The Other Language, the Language of the Other in the Work of Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous
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The Other Language, the Language of the Other in the Work of
Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous
Laurie Corbin
MLN, Volume 129, Number 4, September 2014 (French Issue), pp. 812-828
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2014.0085
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/569895
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]The Other Language, the Language
of the Other in the Work of Assia
Djebar and Hélène Cixous
❦
Laurie Corbin
— langue de l’Autre, devenue pour certains
tunique, voile ou armure, mais elle est, pour
les plus rares, quasiment leur peau!
Assia Djebar, Le blanc de l’Algérie
For both Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous, the relationship to French,
the language in which they primarily write, is a complicated one and
linked to familial and social histories. Each of these writers was born
in Algeria—Djebar in 1936, Cixous in 1937—and each came to the
French language in a way that was determined both by parental deci-
sions and by the politics of the time. Djebar has written extensively,
since the publication of L’Amour, la fantasia in 1985, of her father’s
decision to have her educated in French, a decision that made her
life very different from that of most girls of her background at that
time, and has ultimately become a significant factor in her decision
to live outside of Algeria. Cixous has written, both in essays and in
fiction based on the events of her own life, about her childhood in
Algeria, growing up in a multilingual family with a mother whose
first language was German, a father whose family spoke Spanish and
French, who had her educated in French and whose nationality was,
except for the years of Vichy France, French.
MLN 129 (2014): 812–828 © 2015 by Johns Hopkins University PressM LN 813 In this essay I will analyze the ways in which these two writers use the French language to express a division within themselves, working with and on the language to signify the ruptures or splittings within which they live. I suggest that the use of this “other” language, not the mother tongue, enacts a fragmentation of identity upon Djebar and Cixous that could be seen as paralleled by the fragmentation of the language that is a fundamental part of each writer’s work. This identity fragmentation is connected to each writer’s legacy from her father, legacies that symbolize loss in very different ways for the two. Hélène Cixous lost her father to tuberculosis at a young age; this loss was in many ways linked to the tenuous existence of Jews in Algeria, particularly during the Second World War, and a sense of isolation that was possibly accentuated by the various languages and nationalities of the family. Assia Djebar writes of her deep respect and love for her father yet compares his decision to allow her to be educated in French to the cloak of Nessus, the gift that was given with love to Hercules by his wife who did not know that it would burn him so terribly it would make his life unbearable: “La langue encore coagulée des Autres m’a enveloppée, dès l’enfance, en tunique de Nessus, don d’amour de mon père. . . .” (L’Amour 243). It is also important to look at some of the ways in which language and place are connected for these writers: the relationship to Algeria is one of loss for each yet differently. Cixous writes of Algeria as a place that was never home even though she was born there and lived there until she was eighteen. For Djebar, Algeria is a home that was occu- pied by French colonizers for the first decades of her life and then in recent decades has gradually been taken from her due to the fact that writers, particularly those who write in French, have been targeted in Algeria since the 1990s: her condemnation of the groups that have carried out massacres of writers, journalists, teachers, and artists as well as her defense of women’s rights have led to her decision to live outside of her country.1 For each writer language both expresses and mediates the loss of the homeland: Cixous writes of the “infinite hos- pitality of language” to describe the place where she feels she belongs as being in words rather than a physical location and at the same time 1 For background and analysis of the importance of language in what has been called “the war on civilians” in Algeria, see Algeria in Others’ Languages, in particular, Djamila Saadi-Mokrane’s “The Algerian Linguicide.” See also the special issue of Parallax (Issue 7) entitled “Translating Algeria,” in particular, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger’s “Algeria in Other(s)’ Languages: Toward a Rethinking of Algeria’s Linguistic Predicament.”
814 Laurie Corbin acknowledging her ambivalence toward her French citizenship; Djebar describes French as the language that freed her from the constraints on women of her society and, somewhat paradoxically, the language that now could endanger her by angering compatriots who believe that Algerians should only speak or write in Arabic.2 For each of these writers, it could be said that the French language is the “home” that helps to alleviate the lack of home that has shaped their lives. The word nostalgérie could be useful here in expressing the loss of Algeria yet in the case of Cixous it is the loss of a place she never had and in the case of Djebar, it might be described as the loss of a place that never really existed, which is to say, the dream of what Algeria could have been once freed from French colonial rule.3 Finally, we must note the ways that the two writers foreground the other that is always necessarily expressed when we express ourselves in language: the twentieth century and this beginning of the twenty-first century have shown new links between identity and language and the ways in which language not only speaks the “other” within us but also is the “other” within us. As Cixous states: “La langue, encore une fois, c’est elle qui parle d’abord” (Photos de Racines 66). I would suggest that both Djebar and Cixous play with words and rhetorical figures in ways that emphasize these divisions in identity. In other words, the divisions that are a central subject in the work of these two writers are at the same time political, social, and psychological. The socio-historical backgrounds of the two seem to have produced in them an extreme awareness of the fractures that are within all human identities and which can become particularly visible in the act of self-representation. Fragmented Language, Fragmented Identities Hélène Cixous writes of loss and language in ways that are as paradoxi- cal as they are evocative. She has compared her situation to that of Jacques Derrida, whose background as an Algerian Jew led him to a relationship to the French language famously summed up in his state- 2 Although the election of Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 1999 and his re-elections since then seem to have brought some stability to the country, with fewer massacres, many writers are still living in exile outside of Algeria. 3 I am using this term differently from its more common use as it is defined by Sarah Sussman in “Jews from Algeria”: “With these displacements, the sense of loss, the feeling that something physical (a land, a house, a neighborhood, a family) was missing, became part of the definition of an Algerian Jew. . . . The term ‘nostalgérie’ has entered the French language to describe the specific sense of nostalgia common among rapatriés from Algeria” (221).
M LN 815
ment: “[J]e n’ai qu’une langue, or ce n’est pas la mienne.”4 Cixous’s
description of her relationship to French also emphasizes the distance
between this writer and the language in which she writes: “In the end
I took up French as a foreign language” (“The Names of Oran” 191).
Both emphasize the feeling of being a foreigner or outsider in the
language that would seem to serve as a “mother tongue”: I suggest
that this distance between oneself and the language within which one
lives and works would lead almost necessarily to a sense of identity as
constructed by events or situations that are more or less arbitrary, and
thus undermine the self/other opposition, leading to a representation
of the self that is more open to “otherness.”
Cixous’s grandmother was German but was able to leave Germany
in the late 1930s because of the French passport that was her right as
the widow of a soldier who died in the First World War.5 The Crémieux
edict of 1870 had also established that the Jews of Algeria were French.
The Cixous family was thus considered French in ways that had noth-
ing to do with a feeling of home or belonging but rather were due
to important pieces of paper. This somewhat arbitrary relationship to
nationality became even more arbitrary when the Vichy government
revoked the French citizenship of the Jews of Algeria in 1941, when
Hélène Cixous was three years old. The fact that French citizenship
was restored to her family at the end of the war, although helpful to
Cixous, did not simplify her feelings about her French passport. “D’un
côté affirmer ‘je suis française’ est un mensonge ou une fiction. De
l’autre dire ‘je ne suis pas française’ est un manquement à la poli-
tesse. Et à une gratitude due pour l’hospitalité. Hospitalité houleuse,
intermittente de l’Etat et de la Nation. Mais hospitalité infinie de la
langue” (“Mon algériance” 72).6,7 Language therefore serves as the
4
Le Monolinguisme de l’autre 15.
5
The wonderfully complicated story of the grandmother’s French passport deserves
to be quoted in its entirety: “Chose belle: comment ma grand-mère, veuve de guerre
allemande est devenue veuve de guerre française. Juste avant la guerre, mon grand-
père s’était installé à Strasbourg en Alsace allemande où il avait ouvert une petite
fabrique de jute. Veuve, Omi est rentrée en Allemagne proprement dite, avec ses filles,
à Osnabrück, où ma mère a fait ses études. L’Alsace est devenue française: Omi, du
fait de cette adresse alsacienne a eu droit alors à un passeport à double nationalité.
Lorsque’elle est sortie, en novembre 1938, de l’Allemagne nazie grâce à ce passeport,
elle est partie en gardant son statut de veuve de guerre. C’est ainsi qu’elle est devenue
veuve de guerre en France où elle a touché la petite pension jusqu’à la fin” (Photos
de racines 190).
6
As Ronnie Scharfman notes in “Narratives of Internal Exile,” this echoes a chapter
in Edmond Jabès’s Le Livre de l’Hospitalité titled “L’hospitalité de la langue.”
7
Both Mairéad Hanrahan and Mireille Rosello have discussed the concept of hospi-
tality in Cixous’s work in relation to Algeria. My focus here is on how Cixous uses the
term to describe her relationship to France.816 Laurie Corbin place where one lives yet Cixous never confuses this with the idea of a “mother tongue.” Many literary critics have written about the fluid wordplay that is central to Cixous’s writing yet it is still useful to analyze the ways in which this wordplay derives from a distance from the language that is the result of this complex relationship to it. This distance allows her to work on the language to express things that seem to exist in between words. When speaking of early traumas that she and her brother expe- rienced, she creates a chain of associations: “Le seul témoin ? Non. La seule témoine ? La soeurtémoin la soeurt’aime mais non moins, il faudra bien que la langue me porte où je veux nous trouver” (Rêveries 26). We see an insistence on the work with the language, the need for the language to take this writer somewhere, to some place where she will find herself and with her self, the language as well. Or perhaps when she finds the language, there she will locate herself. But when she says that the language must take her to where she wants to find them (herself and it), this is a summing up of a chain of linked words shifting (but always still including) from witnessing to the love of a sister by way of the sister as witness.8 As Jennifer Yee states: “Phonemic resemblances are used to weave together strands of meaning across different linguistic domains” (“The Colonial Outsider” 189). I would add to this that the wordplay so often found in Cixous’s writings holds open the possibility of simultaneous different meanings. This very short citation from Cixous serves as an example of the ways in which the French language is worked upon to express its foundational impor- tance to Cixous’s identity yet at the same time, its separateness from her conception of her self which allows her to shape it and herself in it at the same time. The “foreignness” of French allows Cixous to always be inside and outside of the language simultaneously. The following citation describes the relationship of her family to France but could also be seen as describing her relationship to the language: “The sea alone, our good sea mother, protected us from the deportation that took those like us captured in France. We fell outside inside. The outside became my inside. I have never left it since” (“Letter” 83). Much more than a status of “outsider,” Cixous is expressing here an identity that is turned inside out. Similarly, the French language both gives her a place and gives her the permanent status of one who is excluded—she resides “outside inside” the language. 8 It is also possible that the “nous” could refer to herself and her brother but I believe this sentence allows for several different interpretations.
M LN 817
Another series of transformations takes place in a lengthy passage
describing a dream that Cixous recounts in which the boat that she is
on is foundering and she is told that she will not be helped because
of crescent rolls (croissants). Croissants are a normal breakfast food
and Cixous’s puzzling over how her love of croissants could lead to
her exclusion from those who deserve help during a catastrophe takes
her though a series of words from croissants to croixsang (cross + blood)
to sans-croix (without cross) to the crescent of Islam. She finishes this
series of transformations with the conclusion: “Les problèmes de
croissant de petit déjeuner c’est une chose. Le croissant de l’islam
c’est autre chose. Un croissant accroît l’autre. Coupable de croissant
et coupable de sans-croix, les deux à la fois. L’innocence n’est pas ce
qu’on croit” (Si près 108). The play of sound in this passage would
be difficult to translate but the signifying chain croissant–croixsang-
sans-croix-croissant (of Islam) makes use of homophony to relate an
“innocent” breakfast pastry to a sense of exclusion based on blood
and the fact of not being Christian.9
Assia Djebar also writes of language and loss yet there is often a
reference to the violence that is inherent in her use of the language
of those who colonized her people. As many who have written on her
work have noted, Djebar uses the veil as a central metaphor in her
writing with both positive and negative connotations, either a protec-
tive covering or a shroud that stifles the women who are required to
wear it when they leave their homes.10 Equally, when she describes
language as a veil, there are both positive and negative images: in a
positive sense, writing can veil the writer from hostile eyes. In particular,
French can be used to conceal and protect the writer of autobiog-
raphies: “Jusque-là, l’écriture française avait été pour moi une sorte
de voile, du moins dans mes premiers romans, fictions qui, évitant
l’autobiographie, ne hantaient vraiment que des lieux d’enfance. . . . ”
(“Le Discours” 4). And in the citation used as epigraph for this essay,
we see a series of words that imply help for the writer: tunic, veil,
armor, or skin can all serve as protection. “[L]angue de l’Autre, dev-
9
The published translation of this passage is as follows: “The problems of the breakfast
croissant is one thing. The croissant or crescent of Islam is another thing. One crescent
increases the other. Guilty of croissant and guilty of sans-cross, both at once. Innocence
is not what you think” (So close 77).
10
For more on the ambiguity of the veil, see Laurie Corbin “‘Imaginez-vous, à me
lire, que je fais mon portrait?’: Looking for the Narrator in Women’s Autobiographical
Texts” and Laurence Huughe “‘Écrire comme un voile’: The Problematics of the Gaze
in the Work of Assia Djebar.”818 Laurie Corbin enue pour certains tunique, voile ou armure, mais elle est, pour les plus rares, quasiment leur peau!” (Le Blanc 264). Yet at the same time, language can reveal the writer, make her vulnerable to masculine hostility: “L’écriture est dévoilement, en pub- lic, devant des voyeurs qui ricanent. . . . Une reine s’avance dans la rue, blanche, anonyme, drapée, mais quand le suaire de laine rêche s’arrache et tombe d’un coup à ses pieds auparavant devinés, elle se retrouve mendiante accroupie dans la poussière, sous les crachats et les quolibets” (L’Amour 204). Here, writing strips the writer of her protection in front of the hostile and invasive gaze of voyeurs. This passage reveals the contradictions of a society that, by “sheltering” its women in the home or in garments that conceal them, actually tries to conceal a predatory view of them: if they are not “protected” by garments that can easily be stripped from them, they are at the mercy of any man that encounters them, whether family or a stranger. The veil represents an impossible duality: it is required for safety, yet its protection is uncertain. Language then, can either protect or strip away protection; the “language of the Other” can provide a sense of security yet it would seem that the security is fragile or even illusory. Similarly to the paradoxical use of the images of language as veil or unveiling, we also see many references to language as skin both in a positive and negative sense: as already noted, in the epigraph for this essay Djebar states that the language of the Other is “pour les plus rares, quasiment leur peau!” (Le Blanc 264), a description with positive connotations, even a suggestion that one can join oneself physically to language, have it become the body’s protection of itself or the meeting of the body with the world around it. Yet speaking of herself in this language is also described as flaying her skin from her body: “Tenter l’autobiographie par les seuls mots français, c’est sous le lent scalpel de l’autopsie à vif, montrer plus que sa peau. Sa chair se desquame, semble-t-il, en lambeaux du parler d’enfance qui ne s’écrit plus” (L’Amour 178). Both for language as veil and language as skin, there is a fear of what might be shown, the idea that autobiography shows “plus que sa peau,” cutting down to the shredded flesh of what she calls her langue maternelle, Arabic, the language that she speaks but does not write. Further, the image of the cloak of Nessus noted earlier implies that language can stick to the skin and burn it unbearably. These contradictory descriptions of language as veil or unveiling, as skin covering the body or skin flayed or burned, communicate the painful situation of this writer and her relationship to the language, yet her acknowledgement of her need of it.
M LN 819
Somewhat like Cixous, Djebar shapes and re-shapes the French
language, bringing out language’s inherent elusiveness with word-
play. “‘L’amour, ses cris’ (‘s’écrit’): ma main qui écrit établit le jeu
de mots français sur les amours qui s’exhalent ; mon corps qui, lui,
simplement s’avance, mais dénudé, lorsqu’il retrouve le hululement
des aïeules sur les champs de bataille d’autrefois, devient lui-même
enjeu: il ne s’agit plus d’écrire que pour survivre” (L’Amour 240).11 The
homophony in French between “love, its cries” and “love writes itself/
is written” offers up the two meanings simultaneously. The sentence
then goes on to evoke the sounds of lovemaking, the writer’s nudity
or vulnerability, the body itself as what is battled for, and the need to
write for survival. The writer’s body becomes more and more present
in this chain of images expressing her relationship to writing: she is
“incorporated” into the text through this work with the language.
Equally, the body and writing are inextricably linked—the loss of lan-
guage would signify the death of the writer. Similarly to the citations
from Cixous discussed earlier, we see a linked series of images that
finish in the writer’s need for language: for Cixous it must take her
to where she will find herself and it, for Djebar it will enable her to
survive the battlefields of both past and present. Both writers work on
the language to maintain multiple meanings simultaneously, an open-
ness to paradox and uncertainty that is linked to the ways in which
they live and work in openness to concepts such as identity and home.
Djebar places the French language at the center of this text, writ-
ing some time after its publication: “L’Amour, la Fantasia est ainsi une
double autobiographie, où la langue française devient le personnage
principal, prosopopée inattendue dont je me rendis compte a poste-
riori” (“Le Discours” 6). The concept of an autobiography which has
as its main character the language in which it is written merits further
examination: again, as in the citation in which Djebar describes the
language of the Other becoming one’s skin, we find a lack of separa-
tion between the writer and the language. More than simply a means
of survival it becomes the life of the writer, the subject of her life.
We must also note a difference between these two writers: whereas
Djebar sometimes emphasizes the idea of language as protection as well
as seeing the language as the central character in her autobiography,
Cixous, as noted earlier, seems to emphasize a distance between herself
and the French language which allows her to shape it, cutting apart
11
I have modified the punctuation in this citation, changing from the French guillemets
(« ») to the quotation marks used in English texts (“ ” and ‘ ’) for the sake of clarity.820 Laurie Corbin
words and blending them, to express her own sense of a fragmented
identity, her own self in pieces that fit together in different ways.
However, for both Djebar and Cixous, the French language, in its
distance from the mother tongue, in its problematic relationship to
the concept of “homeland,” liberates the writer to live inside and out-
side of the language and, what is more, to live. Cixous finds that the
language can replace the homeland, Djebar finds through language a
way to survive the separation from her own culture that the language
imposed and continues to impose upon her. The work on the words
themselves, foregrounding a multiplicity of meanings, allows each of
these writers to explore the paradoxes of her own existence.
The Language of the Father: The Language of Loss
As noted earlier, Hélène Cixous’s father died when she was a child,
leaving his wife, two children, and mother-in-law to struggle with
poverty and prejudice in the city of Algiers, after the Second World
War.12 Before his death, he left his daughter a legacy of languages:
besides the languages spoken in the home, he had found tutors in both
Arabic and Hebrew for her, he had also mistakenly enrolled her in a
French lycée that no other Jews attended.13 Cixous describes her mul-
tilingual household as a place of continual translation and wordplay:
“Cette agilité, ce sport translinguistique et amoureux m’abrita de toute
obligation ou velléité d’obédience (je ne pensai pas que le français
fût ma langue maternelle, c’était une langue dans laquelle mon père
m’apprenait) à une langue materpaternelle” (“Mon algériance” 73).
Although Cixous speaks of the freedom that she was given from any
feeling of indebtedness to the French language as mother tongue,
it also seems likely that French, as the language given to her by her
father, comes to signify his loss as well.
12
The loss of the father of the family resulted in exclusion from the Jewish community
of Algiers in addition to the lack of acceptance from the Arab and French communities.
“[I]l faut ajouter l’anti-veuvisme, dont nous vîmes surgir les manifestations, une fois mon
père disparu, parmi les proches, les amis de mon père qui voulaient tous maintenant
être les amants de ma mère sinon, et leurs épouses qui toutes sans aucune exception
mirent ma mère et la famille à la porte préventivement” (Rêveries 43).
13
See Les rêveries de la femme sauvage page 122 where Cixous discusses her placement in
the Lycée Fromentin rather than the high school that the other Jewish girls attended.
In addition, particularly in the case of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, it is important
to note that much of Cixous’s fiction since the 1990s makes use more or less exactly of
events of Cixous’s own life, with a narrator who speaks in the first person but cannot
be considered identical to the author.M LN 821 Thus, French, as the language left her by the lost father, would always represent both a loving legacy and an exclusion. The lycée where she received her education was a place that always left her feeling as though she did not belong, with its emphasis on French history and society, and Christianity. The anti-Semitism of the environment was not necessarily flagrant but was never absent. The loss of the father would continue to resonate in different ways in Cixous’s choices as an adult and as a writer. Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller states: “Le père disparu représente la patrie absente (“Le ‘Malgérien’” 849). It is worth noting that she chose to concentrate in her graduate studies on the English language and its literature: her doctoral thesis was on the work of James Joyce. The legacy of the father is not only a relationship to languages as outsider/insider, but also a relationship to the loss that language always necessarily represents. The signifier is always stand- ing for something that is not there: here the mother-father tongue is evoking not only the lost father but the lost place in society that the father is supposedly able to give, in this case an ironic supposition since the father lost his place in society as a doctor once the Vichy government excluded Jews from professional positions. This irony also underlies Cixous’s relationship to the language: “Mais à l’école je voulus toujours être la meilleure ‘en français’ comme on disait pour honorer mon père, le chassé” (“Mon algériance” 73). The linguistic legacy from Assia Djebar’s father, although also a loving gift that led to exclusion, had a different impact on her life. By allowing her to be educated in the French system, not only did he free her from the constraints of the veil and the harem, he also ultimately separated her from her culture, particularly from the cul- ture of the women who were traditionally grouped together. Djebar speaks of a growing feeling of alienation as she enters her teens and her mother is questioned about the reason that she does not wear a veil. The feeling of being an outsider is also physical in that she is no longer comfortable seated on the floor, or dancing the tradi- tional dances, nor is she able to vocalize the ululation traditional to women of her culture when expressing joy or sadness. Freedom from the constraints of traditional women’s roles is thus paired with loss. Najat Rahman explains: “The figure of the father represents plural and aporetic aspects of heritage, tradition and modernity, love and fantasia (warring), fragments of which could be reconstituted for a different vision of home” (Literary Disinheritance 74). La langue pater-
822 Laurie Corbin
nelle, as Djebar describes the French language, divides her from her
heritage, her home, her self.14
Djebar’s relationship to French is differentiated not only from Ara-
bic, her langue maternelle, but also from Berber, in that she asserts that
this language of her ancestors, even though she does not speak it, has
still determined certain important parts of her: “Je crois, en outre,
que ma langue de souche, celle de tout le Maghreb, je veux dire la
langue berbère . . . cette langue donc que je ne peux oublier, dont la
scansion m’est toujours présente et que pourtant je ne parle pas, est la
forme même où, malgré moi et en moi, je dis ‘non’: comme femme,
et surtout, me semble-t-il, dans mon effort durable d’écrivain” (“Le
Discours” 1–2; punctuation modified). In this citation, we see that the
Berber language is linked specifically to her identity as a woman and
as a writer and we are reminded that this “langue de souche” con-
nects her to a heritage of powerful women and the ancient written
language of the Tuaregs, which was nearly lost.15 In fact, we could say
that this “presence” of the Berber language helps to alleviate the loss
of the women’s culture that she experiences due to her education in
French. Thus, opposed to French, this language that she does not
speak gives Djebar a sense of her place in history, her relationship to
its people, her solidarity with its women. Importantly, she notes that
it is the language in which she refuses what she perceives as wrong,
either as a woman or as a writer who speaks out against injustice,
whether committed by the French against the Algerian people or
by segments of the Algerian society who have punished those who
are deemed disloyal to Islam or the Arabization of contemporary
Algerian society. Djebar therefore notes her different relationships
to three languages: French, the langue paternelle that she speaks and
writes, Arabic, the langue maternelle that she speaks, and Berber, the
ancient language of her people, which, although she neither speaks
nor writes it, gives her the strength to speak and especially to write
against injustice.
The Language of Place
“Tout le temps où je vivais en Algérie je rêvais d’arriver un jour en Algérie,
j’aurais fait n’importe quoi pour y arriver, avais-je écrit, je ne me suis jamais
14
The expression langue paternelle is taken from page 11 of Vaste est la prison.
15
See pages 121–64 in Vaste est la prison for Djebar’s account of the rediscovery of the
written language of the Tuaregs and of Tin Hinan, the fourth-century Tuareg princess
whose tomb contained examples of this ancient language.M LN 823
trouvée en Algérie. . . . ” (Rêveries 9; punctuation modified). Cixous’s
connection to the land of her birth and her childhood, the land
of her father’s grave, is presented as a paradoxical relation in the
haunted and haunting first sentence of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage.
The narrator describes her and her brother’s yearning to belong to
the community of Arab children who tormented them with the idea
that they were “inséparabe,” a word that I would read as meaning both
irrevocably joined and irrevocably other.16 Thus, they were not in the
place where they lived, they were not the people who lived there. This
sense of “foreignness” has permeated the work of Cixous and she has
created various words to describe her ambivalent relationship to this
place of her childhood that was never hers, among them malgérien,
désalgérie, and Algerrance indicate feelings of loss or dislocation and also
perhaps the feeling described in the citation above of always never
arriving in Algeria.17 Having lived in Algeria she will always never have
lived in Algeria.
This paradoxical relationship to a homeland is due to many histori-
cal factors: as noted earlier, French nationality was given to and then
taken from the Jews of Algeria, one result of this being that the family
was never “Algerian.” Sarah Sussman notes: “[The Algerian Jews] were
from Algeria, but not Algerian, and they were Maghrebi, but neither
Arab nor Berber. Just as the Jews were intermediaries between the
Arab and European societies in Algeria and between the Algerian
and French societies in France, their identities were on the boundar-
ies of the established categories” (“Jews from Algeria” 217–18). As
Cixous describes it, a place in a language can stand in for the place
that cannot be home. “À un certain moment pour qui a tout perdu,
que ce soit d’ailleurs un être ou un pays, c’est la langue qui devient
pays” (“De la scène de l’Inconscient” 19). Dislocation becomes her
place and her language always necessarily expresses this oxymoronic
relationship to the homeland. Cixous’s writings on Algeria seem to
find new ways to express a twentieth-century phenomenon that is
neither exile nor diaspora, but rather, errance, wandering or roaming,
a state of movement suggested by the –ance ending also seen in the
neologism algériance.18 Perhaps the concept of errance could be seen
16
“Le plus insupportable c’est, par-dessus les combats et les humiliations, que nous
étions assaillis au Clos-Salembier par les êtres mêmes que nous voulions aimer, dont
nous étions lamentablement amoureux [ . . . ]. Moi, pensais-je je suis inséparabe” (Rêveries
44–45). Jennifer Yee also discusses this term in “The Colonial Outsider.”
17
Among others, Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, Alison Rice, and Jennifer Yee discuss
Cixous’s use of these neologisms.
18
See Rice 197 and Scharfman 91–92 on these endings in Cixous’s work.824 Laurie Corbin
as simultaneously positive and negative—homeless yet free, in move-
ment yet never arriving.19
Assia Djebar’s relationship to Algeria has been shaped by other
historical events. While Cixous’s childhood was particularly marked by
the Second World War, it is the conquest of Algeria and the Algerian
War of Independence that are prominent in Djebar’s earlier work,
and then the increasing persecution of Francophone or Berberophone
writers and artists in Algeria has been central in her work since the
1990s. Djebar’s descriptions of growing up in a small village of the
Algerian Sahel emphasize her homeland. Yet the problem for the
writer is that this land is no longer her home: a result of the years
of violence directed against writers among others, but also in that it
has become an increasingly hostile environment for women. “Je ne
te nomme pas mère, Algérie amère” (Vaste 347). The loss of home-
land expressed in this poem from the end of Vaste est la prison evokes
also the complexity of Djebar’s relationships to the maternal and the
paternal ties in her life: the “motherland” has become dangerous for
its daughters; the women who live there are increasingly oppressed,
in ways that can go so far as rape and murder, by the religious and
political strife of recent decades. Djebar describes a society that has
transitioned from the colonial era oppression of women to oppression
for different reasons.
Des femmes victimes pour leur savoir, leur métier ou pour leur solidarité—
morsures de l’inquiétude ! Le récit continuera; il se poursuivra de halte en
halte, d’épreuves en affliction, en déceptions, en sursauts réprimés ou en
offenses avalées. . . . Le récit, non le silence, ni la soumission tourbe noire;
les paroles, en dépit de tout, posera jalon, avec la rage, la peine amère, et
la goutte de lumière à recueillir dans l’encre de l’effroi. (Oran 371)
In this passage we find a call for speech, for voices that must not
be silenced, for words that must continue to fight against tyranny and
terror. The bitterness and sorrow of the crushed hopes of the 1960s
is present in much of this writer’s work but there is also a seeming
detachment from the place as it is: “Oui, tant d’autres parlent de
l’Algérie, avec ferveur ou avec colère. Moi, m’adressant à mes disparus
et réconfortée par eux, je la rêve” (Le Blanc 261). “Dreaming Algeria”
is this writer’s response to a land that has been devastated by massa-
cres and struggles between a military government and fundamentalist
19
Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller discusses the term errance in “Le ‘Malgérien’ d’Hélène
Cixous.”M LN 825 Islamist groups—what could be seen as the ongoing legacy of coloni- zation—as though she can only express her attachment to this land by envisioning it as it could be or could have been. Yet, like Cixous, Djebar presents her “homelessness” as positive: “Etapes non de la fuite, plutôt de la mobilité ; dialogues échangés entre Algériennes d’ici et de là-bas” (Oran 367). Like Cixous, Djebar valorizes the freedom to move—mobilité for Djebar, errance for Cixous—but, for Djebar, with the underlying reminder that this freedom of movement is due to her education in French. Telle Zoraidé, la dépouillée. Ayant perdu comme elle ma richesse du départ, dans mon cas, celle de l’héritage maternel, et ayant gagné quoi, sinon la simple mobilité du corps dénudé, sinon la liberté. (Vaste 172) Language and the Other Although I have not addressed many of the differences between the writings of Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous, they are numerous and quite important. My goal in this essay of comparing certain commonali- ties in their use of the French language and the place of the French language in their texts is small in relation to the vast bodies of work that each has produced. Yet overall, this brief examination of each writer’s relationship to language as both division and expression of division, as a connection to the loss of the father, and as a signifier of an ambivalent relationship with Algeria, allows us to see that the two writers, with their different relationships to French, la langue paternelle or une langue materpaternelle, use their relationship to the language in which they write to demonstrate relationships to identity that are perhaps particularly important for our time. For each of these writ- ers, identity and language are intertwined and oppositional at the same time, giving the impression that the language itself speaks the struggle to be. The emphasis on polyphony in the work of these writers evokes the duality or even plurality in all of us. Alison Rice suggests that: “the ‘oral’ component of Cixous’s written work stems from its inclusion of dialogue, its polyphonic mingling of different voices. . . . ” (188). Cixous’s narration in the first person and the frequent use of second person pronouns when speaking to a person described in the text such as her brother, mother, or father, give the impression of verbal exchanges that are always taking place, with the result that sometimes the reader has the impression of being present at a dialogue taking
826 Laurie Corbin place inside the writer, that there is a plurality of voices within the one who is writing: “Quand ‘je parle’ c’est toujours au moins ‘nous,’ la langue et moi en elle, avec elle, et elle en moi qui parlons” (Photos de Racines 93; punctuation modified). Djebar has been noted for her insistence on plural voices: both in her writing and in her films she is communicating the voices and stories of women whose stories would otherwise be unknown. Yet her strategy with these voices is to create something like a chorus in which it is not always clear who is speaking, suggesting not only that we are divided in ourselves but that we are not separate from others. “L’écriture autobiographique est forcément une écriture rétrospec- tive où votre ‘je’ n’est pas toujours le je, ou c’est un ‘je-nous’ ou c’est un ‘je’ démultiplié” (“Territoires” 33; punctuation modified). Again there is the difference that Djebar emphasizes lack of separation and Cixous emphasizes the different parts of her self, but what we see in each writer is that within the je there is always l’autre. Moreover, the wordplay that is an important characteristic of each writer, particularly with neologisms or homophony being used to bring out the endless play of the signifier and its capacity for a multiplicity of simultaneous meanings, also evokes the presence of the other in the expression of the self. The attention to multiple meanings with expressions such as L’amour, ses cris and L’amour s’écrit or the creation of a chain of linked signifiers such as le seul témoin-la seule témoine-la soeurtémoin-la soeurt’aime reveal speech as a splitting of the self and an opening into polyvalence and, as Brigitte Weltman-Aron states about Cixous’s writing, yet I think it can also be said about Djebar’s, it can “bring forth the chance of unperceived links or leaks of sense” (“The Figure of the Jew” 278). These “links or leaks of sense” both present multiple meanings and shred them into numerous parts. The poly- valent signifier opens up the reading of the text to an exploration of identity fragmented by language and the challenge of expressing this identity through a breaking down of the language. Najat Rahman says of Djebar’s work: “[I]t is language as aporia that reflects the hybrid and fragmenting narrative of the divided self” (Literary Disinheritance 109). Aporia, “the expression of a simulated or real doubt, as about where to begin or what to do or say,” is an important strategy for the errance and mobilité of these two writers: shifting from one place to another, bringing words and meanings together in ways that challenge univocity, they choose to live in uncertainty.20 The other languages that enter into their views of themselves— Arabic and Berber for Djebar, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic,
M LN 827 and English for Cixous—are shown to complicate their identities in ways that are ultimately useful and perhaps even lifesaving for both. Although she does not speak it, Berber is the language in which Dje- bar refuses oppression; the multiplicity of languages in which Cixous grew up helped her to live outside of many categories that can limit our understanding of ourselves and of others. In some ways, each writer uses the French language to define what she is not and this is perhaps the most interesting commonality in their work. Djebar uses French to express an often painful distance between herself and the women’s communities of her culture; she also expresses the distance between herself and the violence directed against those who are seen as not conforming to the strictures that have dominated modern Algeria. Cixous uses French to express her distance from common understandings of homeland and mother tongue, self and other. Each writer has addressed the situation of women as “other,” as often having, for many reasons, less access to the ability to speak for oneself, to be heard in their societies, whether North African or European. Each uses her own life as an example of what women undergo, and their painful struggle to speak and to write. Perhaps most importantly, each of these writers has confronted the power of language to shape us in ways that are often invisible. By demonstrating in their work the ways in which language creates and defines us, deludes and eludes us, always luring us on in a never ending pursuit of a stable meaning in our lives, Djebar and Cixous struggle with our place in language, always outside and inside at the same time. Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne Works Cited Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle, ed. Algeria in Others’ Languages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002. Cixous, Hélène. “De la scène de l’Inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire.” Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture. Eds. Françoise van Rossum-Guyon and Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz. Paris: Rodopi, 1990. 15–34. ——— and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Hélène Cixous: Photos de Racines. Paris: des femmes, 1994. ———. “Letter to Zohra Drif.” Trans. Eric Prenowitz. College Literature 30.1 (Winter 2003): 82–90. ———. “Mon algériance.” Les Inrockuptibles 115 (1997): 70–74. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 99. 20
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