Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb 0739145037, 9780739145036

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Writing Postcolonial France

Writing Postcolonial France Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb Fiona Barclay

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barclay, Fiona, 1973– Writing postcolonial France : haunting, literature, and the Maghreb / Fiona Barclay. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4503-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-73914505-0 (ebk.) 1. French fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. French fiction—French-speaking countries—History and criticism. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. 4. Imperialism—Psychological aspects. 5. Colonies in literature. 6. Literature and history—France—History —20th century. 7. Postcolonialism—France. 8. Postcolonialism— French-speaking countries. I. Title. PQ673.B36 2011 843'.91409—dc22 2011014276 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Peter Jarvis

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

1 2

1

3 4

The Return of the Colonial in Le Clézio, Bona and Sebbar 17 October 1961: Haunting in Kettane, Sebbar, Maspero and Daeninckx Writing from Algeria: Haunted Narratives in Cardinal and Cixous Abjection: The Stranger Within in Prévost and Bouraoui

31 69 99

Afterword

131

Bibliography

139

Index

151

vii

Acknowledgments

The process of research is one in which numerous debts are incurred, and I am glad to acknowledge the colleagues whose thoughts and expertise, generously shared, contributed to the evolution of this study. At the University of Glasgow, where this project was begun, Bill Marshall and Alison Phipps were unerringly patient and consistently constructive in response to my tentative early ideas. Also at Glasgow, Keith Reader, James Simpson, Noël Peacock and John Campbell offered valuable comments and encouragement which helped to shape the project. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of colleagues at the University of Stirling, whose enthusiasm for ideas and scholarship has made working with them a joy. In particular, I am grateful to David Murphy, whose comments shaped the study at critical points, and whose careful reading of the manuscript provided focus and clarity. Other colleagues who have generously given their time and expertise include Charles Forsdick, Andrew Ginger, Nick Harrison and Judith Still. Thanks are also due to Cristina Johnston, Charlotte Lange, Alaric Hall, Murray Stewart Leith, and Dan Soule, who shared ideas and raised questions, and whose enthusiasm for research encouraged me throughout the writing process. My sincere thanks go to Michael Sisskin at Lexington Books for his patience and support for the project; his impressive efficiency has smoothed the publication process. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the funding award which made possible the research on which this book is based. Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to my parents for their encouragement over the years, and especially to Stephen Pashley, for loving support, encouragement and patience throughout. Part of an earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Hexagonal Variations: Diversity, Plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary France, ed. Jo McCormack Murray Pratt, and Alistair Rolls (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 413–31, ix

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under the title “Postcolonial France: Immigration and the De-Centring of the Hexagon.” Reprinted with the kind permission of Rodopi. A further section of Chapter 1 appeared as “Exoticising the Senses: Figuring the Other in Contemporary French Novels,” French Studies Bulletin 100 (June 2006), 69–72. Sections of an earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Kristeva’s Stranger Within: The Question of the Foreigner in Daniel Prévost’s Le Passé sous silence,” Paragraph 33, no. 1 (March 2010), 1–19, reprinted with the permission of Edinburgh University Press, www.euppublishing.com/journal/ para; and as “‘Une et multiple’: Marginalisation and Becoming in Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué,” Edinburgh Review, 116, no. 2 (2006), 143–53.

Introduction

France is haunted. The contention is central to this book, but while in certain domains such a claim is unproblematic, in others it is an irrelevance or, worse, a misguided and distracting view. Fictional phantoms may flourish on screen and in novels but away from the confines of celluloid and print, ghosts are an unfashionable topic for a post-Enlightenment society dominated by scientific rationality. With the publication of Specters of Marx (1994 [1993]) and his introduction of the concept of hauntology Jacques Derrida singlehandedly rehabilitated ghosts, transforming them into an acceptable element of high theory, but outside of a narrow academic discourse France lacks a space and language in which to encounter its ghosts. Derrida himself observed as much when he said, “There has never been a scholar who really, and as a scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality.” 1 The lack of a linguistic space which would accommodate the spectral within the everyday has seen ghosts displaced into the fictions of literature and film. This book is about what Derrida calls the “virtual space of spectrality,” the literary space in which the haunting elements which are excluded from everyday discourse about lived experiences emerge and can be explored because, as Peter Buse reminds us, as a medium of representation literature itself shares the simulacral qualities of the ghost. 2 France’s ghosts are produced by socio-historical factors, but they cannot be accommodated easily within sociological realities. Exclusion is a recurring motif, a marker which regulates the haunting economy of the spectral. Yet the post-Enlightenment unwillingness to countenance the existence of ghosts runs parallel with an increasing desire in Europe to recover the past, manifested in the proliferation of memorials and commemorations to historical events from slavery to the wars of the twentieth century. The “postcolonixi

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al turn” described by Charles Forsdick which has taken place in France since 2005 is further evidence of a move towards the re-evaluation of what has taken place in the history of the nation, a trend to which this study contributes. 3 At first sight, the intellectual gap between historical and social realities—what we might call “lived experience”—and the imaginative representations of cinema and literature appears wide. Nonetheless, one of the contentions of this book is that, amongst its many characteristics, literature operates as a privileged site in which the phenomena latent in contemporary society emerge and can be explored. The working hypothesis of the book, then, is that the complex structures of thought which have developed in recent years regarding France’s colonial past can be illuminated through readings of literary texts relating to aspects of France in the post-colonial period. The ghosts and hauntings which provide the themes and foci of these literary texts are significant because in their form—metaphysical or psychological, individual or collective—and in their outcomes, they speak to the contemporary realities of those affected by decolonization and its aftermath. The pictures which emerge are diverse; together they contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the Hexagon as a postcolonial space, holding the sociological and the literary in dynamic tension. GHOSTS OF THE PAST On 27 October 2005 two French teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, were killed whilst hiding from police in an electricity sub-station in the rundown Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Their deaths were to lead to the most significant episode of civil disorder in France since May 1968. In response to the perceived police harassment, that night youths began setting fire to local cars, and throwing stones at police. The violence continued for 21 nights, spreading through the Paris suburbs to other towns and cities, including Rouen, Dijon, Aix-en-Provence, Lille, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Pau. At the height of the disturbances on 7 November, 1,408 vehicles were set on fire across France. The following day, on 8 November, a state of emergency, including a curfew, was declared; on 16 November it was extended for 3 months. The violence lasted for another week, gradually decreasing in intensity until the authorities announced on 17 November that it had ended. The upsurge in violence in the deprived city suburbs, a socio-demographic area long characterised by high unemployment, crime, and poor academic achievement, generated a diverse set of interpretations. For some in the French establishment, the challenge which it presented to social cohesion was best met by a return to France’s republican values. In a televised speech

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delivered on 14 November 2005, the then president, Jacques Chirac, declared that the disturbances were the result of a profound social malaise in which the youth of the banlieues had lost their bearings. 4 In response he reaffirmed the adherence of each individual, regardless of origin, to the national community as “sons and daughters of the Republic.” The magazine L’Express, along with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and much of the right wing press, took a similar line in its edition of 10 November 2005, viewing the riots as an instance of public disorder which threatened social cohesion to which the response should be to maintain the unity of the nation by reinforcing the uniformity of society. More surprisingly, the Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, was similarly robust in her condemnation of the young “delinquents” whom she saw as requiring harsh discipline in order to become useful members of society. The terms of the response testify to the political desire within France to treat the violence which occurred in 2005 as an issue of law and order, to which France had a ready ideological response in the form of the republican model of citizenship. In the analysis which followed, the question of whether republicanism continued to offer an adequate response was debated—intellectuals such as Justin Vaïsse considered that its traditional pillars of state education, military service (phased out in the 1990s), and employment had been eroded since the 1970s—but no alternative model attracted a consensus. 5 Instead the traditional Left focused on assessments of how the already considerable state support channeled towards urban estates could be deployed in order to bring about better outcomes for those living there, whilst the Right called for individuals to be held responsible for their actions. There was little attempt in the course of the debate to identify and treat the source of the wider malaise hinted at by Chirac, or to consider other potential contributory factors: the question of religion did not arise (despite reports in the foreign media which referred frequently to the rioters as Muslims, the Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, Paris prosecutor Yves Bot, and researchers such as Olivier Roy all dismissed any involvement by Islamic organizations in the violence), and, as Joshua Cole has observed, the issue of race did not figure in the controversy over how France should respond. 6 Overall, the debate can be summarized as a situation seen as requiring a specifically French set of responses, with few connections to issues beyond social cohesion. Perhaps surprisingly, given their depiction in the media as poorly educated delinquents, some of the demonstrators themselves sought to place their actions within a historical context. One of the posters carried during the demonstrations which followed the initial outbreak of violence traced the putative history of police harassment of minorities in France through a trio of haunting images, the first showing under the date “1941” an elderly, presumably Jewish, man being searched by police. To the right of this image two

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other photographs showed instances of police interventions: the first, labelled “1961,” showed an Algerian man being led away by police during the massacre of unarmed Algerians which took place in Paris on 17 October 1961, whilst the final one showed the arrest of contemporary demonstrators. Through the combination of images the poster presented current events as haunted by reverberations from the past, placing the current protesters within a tradition in which minorities have suffered from the repressive measures instigated by French authorities and executed by the Parisian police force. The historical resonance was underscored by the legal measures under which the 2005 state of emergency was implemented, measures passed originally in response to the Algerian war. 7 The last time the curfew had been invoked on metropolitan soil it had applied only to “Français musulmans d’Algérie” (or Algerians), an action which had led directly to the protest and subsequent massacre of Algerian demonstrators in October 1961. For the many demonstrators of Algerian parentage the message to be taken from the curfew was clear: the passage of four decades and the acquisition of French citizenship had not been accompanied by meaningful change. Their parents had been singled out by the curfew as foreigners; they had been killed and the event had been covered up by the State, and now, despite the President’s address to them as “sons and daughters of the Republic,” the curfew was proof that little had changed. For some sections of the population, then, just as 17 October 1961 has come to serve as a shorthand for racism, denial of dignity and lack of state accountability, so the riots functioned as a symbol of neo-colonial repression, official lies, and a lack of acceptance. 8 The terms of the debate surrounding the November riots illustrate the vexed relationship between present-day France and its colonial past: the riots represent one of many possible examples which demonstrate the influence which France’s colonial past continues to exert on the present. 9 Although contrary to much current discourse, both political and academic, which criticizes attempts to reassess France’s past, this book complements the work of French historians such as Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and François Vergès in arguing that contemporary France continues to be shaped by its colonial past, indeed, that it is haunted in various forms by the legacy of its history in North Africa which exists as a largely unacknowledged element within contemporary France. Through a literary analysis which traces the ghostly presences of the colonial past, the volume contributes to the wider aim of reconceptualizing the relationship between France and its former colonies, arguing against the tendency towards the geographic and cultural segregation of metropole and periphery. It draws together texts from a variety of genres and reads titles by established authors whose work is familiar to readers of travel literature, women’s writing, so-called “Beur literature,” Francophone Maghrebi literature, life writing and detective fiction alongside writers whose work is less well known. By drawing together texts written

Introduction

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within the metropole by writers from across the different communities which constitute the post-colonial Franco-Maghrebi space, the book offers a vision that attempts to revise conceptions of contemporary France. As Avery Gordon notes, ghosts are the empirical evidence that haunting is taking place, and through analysis of the functions of ghosts in contemporary literature, the study casts new light on France’s relationship to its colonial history. 10 The notion of haunting interrupts the constructed categories of colonial and post-colonial temporality, and incorporates the multi-directional effects of cultural influence identified by Mary Louise Pratt; 11 in undermining the provisional temporality of the nation-state, it allows the Mediterranean to be conceived as a transnational space and in doing so opens up the notion of “Frenchness,” proposing an understanding which takes account of the complex relationship between France and the Maghreb, those who imagine it, and those who are born of it. 12 Following Edward Said’s notion of the “contrapuntal,” the volume produces readings which work against divisions by recognizing the intertwined histories created by imperialism and the resulting polyphony of post-colonial communities. 13 The consequence is a blurring of reified categories and a challenge to conventional conceptions of identity, allowing the reader to trace the constitutive role of a North African otherness in contemporary French culture. Such an approach raises a number of questions which will be explored in the chapters which follow. To what extent do the colonial attitudes born of the binary relationship between metropole and colony continue to haunt France? What form do the ghosts of the past assume? Does the memory of colonial atrocities condemn the former colonizer and colonized to perpetual identification with the sterile categories of perpetrator and victim? Might a recognition of France’s ghosts provoke potentially productive disruptions that might contribute to the evolution of Franco-Maghrebi relations? In exploring these questions, and others, the study deconstructs conventional understandings of Frenchness based on France as a bounded Hexagonal nation state, and proposes a more integrated but complex vision of the metropolitan and the postcolonial, carrying through Chakrabarty’s calls for the “provincialization” of Europe. 14 REPENTANCE The reactions to the 2005 riots, and the refusal by the mainstream media to regard them as located within a historical framework of policies towards minority ethnic groups is characteristic of a wider resistance to the reassessment of France’s past. In large measure this is a consequence of France’s long-held resistance to recognizing its citizens’ ethnic origin, in which appeals to republicanism are employed to deflect accusations of discrimination

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on the basis of the principle—if not the practice—of the equality of French citizens. Yet it is also bound up with the problematic issue of the nature of the contemporary relationship between metropolitan France and other French-speaking areas of the world, in particular those which formerly constituted the French Empire. 15 Nicolas Sarkozy’s July 2007 speech in Dakar, in which he argued that Africa’s current problems were rooted in its peasants’ refusal to enter History, demonstrated that stereotypes of the African persisted stubbornly in contemporary international relations. 16 More vexatious still is the issue of how the colonial past should be represented through official histories or memorialization, or whether in fact such memorialization only opens the nation to the twin snares of nostalgia and guilt. Whilst immigrant groups have campaigned for decades for recognition of the events that took place in 17 October 1961, the memorial to the victims of the massacre which was erected at Pont Saint-Michel in 2001 by the Paris City Council has been interpreted by some as merely a gesture on a local scale which would defuse demands for French State recognition. 17 For some this is a tactical move which has been replicated on a larger stage through moves such as the institution of a national day in recognition of slavery (10 May). On the other hand, what has for some been a tendency to pay lip service to the past has for others formed part of what Henry Rousso has referred to as “hypermnésie,” or commemorative fever, itself allied to the unwelcome but growing tendency to reassess France’s historical record of imperialism. 18 For writers such as Daniel Lefeuvre and Pascal Bruckner, the renewed focus on France’s past is a symptom of a national decline into an impotent state of culpability, with the hesitant emergence of postcolonial studies within France regarded as reinforcing the trend towards an obsession with the putative guilt of the past. 19 They criticize as so-called “repentants” those, such as the members of the historical collective ACHAC (Association pour la Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine), who are intent on reassessing France’s past from a postcolonial perspective that would recover the varied narratives occulted by the dominant tradition. In response, Lefeuvre and Bruckner conjure the specter of “communautarisme,” which they see as threatening to fracture the fabric of French society, while Bruckner rejects attempts to trace the legacy of the colonial past in the “postcolonial” present as “téléscopage spatio-temporel.” 20 In their rejection of the postcolonial, their position is predicated on an interpretation of history that preserves national unity, and the myth that the judicial process of decolonization concluded the business of the colonial period. Lefeuvre’s interpretation involves the relativization of France’s colonial conduct through an insistence that whilst atrocities, including torture, undoubtedly took place in the colonies, contributing to the disappearance of 875,000 Algerians during the forty years that followed the conquest of 1830, they differed little from the violence, including torture, that was perpetrated against French peasants and

Introduction

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other Europeans. 21 Moreover, in his emphasis on the economic failure of colonialism in Algeria, a fact that Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch reminds us has been generally accepted since the publication of Henri Brunschwig’s Mythes et réalités de l’impérialisme français in 1960, Lefeuvre fails to account for the international prestige which accrued from the symbolic possession of colonies, and the affective attachment of sections of the French population to Algérie française in particular which ensured the longevity of colonialism. 22 However, Lefeuvre’s insistence that the colonies contributed little or nothing to the metropole underpins his overarching argument: since the colonies contributed nothing to the eternal nation that is France, the Hexagon lost nothing and was barely affected by the act of decolonization. The talk of loss and mourning frequently associated with instances of haunting is therefore as misplaced as is the notion of repentance for deeds committed during the colonial period. A close reading of Lefeuvre’s work indicates that the criticism of the “repentants” has its roots in an attachment to the same thread of revisionist republicanism to which commentators on the 2005 riots appealed in their quest for national unity. Invoked in these contexts, republicanism functions as a totalizing narrative of national identity, which becomes fixed and immutable in the service of the myth of “la France éternelle.” The Revolution of 1789 becomes credited with notions such as universalism, assimilationism, and secularism, despite the fact that, as Alec Hargreaves notes, the terms themselves in some cases were not employed at the time. 23 The extent to which revisionist republicanism has developed into a modern grand narrative of the French nation is an issue taken up by Frederick Cooper: Much recent scholarship has exaggerated the centrality of the nation-state in the “modern” era, only to exaggerate its demise in the present. Post-Revolutionary France . . . cannot be understood as a nation-state pushing into colonies external to it. . . . This complex, differentiated empire, expanded into continental Europe by Napoleon, did not produce a clear and stable duality of metropole/colony, self/other, citizen/subject. Political activists in the colonies, until well into the 1950s, were not all intent upon asserting the right to national independence; many sought political voice within the institutions of the French Empire while claiming the same wages, social services, and standards of living as other French people. If one wants to rethink France from its colonies, one might argue that France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up its attempt to keep Algeria French, and tried for a time to redefine itself as a singular citizenry in a single territory. 24

Cooper’s deconstruction of the binaries attributed to post-Revolutionary France serves to underline the illusions attached to conceptions of national identity, but it also points to the revisionist nature of contemporary French attitudes which, post-1962, have attempted to sustain the notion of a unified

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France. Late twentieth-century French political and intellectual discourses of various persuasions have sought to re-appropriate aspects of the Revolution in the ideological interests of presenting a certain version of the Hexagon. The discourse of the republican tradition has repeatedly been pressed into service in response to the issues raised by immigration, such that the workers who responded to France’s call for reconstruction following World War Two, many of whom came from the Maghreb and who went on to form the majority of France’s five million strong Muslim population, were confronted with a social model officially aimed at assimilation and the eradication of cultural differences, but which in practice enacted the exclusion of many immigrants, first in shantytowns, and then in housing estates. Throughout incidents such as the October 1989 “affaire du foulard,” in which three Muslim girls were excluded from the state school in Créil for wearing headscarves to class, the republican tradition has been invoked in ever more insistent but anxious fashion over the past two decades: the issue of headscarves was finally settled with the 2004 law which prohibits the wearing of “ostentatious religious signs” in State schools. Republicanism adopted a new form during the political activism of the 1980s, when the far right Front national party responded to the Left’s call for recognition of “le droit à la différence” by replacing the appeal to a new vision of pluralism with a recipe for rigid cultural exclusion. In the rhetoric of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the respect due to the irreconcilable difference of the immigrant produced separation and expulsion. The effect of the growing support for Le Pen, as Herman Lebovics shows, was the return of mainstream politics to conventional republican values; faced with the specter of multiculturalism and the rise of the far right National Front, the political Left was dragged towards the adoption of harsher positions, whilst on the Right politicians retreated to the safety of conservative republicanism and the Rights of Man. 25 The tension inherent in the republican concept of assimilation has therefore had consequences both in the colonial and post-colonial arenas. As Maxim Silverman points out, from a political perspective, it appears universalist and egalitarian, whilst in cultural terms it is particularist and intolerant. 26 In theory, it underpinned France’s colonial mission civilisatrice and, in return for the adoption of French norms and values, it appeared to offer equal political rights to the indigenous peoples of France’s colonies. 27 In practice this was far from being the case: to guard against any threat to French colonial authority, only a tiny number of indigenous elites were granted access to either education or political rights, a factor which was to influence the growth in nationalist feeling in many of France’s colonies. As Elizabeth Ezra points out, although assimilation was predicated on the eventual eradication of distinctions among groups, the disappearance of these distinctions was implicitly feared and rejected, resulting in the magnification of differences between cultures. 28 The unwillingness to countenance an evolution of

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identity is symptomatic of French attitudes towards difference, which Tzvetan Todorov refers to as the “two elementary figures of the experience of alterity.” 29 According to this logic, the republican tradition views the Other either as equal and therefore as the same or identical (“égalité-identité,” the logic of assimilation), or as different and therefore as unequal or inferior (“différence-inégalité,” the logic of slavery and massacre). Difference which cannot be assimilated—and in practice this applies to all difference, at least in colonial terms—inevitably equates to inferiority. Viewed in these terms it is possible to regard republicanism, as Tyler Stovall does, as having failed in both the colonial arena of the civilizing mission, and in terms of the metropole’s policies of integration, yet despite this the republican model continues to undergird responses to the challenges of post-colonial French society. 30 SPECTRAL TEMPORALITIES The appeal to a revisionist myth of an unchanging France which characterizes the position of those to whom we might refer as the “anti-repentants” is predicated on a view of decolonization as a process which, like colonialism itself, had little impact on the Hexagon because the colonies were consistently regarded as having a separate, even parallel, narrative. Having been completed, decolonization is regarded as an event which now belongs to the chronological past. 31 The signal moment in this paradigm is March 1962 and the signing of the Evian Accords, which effectively marked the end of France’s aspirations to an extra-Hexagonal empire, a view which conveniently ignores the alternative strategies of departmentalization (of the DOMTOMs), and neo-colonialism (in the development of Françafrique, for example) which were instituted from the mid-twentieth century. De Gaulle’s speech, in which he emphasized that the time had come to turn the page, for France’s future lay not in the colonies but in the rapidly developing new Europe, set the general mood in a country weary from eight years of war. If the notion of turning a page suggests that the shift in national focus from Empire to Europe was one accomplished with comparative ease, it is the result, in large part, of the failure of republican ideology to achieve colonial assimilation. The consequent vision was of a Hexagon whose geographical borders constituted a closed and bounded space, separated from the colonies whose history traced a parallel trajectory. 32 Such a vision is elaborated by Pierre Nora, whose magisterial work, Les Lieux de mémoire, has been criticized by scholars for failing to take account of the part played in the construction of the nation by episodes of colonial memory. 33 The innovation of Nora’s approach in focusing on the sites around which collective memories have coalesced is undeniable and might be easily extrapolated to include

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memories of France’s imperial past. Indeed, memories of a time when Algeria was a part of France are one of the recurring motifs in this study; like ghostly presences, these memories return to haunt postcolonial France, testifying to the “unfinished business” of decolonization. The logical conclusion of the position which maintains that the history of the Hexagon is that of a hermetic space unmarked by the ties of its colonial past is a refusal not only of the large swathes of French history which took place overseas, but of the current lived experience of France’s community of immigrant origin, for whom Clifford’s routes/roots do not coincide with those of the citizens who can meaningfully talk of “Nos ancêtres les gaulois”; 34 as Michael O’Riley notes, within the historical narrative of the nation those of immigrant origin are relegated to a haunting temporal realm outside the nation’s experience of deep monumental temporality. 35 As Charles Forsdick argues, the debates over recent events such as the official memorial to the massacre of 17 October 1961, the commemorations in Paris and Hanoi of Dien Bien Phu, and Glissant and Chamoiseau’s open letter to Nicolas Sarkozy following the proposed law of 23 February 2005 demonstrate the relationality of multiple colonial memories even in the postcolonial period. 36 The charge is that of a selectivity which refuses to acknowledge the association, and on occasion, the involvement, which France has continued to have in the affairs of its former colonies up to the present day through its policy of Françafrique, if we choose to bring to mind the part played by France in the 2004 overthrow of democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, or its interventions in Côte d’Ivoire, or in Rwanda. The notion that the move from the colonial to the post-colonial era was a clean break achieved (albeit after a prolonged and bitter conflict) by the judicial process concluded at Evian depends on a chronological view of history in which eras unfold successively. Examples such as the ones given by Forsdick above radically challenge this perspective because they demonstrate the extent to which present circumstances are imbued and directed by the legacy of past events. The transition from the colonial to the post-colonial emerges as a process which, fraught with tension, must be repeatedly renegotiated: Arjun Appadurai’s observation that “for the ex-colony, decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, not a simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life” is no less true for the ex-imperial power. 37 The examination of the constituent elements which make up contemporary affairs often involves us in tracing the influence of the past, and the many unsuspected ways in which it emerges to disturb the present. The past thus becomes a ghostly presence, a palimpsest whose marks remain distinguishable beneath the surface of the present. Kathleen Brogan refers to this phenomenon as “cultural haunting,” a term which emphasizes the communal nature of the ghosts which haunt the social imaginary. 38 However, although they assume many, often embodied, forms,

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unlike Brogan’s ghosts the specters of France’s colonial past are not usually metaphysical visitations. In certain instances they figure the post-Enlightenment tradition which, as Colin Davis notes, displaced the spirit world from the realm of metaphysics into the realm of psychology, resulting in the attempts of individuals to come to terms with the traumas of the past. 39 The suggestion that France is haunted by the colonial past immediately brings with it associations of colonial-era atrocities, such as the infamous “enfumades” discussed by Lefeuvre in which large numbers of Algerian natives were smoked to death whilst taking refuge in caves from French soldiers or, more recently, the massacre of 17 October 1961. 40 Lefeuvre’s relativist argument—that only four of these enfumades are known to have taken place— misses the point not only concerning the trauma inflicted on the individuals concerned, either directly in the case of survivors, or at one remove in the case of children or other descendants. To minimize the numbers of victims is to neglect the symbolism of such events—a lesson which, post-9/11, we should scarcely have to be taught—and their contribution to the construction of a social imaginary in which certain groups are cast as wronged victims and others as guilty oppressor. Djebar’s memorable restaging of Pélissier’s enfumade is one example of the raising of literary ghosts in the service of the reinforcement, even the resurrection, of an ideological cause. 41 Powerful the resurrection of the colonial dead may be. But the readings which figure in the following chapters demonstrate that traumatic death is not the only source of the phantoms which haunt contemporary France. Like the colonial administrators who were recalled to the Hexagon with the mission of making peasants into Frenchmen, whether settlers, travelers, conscripts, or immigrants and their children, those with connections in the Maghreb have brought with them traces of the colonial relationship in the form of memories, structures of thought and ideologies which often serve to call into question conceptions of classical, Hexagonal-based Frenchness. The persistence of neo-colonial ideology and the memories of those whose formative years were spent in North Africa therefore figure as two haunting sites which contribute to shaping the French social imaginary, framing personal and social encounters through which the legacy of the past is made manifest in present realities. Too often we dismiss or fail to acknowledge the significance of the past, for ghosts call for a heightened self-consciousness on our part, and an awareness of how their influence affects our perceptions and behaviors. Avery Gordon’s claims that “Haunting is the sociality of living with ghosts” reminds us that the laying to rest of the past may lie beyond our power as an individual; we may instead be called on to look for ways in which we can accommodate the specters of colonialism in a fuller understanding of what they represent. 42 “Following the ghosts is about . . . putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look . . . about stories that not only repair representa-

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tional mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a memory is produced in the first place, toward a counter-memory, for the future.” 43 The ghosts which haunt postcolonial France may assume multiple forms, but they share a common feature. In most cases, the specter of the past is raised, willingly or not, by an individual or group whose roots lie in North Africa. Their presence serves as a catalyst for the re-emergence of neocolonial structures of thought within the society that surrounds them. Where these pertain to gender, they summon and reinforce the orientalist clichés familiar from colonial-era literature and art, conjuring a pervasive and resistant ideology which surrounds and constrains the postcolonial subject. Too often cultural associations of North Africa are overdetermined by the bitter legacy of Algerian independence, so that the whole of the Maghreb is seen as refracted through the prism of the Algerian war. The specificity of individual origin, experience and agency is erased, endowing individuals of Moroccan and Tunisian origin with the same cultural baggage as their Algerian counterparts. Through this lens Maghrebis and repatriated settlers function as mere ciphers for the Hexagonal imaginary, harbingers of the return of Algeria with its attendant emotions of joy, nostalgia, humiliation and bitterness. Within this paradigm, postcolonial subjects are transformed into living ghosts whose presence signals the return of the colonial past. Stripped of individual identity and agency, immigrants may find themselves entirely dispossessed, condemned to wander as living ghosts trapped in a modern-day limbo, invisible to the majority community from whose society they are perpetually excluded. Although French, their children remain foreign for many; functioning as embodied ghosts of the past, they serve as a constant and unwelcome reminder of the Republic’s contradictions, lies and betrayals. Their identity, constantly problematized, represents a threat to the integrity of what is homely, safe and familiar, that is, to the nature of Frenchness as it has routinely been conceptualized post-1962. They are living ghosts whose presence threatens to bring about the unwelcome return of a past believed to have been safely repressed. While novelists such as Assia Djebar have worked to recover the lives of Algerian women occulted by the narratives of imperial history, the literary texts examined in this volume trace the diverse means by which the putatively vanished past continues to leave marks on the French social sphere. The majority of recent research on representations of hauntings has tended to focus on one of a number of areas: the evolution of the Gothic, traditionally associated with specters of varying origins; the roles of cinema and photography, which Roland Barthes memorably linked to the ghost because film references a haunting absence; and the development of ethnic identity. 44 Ethnic identity has often been interpreted in its narrowest sense to refer to the construction of minority groups which suffered dehumanizing oppression at

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the hands of colonizers and so which have been obliged to engage in the redefinition of their collective identity. Within Kathleen Brogan’s work, this ethnicity refers primarily to the African-American descendants of slaves; in Michael O’Riley’s work it is broadly Algerian, overlooking the distinctions between Arab, Kabyle and Jewish communities. As Brogan argues, the telling of ghost stories is a powerful means of exploring a people’s historical consciousness, revising and recuperating the group histories which may have been threatened, erased, or fragmented, and so ensuring the process of cultural renewal. 45 In their ethnic focus, both Brogan and O’Riley follow the common approach within postcolonial studies of focusing on the ex-colonized and their re-appropriation of their long-denied collective identity. Given the history of colonialism, the exploration of subaltern perspectives is necessary and valuable; nonetheless, the widespread scholarly attention attracted by ex-colonized groups has risked a virtual recolonization of the margins by the academy, whilst simultaneously neglecting the post-colonial experience of the former imperial center. This study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the postcolonial by examining the function of ghosts within the ex-colonizers’ society. Whilst Brogan and O’Riley have shown that the dominant message of the specter of the colonized subject centers on matters of victimhood and vengeance, the returning ghosts of the colonizing society bring with them quite different messages, which are nonetheless fundamental to the continued process of working through decolonization. Ghosts may not only manifest the seemingly dead and buried, but signal the re-emergence of paradigms thought to be long dispensed with. As Peter Buse argues, in their defiance of binary oppositions they undo the division between the past and the present: “In the figure of the ghost, we see that past and present cannot be neatly separated from one another, as any idea of the present is always constituted through the difference and deferral of the past, as well as anticipations of the future.” 46 Being elusive and ineffable, the specter disrupts structures and undermines categories. It works against the tendency of totalizing discourses such as republicanism to close down ambiguities in favor of a single narrative because it shimmers endlessly between ontological certainties. As a liminal presence it calls into question our confidence about contemporary reality whilst, being what Derrida refers to as the “revenant,” its movements escape our control because it “begins by coming back,” both returning and appearing for the first time simultaneously to make present the past. 47 The ghost is an appropriate figure for the colonial in that it no longer properly exists in the present, yet its influence persists and makes it real, hovering somewhere between reality and fiction, or past and present. As Derrida argues, the appearance of the ghost signals that “time is out of joint,” haunted by both the past and the future. 48 The disruption of linear time destabilizes the notion of the past as fixed and finished, for the ghost’s

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appearance, perhaps the first of many, opens the haunted subject to the possibility of becoming enmeshed in a cycle of repeated apparitions, or the obsessive return to unresolved memories or colonial structures of thought. The experience of being haunted may for some be associated with stasis, in which the subject is effectively trapped in a condition, psychological or metaphysical, which remains untouched by the passing of calendar time. This state indicates the halting of any teleological conceptions of time, and with it our hope that the future is a blank space of possibility. In a reversal of the white spaces on Western maps which were colored in by the imperial project, the return of the colonial past, with its influence on the present, threatens to color the shape of France’s future. The contemporary effect of the past is powerfully explored through two novels which serve to illustrate the divergent responses of individuals to the past, ranging from obsession to amnesia. The unexpected return of the past is the central concern of Mehdi Charef’s 1989 novel, Le Harki de Meriem, which, as the title suggests, concerns the conduct and fate of the harkis, the native supplétifs of the French army, one of the most shameful aspects of the Algerian war, and, to date, one of the least acknowledged and addressed. 49 It opens with the racially motivated murder of young Sélim by neo-Nazi thugs in 1989, a traumatic event which sparks the resurgence of colonial-era memories for his father, a former harki now successfully established in Reims. 50 As his murderers make clear, Sélim, who holds French nationality, is killed because his face does not fit their expectations of a French citizen. That the nationality which leads to his death was gifted to him as a consequence of his Arab father’s decision to enlist in the French army—a decision which Charef is at pains to emphasize was driven solely by grinding poverty and the desire to provide for his family—is simply the first of many incidents in which the decision to become a harki sparks a series of events whose consequences often do not become apparent immediately, but which lead inexorably to death. For some, like Naïm, haunted by the memory of his father’s death, enlisting offers a chance for vengeance against the rebels who killed his father. For others, like Sélim’s father Azzedine, enlisting is the giving of himself in an act of self-sacrifice, the supreme act of love for his family: “as all he had left was his life, he had given it for those he loved.” 51 As the war progresses and its eventual outcome becomes clear, the harkis become aware of the significance of their choice: For the first time since enlisting, Azzedine realized that he was caught in a trap, and that, even if Algeria remained French, he would always be an oppressor. . . . Even if the French were to win, he would not be at peace for all that. “Istiqlal,” “Independence” became his dread. The green and white flag with its red crescent and star never stopped fluttering in his mind. And it is death which fluttered in the wind with its three colours. 52

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Implicated in atrocities including rape, torture and murder, the harkis reach the point of no return; the realization fuels their savagery as they fulfil their sense of monstrousness in greater acts of barbarity. For the Arab population, including their extended family, their fate is inescapable: they live with the realization that they are condemned men awaiting sentence (146), dead men walking (99; 129), living ghosts stalking the plains of Algeria in a state of limbo, awaiting the final damnation that will come when the fate of Algeria is sealed. For many, the declaration of independence is a presage of death at the hands of their countrymen, through a solitary act of murder (151), or as part of the widespread massacres through which scores were settled following independence (156). For others, like Azzedine, the decision to enlist condemns them and their families to exile, and a ghostly existence. What the novel demonstrates powerfully is that the past has not passed, and that history has created a society in which, through racism or colonial structures of thought, the past can resurge without warning to interrupt the present. After more than twenty years in exile, Azzedine and his wife Meriem have succeeded, slowly and painfully, in establishing themselves in French society. After the humiliation of childlessness, the birth of her son Sélim signals the rebirth of Meriem (190). Azzedine has achieved promotion in his long-term job as a bus driver; Sélim achieves national distinction in his French exam, and his sister Saliha will go on to qualify as a nurse and set up her own practice. Yet as Fredric Jameson argues, it is precisely when we feel secure in ourselves, and in the density and solidity of the living present, that we are vulnerable to the ghostly presences of the past, in moments “in which the present—and above all our current present, the wealthy, sunny, gleaming world of the postmodern and the end of history, of the new world system of late capitalism—unexpectedly betrays us.” 53 The irruption of neo-colonial violence inflicts the death earned by the harki father on his son, and forces the guilt-ridden father to relive agonizing memories which he had thought definitively put behind him. The legacy of the father’s decision extends throughout his family: faced with her son’s murder, Azzedine’s wife Meriem, who has understood and supported her husband’s decision throughout their lives together, can no longer bear to remain in France and, “dying of grief” (65), returns to Algeria where her life becomes a “slow death” (205), and she becomes a phantom lingering among the tombs in a cemetery, subsisting on handouts until the end of her days. The harki’s curse continues to afflict his son after death, denying him burial in an Islamic land and so condemning him to an eternal unrest: having brought her brother’s coffin to Algiers for burial, Saliha is refused entry to the country because of her father’s wartime allegiance. Meanwhile, there are no consequences for those responsible for Sélim’s death: the novel closes with Azzedine’s description of one of them, a municipal employee with whom Azzedine must negotiate to achieve the building of a new mosque. Nonetheless, despite underscoring

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the ineluctable repercussions of the past, the novel leaves open the possibility of individual agency. Faced with the destruction which his choice has inevitably wreaked, Azzedine himself chooses to focus on the positive that remains to him: his daughter Saliha’s children, the two little grandsons who for him are the embodiment of hope for the future. Extending to each member of the family, the harki’s curse raises the issue of the effects of haunting on different generations. As Davis notes and Charef demonstrates, the appearance of ghosts works against assumptions of a “rupture” with the past in that ghostly apparitions signal “unfinished business,” their presence frequently bound up with inadequate or incomplete rituals of burial, commemoration or mourning. 54 Slavoj Žižek’s argument that the dead return to act as “collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt” develops the notion of “unfinished business,” with particular resonance within the capitalist context of colonialism. 55 Exploring the notion of ghostly inheritance, Jodey Castricano points out that haunting implies not only debt but also personal and national guilt predicated on the capitalist transactions associated with the colonial appropriation and exploitation of land. 56 But while the specters which feature in conventional ghost stories are usually banished in order to bring closure to the narrative, in this analysis of France’s modern ghost story we find that the literary texts are concerned more with process than solution: they trace the progress of grappling with the “unfinished business,” since a neat resolution to the problem of haunting rarely offers itself. While Le Harki de Meriem deals with the memories of the past which refuse to be laid to rest and which resurface violently to devastate the carefully constructed present, for sections of French society the colonial past has proved more amenable to being forgotten. The question of how to respond to the deeds of the past is a vexed one: much has been written on France’s failure to come to terms with elements of its recent past, specifically those relating to the Vichy government, and the “événements d’Algérie” (officially recognized as a war only in 1999). 57 Malika Mokeddem takes the collective “amnesia” referred to by Rousso in his work on responses to Vichy, and transposes it onto Algeria, represented by the Franco-Algerian protagonist of her novel, N’zid (2001), in a text which is at once a huis clos of three characters, and a site of Deleuze’s smooth space of infinite possibilities. The protagonist, a French-speaking woman who remains unnamed for much of the book, remains almost exclusively on a yacht sailing the Mediterranean. The novel opens as the woman regains consciousness, and realizes that she remembers nothing of her identity or the past which forms it. The only indications of her immediate past are an enormous bruise which disfigures her face, and a brief and obscure letter signed only “J” which guides her towards false identity papers and a gun concealed in the boat: suggestions of a violent history which her mind refuses to contemplate, and a continuing danger which she cannot comprehend.

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The intimations of unknown traumatic horror overlaid on the blank canvas of her identity create an overwhelming anxiety which results in hallucinations: she sees herself as the headless skipper of the yacht, an apparition whose functioning body is interrupted by a cleanly sliced neck, bereft of its identifying facial features, and as a smooth skin whose exterior surface conceals a void within. Discovering a gift for drawing, she sketches scenes of horror: a flotilla of little boats carrying a cargo of corpses with a single living being—a man—among the dead. Mokeddem’s depiction of the woman as she negotiates between the repressed horrors of the past, and their role in the construction of her identity speaks to the process which has taken place in France, the country of the woman’s birth and residence, over recent decades, in which concerted attempts to move on from the past have proved insufficient in preventing the plural manifestations of its legacy. That the violence is connected in some way with Algeria and colonialism is made evident through a radio announcement of the disappearance of a Frenchman in Algiers—an event which the woman instinctively recognizes as significant to her—and through the woman’s intimate connection, through her Irish father and Algerian mother, to two nations which suffered the experience of settler colonization. The novel’s conclusion, with the murder of the Frenchman and that of the woman’s Algerian boyfriend in unexplained circumstances linked with the rise of the Algerian Islamist movement, emphasizes the returning violence of the past. Amnesia robs the woman of control, purpose and direction; in contrast with the infinite possibilities of the sea she is conscious that, “On land, the lack of a past crushes everything.” 58 Her lost history and identity is unconsciously symbolized by the decapitated body: she has been erased, leaving only an insubstantial shade to wander the seas. Reflecting on her own position, she concludes, “She is like a ghost who has forgotten to dig up her history. She has nothing more to haunt.” 59 Rendered ghostlike by the virtual effacement of her presence, in her drawing she visualizes herself as a transparent, almost invisible jellyfish, swept along by the sea’s currents. While the past is inevitably beyond her control, her inability to live in cognizance of it deprives her of agency, leaving her to react the future as it develops, without any of the points of reference which might habitually contextualize her decisions. The image which emerges in N’zid is of the ghost as powerless shade, a figure reminiscent of Antiquity, whose violent but unknown past condemns it to roam the spaces of the Mediterranean in perpetuity. It serves as a warning of the dangers of ignorance or rejection of the past. As historians such as Benjamin Stora have established, France’s reluctance to acknowledge crimes committed under colonialism, or to face up to the contradictions between its republican ideology and colonial conduct, to the point of instituting legal amnesia in the form of the amnesty covering deeds relating to the Algerian war, has led to a form of repression and

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amnesia about the past which threatens the integrity of France’s identity as the self-proclaimed home of the Rights of Man. Yet as Mokeddem’s text makes clear, the deeply interconnected histories of the Franco-Algerian space mean that France continues to be touched by the contemporary violence which has manifested in its close neighbor and former colony. The woman is faced with a choice: she may remain in a position of stasis, caught in the recurring violent structural relations of the past, or the encounter with the returning past may function as a catalyst, enabling a step change into the future. The implication suggested by N’zid, whose Arabic title translates, we are told, as both “I am born” and “I continue,” is that France, like the reborn nameless woman, should struggle to recover the violence of the past into its cultural memory, not in order that the divisive roles of the past may be reinforced but so that it may be released from the constraints of those roles to move forward into the possibilities of a postcolonial future. CONFRONTING THE PAST The work of the “anti-repentants” provides more evidence, should it be needed, of a current within French society which, for a variety of reasons, continues to be reluctant to revisit the past. Yet the examples cited by Forsdick suggest that the past is far from reluctant to impinge on the present. And as Henry Rousso proposes in his work on the “Vichy syndrome,” there is the potential for what was once hidden by repression and denial to evolve, over time, to a state more akin to obsession. 60 The current evidence suggests that this does little to lay the past to rest. In his discussion of memory, Todorov warns against an excess of memory which traps individuals in what becomes a sterile cycle of repetition, one which offers no promise of progress or redemption and which condemns subjects to perpetual victimhood or to eternal attempts at reparations. 61 Ghosts, or the recognition of ghostly presences, serve as evidence that haunting is occurring, but the recognition of haunting is not sufficient to address the recurrence of the past. As Balibar has noted, the developing tendency towards discussion of colonial history does not necessarily lead to recovery from it, but may simply mark a process of recolonization which is masked by the talk of repentance. 62 For the many campaigners who have struggled over long years to achieve official recognition for violent deeds committed, often long ago, in the name of the French State, the notion of obsessive commemoration may appear preferable to the wall of silence and denial which preceded it. However, the advent of moves towards the official acknowledgement of troubling episodes from France’s past has been accompanied by controversy. The Taubira law of May 2001, which condemns the slave trade as a crime against humanity,

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was criticized for stipulating the inclusion of the slave trade in educational programs at both secondary and university level. 63 Although the significance to be accorded to the slave trade was left vague, the Taubira law served as an indication of the State’s growing interest in influencing the representation of historical narrative. More controversial was the proposed law of 23 February 2005, and in particular, article 4, which set out the responsibility of teachers to present “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas territories, particularly in North Africa.” 64 The insistence on the positive nature of the French presence (inevitably interpreted as a reference to colonization) was welcomed by vocal pied noir lobby groups but caused outrage amongst French academics who, regardless of their personal attitudes towards the legal wording, saw the interpretation of history as lying firmly outside the remit of the legislature. Although article 4 was later retracted, the two cases demonstrate the danger, voiced by Claude Liauzu, of an official trend away from academic debate and towards the judicialization of history, in which the intervention of the State in formalizing approaches to aspects of French history results in a monolithic narrative of the past, shaped by the partisan agendas of certain pressure groups but imposed on all sections of French society. 65 The comparatively unchanging nature of the law is also seen as stifling the interplay of discourses through which new narratives are forged, forcing history into a legal straitjacket. A concomitant problem occurs through the increasing moves towards commemoration, whether in the form of national days of remembrance (such as 10 May, which commemorates the slave trade and its abolition), or through the memorials to veterans of the Algerian conflict which have proliferated in recent years. 66 As Nicolas Sarkozy has found to his cost, official memorials have proved to be the source of unexpectedly ambivalent reactions: his directive, at the dawn of his Presidency, that the final letter of seventeen-year-old résistant Guy Môquet should be read annually at the start of the school year proved only marginally less controversial than his suggestion, made in February 2008, that ten-year-olds should be entrusted with the memory of one of the 11,000 French Jewish children who died following deportation. 67 In both cases, he has been accused of the instrumentalization of history for political ends. 68 While Sarkozy has spoken out explicitly against the tendency towards “repentance,” describing it as “une mode éxecrable,” he has nonetheless attempted repeatedly to recover the past and integrate it, in however partisan a fashion, into the contemporary life of the nation. 69 The irony of an “anti-repentant” advocating that school children “adopt a ghost” is indicative of the complexities and ambiguity which surround our relations with the past; as Jameson notes, the appearance of the ghost

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Introduction calls . . . for a revision of the past, for the setting in place of a new narrative . . . but it does so by way of a thoroughgoing reinvention of our sense of the past altogether, in which only mourning, and its peculiar failures and dissatisfactions opens a vulnerable space and entry point through which ghosts might make their appearance. 70

As Sarkozy has discovered to his cost, the appeal of the ghost is alluring yet treacherous: it remains hauntingly relevant to contemporary concerns and yet proves frustratingly resistant to attempts, however well meaning, to appropriate or deploy it, whilst its presence unsettles our conceptions of both past and present, demanding an attentive and exhaustive reconsideration of what previously we might have mistakenly assumed was behind us. While the formalization of remembrance occurs in response to the demands of diverse memory constituencies, the institution of plaques and other markers of commemoration serve to monumentalize elements of the past which, as O’Riley argues, confine groups within colonial structures that perpetuate the divisive memories separating French from Algerian, depriving both communities of agency by restricting them to the roles of colonial perpetrator and colonized victim. 71 Casting the divisions within a paradigm based on the nation, O’Riley neglects to observe their persistence at a subnational level, separating porteurs de valise from pieds noirs, harkis from fellaghas in a complex mosaic of identifications which, as Benjamin Stora has recognized, constitutes one of the major barriers towards the development of an integrated historical narrative. 72 In according recognition to certain memory communities at the expense of others, the process of monumentalization solidifies the competing narratives of the past and fails to facilitate the fusion of memories. Haunting in this context becomes a signifier of stasis, a state of suspension which is dependent on conflicting interpretations of an increasingly distant colonial history, yet which leaves individuals illequipped to confront the dynamic and relational structures of the contemporary period. Forsdick points out that moves to counter this tendency, such as the preliminary report of the Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (2005), have emphasized the aim of a “mémoire partagée,” or shared memory, which might facilitate the development of what Paul Ricoeur has referred to as a “récit partagé,” or shared narrative. 73 Whether such an aim is ultimately achievable is uncertain: as Forsdick indicates, it depends on the existence of common educational and cultural structures, not to mention a certain degree of shared political will, and is likely to encounter resistance from groups anxious to protect their stake in narratives of the past. In the absence of such concerted efforts, the divisions between the positions of competing groups may become increasingly entrenched through the repeated performance of their demands for recognition. The fascination with the legacy of the colonial era may therefore prove to be as dangerous as a wholesale rejection of it in

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favor of “moving on,” since the haunting economy of the past remains unresolved, its power intact. The challenge, then, would seem to be to find a means of recognizing the legacies of the past which does not shy away from them, but which grants them space in the present in such a way that they no longer threaten to overdetermine relations between the constituent parts of the French social community, nor international relations between France and its ex-colonies. Nonetheless, as a staging post on the road to a transformation of relations with the past, we must understand the impetus behind the approaches adopted to date concerning troubled episodes of the past. In their different ways, the trends towards judicialization and monumentalism are indicative of the desire for control over the identity of the nation. Bound up with Gaullist conceptions of “la France éternelle,” and the republican image of the indivisible nation, this recurrent, highly emotive obsession has most recently been evident in Nicolas Sarkozy’s extended debate on the nature of French national identity, following his controversial creation of a government ministry for Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development. Despite (or perhaps because of) the republican emphasis on the indivisibility of the nation, the correlation between the terms “immigration,” and “national identity” has proved inflammatory, referring back to the tendencies of the Far Right to reject the community of immigrant origin on the basis that they are “not French.” On one level, the use of such “hard” terms is problematic, the notion of unified individual identity having been fatally undermined by Freud’s identification of the unconscious, whilst on a collective level the notion of group identity, whether it be based on gender, nationality, ethnicity or other variables, has been seen as at best “imagined,” at worst essentialized or artificially homogenized. 74 This is evident in the image of the model individual associated with the phrase “French identity,” which invokes historical republican notions of a white, male, active (therefore moneyed) citizen, but which is clearly unrepresentative of large sections of the contemporary French population. French attempts to control and redefine the limits of “French identity” exemplify the contradictions inherent within the usage of the word “identity,” according to Cooper: Much recent scholarship on identity uses the same word for something that is claimed to be general but soft—that is, everybody seeks an identity, but identity is fluid, constructed, and contested—and for something that is specific and hard, that is, the assertion that being “Serbian,” “Jewish,” or “lesbian” implies that other differences within the category should be overlooked in order to facilitate group coherence. 75

In the general emphasis on the fluid, provisional nature of identity, there is a tendency to overlook the fact that “hard,” essentialist versions of identity

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have proved remarkably resistant in political and media discourses. This is evident not only within the extremist rhetoric of the National Front, but in more mainstream debate, as suggested by Jacques Chirac’s 1991 speech concerning “le bruit et l’odeur” (noise and smell) of immigrants, or the reference, which immediately preceded the 2005 riots, by Nicolas Sarkozy to the youth of the banlieue as “racaille.” Since the questions asked by this study are generated by the political realities of contemporary French society, it models a similar tension between the ongoing debates being conducted through discourses in French politics, media and academia, and the creative, literary representations of the diverse lived experiences of those individuals and communities resident in the Hexagon. Just as the psychoanalyst listens to the terms in which the client expresses himself, so the terminology and discourses which frame the debates within France must necessarily be the starting point for our analysis. These terms must then be unpacked in order to understand the functioning of the social forces at work, all the while acknowledging that they must immediately be problematized. As Bill Marshall observes with reference to Quebec, “‘Nation’ and ‘identity’ are ever provisional, historically contingent, ceaselessly elaborated constructions, and yet at some level they are inescapable.” 76 He goes on to model the ongoing tension between discourses of the nation and the everyday, performative practices of constructing provisional identities with reference to language: We must imagine, therefore, a constant tension between forces of homogeneity and heterogeneity, between the centripetal and centrifugal. (I am drawing here on Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the forces in language between an inert unitary form and the plurality and movement of “heteroglossia”: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear.”) It is this tension that creates and that is the “national allegory.” 77

One of the concerns of this volume is the attempt to understand the ways in which this tension of the “national allegory” operates between discourses of a single, fixed “French national identity,” which is defined in relation to an equally homogenized North African otherness (neglecting the specificities of Arabs, Berbers and harkis), and performative practices in which a range of alternative forms of “Frenchness” are enacted in daily life. While the struggle for control of the nation’s identity continues within political discourse, similar battles are fought at the level of collectives who strive for a recognition which would make their voices and perspectives known. In her research on ethnicity and haunting, and borrowing from the work of Werner Sollors, Kathleen Brogan maintains that the identity of a group is less concerned with content (specific food, dress, customs, symbols, language and so on) than with the performative form adopted and re-enacted by those concerned to distinguish themselves from others through the estab-

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lishment and reinforcement of boundaries. While the “content” of traditions may vary over time, the existence of the differentiating boundaries is constant. Indeed, the group’s emphasis on difference is redoubled when assimilation becomes widely accomplished, as Brogan argues: “Widespread assimilation threatens an ethnic group’s self-delimiting boundaries, setting in motion a ‘return’ to what are in fact newly reimagined cultural sources.” 78 Following this anti-essentialist approach, the identity of various groups located within the Hexagon (pieds noirs, harkis, Maghrebi immigrants) is created and maintained through the performance of rituals, commemoration, and the repetition of key narratives which define and distinguish the group’s experience. In this context the past is essential to the construction of present identity: it is the source of the (imagined) shared experience of past events and locations which, repeatedly re-enacted, creates the bonds of group identity. In this context, the significance of the past works against attempts at the creation of a shared narrative: for groups such as pieds noirs activists, the aim is not the laying to rest of the specter, since the ghosts of the past are all that remains of a motherland forever lost to them. Their experience is one of unresolved mourning, a mourning which cannot be resolved because to do so would be to abandon the injustices committed by the French State at the conclusion of the Algerian war in 1962, for which adequate acknowledgement and reparations have not been forthcoming. For the sake of justice, then, their ghosts cannot be laid to rest. The attachment to the experience of colonial haunting reveals one pole of the spectrum of relations to the past which features in the literary texts examined in this book. LIVING WITH GHOSTS In their discussion of the nature of ghosts, Kate Griffiths and David Evans remark that the vocabulary of haunting is conventionally associated with anxiety, horror and paralysis. 79 These terms are reminiscent of psychoanalytic discussions of repression, which occurs when a separation opens up between conscious and unconscious mental activity allowing certain elements to be held at bay from the conscious: in Freud’s words, “The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious.” 80 The terms employed by Freud in his precision that, because of the repressed’s propensity to return, repression is not an event with permanent results—“as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead”—highlight the characteristics which it shares with the ghostly. Although Freud never refers specifically to ghosts or specters in his discussion, his description of the reaction produced by the return of repressed elements has much in common with the experience of

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haunting: “The vanished affect comes back in its transformed shape as social anxiety, moral anxiety, and unlimited self-reproaches.” 81 Specifically, the anxiety manifested in France in recent years with regard to the makeup of the nation and its identity, the relationship between the constituent parts of the body politic, and its guilt or otherwise at overlooked or forgotten episodes of its past would appear to testify to a nation haunted by the past from which it has sought to distance itself. The description seems apt even to the point of “unlimited self-reproaches”—a phenomenon which Lefeuvre would surely characterize as “repentance.” Freud’s work on the uncanny suggests that such unease is provoked by elements which were once familiar and homely (heimlich), but which have been made strange and unfamiliar (unheimlich) through the process of repression and which are perceived as frightening when re-encountered. 82 Julia Kristeva draws on the notion of the unheimlich in her discussion of the foreigner, where she suggests that the foreigner within the boundaries of the nation is a source of fear and dread. 83 Extending Freud’s theory of the individual psyche to the collective, she argues that the anxiety generated is not caused by the fear of any fundamental difference, but because the foreigner, representing difference within the unity of the same, poses a threat to the integrity and identity of the national body. As we shall see in more detail in the final chapter, immigrants, and especially their children who, as in the case of many of the French demonstrators in 2005, may hold the nationality of the host country and yet struggle to achieve the acceptance of their fellow citizens, pose a particular challenge to national identity. Indeed, readings of the texts examined in the following chapters suggest that the social invisibility of members of the community of immigrant origin within France means that, by virtue of their history and uncertain present identity, they function as embodied ghosts haunting the Hexagon. Here, and in her work on the abject, Kristeva proposes that the threat posed by the blurring of the already porous and provisional borders that constitute identity is a major cause of the anxiety which plagues the individual, and that this is directly related to our own fractured sense of self since, because of the presence of the unconscious within our individual psyche, we are to an extent all strangers to ourselves. The reactions provoked by the foreigner are similar to those of the ghost: both pose a conundrum because they call into question the clear demarcation of identity. The ghost is unknowable, otherness par excellence—yet it preserves a vestige of something which we recognize, lending it an uncertainty which, as Derrida says, leads to its perception as a threat. 84 The elusive and liminal nature of the ghostly undermines the neat functioning of ontological classifications, and so opposes the totalizing discourse associated with hard conceptions of identity and conservative republicanism; it cannot be confined by the terms of politico-legal discourse, and so offers a challenge to established histories. Yet paradoxically, following Derrida the enigma of the colo-

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nial ghost can be read as crucial to understandings of France’s present. Historically, the colonies have represented both sameness and difference for the Hexagon, particularly in terms of French Algeria and now, arguably, the Antilles, being a part of France and yet remaining separate from the metropole within the national imaginary. In the case of French Algeria sameness and difference were accentuated by the war of independence, in which the passionate insistence of the pieds noirs that the Mediterranean flowed through France just as the Seine flowed through Paris contrasted with the rejection of the Algerians as non-French by large sections of the mainland population. 85 For Derrida, there is a necessity to embrace this experience of otherness à proximité since, following Levinas, he argues that the self is constituted by its exposure to others. As Colin Davis puts it, There is no self-understanding, no self-sufficient subject prior to its encounter with alterity. . . . There is in Derrida’s account no separation between my relation to myself and my relation to the other, because the other is always already part of, prior to, and in excess of the subject: “in me before me and stronger than me.” 86

For Derrida the other functions as the founding law of the subject. It is for this reason that France struggles to reject and move on from its past to embrace its identity as a bounded nation-state: French society must understand itself in terms of its colonies since, even if large sections of that society persist in regarding the Maghreb and the community of immigrant origin as other, history testifies that they have been closely intertwined into a single transpolitical space. In the absence of recognition of the interconnectedness of the post-imperial space, France continues to be haunted by its unresolved Mediterranean relations. How, then, are we to respond to the persistence of ghostly presences? By returning unbidden in defiance of efforts to “turn the page” or formalize commemorations, the specter raises the question of how we can productively remember the past, accepting its continuing power whilst refusing to remain in thrall to it, acknowledging the injustices which have been committed whilst in many cases recognizing the impossibility of restitution. In the aftermath of the bitterness of decolonization, might it be possible to remember the past in ways which do not result in the production of sterile, opposing and irreconcilable narratives of individual groups, to which communities cling as an inherent part of their campaign for recognition of their identity, in which they are cast as victim, and other figures—the Republic, symbolized often by Charles de Gaulle—as the perpetrator? Such an approach would, if not exorcise the ghosts of the past, then at least transmute their haunting power into a state in which they no longer overwhelm the present. For Derrida, rather than

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dismissing them, the need to learn to live with our ghosts is an ethical imperative: To exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome—without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense, but out of a concern for justice. 87

For Brogan, literature offers one possible site of hospitality extended toward the ghost. She draws on Robert Hertz’s pioneering work on death rituals, in which he observed that for many cultures death is viewed as a transitional process, in which the initial moment of death leads to a “provisional burial,” followed, often months later, by the exhumation of the body and its final inhumation during a second burial at a different location. 88 In the “intermediary period” between provisional and secondary burials the deceased is regarded as living between two worlds, neither fully alive nor dead, manifesting itself as a restless and often malicious ghost that returns uninvited to haunt the living. At the final burial the dead lose their dangerous, uncontrollable aspect and assume the role of beneficent ancestral spirits upon whom the living may call. For Brogan, literature has a role to play in this process: she suggests that the literary recovery (or exhumation) of a lost past can function as a site of communal mourning. Just as, for Hertz, funereal rites work to organize societies, literary memorializing can be seen as the performance of group identity, whether national, ethnic, or racial: the way we remember the dead structures the society of the living. 89

What she refers to as cultural haunting may not be dispelled by the act of witness to the dead which occurs through literary texts, but in integrating lost portions of the past into a national narrative, and bringing to a form of presence the absence of the dead whose bodies and stories have been lost, the haunting is recast in terms which no longer overshadow the present, but become a part of it. Since haunting occurs due to the return of that which has been written out of history, it is unsurprising that hauntings loom large in literary texts which focus on the legacy of colonialism, and the consequences of decolonization. As a genre, literature can almost be defined by its capacity to generate multiplicities of meaning; as Buse notes, “literature has always been a . . . accommodating place for ghosts, perhaps because fiction itself shares their simulacral qualities: like writing, ghosts are associated with a certain secondariness or belatedness.” 90 The openness of literature to multiple readings, with their

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pluralities of meaning and interpretation, enables it to welcome the ambivalence of the ghostly for, like the haunted, literature bears traces of earlier texts, of memories and recollections, of apparent absences which are also what Avery Gordon calls “seething presences.” 91 The hospitality of the literary allows hauntings to operate in multiple, even contradictory, directions within a single text. In J.M.G. Le Clézio’s novel Désert, the ghostly presence of the ancestral spirit functions as the driving force which links the novel’s twin narratives, one located at the dawning of colonization in the Western Sahara, the other in an indeterminate postcolonial present. 92 Deconstructing the linear chronology of the Western calendar through its monumental temporality, the presence of the spirit endows the protagonist, Lalla, with an exoticism which encourages the French characters whom she encounters to develop, on one level, a respect for otherness. 93 Like Derrida’s specter, which stands against ontological certainties, Le Clézio’s ancestral ghost represents ambivalence, even paradox. On one level it allows a sense of imperialist nostalgia on the part of the reader for the loss of a putatively simpler, more authentic form of existence, so reinforcing neo-colonial modes of thought; on the other, it calls into question Western assumptions around chronological time, and the objectivization of the gaze. O’Riley notes that literature can be criticized for being disengaged from actual material conditions, and indeed, sections of Le Clézio’s narrative feature what might be referred to as the aestheticization of dispossession. 94 But the notion of haunting can also function productively: in Le Clézio’s narrative, the ghost functions as a creative force which, although it does not resolve the injustices resulting from the colonial past, demands a reconsideration of the relationship between industrialized French society and the cultures of the community of immigrant origin. In its representation of the beneficent ancestral spirit present at the intersection of colonial and postcolonial cultures, Le Clézio’s text offers one example of what the trope of haunting can contribute to understandings of the postcolonial present. Because it encompasses a range of literary genres, including travel writing, detective fiction, life writing, and historical fiction, this study delineates the spectral picture which emerges from the writings of novelists from across the French community, analysing the traces and influences of the past across a range of contemporary contexts to determine their effects on present day France. Each of the following chapters analyses one instance of colonial haunting as it is represented in literary narratives; in tracing the breadth of haunting as it occurs in French society today, the chapters together propose a mapping of the haunting trajectories of France’s colonial heritage. The hauntings examined occur in both individual and collective circumstances. In keeping with narrative convention, the return of the ghost frequently signals a disruption to the status quo, but one that may be only temporary: on occasion the specter operates in instances of obsession, in

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which the notion of progress is a lure as insubstantial as a mirage, or it may function as a catalyst, disrupting entrenched positions to offer more productive ways of engaging with the solidified mass of cultural memory. In paying heed to the ghostly presences of the past, the novels offer a means of recovery, bidding readers to reach out to the lost bodies and stories of victims of colonial atrocities, but also to the invisible yet tangible bodies of the immigrant community. In doing so, through the process of narrative recognition they offer some hope of restoration. Chapter 1 explores the ways in which French social paradigms are influenced by the colonial experience, focusing particularly on the reach and consequences of the orientalist thought which continues to haunt contemporary France. The three novels considered—J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Desert (2009 [1980]), Dominique Bona’s Malika (1992), and Leïla Sebbar’s Sherazade (1991 [1980])—can be construed as novels of contemporary exoticism, in which the exotic functions as a site of ambivalence, offering alternative and potentially productive modes of conceiving realities, whilst also falling back into well-trodden clichés in which the specter of imperialist thought looms large. The novels explore how the figure of the immigrant acts as a catalyst amongst sections of the majority population to raise the spirit of colonial experience, threatening to transform the immigrant from living individual into barely visible neo-colonial ghost trapped in limbo between past and present by the weight of orientalist expectation. Whilst the texts offer potential strategies of resistance, they also signal the continued struggle of the community of immigrant origin, positioned at a site of conflict in the paradigmatic struggle between colonial past and postcolonial present. The following chapter turns to the legacy of the most painful and deadly aspects of colonial violence. It demonstrates how France continues to be haunted by collective memories of the Algerian war, which have been repressed only to re-emerge in recent years, evidenced in the way in which memories of the massacre of Algerian demonstrators which took place on 17 October 1961 have evolved within the French national imagination, moving from the margins to occupy a central role within debates around postcoloniality. Through readings of four novels, Nacer Kettane’s Le Sourire de Brahim (1985), Leïla Sebbar’s The Seine Was Red (2009 [2003]) François Maspero’s Le Figuier (1988), and Didier Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam (1991 [1984]), it explores the marks, psychological and physical, left on those who witnessed the violence of that night, and on their children, who have learned about it at one remove but who are haunted by what Hirsch calls “post-memory.” Beyond the recovery of lost and conflicting memories, the chapter questions the purposes of memory and considers whether it may serve to further ethical ends that could advance the cause of restorative justice.

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The provisional nature of French boundaries and identity is discussed in the next chapter, which considers how pre-independence French Algeria has contributed to the identity of contemporary France through the childhood experiences of French citizens who grew up there. It examines how the writings of two influential French authors, Hélène Cixous and Marie Cardinal, are haunted by the memories of their childhood spent in French Algeria, an experience, marked by conflict and division, which was fundamental to the development of their feminist writing projects. In this context Algeria itself is figured as a spectral presence, that part of France which was amputated yet whose absence is ever present, in the manner of a phantom limb. In readings of two texts, Cardinal’s Au Pays de mes racines (1980) and Cixous’s Reveries of the Wild Woman (2006 [2000]), Algeria is a spectral visitation that brings the creative inspiration which drives their writing, and offers the potential for a postcolonial vision that transcends the conflict of the past. The final chapter explores how France’s population of immigrant origin and, more precisely, those of mixed Franco-Algerian parentage, function as postcolonial ghosts hovering between the identity categories of French and foreigner. With reference to Kristeva’s theories of the foreigner and the abject, it examines how Franco-Algerian individuals function as returning ghosts of the colonial period, undoing attempts to consign the past to what Didier Daeninckx has called “‘les oubliettes’ of history.” Analyzing Daniel Prévost’s Le Passé sous silence (1998) and Nina Bouraoui’s Tomboy (2008 [2000]), it argues that the “in-between” status of these individuals is perceived to threaten the unity of national identity, and so provokes a sense of abjection amongst sections of the majority population. The chapter concludes with analysis of the writing strategies employed by these individuals to establish a place within French society and reconcile with their own ghosts, in a move which enacts at the level of the individual the strategies which have been highlighted throughout the preceding chapters. Through a range of texts produced in metropolitan France, the study explores the strategic possibilities for understanding and coming to terms with the past in a way that enables us to live with the ghosts of empire. The chapters which follow provide contemporary illustrations of the haunting postcolonial relationship between literature, France and North Africa. NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994 [1993]), 11. 2. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, eds., Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 8. 3. Charles Forsdick, “Colonial History, Postcolonial Memory: Contemporary Perspectives,” Francophone Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2007): 101–118 (104).

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4. For the full speech, see http://www.jacqueschirac-asso.fr/fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/ 04/Les-évènements-des-banlieues.pdf (8 Nov. 2010). 5. For a discussion of responses to the riots, see Joshua Cole, “Understanding the French Riots of 2005: What Historical Context for the ‘crise des banlieues’?” Francophone Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2007): 69–100 (79–82). 6. In contrast, the widespread references to race made in international coverage of the riots frequently and sometimes simplistically blamed the violence on the failure of France’s republican policies to integrate the community of immigrant origin. See for example, John Simpson, “Violence Exposes France’s Weaknesses,” BBC News, 7 November 2005, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4414442.stm (29 Sept. 2010); Henri Astier, “Ghettos Shackle French Muslims,” BBC News, 31 October 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/ 4375910.stm (29 Sept. 2010). 7. Article 1 of the law of 3 April 1955 (no. 55–385) states that “L'état d'urgence peut être déclaré sur tout ou partie du territoire métropolitain, de l'Algérie, des départements d'outre-mer, des collectivités d'outre-mer régies par l'article 74 de la Constitution et en Nouvelle-Calédonie, soit en cas de péril imminent résultant d'atteintes graves à l'ordre public, soit en cas d'événements présentant, par leur nature et leur gravité, le caractère de calamité publique.” http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006068145&dateTexte=20101004 (4 Oct. 2010). The historian Benjamin Stora pointed out the historical connection: “La réactivation de la loi de 1955 va raviver la mémoire douloureuse de ceux qui sont aujourd’hui des grands-parents.” (The reactivation of the 1955 law will revive the painful memories of those today who are grandparents.) Hervé Nathan and Antoine Guiral, “Précédents algérien et calédonien de 1955 à 1961, puis en 1984–1985, la loi a été utilisée dans un cadre colonial,” Libération, 9 November 2005. 8. For more details on the memorial discourses surrounding 17 October 1961, see Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 295–303 and 314–19. 9. Charles Forsdick explores a number of similar examples in his chapter on postcolonial memory: “Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Cultures of Commemoration” in Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World, ed. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 271–284. See particularly 276–78. 10. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 8. 11. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 12. The interconnected nature of Franco-Algerian relations is discussed in Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), and Etienne Balibar, Droit de Cité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). 13. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 72. 14. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 15. In relation to this, and to other aspects of the current “memory wars” taking place within France, it is advantageous to write from the position of an outsider, albeit one belonging to the United Kingdom, a former imperial power which has its own historical issues with which to come to terms. 16. The full text of Sarkozy’s speech can be found at http://www.elysee.fr/president/lesactualites/discours/2007/discours-a-l-universite-de-dakar.8264.html?search=Dakar& xtmc=discours_dakar&xcr=1 (14 February 2011). 17. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 319. 18. Henry Rousso, “La Guerre d’Algérie et la culture de la mémoire,” Le Monde, 4 April 2002. 19. Pascal Bruckner, La tyrannie de la pénitence: Essai sur le masochisme occidental (Paris: Grasset, 2006); Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2006). Other recent publications arguing against a reassessment of the colonial past include Max Gallo, Fier d’être Français (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Paul-François Paoli, Nous ne sommes pas coupables: Assez de repentances (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2006). Jean-Pierre Ri-

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oux, La France perd la mémoire: Comment un pays démissionne de son histoire (Paris: Perrin, 2006). 20. Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la pénitence, 153. The question of who exactly constitutes the “repentants” is unclear. Lefeuvre talks of them as being historians, but as Catherine CoqueryVidrovitch points out, his principal targets (Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Gilles Manceron, and Pascal Blanchard) are not university historians. The charges laid against the repentants are frequently vague, creating the impression of a “straw man” constructed for the purposes of Lefeuvre’s own arguments. For a detailed critique of Lefeuvre’s historical methodology, see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Review of Daniel Lefeuvre’s Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale, 27 April 2007 http://cvuh.free.fr/spip.php?article73 (13 Oct. 2010). 21. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Review of Daniel Lefeuvre’s Pour en finir avec la repentance colonial. 22. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Review of Daniel Lefeuvre’s Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale. 23. Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, “Race,” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (New York: Routledge, 1995), 160. 24. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 22. 25. Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 128–36. 26. Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (New York: Routledge, 1992), 19–33. 27. Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 28. Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 6–7. 29. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Collins, 1985 [1982]), 48. 30. Tyler Stovall, “Diversity and Difference in Postcolonial France,” in Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World, ed. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 259–270 (266). 31. Todd Shepard highlights the paradox which accompanied the end of Algérie française, in which the traditional republican project of making Algeria French and those who continued to champion it were rejected as a threat to the Republic. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 96–100. 32. This vision is problematized by the DOM-TOMs, especially Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyane, whose status as French départements dates from 1946. 33. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, under the direction of Pierre Nora, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1992]). For criticism of the omission of colonial sites, see Perry Anderson, La Pensée tiède: Un regard critique sur la culture française (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 50, 54, and Charles Forsdick, “Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Cultures of Commemoration,” 277. 34. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 35. Michael F. O’Riley, Francophone Culture and the Postcolonial Fascination with Ethnic Crimes and Colonial Aura (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 13–14. 36. Charles Forsdick, “Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Cultures of Commemoration,” 275–77. 37. Arjun Appadurai, “The Decolonization of Indian Cricket” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South-Asian World, ed. Carol Appadurai Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 23–48 (23). 38. Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 5.

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39. Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7. 40. The best known of these “enfumades,” in which hundreds of men, women and children died, took place in caves at Dahra, near Mostaganem on 18 June 1845. The commanding officer was Colonel Pélissier. 41. Assia Djebar, L’Amour la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995 [1985]). 42. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 201. 43. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 22. 44. On the gothic, see Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). On photography see Lyndsey Russell-Watts, “Spectral Texts, Spectral Images: L’Usage de la photo as Haunted Text,” Jean-Xavier Ridon, “Sans Soleil and the Ghost of the Image,” and Andrew Asibong, “Spectres of Substance: François Ozon and the Aesthetics of Embodied Haunting,” all in Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French and Francophone Literature and Culture, ed. Kate Griffiths and David Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). On ethnic identity, see Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (University Press of Virginia, 1998), and Michael F. O’Riley, Francophone Culture and the Postcolonial Fascination with Ethnic Crimes and Colonial Aura (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). 45. Brogan, Cultural Haunting, 5–6. 46. Buse and Stott, eds., Ghosts, 10. 47. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 11, emphasis in translation. 48. For Derrida’s discussion of the ghost in Hamlet, see Specters of Marx, especially 8–12 and 17–23. 49. The situation concerning the harkis was further complicated by the proposed law of 23 February 2005, in which the harkis effectively became part of the celebration of Empire. 50. Mehdi Charef, Le Harki de Meriem (Paris: Mercure de France, 1989). 51. Charef, Le Harki de Meriem, 75. All translations are mine; quotations from the original French are given in endnotes. (Et comme il ne lui restait plus que sa vie, il l’avait donnée pour les siens.) 52. Charef, Le Harki de Meriem, 113. (Pour la première fois depuis son incorporation, Azzedine se rendit compte qu’il était pris dans un piège, et que, même si l’Algérie demeurait française, il resterait à jamais un oppresseur. . . . Même si les Français gagnaient, lui ne serait pas en paix pour autant. “Istiqlal” devint sa hantise. Le drapeau vert et blanc à croissant et étoile rouges n’arrêtait plus de flotter dans son esprit. Et c’est la mort qui flottait au vent avec ses trois couleurs.) 53. Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 26–67 (39). 54. Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects, 3. 55. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 56. Castricano, Cryptomimesis, 11. 57. See amongst others Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: 1944–198 . . . (Paris: Seuil, 1987); Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1994). 58. Malika Mokeddem, N’zid (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 64. All translations are mine; quotations from the French are given in endnotes. (À terre, le manque de passé écrase tout.) 59. Mokkedem, N’zid, 17. (Elle est comme un fantôme qui aurait oublié de déterrer son histoire. Elle n’a plus rien à hanter.) 60. Anne Donadey has developed Rousso’s notion of the Vichy syndrome and applied it to French attitudes towards the Algerian war. See Anne Donadey, “‘Une certaine idée de la France’: The Algeria Syndrome and Struggles over ‘French’ Identity,” in Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 215–32. More recently, Charles Forsdick has traced an evolution in approaches towards memory, moving from amnesia to a state closer to

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commemorative obsession. See Charles Forsdick, “Colonial History, Postcolonial Memory: Contemporary Perspectives,” Francophone Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2007): 101–118. 61. Tzvetan Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire (Paris: Arléa, 2004). 62. Balibar, Droit de cité, 40. 63. Named after the left-wing député from French Guiana, Christiane Taubira, who proposed it, the full text of the Taubira Law is available at http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000005630984&dateTexte=20101020 (20 Oct. 2010). 64. The full text of the “Loi 2005–158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés” is available at http:// www.legifrance.gouv.fr/./affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000444898&fastPos=2& fastReqId=1734713212&categorieLien=id&oldAction=rechTexte (14 Feb. 2011). 65. Claude Liauzu, “Une loi contre l’histoire,” Le Monde diplomatique, April 2005, 28. 66. For details of recent memorials, see Mary Stevens, “Commemorative Fever? French Memorials to the Veterans of the Conflicts in North Africa,” French Studies Bulletin 26, no. 97 (2005): 2–4. 67. Sarkozy’s injunction concerning Guy Môquet’s letter was delivered on 16 May 2007. http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/actualite/politique/20071019.OBS0611/discours-de-sarkozypour-les-martyrs-du-bois-de-boulogne.html (15 Nov. 2010). The proposal to entrust school pupils with the memory of murdered Jewish children was made on 14 February 2008 at the annual dinner of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), http:// www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2008/02/14/au-diner-du-crif-nicolas-sarkozy-defend-sa-conception-de-la-laicite_1011061_823448.html (15 Nov. 2010). For commentary on these pronouncements, see Pierre Nora, “Lettre ouverte à Frédéric Mitterrand sur la Maison de l’histoire de France,” Le Monde, 10 November 2010. 68. Nora, “Lettre ouverte,” Le Monde, 10 November 2010. 69. Nicolas Sarkozy, speech delivered in Caen, 9 March 2007, cited in Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in Narratives (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 11. 70. Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” 43. 71. O’Riley, Francophone Culture, 2. 72. Benjamin Stora and Thierry Leclere, La Guerre des mémoires: La France face à son passé colonial (La Tour d’Aigues: L’Aube, 2007). 73. Forsdick, Postcolonial Thought, 282. 74. See for example Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991 [1983]); Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 75. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 9. 76. Bill Marshall, Quebec National Cinema (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 1–2. 77. Marshall, Quebec National Cinema , 3, quoting Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 270–72. 78. Brogan, Cultural Haunting, p. 12. 79. Kate Griffiths and David Evans, eds., Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French and Francophone Literature and Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 11. 80. Sigmund Freud, “Repression,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), vol. 14, 141–158. 81. Freud, “Repression,” 157. 82. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), vol. 17, 217–252 (241). 83. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1988]). 84. Derrida, Specters, 39.

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85. Margaret A. Majumdar, Postcoloniality: The French Dimension (New York: Berghahn, 2007), xxv. 86. Davis, Haunted Subjects, 143. 87. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 175. 88. Robert Hertz, “Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death,” in Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Aberdeen: Cohen and West, 1960), 27–86. 89. Brogan, Cultural Haunting, 66–67. Brogan emphasizes that the work of cultural mourning differs from Freud’s understanding as a reality testing, in which recognition of the loved object as definitively lost leads ultimately to the healthy severance of attachments to the dead and the redirection of libidinal energies. While Hertz’s liminal period ends in the reinsertion of the boundary between the realms of the dead and the living, the dead are rendered safely accessible rather than inaccessible by their ritual re-interment. 90. Buse, Ghosts, 8. 91. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 17. 92. J.M.G. Le Clézio, Desert, trans. C. Dickson (Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2009). 93. The metaphysical presence surrounding Lalla creates an impression of otherness based on exoticism. Ambivalent and problematic, this is discussed in detail in chapter 1. 94. O’Riley, Francophone Culture, 44.

Chapter One

The Return of the Colonial in Le Clézio, Bona and Sebbar

Often read as an anti-colonial novel, Nobel prize-winning author J.M.G. Le Clézio’s work Desert (2009 [1980]) takes an approach adopted in much of his later writing in its focus on the experiential gap between the culture of his largely Western readership, and that of non-European cultures. As he discussed in a recent interview, his inspiration for writing Desert came in part from the anti-colonial beliefs of his British father, whose work as a doctor in Nigeria, Morocco, and Mauritius meant that from an early age Le Clézio witnessed the exploitation inflicted by colonialism. 1 He has said that his early experience of travel led to an obsessive need to understand the conditions of others, an interest which continued into his later life, fuelled by his frustration with the perceived homogenizing tendencies of Western culture propagated around the globe by the twin forces of industrialization and colonialism: Western culture has become too monolithic. It privileges to the point of exasperation its urban, technical aspect, thus preventing the development of other forms of expression: religiosity, and instinctive understanding, for example. All of the impenetrable part of human beings is set aside in the name of rationalism. It is this realization which has driven me towards other civilizations. 2

In Desert, Le Clézio is concerned to recover the nomadic North African cultures which were lost with the coming of colonialism, and to acknowledge the ghosts of those who suffered and died at the hands of the invaders. His representation of the desert, like that of Dominique Bona, whose work also appears in this chapter, celebrates primitive cultures as an alternative to the 1

2

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rationality of Western societies; both Desert and Malika present a revised version of the North-South cultural hierarchy which figures North Africa as a primitive Edenic utopia, a foil against which post-industrial France emerges as a deadened desert space. Within this reworked conception of difference, Le Clézio teases out the complexities of the colonial, exposing its sterility in contrast to the enduring power of the desert, whilst acknowledging its continued power to crush the vulnerable. The desert figures as a space into which the aspects of humanity occulted by post-Enlightenment thought—aspects which include communion with the elements, and with the spirits of the ancestors—are displaced and foregrounded. Ghosts in metaphysical and conceptual form abound in Le Clézio’s narrative: the primitive culture of the desert, which initially appears to have been lost to the coming of colonialism, through the empowering presence of the ancestral spirits is shown to haunt the postcolonial spaces of North Africa and, through immigration, the urban postindustrial deserts of France itself. However, closer reading demonstrates that France is doubly haunted, this time by the vestiges of colonial structures of thought. Like Bona and Sebbar, Le Clézio raises questions about the ambivalence of the power relations at work within contemporary discourse on the exotic, suggesting that the worn clichés of the colonial era may allow the exoticised subject a measure of creative power. Although for Le Clézio and Bona the ghosts of the colonial period ultimately prove resistant to being laid to rest, the discussion of the exotic opens the door to the potential for the reappropriation of colonial paradigms proposed by Sebbar, in an instance of what Edward Said calls “traveling theory.” Above all, the work of Le Clézio, like that of Bona and Sebbar, serves to emphasize the inherent instability of the historically and culturally constituted concepts on which Western categories are founded, and whose phantom-like propensity to escape the bounds imposed upon them means that they are prone to return at the very point of their vanishing. While much of Le Clézio’s work reprises the cultural divide between Western and non-Western societies, his writing does not exhibit the conventional sense of imperialist confidence in European mastery. Desert tells the story of the last days of a Tuareg tribe of the Western Sahara, the “blue men” (hommes bleus), whose desperate desert march ends in defeat at the hands of the French colonial forces in 1912. The historical narrative is spliced with the tale of orphaned Lalla, a descendant of the blue men, who lives in an indeterminate post-colonial present, and who leaves her Moroccan home for Marseilles, where she works as a hotel chambermaid and is “discovered” as a fashion model, before returning to her desert home. The headings of the two parts of the novel (“Happiness,” and “Life with the Slaves”) encapsulate the two sides of the cultural opposition, with life in the Western Sahara presented as a primitive idyll, whilst in contrast post-modern France is portrayed as a dehumanized urban desert. Le Clézio has been criticized by critics such as

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Winifred Woodhull and Kathleen Smith for eliding the contemporary political realities of the Western Sahara; 3 indeed, his reversal of France’s hierarchical ideology of the mission civilisatrice is none the more nuanced for replacing the valorization of one culture with that of another. Nonetheless, by locating the first part of his tale in a pre-colonial period and narrating it from the perspective of the tribesmen, the text subverts the conventions of the colonial novel by placing the nomads and desert center stage. As Laura Rice comments: “In the context of the Maghrîb, to focus on the desert is to decenter, for the space of a moment, a theoretical apparatus that has been pulled via a colonial history toward the metropolitan West.” 4 In adopting the nomads’ perspective and inviting the reader to share in the imagined suffering of their last days, Le Clézio constructs a narrative which is not only anticolonial but profoundly nostalgic for a primitive way of life whose loss he lays at the feet of imperialist ideology, but whose ghostly traces he portrays as actively persisting in the post-colonial period, its spectral presence contrasting with the apparent solidity of France’s urban landscape. It is this celebration of a putatively vanished cultural difference that transforms Le Clézio’s text from an anti-colonial novel into a work of contemporary exoticism. For some postcolonial critics, the imperialist heritage of exoticism makes it an irredeemably objectifying concept, and certainly in the three novels discussed here there is evidence to support this view. However, an alternative perspective has emerged which builds on work of Victor Segalen. For Segalen, the exotic was equated with alterity, but for this perspective to hold, the exotic must be stripped of its colonial associations; only then could it be recast as a suitable representational vehicle for difference. In disengaging the exotic from its geographical and imperial frame, Segalen restored it to full relativity as an unstable concept dependent on context and perspective, so allowing for the possibility that the West itself would be perceived as a site of exoticism by postcolonial travelers. Such instability underlines the fundamental tension of the exotic, regulated by the desire for possession and domestication, yet dependent on a sense of distance to maintain novelty and alterity. Influenced by his work, other scholars have argued for a more nuanced understanding of the term which takes account of its potential ambivalences, and offers the possibility of resistance. 5 In this way, a concept which once appeared to be permanently tainted by the artistic clichés of Flaubert, Loti, Chateaubriand and Ingres potentially may be rehabilitated and deployed in the service of the anti-colonial. While Forsdick’s work on Segalen has led to an increased interest in his writings, the proximity of exoticism to the related but less rehabilitated concept of orientalism has meant that within Anglophone postcolonial scholarship it continues to be viewed with suspicion. 6 There can therefore be a tendency to consider the exotic from one of two irreconcilable positions, as either irremediably contaminated by colonial

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thought, or as a fertile source of subversion of those same colonial paradigms. In practice textual readings demonstrate that the situation is more complex than these opposing positions would suggest, as a consequence of the shifting play of discourses which surround conceptions and representations of the Maghreb and its peoples. The linguistic representation of the exotic brings particular challenges. As Kateryna Olijnyk Longley states, the slipperiness of language calls into question the feasibility of conceptions of exotic representation: The exotic [is] elusive and ungraspable, more slippery and less stably positioned than the “oriental” and more capable of sliding away or striking back. The exotic is the sting in the tail of orientalism because it is the alluring and potentially entrapping aspect of otherness. . . . Language and discourse always invent as much as “record” their “object” and the idea of “containment” is a fiction. 7

Longley’s notion pushes at the limits of representation and asks what might happen if something as slippery as exoticism were to escape the dominating discourse, refusing to be contained. It suggests that exoticism has a certain power which is potentially available to the exoticized subject, because it exceeds the discourses habitually used to refer to it. Where this occurs, the potential emerges for marginalized groups to begin articulating resistance. This is the perspective adopted by Le Clézio, as he seeks to listen to the ghosts of the desert tribes, and their dispossessed postcolonial descendants and, in doing so, to return to them agency and the power to resist. The challenge for the exoticized subject is to use what Bhabha calls the “ambivalence” of discourse which “enables a form of subversion, founded on the undecidability that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention,” to turn this slipperiness into power which can be used to find a voice and a position from which to speak. 8 Theoretically speaking, in these moments of resistance there lies the potential for the postcolonial subject to evade the monolithic roles in which the dominant discourse constantly seeks to cast him or her. In practice, as this chapter shows, resistance may be achieved on the part of an individual, as in the case of the desert girl, Lalla, whilst on another level the ghost of the colonial paradigms which historically have underpinned and regulated cultural relations may reappear because, Ezra argues: “the doubleness of French colonial discourse reinforces it, providing a sort of reverse doublure, or lining, that protects it from the outside.” 9 The potential for resistance and reassertion underscores the complexity of power relations at work in the cultural discourses which haunt contemporary France.

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EXOTICISM IN THE DESERT: TEMPORALITY, SPECTERS AND THE SENSORIUM Irving Babbit famously referred to exoticism as “the infinite of nostalgia,” 10 and Le Clézio appeals to diverse aspects of human expression which he sees as having been lost to Western rationality in his portrayal of the desert experience. The nomads belong to a pre-colonial time which is about to disappear forever with the French invasion, but Le Clézio insists that they belong not only to a lost way of life, but to an alternate reality which is nonlinear, even timeless in essence. Born of the desert, and intimately linked to the earth, the blue men emerge like phantoms into an elemental world, leaving no trace of their passage in the swirling sands. But although they will be defeated in chronological time—the text opens and closes with the historical details of their defeat, dated by the Christian calendar: “Saguiet al-Hamra, winter 1909–1910”; “Agadir, March 30, 1912”—the nomads disappear in the same dream-like fashion as they appeared, their relationship to the earth unchanged and passed on to their descendant, Lalla. They commune in what Kristeva has called “monumental time” which encompasses repetition and eternity, in an manner reminiscent of Derrida’s spectral temporality. 11 This primitive cycle, in which life and death are an integral part of nomadic wandering, creates in the reader the sense that this is a sphere of perception different from the material experiences of the familiar world. In recounting the courageous but doomed efforts of the desert tribes to find safety and peace, Le Clézio’s lament for a lost culture is emblematic of what Renato Rosaldo has called “imperialist nostalgia,” in that the melancholia of loss is spliced with a sense of colonial guilt, but also with the certainty that, precisely because it is lost beyond reach, the fulfillment offered by temporal otherness cannot be compromised by the threat of possession or domestication. 12 Critics such as bell hooks and Deborah Root have criticized the propensity to celebrate elements which are no longer present in contemporary society as a symptom of the West’s psychological or spiritual lack, seeing in it the tendency for ethnic otherness to be appropriated within Western fashions as a means of adding spice to the bland homogeneity of white culture. 13 There is, then, a tension between cultural appreciation and appropriation, with the danger that the primitive will then become simply a commodity, to be consumed and thrown away at will, rather than being respected and accepted for its difference. However, by appealing to aspects of human existence neglected by the Enlightenment tradition, Le Clézio constructively employs nostalgia as a driver for his representation of the forms of pre-colonial otherness which haunt the contemporary present, using them to question Western assumptions about forms of reality. Central to the primitivism of Desert is the spiritual or

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metaphysical dimension of the nomads, which constitutes an alternative plane of reality and whose ghostly presence further disrupts the sense of chronological time. The text emphasizes their sense of shared destiny as they depend on the spiritual guidance of their leader, Ma al-Aïnine, who turns to God and his representative, the ghost of al-Azraq, the deceased holy man who was Ma al-Aïnine’s teacher. Central to life in the desert, the metaphysical element is both shared collectively by the tribe, and is intensely personal. Nour, a boy of the tribe, and Lalla, apparently his descendant, are both from the line of al-Azraq, and so enjoy an enhanced communion with their ancestor’s spirit. When lonely, Lalla enters al-Azraq’s presence on the high plateau and finds that his spirit draws her into the timeless world of her ancestors, altering her perspective and enabling her to see with his eyes so that she glimpses mysterious, dream-like visions of the desert she has never seen, great white cities with fine towers, ornate red palaces, and lakes of pure blue water. Through its apparition in the post-colonial period, the presence of the pre-colonial ghost transforms perceptions of space and time, so that Lalla sees images which she realizes are the memories of her forebears, the traces of a bygone age. By giving the contemporary character of Lalla access through her ancestor’s spirit to archaic metaphysical experiences, Le Clézio effectively disrupts the conventional colonial chronotope, linking the chronological present to the vanished yet eternal past, and recovering cultural elements which have been lost through the return of the ghost, whose presence guarantees the persistence of primitive culture into the post-colonial period. In referencing metaphysics, he also challenges Western cultural conceptions about vision. Lalla experiences al-Azraq’s presence as a “look” or “gaze” directed upon her like the heat of the sun. Unlike the gaze as defined by feminist theorists such as Jacqueline Rose and Griselda Pollock, this is a look which communicates rather than objectifies, speaking directly into her inner being through the noise of the wind, of the sand and the scorpions and snakes. Lalla calls him al-Ser, the Secret, and experiences him as an omniscient presence, of whom she is aware even in the desolate sequences set in Marseilles, but his gaze is unlike the oppressive surveillance commented on by Foucault in relation to Bentham’s Panopticon. Instead, it is an encouraging, enabling source of power which Lalla can draw on in moments of great need. Indeed, in France by extension her own gaze is described as powerful, as she “holds the burning force of the desert in her eyes.” 14 As if charged with the haunting pre-colonial potency of al-Ser and the desert, her glare is difficult for Westerners to bear; it is strong enough to reverse their contemptuous treatment of her. As Mary Vogl says, “Her gaze is in itself an act of resistance.” 15 In these passages, Le Clézio questions the limitations of Western forms of perception and perspective, and suggests a metaphysical domain, reminiscent of primitive spirituality, that has been lost to modern Western culture, yet

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whose haunting trace remains in the postcolonial immigrant subject. He uses a similar strategy to address the limitations of language and linguistic communication, a subject that he has dealt with in many of his previous texts. In Desert he abandons his attempt to find a solution to the postmodern problem of the unreliability of language, with its endless “différance,” instead exploring the possibility that non-verbal communication and sensory perception might enable a signifying space outside language. While the predominant mode of exoticism has been spatial, drawing on the geographical novelty of the new landscapes and animals of the colonies, the history of exotic representation is bound up with a phenomenological recourse to the senses. Seeking to communicate the experience of the exotic to those at home through writing, art and photography, nineteenth-century travelers relied heavily on the evidence of their senses. In letters describing his arrival at Alexandria, Flaubert appeals to sight and sound to express the essence of Egypt: Landing took place amid the most deafening uproar imaginable: negroes, negresses, camels, turbans, cudgelings to right and left, and ear-splitting guttural cries. I gulped down a whole bellyful of colors, like a donkey filling himself with hay. 16

Whilst sight predominates in his letters, when it comes to Flaubert’s encounter with the celebrated Egyptian courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem, he turns to smell in order to convey the intimacy of his experience of the exotic: “She began by perfuming our hands with rosewater. Her bosom gave off a smell of sweetened turpentine, and on it she wore a three-strand golden necklace.” 17 To his lover, Louise Colet, he goes further, locating olfaction at the heart of his sensual experience of the Arab woman: “You tell me that Kuchuk’s bedbugs degrade her in your eyes; for me they were the most enchanting touch of all. Their nauseating odor mingled with the scent of her skin, which was dripping with sandalwood oil.” 18 In his appeal to the senses in representations of the exotic, Le Clézio returns to Segalen’s notion of “para-sensory Exoticism,” defined as “the creation of a world different from our own by its selection of a particular sense as the predominant one (a sonorous world, an olfactory world etc.) or by its differing Spatial properties: four-dimensional space.” 19 The pre-eminent figure in this regard is the Hartani, the mute shepherd boy rescued from the desert by one of the blue men and looked after by Lalla’s village. Mute by choice, his affinity with the solitude of the desert means that he has no interest in hearing or learning the language of men. Like al-Ser, he speaks silently with his eyes and meaning passes directly to the interior of Lalla. His communication enthrals her: It isn’t really stories that he tells Lalla. Rather, it’s images that he makes appear in the air, with only his gestures, his lips, with the light in his eyes.

8

Chapter 1 Furtive images that appear in flashes, flickering on and off, but never has Lalla heard anything more beautiful, more true. 20

Through Lalla’s wordless relationship with the Hartani and al-Ser, Le Clézio challenges the convention that reality is constructed primarily through language, and raises questions about the potential for the production of meaning through engagement with the human senses, outside of language: Through language, man has made himself into the most solitary of beings in the world, because he has excluded himself from silence. All his efforts to understand other languages, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, and the vibrations, the waves, communications by roots, chemical cycles, anastomosis, all of this must be translated into his language, with his words and figures. But he only perceives the traces: the real meaning is lost on the way. So man is alone, and he does not know how to be himself. 21

Of uncertain origin, the Hartani’s connection to the desert defines him as other; his only human companion, Lalla, sees him as one with his fellow desert dwellers: the sparrowhawk whose soaring flight he seems to share, and the fox and goat whose invisible paths he tracks. Le Clézio creates the impression of an alternative form of reality—“a world different from our own”—through his appropriation of the supposedly universal sensorium. Through his sensory perception the Hartani introduces Lalla to the kaleidoscope of smells which striates the desert, initiating her into a previously unknown dimension: The Hartani showed Lalla how to do it. Before, she didn’t know how. Before, she could pass right by. . . . A strange odor of fear hovers over the trail of a hare; a little farther along, the Hartani motions to Lalla to come closer . . . little by little, the young girl detects something acrid, intent; the smell of urine and sweat, then suddenly she recognizes it: it’s the smell of a wild dog, starving, hair bristling, running over the plateau in pursuit of the hare. 22

Although these sensory learnings will later transform her into the exotic representative of the desert, Lalla functions here as mediator between the alterity of the desert world of the Hartani, and the reader. Through the internal focalization of the narrative, the reader shares her realization that, in the act of perception, the Hartani transforms the reality of the desert around him: Things were more beautiful when he looked at them, newer, as if no one had ever seen them before . . . he knows things that people don’t, he sees them with his whole body, not only with his eyes. 23

The suggestion that “seeing” can extend beyond the eyes to other parts of the body, and the implied existence of alternative dimensions of reality access-

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ible through non-Western modes of sensory application is a key means by which Le Clézio establishes the haunting persistence of desert cultures. In opposing the primitive world of the desert to France’s post-industrial realities Le Clézio proposes an alternative mode of being, one closer to the natural elements, which is at once lost in the haze of desert sands thrown up by the invading colonial troops, and yet still is present in the post-colonial period through the haunting power of the ancestral spirit of the desert, and the mysterious abilities of the Hartani. Whilst Lalla’s experiences in Marseilles’ urban desert testify to the power of post-industrial society to isolate and crush the individual, the haunting presence of al-Ser serves to indicate that the desert retains a potency which should not be underestimated. By exoticizing the desert world, Le Clézio valorizes the cultural alterity which he sets up in opposition to the conquering culture of European colonialism. However, while he succeeds in inviting the reader to share the haunting experience of alterity through his language, a closer examination of his choice of desert location suggests that the process of translation is more complex than it initially appears. The vocabulary employed to describe the desert is restricted (“dune,” “sand,” “wind,” “pebbles,” “stones,” “light,” “silence” appear repeatedly) and effectively creates the elemental sense of the landscape, but it raises questions about exactly who is seeing and describing this location. Laura Rice asks this question in an article which traces representations of the desert, and concludes that while the majority of desert inhabitants are Muslim (Berber, Arab, Black, Tuareg), literature of the desert has often been seen through the lens of the Judeo-Christian tradition. 24 She concludes that this most wild and inhuman of spaces is as socially constructed as any other, and that there is a risk in basing claims of universality on any single account: Non-Muslim writers originally from North Africa like Camus, Jabès, Memmi and Derrida have described the desert—but theirs are, like all deserts, socially constructed. They have described the deserts their particular “situatedness” has allowed them to see—hostile, alien, blank, secondary. Their problem is not in what they have seen; rather it is in the unwarranted claim of universality attributed to these views. Writers who come from the desert, or for whom the desert is deeply valued as reflected in their cultural tropes, see a desert full of potential, moods, complementarities, illuminations. When the colonial soldierscholars carried out their research, they did so thinking they were seeing the landscape as it existed; they probably were often unaware of the extent to which cultural politics shaped their views. When they did recognize the bias, they maintained there was a “rightness” about it just the same. Postcolonial critical theory, for all its insights into the workings of power, may at times fall into the same traps of appropriation: particularized “post-religious” secular deconstructions may turn out to be just such a critical appropriation. 25

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Her closing point about the “post-religious” is particularly apt in relation to Le Clézio’s attribution of a primitive desert spirituality. Again, however, the text reveals a more complex reality, for the metaphysical elements are overwritten with Judeo-Christian allusions to the Exodus, in the form of the desert nomads’ endless march towards the promise of freedom and plenty in the north. As Madeleine Borgomano points out, the tale of this long march across the desert towards the north . . . with a holy prophet as a guide, strongly recalls the biblical story of the Exodus. . . . The story of the desert warriors exactly parallels and is similar to that of the children of Israel. And Ma al-Aïnine, in many of his characteristics, resembles Moses. 26

But while Borgomano defends this reference to the Old Testament on the grounds that “for Islam, the Bible is also a sacred text,” in reality Islam has no tradition of an exodus, particularly not one towards a “promised land,” since what is promised to Muslims is heaven rather than a land in this world. Indeed, the Arabic phrase which corresponds to “la terre promise” carries strong Judeo-Christian connotations. 27 Facts such as these serve to underline the extent to which Le Clézio, like all authors, writes through the lens created by the discourses and traditions that are the remnants of previous eras, which have shaped his perception and which shape ours as readers. In her article, “Barthes and Orientalism,” Diana Knight makes a similar point: How might a white, French intellectual, a purveyor of French culture, free as he may be of all xenophobia, produce a non-Orientalist discourse about Morocco, when he is part of its problem? He can’t of course, even if he wants to. 28

Le Clézio himself is well aware of the writer’s dilemma, being, as Jennifer Waelti-Walters puts it, “caught in language and hence in his culture, in his mask, while making gestures to remove it.” 29 Given that there is no neutral place outside of discourse in which we, as writers or readers, can operate other than in a critical awareness of our own positioning, the difficulty of the task emphasizes Le Clézio’s achievement in those instances where he does succeed in representing the haunting alterity of desert cultures. However, it also serves as a timely reminder to exercise caution when positing the potential and resistance of ex-colonized cultures in the face of Western postindustrial society.

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SPECTERS OF THE EXOTIC While those passages of Desert which focus on the nomads present the potent haunting temporality of the desert, in the second half of his novel Le Clézio superimposes the spectral power of al-Ser onto contemporary society, as Lalla leaves the desert and moves across the Mediterranean to Marseilles. Amid the desolate greyness of the rundown quarter of a twentieth-century city, the practice of Lalla’s connection to the light and strength of her desert ancestor is tested. This section of Desert is discussed in conjunction with the second novel in this chapter, Malika by Dominique Bona, which treats a similar scenario in which a Moroccan girl leaves her desert village to follow her destiny in France. At this point the metaphysical presence of al-Ser is overlaid by haunting presences which assume a plurality of forms. The exoticised appearance of the two young girls favors the perception of them as revenants, returning ghosts of the colonial era whose presence summons the conventional gamut of colonial responses to the Arab woman. While both texts demonstrate the extent to which their unlooked for apparition within French society disturbs the social equilibrium that surrounds them, the question of the source of the disruption remains ambiguous. For many of the French characters, the girls bring with them a supernatural power which influences those around them, but the texts also leave open the possibility that the colonial responses to the girls have little to do with the girls themselves. Instead, they occur because the French are haunted by the colonial structures of thought that are the legacy of France’s past, and which linger in the interstices of the social imaginary. The French locations chosen by the authors are geographically close— Marseilles and St. Tropez—but their tenor could not be more different. The picture which Le Clézio paints of contemporary France is bleak. Focused on the negative aspects of Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity,” it is a place of alienation, peopled almost exclusively by impoverished immigrant workers, exploitative owners, thieves and beggars who constitute an omnipresent underclass. 30 It has nothing in common with the fantastic tales of Europe which Lalla heard in the desert. No one is free; even the bourgeois who do not feature in the novel are by implication subject to society’s capitalist forces. Marseilles, it is suggested, is the real desert. 31 As William Thompson points out, the nomads are at home in the aridity of the physical desert and it is only in contact with French civilization or in France itself that Lalla encounters feelings of abandonment, emptiness and fear. She watches as workers from around the world are drawn, tired and anxious, to the promise of a land of opportunity, through the ports and railway stations that act as the mouth of this creature “that will crush and devour them.” 32 Contemporary France is depicted as a modern version of Germinal’s “Le Voreux.”

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The setting of Malika could hardly prove a greater contrast. Set in a St. Tropez villa, where a wealthy Parisian couple are on holiday with family and friends, Bona’s novel is itself haunted by an earlier text, Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. 33 The intertextual echos of Sagan’s text are striking (besides the classic isolated St. Tropez setting, Malika also concludes with the death of a character in a car accident), indicating that Bona shares the focus on cultural dynamics. The tradition of the Parisian summer holiday, with its potential for the public display of wealth, enables Bona to indicate the class aspirations of her characters; in a few pages, she swiftly constructs a Hexagon-centered world dominated by contemporary bourgeois norms. As in Sagan, the disruption of Bona’s world is precipitated by the introduction of an outside figure invited into the holidaying milieu, in this case as the family au pair, but here the outsider is a returning ghost of the colonial era whose presence disturbs and destabilizes the post-colonial culture of metropolitan France. Despite their different roles and locations, both girls serve as a screen onto which the assumptions and expectations of the characters around them can be projected. For the men in particular, their appearance functions as a symbol of a particular discourse of the exotic which is rooted firmly in the colonial tradition of the nineteenth century. For their male admirers, then, the girls appear as revenants, the incarnated object of colonial desire. Conversely, the projection of such colonial discourses onto young immigrant girls demonstrates the extent to which France is haunted by its colonial past, with its postcolonial relations with North Africa still regulated by the haunting economy of the colonizer-colonized interaction. The ghostly projection of colonial thought is consistent in Bona’s text: from the outset, Malika is presented as a solitary figure whose presence splits the reality of the villa and creates another world within. In spatial terms this other world is located to the rear of the house: an unseen domestic sphere of cooking and child-care. But there is also a metaphysical dimension to Malika’s difference: early textual references to a lost world which she alone can see, and which she carries within her, convey overtones of mystery and primitivism reminiscent of Lalla’s nomadic ancestry. This insistence on the primitive exotic proves fundamental to the cultural disruption which she occasions. Because Malika occupies the domestic sphere of the villa, the extent of her otherness is not immediately remarked upon by her employers’ circle. Her arrival to serve dinner one night is striking, silencing the murmur of conversation: The young girl glowed. With her very short, black hair and pearly teeth, she conveyed a wonderful youthfulness. She didn’t fade into the background like a film extra, as Marie-Hélène would have wanted. On the contrary, she had the brilliance of a star. Of the maid’s role, she had only the costume: a black dress and white apron. The boat-necked dress came down to the mid-thigh. Benoît

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Darman looked with relish at the satin skin of her arms and legs, as soft as an apricot. . . . The young girl seemed to play a role, to be someone else. Someone that no one knew, very different to the uncertain and secondary role of the servant which was attributed to her. When she leaned over, a curious gold pendant, in the shape of a hand, left her round breasts and swung above the guest whom she was serving. The young girl worked her way round the table, swaying her hips, swiftly, without lingering, but letting herself be viewed from all angles. She disappeared. Those left were completely incapable of picking up the conversation where it had been left. 34

Malika here is engaged in the performance of exoticism which calls into question the social context around her. Ostensibly focused on the girl and her silent and conscious use of what she knows to be her greatest asset—her body—the incident acts as a catalyst which perturbs the equilibrium of the group and prompts its members towards self-reevaluation. Her appearance induces a process of de-centering which moves the attention from a unified focus on the “center”—the family and guests—to a fragmented vision in which the French center is seen only in relation to and as a reflection of its North African other. The moment is a turning point in the novel; it establishes the social hierarchy between characters, confirming that, despite the differences in status, Malika dictates the responses of the other characters. Malika’s presence clearly destabilizes those around her, but the precise form in which her exotic power manifests itself is worthy of analysis. The passage introduces the two elements primarily responsible: her sexuality, and her metaphysical beliefs, represented at the dinner table by the hand of Fatima pendant. Both are linked in the eyes of the French onlookers to her country of origin, and both play a key role in the novel, driving the narrative as it builds to the final, fatal climax. What is left deliberately vague is the source of Malika’s exotic power. The exotic is constructed through the attributes of feminine sexuality and religious belief, but whether Malika’s power resides in the perception of the French characters who are perturbed by her difference, or whether she indeed possesses an intensity which she can deploy at will remains ambiguous. An understanding of the causes of this cultural de-centering therefore relies on analysis of the way in which the character of Malika is presented. Throughout the novel, Malika’s beauty and presence arrest the attention of all those around her. Instinctively, the French guests attribute this to her ethnic origins, which are perceived as the source of her sexual attraction, and therefore of the disturbance which she creates in the St. Tropez holiday party. The women are threatened by her youth and dark beauty, finding their evening dress wanting when compared to the impossibly perfect skin and bare feet of the serving girl. The men respond to her eroticism in predictable ways, reproducing colonial attitudes of obsessive sexual desire in which

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Malika becomes a post-Flaubertian version of Kuchuk Hanem. While she appears to offer a convenient taste of the Orient for consumption in France, those men who pursue her as a prize find that consummation, rather than satiating their desire, only makes it more urgent. Bona achieves the exoticization of Malika by describing her in relatively stereotypical terms, yet prevents her otherness from disappearing into a series of Western clichés by insisting that she is intimately connected to a different, lost world. Perhaps because the terms of her exoticism are comparatively conventional, her difference is clearly apparent to everyone in the French party. Le Clézio, on the other hand, addresses the difficulty of translating difference into the midst of Marseilles by suggesting that Lalla is “otherworldly,” her appearance reflecting the brilliance of the desert sun, but that as the months go by she learns to conceal this exotic quality beneath a colorless exterior and effectively become invisible, in order to help her survive in her new surroundings. Unseen by the crowds who pass her, she becomes a ghostly, dispossessed figure, representative of the many homeless immigrants wandering the city streets. Nonetheless, she retains her connection to the desert and its power, which manifests itself on occasion by transfiguring her, even altering the banal reality of a Marseilles department store or nightclub, so that it is relocated amongst the endless sands of the desert. Reaching out to al-Ser and the power of his gaze, and dancing the trance-like rhythmic tribal movements of long ago, in what Le Clézio himself might call “l’extase materiélle” she communes again with the desert sands and stones which gradually appear around her. The trance culminates as the heat of alSer’s gaze falls on her as if for the first time, and she collapses slowly onto the dance floor. The scene is reminiscent of Deleuze’s “becoming imperceptible,” as Lalla is “phantasmagorically transported to the space of the desert where a totalizing incorporation of all identities and differences is enacted.” 35 This experience marks the end of her sojourn in France, as she returns to the cyclical mode of life in the Western Sahara, where she gives birth to the Hartani’s child under the same ancient fig tree as her mother. THE HAUNTING POWER OF THE EXOTICIZED SUBJECT In both texts, the exotic appearance of the North African girls endows them with a certain haunting power over those around them. In her transfigured state, Lalla attracts the attention of a photographer who, fascinated by her otherworldly appearance, turns her overnight into a successful international cover girl. Soon Lalla’s face, under her new persona, “Hawa” (“Eve” in Arabic), is everywhere, and she becomes known as a sought-after model. Similarly, Malika encounters a French photographer, Raymond, who has

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traveled to Morocco in search of fresh creative inspiration, and who becomes her lover. Captivated by her, he in turn ensures that her image is captured in photographs which are widely published and distributed. In both texts, the urge to photograph is described in similar terms: The photographer never stops photographing Hawa. . . . She gives him her shape, her image, nothing else. . . . Then Lalla suddenly steps out of the light field because she’s tired of being photographed. She walks away. To keep from feeling the emptiness, he’ll continue to look at her for hours, in the darkness of his improvised laboratory. . . . There’s something secret about her that sometimes just happens to be revealed on the paper, something you can see but never possess, even if you take pictures every second of her existence, until she dies. 36 He [Raymond] showed me the photographs he had taken: several hundred of Malika. . . . The spotlights didn’t dazzle Malika. The Leica could try out all angles on her . . . it didn’t bother her disconcerting temperament. Her personality shone in the viewfinder with a sensuality that no-one, according to Ray, could resist. 37

For the two Frenchmen, photography is a means of taking possession of an exotic object which remains constantly beyond their reach; however, as their endlessly repeated shots testify, it is ultimately ineffectual because the girls’ exotic qualities are the elusive, ghostly projections of the photographers’ own desires. It at once valorizes the girls as object of desire, but it also objectifies them in an act of possession, as the sexualized object of the men’s scopophilic gaze. It recalls Chateaubriand’s touristic privileging of the image which can be observed in a powerful but unengaged manner, over language which requires the active engagement of listening, thereby emphasizing the passive object status of the exotic woman. 38 In this the photographs are reminiscent of the traditional conception of the Oriental woman as passive, mute odalisque, but while the odalisque is traditionally represented in the individual work of art, which carries an aura, the photographs are massproduced and disposable, used to advertise the girls as commodity. Nonetheless, the male photographers recognize something in their female subjects: an alterity which offers a promise of satisfaction, the “spice” of the Other to which bell hooks refers. This haunting presence is inalienably linked to the girls’ exotic appearance, to their gender, and to their Arab origins. However, rather than acting as passive odalisques, the girls exert their own control over their male admirers/exploiters. They achieve this as befits the exotic object by remaining consistently remote and aloof, maintaining themselves at a distance from the men, and also from French society. Lalla’s reaction to her material success exemplifies this: she remains uninterested and untouched by the furore which surrounds her, accepting little of the

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money which she earns, and leaving the rest with beggars and gypsies whom she finds on the streets. The perception of the girls as elusive, ghostly presences is underscored by their shared propensity to quit their current situation without warning, to the frequent dismay of the male characters. Never knowing how long the girl who so captivates them will remain with them, each of these men must negotiate their apparent powerlessness in the face of the emasculation threatened by the girls’ appropriation of their own subjectivity. Forced to accept their lack of control, or lose their hold on the fragile relationship, the men learn to appreciate the time bestowed on them by these mysterious girls whose actions seem dictated by some unseen force (Malika, 205; Desert, 288–89). Their phantomlike elusiveness adds to their fascination, setting them apart from the everyday so that the perception of them as exotic is enhanced even as they demonstrate their own agency, contradicting the traditional conception of the passive Oriental woman. For the characters surrounding Malika, the power of her sexuality is linked to the other disturbing aspect of her presence—her religious belief—for her actions are dictated by some unseen higher power: in leaving her lovers, Malika is responding to her sense of individual destiny. Like the influence of Lalla’s desert ancestors, Malika’s religious belief is a defining element, which draws on a web of influences. She comes from a Muslim village but rejects the practices of Islam as the imposition of conformity, and is drawn instead to the magic and pagan rites of her Berber grandmother, from whom she learns to pray to the stars and how to attract the protection of the marabout. While Malika is dismissive of the outward signs of Islam, she accepts its emphasis on fatalism and believes fervently in her own destiny—the Arabic “mekhtoub”—as set out by the stars. The hand of Fatima, which she wears around her neck, symbolizes the sometimes sinister air of magic which surrounds her, and which disconcerts others, who refer to her as “Esmeralda” (181) or “the bewitcher” (194). Malika is thus set apart even from those closest to her, including her sisters, who believe that she can bring misfortune to those who wrong her. Through repeated references to the growing sense of unease amongst other characters, and their suspicion that Malika has cast a spell on the group, Bona encourages the reader to take at face value the disruptive potential of Malika’s exoticism. However, in parallel with the sexual fantasies and suspicions of magic to which she gives rise, the narrative contains traces which indicate the disruptive presence of other ghosts of the past. The response of David, her French employer, demonstrates most clearly the link between Malika’s sexual presence and her ethnic origins, for in addition to exciting David’s sexual fantasies, her presence brings back painful, repressed memories of his Algerian pied noir childhood. These memories, which return like evil spirits to trouble him, are compounded by his son Jérémie’s use of the

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Arabic term “sidi papa,” which disturbs David because it recalls the unhappiness of another era, and provides evidence that, far from being lost, the ghosts of that time continue to haunt the next generation. His wife, MarieHélène, shares his reaction when she stumbles across her two young children making an offering of stones collected on the beach, as part of a mystical rite led by Malika. Through specific examples, Bona conjures the doubts and anxiety which haunt the white French population when faced with the presence of North African immigrants and their culture in metropolitan France. She describes a privileged section of mainstream French society which has turned its back on its past relationship with North Africa, repressing the memories of its time there and refusing to acknowledge the legacy of decolonization, yet which is haunted by that past and the colonial structures of thought which it has not succeeded in laying to rest. Paradoxically, it may be that the refusal of the white middle-classes to come to terms with their past is responsible for attributing power to Malika. The perceptions of Malika are so colored by the ghosts of colonial stereotypes that it is difficult for the French characters to move beyond them, to see her in a new light as a young immigrant girl who speaks little French. GHOSTS OF THE PAST: ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF POWER The persistence of colonial thought contributes towards the possibility that the disturbance which accompanies Malika may not be the result of any spectral power immanent in her. On one level, both Lalla and Malika appear to wield the power of the elusive and exotic object referred to by Longley. They both achieve a degree of recognition through their photographic careers, but are dismissive of the material rewards which accompany it. They prefer to maintain their freedom on their own terms, accepting the attentions of male admirers but liable to disappear without warning. Having followed their destiny to France, they choose to remain distanced from the French society in which they find themselves. However, the conclusion that, as an Arab immigrant, each girl possesses the ability to disrupt French society by her presence is less than convincing. As an unstable, subjective category, the exotic is dependent on the perspective of the spectator; as Longley says, because it is always an attribute given to someone else, exoticism, like orientalism, is a way of seeing which sustains the myth of the cultural centrality, and therefore the superiority, of the viewer. 39 On closer examination, their exotic power can be seen as having been constructed to fit contemporary Western expectations of the Oriental woman, and provide a modern odalisque suitable for consumption by a Western audience. As the reactions of the French characters demonstrate, Western tastes in Arab women continue

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to be haunted by the desires and beliefs associated with colonial conquest. The consequent disruption of white French culture is therefore less the result of any power inherent in the Arab girl, than of the haunting traces of Western discourse and prejudice made evident through the reactions of other characters. Various aspects contribute to the construction of the exotic, beginning with the choice of a female protagonist. Femininity and female sexuality traditionally feature strongly in literary and artistic representations of the exotic since, as feminists have noted, Woman occupies a position as “the prime representative of difference.” 40 To this are added descriptions of Oriental beauty. Malika is described in idealized conventional terms, as tall and slim, with firm bust and small waist. In addition to her beauty, her appearance communicates pride and disdain, an attitude immediately reminiscent of the haunting photographs of defiant Algerian women forcibly unveiled by French soldiers during the Algerian War. In contrast, Lalla initially appears unexceptional in appearance, her copper-colored face being her only distinguishing feature, until transfigured by the desert power within: “It’s because of all the light streaming from her eyes, her skin, her hair, the almost supernatural light.” 41 Lalla and Malika inhabit an ambivalent space in relation to the white French characters, finely balanced between the banality of domestic tasks, and an exotic and undefined metaphysical “other world,” while as girls barely past adolescence, they occupy a liminal space between child and adult. Since the exotic is a representation of difference translated for the spectator, this interstitial position crucially allows their difference to be comprehensible to their French onlookers. Colonial representations of the Arab woman, in particular the quiet aloofness of the odalisque, haunt the construction of the girls as exotic. Despite being the novel’s protagonist, Malika remains silent throughout the novel, and is accorded no direct or even reported speech. This could be attributed to her lack of French, since the narrator tells us that she learns the language with difficulty some time after her arrival in the country. However, it reinforces the assumption that, because the exotic cannot speak for itself, it must be spoken for. Bona draws on the figure of the silent colonial odalisque to emphasize Malika’s sense of mystery: according to the clairvoyant, whose first-person narrative retells Malika’s story, she keeps the other characters at distance, and deliberately maintains her enigmatic persona in her relationships with others by restricting their access to different aspects of her life. The result is a fragmented narrative which includes layers of unreliability and effectively distances reader from subject: No-one amongst those who crossed her path—except perhaps me, since I am trying to gather our scattered memories—knew Malika entirely. We thought

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we knew her and yet she always escaped us, only giving a part of herself each time, a more or less eccentric piece of the puzzle of her life. 42

A similar distancing effect takes place in the narrative of Lalla and indeed, of Sherazade, the eponymous character in the third novel, both of which use internal focalization which gives only limited access to the characters’ thoughts and desires. The haunting traces of colonial conceptions of femininity mark their construction as mysterious, unknowable presences. The distance and mystery created by the girls’ self-conscious reticence plays a major role in leading other characters to perceive them as exotic and different. However, while the nature of their exoticism stems directly from the colonial-era discourses on femininity which haunt the French characters in both novels, a close reading of the texts reveals that the persistence of the colonial is overlaid by an evolution in attitudes towards the exotic which encompasses additional elements linked closely to the development of modernity. Individualism is one such element, which Segalen argues is an essential component of the exotic: Exoticism is therefore not that kaleidoscopic vision of the tourist or of the mediocre spectator, but the forceful and curious reaction to a shock felt by someone of strong individuality in response to some object whose distance from oneself he alone can perceive and savor. (The sensations of Exoticism and Individualism are complementary). 43

With a swipe at the tourist collective, Segalen emphasizes the need for individualism on the part of the observer. Bona’s novel, however, suggests that the difference which sets Malika apart is linked to her individuality, indicating that this element also plays a significant role in the construction of the exoticized subject. The rise of individualism in the exotic is linked to the development of Western modernity: as Bauman maintains, the erosion of community and family structures which characterized earlier periods has produced an atomized society which emphasizes the discrete unit. Contemporary society is characterized by fluidity, with individuals working to create their own identity in locations which owe more to the demands of the labor market than to their place of birth or family residence so that, as Bauman argues, “to speak of individualization and of modernity is to speak of one and the same social condition.” 44 With Westerners now more attuned to individual rather than collective identity and difference, contemporary exoticism has evolved such that the status of the exotic is less attributable to a mass of undifferentiated groups or communities. A representation of the objective differences between North African and French society might emphasize the importance of the extended family or the nomadic tribe. In contrast, both Bona and Le Clézio are careful to insist on a separation between their protagonist, and her family and neighbors, who regard her as different and set apart.

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In doing so, they demonstrate that, although a contributory factor, ethnicity alone is not sufficient to render a subject exotic. Most striking in the presentation of alterity is the emphasis laid on the metaphysical aspects of Lalla and Malika’s existence. Lalla’s direct, haunting connection with her tribal ancestors, through the ancient refrain sung in the voice of her deceased mother, and through the visions of the past experienced under the gaze of al-Ser, are the defining element in her identity. Similarly, Malika’s personal faith in her destiny sets her apart. While the exact form of the girls’ beliefs is strange to the French characters, the idea of an individual faith is appealing because the notion that religion, or the metaphysical, is something which belongs to the private sphere is a peculiarly Western view. It is remarkable that while in cultural terms, North Africa is regulated by the call of the muezzin and the public and collective power of Islam, the structuring effect of religion is almost entirely absent from these texts. As Bauman argues, the strength of the Western view of religion as private is overwhelming: It is no more true that the “public” is set on colonizing the “private.” The opposite is the case: it is the private that colonizes the public space, squeezing out and chasing away everything which cannot be fully, without residue, expressed in the vernacular of private concerns, worries and pursuits. . . . Any true liberation calls today for more, not less, of the “public sphere” and “public power.” It is now the public sphere which badly needs defense against the invading private—though, paradoxically, in order to enhance, not cut down, individual liberty. 45

In contrast, Bona’s representation of Islam conforms to the contemporary Western media construction of it as a religion incommensurate with French secular norms; 46 it is shown in a negative light as a cultural imposition which refuses any division between public and private. Malika’s rejection of the dominant North African religion in favor of Berber religious practice, which can be seen as the Other of the (Islamic) Other, and which bears similarities with the individuality of Lalla’s faith, can be read as another example of how the construction of the Arab individual is haunted by Western prejudice. However, since Berbers generally follow Islam, the reference to the pagan beliefs of Malika’s grandmother may be more properly seen as an instance of French imperialist nostalgia for an authentic primitive culture, a phenomenon which, as the discussions of Le Clézio have shown, has become increasingly influential in contemporary constructions of the exotic. It also reinforces the colonial stereotype of the Berber as being ethnically closer to the French, and therefore potentially more assimilable than the Arab, downplaying the threat presented by Malika while maintaining her enticing sense of difference. The beliefs of both Lalla and Malika thus function as a site of liminality, distancing the girls from the putative “clash of civilizations,” and bringing

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them closer to a style of religion which, although alien to French culture in content, conforms to Western tastes in terms of form. 47 Despite ongoing debates about the place of religion in public life, Western forms of religion remain overwhelmingly confined to the private sphere, with restricted public influence. Lalla’s intensely private trances, and Malika’s brand of personal fate reflect this tendency, offering what bell hooks called the “spice” of the Other, whilst not conflicting with the secular norms of modernity. Although often mysterious to the West, with its emphasis on the collective worldwide umma Islam is not a religion of individualism, and so resists the tendency towards exoticism. When considered in conjunction, the combination of gender, physical appearance, age, individual solitude, and personal religion reveals the characters of Lalla and Malika to be constructed to meet the modern Western expectations of exoticism which are based on the pervasive and haunting traces of colonial discourse. This effectively undermines the way in which they appear to “exceed” the norms and conventions of French society, and appropriate the power which their exoticism makes available to them. Instead, the power which they apparently wield, for example, to leave without warning, simply shows them to be operating according to the ideals of Bauman’s liquid modernity, allowing the flow of power to move unhindered by ties of family or other commitments. In light of this, Lalla and Malika can be read simply as exoticized versions of the conventional Bildungsroman liberal subject. The disruption which accompanies them is less the result of any inherent power than a consequence of the exoticizing expectations and colonial attitudes which persist in haunting the French characters, and potentially the implied French reader, that are projected onto them. In a reminder of the pervasiveness of colonialism which Anne McClintock warns about in “The Angel of Progress,” at the very point at which the representation of exoticism appears to hand power to the postcolonial subject, the looming specter of neo-colonialism reasserts itself. 48 Despite Le Clézio’s emphasis on the ancestral spirits of the desert tribes, the most potent ghost haunting France turns out to be the specter of colonial structures of thought. The question of how to welcome this particular ghost is one faced by the author of the final novel in this chapter, Leïla Sebbar. SHERAZADE: RESPONSES TO NEO-COLONIAL GHOSTS In their work, Le Clézio and Bona propose an anti-colonial presentation of the North African immigrant girl which appears to privilege agency and resistance, and it is only upon close reading that the haunting traces of colonial discourse and its role in shaping their construction becomes apparent. In

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contrast, the ghosts of the colonial past are evident in Leïla Sebbar’s novel, Sherazade (1999 [1982]), from the opening pages. Born in Algeria but brought up in the Paris banlieue, the eponymous heroine’s narrative is a quest for identity that rejects the constraints of her Algerian family’s traditions, but which is confronted by the Orientalist expectations of the society around her. As the choice of title suggests, Sherazade contrasts the contemporary generation of Algerian women with the Orientalist images influenced by Scheherezade and the Arabian Nights, and explores how Beur girls respond to the daily encounter with the ghosts of the imperial past which persist in the neo-colonial attitudes of the white French population. In the urban context of the Paris banlieue, Orientalist structures of thought intersect with global youth culture, producing an environment in which the haunting traces of the past are both an imposition to be resisted and fought against, and an empowering source which spurs the protagonist towards deeper levels of self-knowledge. In Sherazade, Sebbar presents haunting as an often uncomfortable but sometimes productive relationship with the past. Having run away from home to escape the impositions of parental authority, Sherazade finds herself repeatedly confronted by overtly Orientalist language and attitudes whose anachronistic quality betrays the extent to which France’s relations with North Africa continue to be haunted, even overdetermined, by its experience of colonialism. The reactions of the French characters are marked by the same preconceptions directed at Lalla and Malika: her green eyes and dark curls set her apart and, together with her name, they conjure the phantoms of Orientalist imagery for those around her. She becomes an unwilling object of fascination for those who encounter her, whether that be simply on hearing her name, like the radio DJ who wants to see if her face fits the aural image: “I’d really like to meet the girl who’s got that name, if it isn’t a false name. . . . Because when you’re called ‘Sherazade’ . . . ,” 49 or on seeing her, as does the photographer at the bourgeois party: “The Grand Vizier’s daughter under a palm tree . . . I must be dreaming . . .” 50 Unlike Malika and Lalla, there is nothing “otherworldly” about Sherazade; in the eyes of those who encounter her, she is the living contemporary embodiment of the pre-colonial tradition of the Arabian Nights. Julien, the pied noir son of pro-Independence settlers who befriends her, is captivated by her appearance because she reminds him of the Algerian women whose painted images fascinate him in the work of Delacroix and others. Yet although he is a sympathetic character whose own origins are in Algeria, his fascination with the paintings of odalisques marks him out as a modern day Orientalist possessed by the spirits of colonial mythology: “I was miserable and felt prepared to buy anything as long as it had an Algerian woman. . . . An Arab woman.” “But why are you so keen on all those women?”

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“I love them.” “You love pictures of them?” “Yes, that’s right . . . ” 51

Indeed, like Lalla and Malika’s admirers, Julien acts like a modern artist, taking endless photographs of Sherazade, re-developing them until he is satisfied and then pinning the countless images around his apartment. Despite his affection for her, he is constantly aware of how little he is involved in Sherazade’s life, and that she refuses to share with him other aspects of her life; he knows that it is she and not he who is in control. He is also conscious that this echoes the original relationship between Algeria and her conquerors, as he quotes from Gautier’s Picturesque Journey to Algeria, We think to have conquered Algiers and it is Algiers which has conquered us. Our women already wear scarves interwoven with gold, a medley of a thousand gaudy colours, which were used by the slaves in the harem, our young men adopt the camel-hair burnous. . . . If this continues, in a very short time France will be Mohammedan and we shall see in our cities the white domes and minarets of mosques mingling with church steeples, as in Spain at the time of the Moors. 52

His obsession would appear harmless were it not for its link to contemporary racist discourse, which is manifested repeatedly by different characters, and which implies that the sexuality and exoticism of girls like Sherazade threaten to contaminate the purity of the French nation. While few of the characters in the novel share Julien’s depth of artistic learning, this does not prevent them from recognizing the exotic potential of Sherazade and her peers. Exploitation of the exotic here takes place on a more systematized level than in the previous novels. The focus is again on the girls’ visual appearance, and its expression takes the forms of photography and film, which allow image to be captured and circulated as profitable commoditization. The street chic of Sherazade and her friends Zouzou (from Tunisia) and France (from Martinique) gains them temporary access to a party held by the fashionable set, where photographers pursue them for photos which will inspire a new fashion line. However, while Lalla and Malika tolerated the commoditization of their image, here the balance of power is portrayed as being more evenly distributed, with the exploitation reciprocated by certain of the young targets, who hope to catch the eye of a passing director or photographer and so benefit from the taste for urban fashion. This power dynamic is evidenced when Sherazade and her friends are approached by a photographer who, aware of the ambitions of many of the immigrant youth, invites them to pose as jungle guerrillas for soft porn photos. The incident is primarily narrated through the monologue of the photographer who believes himself to be in control of the situation, yet his

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patronizing and sexist tone is subverted by the reader’s knowledge that the girls, armed with toy pistols, have a plan to reverse the exploitation by collecting their fee and then turning the tables. A subtle twist on this situation occurs later in the novel when Julien persuades Sherazade to star in a screenplay which he has written and which is being produced by his friend. Sherazade is initially positive, giving comments which Julien incorporates into his script. The heroine in this scenario is similar to that of the earlier porn shoot, this time being an urban guerrilla, yet the director who has been searching for his heroine—“the one who [would get] away from all the stereotypes”—upon seeing Sherazade exclaims immediately “That’s her! That’s Zina!” 53 His reaction highlights the visual paradox in the exotic, which offers ineffable difference whilst being instantly recognizable. Sherazade, on the other hand, sees the test-shots as the imposition of yet another exoticist identity and refuses to continue with the project. While Sherazade encounters the ghostly presence of colonial Orientalism throughout the novel, she consistently refuses to accept the identities it imposes on her. Unlike Lalla and Malika, who passively accept their role as models, her reaction to Julien’s photographs is typically forthright: she tears them up, declaring “I’m sick to death of seeing my mug everywhere, you understand . . . you don’t need me in the flesh after all . . . ,” 54 and to his comparisons between the green-eyed women of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers and herself, she insists that physical appearance alone is an inadequate justification (2) and later declares “I’m not an odalisque.” 55 Her response to the photographer who insists on taking her picture without permission is to smash his camera, thereby provoking the typically racist response: “And the little sluts can go back to their own country.” 56 Yet if Sherazade rejects the imposition of Orientalist identity, she is nonetheless haunted by aspects of the Orient: the same ghostly traces which objectify when imposed by others represent a potential facet of the identity which she, as a young runaway, is working to construct for herself. While Sherazade refuses to be seen as an odalisque, the paintings beloved of Julien possess an equal attraction for her (201); her fascination with the exotic discourse of the past allows her to seize aspects of the visual tradition through which much of the colonial objectification to which she is subjected passes, and to reappropriate it as a source of empowerment and a tool for her own use. In this sense, the odalisque operates as an example of Said’s “traveling theory,” an ideological application of the ghostly return in which an idea or theory becomes displaced from one location only to return, phantom-like, in the politico-historical context of another period, reshaped by the reception and use to which it is put. 57 Forsdick argues that the implications of traveling theory extend to “the displacement, recycling, and reinterpretation of colonial concepts (and, more controversially, of the language used to

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describe them)” and, as an example, points to Robert Young’s study of the term “hybridity,” which evolved from a nineteenth-century racialized term to become a cultural term in the twentieth century. 58 The notion of traveling theory is a particular instance of the haunting persistence of ideologies and discourses which have formed the focus of this chapter; it contributes on a theoretical plane to an understanding of how the haunting presence of discourse influences us in ways of which we often remain unconscious. Sherazade thus demonstrates a plural relation to the figure of the odalisque, which for her is both a site of neo-colonial oppression, and a source of energy for her own project of self-fashioning. The gaze of the painted odalisques, with its unmoving, open quality, moves Sherazade in a way that she cannot or will not express; their haunting power empowers her to discover more of herself. The climax of the book occurs after a night spent in a gallery gazing at Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Trousers (263), an experience which serves as the catalyst for her decision to go to Algeria. She is haunted also by a more modern image of the odalisque, found in the book Algerian Women 1960, which plays its own part in directing her to travel to Algeria: These Algerian women all faced the lens . . . with the same intense, savage stare, a fierceness that the picture could only file for posterity without ever mastering or dominating. These women all spoke the same language, her mother’s language. 59

Rather than representing colonized submissiveness, the women captured by these images fill Sherazade with a defiance that is at odds with the objectifying quality commonly attributed to the visual tradition; she appropriates the power of their gaze in a postcolonial, postmodern context to produce and enable a positive aspect of her own nomadic identity. The women are also significant to Sherazade because they represent a link to the lost culture of her mother, and to the Algerian roots from which she has been cut off by the move to France, and which she seeks constantly to recover by reading books on the Algerian war (79–80), literature by a range of North African writers (102; 142), recalling the stories told by her grandfather (145–46; 158) and the sewing days with her mother and neighbors (216), listening to the stories of an Algerian man she meets (186) and sharing stories with Julien (158), and keeping her mother’s jewelry and the burnous which she took when leaving home (138). All of this contributes to her decision at the end to go to Algeria, but on her own terms: Sherazade jealously guards her independent agency, rejecting the pressures of her family’s traditional Algerian expectations by running away from home, despite the pain this causes her. However selective her appropriation of it, Sherazade’s identity is indissociably bound up with Algeria, a country which she scarcely knows but which

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haunts her throughout the novel. From its opening pages, she is identified in Julien’s eyes with the women of his Algerian village, through the red and gold scarf she wears of the kind “favored by Arab women from the Barbès neighborhood and those fresh from the backwoods who haven’t yet been attracted to the scarves sold at Monoprix stores that imitate designer label ones with muted colors and abstract designs.” 60 But this statement conceals the nature of the scarf, which is in fact nothing but a cheap imitation of the fringed Arab scarves referred to in Gautier’s Journey, mass-produced in poor quality material. Sherazade breaks the thread of the scarf, signaling her fractured allegiance to the traditional feminine role although, certainly in Julien’s eyes, the scarf is more reminiscent of Arab feminine submissiveness than is the Palestinian keffia which Sherazade formerly wore. It is, however, ultimately a fashion accessory, significantly closer to the banlieue culture which Sherazade adopts than to Arab traditions, just as her Gallicized name both calls to mind and denies the association with the pre-colonial tradition of the Arabian Nights. As the novel unfolds, it becomes apparent that Sherazade is an urban nomad who, although haunted by the past, refuses to be possessed by its ghosts, and who jealously works to construct an identity from a range of sources. Refusing to accept the Orientalist identities which are thrust upon her, Sherazade is defined only by her strategy of cultural eclecticism. The opening of the novel, with its comparisons with Sheherazade and Aziyade, takes place against the orange Formica of a fast food restaurant, with Sherazade drinking Coke and listening to her walkman: a contemporary, globalized odalisque. She listens to a range of radio stations from NRJ to RadioBeur, flicking incessantly to choose the station which best suits her at that moment (33)—a microcosm of her attitude to culture—while later in the novel Julien introduces her to opera. Her home is a squat, a refuge from the conventions of the outside world where numerous young people of varying origins hold forth on their ideals, from revolutionary Marxism to Rastafarianism, united only in their shared experience of marginalization. In this environment Sherazade is able to assert herself against the prejudices which she encounters; she deterritorializes her identity, frees it from the constraints of the imperialist thought systems which haunt contemporary society, and borrows or steals those signifiers which attract her from a range of social and artistic practices in a defiant act of identitarian bricolage. For Sherazade, while the neo-colonialist attitudes which she encounters are to be confronted and subverted whenever possible, her relationship with the Orientalist tradition is both multifaceted and ambivalent. Despite being the source of the attitudes which she despises, it is also responsible for artistic representations of Arab women through which she is able to access elements of her lost personal history. In the hands of neo-colonialists such as Julien, representations of Oriental women, whether paintings or photographs, are nega-

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tive because they represent the desire to possess and control, but when encountered from a non-Orientalist perspective these works can be sources of creative self-production. In this sense Sebbar successfully manages the exoticizing tendencies which haunt French culture because, throughout the novel, she remains conscious of the looming presence of the ghostly traces of colonial thought. Rather than denying or attempting unilaterally to lay to rest these ghosts of the past, she instead welcomes their presence, offering them hospitality within the characters and society of her text. By enabling her protagonist to confront and subvert the totalizing forces emanating not only from Western discourse but from the pressures of her own Algerian background, and to develop her own distinct identity which also remains fluid and evolving, Sebbar both acknowledges and accommodates the spectral presences whilst refusing to allow them to dominate to the exclusion of individual agency. In doing so she offers an example of how to achieve Derrida’s injunction to learn to live with ghosts. Like the other two novels, Sherazade demonstrates clearly that the exotic holds a persistent fascination for the West. Although the form assumed by the exotic has evolved in response to the rise of modernity, the haunting legacy of colonial structures of thought present in all three texts is an indication that, for these novelists at least, Hexagonal attitudes towards North Africa have altered little in the period since decolonization. What also emerges through an examination of the three texts, however, is the difficulty of offering hospitality to these ghosts of the past in a way which prevents them from overwhelming attempts to forge new modes of relational structure. As writers and readers we are all implicated in the process of bringing our cultural expectations to bear, as Said reminds us: “No reading is neutral or innocent, and by the same token every text and every reader is to some extent the product of a theoretical standpoint, however implicit or unconscious such a standpoint may be.” 61 The tension between welcoming and containing the ghosts of the past is responsible for the problematizing of Le Clézio’s and Bona’s attempts to de-center the Hexagon by focusing on the exoticism of the desert and its inhabitants, which reveal the haunting and pervasive nature of existing exotic conventions. Nonetheless, as Le Clézio demonstrates in his passages on the sensory perception and non-verbal communication which take place in the desert, it is still possible to celebrate difference without becoming overwhelmed by the weight of established discourses of otherness. Passages such as these and Sebbar’s writing on the odalisque offer an alternative paradigm that acknowledges and yet escapes the reifying influence of the past, challenges our preconceptions and sparks our imagination; following Derrida, they draw on the past productively to offer new and creative modes which accommodate the haunting presences at work in contemporary France.

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NOTES 1. Interview with J.M.G. Le Clézio, “World Book Club,” BBC World Service, 3 April 2010. 2. J.M.G. Le Clézio, “La langue française est peut-être mon veritable pays,” Entretien avec Tirthankar Chanda, Label France, 45 (2001). http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/article_imprim.php3?id_article=37009 (12 Sept. 2009). (La culture occidentale est devenue trop monolithique. Elle privilégie jusqu’à l’exacerbation son côté urbain, technique, empêchant ainsi le développement d’autres formes d’expression: la religiosité, les sentiments, par exemple. Toute la partie impénétrable de l’être humain est occultée au nom du rationalisme. C’est cette prise de conscience qui m’a poussé vers d’autres civilisations.) 3. Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Kathleen White Smith, “Forgetting to Remember: Anamnesis and History in J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Désert,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 10, no.1 (1985): 99–115. 4. Laura Rice, “Critical Appropriations: One Desert, Three Narratives,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 4, no. 3 (2001): 128–145 (140). 5. See, for example, Isabel Santaolalla, ed., “New” Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 6. See for example, Jennifer Yee, Clichés de la femme exotique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 22; Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious, 126. 7. Kateryna Olijnyk Longley, “Fabricating Otherness: Demidenko and Exoticism,” in “New” Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness, ed. Isabel Santaolalla (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 21–39 (28–29). 8. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 112. 9. Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious, 8. 10. Irving Babbit, Rousseau and Romanticism (New York: AMS, 1978), 251. 11. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 [1979]), 187–213 (189). 12. Rosaldo defines this as follows: “Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: a person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim. In more attenuated form, someone deliberately alters a way of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention.” Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1989), 69–70. 13. Examples of this include Dorothy Figueira, The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (Albany: State University of New York, 1994); bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation, ed. bell hooks (Boston, MA: South End, 1992), 21–39; and Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference (Boulder: Westview, 1996). 14. J.M.G. Le Clézio, Desert, trans. C. Dickson (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009 [1980]). 15. Mary B. Vogl, Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 79. 16. Gustave Flaubert, “Alexandria, November 17, 1849,” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmüller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 101. With regard to the relativity of exoticism, it is worth noting that, because of its status as France’s main trading colony, Flaubert and his travelling companion Maxime du Camp did not consider Algeria or the Maghreb as part of the Orient—an ironic situation given that the Maghreb derives its name from the Arabic “gharîb,” meaning “exotic.” Egypt and the Middle East, on the other hand, were a different matter. See “Appendice: Afrique du nord et exotisme chez les arabes,” in L’Exotisme, Cahiers CRLH. CIRAOI, No. 5, 1988, ed. Alain Buisine and Norbert Dodille (Paris: Diffusion Didier-Erudition, 1988), 418. 17. Flaubert, “March 13, 1850,” Letters, 116. 18. Flaubert, “March 27, 1853,” Letters, 181. 19. Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 24. 20. Le Clézio, Desert, 101.

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21. J.M.G. Le Clézio, L’Inconnu sur la terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 47. (Par le langage, l’homme s’est fait le plus solitaire des êtres du monde, puisqu’il s’est exclu du silence. Tous ses efforts pour comprendre les autres langages, olfactifs, tactiles, gustatifs, et les vibrations, les ondes, les communications par les racines, les cycles chimiques, les anastomoses, tout cela il faut qu’il traduise dans son langage, avec ses mots et ses chiffres. Mais il n’en perçoit que les traces: le vrai sens est passé à côte. Alors l’homme est seul, et il ne sait pas être lui-même.) 22. Le Clézio, Desert, 98–99. 23. Le Clézio, Desert, 97–98. 24. Rice, “Critical Appropriations.” 25. Rice, “Critical Appropriations,” 145. 26. Madeleine Borgomano, Désert: J.M.G. Le Clézio (Paris: Bertrand-Lacoste, 1992), 95–96. (Le récit de cette longue marche à travers le désert vers le Nord . . . avec pour guide un saint prophète, rappelle fortement le récit biblique de L’Exode . . . L’histoire des guerriers du désert est exactement parallèle et semblable à celle des fils d’Israël. Et Ma el Aïnine, par bien des traits, ressemble à Moïse.) 27. I am grateful to Dr Ayman Shihadeh from the Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow for confirmation of this point. It is worth noting that the second novel in this chapter, Malika, contains a similar reference: “The name of the French capitale resonated like that of the promised land” (Le nom de la capitale française sonnait comme celui de la terre promise) (Malika, 230). This reference also neglects the Judeo-Christian origins of the phrase, which would be meaningless to a character of Muslim origin, such as Malika. 28. Diana Knight, “Barthes and Orientalism,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 617–33 (631). 29. Jennifer Waelti-Walters, J.M.G. Le Clézio (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 84. 30. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 31. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the origins of “desert” lie in the Latin “desertus,” meaning abandoned or deserted. Critics such as William Thompson and Hanna Hofhansl have observed that the word therefore refers less to the geographical characteristics of an area than to its characteristic state. William Thompson, “Voyage and Immobility in J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Désert and La Quarantaine,” World Literature Today 71, no. 4 (1997): 709–716 (710); Hanna D. Hofhansl, “Le Désert d’Albert Memmi: La (con)quête du ‘Royaume-duDedans,’” International Journal of Francophone Studies 3, no. 3 (2000): 170–179 (173). 32. Le Clézio, Desert, 217. 33. Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (Paris: Julliard, 1954). 34. Dominque Bona, Malika (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992), 36–37. All translations are mine; quotations from the French are given in endnotes. (La jeune fille rayonnait. Avec ses cheveux noirs très courts, ses dents de nacre, elle exprimait une merveilleuse jeunesse. Elle ne s’estompait pas comme Marie-Hélène l’eût souhaité, telle une figurante dans le décor. Au contraire. Elle avait l’éclat d’une star. De la soubrette, elle n’avait que le costume: une robe noire et un tablier blanc. La robe, à décolleté bateau, arrivait à mi-cuisses. Benoît Darman savourait du regard les jambes et les bras satinés, doux comme une peau d’abricot. . . . La jeune fille semblait jouer, être quelqu’un d’autre. Quelqu’un que personne ne connaissait, bien différent du rôle incertain et secondaire de servante qu’on lui attribuait. Quand elle se penchait, un curieux bijou en or, qui représentait une main, se détachait de ses seins ronds et se balançait au-dessus de l’hôte auquel elle présentait le plat.) La jeune fille fit en balançant des hanches le tout de la table, vivement, sans s’attarder, mais en se laissant contempler, sous tous les angles. Elle disparut. On fut bien incapable de reprendre la conversation là où on l’avait laissée.) 35. Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb, 182. 36. Le Clézio, Desert, 282–84. 37. Bona, Malika, 191; 194. (Il [Raymond] me montra les photographies qu’il avait prises: plusieurs centaines de Malika. . . . Les sunlights n’éblouissaient pas Malika. Le Leica pouvait essayer sur elle toutes les approches . . . il ne troublerait pas son naturel déconcertant. Sa personnalité rayonnait, dans le viseur, d’une sensualité à laquelle personne, selon Ray, n’aurait pu resister.)

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38. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993 [1989]), 305–06. 39. Longley, “Constructing Otherness,” 23. 40. Valérie Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 17. 41. Le Clézio, Desert, 269. 42. Bona, Malika, 214. (Personne parmi ceux qui ont croisé sa route—sauf moi peut-être qui tente de rassembler nos souvenirs éparpillés—n’a connu Malika dans son unité. On croyait la connaître et pourtant elle nous échappait toujours, ne donnant chaque fois qu’une part d’ellemême, une pièce plus ou moins originale du puzzle de sa vie.) 43. Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 20–21, emphasis in original. 44. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 32. 45. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 39; 51, emphasis in original. 46. Silverstein, Algeria in France, 58. 47. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Touchstone, 1998). 48. Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” Social Text 31/32 (1992), 84–98 (86): “Colonialism returns at the moment of its disappearance.” 49. Leïla Sebbar, Sherazade. Missing: Aged 17, Dark Curly Hair, Green Eyes, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Quartet, 1991 [1982]), 33. 50. Sebbar, Sherazade, 133. 51. Sebbar, Sherazade, 104. 52. Sebbar, Sherazade, 204. 53. Sebbar, Sherazade, 233. 54. Sebbar, Sherazade, 169–70. 55. Sebbar, Sherazade, 222. 56. Sebbar, Sherazade, 134. 57. Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory,” in The World, The Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991), 226–47. 58. Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 31; Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 59. Sebbar, Sherazade, 237–38. 60. Sebbar, Sherazade, 2. 61. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 241.

Chapter Two

17 October 1961: Haunting in Kettane, Sebbar, Maspero and Daeninckx

According to Western cultural representation, haunting is not in the proper order of things. As Colin Davis observes, the appearance of the ghost can be read as a sign that a disturbance has taken place in the symbolic, moral or epistemological order. 1 The dead return because the rituals of burial, commemoration or mourning are incomplete, or because they know of an injustice to be made public. In practice, this model of “unfinished business” centers on the return of those whose lives have been ended prematurely by violent means in order to obtain either justice or revenge. From Hamlet’s father to the House of Usher, ghosts bent on vengeance have proved a staple of literature, allowing for a tale of intrigue (the crime, or some other information, is usually hidden) leading to a satisfying closure as the ghost is laid to rest or otherwise dispatched. However the ghosts of the thousands who died as a result of colonial oppression have proved less ready to assume metaphysical or literary form, their identities often unknown and the circumstances of their death too banal for colonial records. In the contemporary period, the absence of ghosts may be a by-product of the emphasis on rationality; this does not imply, however, that the “unfinished business” occasioned by colonial crimes does not require a response or, indeed, that the phenomenon of haunting is not taking place. Few episodes haunt a nation more deeply than the State-sponsored murder of innocent civilians. From the Sharpeville massacre to Bloody Sunday, certain instances of the killing of unarmed civilians have attracted international protest, whilst others have been quietly covered up by the authorities responsible. Cases such as the latter have tended to follow the broad mode of response proposed by Henri Rousso in his study of Vichy France, and adapted by Anne Donadey with reference to the Algerian war: initial shock 31

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(if the deaths were reported) interrupted by denial and repression, the return of the repressed and, finally, a state referred to by Rousso as obsession. 2 The latter includes demands for the “truth” about the event, which are followed by unresolved debates about the nature of a society which would permit such killings in its name, the kind of reparations, symbolic or otherwise, which can be made, and so on. The massacre of Algerians which took place on 17 October 1961 in Paris is one such incident. On that night, almost seven years after the start of the Algerian war, the metro stations and boulevards of central Paris were thronged with unprecedented numbers of Algerian immigrants and their families. Organized under the leadership of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), the thousands of demonstrators, unarmed and including women and young children, were united in a single aim: a show of Algerian strength and unity of purpose in the face of the curfew which had been imposed on Algerians by police chief, Maurice Papon. What had been intended as a peaceful protest was met with brutal police repression, with savage beatings and shootings by the Paris riot police. Estimates of the numbers killed by police have varied greatly, but it is likely that at least 100 unarmed protestors died during the demonstration, with many thrown into the Seine to drown. 3 That night 11,538 Algerians were arrested and held in the Palais des sports, many of whom were subsequently deported to detention camps in Algeria. 4 In their historical study of the event, Jim House and Neil MacMaster point out that the violence associated with the demonstration was not confined to the single date of 17 October but extended over several days, and that the deaths merely formed the “more ‘visible’ peak” in an escalation of violence towards Algerians throughout the summer of 1961. 5 However, since representations and discussions of the event have tended to refer only to the day of the demonstration, in the interests of conciseness and consistency this chapter follows that approach, although the reductiveness implied forms an element of the discussion which follows. For twenty years the massacre, like the wider Algerian war, was ignored, denied a place within the narrative of official French history. From the 1980s onwards a slow process of recovery took place through the efforts of memory activists, anti-racism campaigners, writers, journalists and historians, whose campaigning gradually led to the opening of State archives, and the shedding of light on a period of France’s history which had been subject to “legal forgetting” because it was covered by the amnesty laws relating to the events of the Algerian war. 6 The way in which understandings of 17 October have evolved, in the words of House and MacMaster, “from the outermost margins of the French political imaginary . . . to occupy an important if not central role in discussions of post-colonial France” functions as a significant indicator of France’s politics of memory, and of the way in which the Republic relates to its colonial past. 7 Inevitably, and quite properly, this process has

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been accompanied by much discussion, some of it agonized, some reluctant, about the appropriate response required to commemorate and deliver justice to the unknown victims. While much of the research into 17 October 1961 has inevitably been historical, the massacre has come to occupy a distinct place within literary texts focused on France’s past. 8 Since Didier Daeninckx’s detective novel, Meurtres pour mémoire (Murder in Memoriam) appeared in 1984, the massacre has featured in a plethora of fictional texts and films which together have contributed to the restitution of the events of 17 October, if not its victims, within the French social imaginary. 9 Indeed, from its initial position as an event excluded from official discourse, it has become a symbol invoked commonly not only by novelists and directors but, as the introduction showed, by young people demonstrating during the 2005 riots. The symbolic appropriation of 17 October as a historical event is potentially problematic: it functions as a shorthand reminder of a period of history which haunts France because it has not adequately been addressed but, as Sarkozy discovered through his initiatives to deploy the past, haunting episodes of history may not correspond to the intended objectives and, on an ethical level, may present difficulties, as the suffering of individuals is subsumed into political and artistic ends. As an event that took place in the heart of metropolitan France, 17 October is perhaps the pre-eminent example of a colonial atrocity whose ghosts have haunted France in the intervening decades. This chapter explores the form which its ghosts have assumed through an analysis of the function of the massacre in four novels by authors drawn from France’s different memory communities, which appeared during the last fifteen years of the twentieth century, and which have therefore been instrumental in recovering the massacre as a historical event located within the trauma surrounding the Algerian war and, on a broader scale, within the narrative of France’s past. In addition to Daeninckx’s text, which is the earliest and still best known literary work to feature the demonstration, the chapter looks at Nacer Kettane’s novel, Le Sourire de Brahim (1985), the little-studied novel by François Maspero, Le Figuier (1988), and one of the more recent texts, Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge (The Seine Was Red), published in 1999. Through comparative readings, the chapter unpacks the symbolic function of 17 October as a historic event which continues to haunt France, and the ends to which it has been appropriated, if not by the writers themselves, then by critics with differing interests. In representing the massacre, Kettane, Sebbar, Maspero and Daeninckx do not simply give a voice to its forgotten victims, but reinsert it into the context of France’s wider history; following Maurice Halbwachs, they recover lost aspects of the past and recast them in the context of the present, generating representations laden with multiple signification which resonate with the diverse memory communities who, consciously or

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not, have a stake in 17 October 1961. 10 In reading their work contrapuntally, the chapter builds up a mosaic of the varying ways in which this troubled period of history continues to haunt contemporary France. To point to the dramatic symbolic transformation which the events of 17 October have undergone over the last twenty-five years is not to imply a universal awareness of the massacre on the part of the French public. While an opinion poll conducted in early October 2001 found that 47% of those questioned in France said that they had heard of 17 October 1961, 11 in 2005 the eminent historian Benjamin Stora maintained that the massacre continued to be absent from the narrative of France’s past: It is incorrect to speak about silence with regard to the massacres of 17 October 1961. . . . The problem is that the French repress this episode of the past. Nothing, neither documentary, nor fiction, registers on collective memory. We are struck by amnesia. 12

Yet as awareness of it has increased, the massacre has not become less controversial. Initially overshadowed by the deaths at the hands of police of nine Communist protestors in the Charonne metro station in February 1962—Jim House and Neil MacMaster argue that, for political reasons, Charonne was deemed more “worthy” of commemoration than 17 October 13 —it is now discussed (within the academic sphere, at least) as the pre-eminent example of French state violence against civilians, to the almost complete exclusion of the massacre by French forces of 56 pied noir civilians which took place on the rue d’Isly in Algiers in March 1962. 14 No doubt this is in part due to the location of the events of 17 October in the heart of Paris, the seat of Republicanism and a site which until then many French people had considered removed from the war taking place across the Mediterranean. Nonetheless, its totemic power is now such that historians have voiced concerns that the massacre has been removed from its historical context and, its haunting power augmented by its status as a singular event, in some cases it has been fetishized, invested with a range of symbolic values according to the agenda of the appropriating group. 15 On one level this is unavoidable: commemoration may be about “remembering in common,” to borrow Robert Gildea’s phrase, but the investment which is made in the act of remembrance alters as the commemorating community and its socio-political context evolves. 16 However, in many of the novels and films in which it is included, 17 October features only briefly; indeed with only the barest of information about the events communicated, many texts appear to assume some prior knowledge on the part of the audience. In the case of Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché, the director is confident enough in his passing reference to 17 October to make it crucial to the plot, which centers on the fate of a little boy whose Algerian parents died

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in the massacre, and whose own death is shown to be a belated consequence of their disappearance. 17 A similarly brief reference appears in N’zid: participation in the demonstration is the final act carried out by the protagonist’s Algerian mother, Aïcha, before she returns to Algeria, where she is incarcerated in a forced marriage and subsides into a state of silent madness which ends only in her death. 18 In Daniel Prévost’s Le Pont de la Révolte, the massacre is invoked as a source of guilt for the Franco-Algerian narrator, who has been unaware of it despite being in Paris on 17 October. 19 In these cases and others, reference to 17 October serves as shorthand for a particular episode of French State brutality towards Algerians, one which has consequences for Algerians far beyond the fetishized date in 1961. 20 As such, the demonstration is detached cleanly from its historical context within the Algerian war where it was symptomatic of wider patterns of official violence and oppression towards Algerians in France, and is deployed instrumentally to serve the purposes of the author; in these short references there is, of necessity, no attempt to mourn the victims or redress the injustices committed against them. 21 That is left to novels which focus in more depth on 17 October 1961. AN UNENDING WAR: LE SOURIRE DE BRAHIM The first novel by the young Beur author, Nacer Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim, is typical of much of the so-called Beur literature which appeared in the 1980s: it is heavily autobiographical in content, realist in genre, and chronological in structure. Many Beur novels focus on the issues of personal identity encountered by their authors, whose sense of cultural alienation results from the discrimination they experience within education and the labor market as a result of their ethnicity, but who are equally ill at ease in postindependence Algeria, where their history and lack of Arabic marks them out as a target for resentful local officials. Kettane’s novel reflects the prevalence of questions of identity to the extent that it adopts the structure of a Bildungsroman, following the young Brahim from the age of seven to the novel’s conclusion when he is twenty-nine. An account of 17 October opens the novel and haunts the narrative which follows, with Kettane using it as the springboard from which to ask questions about the evolving relationship between wider French society and the community of immigrant origin. The novel begins with the description of the demonstration of 17 October in which Brahim and his family are participants. In the context in which it was published in 1985, few of Kettane’s readers could be assumed to be familiar with the date, but the omniscient narrator lends a sense of classical tragedy to the narrative through the inclusion of the French neighbor who,

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clutching at her breast in the manner of a Greek chorus, warns against participating in what will become a scene of disaster. The angelic smile of Brahim’s adored little brother Kader as he sleeps in the moving car presages his fate, shot by French riot police as he is carried in his mother’s arms amongst the demonstrators. His death marks the disappearance of the titular focus, Brahim’s smile. As Alec Hargreaves notes, the death of Kader is the single major invention in an otherwise autobiographical novel: Kettane was not present at the demonstration, nor did a brother of his die there. 22 The demonstration is introduced and foregrounded as an event which is integral to what follows. Its significance is further emphasized by Kettane’s choice of title: Brahim’s smile is remarkable by its absence throughout the novel, an absence which is sparked by the experience of the massacre and, more specifically, by the loss of his brother. In functioning as the founding event of the narrative, the massacre establishes an economy of loss (of Brahim’s brother, of his smile) which haunts and regulates the rest of the novel: there are periodic references to the fact that Brahim’s friends have never seen him smile (44; 57; 120), with the implication that this is as a direct result of the psychological damage caused by what he witnessed on 17 October. However, while the affective bond between Brahim and Kader is clearly established in the opening section of the novel, references to Kader or the circumstances of his death are almost wholly absent thereafter: the events of 17 October frame what follows, but they haunt the narrative through their absence, and the absence of Brahim’s smile. While the death of his beloved brother is the most obvious cause of Brahim’s melancholy, a close reading suggests that Brahim’s internalization of what he has witnessed may have produced a more complex set of responses. When asked by his friend Malika why he never smiles, Brahim is unable to respond: Of course he was happy with her, and he wanted that to last, but something deep inside haunted him. He sought to put his finger on it but didn’t know exactly what it was. For the moment he let his imagination soothe him. 23

This passage implies that while Kader’s death may have played a significant contributory role in Brahim’s melancholic state, his inability to identify it as the cause suggests that other factors at work in his life may have affected his psychic well-being, at the time of the massacre or thereafter. There is no suggestion in the text that Brahim represses Kader’s death or is unaware of it as a factor in his psychic makeup. Kettane himself suggested in an interview that the loss of Brahim’s smile is a symbol of the sense of cultural dislocation and loss suffered by the immigrant community, rather than an image of

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political discontent. 24 A close reading of the text permits us to assess in more detail the wider symbolic function of the events of 17 October. Although the description of 17 October is comparatively brief (9–19), it introduces a number of elements which recur as haunting motifs throughout the narrative. The brutality of the massacre is one such: after the initial atrocities of 17 October, the narrative is studded with occurrences of violence which echo Kader’s death in that they are often directed at, and cause the death of, Arab children, the most vulnerable members of the immigrant community. Some, like the death of twelve-year-old Aziz at the hands of OAS supporters, are due directly to the murderous divisions of the war but many, like the five Arab children who die at various stages by falling down an empty lift shaft—empty because the local council has not bothered to install a lift in the tower block which houses the immigrant community—result from the lack of care of the French authorities. By neglecting to block off the lift shaft until the fifth child has died, the French authorities replay the official violence which led to Kader’s death. Many of the novels dealing with 17 October, including those by Sebbar and Daeninckx, establish a connection between the racist element of the French violence towards the Algerians, and the Nazi brutality towards occupied France and in particular its Jewish population. The equation of Jews and Algerians is not a new strategy—contemporary observers of 17 October commented on the similarities in their treatment 25 —but Kettane picks up on the issue in his opening pages, comparing the OAS supporter to the occupying SS forces: “Not only did we see them coming, but we heard them, with their great black boots which came up to just below the knee, recalling another time when certain uniforms haunted France.” 26 The racism of sections of the French population, evident in the CRS conduct on 17 October, continues to haunt Kettane’s narrative of the 1960s and ’70s. It resurges violently though the story of Sophie, Brahim’s first girlfriend, whose Jewish parents fled the pogroms of World War Two to take refuge in France, and who shares his experience of exile. Her head injury, inflicted during an attack by far-right extremists on their school, leaves her in a coma, and then brain damaged, a victim of the neo-Nazi spirit which has not been laid to rest in the twenty-five years since the Liberation. Like Charef, who highlighted the respectable career that Sélim’s murderer enjoyed within the local council, Kettane is explicit about the links between the police and the far right: the wallets belonging to Sophie’s far right attackers, which Brahim hands to the police, mysteriously reappear in their owners’ possession a few days later. Sophie’s catastrophic brain injury is shown to be caused by the same racism which led to Kader’s death, and to Brahim being stopped and beaten up by the police, and which results in numerous Arab deaths, either at the hands of neo-Nazi thugs, or while in police custody. In this context, Kader’s death and the violence of 17 October is shown not to be an isolated incident but an

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instance of the murderous spirit of racism which haunts France and to which the French authorities turn a blind eye because it possesses both far right groups and elements of the police force. If the racist violence and injustice of 17 October haunt Kettane’s text, they find a corresponding echo in the agency of the immigrant population, which repeatedly demonstrates its commitment to having its voice heard. Far from presenting Arab immigrants as innocent, oppressed victims, Kettane emphasizes their political will, so that the activism of 17 October is reprised at various points in the text. Brahim participates in the demonstrations of May 1968, and his response to the shooting dead of his cousin Larbi is political action—“We need to organize a demonstration” 27 —while other causes, such as the repression of the Berber language in Algeria, also see the banlieusards taking to the streets, risking police arrest and detention. The novel ends as it had opened, with a mass demonstration, here the rally which concluded the 1983 “Marche des Beurs” in the center of Paris. The principal legacy of 17 October is therefore expressed through Brahim’s commitment to political engagement. The later sections of the novel (166–70) contain passages of comparatively crude, undigested ideological discussion of the place of the immigrant community within French society, in which two main strategies are advanced. Coming from the founder of Radio Beur, it is unsurprising that the first of these is the need for Beurs to reclaim their own voices, and create the means, through radio, television and print media, to make their voices heard. Secondly, the community of immigrant origin must become integrated into the political structures of power, and provide elected representatives whose positions of authority would deliver a new sense of respect for their community, and put an end to the abuse of power by the police and other functionaries. The fundamental demand for respect and to have their voices heard is a continuation and fulfillment of the aims of 17 October, resulting in a cyclical structure to the novel, albeit one which ends on a positive note of hope for the future. Kettane’s portrayal of the events of 17 October thus haunts his novel on a number of levels. The death of Kader renders the demonstration a moment of trauma which haunts Brahim personally and doubtless contributes to the melancholy which he suffers throughout his youth. On a broader scale, it functions as a symbol of the racist violence which is a haunting remnant of earlier wars and which murderously and periodically reasserts itself against ethnic minorities, particularly Arabs, in France. The deadly legacy of 17 October is not forgotten, but it provides the foundation for the novel’s hopeful conclusion: despite the carnage which he witnessed as a child, Brahim’s commitment to change by political means is unswerving. But 17 October is not the only ghost which haunts the novel. Kettane’s text presents the immigrants themselves as specters in their homeland of Algeria, where, post-independence, they are seen as revenants whose pres-

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ence is unwelcome to the authorities there because they belong to a past era. Like classical phantoms, their return threatens to disrupt the established order: You know, Sofiane, they don’t like us. For them it’s as if we are dead. In any case they don’t want us to come back. You see, in France we’ve got rights in the factories, we’re used to fighting for ourselves. So they’re scared. For them, if we went home we would be shit-stirrers. 28

Algerian immigrants, uncomfortably installed in France, are the incarnation of a past which both French and Algerian governments would prefer to forget. As in N’zid,The move to amnesia is portrayed as a deliberate surgical intervention which affects memory and, by extension, identity and sense of purpose: France is referred to as having “amputated its memory,” and of “losing its head, and especially its memory.” 29 As a result, the immigrants are cast in the ironic role of the ghostly guardians of France’s forgotten Republican values, bearers of the essence of the Republic but also of the knowledge of its history of contradictions and paradoxes. An apparently successful product of France’s policy of assimilation, Brahim’s Arab mother therefore appears more French than the French, finding the racist hate around her inexplicable: “His mother did not understand why there was so much hate. For her, all men were equal in rights and responsibilities. Each had the right to live peacefully with his family, and to eat his bread quietly. 30 Nonetheless, the text suggests that there is some justification for the authorities’ fear of the destabilizing presence of immigrants. As Brahim points out, since the policy of assimilation died with the French Empire, immigrants appear as ghosts who return to settle the unfinished business of colonial injustice: “We reveal their contradictions, their lies and even their betrayal of the memory of the people. We are a nail in the Achilles’ heel of the collective conscience.” 31 In Kettane’s novel, 17 October serves as a symbolic nexus of the contradictions inherent in France’s application of republican principles to the colonial project of assimilation, and the lies that are practiced by the French authorities who spout the discourse of law and order whilst turning a blind eye to their own collusion in racist practices which perpetuate violence towards the ex-colonial body. Kettane’s novel stands out amongst the plethora of texts which make reference to 17 October in its emphasis on the political agency of the immigrant community, whose voice, faltering at first but growing increasingly confident as the Beur generation matures, becomes a decisive intervenant in the historical narrative of the nation. By treating the massacre as a symbol of the racist tendencies which have scarred modern France, Kettane inscribes it within a long tradition of anti-racism campaigning most recently evident in the 2005 riots, which has appropriated 17 October as a demonstration of the

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continuity between colonial attitudes of oppression towards Algerians, and contemporary racism directed towards the French descendants of North African immigrants, but which in doing so has disengaged the massacre from the historical context of the Algerian war. At the same time, as one of the earliest texts to feature 17 October, Le Sourire de Brahim contributes to the reinsertion of the massacre as an event within immigrant memory. The question of the absence of collective memory is explored in more depth in the next text in this chapter, Leïla Sebbar’s The Seine Was Red. HAUNTING SILENCE AND TRAUMA: THE SEINE WAS RED The number of deaths associated with 17 October, and its location on the grands boulevards at the heart of the French empire means that it occupies a singular place in French history; as Benjamin Stora comments, “October 17 marks the transfer of the Algerian war to France, and registers as one of the rare occasions since the nineteenth century when police opened fire on workers in Paris.” 32 Yet, despite being witnessed by large numbers of passersby on the Parisian avenues, the events of that night were almost completely forgotten. 33 French newspaper reports appeared as early as 18 and 19 October 1961, but many of the mainstream titles, such as L’Aurore, Le Parisien Libéré, and Paris-Match, reproduced the official version of events which blamed demonstrators for initiating the violence, and put the blame for Algerian deaths on internecine conflict between the FLN and its rival nationalist group, the Mouvement national algérien (MNA). 34 There is little doubt that, weary from seven years of war and with little sympathy for the immigrants that many regarded as the enemy, the French public was unwilling to accept the likelihood of police brutality, and that this played a major part in the twenty-five year silence which followed. Perhaps more surprisingly, the silence of the French mainstream media was echoed in the immigrant community. This was in part due to the difficulties experienced in coming to terms with the trauma suffered as a result of the extreme violence inflicted. In Paris 1961, House and MacMaster discuss the difficulties in the transmission of memories of 17 October, and note that although the demonstrators remained haunted by what they had seen, they often chose not to pass on details of their experiences to their children who instead learnt of the events via the counter-memories of French former anticolonial activists. 35 Paradoxically, the experience of witnessing the oppression at close quarters led to a reluctance to testify: in their analysis, House and MacMaster observe that the greater the emotional pain endured by witnesses, the less likely they were to speak out, leaving others to recover what had become a forgotten episode of history. 36 Leïla Sebbar focuses on the

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impact of trauma in her novel, The Seine Was Red, set in 1996, in which the refusal of the older generation to speak about the terrible but undefined events of 1961 becomes the catalyst for a quest for truth conducted by the children of those involved in the massacre, in an attempt to lay to rest the ghosts of the past. 37 Sebbar’s multivocal text features Amel, a young Beur who is joined in her search by Omer, a journalist who has fled the violence of Algeria’s civil war. Their quest runs parallel with the film being made by Louis, the French son of a wartime porteur de valise, who has persuaded Amel’s mother to break her silence and bear witness to her memories in front of his camera. Her account is interspersed with the recollections of a police officer, harki, café owner, porteur de valise and others involved that night. The resulting film is a tapestry of testimonies, a lieu de mémoire which brings the ghosts of 17 October into the light, and makes collective remembering possible. Sebbar stages the act of witnessing in a deliberate and self-conscious manner, through the efforts of the various young people determined to discover the facts of the past, and to hear it directly from those involved. Recognizing that the various heterogeneous communities which have a stake in 17 October respond to it in a range of ways, Sebbar has tried to make her novel representative by reflecting the diverse attitudes of her Beur, Algerian and French protagonists, in the interests of developing an example of Ricoeur’s “shared narrative.” 38 By writing memory, Sebbar constructs a site of communal mourning, but in bringing together France’s memory communities, rather than reinforcing division, Sebbar is engaged in a process of literary memorializing which performs and enacts a group identity which spans the transpolitical space of France and Algeria. In this, Sebbar shares the political concern found in Le Sourire de Brahim, but whilst Kettane’s characters call for the kind of political action which Kettane himself engaged in with the creation of Radio Beur, Sebbar makes her political statement in the act of writing, by creating a narrative of remembrance that overcomes the resistance of trauma to inscribe 17 October onto France’s historical narrative. While recent controversy in France has focused on the “duty of memory” (devoir de mémoire), the silences which punctuate Sebbar’s novel reminds us of the pain, even the impossibility, of the process of remembering events of trauma, and recall what Todorov has called “the right to forget” (le droit à l’oubli). 39 In his work on atrocity, Michael Humphrey points out that survivors are haunted by the past with their private memory unable to be assimilated into public memory. Consequently, their experience cannot be commemorated, preventing them from reconstructing the self through narration. Instead, the mnemonic of violence leaves the mark of repression buried in the individual: through terror and trauma the victim is silenced. 40

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The twenty-year silence which followed 17 October left its victims without a public space in which to speak, and forced them to internalize the memories which haunt them, so that the state violence of that night became a state of violence which marked and was carried within their bodies. The lack of opportunity to express trauma verbally means that the legacy of trauma becomes embedded, and in turn becomes a barrier to the transmission of experience. As Humphrey reminds us, “the memory of violence may be inaccessible and inexpressible because it refers to traumatic experience which is encoded not in verbal narrative and context, but in sensations and images.” 41 The suggestion that violence leaves a bodily legacy beyond the physical injuries inflicted, which is borne thereafter by its victims, recalls the fact that while the ideologies of imperialism present themselves in abstract forms, in practice they are enacted in ways which leave traces on the physical, as human bodies become the contested site of contact. Judith Butler makes explicit the link between the sensory modes of apprehending the world and the abuse of the senses through (here, colonial) violence when she says: Violence is surely a touch of the worst order, a way a primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control, to the will of another, a way in which life itself can be expunged by the willful action of another. To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another, putting another at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other. In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt. This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions, especially those in which violence is a way of life and the means to secure self-defense are limited. 42

The social and political conditions which exist under colonialism inflict on the colonized the kind of anonymous, depersonalized status which was experienced by Algerians in metropolitan France. Under the conditions of a colonial war, state violence was intensified through a systematized pattern of police brutality directed at the Algerian population, which included summary arrests, shootings, and torture, designed to terrorize and intimidate the immigrant community. 43 In her treatment of atrocity, Sebbar is careful to testify to the multi-faceted nature of the Algerian war: the oppression of the French State is replicated in the brutality employed by the FLN against supporters of the rival MNA, and while the need for acknowledgement on the part of contemporary France is the focus of the text, through the character of the exiled Algerian journalist, Omer, Sebbar reminds us that state terror continued to haunt the Algeria of the 1990s. Her text demonstrates that the spectacle of atrocity serves the broader aim of terrorizing and so dehumanizing those who are not its direct victims, resulting in a concentration of the pro-

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cess of colonial objectification. Yet if, as Humphrey argues, the witnessing of atrocity plays a major role in widening the experience of violence, paradoxically witnessing is also the essential basis for recognition of suffering victims, for compassion and care. Witnessing is the vehicle for reversing the de-humanizing effect of atrocity and recovering the humanity of victims and their social worlds. Through witnessing victims’ suffering and hearing their testimonies social connections are created between victim and witness, establishing a basis for moral responsibility. And this can occur even between strangers at a distance. 44

This is the process in which Sebbar engages, on two levels: firstly, by gathering eyewitness testimonies through Louis’ film, thus creating a new state of empathy in characters such as the pied noir Madame Yvonne, who listens to the story of her Arab cook for the first time, and secondly, by offering the reader access to the divergent accounts of individuals from all sides of the conflict whose lives have been permanently marked by the events of that evening, and so inviting an ethical response from the reader as witness. Through the acts of testimony and witness, the gulf between generations is bridged and the understanding between communities broadened. The text, which opens paradoxically with silence—“Her mother said nothing to her, nor did her mother’s mother” 45 —is then punctuated by the recurrent refrain “Amel hears her mother’s voice,” 46 which eventually becomes “They hear her mother’s voice.” 47 The silence of the opening is not without significance: speaking of her writing project, Sebbar has said elsewhere: I write on silence, a blank memory, a history in fragments, a community dispersed, shattered, divided forever. I write on the fragment, on the emptiness, a poor land, uncultivated, sterile, where one must dig deep and far to bring to light what would have been forgotten forever. 48

The progression from silence to a broad and collective hearing restores a voice to the voiceless witness, and so re-establishes lost history initially for the descendants of those involved, and then tentatively makes it available to the wider community, included through the use of the pronoun “they.” Sebbar’s text, like the mise en abyme which is Louis’ film, serves as a receptacle for the fragments of memories which have been silenced or forgotten, and so constructs a self-conscious lieu de mémoire. Like Sebbar’s text, François Maspero’s novel, Le Figuier (1988), contains an account of the 17 October demonstration although its depiction as the peak in a pattern of violence and oppression towards Algerians which existed in Paris in 1961 is unusual in its historical accuracy. As the roundup of Algerian men in Paris increases, with many deported to Algeria or forced to join the burgeoning bidonvilles of Nanterre, the climate of unconcerned

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racism amongst middle-class Parisians deepens. Violence is casual and endemic amongst those in authority, its victims made faceless by their lack of agency. The novel includes details of the police manipulation of Algerian suspects, arrested, questioned and released, only to be immediately seized by plainclothes police and detained unofficially by the harki detachments of the rue de la Goutte-d’Or. The torture which is routinely carried out there is replicated in centers in rue du Château-des-Rentiers, and in rue Harvey; techniques include water torture, electric shocks, and impalements on bottles, all of which were also carried out by the French army in Algeria. Many of the detainees do not survive to be transferred to the detention camp at Larzac, where around 3,000 Algerians are held indefinitely. Against this backdrop the events of 17 October are presented as consistent with an atmosphere of orchestrated police brutality towards immigrant workers. The subject of torture faces the writer with the challenge of representing the experience of pain, and its consequences for our apprehension of reality. As Humphrey argues, The experience of pain confronts individuals with the “space of terror,” the abject limits where meaning collapses. . . . Pain deconstructs language, thereby silencing the victim, and second, it reduces the body of the victim to an abject sign. . . . By confronting individuals with the abject, with the victim’s pain and suffering, violence challenges social reality by exposing the void against which cultural meaning is founded. 49

The violence of torture reduces the human to an abject object; as Elaine Scarry says, it silences and objectifies the individual because it contracts their world to the present moment and disconnects them from their environment. “In that moment of abjection and non-communication, the body is made a contested sign.” 50 Torture threatens to reduce the body to the most abject of objects—the corpse—which signifies the collapse of the border between living and non-living, and menaces the boundaries of human identity. The violence of 17 October delivered unbreakable silence and threatened the permanent erasure of memory, as bodies were put beyond recovery or commemoration, thrown into the Seine in unknown numbers. Beyond objectification, violence rips away the socially constructed meanings which constitute reality and, in extreme cases, denies the possibility of individual recovery or rehabilitation. The difficulty of commemorating the lives of the drowned Algerians is acknowledged by Butler when she says, “It is not just that such a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipsis by which public discourse proceeds.” 51 One of the few effective techniques used by campaigning groups in their attempts to bring state oppression to public attention was the media case study, which focused on the experiences of individual Algerians, and so

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succeeded in lifting them out of the general anonymity that rendered them effectively invisible and stifled empathy for their plight. 52 Maspero employs a similar, albeit fictionalized, approach in his novel, reproducing the testimony of one individual, Hocine Rachid who, in his account of the horrific experience of torture, speaks for the dozen or so men with whom he shared a cellar in the Goutte d’or and, by extension, represents the suffering of thousands of nameless Algerians in both Paris and Algeria. The case study approach does not dispense with the difficulties of communicating pain and terror: Maspero’s protagonist, who edits Rachid’s own narrative, struggles with the limits of language in ensuring that the descriptions of violence do not dull the reader’s senses, in communicating the fear and pain that make each second feel like the first, an endless moment of agony succeeded by similar, endless moments. Nonetheless, beyond the horrors of torture, Rachid’s testimony personalizes the consequences of French state policy; it encourages the reader to empathize with the victim as individual, and so begin a process of rehabilitation which returns the objectified victim to a human subject. By representing personal experiences in language and reinserting them into a larger narrative of the war, Maspero and Sebbar bring hidden suffering into the light of public narrative, and so reinscribe signification onto the blankness of the abject wiped clean by trauma and the sensations of pain and violence. In creating a space which recognizes the ghostly haunting of trauma, the literary text becomes a defense against the senselessness of war; as Humphrey, following Candini, argues, we are faced with a void we must fill with stories to defend ourselves against the terror of its nothingness. 53 Literature renews the meaning destroyed by abjection; it signifies to the reader hitherto untouched by the violence of 17 October, proposing that they become a witness to previously unsuspected events. Through writing, Maspero and Sebbar inscribe the haunting trauma of the cultural clash between France and Algeria in material, embodied terms, presenting the traces of memory through physical scars on bodies and rewriting the sensations and images of the abject into accessible narratives. As Sebbar makes clear, the significance of memories of violence is not restricted to those who personally experience it. By directly involving the younger generation, none of whom were alive during the war, in the quest for the truth of what took place that night, Sebbar is drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory,” insisting that events which occurred in the past can exert a haunting influence on later generations. Hirsch defines “postmemory” in the following terms: Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . . Postmemory charac-

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As Helen Vassallo argues, this suggests that the legacy of violence is not limited to the physical, but can be manifested as a wound which leaves psychological scars on its victims. Sebbar is writing therefore of what Vassallo calls “transmitted trauma,” which functions in a manner similar to the physical process of referred pain, but which here is provoked by violence which is not physical but psychological and social, and which can continue to exist as embodied memory in subsequent generations. 55 However, Hirsch draws attention to the way in which this memory is constituted for, as Sebbar’s text reminds us, it is not transmitted intact from one generation to the next. Instead, the recovery of memory involves a process of recreation, drawing on a range of external sources: as House argues, it becomes a mixture of inter-personally transmitted memories, and memories acquired via external media such as books, radio or television which testify to the phenomenon of cultural haunting. 56 Sebbar’s inclusion of Louis’s film emphasizes that literature and cinema have a particular role to play in the constitution of postmemory precisely because they involve the imagination in a process of recreation which, being open to a plurality of readings, supports the reconstruction of memory which occurs anew each time it is recovered. Since, as Halbwachs recognized, memories are reconstructions of the past which are reworked within the context of the present, for each generation and memory community the commemoration of 17 October is invested with specific values, values which evolve over time as the socio-political context in which the commemoration takes place alters. Commemoration may designate a common act of remembrance, but the investment which is made in the act of remembrance differs according to community. Sebbar is well aware of the subjective nature of memory, and her text is about more than the gathering of the past. It also records the reinscription of the past onto the present, as two of the characters, Amel and Omer, set out in search of the sites which figured in the demonstration. In adopting their perspective, it can be argued that Sebbar’s approach follows that of Assia Djebar, the francophone Algerian author and member of the Académie française, whose novels often seek to rewrite a new history of Algeria which would incorporate the lost experiences of generations of Algerian women into the existing narrative of the past. As Valérie Orlando argues, Djebar employs a multivalent perspective to reinscribe the multiple stories of the Other’s past and present. She seeks not to wipe the historic slate clean of the former colonial presence in her own country, but to refocus the reader’s gaze on overlooked events in France’s archives on Algeria. Layers of history

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are incorporated into her narrative, creating a palimpsest text, a text through which multiple views encompassing both French and Algerian spheres may be read. 57

In The Seine Was Red, Sebbar also is engaged in the creation of a palimpsest text. The layering of history is in process as Amel and Omer set out to reenact the progress of the Algerian demonstrators. Their destinations are the landmarks of Paris: la Défense, République, la Concorde, the metro stations at Bonne Nouvelle, Saint Michel, and Orly, all now lent a new significance through their association with the massacre. In crossing Paris, Amel and Omer are inscribing another trace of history upon the city. When, at the sites of the massacre, they find no monument to those killed, they take it upon themselves to remake the city’s official lieux de mémoire by marking them with red spray paint, thereby transforming the government plaques which recall official French history into palimpsests of the Algerian war narrative. Their graffiti creates ghostly memorial sites, replacing the absence left by amnesia with a transient presence. Thus the significance of the plaque on the wall of La Santé prison, with its celebration of resistance against the Nazi occupier, is fundamentally altered, with the French now cast in the role of occupiers. The plaque, which formerly read ON NOVEMBER 11 1940 IN THIS PRISON WERE HELD HIGH SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS WHO, AT THE CALL OF GENERAL DE GAULLE, WERE THE FIRST TO RISE UP AGAINST THE OCCUPATION

is overwritten with the following words: 1954–1962 IN THIS PRISON WERE GUILLOTINED ALGERIAN RESISTERS WHO ROSE UP AGAINST THE FRENCH OCCUPATION 58

Sebbar inscribes an alternative version of history which challenges the official Gaullist narrative of France as nation of résistants, the heroic many against the traitorous few, and presents the French as colonizers and as perpetrators. It is the novel’s boldest, and arguably most successful, tactic, subverting historical memory and recognizing the ghostly narrative of the Algerian war. The text therefore functions as a counter-memory, an alternative reading of the narrative of history from a neglected angle. The process of over-writing does not erase the earlier discourse, which is still visible be-

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neath the graffiti, but its totalizing effect is destabilized by the palimpsestic reinscription of a spectral layer of history which now exists in parallel with the national narrative. Fictional narrative thus emphasizes the complex and heterogeneous nature of its equivalent, historical narrative. By insisting on the role of the Algerian immigrants as resisters, Sebbar avoids one of the potential pitfalls associated with recovering 17 October as an event in immigrant memory. The symbolism of the massacre, and the reasons for its suppression in France, relate to its significance for the French state and its conduct during the Algerian war and beyond. To reduce it to a lost episode of Algerian history by emphasizing its importance for immigrant memory without reinserting it into French history risks denying immigrants the agency which they displayed in demonstrating in defiance of Papon’s curfew on 17 October, and constructing a haunting myth of Algerian martyrdom in which Algerians see themselves only and always as victims, suffering at the hands of French oppressors. As the French obsession with Vichy demonstrates, the state of being haunted can lead a group to cast itself in the role of historic and eternal victim, thereby fossilizing the heterogeneous play of forces and resulting in a mummified memory which prevents the social evolution of minority groups towards a position of agency. The reinsertion of 17 October 1961 into French history is therefore crucial to its successful recovery. By setting her narrative in the 1990s and marshaling a multi-national, multi-ethnic cast, Sebbar insists on the relevance of the past to the contemporary Franco-Algerian space. However, her characteristic reliance on youthful protagonists speaks of more than the implications for the future of the nations. As the main protagonist, the motivation for Amel’s interest in a conflict which she never experienced is the discovery of her roots, the episodes which have shaped her family and community in the past and which, by extension, shape her own sense of identity. Rather than a quest to make peace with the ghosts of the past, her search is for a sense of who she is. Defined in opposition to the putative lies of the official discourses of Gaullism and republicanism, symbolized by the graffitied commemorative plaques and Louis’s emphasis on Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, her search serves as a reminder of the conflict between the rhetoric and practice of colonialism. Personal identity is a recurrent theme in the novel: Sebbar emphasizes the heterogeneity of the communities touched by 17 October, for in separate incidents both Amel and Louis object to Omer’s sweeping designation of them as belonging to an undifferentiated mass of French citizens, “Again it’s ‘you all’ . . . how long is that going to last? It’s true that I have French papers, but I don’t represent all the French.” 59 Amel’s rejection of authoritarian oppression extends to the identity imposed on her by Omer, for whom 17 October has little relevance since he has been brought up on and disillusioned by the official Algerian narrative of the war of liberation. Having

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retraced the past which haunts her, she attains a degree of self-knowledge: “I’ll say that ‘the right time’ arrived, that I experienced it, I learned the truth, not all of the truth, that it was not a terrible day.” 60 While Sebbar recovers a forgotten element of the past, she reinscribes it through characters who instrumentalize it as an instance of oppression against which they define themselves, and for whom, ultimately, the process of uncovering the past is a component of a Bildungsroman narrative of self-discovery, rather than a commemoration or laying to rest of the ghosts of the past. CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE NATION: MURDER IN MEMORIAM Published in 1984, Didier Daeninckx’s novel, Murder in Memoriam, is one of the earliest and most discussed texts to feature the events of 17 October. It has also proved intensely problematic, since although the murder of the title (the French version refers to multiple killings) relates initially to the deaths of 17 October, the massacre forms the subject of only the first two chapters, which are narrated from the perspective of some of the Algerian demonstrators. Thereafter the Algerians vanish, and the focus moves to Franco-French characters, and the investigation of a murder committed twenty years later, in 1980s Toulouse, which is shown to be related to the afterlives of the Vichy regime. While Daeninckx’s interweaving of events from the 1940s, 1961, and the 1980s demonstrates unequivocally the continued power of the past to haunt France’s present, the appropriation of the demonstration as background color, a cover under which a fictional assassination could be carried out by the French authorities, has led Anne Donadey to criticize the text on the grounds that “while Daeninckx’s novel deals with the erasure of French memory, it has little to say about immigrant memory and thus unwillingly participates in the continued silencing of the October 1961 massacre.” 61 Daeninckx’s strategy is arguably more subtle, however, for in using the thinly veiled figure of Maurice Papon to link the fates of the deported Jews and the murdered Algerians, he shifts the focus onto the narrative of French history. In highlighting the degree of official suppression which surrounds records of the wartime deportation of Jews, and which ultimately costs the lives of a father and son, Daeninckx draws attention to the lengths to which the French State is willing to go in order to keep certain facts out of the public domain. By foregrounding the instance of 17 October, the text implies that the Jewish deportations are not the only case of State suppression. As in Sebbar’s novel, Daeninckx’s plot centers on the issue of intergenerational haunting. The murder of Bernard Thiraud, the crime which Daeninckx’s regular protagonist, Inspector Cadin, is called to investigate, turns out to be an instance of the sins of the father being visited on the son. The

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decision of Bernard’s father, Roger Thiraud, to research the history of Drancy (the town from which the Jews were deported east) leads to his murder when his investigations lead him to incriminating evidence about the involvement of serving officials in the deportation of Jewish children. As for Sélim in Le Harki de Meriem, the father’s decision is shown to have lethal consequences for the son: Bernard is killed when he attempts to complete his father’s unfinished work. In both texts, the violence of war and racism lingers long after the official conclusion of hostilities, re-emerging to reassert itself to deadly effect. The novel is shot through with the call for an encompassing understanding of history which would bear witness to the ghosts of the past: in addition to the investigative historical studies of Thiraud père et fils, as numerous critics have observed, to solve the crime(s), Cadin the detective must become both witness and historian. 62 In parallel, however, the text points to symbolic instances where France has proved unable to face its past. Following the murder of her husband in 1961, Madame Thiraud has become a recluse, unable to care for the young son whom she was carrying at the time of his father’s death. When Cadin visits her, he describes her as a “corpse” (“un mort vivant”), whose only inclination is to join her dead family; 63 possessed by the ghosts of 17 October, she has become trapped in a state untouched by the passing of time. Cadin’s intervention leads her to give for the first time her eyewitness account of her husband’s death; as he reassures her of the purpose of her husband’s movements on the day of the demonstration (his predilection for fantasy films, rather than another woman) the ad hoc talking cure reanimates her, moving her literally from darkness to light as Cadin opens the shutters kept closed for twenty years. Not all of the ghosts of 17 October are as amenable to being summoned, however. Cadin is repeatedly warned against delving into matters closed and forgotten—“There are certain ghosts both governments [French and Algerian] would prefer not to bring back to life” 64 —with the implication that his actions will come back to haunt him if he perseveres. Speaking of the bodies of Algerians killed on 17 October, a former police photographer tells him, No trace of those forty-eight bodies: the Institute came up with a cut and dried explanation for each death. They all ended up in history’s dungeons. Don’t think of bringing them to the surface; they’ll be like Dracula, it’ll be your blood that’ll bring them to life. 65

The physical bodies are analogous with the buried deeds of the past, and the warnings turn out to be prophetic. Cadin’s doggedness in tracking the killer of Bernard Thiraud leads him to being shot at, while, as Margaret-Anne Hutton points out, his attempts to reveal the truth about circumstances deliberately covered up by those in authority lead to his eventual downfall. 66 By

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the last Cadin novel, Le Facteur fatal (1990), the repercussions of Cadin’s penchant for asking awkward questions about the past have led to his resignation from the police and, ultimately his suicide. Significantly, there is an echo of Amel’s personal motivations in Cadin’s attitude towards the past: although tenacious in getting to the bottom of what has been officially denied, once he has established the truth he feels no obligation to share the facts with a wider public, and ensure a public commemoration for the dead. The novel closes with Cadin’s acceptance that the crimes of the past will once again be buried as part of an official cover-up. While in terms of plot structure, the Algerian massacre is incidental to Murder in Memoriam, it serves to illustrate the process through which the past is deployed to construct historical narratives which support certain conceptions of the nation. Like Sebbar, Daeninckx illustrates the play of successive and competing interpretations of history through the practice of graffiti. Posters and graffiti operate as spaces of political statement, whose declarations, although made in public, are subject to being amended, partially hidden, and interpreted in multiple ways. On a wall graffitied with the word “SOLIDARITY,” Cadin notes the traces of former, conflicting declarations: “SOLIDARITY WITH IRAN” has been replaced with “PALESTINE,” and then “ISRAEL” before being finally overpainted. 67 Daeninckx also signals the possibility of multiple interpretations of the past in another remaining fragment, which reads, “I AU RÉFERENDUM,” with the reader left to decide whether the I belongs to the final letter of “OUI” or the last stroke of “NON.” 68 The novel closes with a similar image of successive layers of old posters being peeled away by an Algerian immigrant worker, to reveal the remnants of a Nazi poster, a reminder of France’s collaboration in the deportation of Jews. 69 For Daeninckx, history is not fixed or finished, it is a narrative of competing discourses in which certain groups are advanced and others subject to a process of exclusion, an argument made explicit through Claudine’s analysis of the function of the Paris periphery, an area whose inhabitants—first the working class, and more recently, Algerian immigrants—have historically been excluded and made scapegoats for crime and anti-social behavior (108–11). However, the way in which he, like Sebbar, emphasizes palimpsest rather than outright challenge to the hegemonic order suggests a focus on plurality of interpretation rather than historical revisionism. In effect, the opening reference to 17 October launches a call for a reconsideration of France’s recent past, while the connection between the treatment of the Jews under Vichy, and that of the Algerians under Papon and de Gaulle is developed in the remaining text. Cadin’s moment of realization, when he understands that the motive for the murders has been the need to conceal details of the deportations, is followed by an uneasy dream in which Jews and Algerians are expressly conflated, and the occupants of the trains

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destined for Auschwitz are revealed, when “hundreds of bleeding Algerians got out of the wagons.” 70 The textual implication is that the treatment of Algerians on 17 October 1961 is as serious a crime as the deportations, for which Papon was tried in 1997–98, a position adopted by the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who claimed in a 1997 interview that the racist suppression of Algerian demonstrators was a crime against humanity and should be judged accordingly. 71 As we have seen, and as Richard Golsan points out, the comparison between crimes carried out by the Nazis and Vichy, and the acts committed by the French during the Algerian war has been made repeatedly since 17 October 1961. 72 During Papon’s trial, cartoons in the Paris press revisited the comparison, showing two buses side by side in the “police museum,” the first used to carry Jews to the Vel d’Hiv in 1942, and the other to move Algerian protesters in 1961. 73 The parallel is also present in the dedication of Einaudi’s La Bataille de Paris, which is addressed “to Jeannette Griff, 9 years old, deported from Bordeaux to Drancy, 26 August 1942. Deported from Drancy to Auschwitz, 7 September 1942” and “to Fatima Bédar, 15 years old, drowned in the canal Saint-Denis in October 1961.” 74 Despite the popular equation of acts committed during Vichy and the Algerian war, Golsan and Rousso have attacked the process on the grounds of the different historical contexts, arguing that the logical conclusion of the position would be the identification of Gaullism with Vichy. 75 This is clearly unsustainable, but it is difficult to believe that this was Daeninckx’s aim. Rather than treating the facts from a historical perspective, Cadin’s reactions serve a rhetorical purpose, as a means of provoking the reader to reconsider the significance of French actions. The dream, that most symbolic of representations, is not intended as a conflation in historical terms, but as a literary device aimed at challenging received notions around the repressed massacre. Indeed, the novel’s other comparison between the Algerian conflict and World War II goes even further, as Cadin tries to ascertain the scale of the event which took place in October 1961: They talk about two hundred dead on the evening of the disturbances and as many again during the following week. The point I’m trying to make is that we’re talking about something big here. An Oradour massacre in the middle of Paris; nobody knows anything about it! A slaughter on this scale has to leave traces. 76

Cadin’s reference is to the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women and children of Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944, in which all but eight of the villagers present were murdered by SS soldiers, the men shot and the women and children trapped in a burning church. In this case, the comparison with the massacre of Algerians goes far beyond simple conflation. It draws on and

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reverses the myth which has grown up around one of the most notorious events of the Nazi occupation of France. Sarah Bennett Farmer points to the immediacy with which this symbolism was created by the French State: Almost immediately after the war, the massacre at Oradour became the preeminent example of French suffering at the hands of the Germans. In 1946 the French parliament passed a special law classifying Oradour as a historic monument and mandated that the vestiges of the old town be preserved for eternity. . . . The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms and shops became France’s “village martyr,” a testament to French suffering under the German occupation. 77

The designation of Oradour as a historic monument has helped to ensure that the national memory of the massacre is preserved along with the blackened buildings. However, Farmer draws attention to the way in which, over time, the crumbling vestiges have required increasing intervention from the state in order to ensure their preservation, to the extent that the damaged landscape has been transformed, its harshness becoming softened over time. The “authenticity” of the village’s history has necessarily been sacrificed to the preserved memory of the event, serving the cause of a particular interpretation of events: The history of the commemoration of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane is, to a large extent, the story of how this incident was emptied of its political particularities in order to become the archetypical atrocity that could stand as a symbol for the suffering of France. Today, those who make the journey to the ruins of Oradour see a landscape and hear a commemorative narrative telling of an ideal French village which, through no fault of its own, became the target of Nazi barbarism. The story of villagers uninvolved in the Resistance and nonetheless massacred by the Germans gives the implicit message that, regardless of their political choices or war-time activity, all the French were at risk or were potential martyrs. The commemoration of Oradour as a “village martyr” thus served to mitigate the humiliation of defeat and French passivity during the Occupation and played a key role in the reconstruction of French national dignity, which the policies of Vichy had seriously damaged. 78

Oradour’s ghosts have been domesticated in order to become the bearers of an alternative myth, that of the innocent French nation martyred at the hands of the invading barbarians. This language is remarkably similar to that used by contemporary far-right groups in France to describe the situation around the integration of Maghrebi immigrants, and demonstrates the extent to which the French perception of France as an innocent victim suffering at the hands of others has become an entrenched and powerful discourse. 79 As a successful strategy for mitigating the humiliation of defeat, it contrasts with

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the violence perpetrated by the French security forces in October 1961, creating a dissonance that makes the latter more difficult to accept. By associating October 1961 with Oradour, Murder in Memoriam allows the ghosts of the past to speak and challenge the status of the mythical purity of the French martyr-nation, throwing open the possibility that the victim may also in some cases be a perpetrator guilty of barbarous crimes. Pointing towards the contradictions inherent in France’s self-image, the text pushes towards an awareness and acknowledgement of the crimes of the past, which it suggests are a consequence of the practices of exclusion ongoing within the nation. From this perspective, the amnesia surrounding the massacre of 1961 is less a question of Algerian immigrant experience, and more a challenge to the simplistic (self-)conceptions of France as victim, now ambivalently revealed as perpetrator of crimes against humanity. Daeninckx persuasively invokes the ghosts of 17 October to work against the totalizing narrative of Republicanism yet, more controversially, as the years pass since the publication of Murder in Memoriam, and the artistic references to 17 October proliferate, one wonders whether the massacre is not now itself being subjected to the same kind of instrumentalized symbolic shorthand that the remains of Oradour have suffered. In their texts, both Sebbar and Daeninckx present 17 October as a symbolic event which demonstrates that the narrative of the past which we call history is not a unified tale, but one constituted of overlapping and competing, often haunting, fragments which, as Michel Foucault notes, can leave a legacy of physical and psychological marks: We should not be deceived into thinking that this heritage is an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies; rather, it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath. . . . This relationship of domination is no more a “relationship” than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies. 80

In his essay Foucault discusses the development of humanity as a genealogy or series of interpretations, each emerging as an event within history, none of which are the final word. The question of dominance reveals an unstable hierarchy between the prevailing discourse, and those counter-memories which compete with it for authority. More recently, Bhabha has built on the notion of heterogeneity suggested by these narrative interpretations, and has claimed the existence of a fundamental split within the ethnically diverse modern nation. 81 This split results from the ambivalence of a national identity based on the mythic origins of the nation, such as 1789, the Rights of Man, and the Gaullist narrative of “la France éternelle,” but enacted through

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the daily performance of a range of practices which lie outside the traditional Hexagonal space. The result is “a cultural liminality within the nation” which is based on two separate temporalities, and which disturbs established expectations, allowing new forms of identity to emerge: “Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries—both actual and conceptual—disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities.” 82 Bhabha’s theory of the ambivalence of the nation-space seeks to account for the haunting persistence of a counter-memory of the kind referred to by House and MacMaster amongst the families of Algerian immigrants, and anti-racism groups during the thirty years of official denial of the massacre, and which in many cases provided the source for literary representations of the massacre. 83 Whilst Foucault’s account of genealogy insists that this haunting play of forces is not controlled by any group—“no one is responsible for an emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice” 84 — Raymond Williams identifies a more conscious aspect to the way in which the dominant discourse both produces and limits forms of counter-culture, referring to “an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a preshaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification.” 85 Within a particular hegemony, certain meanings and practices are selected for emphasis, whilst others are excluded, resulting in a selected version which is presented as the significant past, no longer simply a version but an authoritative account of the past which offers continuity with, and legitimates, the present. In the case of 17 October 1961, this is the tradition which maintains that the Algerian war took place overseas and which has substituted Charonne as the example of police brutality towards civilian demonstrators. But, as Williams affirms, this selective tradition is at once powerful and vulnerable: It is at the vital points of connection, where a version of the past is used to ratify the present and to indicate directions for the future, that a selective tradition is at once powerful and vulnerable. Powerful because it is so skilled in making active selective connections, dismissing those it does not want as “out of date” or “nostalgic,” attacking those it cannot incorporate as “unprecedented” or “alien.” Vulnerable because the real record is effectively recoverable, and many of the alternative or opposing practical continuities are still available. Vulnerable also because the selective version of “a living tradition” is always tied, though often in complex and hidden ways, to explicit contemporary pressures and limits. 86

This is important because in recent years the official narrative of history has been challenged by the resurgence of haunting elements of the past which have re-emerged in contemporary social realities. The official history of the Algerian war maintains that the conflict was resolved at a given moment,

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allowing de Gaulle’s government to move on to issues, such as France’s place in Europe, which were deemed to be of greater significance for the nation. However, the pressures in contemporary society which derive from the daily performance of the nation’s identity, such as issues over integration of Maghrebi immigrants and their descendants, increased racism and the rise of the National Front, have exposed the weaknesses in this dominant tradition. Like the return of the repressed, these colonial revenants will not be silenced; they are concerned with changes in the meanings and values which are actively lived and felt, which Williams refers to as “structures of feeling.” These have prompted what might be termed an “emergent” movement (using Williams’s vocabulary rather than Foucault’s), that is, a reconsideration of received wisdom and its replacement with new meanings, values and relationships. As a “living tradition,” the growing call to address the implications of France’s colonial history has been sown and nurtured by the social context of the contemporary period, which is responsible for the transformation of 17 October from a casualty of amnesia, passing through literary representation, to a multiply appropriated and increasingly fetishized contemporary symbol. LE FIGUIER: THE DYNAMICS OF MEMORY Williams’s view of emergence differs from Foucault’s in his rather less abstract understanding of how emergent movements come into being. Like all traditions, emergent movements depend on formal cultural, political and economic institutions, which have a profound effect on the formation of social realities. However, Williams also points to the role of “formations,” or movements in intellectual and artistic life which influence the active development of a culture. 87 In a country such as France which has a well-developed tradition of public intellectuals, it is not difficult to see how these might influence the selective nature of an emergent tradition. The repeated inclusion of 17 October in literary texts suggests that writers are choosing to recover the event as a means of addressing France’s long amnesia concerning the history of the Algerian war but, as the details of the massacre have emerged over the last two decades, it raises questions about the ends to which the haunting memories of the massacre are being put. The pendulum of remembrance has swung away from a position of historical absence to the opposite extreme in which the general facts of the massacre are comparatively well known within a framework which often sees 17 October divested of its historical context within the Algerian war, and symbolically appropriated in the service of a range of causes. In his short but trenchant text, Les Abus de la mémoire, Tzvetan Todorov discusses the contemporary dynamics of memory. Acknowledging the em-

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phasis which French society has placed on the recovery and preservation of memory in recent years, his argument bears down on the means and ends which memory serves. 88 As his title indicates, Todorov’s attitude towards remembrance is ambivalent: he recognises that both preservation of memory and the act of effacing it are driven by the interests of the groups concerned. For him, the primary issue is the use to which memory is put: An initial distinction must be made: that between the recovery of the past, and its subsequent use. For it is essential to note that nothing automatically links these two acts: the need to recover the past, to remember, tells us nothing about the uses to which it will be put. Each of these acts has its own characteristics and paradoxes. 89

While there may be a duty to remember, Todorov suggests that an excess of memory risks toppling into a cult of commemoration which traps individuals in a sterile cycle of repetition in which past events are fetishized and mummified until they become an obstacle to the development of society. Haunted by the past, with no promise of progress or redemption, subjects are condemned to perpetual victimhood, or to eternal attempts at reparations. The activism of pied noir associations offers one instance in which memory acquires a totemic power. Since memory forms the only remaining connection to the Algerian motherland from which thousands were abruptly torn in 1962, its loss would mark the final act in a drama of loss which has been played out over fifty years. Moreover, the memory of life in Algeria, and of the injustice of defeat and exile have come to define the contemporary identity of the pied noir collective, whose identity is established and maintained through the repeated performance of myths constructed around the shared sentiments of nostalgia and suffering, and the unfulfilled demands for recognition and reparation of the wrongs inflicted. Memory serves to attach this group to the past, a past which is by definition lost but which cannot be allowed to be lost definitively, at the price of the erasing of the identity which defines thousands of individuals. Remembrance in this context prevents the pieds noirs from laying to rest the ghosts of the past, because those ghosts are what defines them; without their haunting presence, the pieds noirs as such would simply cease to exist. For Todorov, the attachment to the past stymies healthy growth and development, not least because it gives rise to the creation of myths which may bear little relation to the truth of the past but which nonetheless can exercise a powerful influence. With reference to this phenomenon, he distinguishes between two forms of remembrance: The recovered event can be read either in a literal or an exemplary manner. Either this event . . . is preserved in its literal form (which does not mean in its true form), it remains an intransitive event and does not lead to anything

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Chapter 2 beyond itself. . . . Or, once recovered, without denying the singularity of the event I can decide to use it as an instance amongst others of a more general nature, and I use it as a model in order to understand new situations, with different agents. . . . We will say then that, as a first approximation, literal memory, particularly when taken to extremes, brings with it risks, whilst exemplary memory is potentially liberating. 90

Pied noir memory clearly constitutes an instance of Todorov’s literal memory, since it makes no reference to historical events beyond its immediate sphere. In contrast, in Le Figuier, Maspero recounts the details of 17 October as an event which remains firmly implanted in the wider Algerian war as it manifested itself in Paris and, indeed, in the wider context of twentiethcentury conflicts. As the narrative unfolds, 17 October is shown to be situated at the nexus of the overlapping spheres of influence exerted by multiple historical events, each of which functions as an imperative for political response and exemplary remembrance. The Algerian war, which occupies the central and most recent point on the chronology of this historical model, is thus shown as an event demanding the political engagement of individuals, and by extension, interpretation as an exemplary event on the part of the reader. The ghosts of 17 October are placed in correspondence with the ghosts of other violent conflicts which, rather than denying the singularity of their fate, works towards their greater understanding and accommodation. Yet like Todorov’s text, Le Figuier is marked by a profound ambivalence towards memory, which is portrayed as crucial and yet fundamentally unreliable, and which requires the active engagement of those seeking to read the past. Maspero’s novel is a self-conscious reflection on the relationship between literature and the haunting nature of memory in responses to the violence of war. The immediate concern is the Algerian conflict, to which the novel’s narrator, François Serre, owner of La Vigie bookshop, and Manuel Bixio, his friend and colleague, are firmly opposed. Their fight is an ideological combat—although Manuel flirts with the idea of becoming a militant, he is always out of his depth—and the concern of the novel is not the conflict in which François serves as a conscript, but the realm of writings and testimony, and the hostility and violence these attract, as the writer invests in the process of literary creation, production and distribution. After François leaves for Algeria, and the roundups of Algerian men in Paris increases, Manuel takes up the Algerian cause and surreptitiously begins circulating copies of Henri Alleg’s La Question, the suppressed account of the torture suffered in Algeria by a concentration camp escapee, and then of François’s war memoirs, whose proposed title, Oradours en Kabylie, follows Daeninckx in drawing a comparison between the conduct of the Nazis and the French. The memory of the Occupation is a specter which looms over

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France’s role in the Algerian war; it is invoked briefly here, but forms part of the broader frame of exemplary memory as the novel progresses. The attacks on the bookshop which follow add to the sense of a guerre franco-française, which sets the potency of literary symbolism against physical violence. It confirms the belief held by François and Manuel that a Parisbased recourse to writing offers the most meaningful response to the war, through a combination of collective testimony and political protest. Thus when the availability of anti-war texts becomes restricted by the application of state censorship, Manuel takes advice and opens his own small publishing house, defying the immediate bans placed on his texts, risking reprisals in order to make public the painstaking scripts of political prisoners. The faith of François and Manuel is in the effectiveness of writing: I told him again that the only battle we could fight, and the most effective one, would be undertaken with our own weapons, information, explanation, books, articles, a fight endlessly resumed. 91

Their mission is to “make real,” to solidify as far as is possible through literature, the simulacral qualities of the hidden experiences of wartime atrocity and trauma, which are taking place in Paris and Algeria but which remain spectral because they are unseen, and so unacknowledged, by the majority of society. Their response recognizes the power of the written word to inform and transform the perspectives of a readership, but equally, the physical existence of the text motivates their efforts even when censorship and seizures mean that few copies are distributed or read. In addition to raising awareness of the French army’s conduct in Algeria, through examples of police violence their work demonstrates that the war is also being waged within the Hexagon, presenting a dimension of reality which, historically, intruded into consciousness of the French public only through the horror of “human interest” stories such as the blinding of four-year-old Delphine Renard in an OAS attack. In this sense, Manuel’s publishing house is a ghostly mise en abyme of Maspero’s own project, for by including the account of Hocine Rachid’s torture and the details of 17 October 1961, albeit in fictionalized form, Maspero engages in the same process of informing and influencing, this time in late 1980s France. In their roles as minor “committed intellectuals,” François and Manuel are joined by Mary Kendale, a Franco-American photographer whose shots of the Nanterre bidonville, the Paris harki detachments, and the events of 17 October bear witness to another side of life in France. As with Manuel’s texts, the images testify to the experiences of those otherwise deprived of a voice; they record the memories of an ephemeral moment in time and space, offering ghost-like images of locations—the camps of Algerian refugees in Tunisia, and the slums of Nanterre—which will soon vanish. Mary’s images

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represent the lived realities of the Algerians who are nominally French; in doing so she exposes the exclusionary practices which are sanctioned by the Republic but which remain unsuspected by much of French society. The power of her work is recognized by the French authorities who raid her lodgings; more grimly, her photographs and militancy finally lead to her death at the hands of the government of Nueva Cordoba. By its actions, the French establishment is thus paralleled with a brutal and unelected military junta. The inclusion of references to Nueva Cordoba in the later sections of the novel help to insert the Algerian war into a continuum of twentieth-century conflicts, each of which is read as an exemplary event whose memory serves to inspire responses to future events. The pre-eminent character in this regard is F G, owner of the eponymous publishing house, whose name—Felipe Gral—is only one of the many identities he has acquired across the years. F G provides the printing expertise and advice needed when Manuel decides to start up his own publishing house, and in doing so affords the support necessary to Manuel’s political action. F G himself has no particular involvement in the Algerian cause, and it is only in the latter stages of the narrative that his motivation becomes evident: he had served as a translator and fought with the Republican army in the Spanish civil war, and, upon returning to France, took part in the Resistance during the Occupation. The torture which he suffered at the hands of the Gestapo marks his body, just as the experience of political engagement shapes his approach to the world. The conflicts in Spain and occupied France function for him as instances of exemplary memory, each defining the ideological imperatives of the future, so that when Manuel comes to ask for help in conducting his fight, the Algerian war is already present as the contemporary concatenation of past events, demanding the only possible response, a response which is later reprised by Mary in her final campaign in Nueva Cordoba. Within this context, 17 October appears as a haunting moment of atrocity—narrating, François says that he will always hear the echo of the dull thud of long police batons on skulls—but one which is consistent with the wider violence and oppression being enacted in Paris. Based on Maspero’s own firsthand experiences of that night, witnessing police brutality and helping injured Algerians back to the safety of his bookshop, the narrative carefully sets the demonstration in context, as a response to the curfew imposed on Algerians, itself a response to the FLN attacks on the Paris police, which themselves were intended as a response to the torture and murder of Algerian militants. The precise insertion of the massacre into a historical narrative, not only of the Algerian war, but of the conflicts of the mid-twentieth century, works against the tendency to read it as an isolated event, and encourages the committed interpretation which Todorov calls exemplary memory.

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In concert with an emphasis on committed memory, however, Maspero’s text sounds a clear note of caution concerning the process of remembrance. While the consequences of the past and the imperatives it issues are always with us, there is a sense in which, as David Lowenthal memorably opined, the past is a foreign country, a spectral realm which remains forever unknowable. F G himself is a manifestation of this circumstance, his past a shadowy enigma which shifts with the stories of his life, stories which have a ring of truth to them but which conflict with historical fact at key points, and which compel his friends to be wary in disentangling truth from non-truth: Just before Christmas, F G placed on top of the weekly pile an envelope bearing, in his handwriting, the name of Manuel Bixio. The latter opened it and took out a short, slim booklet with a pale blue cover: it was Ode to the Right Whale by the great Irish poet Oohnagh Parmantier, “adapted from the Gaelic by F G.” . . . It didn’t occur to him that the famous Oohnagh Parmantier only ever lived in the imagination of his translator. Later, he would be vigilant: he would learn to evade the masks. 92

While on one level F G is manifestly solid, on another he is a spectral figure whose story, recounted at one remove by Mary to Manuel, passes through a moment of what he refers to as his “first death and second birth,” 93 as he comes to in a hospital after taking an overdose in January 1946. What he refers to as his “posthumous life” is different in quality to what had gone before, which is vague and confused, but the rebirth is itself surrounded by confusion: we learn that F G was born in 1909, and that he dates his rebirth as occurring at the age of 35—but while this would place it in 1944, the narrative clearly attributes it to 1946. The text is marked by similar inconsistencies which are repeatedly laid at the door of the difficulties and deceptions of memory, a seductive mode of perception which appears to give access to the truth of the past but which is characterized by uncertainty, illusion and subjectivity. In his publications, and in the stories he recounts, F G remakes an alternative history, one full of absences, but seductive and convincing to the unwary. This is something of which Manuel becomes conscious as he recollects F G’s advice on publishing. What he remembers as elegantly phrased paragraphs of guidance, he now realizes were delivered quite differently: the reality has been corrupted by memory: “Did he really say things in this way? Classic trick of memory. Actually he never spoke at such length. He expressed himself in short unfinished bursts.” 94 Through F G, Maspero reminds us that memory is prone to becoming corrupted over time, not as a result of a natural process of disintegration and decay, but more frequently because it becomes contaminated by the ideologies of the present, as we seek to avoid dissonance between our memories and our present realities. In doing so, he warns us against an easy acceptance of historical truth as produced through eyewitness testimonies in the manner

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of Sebbar’s The Seine Was Red. To accept memories unquestioningly is to leave oneself open to deception: either through our unconscious desires, or the influence of some interested party, we risk accommodating a reality which may be entirely different from that which was true at the time, as F G is aware: “I believe that I’ve known something like that in my life: like a feeling of freedom that seizes you when you touch the bottom.” “When?” asked Manuel. F G hesitated, then answers regretfully: “I don’t know. I don’t know any more. A few days before the liberation of the camp, for example.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But it’s probably the sort of story that you invent after the fact. It’s so easy, fifteen years later.” 95

The elusiveness and corruptibility of memory is an issue which recurs repeatedly in the text. The evolution of memory over time is not something which should be surrendered to, or accepted; instead, the imperative to preserve the integrity of memory transforms it into a site of combat. Characters must struggle to bear witness faithfully to what they have seen, as François affirms on his return from Algeria: I want to testify. I committed myself to it. For Manuel, I write what I’ve seen, what we did over there. . . . I need to write to carry out the fight, exerting a violence which exhausts me. Not to give in to forgetting, to the blessing of the fog which drowns the past: struggling with images, to keep them alive. 96

François is haunted not only by the memories of what he has seen, but by the fear that he will not be able to remember them; without the effort to recall, as he says, to the point of obsession, memory will deteriorate and become deceptive. Contrary to Todorov’s criticisms, obsession with memory is here presented as necessary, even crucial, to the preservation of the past. 97 However, the text makes clear that this obsession is not simply a question of passive commemoration, but involves the active engagement required to combat the natural tendency of memory to corrupt in order that an accurate representation of the past may be possible. Throughout the text, therefore, Maspero implies that we must learn to be cunning, to be constantly alert and questioning our assumptions about the past as we remember it, following the experience and example of his characters: “[F G] learned to be crafty. To trick time, trick the pitfalls of memory.” 98 Of the four texts analysed above, Le Figuier has the most complex relationship to the past and the duty to remember the dead of 17 October 1961. Written twenty-five years after the events it records, it calls for a passionate encounter with the past which would avoid the anachronisms of the present, and listen to the ghosts of the past. Its political emphasis is, to an extent,

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shared by the other texts read here, in particular Le Sourire de Brahim, whose closing sections function as a call to political arms for the disenfranchised Beur youth. Nonetheless, despite its engaged activism, and its timely retrieval of the massacre as an event hitherto consigned to “les oubliettes” of history, the comparatively sparse detail contained within Kettane’s text means that 17 October serves a largely symbolic function, presented as a horrific instance of the racism which infests contemporary French society. It serves a similarly instrumental purpose in Murder in Memoriam, as a vehicle by which to call into question the sustainability of the myths that have grown up around the Republic in the twentieth century. Criticisms of Daeninckx’s text should not, however, lose sight of the positive influence it has exerted since its publication in 1984, in restoring 17 October 1961 as a significant date not only for the community of immigrant origin, but for France’s historical narrative. However, the revolution which has taken place since 1984 with regard to the awareness of 17 October, within academic and artistic spheres if not within the public domain, lends a note of caution to the powerful comparisons between 17 October and Oradour which exist within the novel: the proliferation of representations, both extended and allusive, which now exist in relation to the massacre place it at risk of being reduced to the kind of symbolic shorthand which Oradour has become. In contrast, Sebbar’s novel, published fifteen years later when awareness and attitudes had already begun to evolve, explicitly presents the massacre as a singular event, one whose traumatic legacy affects communities far beyond those who were present and witnessed the events. Through the creation of a “lieu de mémoire” in which the testimonies of diverse memory communities can be accommodated, the novel emphasizes the continuing relevance of the massacre to the broader Franco-Algerian space; however, by focusing so closely on the events of those days in October, Sebbar risks detaching them from their historical context, and so facilitating the construction of 17 October as a fetishized date, a symbol ready to be invested with a range of significations, to be appropriated at will. It is left to Le Figuier to reinsert the events of October 1961 within the unfamiliar narrative of the Algerian war as it took place in Paris, and to contextualize this as one exemplary event amongst the range of wartime atrocities which took place in twentieth century Europe. His admonition to careful remembrance represents an ethical imperative for the future, which is perhaps the most respectful response to the ghosts of 17 October 1961. NOTES 1. Davis, Haunted Subjects, 2–3.

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2. Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy 1944–198 . . . (Paris: Seuil, 1987); Anne Donadey, “‘Une certaine idée de la France’: The Algeria Syndrome and Struggles over ‘French’ Identity,” in Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 215–232. 3. For a discussion of the various figures proposed by historians, see Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 161–179. 4. Anne Tristan, La Silence du fleuve: Ce crime que nous n’avons toujours pas nommé (Bezons: Au Nom de la Mémoire, 1991), 73. 5. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 162. 6. Rousso uses this term in relation to Vichy; see Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy, 66–71. 7. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 19. 8. See for instance Jean-Luc Einaudi, La Bataille de Paris, 17 octobre 1961 (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Jean-Paul Brunet, Police contre FLN: Le drame d’octobre 1961 (Paris: Flammarion, 1999); Linda Amiri, La Bataille de France: La guerre d’Algérie en métropole (Paris: Laffont, 2004); House and MacMaster, Paris 1961. 9. Didier Daeninckx, Meurtres pour mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Nacer Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim (Paris: Denoël, 1985); Mehdi Lallaoui, Les Beurs de Seine (Paris: L’Arcantère, 1986) and Une Nuit d’octobre (Paris: Alternatives, 2001); François Maspero, Le Figuier (Paris: Seuil, 1988); Tassadit Imache, Une fille sans histoire (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1989); Paul Smaïl, Vivre me tue (Paris: Balland, 1997); Nancy Huston, L’Empreinte de l’ange (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998); Leïla Sebbar, La Seine était rouge (Paris: Thierry Magnier, 1999); and Gérard Streiff, Les Caves de la Goutte d’Or (Paris: Baleine-Le Seuil, 2001). 10. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994 [1925]), 92. 11. L’Humanité, 13 October 2001. 12. Benjamin Stora, “Entretien entre Michael Haneke et Benjamin Stora, à propos du film Caché,” La Vie, 4 October 2005, 75. (Il est inexact de parler de silence au sujet des massacres du 17 octobre 1961. . . . Le problème est que les Français refoulent ce passé. Rien, ni documentaire, ni fiction, ne s’imprime dans la mémoire collective. Nous sommes frappés d’amnésie.) 13. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 185. 14. As an example, of the proposals for papers submitted to the 2011 annual conference of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, held at the University of Stirling on the broad topic of “Continuities and Discontinuities? France Across the Generations,” out of a total of 78 submissions, 7 or 9% related to the events of 17 October 1961. 15. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 316. 16. Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 10. 17. Michael Haneke (dir.), Caché (2005). 18. Mokeddem, N’zid, 140–41. 19. Daniel Prévost, Le Pont de la Révolte (Paris: Denoël, 1995), 109. 20. As House and MacMaster argue, “the crisis of 1961 can be most usefully interpreted as a two-month-long cycle of state violence that culminated in a more ‘visible’ peak of brutality on the night of 17 October” (Paris 1961, 162). In particular, the violence and deaths associated with the demonstration continued over several nights, as demonstrators were detained in the Palais des sports. 21. The violence of 17 October and its place within a wider period of repression, and within the context of the Algerian war as it was played out on both sides of the Mediterranean, is a major aspect of House and MacMaster’s research. See House and MacMaster, Paris 1961. 22. Alec G. Hargreaves, “Resistance and Identity in Beur Narratives,” Modern Fiction Studies, 35, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 87–102 (88–89). 23. Nacer Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim (Paris: Denoël, 1985), 120. All translations are mine, and quotations from the original French are given in endnotes. (Bien sûr qu’il était bien avec elle et qu’il aurait voulu que ça dure. Mais quelque chose au fond de lui le hantait. Il cherchait, il ne savait pas exactement quoi.) 24. Hargreaves, “Resistance and Identity,” 93.

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25. “We refuse to differentiate between the Algerians crammed into the Palais des Sports waiting to be ‘deported’ and the Jews locked up at Drancy before Deportation.” “Appel,” Les Temps modernes 186 (November 1961): 624–28 (624), quoted in House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 224. 26. Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim, 11–12. (Non seulement on les voyait venir, mais on les entendait avec leurs grosses bottes noires montant jusque dessous le genou, rappelant un autre temps où certains uniformes hantaient la France.) 27. Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim, 136. (Il faut qu’on lance une manif.) 28. Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim, 139. (Tu sais, Sofiane, ils ne nous aiment pas. Pour eux on est comme des morts. De toute façon, ils n’ont pas envie qu’on revienne. Tu comprends, en France, nous avons acquis des droits dans les usines, nous sommes habitués à nous battre. Alors, ils ont peur. Pour eux si on rentrait, nous serions des fouteurs de merde.) 29. Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim, 145 (elle amputait sa mémoire); 126 (la France perdait la tête et surtout la mémoire). 30. Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim, 126. (La mère ne comprenait pas pourquoi tant de haine. Pour elle tous les hommes étaient égaux en droit et en devoir. Chacun avait le droit de vivre en paix avec sa famille et de manger son pain tranquillement.) 31. Kettane, Le Sourire de Brahim, 168. (Nous sommes les révélateurs de leurs contradictions, de leurs mensonges et même de leur trahison vis-à-vis de la mémoire du people. Un clou dans le talon d’Achille de la conscience collective.) 32. Benjamin Stora, Le Transfert d’une mémoire, 107. (Le 17 octobre marque ce transfert de la guerre d’Algérie vers la France, et s’inscrit comme l’une des rares fois, depuis le dixneuvième siècle, où la police a tiré sur des ouvriers à Paris.) 33. House and MacMaster point to a number of factors which led to its erasure from public memory, including government (in)action, FLN reluctance to destabilize peace negotiations, divisions amongst the political mainstream, and the deaths at Charonne in February 1962. Jim House and Neil MacMaster, “‘Une Journée portée disparue’: The Paris Massacre of 1961 and Memory,” in Crisis and Renewal in France Since the First World War, 1918–1962, ed. Kenneth Mouré and Martin S. Alexander (Oxford: Berghahn, 2002), 267–291 (274–7). 34. Sylvie Thénault, “La Presse silencieuse? Un préjudgé,” Carnet d’échanges 1 (May 1999), 23–28. 35. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 19; 267; 283. 36. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 267. 37. Leïla Sebbar, The Seine Was Red: Paris, October 1961, trans. Mildred Mortimer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008 [1999]). 38. Forsdick, Postcolonial Thought, 282. 39. Tzvetan Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire (Paris: Arléa, 1998), 24. 40. Michael Humphrey, The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma (London: Routledge, 2002), 94. 41. Humphrey, Politics of Atrocity, 112. 42. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 28–29. 43. See House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 80–87, Einaudi, La Bataille de Paris and Brunet, Police contre FLN, ch. 6. 44. Humphrey, Politics of Atrocity, 91. 45. Sebbar, The Seine, 1. 46. Sebbar, The Seine, 18, 26, 40, 63, 87. 47. Sebbar, The Seine, 102. 48. Leïla Sebbar and Nancy Huston, Lettres parisiennes: Autopsie de l’exil (Paris: Bernard Barrault, 1986), 160–61. (J’écris sur du silence, une mémoire blanche, une histoire en miettes, une communauté dispersée, éclatée, divisée à jamais, j’écris sur du fragment, du vide, une terre pauvre, inculte, stérile où il faut creuser profond et loin pour mettre au jour ce qu’on aurait oublié pour toujours.) 49. Humphrey, Politics of Atrocity, 11–12. 50. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 25.

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51. Butler, Precarious Life, 35. 52. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 225. 53. Humphrey, Politics of Atrocity, 17. 54. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. The most obvious example of postmemory, which Hirsch explores in her book, is the effect of the Holocaust on the children of concentration camp victims. 55. Helen Vassallo, “Embodied Memory: War and the Remembrance of Wounds in Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 1, no. 2 (2008): 189–200 (193). 56. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 325. 57. Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile, 111. 58. Sebbar, The Seine, 14–15. 59. Sebbar, The Seine Was Red, 91–92. 60. Sebbar, The Seine Was Red, 115. 61. Anne Donadey, “Anamnesis and National Reconciliation: Re-membering October 17, 1961,” in Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France, ed. Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, no. 106 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 44–56 (50). 62. Charles Forsdick, “‘Direction les oubliettes de l’histoire’: Witnessing the Past in the Contemporary French polar,” French Cultural Studies 12 (2001): 333–50; Claire Gorrara, “Tracking Down the Past: The Detective as Historian in Texts by Patrick Modiano and Didier Daeninckx,” in Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture since 1945, ed. Anne Mullen and Emer O’Beirne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 281–90. 63. Didier Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, trans. Liz Heron (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991 [1984]), 95; [Meurtres pour mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1999 [1984]), 201.] 64. Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, 68. 65. Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, 80. 66. Margaret-Anne Hutton, “From the Dark Years to 17 October 1961: Personal and National Identity in Works by Didier Daeninckx, Leïla Sebbar and Nancy Huston,” in Violent Histories: Violence, Culture and Identity in France from Surrealism to the Néo-Polar, ed. David Gascoigne (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 155–173 (159). 67. Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, 129. 68. Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, 128. 69. Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, 175–76. 70. Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, 148. 71. Interview with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Ce qui accable Papon,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 23–29 October 1997, 56–7. 72. Richard Golsan, “Memory’s bombes à retardement: Maurice Papon, Crimes against Humanity, and October 1961,” Journal of European Studies 28 (1998): 153–73 (149). 73. Le Monde, 19–20 October 1997. 74. Einaudi, La Bataille de Paris, dedication. (“à Jeannette Griff, 9 ans, déportée de Bordeaux à Drancy, le 26 août 1942. Déportée de Drancy à Auschwitz, le 7 septembre 1942” and “à Fatima Bédar, 15 ans, noyée dans le canal Saint-Denis en octobre 1961.”) 75. Golsan, “Memory’s bombes à retardement,” 149. 76. Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, 67. 77. Sarah Bennett Farmer, “Oradour-sur-Glane: Memory in a Preserved Landscape,” French Historical Studies 19 (1995): 27–47 (30). 78. Farmer, “Oradour-sur-Glane,” 33. 79. Examples of racist discourse include the following reported by Renaud Dely in “Elections européennes,” Libération, 10 June 1999: “‘There are thirty million Muslims in France, while from 1940 to 1945 there were no more than 500,000 Germans.’ . . . The public, largely composed of pied noir settlers, is elderly, and has only one obsession in mind: ‘the Arabs’ who are ‘invading us.’”

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(“Il y a 30 millions de musulmans en France alors que les Allemands dans les années 1940–1945 n’étaient pas plus que 500 000.” . . . Le public, à forte composante pied-noir, est âgé et n’a qu’une obsession en tête, “les Arabes,” qui “nous envahissent.”) 80. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 146; 150. 81. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 82. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 149. 83. House and MacMaster, “‘Une journée portée disparue,’” 268. 84. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 150. 85. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115. 86. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 116–7. 87. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 117. 88. Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire, 16. 89. Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire, 15, emphasis in original. (Une première distinction s’impose: celle entre le recouvrement du passé et son utilisation subséquente. Car il est essentiel de constater qu’aucun automatisme ne relie ces deux gestes: l’exigence de recouvrer le passé, de se souvenir, ne nous dit pas encore quel sera l’usage qu’on en fera; chacun de ces actes a ses propres caractéristiques et paradoxes.) 90. Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire, 30–1. (L’événement recouvré peut être lu soit de manière littérale soit de manière exemplaire. Ou bien cet événement . . . est préservé dans sa littéralité (ce qui ne veut pas dire sa vérité), il reste un fait intransitif, ne conduisant pas au-delà de lui-même. . . . Ou bien, sans nier la singularité de l’événement même, je décide de l’utiliser, une fois recouvré, comme une instance parmi d’autres d’une catégorie plus générale, et je m’en sers comme d’un modèle pour comprendre des situations nouvelles, avec des agents différents. . . . On dira alors que, dans une première approximation, la mémoire littérale, surtout poussée à l’extrême, est porteuse de risques, alors que la mémoire exemplaire est potentiellement libératrice.) 91. François Maspero, Le Figuier (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 142. All translations are mine. Quotations from the original French are given in endnotes. (Je lui répète que le seul combat que nous puissions mener, et le plus efficace, c’est avec nos armes à nous qu’il faut continuer à le livrer, l’information, l’explication, les livres, les articles, une lutte sans cesse recommencée.) 92. Maspero, Le Figuier, 23–4. (Peu avant Noël, F G pose sur le dessus de la pile hebdomadaire une enveloppe qui porte, écrit de sa main, le nom de Manuel Bixio. Celui-ci l’ouvre et en retire une plaquette brève et mince à la couverture bleue pâle: il s’agit de l’Ode à la baleine franche du grand poète irlandais Oohnagh Parmantier, “adaptée du gaélique par F G.” . . . Il ne lui vient pas à l’esprit que le célèbre Oohnagh Parmantier n’a jamais vécu que dans l’imagination de son adaptateur. Plus tard, il sera vigilant: il apprendra à déjouer ces masques.) 93. Maspero, Le Figuier, 191 (sa première mort et sa seconde naissance). 94. Maspero, Le Figuier, 50. (Dit-il vraiment les choses ainsi? Piège classique de la mémoire. En fait il ne parle jamais si longtemps. Il s’exprime par courtes rafales inachevées.) 95. Maspero, Le Figuier, 97. (“Je crois bien que j’ai connu, dans ma vie, quelque chose qui ressemble à cela: comme un sentiment de liberté qui vous prend lorsqu’on touche le fond.” “Quand?” interroge Manuel. F G hésite, puis répond, à regret: “Je ne sais pas. Je ne sais plus. Quelques jours avant la libération du camp, par exemple.” Il hausse les épaules: “Mais c’est probablement le genre d’histoire qu’on s’invente après coup. C’est si facile, à quinze ans de distance.”) 96. Maspero, Le Figuier, 57. (Je veux témoigner. Je m’y étais engagé. J’écris pour Manuel ce que j’ai vu, ce que nous avons fait là-bas. . . . Il me faut écrire pour mener une lutte, me faire une violence qui m’épuisent. Ne pas céder à l’oubli, au bienfait du brouillard qui noie le passé: se battre avec les images, pour les maintenir vivantes.) 97. Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire, 30–31. 98. Maspero, Le Figuier, 236. ([Manuel] apprit à ruser. Ruser avec le temps, ruser avec les pièges de la mémoire.)

Chapter Three

Writing from Algeria: Haunted Narratives in Cardinal and Cixous

Pierre Nora’s assertion that memory offers a lived link between the past and what he refers to as “the eternal present” serves as a reminder that contemporary discourses which insist on decolonization as a rupture between colonial and post-colonial categories fail to acknowledge the experiences of the thousands of French citizens who grew up in Algeria when it still formed part of France, and whose contribution to contemporary France has been shaped by influences from outside the Hexagon. 1 While the previous chapter examined collective memories of wartime events and discussed how the ghost of Algeria’s history haunts contemporary France, this chapter considers the personal recollections of two novelists, Marie Cardinal and Hélène Cixous, who until recently have been best known as French women writers but whose work also deals with their childhood in French Algeria, through two texts, Cardinal’s Au Pays de mes racines (1980) and Cixous’s Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage (Reveries of the Wild Woman), published originally in 2000. The chapter explores the relevance of their memories to the contemporary period, particularly in terms of the way in which their early experiences shaped their writing projects and, by extension, their contribution to the field of French literature more broadly; it looks at the ways in which France’s colonial past in Algeria continues to reverberate in its postcolonial present. Their memories reveal an ambivalent relationship with their motherland, which they experienced both as a place of conflict and otherness, and as a site of desire and longing. While the conflict within Algeria drove both writers to emigrate in early adulthood, leading to a sense of loss which was compounded by Algerian independence, their writings suggest that the desire associated with Algeria prevented them from achieving complete separation 69

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from the country of their birth, which haunts their work and leads them to return there, physically or metaphorically, later in life. Although both novelists are best known for their writings on women and the feminine, these texts and others suggest that their childhood experiences of conflict and difference in Algeria were fundamental in shaping their attitudes towards the oppression of women and conceptions of feminism, and that Algeria acted as a primary influence on their development as writers. The Evian Accords placed Algeria beyond their reach, yet paradoxically ensured that the motherland which was now lost to them became a constant spectral presence, as its ambivalence, associated at once with both unity and difference, becomes the driving force in the development of writing projects centered on the feminine and maternal. In each of the two texts, the writer reconstructs her childhood memories of conflict and longing, and shows how Algeria operates as a site of irreconcilable difference for its various Algerian, pied noir and Jewish communities. Algeria’s hybridity was, in large part, the consequence of the decision not to extend the policy of territorial assimilation to include all of Algeria’s inhabitants through political representation and citizenship, ensuring that Algeria remained an instance of difference within the putative unity of the Republic. The childhood experience of conflict and difference haunts both authors, whose work, written decades after decolonization, teases out and questions unitary conceptions of Frenchness. Their work not only looks back to colonial times but also speaks to the contemporary situation in which Algerians and their descendants within French society continue to be regarded as different, underscoring the legacy of France’s Algerian past. While both texts initially focus on the ways in which the writers revisit their memories through literature, they also demonstrate a self-conscious set of writing strategies, reversing the process to probe the role of literature in imaginatively recovering and reconstructing memories of the past. An exploration of the way in which the process of literary creation is intimately linked to a return to Algeria suggests that, for these exiles, writing offers a means of coming to terms with the haunting colonial past. For Cardinal this reconciliation takes place on a personal level, while Cixous’s different relationship to writing means that she uses it creatively as a means to manifest the irresolvable impasse of Algeria’s difference, and invite the reader to engage in the experience of that otherness. The chapter concludes by suggesting that these literary memories offer the potential to respond to the otherness of the colonial ghost with a view to deriving an ethics of respect and acceptance.

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CARDINAL: DISTANCE AND NURTURE—ALGERIA AS MOTHER Both texts examined here center on a return to Algeria, many years after the writers left for a life in metropolitan France. 2 In Cardinal’s case, the return is a literal one: the opening sections of the text recount the narrator’s anxiety at the prospect of seeing Algeria for the first time in twenty years, and then her relief during her 1980 visit at rediscovering the country which she knew and loved as a child. The text takes the form of an autobiographical travel diary, and consequently there is a strong sense of Cardinal the author identified with Cardinal-as-narrator. 3 However, Cardinal emphasizes the fictionalized nature of her text by including passages in which she explicitly signals the way in which it is constructed, with certain episodes being selected and combined at the expense of others; hence it is treated here as a semi-autobiographical work of fiction. 4 Selectivity is fundamental to the narrator’s earliest memories of Algeria. Life there is untrammeled by conventional categories; the narrator is entirely unaware of any problematic division into identity communities, instead identifying fully with her homeland: “This land was mine, had always been my home.” 5 Her conception of Algeria seems to correspond to a Lacanian realm of the Imaginary, before identity is constructed, and before any entry to the Symbolic realm is effected. For the narrator it is the source of plentitude, “archaïque, primaire, primordiale,” which refers back to a time before division from the Mother took place. 6 Indeed, the narrator refers to Algeria as the source of these archaic rhythms in gendered terms: the land is feminized and takes on the role of the adoptive mother. The explicit creation of the maternal role occurs in response to news given by the narrator’s own mother, who tells her daughter, then aged ten, that she had desperately tried to rid herself of the pregnancy which resulted in her daughter’s birth. Cardinal writes about the shocking effect which this news had on her narrator in Les Mots pour le dire (The Words to Say It). 7 In this text, though, the narrator reacts to this calamitous rejection by turning to her surroundings for reassurance: I clung on to what I could, to the town, the sky, the sea, the Djurdjura mountains. I gripped on to them, they became my mother and I loved them as I would have liked to have loved her. 8

Algeria thus occupies the maternal space left vacant by the biological mother, and becomes the source of identification for the narrator, even into adulthood. The narrator’s decision to return to Algeria is based on a nostalgic wish to retreat to the plenitude of the state of wholeness which she enjoyed as a child, and which she rediscovers, intact, on her return:

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In this vision, Algeria is a depoliticized space linked to the construction of the narrator’s subjectivity. The narrator’s substitution of Algeria for her biological mother, driven by the urge for self-preservation, means that Algeria forms her earliest object-choice, and one which proves enduring, for it is to Algeria that she returns later in life when in need of nurturing. In Freudian terms, the narrator is engaged in a prolonged state of primary narcissism, which is motivated by the desire to meet the needs of self. In the light of this, whilst the narrator repeatedly claims that it is her motherland which is the source of this life and energy, her words call into question the extent to which the nurturing source can be geographically located. Indeed, it appears that the narrator’s longing is for a return to the state of childhood unity which she knew in Algeria, rather than to the country itself. Her need is for a sense of that archaic existence before the separations of identity, which has nothing to do with the place of birth: Impotence and power of the first speck of life. For me it happens in Algeria. Not because I was born there—my birth has no importance—but because the rhythms of the universe common to all humankind entered me there, it is there that I knew them. 10

Algeria thus figures as a psychic space, its significance dependent on and constructed around its associations with the narrator’s early development. The child’s experience of Algeria as a site of wholeness and unity is predictably short-lived: divisions along ethnic, religious and class lines soon emerge, and are attributed to the overarching influence of the French motherland. “France created difference by raising us up, since everything that came from there was ‘better.’” 11 Over time French cultural norms, in the form of strictures regarding table manners, general comportment, and Catholic religious practices, are gradually imposed on the child, separating her from the Arab children around her. Her biological mother is closely associated with French social codes, and the consequence of replacing the “bad” biological mother with the “good” Algerian mother is the creation of a strongly polarized mentality. The imposition of cultural norms leads her to conceive of France—which she has never visited but whose shadowy influence permeates her life—and Algeria in typically binary terms, with the positive term consistently associated with the latter: cold and warmth, restriction and pleasure, rationalism and sensuality. The narrator remains defiant in the face of the French social codes of morality and religion which are imposed on her as she grows; the society they create is compared to the hierarchical, intense-

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ly ordered communities of ants which, as a little girl, she took pleasure in disrupting. The society of French Algeria is more complex than this straightforward opposition suggests, however, for the relationship between France and the European population in Algeria is problematized by the pieds noirs’ passion for the idealized motherland, to which they offer tributes of wine and harvests. France is presented as a coquettish and manipulative goddess who exploits the devotion of her people. Although initially the narrator had seen the pieds noirs simply as colonizing, the dependency of the relationship brings her to consider her family as both colonized and colonizing, “victim and executioner at the same time,” in a move which problematizes the easy assignation of colonial guilt. 12 The narrator, however, regards herself as independent of the various social groupings which surround her. At puberty she is separated from her Arab friends; she continues her education towards the goal of becoming a “good Christian Frenchwoman,” whilst the Arab girls are confined to the home, and the boys begin work at dawn in the vineyards. Her childhood experience of the split in the unity of the self leads to pressing questions of identity which, in contrast to her later feminist preoccupations, she formulates in terms of nationality: Arab-French, French-Arab? This contradiction is partially responsible for her withdrawing her identification from her family and their pied noir identity, refusing to share their colonial attitudes: I have nothing to be forgiven for. Although I’m a pied noir, I was never in favor of French Algeria. From childhood I was in conflict with my family, first for personal reasons, then these reasons became political. 13

In her insistence on her innocence the narrator denies the suggestion that the individual has a shared responsibility for the actions (past or present) of the collective; her refusal to ask forgiveness—a necessary pre-requisite of receiving it, according to theorists such as Kristeva—signals her refusal to engage in strategies aimed at resolution of historic conflicts between the pied noir community and others. The maternal role played by Algeria, which the narrator established in childhood, and to which she clings even in postcolonial adulthood, allows her to distance herself from both France and the pied noir community, and from the divisions which the Algerian war created, and to justify her closeness to Algeria on the basis that she is innocent of the crimes committed against it. On one level her adoption of this position is a political act of acknowledging the injustice and violence of colonialism, and of recovering the oppressed other. However, read in a different way her rationale for positioning herself in this way appears both selective and personal.

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HAUNTED BY PLURAL ALGERIAS While the narrator’s immediate portrayal of Algeria is as a maternal, nurturing space, this is only one aspect of what Woodhull and Cairns have identified as two “contradictory” or “parallel” attitudes towards the country: Algeria also exists in the text as a politico-historical entity. 14 Returning in 1980, the narrator rediscovers the maternal pleasures of Algeria exactly as she had hoped. This allows her to turn her attention from the past to the present, and spend her visit observing the way in which the revolutionary forces of Algeria have transformed society in the years since 1962. What she finds is a country whose population has more than doubled since independence, to over twenty million, the majority of whom are aged under twenty-five. At first the situation appears promising: Cardinal sees the Algerians as still motivated by the revolutionary zeal which led them to independence two decades earlier. Whilst she claims that the Algerians themselves have not changed, with the same mannerisms, attitudes and gestures, she recognizes that she is watching something new: “a people rejoicing in being a people”; 15 she sees the Algerian people as still mobilized for revolution seventeen years later—“ready to brandish its pitchforks and raise its fists.” 16 According to her, the revolutionary pulsions of Algeria which led to its independence have not ceased, but have the ability to continue to transform the country. She finds this revolutionary promise in different forms throughout Algerian society: in the imagery of Algerian language which, for her, can communicate ideas of revolution that are fluid and open, without resorting to the technical, theoretical terms which predominate in France and which operate by imposing order and categorization. Islam, too, is seen as a force of change within the new society, operating, together with socialism, as a fundamental element of the new nation’s identity. The picture which the narrator paints of Algeria is of an infant nation moving swiftly into autonomy, yet simultaneously haunted by the violence of its birth. As with the narrator’s attachment to her childhood, Algeria and its people appear fascinated by the nation’s early experiences of conflict, and are unable to disengage from the insurgent violence which frames the descriptions of the contemporary nation. In different ways, then, both the narrator and the Algerian people are caught in a haunting late-colonial economy which continues to determine their outlook. Despite the future offered by independence and the continued revolutionary energy of the people, the overdetermining ghost of the past means that the outlook for Algeria is not unreservedly rosy. Moments such as these demonstrate that the narrator is not alone in carrying the haunting traces of French Algeria; Algeria itself is haunted by the memory of colonialism, which continues to structure and

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curtail its responses to the post-colonial world, and which will ultimately consign it to a cycle of repeated violence. The narrator views Islam cautiously, as an ambivalent force: on one hand, apparently oblivious to the exoticist overtones of her attitude, she approves the orientalized character of Algiers, created through the replacement of churches with mosques and muezzins, but on the other she is wary of the hardening of official attitudes towards foreigners. Paradoxically, while Algerians continue to celebrate the autonomy achieved through their now-distant independence, caught within the static paradigm of revolutionary violence which haunts the country and stifles its development they fail to realize that they are ceding control of their destiny to Islamism, with consequences which would only become clear a decade later. Visiting Algeria for the first time in 1980, the narrator’s daughter alludes prophetically to the country’s future, warning that this battered child could turn out to be worse than its colonial mother (212). Despite the ongoing fervor of revolution, the narrator accuses the population of an unconscious slide into bureaucratization: what the people don’t see, according to her, is that each day takes them further from independence, and that the administrators have already taken their place and are quietly engaged in systematizing society and its institutions. As with the Algeria described in Assia Djebar’s La Femme sans sepulture (and in the manner of Ulysses’s oarsmen), the population has chosen to stop its ears with wax to prevent it being distracted by the voices in the background. 17 The narrator scans the state-controlled newspaper, El Moudjahid, trying to discern the voices of the people, but there is little evidence of any departure from official discourse. No mention is made of the events of the Berber Spring, taking place during the narrator’s visit, nor of the university strikes which are being held: no alternative narratives of the developing nation are permitted. The question she asks is whether there is a viable alternative to this process, or whether the weight of History is too great as, according to her, it proved after 1789, and after the Commune. What she longs for at a political level, and also in her writing, is what she calls the “Permanent Revolution”—words which she recognizes have already been systematized and so rendered useless. The challenge, then, is to find new words, new modes which will convey the revolutionary pulsions present in Algeria. Interference from internal bureaucrats is not the only challenge facing the people: as the country evolves as a new independent state, there is a sense in which Algeria is caught between the institutionalization of socialism, which is the country’s hope for autonomy, and the external forces of globalization and international neo-colonialism. As a developing economy, the socialist government has committed Algeria to industrialization, with the implication that it will also take on the Western pace of production. Algeria therefore finds itself faced with the challenge of modernizing, whilst maintaining its

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culture or, as the narrator says, without changing its soul. The traditional emphasis on contemplation identified by the narrator’s daughter is at odds with Western values, and so is viewed with suspicion by the many industrialists and consultants who are advising the Algerian authorities on economic development, and whose attitude of Western superiority ignores the inability of their own countries to address their failings on issues such as racism and pollution. The narrator bristles with indignation at their paternalistic tone. Yet in defending Algeria from neo-colonial attacks, the narrator is faced with the question of where she stands on these complex issues. She has distanced herself from the pied noir community, refers to Algeria as “my country” and feels that her longstanding opposition to colonialism means that the Algerians have nothing to forgive her for, but nevertheless her experience in the Algerian quarter of the Casbah is that of a foreigner—“tourists in our own town”—where “our” clearly refers to the pied noir community. 18 The question of ideological baggage is common to all intercultural travelers, challenging us to understand what we bring to our readings of texts and of situations, and inevitably the narrator’s comments disclose her own attitudes and prejudices. She condemns the neo-colonialism of the Western consultants, yet her own attitude towards the Algerians betrays the haunting presence of colonial paternalism, as she concludes that they lack the self-awareness to realize that the energy of revolution is being systematically eroded. As Woodhull comments, Cardinal-as-narrator appears to be unaware that she is adopting a similarly paternalistic tone in claiming to see realities of which the Algerians themselves are oblivious: “At this juncture, the observations of Cardinal’s narrator imply that Algeria is autonomous only in the sense that it produces its own problems; it must still rely on first-world observers like herself to theorize them.” 19 Similarly, her “greater experience” enables her to scoff at the views of a female bacteriologist which appear on the letters page of El Moudjahid. The writer maintains that it is the legacy of colonialism which is responsible for the continued absence of women in professions. The narrator’s response—she questions the ongoing scapegoating of colonialism—is cutting, and her patronizing attitude, suggestive of “they’ll learn,” reminiscent of the discourse of the Western businessmen. The condescension present in the narrator’s tone is consistent with her childhood approach, and calls into question the extent to which her valorization of Algeria extends to its inhabitants. During her parents’ divorce— another of the many experiences of separation which occurred during her childhood—the household servants formed an extended family which, like the narrator, suffered from the imposition of pied noir socio-cultural norms. Yet despite this, the narrator admits to her lack of interest in them, because they cannot offer her access to the source of nurturing which she craves:

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Yes, I confess, I am seeking what is archaic in me and I have the impression that it is from the earth itself that I will access it, not from people. People bear a culture which confuses archaism; I would like it raw. 20

Passages such as this raise questions about the extent of the narrator’s concern for the Algerian people whose fate she nonetheless claims to care about on her return to Algeria. In one of the few instances in which Cardinal’s Algerian characters are given names and identities—that of the worker, Barded—Marie-Paule Ha observes that she follows an established literary pattern: These Uncle Tom characters are almost permanent fixtures in colonial literature whose function serves to prove the “humanness” of the colonizers’ and the colonized’s relations. Some of Barded’s counterparts are the Corporal in Margurite [sic] Duras’ Barrage contre le Pacifique and Kamante in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. 21

Despite her disavowal of support for French Algeria, and the decades which have elapsed since decolonization, in repeated instances the narrator demonstrates the persistence of colonial structures of thought which, as we saw in Chapter 1, continue to haunt French culture. In replicating the colonial French ideology in which attachment to Algeria was rooted in the land at the expense of its native population, she effectively calls into question the extent of her proclaimed separation from pied noir thought. As a writer known for her feminist views, the situation of Algerian women is of particular interest to Cardinal but, perhaps surprisingly, here also the narrator continues to reject Western attempts at intervention. Inspired by the participation of Muslim women in the Iranian Revolution which took place during her visit, she is adamant that Western feminists cannot hope to intervene fruitfully in the situation of Islamic women. For her, intervention is tantamount to perpetuating colonial attitudes, and she advocates listening to the educated Algerian women who are engaged in building their country, rather than joining them in their efforts. This strategy of non-intervention may seem problematic, given the struggles which Algerian women continue to face, but the narrator is insistent that the solution must come from Muslim women themselves: The image of the Moorish woman who walks, laden with bundles, at the side of the man snoozing on his donkey is a horrible image, absolutely horrible. But the West doesn’t know that woman, nor the man, nor the donkey, nor even the bundles. . . . We need to leave the Arab women to put down their bundles and say “I’m not walking any further.” 22

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Assia Djebar also points to the need for Muslim women to develop their own agency in response to the reifying influence of Orientalism, a development which, for her, is made possible through the practice of writing: “Thus, a veritable écriture and écriture au féminin, in Muslim countries of the approaching twenty-first century, will only be able to establish itself and develop beginning with the liberated body (or the body in the process of selfliberation) of the woman.” 23 Nevertheless, at this point Cardinal’s text appears to be reinforcing the colonial divisions which elsewhere she has rejected. Since feminists generally repudiate notions of nationhood as patriarchally based, to argue that their priority should be to privilege national and therefore cultural boundaries is problematic; indeed, Cairns criticizes the assertion that Algerian women should be left to initiate their own stand against male oppressors as acquiescence to an impotent religion of cultural relativism. 24 In privileging ethnicity over feminism, Cardinal’s stance— somewhat surprising given her reputation—indicates the continuing influence of the ghostly traces of the putatively vanished colonial past. The contradiction between Algeria as the depoliticized realm of the imaginary, and Algeria the embodied postcolonial state here becomes stark. It is difficult to reconcile the narrator’s repeated emphasis on the maternal, nurturing function of Algeria with the material reality of the circumstances in which Algerian women live in the 1980s. At various points the narrator refers to the impossibility of life in Algiers as a single woman, for whom failure to conform to tradition would lead her to be regarded either as a whore or a madwoman (a distinction familiar to Western feminists). She describes the male scrutiny to which women are habitually exposed, which prevents them from behaving other than as fully dressed servants during family trips to the beach, contrasting this with the experience which she and her daughter enjoy. However, despite the generalized sympathy which she expresses towards the situation of Algerian women, in practice the narrator’s attitudes towards the women she meets reveal a lack of active engagement with their cause. She meets with them out of self-serving motives, as an author rather than as a fellow woman, with the intention of receiving approbation, or at least feedback, on her writing. What starts out as an account of modern Algeria quickly reveals more about the contradictions inherent in the narrator’s expatriate mentality, highlighting the cultural tensions involved in responding to 1980s Algeria. In Cardinal’s writing, therefore, Algeria functions as a nexus of utopia and dystopia, its conflicted nature evident in the narrator’s ambivalent attitudes. She is attached to Algeria as the source of nurturing pleasures, but as the text makes clear these are more closely linked to a return to childhood experiences than to the geographical specificities of North Africa. She is thus caught by the ghosts of childhood and is unable or unwilling to view Algeria other than through the lens of her colonial youth. In this sense she experi-

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ences a condition of stasis similar to that suffered by Madame Thiraud in Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam, for despite her belief that her relationship to Algeria is a positive, nurturing one, it was originally motivated by a similarly traumatic incident. The narrator’s rejection by her mother causes a rupture in her psychic development; her substitution of Algeria as the source of the maternal function means that she cannot contemplate the loss of the maternal for a second time. Desperately clutching at the ghostly traces of her colonial childhood, she fails to realize that, haunted by her attachment to French Algeria, she is unable to form new affective bonds, and so is caught in the same sterile cycle of repetition for which she criticizes the Algerians. Her motivation in returning to Algeria is to further her own sense of wellbeing, and since her passion is for Algeria rather than its people, her perception of the Algerians she meets is couched in terms of what they can offer her, rather than as equals in the struggle for recognition and autonomy, emphasizing her needs rather than theirs. GHOSTS OF ALGERIA IN WRITING Given its personal significance, it is perhaps unsurprising that Algeria occupies a place of some importance in Cardinal’s writing. Not only is it the place where she first became aware of socio-political difference, but it also functions as a haunting motif throughout her work, and in Au Pays de mes racines, it is shown to be intimately linked to the creative process of writing. Cardinal reveals that her experience of writer’s block and her inability to complete her current novel was the catalyst for her return, after twenty-five years, to the country of her birth, in search of something that would transform her writing. The emphasis which she lays on the ex-colony is remarkable: almost two decades after it ceased to form part of the French Republic, Algeria continues to function as the defining element which drives her creative expression. However, it is not until the closing pages of the text that Cardinal makes it clear that it is the jouissance of Algeria that she sees as offering a solution to her writer’s block. Algeria is a site of archaism and plenitude, but also of revolutionary rhythms which enable the narrator to surmount the constraining memories of the past, and which she aims to appropriate as a source with which to re-energize her writing. As Woodhull says, “Cardinal casts ‘Algeria’ both as an experience of presymbolic pleasures and a force capable of disrupting oppressive power formations and fueling struggles to reconfigure the modern nation.” 25 Enviously watching the Algerians reveling in their independence, the narrator is conscious that the forces which have disrupted colonial power formations are now agents in the emergence of the Algerian nation; she recognizes that the revolutionary

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effects of these forces are present not only in political action, but in the imagery of poetic language. They are what the narrator hopes to see at work in her writing, in an attempt to overcome her writer’s block: “Permanent Revolution: what words! But they have already been appropriated, boobytrapped, and imprisoned, by the usual blindness and greed of the authorities. Why not find other words?” 26 Cardinal thus locates the inventiveness and otherness of literary writing in a semiotic space intimately associated with Algeria. This draws her view very close to that of Cixous’s early theoretical writings, in which she speaks of feminine writing as a space in which the subject can explore new, hospitable ways of relating to otherness, in a non-violent context: So, urgently and anxiously, I look for a scene in which a type of exchange would be produced that would be different, a kind of desire that wouldn’t be in collusion with the old story of death. . . . On the contrary, there would be a recognition of each other, and this grateful acknowledgment would come about thanks to the intense and passionate work of knowing. Finally, each would take the risk of the other, of difference, without feeling threatened by the existence of an otherness. 27

However, while Cardinal is evidently aware of the revolutionary potential of this semiotic realm for the transformation of Algeria and its people, her attitude towards it is indicative of the nature of her long-term relationship with the country. Because of the narcissistic aspect of her relationship to Algeria, she is primarily seeking its resources in order to revolutionize her writing, just as her eagerness to meet the women at the university in Algiers stemmed not from a wish to know and support them in their struggles, but from her desire to receive their admiration for her work as an author. Writing, in contrast, offers Cardinal a potential means to better self-understanding. Her longing for the transformative power of Algeria at once underlines its importance to her writing, and yet establishes the limits of her ties to the country itself, as it becomes clear that her focus is on the writing, which will take place on her return home, away from Algeria. There is a sense, therefore, in which Cardinal’s complex and ambivalent vision of Algeria can be criticized as narcissistic, because it is driven by the need, as Freud says, to be loved. 28 The early shock of abjection has forced Cardinal’s narrator to forge an unbreakable bond with Algeria which shapes her sense of identity and self-worth, and which endures into adulthood. The loss of her homeland following independence has been only partial, since the narrator has refused to be separated completely from the source of her childhood plenitude; she has carried it with her throughout the years spent abroad, and if she is haunted, it is something which she interprets positively because it fuels and powers her view of the world, and by extension her writing. However, while the narrator experiences the bond with Algeria as fulfilling

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her psychic needs, persisting in a state of narcissism also has a negative aspect: Freud presents narcissism as an interim stage of psychic development, located between the auto-eroticism of early subjectivity, and the state of object-love in which the individual arrives at a developed relationship with the outside world. Cardinal’s narrator persists in a state of arrested development which is fundamentally centered on her self, and which therefore conditions her view of the world around her. Caught up in the ghostly relations which she developed during childhood, haunting for the narrator is an experience of static repetition, which prevents her from developing the self-awareness necessary to evolve a new means of living with her ghosts. From this point of view, her narcissistic experience is responsible for her attitude, in which she is unable to identify with any entity or grouping (pied noir, Algerian, or French) other than Algeria the land, and herself as writer. It accounts for her binary views on the oppositional relationships between France and Algeria, and between French, Algerians and pieds noirs, from whom she stands apart. Trammeled by conventional taxonomies, the narrator is unable to engage with the Algerian people, whose progress she admires but whose struggles she does not share. Cardinal therefore relates to Algeria either in an instrumental sense, in order to benefit her writing, or as part of a psychodrama about her own subjectivity. Ultimately, her connection to the ghostly, vanished world of colonial Algeria, which has been vital to the maintenance of her psychic well-being, stifles the development of her subjectivity, and prevents her from exploring the creative potential of post-independence Algeria. CIXOUS: HAUNTED BY INESCAPABLE CONFLICT Despite their common aim of giving a voice to feminine experiences, Cardinal and Cixous are often seen as belonging to two contrasting schools of feminist thought. While Cardinal has been linked to the “social realism” of writers such as Annie Ernaux and Christiane Rochefort, 29 and has arguably been neglected as a “serious” or “intellectual” writer, 30 Cixous’s early and influential theory of écriture féminine has ensured her inclusion with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva in the triumvirate of what is referred to, particularly in Anglo-Saxon circles, as “French feminism.” Influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction, Cixous has called for a new practice of feminine writing which would refigure the hierarchical structures of logocentrism through the inclusion of the revolutionary pulses of the body. 31 Although emphasizing that the practice is closely linked to the female body, Cixous rejects the accusation of essentialism, claiming that although this economy of writing is more accessible to women because of their

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proximity to the archaic mother, it is also available to male authors, examples of which include Shakespeare and Jean Genet. 32 However, Cixous has been criticized for her insistence on poetry at the expense of politics, and for failing to analyze the material factors which prevent women from achieving autonomy. 33 Critics have questioned the usefulness of her approach to the feminist project, with Rita Felski arguing that “there exists no obvious relation between the subversion of language structures and the processes of social struggle and change.” 34 Her insistence on the reinsertion of the experience of the feminine body has also led to criticism that she focuses on herself at the expense of the oppressed subject, transforming exploitation into an exploration of narcissism; 35 certainly, her early writing, such as her influential contribution to The Newly Born Woman, is marked by the celebration of the experience of the feminine writing subject and the jouissance achieved through the recovery and reinsertion of bodily pulsions evidenced in the feminine economy. This view of Cixous’s work is summed up by Ian Blyth, who argues that it is not until 1977 that, ‘her writing moves beyond “the scene of the unconscious” and engages with the other in “the scene of history” 36 However, while Cixous has been subject to the same accusations of narcissism leveled here at Cardinal, readings of her early writings show that they are marked with a political concern that, although it only becomes overt in her more recent texts, is the haunting legacy of the childhood experiences of conflict in Algeria, and which is fundamental to the relational conception of otherness which runs throughout her work. Although her theoretical work was to become associated with feminine difference, it appears that, far from being dehistoricized, her childhood introduction to difference and otherness was in fact profoundly rooted in the political and economic realities of wartime Algeria. As an example, one might turn to her contribution to The Newly Born Woman. Although this text is best known as her manifesto for écriture féminine, an examination of its early sections reveals the ghostly traces of her Algerian childhood: “So I am three or four years old, and the first thing I see in the street is that the world is divided in half, organized hierarchically, and that it maintains this distribution through violence.” 37 Like Cardinal, for whom “death, love, work, money, chance are, in my head, Algerian,” 38 Cixous’s earliest experiences of life are marked by their Algerian context: “I learned to read, to write, to scream and to vomit in Algeria. Today I know from experience that one cannot imagine what an Algerian French girl was; you have to have been it, to have gone through it.” 39 Just as these children are beginning to acquire the knowledge which will shape the formation of their identity, so they are made aware of difference, a difference that is produced by the particularities of colonial Algeria and which will haunt them long after French Algeria has ceased to exist.

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ENCIRCLEMENT AND EXCLUSION Reveries of the Wild Woman is the outworking of the ghosts of Cixous’s childhood in Algeria which have haunted her throughout her adult life, and which have, in various forms, shaped her writings. As a Jew growing up first in Oran and then Algiers, the specificities of Cixous’s experience were inevitably different from those of the pied noir Cardinal, yet their common sense of division and conflict is striking. In large part, Cixous’s experiences stem from her complex family, which she discusses in her article, “My Algeriance.” 40 Descended from Spanish Sephardic Jews on her father’s side, and from German Ashkenazi Jews from her mother, her family all have French nationality, although as she says, “no-one ever took themselves for French in my family.” 41 The nature of “Frenchness” for French citizens who have never lived in the Hexagon, and whose French status has been shown to be precarious, vulnerable to political winds, has repeatedly been questioned by both Cixous and Jacques Derrida, also an Algerian Jew. 42 Their liminal status meant that when the family moved to Algiers, Cixous’s father Pierre chose not to live in the pied noir quarter, but instead settled on the edge of the Arab housing, in the area of Clos Salembier. While Cardinal struggled with the desire to distance herself from her pied noir family but was unable to identify completely with the Arab community, Cixous’s experience is one of rejection by the two majority communities. However, whilst Cardinal responded to the difficulties of her conflicted identity by identifying wholly with her motherland, Cixous’s relationship with Algeria is more complex. Like Cardinal, she also conceives of Algeria as maternal, particularly through the perpetually pregnant figure of the domestic servant Aïcha, because, as she says, that is the only Algeria that I was ever able to touch rub against touch again handle stroke arch my back against her calf clamp my mouth between her breasts crawl around on her spicy slopes . . . there is no other woman but Aïcha. 43

Aïcha represents the embodiment both of Algeria and of femininity itself. However, like Cardinal’s ambivalent relationship with the “good” mother French Algeria, and the “bad” biological mother who also represents metropolitan France, Cixous’s maternal relationship with Algeria is ambiguous and fraught. It transpires that Aïcha, for twenty years a much-loved domestic figure, is in fact called Messaouda. Cixous is mortified at the discovery, for she and her brother have been at pains to avoid the widespread but violent appropriation of Arab names, but the incident is revelatory of the distance which characterizes her relationship with Algeria.

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Reveries of the Wild Woman is Cixous’s exploration of her ambivalent attachment to Algeria, and the memories of it which haunt her. As the country of her birth, the narrator longs to belong to Algeria, but even while living there, she feels perpetually separated from it. Following her departure for Paris, Algeria became a site of loss which remains as a ghostly presence in her life and which she is unable to lay to rest. To describe her relationship to her motherland, she employs the figure of pregnancy which, for Cixous, is the image of an impossible expulsion: the placenta previa, which obstructs the birth canal and prevents the baby from being born. The natural process of expulsion is impeded, with the mother and the other which is the unborn child joined by a third element—the placenta—which is neither self nor other and which acts as a (closed) door to the outside where the pregnant mother and child, presently at once united and different, will become separate subjects. Cixous left Algeria in 1955, although it was an abortive attempt at departure, since the ties binding her to the country of her birth were not broken. According to her mother, the only means of removing the obstruction caused by the placenta previa is to break the waters surrounding the child. For the narrator, this means tears and mourning for the unknowable country of her birth, tears which were never shed. The image of impeded pregnancy is a powerful image of Cixous’s position in Algeria, for after her father’s early death the family comes under a form of siege from their Arab neighbors, who throw the corpses of cats and dogs into the garden, and hurl stones at their terrified, howling dog. Cixous and her brother long to escape the situation—indeed, if the metaphor of pregnancy is extended one might say that it is their destiny to escape—yet the exit is blocked and escape thwarted, at least temporarily. Cixous herself acknowledges the influence of the image when she refers to the opening line of Inside, her first fictional text, in which the house, encircled and surrounded by fifty thousand, is shown to be an echo of the 50,000 indigenous people of her childhood, who lived fifty meters away but who only now appear explicitly in her writing. 44 The metaphor of pregnancy, of being both other and one within the same body, stretches to accommodate the state of being Jewish, French and Algerian, excluded and yet surrounded and unable to leave. For Cixous, then, Algeria is the perfect demonstration of the complexity and provisionality of otherness: The paradox of otherness is that, of course, at no moment in History is it tolerated or possible as such. The other is there only to be reappropriated, recaptured, and destroyed as other. Even the exclusion is not an exclusion. Algeria was not France, but it was “French.” 45

In Cardinal’s text, the narrator’s sense of being perceived as other is limited to her gender difference, which emerges only in specific circumstances such

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as when being gazed upon, bathing at the beach. At other times her perspective can be described as Western, as she demonstrates control and authority in her relationships with those around her. While she identifies with Algeria, her valorization of difference does not extend to the indigenous inhabitants who, as we have seen, remain distanced from the narrator. Although not comfortable with French norms, she is content to draw on them when necessary and it is clear that she has no wish to make her life in present-day Algeria. 46 In contrast, Cixous’s text demonstrates that her narrator sees herself and her family as different, caught between two opposing communities, both of which reject them. This becomes evident through a gradual exploration of the memories which have marked the narrator’s childhood, and which continue to haunt her as an adult. The unevenness of memory, which Maspero explored in compelling fashion in Le Figuier, has ensured that the narrator’s sense of the haunting past has coalesced around a number of everyday objects, which hold multiple associations with her life in Algeria and provide a gateway into remembered realities. Endowed with an uncanny resonance, they function as an emblem of the otherness represented by French Algeria but, unusually for Cixous’s often figurative language, they are also the material, embodied objects which are central to a child’s life. THE MATERIALITY OF MEMORY The first of Cixous’s material signs is “the Bicycle,” the children’s bike which the narrator and her brother long for as a means to explore and possess the Algeria which surrounds them but which remains out of reach. Here, Algeria itself is what remains unknown and unknowable while, at a later stage, the Arab Algerians are presented as unknowable to the narrator. “The Bicycle” does nothing to change this situation, initially because of its own continually deferred arrival. The longing for the bike is a longing for a transcendental signifier—an “absolute Object” 47—which the children believe will open to them the hitherto locked country. The longing becomes a messianic act of faith, a promise to be fulfilled. And when it finally arrives, it brings disappointment: for the brother, who feels symbolically castrated because his mother has bought a girl’s bike without imagining that this would trouble her son, and for the narrator, who loses the brother who has been her other self. The brother takes off on the bike; the narrator, scared by the hostility of the Arabs who surround her as she cycles, chooses to remain at home, encircled. A similarly disappointing episode follows the arrival of a puppy, a gift from the dying father to his children. Fips, the dog, becomes the embodiment of the rejection and suffering experienced by the narrator. Kept in a cage

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outside, he becomes the innocent victim, whom Cixous refers to as “Job taken hostage.” Like the narrator, who refers to him as her twin, he is caught between the warring sides. Hit by stones thrown by the surrounding Arabs, his howls bear witness to the double suffering: his own fate, caged by the family, and their fate too, surrounded and attacked on all sides. His predicament is a microcosm of the narrator’s wider experience of Algeria: In the Clos-Salembier . . . my heart howled in my cage. The Dog like me. I told myself if ever it opens I’ll flee. I knew neither courage nor hope. And the Dog like me . . . All of us were mad dogs, each against the other but we were dogs left free. The Dog, the Dog alone, prisoner. 48

Fips colludes in his own imprisonment, for each day he is briefly let out but chooses not to escape, voluntarily returning to his cage, hungry for the food which has been placed there. In the same way, the narrator describes how she and her brother are “crazed and ill with our need of Algeria,” 49 whilst at the same time she struggles vainly with leaving her painful situation: “I will depart, I will leave all of Algeria Clos-Salembier behind me, I will never come back, even in my imagination.” 50 For the whole family, the death of the father has turned Algiers into “the site of multiple and endless expulsions.” 51 Algeria haunts the narrator as a place of division, conflict and arbitrary otherness, its borders interrupted only occasionally by spectral gatekeepers like “the Bicycle” and “the Dog,” which allow the narrator access through memory. Until his death, the father acted as a gatekeeper for the family, facilitating passage between the inside and outside. He offers hospitality to two Arab hitchhikers who, taking him to be a Frenchman, accept his offer with astonishment. His presence as the local doctor maintains an uneasy peace between the communities, while after his death it is the gate itself (“le portail”) which becomes the boundary between groups, albeit a doorway which occasionally opens. It separates the narrator from her brother, just as “the Bicycle” also separated them by allowing the brother access to the outside world, and it separates them as Jews from the little Arab children outside. However, this is a boundary which is porous, at least for the male, as Jennifer Yee has pointed out, 52 and it allows the brother to pass through, so that the impossible gate which separates brother and sister becomes a division between the children who have bread, and those who are without. 53 A similar incident (re)occurs later in the text, when the narrator passes bread to a little Arab girl through the “open-closed gate.” 54 In the process of giving, the narrator becomes aware that her bread has become restitution: she is giving back bread that has been stolen from the Arabs who are the dispossessed owners of the land. The narrator’s fascination with her Arab neighbors, whose acceptance she longs for, haunts her recollections. In the later sections of the narrative,

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Cixous introduces the reader to the three Arab girls who begin attending the narrator’s school. Ostracized as the only Jew, the narrator is glad of the presence of other “outsiders” in the French school community, and longs to make friends with them. In her disappointment at being rejected by them also, she voices feelings of simultaneous longing for Algeria and its people, and inability to separate herself from it even after it has rejected her. Although the narrator is fascinated by the girls because, in the school setting, they represent the multitude of her “Algerias,” Cixous’s text shows her real interest in individual Algerians. Unlike Cardinal, for whom Algerians are “les Arabes” or “les Algériennes,” here Cixous gives their individual names, together with a recollection of the part played by one of them, Zohra Drif, in the independence and subsequent development of Algeria. Despite, or perhaps because of, the constant rejections, Cixous identifies completely with the Algerians; they play a crucial part in the construction of her own identity: “How could I be from a France that colonized an Algerian country when I knew that we ourselves, German Czechoslovak Hungarian Jews, were other Arabs.” 55 As a consequence of this she is condemned to endless and incomplete expulsions, a haunting condition which has no natural resolution or closure. This state of (not be)longing is what Cixous refers to with one of her many neologisms, as she says “I am inseparab. This is an unlivable relationship with oneself.” 56 While these passages make clear the segregation and exclusion experienced by the narrator in 1940s French Algeria, Cixous is careful not to suggest that the Jews were the sole affected group; instead, she is at pains to illustrate the shifting and ambivalent power relations at work in Algerian society, which oppress the Algerians economically even as the latter lay siege to the Jewish family’s house. She criticizes the way in which a system of multiple exclusions operates, affecting different groupings. The gate which is both border and opening illustrates Cixous’s impatience with boundaries, and her desire to penetrate the exclusionary categories which they contain so that the edges become blurred. This is evident in the “bisexuality” which she advocates in The Newly Born Woman, 57 and in the “us” of the gate, which becomes transferable, signifying both the brother and sister, and the Jewish and Arab children. Similarly, in her identification with Fips the dog, which is explored further in her essay “Stigmata or Job the Dog,” 58 she challenges the boundaries between the human and the animal. In doing so she again blurs the divide between subject and other for, as she stated explicitly in an interview, “for me, there is no separation, no strict separation between animals and human beings.” 59 Here, as in all of her work, she seems to be reaching beyond, over and through the barriers which separate sameness and difference, an experience of division which has haunted her since she first encountered it in Algeria.

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CIXOUS: LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND THE IRRESOLVABLE IMPASSE OF ALGERIA Much of Reveries of the Wild Woman concerns the revisiting through literature of the childhood experiences of Algeria which have marked and haunted Cixous’s adult life. However, despite the recurrent motif of incomplete expulsion, and unlike the static relation present in Cardinal’s work, in this complex text Cixous also reverses the process of writing memories, and explores the constructive role which literature can play in imaginatively recovering and structuring memories of the past, thus transforming haunting from a sterile state which threatens to trap the narrator in cycles of the past, into an enabling mode of representation. The potency of language and writing is present as a fundamental element throughout Cixous’s work, manifesting itself at an early stage in response to the exclusion which she experienced as an Algerian Jew. Literature offered an alternative to the sterile religious and ethnic categories, and on leaving Algeria for France, she assumed a position beyond boundaries: “I adopted an imaginary nationality, which is literary nationality.” 60 Not only literature, but language itself offered her a means of escape from Algeria. Born into a polylingual family, Cixous found herself in an extraordinary relationship with language: We played at languages in our house, my parents passed with pleasure and deftness from one language to the other, the two of them, one from French the other from German, jumping through Spanish and English, one with a bit of Arabic and the other with a bit of Hebrew. . . . That translinguistic and loving sport sheltered me from all obligations or vague desire of obedience (I did not think that French was my mother tongue, it was a language in which my father taught me) to one mother-father tongue. 61

The linguistic ability gifted to her by her parents therefore released her from the conventions which bind monolingual speakers to a collective identity. Jacques Derrida has written about his personal experience of the difficulties in speaking a language which is alienated by association with a colonizing power, 62 although, as Jane Hiddleston points out, the experience of alienation extends to each of us: “Derrida describes the metaphysical alienation experienced by all individuals in relation to language per se. Alienation and lack are not symptoms of a lost wholeness, but are constitutive of all language and culture.” 63 Cixous echoes Derrida’s linguistic alienation when she says that although German was ostensibly her mother tongue, it was “forever distanced from the mouth of my conscience by the Nazi episode.” 64 Fortunate enough to have a choice of languages in which to write, she is not compelled to use a language from which she feels alienated. However, seeing herself as

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“not French,” she always remains at a certain distance from French, the language in which she has chosen to write. Comparing her situation to that of Derrida, she says, I recognize his foreign relationship to the French language. I also have a foreign relationship to the French language. Not for the same reasons; but from the start it was there. He has himself made the portrait of his own foreignness. My foreignness is all-powerful in me. When “I speak,” it is always at least “we,” the language and I in it, with it, and it in me who speak. 65

Cixous here speaks as if language is a separate entity with which she has an intimate relationship. Indeed, it is arguable that the distance that she experiences between herself and the French language, which is a space of difference, is what allows otherness and creativity to enter her work, and so enables her to write. The exploration of Cixous’s relationship with the French language and its ability to welcome the haunting experiences of division is, on one level, the subject of Reveries. Commenting on the capriciousness of the French State, which has both given and retracted unlooked-for French citizenship to its Algerian Jewish subjects, she celebrates her experience of the French language: “The stormy, intermittent hospitality of the State and of the Nation. But the infinite hospitality of the language.” 66 Since, as Derek Attridge says, hospitality implies a willingness to accept the other into the domain of the host, and even to change that domain in order to accommodate the other, the French language, best known for the rigidity of the Académie française, would not appear to be the epitome of linguistic hospitality. 67 However, Cixous, perhaps more than any other writer in this study, pushes at the limits of the hospitality offered by language and accepted by the writer leading, as a consequence, to a call for a corresponding depth of readerly hospitality. In one sense, therefore, the text is the exploration of the hospitality offered by literary writing in the service of communicating the ghostly otherness of French Algeria. In another sense, it is an instance of what for Derrida is the ethical imperative of learning to live with our ghosts, of recognizing that the spectral continues to live, and of offering them welcome out of a concern for justice. In her writing, Cixous offers a site of recognition for the ghosts whose otherness has haunted her in both form—the spectral—and content— the difference associated with Algeria—throughout her life. LINGUISTIC HOSPITALITY AND LITERARY SPECTERS The text opens with the narrator’s account of receiving inspiration for a new novel, as she lies awake in the middle of the night. Knowing that the inspira-

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tion, which she calls “the Comer” (“le Venant”), will soon pass, she quickly begins to write as words come to her. Her term for this mysterious inspiration is reminiscent of Derek Attridge’s account of the process of literary creation, which acknowledges the existence of something outside of our normal experience: “Motivated by some obscure drive, I sense that I am pushing at the limits of what I have hitherto been able to think.” 68 However, in the morning, of the five pages hurriedly written, only half of the first page remains, reproduced for us in italics. It speaks of her childhood longing for Algeria, which was never realized, and of how memory—and the spectral presence of “the Comer”—now permits, even obliges, her to return to Algeria for the first time. The search for the pages parallels her fruitless search for Algeria, and their loss reproduces the old aching loss of her country when she left, so that she relives her past: “This is exactly what used to happen with Algeria, when I was living there: I had it, I’d got a grip on it—I didn’t have it any longer, I’d never had it, I’d never held it in my arms.” 69 Algeria is ghostly, intangible and elusive; nonetheless the spectral presence of “the Comer,” and what she calls the “malgérie” of the loss it provokes is the occasion for her to revisit the impossibilities of life in Algeria in writing. The spirit of writerly inspiration acts as a gateway into the ghostly, vanished otherness of French Algeria. Cixous hints at this in The Newly Born Woman when she speaks of writing as a gateway which, unlike the gates in Algeria, is particularly accessible to women: I will say: today writing is woman’s. That is not a provocation, it means that woman admits there is an other. . . . It is much harder for man to let the other come through him. Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place, of the other that I am and am not. 70 Writing is working; being worked; questioning (in) the between (letting oneself be questioned) of same and of other without which nothing lives. 71 How could the woman, who has experienced the not-me within me, not have a particular relation to the written ? 72

In this Cixous suggests that writing, like the experience of pregnancy, is an encounter with otherness. Her description of the process of writing is one of working and being worked upon by the slippage between same and other, and of the resulting possible transformations. Since both her writing project and the image of pregnancy are explicitly linked to her experiences of Algeria, writing, then, would seem to be a wholly appropriate passageway through which to engage with the conflicted otherness of Algeria. The narrator describes the process of beginning to write as the arrival of an expected and hoped-for guest. The patience of the expectant writer is an echo of the child-narrator’s experience of waiting for “the Bicycle,” and for

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the father who never comes. The image of the father as the Messiah, the Christ-figure whose promised return has not (yet) materialized is at once repeated and altered here, for “the Comer” is a type of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost of the Christ, received by the narrator as the Eucharist: Once the absolute viaticum had been received I ventured to switch on the light, and as though I held the Host to disperse the Comer’s flesh and blood through my body in my mouth, in my soul’s mouth and my hand’s, and on my night tongue, as I let it dissolve, in the trace of that initial seeding, I had scrawled four big, single-spaced pages. 73

From the opening of the text, then, the Jewish Cixous chooses to introduce the notion of the hospitality offered by writing as the reciprocal welcoming of ghostly otherness figured in the Christian sacrament. As Mairéad Hanrahan points out, The hospitable aspect of writing is reinforced by the fact that communion does not pass without evoking the breaking of bread, the scene of hospitality par excellence. . . . The narrator “receives” the host at once as a gift and as a host, a guest. 74

Through the spectral presence of the Comer, the hospitality of writing enables Cixous’s narrator to offer a welcome to the ghosts of her Algerian childhood. She goes on to draw parallels between the hospitality shown by writing, and by the French language in particular, and by Algeria and its inhabitants. The degree of hospitality offered is in inverse proportion to the experience of boundaries, with her Jewish parents, who have experienced the inhospitableness of the Vichy regime, extending the most extravagant welcome. Her father’s “unexpected hospitality” stems from the fact that he consciously overlooks Algeria’s identity categories, something that the narrator attributes to his own varied origins. His hospitality is shared by the narrator’s mother, the German-speaking Jew who refuses national labels, and who speaks of doors wide and welcoming. Her experience of displacement has taught her to be suspicious of roots and of her children’s desire for them, and her vision of hospitality is radical: she refuses to visit Jews who might welcome her simply for her Jewishness. But the foreignness, the strangeness, which is responsible for her own proffered hospitality creates in her Algerian neighbours a suspicion of the different. She becomes the “uninvited guest,” and consequently her children are “uninvited by association.” 75 The memory of welcome withdrawn and refused is an experience which Cixous is able to exorcise through the presence of the Comer, who makes possible a literary space in which to accommodate the ghosts which have haunted her since childhood.

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HAUNTING CONFLICTS (UN)RESOLVED IN LANGUAGE In creating a literary welcome for the ghostly traces of the conflicts which she experienced in Algeria, Cixous’s narrator begins to push linguistically at the boundaries which constricted her life there. The long, fluid sentences allow Cixous to convey the process of memory as it develops out of recollections of key childhood objects. She plays with language to find new ways to represent the slippery, often contradictory, aspects of life. As Owen Heathcote says, “Cixous’s language does not create in order to register change but in order to articulate unresolvable conflicts, paradoxes and divided allegiances.” 76 The paradoxical is present in the desire to belong whilst being held at a distance, which produces an unlivable relationship with oneself, with associated neologisms (“séparéunir”; “inséparable”); the conditional hospitality often withdrawn (“invitée-évitée”; “ininvités”); and the recovered memory of undivided childhood enthusiasm (“Yadibonformage”; “yadlavachkiri”). Through her syntax she attacks the “open-closed gate” which separates “us the children with two loaves and us the children without loaves” and imposes socio-cultural separation on childhood unities. Her success in this is unlooked for, as Yee says, The freedom of linguistic play (liberating or unlocking meaning) thus offsets the locked gates/doors that exclude the narrator-as-child from the various spaces of her childhood and releases her fiction from the narrowed space that threatened to imprison it in this piece of writing. 77

As the narrator says, language is the vehicle (or the doorway) which takes her where she wants to go. 78 And while Algeria, the land of borders and boundaries, never offers her the hospitality she craves, it is nonetheless the ghost of colonial Algérie française that inspires the writing which in the end enables her to overcome those boundaries. Her writing enables her to manifest the persistent specter which is the irresolvable impasse of Algeria’s difference, with its borders and encirclements, while at the same time her creative use of language enables her to push beyond the boundaries into a space of linguistic otherness which expresses the stalemated conflict, yet is beyond it. The hospitality of the French language gives her the freedom to return to Algeria and in doing so, enables her to overcome the incomplete and multiple expulsions of her childhood and to make peace with the ghosts of her past. As a writer who is generally considered to be French, writing about her origins which were once French but are no longer, Cixous is therefore engaged, through her use of both subject matter and language, in laying to rest the conflicts of the past. In the process she de-centers France, exploring the hospitality of the French language to produce a deterritorialized version of French which demonstrates that she, who is seen as French, is in fact the

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product of a hybrid country. In moving beyond the sterile conflicts of the colonial years, through the impulsions of the returning ghost of Algeria, Cixous’s narrator demonstrates that, under certain circumstances, haunting can prove to be productive and can be harnessed in the service of new and dynamic models of cultural relations. Through her text, Cixous calls the reader to an encounter with the ghosts of the past, with the invitation to engage in the experience of the otherness of what was once part of France and which continues to haunt the Fifth Republic. By presenting the conflicts which constitute the irresolvable impasse of Algeria’s difference, the text invites the reader to an encounter with colonial ghosts which would allow the transformation of existing assumptions about colonial French Algeria. The dominant norms of thought which surround Algeria, and which project it either as part of the old, colonial self, the conquered territory fully assimilated into the French Republic or, more commonly, as the essence of otherness which rejected assimilation in the most bitter and humiliating circumstances, are fundamentally called into question. Instead, the reader encounters a complex and haunting site of multiple differences structured around the identities of various communities, which resist the imposition of totalizing republican categories. In experiencing these manifestations of otherness through Cixous’s linguistic inventiveness, the reader is invited to make space in which to accommodate the inhabitual forms of difference which haunt Hexagonal discourses, and to accept the notion of “Algérie française” and, by extension the French Republic, as a place of conflicted and irresolvable hybridity. The notion of a hybrid Algeria poses a challenge to republican norms, since in Cixous’s recollections Algeria still forms a part of the French Republic. Moreover, the conflicts which she experienced in Algeria, which were the consequence of this irresolvable hybridity, have haunted the development of her writings since leaving Algeria, writings which have been influential throughout the French academy. As this study shows, ghostly traces of the same conflicts, which are the legacy of France’s Algerian past, continue to operate today. By its very nature, literary writing offers an appropriate medium for the exploration of difference, since it remains permanently open to re-interpretation. Like the impasse of Algeria and the ontology of the ghost, it never offers a definitive answer. It is in this sense that Cixous agrees with Tsvetayeva’s statement that “all poets are Jews”: For Tsvetayeva, all indications are that something of a Jew is in every poet or that every poet is Jewish. The point has nothing to do with religion but with what it means poetically “to be Jewish.” She suggests that we are better off as wandering Jews, belonging where we cannot belong. 79

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Poets can be considered as wandering Jews to the extent that their writing never arrives at a definitive meaning, since poetic writing is open to multiple interpretations. The poet’s relationship to writing is analogous with Cixous’s relationship to Algeria, in the sense that there is never a definitive arrival, if we recall the opening sentence of Reveries: “The whole time I was living in Algeria I would dream of one day arriving in Algeria.” 80 This experience of Algeria is the experience of messianicity; indeed, as Cixous says, the very word “messiance” comes to her from Algeria. 81 Similarly, for Cixous, the experience of writing is a ghostly process of deferral, moving towards a point of arrival which is never attained, an experience which I argue stems directly from her Algerian past. In Reveries of the Wild Woman, Cixous pushes at the conventional limits of the French language, splitting it apart and insisting that the difference which operated in Algeria still has a place within contemporary French, and therefore contemporary France. Her text challenges the reader to make space for ghostly encounters open to new and hybrid forms of otherness which escape totalizing categories, and to accommodate this difference with a respect which resists the urge to assimilate. In contrast, Cardinal’s response to the experience of being haunted by Algeria’s conflicts is to become detached from the varied communities which surround her, succumbing instead to an obsessive and haunting focus on the country itself which, while offering nurture to her childhood trauma, is ultimately sterile because it has nothing to offer her psychic development. Her narrator’s narcissism means that she retains a conventional subjectivity which, although binarized in complex ways, remains centered on her self, and consequently her writing is not open to the creative potential of the otherness which surrounds her. Cixous’s writing, however, is inflected by and expresses the haunting paradigm of her experience in Algeria. Whilst her text is haunted by pre-independence Algeria, her linguistic practices have implications for notions of identity, sameness and difference within the French Republic at the time her text was published in 2000. What initially appears to be a text about history and memory, through the reader’s engagement with its linguistic inventiveness, is therefore shown to have destabilizing consequences for French conceptions of the Republic. NOTES 1. Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” 3. 2. Cixous left Algeria to study in Paris in 1955. After teaching in French lycées in Salonika, Lisbon and Vienna, Cardinal left Algeria definitively in 1958. In 1984 she left France for Canada, where she became a Canadian citizen. 3. Lucille Cairns omits it from her study of Cardinal’s writing on the basis that “[it] is not a novel but a travel-journal . . . its concerns are prominently political rather than artistic, and my

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main interest in this study is in Cardinal the novelist.” Lucille Cairns, Marie Cardinal: Motherhood and Creativity (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992), 17. 4. Marie Cardinal, Au Pays de mes racines (Paris: Grasset, 1980), 190–91. All translations are mine. Quotations from the original French are given in endnotes. 5. Cardinal, Au Pays, 13. (Cette terre était à moi, c’était chez moi, depuis toujours.) 6. Cardinal, Au Pays, 88. 7. Marie Cardinal, Les Mots pour le dire (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993 [1975]). 8. Cardinal, Au Pays, 181. (Je me suis accrochée à ce que j’ai pu, à la ville, au ciel, à la mer, au Djurdjura. Je me suis agrippée à eux, ils sont devenus ma mère et je les ai aimés comme j’aurais voulu l’aimer, elle.) 9. Cardinal, Au Pays, 161. (Ce matin, le bruit des vagues. Elles entrent dans mon berceau comme des nourrices pleines de lait. . . . Bercez-moi encore, j’ai besoin de vos seins lourds, de votre rengaine murmurée, de votre sérénité. Je ne me lasserai jamais d’être bercée par vous). 10. Cardinal, Au Pays, 87–88. (Impuissance et puissance du premier grain de vie. Pour moi c’est en Algérie que ça se passe. Non parce que je suis née là—ma naissance n’a pas d’importance—mais parce que les rythmes de l’univers qui sont communs à tous les humains sont entrés en moi là, c’est là que je les ai connus.) 11. Cardinal, Au Pays, 14. (La France créait la différence en nous haussant, puisque tout ce qui venait d’elle était “meilleur.”) 12. Cardinal, Au Pays, 23 (victime et bourreau à la fois). 13. Cardinal, Au Pays, 153. (Je n’ai rien à me faire pardonner. Bien que pied noir, je n’ai jamais été pour l’Algérie française. Dès mon enfance j’ai été en conflit avec ma famille pour des raisons personnelles d’abord, ensuite ces raisons sont devenues politiques.) 14. Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb, 154; Lucille Cairns, “Roots and Alienation in Marie Cardinal’s Au Pays de mes racines,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29 (1993): 346–358 (347). 15. Cardinal, Au Pays, 132 (un peuple jouir d’être un peuple). 16. Cardinal, Au Pays, 167 (prêt à brander ses fourches et à lever ses poings). 17. Assia Djebar, La Femme sans sépulture (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), p. 214. 18. Cardinal, Au Pays, 56 (touristes dans notre propre ville). 19. Woodhull, Transformations of the Maghreb, 166. 20. Cardinal, Au Pays, 42–43. (Oui, je l’avoue, c’est ce qu’il y a en moi d’archaïque que je recherche et j’ai l’impression que c’est par la terre elle-même que je l’aborderai, pas par les gens. Les gens portent une culture qui embrouille l’archaïsme; je le voudrais brut.) 21. Marie-Paule Ha, “Outre-mer/Autre mère: Cardinal and Algeria,” Romance Notes 36 (1996): 315–23 (321), n. 5. 22. Cardinal, Au Pays, 52. (L’image de la Mauresque qui chemine, chargée de ballots, au côté de l’homme somnolent sur son âne est une image odieuse, absolument odieuse. Mais cette femme-là, l’Occident ne la connaît pas, ni cet homme, ni cet âne, ni même ces ballots. . . . Il faut laisser les femmes arabes déposer leurs ballots et dire: “Je ne marche plus.”) 23. Assia Djebar, Ces Voix qui m’assiègent: En marge de ma francophonie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), 28. (Aussi, une écriture veritable et au féminin, dans les pays musulmans de ce prochain XXIe siècle, ne pourra s’approfondir et se developer qu’à partir du corps libéré (ou en train de se libérer) de la femme.) 24. Cairns, “Roots and Alienation,” 355. 25. Woodhull, Transformations of the Maghreb, 162, emphasis in original. 26. Cardinal, Au Pays, 184. (La Révolution Permanente: quels mots! Mais ils ont déjà été récupérés, piégés, emprisonnés, par l’habituel aveuglement et l’habituelle avidité des pouvoirs. Pourquoi ne pas en trouver d’autres?) 27. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996 [1975]), 78. 28. Freud, “On Narcissism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 73–102 (98). 29. Emma Webb, “Introduction,” in Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives, ed. Emma Webb, Modern French Identities 43 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 13–30 (17).

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30. See Colette Trout’s analysis of the obituaries which followed Cardinal’s death in 2001. Colette Trout, “Marie Cardinal’s Legacy: Quels mots pour la dire?” in Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives, 227–54 (227). 31. Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman. On p. 92 Cixous states: “At the present time, defining a feminine practice of writing is impossible with an impossibility that will continue; for this practice will never be able to be theorized, enclosed, coded, which does not mean it does not exist. But it will always exceed the discourse governing the phallocentric system.” 32. In contrast, for Cardinal the gender of writing occurs at the level of the reader, whose reception and interpretation of language varies with the gender of the author. She cites the example of the word “table,” arguing that if a woman writes “there was a table in the room” then “one reads this table as if it were spread, clean, useful, waxed, adorned with flowers or dusty.” On the other hand, if the words are written by a man, “one reads this table as if it were made of wood or some other material, the work of a craftsman or laborer, the product of work, the place where you go to sit and eat or talk.” Marie Cardinal, In Other Words, trans. Amy Cooper (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995 [1977]), 70. 33. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Routledge, 2002), 121. 34. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 6. 35. As Verena Andermatt Conley observes, commenting on Cixous’s treatment of the torture of Steve Biko, the black African tortured by the South African government, “While questioning the limits of writing and reading, the reader cannot fail to notice that she ends up writing about herself.” Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 109. 36. Ian Blyth and Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), 113. 37. Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 70 38. Cardinal, Au Pays, 99 (la mort, l’amour, le travail, l’argent, le hasard sont, dans ma tête, algériens). 39. Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 70. The original French refers to “l’algérifrançaise,” probably a reference to French Algeria rather than to “an Algerian French girl.” 40. Hélène Cixous, “My Algeriance, in Other Words: To Depart Not to Arrive from Algeria,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 2005 [1997]), 204–34. 41. Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Lifewriting (London: Routledge, 1997 [1994]), 204. Cixous’s German family lived in Strasbourg in 1918, where they were granted French nationality. They preserved this despite moving back to Germany; their French nationality saved them from Nazi persecution in 1938, but in 1940 France withdrew French citizenship from its Jews in Algeria, along with the right to go to school, and the right for Cixous’s father to practice medicine. 42. Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre. 43. Hélène Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006 [2000]), 51–52. 44. Hélène Cixous, Inside, trans. Carol Barko (New York: Schocken Books, 1986 [1969]), 11. 45. Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 71. 46. Cardinal, Au Pays, 159. 47. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 14. 48. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 45. 49. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 32. 50. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 45. 51. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 35. 52. Jennifer Yee, “The Colonial Outsider: ‘Malgérie’ in Hélène Cixous’s Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 20, no. 2 (2001): 189–200 (194). 53. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 18. 54. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 65.

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55. Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous, Rootprints, 204. 56. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 24, emphasis in original. 57. Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 85. 58. Hélène Cixous, “Stigmata or Job the Dog,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 2005 [2001]), 243–261. 59. Ian Blyth and Susan Sellers, “English Language Interview with Hélène Cixous, June 2002,” in Blyth and Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Live Theory, 109, emphasis in original. 60. Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous, Rootprints, 204. Cixous’s comment is reminiscent of the similarly multilingual J.M.G. Le Clézio’s assertion that “The French language is perhaps my real country,” in the article of the same title (La langue française est peut-être mon véritable pays). 61. Hélène Cixous, “My Algeriance,” in Stigmata, 225. 62. Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre. 63. Jane Hiddleston, “Derrida, Autobiography and Postcoloniality,” French Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2005): 291–304 (299). 64. Cixous, “My Algeriance,” in Stigmata, 226. 65. Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous, Rootprints, 84. 66. Cixous, “My Algeriance,” in Stigmata, 207. 67. See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 152, n. 25. 68. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 18. 69. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 5. 70. Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 85–86. 71. Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 86. 72. Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 90. 73. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 3. 74. Mairéad Hanrahan, “Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage ou le temps de l’hospitalité,” Expressions maghrébines 2, no. 2 (2003): 55–69 (66). (L’aspect hospitalier de l’écriture est renforcé par le fait que la communion ne va pas sans évoquer le partage du pain, la scène d’hospitalité par excellence. . . . La narratrice “reçoit” l’hostie à la fois comme un don et comme un hôte, un invité.) 75. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 63. 76. Owen Heathcote, “The Personal and Political: Algeria, Violence, Gender and Writing in Marie Cardinal, Hélène Cixous and Assia Djebar,” in Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives, 53–70 (60). 77. Yee, “The Colonial Outsider,” 199. 78. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 12. 79. Hélène Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva, ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 150. Abridged transcripts of seminars at the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines, 1982–84. 80. Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 3. 81. Cixous, “My Algeriance,” in Stigmata, 227.

Chapter Four

Abjection: The Stranger Within in Prévost and Bouraoui

With the establishment of nation-states we come to the only modern, acceptable, and clear definition of foreignness: the foreigner is the one who does not belong to the state in which we are, the one who does not have the same nationality. 1

As the wartime experiences of life under Vichy demonstrated to Cixous’s Jewish family, the question of nationality is a vexed and arbitrary one. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva analyses France’s historical relationship with the foreigner, and asks why the foreigner within the nation’s borders provokes such anxiety. Her definition, which rests on the legal status of nationality, carries an ontological edge in its choice of vocabulary, for “the state in which we are” is suggestive of the notion that individuals who do not share our nationality are in some metaphysical sense different from us. The immigrant whose presence perturbs, whose form is different from ours because his nationality is different is reminiscent of the immigrant as embodied ghost hinted at by Le Clézio, Bona, and Kettane. The notion that an individual can function as metaphorical specter because their “strange” or “foreign” presence represents the unwelcome return of the colonial past is also present in the two novels which feature in this chapter: Daniel Prévost’s Le Passé sous silence (1998) and Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (Tomboy) (2007 [2000]). However, as Sam Haigh reminds us, the issues which surround the figure of the stranger exceed questions of nationality. 2 Since departmentalization in 1946, the French Caribbean has produced French citizens living on French soil, but as Haigh argues, this does not prevent the Antillean migrants’ ethnic difference from being experienced by the (white) Franco-French individual 99

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as either a threat, or as proof—as long as the Antillean continues to behave as the model colonial subject—of France’s superior civilization and hospitality. Similarly, Kristeva’s definition neglects the reality that the most bitterly contested ground in recent debate is not immigration per se but concerns those born in France to parents who were once French but are no longer. 3 The second- and third-generation descendants of North African immigrants disturb conventional conceptions of “Frenchness”: they hold French citizenship, but because their origins are characterised by a liminality which troubles the categorization of identity—they come from a part of the Republic which is no longer France—they are perceived as a threat by many in the Hexagon. Their presence is an unwelcome reminder of the bitterness and humiliation of a period which the Republic has struggled to forget; because they serve to embody the colonial past, they are rejected by sections of the majority population. Charef’s harkis demonstrated painfully that the acquisition of citizenship has proved no defence against racism for, as Ezra points out, the disappearance of such distinctions between groups has historically been feared, resulting in a corresponding magnification of differences between cultures. The fear of difference has haunted the Republic as a consequence of its policy of assimilation, and that fear finds its object most clearly in individuals whose presence serves as a reminder of the contradictions and failures of the past. The Beur subject, then, is one who is indistinguishable before the law, who enjoys the advantages of citizenship, and who therefore can be seen to present a more insidious threat which haunts the integrity of the nation because the characteristics of foreignness have been internalized. The haunting relationship with the foreign is now a relationship between France’s body politic and its constituent parts. This chapter explores the experiences of two individuals who are themselves haunted by the violence of the past and its impact on the formation of their subjectivity, but who also struggle with the ghosts that haunt wider society, and which make them the target of the majority community’s fear and dread. As individuals with mixed Franco-Algerian heritage, they share many of the characteristics of the Beur generation which, located at a complex intersection of foreign origins and French education, may be perceived as posing a perceived challenge to a unified Republican identity through the production of a distinctive, primarily urban, community that draws on a number of cultural sources. However, the success of Beur culture in achieving mainstream recognition, realized through a combination of cultural production and political campaigns, has effectively transformed it into another established, even fixed, identity which, although far from unified, is not more heterogeneous than other categories. Once labeled in this way foreignness can be contained; it ceases to haunt, and becomes domesticated and familiar. In contrast, those with mixed heritage escape easy definition and so may be perceived potentially as posing a more insidious threat, bringing about the

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return of the past in ways which cannot be controlled. As the children of a French mother and Algerian father, the narrators of Daniel Prévost’s Le Passé sous silence and Nina Bouraoui’s Tomboy inevitably face complex questions of identity in coming to terms with their place within French society. Their interstitial position as both French and foreign produces a series of conflicts which trouble both the individual subject, haunted by the internalized memories of the violent past, and the wider society, which incorporates and is haunted by the history which they represent. Their situation invites an application of Kristeva’s work which, read in conjunction with the strategies undertaken in the novels, illuminates the anxiety which characterizes our relationship with the foreign, and proposes some possible approaches in coming to terms with the haunting encounters which mark the postcolonial. THE UNCANNY In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva theorizes the position of the foreigner in the Western tradition, and questions why he should be perceived as the source of anxiety. She argues that through psychoanalysis we can become aware of and reconciled to our own strangeness, which inhabits us through our unconscious, and so can come to acknowledge that in some sense we are all foreigners. Psychoanalysis therefore enables us to embark on a journey towards what she calls an “ethics of respect for the irreconcilable,” a notion not dissimilar from Derrida’s call to grant ghosts the right to hospitable welcome. 4 While her theorizing does not take in questions of haunting per se, Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach focuses in detail on the functions and effects of repression which, as we saw from the discussion of Freud in the introduction, may be reminiscent of the experience of haunting. It is for this reason that her theories may be applied to the haunting effects provoked by the Franco-Algerian “foreigner.” Indeed, central to Kristeva’s argument is Freud’s notion of the Unheimlich. Freud uses this term to show that the feelings of strangeness and dread which accompany the presence of the foreigner, and which bear a strong resemblance to the vocabulary of haunting, do not result from the threat of a fundamental difference. Rather, the term has its roots in the term “heimlich” (homely): “The frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs . . . this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only by the process of repression.” 5 The emphasis on recurrence, and the notion that the uncanny is an unknown form of something familiar are immediately suggestive of the returning specters of the past. However, whereas Freud originally conceived of the Unheimlich as the re-

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turn of the repressed within the individual psyche, Kristeva ascribes it to the reaction of a collective when faced with the stranger within the national borders, thereby drawing parallels between the individual and the collective. Although Kristeva’s choice of the term “uncanny” to describe the reaction to the stranger’s presence initially seems unexpected, Sara Ahmed suggests that an economy of recognition operates around our relationship to the stranger: the stranger is the one whom we have always already encountered, so that “we recognize somebody as a stranger, rather than simply failing to recognize them.” 6 A similar economy operates around the figure of the ghost, whose ontological existence escapes conventional categories, but whom nonetheless we are able to recognize. Recognition of the stranger appears to operate both as a means of maintaining distance between subject and other, and of neutralizing the threat that he might pose by placing him in a familiar, “known” category. Most commonly this is a temporary resolution, acceptable in the absence of a more permanent solution which Kristeva says has historically taken the form either of the destruction of the foreigner, or of his assimilation into the fraternities of the “wise,” the “just,” or the “native.” 7 The foreigner is perceived as a threat, not only to the individual citizen, but to the integrity and identity of the body politic, hence the need to neutralize his foreignness. As Noëlle McAfee observes, Kristeva is not discussing xenophobia—fear of foreigners, or even of foreignness—as much as a dread of foreignness. 8 Unlike fear, anxiety provoked by the foreigner is indeterminate; it has no object. The suggestion that the foreigner provokes a state of dread unrelated to his individual characteristics provides some explanation for the violence of the reaction which is often directed towards the foreigner, the exile or the immigrant. Such a reaction may seem disproportionate to the threat posed, given the infinitely greater violence which the “host” society is capable of directing towards the foreigner, which indicates that unconscious drives are at work. Moreover, Kristeva’s description of the foreigner as “in addition” significantly aids our understanding of the source of this dread, 9 as she returns to questions about the constitution of the national community, which Benedict Anderson argues is based on an imagined, shared identification. 10 But while Anderson focuses on the features of nationalism which unite individuals, Kristeva is interested in what happens when the unity of the nation-state breaks down, where the haunting presence of the foreigner creates a disturbance within the national unity. Slavoj Žižek touches on similar issues when he argues that the element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification, for “the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship towards a Thing, towards Enjoyment incarnated. This relationship toward the Thing, struc-

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tured by means of fantasies, is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our ‘way of life’ presented by the Other.” 11 The foreigner therefore embodies the excess of the Thing, that which escapes and which creates the dread of “the theft of enjoyment,” as Žižek refers to it: We always impute to the “other” an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the “excess” that pertains to this way; the smell of “their” food, “their” noisy songs and dances, “their” strange manners, “their” attitude to work (…) The hatred of the Other is the hatred of our own excess of enjoyment. 12

Žižek’s reference is to Jacques Chirac’s 1991 speech on “le bruit et l’odeur” (the noise and smell) experienced by French workers living in proximity to “foreign” families, an infamous address indicating the extent to which the scapegoating of the foreigner has become accepted within official French discourse. The foreigner’s difference represents an excess which has been projected out of the national Thing, but which may return to threaten the boundaries which constitute identity in the form of the nation’s enjoyment. The mechanism of this return of the repressed is similar to the functioning of the uncanny, albeit on a more collective scale, as Ewa Ziarek argues: “Perpetually threatened by the irruption of the irreducible difference within the imagined communal unity, the national bond is inseparable from the negativity of the uncanny.” 13 However, this imagined unity is problematized by the arbitrary nature of nationality which is the determining criterion in Kristeva’s definition of the foreigner, particularly in light of the pied noir argument that Algeria was not a colony but rather an integral part of Greater France. However, although the land was assimilated into the territory of metropolitan France in 1848, its inhabitants occupied a more ambiguous position. Unlike the residents of France’s Antillean colonies, and their pied noir neighbors, the vast majority of Arabs and Berbers of colonial Algeria were denied French citizenship, being classed instead as French subjects. 14 The provisional status of the migrant population which arrived in France after World War II was further demonstrated in 1962, when the advent of Algerian independence brought about the category reversal of Français musulmans resident in the Hexagon, to foreign Algériens. The historical specificity of the Algerian case therefore means that its people, who have been both “French” and “foreign,” provoke a reaction which is different from that of people of other nationalities in France. This is in part because their presence serves to stir up unwelcome memories of the bloody history between Algeria and France, and in part because, as a result of immigration, those people who have been French, and

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then foreign, now have children who are French. When she speaks of the foreigner “whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify,” Kristeva might therefore be referencing the reactions of many white French to their fellow citizens: Strange indeed is the encounter with the other. . . . Also strange is the experience of the abyss separating me from the other who shocks me—I do not even perceive him, perhaps he crushes me because I negate him. Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container, the memory of experiences when I had been abandoned overwhelm me, I lose my composure, I feel “lost,” “indistinct,” “hazy.” 15

The threat posed by the uncanniness of the foreigner to those borders which constitute identity is commonly seen in terms of national boundaries. However, here Kristeva figures the challenge in individual terms, where the boundaries which become blurred are those which maintain individual identity. THE ABJECT The formulation of the foreigner’s challenge to individual identity is reminiscent of Kristeva’s earlier work on the abject, which considers the process by which the self is constituted through differentiation from the mother’s body, which the child comes to find both fascinating and horrifying. 16 As the first stage in subject formation, the mother’s body is not yet an object for the child but, as an abject, it is something opposed to the child’s “I.” 17 This first experience of separation, then, involves the abjection of self: “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.” 18 The abject is therefore intimately linked to the maternal, and to the process of identity formation and maintenance. While this occurs at the level of individual subjectivity, by drawing on Mary Douglas and her work on defilement and social ritual, Kristeva argues that the process can also operate at a collective level. 19 Defilement, particularly that issuing from the feminine (menstrual blood), indicates the danger emanating from within social and sexual identity. As a recurring trigger of abjection, it must be continually contained and kept at a distance. The abject therefore shares certain characteristics with the uncanny, in that it is repressed only to recur periodically when triggered by some external stimulus. Kristeva describes the effect of its return in terms similar to that of the uncanny: “A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome.” 20 Given the significance of the maternal

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for the abject, it is also notable that Freud connects the Unheimlich to the maternal in the form of the uncanny strangeness experienced by men faced with the female genitals; according to Freud, this is because “this unheimlich place . . . is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.” 21 However, in defining the abject Kristeva is clear that the two terms cannot be conflated: “Essentially different from ‘uncanniness,’ more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory.” 22 As we shall see, the situation which arises when individuals find themselves unable to “recognize their kin,” which Kristeva refers to as abjection, is exactly that endured by individuals of mixed parentage, and by their families. Eligible for dual nationality, they are far from the foreigners whom Kristeva has in mind in Strangers to Ourselves, yet they struggle with the boundaries which constitute identity on both an individual and collective basis. The connection between abjection, and the boundaries of individual and collective identity is explored by Norma Claire Moruzzi: Kristeva discusses the privately embodied subject’s relation with its own borders and excess. The subject abjects itself, and discovers itself in its own abjection; historically, the nation-state establishes itself through the convulsions of a body politic which rejects those parts of itself, defined as other or excess, whose rejected alterity then engenders the consolidation of a national identity. 23

Positing a relationship between the foreigner and the abject enables us to look at the effects of abjection on the individual who embodies the excess of the (Algerian) foreigner, but within the citizenship of the (French) nation. It draws on Kristeva’s notion of the foreigner as one who has lost or been separated from his mother. This separation comes about because, on one level, the individual has suffered the loss of mother, of motherland, and often of mother tongue, and so endures the consequences of abjection on a personal level. On another level, however, the individual represents the excess and foreignness of Algeria within the society around him, a foreignness which provokes a reaction which is all the more violent because it represents the return of the repressed, the recurrence of what was familiar because Algeria was once part of the indivisible Republic, before the brutal separation of Independence occurred. The return is experienced in haunting terms because the bitter and humiliating events of the Algerian war have compelled the citizens of the Republic to collectively turn away from the colonial episode in the belief that it can be put behind them. French citizens of North African origin bring the return of Algeria into the heart of the Hexagon; they function as unwelcome ghosts of the past, reminders of France’s policy failures, and

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military and diplomatic defeat. As we saw with regard to the representation of immigrants in chapter 1, the properties imputed to the “ghosts” say nothing about the putative specters themselves; they are merely the responses of France’s social imaginary projected onto individuals who are perceived as a threat because, as the incarnation of an aspect of history which has been excluded from France’s contemporary narrative, they confront France with a challenge to its current identity. The situation is more pronounced when it concerns individuals of mixed heritage because they can less easily be excluded from mainstream society on the grounds of their “excess,” or ethnic difference. Being closer to the state of assimilation, they pose a greater threat to the imagined unity of the Republic; their uncertain state (here I refer back to Kristeva’s definition of the foreigner which opened this chapter), reminiscent of the ontological uncertainty of the specter, means that they haunt the boundaries of national identity, which must be constantly reinforced against them. On a collective level this is achieved through what Kathleen Brogan refers to as the construction of ethnicity through performance, through the enactment of rituals of commemoration which reinforce France’s role as innocent victim of invasion and occupation, and its response of heroic resistance to oppression, myths in which North Africa has no place, and which the novels by Sebbar and Daeninckx explicitly call into question. 24 However, Prévost’s and Bouraoui’s texts also focus on what occurs at the level of the Franco-Algerian individual, whose presence haunts those around them because it serves to raise unwelcome memories of the past in those around them, and who suffers abjection as a result. Kristeva defines the abject subject as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” 25 It is a description which corresponds exactly to the experience of the narrator of Le Passé sous silence. 26 The narrator is Denis, a Parisian journalist and writer who discovers in his thirties that his father was not French, but Algerian. The narrative is his account of his difficult relationship with his mother, for whom he is the haunting embodiment of a past which she cannot bring herself to face, and his struggle to recover the details of his absent father, who died when Denis was still young. The novel opens with the presentation of what will become the narrative’s pivotal moment: the receipt on Denis’s fifty-sixth birthday of a postcard from his mother Louise, in which she accuses him of being “the offshoot of a rotten root.” 27 The trigger for her venomous words, which haunt her son throughout the novel, is Denis’s insistence on discovering the truth about his father, which has led him to contact members of his father’s Algerian family, and to write a novel telling his story publicly. As a result of her rejection, Denis has to come to terms with the foreignness in his life on a number of levels: firstly, the discovery, in his mid-thirties, that he is not who he thought

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he was, or that, at least, the Frenchness on which his identity was based is spliced with a foreignness of which he knows nothing; and secondly, in terms of his immediate social context, he has to deal with the rejection from his mother and her traditional Norman family, whose emphasis on traditional French culture in the “Camembert and Beaujolais” mold performs and maintains an ethnic identity which excludes Denis’s Algerian origins. He must also forge a new place in society at large which can accommodate his association with the ghosts of the past. It is in theorizing these questions that Kristeva’s work on the abject is useful although, as we shall see, it is perhaps less successful in offering any solution. THE ABJECT(ED) MOTHER Given the inner turmoil and cultural conflict which frequently feature in autobiographical texts by Beur authors, the ease with which Denis adapts to the news of his mixed origins is striking. Haunted throughout by the ghost of his absent father, the discovery of his Algerian origins and culture is welcomed as a father-substitute. Fascinatingly, Denis does not struggle with the complexities of being both French and Algerian (or Kabyle, as he prefers to see himself), but embraces certain aspects of Kabyle culture (food, music, time spent with his Algerian family) which do not compromise his Parisian identity and allow him to continue to enjoy the status of a cosmopolitan journalist. 28 Without denigrating his engagement with his Algerian roots, this suggests that his adoption of a Kabyle identity is facilitated by the professional status and respect which he had already established by the time he discovered his paternal origins. Indeed, as the opening of the novel suggests, the biggest threat to Denis’s subjectivity comes from his mother. Louise Drancourt had a love affair with Mohand Aït-Salem when she was young, but with pressure from her disapproving, even racist, family she refused him access to the young son who resulted from their liaison. Since marrying Raymond, Denis’s hated stepfather, she refuses all references to the past and insists that Raymond is Denis’s only father. The difficult relationship with her son which results from her repression of the past is comparable with that of Daeninckx’s Madame Thiraud; both are unable to forge an affective bond with the son who for them is a haunting incarnation of a past which they passionately refuse but which returns like a specter each time they see their son and which poisons the relationship with him. Ironically, in attempting to put the past behind them both women have become a prisoner of the ghosts of the past, which haunt their relationships and trap them in a state untouched by the passing of time.

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In Kristevan terms, then, it becomes evident that Louise has sought to separate herself from the relationship with Mohand which, with the encouragement of her family, she now sees as unsuitable and disgusting. Since the affair threatened her identity as the daughter of a good family, she has repressed the memory of it. Denis, however, is the embodied evidence of the event, and his appearance, with its foreign element, functions as the abject for his mother, disrupting her carefully constructed version of reality. Had it not been for her son, Louise’s attempts to bury the past might have been successful; in the event it is her status as mother which is the source of her dread of the foreign. As Kristeva maintains, “[The] fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power.” 29 In this context, her contention holds true, although on reading it we might not have anticipated that the fear would reside within the mother. In the text Louise is fully implanted in a patriarchal discourse which sees sexual relations between a French woman and an Algerian man in colonial terms, as a threat to established order. 30 The reminder of the uncertain border between the maternal body and the unborn child, which is reminiscent of the blurred border between French citizen and French subject, forces her to endlessly re-establish the separation without which her identity would collapse into the state of pre-subjectivity. As Kristeva, drawing on Mary Douglas, makes clear, the threat to order and identity often comes through liminal elements: vomit, shit, blood, decay, bodily matter. 31 It is in these liminal terms that Louise conceives of her son, his father, and the whole Algerian people, as “the offshoot of a rotten root,” a phrase which opens and closes the novel (13; 240; 241). As a result, she must constantly re-establish the threatened boundaries, presenting Raymond, the replacement father, as a “healthy root” to be grafted in place. When this fails, she begins to effect a separation from her abjected son, telling Denis’s wife, Hanna, that she would be happy if she never saw Denis again. Indeed, like the mother of Cardinal’s narrator, Louise goes as far as to tell her son that she regrets having given birth to him. Consequently, Denis feels the compulsion to return to a pure state of bodily matter before the contamination despised by his mother took place. However, his view of the source of contamination is quite different from that of his mother: rather than seeing his own “foreignness” as being responsible, he considers Louise and his stepfather Raymond as the source: To me, they [Louise and Raymond] were two foreign bodies, seemingly come from within me, from the pus and shit that I absolutely had to get rid of, to regain my original purity. . . . The feeling that without them I would be pure. 32

The conflict of cultural identity is again conceptualized as bodily fluids: the material terms of abjection.

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THE ABJECTED STRANGER: FILTH AND DIRT It thus emerges that Louise abjects her son because he represents a foreignness which her racist background despises, and an episode of the past which continues to haunt her. Denis is therefore forced to deal with the consequences. His response is to internalize the feelings which result from his own mother treating him as if contaminated: “I was stained.” 33 The experience of being defined repeatedly as foreign and disgusting leaves Denis struggling to preserve and disengage his sense of self. However, Denis’s material experience of contamination has a specific source. The lies and revulsion of his mother, to whom he is linked by a history of maternal fluids, create a sense of defilement which threatens to overwhelm his sense of self. Abjected by her, he repeatedly abjects in response. The repugnance that he feels towards his mother and stepfather recurs throughout the text—“I am the offshoot of a sickening family”; “We took leave of Louise and Raymond. . . . I wanted to vomit with disgust” 34 — but as the child in the relationship, he struggles to establish his independence from the mother. Despite the violence of his feelings, Denis cannot either voice them or translate them into action which would achieve the separation from his mother. He is therefore left unable to articulate his individuality or affirm his subjectivity. Kristeva makes the significance of abjection and the need for separation clear: “The relationship to abjection is finally rooted in the combat that every human carries on with the mother. For in order to become autonomous, it is necessary that one cut the instinctual dyad of the mother and the child and that one become something other.” 35 For both Lacan and Kristeva, the separation of this dyad is achieved through the father, who intervenes in the imaginary relationship between mother and child. The child learns that it cannot be the mother’s Phallus, that is to say, the object of her desire, and her gratification. 36 It learns this because the presence of the father signals that the mother desires the father, an object of desire which is not the child. Consequently the child begins to realize that it cannot be everything to the mother. The intervention of the father between mother and child is the Law of the Father. In her discussion of this process, Kelly Oliver adds that it takes place “even if the father is not around,” because of the child’s intuition that in order for it to have been conceived, the mother must once have desired the father. 37 However, in the case of Denis, the Law of the Father has not been adequately asserted, for not only has the father been absent, but Louise has consistently refused to speak of him, producing a space of absence and silence. It is years before Denis is able to discover his father’s name: Lacan’s “Name/No of the Father” is a literal absence for him. As a consequence, the separation of mother and child is partial, achieved through the Law of the Mother, who

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finds herself abjecting the child whose presence she both loves and reviles. Denis is left with a single parent who becomes the focus of the emotions normally attributed to mother and father. He is unable to give up the relationship with Louise, and yet she also becomes the object of emotions more commonly associated with the father. He sees her Law of the Mother as “the castrating mother,” 38 punishing him for the crime of desiring the father. He imagines her reading about his search for his father in his book, Saint-Denisla-Révolte, and then tearing its pages and cover: The photo of Denis is intact. With surgical precision, she tears her son’s face from the forehead down. Suddenly she has an idea, she will use the scissors to cut up his face of shame—shame that he inflicted on her by his birth, and again in the present. She . . . grabs the scissors and pierces the eyes of Denis her son. She puts his eyes out. 39

The passage is imagined by the narrator: it is a reflection of the emotions which Denis imputes to his mother. The blinding is a classic symbol of the fear of castration, indicating Denis’s anxiety that, rather than creating a child capable of independence, Louise intends to neutralize the potential of her son. This powerful statement of the division within French society returns us to an examination of Kristeva’s work. KRISTEVA’S SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGNNESS Although Strangers to Ourselves and Nations without Nationalism were written in the context of social disquiet regarding the very issues of integration which feature in Prévost’s novel, Kristeva’s depiction of the foreigner is strangely ahistorical. Her appeal to psychoanalysis, which illuminates the otherness within each of us and so transforms us all into strangers, neglects the lived realities of today’s migrants, exiles and refugees. By directly comparing the situations of “a Maghrebian streetsweeper riveted to his broom [and] an Asiatic princess writing her memoirs in a borrowed tongue,” 40 she elides the economic differences which historians of immigration have argued are a major factor in the violence experienced by migrant workers, and glosses over diversity in favor of the argument that, since Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, we are all foreigners now. 41 By contrast, Prévost emphasizes the heterogeneous experiences of foreigners by juxtaposing Denis’s treatment at the hands of his family with that endured by his Danish wife, Hanna. The inclusion of a blonde, blueeyed, European female underscores the ambivalence of the foreign and highlights the diverging reactions on the part of the Franco-French characters, in particular Denis’s stepfather Raymond. While Denis’s foreignness provokes

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repulsion from his mother, Hanna finds herself the reluctant object of Raymond’s lascivious fascination: “See, Nordic girls, they’re hot for it. They’re sexually liberated, which is handy!” 42 By brushing aside the material specificities of the foreigner’s experience in favor of an emphasis on the outcome promised by psychoanalysis, Kristeva neglects to consider the need for the individual foreigner to address and overcome the immediate obstacles with which she is confronted. She therefore opens herself to accusations that, by privileging the psychic over the conflict in social relations, she is reducing material oppression to issues of psychology. As Ewa Ziarek argues, such reductionism risks aestheticizing the problem of political violence. 43 This objection notwithstanding, Kristeva does offer a model of respect for difference which, if achievable, would transform social relations and create a space which would accommodate the ghosts of the past. In proposing her solution, she appeals to political sociology, and the cosmopolitan Enlightenment thinking of Montesquieu. She advocates a return to the notion of an esprit général, based on the notion that each culture produces a distinctive behavior, in which citizenship becomes a relative question, of confederates rather than citizens. According to this view, the esprit général represents a totality within which specificity and difference can take their place as part of a greater whole, without being repressed or assimilated. To exemplify her thinking, she returns to Montesquieu’s famous dictum: If I knew something useful to myself and detrimental to my family, I would reject it from my mind. If I knew something useful to my family, but not to my homeland, I would try to forget it. If I knew something useful to my homeland and detrimental to Europe, or else useful to Europe and detrimental to Mankind, I would consider it a crime. 44

A return to the notion of esprit général, then, would result in a cosmopolitan community of individuals where, foreignness having been abolished, each would be free to relate to those around her in acknowledgement and acceptance of their relative strangeness in or, as Kristeva says, “an understanding between polyphonic individuals, respectful of their mutual foreignness.” 45 The transformation of relations would halt the projection of haunting fear and dread onto suspect individuals, and would aid in the process of laying to rest the violent ghosts of colonial rule. In this way Kristeva addresses one of the fundamental questions of French nationhood, and one which is central to her project of the relationship between foreigners and the state in which they find themselves, namely, the contradiction contained within the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which restricts universal freedoms to members of the nation. Kristeva is aware of this irony: “Never has democracy been more explicit, for it excludes no one—except foreigners . . . ” 46 In

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contrast, she presents Montesquieu’s thought as a modern cosmopolitanism which highlights the interdependence of nations: We should note this observation, astonishing for its modern tone: “Europe is no more than a Nation made up of several others, France and England need the richness of Poland and Muscovy as one of their Provinces needs the others; and the State that thinks it increases its power through the downfall of its neighbor, usually weakens along with it.” 47

Although Kristeva praises the universalism of Montesquieu’s dictum on the greater good, she sees a specifically French quality in his cosmopolitanism. “I should like to argue that the nation as esprit général . . . is one of the most prestigious creations of French political thought,” 48 she states, while elsewhere we find that “this common denominator which is the basis of the Republic . . . is our symbolic antidepressant.” 49 Kristeva sees immigrants and foreigners as linked both to the cause of France’s contemporary depression (through the lost ideal of national unity linked to the colonial past, of which the current debate around immigration and integration is a constant reminder), and to its cure, since psychoanalysis advocates learning to live with (inner) alterity. She hints at this in her discussion of Montesquieu, arguing that where the rights of man are privileged beyond the rights of the citizen, “the obliteration of the very notion of ‘foreigner’ should paradoxically encourage one to guarantee a long life to the notion of . . . ‘strangeness.’” 50 Referring to the use of psychoanalysis as a model for the nation, Sam Haigh shows that, for Kristeva, a relationship with the immigrant as other offers a privileged means through which a national sense of self can begin to be reestablished in France. 51 For Kristeva, then, the ex-colonial foreigner becomes central to the troubled nation, no longer a source of haunting division, but a means of reconciliation with self. This requires a radical reversal of thought, to conceive of the marginal as the potential cornerstone on which a national sense of self can be built. As Haigh shows, the process is structured on the transference relationship between the analyst and analysand, providing the depressed nation with an other in relation to whom a sense of self can be constructed. Were this process to prove possible, it would offer a fundamental means of resolution of the intractable problems raised by immigration in France. Nevertheless, when applied in practice there are difficulties with Kristeva’s theory. First, on an ethical level: as a consequence of this process, the immigrant ceases to be a subject and, deprived of agency, becomes simply a tool which facilitates the recovery of the French subject. Kristeva offers no comment on this situation. Moreover, as I have argued, her emphasis on the need for the foreigner to achieve psychic reconciliation in the face of material oppression is problematic, and appears even more so if, as she suggests,

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the renewal of the French nation is dependent on the foreigner’s success. In Nations without Nationalism, Kristeva questions the extent to which the Franco-French population is aware of the notion of the Republic’s esprit général; elsewhere she not only questions awareness amongst the majority populace, but highlights the need for Montesquieu’s model to be reconstructed through schools and programs initiated by political parties and the media. 52 There is a utopian element to her argument since, if her assessment is correct and there remain only faint traces of the esprit général within the Hexagon itself, a dependence on foreigners being aware of and therefore able to successfully enact the esprit général appears unrealistic. She claims that it is time to ask immigrants what motivated them to choose the French community, with its historical memory and traditions, as their new country; however, her assumption that there is a motivating factor beyond the economic opportunities and knowledge of French provided through the colonial relationship (which she acknowledges) appears overly optimistic. 53 Why should immigrants be motivated by a historical memory and traditions which are not theirs, and which, moreover, have been so dissipated that organized political programs which would restore the nation’s cultural heritage are required even for the Franco-French? Moreover, the efficacy of Kristeva’s approach is questionable when applied to the situation of the abject “foreigner,” Denis. He is firmly implanted in the French intellectual establishment, and there is no question of his refusing to integrate, as Kristeva suggests may be the case for certain foreigners. His foreignness is only evident, and therefore threatening, to those members of his immediate family who are aware of his Algerian roots. If we follow Todorov, their racism can be read as stemming from the belief that (colonial) difference equates to inferiority; the fact that Denis’s foreignness is not visible, and that he himself is integrated, only makes him a more insidious threat. Denis’s family therefore represents those sections of the French population which Kristeva identifies as being unaware of or disregarding the notion of Montesquieu’s esprit général. However, the challenge to Kristeva’s project may lie in the difficulties inherent in persuading French nationals of the need for a change in their attitudes. Their racism is based on an ethnocentric confidence that views difference as a threat, and which is convinced that any change must take the form of neutralizing, not to say destroying, the perceived source of threat. Indeed, having accepted foreignness once, Louise in particular seems determined not to repeat her mistake. Her attitude towards Algerian difference can be seen as symbolic of a general feeling towards Algeria within French society, which holds the classical Republican view that France’s civilizing mission historically presented a move to welcome and incorporate difference. Since Algerian colonials violently rejected the benefits of French civilization, sections of French society now refuse all attempts at reconcilia-

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tion with the haunting past, and view representatives of Algerian difference as part of a fifth column. In a context where change is conceptualized as weakness, Kristeva’s approach may have little appeal in the face of the stubborn resistance of deep-rooted racism. Indeed, the fact that “foreigners” have integrated themselves into French society to the point that, in legal terms at least, they are indistinguishable from other French citizens, is in itself justification for “Franco-French” citizens to reinforce the boundaries which they perceive to be under threat. The resulting notions of threat, contamination, and expulsion simply re-enact the mechanisms of the abject. It would appear, therefore, that while Kristeva’s theories serve greatly to illuminate the situation facing “foreigners” in France, they function more as descriptors than as possible sources of resolution. Although Kristeva has arguably theorized this area of individual and national identity more extensively and successfully than any other writer, in practice the application of her work to specific groups characterized by national difference is of limited benefit. In the case of Prévost’s novel, the difficulties which exist around the abject remain unresolved, albeit more clearly illuminated. At this point, a different approach may prove fruitful. In his work with Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze offers an alternative way of conceiving of the dilemmas of individual difference, one which is relevant to the second novel of this chapter, Tomboy. An application of his theories enables further understanding both of Bouraoui’s narrator, and of the narrator of Prévost’s Le Passé sous silence. THE GENDERED NATION Tomboy, Nina Bouraoui’s sixth novel, is the autobiographically based account of a young girl growing up in the 1970s. Born in France to a French mother and Algerian father, her life, like her narrative, is divided into two sections, located in and entitled “Algiers” and “Rennes” respectively. Like Le Passé sous silence, the text is a first-person narrative. However, while Prévost’s narrator accepts with comparative ease the news of his mixed origins, thereby locating the novel’s conflict in the public sphere, Bouraoui’s narrator, Nina, is faced with both the crisis in personal identity common to many Beur texts, and the racism and violence of the society around her. The experience of growing up as the publicly acknowledged product of a violent transnational history leads her to internalize the legacy of violence more profoundly than does Denis, with his intellectually acquired sense of historical injustice. Consequently, haunted by the violence of the past, the narrator struggles to form her coherent subjectivity, whilst the society around her

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reads her multi-racial appearance as an unlooked-for and unwelcome reminder of past traumas. The inner crisis which dominates the first sections of Bouraoui’s narrative stems from the narrator’s early realization that she is perceived by Algerians as posing a threat. As with Denis, the indeterminate identity of the FrancoAlgerian troubles category boundaries with its uncontainable excess. The narrator is caught between the two nationalities which constitute her, a position reflected in the novel’s opening, in which she and her alter-ego Amine run along the beach at Algiers. The sea symbolizes their in-between status, since it, like their bodies, unites the two opposing countries. However the text soon makes clear that this faultline between the massified tectonic plates constituted by the national entities of France and Algeria is a vulnerable location, subject to violence and marginalization. The narrator experiences divisions within her which result directly from the violence of her origins, the transmitted memories of the bitter divisions against which her parents, in their union, acted in defiance, and which she has internalized through the experience of marginality. The history of the two nations united in her body leaves the narrator perpetually struggling to reconcile the paradox of her identity, fractured along national lines. Conceived as the embodiment of the haunting memories of conflict, she experiences her difficulties of self-identification in physical terms. As such, the inner turmoil created by the sentiment of difference and exclusion forces the narrator to execute a series of physical strategies aimed at overcoming and reconciling the divisions which constitute her. DELEUZE AND GUATTARI: THE DISSOLUTION OF THE INDIVIDUAL Although excluded by both societies, the narrator does not desire to belong to them equally: Algeria, rather than the land of her birth, is the country that she loves and desires desperately to be part of, because she feels her body is deeply impregnated with the Algerian identity handed down from her paternal grandparents. As such, a primary indicator of her difference is her inability to learn Arabic, recognizing its sounds but excluded from their meaning. Rather than remain silenced by her linguistic lack she chooses to mimic those around her and invents her own way of speaking Arabic. Unsurprisingly, however, her enterprising attempts at mimicry are not sufficient to overcome the linguistic barriers, and she is left with the inner certainty of being an “imposteur,” an habitual liar (6). More significantly, beyond language, her desire to become Algerian is frustrated by her gender. What Kristeva has called “the ‘fight to the

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death’ . . . between the sexes” is for the narrator intimately linked to her gendered view of nationality; 54 sexual identity holds the key to a resolution of the conflicted question of national identity. In the little girl’s eyes, the source of her foreignness is her (French) mother (6), who “brings France back to Algeria by her mere presence,” her appearance raising the ghosts of the past in Algeria just as when she visits France, the narrator’s ethnicity threatens and haunts her grandparents’ neighbors. 55 In contrast, the narrator’s father is the means for her to attain her desire to become Algerian and so end the haunting associated with her gender (13). To achieve integration with Algeria, however, entails a certain separation from her motherland, and one which she struggles to achieve, for Algeria is repeatedly described as a land, or forest, of men and she, through her gender, is irretrievably linked to her mother’s motherland of France. As the mother is the source of foreignness, she and her gender must be rejected, and in order to become truly Algerian, the narrator and her (male) alter-ego Amine must take the place of their fathers. 56 The child’s solution to this scenario is literally to become male: To be a man in Algeria means becoming invisible. I will leave my body, my face, my voice. I will be on the side of power. Algeria is a man; it is a forest of men. 57 With men, I will become a man, a body without a name, a voice without a face. I will assimilate and become an element, a fragment, one of the shadows among them. My existence is too much. I am a woman. I remain outside the forest of men. 58

Her reasoning suggests the notion that female sexuality represents an excess which cannot be incorporated, and which threatens the established borders of male hegemony. The link between gender and nationality replays the movement of Kristeva’s foreigner, far from his motherland, while the need for separation from the mother to achieve subjectivity repeats the mechanism of self-abjection. However, the language in these passages is more reminiscent of the work of Gilles Deleuze than it is of Kristeva’s theories. In their work A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose an alternative to the kind of binary structures which organize the world of Bouraoui’s narrator. They view Western philosophy as calcified around the sterility of massified “molar” categories such as “France” and “Algeria,” “man” and “woman”: “What we term a molar entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject.” 59 Against this, they offer an alternative conception of continual creations and transformations which take place at a molecular level. With power flowing in constant motion, deterritorializing and reterritorializing, the nature of reality constantly changes. They refer to these molecular changes as

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“becomings” which, because they take place at a molecular level, transform the individual into a collectivity: Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities . . . there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, that do not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar entities (although it is possible—only possible—for the woman or child to occupy privileged positions in relation to those becomings). 60

Deleuze and Guattari advocate an endless series of becomings of which the most radical is their “becoming-imperceptible.” The narrator echoes this process in her description of becoming elemental, invisible and fragmentary. 61 Her move to empty her body of the features which define it—her voice, her face, her name—is also reminiscent of the celebrated “Body without Organs,” in which conventional hierarchies are removed to allow new creative possibilities, and which Deleuze and Guattari claim is inseparable from becoming-woman, or the production of the molecular woman. 62 It is clear from these passages that the narrator’s intention is to integrate with Algeria, “the forest of men,” by mingling her molecular structure with the assemblage or mass that it represents. She reasons that it is female excess which isolates her, preventing her from being a part of Algeria. With this in mind, the narrator sets about negating all signs of her femininity in her body, her face and her voice. She cuts her hair, throws back her shoulders into a male stance, opens her legs into a male walk, wears aftershave and dresses in jeans. The anxiety which this behavior provokes in her family is allayed by the quantities in which she uses the feminine Nivea face cream—little do they realize that it serves as a shaving cream. She feels some success at these efforts to gain control, the strength of her muscular body supporting her hope of shattering her identity and changing her situation. In her attempts to become male, the narrator uses naming as another strategy to contain her uncertain identity. Although her given name is Yasmina (Nina to her French family), her father calls her Brio, a name which she uses in defiance against the threatening elements of the world, France and her developing female body. Her own name for herself is Ahmed, borrowed from her uncle killed in the Algerian war and chosen to reinforce the male subject that she would become. She gives this name in response to the women who coo over her, celebrating their discomfort as a victory and a sign that she is succeeding in becoming Algerian. Yet despite her progress, the violence of these multiple identities within a single subject remains. Pursuing masculinity does not deliver the desired objective: I go from Yasmina to Nina. From Nina to Ahmed. From Ahmed to Brio. It’s an assassination, an infanticide, and a suicide. I don’t know who I am. One and

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The failure of her apparently Deleuzean project can be anticipated, not only because of the physiological changes to which her body is subject, but with reference to A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari strongly advocate the need for a “becoming-woman” because this body is stolen first from the girl: Stop behaving like that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy, etc. The girl’s becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, or prehistory, upon her. 64

However, they are equally clear that man’s place as society’s hegemonic norm—which is the very thing which attracts Nina, and which persuades her that as a man she will be able to escape her interstitial position of exclusion and mingle with society at large—prevents any becoming-man. “There is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular.” 65 It is clear, therefore, that Nina’s strategy will not succeed. COMING TO TERMS WITH STRANGENESS: DELEUZEAN STRATEGIES Despite the failure of her gender-bending strategy to resolve her identity conflict, Nina persists in her attempts to follow a Deleuzean line of action. Sent on holiday to her French family, she experiences the racism directed at Algerians. To her it is clear that the Algerian war has not ended; it has simply been transmuted and displaced, to continue by other means. The legacy of colonialism, another dominant binary, thus persists, transformed into new forms with the passing of time, but returning to exert its haunting power over individual subjects. Faced with this proliferation of forces acting on her, Nina’s reaction is to attempt to adapt to avoid the full intensity of the pressures at work. Her description is reminiscent of the process of becoming molecular, as she transforms her single self into a multitude of identities: “I adjust to everything quickly. My ability to adjust is maddening, creating several parallel lives and a multitude of small betrayals.” 66 However, because each element of this multitude of identities is driven in reaction to a corresponding molar force—nationalism, masculinity, colonialism—rather than positively evolving through the creative process of becoming, Nina continues to experience the consequences of difference, and is still forced to conceal the elements of herself which do not conform to the social models expected. She aims to minimize the damage inflicted on her subjec-

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tivity by fleeing the forces crushing her, whilst sustaining the violence against her personal integrity caused by masquerading as something she is not. Her model of becoming is thus far a negative one; she is fleeing but without the positive transformation created by Deleuze’s lines of flight. Instead she is driven by the will to hide, to conceal her difference, and if possible to transform it, fleeing her original state in an attempt to evade the laws that regulate social roles. At this point, then, as the abjected daughter of France and Algeria Nina is still subject to the violent legacy of the past which returns in the haunting questions of her own nationality and gender, and in the racism and rejection directed at her by the societies in which she lives. However, a hint of personal resolution and the potential for liberation comes during a holiday spent in the woods of New Hampshire. There, far from both France and Algeria, the narrator feels a release from the interminable pressures. This brief memory prefigures the closing pages of the novel, where Nina experiences the transformations of a subject gone finally beyond the contradictory forces which have defined her. The move allows her to reterritorialize in a new and temporary environment, in the manner and mode of Deleuze’s nomad. The start of nomadic becoming takes place as the narrator reaches maturity, during a summer spent in the heat of Rome. There, on a neutral site beyond the reach of the violence of national, sexual and family identity, she is free to begin to exist and become. Her habitual wearing of white, ostensibly a protection against the heat and light, symbolizes the experience of renewal as she leaves behind the constraints of her earlier life: I came from myself and myself alone. I was finding myself, born solely from my eyes, my voice, and my desires. I shed my old self and reclaimed my identity. My body was breaking free. It no longer had French traits. It no longer had Algerian traits. It experienced the simple joy of being alive. 67

Released into this new freedom, Nina discovers her body as if for the first time, seeing it display the gestures and characteristics of a woman. She experiences a joy in discovering the vitality of her own being. The change transforms her from life on the margins, and under the focus of the tourist camera, she finds herself as part of a new, instantly created and temporary multiplicity, becoming imperceptible as she had wanted in Algeria, but here as part of a crowd, an assemblage of unknown Italians. In both episodes, Nina’s experience of freedom comes as a tourist. Nelson Graburn has shown that tourism offers the opportunity to invert aspects of everyday life in particular and limited ways, and Nina’s choice of tourist destination reflects this. 68 As the child of well-educated, middle-class parents, like many travelers she is looking to escape the constraints of the familiar but in an inversion of the conventional directional tourist flow, she

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turns to the West. She is attracted to environments which, like the natural woodland of New Hampshire, or the historic center of Rome, offer a departure from her habitual surroundings. Victor Turner demonstrates how tourism leads to the temporary disruption of social roles, which sees Nina released from the constraints of imposed identity, and leaves her free to explore new contexts which, exotic and temporary, illustrate the creative potential of Deleuze’s nomadism. 69 However, the novel’s emphasis on the part played by tourism in the process of Nina’s becoming does highlight ambiguities in Deleuze’s theory and raises questions about its applicability beyond what Mike Featherstone has called “[those cosmopolitan elites] who enjoy the freedom of physical movement and communication, [and] stand in stark contrast to those who are confined to place, whose fate is to remain located.” 70 The reproach that French intellectuals neglect to consider specific economic realities when theorizing situations, concentrating instead on those who belong to the Westerneducated, financially secure position of privilege, is similar to the criticisms made of Kristeva earlier in this chapter, and here demonstrates the limitations of an otherwise illuminating approach. Moreover, while a reading of Deleuze and Guattari reveals the strategy by which Nina succeeds in overcoming her inner conflicts, it offers little towards the resolution of her difficult relationship with the French and Algerian societies which reject her. Because she achieves her inner breakthrough only by physically leaving the sites haunted by social violence, she does not address her status as the rejected product of both France and Algeria. Instead, the difficulties of being a citizen who is treated as a foreigner remain unresolved, as Nina simply shifts location to one in which she has the more straightforward status of a “real” foreigner. ROOTS AND RHIZOMES Deleuze’s work is also useful when applied to the situation faced by Denis. Faced with his inability either to break with or resolve the emasculating relationship with his mother, Denis sets about discovering his father. The search for the absent father who haunts him is the search for a kind of transcendental signifier, that is, a source of origins which will give meaning to who he is. When it becomes apparent that his father is deceased, he embarks on an impassioned search for meaning in his Kabyle roots. Given that Deleuze and Guattari reject this classical mode of thinking, which they characterize as “arborescent,” at first it seems that Denis’s search has little in common with their theories. According to them, trees are genealogical, restricting thought to established forms: 71 “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much.

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All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics.” 72 Instead, they advocate rhizomes, which they describe as a multiplicity of connections without beginning or end, without fixed point or center. “Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.” 73 Both plants and animals can take rhizomatic form: in addition to the archetypal root-system Deleuze cites packs of rats as examples of rhizomes. 74 Certainly “racines,” the root-form rejected by Deleuze and Guattari, loom large in Denis’s discourse and that of his mother. They recur throughout Prévost’s texts, from the damage inflicted by the infamous “rotten root” and the “healthy root,” to Denis’s injunction to “not forget our roots!” and the reminder that, through their mother, his children also have links to Denmark, “That was also their roots.” 75 But while these initially appear to belong to the category of structure refuted by Deleuze and Guattari, in practice Denis’s experience of his Algerian family is far from the conventional hierarchy of the family tree. Because the patriarchal object of his search cannot be found, the only line of segmentation along which his roots are structured is that of haunting absence. The means by which he makes contact with his family is random: in Le Pont de la Révolte we learn that he locates the first member of his family by calling all the numbers in the phone book which corresponded to his father’s surname. 76 Having felt that he was part of the “thousands of uprooted people the world over,” 77 Denis now finds himself as part of an unanticipated grouping. The initial contact broadens progressively thanks to the network of Algerians based both in Paris and Algeria. From this relative he learns of his father’s death but is able to meet his father’s brother, who tells him of his Algerian half-brother by his father’s first marriage, and then of his French half-brother and -sister by his second marriage to a Frenchwoman. His father’s widow, an aunt, endless cousins: the structure is rhizomatic, with each discovery of a family member leading to others in a network that spans the Mediterranean and cuts across national boundaries, from Parisian stepmothers, brothers and cousins to far-flung relatives around Algeria. Indeed, the network exceeds the boundaries of the family, as Denis becomes a member of his family’s village in Kabylia, and of the Berber community in Paris. Few individuals in this network are named, fewer are described in detail; their importance lies in their number and their connection rather than their personal characteristics. The network is linked by lines of telephone calls, air flights, letters and photographs sent by post, and car and metro crossings of Paris. The family rhizome thus replaces the family tree. While the network clearly consists of roots in one sense, they are rhizomatic in character for, as Deleuze and Guattari affirm, “There are . . . rhizomatic offshoots in roots.” 78 Like Nina, Denis finds his place in an apparently

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ever-changing mass, which in his case consists of the community of his extended family. The potential for the creation of new connections and relationships transforms his world; after the sterile and constricted experience of his French family, he finds joy and release in this new context, which allows him to explore and develop his identity. However, it does nothing to resolve the issues with his mother, and her rejection of his ethnic difference and the memory of what that represents for her own life. WRITING RECONCILIATION Speaking of the Beur generation, Bouraoui’s narrator identifies with their position: “Nomads and ghost children, these prisoners preserve memory like a fire and hold onto history like an heirloom.” 79 She, like them, haunts the French nation because her Arab excess disturbs conventional notions of Frenchness, and provokes resurgent memories of colonial defeat and loss. But this ghostly generation is itself haunted, by the memories of events which it did not witness but which were experienced and passed on by earlier generations and which, because of violence or injustice, continue to weigh heavily. The horror of the past resurges; without warning, the apparent solidity of the postcolonial present gives way treacherously, and everyday scenes become the settings for apparitions of atrocity, so that the “immobile bodies, frozen in their last gestures” of sunbathers relaxing on a France beach are transformed into the “[d]ead and naked” bodies discovered after a wartime massacre, and the spectacle of the crabs boiled alive for dinner brings with it memories of the children burned alive during the destruction of their village. 80 The horror of the past is such that it cannot be confined but erupts uncontrollably, disturbing the equilibrium which the narrator has painstakingly constructed for herself. As the offspring of the “controversial marriage” (32) between France and Algeria, she bears a responsibility for the burden she carries and, although barely able to contain the memorial legacy which she has inherited, must negotiate with specters in regulating the transmission of memories to the next generation. 81 “Here, through your childhood, my childhood returns like a ghost that resurfaces through your games, your laugh, your joy.” 82 The uncontainable ghosts of the past are one aspect of the haunting which afflicts the narrator, but Nina also speaks of the importance of carrying her parents’ memories based on the principle of substitution, that in bearing the suffering and humiliation which are her inheritance from them she will relieve, even cure, their ills. There is a cost attached to bearing the burdens of the past: her heritage is transmitted to her as wounds which reduce her to silence (69–70, 79). She describes this mute state as one aspect of the wider

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legacy of the past, which casts a blanket of silence over all the violence and pain connected with Algeria. The referred trauma of her parents’ experiences produces the same consequences in Nina as the racist wounds directly inflicted on Denis by his family: both are silenced by the haunting weight of the past. Protected from the racism of society at large because of his French surname and family, within the small community which knows the truth of his origins, Denis is exposed to open hostility: his Norman godmother suggests that the family should have abandoned him at social services, while his stepfather hints that he was conceived under duress: He told me, “Yes, actually, it was some Mohamed,” and . . . added: “But then, if there was a rape . . . ” This sentence weeped in me like a wound: an Algerian couldn’t love, he could only be a rapist! 83

Having internalized the racist views of what he refers to as “the Aryan family,” it is only when Denis meets Thérèse, his father’s Parisian second wife, that he becomes aware that, since mixed marriages were accepted even thirty years earlier, such racist views were not universal. Within his family Denis is forbidden to talk about his father or his Algerian origins. According to Kristeva, abjection and separation from the mother are required in order for the entry into the Symbolic to take place, but Louise’s power stifles the process at the stage of abjection. Denis can therefore transgress this law and speak out only at the cost of crippling guilt, as when he tries to tell Louise about his holiday in Algeria: I started my sentence softly, watching my delivery, my words, all the while feeling this uncontrollable anguish rising in my chest, born of my guilt at having transgressed the imposed law of silence. “Oh! We saw lots of things, landscapes, lots of people.” 84

Despite the cost, however, he is driven by the need to speak in order to affirm his existence; language is a prerequisite for his subjectivity, and he continues to struggle against his mother’s domination. He is fully aware of the power of writing, since the deepest wound inflicted by his mother comes through the words inscribed on the postcard sent for his birthday. However, writing also proves a source of relief, allowing him to play out in imagination his mother’s reactions to him, and letting him fantasize about killing her and his stepfather, as a way of coming to terms with his inner conflicts. In this it acts as a precursor to the archetypal “talking cure,” as he embarks on psychoanalysis at the novel’s close. For both narrators, writing provides the space in which to explore and negotiate with the ghosts of the past, and the means to construct a narrative

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which would express and accommodate their wounds and pain. Nina’s initial reaction to the division and conflict which she has experienced has been flight, but in writing she finds that turning away from the past is not an option. As she says, “I wanted to forget Algeria, but it returned with writing. Writing means rediscovering your ghosts.” 85 As for Hélène Cixous, Bouraoui’s narrator experiences Algeria as a returning specter with whom she must negotiate and, through writing, seek to accommodate. Paradoxically, then, for Nina writing is both the site of re-encounter with the violent ghosts of Algeria’s past, and, as she says, her only means of protection from the world. 86 Writing provides a space in which to create a narrative that breaks the silence into which she has been cast, and to transform the blank spaces of repression and denial into stories that testify to the struggle that lies beneath the silence (33). For a generation burdened and haunted by injustice, writing provides a conduit which brings forth and channels the strength and passion of their outrage (129). Rather than being overdetermined by history, through writing the narrators of both novels are able to play with the possibilities inherent in individual identity and, by reimagining narratives of the past, construct a version of history in which they are not marginalized or excluded. Both Denis and Nina have suffered from being socially constructed as the embodiment of the fractured relationship between France and Algeria. Their writing allows them to construct a narrative which opposes the haunting history of division: both recount episodes in which they imagine their parents’ early relationship and the meetings and events which led up to their own birth. Their reinscription of the forgotten past is a means of reaffirming a time long ago when, instead of violence and exclusion, there was a means and desire manifested in their parents’ love which was powerful enough to overcome the divisions created by history, language, ethnicity, religion and culture. The creativity of writing thereby enables them to recover a moment of unity and respite from the haunting wounds of the past. The need to recover the past in the interests of restorative justice is a powerful issue in both novels. Le Passé sous silence opens with the phrase “By forgetting the past, we condemn ourselves to relive it,” an epigraph shared with Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam, and one which highlights the possibility that the ghosts of the past may return violently to disrupt the present. Like Daeninckx’s text, Prévost’s writing also highlights the consequences of colonialism on a broad scale: in addition to the racism that lost him his father, Denis is concerned with justice for actions which affected the wider Algerian population, seeing a parallel between the repression that he has experienced, and the repression of the Berber language that took place in 1980 and led to the Berber Spring. 87 He feels guilty when his uncle tells of the events in Paris of 17 October 1961, and tries to recover his own halfforgotten memories of seeing Algerians and French riot police on the streets

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of Paris that night. 88 By focusing on some of the landmark moments of oppression, Denis tries to reinsert his own personal narrative into Algerian history and, in turn, to reinsert memories of Algeria into France’s history, by making specific instances of its past known to a wider audience through the creative power of his writing. In a similar way, Bouraoui’s narrator works to locate her experiences within the wider sweep of Algerian history. As part of a “French” family living in Algiers in the late 1970s, she notes the increasing racial tension and hostility which are directed towards her mother in particular (78–81). For Nina, these experiences are linked to the violence of the Algerian war, the referred memory of which is sparked by the discovery of old newspapers dated 1962 and, worse, bloody knives, under the water pipes in their apartment: physical reminders of the massacre of Algerian women at the hands of the OAS which took place in their building in 1962. After that, the whistling of the wind sounds to her like the wailing of the murdered women, whose ghosts, like the ghosts of the OAS, seem closer each time her father has to go away. The violence of the encounter between Algerian women and French OAS has a physical effect on the present—the narrator describes how their ghosts inhabit her mother’s body, through her asthma, her solitude and fear (37)—leaving material, yet also ghostly, traces which Bouraoui inscribes on her text, and which contribute to the notion that, because it hovers dangerously close to the present, the past can repeat itself: violence can erupt again on the scarred site of colonial atrocities, as indeed it proved in the Algeria of the 1990s. Bouraoui’s narrator foresees the violent return of colonial ghosts: in her dream she witnesses Algeria’s future, the violence of a nation turned on itself and torn apart (86–87). The vision of another war, of massacres and bitter fighting, presaged by the climate of increasing tension, is the catalyst which propels the narrator to leave Algeria permanently. Bouraoui’s description references the complex layering which constitutes the haunting of Algeria: haunted by the manner of its birth, the country itself is unable to break out of the cycle of violence, and is condemned to suffer the return of malevolent forces in a manner hinted at by Cardinal; yet, as Cixous described, the country itself also remains as a haunting presence in the lives of those who have tried to separate themselves from it. “Algeria will return like a ghost. Algeria will return through the small black door of an immense morgue. You will be haunted. Algeria will follow your shadow, consume your thoughts.” 89 As Cixous’s and Bouraoui’s texts indicate, France may provide a refuge for those exiled by Algerian independence, or by the recurring cycles of violence which mark Algerian history, but it offers no defense against Algeria’s spectral return. Writing is the narrators’ defence against the aphasia of atrocity and pain; it provides a space in which to articulate narratives which express the

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wounds transmitted and so begin to offer a process of healing. Paradoxically, as Bouraoui has said, writing is also a space which is easily penetrated by ghosts, and which forces the writer to (re-)encounter and negotiate with specters. To both writer and readers the literary text offers the opportunity to explore in detail the experiences of exclusion and abjection, and to encounter the strange unknowability of the ghost. As Attridge observes, in the event of reading what has been creatively written, otherness enters the reader’s world through the inventiveness of writing, bringing with it potential experiences of alterity which may alter momentarily the reader’s views. 90 This is a consequence of the inventiveness of literary writing which engages it in a process of pushing at the limits of written convention that allows newness to enter the text—although because what emerges is not always new but can manifest itself as a reworking of the old, it is more productively referred to as “otherness.” Writing therefore offers an opportunity in which we, as readers and writers, may be predisposed to the encounter with otherness. Derrida emphasizes the openness of literature to the plurality of new forms when he says: This writing is liable to the other, opened to and by the other, to the work of the other; it works at not letting itself be enclosed or dominated by the economy of the same in its totality. 91

As Derrida makes clear, this alterity is not an objective essence, but exists within the individual reader’s encounter with the text. It is therefore relational, depending on the context of the individual reader, and as Derek Attridge says, “it is always a singular encounter, and an encounter with singularity.” 92 As Derrida points out, inventiveness inevitably destabilizes the existing order: An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts a disorder into the peaceful order of things, it disregards the proprieties. Showing apparently none of the patience of a preface—it is itself a new preface—it goes and frustrates expectations. 93

The uncanniness which we encounter in the stranger, and which is not far removed from the uncanny experience of being haunted is, for Attridge, linked to the otherness which Derrida suggests that we encounter through creative writing: to the extent that I apprehend the “already existing other” in the form of a person it is not other: I recognize the familiar contours of a human being, which is to say I assimilate him or her to my existing schemata of understanding . . . but these are responses to the person not as singular individual but as (generic) person. . . . It is in the acknowledgement of the other person’s uniqueness, and therefore of the impossibility of finding general rules or sche-

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mata to account fully for him or her, that one can be said to encounter the other as other. 94

Writing therefore offers a privileged site of encounter with ghosts, one in which we may begin to feel, tentatively, towards the hospitality which Derrida holds as necessary for reconciliation, because it accommodates their otherness. There is an ethical dimension to the reaction demanded of the reader in response to this encounter with alterity, an obligation which is underscored because of the postcolonial questions raised by the return of the ghost. As a means of reconciliation with the seemingly irreconcilable, represented by the foreigner who is not a foreigner, who both haunts and is haunted, writing therefore offers a potential alternative to Kristeva’s advocacy of psychoanalysis. Indeed, speaking of the need for a discourse on the “national” that does not descend into racism whilst still respecting difference, she suggests that psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature may all have a contribution to make in helping us to accommodate singularity and otherness: Nevertheless, such an ethical course suggested by psychoanalysis but also, in different fashion, by contemporary philosophy—devoted as it is to analyzing singularity and the right to anomaly as the end and surpassing of the rights of man—as well as literature, which is written as a defense of the dignity of the strange—that ethical course, then, which can develop patient, complex discourses, involving everyone’s meditation, does not exonerate us, quite the contrary, from putting the “national” back into question. 95

The narratives of Le Passé sous silence and Tomboy suggest that literary writing takes its place as one of a range of strategies to be called on in response to the issues raised by the postcolonial “foreigner” within France’s national borders. Through these and other novels, then, literature offers one means of enabling the ghosts of the past to speak through a process which encourages the reader to be open and welcoming to the encounter with (literary) otherness, allowing it to reshape what is known and familiar. By letting writing alter our preconceived categories in this way, we as readers also allow it to alter our conceptions of ourselves, making space to accommodate the ghosts of the past. In addition to giving a voice to the silenced wounds of the past, then, it seems that writing might offer a path towards what Kristeva calls an “ethics of respect for the irreconcilable,” encouraging us to acknowledge hospitably the presence of the ghosts which walk amongst us. NOTES 1. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1988]), 96.

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2. Sam Haigh, “Migration and Melancholia: From Kristeva’s ‘Dépression nationale’ to Pineau’s ‘Maladie de l’exil,’” French Studies 60 (April 2006): 232–250. 3. Kristeva addresses France’s situation directly in terms consistent with Strangers to Ourselves in Nations Without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 4. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 182. 5. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), vol. 17, 217–252 (241). 6. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 21, emphasis in original. 7. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves , 2. 8. Noëlle McAfee, “Abject Strangers: Toward an Ethics of Respect,” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (London: Routledge, 1993), 116–134 (122). 9. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 4. 10. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 11. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 201. 12. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 203; 206, emphasis in original. 13. Ewa Ziarek, “The Uncanny Style of Kristeva’s Critique of Nationalism,” Postmodern Culture 5, no. 2 (1995) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v005/5.2ziarek.html (15 Aug. 2006), (para. 16 of 28). 14. The Jewish population of Algeria was accorded French citizenship under the Décret Crémieux of 1870, only to be stripped of it by Vichy in 1940. 15. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 197. 16. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980]). 17. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1. 18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. 19. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 20. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 21. Freud, “‘The Uncanny,’” 245. 22. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5. 23. Norma Claire Moruzzi, “National Abjects: Julia Kristeva on the Process of Political Self-Identification,” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (London: Routledge, 1993), 135–49 (143). 24. Brogan, Cultural Haunting, 12. 25. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 26. Daniel Prévost, Le Passé sous silence (Paris, Denoël, 1998). All translations are mine; quotations from the French are given in endnotes. 27. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 13 (l’issue d’une racine pourrie). 28. It is perhaps a measure of the persistence of binary structures (colonizer/colonized; Self/ Other) within French attitudes that the concept of métissage does not figure in either Le Passé sous silence or Tomboy, the other novel analysed in this chapter. The influence of theoretical notions of hybridity, proposed by theorists such as Homi Bhabha, within French society appears limited, and the need to effect a strict differentiation between French and Algerian identity remains compelling. 29. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 77. 30. How Louise’s attitude evolved from love for Mohand to one of disgust and rejection not only of him but also of her son is unclear. However there is no suggestion that the liaison between Denis’s parents was anything other than consensual. 31. Douglas, Purity and Danger.

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32. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 187. (Ils m’étaient deux corps étrangers comme sortis de moi-même, du pus, de la merde dont je devais absolument me défaire afin de me retrouver dans ma pureté originelle. . . . Le sentiment selon lequel je serais pur sans eux.) 33. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 21 ; cf. 27. (J’étais souillé.) 34. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 145. (Je suis issue d’une famille à vomir); 203. (Nous prîmes congé de Louise et Raymond. . . . J’avais envie de vomir de dégoût.) 35. “Interview with Elaine Hoffman Baruch,” in Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 113–121 (118). 36. Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), 83. 37. Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 22. 38. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 229 (la mère castratrice). 39. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 90. (La photo de Denis est intacte. Avec la précision d’un chirurgien, elle déchire le visage de son fils à partir du front. Soudain il lui vient une idée, elle va l’entailler à coupes de ciseaux, ce visage de honte—honte qu’il lui a fait subir par sa naissance, puis à présent. Elle . . . s’empare de la paire de ciseaux et transperce les yeux de Denis son fils. Elle lui crève les yeux.) 40. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 9. 41. Gérard Noiriel, “French and Foreigners,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1, under the direction of Pierre Nora, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3 vols., 145–180 (152); Hargreaves, Immigration, “Race,” and Ethnicity. 42. Prévost. Le Passé sous silence, 72. (“Remarque, les filles nordiques, elles ont pas froid aux yeux. Elles sont libres sexuellement, c’est commode!”) 43. Ziarek, “The Uncanny Style of Kristeva’s Critique of Nationalism,” 6. 44. Montesquieu, Mes Pensées in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 981, quoted in Strangers to Ourselves, 130. 45. Julia Kristeva, Contre la dépression nationale: entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris: Textuel, 1998), 77; my translation (une entente entre des êtres polyphoniques, respectueux de leurs étrangetés réciproques). 46. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 149, emphasis in original. 47. Montesquieu, Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 34, quoted in Strangers to Ourselves, 130. 48. Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, 57. 49. Kristeva, Contre la depression nationale, 99 (ce commun dénominateur qui fait le sol de la République . . . est notre antidépresseur symbolique). 50. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 132. 51. Kristeva, “Migration and Melancholia,” 237. 52. Julia Kristeva, “What of Tomorrow’s Nation?” in Nations without Nationalism, 1–47 (47); “Open Letter to Harlem Désir” in Nations without Nationalism, 49–64 (59). 53. Kristeva, “Open Letter to Harlem Désir,” 60. 54. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 [1979]), 187–213 (209). 55. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 17. 56. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 6. 57. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 21. 58. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 22–23. 59. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004 [1980]), 303–04. 60. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 303. 61. It is also interesting to note in passing that the narrator considers the possibility of “becoming a rat” (Tomboy, 23). This becoming-rat, which is explored by Deleuze and Guattari in the opening pages of Chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus, occurs when the narrator compares the danger which she represents to Algerian identity, with the reputation which rats have for terrorising respectable society.

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62. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 305. 63. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 33–34. 64. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 305. 65. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 322. 66. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 97. 67. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 112. 68. Nelson Graburn, “The Anthropology of Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research, 10 (1983): 9–33 (21–2). 69. Victor Turner, “Variations on a Theme of Liminality,” in Secular Ritual: A Working Definition of Ritual, ed. Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff (Amsterdam: Van Gocum, 1977), 27–41. 70. Mike Featherstone, “Cosmopolis: An Introduction,” special issue of Theory, Culture and Society 19, nos. 1–2 (2002): 1–16 (1). 71. Nina in fact could be speaking for both Deleuze and Guattari, and Denis, when she says that the French are “smothered” by the stories and hierarchy of their family tree (Tomboy, 105). 72. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 17. 73. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 23. 74. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7. 75. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 146. (ne pas oublier nos racines!); (C’était cela aussi leurs racines.) 76. Prévost, Le Pont de la Révolte, 66. 77. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 59 (milliers de déracinés de par le monde). 78. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 22. 79. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 78. 80. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 92. 81. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 18. 82. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 87. 83. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 19. ([Il] me déclara: “Oui, en fait, c’était un Mohamed quelconque,” et . . . ajouta: “Mais alors, s’il y a eu viol . . . ” Cette phrase suinte en moi comme une plaie: un Algérien ne pouvait pas aimer, il ne pouvait être qu’un violeur!) 84. Prévost, Le Passé sous silence, 44. (Je commençai doucement ma phrase, surveillant mon débit, mes mots, tout en sentant resurgir en ma poitrine cette incontrôlable angoisse, née de ma culpabilité d’avoir transgressé la loi du silence imposé. “Oh! nous avons vu beaucoup de choses, de paysages, beaucoup de gens.”) 85. Dominique Simonnet, “Interview with Nina Bouraoui: ‘Ecrire, c’est retrouver ses fantômes,’” L’Express, 31 May 2004. (J’ai voulu oublier l’Algérie, mais elle est revenue avec l’écriture. Écrire, c’est retrouver ses fantômes.) 86. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 10. 87. Prévost, Le Pont de la Révolte, 104. 88. Prévost, Le Pont de la Révolte, 109. 89. Bouraoui, Tomboy, 43. 90. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 29. 91. Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other , trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007 [1987]), 1–47 (46). 92. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature. 93. Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” 1. 94. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 32–33. 95. Kristeva, “Open Letter to Harlem Désir,” 51, emphasis in original.

Afterword

Writing in 1996, Kristin Ross argued that the narrative of modern France was partial in every sense. The France of the 1960s was dominated by the twin movements of modernization and decolonization, but all energies were bent towards the former at the expense of acknowledging the ongoing influence of the colonies in the reconstruction of the modern nation: Keeping the two stories apart is usually another name for forgetting one of the stories or for relegating it to a different time frame. This is in fact what has occurred. For, from this perspective (a prevalent one in France today), France’s colonial history was nothing more than an “exterior” experience that somehow came to an abrupt end, cleanly, in 1962. France then careened forward to new frontiers, modern autoroutes, the EEC, and all electric kitchens. Having decisively slammed shut the door to the Algerian episode, colonialism itself was made to seem like a dusty archaism, as though it had not transpired in the twentieth century and in the personal histories of many people living today, as though it played only a tiny role in France’s national history, and no role at all in its modern identity. 1

The tenacity of the post-1962 attempt to recast France as a “singular citizenry in a single territory,” to borrow Frederick Cooper’s phrase, has proved remarkable; in the face of contradictory evidence—the five-million-strong community of immigrant origin, the inhabitants of France’s DOM-TOM possessions—the appeal to a revisionist version of French republicanism has been largely successful in detaching metropolitan France, in the popular imagination, from its colonial possessions. 2 The process which Ross observed taking place in the 1960s is the direct antecedent to the calls of Lefeuvre, Bruckner, Paoli and others to move on from what they regard as a national tendency to masochism with regard to the colonial past. Yet the door which was slammed shut with comparative ease at the level of discourse has 131

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proved more resistant when it comes to the individual practices through which group and national identity is repeatedly performed and enacted. The result has been what Bhabha calls “a cultural liminality within the nation,” a division based on two separate temporalities which, continually evoking and erasing totalizing boundaries, disturb the ideological maneuvers through which the essentialist identity of the French nation is constructed. 3 Across the range of narratives which result, colonialism functions in contradictory fashion, consigned to history’s archives but also playing a central role in the subjectivities of many French citizens either through lived experience or the transmission of memories. The colonial period haunts France, through a spectrum of responses which ranges from nostalgia and loss, to frustration at the perceived irrelevance of colonialism, and the resentment of those for whom colonialism continues to be entirely relevant because it generates the racism and violence that they experience. The two-speed narrative of the nation has led to a temporal disconnect which has allowed the past to dwell within the present despite official assurances to the contrary. Haunting provides the apposite image for France’s relationship to the colonial: the latter no longer exists, and yet its ghostly presence manifests itself throughout contemporary society, its influence apparent even when its existence is denied. Meanwhile, those communities whose lived realities testify to the ghostly traces of the past also find themselves haunted. Sometimes this is due to the fear of losing the past which functions as a defining narrative of identity, but more often it is caused by the sense that in excluding its extra-Hexagonal territories from its modern identity, France has effectively consigned to history the roots and origins which define contemporary identity for many citizens—and that in doing so, they have been cut loose and cast into a state of limbo. Excluded from the dominant narrative of the nation, they become the embodiment of the ghostly traces of the colonial past which haunt France. Yet if France is haunted by colonial ghosts, for the most part it lacks an intellectual terrain and vocabulary in which to explore the haunting phenomena at work. Displaced from rational discussion by post-Enlightenment discourses, the revenant is accommodated within fiction, its traditional home where the anxiety and unease associated with the ghostly may be harnessed in the service of suspense and tension. Moreover, away from the conventions of genres such as the Gothic, literature proves accommodating to haunting by virtue of the inventiveness which opens it to alterity; this, together with the belatedness associated with writing, makes the literary a space which is easily penetrated by ghosts. The experience of ghostly otherness which, in Reveries, Cixous suggests takes place in the process of literary creation, and which Attridge argues is re-enacted anew in the event of reading, brings with it a call for an ethical response:

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Each time I read what I have written, I undergo (though never in quite the same way) an encounter with alterity, which is to say the shifting and openingup of settled modes of thinking and feeling. In such a case, the idiocultural displacements which made the creative event possible have not produced a permanent transformation; alternatives just glimpsed as the other became the same have receded again as old habits have reasserted themselves, only to flicker up again on re-reading. In this case what I have to offer the world is the possibility not of a new structure of knowledge but of a powerful and repeatable event of mental and emotional restructuring. 4

There is an ethical dimension to the reaction demanded of the reader in response to this encounter with alterity, an obligation which is present with every literary reading, but which is underscored by the postcolonial questions which frame the literary corpus of the study. The experience of committed, responsible literary reading creates a space in which a hospitable memory or welcome for the ghostly may be possible, and so points in the direction of the respectful encounter with ghostly otherness which Derrida, in the interests of justice, advocates as a necessary step in the process of learning to live with our ghosts. 5 As we suggested in opening this study, literature has come to serve as Derrida’s “virtual space of spectrality,” an area in which we can engage with ghosts and ask about what it means to be haunted by the past. 6 In recent times these questions have constituted part of the process of defining the newly independent nations; in comparison, this study works towards a more comprehensive understanding of the postcolonial by examining how the former imperial power may itself be haunted. However, rather than perpetuating the binary relation between (former) colonized and colonizer, the undecidability of the specter allows us to move beyond artificial boundaries, whilst acknowledging the persistence of such historically contingent entities as the nation-state, to consider the postcolonial relationship between France and North Africa as constitutive of a transnational Mediterranean space in which the full complexity of interrelational cultural influences might be traced. In the process, a haunting North African element has emerged within French culture which, by its presence, works to destabilize republican understandings of French national identity as fixed and homogenous. The motif of haunting allows us to map the influences of the past on the present, and so to move towards a cartography on which relational intra- and inter-community dynamics can be traced and understood. Inter-generational haunting emerges as a defining narrative of the post-colonial period, as the unlooked-for effects of war and independence on children born after decolonization are exposed; the haunting past constitutes a heavy burden for individuals who have experienced wounds and violence at one remove, and who are unprepared, lacking strategies with which to negotiate with ghosts. The past becomes a means of self-fashioning for the children of some immi-

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grants, a narrative against which to define themselves and their values. The task of ensuring that the past is read in an appropriate context becomes a major challenge, so that haunting events do not become a transcendental narrative which produces a constricted identity because all subsequent happenings are read in relation to and as a consequence of it. Todorov’s injunction towards exemplary memory calls instead for haunting memories to be inserted into a broader narrative sweep in which ghosts become a reminder of ethical obligations for the future. In practice the application of exemplary memory demands a constant self-awareness which might regulate the conditions and context in which knowledge of the traumas of the past is transmitted to the next generation. The haunting transmission of the past has a particular place in maternal relations. Like a disease (or more properly, given the anxiety it provokes, a “dis-ease”), it passes from mother to child at the moment of birth, or, perhaps, at an earlier moment if the mother regrets the decision to give birth. For Daeninckx’s Madame Thiraud and Prévost’s Louise Drancourt, the regret associated with the birth of their child is linked to an inter-cultural encounter, when the intertwined histories of France and Algeria coalesced in a moment of physical or psychic violence which cannot be rescinded, and which leaves the mothers unable to move beyond trauma to care for their children. In the case of Cardinal’s narrator, the news of the unwanted pregnancy is communicated to the child through a moment of confession that transmits trauma and, as Sam Haigh notes, the mother’s madness to the daughter. 7 That the ghosts of the colonial past should have a particular attachment to the mother is unsurprising given the links demonstrated in Kristeva’s work between the uncanny and the abject responses to the foreigner, and the maternal function. As Cixous’s work testifies, pregnancy appears as a privileged site of the intercultural encounter with embodied otherness, a physical otherness which nonetheless shares commonalities with the spectral. Motherhood figures as a specific and recurrent site of haunting transmission which can leave the children afflicted by ghosts which predate their own existence but with whom they must negotiate a means of co-existence. As a system of structuring the social imaginary, haunting offers distinctive insights into the position of the immigrant community. The notion of inter-generational haunting, together with the anxiety which Kristeva notes is generated by the foreigner within the national boundaries, illuminates the role in which the immigrant community has been cast; excluded from the national narrative because they are deemed to belong to a colonial history which no longer has a place in the Hexagon, immigrants and their children are consigned to a haunting temporality outside the history of the nation. Their experience is defined by the neo-colonial structures of thought which impose roles on them: they may be cast momentarily as potentially malevolent specters associated with witchcraft and magic, regarded as objects of

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fear and distrust, or alternatively, even simultaneously, they may become exploited workers deprived of agency, socially invisible and condemned, like powerless shades, to wander the margins of modern society. Where society is forced to recognize their agency and political will, they become the returning spirits of the colonial past, vengeful revenants demanding redress for injustices long forgotten and dismissed by the majority population. Regardless of the specific role that it is called to play, the community of immigrant origin is figured as an unwelcome remnant of the past, a troublesome, disruptive entity whose presence many would happily see exorcised from the Hexagon. Paradoxically, the experience of being cast as the embodied ghosts of the past does not prevent the community of immigrant origin from itself being haunted by the past. The end of the colonial era left the immigrant community to mourn the personal losses occasioned by torture, beatings and drownings, but it also left a legacy of imperial structures of thought. Although the most poignant instances of the returning past are often manifested on an individual level, haunting also occurs on a paradigmatic and public plane, through the residue of colonial discourse and ideology which persists despite decolonization, which may cast the immigrant community in the orientalist image of the nineteenth century, and which may have physical repercussions through the ghostly but deadly spirit of racism. As Le Sourire de Brahim and Le Harki de Meriem demonstrated, while the immigrant community may, by its very existence, be perceived to threaten the unity of the nation, in practice the haunting past proves more perilous to those whose precarious position on the margins of society makes them vulnerable to the murderous ideologies of the past whose spirits inhabit those in authority as much as they do extremist minorities. In different manifestations, then, this study has traced the return of colonial Algeria as a ghostly form whose presence continues to haunt France. Beyond the exoticist nostalgia for the lost prestige of empire, the Algerian war forms a recurrent motif, a prism of violence bringing sharply into focus the blurred specters of the past. The memory of violence has traumatized and haunted France, through the experience of the two million or so conscripts who witnessed it, and the accounts of torture practiced by the French which entered the public debate in the late 1990s. The specter of violence which loomed over postcolonial Franco-Algerian relations crystallised in the outbreak of the Algerian civil war in 1992, an event which appeared to confirm suspicions that Algeria was itself caught in a haunting cycle of recurring violence. For many white French citizens, the Algerian civil war represented a heightened threat to France, both in terms of possible violence and increased immigration, and their initial reaction—the association of Islam with terrorism—appeared to be vindicated when Algerian violence spilled over into the Hexagon in 1995 and 1996, with the metro bombings at Saint-Michel and Port Royal. In both cases, the Algerian Islamist group, the GIA, was held

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to be responsible, although as Martin Evans and John Phillips have argued, there is evidence that the Algerian authorities were themselves implicated in a process of manipulating the GIA. 8 The attacks not only served as a reminder to the French public that its historical links to North Africa continued to resonate in the present but, with the Muslim population now numbering around five million, 9 they revived French fears dating back to the Algerian war that the community of immigrant origin represented a fifth column hostile to France. The anxiety appeared to be confirmed by the discovery in 1995 of a device planted on the high-speed train line north of Lyons, a failed attack traced to Khaled Kelkal, a twenty-four-year-old born in Algeria but raised from the age of two in the Lyons banlieue of Vaux-en-Vélin. While Kelkal was shot dead (“finished off”) by French police, his actions sparked debate about what might lead youths brought up and educated in France to turn against the country. The attacks led to a series of anti-terrorist initiatives targeting the immigrant community, including increased policing of cités, the roundup of suspected Islamic militants, and the introduction of a system of de facto racial profiling that led to hundreds of thousands of identity checks on individuals of North African origin. 10 The huge public support for these measures demonstrated the extent of the fear that France’s history in Algeria had assumed a life of its own and would continue to haunt metropolitan France, with repercussions far beyond the end of colonialism. 11 France, then, is haunted by its colonial past. But as Avery Gordon observes, haunting is a constituent element of modern social life, neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis, but a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. 12 Rather than refusing to acknowledge it as part of the experience of the everyday, we should start to look carefully at the moments of haunting which surround us, for our denial of ghostly presences does not mean that haunting is not taking place. Sites of haunting call for a heightened sense of self-awareness on our part, for our assumptions and expectations are shaped by the neo-colonial ideology that remains prevalent in contemporary society. To live with ghosts we must be conscious of how the haunting past continues to influence our present and shape our future. To do this, we must develop a language with which to talk calmly of the moments in which the past touches our lives in the present, in order that we may offer an accommodating welcome to the ghosts, fulfilling the ethical obligations that Derrida reminds us are due. In the process of reaching out to the unknowability of the ghost, we come to a greater degree of self-knowledge where, in an awareness of our own contradictions, there may lie the possibility of respect for ghosts. The literary work of the writers analyzed in this study offers one example of this, advancing a vision of the intertwined histories of the Hexagon and the Maghreb which, at its best, proposes a space of welcome for the specters which haunt France.

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NOTES 1. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 9. 2. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 22. 3. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 149. 4. Attridge, Singularity of Literature, 27–28, emphasis in original. 5. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 175. 6. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 11. 7. Samantha Haigh, “Between Irigaray and Cardinal: Reinventing Maternal Genealogies,” Modern Language Review 89, no. 1 (Jan 1994): 61–70. 8. Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 213. 9. These figures are approximate, since official figures gathered by INED and INSEE do not record ethnicity as a category. 10. Silverstein, Algeria in France, 1. 11. A poll published in Le Monde showed that 91% of those questioned were in favor of the government’s actions. Le Monde, 24 October 1995. 12. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 7.

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Index

Attridge, Derek, 89, 125, 126, 132–133

Derrida, Jacques, xi, 5, 9, 83, 88, 125–127; Specters of Marx, xxiii, xxxiv–xxxvi, 101, 133 Djebar, Assia, xx, xxii, 46, 75, 78

Bauman, Zygmunt, 11, 19–20, 21 Blanchard, Pascal, xiv, xlin20 Bona, Dominique, 1; Malika, 11–21 Bouraoui, Nina, 123; Garçon manqué (Tomboy), 114–120, 122, 123–124, 125, 129n61, 130n71

exoticism, xxxviii, xlivn93, 2–5, 13–14, 17–21, 28n16; of the senses, 6–8. See also Segalen

Cardinal, Marie, 81, 94n2, 96n32; Au Pays de mes racines, 71–81, 82, 83, 84, 86 Cixous, Hélène, 70, 80, 81–82, 94n2, 96n41, 99, 123, 125, 134; Rêveries de la femme savage (Reveries of the Wild Woman), 83–94, 132; La Jeune Née (The Newly Born Woman), 82, 84, 87, 90 colonial thought, xxi–xxii, xxiii, xxv, 1, 11, 12, 16, 21, 27, 77, 134–135 commemoration, xx, xxvi, xxviii–xxx, xxxii, 34, 46, 53, 57, 62, 106 cultural haunting, xx, xxxvi, xlivn89, 46 Daeninckx, Didier, xxxix; Meurtres pour mémoire (Murder in Memoriam), 33, 37, 49–52, 54, 58, 62, 78, 106, 107, 124, 134 decolonization, xi, xvi, xix–xx, xxiii, 131 Deleuze, Gilles, xxvi, 14, 116–118, 120–121, 129n61, 130n71

Foucault, Michel, 6, 54–55 Freud, Sigmund, xxxi, xxxiii, 72, 80; the uncanny, xxxiv, 101, 104 ghosts, xi, xx–xxiii, xxvi, xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxv–xxxvi, xxxvii identity, constructions of, xxii, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxvi, 19–20, 21, 24–26, 35, 44, 48, 57, 71, 72, 73, 80, 83, 86, 88, 103, 104, 104–105, 106–107, 108, 114–120; French national identity, xvii–xviii, xxii–xxiii, xxvi–xxvii, xxxi–xxxii, xxxiv–xxxvi, xxxix, 39, 54, 55, 94, 99–100, 105–106, 131–132, 133 Islam, representations of, xiii, xxv, xxvii, 10, 16, 20–21, 74, 75, 77, 135 judicialization, xxviii, xxxi Kettane, Nacer, 33; Le Sourire de Brahim, 35–39, 62, 99

151

152

Index

Kristeva, Julia, 5, 73, 81, 115; Strangers to Ourselves, xxxiv, xxxix, 99–104, 110–114, 116, 127; the abject, 104–106, 109, 123 Le Clézio, J.M.G., 1; Désert (Desert), xxxvii–xxxviii, 2, 4–11, 14–19, 20–21 Lefeuvre, Daniel, xvi–xvii, xx, xxxiii, xlin20, 131 literary hospitality, xxxvi–xxxvii, 26–27, 89, 91–92, 127 living ghosts, xxii, xxv, xxxiv, 14, 16, 38–39, 134–135 living with ghosts, xxi, xxxiii–xxxvi, 26–27, 80–81, 89 Maspero, François, 33; Le Figuier, 43–45, 56–62, 84 Massacre of 17 October 1961, xiii, xv, xx, xxxviii, 32–34, 51 postcolonial, xv, xxxvii–xxxix, 69, 78, 100, 122, 127, 133 postcolonialism in France, xi, xvi, xix–xx, xxii–xxiii postmemory, xxxviii, 45–46 Prévost, Daniel, 34, 106, 116–117, 118–119, 119–121; Le Passé sous

silence, 106–110, 113–114, 120–121, 123–124 repentance, xv–xvii, xxviii, xxix, xxxiii Republicanism, xii–xiii, xv, xvii–xix, xxiii, xxvii, xxxi, xlin31, 34, 39, 48, 93, 100, 113, 131, 133 riots, November 2005, xii–xiv, xv, xvii, xxxi, 33, 39 Rousso, Henry, xv, xxvi, xxviii, xliin60, 31, 52 Sebbar, Leïla, 1; Shérazade (Sherazade), 21–27; La Seine était rouge (The Seine Was Red), 37, 40–43, 45–48 Segalen, Victor, 3, 7, 19 Stora, Benjamin, xxvii, xxx, xln7, 34, 40 Todorov, Tzvetan, xviii, xxviii, 41, 56, 57–58, 60, 62, 133 torture, xvi, xxv, 42, 43–44, 58, 59, 60, 96n35, 135 trauma, xx–xxi, xxvii, 33, 38, 40–42, 45–46, 59, 78, 123, 133–134, 135 Williams, Raymond, 55–56 Žižek, Slavoj, xxvi, 102–103