sexual encounter with him. She becomes torn between Kangha and her French boyfriend Frédéric, another symbol of the confusion she 29 Baram Reid, p. 146. 30 Éloïse Brezault, ‘Identité réelle et fantasmée dans Loin de mon père de Véronique Tadjo: l’écrivain entre filiation et déterritorialisation’, in The Contemporary Francophone African Intellectual, ed. by Christopher Hogarth and Natalie Edwards (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 119–34 (p. 126). 31 Adler, p. 17. 32 Adler, p. 17.

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experiences in her identity struggle, similarly torn between belonging to Côte d’Ivoire and belonging to France. Kangha suggests that Nina should consider returning to Abidjan permanently after the funeral ceremonies, but she immediately rejects this proposition, describing the country as chaotic and violent, void of all hope and future prospects in yet another interrogatory phrase: ‘mais pourquoi prendrais-je une telle décision? […] Cela n’a pas de sens, c’est le chaos ici’ (p. 101). This permanent return looms over the text, leading the reader to speculate what Nina will eventually decide to do. Here, Toivanen reminds us of Nina’s ‘cosmopolitan privilege’ of being able to decide if and when she will return to France, given that ‘she is at no point at the mercy of her old homeland’s hospitality’. 33 Yet despite the social benefits she enjoys as the daughter of an important doctor and former member of the elite, including the freedom to travel between France and Côte d’Ivoire, her family obligations hinder her flexibility. She finds herself financially responsible for her newly discovered siblings and is required to order her father’s accounts after his death as his oldest child present, so in fact she has more ties to Ivorian life, and fewer opportunities to benefit from her cosmopolitan status, than Toivanen suggests. Caporale observes that within the family ‘Nina occupies a still undefined space and can only assume the peripheral status of bystander’, noting that she passively stands at the window and watches when soldiers march past her house, thereby refusing to participate in the main family action. 34 Yet she does actively help with the funeral arrangements, and, in fact, she is the only one of Kouadio’s children who takes her family responsibilities seriously—Gabrielle refuses to return, Amon only arrives the day before the final ceremony, and the others are too young to help organize the ceremonies. In a striking departure from the traditional family model where filiation passes from father to son in Côte d’Ivoire, it is Nina on whom the family rely to solve their financial problems. 35 She is therefore perceived by the other family members as being an integral part of the community, even if, at this point, she considers her own position to be on the margins. While in the argument with Kangha she appears to dismiss the idea of staying completely, snapping at him and proclaiming that ‘il 33 Toivanen, ‘Diasporic Romances Gone Bad’, p. 442. 34 Caporale, p. 165. 35 Elisabeth Snyman, ‘Véronique Tadjo: Is There Any Hope Beyond the Divisions in Contemporary Africa?’, Pretoria, 55.1 (2018), 18–27 (p. 24).

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existe beaucoup d’autres pays plus accueillants. Pourquoi gâcher ma vie ici?’ (p. 101), it is the first time that she talks about staying in Côte d’Ivoire permanently. She is beginning to reintegrate into life in Abidjan, demonstrating a growing cultural awareness and an increasing sense of belonging within her own family. Autonomy and Independence Towards the end of the text, Nina moves into the stage of culture shock that Adler terms ‘autonomy’. This phase ‘is marked by a rising sensitivity and by the acquisition of both skill and understanding of the second culture’ as the individual becomes increasingly more comfortable in the new surroundings, employing coping strategies in order to adapt. 36 Nina actively participates in local traditions: she prepares her father’s body in accordance with Akan customs, choosing an additional pinstripe suit for him and placing some money in his coffin for his next life. However, Tadjo describes these actions as an afterthought, which Nina only remembers ‘tout à coup’ following an argument with her aunts about the most appropriate clothing for her father’s body (p. 163). This episode suggests her inability—and indeed refusal—to conform completely to Akan traditions. She is beginning to understand the importance of ritual for her family and the comfort it provides them in times of despair, but this is a slow and gradual process (and one that she is not prepared to embrace completely). Yet she does begin to consider her father’s behaviour in a new light, and this can be read as a further symbol of her changing relationship with Côte d’Ivoire. She learns to accept his weaknesses, and although she still feels betrayed by his infidelities, she takes solace in her newly discovered family. She realizes that her siblings give her roots in Abidjan that she thought she had lost and that ‘la plantaient fermement dans la terre’ (p. 170); she felt alone and isolated when Kouadio died, having already lost her mother, but she now understands that she has ‘plus d’attaches qu’avant’ to help her to come to terms with her grief (p. 170). The root metaphors here are significant as they demonstrate the importance of her family in providing her with stable foundations to recast her new life. Pierre-Louis Fort argues that the discovery of her new family

36 Adler, p. 17.

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enables Nina to ‘dépasser l’absence de son père’. 37 While it is somewhat problematic to propose that Nina’s new family are simply able to replace her father’s position in her life and help her to overcome his death more quickly, their existence is a positive discovery for Nina. She realizes that she has now become closer to her father through her new siblings than she ever had been while he was alive. She also begins to understand the transformations her father underwent towards the end of his life as he lost his status as an important elite and well-respected doctor and retreated to the domestic sphere; his downfall is representative of the ‘national turmoil’ of Côte d’Ivoire during the mid-2000s. The novel ends poignantly with her father’s coffin being lowered into the ground, while Nina promises that she will always love him, regardless of the pain he has caused her. The close bond between her father and his nation implies that if she is able to overcome her disapproval of his life choices and forgive him, in time she will be able to consider Côte d’Ivoire her home once again. She also views her difficult relationship with her mother from a different perspective. As a child, she blamed her mother for all her problems, and ‘lui avait même reproché la couleur de sa peau’ (p. 136). Nina thought her cultural difference and subsequent inability to integrate into the Ivorian community was principally a racial issue, and one caused by her mother who passed down her Frenchness to her. ‘Frenchness’, and its perceived corollary of ‘whiteness’, are of course highly contested concepts in the postcolonial context. While France’s Republican model of inclusion means that the universal notion of ‘Frenchness’ operates above all racial categories, being French is synonymous with being white in contemporary French discourse, despite France’s colonial and postcolonial histories that have seen the arrival of large numbers of ethnic minority migrants from France’s former colonial territories. 38 Nina wears her Frenchness very visibly in the light colour of her skin, and she considers it a hindrance rather than an advantage. Discovering her father’s secret life makes her realize, though, the hardships her mother 37 Pierre-Louis Fort, ‘Les Secrets du deuil dans Loin de mon père’, in Écrire, traduire, peindre: Véronique Tadjo: Writing, Translating, Painting, ed. by Sarah Davies Cordova and Désiré K. Wa Kabwe-Segatti (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2016), pp. 77–87 (p. 85). 38 See Jean Beaman, ‘Are French People White? Towards an Understanding of Whiteness in Republican France’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 26.5 (2019), 546–62.

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had to tolerate, and so she remembers her in a more forgiving and loving manner. This complex maternal relationship is undoubtedly a reflection of patriarchal Ivorian society, which instilled in her from a young age the need to idolize her father and view him as a role model. It is only with the maturity that her adulthood has granted her that she is able to realize how these gender inequalities affected her relationship with her mother; this realization is bitter-sweet, though, because it is now too late to remedy this relationship as her mother has already passed away. Although Nina initially envisages her displacement to Abidjan as a short-term trip, by the end of the novel, she does contemplate returning permanently, having reached some level of reconciliation with herself, with Côte d’Ivoire, with her father, and with her former lover Kangha. It is not until chapter 15 of the second part of the book that this resolution begins, just before her father’s final funeral ceremonies are held. Nina is not completely convinced about staying permanently in Abidjan, admitting that ‘si elle choisissait de revenir, beaucoup de choses allaient devoir changer’ (p. 167). She is determined to try to engage in a world with which she is no longer completely familiar, even though she realizes that this will be challenging. The hesitation she encounters, which is apparent in the conditional structure, in fact makes her desire for a permanent return more credible, since she is unlikely to come to a decision about such an important event so quickly. Her gender continues to play a part in her exile, however. Her discussions with Kangha have given her the opportunity to reflect on what home means for her, and just when she is considering remaining permanently in Abidjan, he announces that he has been given a researcher post at the University of Michigan. Nina is upset that her former lover with whom she has reconnected is leaving Abidjan, but he simply replies ‘c’est une opportunité que je ne peux pas refuser, tu comprends?’ (p. 161). This episode reveals the salient gender disparities at the heart of Ivorian society: it is acceptable for Kangha to be ambitious and career-driven, but Nina’s priority must be her family’s well-being. The addition of the interrogation ‘tu comprends?’ is illustrative of these gender norms, as Nina is expected to be understanding and to put his needs above her own. It seems almost impossible for Nina to be fully reconciled with Côte d’Ivoire when her ideals and values are so widely different from those held by many people in her homeland. While Nina moves slowly through Adler’s model of culture shock, then, her reconciliation with Côte d’Ivoire is ongoing and incomplete. Bartoloni asserts that the exiled person’s relationship with the country of origin is determined by both spatial and temporal parameters and

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contends that ‘the longer a journey and the longer the sojourn in another place become, the more acute is the feeling of nostalgia (that gnawing reminder that something essential to being and identity is missing)’. 39 However, Tadjo’s novel complicates Bartoloni’s analysis. The longer Nina lives in Côte d’Ivoire, the greater are the possibilities for integration into this society, because the language and culture become increasingly familiar. While she does not quite succeed in making Abidjan her home again by the end of the text, her reconciliation with her homeland is in progress. Nina has already undergone one process of adaptation when she moved to France as a young adult, successfully creating a home for herself in Paris; perhaps her proven cultural fluidity and capacity to adapt mean that, in time, she will be able to call Côte d’Ivoire home once more. Nina recognizes that she needs to continue learning about herself and her country in order to reintegrate into life in Abidjan, and here the text prioritizes her narrative voice in an introspective, self-reflexive passage: ‘il faut que je mette la dernière main à mes pensées, que j’accepte de reconnaître ce qui est arrivé et que je retrouve ma vie’ (p. 168). However, the narrative concludes in an ambiguous manner with the depiction of her father’s burial. The funeral ceremony is cathartic on one level because it allows Nina to come to terms with her father’s death and her own transcultural identity, but it is simultaneously painful and bewildering: ‘tout s’était passé trop vite, cela n’avait pas de sens’ (p. 189). Moreover, the reader does not know where Nina eventually decides to live, nor what will happen to her relationship with Gabrielle, with her aunts, and with her newly discovered siblings. Nina is unable to completely ‘accept and draw nourishment from cultural differences and similarities’, in Adler’s terms,40 suggesting that she never quite reaches the final stage of culture shock of ‘independence’. For Adler, this stage is characterized by an appreciation of social, cultural, and psychological differences within the host culture, but this is never entirely possible for Nina who is still grieving for her father and remains haunted by constant questions of belonging and identity. Nina’s culture shock is a natural and inevitable reaction to a different cultural experience, which requires exploration and understanding. What renders her culture shock more unique and complex is that she is not experiencing a completely new culture. Loin de mon père calls into question the understanding of home 39 Bartoloni, p. 103. 40 Adler, p. 18.

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as a fixed, stable location that grants stability and security, as Nina has felt culturally exiled in the location that used to be her home. Even if, as the end of the text suggests, she may be able eventually to call Côte d’Ivoire her home once again, her experiences of culture shock cause her to wonder whether she ever truly belonged there at all, and whether it ever was her home. Conclusion Tadjo’s presentation of the return to the homeland in Loin de mon père, in the midst of a violent and turbulent civil war, reveals the struggles faced by Nina and her family on attempting to reintegrate into life in Abidjan, a difficulty Tadjo herself also encountered on her return to Côte d’Ivoire following the brutal conflict. The autofictional narrative underscores that returning to the country of origin is not always a utopian, idealistic solution that eradicates sentiments of exclusion and isolation from the host society; rather, it can cause a fracture for returnees as they continuously question what it means to live in a land that no longer feels like home. Nina’s cultural exile is rendered more acute because of underlying gender disparities in Côte d’Ivoire, which reinforce her estrangement from her birth country. Nina shares similarities with those who experience culture shock on arriving in a completely unfamiliar location. Her alienation is, in part, caused by a lack of identification with the customs and traditions of Abidjan due to a long period of absence away from the city; in part, by the grief the family suffer after the death of Kouadio; and in part, by the civil war that has completely undermined the people’s solidarity, camaraderie, and patriotism, driving Ivorians to question their loyalty to their country. Culture shock destabilizes Nina, then, and forces her to reflect on her relationship with her father and with Abidjan, but it also acts as a process of self-discovery. Paradoxically, while Loin de mon père is a melancholic and at times pessimistic text about exile, grief, loss, and non-belonging, it is also a novel about hope and optimism. Through this re-acquaintance with Abidjan culture she learns more about herself and her ability to cope with difficult situations. Her newly discovered siblings provide her with a sense of community that she never thought she had, and she wonders whether this support network is actually ‘l’héritage de son père’ that he wanted to pass down to her after his death (p. 170).

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Nina’s cultural otherness, however, is aggravated further by her own Western, Eurocentric perspective of Côte d’Ivoire that she has developed while living a diasporic life in France. While her family endeavour to preserve traditional values and beliefs, Nina prefers to move away from tradition and embrace Western modernity, feeling exiled on recognizing the gulf between the two attitudes. Tadjo’s text challenges notions of what it means to live in the diaspora, and what it means to return to the homeland.

chapter seven

Transgenerational Exile in Abla Farhoud’s Autofiction Transgenerational Exile in Abla Farhoud’s Autofiction

What does it mean to grow old in exile? Abla Farhoud’s autofictional works Toutes celles que j’étais and Au grand soleil cachez vos filles endeavour to answer this question by portraying the experiences of migrant women as they adapt to new environments at diverse ages and at different stages of their lives. Toutes celles que j’étais is narrated by Farhoud’s younger self named Aablè and intertwines chapters dedicated to her mother, grandmother, and female elderly relatives. Aablè integrates quickly into life in Quebec; she attends a local school where she rapidly learns to speak French. Her young age means that she is adaptable, and she soon makes Quebec her home, attending drama school and making friends easily while also helping out in the family shop. Her mother finds it more difficult to adapt because of linguistic difficulties—she speaks Arabic and hardly any French—and because, as a mother, her priority is expected to be her children, rather than herself. Breaking this pattern between ageing and exile is Aablè’s grandmother Jana, who emigrated from Lebanon to Quebec in 1930. A strong and independent woman, Jana became a businesswoman in Quebec and in fact housed the family when they first arrived. The text is divided into six sections, which commences with Aablè’s journey to Quebec to be reunited with her father and concludes with her impending return voyage to Lebanon. Each section is composed of short chapters that give a brief snapshot into Aablè’s life and demonstrate her multiple selves to which the title alludes. These chapters are not connected together via a coherent narrative thread; moreover, the language used is relatively simple and the present tense is privileged. These narrative devices indicate that the narrative voice is that of a young child who is not yet able to give a sustained account of her life. The memories are interspersed by the adult narrator reflecting on her exilic past and on the fleeting nature of memory.

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Au grand soleil cachez vos filles, in contrast, focuses on young adulthood as the grown-up children of the Abdelnour family, Adib, Ikram, and Faïzah, each narrate their experiences of exile on returning to Lebanon in the 1970s to create a polyphonic text. This return is complicated by the patriarchal and oppressive atmosphere they discover in Lebanon, which prevents the young women from pursuing professional opportunities. Through their stories, the reader also glimpses what life is like for their mother and older female relatives, who, in contrast, enjoy being surrounded by their native culture once again. These themes of women’s exile, solitude, and ageing span Farhoud’s writing and are not solely limited to her autobiographical texts. As Louise Forsyth observes, Farhoud was ‘one of the first Quebec writers to represent the experiences of immigrant girls and older women’,1 both in her early plays and in her fictional writing. Farhoud’s recent autofictional narratives can thus be considered as part of her wider literary project that examines the ageing of women in exile, and offer an alternative model of female mobility to the one proposed by other autobiographical texts written in French. As Kate Averis remarks, ‘the experiences of transnational mobility that are described in postcolonial Francophone women’s writing frequently focus on protagonists in childhood and early adulthood’. 2 It is true that most of the texts analysed throughout this book focus on the exilic experiences of young people, and Kim Lefèvre, Gisèle Pineau, Nina Bouraoui, and Véronique Tadjo all explicitly incorporate the narrative voice of young protagonists. In counter-balance, Farhoud’s autobiographical writing features both younger and older protagonists. Above all, her texts reveal that experiences of exile alter considerably as women grow older. Abla Farhoud: From Lebanon to Quebec, to Lebanon to Quebec Farhoud is the only author in this study whose exile does not revolve around metropolitan France. Her experiences in Quebec thus decentre exilic narratives that tend to have France as the central focal point. Her writing enables Quebec to be included in discussions of (post)coloniality, 1 Louise Forsyth, ‘Resistance to Exile by Girls and Women: Two Plays by Abla Farhoud’, Modern Drama, 48.4 (2005), 800–18 (p. 817). 2 Kate Averis, ‘Mobility and Stasis: Ageing Abroad in Abla Farhoud’s Le Bonheur a la queue glissante’, Francosphères, 6.1 (2017), 7–20 (p. 8).

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thereby subscribing to Mary Jean Green’s call to ‘locate Quebec’s vibrant cultural production on larger maps from which it has too often been erased’. 3 One similarity Farhoud does share with the other authors, however, is the fact that she has also been uprooted many times during her life, and particularly during her childhood. Farhoud was born in 1945 and lived in Ain Hircha (or Ain Harcha), a small, mountainous village in the South East of Lebanon, until 1951 when she migrated with her family to Quebec. The family settled in Montreal, and although initially Farhoud felt out of place as one of few Lebanese families living in Montreal—the family became ‘le point de mire des autochtones, une espèce d’attraction’ and thus felt ‘une peur incontrôlable de [leur] différence’, in Farhoud’s own words—she eventually succeeded in integrating into life in Quebec.4 In 1965, the family returned to live in Lebanon, preferring the urban centre of Beirut to their native rural village. Farhoud did not experience this return as a return home, but as a form of exile, explaining in an interview in 2017 that she equated her return to Lebanon to ‘une souffrance qui ne voulait pas s’en aller’. 5 She left Lebanon after four years to study drama at L’Université de Vincennes in Paris. After marrying a Québécois musician in Paris, she returned to Quebec in 1973. She has since made Quebec her permanent home. Farhoud’s initial migration to Quebec offers an example of the collision between the personal and the political, a model replicated by each writer examined in this book. It is unclear exactly why the family migrated in 1951. Jane Moss describes their migration in economic terms, drawing links between Marco Micone, Filippo Salvatore, Pan Bouyoucas, and Farhoud because despite their cultural differences, they are all writers ‘whose families came to Quebec for economic reasons’.6 There is undoubtedly some truth in this; it is likely that her father considered that the family would be able to enjoy a better quality of life in Quebec than in Lebanon. Although Lebanon experienced economic growth of more than 50 per cent in the years following independence 3 Mary Jean Green, ‘Locating Quebec on the Postcolonial Map’, in Postcolonial Thought in the French Speaking World, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 248–58 (p. 257). 4 Farhoud, ‘Immigrant un jour, immigrant toujours’, p. 53. 5 Latendresse Charon and Rhéaume. 6 Jane Moss, ‘Immigrant Theater: Traumatic Departures and Unsettling Arrivals’, in Textualizing the Immigrant Experience in Contemporary Quebec, ed. by Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx (Westport, CT; London: Praeger Publishers, 2004), pp. 65–82 (p. 65).

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from France in 1943,7 there remained huge inequalities between urban Beirut and rural areas, and so the Farhoud family would probably have been unable to enjoy this increase in commercial development and financial prosperity. A careful reading of Farhoud’s two autofictional narratives, however, offers an alternative reason for their departure for Quebec and gives new insights into Farhoud’s relationship with both countries. In Toutes celles que j’étais, Aablè explains that her father had initially gone to Canada to look after his sister who was dying; after her death, he sent for his family so that they could be reunited. This reunification has a wider significance for the Farhoud family. Later in the text, it is revealed that migration to Quebec had been a family tradition since the nineteenth century, but one family member had always been left behind in Lebanon to retain their connections to the homeland: ‘l’enfant devenait grand, émigrait à son tour en laissant derrière lui l’un de ses enfants…qui devenait grand, émigrait…’ (p. 84). The fact that her father calls for the whole family to migrate to Quebec breaks this family tradition and suggests that they are prepared to make a new life for themselves, away from their familial and cultural heritage in Lebanon. The young Aablè wonders whether her parents ‘ont vraiment fait le choix de partir’ (p. 87), or whether they were tied in some way to this unusual family ritual. She certainly did not have a choice; aged just six, she simply obeyed her father’s orders. While the origins of their exile primarily lie in familial factors, it is likely that growing political tensions in Lebanon played an additional role, and the unstable political climate could also help to explain Farhoud’s subsequent departure from Lebanon in 1969. F. Elizabeth Dahab argues that Farhoud was ‘the first Arabic Canadian writer to have dramatized the communal experience of exile, and more specifically the horrors of the civil war in Lebanon’.8 Even if Farhoud did not witness the horrors of the war herself, in her personal and professional life she has been marked profoundly by a war that has torn apart her country of birth, a war described by Adib in Au grand soleil cachez vos filles as ‘atroce, parce que la folie et la haine s’emparent des têtes et grugent les cœurs sans que tu saches pourquoi’ (p. 145). When Farhoud was born in 1945, Lebanon had been an independent country for two years. French control of Lebanon dates back to the First 7 William Persen, ‘Lebanese Economic Development Since 1950’, Middle East Journal, 12.3 (1958), 277–94 (p. 277). 8 Dahab, p. 99.

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World War and ended on 22 November 1943 with the declaration of Lebanese independence. Following independence, Lebanon adopted a system of parliamentary democracy, yet it also established the National Pact, a rigid sectarian power-sharing arrangement: the presidency was reserved for a Maronite Catholic, with the less powerful role of prime minister allocated to a Sunni Muslim and the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies to a Shi’a Muslim. However, Muslim communities called for greater representation within this framework, and consequently the 1950s saw a series of coups against the presidents in power, with tensions within the country mirrored by conflicts with neighbouring countries. The Suez War (October–December 1956) and the Insurrection of 1958 threatened Lebanese relations with Syria and Egypt. In 1965, socio-economic reforms were passed by President Hélou, dramatically improving living conditions in urban areas but neglecting to integrate all communities and religious groups into the increasingly prosperous cities. The 1970s were marked by violence between these groups, and tensions came to a head on 13 April 1975 when a group of Christian Phalangists attacked a bus of Palestinians en route to a refugee camp. This attack was the catalyst for the Lebanese Civil War, a war that lasted from 1975 to 1990 and that was exacerbated by ‘non-Lebanese ingredients to the conflict, the Syrian, Israeli, and Palestinian armed presence and the interference of the two super-powers’.9 According to Craig Larkin, 170,000 people were killed during the civil war and two-thirds of the population were displaced from their homes and fled to neighbouring Arab countries, the US, and Canada.10 Lebanon’s political upheaval thus plays a crucial role in Farhoud’s reluctance to call Lebanon ‘home’, a reluctance shared by her literary protagonists at particular stages in their lives. Childhood: Excitement, Adaptation, and Resilience in Toutes celles que j’étais While Au grand soleil cachez vos filles treats themes of sexuality, independence, and female oppression because the principal characters 9 David McDowall, Lebanon: A Conflict of Minorities (London: Minority Rights Group, 1983), p. 7. 10 Craig Larkin, ‘Beyond the War: The Lebanese Postmemory Experience’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42.4 (2010), 615–35 (p. 617).

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are now in their early twenties, Toutes celles que j’étais offers a productive space in which to analyse how exile specifically affects young children in the first years of their life. The text begins in rural Lebanon, and in fact this is the only chapter of the text that is set there, suggesting that Quebec holds a much more prominent place in Aablè’s self-construction of her identity than Lebanon. However, a more prosaic reason for the lack of discussion of Lebanon in the text could be the fact that Farhoud was only young when she lived there and is therefore unlikely to have many firm recollections of the time she spent in her native village. Aablè learns of her father’s plans to bring them to Canada through a letter he has written for them. As families in Lebanon are structured around what Suad Joseph terms ‘patriarchal connectivity’, a relational model of selfhood that stipulates that individual identity is constructed through relationships with other family members and controlled by males and elders,11 it is the father’s responsibility as the head of the family to decide where they will settle. Indeed, as the text progresses, it becomes apparent that this patriarchal control is at the heart of the family’s internal exile. Initially, Aablè is confused and simply thinks that her father is upset following the loss of his beloved sister. She uses the Arabic term ‘bayé’ to refer to her father; as a young child from a relatively poor family living in rural Lebanon, she has no access to French, considered to be ‘la langue de la spécificité culturelle d’une exception libanaise et celle de la mère patrie’ for the Christian elite, and ‘le fer de lance de la politique occidentale, impéraliste, et néocolonialiste’, for many Muslim communities.12 Her brother reads the letter aloud, an indication of the latent patriarchal gender norms at work in Lebanon as the reader presumes from Aablè’s comment—‘c’est toujours mon frère qui lit les lettres parce que m’ma elle aime pas lire beaucoup’ (p. 9)—that the mother lacks literacy skills. The absence of the negative particle ‘ne’ here mirrors the orality of the situation and emphasizes the children’s young age, rendering these reflections all the more emotive. Aablè then reflects on the physical and emotional distance that separates her father from the rest of the family and wonders what life is really like ‘loin loin à Canada’ (p. 10). The repetition of the adverb ‘loin’ poignantly reinforces the remoteness she feels from her father, and 11 Suad Joseph, ‘Conceiving Family Relationships in Post-War Lebanon’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 35.2 (2004), 271–93 (p. 274). 12 Mona Makki, ‘La langue française au Liban: langue de division, langue de consensus?’, Hérodote, 126.3 (2007), 161–67 (pp. 162–63).

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the short, simple sentences in which this section is written is evidence of a young child feeling lost and alone. The realization that the family will not be returning to Lebanon strikes Aablè when she has her photograph taken in order to obtain her passport. Once again, she does not understand what is happening: she is given a dress to wear that her mother has sewn for her especially for the occasion, and her aunt travels from the remote village of Aïn Aata (also named Ain Aata or Ain Ata) to help with the preparations for their voyage. In a tragi-comic turn, she thinks she has confused the months of the year and that it must be Easter again, for this is the only time she usually receives new clothes, handed down from her sister. Such comments reinforce the family’s financial precarity, as the family can only afford to buy material to make new clothes for celebrations and religious festivities. It is only when Aablè sits down to have her photograph taken that her older brother tells her that they are undergoing preparations to obtain a passport in order to leave for Canada. While her brother experiences this early departure as a form of exile—Aablè realizes that he ‘est en train de faire adieu à tout ce qu’il verra plus jamais’ (p. 14), just as her father had done before his departure—Aablè is excited at the prospect of being reunited with her father. She is only six years old and is eager for a life of adventure and excitement; her brother is old enough to have already constructed a Lebanese identity and is distressed at the thought of leaving behind his old life. What particularly distresses Aablè are the gender divisions that segregate her own family. Her brothers are allowed a photograph together but when she readies herself for one with her sister, she is simply told ‘y a pas de photo pour les filles’ (p. 16). The patriarchal society of Lebanon has even encroached upon her own family and she is keen to move to a country that does not consider that ‘les garçons, c’est mille fois mieux que les filles’, a comment Aablè overhears on her way home from school uttered by two gossiping women (p. 16). Aablè’s excitement at leaving Lebanon is accentuated by the thrill of the long and dramatic journey. In a further demonstration of their relative precarity, the family have to travel by donkey to reach the town of town of Rachaya (also named Rashaya, Rashaiya, Rashayya, or Rachaiya), where they catch a coach to Beirut and then travel by boat to reach Canada. The lack of verbs and punctuation in Aablè’s speech when she describes these multiple modes of transport—‘automobile autocar Rachaya Beyrouth bateau Canada’ (p. 18)—reveals her enthusiasm as her thoughts run away with her and her speech cannot keep up. On

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the day of their departure all the villagers rush outside to say goodbye. Many have requests for the family to pass on letters and parcels to their own loved ones living in Canada, which is evidence that a relatively sizeable Lebanese diasporic community has already formed in Quebec by the early 1950s. Aablè does not understand why her mother is so upset: she is too young to understand her mother’s sentiments of loss and nostalgia and erroneously presumes that she would rather stay in Lebanon than be reunited with her husband. For Aablè, the internal journey within Lebanon is just as exciting as her trans-Atlantic voyage to Canada, because it brings with it new experiences that lie far from her mundane, monotonous existence. In contrast, for individuals who have had to make this long, tiring journey many times, such as Farhoud’s older heroine Dounia in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante, it brings with it a sense of exile and reinforces ‘the disaffected ties to the homeland to which displaced women frequently testify even before departure’, in Averis’s terms,13 because they are constantly moving between different locations and always feel out of place, even within the borders of the homeland. The family then board the boat on which they travel for 20 days to reach Canada. Aablè is amazed at the luxury of the boat, which she describes as ‘le plus beau de toute [sa] vie’—it is the first time she has slept in a bed, has had access to running water from a tap, and has not had to use an outside toilet (p. 22). She soon becomes frustrated, however, at the interminable journey, and her frustration turns to fear that her father will not recognize her after two years apart from the family. In typically childlike language, Aablè utters a series of conditional sentences that end in ellipses, and the repetition of the ‘si’ structure, which culminates in the ultimate fear that ‘bayé m’aime plus comme avant’, highlights her underlying dread that her family will be torn apart once again when they are in Canada, as she has become so accustomed to living in a fractured family without one of her parents (p. 24). The section ends optimistically with Aablè declaring that ‘à Canada je sens ça va être une belle vie’ (p. 24), an optimism countered in the following section when the adult narrator, presumed to be Farhoud herself, reflects on this departure. The narrative time has now moved to the present day when she returns to her native village in Lebanon, in a nod to Serge Doubrovsky’s model of autofiction that privileges a departure from a chronological timeframe, and the narrative style is 13 Averis, ‘Mobility and Stasis’, p. 10.

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much more sophisticated, with longer, descriptive phrases interspersed with short, dramatic sentences for emotional effect. The older narrator becomes emotional when she catches sight of a tree in the courtyard and is reminded by her cousin of the poem she recited from the top of the tree on the day of her departure. In a poignant reflection, she realizes that she had locked away this memory because it was so painful for her: Les grandes émotions, les rares, celles qu’on n’éprouve pas souvent, mais qu’on n’oublie jamais, celles qui nous font saisir l’invisible et le chemin parcouru et celui à venir, ces émotions-là, on a tant de mal à les décrire qu’on risque de ne jamais les partager avec personne si on ne fait pas un effort monstrueux pour trouver les mots. (p. 27)

It is only with hindsight that Farhoud’s narrator realizes the significance of her departure and that cutting ties with Lebanon was extremely traumatic. It seems that her Lebanese history is indeed an important element of her identity, but she only recognizes this as an elderly woman looking back on her life. As a young child desperate to be reunited with her father and eager for a new life of opportunity, she longs to turn her back on her Lebanese roots and embrace her new life in Quebec. Analysing the figure of the stranger in Étrangers à nous-mêmes, Julia Kristeva argues that although the stranger inevitably encounters difficulties in the host community, the stranger is also tenacious and determined and uses his or her own personal strength to overcome these problems. For Kristeva, although ‘les déboires que reconcontera nécessirement—il est une bouche en trop, une parole incompréhensible, un comportement non conforme—le blessent violement’, such setbacks ‘le rendent lisse et dur comme un caillou, toujours prêt à poursuivre sa course infinie, plus loin, ailleurs’.14 This definition of the stranger rings true for the young Aablè, who experiences trials and tribulations during her first years in Quebec but who surmounts these difficulties through the education she receives, becoming determined to succeed in spite of, or indeed because of, her immigrant status. Aablè’s integration into life in Quebec is facilitated by the linguistic instruction she receives at school. The family first settle in Saint-Vincentde-Paul, a district to the north of Montreal, and Aablè is educated at a Catholic school where she learns to speak French. Before arriving in Quebec, she does not speak a word of French. Linguistic exile, therefore, takes on a particular significance for Farhoud as she is the only author 14 Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, p. 15.

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examined in this study for whom French is not her native language. Farhoud has since overcome this linguistic exile; French has replaced Arabic as her mother tongue because she has lived in Quebec for so long. She describes French as her ‘langue maîtresse’ because it is the language that she has chosen, the language she now fully commands; Arabic, in contrast, is the language passed down to her by her parents, rather than a language she has learned through choice.15 In The Translingual Imagination (2000), Steven Kellman defines translingual writers, such as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov, as those who ‘write in more than one language or at least in a language other than their primary one’.16 Although in theory Farhoud has knowledge of two linguistic systems, in practice she now perceives French as her primary language and considers herself to be a monolingual writer who writes exclusively in French. This was not the case when she first arrived in Quebec, however. Aablè remembers a particularly humiliating episode when, after handing over a picture of the Virgin Mary to sister Marguerite at the convent, she is asked ‘où l’as-tu trouvée, l’image?’ (p. 31). Aablè does not understand the French interrogative adverb ‘où’; she is embarrassed about her lack of linguistic ability in French and so she runs away from the school. Farhoud opens this chapter with the anecdote describing Aablè’s humiliation before providing the contextual information that explains her linguistic exile. The universality evoked by a child’s complete misunderstanding of a particular situation allows the reader to share Aablè’s sentiments of confusion and humiliation because all readers, even those who have not necessarily migrated to a new location, can identify with this particular experience of feeling humiliated because of their apparent ignorance. Yet Aablè’s situation is even more difficult because of the alien linguistic and cultural context in which she finds herself. The short, disjointed sentences in which Aablè recounts this episode—‘la sœur me parle. Je ne comprends rien’ (p. 31)—is testimony to her embarrassment as she struggles to find the words to articulate her despair, her wounded pride aggravating her sentiment of linguistic exile. Knowledge is extremely important to Aablè because she is determined to succeed in her life to prove wrong those who do not accept her, and she recognizes that her future success is dependent on her learning. She runs home to her father, 15 Delisle and Tézine. 16 Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln, NA; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. ix.

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convinced that he would understand her plight because knowledge is equally important to him. He teaches her the significance of the word ‘où’ and instils an even more important lesson in her: the need to ask for help. This strategy proves to be successful and within nine months she is able to speak French fluently. Having overcome this linguistic setback, Aablè is certainly ‘prêt[e] à poursuivre sa course’, in Kristeva’s terms. Young and adaptable, she makes friends easily when she attends drama school, an activity that she loves because she is able to forget about the emotional baggage she carries around her. Sister Marguerite is stunned when Aablè performs confidently in French for the concert at the end of the year, exclaiming that ‘dire qu’il y a à peine neuf mois, tu ne savais pas dire trois mots en français, c’est incroyable’ (p. 41). It is striking that it takes Aablè exactly nine months to learn French, the same amount of time it takes for a foetus to develop in a woman’s womb; Farhoud here plays on the concept of the ‘mother tongue’ and makes an interesting connection between mothering and learning a new language. As a young child, then, Aablè has the adaptability, personal strength, and resourcefulness to acclimatize to this new situation. She is not defeated or held back by the obstacles she encounters; rather, they spur her on to achieve greater success. Interestingly, the child herself recognizes the inherent link between exile, integration, and education when she comments that ‘la faculté de s’adapter au changement est un signe d’intelligence, paraît-il’ (p. 35). It is her inner intelligence, cultivated at the schools she attends in Quebec, which explains her relatively smooth transition from life in rural Lebanon to life in urban Quebec. Adolescence: ‘L’étranger n’est de nulle part’ As Farhoud’s protagonists transition from childhood to adulthood, they no longer desire to stand out for their intelligence and bravery but simply want to fit in and be identical to everyone else. This is particularly difficult for Faïzah and Ikram on their return to Lebanon in Au grand soleil cachez vos filles because they are attempting to adapt to social and cultural norms that were once familiar to them, but that now do not correspond to their own values after living in what they consider to be a more open, cosmopolitan, and tolerant environment in Montreal. A common thread running between the two texts is the protagonists’ love for acting, an activity that epitomizes their desire to shed their immigrant identity and to adopt a new sense of self that is not

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conditioned by their status as exiled individuals. For Aablè, acting allows her to attract attention for her own talent, rather than for her cultural difference. She is able to determine her own identity and be in control of the ways in which others define her. She describes the acting lessons she took as a child and adolescent as ‘une affaire de vie ou de mort, ou pour le dire plus simplement, une rampe de survie’ (p. 79). Whenever she was engrossed in playing a new character, she felt as though she belonged everywhere, and was not limited by artificial national borders: ‘je venais d’un autre pays, oui, mais quand j’étais sur scène, j’étais de tous les pays. Ou du pays que je choississais’ (p. 81). The adult narrator is speaking here, and so it is only with the formative experience of adulthood that Farhoud recognizes the debt to which she owes theatre for assisting her with her survival from exile. The typographical layout of this quotation adds to its emotional charge—the final sentence ‘ou du pays que je choississais’ is set apart from the rest of the text by an additional line space, emphasizing the freedom acting gave her to carve out a new identity for herself. As she grows older, however, her acting experience is not able to counteract her inherent difference. Her adolescence, already a time of heightened emotion, is marked by an extreme identity quest in which she begins to question whether her Lebanese origins and Arabic cultural heritage will always set her apart. When Aablè is 12, she takes part in a Catechism competition, designed by the Archbishop of Montreal to demonstrate the children’s strong religious beliefs. Young Aablè is ambitious and competitive and studies hard for the competition, determined to prove to everyone that she is intelligent and successful, even though she does not follow the Catholic faith (like the rest of her family, she belongs to the Lebanese Greek Orthodox Church). She is extremely proud on learning that she has won the competition, but her pride quickly turns to dismay when the teachers express their incredulity that she has won, despite not being Catholic, and she comments that ‘elles apprenaient ce qu’un enfant d’immigrants ne crie pas sur les toits ou cache, si possible: sa différence’ (p. 135). Regardless of Aablè’s attempts to erase her difference, she is always automatically recognized as being other by those around her, in a process reminiscent of Sara Ahmed’s work on strangers. For Ahmed, strangers are ‘those who are, in their very proximity, already recognized as not belonging, as being out of place’ [original emphasis].17 In contrast to Kristeva, Ahmed argues that 17 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality

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estrangement is external, rather than internal; the stranger is recognized as being ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ in relation to those who are not. In an explicit nod to the title of Kristeva’s influential text, Ahmed explains that ‘rendering strangers internal rather than external to identity, to conclude simply that we are all strangers to ourselves is to avoid dealing with the political processes whereby some others are designated as stranger than other others’ [original emphasis].18 Aablè’s estrangement in this episode is certainly external: she does not personally feel different to the other children but her strangeness is projected onto her by her classmates and teachers who consider her as ‘stranger than the other others’, in Ahmed’s terms. Despite this narrow-minded perception of Aablè’s identity at school, schooling is a life-line for the adolescent as it enables her to make friends, enhance her knowledge of French, and equip her with knowledge and skills that will be crucial for her later life. She only realizes the benefits of her education and its intrinsic function as a coping mechanism when instruction is removed from her. When Aablè is 14, her father takes her out of school and orders her to help in the family shop; the business is becoming increasingly successful after the family move to a different suburb, but her father wants Aablè and her older sister (who remains unnamed in the text) to work in the shop for free. For Aablè, this removal from school only serves to accentuate her sentiments of exile, highlighted by the lack of verbs in her disjointed speech and the repetition of the negated adverb ‘plus’: ‘plus d’école. Plus de cours de diction. Plus de théâtre. Plus d’émissions de radio du samedi. Plus d’amis. Plus rien’ (p. 165). This interminable list of Aablè’s lack of opportunities terminates in complete frustration. Gender issues are also salient here: her brothers are allowed to complete their schooling, while the girls must simply obey patriarchal orders. Aablè struggles to understand how her father could prevent her from learning when education is crucial to his own self-worth. She feels completely trapped and alone working in the shop, and compares this exile her father has imposed on her in Quebec to her initial exile from Lebanon, wondering whether she is ‘en train de vivre le déracinement une deuxième fois?’ (p. 166). Her second exile makes her feel resentment towards her father who dictates all elements of her life and she becomes depressed by her lack of professional prospects. (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 21. 18 Ahmed, p. 6.

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This frustration at the lack of professional opportunities spills over into Au grand soleil cachez vos filles as Ikram struggles to find acting work in Lebanon, forcing her to question her life choices. Ikram’s return to Lebanon is initially shrouded with excitement. She is delighted to spend time with her family and enjoys discovering her sister Faïzah’s favourite haunts in Beirut. In awe of the marvels of the urban and natural landscape, she describes Lebanon in exotic and Orientalizing terms, exaggerating the differences between life in what she perceives as dull and subdued Quebec and life in exciting, noisy, and hectic Lebanon. She admits to being ‘subjuguée devant tant de beauté’ (p. 35), a phrase that emphasizes her initial joy at returning to her native land but that also hints at the underlying unequal gender relations in the country, and Lebanon’s colonial history of invasion and oppression, through the use of the loaded adjective ‘subjuguée’. In her first few months living in Beirut, she is not concerned about relaunching her failing acting career or finding work to stimulate her interests, but simply wants to rediscover the country and its inhabitants. This is the first time she fully identifies as being Lebanese, using the possessive adjective ‘mon’ to define her close relationship to her native land: ‘c’est la première fois que je le dis: mon pays. Sans hésiter’ (p. 37). Although she demonstrates a positive attitude towards her Lebanese identity, it is problematic that she feels obliged to neglect her professional desires in order to connect fully with her homeland, and, as a consequence, she experiences a regression in her personal emancipation. In time she becomes frustrated by her supposed freedom. She has no job, no education, and no purpose, and simply wanders around the city to idle away her time. She returns to Lebanon as a tourist rather than a citizen, initially excited to rediscover a long-forgotten land but soon dissatisfied by her lack of opportunity. Her anger is also targeted at those who do not accept her. While they do not openly question her nationality, as people did in Quebec, it is clear to her that they do not consider her as Lebanese: ‘au Canada, on me posait les questions: d’où viens-tu? Où es-tu née? Ici, ils sont sûrs de ce qu’ils avancent: tu ne viens pas d’ici, c’est clair’ (p. 47). Ikram thus does not feel she belongs anywhere, echoing Kristeva’s assertion that ‘toujours ailleurs, l’étranger n’est de nulle part’.19 Ikram’s later experiences of Lebanese society offer a particularly gendered perspective of exile and estrangement. She is frustrated at the lack of prospects available for young female actresses in Lebanon, and 19 Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, p. 21.

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so is elated when she eventually lands a role in a theatre production. Yet her father is adamant that acting is not an acceptable profession for a young woman from a reputable family, and he explains that ‘tu le sais, ma fille, au Liban…une fille de bonne famille ne joue pas au théâtre ni à la télévision’ (p. 109). The ellipsis in this quotation is suggestive of his hesitation at imposing a rule that, inevitably, she will not appreciate, while the reference to ‘une fille de bonne famille’ reinforces the inherent gender norms at work in Lebanese society. According to her father, Ikram’s primary concern should be to behave as a respectful young girl rather than as a progressive woman who is only interested in professional opportunities. Ikram is headstrong and stands up to her father, informing him aggressively that if he does not approve of her career then he will have to throw her out of the family home. Keen to salvage his reputation, he does not order Ikram to leave. Ikram soon becomes upset at the ways in which she is forced to treat her family in order to pursue her acting career, admitting that she does not even recognize herself anymore as she has become ‘méchante’ (p. 136). Kristeva argues that the condition of estrangement is temporary and can be overcome by pursuing a particular interest or occupation. As she claims, ‘dès que les étrangers ont une action ou une passion, ils s’enracinent. Provisoirement mais intensément’. 20 Yet, in Ikram’s case, doggedly seeking an acting career does not help her to put down roots in Lebanon. Rather, it creates a rift in her family and causes her to be acutely aware of her own cultural difference, as she is continuously reminded that her gender hinders her chances of becoming a professional actor in what she regards as a rigid, hierarchical, and patriarchal society. As a consequence of her inability to fully integrate into life in Lebanon, Ikram returns to Quebec via Paris at the end of the text. Her departure mirrors Farhoud’s own departure from Lebanon as a young woman, reinforcing the connections between the author and her fictional character. Ikram openly blames Lebanon for all her family’s problems, an attitude tinged with Orientalism: ‘qu’est-ce que le Grand Soleil a fait de nous?!’ (p. 223). The text closes with her plane journey back to Lebanon, during which Ikram suffers a mental breakdown. The air hostess thinks she is simply upset to be leaving Lebanon, but Ikram believes that Lebanon is the source of all her ills and thus has no choice but to leave. The capital letters ‘je DOIS partir, je VEUX partir’ that appear on the penultimate page of the text (p. 225) depict her screams 20 Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, p. 19.

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and represent a young woman in crisis. She falls asleep and when she awakes, she is almost in Paris. Subscribing once again to attitudes criticized by Said in Orientalism, she suddenly feels calmer now she has almost arrived in the West: ‘tout est clair dans ma tête, je sais que l’Orient est derrière moi. Je me sens reposée’ (p. 226). She associates her erratic behaviour with the Middle East and looks forward to a calmer life in Paris. Her stay in Paris and subsequent journey to Quebec lie beyond the textual constraints of the book and so the reader does not know whether Ikram’s reverse exile is a positive experience. Yet given the similarities between Ikram and the author herself who has never returned to live in Lebanon as an adult, it can be assumed that the young woman is only able to find peace far away from her country of origin. Her sister Faïzah experiences her own downfall, which she explicitly associates with the patriarchal Lebanon of the 1970s. She has already been living in Beirut for two years when the rest of her family return, and initially she offers a positive model of integration. She is financially independent, working as a manager of two shops in central Beirut, and she speaks Arabic fluently. She is, however, aware of the social expectations placed on women to marry young in order to raise a family and run the household, abandoning any professional ambitions they may have. She admits that she loves Lebanon but her patriotism is compromised by pressures imposed on her by society—and even by her own mother—to remain a virgin until marriage and subsequently to sacrifice her own needs and desires to satisfy her husband. In a nod to Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘on ne naît pas femme, on le devient’, the most famous feminist sentence ever written and a controversial examination of sexual difference, 21 Faïzah exclaims that ‘on ne naît pas hypocrite, on le devient’ (p. 21). Premarital sex is deemed immoral in Lebanon, as in many countries with large Muslim communities, and women and their families may face social ostracization if they are suspected to have lost their virginity before marriage; men, in contrast, ‘enjoy elevated social status as a result of their perceived sexual prowess’, as they are not subjected to the same sexual and social stigma. 22 Faïzah is aware that women are forced to be deceitful about their virginity. She knows of many rich families who send their daughters to Europe for surgical 21 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 13. 22 Linda Rae Bennett, Women, Islam and Modernity: Single Women, Sexuality and Reproductive Health in Contemporary Indonesia (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 20.

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intervention on their hymens in order to disguise any signs of sexual activity; otherwise, as she exclaims ironically, ‘pas de mariage avec un riche époux et surtout, mon Dieu, quel scandale pour les parents!’ (p. 23). Her feminist ideology soon breaks down when she becomes engaged to a rich lawyer named Izzam, simply to ‘partir définitivement de cette maison où l’air est devenu irrespirable’ because Ikram has refused to abandon her dreams of becoming an actress (p. 127). Faïzah simply passes from one patriarchal relationship to another, and does not seem concerned that her identity will remain defined by her relationship with her husband for the rest of her life. She never actually marries Izzam because he discovers that she is not a virgin, and so he cancels the wedding. Distraught, Faïzah angrily calls out the hypocrisy of the situation: ‘combien de fois a-t-il joui en elles, sans conséquence, puisque le masculin, lui, est toujours vierge?’ (p. 155). Yet rather than reverting to her feminist ideals, she quickly gets engaged again, this time to Nabil, the owner of the shops where she works. She does not love him, but in a reflection of patriarchal Lebanese society, she problematically believes that the only status she can rightfully claim is that of wife. She is soon disgusted with herself and likens herself to a prostitute. Her disgust at her own disregard for her sexual freedom leads her to become a nun at a monastery in Deir es Salam, enclosing herself off from her family and the local community to live in a place where no man can touch her. This self-imposed exile is a direct consequence of a patriarchal society that considers women as ‘une monnaie d’échange, une tare, une malédiction’, in Faïzah’s eyes (p. 179). As women grow older, their social and sexual value become dramatically diminished and their sentiments of exile become even more pronounced, as is the case with the mother figure in Toutes celles que j’étais. Motherhood: ‘L’étranger n’a pas de soi’ For Kristeva, the stranger has no defined sense of self because he or she does not belong to a specified time or place. The stranger has no homeland in spatial and temporal terms, which unleashes a profound identity crisis, in which the stranger is detached from his or her own ego: C’est dire qu’établi en soi, l’étranger n’a pas de soi. Tout juste une assurance vide, sans valeur, qui axe ses possibilités d’être constamment autre, au gré des autres et des circonstances. Je fais ce qu’on veut mais,

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ce n’est pas “moi”—“moi” est ailleurs, “moi” n’appartient à personne, “moi” n’appartient pas à “moi”, “moi” existe-il?’23

This endless questioning of the identity of the ‘moi’ becomes even more pronounced for migrant mothers, who frequently put their own national and cultural identity on hold in order to prioritize the integration of their children. The language in which migrant mothers interact with their children can be a productive source of attachment to their native culture, but it can also reinforce the alienation that mothers experience if they communicate with their children in a language other than that spoken in the country where they are living. Eglė Kačkutė distinguishes between three categories of migrant mothers, according to their linguistic tendencies: silent mothers are those who do not speak to their children in their mother tongue at all because of a personal or historical trauma they have experienced; monolingual mothers only speak to their children in their native language and thus their integration into the host society is restricted; and multilingual mothers are those who communicate with their children in both their native language and in the language of the host country. 24 Kačkutė argues that maintaining communication between mother and child in the native language can be a positive experience that preserves connections to the native culture and recreates the familiar maternal space that has been lost during migration. However, adopting this language can also serve to distance mothers from their children who do not necessarily appreciate this linguistic practice. These mothers are often othered by their own children as well as by the host community. The children, who ‘develop a higher degree of belonging in the host culture and do so faster due to schooling and socialization’, can come to resent having to ‘mother’ or support their mothers in some way. 25 In Toutes celles que j’étais, Aablè and her mother experience a role reversal beyond the domestic space as Aablè considers it her duty to 23 Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, p. 19. 24 Eglė Kačkutė, ‘Mothering in a Foreign Language: Silent and/or Multilingual Mothers in Dalia Staponkutė’s The Silence of the Mothers’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 52 (2015), 82–91. 25 Eglė Kačkutė, ‘Mother Tongue as the Language of Mothering and Homing Practice in Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue and Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms’, in The Migrant Maternal: ‘Birthing’ New Lives Abroad, ed. by Anna Kuroczycka Schultes and Helen Vallianatos (Ontario, Canada: Demeter Press, 2016), pp. 56–74 (p. 64).

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protect her mother from ‘des intrus et de l’extérieur’, while her mother looks after the children at home (p. 99). Aablè takes her mother to the doctors, goes shopping with her, and runs errands for the family to avoid her mother being forced to cope with difficult situations because she does not speak French. Exile has made her mother regress from a confident and resourceful young woman who took five small children on the long journey from Lebanon to Quebec, to a timid and reserved woman who spends all her time at home, protected by her young children. Yet Aablè does not resent looking after her mother; rather, she is proud to have acquired sufficient linguistic knowledge of French to be able to adopt the position of guardian and protector. In the chapter entitled ‘M’ma et le bulletin de fin d’année’—one of the few chapters entirely dedicated to her mother in an indication of her absence from public life and her relegation to the domestic sphere—the mother’s linguistic exile is foregrounded. A monolingual mother in Kačkutė’s terms, she is forced to speak to her children in Arabic, less in a bid to transmit her native culture to her offspring, and more because this is the only verbal linguistic system available to her (although food preparation is also an important way in which the mother communicates with her children, as is the case for Dounia in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante, and could also be considered a form of language). She is obliged to prioritize her domestic chores over any ambition to further her education or to facilitate her integration into life in Quebec by learning French. Young Aablè is aware of these gendered limitations to her mother’s education: ‘ma mère était toujours occupée à faire à manger et tout le reste pour que vivent décemment six enfants, un mari, une aïeule, et souvent des amis de mon père qui passaient plusieurs jours chez nous’ (p. 97). She neither has the time nor the opportunity to learn French. On this particular occasion the children are talking in French about receiving their school reports at the end of the year, and about the school tradition of inviting parents to a ceremony to celebrate the students’ achievements. Their mother overhears the French noun ‘bulletin’ and enquires about the nature of their conversation. Here, Farhoud transcribes the Arabic form of this French noun that becomes ‘boultine’, and the adult narrator offers an explanation of the differences between Arabic and French punctuation. This additional comment appears between parentheses to mark that it is the adult Farhoud who is offering linguistic explanations, and such an explanation suggests that Farhoud is targeting her writing at a French-speaking readership who is likely to be unfamiliar with written and spoken Arabic. On finally understanding

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the significance of the ‘bulletin’, the mother is keen to go to the school and watch her children being praised for their successes. The children are less eager, fearing she will embarrass them because of her lack of cultural awareness, and so they invent reasons for needing to stay at home. They remind her that she needs to look after their youngest sister and make the dinner, and add: ‘tu ne sors jamais seule. Tu vas te perdre’ (p. 98). When the children remind her of her incompetence in French, she suddenly becomes angry and retorts ‘c’est bien là l’excellente idée de votre père, que je reste ignorante, que je me sacrifie, eh bien qu’il se sacrifie, lui, moi j’en ai assez!’ (p. 98). The children are incredulous as this is the first time their mother has demonstrated any rebellious spirit. In a rare flash of outspokenness, she actively blames her husband for her lack of linguistic knowledge, and she understands that because of underlying gender norms in Lebanese culture, she is expected to sacrifice her own ambitions for the good of her husband and her family. She continues to rebel against patriarchy by succeeding in visiting the school for the ceremony, and on her return she teases her children that she has arrived home in one piece and she has successfully navigated an unfamiliar cultural and linguistic context, remarking playfully ‘vous voyez, le loup ne m’a pas mangée’ (p. 100). This rare example of humorous nonconformity is undermined, though, by subsequent episodes in Toutes celles que j’étais that continue to portray the mother as a passive figure, othered by her children and by the Québécois community to such an extent that she has no defined sense of self. The chapter following the episode of the school report recounts the first time Aablè’s parents watch her acting on stage. Aablè does not expect her parents to come to watch her, as they do not support her acting ambitions. On the last evening of the performance, she is stunned to see them sitting proudly in the audience. It is the first time she has seen her mother in a public place, with the exception of the Greek Orthodox church she attends every Sunday, and she cannot help but perceive her mother as being out of place: ‘je la sentais déplacée, pas dans son monde’ (p. 104). For Aablè, her mother is so different to the other white educated Québécois mothers that she regards her integration into life in Montreal as impossible. The mother is not given a voice in this episode, a further indication of her passivity. This chapter is evidence of the inherent connections between exile, age, and education: the mother is denied an education because of her maternal status, and thus struggles to integrate into the host society, while Aablè and her siblings are better

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equipped to cope with their new environment through the linguistic and social instruction they receive at school. Although the mother of the Abdelnour family in Au grand soleil cachez vos filles experiences a return to her country of origin from exile in Quebec, and therefore could be expected to feel more comfortable in this familiar setting, she also struggles to find her place in her new surroundings. Her estrangement is further accentuated by her gendered and maternal roles. Like Faïzah, she has been living in Beirut for two years before the rest of the family arrive. While initially she is delighted that her family are reunited in Lebanon, and particularly enjoys spending time with her troubled son Adib, she soon finds herself confined to the same domestic role she held in Quebec. In an observation reminiscent of Aablè’s comments about her mother’s maternal obligations in Farhoud’s first autofictional narrative, and a reminder of the connections between the two books, Ikram states that ‘maman fait tout ce qu’il y a à faire quand on est une mère, c’est-à-dire qu’elle n’arrête pas de la journée’ (p. 94). It is telling that the mother has no voice herself as there is no chapter dedicated to her, and she rarely speaks directly throughout the text. Her thoughts are therefore mediated through her children, reinforcing her sentiments of estrangement from Lebanese society. On the one occasion the mother is given the narrative voice, her speech underscores her inability to challenge gendered norms because of her lack of critical conscience. In a chapter narrated by Ikram, the reader learns how the children enjoy swimming in the sea with their father, but their mother never joins them. When Ikram asks her mother why she refuses to go swimming with them, the latter replies that she is too old to engage in such ludic activities where her uncovered body will be on show. While defiant, rebellious Ikram angrily retorts that there are no written rules forbidding older women from swimming, her mother is aware that she must conform to social expectations, just as she did in Quebec: ‘quand je vivais au Canada, je faisais comme les gens de là-bas, maintenant je suis ici, je fais comme les gens d’ici’ (p. 80). For the mother, adapting to a new environment means simply following orders and copying behaviours, and because she has never been taught to question social expectations given her lack of formal education, it never occurs to her to transcend these restrictive social norms. Rather, she is deprived of, and deprives herself of, the freedom that release from exile in Quebec could have granted her, and she thus finds herself exiled once again in Lebanon.

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Old Age in Exile As Alain Montandon observes, ‘le problème de vieillir en terre étrangère rejoint les préoccupations identitaires nombreuses de la scène publique québécoise’, 26 and thus Farhoud’s writing can be considered as part of an important literary trend in Quebec, observed by other women writers such as Marie-Célie Agnant and Monique Bosco. Unlike much work by women writers from other regions of the Francophone postcolonial world, migrant writing from Quebec maintains a sustained focus on old age in exile. Although the self-referential focus of Toutes celles que j’étais and Au grand soleil cachez vos filles restrict the texts’ potential of portraying a range of challenges and experiences encountered by ageing women living away from their country of birth, the narratives do offer a nuanced depiction of the intersections between ageing and migration. In Toutes celles que j’étais, introspective reflections from Farhoud the author punctuate the narrative as she looks back on her own life of migration between Lebanon and Quebec. It seems that the present-day account of the elderly author/narrator are predominantly aligned with Margaret Morganroth Gullete’s ‘narratives of progress’27—that is, a positive experience of growing older whereby an individual matures into a successful, confident, and fully participating member of society. For instance, Farhoud has experienced considerable literary success as an older woman, and she has developed her own subjectivity that is no longer defined by the exile she experienced on her arrival in Quebec from Lebanon, or her reverse exile on moving back to Lebanon in 1965, by turning her back on her past life, an approach she defines in the narrative as ‘une question de survie’ (p. 25). In addition, the older narrator comments on the positive aspects of her exilic experiences, most notably that she has since become much closer to her family. She acknowledges that only other members of her family can understand the alienation she experienced at the time of her initial migration to Quebec because they too suffered from a similar sentiment: ‘personne n’est plus proche de soi que celui qui a vécu dans le même pétrin, qui a passé à travers les bombes en même temps’ (p. 47). The fact that she equates her 26 Alain Montandon, ‘Abla Farhoud: portrait d’une libanaise en exil: à propos du vieillir dans Le Bonheur a la queue glissante’, Neohelicon, 33.1 (2006), 81–90 (p. 82). 27 Margaret Morganroth Gullete, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997).

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early life in Quebec to destruction caused by ‘les bombes’ is testimony to her initial struggles to adapt to her new surroundings, but that she has since overcome. It is only as an older woman looking back on her life, with all the wisdom that hindsight grants her, that she is able to recognize that her exile has strengthened her affective relationships with her family, thereby providing a productive space for her personal growth and development. However, the disjointed and contrapuntal structure of the final section of the text, which continually alternates between the past and the present, and between the narrative voice of the young fictionalized character Aablè and that of an older narrator who represents the author Farhoud, suggests that while the older woman is experiencing personal and professional success, she is also constantly reminded of her own troubled existence as a young woman. This mode of reflective narration breaks the binary between ‘narratives of progress’ and ‘narratives of decline’, as Gullete does in her theorization of these terms, instead offering a more nuanced account of ageing, and specifically ageing in exile. Towards the end of the text, the reader learns that the adolescent Aablè kept a diary. This diary symbolizes the beginnings of Farhoud’s literary career, and aligns the text with her other work that privileges some form of ‘autoreprésentation’ of the characters for whom ‘il faut arriver […] à se penser et à se dire pour dépasser le manque, la perte’, according to Lucie Lequin. 28 The first diary entry, in which Aablè talks about her first love interest, is not introduced by a commentary from the author; it is only apparent that this section is taken from her diary by the title of the chapter, which reads ‘Journal, 26 juin 1960’ (p. 181). This title positions the narrative time within a specific timeframe, five years before her departure for Lebanon. The next diary entry from 13 July 1960 does not immediately follow the first but is interspersed by Farhoud’s memories of a Lebanese friend of her father visiting the family in Quebec. This fragmented structure of short diary entries and more developed memories continues to punctuate the narrative, until Farhoud’s older voice becomes clear in the chapter entitled ‘Artéfacts’ (pp. 271–74). Here, the older narrator finds various important objects that marked her childhood: press cuttings from newspapers from Montreal that narrate her beginnings as an actress, photographs taken to document her early 28 Lucie Lequin, ‘La Filiation rompue ou l’écriture d’Abla Farhoud’, in Des femmes et de l’écriture: le bassin méditerranéen, ed. by Carmen Boustani and Edmond Jouve (Paris: Karthala, 2006), pp. 55–66 (p. 63).

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successes, and the diary she kept from 1960 to 1965, ‘ce cahier épais à couverture noire’ (p. 273). In an emotional state, she barely recognizes her younger self, using the third-person pronoun ‘elle’ to talk about herself, denoting this distance between who she was and who she is now. She even wonders if some of the incidents are invented, as she has intentionally forgotten about her childhood in order to preserve her Québécois subjectivity: ‘j’ai été surprise en découvrant son ami René. Au début, j’avais complètement oublié qui il était, j’ai même pensé qu’elle l’avait inventé’ (p. 274). This poignant chapter acts as a mise-enabyme of the reader’s own reading process as the reader reads the diary alongside Farhoud. The final diary entry from 21 April 1965 is written on her last night in Quebec, and reveals a young woman frightened about her unknown future, her fear foregrounded by short sentences: ‘demain, nous partons. Et j’ai peur’ (p. 298). By offering a snapshot of her previous troubles alongside her more measured and reasoned thoughts as an older woman, Toutes celles que j’étais challenges the very polarized view of old age as either progress or decline. The older Farhoud now possesses a defined sense of self, but she continues to be reminded of her exilic past. Kristeva’s probing question of whether one can be ‘étranger et heureux’29 thus takes on an additional meaning for migrants in old age, who are aware of their own mortality and are confronted with the memories of what might have been a traumatic past. Farhoud’s paternal grandmother Jana offers an alternative model of old age in exile. Jana was born in 1900 in Lebanon. A close reading of Toutes celles que j’étais reveals that, in keeping with the family tradition, she remained behind when her parents migrated to Quebec in 1903. At the age of 15, she got married and later had three children, but when her husband died in 1930, she joined the rest of her family in Quebec, leaving behind Chafic, Farhoud’s father. She was a young woman when she first migrated, which perhaps explains her participation in life in Quebec as an older woman. Although she had no formal education, she was determined and intelligent, and she taught herself to read and write; her self-directed instruction was a key component of her later success as a businesswoman who owned numerous shops in Montreal. Jana is described as a feminist before her time because she understood that ‘l’émancipation passait d’abord par le savoir et l’indépendance financière’ (p. 84). Likewise, in Au grand soleil cachez vos filles, the children’s great aunt Faridé is a head-strong and independent woman. 29 Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, p. 13.

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Ikram turns to her for advice when she is considering leaving Lebanon, which suggests that she views her great aunt as a source of wisdom. It is unclear whether Faridé has lived all her life in Lebanon, although she does admit to Ikram that the only reason she has stayed in the country is to keep the memories of her deceased family alive, so perhaps she is not as well integrated into Lebanese society as she first appears: ‘il fallait que quelqu’un reste pour penser à eux’ (p. 209). These varying tales of exile and integration at a later stage in life are a reminder of the idiosyncrasies of exilic experiences that must be analysed on their own terms, taking specific personal and cultural circumstances into consideration. Conclusion Toutes celles que j’étais and Au grand soleil cachez vos filles invite a comparative reading for the ways in which they explore transformations in female subjectivity as women in exile grow older. While Farhoud’s first autofictional narrative is a more openly personal, honest, and emotive account of the events that have shaped her as a person and a writer, given the nominal identification between author, narrator, and protagonist, the second text is equally instrumental in portraying the struggles encountered by her multiple selves on attempting to adapt and re-adapt to life in Quebec and Lebanon at different ages and in different circumstances. Analysing exile and estrangement across different life stages thus reveals that these experiences are not linear and do not necessarily mirror the ageing process. They are particularly complex for women from patriarchal societies such as Lebanon, who continue to be defined by their familial obligations that restrict their access to formal education and prevent them from acquiring the language of their new surroundings, both fundamental tools for integration. The genre of autofiction enables Farhoud to articulate her fragmented and disrupted life between Lebanon and Quebec through the constant shuttling back and forth between the past and the present and the continuous shifting of the narrative voice. The two texts resonate with her wider literary œuvre, as they both offer a vivid and personal elucidation of many of the themes already put forward in her fictional writing, such as the resilience yet fragility of her experience of old age and the importance of language in the self-construction of identity. Farhoud has suggested that a third book about her migration to Paris as a student in the 1970s would complete this autofictional sequence, as she explains

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that this period of her life would provide rich narrative material: ‘j’ai vécu quatre ans à Paris, ça pourrait faire facilement quarante romans!’30 It is not clear in this interview whether Farhoud has already written this book, nor when or if she intends to publish it. In fact, Farhoud’s most recent publication has broken this autofictional cycle: Le Dernier des snoreaux (2019) is a fictional novel that recovers themes of madness and mental illness that were central to her 2005 publication Le Fou d’Omar. 31 Were this final narrative of the trilogy ever to be written, it would certainly be illuminating to examine how her age and educational experiences influence sentiments of exile in France, a space that, unlike Quebec, maintains political and cultural ties with Lebanon following its role as former colonial power, and where the historical baggage of the disintegration of France’s imperial hold over the Middle East is still present in the French imaginary.

30 Latendresse Charon and Rhéaume. 31 Abla Farhoud, Le Fou d’Omar (Montreal: VLB, 2005); Le Dernier des snoreaux (Montreal: VLB, 2019).

Conclusion Conclusion

This book has sought to reconceptualize female experiences of exile. From the analysis of primary and secondary sources undertaken, it is evident that a gap exists in the current conceptualization of exile, namely the question of gender, which, all too often, goes underexplored. By analysing the autofictional narratives of six contemporary female authors from across the Francosphere—Kim Lefèvre (Vietnam/ France), Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe/mainland France), Nina Bouraoui (Algeria/France), Michèle Rakotoson (Madagascar/France), Véronique Tadjo (Côte d’Ivoire/France), and Abla Farhoud (Lebanon/Quebec)— this book has drawn on literary theory and postcolonial theory in order to create an analytical framework that widens contemporary gendered understandings of exile. Reading exile in light of both gender and genre in a way that previous studies have not reveals original discussions and insights into this unique modality of displacement. By examining each author and their autofictional narratives in turn through a series of close readings, this book has argued that each author’s exile is determined by the specific historical, political, and cultural contexts in which their exile occurs. Furthermore, a close focus on individual voices, which has allowed me to compare between two or three narratives of exile written by a single writer where appropriate, has revealed the particular dynamics at play for each author and has identified their longer-term coping strategies when faced with exile in its various forms. However, certain parallels have also been noted in the ways in which their exile and gender converge. Comparing and contrasting between the autofictional accounts of the six authors has enabled me to determine a specific gendered aesthetics of exile within female Francophone postcolonial writing that transcends the socio-political specificities of their countries of origin. The book thus exposes how France’s colonial past and postcolonial present has shaped

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experiences and literary expressions of exile, probing the multiple encounters that have forged national and transnational identities in the present time. The study has also drawn attention to the ways in which the six authors each position themselves in a peripheral relationship not only with France but also with other regions of the Francosphere. This research has connected gender with literary genre, identifying similarities in the ways in which women articulate their experiences of exile through the genre of autofiction. In addition, the study has demonstrated how their exile has impacted upon their sense of self, confirming Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré’s assertion that ‘women’s identities are irrevocably altered, if not constituted by the fact and experience of mobility’.1 For each of the six authors, the autofictional mode of writing provides a productive space in which to discuss female experiences of exile in the Francophone postcolonial context. Autofiction enables them to voice their exile on their own terms, blurring boundaries between truth and fiction, distancing themselves from the traumatic circumstances of their exile, and reflecting on their complex identity issues. Their multi-layered identities are closely tied to the colonial past of that part of their heritage that is located beyond the European continent. Their texts thus offer a point of entry for a thorough re-engagement with critical questions about the legacy of French colonialism across the Francophone world, and in metropolitan France itself, while also widening discussions of exile and migration to incorporate the idiosyncratic case of Quebec and the underexplored location of Madagascar into studies of exilic literature. Throughout this book, particular attention has been paid to the positionality of the six authors, and to their status as privileged women who have had both the financial means and the opportunity to create new identities for themselves in France and Quebec, and to write about their experiences. This is not to denigrate the estrangement that they have undoubtedly felt because of their physical and cultural otherness, but to be aware that their experiences of exile differ considerably to those of most exiled individuals. They are ‘cosmopolitan’, hybrid, and mobile Francophone writers, able to travel towards and away from metropolitan centres. Yet rather than experiencing their mobility as enriching, they define themselves as rootless, ‘out of place’, and exiled. By examining the lacuna between existing theoretical models of exile and its literary expressions by Lefèvre, Pineau, Bouraoui, Rakotoson, 1 Averis and Hollis-Touré, p. 9.

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Tadjo, and Farhoud, I have argued that these models are particularly unsuitable for Francophone autofictional narratives written by women, who often experience their fluid, multi-layered identities as a manifestation of exile, which is both liberating and traumatic. The six authors can thus be considered as part of a new trend of popular, contemporary Francophone women writers who question the idea of a fixed, static homeland. The success of mobile, middle-class, and multicultural female writers such as Leïla Slimani—who is only the twelfth woman to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her 2016 novel Chanson douce, 2 and who was appointed ‘représentante personnelle du Chef de l’État français pour la Francophonie’ in November 2017—demonstrates the increasing recognition that highly mobile Francophone women writers, like the corpus under consideration in this book, are currently gaining across the Francophone world. This book has argued that the literary depiction of exile assists the six authors in beginning to explore and articulate their status as exiled subjects. The research has confirmed that the endings of each texts are somewhat ambiguous. In Bouraoui’s narratives, the narrative persona seems to be increasingly coming to terms with her national, gendered, and sexual otherness, but at times she still remains haunted by her difference. In Tadjo’s Loin de mon père, Nina considers returning to Abidjan permanently, but this return is not realized within the narrative space of the text. It is also unclear whether Farhoud’s protagonists are eventually successful in negotiating their exilic status and settling permanently in Lebanon, while Rakotoson’s literary persona has privileged the nomadic lifestyle to protect herself from exile. In fact, L’Exil selon Julia is the only text that genuinely ends optimistically, as Pineau’s narrator appears to have embraced both her French and Creole identities. By paying particular attention to the nuances and ambiguities of each text, this book concludes that the literary heroines of the six writers remain troubled by their multiple experiences of exile and are unable to close off their gendered exile completely. By undertaking a comparative reading of these autofictional narratives, other connections emerge, including a sustained emphasis on events during the authors’ childhood and adolescence, a crucial formative period for their future selfhood. Farhoud, however, adds an additional layer to her text by discussing how experiences of exile alter as women grow older and become mothers and grandmothers. The tropes of home, return, and 2 Leïla Slimani, Chanson douce (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).

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belonging also bring the texts together, as does an investigation of how issues of gender and sexuality add different layers to the protagonists’ experiences of exile. The six authors all reveal in their writing the patriarchal frameworks that hinder the roles and possibilities available to them in their birth country, and that often continue to hold them back following their displacement to metropolitan France and/or Quebec. Yet several differences between the six female authors have also become apparent, revealing that exile is an individual experience that affects women in different ways, regardless of the political and cultural frameworks that bind them together. As my study has uncovered, a particularly striking divergence is their use of the French language. Adopting the language of the former colonizer to write postcolonial narratives of exile and estrangement could be considered problematic because ‘French was actively and consciously exported as part of a concerted drive to suppress indigenous languages and cultures and replace them with the culture and language of the French colonizers’, as Patrick Corcoran explains. 3 However, the language employed by the six authors is undoubtedly inflected by their native culture, demonstrating their continued attachment to their indigenous culture and a certain resistance to the hegemonic frameworks of metropolitan France. The book has revealed that Bouraoui is the most creative in terms of linguistic innovation, as she plays with language and form in order to construct a new linguistic identity within the space of her narratives. She uses repetitive, fragmented, and at times agrammatical language, representative of her refusal to be categorized by gender, sexuality, or indeed language. Pineau employs the metonymic gap, ‘that cultural gap formed when appropriations of a colonial language insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language’,4 by infusing her French with Creole terms and vocabulary. This is indicative of her desire to foreground her strong Caribbean identity and of her affinities with the movement of créolité; however, since her texts are predominantly published in Paris, her use of Creole could also be interpreted as a form of exoticism, with the view of satisfying a metropolitan French readership intrigued by Antillean culture. Meanwhile, Farhoud’s writing contains allusions to the Arabic language, her mother tongue, through individual 3 Patrick Corcoran, The Cambridge Introduction to Francophone Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 5. 4 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 3rd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013 [2000]), pp. 152–53.

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words and phrases. Although Farhoud is now a monolingual writer who writes only in French, the fact that she intersperses Arabic into her writing suggests her desire to foreground her continued connection to her birth country of Lebanon and become translingual once again. While Rakotoson transverses linguistic boundaries freely in her writing, incorporating proverbs, poems, and song lyrics in Malagasy into the French text, these quotations are immediately followed by their French translation, thereby suggesting that the French language constantly wins out over Malagasy. Rakotoson thus remains bound to the linguistic framework of metropolitan France. As I have demonstrated in Chapter Six, Tadjo’s language, in contrast, is simple and concise. In a 2011 interview for Présence Africaine, Tadjo described her style as poetic prose, explaining that it takes considerable effort to strip back her language: ‘en épurant le plus possible mon écriture, en élaguant sans cesse, j’essaie d’arriver à une fausse simplicité qui est le résultat de tout un travail’. 5 Her creativity lies in her use of intertextuality: she layers Loin de mon père with extracts from published books, fictional letters, diary entries, and email correspondence from the different characters in order to demonstrate the multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and cultures that form a person’s identity. Lefèvre is the most traditional of the six authors in terms of her use of language, principally because, in contrast to the other writers, she was educated at the height of the French colonial empire. Her descriptions are poetic but she writes in standard metropolitan French, and any references to Vietnamese vocabulary or cultural items are clearly explained. Even though her narratives reflect at length on her racial métissage, her writing itself is not métissé. While each author has demonstrated the crucial role played by war in their exile and displacement, their autofictional narratives reveal that conflict has affected them in a myriad of different ways. Lefèvre is the only author to have experienced war personally, although Rakotoson was born only a year after the bloody Malagasy uprising of 1947, so she was highly aware of Madagascar’s violent history as a young child. Moreover, Farhoud’s multiple migrations between Lebanon and Quebec took place against the backdrop of growing sectarian tensions in Lebanon that led to a full-scale civil war in 1975, but she was not living in Lebanon at the time of the war. Bouraoui was not a direct victim of the 5 Véronique Tadjo, ‘Véronique Tadjo’, Présence Africaine, 184 (2011–2012), 261–64 (p. 263).

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Algerian War of Independence either, but its traumatic legacy was passed down to her through her parents. Warfare has a particularly significant role in the Pineau family’s exile. As Pineau documents in L’Exil selon Julia and her later (auto)biographical text Mes quatre femmes, which ‘sits in a hypertextual relationship’ to her first autobiography, according to Louise Hardwick, 6 the Second World War was a direct cause of the family’s displacements between the French Caribbean, the African continent, and metropolitan France. However, Pineau’s young narrator never witnesses warfare or its devastating consequences first-hand. In contrast, in Tadjo’s narrative, the after-effects of war bring about Nina’s exile, as her native Côte d’Ivoire has been completely torn apart by civil war. Studying the representations of colonial and postcolonial wars across a wide geographic expansion brings new insights into the complex motivations for the displacements of each author. This book has focused on contemporary female writers from a diverse range of locations across the Francophone world, and while these writers clearly cannot be considered as representative of all female writers originating from their specific locale, the book has revealed new and diverse cross-cultural comparisons of Francophone women’s exile and estrangement. In their introduction to Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France (2013), Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye examine the need to prioritize women’s writing over writing by men in the twenty-first century, concluding that ‘it is our (feminist) position that the study of writing by women offers crucial—and unparalleled— insights into women’s lives, experiences and creativity, as well as into their perspectives on a range of issues’.7 Responding to their call to foreground female articulations of lived experience, this study has demonstrated above all that women experience exile and otherness differently to men, because of the patriarchal frameworks inherently embedded within contemporary society. Yet as this research has also confirmed, although Francophone women’s writing has developed in parallel with writing by women from metropolitan France, it has not been directly informed by the same Western models of feminist thought. These theoretical frameworks do not consider how racial difference 6 Hardwick, p. 195. 7 Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, ‘Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Introduction’, in Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature, ed. by Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), pp. 3–16 (p. 3).

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intersects with debates about gender equality, a focal point for the authors under consideration here. There is much room for further research on female self-articulations of exile, which might investigate themes of exile and displacement across different media, considering how visual artists, film makers, and photographers depict their own exile within the Francophone postcolonial context. A transcultural comparison of autofictional works across different linguistic frameworks would be another avenue of investigation; it would be productive to question how the legacy of French colonialism on female writers’ subjectivities, and their choice of literary genre, is comparable to that of other European colonial projects. This comparative line of enquiry is informed by Charles Forsdick’s 2015 reflections on the discipline of Francophone postcolonial studies. Forsdick writes if there is still to be a meaningful cross-cultural debate around ‘le postcolonial’—cross-Channel, trans-European, trans-Atlantic intercontinental, and modulated according to a variety of other axes of exchange—then the shared but often obscured roots in transcolonial, transnational and transcultural comparatism constitute one of the most fruitful areas in which this might take place.8

Most importantly, this research has argued that Lefèvre, Pineau, Bouraoui, Rakotoson, Tadjo, and Farhoud facilitate a critical engagement with postcolonial models of identity and displacement through their autofictional writing because while their displacement differs to conventional understandings of exile, the disconnection and psychic dissonance they experience as a result of their multiple layers of otherness is more closely associated with the paradigm of exile, rather than with postcolonial models that celebrate difference as a form of resistance. By analysing the experiences of diasporic and cosmopolitan groups through the lens of exile, the book points out the limitations of the cosmopolitan framework of mobility and hybridity that has been put forward as empowering, positive, and liberating in postcolonial studies. This approach, in turn, has led to a more nuanced understanding of the gendered exile of the six authors, and one that transcends geographic displacement. Autofiction, then, gives women the space to voice their specifically female experiences of exile. 8 Charles Forsdick, ‘Beyond Francophone Postcolonial Studies: Exploring the Ends of Comparison’, Modern Languages Open, 2015, [accessed 7 June 2017].

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Index Index

Adler, Peter 170–71, 172, 181, 186, 188, 190, 191 adolescence 45, 135, 205–11, 223 Africa 29, 30–31, 36, 38–39, 40, 41, 56, 63, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 94–96, 103, 108, 109, 144–45, 152, 171, 174, 175, 180–83, 185–86, 226 North Africa 91, 114, 115, 124 age 3, 33, 108, 111, 135–36, 163, 195, 200, 214, 216, 218, 219, 220 ageing 22, 195, 196, 216–19 Agence Nationale pour l’insertion et la promotion des Travailleurs de l’outre-mer (ANT) 96 agency 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 25, 27, 29, 49, 51, 86, 92, 102, 103, 105, 107, 124, 126, 129, 132, 162, 167, 173 Agnant, Marie-Célie 216 Ahmed, Sara 206–07 Akan 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188 Algeria 3, 19, 31, 34–35, 40, 46–48, 113–41, 149, 221 Algiers 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 133 El Asnam/Chlef 118 alienation 7, 17, 20, 33, 37, 43, 53, 57, 61, 75, 83–84, 96, 102, 114, 126, 130, 133, 138, 139–40, 151, 171, 192, 212, 216 Angelou, Maya 38 Antilles 44, 83–85, 90–94, 95–98, 100, 103, 106, 111, 112, 224 see also Caribbean Apostrophes 74 see also Bernard Pivot

Appadurai, Arjun 5 Arabization 136–37, 149 Arenberg, Nancy 132 Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie 82 asylum 1, 11–12 autobiography 25–26, 28, 29, 30–34, 39, 41–42, 44–45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 160, 226 autobiographical pact 26, 32, 41, 45, 48, 52 life narrative 25, 27, 28 ‘out-law genres’ 25 récit d’enfance 45 autofabulation 28 autofiction 27–30, 32, 33, 34, 41–53, 57, 82, 130, 135–36, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 169, 192, 195, 196, 198, 202–03, 215, 219–20, 221–23, 227 Averis, Kate 2, 6–7, 61, 76, 86–87, 92, 196, 202, 222 Bâ, Mariama 39 Bartoloni, Paulo 8, 178, 190–91 Beauvoir, Simone de 210 Beckett, Samuel 204 Bédié, Henri Konan 175 belonging 1, 4–5, 9–11, 16–17, 35, 37, 51, 72, 78, 88, 98, 144, 170, 175, 177–78, 186–88, 191–92, 206, 212, 224 Ben Jelloun, Tahar 114 Benedetti, Mario 8–9

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Bernabé, Jean 37–38 Bevan, David 16 Bey, Maïssa 114 Beyala, Calixthe 39 Bhabha, Homi K. 14–15, 46, 114, 124, 125, 140, 155 The Location of Culture 15, 124, 125, 140, 155 biofiction 33 Boehmer, Elleke 14 Bosco, Monique 216 Bouraoui, Nina 3, 20, 21–22, 29, 31–32, 34–35, 36, 40, 41, 46–48, 53, 56, 113–41, 196, 221, 222–23, 224, 225–26, 227 Garçon manqué 21, 46–47, 113–16, 119–20, 121–25, 126–27, 128–29, 130–33, 134, 137, 138, 139 Le Jour du séisme 21, 46–47, 114, 118–19, 122, 127–28, 129–30, 139 Mes mauvaises pensées 21, 34, 46–48, 114, 120, 125–26, 127, 128, 133–35, 137, 138–39 Tous les hommes veulent naturellement savoir 32, 135–36 Bouyoucas, Pan 197 Boyle, Claire 26 Braidotti, Rosi 158 Bressolles, Louis Henri 90 Britto, Karl Ashoka 64 Britton, Celia 109–110 Brocheux, Pierre 58 Brubaker, Rogers 10 Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer (BUMIDOM) 85, 96–97, 100 Butler, Judith 130, 131, 132 Cabrisseau, Sylvette 111 Canada 63, 91, 198, 199, 200, 201–02, 208, 215 see also Quebec

Caporale, Marzia 172, 187 Caribbean 21, 32, 35–36, 37–38, 45, 63, 83–112, 144, 183, 224, 226 Dominica 91 Guadeloupe 3, 21, 83–112 Martinique 83 n. 1, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 98 Saint Lucia 91 see also Antilles Césaire, Aimé 1, 36, 38, 143, 170 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal 143, 170 Chamoiseau, Patrick 36, 37–38 Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation 118 Cheallaigh, Gillian Ni 56–57 Chevant, Aurélie 70–71 Childers, Kristen Stromberg 91 childhood 42–43, 44–45, 47, 61, 64–68, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 84, 95–96, 106, 108–11, 115, 118, 119–20, 122, 130, 133, 135, 143, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 158–59, 161, 159, 173, 176, 178–79, 196–97, 199–205, 218, 223 Chiu, Lily V. 77–78 citizenship 11, 19, 42, 62, 83, 85, 90, 91, 103–04, 116, 208 Cixous, Hélène 40 class 7–8, 14, 16, 23, 38, 69, 90, 104, 163, 165–66, 179–80, 223 see also social status Code pénal de 1810 105 Cohen, Robin 11 colonialism 1, 4, 7, 15–16, 20, 21–22, 41–43, 49, 53, 56–72, 80–81, 83–84, 87–90, 95, 97, 102–03, 114–21, 129, 137–38, 140, 146, 148, 150–51, 154, 158–60, 171, 180, 182–84, 2-8, 222, 224–27 Colonna, Vincent 28 Condé, Alpha 174 Condé, Maryse 1, 36

Index Confiant, Raphaël 36, 37–38, 93 Conrad, Joseph 8, 204 conscription 87–90, 148 Cooper, Nicola 58 Cordova, Sarah Davies 160, 161, 162 Cortázar, Julio 19 cosmopolitanism 10–11, 34, 171, 182–83, 187, 205, 222, 227 cosmocrats 11 Côte d’Ivoire 3, 22, 50, 169–93, 221, 226 Abidjan 22, 170, 171, 172–73, 175–77, 179–81, 183, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 223 COVID-19 11, 30 Craps, Stef 120 créolité 37–38, 96, 224 Éloge de la Créolité 38 creolization 15 culture shock 170–92 Dahab, F. Elizabeth 2, 198 Damas, Léon-Gontran 38 Damlé, Amaleena 226 Darrieussecq, Marie 28–29 Dash, J. Michael 158 Davies, Carole Boyce 13–14 death 120, 172, 179, 181–82, 184, 188, 191, 192, 198 décennie noire 117–18, 119, 128 see also Algerian Civil War de Gaulle, Charles 91–92, 98, 151 Delaume, Chloé 29 Dennis, Laura 73 Dépardieu, Gérard 93 Département d’outre-mer (DOM)/ overseas department 83, 87–88, 100–01, 109 Derrida, Jacques 19 desexilio 8–9 diaspora 9–10, 12–16, 17, 22, 39, 61, 75, 77, 79–80, 83, 151, 169, 171, 177–78, 180, 183, 193, 202, 227 diasporic strangeness 79–80 Diome, Fatou 1

251

displacement 1–2, 4–12, 16, 18–21, 31, 44, 46, 53, 55, 57–62, 64–65, 66, 83–85, 87, 95–97, 101–02, 111, 115, 117, 122–23, 146, 149, 152–53, 155, 171, 190, 221, 224, 226, 227 Dissidence 90–94 Dix, Hywel 29 Djebar, Assia 40, 114 Doubrovsky, Serge 20, 27–29, 34, 45, 47, 49, 51, 202 ‘Autobiographie/vérité/ psychanalyse’ 27 Fils 27 drowning 133–34 Duras, Marguerite 151 Durmelat, Sylvie 38, 88 earthquake 47, 118–19, 127–28, 129 Ébodé, Eugène 174 écriture féminine 40–41 écriture migrante 39 education 13, 17, 19, 22, 59, 61, 65–66, 69–70, 71–72, 81, 95, 98, 99, 106, 109–10, 147, 149, 155, 163, 165, 180, 184–85, 203–07, 208, 213, 214, 215, 218–20 see also schooling Edwards, Natalie 26, 108 El Khoury, Mona 121 Elysée Palace 93–94 emancipation 20, 102, 128–30, 208, 210 errance 16, 22, 48, 49, 53, 143–67 Esposito, Claudia 126–27 estrangement 12, 21, 22, 29, 35, 73–76, 81, 97, 130, 171, 172–73, 177, 192, 206–07, 208–09, 215, 219, 222, 224, 226 cultural estrangement 181 family estrangement 73–76, 81 ethnicity 3, 53, 69, 109 ethnoclass hierarchy 90 Eurocentrism 26, 40–41, 152, 173, 183–84, 193 Évian agreements 116

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exile cultural exile 19–20, 116, 167, 170, 171, 192 geographic exile 66, 150 linguistic exile 18–19, 20, 70–71, 136–39, 185, 203–05, 213 metaphorical exile 4, 16–20, 21, 22, 145 political exile 7, 20, 32, 144, 146–51, 166–67 transgenerational exile 195–220 famadihana 144 Fanon, Frantz 91, 95 Peau noire, masques blancs 95 Farhoud, Abla 3, 18, 20, 22, 29, 32, 33, 36–37, 39–40, 41, 51–52, 53, 195–220, 221, 223, 224–25, 227 Au grand soleil cachez vos filles 22, 51, 52, 195–96, 198, 205, 208–11, 215, 216, 219 Le Bonheur a la queue glissante 33, 37, 202, 213 Toutes celles que j’étais 22, 51, 52, 195, 198, 199–205, 206–07, 212–15, 216–18, 219 father 50, 59, 62–63, 65–66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 84, 87, 90–92, 101, 108, 112, 115–16, 130–31, 133–34, 136, 137, 149, 150, 169, 176, 178–79, 182, 183, 184–86, 188–89, 191–92, 195, 197–98, 200–01, 202, 204–05, 207, 209, 218 femininity 21–22, 40–41, 114, 128–29, 130–34, 166 feminism 12–14, 25–26, 29–30, 40–41, 210–11, 218, 226 Fernandes, Martine 132 Fête des Ignames 182 fictionalization 20, 28, 29–30, 33, 45, 49–50, 217 Firpo, Christina Elizabeth 65 Fogarty, Richard S. 88 forced choice 85–87, 92

Forces françaises libres/Free French Forces 91–92 Forsdick, Charles 3–4, 227 Fort Desaix 98 Fort, Pierre-Louis 188–89 Fournet-Guérin, Catherine 49 France Brittany 124–25 Paris 19, 32, 37, 38, 40, 47, 48, 61, 74–75, 77, 79–80, 84–85, 90, 93, 96–97, 99, 102, 104, 115, 126, 135–37, 144, 145, 147, 169, 171, 173, 177, 178, 191, 197, 209–10, 219–20, 223 Rennes 115, 119, 122–23, 124–25, 135, 138 French Guiana 83 n. 1, 88 Friedman, Susan Stanford 169 Front de libération nationale 117 Front islamique du salut (FIS) 118 Front populaire ivoirien 175 Gallagher, Mary 100 Gasparini, Philippe 27–28 Gbagbo, Laurent 174, 175 gender 2–4, 7, 12, 14, 16–17, 21–23, 25–26, 30, 32–41, 57, 63, 67, 84, 89, 98, 99–107, 112–14, 122, 126, 128–36, 139–41, 144–46, 154–55, 159, 162–66, 170–71, 178, 184–86, 190, 192, 200–01, 207–11, 213–15, 221–22, 223–24, 227 genre 2–3, 4, 25–29, 41–52, 160, 221–22, 227 Gilmore, Leigh 26–27 Glissant, Édouard 15, 16, 36, 57, 145, 153–54, 158 Poétique de la Relation 15, 16, 153–54 globalization 1, 13 grandfather 87, 138–39, 145, 160–61 grandmother 44, 82, 84, 102–07, 112, 132, 195, 218, 223

Index grief 158–59, 172, 181, 188, 192 Guéï, Robert 175 Gullete, Margaret Morganroth 216, 217 Haddad, Malek 137 Haigh, Sam 103 ‘Halte à la présidence à vie en Afrique!’ 174 Hanne, Michael 11–12 Hardwick, Louise 26, 44, 45, 88, 104, 226 Harkis 117 Hawkins, Peter 144–45 Heinsohn, Kirsten 10 Hémery, Daniel 58 Henke, Suzette A. 53 Herndon, Gerise 8, 176–77 Hirsch, Marianne 121 Hollis-Touré, Isabel 2, 222 Holocaust 110 home 1, 5, 6, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 48–49, 52, 56, 57, 61, 66–67, 79–80, 92, 109, 110, 112, 123, 126, 128, 140, 144–46, 153, 157, 169–93, 195, 197, 199, 223 home country 4, 6, 7–10, 14, 19, 22, 72–73, 79, 86, 157, 169–93, 198, 202, 208, 211–12, 223 see also motherland host country 4, 7, 9–10, 18, 212 Hron, Madelaine 18–19, 71, 106, 130 Husung, Kirsten 138–39 hybridity 4, 10, 11, 15, 51, 69, 114, 124, 125–26, 140, 227 ici-là 100 incarceration 6, 66–67, 104, 109–10 Indian Ocean 15, 63, 144–45 Indochina 21, 56, 58–65, 71 Annam 58, 70 Cochinchine 58 Tonkin 58–59 interstices 15, 157 see also interstitial space

253

interstitial space 15, 157 see also interstices intertextuality 51, 169, 225 Invalides, Les 93 Ireland, Susan 39 ivoirité 175 Jakobson, Roman 19 Joseph, Suad 200 Joyce, James 8 Kačkutė, Eglė 212, 213 Kaminsky, Amy 85 Kaplan, Caren 8, 25 Kellman, Steven 204 Kelly, Debra 46 Kristeva, Julia 17, 99, 102, 139, 172–73, 203, 205, 206–07, 208, 209, 211–12, 218 Étrangers à nous-mêmes 173, 203, 208, 209, 212, 218 ‘Un nouveau type d’intellectuel: le dissident’ 17, 99, 102 Kurmann, Alexandra 57 Lachenicht, Susanne 10 Laferrière, Dany 170 language 16, 18–19, 23, 25, 31, 35, 40–41, 53, 70–71, 95, 105–07, 111, 136–38, 149, 155–57, 162, 165, 170, 185, 191, 204, 205, 212–14, 219, 224–25 Arabic 2, 18, 19, 36, 119, 136–38, 195, 198, 200, 204, 210, 213, 224–25 Baoulé 50, 185 Creole 38, 84, 105–06, 112, 223, 224 French 5, 18, 19, 28–29, 34, 35, 40–41, 49, 50, 63, 70–71, 80, 89, 106–07, 109, 136–38, 149, 155–57, 162, 185, 195, 200, 203–04, 205, 207, 213–14, 224–25 Latin 5, 63, 165

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Malagasy 36–37, 49, 155–56, 162, 165, 225 Vietnamese 70–71, 73 Lê, Linda 56–57 Lebanon 3, 18, 33, 39–40, 51–52, 195, 196–99, 200–03, 205, 207, 208–11, 215, 216–20, 221, 223, 225 Beirut 33, 52, 197, 198, 201, 208, 210, 215 Lefèvre, Kim 3, 20, 21, 29, 33–34, 35, 40, 41–43, 53, 55–82, 149, 196, 221, 222, 225, 227 Les Eaux mortes du Mékong 34 Métisse blanche 21, 33, 34, 42, 55–56, 57, 58–59, 61, 62–72, 74, 75, 77, 82 Moi, Marina la Malinche 33–34 Retour à la saison des pluies 21, 33, 42, 55–56, 57, 59, 61, 62–63, 71, 73–81, 82 Légion d’honneur 94 Lehning, James R. 65 Lejeune, Philippe 26, 27, 28, 32, 41, 47, 48, 52 Le Pacte autobiographique 26 Levitt, Peggy 9, 177 Liking, Werewere 39 Lionnet, Françoise 13, 15, 26, 57, 63 loss 8, 9, 58, 66, 118, 127–28, 130, 140, 182, 192, 202 Lukács, Georg (György) 8 Mabanckou, Alain 1, 170 MacLachlan, Rosie 48, 129 Madagascar 3, 22, 32–33, 36–37, 41, 48–49, 94, 143–67, 221, 222, 225 Ambatomanga 150, 160–61, 164 Antananarivo 144, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 159 Malgachization 149 masculinity 21, 113, 114, 130–34, 137, 166 Maximin, Daniel 93 McDougall, James 40

Mediterranean 40, 126–27 Mehta, Brinda 97 memory 7, 25, 27, 28, 42–43, 44–45, 62, 73, 77, 93, 110, 121, 152, 160, 195, 203 multidirectional memory 110 postmemory 121 métissage 15–16, 42, 55–82, 225 see also mixed race metonymic gap 224 Micklethwait, John 11 Micone, Marco 197 migrant 5, 17, 18–19, 39–40, 75–76, 78, 96, 189, 195, 212, 218 immigrant 5, 33, 39, 52, 97, 104, 106–07, 175, 196, 203, 205–06 migration economic migration 1 forced migration 1, 6–7, 16–17, 88, 126, 144, 146–47, 152, 153, 167 involuntary migration 85–86 voluntary migration 85–86 military 9, 83, 84, 87–90, 90–94, 94–98, 99–107, 108, 111–12, 117, 118, 149, 152, 160, 174–76 military wife 99–107 mise en valeur 59 mission civilisatrice 66, 88–89, 94–95, 97, 99, 183 mixed race 21, 43, 55–82, 115–16, 119 see also métissage mobility 1–4, 12, 17, 40, 59, 83, 85, 99, 101, 109–10, 143, 145, 157, 196, 222–23, 227 Mokeddem, Malika 40 Monénembo, Tierno 174 Moss, Jane 197 mother 33, 34, 50, 59, 62–72, 77–79, 81, 84, 92, 101, 106, 115, 136–37, 149, 156, 158–59, 166, 185, 189–90, 195, 196, 200, 202, 211–15, 223 migrant mothers 212–13

Index motherland 88–90 Moudileno, Lydie 124–25 Mouvement démocratique pour la rénovation malgache 148 Murphy, David 3–4 Nabokov, Vladimir 204 Nacify, Hamid 6, 10, 66–67 narrative of progress/decline 216–17 national identity 1, 5, 15, 46, 114, 116, 133, 175 nationality 3, 53, 103–04, 113, 116, 119, 127, 140, 208 National Pact 199 négritude 38–39, 96 neo-colonialism 42, 76, 80–81, 183–84, 200 Nguyen, Natalie 42, 43, 67 Nizon, Paul 28 Noakes, Beverley Ormerod 44 nomadism 16, 145–46, 152–53, 158, 166, 180, 223 Norindr, Panivong 146 nostalgia 38, 107, 126, 127, 148, 149, 178–79, 190–91, 202 ‘no-woman’s-land’ 143–67 Okawa, Rachelle 105 Opération Bokiko 150 orality 25, 31, 200 Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 34, 35 Organisation armée secrète 117 Organisation internationale de la Francophonie 137–38, 223 Orientalism 21, 55, 70, 209–210 see also Said, Edward W., Orientalism Orlando, Valérie 14 Ouattara, Alassane 174, 175 Palcy, Euzhan 93–94 Parti démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire 175 patriarchy 7, 29–30, 40, 69, 87, 99–105, 107–08, 129, 131, 146, 166,

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178, 184–86, 190, 196, 200–01, 207–09, 210–211, 214, 219, 224, 226 Pavel, Thomas 7–8 Pears, Pamela 71, 123 Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy 42–43 Pétain, Maréchal Philippe 90 Peters, John Durham 8, 126 phallocentrism 2, 128–29 Pieds-Noirs 117 Pike, Burton 28 Pineau, Gisèle 3, 20, 21, 29, 32, 35–36, 37–38, 40, 41, 43–46, 53, 83–112, 196, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227 L’Exil selon Julia 32, 35–36, 43–46, 83–112, 223, 226 Mes quatre femmes 32, 226 Un papillon dans la cité 32 Pivot, Bernard 74 see also Apostrophes Popkin, Debra 45 postcolonial 1–23, 25–27, 30, 41–42, 46, 56, 57, 90, 103–04, 120, 124, 138, 143, 144, 150, 158, 160, 167, 170–71, 180, 183, 189, 221–22, 224, 226–27 postnational 5 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 89 poverty 17, 32–33, 55, 59, 65, 76, 80–81, 106, 117, 123–24, 143, 145, 149, 152, 154, 157, 163, 200 privilege 4–5, 7–8, 47, 63, 78–80, 86–87, 102–03, 115, 122, 145–48, 150, 152–53, 163, 165, 171, 180, 187, 222–23 prize/prix (literary) 31 n. 26, 34, 35, 36, 37, 223 Proulx, Patrice 39 Proust, Marcel 77 psychoanalysis 20, 27, 29, 53, 173 Quebec 3, 18, 22, 33, 37, 39–40, 51–52, 195–220, 221, 222, 224, 225

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Montreal 197, 203, 205, 206, 214, 217, 218 see also Canada Queen Ranavolona I 164 Queen Ranavolona III 160 race 3, 14–16, 21, 23, 36, 38–39, 43, 53, 55–82, 88–89, 95–97, 107–11, 115–16, 119, 122–24, 141, 189, 225, 226–27 racism 15, 39, 40, 43, 53, 67–68, 70, 72, 74, 75, 83, 85, 88, 107–11, 115–16, 119, 122–24, 155–56 Rakotoson, Michèle 3, 20, 22, 29, 32–33, 36–37, 40, 41, 48–49, 53, 143–67, 170, 221, 222, 223, 225, 227 Elle, au printemps 32 Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar 22, 33, 48–49, 143–67, 170 Ratsimandrava, Richard 149 Ratsiraka, Didier 144, 147, 148, 149 Ravalomanana, Marc 149–50 Ravi, Srilata 49, 78, 79, 147, 160 reconciliation 31–32, 53, 77–81, 118, 124–25, 186–87, 190–91 refugee 5, 60–61, 74, 199 Reid, Amy Baram 50, 174, 185–86 Relation 15 religion 6, 13, 16, 86, 118–19, 129, 140–41, 170, 175, 181–82, 199, 200, 201, 203–05, 206 Catholicism 59, 69–70, 107, 175, 181, 199, 200, 203–05, 206 Islam 118–19, 175, 199, 200, 210 Judaism 19, 109–10 return 6, 8–9, 19, 20, 22, 42, 49, 51–52, 61–62, 72, 74, 76, 77–81, 86–87, 103, 109, 115–16, 123–24, 126, 144–45, 150–51, 153, 154, 157, 166–67, 169–93, 195–97, 201–03, 205, 208–210, 215, 223–24

Réunion 15, 88, 96, 152 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 28 Robert, Georges 90, 91 Robson, Kathryn 60, 120 Rothberg, Michael 110 Rye, Gill 226 Said, Edward W. 5–8, 14, 21, 55, 66, 127, 140, 157, 210 Orientalism 21, 55, 210 see also Orientalism ‘Reflections on Exile’ 5–8, 127, 140 Salvatore, Filippo 197 Salvodon, Marjorie Attignol 116–17, 119, 131 Sarkozy, Nicolas 94 Schlesinger, Philip 9 Schmitt, Arnaud 28 schooling 45, 56, 61, 69–70, 71–72, 97, 106, 108–10, 131, 136–37, 150, 156, 165, 195, 203–05, 207, 212–15 see also education Schwarz-Bart, Simone 36 Schwerdtner, Karine 143, 150–51, 158 scriptotherapy 53 Sebbar, Leïla 114 Selao, Ching 70, 73–74 self-narration 28 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 31, 38 sexuality 2, 16, 21–22, 31, 34, 41, 46, 48, 59, 68, 113–14, 120, 126–27, 130, 133–36, 139, 140, 199–200, 210–11, 224 homosexuality 127, 133–36 lesbianism 32, 34, 48, 133–36 Seyhan, Azade 5, 6 Sheffer, Gabriel 9, 177 Shih, Shu-mei 13 Shilton, Siobhán 80 slavery 13, 32, 91, 104, 110, 150, 161, 164 Slimani, Leïla 223 Smith, Sidonie 25, 27

Index social status 3, 7–8, 34–35, 40, 70, 98, 99, 101, 151–53, 163, 171, 184–85, 187, 210–11 see also class Sorin, Constant 90 Sourieau, Marie-Agnès 95–96 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 12–13 Spurlin, William J. 134–35 stateless 56–57, 153 Stone, Martin 117–18 Tadjo, Véronique 3, 20, 22, 29, 30–31, 32, 36, 38–39, 40, 41, 49–51, 53, 56, 169–93, 196, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227 En compagnie des hommes 30 Loin de mon père 22, 31, 50–51, 169–93, 223, 225 L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout de Rwanda 30 Tang, Élodie Carine 2 Thúy, Kim 57 Toivanen, Anna-Leena 177, 180, 182, 187 Toumson, Roger 16, 63–64 tourism 1, 61–62, 79–80, 123–24, 157, 208 traditions 39, 70, 95, 101, 106, 144, 164, 171, 179, 181–84, 186, 188, 192, 193, 198 Tran-Nhut, Thanh-Van 57 translation 18–19, 35–37, 63, 95, 106–07, 162, 174, 225 intersemiotic translation 19 translingualism 204, 225 transnationalism 9–10, 11, 12–13, 18, 69, 154, 184, 196, 222, 227 cultural transversalism 13 minor transnationalism 13 transnationalism from above/below 13 trauma 4, 7, 8–9, 20, 26–27, 29, 44, 48, 49, 53, 56, 61, 67, 73–74, 76, 82, 89, 110, 120–28, 130, 140, 144, 147–48, 157, 161, 164, 167, 172, 203, 212, 218, 222–23, 226

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travel 1, 4, 11, 16, 20, 49, 74, 85, 99, 101–03, 145, 153–54, 155, 164, 180, 201, 202, 222 traveller 4–5, 80, 164, 180 travel narratives 48, 160, 162 Tsiranana, Philibert 149 Tsuquiashi-Daddesio, Eva 76 ‘unhomely space’ 155 Vassallo, Helen 116, 119, 121–22 Vergès, Françoise 15, 57, 68, 69 Vertovec, Steven 9, 11 Vichy regime 90–93 Viet Minh 60, 67 Vietnam 3, 34, 40, 42–43, 55–62, 149, 221 Dalat 71–72, 76, 81 Hanoi 42, 59, 60, 64, 66, 67 Saigon/Ho Chi Minh 60, 61, 65, 69–70, 72, 77, 80–81 see also Indochina Vince, Natalya 116–17 violence 6, 7, 11, 32–33, 55, 58, 60, 89–90, 104, 116, 117, 119, 123, 128, 129–30, 140, 143, 145–46, 147–49, 173, 174–76, 199 sexual violence 122, 129–30 virginity 68, 210–11 Wagner, Lauren 79–80 Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina 29 war 107–11, 118–19, 125–26, 176, 225–26 Algerian Civil War 116, 117–19, 129 Algerian War of Independence 47, 48, 115–17, 119, 120, 121–22, 225–26 First Indochina War 60 First Ivorian Civil War 172, 174–75, 176, 226 First World War 83, 87–89, 102, 198–99 Lebanese Civil War 198–99, 225 Malagasy uprising 148, 225

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Second World War 42, 59–60, 83, 84, 90–94, 98, 109–10, 148, 226 Suez War 199 Vietnam War 60–61 see also décennie noire Watson, Julia 25, 27 Wimbush, Antonia 50, 85 n. 4, 90 n. 16, 184 Wooldridge, Adrian 11 Wright, Richard 38

writing 17, 19, 25, 27–29, 30–41, 41–53, 134–36, 137–39, 148, 156, 162, 166–67, 170, 216, 221–27 women’s writing 14, 20, 35, 40–41, 196, 221–27 Yeager, Jack A. 35, 63, 64, 66, 73 Yee, Jennifer 60 Zafy, Albert 149