Re-hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity: Women's Contemporary Filmmaking and Lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia (After the Empire: Francophone World and Postcolonial France)

Re-hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity

After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France Series Editor Valérie Orlando, University of Maryland Advisory Board Robert Bernasconi, Memphis University; Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University; Chima Korieh, Rowan University; Mildred Mortimer, University of Colorado, Boulder; Obioma Nnaemeka, Indiana University; Kamal Salhi, University of Leeds; Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt University; Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Tulane University See www.lexingtonbooks.com/series for the series description and a complete list of published titles.

Recent and Forthcoming Titles Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from Maghreb, by Alison Rice Breadfruit or Chestnut?: Gender Construction in the French Caribbean Novel, by Bonnie Thomas History’s Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature, by Seth Graebner Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War (1954–1962), by Jo McCormack The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures and Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean, by Peter Hawkins Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures, by Cécile Accilien

Two Novellas by YAE: A Moroccan in New York and Sea Drinkers, by Youssouf Amine Elalamy, translated by John Liechty Frankétienne and Rewriting: A Work in Progress, by Rachel Douglas Charles Testut’s Le Vieux Salomon: Race, Religion, Socialism, and Freemasonry, by Sheri Lyn Abel What Moroccan Cinema?: A Historical and Critical Study 1956–2006, by Sandra Carter Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature, by F. Elizabeth Dahab Re-hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity: Women’s Contemporary Filmmaking and Lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia, by Stacey Weber-Fève

Re-hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity Women’s Contemporary Filmmaking and Lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia

STACEY WEBER-F`EVE

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 © 2010 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. Excerpts from The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, translation copyright © 1969 by Collins Publishers, and G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Annie Ernaux, excerpts from A Frozen Woman, translated by Linda Coverdale. Translation copyright © 1995 by Seven Stories Press. Reprinted with the permission of Seven Stories Press, www.sevenstories.com. Excerpts in the first half of chapter 2 are reproduced from Annie Ernaux, La femme gelée, © Éditions Gallimard, 1981, all rights reserved. Excerpts in the second half of chapter 2 are reproduced from Simone de Beauvoir, La femme rompue, © Éditions Gallimard, 1967, all rights reserved. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weber-Feve, Stacey, 1977– Re-hybridizing transnational domesticity and femininity : women’s contemporary filmmaking and lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia / Stacey Weber-Feve. p. cm. — (After the empire: the francophone world and postcolonial France ; 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3451-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3453-5 (ebook) 1. French literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. French literature—Frenchspeaking countries—History and criticism. 3. Feminist films—French-speaking countries—History and criticism. 4. Women motion picture producers and directors—French-speaking countries. 5. Home in literature. 6. Home in motion pictures. 7. Femininity in literature. 8. Femininity in motion pictures. 9. Gender identity in literature. 10. Gender identity in motion pictures. I. Title. PQ149.W38 2010

840.9'3522—dc22

2009036732

⬁ ™ 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

To Sébastien, whom I’d be utterly lost without. For my mother and father, who gave my sister and me our allowances “just for breathing.” In memory of my grandmothers, Rose Migliorino and LaRue Weber, who inspired me to learn how to knit, cook, and bake.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Interrogating and Re-hybridizing the Personal 1 2 3 4

Making Home with Assia Djebar: Destablizing the Center(s) (Re)Displaying Femininity and Home with Annie Ernaux and Simone de Beauvoir Creating Domestic Landscapes and Soundscapes with Raja Amari and Coline Serreau (Re)Presenting Female Iconography at Home with Leïla Sebbar and Yamina Benguigui

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to all the filmmakers, writers, former professors, and scholars who have inspired me to write this book and to the friends, colleagues, family members, and students who have supported me throughout the process of doing so. I would like to thank my editor, Mr. Michael Sisskin, who worked with me on the completion and production of this book and promptly answered my many queries. I am also grateful to the “After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France” series editor, Dr. Valérie Orlando, and the advisory board members, Drs. Robert Bernasconi, Alec Hargreaves, Chima Korieh, Obioma Nnaemeka, Kamal Salhi, Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting, Frank Ukadike, and Mildred Mortimer, for giving me the opportunity to publish this study with them. I owe special thanks to the anonymous external reader whose insightful feedback and commentary helped me improve the clarity and organization of my discussion and enrich my study. I warmly thank the following scholars who either read early drafts of this manuscript or were involved in its conception stage: Drs. Judith Mayne, Danielle Marx-Scouras, Jennifer Willing, Julia Watson, and Karlis Racevskis. I wish to thank my friend and colleague Dr. Wynne Wong for her unwavering support and belief in me. I am most grateful to my family—especially my mother- and father-in-law, Jean-René and Eliane; my sister, Laura; and my parents, John and Mary Ann—for their love and support. I am very lucky to have my own personal cheerleader, a sweet and loving beagle named “Queenie” who likes to cuddle and give kisses and whose tail is in perpetual motion. Finally, I infinitely thank and am especially grateful to my husband, Sébastien, who spent countless evenings and weekends on his own while I worked, never complaining, objecting, xi

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or questioning. I could have never succeeded without his tireless support, endless patience, and unconditional love. The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce the following copyrighted material: A shortened version of my study of Assia Djebar, which first appeared as “Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in ‘Touchia: Ouverture’ and Ces voix qui m’assiègent” in the French Review 81.3 (February 2008): 60–68. An earlier version of my study of Raja Amari appeared under the title: “Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in French-Tunisian Filmmaker Raja Amari’s Satin rouge (2002)” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (forthcoming).

Introduction INTERROGATING AND RE-HYBRIDIZING THE PERSONAL

This study examines the problematic location of home, the traditional female activity of homemaking, and representation of female subjectivity in contemporary cinematic, (auto)biographical, and fictional texts by several prominent contemporary French and Francophone women artists. The women artists (filmmakers, authors, and screenplay writers) in this study question the notion of home as a female interior space in which protagonists traditionally become objects or accessories. They bring to the fore multiple representations of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian femininity. In their texts, the artists foreground domestic space, female housekeeping activities, and women’s ideological roles in order to (re)appropriate the normative gender discourses of their homelands. They accomplish these goals by revealing how the home within each society functions, often subversively, as a space of socio-political-historical contention and a complex framework for identity and subjectivity construction. I take as my point of departure in this study the notion of the transnational; but in following Shohat and Stam’s approach, I also wish to postcolonialize as well as feminize and domesticize this notion. In the same spirit as Shohat and Stam, I likewise strive to shape a conceptual space in this book that questions any single theory or theoretical approach by echoing their call to see the practice of theorization itself as grounded within implicated historical, geographical, socio-political, and gendered contexts (2003: 1). By bringing together a few primary tenets of critical inquiry from postcolonialism, feminism, and domesticity in this book, I argue that these theoretical frameworks must be considered in relation to one another and suggest the xiii

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lenses of transnationalism and by extension transvergence as useful tools of analysis in such an endeavor. From this transnational point of departure, this study illustrates the representation of women in body, by voice, and through the gaze in a collection of first-person cinematic and literary narratives created by French-speaking women artists from France, Algeria, and Tunisia. Specifically, I take up the functions of the gaze and the problems of voicing the personal when considering the role and place of the home in transnational processes of identity formation, gender performances, and constructions of culture and society. Transnational is a polysemic term with different tenets and applications in film, literary, media, and cultural studies. Yet, the transnational—regardless of specific field of study—is rooted in the notion of the inter- and intranational natures of media and their messages and interpretations. This is to say that the transnational often investigates both the so-called “local” and so-called “global” audiences and their interpretations of these media and messages. In an oversimplification of the concept, the transnational world is generally typified by a global circulation of images, sounds, products, and peoples. In this transnational world, the media and its messages have a complicated and complex impact on notions of national identity and communal belonging. In this book, “media” is defined as first-person films and lifewriting narratives. Like the other, more commonly considered “media,” such as television and the Internet, first-person films and lifewriting narratives also “partially deterritorialize the process of imaging communities” (Shohat & Stam, 2003: 1). Shohat and Stam explain that while the media can fashion spectators into atomized consumers or self-entertaining monads, they can also construct identity and alternative affiliations. Just as the media can exoticize and otherize cultures, they can also reflect and help catalyze multicultural affiliations and transnational identifications. (1)

The first-person films and lifewriting narratives included in this book capture the inter- and intra-national natures of media and their messages as well as exoticize and otherize French and North African cultures and diversify and multiply so-called national or hegemonic points of identification. Film, literary, and cultural studies research has seen since the turn of the millennium an intensification of academic interest in issues concerning nation, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of identity. Once believed in the past to be objects of separate and specialized disciplines, the study of different visual and written systems of representation today elicits many overlapping

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and interdisciplinary analytic investigations and theoretical methodologies. The juxtaposition and echoing of questions from a range of academic disciplines and varying critical perspectives and approaches—from anthropology to archaeology, from theology to art history, from psychoanalysis to post-structuralism, and so forth—have multiplied and diversified the lines of inquiry into the meanings of imagery in both so-called high and so-called low forms of literature and visual culture. Moreover, these multiple yet interconnected discourses have challenged and reconfigured understanding and discussion of how different peoples and individuals around the globe inscribe themselves or are inscribed into their or other various visual and written systems of representation. In scholarly practice, these discourses often follow a tripartite process. First, scholars interpret how different peoples and individuals see and project themselves in and through their visual or written system of representation. Second, scholars analyze how historical, political, ideological, and social structures or belief systems determine and define the relationships between peoples and individuals and their visual or written systems of representation. And third, scholars consider how different peoples and individuals relate to and see one another as they are interpolated in visual and written systems of representation. Some of the key questions concern the social production and exchange of signs and their function in offering a vehicle for social cohesion or subversion; questions about style or the significance of form; the tradition of social history; the study of material technologies; or methods of interpreting unconscious desire, drives, and fantasy. The field of feminist studies has greatly impacted literary and media studies by opening up additional key questions regarding sexual differences that inflect the visual and the written. Furthermore, postcolonial exploration of visual and written texts has also impacted literary and media studies through its aim of exploding the traditional stereotypical, limited, and exclusive ways of seeing individuals in which gender, race, and sexuality are bound together and grafted onto monolithic or hegemonic visual or written representation. One cannot underestimate the importance of such critical investigation in contemporary scholarly practice and artistic production for many scholars and artists around the globe. The female protagonists of the contemporary first-person films and lifewriting narratives examined in this book are all multifarious and multisited. These subjects do not exist independently but rather as part of a complex network of political, social, and historical practices and ideological cultural values. Their authors show how these subjects often work against, through, in relation to, or in-between other subject positions in different and diverse ways. The artists are wary of claims of “authenticity” and

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“realism.” They assert that these false claims are always fraught with power relations and imbued with a priori frameworks that regulate and govern the relationship of seeing and knowing. The artists in this study are interested in exploring how the process of uncovering or articulating new identities and subjectivities ushers in new ways of seeing, knowing, and being. Their works illustrate an interactive process in which meaning is always in production and a state of transition, dependent on the spectator or reader who must decode or interpret and assign the new identities and subject positions and construct the new ways of seeing, knowing, and being. Their work supports the notion that written and visual inscriptions cannot be predetermined nor narrowly prescribed. My hope in this book is to bring together all of these postcolonial, feminist, and domesticity concerns and practices under the same transnational umbrella and to discuss them in relation to one another. Shohat and Stam remind us that, “Communities, societies, nations, and even entire continents exist not autonomously but in a densely woven web of connectedness, within a complex and multivalent relationality” (2003: 1). In following their lead, I too take a relational approach in this book by crossing borders between geographies, communities, practices, and disciplines. I bring together France, Algeria, and Tunisia not because of their shared historical colonial past—Algeria and Tunisia are two former colonies of the French Empire—but because of their shared contemporary transnational, linguistic, and transcultural heritages. Their cultures, languages, cuisines, religions, economies, politics, and art have overlapped, melded, clashed with, and complemented one another for more than a century. Mostly though, as I will show, I bring together France, Algeria, and Tunisia in this study because many French, Algerian, and Tunisian artists share common artistic and aesthetic aspirations and points of reference; albeit the kinds of socio-cultural perspectives and motifs and individual tropes, devices, and specificities in their work vary widely. The French, Algerian, and Tunisian women artists and their protagonists included in this study are all engaged in the common pursuit of challenging traditional stereotypical, limited, and exclusive ways of seeing women within and outside the borders of their respective societies and cultures in which the women’s race or ethnicity, social class or level of education, and sexuality or sexual activity conform to monolithic or hegemonic ideals of their respective societies and cultures. These women artists work from within as well as beyond their so-called national systems of visual and written representation to open up new ways of seeing, knowing, and being. At times, they adopt an Orientalist paradigm in their pursuit (e.g., seeing North African women through the French-European gaze). Other times, they reverse this paradigm

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(e.g., seeing French women through a North African or Other perspective). In all instances, though, these women artists ultimately play with these paradigms and challenge previously conceived notions of spectatorship, power and gender relations, and performances, definitions, and discourses of femininity. Bringing together women artists from France, Algeria, and Tunisia in this book effectively calls into question the inscription of neatly separate communities or personal narratives. Yet doing so still brings to the fore in a complementary manner the different, multiple, and diverse ways communities of women or individual women engage with and articulate this question of inscription within the context of “Nation” or “Republic.” This book also crosses disciplinary borders. I bring together film and literature and theory and practice for I desire to forge links between seemingly disparate or compartmentalized fields of study; for example, film studies and film theory, literary studies and literary theory, lifewriting, domesticity, postcolonialism, feminist theory, and transnationalism. While I do not wish to suggest that the different theoretical methodologies, lenses, and approaches are interchangeable or may easily replace one another, as I will unravel in the following discussion of this introduction, there are certain similar echoes and optics that reverberate and refract across these disciplines. Thereby, once again in the spirit and coinage of Shohat and Stam, this book offers a kind of “methodological cubism.” This is to say, the use of multiple critical perspectives and theoretical frameworks—especially with regard to subjectivity, identity construction, gender performance and discourse, space, and modes of articulation and enunciation—as they are imbricated and reflected across various disciplines. This methodological cubism informs the different tropes I undertake in my analyses and allows a multitude of viewpoints from which to examine and theorize more richly women’s contemporary first-person filmmaking and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia. In this study, I will specifically address the tropes of: making home in the first segment, Touchia: Ouverture, of Assia Djebar’s film La nouba du Mont Chenoua (1976) and in her essay Regard interdit, son coupé from her collection of short-stories entitled Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980); displaying femininity through the home in Annie Ernaux’s novel La femme gelée (1981) and Simone de Beauvoir’s short-story La femme rompue (1967); creating domestic landscapes and soundscapes with Raja Amari’s film Satin rouge (2002) and Coline Serreau’s film Chaos (2000); and representing female iconography at home in Leïla Sebbar’s travelogue Mes Algéries en France: Carnet de voyage (2004) and Yamina Benguigui’s film Inch’Allah dimanche (2002). I have selected these specific tropes because they bring to the surface interesting contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes specific to the various cultures,

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societies, and communities from which they originate. In each corresponding primary text, these tropes raise questions concerning the Self-Other divide and reveal the hybrid nature or in-between spaces of expression that many contemporary women artists’ works (and even the artists themselves) occupy. Yet, as the women artists considered in this study demonstrate in their texts, these various tropes of domesticity curiously manage to transcend the SelfOther divide and celebrate the hybrid and collaborative spaces of expression created in this divide, in turn offering new manners in which and approaches through which to contemplate the Self-Other divide. A serious treatment of the Self-Other divide in this book requires some preliminary discussion of the theoretical methodologies that inform the approach I adopt in this study and that scaffold its subsequent chapters. First, however, a brief look at Assia Djebar’s Ces voix qui m’assiègent lays the conceptual groundwork vis-à-vis the theoretical methodologies in question. In Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Djebar speaks candidly of her experiences growing up in a plurality of languages and cultures as represented by the French school system and Algerian geographic location. She presents herself largely as a writer caught in a whirlwind of languages—linguistic (French, Arabic, and Berber) and corporeal—and in between multiple worlds and cultures. For Djebar, this “in-betweeness,” where she situates herself, is a fertile zone perpetually changing. Voices and discourses are of prime concern and occupy primal positions. Languages and modes of expression trap her in this “in-betweeness” and speak to the dis/location implied during the writing or reading process. In this study, this dis/location textually resides in the home, as the home becomes a catalyst for the female protagonists’ (or artists’) (re)awakening to the hegemonic discourses giving shape and form to their multiplicitous identities. Thus, in many instances, the dis/location of home results in a state of “homelessness at home” for the protagonists and their authors or filmmakers. The state of “homelessness at home” speaks to the feelings of unease, nervousness, dissatisfaction, restlessness, shame, frustration, and resignation experienced by the protagonists in their daily existence inside the home and their dis/location lived within. In other words, “homelessness at home” captures in almost existentialist and postcolonial terms a diasporic space and the inauthentic self-identity normatively conceived, understood, imposed upon, accepted, and performed at home by the protagonists in these primary texts. At first glance in the primary texts I examine in this study, the home appears to engender traditional roles, standards, and expectations of socially ascribed female and immanent behavior (i.e., cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, caring for and raising children). Yet upon further analysis, one finds that the female protagonists, in engaging in these domestic activities,

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are actively redefining their daily existence, expression, and representation. They are reconstructing their homes as a means to deconstruct and then reconstruct personal and socio-political-historical identities. For these women artists, gender identity grounded in the institution of the middle-class home (and normative domesticity) is shown to be inherently unstable and therefore open to redefinition through interrogations of identity formation and memory function as well as through “struggles over the social meaning of gender or struggles whose outcome cannot be predicted or specified in advance” (Foster, 2002: 11).1 This is to say, an elusive, unpredictable, and evershifting multiplicity of markers, definitions, constructions, and ways of being female and significances of keeping home. In order to investigate better the revised approaches through which we may contemplate the Self-Other divide in relation to the home in this study, let us now turn to a brief overview of the critical methodologies and tenets informing this study and shaping our contemplations.

Domesticity as Lens of Analysis For several decades in North America and the United Kingdom, domesticity has provided an interesting framework for reading and analyzing Anglophone women’s literary writing and for the interdisciplinary fields of culture and gender studies. Where domesticity has most largely impacted French literary and cinematic studies tends to fall either in material culture–related readings of the nineteenth century (e.g., concerning the roles and functions of cuisine in literature and poetry) or feminist readings of often autobiographical representations of domestic spaces among twentieth-century French writers and cineastes. Moreover, there is much French-language work in the social sciences with regard to the variations, functions, and roles of different examples of domesticity in a variety of cultural settings. One specific mode of domesticity, housework and its associated representation of the housewife, proffers many cross-cultural and transnational optics for examining gender performances, constructions of culture and society, and processes of female identity formation in a wide variety of media and texts that foreground the home. Whether a material dwelling place or abstract category of belonging or residing, the home has been much debated and examined in critical discourse. From architectural, psychological, geographical, anthropological, ethnographic, historical, or sociological perspectives, the home manifests a deeply personal and highly political symbol that often underlies diverse

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artistic narratives of different cultures and languages. These narratives range from imperial texts in which home countries are cast against colonies, to “first world” texts that position the home as a metaphor for national and social concerns, to colonial texts in which politics of domestic assimilation abound, and to postcolonial texts in which the discourses of the motherlands are challenged in pursuit of an independent nationalist identity. In contemporary French-language filmmaking and literature, the home often appears as a tool of imperial ideology, a site of loss or desire, and, most importantly, as a place from which to write.2 Erica L. Johnson identifies the contemporary critical trend in “expos[ing] and debunk[ing] conservative notions of the home as it was employed by imperial ideology” (2003: 14). She suggests that the home—which for many decades (if not centuries) was understood as static, solid, and homogenous—has in recent decades become an important concept for a variety of theorists concerned with the notion of national identity. Scholars have defined the home as the original site of nationalism and space of return and of consolidation of the Self enabled by encounters with the Other.3 For travelers, this meant defining the home within a context of difference as individually experienced when abroad versus when at home. Other scholars have defined the home by emphasizing the role of difference within its construction. By examining the notion of a “home-country” or a “homeland,” these scholars turned to the ideological apparatuses of the abstract psychological and emotional notions of belonging, of having a home, and as a place of one’s own.4 Within this framework of ideological difference, domestic meaning emerges within a given set of metropolitan and colonial countries’ contrasting logics of how to define the home and its cultural functions in their respective societies. As Johnson postulates, artists have often applied these contrasting logics in their narratives in an effort to prevent the inevitable cultural hybridization by establishing and protecting the representations of cultural borders in their primary works through politics of marginalization and displacement of cultural decolonization or exclusion (2003: 15). Still, some scholars link postcoloniality and feminism in their critical interrogations of the home through critiquing nationalist discourses that refuse, deny, or overlook women’s contributions within the nationalist landscape or national identity of the country. These scholars address in their work both common domestic concerns as well as differences among women by taking into consideration the specificities of location and experiences.5 In this view, home reveals “its deeper affiliation with the public realm, as a patriarchal space where power relations vital to the nation and culture are negotiated”

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(Strehle, 2008: 1).6 Home reflects and resembles “nation”: it expresses the same ideological pressures that contend within the nation and does not serve as a retreat from the public and political spheres.7 As such, the home cannot be viewed as women’s space, but rather as a space designated—and perhaps deliberately designed—to teach, form, and shape women to enact their imperial function of (re)constructing the homeland. In this sense, the home is a receiver of public languages and values, a location in which national, global, and/or hegemonic discourses speak and reproduce themselves through magazines, newspapers, television, radio, books, how-to manuals, the Internet, and so on. Moreover, many contend that nation, world, and/or hegemony speak in the privacy of the home through the traditions and practices related to the imperial mission of engendering legitimate, obedient, civilized children.8 In Strehle’s words, “Far from being a ‘separate sphere’ of insulated privacy, home has permeable walls and a vital function in the nation, which explains why it is vigorously defended as a public good” (2008: 2). Thus, many scholars advocate a transnational approach to the reading of seemingly “local” and “domestic” texts that illuminate structures overlapping home and elsewhere. The women artists in this project reflect a variety of specific cultural locations and individual positions inside and/or outside the home/land and all are aware of either a colonial legacy of domesticity or an imperial ideology of home and its associated values. I explore these women’s representations of first-person domestic experience in their texts in relation to public and national discourses or social and personal crises. I am concerned with how these domestic experiences, performances, and relationalities inflect identity and understandings of self and gender. Regarding the theorization of self and gender, many feminist scholars focus on the impact that domestic space, architecture, and geography have on female identity. Along this vein of critical investigation, very recent examinations of the home have begun focusing on how everyday relationships with our homes are bound up with sensory perception and metaphor.9 These approaches seek to understand how “people’s experiences and understandings of, engagements with and metaphoric references to the aural, tactile, olfactory and visual elements of their homes” figure into theories of gender performativity and agency (Pink, 2004: 10). Many argue that housework and forms of home creativity (a term which refers to home decoration or the creation of mood or atmosphere, such as controlling the lighting, burning candles, playing music, etc.) can be seen as conscious or subconscious subjective actions through which individuals engage with the sensory environments of their homes. In turn, these subjective actions may be read as gender constructing

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agents in both cultural and social practice.10 Yet researchers caution that these gender-constructing agents must be read and understood within a context of difference, for domestic practices and spaces have different social meanings in different cultural and economic contexts. Sarah Pink explains that “different practices and relationships to the material and ‘natural’ components of ‘home’ are embedded in specific sets of values and beliefs and long-term historical processes” (2004: 13). In this study, we will see how these women artists engage differently with the location of home and with varying practices and politics of domesticity in their common vision of challenging and (re)appropriating these “specific sets of values and beliefs” and “long-term historical processes.” As one commonly finds in the genres of first-person cinema and lifewriting, the cinematic and literary backdrops of the primary texts in this study, the home often figures as a site of personal, social, racial, ethnic, linguistic, political, sexual, and historical struggles. The women artists I examine in this study all seem to concur that one may no longer regard the home un-problematically as a geographical location or source of identity, memory, and the personal. In each account, home is unsettled as the protagonists realize that it was or still is “an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of difference even within oneself” (Martin & Mohanty, 1986: 196).11 This realization manifests an important point of departure in analyzing the primary texts included in this study.

Postcolonial Discourse as Lens of Analysis As already hinted at, the home manifests a powerful political symbol in much postcolonial discourse theory and practice. Postcolonial discourse theory refers to an interdisciplinary academic field that brings together primarily history, economics, literature, and cinema. It is a diverse and amalgam-like field in which scholars explore issues of the colonial archive (or “History”) and postcolonial identity, using approaches centering on nationalism, the “Third World” allegory, the subaltern, and the work of postcolonials proper (i.e., Bhabha and Spivak and many more). Growing out of post-structuralism, postcolonial discourse theory built a solid foundation primarily on the work of three important thinkers: Edward Said’s theorizations of the ways that Western imperial power and discourse constructed a stereotypical Orient through asymmetrical power relations (i.e., rational Europe/irrational Orient), Frantz Fanon’s studies on the effects of colonialism on the psyche of the

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colonized peoples (i.e., the desire to mimic the colonizer) and call to return to a pre-colonial past, and Michel Foucault’s notions of discourse and the power/knowledge nexus (i.e., discourse has social materiality and efficacy and is always imbricated with power, emerging from everywhere). Although these scholars and their thinking have been much challenged and expounded upon in postcolonial discourse theory, their work opened up the dialogic process in which scholars—coming from many points of view—sought to expose the linking of Western knowledge with oppression (i.e., imperialism/colonialism) and to re-think the very way in which knowledge has been constructed.12 European enlightenment thinking of the eighteenth century had closely aligned the terms democracy, nationalism, and citizen-subject and understood them as interrelated on a one-to-one basis. With the fall or decline of the French and British Empires in the twentieth century, scholars en masse began to perceive the relationship between these terms—especially with regard to citizen-subject and the nation-state—as far too narrow and limiting, suggesting a homogeneity that did not and does not exist. Scholars began to question and critique the historicism of the West, which posited Europe as its theoretical subject, and started to investigate history in an anti-chronological manner along three syncretic key concepts: precolonialism, colonialism, and postcolonialism. Yet, postcolonial discourse theory is not a single theory or approach but rather an amalgam of theories and approaches, a dialogic process of re-thinking knowledge and the construction of that knowledge. Within postcolonial studies, terms like ambivalence, hybridity, and the third space of negotiation become widely applied tools facilitating and effecting the re-thinking of knowledge and its construction. These interdisciplinary tropes are much debated in postcolonial discourse theory and are far-reaching and widespread, with profound implications in other disciplines and discourses. Ambivalence, hybridity, and the third space of negotiation (also sometimes called an “in-betweeness”) are important terms most often utilized when analyzing and theorizing the location and construction of the postcolonial subject, a prime preoccupation in the field of postcolonial studies. One of the primary assertions with regard to the postcolonial subject in the field of postcolonial studies is the notion that the postcolonial subject is hybrid; that is, that s/he occupies a space in-between two cultures.13 Hybridity illustrates an important practice in postcolonial studies: the avoidance of binaries or pairings of oppositions such as self/other, center/margin, speaking subject/silent native and so on, since such binary terms of opposition are hierarchically constructed and based on ontological notions of subjectivity common to Western thinking. Unlike binary terms of opposition, this hybridity or in-betweeness directly illustrates the contradictions and

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ambivalences of culture that ontological binary thinking does not account for. Thus, a primary tenet in postcolonial studies is the acceptance that no culture is unified per se and that the postcolonial subject is a product of the hybridization of the two interdependent first and second cultures. Furthermore, this third space or in-betweeness occupied by the postcolonial subject is a space of potential resistance that allows the postcolonial subject to embody the contradictions and ambivalences of the two cultures. By exposing these contradictions and ambivalences, in turn, the postcolonial subject has the power to invalidate or subvert the rhetoric and discourse of imperialism and colonialism. The postcolonial subject evidences the fact that discourse and meaning are never fixed; therefore Western knowledge cannot fix the Other in a predetermined set of characteristics, categories of identity, subjectivities, or subject or object positions. The notion of hybridity and the third space have been and continue to be challenged in postcolonial studies. The hybrid subject is in essence such an entirely scattered and fragmented subjectivity that it “runs the risk of lacking specificity, of being unrooted in history or space” (Hayward, 2006: 298). Many scholars argue that the cultural hybridity occupied by this subject is a specific condition experienced by migrant intellectuals living in the West, in which these individuals become “Truth-Subjects,” detached from nation, class, or gender constructs.14 As a critical concept, though, hybridity is highly valued in postcolonial studies; many have shown it to be lacking, however, mostly because the concept also inevitably excludes, as feminist studies has pointed out. There is no such single category of identity or subjectivity called “colonized,” as women are subjected to a double colonization or oppression in terms of both race and gender. In an effort to tease out the problems associated with the hybrid-speaking postcolonial subject, scholars found inspiration in Gramsci’s thinking and postulations concerning the subaltern. Although the term runs the risk of reappropriating a binary (i.e., elite/subaltern) and recuperating the modernist tendency to see subjectivity as Self/Other, the term is useful as it refers to a collectivity of voices (especially oral voices and cultural traditions) who seem even more disempowered than the elite postcolonial subjects.15 The subaltern in postcolonial studies reminds us that there are many other voices to listen to and recognize, and many other stories to hear and inscribe in history and culture. In this book, the subaltern connects with an approach in film studies commonly referred to as the interrogation of the personal. The majority of contemporary women’s filmmaking and lifewriting from France, Algeria, and Tunisia seeks to interrogate the personal, a course of investigation and exploration which draws heavily on the trope of personal history. As influ-

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enced by Freud’s notions of identity formation, the personal narrative demonstrates how one conceptually forms and visually (mis)construes identity and memory. In other words, personal narratives may provide the spectator [or reader] with identity images, yet they may also remind the spectator [or reader] that identities are unstable; change through time, location and encounters; have many facets; and are inherently unknowable. (Wilson, 1999: 19)16

This style of filmmaking and writing seemingly engenders the artist’s personal vision and intrinsically underlines the processes involved in remembering— notably the dispersing of the unified subject in order to suture together the fragmented bits of his/her past into a cohesive fictional narrative of experience. Thus, the hybrid postcolonial subject, as seen through the lens of the interrogation of the personal in this book, is well situated in history, class, gender, and “nation.” However, as I will argue, the emphasis here is on changing notions of history, class, gender, and “nation” and their long-standing ideologies. Although marginalized within their respective societies, the protagonists examined in this study are neither restrictively described as nor necessarily seen as the mouthpiece for an anonymous subaltern group. Rather, they are personalized and individualized (this is to say re-hybridized) in different and diverse ways. The women artists included in this study are careful not to speak for the women of the communities or social groups they put into representation in their narratives, since doing so runs the risk of re-appropriating colonial practices and power relations and reinstating colonial dichotomies and identities. Instead, the artists speak with the voices of the women they bring to life in their narratives. Furthermore, the artists multiply and diversify these female voices and the representations of the female bodies and female activities of the owners of these voices so as to show the very fluid, permeable, and shifting natures of the interminable processes of identity formation and gender construction. Thereby, the hybrid postcolonial subject no longer remains strictly either a diasporic intellectual elite or a subaltern collectivity of anonymous voices in unison or in tandem. The hybrid postcolonial subject, through the lens of the interrogation of the personal, becomes a polyphony of personalized and dispersed individual voices that share a common origin or source and that individually expose, resist, and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which they are implicated. Moreover, the re-hybridized postcolonial subject

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generally looks more to the present and future as opposed to the past. These are important postulations to which we will often return in this book.

Feminist Discourse as Lens of Analysis Feminist theory’s impact on postcolonial studies in general and the issue of the hybrid-speaking postcolonial subject in particular has been substantial. It is worth returning briefly once again to Assia Djebar’s work to consider a case in point. In her essay Regard interdit, son coupé, Assia Djebar, by using the narrative of the Song of Messaouda, calls into question the cultural erasure of representations (or social constructions) of Algerian women beyond that of the mother. Her critique of this restricted representation or iconography of Algerian women is not unique to Algeria, as one may trace this representation to other cultures in other parts of the Maghreb (or North Africa) as well as in the Métropole (or France)—bearing in mind the differing cultural parameters and pressures surrounding women’s maternal representation as specific to each society or culture. The Song of Messaouda narrates the story of a young girl, Messaouda, who spurs the fleeing men of her village to turn around and fight the invading army by involuntarily exposing her body to the would-be conquerors. In this study, I find inspiration in the manner in which Djebar uses this narrative to illustrate the importance of communal language (or oral discourse) as these songs and legends are passed inside traditional, indigenous female communities and how these oral discourses—among others as specific to the different communities included in the subsequent chapters—work to tease out multiple theoretical interrogations of women’s contemporary representations, ideologies, subjectivities, and identities. I read this discursive dialogic exchange and prevalent image of the mother as a point of departure in Regard interdit, son coupé for a necessary revisiting of the past, for the “official” insertion of women into inscribed history, but most importantly for a rewriting of this past. All of the women artists whose primary texts this study examines position the maternal (the mother’s gaze, her voice, her body, her activities, her space, and her iconography) as a link to the past. These women artists reframe the maternal as a virtual location of firstperson expression in which to rewrite this past in an effort to (re)conceive the present and lay claim to the future. Yet, in every instance, the maternal (like the hybrid postcolonial subject) is diversified, personalized, individualized, and dispersed in each narrative. Feminist and psychoanalytic theorists have suggested both severing the link between mothers and daughters as well as conversely returning to (i.e.,

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forgiving) the mother—a victim herself who unknowingly molded her daughter into a replicated social and historical subject—in the daughter’s attempt to find her unique and separate or shared and symbiotic identity. In Regard interdit, son coupé, Djebar diverges from her contemporaries through her emphasis on pushing the filial question one step further. By accepting that the daughter’s social and cultural (and even personal) identities may stem from her mother, Djebar extends this issue to include the questions of memory and the remembering of H/history. For Djebar, women’s representations do not culminate solely in the (re)appropriation of social, cultural, or individual female identity. Rather, women’s representations also serve as her means to (re)appropriate History and to (re)construct the history and memory of the individual, the community, a people, or a republic or nation. Both identity and memory are effected and affected by language, a critical argument often raised in both feminist and psychoanalytic theory. Djebar’s postcolonial and diasporic subjectivity grants her a more immediate (and thus privileged) hybrid vantage point in her theorizations of identity and memory than are readily witnessed in many Eurocentric theoretical discourses, particularly those that concern women’s representation. In what is now a commonplace and almost trite comparison in postcolonial discourse theory, but certainly true in Djebar’s early writings, the mother has come to symbolize a land, a nation, a community, a génétrice. Yet in today’s examinations of globalized, multilingual, multifarious, multi-sited, and multicultural transnational and diasporic subjects, Djebar’s maternal-filial dialogic exchanges (voice) and filial observations (gaze) of the mother and her homemaking activities serve as site and source of women’s symbiotic identity and her (re)location in History, home, and socio-political discourse. This is one of the principal tropes I examine in the personal cinematic and lifewriting narratives I treat in this study.

CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST FILM THEORY POINTS OF ENTRY The primary line of critical inquiry in feminist film studies centers on the trope and language of desire. For many scholars, women’s filmmaking is not simply a matter of “learning to speak a new language, nor of displaying new cinematic strategies, but is a desiring process itself that emerges from a locus of difference” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996: 3).17 These scholars have sought to reexamine earlier notions of female experience and identity in an effort to understand how notions of lived experience are socially constructed and fully implicated in structures of desire, whether hegemonic or marginal.18 In this

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study, this trope of desire aids in the examination of the homes in the primary texts as domestic sites that are socially constructed and fully implicated in hegemonic constructs that restrict and suppress female desire, but which can also be later subversively deconstructed (like the “third space”) and reconstructed by female desire through re-hybridized female-speaking subjects. Aided by psychoanalysis, a second line of critical inquiry developed in feminist film theory that focused on desire as created by the gaze. In this second wave of feminist film criticism, film scholars began to see the cinema as a “fantasmatic production which mobilizes primary processes in the circulation of desire” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996: 11). Feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey has famously asserted that the cinema (à la Hollywood) manifests an erotic, voyeuristic activity, offered to the male spectator who holds the gaze, in which the woman-image exists precisely to be looked at and to be desired. In contrast, many women and European filmmakers developed alternative cinematic models in an effort to develop a counter-discourse—either at the margins or from within the center of the structure—purporting “to transcend distinctions of period and genre” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996: 11). These counter-discourses emerged as early as the 1920s by Germaine Dulac, were continued through the 1930s by Marie Epstein, were carried throughout the 1950s to the early twenty-first century by Agnès Varda, and are ever-present in the modern-day contemporary women filmmakers examined in this study. Closely connected to this second line of inquiry, enunciative apparatus theory opens a third line of critical inquiry. Within the context of psychoanalytic film theory: “the woman is the pivotal figure which allows the entire machine to operate” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996: 11). This theory draws heavily on the notion of scopophilia and the pleasure created by the voyeuristic filmviewing experience as well as on the notion of fantasy functioning “to activate a process of slippage between the subconscious desires of the filmmaker performed on the screen and that of the viewer who is made susceptible to having his or her own fantasies interact with these generated by the film” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996: 11). When applied specifically to cinema studies, enunciation involves the technical and the narrational techniques (or the so-named enunciative apparatus) employed by the director to render his/her imagined film text coherent to the spectator. However, the enunciative apparatus engenders a reciprocal process in which the screen image must appear as the spectator’s own in order for the slippage to be maintained. In relation to women’s cinema as a counter-cinema, women filmmakers began challenging and (re)appropriating in a different way the traditionally patriarchal enunciative apparatus to their purposes in presenting their texts from their own perspectives.

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CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S LIFEWRITING POINTS OF ENTRY As with the cinema, the problematics of enunciation, language, and memory described above also play a large role in critical approaches to analyzing life writings. The act of writing a life recaptures and recapitulates the effects of Lacan’s mirror stage in psychoanalytic terms—the je (or “I”) expressed on paper (like the image appearing in the mirror) embodies only a representation or (re)interpretation of the woman writing (the person standing before the mirror). Thus, it is often argued that the first-person subject pronoun (je or I) expressed on paper speaks as a fictionalized character. Consequently, one typically theorizes that the writing subject presumes to know him/herself, whereas the written subject manifests the effects of the writing process (in other words, the process of coming-to-knowledge), which is a process of differentiation from others in language, memory, discourse, and consciousness. Scholars now consider women’s lifewriting a “privileged site for thinking about issues of writing at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern critical theories, where the processes of subject formation and agency occupy a prime position” (Smith & Watson, 2001: 9–10).19 In other words, critics have concluded that women write themselves into history in order to introduce stirring narratives of self-discovery that authorize new subjects, claim models of heroic identity, and seek to authenticate themselves in stories that reveal “self-consciousnesses and a need to sift through their lives for explanation and understanding” (Smith & Watson, 2001: 9). This trope of “sifting through life experiences” from the past and in the present—so commonly found in the vast majority of contemporary first-person cinematic and literary narratives of France, Algeria, and Tunisia—occupies an almost primal or primordial place of importance in this current study. This notion of sifting connects with Djebar’s turn to the mother and her stories and underlines the active role protagonists must play in selecting the stories (or histories) to put forth. Moreover, the agency or action implied by this notion of “sifting” also connects with how the artists construct and formulate these narratives (or discourses), which is a primary focus in each chapter of this study. Feminist scholars find that these narratives characteristically depict the everyday aspects of these women’s lives—lived or imagined by the writers and/or their protagonists—and embody and reflect the reality of difference and complexity as well as stress the centrality of gender to human life. In addition, for many feminist critics, women’s lifewriting is categorically said to employ non-linear or “oral” narrative strategies and utilize frequent digression that gives readers the impression of a fragmentary, shifting narrative voice, or a plurality of voices in dialogue.20 Three important critical modalities

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primarily surface in the theoretical approaches to lifewriting: performativity, positionality, and heteroglossic dialogism. A performative view of lifewriting finds that these narratives manifest dynamic sites for the performance of identities constitutive of subjectivity. This is to say that this view takes an identity not as fixed or essentialized attributes of an autobiographical subject but rather as produced and reiterated through cultural norms.21 In theoretical practice, a performative critical view contests the previously assumed notion of autobiography or life narrative as site of “authentic identity” and seeks to investigate the underlining complexities of the relationship(s) between language, memory, society, history, and identity—especially in relation to women’s (self-)representation in body and voice. In this performative view, and as already discussed in relation to women’s filmmaking, desire once again surfaces from a locus of difference in which women lifewriters showcase the intersections of language, memory, society, history, and identity in revealing how notions of lived experience are socially constructed and fully implicated in structures of male, female, normative, or marginal desire. The concept of positionality also draws on the intersections of language, memory, society, history, and identity but purports to “designate how subjects are situated at particular places through the relations of power” (Smith and Watson, 2001: 145). Within this modality, feminist and postcolonial scholars began recognizing that an earlier generation of autobiographical theories was not applicable to some life narratives, particularly the narratives of marginalized women—women of color, working-class women, etc.—and colonized peoples. They asserted that narrators writing these contemporary hybrid narratives often combine autobiographical and ethnographic writing practices and situate themselves in and through a social milieu or ethos to which the subject is tied and by which the subject is constructed.22 This literary practice has been coined “autoethnography,” which speaks to the narrator’s sense of comprehending identity as collective and transindividual and often located at a complex “contact zone” between metropolitan and indigenous sites.23 In other words, autoethnography constitutes a “métissage that braids together multiple, disparate discourses” (Watson, 2001: 83). It most richly speaks to the theoretical investigations into the relationships between Self and Others (and by extension the relationships between the Self and the various “Others” residing within the Self) that currently occupy many postcolonial studies scholars and their reflections as shown above. Thus, in this view of positionality, the traditional ontological (and male) je/I has been replaced by a pluralistic (and now feminine) subjectivity. Whether as a timeless chorus of female voices recounting oral histories or as an individual counter-discourse

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to women’s positioning as object of the male gaze in both film and literature (or even History), women’s subjectivity is multiple and hybrid and firmly situated inside a “contact zone” of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox. Finally, lifewriting scholars of heteroglossic dialogism, or the “multiplicity of tongues” through which subjectivity is enunciated, seek to explore the interfaces of orality and writing. In this view, the spaces or “margins” between languages manifest sites of interdiscursivity and contest the notion that self-narration is a monologic utterance of a solitary, introspective subject.24 This view emphasizes the role of language in positioning speakers and their discourses at an intersection of multiple socio-historical-political positions and operative cultural values. This is to say that, in this view of heteroglossic dialogism, textual subjectivity stems from a socio-political-historical context in which several oppositional or alternative meanings could have been derived. Consequently, the extra-textual subjectivities are thus realized via the relationships of divergence or convergence that they share with those alternative meanings. Scholars of lifewriting who employ a heteroglossic dialogic optic when examining a first-person narrative most often underline the text’s interlocutory or dialogic character. They find that this character reflects “not only a relationship with the ‘other(s),’ but an internal dialogue with the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of [marginal] female subjectivity” (Henderson, 1998: 344). This internal dialogue with the aspects of “otherness” within the self implies a relationship of difference and identification with the “other(s).”25 We will see in the chapters that follow how, like the enunciative apparatus, this heteroglossic dialogism engenders a subjectivity that slips between multiple socio-political-historical discourses and the author’s, the protagonist’s, and the reader’s desires while paradoxically still managing to root itself in time and history and push to the surface new or revised ideologies. For all of the primary texts included in this study, the home and domestic acts provide important jumping off points from which subjectivity slippage and new ideological prospects may occur.

Transnational Umbrella as Overarching Framework I have underscored thus far in this introductory chapter a number of critical tenets in the theoretical approaches of domesticity, postcolonial discourse theory, and feminist film and literary theory. In each instance, these interdisciplinary tenets work to flesh out the Self/Other relationship(s) much debated

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in contemporary academic investigation and are all crucial to this study. From domesticity we saw three important postulations: the home as the original site of nationalism and a space of return and of consolidation of the Self enabled by encounters with the Other; how the sensory perception of the home and home creativity may be read as gender constructing agents of the Self; and how the location of home and the politics of domesticity have the potential to challenge and (re)appropriate specific sets of cultural values and belief systems and long-term historical processes. In postcolonial discourse theory, we understand that Western knowledge (or the Self) cannot fix the Other in predetermined sets of characteristics, categories of identity, or subjectivities or subject (or object) positions and that identity (or the Self) is unstable; changes through time, location, and encounters; has many facets; and is inherently hybrid, ambivalent, and contradictory. From feminist studies, as we just saw, we underline the enunciative apparatus and heteroglossic dialogism that engender a subjectivity (or the Self) that slips between multiple sociopolitical-historical discourses and desires while still managing paradoxically to root itself in contemporary time and history and push to the surface various Others and new or revised ideologies. The Self/Other divide proves an equally critical tenet to transnationalism; where diaspora, borders, globalization, and the politics of location figure largely in this divide. It is perhaps more befitting to discuss transnationalism as an interdisciplinary academic field or critical optic than as an institutionalized school of critical theory, per se. Rather like postcolonial studies in some regard, transnational studies is also not a single theory but an amalgam of many interdisciplinary theories and theoretical positions. It, too, is a dialogic process of re-thinking knowledge and discourse and the construction of that knowledge and discourse. Transnational studies brings together history, sociology, economics, literature, cinema, art, popular culture, and mass media. Scholars working in this tradition explore issues like migration, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, marginality, diaspora or displacement, borders and border crossing, representation, transculturation, ethnography, consumerism, and politics of location in the primary texts they analyze. In scholarly practice, the term transnational is often used to qualify tropes and perspectives like: “transnational spaces,” “transnational identities,” “transnational subjectivity,” and so on. Transnational studies has amassed more scholarship in the fields of cinema and mass media studies as well as in other areas of visual culture, especially architecture, than necessarily in traditional literary studies. Yet transnational studies has significant implications for the field of literature, especially with regard to lifewriting narratives of migrant and immigrant or “other” so-called marginal communities and “minor” literatures.

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Transnational studies also shares several foci with postcolonial studies, in particular the notion of nationalism, the concept of “center” versus “margin(s),” and the postulation that no culture is ever unified. However, transnational arguments tend to approach these concerns from a slightly different starting point and in a slightly different manner. Transnational studies is more concerned with the present (and even the future to some degree) than may be postcolonial studies, which has tended to focus and concentrate on the past. Yet, just as globalization has not produced a smooth, borderless, integrated global order, transnationalism has neither produced consistent kinds of social formations or practices.26 As a manifestation of globalization, transnational studies takes shape in the “multiple, complex, messy proximities and interconnections” of social morphologies, types of consciousness, modes of cultural reproduction, avenues of capital, sites of political engagement, and (re)constructions of place and locality (Vertovec, 2009: 2). Transnationalism investigates the cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations, and social formations spanning nation-states as typically couched in terms of “local” (or within the borders of nation) and “global” (or beyond the borders of nation). Transnationalism describes a condition in which despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common—however virtual—arena of activity. (Vertovec, 2009: 3)

In the field of cultural studies, considerable transnational discussion has concentrated on a kind of “diaspora consciousness” (a globally-intensified relationship) that is marked by double or multiple identifications. Depictions of individuals’ awareness of de-centered attachments—the feelings of a “home away from home” or of a “being here and there at the same time”—have been and continue to be much considered. For Stuart Hall and many other scholars working in transnational studies today, this diaspora consciousness comprises constantly changing representations and subjectivities that provide, in the age of cyberspace, an “imaginary coherence” for a set of malleable identities that are no longer strictly tied to the patterns or the experiences of migration, as once argued before the invention of the Internet and widespread use of telecommunications. In this sense, transnationalism is often associated with a fluidity of constructed styles, social institutions, and everyday practices, which are described

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in terms of syncretism, creolization, bricolage, cultural translation, transculturation, and hybridity.27 Transnationalism is part and parcel of the process of globalization but may also “be less scripted and more scattered” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005: 5).28 Some scholars find that the common practice in transnational studies of adopting the construction of global/local as a binary model has romanticized the local as not necessarily pure but certainly as the site of resistance to the global. Many argue that this research has overlooked the creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national or “local” boundaries.29 The national is “no longer the site of homogenous time and territorialized space but is increasingly inflected by a transnationality that suggests the intersection of multiple spatiotemporal (dis)orders” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005: 6). The transnational, therefore, is not restricted to something created only in the interface of the local or global but rather claims a potentiality to span national, local, or global spaces and modes of expression occupying multiple spatialities and temporalities. Thus, these scholars have turned to transversal movements of culture (or a cultural transversalism) in an effort to interpret and comprehend better so-called minor or so-called marginal cultural articulations in productive relationship with so-called major or so-called dominant cultural reproductions. Thereby, transnational studies, through an optic of cultural transversalism, “produces new forms of identification that negotiate with national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, thus allowing for the emergence of the minor’s [or the “margins’”] inherent complexity and multiplicity” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005: 8). In other words, the transnational becomes the signifier for multiplicity or creolization within and across all levels of the “local,” “national,” and “global.” As mentioned briefly before in this discussion, in the realm of literature, scholars have mostly used this transnational approach in the investigation of “minor” or so-called marginal literatures. However, in the field of cinema, the transnational approach—probably due to the more self-evident global economic factors inherent to the film industry—is well established as a lens of analysis for dominant as well as marginal filmmaking. Thus, a more in-depth discussion of a transnational approach in film studies, an approach which overlaps with some methodological pursuits in literary studies, will help us better grasp the overarching theoretical framework that informs my analyses and discussion of contemporary women’s first-person filmmaking and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia in this study. In her goals to examine the utility of the concept of the transnational to French cinema studies and to assess the appropriateness of such a concept in relation to more conventional approaches to French cinema organized around the construction of the “national,” Carrie Tarr brilliantly summarizes the sit-

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uation. She explains that in the field of French film studies (as it developed in the United Kingdom)—although always recognizing the contribution of émigrés filmmakers to the French film industry—scholars initially focused most energies and attention on examining how “the canonization of [“French”] films, filmmakers, film movements, and film genres . . . contribute[s] to the vexed notion of French cinema as a ‘national’ cinema” (Tarr, 2007: 3). From this critical perspective, Tarr argues, “the specificities of French cinema at particular moments in time through its love/hate relationship with, and need to differentiate itself from, Hollywood” accounts for the principal line of investigation into the concept and construction of French National Cinema (Tarr, 2007: 3). In other words, the national approach that dominated much scholarly European but particularly French film criticism in the UK in the 1990s sought to analyze how film texts enunciate the national. Scholars analyzed individual film texts and cinematic genres and questioned the meanings they mobilized vis-à-vis constructions of the national. They considered what typologies needed tracing into a cartography of the national.30 Scholars looked for what was coded in the film as national (e.g., language, costuming, setting, décor, music, themes, historical figures or events, and other cultural elements) and took into consideration the country responsible for the financial backing of the film and other more technical matters like the origins, nationalities, training, and schooling of the production and editing crews as well as the cast members. Scholars illustrated how this enunciation of the national in the cinema worked to construct and perpetuate myths of the given society and culture. As Hayward summarizes, “Traditionally the ‘national’ of a cinema is defined in terms of its difference from other cinemas of other nations, primarily in terms of its difference from the cinema of the United States (i.e., Hollywood)” (Hayward, 2005: 8). Scholars still adopt this national approach in scholarly practice today, where much attention is paid to the economic and political forces pressuring or influencing particular film industries and productions. However, the national approach has mostly evolved and expanded its preoccupations to the realm of the transnational, where it generally seeks to decode and debunk such cultural myths and constructions of “nation” via counter-cinematic productions, styles, or techniques of filmmaking, or ideological perspectives. In the late 1990s and with the turn of the millennium, film scholars began to speak to the reductionist nature inherent in the national approach to film analysis. Influenced by post-structuralist and multiculturalist arguments, scholars began to see this approach as built on a paradigm of exclusion. That is to say that the “national” in the mainstream films under analysis tended to recuperate and proliferate dominant or hegemonic views and definitions of

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“nation” at the expense of excluding marginal or periphery views of the very same “nation.” Scholars began to call for the recognition and acceptance of the belief that what the “national” enunciates and signifies will change according to social, economic, and political mutations and pressures.31 Thus, not only did scholars turn more widely to counter-cinema productions, but they also began to decode the national signs “against the grain” in twentyfirst-century mainstream and “other” films as challenges to or subversions of the static and monolithic mythologies of “nation.” Scholars were interested in seeking new definitions, constructions, and ideologies that mobilized revised representations and conceptions of the “nation.” In light of these developments, Tarr asserts that it is not surprising, then, that over the last twenty years or so a key strand within film studies has been the investigation of cinema as, variously, a “hybrid,” “postnational,” “supranational,” “sub-state” or . . . “transnational” phenomenon, in relation to which the “national” is bypassed, decentered or hybridized. (2007: 4)

Tarr’s reading of contemporary French film studies echoes some observations made of contemporary “minor” literatures or migration narratives as articulated above. Informed by Deleuze’s work on deterritorialization, or a weakening of ties between culture and place, many film scholars now posit that mainstream French cinema must be read as both national and transnational for three main reasons. First, cinema and the film industry have always been international and thus trans/national since the very beginning. Second, financial backing and production crews and casts of contemporary films are often international. Third, the forms of discursive, technical, and narrative enunciation are increasingly more “globalized”; for example, the increased universal uses of computer-generated imagery (CGI); various telecommunicative devices like the Internet and satellites figuring in the narratives; geographical, linguistic, and spatial border-crossings; real or virtual foreign or remote sets or locations; and so on. Tarr summarizes: “French” cinema is imbricated with and transformed at a supranational level by its dialogic relationship with other cinemas, not just Hollywood, but also European, francophone, Mediterranean and (other) world cinemas, and at a subnational level by the work of deterritorialized, notably postcolonial, migrant and diasporic filmmakers, among others. (2007: 4)

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Furthermore, Tarr explains that, “The increasing fluidity between these various categories means that the identity of any given film or filmmaker is becoming increasingly difficult to pin down in purely national terms” (2007: 4). This fluidity led to a rather wide-spread adoption of the term transnational in film studies on a number of different continents as well as to the discussion of two specific and quite paradoxical notions: the homogenizing effects of Hollywood in “other” cinemas and the diversity of multicultural particularities which are also the result of globalization.32 With the first notion, as Tarr elucidates, there is a risk that a transnational perspective will continue to position Hollywood as central to its concerns and with the second, that it will underestimate the asymmetrical power relations between various constituencies (2007: 4). Hence, most scholars consequently began to engage with the “transnational” not as a dialectical or oppositional term to “national,” which was (and still sometimes is) the temptation in some scholarly work (i.e., genre studies approach). Rather, scholars taking up the transnational cause view it as a “necessary framework for analyzing how films are produced, circulated, and received in the era of globalization” and as a “relational concept which remains in dialogue with the national as well as with the global and the local” (Tarr, 2007: 4–5). Thus, in this inclusivist reworking of the transnational—which espouses the concept of fluidity and permeable boundaries of various categories—cinematic genres, styles, content matter, and discourses are not necessarily viewed in opposition to or in conflict with one another but rather appear as converging within one another; thereby including the “national” and that which was formally supposedly considered “not” or just simply previously ignored or unseen. In simplified terms, a transnational approach to film studies creates an opportunity to define and construct diacritically one “nation” in relation to another as well as to define and diacritically construct multicultural facets existing inside the “nation.” Most important to emphasize, though, and more than just a de-centering of the “national” or “dominant” or an international collaboration or exchange with multinational financial backers, casts, and production crews, a transnational approach proposes a polycentric look at the film industry and its inter/national productions. Like postcolonial studies, transnational studies is also a “post-” movement. It is postnationalist and can be understood as a number of different “modes of production and consumption as well as ideology, genre and aesthetics” (Lim, 2007: 39). Yet, one may read the “trans” prefix more as a spatial marker as opposed to the temporal marker indicated by “post.” The transnational functions to destabilize or has the effect of destabilizing the

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notion of place, for the transnational “is most at home in the in-between spaces of cultures, in other words, between the local and the global” (Ezra and Rowden, 2005: 4).33 Transnational artists and transnational texts often foreground a number of common concerns, critical devices, and enunciative tropes. Many scholars agree with Vijay Devadas’ definition of transnational cinema, which also more-or-less fits a definition of transnational literature. He summarizes that transnational cinema is defined and used in reference to cinema made by displaced filmmakers living in exile or diaspora; used as a mode of expressing the interstitial and artisanal modes of production, distribution, and consumption; marked by the use of hybrid stylistic forms, patterns of identification, and ideological concerns; and defined by the affirmation of difference. (2006: ¶3)34

Echoing attestations in postcolonial discourse theory, transnational studies also challenges the parameters of the national and constructions of social networks, families, identities, public spaces, and public cultures. Scholars working in the field of transnational studies in relation to both cinematic and literary texts are interested in exploring a variety of issues, in particular issues related to: how families are split between countries of origin and destination; the emotional ties binding individuals to one or both countries of origin and destination; the ebb and flow of border crossings and communications across borders; the hybridization of cultures; and the counterhegemonic actions and discourses of the nonelite who refuse assimilation to a nation-state. Very recently, scholars have started suggesting that the notion of the transnational entrains a necessary revisiting of the term “postcolonial.” Will Higbee concludes that postcolonial discourses in film are concerned with challenging fixed, Eurocentric assumptions around cultural identity and the nation and asserts that “the kind of films most readily identified with postcolonial cinema deals broadly with the global circulation of peoples and cultural goods in a mediated and interconnected world” (2007: 52).35 Yet, Higbee maintains that the problematic and contested category of the postcolonial has been largely bypassed, elided, or rejected by critics and scholars attempting to theorize around the idea of transnational cinema (2007: 52). As described in the discussion above, transnational cinematic critical scholarship has primarily focused on issues of production (i.e., movement of filmmakers between different film cultures and national cinemas), distribution (i.e., the global circulation of films and film products as cultural commodities), and

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reception (i.e., the different ways in which individual films are interpreted by foreign audiences).36 As already hinted at, other scholarship centered on the transnational in relation to film, mass media, popular culture, and literature has concentrated on migration and diaspora. Reasons for omitting the postcolonial from the transnational vary among scholars, but the most common reasons why include that the term is ambiguous in socio-historical terms, largely apolitical, and fundamentally Eurocentric in its privileging of the colonial era.37 In drawing from Stuart Hall’s and Bill Ashcroft’s work on globalization, Higbee proposes that we should include the postcolonial in our thinking about the transnational in the context of contemporary French cinema for “an appreciation of postcolonial theoretical discourses and their historical context is vital if we are to fully understand what is at stake in French films that deal with issues of migration, displacement, and the imbalance of power involved in intercultural exchange” (2007: 53). Thus, two potentially separate yet interconnected approaches to theorizing the transnational are developing in the field. On one hand, transnational studies has looked to the “technical” components of the aesthetic project (the financers, production crews, filmmaking tools like CGI, cast members, and audiences) and the mechanisms of distribution and circulation of these artistic products around the globe. These scholars seek to investigate the interstices between “national” and “transnational” in the texts, audiences, and cultures they analyze through an optic of globalization. In this account, globalization comes to represent “the increasing concentration of economic, political and media powers . . . and the fragmentation of nation states, social and cultural formations” (Higbee, 2007: 52). On the other hand, transnational studies is also starting to look to the “postcolonial” components of the aesthetic project (the categories of exile, diaspora, and “accent”) and the provisionality of inherited boundaries and pressures of global hegemony. These scholars seek to investigate the interstices between “global” and “local” in the texts, audiences, and cultures they analyze also through an optic of globalization. But in this account, globalization comes to represent (à la Hall) a centuries-old phenomenon of which we are simply experiencing the latest (albeit highly accelerated) phase and of which colonialism is an earlier manifestation and (à la Ashcroft) as predication of the fluidity of the concept of home and a basis for how local communities and minority groups achieve agency.38 This revised consideration of the transnational in which the postcolonial is taken into account connects with another approach to film studies, the discussion of “Third Cinema,” and it recalls Bhabha’s “Third Space of Negotiation.”

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Various categories of classification exist in film studies. Two categories, Third Cinemas and Third World Cinemas, are the most pertinent to this discussion of a revised concept of transnational cinema. Generally speaking, First Cinema refers to the USA and more precisely Hollywood; Second Cinema designates European art and auteur cinema. The terms First and Second, in this context, do not refer to First or Second World economies, although the terms were coined intentionally as ironic parody of designation of dominant economic powers.39 The terms ignore geographic situation and refer rather to dominant cinematic practices: Hollywood-style cinema and auteurstyle cinema; both of which may theoretically be practiced anywhere in the world and by any filmmaker. Importantly, though, neither of these cinemas is an engagé cinema, which is a cinema of political protest. Auteur cinema may effectively challenge Hollywood or mainstream cinema, but auteur cinema is not necessarily or categorically committed to inspiring or realizing profound political change. Inspiring or realizing profound political change is the role of Third Cinema, which is a “cinema committed to a direct confrontation of the political and cinematic systems . . . [operating] . . . from a third space that is distinct from First and Second cinema positions” (Hayward, 2006: 423). Third Cinema largely refers to cinema of the so-called Third World countries, but not all Third World Cinema is necessarily Third Cinema and not all Third Cinema is necessarily Third World Cinema. Third Cinema seeks “to promote the cause of socialism and to counter the ideologically unsound filmmaking practices of the other two cinemas, especially Hollywood.40 Third Cinema challenges First Cinema’s consumerist tendencies and Second Cinema’s aesthetic principles. Third Cinema films make a political statement about their own country of origin either directly or through allegory and tend to be political also in terms of stylization (as in a counter-cinema) and target their own culture’s mainstream films and filmmaking practices as well as style and content enunciated in dominant international film practice.41 Third Cinema, as it is constituted by a number of different cultures and countries, is not a homogenous category of film or filmmaking, but its films do by-and-large share a common desire to address the effects and legacy of colonialism or imperialism. Third Cinema strives to create new cinematic codes and conventions and discusses major issues of class, race, culture, religion, gender, and national identity and integrity. Class struggle—especially between the rich and the poor—is a key theme, and the preservation of popular indigenous (or minority) cultures and their representation in opposition to dominant colonial or imperialist cultural values are key tropes. As Hayward explains, “In a sense

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Third Cinema asserts difference within its own indigenous cinema, but also dissolves geographical boundaries with ‘a virtual geography of its own’” (2006: 421). It is a cinema committed to social liberation and to a school of anti-aesthetics. It is not to be confused, however, with Third World Cinema, which is a term that refers to the cinemas of the African continent, the Middle Eastern territories, the Indian continent, China and Asian territories, and Latin America.42 As already indicated, not all Third World Cinema is necessarily Third Cinema in project, stylization, content, and design and vice-versa. And furthermore, as the previous discussion of transnational and deterritorialization has shown, to think in geographical terms is not always the most productive and helpful approach. Thus, many scholars, myself included, prefer to employ the terms postcolonial or transnational cinema instead of Third World Cinema in their work. It should be noted, though, that postcolonial and transnational are not completely synonymous terms with Third World Cinema and that Third World Cinema is a cinema with its own history, codes, conventions, canon, and theory. However, it lies beyond the scope of this book to engage with this particular cinema, especially given the fact that I am more interested in the notion of Third Cinema and where it intersects with the postcolonial cinematic optic. In his theorization of “accented cinema,” Hafid Naficy does not assert that all diasporic, exilic, or Third cinema can (or indeed must or should) be viewed through a postcolonial optic.43 Nevertheless, including a postcolonial optic in the transnational readings I present in this study is not only a valuable contribution; it is essential to this study as I will show in the subsequent chapters. As I mentioned before, this revised consideration of the transnational that takes into account the postcolonial optic recalls Bhabha’s third space of negotiation. For Bhabha, this Third Space, like the Third Cinema, enables other positions to emerge. It is a mode of articulation, a productive space that engenders new possibility and in which cultural meaning, representation, and interpretation have no “primordial unity or fixity.”44 In essence, this Third Space encodes a counter-hegemonic practice and hybrid strategy in which meaning may be renegotiated and rearticulated. As I already pointed out, this may be problematic, for this Third Space is left unrooted in history and space. I suggested before the possibility of a re-hybridization of the postcolonial hybrid subject through the lens of the interrogation of the personal. In addition, I would like to argue for the possibility of a re-hybridization of this Third Space also through the lens of the interrogation of the personal and propose the construction: a ²⁄³ (or two-third) space; or in other words, a space or spaces in-between the second space and the third space.

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Drawing from the cinematographic methodology just outlined, Second Cinema refers to a Eurocentric or auteur cinema. Since the publication of François Truffaut’s la politique des auteurs, the interrogation of the personal has become synonymous with and a basis for auteur cinema. In Truffaut’s vision, as a move away from the realm of social and political concern that dominated French cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, he called for an expressly formalist style of filmmaking in which form over content and an exploration of the aesthetic and technical aspects of filmmaking took precedence over political messages and the historical or social import of the narrative. The interrogation of the personal was initially understood as the personal vision of the auteur filmmaker. André Bazin, in response to Truffaut’s la politique des auteurs, challenged Truffaut’s position with regard to subject matter by suggesting that Truffaut’s vision opened the possibility for over-valuation of any film just because it was made by a particular auteur filmmaker.45 In Bazin’s nuanced construction of the interrogation of the personal, attention shifts from the director’s vision to emphasize his/her voice in conjunction with his/her vision. In other words, for Bazin, an auteur is a filmmaker who speaks in the first person and in whose filmmaking personal history works to bring together form and content in equal footing. By personal history, Bazin is suggesting the director’s perspective: his/her personal “take” on the story, whether autobiographical or not.46 As Emma Wilson describes the role of personal history in Second Cinema, “Through both form and content, a director may seek to unravel or deconstruct an identity; be it artistic or personal, his own or a protagonist’s” (1999: 19). Bazin’s postulations have overwhelmingly become the standard trademark or signature of contemporary French “national” cinema since 1950 with the birth of French New Wave Cinema that adopted this manifesto, and its legacy is still practiced, paid homage to, and felt even today. Yet, a significant portion of France’s cinema today—thanks to the work of émigré and other ethnic minority or politically conscientious or politically minded filmmakers—has maintained the personal history approach while effectively returning to, equally emphasizing, and clearly situating personal history inside the historical or social import of the narrative and political messages surrounding the film. Thus, the interrogation of the personal in much contemporary French filmmaking has evolved, intentionally or unintentionally, to include aspects of Third Cinema filmmaking. As we recall, Third Cinema makes a political statement about its country of origin either directly or through allegory; tends to be political also in terms of stylization; strives to create new cinematic codes and conventions; and discusses major issues of class, race, culture, religion, gender, and national identity and integrity. Third

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Cinema asserts difference within its own indigenous cinema but also dissolves geographical boundaries with a virtual geography of its own. These characteristics of Third Cinema do not address in the same way or to the same degree all of the films and filmmakers I include in this study; and not all of the filmmakers I include are considered auteurs and not all the texts I analyze here fit the category of Second Cinema. Yet, all of the filmmakers and their texts theoretically fit within the third space of negotiation and in-between the categories of Second and Third Cinemas in terms of project, stylization, and content. Hence, I propose an articulation of a ²⁄³ Space in transnational film and literary studies in this book. I recognize that mathematically speaking, ²⁄³ (or two-thirds) is not a fraction in-between the integers two and three; but linguistically-speaking, thanks to the diacritical slash mark, ²⁄³ may be read as 2 and/or 3. This construction neatly expresses my consideration and suggestion to re-hybridize the Third Space and Second and Third Cinemas by situating the postcolonial hybrid subject in personal history, as I will show in the following analyses in each subsequent chapter.

A “TRANSVERGENT” CONSIDERATION If personal history is a criterion of Second Cinema (the “local” or “national”) and socio-historical-political import a characteristic of Third Cinema (the “global”), artists who incorporate both and speak from this ²⁄³ Space in their work effectively exemplify a transnational [or (trans)national] identity, historicity, subjectivity, and speaking position. In the context of this study with my focus on women artists from France, Algeria, and Tunisia, the transnational—which espouses the postcolonial optic and enables this re-hybridization of subject and space—is critical if we are to understand what is at stake in contemporary women’s filmmaking and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia that treat issues of migration, immigration, geographical or psychological displacement, and the imbalance of power involved in “local” and “global” intercultural exchange. This line of thinking, in the context of French trans/national filmmaking, has prompted Higbee and other scholars to turn to Marcus Novak’s notion of “transvergence” in art and architecture to “better describe how both postcolonial and diasporic cinemas function not only across borders, nations, and cultures but also within them” and for how the notion of transvergence “helps us better appreciate how postcolonial and diasporic cinemas engage, function, and produce meaning within and across national and transnational positions” (Higbee, 2007b: 80). Although Higbee develops his theorizations specifically in relation to the work of North African émigré filmmakers living

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and working in France, his postulation of a “cinema of transvergence” has solid implications for the fields of French and Francophone women’s filmmaking and lifewriting as we shall see. Higbee delineates a cinema of transvergence along Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, for doing so rightly acknowledges a “foregrounding of difference,” completed by the realization that a certain degree of interconnectedness between these apparently isolated or oppositional groups or individuals [that make up the landscape of transnational and/or postcolonial cinemas] exists nonetheless. (2007b: 87)

In his view, a cinema of transvergence manifests a powerful means of analyzing postcolonial and diasporic cinema in terms of “transcultural phenomena that operate on both a transnational level—the relationship between the global and the local—and with the context of specific national cinemas and film cultures” (2007b: 87). Higbee asserts that a cinema of transvergence does not limit itself to “the largely artificial borders and boundaries of national cinema although it may often work within a national cinema to subvert and bring into question the ideology of nationalism and the problematic construct of nation” (2007b: 87). Instead, Higbee maintains that a cinema of transvergence proposes a clear understanding of the discontinuity, differences and imbalances of power that exist between various filmmakers, film cultures, and film industries as well as the elements of interconnectedness that may bind a filmmaker to a given film culture or national identity at a given time. (2007b: 87)

Thus, a cinema of transvergence, especially in the context of French contemporary cinema and like the re-hybridized postcolonial subject, is also situated in the re-hybridized ²⁄³ Space of artistic and ideological expression. But what is meant by this term “transvergence?” As defined by the self-described transarchitect and cultural theorist Marcus Novak in his essay, “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on the Production of the Alien,” transvergence refers to a non-linear, or rather trans-linear relation between two or more systems. Novak explains, “while convergence and divergence are simple linear extrapolations that proceed by strategies of alignment, transvergence advances translinearly through tactics of derailment” (2002: 66).47 For Daniela Berghagn, Novak’s concept of transvergence can be conceived of “as the opposite of convergence” (2008: ¶2).48 The notion of convergence suggests movement and direction toward a fixed

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and final point of resolution, consensus, or destination or at the very least, a coming together in a finite way. Transvergence, on the other hand, as used by Novak, implies a complexity, incompleteness, fragmentation, derailment, and chaos.49 As Higbee explains: In the context of national/transnational cinemas we might say that whereas a nationalist ideology [or convergence] might attempt to paper over the cracks of difference, tranvergence, in a very postmodern way, aims to expose and foreground (celebrate even) such differences. (2007b: 87)

In this way, a cinema of transvergence, like the concept of the rhizome, shares the postcolonial optic’s agenda to re-frame “marginality” (or difference) as well as “dominant” by challenging hegemonic modes of thought and binary structures through a deconstruction of “center” and “margin” and through a revelation of how the so-called center and so-called margins, themselves, exist as constructed ideologies and positionings that serve hegemony. There are two main positions or tropes that emerge from Novak’s logic of transvergence that have been most often discussed in scholarly discourse and that have interesting implications for this study. They are the notion of derailment and the concept of allogenesis or the alloself, which is to say the “alien from within” (Novak, 2002: 65). Novak coins the term transvergence as a way in which to discuss the postmodern experiences of relations and relationships with otherness. He calls this experience the “production of the alien,” but he does not perceive this otherness as negative or in classical accordance with typical sciencefiction or political themes of alienation. For Novak, rather, this production of the alien represents a centrifugal (and thus derailed) process of becoming and being the other of the self. This process results in the formation of a subjectivity he names the alloself. In architecture, Novak accomplishes this transvergent paradigm by employing the virtual processes of contemporary digital architecture that are able to conceive of and design spaces beyond the limits of human experience of spatial and temporal dimensions. By using a computer’s ability to entirely disregard physical laws and the constraints of geometry, Novak designs his “liquid architectures,” that is to say new forms of virtual reality or new objects and areas in cyberspace that combine time and space with little-to-no rational constraints. Thus, some scholars in various disciplines have looked to Novak’s work and designs as discourses and texts that transcend the traditional boundaries between art and science. For these thinkers, transvergence exposes the artificial construction that art and science are binary opposites.

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In the field of art history, a transvergent ethics has come to view new idioms of expression as conditioned by exodus, invention, and eventual collaboration. In this context, collaboration does not stem from democratically disseminated or proportionally allocated resources but from the permanent re-appropriation of shared resources, resulting in a re-territorialization of production, creation, and artifacts. Transvergent ethics has redefined some contemporary art by creating a home for several new “genres” or “media”; as in: BioArt—which includes the use of biological matters as part of the artistic production and context creation, EcoArt—which are artistic acts in which artists attempt to influence the ecologies in which one lives by reclaiming or restoring damaged environments artistically or in which artists revision the human relationship to nature by proposing and inspiring new ways for people to co-exist with their local environments, Technozoosemiotics—which is the study of signs elaborated by all natural or artificial living species, as well as various other new cutting-edge media in which artists explore the relations between technology and material culture. In the field of cultural studies, a transvergent ethics concentrates on the logic of becoming the other and being the alloself. In borrowing a construction from postcolonial studies, the first and second cultures (the particular cultural roots or identities of both cultures) in this paradigm of transvergence no longer count, per se. Rather, as Michael Goddard explains, “the capacity to be transformed through a cross-cultural encounter with otherness” is at the heart of the transvergent project (2007: 114).50 Transvergence privileges a forging ahead as opposed to a retreat into pre-existing cultural, familial, or psychological identities and a priori social, historical, or political frameworks and discourses. As such, Novak’s notion of transvergence is quite different from Lacan’s mirror stage, although both address the Self/Other relationship paradigm. Whereas both ego (or the Self) and the other simultaneously embrace, oppose, fix, and fixate each other in the mirror in the Lacanian theorization of otherness, the Novakian theorization of otherness articulates dynamic and shifting relationships of opposition and confluence for the alloself (or the other within the self) that is never separated, fixed, or fixated in binary opposition. These dynamic and shifting relationships of opposition and confluence for the alloself are made possible through centrifugal forces or derailment in Novak’s perspective. This trans-linear, centrifugal, or derailed movement between two systems allows for a myriad of possibilities. For Higbee, tranvergence articulates “an open-ended challenge to the fixed positionings typically offered by hegemonic structures of knowledge and power” (207b: 85). The identification with the alien/allo-/other as an integral element of transvergence enables a po-

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tentially subversive and destabilizing influence on the relationships between center/margin and Self/Other. Through the fragmented, incomplete, chaotic, and centrifugal or derailed nature of transvergence, a logic of transvergence also opens up the possibility that these marginal or “othered” positions—this identification with the alien/allo-/other construct—can occupy shifting and multiple positionings. As Higbee explains: At one moment, placed on the peripheries, [the marginal or “othered” positions] point away from the center but is also, and at certain times, temporarily coming into contact with the notional ‘center,’ only to move off at a later time on another, new trajectory. (2007b: 86)

Therefore, a cinema of transvergence—as also articulated in postcolonial studies—can negotiate a position that is both center and margin and has the power to deny the fixity of binary epistemology. This is precisely the agenda of postcolonial and diasporic cinemas and literatures in their common pursuits of challenging fixed notions of nation, center/margin, self/other, and home/exile. Thus, a cinema and literature of transvergence may re-frame marginality as a point of resistance and allow for continuities as well as differences in “national” identity and integrity to exist side by side. In essence, they function from a ²⁄³ Space of expression filtered through the lens of the interrogation of the personal and are articulated through a re-hybridized subject speaking position situated in personal history. BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER Once again in the spirit of Shohat and Stam, my challenge in this study was to produce knowledge within a kind of “kaleidoscope framework” of communities, ideologies, disciplines, and discourses in relation to one another without suggesting that their positionings are identical and interchangeable. For this reason and from my own ²⁄³ Space of expression in this book, I do not adopt a single theoretical methodology and restrictively apply it to the close readings in each chapter. Rather, I am more interested in exploring the multichronotopic links of theory and practice that bypass the proverbial feminist studies versus transnationalism versus postcolonialism and so-on scenario. In this study, I aim to investigate the relationalities between trans/national representations of French, Algerian, and Tunisian women on the page and on the screen in a trans-linear or derailed-like fashion through a diversity of domestic, feminist, postcolonial, and transnational optics.

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Contemporary critical work on first-person cinematic and literary narrative seeks to understand the constitutive processes of auto/biographical or trans/national subjectivities and the components of any particular auto/ biographical or trans/national act. In keeping with contemporary scholarly criticism of auto/biographical and trans/national first-person literary and cinematic narration when analyzing the primary texts, this study takes into consideration in every chapter the autobiographical I’s, the roles of Others, multiple gender and domestic discourses and representations, various structuring modes of self-inquiry and their patterns of employment, and the role of the audience. For scholars of life narratives, these components of auto/biographical and trans/national acts complicate and enrich the way one understands the stories one reads and the ways one tells stories about oneself.51 The domestic, feminist, postcolonial, or transnational theoretical perspectives—the “methodological cubism” discussed in this introduction—are collectively essential to investigating the function of the look, the problem of the personal, the construction of gender ideology, and the dis/location of home in this study’s analysis of homemaking, making home, and gender performance as specific to the primary texts included.

Overview of Chapters In Chapter One, I will begin with an exploration of making home in Algeria through the metaphorical processes of de/reconstructing the home from a space of confinement and imprisonment to one of improvised movement and (un)veiled collective subjectivity. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the first segment (Touchia: Ouverture) of Assia Djebar’s 1976 film, La nouba du Mont Chenoua, and the postface (Regard interdit, son coupé) from her 1980 collection of short stories, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. By pulling from her 1999 text, Ces voix qui m’assiègent, a “theoretical journal” that provides insights into her creative intention and struggles, I will situate Djebar as a postcolonial feminist literary and film theorist and will outline a series of important theoretical contributions she makes in this text. Specifically, I will discuss the concept of a double gaze, the importance of the audience’s positioning as listener, and the recognition of women’s desire to speak in refusing the dominant masculine gaze. In Chapter Two, I will consider Annie Ernaux’s 1981 text, La femme gelée, and Simone de Beauvoir’s 1967 novella, La femme rompue, within the trope of displaying femininity through the home and domestic acts in French society. In this chapter, I will understand Ernaux as a quasi-sociologist or

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quasi-archaeologist who shares first-person female narratives of existence through her recollections of scenes from her childhood as well as discourses of social class stereotyping and social contradiction. Additionally, I will draw the reader’s attention to Ernaux’s tales of personal disillusionment and moments of class and gender mis/identifications as they are lived out in the home in this text. Taking De Beauvoir as both philosopher and artist, I will focus in Chapter Two on her use of the diary form as a transcended, “fictionalized” first-person narrative that has the potential to stir De Beauvoir’s original reader’s awakening to the normalizing discourses of femininity in operation around him/her. In Chapter Three, I will concentrate on the creation of domestic landscapes and soundscapes in Tunisian and French societies as shown to be possible in Raja Amari’s 2002 film, Satin rouge, and Coline Serreau’s 2001 film, Chaos. Both films testify to the hypocritical nature of their respective societies by portraying multiple cultural double standards, ideological paradoxes, and social contradiction through their cinematic representations of gender bias. In this chapter, I will discuss how both directors (vis-à-vis their respective societies) avoid beginning with traditional, unified, and fixed definitions of femininity in order to advocate a reading practice that focuses on the shifting lines of trans/national demarcation that exist within both genders as well as between genders. In Chapter Four, I will echo the challenge made by postcolonial artists to French Republican manners of representing “French” female iconography at home. I will examine the representations of “ethnic Othered” French femininity created in portraits of beur (or French citizens of North African heritage) marginal domestic space and households in France as portrayed in Leïla Sebbar’s 2004 collection of narratives, Mes Algéries en France, and Yamina Benguigui’s 2001 film, Inch’Allah dimanche. In both texts, their authors position the home and homemaking activities as site and source of socio-political contention within the beur family and French society. Throughout the discussion in Chapter Four, I understand these texts to constitute countertexts to conventional French discourses of race and ethnicity based on fixed, essentialist, and Orientalist definitions of self and culture. In this chapter, I will draw out the marginal female identities projected in the texts as well as debate the narrators’ abilities to engage with self-definitions in different and diverse ways by asserting the right not to belong and through enjoying the freedom of the margins. In summation, this study will pursue the issue of home by specifically examining women’s representations of self, diverse communities of women, relational identities, sexuality and corporality, and orality and discourse. This study

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will consider women’s coming to voice through women’s (re)appropriation of hegemonic discourses of representation, use of language, and authority in speaking as made possible through the domestic space of the home and the arts of homemaking. In addition, this study will also engage in analyzing the common thread discursively hemmed by each woman artist throughout her work, which is the desire to challenge virtually all binary oppositions through self-referential modes of storytelling. In every case, as this study will develop, the women artists make possible these self-referential modes of storytelling through re-hybridized speaking positions in which protagonists speak and gaze from a ²⁄³ Space of expression. This notion or position of subjectivity opens up our discussion in Chapter One and begins to define the parameters of the concept of “making home.”

Notes 1. Thomas Foster, Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women’s Writing (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). 2. Erica L. Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell-Oro (London, UK: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2003), 14. 3. Inderpal Grewal, House and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1996). 4. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocation and Twentieth Century Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). 5. Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa, 19. 6. Susan Strehle, Transnational Women’s Fiction: Unsettling Home and Homeland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 7. Strehle, Transnational Women’s Fiction, 1. 8. Strehle, Transnational Women’s Fiction, 2. 9. Sarah Pink, Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects, and Everyday Life (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2004). 10. Pink, Home Truths, 10. 11. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Theresa de Laurentis (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), 191–212. 12. Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2006), 295. 13. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 296. 14. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 298. 15. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 298.

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16. Emma Wilson, French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). 17. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996). 18. Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 57–71. 19. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001). 20. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 9–11. 21. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 145. 22. Julia Watson, “Autoethnography,” in Enclyclopedia of Life Writing, ed. Margaretta Jolly (London, UK: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 83. 23. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialects, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 343–351, and Françoise Lionnet, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 325–336. 24. Henderson, Speaking in Tongues, 344. 25. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 165. 26. Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism: Key Ideas (London: Routledge, 2009). 27. Vertovec, Transnationalism, 7. 28. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2005). 29. Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 6–7. 30. Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005), 5–6. 31. Hayward, French National Cinema, 8. 32. Carrie Tarr, “French Cinema: ‘Transnational’ Cinema?” Modern & Contemporary France 15.1 (2007), 3–7. 33. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “General Introduction: What is transnational cinema?” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–12. 34. Vijay Devadas, “Rethinking Transnational Cinema: The Case of Tamil Cinema,” Senses of Cinema, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/transnational -tamil-cinema.html (22 July 2009). 35. Will Higbee, “Locating the Postcolonial in Transnational Cinema: The Place of Algerian Émigré Directors in Contemporary French Film,” Modern & Contemporary France 15.1 (2007), 51–64. 36. Higbee, Locating the Postcolonial, 52. 37. Higbee, Locating the Postcolonial, 52. 38. Higbee, Locating the Postcolonial, 52–53. 39. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 422–423.

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40. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 415. 41. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 415. 42. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 423. 43. Hafid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001). 44. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 45. Emma Wilson, French Cinema since 1950 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 17. 46. Wilson, French Cinema since 1950, 19. 47. Marcos Novak, “Speciation, transvergence, allogenesis: Notes on the production of the alien,” Architectural Design 72:3 (2002), 64–71. 48. Daniela Berghagn, “Cinema of transvergence,” Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe, 2008, http://www.migrantcinema.net/glossary/term/cinema_ of _transvergence/ (22 July 2009). 49. Will Higbee, “Beyond the (trans)national: toward a cinema of transvergence in postcolonial and diasporic francophone cinema(s),” Studies in French Cinema 7:2 (2007), 79–91. 50. Michael Goddard, “East-West European Superpositions as Transvergent Cinema,” Studies in French Cinema 7:2 (2007), 107–117. 51. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 9–11.

CHAPTER 1

Making Home with Assia Djebar DESTABLIZING THE CENTER(S)

As I have illustrated briefly by the two short case studies of Assia Djebar’s Ces voix qui m’assiègent and the Song of Messouada in the Introduction of this book, Djebar’s contributions to the fields of postcolonial and feminist studies and my own particular study of women’s contemporary filmmaking and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia cannot be understated. I posit that scholars may now discuss much of her work not simply as primary artistic examples in which feminist and postcolonial literary and film theories resound, but as actual theoretical discourses, themselves, in feminist, film, and postcolonial theory. Principally speaking, we know Djebar as a novelist, translator, filmmaker, poet, essayist, and playwright. Increasingly, we consider Djebar a theorist. As we shall see in this chapter, Djebar puts in theory and practice self-referential modes of storytelling articulated through re-hybridized speaking positions in which protagonists speak and gaze from a ²⁄³ Space of expression. Let us begin with a cursory overview of her literary and cinematic project and agenda so as to better contextualize and comprehend her employment of this speaking position and space of expression. Throughout her work, by engaging with a variety of political and social themes and content, Djebar presents issues that touch very deeply not only her personal experiences but those of her community as well. At the heart of Djebar’s work is her primary agenda of articulating the struggle for women’s social emancipation in Algeria through a variety of first-person singular and plural narratives. She promotes this agenda by textualizing the challenges and complexities of women’s existence in a Muslim world and by taking up the semiotic impact of war on the minds, daily existence, representation, and identity of Algerian women and their communities. Moreover, Djebar 1

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consistently brings to light in her work numerous complex contradictions embedded in Algerian society that “engender” Algerian women. Djebar adopts a variety of motifs and preoccupations in confronting these contradictions in all of her work. First, by interviewing Algerian women and recording their dialogues in her work, Djebar struggles against Algeria’s dominant, nationalist discourse that excludes women’s active contributions to modern Algerian society, her primary preoccupation throughout her corpus. Second, by allowing Algerian women to gaze in her work, she affronts traditional patriarchal and Oriental ways of seeing Algerian women that value them only as a mother or member of the harem, respectively. She appropriates matriarchal ways of seeing and speaking in Algeria that legitimize Algerian women’s oral tradition and position Algerian women as transmitters of Algerian history. And, third, she debates Algerian women’s domestic role and existence within and outside the home and family. Moreover, Djebar (like many postcolonial and feminist theorists) engages throughout all of her work in the non-dire—that which societies or cultures deem taboo or unspeakable. In her work, this concept focuses on the discussion and recognition of Algerian women’s contribution throughout history to revolutionary wars waged against foreign rulers. By either implying or explicitly stating the non-dire in her texts, Djebar seeks to break through Algerian social taboos concerning the physical violation, emotional torment, and sexual assault many Algerian women have suffered throughout Algeria’s history but especially during the war for independence from France. Djebar relies on two important tropes—the gaze and voice—in her efforts to engage these examples of the non-dire in her work. For Djebar, the gaze and voice remain complex notions that extend beyond the immediate questions of who is looking at whom or who is speaking to whom in Algerian society in order to examine the how, why, and to what effect these individuals are looking and speaking. Wrapped up in these more critical questions, Djebar, like many theorists of cinematic spectatorship and agency theory, finds a variety of spectator positions and cinematic voices. She upholds the traditional assertion that the one who gazes or speaks maintains the position of power in Algeria and explains that Algerian men exercise the only licit gaze and voice in Algerian society. She shows in her work how Algerian women may subvert this hegemonic gaze and voice—namely through the function of the veil—and appropriate a multiplicity of gazing perspectives and voices in Algerian society. This multiplicity of gazing perspectives and speaking voices allows Djebar to revise traditional, official French colonizers’ and official post-independence, Algerian history-writing in her work. By (re)writing and (re)recording

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previously silenced female voices into Algerian history, Djebar mediates textual and cinematic spaces in collaboration with her own views and speech in which a re-hybridized subject’s views and speech may also be seen and heard. To this effect, Djebar asserts that in all of her work, she is “speaking nearby” the indigenous women of her Algerian communities. In other words, Djebar knows that she may not speak “for” the subjects in her literary or cinematic discourses since “speaking for” reinstates colonizing cultural practices. Therefore, in her texts Djebar collaboratively appears alongside her seeing/speaking female subjects. In effect, this multiplicity of female Algerian gazing perspectives and voices challenge and overturn hegemonic Algerian discourses, which then in turn create new transnational cultural discourses for future generations of Algerian hybrid gazing/speaking subjects in Algeria. Thus, her work lends itself well to and continues debates central to feminist, autobiographical, cinematic, and postcolonial modes of critical discourses. I take as my point of departure in this chapter Djebar’s text, Regard interdit, son coupé—the postface to her 1979 collection of short stories, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. This chapter will examine numerous theoretical positions set forth in the postface. In this text, Djebar problematizes spectatorship and the gaze and finds support for multiple gazing perspectives when examining the role and function of the gaze in Algerian society. She recognizes the act of writing as both processes of veiling and unveiling (i.e., the anxiety inherent in divulging personal narratives in Arab societies; unveiling), which she succeeds in mitigating by finding a collectivity of Algerian women’s voices (veiling) in her work. She fleshes out women’s duality in body and voice, which draws out a division between Algerian women’s bodies and voices as two (in)congruent agents of narrative discourse. Importantly, she also examines women’s oral tradition of the stories, songs, histories, and legends Algerian women pass along to and instill in their children. I also take into consideration in this chapter how Djebar further engages in (twenty years later) these theoretical positions in her 1999 text, Ces voix qui m’assiègent, as well as how Djebar has specifically contextualized many of them in her first film, La nouba du Mont Chenoua. These theoretical positions and their evolution in Djebar’s work contribute to the methodological cubism in this study by helping to explore the multichronotopic links of theory and practice concerning the representations of women, the home, and homemaking activities in contemporary French-language women’s literature and filmmaking from the Maghreb (specifically Algeria and Tunisia) as well as the Métropole (France). In order to understand how Djebar’s first-person cinematic and literary narratives have the potential to partially deterritorialize the process of imaging

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communities, and thus contribute to this study’s methodological cubism as established in the Introduction, we would do well to start with a discussion of the gaze and positions of spectatorship as they are realized and created in Djebar’s work, in particular, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement.

The Gaze and Positions of Spectatorship Djebar’s treatment of the gaze and positions of spectatorship in both theory and practice in her corpus is key to grasping how her work supports the notion that written and visual inscriptions cannot be predetermined nor narrowly prescribed. Furthermore, her use and discussion of the gaze and positions of spectatorship form the basis to an exploration of how the process of uncovering or articulating new identities and subjectivities ushers in new ways of seeking, knowing, and being. Each of the short stories from Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement underlines debates, figures, and issues that Djebar often revisits throughout her work. The first story, also entitled Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, opens on a scene in which an Algerian woman is tortured by French soldiers during the Algerian war for independence. The story then flashes forward to present day and chronicles the daily existence of Sarah, a musicologist and former freedom fighter during the war for independence who collects, translates, and transcribes women’s old songs. Il n’y a pas d’exil, the second short story, examines the situation of young Algerian women through a twenty-five-yearold divorcée, her two children deceased, who remarries against her will. The third short story, Les mots parlent, brings into question the representations of the repudiated, outcast Algerian woman (Aicha) and the strong-willed, generous Algerian woman (Yemma Hadda). Nostalgie de la horde, the fourth short story, contemplates Algerian women’s memory that spans centuries and theorizes the process of relaying the past through their own and others’ memories and tales. And the final short story, Jour de Ramadan, conveys the widespread disappointment Algerian women feel in relation to the “new” and “liberated” Algeria. The postface, Regard interdit, son coupé, recapitulates the motifs of these stories through Djebar’s analysis of two specific paintings—Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers. As I have already argued in Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in “Touchia: Ouverture” and “Ces voix qui m’assiègent” (Weber-Fève, 2008), in her essay, Djebar juxtaposes the two paintings and reads them as symbols of a static past and present and evolving future of Algerian women’s representation, respectively.

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When examining the two paintings in this essay, Djebar speaks to the reader “simply” as an Algerian woman. At the beginning of this essay, she introduces Delacroix’s masterpiece as one that still makes us question ourselves (1979: 240), and she provides a brief history of how this painting came into being. She explains that Delacroix came to Algiers as an invited guest of a Monsieur Poirel, chief engineer of the Port of Algiers and amateur painter. Through Poirel, Delacroix made the acquaintance of a local rich man, who eventually allowed Delacroix to enter his home. Once inside the man’s home, Delacroix excitedly sketched the women and children, as well as the décor, and took precise notes of the colors of the room and the women’s clothing as well as of each of their names. Djebar recounts that upon his return to Paris, Delacroix would spend the next two years working on the image in his memory of this visit to this man’s home. For Djebar, the full sense of Delacroix’s painting plays on the relationship of the three women depicted, their bodies, and their confinement. She sees these women as prisoners resigned to a closed place illuminated by a kind of dreamy light of no clear origin (1979: 241). She suggests that Delacroix’s genius in this painting rests in that he makes these women appear to us at once present and distant, enigmatic to the highest degree (1979: 241). From Djebar’s point of view, Delacroix’s vision of the man’s home manifests a stolen gaze. In effect, Djebar reminds us that his painting permits us to gaze—a gaze which in reality is forbidden to us. She rightly asserts that we are not subconsciously fascinated by Delacroix’s superficial vision of the Orient “dans une pénombre de luxe et de silence” (1979: 243) / [“within a luxurious and silent semidarkness” (1992: 137)]; but rather we are consciously fascinated because we position ourselves in front of these women in order to gaze at them, which reminds us that we do not ordinarily have the right to do so. Thus, Delacroix’s painting grants us a voyeuristic vantage point. The original “public” spectator of “the women of Algiers in their apartment” was in fact male and Western. As Djebar underlines in her essay, this orientalizing gaze (regard orientalisant)—which was borne first by French military translators and then later via Western photographers, painters, and cineastes—relies on this closed society and continuously underscores its “mystère féminin” (1979: 256) / [“feminine mystery” (1992: 146)]. This orientalizing gaze in Djebar’s writing raises the question of spectatorship for her and for scholars examining her work. Central to feminist film theory has been the examination of the relationship between the gaze and the object of the gaze—a notion which includes the on-screen characters’ diegetic gazes throughout the film and also the viewer in the audience’s gaze watching the film being projected on screen.

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Moreover, feminist film theory has also focused on how that relationship between the gazer and the object of the gaze carries on after the object leaves the gazer’s gaze. Thus, feminist theories of spectatorship have intrinsically relied on analyses of the roles and functions of the gaze in the cinema, which we know to be a critical theoretical point of departure in Djebar’s filmmaking and writing as well. The gaze for Djebar and other feminist film scholars refers to the exchange of looks that takes place within the cinematic text, but its functions extend far beyond a simple exchange of looks. Feminist film scholars over the last thirty years have approached the gaze from a variety of perspectives and have come to a variety of evolving conclusions concerning the functions of the gaze in the cinema. In the 1970s, feminist film scholars—grounding their assertions in psychoanalytic theories of pleasure and desire—saw this exchange of looks in dominant forms of cinema as reproducing a voyeuristic pleasure and associated the position of the spectator with the male viewer in the audience. They read the positioning of the on-screen woman as the object of the (male) spectator’s gaze and suggested that the female spectator would have to derive her viewing pleasure through identification with this passive, fetishized position of the female character on screen or assume the male positioning.1 In relation to Djebar’s theoretical work on the spectator (gazer) in Algerian society in her text Regard interdit, son coupé, she finds that the only licit gaze in her society is Algerian and male. In paraphrasing an important reading of the gaze in this essay, Djebar asserts that the eye that gazes in Algerian society maintains dominance over and always seeks out the eye of the dominated (1979: 245). Thus Djebar’s first conception of the gaze (like its first conception in early feminist film studies) assumes a male “bearer-of-thelook.” Where their early theorizations differ, however, stems from the role of the female (her beauty, her body, etc.) stylized as the normatively assumed object of the male spectator’s public gaze. Djebar identifies the first public spectator of the Algerian women of Delacroix’s painting as male and Western. However, Djebar explains in Regard interdit, son coupé that the female as object of the public look is forbidden in Algerian society. Thus, Djebar’s first spectator position assumes a male theoretical positioning; but when Algerian gazing practices focus on a female object, Djebar asserts that this position is reserved for male family members (husbands, brothers, and sons) within the confines of private places and is denied to the public spectator. Therefore for Djebar, the “bearer-of-the‘authorized’-look” is qualified as Algerian, male, and familial. This familial restructuring of the authorized spectator in her post/colonial context provides

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one insight into how looking relations have been revisited in feminist film theory. Almost initially following the assertion of the assumed male position of the cinematic spectator, feminist film scholars began to unravel this supposed impossibility of female spectatorship in dominant cinema. One central revision of this impossibility included the female viewer’s ability to postulate a bisexual spectatorship position, thus escaping the previously assumed fixed masculine/feminine sexual identities of the viewer.2 This restructuring allowed for a position of spectatorship for the female viewer, but the gender binaries of masculine/feminine were still strictly maintained. Yet, still further revisions recognized the limitations in this postulation of masculine/feminine traditional positions of spectatorship and their implications. These “third wave” revisions emphasized the heterogeneity factor implicit in the female spectator’s position.3 This theorization, stemming from psychoanalytic theory, still upheld the belief that dominant cinema continually restages the Oedipal scenario; but feminist film theorists now began to see this as a process by which the female viewer might identify as both subject and object of the cinema. These revisions emphasized the social nature of subjectivity and called for an objective in feminist cinema to construct within the film medium different visions and conditions of viewing/representation for different social subjects.4 By revising filmmaking, mise en scène, and editorial practices in their work, filmmakers desiring to create counter-discourses to the apparatus and enunciation of dominant cinema have sought technical and narrative ways of re-conceptualizing gender and gender roles on screen and in the audience. “Feminist” filmmakers have often challenged and continue to challenge the female viewing experience and the representations of femininity in the cinema. Primarily through subversion and requisition, they work to defamiliarize conventional characteristics, codes, conventions, modes, tropes, and motifs of dominant modes or enunciations of filmmaking and gender representation. Their re-conceptualizations of the female viewer and femininity emphasize the social nature of subjectivity and identity formation, which reflects Djebar’s theorizations of the Algerian female spectator and her representation of Algerian femininity in Regard interdit, son coupé. In Djebar’s theorizing, the social nature of female subjectivity and identity formation—as either viewer or object—is grounded in the physical and metaphorical functions of the veil. From Djebar’s perspective, the veil manifests a social signifier that engenders Algerian society and spaces. In Regard interdit, son coupé, Djebar analyzes the physical veil worn by many Muslim women. For Djebar, their veil paradoxically creates a position

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for the female spectator in an Algerian male space as well as erases her identity. As she explains, totally enveloping her body and limbs, the veil allows the woman who wears it and circulates in public under its covering to be in her turn a possible thief in a masculine space (1979: 245). However, as Djebar continues, the female gaze is present in society, but this liberated eye, that could become a sign of a conquest toward the knowledge of others, outside a confinement, is perceived as a threat, and the vicious circle reforms (1979: 245). In other words, Djebar reifies that the authorized gaze is only to be Algerian, familial, and male. Although the veil ironically allows the Algerian woman to gaze, her gaze, like Delacroix’s, remains stolen and unauthorized. Like Delacroix’s outsider spectatorial position that threatens the traditional gaze, Djebar’s position created in this essay also threatens the traditional gaze. She shows in Regard interdit, son coupé how the spectatorial position of the veiled woman—a female spectator—threatens the traditional gaze by representing a potential to upset the balance of dominator/dominated in traditional Algerian society. In all of Djebar’s work, the veil represents a rather complex and contradictory signifier. As David Kelly asserts, “It both imprisons and offers freedom” (1996: 845). The veil functions to occult the Algerian woman from public view by concealing her body beneath it and thus, in effect, renders her an invisible subject. But as Laurence Huughe argues: “The cotton veil that removes the woman from the masculine, alien gaze also figures the veil of stone—that is, the walls that imprison the woman within the universe to which Islamic social order relegates her: the domestic universe, that of the family” (1996: 867). In brief, as an “invisible subject,” the veil allows the Algerian woman to circulate in a public and masculine space, consequently subverting and appropriating—Djebar suggests “stealing”—the masculine gaze for herself. Yet, in Islamic thought and social practice, the veil may remain a tangible marker of her marginalization in such a space and thus “relegates her [to the] domestic universe.” Thus, the veil creates both presence (the male gaze subverted by a female eye) and absence (her occulted subjectivity). Recalling the discussion from the Introduction concerning the home’s deeper affiliation with the public realm, the domestic universe is a receiver of public languages, values, and discourses and reflects and resembles “nation.” Thereby, the veil works on both ends of the spectrum, as a marker of masculine presence and feminine absence and national and domestic discourses; thus effectively challenging the binary oppositions and social contradictions facing all Algerian women. For Huughe, this ambivalent figure of the veiled woman “is indeed the paradigm of a sort of unifying instance in the search for a new relation to meaning that would take into consideration the complexity and contradic-

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tions inherent in the Algerian woman” (1996: 867). For Djebar, as expressed in Regard interdit, son coupé, and for this chapter, this “new relation to meaning” materializes in the female spectatorial position that the veil enables. Additionally, the examination of Regard interdit, son coupé and Ces voix qui m’assiègent from Djebar’s position, herself, as a “veiled” spectator analyzing Delacroix’s painting implies another way in which Djebar complicates the spectator position and its traditional theorizations. By presenting the first spectators who are male (represented through the local man and by extension, Delacroix) and a second spectator who is female (represented by the figure of the veiled woman), Djebar creates a third spectatorial space (represented through her use of “nous” [“we”] when discussing the effects of Delacroix’s painting on the observer) that fluidly shifts gender through its interpolation between the authorized Algerian-familial-male spectator position and the unauthorized feminine and female spectator positions. This gender-shifting spectator may effectively move in and out of masculine, feminine, authorized, and unauthorized spectatorial spaces or positions. Through presenting a series of spectators in Regard interdit, son coupé—male, female, masculine, feminine, authorized, unauthorized, Algerian, Western— Djebar asserts (although she does not yet articulate it as such in Regard interdit, son coupé) a certain “in-betweeness” or hybridity of spectator positions. In this instance, the re-hybridized postcolonial subject is clearly situated in personal history or rather personal histories: Djebar’s experiences and reflections examining Delacroix’s painting, Delacroix’s experiences and reflections during the visit to this home, and our experiences and reflections reading Djebar’s essay. At once, the spectator position is both center and margin and begins to imply a complexity, incompleteness, or fragmentation. With regard to the spectator position created in Djebar’s filmmaking, just like the critical distance she takes in her writing, the camera allows her to assume a multiplicitous perspective. For this chapter of this study, this multiplicitous perspective speaks to Djebar’s ability to assume different perspectives and avoid being gazed upon. In other words, the re-hybridized ²⁄³ Space of expression allows Djebar to bring to light in print or in film Algerian women’s first-person perspectives and both marginal and hegemonic representations of Algerian femininity. In Djebar’s work, the position of the re-hybridized spectator is both textual (occupying a representative space or position in her writing and filmmaking that challenges Algerian nationalist discourse) as well as meta-textual (implying a shared relationality) between the viewer or reader (the “real-world” spectator) and the text. As already briefly discussed in the Introduction, much contemporary women’s filmmaking and lifewriting emphasize an interactive process in

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which meaning is always in production and a state of transition, dependent on the spectator or reader who must decode or interpret and assign the new identities and subject positions and construct the new ways of seeing, knowing, and being. Djebar’s corpus is no exception to this rule. Trinh T. MinhHa has suggested that the spectator’s interaction with the cinematic text through the script and shots of the film enables the spectator to assemble his/ her “own film.”5 Although Djebar does not explicitly define spectatorship as such in either Regard interdit, son coupé or Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Minh-Ha’s definition accurately applies to the (meta)textual position of the re-hybridized spectator position in relation to Djebar’s work as well. This (meta)textual position and Minh-Ha’s working definition of spectatorship raise an interesting line of inquiry on the role of collaboration—whether technical, ideological, symbolic, or on the level of the narrative—in primary artistic works. In Character Zone from Cinema Interval, Minh-Ha writes: “ ‘Collaboration’ is a term that is highly esteemed among marginalized groups because there is a tendency to value collaborative work over individual work in contexts where it is almost impossible to escape the burden of representation” (1999: 244). Although in many minds this politically-charged word often conjures up images of occupied peoples assisting occupying forces and assimilating the occupants’ foreign politics and culture in indigenous settings, Minh-Ha uses this polemic to suggest something much more positive. For Minh-Ha, collaboration is akin to “speaking nearby.” This is to say that, collaboration—or the veiling of one’s voice, perspective, and knowledge with other voices from members of one’s communities—begins to avoid the inherent essentialist pitfall of “authentic” representation that burdens the marginalized individual in public discourses. Minh-Ha explains, “Collaboration happens not when something common is shared between the collaborators, but when something that belongs to neither of them comes to pass between them” (1999: 244). This notion of collaboration captures the interstitial spaces of counterhegemonic strategies of renegotiating and rearticulating meaning called for in transnational and postcolonial studies and most poignantly speaks to Djebar’s theorization of the re-hybridized spectator and her project to “speak nearby” in her work. For Djebar, “speaking nearby” (and I will add “seeing what is nearby”) occurs after she allows her gaze to focus on the Algerian women of her indigenous community, listens to their oral tradition stories and testimonies (their “timeless choruses”), and then offers her voice echoing these discourses to a public audience through her work. Through this elaborate framework of Algerian female collaboration in Djebar’s work, Algerian women’s voices and gazes do not belong to one specific individual in the narrative; but rather,

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they are passed between the character and the author and then to us. This collaboration creates a position for a re-hybridized spectator in which she may see him/herself as both subject and object of the cinematic or literary text. In Djebar’s work, collaboration is metaphorically represented in her analysis of the symbolism and function of the physical veil, behind which Algerian women may gaze, and the metaphorical veil, under which they may share their stories in whisper. Thus, the veil remains key in understanding Djebar’s contribution to feminist film and literary studies, as it allows for collaboration in the narrative and collaboration between the text and reader or viewer as well as creates a space or position from or in which to challenge traditional theorizations of the voice and gaze. In all of Djebar’s work, this re-hybridized postcolonial subject position—situated in personal history and speaking and seeing from the ²⁄³ Space—is perhaps most strikingly prominent in her 1976 film, La nouba du Mont Chenoua. Let us consider this cinematic text more closely.

LA NOUBA DU MONT CHENOUA (1976) In Djebar’s post/colonial revisions of the gaze in contemporary Algeria, Algerian women must read against the grain of two gazes in order to refuse the normalizing processes of patriarchal socialization and post/colonial representation. For Djebar in Regard interdit, son coupé, this double gaze stems from two sources: a male, Algerian gaze that generally represents Algerian women as “limitée[s] certes au terroir, au village, au saint populaire local, quelquefois au ‘clan’” (1979: 257) [“limited to the land, to the village, to the popular local saint, sometimes to the ‘clan’ ” (1992: 147)] and an orientalizing, Western gaze that represents Algerian women either as an odalisque or in exaggerated folkloric imagery. Djebar’s objective in La nouba du Mont Chenoua is to use the gaze to foreground a female-gendered subject who is not uniquely represented as the land/Nation of Algeria or who is not solely depicted as the exotic object of sexual desire and/or folkloric exaggerations. She strives rather to foreground a female-gendered subject who is at once both inside (as represented in the figure of the mother) and outside (as overlooked in the figure of the sororal war participant) the hegemonic post/colonial ideology of gender. In filming La nouba du Mont Chenoua, Djebar returned to the mountains of her childhood, fifteen years after the end of the Algerian war of liberation, in order to interview her aunts and female cousins about their daily wartime experiences and involvement (Donadey, 1996: 885). As Anne Donadey summarizes, “Both documentary and fiction, La nouba follows the

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filmmaker’s ‘alger ego,’. . . as she questions her relatives, thus reactivating her own memory of a war in which she lost many loved ones” (1996: 885). When prompted in interviews to discuss the difficulties for the spectator in reading or understanding this film, Djebar has replied that she does not find the film to be difficult and simply stated that she asks for some effort on the part of the spectator (Bensmaïa, 1996: 877). “Some” effort, in my view, proves rather an understatement, for La nouba du Mont Chenoua offers no classical narrative film elements that conventionally allow the spectator to comprehend the subject matter, engage in the storyline, or identify with the characters. In Réda Bensmaïa’s view: “There is certainly no single thread to guide the viewer toward a definitive meaning or a final synthesis. Instead, the film seems to take a perverse pleasure in thoroughly disappointing any desire on the viewer’s part to tie up loose ends or to reach closure” (1996: 877). However, one suggested manner in which one may initially interpret or decode La nouba du Mont Chenoua is to see the film as a construction of a “musical suite.” Djebar dedicated the film to Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and conceived of the film as a “type of musical composition: that is, as a nouba, ‘an everyday story of women,’ but at the same time a discontinuous suite of heterogeneous musical fragments” (Bensmaïa, 1996: 882). There is very little continuous dialogue in the film. The voices and vocalizations that one does hear in the film seem to occupy (or reclaim?) an audio space of “feminine” sound rather than a narrative space of meaningful words in communicative exchange. Bensmaïa identifies the bits of speech, dialogue, recollections, verses of poetry, songs, testimonies, and nursery rhymes occupying the film’s audio space as “verbal rhetorical places” (1996: 880) and asserts that they effectively establish the film’s “timbre.” Bensmaïa explains: What dominates and guides the film is no longer meaning or directionality but rather timbre. The word functions less as a word within a sentence than as a sound, a cry or interjection, a password. Made up of fragments . . . the film moves forward by fits and starts of the imaginary, by bursts of memories and recollections wrested from the past or appeals projected into the future; it progresses by spurts of images rather than by smooth, nicely hierarchized phrases. (1996: 883)

Thus in La nouba du Mont Chenoua, it is not enough just to watch what takes place on screen. One must also listen to the dialogue, music, and sounds recorded in the soundtrack and question how it connects to the images projected.

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In Regard de l’autre, regard sur l’autre from Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Djebar writes that she remembers clearly the first shot of La nouba du Mont Chenoua that she filmed on a December night of 1976 in a country farmhouse—“une scène d’‘intérieur-nuit’: image de fiction” (1999: 161) [“an inside night scene: image of fiction”]—lasting one minute, thirty seconds of a man watching his wife sleep. She explains that in this shot she captures a gaze, or rather a double gaze. Djebar writes: nous—regardons l’homme, l’Autre, regarder une femme algérienne allongée, endormie, telles les Vénus ou nonchalantes, ou absentes, ou rêveuses de la peinture italienne de la Renaissance. . . . Comme si tout commencements de l’art (le cinéma en pays arabes se retrouve objectivement en situation analogue à celle des peintres florentins ou vénitiens du Quattrocento!) passait par cette expérience originelle : comment l’autre regarde la femme dans son abandon et comment, à notre tour, nous le regardons regarder . . . (1999: 161) [we (the technicians and I)—watch the man, the Other, looking at an Algerian woman stretched out, asleep, such as the Venuses or the nonchalant, absent, or dreaming women of Italian painting from the Renaissance. . . . As if all beginnings in art (cinema in Arab countries finds itself objectively in a situation analogous to that of the Florentine or Venetian painters of the Quattrocento!) went through this original experience: how the other gazes at the woman in her abandonment and how, in our turn, we gaze at him watching . . . (my translation)]

This insight is significant for, in her essay, Djebar shares that she uses this particular scene occurring near the middle of La nouba du Mont Chenoua in which “l’autre” (an injured Algerian man) sits in his wheelchair watching his sleeping wife (an Algerian woman) lying in bed as a platform upon which to expostulate the conditions of masculine and later orientalizing gazing practices. At the close of this short essay, she then compares these two gazes to women’s gazing and redefines what it means for women to gaze within Algerian female communities. Djebar asserts that the man in the wheelchair’s gaze is certainly a gaze of desire (1999: 162), and she questions whether there would really be a cinema if there were not first, explicitly, a quest for desire (1999: 162). She stresses, however, that this masculine gaze in this shot is not held long enough to allow the spectator to slip into a more or less complaisant suggestion of a shared pleasure with the man (1999: 162). Quite interestingly and almost

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counter-intuitively, she asserts that this masculine gaze is not voyeuristic. For Djebar, this masculine gaze “d’avant le desert” [“before the desert”] draws out this man’s powerlessness and his suffering from separation (1999: 162). In Djebar’s theorization of re-hybridized spectatorship, the masculine (Algerian, male, familial) gaze—when he is not the “maître du sérail” [“master of the seraglio”]—manifests a lack of power (1999: 163). As Djebar sees it, this powerless masculine gaze proves reminiscent of colonization in which this “regard d’avant le désert” is made subordinate to a voyeurstic “regard dominant” [“dominant gaze”] of the colonizer (1999: 163). In confronting these two forms of the gaze in her work, Djebar successfully draws on and draws out multiple gazes from multiple perspectives in La nouba du Mont Chenoua. In words echoing more recent feminist film theory, Djebar succeeds in La nouba du Mont Chenoua in representing portraits of the (Algerian) multiplicitous woman—the female-gendered subject who formerly existed outside the (Algerian) ideology of gender. Through the “regard d’avant le désert” in this scene, she asks the spectator to read the sleeping woman on screen (Lila) in a revised way which recuperates alongside of her multiplicitous figure the representations of Algerian women who have not been traditionally represented in Algerian society or who have been formerly relegated to the offscreen spaces of the cinema. Djebar succeeds in bringing to light in her work the representations of Algerian women who have traditionally been ignored in Algerian history-writing. However, Djebar implies in her work that the West must recognize that to gaze at “the” Algerian woman and to see “her” in terms of a Western subject-object relation as a monolithic representative of all Algerian women inherently repeats essentialist colonial ways of seeing. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster develops this idea by asserting that the women in postcolonial cinema (the subaltern), whose enunciations often seem designed to circumvent Western subjugation, remain subject to Western generalizations. But when looking back at the Westerner as subject, Foster postulates that they disrupt feminist and postcolonial discourse.6 Foster suggests that the Western reader should assume “the subject position of the listener, rather than the dominant position of the gazer/criticizer” (1997: 217). Thus, the spectator as listener should listen to the critical testimony—explicitly or implicitly stated—in postcolonial women filmmakers’ work. Djebar reconciles this inherent danger in her work through the qualification of her artistic design to “speak nearby” and not “for” the (subaltern) women of Algeria. This is to say that, she recognizes her privileged position to bring to light the figure of the multiplicitous Algerian woman, but she refuses to embody the figurehead of such representation. Rather, she veils her voice with the voices of her fellow speaking countrywomen; since she

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reminds us that in a postcolonial context, both the Western and the feminine gaze remain unauthorized. Thus, Djebar privileges Algerian women’s voices throughout her work. The privileging of Algerian women’s voices instantly brings to mind Gayatri Spivak’s groundbreaking essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? After analyzing the story of the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a young Indian woman who had been involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence, Spivak concludes that the subaltern—the indigenous women of postcolonial societies—cannot speak. Touria Khannous asserts in this regard: Spivak’s implication is that within certain discourses of representation, there is no space from which the gendered subaltern can speak. The subaltern woman, Spivak also implies, cannot speak in the place where she is subalternized, but this does not preclude her ability to speak in other contexts for herself. (2000: 56)

Within the constraints of hegemonic colonial, postcolonial, and nationalist texts, Spivak’s conclusion maintains its ground. Djebar indirectly speaks to this time and time again throughout her work. But as Khannous recognizes, there are other contexts (or media?) in which the subaltern may in fact speak “for” herself. Within the in-between space located among communities of countrywomen or from behind the veil—which Djebar captures in her filmmaking—Djebar shows in La nouba du Mont Chenoua how the subaltern can indeed speak. As Khannous states, “The film literally lets them speak. Their speech is embodied just as much in their painful expressions, their anguished tone, and their tears” (2000: 57). Therefore, through the act of Lila, the French-educated daughter of the tribe, listening to the voices of the women of Chenoua, Djebar effects a ²⁄³ Space in La nouba du Mont Chenoua in or from which the subaltern speaks. However, affirming that the marginalized subject can speak skirts the central issue in Spivak’s postulation. Spivak’s larger question is not just simply whether a subaltern individual may or may not be able to speak, but rather if s/he may ever be represented without the mediation of another’s discourse or medium. The short answer to this question would suggest that the subaltern—due to a variety of factors including limited access to formalized education, limited financial means, limited opportunities for publication, etc.—is never capable of speaking without another’s written, cinematic, political, etc. mediation. Djebar appears to support this notion, but only to a certain degree. For in her desire to “speak nearby” the subaltern in her work, Djebar creates a collaborative space in which discourses belong to no one in particular (thus no one speaks

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“for” another) but in which discourses “come to pass between them.” In other words, Djebar shows that the subaltern may speak and does reaffirm that their discourse is mediated through another’s discourse, but she along with Minh-Ha reveals the collaborative nature of such a process in which speaking subjects speak “with” or “nearby” one another. For Djebar, this is the only possible form of female communication in Algerian society. She foregrounds the great importance of this collaborative female form of communication through all of La nouba du Mont Chenoua. Yet, as we established in the Introduction of this study, the original hybrid subject of postcolonial studies—now re-situated in this study in a ²⁄³ Space through the lens of the interrogation of the personal and echoing Minh-Ha’s concept of collaboration—is no longer strictly a subaltern collectivity of anonymous voices but a polyphony of personalized and dispersed individual voices that share a common origin, source, location, agenda, or position. This reworking of the hybrid postcolonial subject in La nouba du Mont Chenoua as a re-hybridized speaking and gazing subject is textualized in the very first installment or “movement” of the film.

“Touchia: Ouverture” As I have already demonstrated in Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in “Touchia: Ouverture” and “Ces voix qui m’assiègent” (Weber-Fève, 2008), Djebar takes up this challenge to foreground collaborative female communication and a re-hybridized subject position within the very opening sequence of her film. She describes this sequence in Regard de l’autre, regard sur l’autre: Une femme, en gros plan, est représentée; elle tourne le dos aux spectateurs; on ne voit que ses cheveux, que la masse de sa tête et elle est contre un mur; elle fait glisser son front sur la Pierre; peutêtre, signe d’impatience ou d’impuissance, vient-elle de se taper littéralement la tête contre ce mur! . . . C’est possible. Car elle nous refuse, elle me refuse—moi, le regard-caméra. C’est pourtant dans ce rapport que je choisis de la montrer. Elle continue de marcher, de chercher, de s’obstiner à dire non aux spectateurs; soudain sa voix, et avec elle sa révolte, éclate: ‘Je parle, je parle, je parle!—silence—je ne veux pas que l’on me voie!’ soupire-telle. Puis elle ajoute, quand on comprend que, dans la chambre, l’homme est là aussi, dans l’attente : ‘Je ne veux pas que tu me voies! ’ (1999: 165–166)

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[A woman, in close-up, appears; she turns her back to the viewers; we only see her hair, only the mass of her head et she is against a wall; she slides her forehead on the Stone; maybe as a sign of impatience or powerlessness, she just literally taped her head against this wall!. . . It’s possible. For she refuses us, she refuses me, the camera’s gaze. It is in this relationship, however, that I choose to show her. She continues to walk, to look, to insist on saying no to the viewers; suddenly her voice, and with it her revolt, explodes: ‘I speak, I speak, I speak!’—silence—‘I do not want anyone to see me!’ she sighs. Then she adds, when we understand that, in the bedroom, the man is also there, waiting: ‘I do not want you to see me!’ (my translation).]

Djebar shares that, in her view, cinema made by women and possibly all postcolonial cinema in her reasoning always originate in a desire to speak (1999: 166). That is, this woman’s unauthorized refusal to be gazed upon by the masculine gaze—as the protagonist expresses this in the voiceover—and by the camera gaze—as evidenced by her turning her back to the lens—suggests a privileging of speech over the gaze. This refusal is also heard in Minh-Ha’s cinematographic work7) and illustrates how Djebar desires to present “those who gaze for the first time”; that is, by a voiced refusal to be gazed upon. Although Djebar may privilege speech in this opening sequence, she cannot ignore the gaze, however, in her first film. The film foregrounds a French-educated Algerian woman’s (Lila) search for “testimonial proof of her brother’s disappearance during the war” (Knannous, 2000: 53). Ali—Lila’s mute and paralyzed husband (injuries sustained in a horse-riding accident)—and Aicha—Lila’s daughter—accompany Lila. Throughout the film, Djebar films Lila at home with Ali and Aicha, traveling around the Algerian countryside in her jeep, and her interviews with the countrywomen of Chenoua. Spliced throughout the film within these fictional narratives are fantasy-like enactments of the women’s oral histories, documentary-like military sequences, ethnographiclike images of Chenoua countrywomen and children, and quasi-formalistic shots of grandmothers and grandchildren engaged in the recounting of oral histories. In all of these fragments, Djebar in/directly investigates various forms of gazing from various perspectives. Through a formal cinematic analysis of the first section of the film entitled, Touchia: Ouverture, let us now examine Djebar’s textualization of the gaze as a “phenomenological reduction” (Bensmaïa, 1996: 877), a notion which suggests the outlawing of the “master’s” gaze and voice.

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This segment of the film opens with Djebar’s aforementioned description in which Lila in a medium one shot with her back to the camera slowly makes her way down an interior wall while sliding her forehead against it. The camera slowly pans left following her movement. Although this woman does not speak on screen, a voiceover (Djebar’s actual voice) articulates a desire not to be looked upon and rather to speak. Djebar cuts to a closer medium one shot of Ali sitting in his wheelchair. We see Ali straight on, but he does not look directly into the camera’s lens. Rather, he gazes slightly off to the side. Djebar cuts back to Lila as she turns around toward the camera. Djebar pulls back, revealing Ali in the foreground, across from Lila but not looking at her. This opening sequence succinctly sums up the goal of all of Djebar’s work—to forbid the hegemonic, “master’s” gaze and voice as the only sources of Algerian women’s contemporary representation. Through the editing—the back and forth cutting between Lila and Ali— Djebar gives the impression that Lila is the object of Ali’s gaze, but it proves to be an illusion. In order to realize her goal of interdicting the male gaze, Djebar must first effectively rely on this traditional patriarchal way of seeing. She recognizes that the spectator is socially conditioned to position Ali as the dominant gazer. So when Djebar pulls back revealing Ali in the foreground looking elsewhere, she surprises the spectator. The spectator is disillusioned. By overturning hegemonic cinematic conventions in this sequence, Djebar succeeds in challenging the spectator’s assumptions. Therefore, we must immediately call into question our own conventional viewing practices and quickly suspend them for the remainder of the film. With a stationary camera, the scene continues as Ali wheels himself forward more into the center of the shot. Lila enters the shot from screenright and walks behind and then around him. She exits the frame screen-left. Djebar then jump cuts to a close-up one shot of the back of Lila’s head looking out a window. The bars in the window pane resemble prison cell bars, and the bright exterior light washes out any background images. We only see the back of Lila’s head framed inside this prison-like window. This shot effects two symbolic images. First, Djebar alludes to Delacroix’s representation of the home as a space of confinement and imprisonment and location of women’s autism in the “master’s” presence. And second, the prison celllike bars foreshadow the narratives the older women will tell of the Algerian women and men who were arrested and tortured by French soldiers during their imprisonment. In La nouba du Mont Chenoua, Djebar works to undo the first image and memorialize the second. The scene continues as Lila, still framed within the window, turns to reveal her profile. Djebar zooms in for a tighter close-up of Lila’s profile and

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then quickly jump cuts to a medium shot of Lila still framed in the window. Lila closes the window shutter blocking out the exterior light, walks toward the left side of the room (camera pans left to follow her movement), and then stops to lean against the wall near a painting of what appears to be a landscape. She removes her scarf. Meanwhile, Djebar’s voiceover continues in which Djebar expresses a desire to “wander in the past, in my memories” and questions the term, “homeland.” Djebar throws a large-than-life shadow of Lila on the back wall, which symbolically superimposes a variety of motifs in this film that she often recasts throughout her work. On one hand (in addition to Djebar’s voiceover), Lila’s shadow provides a second metaphor for Djebar’s direct presence in this work. The actress playing the role of Lila bears a striking physical resemblance to Assia Djebar. By extension then, one could convincingly read Lila’s shadow as Djebar’s authorial signature—her veiled presence—speaking nearby Lila. In a second way, Lila’s shadow may also represent a community of shadows (an in-between or ²⁄³ Space) of patios and huts that Djebar identifies in Regard interdit, son coupé in which Algerian women congregate and from which their whispers and murmurs originate. And finally, the shadow also suggests Algerian women’s doubled existence—as the silent woman perpetuated in the hegemonic discourses of Algeria (expressed through Lila’s silent on-screen frustration) and as a veiled, marginal-speaking transmitter of and (active) participant in Algerian history (the larger-than-life shadow), who needs bringing into the light. The scene continues with a cut to a longer medium one shot of the profile of Ali wheeling himself into the shot from screen-left. Lila remains standing in her previous position screen-right. The two appear to mutually gaze at each other via an eyeline matching, and then Lila walks over and stands directly across from Ali. Djebar cuts to a close-up of Ali’s profile, which is framed by a window with its curtain drawn in the background. Ali turns his head to face the camera, but he never looks into the camera’s eye. He then slowly wheels himself backwards into a corner of the room. It is interesting to compare Djebar’s framing of Ali inside a closed window shut to the exterior with her earlier framing of Lila inside a barred window open to the exterior and its natural sunlight. Immediately, the less dramatic framing of Ali draws out the exceptionalness of Lila’s framing and asks the spectator to begin to see Algerian men and women in revised ways. In Ali’s framing, the home becomes reduced to a single corner. Djebar reifies the dominator/dominated structure, but she revises it through gender reversal. In quite a literal way, Djebar’s dominating (camera) eye seeks out and annihilates Ali’s dominated eye, leaving Ali no recourse but to retreat to the corner of the room as if out of fear. Thus, the home as represented in relation to Ali ironically becomes

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even more prison-like than the way in which Djebar presents it in relation to Lila. The exterior sunlight that floods the open window also floods and illuminates Lila’s body—thus creating a connection to the outdoors, an “escape route” of sorts to reach other women in her effort to wander in the past, sift through her memories, and explore the meaning of a homeland through the women’s narratives. Djebar reinstates the hegemonic or nationalist way of viewing Algerian women in connection to nature and the country. As Djebar claims in Regard interdit, son coupé, one of the only ideologically accepted ways of representing Algerian women in Algeria is in connection to the land. Further editing between shots of Lila looking through the window, the countryside, the home’s rooftop, and then the mountain of Chenoua crystallizes this representation. But as Djebar had first accomplished in the disillusionment (or defamiliarization) of the male gaze earlier in this scene, she once again succeeds in surprising the spectator. Following this tranquil editing between Lila and the Algerian landscape, Djebar cuts to an image of a woman standing behind vertical bars—in a prison cell it appears—and then to a sequence of documentarylike archival images of army trucks entering a village, a tree blowing in a storm, and the trees on the mountainside ablaze. Set against these images are sounds of war: airplanes, explosions, male and female cries and shouts, and gunfire. In a very abrupt way, Djebar unseats the idyllic representation of Algerian women as an Algerian landscape and creates a new representation by memorializing in this sequence the sacrifices made, the trauma experienced, and the hardships borne by many Algerian women during the struggle for independence from France. Djebar also effectively defamiliarizes the traditional representation of home as a space of female occultation through the low-angle long shot which foregrounds the home while capturing the mountain of Chenoua in the background. Viewing the home in relation to the mountain as a former fe/male site of warfare testifies to the contemporary emancipatory war some Algerian women and Djebar directly or indirectly wage against the patriarchal State and political factions in Algeria.8 Moreover, viewing the home in relation to the mountain as a beacon to Algerian women’s communities—since Djebar has returned to the rural mountain communities to interview the women there—bespeaks her project to salvage and encourage women’s oral histories in a strengthened effort to avoid their cultural, social, and historical autism. Therefore, the home becomes a site of female political action, spectatorship, and authorship in La nouba du Mont Chenoua. Following the sequence of editing that recaptures images and sounds of the war in Touchia: Ouverture, Djebar cuts back to a medium one shot of Lila’s profile. Lila then turns to look back at us over her left shoulder, directly

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gazing into the camera lens. Fully centered within the cinematographic frame, Djebar subtly zooms in on Lila’s face and freeze-frames this image. This has a striking effect on the spectator. In a very literal way, Djebar crystallizes the female gaze. Her dominant gaze (represented in the camera’s eye) directly meets Lila’s appropriated gaze in a “metaphorical” or symbolic direct eyeline matching. Equal cinematographic and semiotic ground is established. The male gaze, as represented earlier in Ali’s inability to look into the camera’s eye, is successfully subverted. The freeze-frame not only effectively creates for Djebar a (re)appropriated space or position of female (on-screen as well as off-screen) spectatorship in transnational cinema, but it also directly engages her theorizations of the female gaze as an enabler of female conversations and dialogues (female speech), a point she later articulates in Ces voix qui m’assiègent. In Regard de l’autre, regard sur l’autre from Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Djebar challenges the traditional gaze through Algerian women’s désir de parole (1999: 166) / [“desire for speech” (my translation)], but Djebar asserts that this desire for speech is borne only after she opens her eyes (1999: 166) and specifically when she circulates “dans les paysages retrouvés” (1999: 166) / [“in refound landscapes” (my translation)]. Djebar states that this female gaze searches out locations, houses, dried-up rivers, burned forests and meets other women who gaze back on her in their turn (1999: 166–167). Djebar finds that in their interweaving gazes, dialogue becomes baited on the present and on the past (1999: 167). For Djebar, women’s gaze becomes a departure for speech (1999: 167) or in other words, an impetus for a feminine speech purporting to testify to women’s present (and past) daily existence and memories of “un passé encore à vif” (1999: 167) / [“a past still alive”]. Through a personal investigation or a sifting through life experiences that shares common points of origin, reference, or destinations with others in Djebar’s work, this re-hybridized subject—through the gaze and in speech—exposes, resists, and challenges the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which it is implicated. For the remaining roughly ten minutes of Touchia: Ouverture, the film juxtaposes sequences of ethnographic-like images of Algerian countrywomen and children performing domestic tasks, fictional fragments of the doctor’s house call to examine Ali, Ali’s dream sequence revealing his riding accident, anonymous women performing various domestic tasks, and a group of strolling musicians playing traditional indigenous music. Spliced within these fragments are images of the mountain, countryside, and coastline. The most striking element of these juxtapositions impacting the spectator’s viewing experience is Djebar’s mise en scène in each of the images. Djebar masterfully fills each plane (foreground, middle ground, and

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background) of the cinematographic frame with figures and objects that on one hand seem dissident to one another yet paradoxically on the other seem interconnected. In one memorable sequence in Touchia: Ouverture, Ali, occupying the middle ground, sits in his wheelchair with his back quarter-turned toward the camera and appears to be staring through an open window. Djebar cuts to a reverse longer shot of Lila in the background entering the house and removing her wrap. (Ali is now in the foreground.) Lila approaches the room in which Ali is sitting and stops in the door frame (now occupying the middle ground). Djebar cuts to a close-up reverse shot of a young girl peering into the room in which Ali and Lila are positioned. The window frames her head. The young girl closes one of the window shutters, slides screen-left into the left-hand side of the window, and appears to engage our gaze by directly returning Djebar’s camera’s gaze. Djebar then cuts to a reverse full shot of Ali occupying the middle ground rolling backwards in his chair, as if away from the girl in the window now in the background. Lila’s immense or larger-than-life shadow is recast on the back wall and dramatically overshadows Ali. She enters the room from the foreground, moves to the middle ground standing opposite of Ali, then moves to the background and closes the second window shutter, thus cutting off the young girl’s gaze. The characters’ positions throughout the various planes, the angles Djebar employs when filming the characters, and the characters’ movements about the frame create a cinematographic “dance” of sorts in which the characters constantly appear to vie for agency on screen. There are definite overtones of a kind of struggle for ground to occupy (perhaps colonize?), and the only direct outcome is the occultation of the young girl from the camera’s eye and the interdiction of her gaze, which is effected by Lila’s closing of the window shutter. With everything we have discussed so far in this chapter, Lila’s action—this intentional shutting away of the young Algerian girl—proves quite curious, as it seems to oppose so many goals throughout much of Djebar’s work. In many ways, Lila’s act speaks to Djebar’s own experience and understanding of the Algerian women’s situation in Algeria as well as symbolically functions to warn Algerians by foreshadowing Algerian women’s rather pessimistic fate if viewing practices are not revised in Algeria. Many scholars read the figure of Lila as a “stand-in” for Djebar or Djebar’s “alter ego.” I do believe that some aspects—namely Lila’s fictional desire to record the oral narratives of her countrywomen in the film which so reflects Djebar’s own artistic and political goal in her work—do validate such readings. However, it seems to me that the figure of the young girl more accurately reflects Djebar’s presence in the film by reminding us that she is “speaking nearby” by the Algerian women multiplicitously represented in the figure of Lila. In this

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instance, I wish to read Djebar more specifically in the young girl’s figure than in Lila’s, largely because this young girl seems to recognize that she has something to learn about Algerian culture, history, and society by watching/ listening to the mother figure as represented in Lila. Indeed, this most literally reflects Djebar’s project: to look and listen to the mother as a source to the past and a means for revised Algerian women’s representation. Lila’s closing of the window shutter, which symbolically reinstates social occulting practices in the film, effectively demonstrates the guaranteed effacement of an entire female generation’s representation and predicts the implicit dangers for the new generations if communication between female generations is cut. In the remaining segments of La nouba du Mont Chenoua, Djebar works against these dangers by establishing positions of female spectatorship and authorship through Lila’s gaze and speech as well as through her own voiceovers that meld and collaborate with the gazes and voices of the countrywomen Lila interviews in various home settings. In Regard interdit, son coupé, the home shelters a paradox. On the one hand, the home houses the “mystère féminin.” It is a private and feminine world in which the women may whisper with one another and may carry out their domestic duties. They are physically present and active in this world. On the other hand, Djebar speaks of the home as a metaphor for a quasiprison. Djebar reads the women of Delacroix’s painting as symptomatic of the cultural double imprisonment of Algerian women in society. As captured in Delacroix’s painting, even within the closed “feminine” space of the home, the master makes his authority felt through his own gaze that annihilates all others (245). Thus, the unveiled women of the painting are imprisoned inside his gaze, as their gaze is ironically made absent in this “female” world. As such, the home in Djebar’s essay is unsettled, destabilized, and becomes a site for a repression of difference. Yet, as we saw above, the home also has the potential to become a ²⁄³ Space of contradiction, ambivalence, paradox, and resistance. It is a contact zone in which gazes, voices, speeches, and bodies may collaborate together to produce trans/national representations of Algerian women on the page and on the screen. A brief overview of Djebar’s utilization and theorization of the voice, the body, and speech in Regard interdit, son coupé and Ces voix qui m’assiègent will show us how.

The Voice, the Body, and Speech In some ways, since the cultural silencing of Algerian women is imposed by the patriarchs of Algerian society, which is how Djebar presents the situation in Regard interdit, son coupé, her literary strategy to veil her voice with her

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fellow countrywomen in her writing reifies this silencing since she claims to deny her individual voice in her work. Yet in more ways, Djebar’s literary strategy in Regard interdit, son coupé, and by extension in all her work, revises this cultural silencing insofar as she is consciously “writing in order to affront and struggle against a double silence” (1979: 27). In Être une voix francophone from Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Djebar identifies this double silence firstly as a struggle against her own literary silence (“autisme”) when faced with the unnamable violence in Algeria (1999: 27) and secondly as a struggle against her maternal genealogy (1999: 27). As she demonstrates in La nouba du Mont Chenoua, by veiling her individual voice in the shadows (or “timeless chorus”) of her female family members’ voices, she effectively revises this double silence in creating a polyphonic palimpsest upon which she superimposes (some of the following being earlier identified by Donadey in this chapter): encounters and spoken exchanges between women, the oral transmission of history by women, a multiplication of female voices, and parallels between women’s existence. Djebar’s struggle against a female autism—the first of the threatening silences against which she writes—returns us to Regard interdit, son coupé, specifically when Djebar explains that the silencing of female voices in their oral transmission of history leads to their autism. Djebar writes: “Ainsi, ce monde de femmes, quand il ne bruit plus de chuchotements de tendresse complice, de complaints perdues, bref d’un romantisme d’enchantement évanoui, ce monde-là devient brusquement, aridement, celui de l’autisme” (1979: 259). Thus, Djebar suppresses her individual voice so that she may successfully muffle it and blend it with the whispers of her fellow countrywomen recounting the songs, legends, and stories testifying to Algerian women’s role in history so as to avoid her personal and her female community’s collective autism. The suppression of her individual voice does not suggest complete anonymity, however. Djebar’s voice speaking alongside her fellow countrywomen in her writing is still personalized and collaboratively recounts a personal history or histories; in other words, her perspective and personal take on the story in which she seeks to (re)claim a multiplicity of female identities. In this superimposition of female voices reclaiming their oral tradition, Djebar effectively overcomes the double silence. She additionally suggests that the female body, through its textual representation in print and in film, may also overcome the double silence. Djebar ushers in this assertion in Regard interdit, son coupé through her analysis of the Algerian oral narrative (or song) of Messaouda—the young Harazélias girl who spurs the retreating men of her village to turn around and fight the invading Tedjini warriors by voluntarily revealing herself as she climbs over the village wall to face the would-

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be conquerors. In this legend that Djebar recounts in her essay, while facing the advancing Tedjini enemies, Messaouda cries out: “Où sont les homes de ma tribu? / Où sont mes frères? / Où sont ceux qui chantaient pour moi des chants d’amour?” (1979: 251). [“Where are the men of my tribe? / Where are my brothers? / Where are those who used to sing songs of love to me?” (1992: 143).] Upon hearing her cries, as legend has it, the men rushed to her aid crying out: “Sois heureuse, voici tes frères, voici tes amants!” (1979: 250). [“Be happy, here are your brothers, here are your lovers!” (1992: 143).] As a result, the men, “électrisés par l’appel de la jeune fille” (1979: 250) [“electrified by the young girl’s call” (1992: 143)], successfully pushed back the enemy. On a pragmatic level, Djebar uses the song of Messaouda as evidence of women’s involvement in many nineteenth-century resistant movements as “women warriors” who successfully stepped out of their traditional bystander or supporting role. However, on a theoretical level and as she also shows via her analyses of Delacroix’s and Picasso’s paintings, Djebar successfully uses the song of Messaouda to interrogate the cultural representation of the female body and voice in Algerian society. In addition to her body and voice representing—as illustrated in the aforementioned song of Messaouda—a local heroism, tribal solidarity, and the impetus to a victorious ending for the community, they also represent a mobilizing force for Djebar. She questions whether the fleeing men of Messaouda’s village are more afraid of seeing Messaouda’s body totally revealed or if they are more “éléctrisés” by hearing her voice. The recognition of the female body and voice as a mobilizing (especially creative) force has prolifically proven central to many feminist approaches and readings of literature and film. Historically speaking, women and their socio-political-economic position and status have typically been determined by their bodies—their individual awakenings and action, their pleasures and their pain all competing against representations of the female body in larger social frameworks.9 The body and its organs, functions, fluids, and secretions have all been a source of biological (“natural”) and ideological (“cultural”) (mis)representation as well as constituted a site for gender (mis)construction. This is one reason why the female body remains the cornerstone to the field of feminist theory, for it offers no such “natural” foundation for the pervasive cultural assumptions constructed about femininity.10 This appears especially true with regard to the representations of femininity as presented in dominant, patriarchal, middle-class literature and film as complaisant, subservient, self-sacrificing to the needs or bettering of the family, passive, secondary, attractive, and in danger of violation. In questioning women’s sociopolitical-economic status, feminists throughout the ages have examined

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in various ways and from various perspectives the tension that has always existed between women’s lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body that always mediate those experiences.11 This tension has often been framed within the binary opposition of male as Self/ Subject and woman as Other/Object.12 Scholars understood the Self as transcendent and superior to bodily representation and bodily functions, while the Other was trapped in immanence and defined by bodily shape, size, and functions. Feminist scholars noted how the female was constructed in and by the cultural assumptions of femininity and how the male reaped the benefits of that arrangement.13 The Other was seen as inferior and “defined by a ‘lack’ of masculine qualities that men assumed resulted from natural defectiveness” (Conboy et al, 1997: 7). Djebar picks up on these readings of the female body to some extent in her work, but she revises them. Djebar underlines the female body in Regard interdit, son coupé through her reading of Messaouda’s body (and voice) in the song of Messaouda as a body and voice in danger. Interestingly, Djebar reads them in this way not because Messaouda has put herself in harm’s way by climbing over the wall and calling out to the men of her village, but rather because she has done so in a totally spontaneous movement. In Regard interdit, son coupé, the female body and voice manifest a mobilizing creative force borne in the improvised and dangerous action of a young girl who voluntarily shows her body and calls out—two transgressive acts in Algerian society. This representation of a female body and voice in creative spontaneity instantly brings to mind Hélène Cixous’ theorizations of the female body and voice and their connection to writing that she asserted in her groundbreaking essay Le rire de la Méduse (1975). In this essay, Cixous outlines a feminine writing practice or mode—une écriture féminine [“a feminine writing”]—that recuperates the lost voice of the archaic mother and creates a space or position from which the body speaks. Critics of this writing genre find the practice essentialist since Cixous relies on a certain biologism that privileges biology (“nature”) over ideology (“culture”) in arguing that one is born and not made a woman. Scholars seeing Cixous as an essentialist see the issue of sexual difference and gender construction in her work as a “glamorous form of biologism” (Bray, 2004: 29). In Le rire de la Méduse, Cixous calls for a specifically feminine textuality which directly expresses a subversive feminine sexuality—not advocating a language of the body which is composed of grunts, wails, screams, or nonsense—but a spontaneous language which is capable of translating those moments when language fails us and the body attempts to speak.14 Cixous desires to forge a new language which “communicates the space between language and the body, a

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space of the (m)other” (Bray, 2004: 37) and which is inherently subversive to dominant, phallocentric, or patriarchal language. In some ways, as seen in Djebar’s discussion of Messaouda’s body and voice, Djebar is also advocating a “mythical” or “legendary” language of the (m)other that draws on the female body and voice. In Regard interdit, son coupé, Djebar explains that the mother, as well as the daughter, are shut-up inside the family—ce resserrement à l’intérieur des familles (1979: 256) [“this tightening within the families” (1992: 146)]—which she finds leads to a reattachment to the oral roots of Algerian history, as mothers and grandmothers often recount oral histories (including Messaouda’s song) to their children. In this context, Djebar reads the (m)other’s representation as a woman without body and individual voice whose sound recovers the timbre of a collective and obscure voice, necessarily sexless (1979: 256–257). In effect, Djebar positions the maternal as a link to history—but a history only realized through the aid of the sororal as represented in the figure of Messaouda (she cries, “Where are my brothers?”). In brief, the maternal in Regard interdit, son coupé delineates a group of mothers and grandmothers who maintain affective memory in the shadows of the patios and huts (1979: 257). In Regard interdit, son coupé, the maternal also “engenders” the only official female cultural identity constructed, which is limited to the land, the village, the popular local saint, sometimes to the “clan,” but in any case is concrete and passionate with affection (1979: 257). For Djebar the (m)other bears no individual identity, either in body or voice, and exists only as a figureless and collective voice. But the sister (Messaouda), for Djebar, bears her own unique identity and exists as an individual body and voice in fusion. Yet, the (m)other and sister are co-dependent and both exist as speaking subjects that either create histories (Messaouda) or narrate histories (the mother). However, in Regard interdit, son coupé, Djebar uses the figureless representation of the (m)other or the maternal to speak to a larger cultural project that she has in mind. For Djebar, the maternal provides not just a procreative link between the generations but also an affective link to H/history through her oral tradition. And in order for her voice to effect the oral tradition story/history—l’histoire (1979: 257) in Djebar’s view—she hides her body from us so as to return as the voice of an indefinite grandmother or timeless chorus in which the story/history is told (1979: 257). Through the figure of the (m)other in this essay, Djebar reifies Algerian women’s duality—their division into body and voice—and privileges the (m)other’s voice, particularly in chorus, which in turn reaffirms the importance and weight of the Algerian women’s community in Algerian society and history.

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However, through the figure of the sororal in her essay, Djebar challenges the division of female body and voice by fusing the two. This fusion begins to echo Cixous’ understanding of the body as morphology—“the interpretation of the way in which the shape or form of the female body is represented in culture” (Bray, 2004: 35). In looking at Djebar’s study of the relationships between female body and voice through a lens of morphology, one may conclude that the female body may not be reduced to either nature or culture but becomes, rather, the scene of a dynamic discourse which exceeds the limits of either category and thus opens up the possibility of a radical rewriting of the place and function of the body within the nature/culture divide or larger framework of society (and representation) in general.15 In this regard for Cixous and to a lesser extent for Djebar, écriture féminine provides a “space in which women can begin the process of creating an ontological autonomy and begin to write a subjectivity which exceeds the phallocentric limits imposed on women” (Bray, 2004: 73). Whereas Cixous sees writing in the feminine as a deconstructive avant-garde textual practice challenging and moving beyond the constraints of phallocentric thought, we can read Djebar’s writing in the feminine as a space in which women can begin the process of creating a “veiled” textual hybrid subjectivity that challenges nationalistic discourses by bringing the female body and voice in fusion to the task of discourse.16 This process is perhaps best illustrated in Djebar’s collection of essays, Ces voix qui m’assiègent.

CES VOIX QUI M’ASSIÈGENT As is commonly known, Fatima-Zahra Imalayen adopted the pseudonym of Assia Djebar out of fear of angering her father through her publication of traces of family stories and secrets in her many works. In many Arab cultures, writing one’s life is considered a transgressive act, regardless of the writer’s sex. According to Jean Déjeux, the reticent attitude toward the use of the first-person-singular pronoun “I” is characteristic of Maghrebian society in general, among both men and women (1973: 66).17 Déjeux further suggests that despite the reticence of both men and women in the Maghreb, the stakes are higher for a woman who “unveils” intimate details about herself. Katherine Gracki articulates more specifically the stakes for women writers of first-person narratives of the Maghreb. According to Gracki, these writers face consequences of a symbolic nudist exposure.18 She explains:

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[Djebar’s] upbringing taught her never to talk about herself, since the singularity represented by the “I” transgressed the traditional anonymity surrounding any confessional discourse. Transgression of this taboo has far-reaching symbolic consequences particularly for women, since revealing intimate details about oneself with the first-person pronoun “I” without adopting traditional circumlocutions is akin to unveiling or denuding oneself. (1996: 835)19

Djebar echos Gracki’s assertions in her own words in her Du français comme butin from Ces voix qui m’assiègent. Du français comme butin originally appeared as an article in La Quinzaine littéraires’s December 1989 edition. In this brief excerpt reprinted in Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Djebar succinctly debates several keystone issues in her writing. She contemplates la sotto voce (or the low, soft voice, so as not to be overhead) of women’s speech. She theorizes that speech is anchored in the memory of the shadow of the people. And she discusses writing in the first-person-singular pronoun in the Maghreb. In her essay, Djebar supports the metaphoric reading of the use of the “je” in literary writing as akin to appearing naked in public. She explains that to speak outside the matriarchal warmth, outside the antiphon of Tradition, outside the “fidelity”—this term taken in a religious sense—to write in the first-person singular and from a singularity (or individuality), body naked and voice hardly deviating by the foreign timbre, incites again in front of us all the symbolic dangers (1999: 70). She asserts in her essay that censorship and curses sometimes result, accompanied by a premature prolixness and more new, freshly “modernized” orators than female elders of the suspicious tribe (1999: 70). In other words, Djebar agrees that an ontological use of the “je” in Maghrebian writing constitutes a transgressive act in a religious sense; but she also recognizes additional symbolic dangers in such an act, largely in the creation of a new, modernized “nationalistic” discourse that denies women’s oral histories. Djebar envisions no possible avenue to Algerian women’s subjectivity through the “national” (hierarchical and patriarchal) discourses that refuse their voices. Djebar, like many feminist theorists, wishes for the free pursuit of fe/male subjectivity insubordinate to a hierarchical patriarchal economy. But Djebar slightly qualifies this pursuit by seeking to set free a collection of subjectivities in the plural that are located within the oral histories of Algerian women by recounting these personal histories in her work. Djebar interrogates the nationalist discourses of Algeria as solely privileging and elaborating masculine subjects and their contributions to Algerian history, effectively ignoring Algerian women and their contributions. Djebar will directly affront the

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symbolic consequences of this privileging of masculine subjects in her analysis of Picasso’s painting in Regard interdit, son coupé. But it is important to underline in this chapter that for Maghrebi writers, the decision to divulge one’s own or a community story is a deliberate and decisive action that can have religious, social, and political ramifications. North African women who write autobiographical discourses, in essence, commit a double transgression. They, like Djebar, write about the private and speak to a public (assumed male) audience through their work. This is why the physical or metaphorical veil, as she re-explains in De l’écriture comme voile from Ces voix qui m’assiègent, remains a cornerstone for Djebar in all of her work. Djebar first presented De l’écriture comme voile at a literary conference at the University of Ottawa in May 1982. In this text, she re-debates the function and symbolism of the veil in her writing and filmmaking. Djebar has admitted in various texts that writing in her culture is or rather can be a form of dévoilement [“unveiling”]. However, we have come in this chapter to discover Djebar to be a theorist who incessantly avoids binary positions and who interminably relishes in presenting the contradictory figure of the veiled woman whose signifier-signified relationship Djebar manipulates in order to reflect the complexity, ambivalence, and contradictions inherent in Algerian women’s social constructions and their personal situations. On one hand, Djebar situates the act of writing as the equivalent to unveiling herself in a public space and thus renders herself the object of a panoptic gaze. Huughe summarizes this point: Thus, by dint of writing and of its social impact when published, the woman penetrates not only the public space, the outdoors—masculine space—but also and especially the heart of the panoptical center, where she becomes the object of all gazes and transgresses the prohibition on visibility. In other words, she agrees to become the target of voyeurs. (1996: 867)

On other hand, however, Djebar contradictorily situates her writing as the metonym for a veil. Djebar concludes the introductory paragraph of De l’écriture comme voile with, “Je me dis à présent que j’écrivais tout en restant voilée. Je dirais même que j’y tenais : de l’écriture comme voile !” (1999: 97). [I tell myself right now that I wrote while remaining veiled. I would even say that I clung to it: writing as a veil!] Djebar elucidates in De l’écriture comme voile that at the beginning of her literary writing practice, her relationship to the French language in her novels came rather close to this image of the veiled woman circulating openly in the street (1999: 98). She justifies this comparison by explaining that to write is to expose oneself, to parade oneself

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in others’ views, and that to veil herself in her writing was a natural mode (1999: 98). As Huughe proposes, the first veil Djebar donned was her pseudonym. Huughe writes: It is thus understandable that Djebar has chosen to veil herself in order to venture into the public space of writing. Indeed the first assumes the pseudonym Assia Djebar, a choice which, as for many of her female compatriots who write, enables her to evolve under cover of anonymity. (1996: 867)

The second way in which Djebar veiled herself (or the second veil she donned) is her relationship to the French language. In Écrire dans la langue de l’autre—an essay from Ces voix qui m’assiègent that first appeared in a speech she delivered at the “Troisième Congrès international de l’ARIC” on “Identité, culture, et changement social” at the Unviersity of Sherbroke (Canada-Québec) in August of 1989—Djebar writes, “J’ai utilisé jusque-là la langue française comme voile. Voile sur ma personne individuelle, voile sur mon corps de femme; je pourrais presque dire voile sur ma propre voix” (1999: 43). [“I have used the French language until now as a veil. Veil covering my individual person, veil covering my woman’s body, I could almost say veil coving my own voice” (my translation).] Djebar reasons that since the French language represented the outside world of men while the Arabic language represented the inside world of women, her use of the French language in writing allowed “her stealthily to break into the world of the ‘outside’ while preserving herself” (Huughe, 1996: 867). Thus, the French language became her second veil. For Djebar, to veil oneself does not signify dressing up or disguising oneself in order to hide oneself (1999: 98), but rather to venture outside while at the same time preserving oneself (1999: 99). Although some have argued that Djebar’s use of the French language as a veil in her writing has alienated her from her Arabic-speaking female community, Djebar strives to overturn this claim by denying any ontological authorial voice in her writing. Thus, she permits herself to adopt in her work a collective (and thus veiled) voice resonating in the conversations between Algerian women and in their oral tradition. (Consequently, this collective voice constitutes Djebar’s third veil.) In essence, the veil permits and presents Djebar, and by extension all of the other Algerian women to whom she is speaking nearby in her work, as a re-hybridized speaking subject. By denying her individual subjectivity in her writing and by adopting a collective yet still personal female voice, Djebar rehabilitates a ²⁄³ female space or position of spectatorship and authorship

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from which she may begin to (re)appropriate Historical Algerian discourses and circumvent Nationalist Algerian ideologies. Starting with Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, Djebar systematically speaks in her writing through a collective female voice that recounts the “real” historical accounts of a community of Algerian women from a personalized female point of view in sometimes fictional and sometimes non-fictional modes of expression. For Gafaiti, Djebar’s literary writing in connection to her country’s history manifests: a junction between the individual and the community . . . she feels committed as an Algerian to revisit the history of her country and as a woman to rewrite it from a feminine point of view, with and for all other women. As a consequence, in her work the process of writing, reading, and rewriting becomes the very motor of the text. (1996: 813)

This collective female voice in oral tradition and in personal history in Djebar’s work echoes an important revision in feminist theoretical discussions of the corporeal body in literature; that is, the notion that the body is a site for play with categories and labels and that gender is not passively scripted on the body but rather performed on and through the body.20 In revising earlier theorizations of gender formation, feminist scholars began seeing representations and standards of conventional or normative femininity as performative acts. Scholars began turning their attention to the examination of “feminine” behaviors, in which women may burden themselves with cosmetics and cosmetic procedures in an attempt to embody eternal youth or may gravely jeopardize their health or undergo expensive cosmetic procedures in pursuit of an idealized female form, may repress sexual desire and freedom for the preservation of Victorian middle-class or religious ideals, may resign to social or familial pressure to abandon career for the bearing and raising of children, or may carry the burden of maintaining domestic order at home. Contemporary debates concerning the female body have focused on the existing tension between defining and challenging the category and activities of women, or more specifically, contemplating the physical features that mark a body as female and the attributes and practices that render a body “feminine.”21 Scholars commonly concur that gender, itself, is a performative act and that the female body—constructed through ideologies, discourses, and practices—manifests a contested site or battleground for competing ideologies (Conboy et al., 1997: 8). Djebar takes up this “battleground” notion in a most direct, literal, and head-on fashion throughout all of her work by examining the image, representation, symbolism, and function of many bod-

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ies of Algerian women throughout history during times of war, but especially during the war for independence from France. In Regard interdit, son coupé and Ces voix qui m’assiègent, often times Djebar writes of the porteuses de bombes [“women bomb carriers”], the Algerian female F.L.N. members who took part in attacks against French colonialists during the Algerian war for independence. As Djebar views it, the sexual violation and torture of these Algerian women in French custody affronts masculine codes of honor and were largely missing from French accounts of the war.22 In Algeria during the years following the war, when the newly (re)independent country was searching for a revised national identity, the subjects of rape and female torture during the war became taboo. As Djebar argues, Algeria’s revised national identity effaced these women’s bodies that bore physical evidence of their sacrifices and silenced their troubling testimonies. On this point, Madeleine Dobie argues that: In the “Postface” to the Femmes d’Alger, [Djebar] writes that although many women suffered torture and even rape in prison, these painful subjects remain taboo, unspeakable. As an exposure or invasion of the propriety or property of the female body, this history of rape and torture itself constitutes an ‘affront to masculine codes of honor.’ The violated bodies must therefore be covered up and the memory of their exposure erased. And because women bore witness to successive military defeats, their potentially humiliating testimony—which incidentally, would also demand their recognition as the speaking subjects of perception—had to be silenced and disavowed. (1994: 91)

The inscription of women into the “official” History of Algeria whether on the side of the colonial French or postcolonial Algerians—as Dobie’s preceding citation evidences—excluded Algerian women, both in body and voice. Djebar points out in Regard interdit, son coupé that Algerian women in their maternal, oral traditional role essentially function as agents responsible for the transmission of Algeria’s past. Thus, she encourages Algerian women to continue their “murmurings” and “whisperings” that recount this past. She textualizes Algerian women’s voice and incites them to bring their bodies into the light. In other words, Djebar calls to the Algerian women and instructs them—as well as provides a model for them through her short stories in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement—to inscribe their voices as well as their bodies into History. In so doing, Djebar believes they will present what we recognize today as a transnational view of Algerian women both within and

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beyond the borders of the nation-state. She drives this argument home particularly in the Postface of Femmes d’Alger dans leurs appartement.

REGARD INTERDIT, SON COUPÉ Djebar’s emphasis on female bodies and voices in written texts once again cannot fail to bring to mind Cixous’ work on écriture feminine in quite a literal way. Again, Djebar appears to answer Cixous’ call for women to return to their bodies in writing the feminine, which as Cixous argues cannot fail to subvert traditional phallocentric reasoning. By using Algerian women’s bodies as a point of departure in her writing, Djebar envisions an avenue to a revised (transnational) set of Algerian H/historical discourses that would take into account Algerian women’s existence and contributions. This revision would bestow upon individuals, most notably the spectator or reader, a liberty to move between masculine and feminine subjectivities and would provide what Cixous would recognize as an emergence of relational identity, certainly between the sexes. Djebar calls to Algerian women to bring their bodies into the light, thereby “challeng[ing] the dominant discourse of nationalism” (Gafaiti, 1996: 814), which was set forth in 1980 when the Algerian government launched a campaign to write (falsify) the modern history of Algeria. The writers and intellectuals who answered this campaign produced texts that became easily distinguishable by their self-celebratory tone, their mechanical nationalism, and incomparable mediocrity from an esthetic point of view (Gafaiti, 1996: 814). What proves interesting in Djebar’s theorizing of Algerian women’s maternal duality—her absent body but present voice—lies in the fact that this theorization reads “against the grain” of much early “nationalist” postcolonial theory. Much first-generation postcolonial theory reads the Mother’s body—very much present as illustrated by the appearance of her breasts, stomach, thighs, etc. in many postcolonial primary works—as a metaphor for the African continent, a pre-colonial past or a traditional or indigenous society, the nation, the community, or the family. Although Djebar’s mother represents many of these same locations, ideologies, or social institutions, it remains ultimately the mother’s voice and not her body in Djebar’s work that presides and leads us to the past and/or situates us home. Yet the female body—since it also bears physical evidence of the past— remains important as a corporeal palimpsest of Algerian H/history and women’s roles played throughout. Therefore, not wanting to reinstate binary practices of situating Algerian women in either body or voice, Djebar often engages in

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her work in the corporeal representation of Algerian women—particularly as evidenced in the disfigured bodies of the former porteuses de bombes characters. To this end, Djebar envisions the future of Algerian women’s writing, as she has demonstrated in her own work, to engender a new way of speaking and seeing in which Algerian women’s voices and bodies fuse together to (re)claim Nationalist and Historical Algerian discourses. As Donadey asserts, “Contemporary Algerian women’s struggle for the liberation of their gaze and voice is no longer marginal to the project of nation-building. Instead, their struggle inscribes itself fully within a national history of resistance and is thus legitimated” (1996: 892). Thus, not wanting to lose sight of the female body while at the same time paradoxically effacing it in her representation of the maternal in Regard interdit, son coupé and Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Djebar suggests that the mother’s voice narrating the histories borne on women’s bodies constitutes the key to unlocking the door to Algerian H/history and the notion of “home.” It seems as if for Djebar, the female body may effectively provide a potential catalyst for her narration of her personal history, as she individually experienced it and of which portions also resonate collectively in many other women’s narrations. Thus, the future representation of Algerian women depends on the shedding of light on her body that leads to frank oral discussion and official inscription in historical discourses. In Regard interdit, son coupé, Djebar finds this “shedding of light on female bodies” in her reading of Picasso’s series of paintings addressing the women of Algiers.

Djebar’s Reading of Picasso’s Women of Algiers In response to this “shedding of light on female bodies,” Djebar responds again with a “double transgression.” Gafaiti outlines the situation by asserting that [Djebar] challenges the dominant discourse of nationalism by presenting a more subtle and complex analysis of the relationship between Algeria and France. At the same time, she constructs the modern history of Algeria from the perspective of those whom the official ideology excluded by reducing them, against all evidence, to a secondary role: women. (2001: 814)

Again, Djebar principally challenges the dominant discourse of nationalism through the textualization in her work of (re)appropriated female bodies and

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voices in literary, social, cultural, and historical discourses. This is not to say that prior to Djebar’s figures of Algerian women as mothers and sisters that Algerian women were not represented in postcolonial literary, social, cultural, and historical texts. Gafaiti’s assertion simply evidences the truism that the involvement of those Algerian women as active agents in the anti-French demonstrations and attacks was fully ignored. Yet, Djebar’s duality of female body and voice proves interesting in another way with regard to the challenges she levels at the dominant discourses of nationalism. Djebar reveals this additional challenge in her analysis of Picasso’s Women of Algiers at the end of her essay. As Djebar presents in Regard interdit, son coupé, Picasso came to live in Algeria from December 1954 to February 1955, when the Algerian war for independence was just beginning. During this time, he created fifteen paintings and two lithographs on the subject of three Algerian women. When comparing Picasso’s work to that of Delacroix a century earlier, Djebar writes that Picasso reverses Delacroix’s curse, shatters the unhappiness, inscribes in bold or daring lines a totally new happiness, a prescience that should guide us in our daily lives (1979: 259–260). Picasso’s work manifests a glorious liberation from confinement and awakens the bodies in dance, in expenditure, and in free movement (1979: 260). According to Djebar, the juxtaposition of the “impenetrable” figure of one Algerian woman in Picasso’s painting to the figures of the other Algerian women in motion represent a proposed moral of a connection to be recovered between the former and parried calmness—the lady, frozen as before in her sullen sadness, is henceforth immobile, but like a rock of interior strength—and the improvised bursting out in an open space (1979: 260). In other words, one must find an “in-betweeness” between this particular representation of a frozen Algerian—reminiscent of Delacroix’s representation—and the representation of Algerian women bursting out in improvised movement—reminiscent of the representation of Messaouda. Djebar desires to create a literary and historical in-betweeness or re-hybridization for Algerian women writers, storytellers, mothers, sisters, and daughters in which they may socially exist congruently in body and voice. Djebar specifically finds the makings of this corporeal and audio congruence in the figure of the woman warrior. In Regard interdit, son coupé, Djebar utilizes the image of the woman warrior (Messaouda) and by extension the bomb carriers who were also women warriors, and the recounting of their heroic actions and liberating (for Messaouda) / punitive (for the bomb carriers) consequences as a textual representation of fusion between Algerian women’s bodies and voices.

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Djebar elucidates that two years following Picasso’s sojourn in Algiers, a line of women bomb carriers, “à la bataille d’Alger” appeared (1979: 261). In this essay, she asks if these women are only the sister companions of the (male) nationalist heroes and replies that they are certainly not (1979: 261). She wonders if the bomb carriers, leaving the harem, chose by pure chance their most direct mode of expression—their bodies exposed outside attacking other bodies (1979: 261). Djebar parallels the taking out of these bombs to the taking out of their breasts and finds that the grenades exploded against them and against all (1979: 261). She explains that some of these women warriors, once captured and imprisoned, found themselves “sexes electrocutes, écorchés par la torture” (1979: 261) [“sex electrocuted, flayed through torture” (1992: 150)]. In effect, Djebar uses this image in the woman warriorlike tradition created by Messaouda to bespeak her literary-cultural-historical project to fuse women’s body and voice in Algerian literary and historical writing. Algerian “nationalists” seeking to create a new Algerian identity following the war ignored this very image. However, through this image of the Algerian female warrior’s body—upon which is physically written the histoire of her experience and existence—Djebar finds a voice. Thus, in quite a literal way, the comparison between the women’s breasts and the deadly grenades the women carried revisits this chapter’s earlier discussion of the threats imposed upon Algerian patriarchal society by the female eye that gazes in public. Djebar draws a correlation between the female “eye” and the other “eyes” of her body—including the nipples of breasts. Thus by paralleling the grenades to the female breasts and then by extension to the female eye, one may understand why Algeria’s newly (re)created independent identity “overlooked” the bomb carriers’ involvement in its war of liberation. In the same way in which the female gaze threatens Algerian patriarchal society by challenging the dominator/dominated paradigm, the image of the bomb carriers equally challenges and disrupts this very paradigm. This is to say that, if in order to maintain traditional North African social practices Algerian women’s bodies were to remain covered, it stands to reason that the postcolonial elites in charge of this “new” nation could not bear (or bare) the image of the bomb carriers’ exposed and violated bodies, and by extension their actions. These bodies and their voices in testimony were covered up. Thus, the subjects of their testimonies—namely the accounts of rape endured by Algerian women at the hands of French soldiers—became taboo. For Djebar, sound becomes cut: The subject becomes taboo and is no longer discussed following the liberation, which ultimately leads to the (re)imposition of the “structure du sérail” [“structure of the seraglio”] with its laws of invisibility and silence (1979: 262).

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In essence, barring the years during the Algerian war of independence and its moments of spontaneous heroic acts of women warriors as represented in the Song of Messaouda, Algerian women’s situation has not changed, Djebar reckons. She expresses in Regard interdit, son coupé that Je ne vois que dans les bribes de murmures anciens comment chercher à restituer la conversation entre femmes, celle-là même que Delacroix gelait sur le tableau. Je n’espère que dans la porte ouverte en plein soleil, celle que Picasso ensuite a imposée, une libération concrète et quotidienne des femmes. (1979: 263) [Only in the fragments of ancient murmuring do I see how we must look for a restoration of the conversation between women, the very one that Delacroix froze in his painting. Only in the door open to the full sun, the one Picasso later imposed, do I hope for a concrete and daily liberation of women. (1992: 151)]

Djebar makes possible in all of her work self-referential modes of storytelling through re-hybridized speaking positions in which protagonists speak, gaze, and act from a ²⁄³ Space of expression. For Djebar, this space is characterized by oral tradition, shifting gender perspectives, multivalent positions of spectatorship and authorship, an illumination of tabooed subjects, changing constructions of power and power relations, and the recounting of multiple personal histories as they are all effected by and through the home.

Conclusion For Djebar, the image of the home Delacroix represented in his painting—a space of imprisonment—still represents the contemporary Algerian cultural norm. But the home as a space of improvised movement and (un)veiled collective subjectivity, which Djebar wishes to read in Picasso’s painting, bespeaks a possible revised image of the home for Djebar. It still remains, however, that both of these representations materialized from the problematic Western (orientalist or cubist), male gaze. As Djebar has shown in La nouba du Mont Chenoua, in order for the image of the home as a space of improvised movement and (un)veiled collective subjectivity to come to fruition through female spectatorship and authorship, Algerian women must subvert the masculine double gaze and voice and continue their feminine oral tradition. As shown in Regard interdit, son coupé, the means to effect Algerian women’s concrete and daily liberation rests in the in-between space of official and

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unofficial discourses in which Algerian women must fuse their “illuminated” bodies and “murmuring” voices. Thus, we have come to see in this chapter how Djebar’s theorizations of the gaze and voice contribute to debates argued in feminist and postcolonial film and literary theories. Djebar’s postcolonial women’s cinema and literature work to subvert the double gaze and “master’s” voice by outlawing male gazing through gender reversal and by (re)claiming multiplicitous representations of Algerian women from feminine perspectives. As a film and literary theorist, Djebar asserts that women’s cinema and literature privilege female voices that in turn forge spaces or positions of cinematic and literary authorship, but she shows how these voices rely on the female gaze that first must appropriate cinematic and literary spaces of spectatorship. Through these modes, Djebar shows in the primary texts discussed in this chapter how the home shifts in representation from a site of Algerian women’s audiovisual occultation and imprisonment to a liberating site of female political action and appropriated location of female spectatorship and authorship. As such, the home shelters a ²⁄³ Space of expression in which a re-hybridized gazing and speaking subject may create new, public spaces in which the next generation of even further re-hybridized gazing and speaking subjects may continue their oral tradition and collaborate on new discourses that combine their mothers’, grandmothers’, sisters’, and their own histories. As we shall see in Chapter Two’s examination of Annie Ernaux’s La Femme gelée (1981) and Simone de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue (1967), although normative discourses of femininity and female representation may be grounded in the institutions of the ruling-class hegemony of any given society, Djebar’s motif and mode of inter-female-generational histories resurface in Ernaux’s and de Beauvoir’s first-person narratives and successfully permeate, in varying degrees, time and class as well as ethnic and geographical boundaries.

Notes 1. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975), 6–18. 2. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun,” Framework 6 (1981), 15–17. 3. Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984). 4. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), 9.

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5. Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy Chen, “Speaking Nearby,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 317–335. 6. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Third World Women’s Cinema,” in Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, eds. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose (New York, NY: Garland, 1997), 220–221. 7. Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), 212–216. 8. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 1–12. 9. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 1–12. 10. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 1. 11. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 1. 12. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 2. 13. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 2. 14. Abigail Bray, Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 37. 15. Bray, Hélène Cixous, 37. 16. Bray, Hélène Cixous, 71. 17. Jean Déjeux, Littérature maghrébine de langue française (Ottowa, CA: Naeman, 1973). 18. Katherine Gracki, “Writing Violence and the Violence of Writing in Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet,” World Literature Today 70.4 (1996), 835–843. 19. Laurence Huughe, “ ‘Écrire comme une voile’: The Problematics of the Gaze in the Work of Assia Djebar,” World Literature Today 70.4 (1996), 867–876. 20. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Writing on the Body, eds. Conboy et al. (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 401–418. 21. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 7. 22. Madeleine Dobie, “The Woman as Look and the Woman as Voice: Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar,” Constructions 9 (1994), 89–105.

CHAPTER 2

(Re)Displaying Femininity and Home with Annie Ernaux and Simone de Beauvoir

Neither Annie Ernaux nor Simone de Beauvoir in the field of French literary studies is a modern or contemporary women writer that one immediately or even generally associates with Diaspora or diasporic spaces. To my knowledge, there are no “official” postcolonial approaches to or postcolonial readings of their work and ideas, per se. Although both Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre championed Francophone African literatures in the mid-twentieth century and were fervent supporters of the independence movements in Southeast Asia and North and West Africa, they were not socalled “postcolonial” writers. With regard to Annie Ernaux, the prototypical postcolonial questions concerning nationality, citizenship, nation-states, borders, and political engagement never surface. She is categorically considered a French writer of the auto/biographical tradition in both theory and practice. However, if we recall the trope I elaborated in the Introduction, all of the artists in this study address a state of “homelessness at home” in their narratives. This notion speaks to the feelings of unease, nervousness, dissatisfaction, restlessness, shame, frustration, and resignation experienced by the protagonists in their daily existence inside the home and their dis/location lived within. In other words, this dis/location captures a kind of diasporic space in which the protagonists are both “here and there,” caught in an inauthentic self-identity normatively conceived, understood, imposed upon, accepted, and performed at home. It is this diasporic-like experience of an unsettled home and its in-authenticity that becomes a catalyst for the female protagonists (re)awakening to the hegemonic and personal discourses giving shape and form to their multiplicitous identities, thereby creating their sense of existing both “here and there” or neither “here nor there.” Calling to mind 41

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Strehle’s theorization of the home as I laid out in the Introduction, the home reflects and resembles “nation” by expressing the same ideological pressures that contend within the nation and does not serve as a retreat from the public and political spheres. We recall that the home has permeable walls and is a receiver of public languages and values as well as a space in which national, global, and/or hegemonic discourses speak and reproduce themselves. It is through this lens that I include de Beauvoir and Ernaux in this study. Both women are keenly aware of the “imperial” ideology of home and its associated values, which is to say the “deeper affiliation[s] with the public realm as a patriarchal space where power relations vital to the nation and culture are negotiated” (Strehle, 2008: 1). In this case, “nation” is understood as hegemonic middle-class, mid-twentieth-century, metropolitan France. In this chapter, we will explore how the diasporic space of home—this “homelessness at home”—inflects transnational identity and transnational understanding of self and gender in contemporary women’s lifewriting from France. Transnational in Chapter Two does not suggest the international borders between two independent nation-states but rather the virtual intra-national borders between social class and sex within the homeland of France. In order to realize this transnational reading of femininity and home in this study, let us first begin with an overview of de Beauvoir’s and Ernaux’s literary corpuses. Annie Ernaux’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s objectives in their writing echo some of Assia Djebar’s primary artistic and theoretical agendas. On the surface, all three women are concerned with bringing to light numerous contradictions that engender the representations of Algerian or French women within various societies and circumstances. Whereas Djebar has represented these contradictions in a variety of artistic media and academic forms, Ernaux has principally remained within the realm of literature, and de Beauvoir worked within the realms of literature, philosophy, and drama. As Djebar has done in her revisions of conventional forms of cinematic spectatorship and literary authorship, Ernaux has likewise revised “high literature” through the blurring of the literary boundaries between conventional fiction, auto/ biography, and auto/ethnography. One may consider both women writers as quasi-sociologists or quasi-archaeologists whose texts disclose first-person female accounts of Algerian and French women’s existences in contemporary times. More of a “traditionalist,” de Beauvoir remained more faithful to conventional literary forms in her writing than the other two women. However, as this chapter will show, her work also manifests certain tropes that work together to subvert multiple aspects of conventional literary forms. Additionally, all three women’s texts tease out multiple theoretical interrogations of women’s contemporary representations, subjectivities, and identities in Alge-

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ria and/or France. Let us continue this overview with a more in-depth look at Annie Ernaux’s corpus and then explore in close detail her novel La Femme gelée with regard to the re-hybridized speaking and gazing subject position she creates and the ²⁄³ Space of expression she adopts in this text.

Annie Ernaux Since many of Ernaux’s texts include much of her personal life and personal history, it only seems fitting in this chapter’s discussion and analysis of her third novel, La Femme gelée (1981), to begin with her brief biography. ClaireLise Tondeur provides a very useful summary. She writes: Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux est née en 1940 à Lillebonne en Normandie. Ses parents Alphonse et Blanche Duchesne, d’origine très modeste, tenaient une épicerie-café dans un quartier populaire d’Yvetot. Annie est entrée à l’école libre, au Pensionnat Saint-Michel à Yvetot, puis au lycée Jeanne d’Arc à Rouan avant de poursuivre ses études à la Faculté des Lettres de Rouen et à celle de Bordeaux. Agrégée de lettres modernes, elle a été professeur de lycée à Bonneville, Annecy et Pontoise. Depuis 1977 elle est rattachée au Centre national d’enseignement par correspondance où elle rédige des corrigés pour préparer les étudiants au CAPES. (1996: 37) [Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux was born in 1940 in Lillebonne in Normandy. Her parents Alphonse and Blanche Duchesne, of very modest origin, owned and ran a grocery store-café in a working-class neighborhood of Yvetot. Annie attended an independent school, at the Saint Michael boarding school in Yvetot, then went to the Joan of Arc high school in Rouan before pursuing her studies at the universities of Rouen and Bordeaux. Agrégée in literature, she was a high school teacher in Bonneville, Annecy et Pontoise. Since 1977 she is linked to the National Center of Distance Teaching where she writes answer keys for students preparing to take the CAPES. (my translation)]

Ernaux’s early texts, Les Armoires vides (1974), Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (1977), La Femme gelée (1981), La Place (1983), and Une Femme (1987), primarily recount scenes from her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, which all testify to various forms of social class stereotyping, social contradictions, personal disillusionment, class mis/identifications, and gender mis/representations. In these texts, Ernaux introduces the reader to her struggles with

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social class and gender stereotypes brought about by her parents’ social ascension from the working class to the petite bourgeoisie. She also shares with the reader her personal pains and anxieties endured in her passage from the petite to intellectual middle-class bourgeoisie. In her work, Ernaux foregrounds social class and gender stereotypes in order to undermine them by writing against their misrepresentations. In other words, like Djebar, Ernaux also appropriates hegemonic ways of seeing, in this case contemporary French women of the lower and middle social classes in order to revise these mis/representations. She reveals in her writing how these representations have been unilaterally constructed by the dominant social class in the interest of self-gain and complicitly carried out by the dominated social classes. In doing so, Ernaux, like Djebar, succeeds in mediating a textual ²⁄³ Space or mode of articulation in which a re-hybridized subject, which is to say a protagonist caught in-between multiple social and gender discourses and personal histories, may gaze and speak. From a seemingly anthropological or sociological perspective, Ernaux thus underscores all of her texts with a rather post-modern examination of the contemporary contradictory and ambivalent French social politics and cultural discourses by questioning normative gender and social class roles and ideologies and their effects. On this point, Tondeur asserts that, “l’auteur rédige [des] textes pour chercher à mieux comprendre l’aliénation langagière et sociale que représente pour cette intellectuelle son appartenance originelle au prolétariat” (1996: 37). [“the author writes texts in order to better understand the linguistic and social alienation that represents for this intellectual her original belonging to the working classes” (my translation).] Concerning this assertion in relation to the corpus of Ernaux’s work, Michèle Bacholle finds that: Tous ces textes sont en fait des variations sur un même thème. Ils disent tous le déracinement socioculturel, la douleur de ce passage de la classe “dominée” à la classe “dominante”, la honte que l’auteur adolescente a ressentie vis-à-vis de ses parents, le sentiment de trahison et de culpabilité éprouvé plus tard envers eux et la nécessité de réhabiliter à travers eux un monde jugé inférieur par ceux qui tiennent le haut du pavé. (2000: 141) [All these texts are in fact variations on the same theme. They speak, all of them, about socio-cultural uprooting, the pain of this passage from the “dominated” class to the “dominating” class, the shame that the adolescent author feels in respect to her parents, the feeling of betrayal and of guilt later felt for them and the need

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to rehabilitate through them a world judged inferior by those who are in the majority. (my translation)]

Yet, Ernaux restricts these notions in an autobiographical personalization by localizing her analyses within the context of her immediate and extended families. Throughout her work, Ernaux presents a microcosm of an individual provincial family that reflects a macrocosm of contemporary French society at large. It is this auto/biographical personalization, this form of personal history, that enables Ernaux to re-hybridize the speaking and gazing subject in her work. Specifically speaking, it is the critical literary device of her je transpersonnel in her work that manifests the ²⁄³ Space from which both this re-hybridized subject and the author speak and gaze.

ERNAUX’S JE TRANSPERSONNEL Ernaux’s microcosm of an individual provincial family that reflects a macrocosm of contemporary French society at large reminds us somewhat of Djebar’s project to “speak nearby” in her work. Whereas Djebar collaboratively appears alongside her seeing/speaking female subjects and their personal histories, Ernaux authoritatively speaks through her seeing/speaking female subjects and their personal histories. Varyingly throughout her narratives, Ernaux fluctuates between the protagonist, the antagonist, a by-stander, or a seemingly omniscient narrator. Yet, her presence or authority—noted in the text through her incessant use of je or first person—is always felt nearby. I wish to pause for a moment to emphasize that by “speaking nearby” I am not talking about the use of the first person in character dialogue. I am referring to the self-referential uses of Ernaux’s first person that stem either from her direct involvement in the narrative as a character in the story or the parenthetical contributions she makes as she remembers and recounts the events of the story/memory in the narrative. I will return to this discussion of Ernaux’s presence in her texts in just a moment, but I would like to underline first that this framework of the personal “speaking nearby” the familial or the social convincingly blurs the conventional genre boundaries between fiction and autobiography in the field of literary studies. In addition to blurring the boundaries of literary categorization, this framework permits Ernaux to revise normalizing processes of patriarchal socialization through her personal narratives and creates a position for a rehybridized seeing and speaking subject. Furthermore, Ernaux benefits from this framework by successfully reworking canonical forms of literature and

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conventional ways of writing via the critical device that scholars have named the “transpersonal I” or her je transpersonnel. Ernaux defines this device in her own words as: Le je que j’utilise . . . ne constitue pas un moyen de me construire une identité à travers un texte, de m’autofictionner, mais de saisir, dans mon expérience, les signes d’une réalité familiale, sociale, ou passionnelle. Je crois que les démarches, même, sont diamétralement opposées. (Ernaux, 1994: 218) [The je that I use . . . does not constitute a means to construct for myself an identity through a text, to autofiction myself, but to seize, in my experience, the signs of a familial, social, or passionate reality. I believe that the approaches are even diametrically opposed. (my translation)]

Thus, Ernaux’s je diverges somewhat from autobiographical theory in that she does not find that her je constructs a fictional identity for her throughout a text, as commonly argued in theories of lifewriting. For Ernaux, her je seizes “signs” or referents of a familial, social, or passionate reality. In her writing, her je transcends the individual to encompass the social, but not without demonstrating the conflicts and contradictions entrained in such a process. I underscore here that a literary presence and a literary identity are not the same thing in Ernaux’s work and thinking. Ernaux is clearly felt on every page of her narrative, thus we come to feel that we know her personally to some degree. But as we read and reflect, we realize that what we are coming to know is rather a subjectivity that is multiple and multifarious and that transcends time and person. In effect, we find a contact zone of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox in her personal history as she sifts through her own life experiences and those of her family members whose personal histories she also speaks through and intertwines with her own in her texts. This notion of a transcending subjectivity in auto/biographical writing remains central to studies of first-person narrative theory. A brief look at an important tenet focusing on the first-person subject pronoun in first-person narrative theory will help to illuminate our discussion of Ernaux’s je transpersonnel and its role in the constructions of transnational representations of home and femininity in this chapter. Most scholars of first-person narrative theory delineate four basic “I’s” in any autobiographical narrative. They are: the Historical I, the Narrating I, the Narrated I, and the Ideological I. The notion of the Historical I brings into account the authorial I, or the historical person found in a particular era

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and location. One may understand this I as the articulation of an ensemble of subject positions that correspond to the multiplicity of social relations in which it is inscribed.1 In short, the Historical I is the “I” of the author who lives/lived in the world and who remains unknowable to the reading public. In relation to La Femme gelée, this Historical I is Ernaux as an adolescent in the 1950s and young woman and mother in the 1960s. As scholars and readers, we do not nor cannot know this Ernaux as Historical I. Conversely, the Narrating and Narrated Is are knowable to the reader. The Narrating I recounts the autobiographical narrative. This “I” is generally considered neither stable nor unified. In the narrative, the Narrating I is often perceived as split, fragmented, and multiple, leaving readers to understand the Narrating I as a subject caught in a continual process of suturing and dispersing. In many women’s first-person narratives—as certainly seen in Djebar’s work in the previous chapter—this “I” often manifests a collection (or chorus) of multiple female speaking voices speaking alongside or through one another. In brief, the Narrating I is the subject that remembers the story and either willingly or through coercion recounts it. In relation to La Femme gelée, this Narrating I is Ernaux, as the author, telling us her story. The Narrated I, on the other hand, embodies the object of the story. As Françoise Lionnet finds, the Narrated I is the subject (or protagonist) in the narrative whereas the Narrating I functions as the agent of discourse.2 The Narrated I personifies the version(s) of the self that the Narrating I chooses to represent to the reader. In most of Ernaux’s work, this Narrated I is named or referred to in critical scholarship as “Annie.” However, in La Femme gelée, the protagonist remains unnamed but does exist as the adolescent and young woman and mother whom we come to know in the text. Therefore, the Narrated I is fictional and occupies a textual space in the narrative. Yet the Narrating I may also occupy a textual space within the narrative, as in the case of Ernaux. The presence of Ernaux as Narrating I is evident in the text when she comments on and gives additional insight into the actions and thoughts of the adolescent and young woman and mother—usually represented in parentheses or implied by an abrupt change of tone, rhythm, or verb tense in the discourse. Contrarily, the Ideological I occupies a meta-textual (or extra-diegetic) space. Like its name implies, this “I” inhabits a virtual space or position both inside and outside the reader’s consciousness. Paul Smith has identified the Ideological I as the concept of personhood culturally available to the narrator when he tells his story.3 Since we (and all narrators) are always historically, culturally, and economically situated in time and place, we/narrators are produced in a particular way unique to our/their particular time. Scholars thus advocate for a reading practice that situates the narrator within a historical

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notion of “personhood” and a socio-cultural understanding of the narrator’s life during the times about which the narrator is writing. This is to say that the Ideological I takes into account the narrator’s (as a product of his or her times) internalization of personal and cultural traits that seem to represent “natural” or “universal” characteristics of all people from that time and place. Thus, the Ideological I creates multiple positions for narrators (or the Narrating I) to inhabit, as well as from which to challenge and revise in retrospect these very ideologies. This Ideological I perhaps most closely resembles Ernaux’s je transpersonnel. The multiple positions that the Ideological I creates as well as the critical distance it provides the narrator capture Ernaux’s goal in her first-person narratives: to transcend the personal in order to “speak nearby” the social. Nonetheless, the multiple narrating positions of the Ideological I may also be usefully mobilized against one another in order to bring to the surface the ideological, social, and cultural contradictions and ambivalences widely apparent in first-person narratives. The Ideological I allows the reader to comprehend and witness the relational nature of first-person narratives. In their respective critical work, Nancy K. Miller and John Eakin, through the lens of relationality, have analyzed the Ideological I in relation to the other theoretical “I’s” in first-person narratives.4 They have found that the boundaries between any “I’s” are often shifting and flexible. By drawing psychoanalytic notions of the ideal or internal Other, they concur that no “I” may speak unless in relation to others. This theoretical assertion unseats first wave autobiographical theory, which traditionally understood the life narrative as a unique story bounded to an ontological narrating subject. Moreover, recognizing the relational nature inherent in the Ideological I also reveals a text’s (or artist’s or narrator’s) inherent hybridity. For Ernaux, her first-person narratives are clearly hybrid forms falling somewhere in-between biography, history, sociology, cultural studies, and literature. Furthermore, through the lenses of the interrogation of the personal and personal history, Ernaux’s hybrid subjects are well situated in history, class, gender, and “nation.” It is the clash between the multiple contradictory, ambivalent, and paradoxical discourses of history, class, gender, and “nation” that surround her subjects that unsettle them and re-hybridize them in transnational identity, historicity, subjectivity, and speaking positions. Thus, her texts create a ²⁄³ Space that combines personal history (the “local” or “national”) and socio-historical import (the “global”) from which a re-hybridized biographical, historical, sociological, cultural, and literary subject speaks and gazes. When asked to situate herself in relation to the genre of autobiography, Ernaux replies:

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[Mes textes] sont d’une façon ou d’une autre autobiographiques, c’est-à-dire que tous prennent ma vie comme matière . . . ma vie, non pas seulement comme ensemble d’événements qui sont survenus, mais aussi mes relations familiales, tout ce que j’ai vu, ce que j’ai entendu. Je dirais plutôt que j’ai une matière qui est liée à ma vie et qui est le sujet de mes livres. Ce que je fais est alors quelque chose entre la biographie, l’histoire, la sociologie et la littérature. En fait, je me sers de cette matière autobiographique comme un scientifique ferait d’un objet qu’il étudie et dont il se sert pour aller vers autre chose. (Bacholle, 1998: 142) [My texts are in one way or another autobiographical, that is to say that all of them take my life as material . . . my life, not only as an ensemble of events that have taken place, but also my family relations, all that I have seen, all that I have heard. I would say rather that I have a subject matter that is linked to my life and that is the subject of my books. What I do is then something inbetween biography, history, sociology, and literature. In fact, I use this autobiographical subject matter like a scientist would do with an object that he is studying and that he is using to move toward something else. (my translation)]

Thus, in the first-person narratives of Ernaux, Djebar, and the other women artists in this project, we continually see a relational form of self-narrating and self-discovery in their respective works. In addition to structuring these women’s works and creating an in-between space of genres and disciplines in which to write, another immediate advantage to this relational framing is that it provides a practical agent for these women artists as re-hybridized speaking subjects in challenging, appropriating, and revising hegemonic forms of gender representation and conventional modes of writing. This, in turn, allows these artists (and others after them) to continue creating new re-hybridized spaces and seeing and speaking subjects. We will pause for a moment to consider Ernaux’s writing style and the manners in which it realizes ²⁄³ Spaces or modes of articulation and expression.

ERNAUX’S HYBRID WRITING STYLE Scholars often refer to Ernaux’s writing style as “hybrid.” In support of this qualification or categorization, Ernaux has expressed two key phrases that one cannot overlook in any discussion of her work. Firstly, Ernaux has expressed in her text, Une Femme, a desire to write “en dessous de la littérature” (1989: 23)

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[“underneath literature” (my translation)]. This phrase speaks to a search for writing techniques that free the author from codified forms and high culture rituals.5 For Ernaux, this approach specifically rejects a romanticized representation of her working-class origins and family life. Secondly, Ernaux has shared in her text, La honte, a desire to be “en somme l’éthnologue de moi-même” (1997: 40) [“in sum the ethnologist of myself” (my translation)]. This phrase summarizes Ernaux’s desire to combine sociological categories of analysis with revised literary strategies. This desire results in a wealth of concrete portraits of everyday life, inclusion of mundane artifacts, and descriptions of material conditions, which are unparalleled in other French texts by working-class women writers.6 La Femme gelée provides one clear example in which she becomes an ethnologist of herself (and by extension her family, her community, her social milieu and class, and her nation). La Femme gelée narrates critical moments of essentially three periods of Ernaux’s young life—early adolescence, young adulthood (including her university years), and the early years of marriage and motherhood. We see three general portraits of the anonymous narrator: dutiful pre-teen girl and serious student beginning to recognize two conflicting sets of realities; the more rebellious and sexually active teenager/young woman trying to come to terms with these conflicting sets of realities and who is still serious about school; and the disillusioned and disappointed frozen woman frustrated by these conflicting sets of realities and whose schooling becomes secondary to her expected responsibilities as dutiful bourgeois wife, homemaker, and mother. Ernaux expresses in an interview with Philippe Vilain that she considers this text to be: une recherche de la “trajectoire” d’une femme qui se retrouve sur soi, sa vie à environ trente ans, qui a le sentiment d’un dévoiement, de choses gâchées. Elle est installée dans ‘la différence’ qui caractérise la condition féminine. Où est la part culturelle, le conditionnement progressif, éducation, religion, confrontation au monde masculine, où est la liberté, c’est-à-dire la possibilité qui était donnée de ne pas accepter, en quelque sorte, la responsabilité; voire l’acceptation plus ou moins consciente du rôle de la femme, pour toutes sortes de raisons, par exemple plaire à un homme, jouer la séduction, etc. . . . À l’intérieur du livre, il y a souvent un balancement du discours entre ‘voici l’influence, le conditionnement’ et ‘mais pourquoi ai-je accepté?’ Ce qui suppose qu’on puisse refuser, exercer sa liberté. (1997: 68) [a research study of the trajectory of a woman who meets up with herself, her life of about thirty years, who has the feeling of

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being led astray, wasted things. She has moved into ‘the difference’ that characterizes the feminine condition. Where is the cultural portion, the progressive conditioning, education, religion, confrontation with the masculine world, where is the freedom, in other words the possibility that was given to not accept, in some fashion, the responsibility; perhaps even the more or less conscious acceptance of the role of the woman, for all sorts of reasons, for example to please a man, to perform seduction, etc. . . . Inside the book, there is often a sway of discourse between ‘here the influence, the conditioning’ and ‘but why did I accept?’ That which supposes that one can refuse, exercise his/her freedom. (my translation)]

Lyn Thomas finds this novel to manifest a literary version of topics discussed among 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups, for Ernaux shares her thoughts on and experiences with personal problems stemming from traditional social and gender politics.7 Thomas recognizes in this novel affinities with the feminist Bildungsroman insofar as Ernaux depicts a gradual process of self-awareness and the development of a feminist understanding of her individual experience (1999: 10). Additionally, she concludes that Ernaux emphasizes the contrast between the reality of oppressive gender roles and the discourses of equality and liberation prevalent in the existentialist literature and middle-class intellectual milieu of the time (1999: 32). Gender roles and discourses of power and power relations are common lenses adopted by many scholars as they discuss this text in their secondary criticism. Bacholle asserts that La Femme gelée “montre comment l’annihilation du pouvoir féminine qui étrangement se perd au fur et à mesure que le pouvoir culturel et social se gagne, a déçu les espoirs de la jeune fille de 20 ans” (2000: 32) [“shows how the annihilation of feminine power that strangely is lost as cultural and social power is won, has disappointed the hopes of the young twenty-year-old girl” (my translation).] And she concludes that Ernaux’s goal in this text is not one of a “revendiation féministe en soi” (2000: 32) [“a feminist demand for self” (my translation)] but rather “la dénunciation d’un ordre social, inapproprié à l’épanouissement de la femme—un order qui ne s’explicite pas clairement, mais qui sourd partout et que le langage selon les cas dénonce ou renforce” (2000: 32). [“the denunciation of a social order, inappropriate to the blossoming of the woman—an order that does not make itself clearly explicit, but that bursts everywhere and that language accordingly denounces or reinforces” (my translation)]. Each of these aforementioned readings or summaries of La Femme gelée thereby demonstrates the ability of Ernaux’s je transpersonnel to transcend the personal to speak nearby the social

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in her work through content, portraiture, and mundane details of common everyday life. Let us now turn to the close reading of this novel, considering in particular the manners in which Ernaux uses written representation to open up new ways of seeing, knowing, and being “female.” LA FEMME GELÉE In La Femme gelée, Ernaux employs the literary device of comparison as her first means to opening up new ways of seeing, knowing, and being “female.” She compares and contrasts at some length multiple representations of motherhood and various scenes of home life. Throughout this text at various points, Ernaux mobilizes against one another multiple portraits of the mother and maternal conduct in an effort to draw out society’s contradictions and ambivalences. For example, the first pair of portraits she compares and contrasts is her mother and “les momans” of her neighborhood (the “o” reflecting her working-class accent) and her middle-class classmates’ mothers and “les mamans” of the school (the “a” manifesting the standardized spelling and pronunciation). Later on in the novel, she compares and contrasts the portrait of her “Stepford Wife” mother-in-law and her own portrait of the “frozen” mother that she later becomes. Ernaux uses these pairings as examples of the conflicting sets of realities and contradictory social and intellectual politics of the time. As she reveals in the narrative, these conflicting realities and contradictory politics eventually entrain her personal disillusionments and disappointments as a twenty-something bride and mother. The clash between “les momans” and “les mamans” of early adolescence is vividly recalled in the text when Ernaux remembers the Mothers’ Day gifts she and her classmates spent hours preparing at school. The protagonist knows that the basket she is weaving will not carry the same importance for her mother that her schoolteachers believe it will. In this scene in La Femme gelée, Ernaux contemplates the various representations of the “mother” that were knowable to her as a child and writes: On en laisse toujours moins qu’on s’imagine, Surtout qu’il est ardu, impossible même, de repérer à dix ans des tas de rapports, comme entre cette admiration qu’on nous inculque pour la Vierge, notre mère à tous, l’église aussi est notre mère, et le respect de ‘votre chère maman’. J’espère que vous l’aidez, mes petites filles, jamais vous ne lui prouverez assez votre reconnaissance, la maison en ordre, c’est elle, votre robe repassée, c’est elle, et les re-

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pas, etc. Interminable. Lourde à porter l’iconographie maternelle déballée par l’école des sœurs. (1981: 58) [One always leaves less of it, however, than one thinks. Especially since it’s difficult, even impossible, to figure out all the connections involved, like the one between that admiration they instill in us for the Virgin, the mother of us all (and the Church is our mother as well), and the respect we owe to “your dear mama.” I hope that you help out at home, girls, because you could never show her enough gratitude! Who does the cleaning? She does. Who irons your dress? She does. And the meals, and so on. And on. It’s a heavy burden, the maternal iconography dispensed by the good sisters. (1995: 62)]

Very shortly afterwards in her recollection, Ernaux contrasts this representation of the self-sacrificing mother, whom the female students should honor with their hand-woven baskets, with the reality of what will follow on Mother’s Day at her individual home. Ernaux recalls: Prouver à toute force sa reconnaissance. Napperons brodés, corbeilles de raphia, compliments avec des cordelières de coton perlé, vite dès la rentrée de Pâques, toutes les fins d’après-midi bruissent d’une activité trépidante, on prépare la fête des Mères. . . . Une voix glace soudain la fête: “Mademoiselle, je vous vois, vous ne faites rien, vous n’aurez pas fini votre corbeille!” . . . Qu’il n’est pas question de réciter le compliment, ce qu’on se sentirait ridicules toutes les deux. Je n’osera jamais avouer des choses pareilles, d’autant plus que la maîtresse affirme devant toute la classe: “Si vous ne finissez pas votre corbeille, c’est que vous n’aimez pas votre maman!” Je pique du nez sur mon ouvrage, persuadée d’être un monstre, même si chez moi la fête des Mères c’est roupie de sansonnet. (1981: 59) [Do your best to show your gratitude. Embroidered doilies, raffia baskets, sashes of corded cotton—we start getting ready right after Easter, spending the end of every afternoon busily working on our Mother’s Day presents. . . . Sudenly, the icy reprimand: “Mademoiselle, I have my eye on you. You aren’t doing a thing and you will never finish your doily in time!” . . . No question of me reciting the short poem we’ve all been taught—the two of us would feel absolutely ridiculous. I’d never dare admit such things, especially when the teacher announces in front of the whole class, “If you don’t finish your doily, it means you do not love your mama!” I beaver away at my embroidery, convinced that I’m a

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Thus, through the relationality of comparing her mother to the maternal standards perpetuated at school, the protagonist seems caught between these two contradictory worlds or conflicting sets of realities. On one hand, she temporarily mitigates this displacement by dismissing ahead of time the school’s image of the mother that contradicts her own mother’s image. But on the other hand, through constant exposure to the school’s maternal standard, she becomes further displaced as a child and adolescent by internalizing the school’s image of motherhood and questions (as she continues in this recounting) her mother’s “authenticity.” The protagonist explains that she felt uncomfortable and began to wonder if her mother was “une vraie mère, c’est-à-dire comme les autres” (1981: 59) [“a real mother, one like all the others” (1995: 63)]. She shares that she did not recognize many of the motherly traits found in the “portrait-robot” provided by the teacher in her own mother’s portrait. The protagonist expresses: Ce dévouement silencieux, ce perpétuel sourire, et cet effacement devant le chef de famille, quel étonnement, quel [sic] incrédulité, pas encore trop de gêne, de ne pas en découvrir trace en ma mère. Et si la maîtresse savait qu’elle dit des gros mots, que les lits ne sont pas faits de la journée quelquefois et qu’elle flanque dehors les clients qui ont trop bu. (1981: 60) [The spirit of self-sacrifice, the perpetual smile, and that deference toward the man of the house—imagine my surprise and skepticism (but not too much embarrassment yet) when I don’t see these traits in my mother. And if the teacher only knew that she uses bad language, and sometimes leaves the beds unmade all day long, and tosses customers out of the café when they’ve tied one on too tightly! (1995: 63)]

One manner in which the protagonist reconciles the differences (ultimately irreproachable in Ernaux’s later works) between these two “motherly” portraits is through language. As if acquiring a new vocabulary word in a second language, the protagonist eventually establishes a form-meaning connection between the term, “maman,” and the image of the mother as silent, subservient, self-sacrificing, pious, and domestic—the archetype perpetuated by the school. She maintains her “native” term, “moman,” in relation to her workingclass mother and the mothers of her neighborhood, thus (temporarily) resolv-

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ing the confusion she felt as a child regarding her mother’s “authenticity.” The protagonist clarifies: Tellement agaçante en plus la maîtresse à susurrer “votre mââman”, chez moi et dans tout le quartier, on disait “moman”. Gross différence. Ce mââman-là s’applique à d’autres mères que la mienne. Pas celles que je connais bien de ma famille ou du quartier, toujours à râler dur, se plaindre que ça coûte cher les enfants, distribuer des pêches à droite et à gauche pour avoir le dessus, incroyable ce qu’elles manquent du “rayonnement intérieur” attribué par la maîtresse aux mââmans. Mais celles, distinguées, pomponnées, aux gestes mesurés, que je vois à la sortie de l’école quand mon père m’attend près de son vélo. Ou celles qu’on appelle dans l’Echo de la mode des “maîtresses de la maison”, qui mijotent de bons petits plats dans des intérieurs coquets, dont les maris sont dans des bureaux. La vraie mère, c’était lié pour moi à un mode de vie qui n’était pas le mien. (1981: 60) [And it’s so irritating, the way the teacher whispers “your mamah”; at home and all around my neighborhood, we may “mama.” Big difference. That ma-mah stuff is for other mothers than mine. Not the ones I know well in my family or among our neighbors: always in a complete snit, griping about how children don’t come cheap, walloping kids right and left to keep them in line—it’s just unbelievable how much they lack that “inner glow” so characteristic of the ma-mahs out teacher describes. I see them after school, when I go to meet my father, who waits for me with his bike. Elegantly dressed, refined ladies. The kind referred to in fashion magazines as “the mistress of the house,” who simmers delicious dishes in their cunningly decorated homes while their husbands are busy at the office. I see the ideal mother as part of a way of life that has precious little to do with ours. (1995: 64)]

However, this dilemma will resurface time and time again in Ernaux’s lifetime through her ascension to the intellectual bourgeoisie, a social class space and status in which “moman” does not exist, when she finds herself faced with similar conflicting portraits of motherhood; that is, an “emancipated” mother sharing the domestic chores and child-raising responsibilities with her partner that Ernaux experienced as a child and the “maîtresse de la maison” mother “qui mijotent de bons petits plats dans des intérieurs coquets, dont les maris sont dans des bureaux” (1981: 60) [“who simmers delicious dishes in their cunningly decorated homes while their husbands are busy at the office” (1995: 64)] that her husband ultimately comes to expect from Ernaux. In

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this new context Ernaux faces after her marriage in the last third of La Femme gelée, language will not aid but rather complicate her conceptualization of the home and to the same extent her expected (female) role therein. Like Djebar who found it impossible to write in her maternal language of Arabic and opting rather to write in the French language of her schooling, Ernaux also found it impossible as a child, adolescent, and young adult to write exclusively in her maternal—or what some scholars call carnal—language. Like Djebar, Ernaux chooses rather to write mainly in the language of the school and peppers her writing with her “language of origin” when pertinent or necessary. Thus both women associate their maternal language with the oral and their acquired language with the written. Furthermore, both women negotiate a ²⁄³ Space of authorship as a rehybrid speaking subject that borrows from both languages in creating a new “language” that (re)appropriates speech in order to challenge the dominant discourses of patriarchy in literary, social, cultural, and historical discourses. More so in Ernaux’s work than in Djebar’s, this new language is “imbued with ‘argot,’ provincialisms, billingsgate, abrupt shifts, and fluid connections” (Johnson, 1999: 298) and is a “paratactic hodgepodge that mirrors the babble of heteroglossic discourses influencing her development” (Johnson, 1999: 298). Thus for Ernaux as well as for Djebar to a lesser extent, words and their concrete referents and symbolic associations play a primary role in their work. As Christine Fau finds, “words have an almost magical power” for Ernaux (1995: 502). Fau asserts that on one hand, words for Ernaux “reassure and help her in her journey into womanhood” (1995: 506). On the other hand, Fau conversely concludes that the protagonists of Ernaux’s texts try to conform themselves to the images that these words evoke, which results in the protagonists’ creations of various identities that do not seem “authentic” (1995: 506). The word “authentic” often appears in many scholars’ descriptions of Ernaux’s writing style and is regularly implied in Ernaux’s own textual representations. It seems to me that these scholars and Ernaux are either using or implying this polemic not to suggest that Ernaux is speaking for all of contemporary French women in her writings, as once explicitly argued in the feminist practices of essentialism that pivoted on the notion of authenticity. It appears rather that this “authenticity” reflects a certain first-person reality (as understood and interpreted in Ernaux’s language) that imitates a specific “slice of life” that other women caught in a similar upward trajectory of social mobility might also experience. Ernaux elucidates this point in her own words:

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Pour La Femme gelée, c’est différent. Je me situe dans une perspective féministe, au sens où ma recherche pourrait se résumer à: “comment suis-je devenue femme?” comment s’est façonnée cette femme “gelée” que je pense être devenue. On voit le rapport avec la phrase de Simone de Beauvoir, “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient”. Recherche ai-je écrit. Non développement d’une théorie. Or, il existait dans les années 70 un discours très théorisant sur les femmes, l’affirmation d’une différence essentielle qui, par ailleurs, ne prenait jamais en compte l’appartenance sociale. La femme prise comme référence était plus ou moins la bourgeoise. La Femme gelée s’inscrit donc dans un paysage, elle est sous-tendue par le refus d’une doxa féministe dans laquelle je ne reconnais pas une partie de mon expérience. Et l’exaltation de “valeurs féminines” propres me paraissant un énorme piège, j’avais le désir de montrer par l’analyse concrète de situations que celles-ci étaient une illusion. (1997: 69) [For La Femme gelée, it is different. I situate myself in a feminist perspective, in the sense that my research could be summarized as: “how did I become a woman?” how this “frozen” woman that I think I became was molded. One sees the relationship with Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase, “One is not born woman, one becomes woman.” I did not write research. No development of a theory. Yet, there existed in the 1970s a very theorizing discourse on women, the affirmation of an essential difference that, in addition, never took into account social belonging. The woman taken as a reference was more or less the middleclass woman. La Femme gelée is inscribed in this landscape, it is underlied by the refusal of feminist doctrine in which I did not recognize a part of my experience. And this exaltation of “feminine values” proper appeared to me a huge trap, I had the desire to show by manner of concrete analysis of situations that these values were an illusion. (my translation)]

Yet having just read Ernaux’s position on the misgivings of “feminine values,” as expressed in this citation, there is still the contradictory trace in Ernaux’s work that she intends her je transpersonnel to speak on the level of the universal. This is not at all to say a “universal” in the realm of a “universal sisterhood” in which all women questionably share the same experiences modeled on the middle-class metropolitan woman. Rather, Ernaux’s “universal” is more akin to Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of the term within the realm of the philosophical. In Ernaux’s and

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de Beauvoir’s usage of the term, the “universal” becomes a location in which the female gender struggles against the creation and imposition of different normative gender role discourses that stretch across cultural borders in varying degrees. In this Existentialist context of mauvaise foi created by the “exaltation de ‘valeurs féminines,’ ” Ernaux’s je transpersonnel, like Minh-Ha’s (meta)textual spectator position, transcends the individual first-person narratives to stir the reader’s awakening to these normalizing discourses and their socio-historical-political import. In turn, this awakening allows the reader’s more “authentic” being-in-the-world and ideally would bring about a revision of hegemonic gender roles in contemporary society. As Ernaux reveals in her texts, this awakening gives voice to a re-hybridized speaking subject who asserts that normative gender roles should be built on a bilateral system of gender equality in the home. Specifically speaking, revisions of the heterosexual couple’s contemporary gender roles should give rise to domestic, intellectual, and professional roles and responsibilities in which men and women should both actively engage. In fact, Ernaux qualifies this assertion as the only feminist tenet that she recognizes. She develops this thought: Le féminisme comme lutte pour l’égalité des droits entre les homes et les femmes, conditions de vie, responsabilités, rôles identiques ou partagés est toujours au cœur de mes préoccupations. Je pense qu’il y a peu de femmes et d’hommes vraiment féministes, les unes et les autres voudraient conserver les avantages (ou qu’ils supposent comme tels) des rôles masculins/féminins traditionnels, des tabous et des censures demeurent. Je me surprends à ne pas faire telle chose, à ne pas aller à tel endroit parce que je suis femme. Tout cela montre la nécessité d’une pensée féministe. Pas d’une écriture féminine, évidemment. Ce n’est pas à moi de décider si mes livres sont féministes ou non. (1997: 70–71) [Feminism as a struggle for equal rights between men and women, conditions of life, responsibilities, identical or shared roles are always at the heart of my preoccupations. I think that there are very few women and men who are truly feminist, certain of them would like to conserve the advantages (or what they consider as such) of traditional masculine/feminine roles, taboos and censorship that remain. I surprise myself when I do not do something, when I do not go somewhere because I am a woman. All of this reveals the necessity of feminist thought. Not feminine writing, of course. It is not up to me to decide if my books are feminist or not. (my translation)]

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Whether Ernaux recognizes it as such or not, La Femme gelée is a feminist text that demonstrates Ernaux’s desire to engage in a textual representation of the condition féminine—insofar as how she individually experienced and personally perceives it. With regard to the organization and structure of the “text,” Ernaux clarifies that with La Femme gelée she takes a certain distance from the literary form of the novel largely because there really is no difference between the narrative and the protagonist (Ernaux, 1995: 38). Ernaux shares that La Femme gelée is not a text that presents itself at the beginning as novel-like, since the heroine (the Narrated I) has no first or last name (Ernaux, 1995: 38). She theorizes that the status of this text is almost autobiography, but that the word “novel,” is still present in the back of her mind (Ernaux, 1995: 38). However, Ernaux explains that, “mais en fait dans les interviews que j’ai pu avoir au sujet de ce livre, j’ai été presque obligée par les gens qui me parlaient de reconnatire que ce n’était plus un roman mais une autobiographie” (Ernaux, 1995: 38) [“but in fact in interviews I was able to give on the subject of this book, I was almost obliged by the people who were speaking with me to recognize that this was no longer a novel but an autobiography” (my translation)]. This ambiguity strikes at the very heart of Ernaux’s philosophy of writing. For Ernaux, to write is an impure thing stemming from pain, the body, and feelings; and her writing is a dive into something unclear, a falling into a magma where there is “un travail de bricolage” and a portion linked to feelings of guilt.9 In other words, Ernaux recognizes the ambiguous and ambivalent relational aspects of her existence, and she brings this into her work in various modes or forms. In her texts, we find the relation between her writing and her life; the relations among the genres of writing converging in her texts; the relationality between her texts and her readers (and by extension, since her texts are so personal, the relation between her readers and herself); and the relations inherent in processes of self-identification. Ernaux shares, “Et je crois que le moi, notre moi, nous est révélé par la fréquentation des autres, non seulement par le regard qu’ils portent sur nous, mais aussi par l’intérêt, les souvenirs, qu’ils éveillent en nous” (Ernaux, 1995: 43) [“And I believe that the me, our me, is revealed to us through the company of others, not only by the gaze that they hold on us, but also by the interest and the memories that they awake in us” (my translation)]. It is this latent “fréquentation des autres” in all of Ernaux’s writing that constitutes the ²⁄³ Space from which she attempts to reconcile with her “exil intérieur” (or her inability to escape her origins and feel at total ease in her new social class identity) and reframes her re-hybridized speaking subject.

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Ernaux states that La Femme gelée textualizes this “exil intérieur” as a loss of identity and period of suffering when living in Annecy as a young bride and mother. Yvetot où j’ai passé toute ma jeunesse, c’est le lieu le plus fort. Annecy, j’y étais entre vingt-cinq et trente-cinq ans. C’est très complexe. Dans cette ville je suis entrée dans le rôle qu’on attendant de moi. Pendant cette époque j’ai pourtant préparé le CAPES, l’agrégation, j’ai écrit Les Armoires vides. C’est en fait dix années de vie active intellectuellement, ce qui aurait pu aussi ne pas être le cas. Mais c’est très mutilant, d’avoir, dans la force de l’âge, toute son existence soumise à la transmission de la vie. Je suis heureuse d’avoir eu des enfants mais l’enfermement était total. Je ne savais pas comment je me sortirais de là. Quand je retourne à Annecy, je revois cette femme, un double souffrant. Car c’était une souffrance. (1995: 39–39) [Yvetot where I spent my entire youth, is the strongest place. Annecy, I was there for the time when I was between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. It’s very complex. In this city I went to school in the role that everyone expected of me. During this time, however, I prepared for the CAPES, the aggregation, I wrote Les Armoires vides. It’s in fact ten years of an intellectually active life, which could have also not been the case. But it’s very mutilating, to have, in hindsight, all one’s existence subjected to the transmission of life. I am happy to have had children but the imprisonment was complete. I did not know how to pull myself out of it. When I return to Annecy, I see again this woman, a double suffering. As that was a suffering. (my translation)]

Ernaux poignantly reflects this suffering immediately in the title of the text. The symbolism of the title of this text, La Femme gelée, suggests that the “narrator is frozen in a certain lack of identity” (Bacholle, 1996: 32) but also that she is frozen between conflicting and ambivalent sets of realities or modes of representation and between two homes. On one hand in this text, the narrator rather affectionately describes her childhood home in which the conventional domestic roles were reversed—her father performing many of the “feminine” acts, such as cooking, doing dishes, and picking Annie up from school and her mother performing many of the “masculine” acts, such as regulating the family business accounts and balancing the family business books. On the other hand, the narrator frustratingly depicts her new home in which her husband (after promising to share equally in the domestic chores

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and child-raising responsibilities before their marriage) shortly comes to expect the upholding of normative or traditional domestic gender roles. Yet, both home settings stir up contradictory emotions inside the protagonist and Ernaux. Regarding her childhood home, Ernaux finds happiness and nostalgia as well as shame and abjection. Concerning her new home, she finds frustration and oppression as well as pride and conformity. Throughout the novel, Ernaux finds herself immobilized between these contradictory emotions and between three maternal portraits: her mother and “les momans” of the working-class neighborhood of her social origins, her mother-in-law and “les mamans” of the middle-class residential areas of the city, and her imagined ideal figure of an emancipated mother free to pursue equal intellectual, professional, parental, and domestic tasks with the father. By extension, these three maternal portraits create three domestic portraits: her childhood home in which furniture was seldom dusted and beds were sometimes left unmade; the meticulously dusted and sublimely immaculate home of her bourgeois classmate, Brigitte, and as represented in the school’s literature; and her first home with her husband resting somewhere in-between the first two representations with a well-scoured bathroom and kitchen but a certain degree of dust residing on the furniture. Ernaux’s suffering and identity crisis arise from her sense of feeling trapped inside these three contradictory maternal portraits and three conflicting domestic portraits. Ernaux opens her third novel by comparing our first two maternal portraits—the stay-at-home bourgeois mother and the working-class mothers of her neighborhood. She writes: Femmes fragiles et vaporeuses, fées aux mains douces, petits soufflés de la maison qui font naître silencieusement l’ordre et la beauté, femmes sans voix, soumises, j’ai beau chercher, je n’en vois pas beaucoup dans l paysage de mon enfance. Ni même le modèle au-dessous, moins distingué, plus torchon, les frotteuses d’évier à se mirer dedans, les accommodatrices de restes, et celles qui sont à la sortie de l’école un quart d’heure avant la sonnerie, tous devoirs ménagers accomplis. Les bien organisées jusqu’à la mort. Mes femmes à moi, elles avaient toutes le verbe haut, des corps mal surveillés, trop lourds ou trop plats, des doigts râpeux, des figures pas fardées du tout ou alors le paquet, du voyant, en grosses tanches aux joues et aux lèvres. Leur science culinaire s’arrêtait au lapin en sauce et au gâteau de riz, assez collant même, elles ne soupçonnaient pas que la poussière doit s’enlever tous les jours, elles avaient travaillé ou travaillaient aux champs, à l’usine, dans de petits commerces ouverts du matin au soir. (1981: 9)

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The imagery that Ernaux evokes in this opening passage—the normative representation of femininity in the post-war middle-class archetype of the stayat-home mother as “vaporish,” a “fairy,” and “voiceless” versus the marginal representation of femininity in the working-class archetype of the working mother as “too fat or too flat,” with “sandpapery fingers” and gaudy makeup, and as outspoken—is recursively repeated throughout this text as well as throughout most of her other works. In effect, these two portraits occupy two polarities on the spectrum of feminine representation for Ernaux. Like Djebar and the other women artists discussed in this project who challenge the binary oppositions of social and gender politics in their work, Ernaux immediately draws out these representations of femininity so that she may mobilize them one against the other in order to reveal their inherent contradictions and misrepresentations. In turn, this allows her to tease out multiple theoretical interrogations of French women’s multiple contemporary representations and identities inside and outside the home, thus creating an in-between space in which Ernaux may transcend her personal disillusionment by and disappointment in these representations of femininity. In the same manner as the afore-cited opening paragraph, Ernaux compares just a few pages later two contradictory portraits of the home. When recalling the “home economics” lessons learned at school, she expresses: Le matin, papa-part-à-son-travail, maman-reste-à-la-maison, ellefait-le-ménage, elle-prépare-un-repas-succulent, j’ânonne, je répète avec les autres sans poser de questions. Je n’ai pas encoure honte de ne pas être la fille des gens normaux. (1981: 16)

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[In the morning, Papa-goes-to-work, Mama-stays-home, shedoes-the-housework, she-prepares-a-tasty-meal, I drone along with the others, repeating everything without asking any questions. I am not yet ashamed that my parents aren’t normal. (1995: 16–17)]

In the very next paragraph, Ernaux describes her home life. Le mien de père ne s’en va pas le matin, ni l’après-midi, jamais. Il reste à la maison. Il sert au café et à l’alimentation, il faut la vaisselle, la cuisine, les épluchages. Lui et ma mère vivent ensemble dans le même mouvement, ces allées et venues d’hommes d’un côté, de femmes et d’enfants de l’autre, qui constituent pour moi le monde. (1981: 16) [My father doesn’t leave in the morning, or in the afternoon, or ever. He stays home. He waits on customers in the café and the grocery store, he does the dishes, the cooking, the weeding. He and my mother live together in the same activity, with the men coming and going on one side, the women and children on the other, and all this makes up my world. (1995: 17)]

However, Ernaux qualifies this description by stating that her family did live by a certain “code.” She explains, “Pas tout à fait les memes travaux, oui il y a toujours un code, mais celui-là ne devait à la tradition que la lessive et le repassage pour ma mere, le jardinage pour mon père” (1981: 16) [“Not exactly the same work, true, there’s always a code, but theirs owes nothing to tradition except the laundry and ironing for my mother, the gardening for my father” (1995: 17)]. But as Ernaux reflects on this code—her mother with the laundry and ironing responsibilities, her father with the gardening—she realizes that the division of labor in her parents’ home was established in correspondence to their “goûts” and “capacités” (1981: 16) [“personal preferences and abilities” (1995: 17)]. In other words, the domestic and child-raising tasks were shared in a practical way between her parents that took into consideration their personal preferences as well as the demands of their businesses, which were located on each side of their family house. Yet, when the protagonist learns in school lectures and through the examples of her classmates’ family life the aforementioned normative descriptions of home life, she begins to view her parents’ shared division of labor as representative of their lower-class origins and begins to doubt her mother’s “authenticity.” It is only through this relationality and the other’s gaze that the protagonist will come to see conflicting sets of reality and feel ashamed

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of her parents’ home, as illustrated in this following encounter between the protagonist and Brigitte when Brigitte is visiting the protagonist at home. Ernaux recounts, la poussière pour [ma mère] n’existait pas, ou plutôt c’était quelque chose de naturel, pas gênant. Pour moi aussi, un voile sec qui poudre mon cosy, dessinant des dentelles quand j’enlève des livres, qui danse dans les rayons de soleil et qu’on efface sur un vase ou un cahier avec la manche de sa blouse. Entre douze et quatorze ans, je vais découvrir avec stupéfaction que c’est laid et sale, cette poussière, que je ne voyais même pas. (1981: 22) [But dust doesn’t exist for her, or rather, it’s something natural, not a problem. I feel the same way: it’s just a dry veil powdering my cozy, a trail of lace when I take a book from the shelf, motes dancing in the sunbeams, something to be wiped off a vase or notebook with one’s sleeve. Between twelve and fourteen years old, I will be amazed to discover that it’s ugly and dirty, this dust I don’t even notice. (1995: 22–23)]

Ernaux continues: Brigitte, désignant un endroit dans le bas du mur: “Dis donc, il y a longtemps que ça n’a pas été fait!” Je cherche: “Quoi, ça?” Elle m’a montré le minuscule rebord de la plinthe, tout gris en effet, mais comment, il fallait nettoyer là aussi, j’avais toujours cru que c’était de la saleté normale, comme les traces de doigts aux portes et le jaune au-dessus de la cuisinière. Vaguement humiliée de constater que ma mère manquait à l’un des ses devoirs puisque apparemment c’en était un. (1981: 22) [“Say, that hasn’t been done in a long time!” remarks that snake Brigitte, pointing at a spot low on the wall. I look. “What hasn’t?” My girlfriend shows me the thin top edge of the baseboard, all gray. She’s right. You mean to tell me we’re supposed to clean there, too? I’d always thought that was normal dirt, like fingerprints on doors and the yellow smudge over the stove. I’m vaguely humiliated by the realization that my mother is failing in one of her duties, since apparently this is one. (1995: 23)]

Thus, through the eyes of a socially superior other with bourgeois domestic standards of the era, Ernaux comes to view the home as a maintenance trap of things to be kept up as opposed to a space in which things are left alone with their dust and their wear (1981: 23), as she had believed before Brigitte’s visit.

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Ernaux explains that until her adolescence, she found it normal for her father to be at the kitchen sink doing dishes and her mother at the filing cabinet running the businesses (1981: 61). The protagonist of La Femme gelée never truly questioned her parents’ gender roles until their non-conventionality was pointed out to her by another—her first school friend, Brigitte. The protagonist explains: “Introduite dans mon intimité familiale, Brigitte me fait voir ce que j’avais senti jusqu’ici sans y attacher d’importance. Non, ma mère ne sait pas cuisiner, même la mayonnaise, le ménage ne l’intéresse pas, et elle n’est pas ‘féminine’ ” (1981: 74). [“On my own home ground, Brigitte makes me see what I had hitherto felt without attaching any importance to it. No, my mother doesn’t know how to cook, not even to make mayonnaise, housework doesn’t interest her, and she isn’t ‘feminine’ ” (1995: 78).] Ernaux textualizes Brigitte’s and later other middle-class friends’ astonishment at witnessing the narrator’s father cooking and doing the dishes. The protagonist suggests that her father’s kindness is transformed in her schoolmates’ eyes into weakness and her mother’s dynamism as wearing the pants in the family (1981: 75). She confesses that their interpretations of her parents’ non-conventional gender roles shame her (1981: 75). In contrast to the protagonist’s “abnormal” division of labor and home life, she describes on the next page the “normal” standards as observed in Brigitte’s family: Le normal, je le rencontrais en particulier chez Brigitte. Mme. Desfontaines, toujours là, toupinant dans sa cuisine, petits lavages, petite couture minutieuse, et nous interdisant la salle à manger, vous allez salir. Univers menu, où à mes yeux on s’occupait de petites choses, récurer des boutons de porte, quelle garce, et comment s’interroger sérieusement cinq minutes pour savoir s’il fallait faire des nouilles ou du hachis Parmentier. (1981: 76) [Brigitte’s house is a shining example of normality for me. Mme. Desfontaines, always there, busy-busy in her kitchen, a little washing, a little sewing, dainty chores, and don’t go into the dining room, you’ll get it dirty. A tiny universe, to my eyes, preoccupied with trivial tasks, like polishing the doorknobs, what a joke, and how can anyone seriously spend five minutes wondering whether to make noodles or shepherd’s pie? (1995: 80–81)]

The protagonist recounts that Brigitte often helped her mother with the cooking, cleaning, and laundry work. Since the protagonist did not share in these domestic chores at her home—due to both of her parents wanting her to spend her time on schoolwork, reading, or playing—she begins to

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feel a certain lack in her existence, knowledge, and abilities (1981: 76). She discovers “une étonnante complicité ménagère entre mère et fille” (1981: 76) [“an astonishing and unexpected domestic complicity between mother and daughter” (1995: 81)] of which she had no idea. In front of Brigitte and Brigitte’s mother, the protagonist is embarrassed not to be able to share this commonality in her family home-life setting. As Ernaux states in La Femme gelée, conventional social and gender-role logic of 1950s France asserted that: Pour une fille, ne savoir rien faire, tout le monde comprend, c’est ne pas être fichue de repasser, cuisiner, nettoyer comme il faut. Comment tu feras plus tard quand tu seras mariée? La grande phrase de logique irréfutable, pour vous mettre le nez dans le caca, pas un œuf à la coque, bien bien, tu verras si ça plaira à ton mari la soupe aux cailloux! . . . Puisque toutes les filles, toutes les femmes doivent s’occuper de leur intérieur, il faudrait bien que j’apprenne ces choses, en plus de mon future métier. (1981: 76–77) [Everyone understands that for a girl, not knowing how to do a thing means being incapable of cooking, cleaning, ironing properly. How will you cope later on when you’re married? The big question, with its irrefutable logic, to rub your nose right in it, can’t even boil an egg, well just wait, you’ll see how your husband lies eating out of cans! . . . Since all girls and women have to look after their homes, I should learn those things too, as well as my future profession. (1995: 81–82)]

Feeling this pressure as well as the “lack” when comparing herself to Brigitte, during one summer vacation, the protagonist convinces her mother—at her mother’s shoulder shrugging (1981: 77)—to teach her a few basic housekeeping tasks and to the protagonist’s great sense of self-worth, how to make a chocolate mousse. The success of this summer’s homemaking experiment made the protagonist feel complete; but Ernaux’s adult voice, looking back, qualifies this completion, “Mais ne pas exagérer, c’était un plaisir et un jeu, repassage et gâteaux, du délassement d’après lecture, du trompe-l’ennui des fins de vacances. . . . Sitôt la classe recommencée, adieu le divertissement ménager les choses sérieuses d’abord” (1981: 77–78). [“But I shouldn’t make too much of this ironing and baking; it’s fun, a game, a relaxing change from reading, a way to stave off boredom toward the end of vacation. . . . As soon as school starts again, that’s the end of domestic diversions. First things first” (1995: 82).] Thus, Ernaux leaves us again with an in-between representation of home life, which begins to speak to Ernaux’s ideal domestic representation.

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In this summer vacation’s homemaking experiment, we learn that the protagonist (and by extension Ernaux) does indeed attribute an importance to traditionally feminine housekeeping rituals, which she seeks to uphold to a certain degree. However, these rituals in the protagonist’s mind, as instilled by her parents’ reticent attitude toward her performance of domestic chores in lieu of reading and homework, are secondary to her education and future professional career track. This insight will again resurface in the protagonist’s new home with her husband and will fuel much of the household tension and frustration in the third domestic portrait in La Femme gelée. In reflecting upon her new home with her husband, the protagonist is constantly reminded of her classmates’ childhood homes and often draws comparisons between these two portraits. In one instance when describing the childhood home of a schoolmate, Marie-Jeanne, the protagonist describes: Le couloir sombre, avec des tableaux, débouchait sur une cuisine miroitante, blanche comme dans les catalogues. Une femme mince, en blouse rose, glissait entre l’évier et la table . . . Silence, lumière. Propreté . . . L’ordre et la paix. Le paradis. Dix ans plus tard, c’est moi dans une cuisine rutilante et muette, les fraises et la farine, je suis entrée dans l’image et je crève. (1981: 60–61) [The dark hall, hung with paintings, opens onto a gleaming white kitchen like the ones in catalogues. A slender woman in a pink blouse moves quietly between the sink and the table . . . Peace and quiet. Paradise. Ten years later, I will be the one in a silent, sparking kitchen, with flour and strawberries: I have stepped into the picture, and it’s killing me. (1995: 64–65)]

The shame as a child and adolescent when faced with the lack of normative, middle-class standards of domesticity, family life, femininity, and gender roles—these national and sometimes global discourses—in her childhood home transforms into oppression as an adult when undertaking these new values in her new home. Insofar as the division of domestic labor is concerned as an adult, she longs for her childhood portrait of non-conventional family home life. However, the protagonist explains that both she and her husband began their marriage with non-conventional characteristics that quickly ended with her husband’s graduation from law school, his starting his career, and the birth of their first son. Before their move to Annecy, where her husband begins his career, the protagonist and her husband live in Bordeaux while finishing their studies. Ernaux describes this period of time as moments before marriage began to weigh on her (1981: 127). She finds a certain complicity between the

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couple—a complicity in the daily domestic chores (or joint lack there of) and their academic progress. Although their meager finances distance them from the downtown and fashionable neighborhoods surrounding the university, where the protagonist would have preferred to live, to the less expensive peripheries of the city, she still finds this new chapter in their lives a great and exciting adventure (1981: 128). The protagonist describes: Et quelle excitation de s’installer, là on mettra de la toile de jute, l’électrophone ici, le premier disque, de fureter dans la cuisine, essayer le gaz. La maison pour rire avec ses meubles rococo disparates, du rebut sans style, qu’on quittera l’année prochaine, après les derniers examens. Les premiers mois du mariage, c’était comme l’enfance qui remontait. (1981: 128–129) [And the excitement of moving in: we’ll put some hessian cloth over there, the record player here, the first record, exploring the kitchen, seeing if the gas works. A ridiculous house with its mismatched rococo furniture, rubbishy rejects, to be abandoned next year after our final exams. The first months of marriage are like a return to childhood. (1995: 136)]

In retrospect, Ernaux describes the seemingly egalitarian distribution of domestic roles at the start of their marriage as “complètement à côté de la plaque, Le Deuxième Sexe” (1981: 129) [“completely off base from the Second Sex” (1995: 137)]. In describing the “egalitarian” beginnings of their marriage and household, Ernaux recollects: Et la dînette, charmante. Les tomates scintillent dans leur huile, odeur molle des pommes de terre rissoles, autour de la table minuscule, l’amour devient tendresse, la cuisine du meublé, intérieur hollandaise avec sa paix et son harmonie. La petite vaisselle, deux assiettes, deux couverts, deux verres et une poêle. . . . Tant pis pour la tablette qui se caramélise sous le gaz, à force de débordements, la poussière sous les meubles, les lits pas faits. On emprunte de temps en temps l’aspirateur à la proprio et c’est lui qui le passe sans rechigner. (1981: 129) [And dinner for two, charming. The tomatoes gleaming in their vinaigrette, the inviting aroma of fried potatoes, us at the little table, loving tenderness, cooking for newlyweds, a Dutch interior of peace and harmony. Our mini-tableware: two plates, silverware for two, a couple of glasses, and a frying pan. . . . Too bad about the stove top turning brown from all the boiled-over food, and the dust beneath the furniture, the unmade beds. Once in a while we

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borrow the landlady’s vacuum cleaner, and he’s the one who runs it, without complaining. (1995: 136)]

Unified during this time by a lack of money, the protagonist shares that her husband accompanies her to the grocery store and that they select together their groceries. She describes this portrait as one of a “jeune couple modernointellectuel” (1981: 130) [“young, modern, intellectual couple” (1995: 137)] in which they take turns preparing soup in their pressure cooker, always equally able to return to their studies (1981: 130). The crack in this harmonious imagery arrives when the university restaurant (cafeteria) closes for the summer. When this occurs the protagonist finds herself abandoned “devant les casseroles” twice a day (1981: 137). From this moment on, conventional bourgeois housekeeping standards, expectations, and gender roles begin to take root—against the protagonist’s will. The protagonist vents, “Aucun passé d’aide-culinaire dans les jupes de maman ni l’un ni l’autre” (1981: 130) [“neither one of us used to help Mama in the kitchen” (1995: 138)] and questions pourquoi de nous deux suis-je la seule à devoir tâtonner, combien de temps un poulet, est-ce qu’on enlève les pépins des concombres, la seule à me plonger dans un livre de cuisine, à éplucher des carottes, laver la vaisselle en récompense du dîner, pendant qu’il bossera son droit constitutionnel. Au nom de quelle supériorité. (1981: 130) [so why am I the only one who has to muddle through (how long does a chicken take, and do you take the seeds out of summer squash?), who has to pore over a cookbook, scrape the carrots, wash the dishes as a reward for fixing dinner—while he studies his constitutional law? Who gave him the right? (1995: 138)]

In these moments, the protagonist remembers her father and his role in the kitchen. In a manner similar to Brigitte’s earlier reaction to his peeling potatoes, the protagonist’s husband retorts, “non mais tu m’imagines avec un tablier peut-être! Le genre de ton père, pas le mien!” (1981: 130–131) [“Come on, do you think I’m going to wear an apron? That sort of thing is for your father, not me!’ (1995: 138)]. As before in Brigitte’s gaze, she once again feels humiliated in the gaze of a socially superior other. This time the other is her husband. The protagonist concludes, “Non je n’en as pas vu beaucoup d’hommes peler des patates. Mon modèle à moi n’est pas le bon, il me le fait sentir” (1981: 131) [“No, I haven’t seen many men peeling potatoes. My father, out in the kitchen, is not the right role model, that’s made very clear”

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(1995: 138)]. She considers the two paternal models she knows—her father and her father-in-law, “Le sien commence à monter à l’horizon, monsieur père laisse son épouse s’occuper de tout dans la maison, lui si disert, cultivé, en train de balayer, ça serait cocasse, délirant, un point c’est tout. A toi d’apprendre ma vieille” (1981: 131) [“His father is beginning to loom on the horizon, the master of the house who lets his wife do all the housework, such a cultivated, eloquent gentleman—and you want him to pick up a broom, that’s a good one, are you crazy or what? Period. Just get on with it, old girl” (1995: 138)]. As the protagonist will soon come to recognize: Fini la nourriture-décor de mon enfance, les boites de conserve en quinconce, les bocaux multicolores, la nourriture surprise des petits restaurants chinois bon marché du temps d’avant. Maintenant c’est la nourriture corvée. (1981: 131) [Despair and discouragement in front of the canary yellow cupboard in the apartment. Pasta, eggs, endives, all this stuff waiting to be dealt with, prepared, no more décor-food, the stacks of canned goods from my childhood, the rainbow-colored candy jars, the surprising dishes of the cheap little Chinese restaurants of the good old days. No it’s chore-food. (1995: 138)]

Moreover, she alone is expected to affront this culinary chore. And unfortunately, her homemaking responsibilities only increase when their first child enters the family portrait. Eventually, the protagonist manages to finish her studies and accepts a position as a public school teacher, but the child-raising chores added to her daily housekeeping drudgery begin to eat away at her. In La Femme gelée, the protagonist cannot successfully break out of her state of frozenness brought on by her disappointment in conventional gender roles and her disillusionment by their normative discourses. The protagonist’s and her husband’s learning and sharing of child-raising responsibilities initially established with the birth of their first child will rather soon suffer the same fate as their earlier sharing of domestic tasks. The protagonist’s jealousy and frustration in not being able to pursue the same intellectual and professional goals as readily as her husband resounds on almost every page of this portion of the novel that describes their homes and home life in Bordeaux and Annecy. Consequently, a revengeful spirit comes to occupy some of the protagonist’s thoughts and actions: Il y a bien le comptage incessant, je lui prépare son déjeuner, je lui brosse son costume, il doit déboucher le lavabo et descendre

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la poubelle. Tu t’achètes un disque alors moi un livre. Merde, très bien je réponds sale con. Ça ne ressemble pas beaucoup à des libertés qui s’échangent. J’y ai eu recours. Epuisant, du détail mesquin qui me conduisait à me payer un bouquin ou laisser pleine la poubelle ni par plaisir ni par vraie révolte, par esprit de revanche. Depuis le début du mariage, j’ai l’impression de courir après une égalité qui m’échappe tout le temps. (1981: 166–167) [Of course one can keep track all the time: I fix him breakfast, I brush his suit; he should unplug the sink and take out the garbage. You buy yourself a record, so I get a book. Shit? Fine, I reply: son of a bitch! It doesn’t seem much like a fair exchange of freedoms here. I keep tabs anyway. Exhausting, this nitpicking that leads me to spend money on a book or leave the garbage can full—neither for pleasure nor through real rebellion, but for revenge. Ever since the beginning of the marriage, I’ve had the impression of chasing after an equality that continually eludes me. (1995: 175)]

Furthermore, the protagonist’s consistent comparison of the portrait of her and her husband’s family life to that of her in-laws continues to immobilize the protagonist in her search for her identity and understanding of her “feminine” condition as she ideologically desires it but contrarily lives it. The maternal portrait that her mother-in-law offers resembles that of her childhood schoolmates’ mothers: a portrait in which intellectual and professional pursuits are abandoned for the preservation of conventional familial gender roles. During an in-laws’ visit to Ernaux and her husband’s home in Bordeaux, the protagonist describes the portrait of her in-laws’ marriage as “le bon modèle” (1981: 135) [“the right model” (1995: 142)]. She asserts: Ne s’imposent pas, gens bien éduqués, brèves visites, petits repas, un couple charmant. Monsieur père, toujours aussi parleur, perpétuel diseur de bons mots et contrepèteries en tout genre sous le regard indulgent de son épouse. Attention, pas pitre, derrière les plaisanteries, toujours l’autorité, dans l’œil, la voix, la façon de réclamer la carte au restaurant, d’être imbattable sur le chapitre des vins et la tactique du bridge. (1981: 135) [Would never impose themselves, well-bred people, short visits, the occasional dinner invitation, a charming couple. The man of the house, as talkative as ever, a constant flow of witty remarks and spoonerisms of all kinds as his indulgent wife looks on, beaming. But watch out, no fool he, behind all the jests there’s authority in his voice and eye, in the way he calls for the menu in

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The protagonist continues: Toujours gaie, madame mère, sautillante, jamais assise, elle m’entraîne, laissons causer les hommes, nous on va préparer le dîner, non non mon garçon on se débrouillera, tu nous gênerais! Tout de suite, le tablier, l’éplucheur à légumes avec entrain, du persil sur la viande froide, une tomate en rosace tralali, de l’œuf dur sur la salade, tralala. (1981: 135) [Always perky, his lady wife, never still for a moment, she drags me away, let’s leave the men to their talking, we’ll go fix the dinner, no no no son, we’ll take care of everything, you’d just be in the way! On goes the apron, out comes the chopping board, parsley on the cold sliced meats, a tomato cut in the shape of a rose, tralali, a hard-boiled egg to garnish the salad, tralala. (1995: 142–143)]

At times, Ernaux writes that her mother-in-law shared confidences with her on these occasions. In one such episode, the mother-in-law tells the protagonist that she had earned a “licence” in natural sciences and had even taught some courses in an institution before meeting her husband and the arrival of their children (1981: 135). “Naturally,” her intellectual and professional pursuits were abandoned for her domestic responsibilities. Although Ernaux does not directly comment on this information in the text, we can see her mother-in-law’s expected notion of intellectual and professional abandonment contributing to Ernaux’s frozenness. In reflecting on her mother-inlaw’s portrait, Ernaux writes: Elle s’apitoie maternellement sur moi, elle m’excuse, vos études ne vous fatiguent pas trop, vous n’avez pas le temps de nettoyer à fond c’est normal. Je déteste cette manière insidieuse de s’occuper de moi. Sa gentillesse perpétuelle me gêne, un truc où l’on s’ensable, obligée de répondre pareil, sucre et miel, puérilité et fausseté tout ensemble. . . . Personne ne trouvait ridicule son gazouillis, sa pétulance ménagère, tout le monde l’admirait, ses fils, ses belles filles, de s’être consacrée à l’éducation de ses enfants, au bonheur de son mari, on ne pensait pas qu’elle aurait pu vivre autrement. (1981: 136) [She commiserates maternally with me, makes excuses for me, doesn’t all that studying wear you out—it’s no wonder you

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haven’t time to clean things properly. I hate that insidious way of minding someone else’s business. Her indomitable niceness bothers me, it’s like a sticky trap, obliging me to answer the same way, all sweetness and light, puerility and fakery at the same time. How can I dare say anything? So even-tempered and agreeable . . . No one else finds her twittering or her domestic spriteliness ridiculous; everyone—her sons, her other daughters-in-law— admires her for having devoted herself to her children’s education and her husband’s happiness. It never occurs to anyone that she might have had a different life. (1995: 143–144)]

As time progresses in La Femme gelée, the protagonist starts to resemble more and more her mother-in-law’s portrait, especially insofar as learning how to maximize every waking minute of the day in order to accomplish more household tasks more quickly. But as Ernaux reflects on this system of time management, she asserts that it does not represent a “danse légère” (1981: 155) [“sprightly dance” (1995: 164)] for her as implied in relation to her mother-in-law’s housekeeping system, but rather “le pas de charge” or “le gallop ménager” (1981: 156) [“full tilt” and “stampeding” (1995: 164)] taken up in order to free an hour here or a block of time there for herself and her studies. The protagonist has effectively entered into the painting of conventional domestic order and seems swallowed up in its accompanying logic. Ernaux writes, “Pour qui pour quoi cet ordre, simplment s’il venait quelqu’un je n’aurais pas besoin de dire comme mes tantes, faites pas attention à la maison” (1981: 163) [“Why this tidyness? For whom? Simply so that if anyone were to drop by I wouldn’t have to say, like my aunts, please excuse the mess?” (1995: 172)]. But, the protagonist also recognizes and is frozen by the disillusionment and disappointment in such logic. She explains, “Toute mon agitation depuis le matin sept heures aboutissent à ce vide. Ça doit être l’heure où des femmes avalent des comprimés, se versent un petit verre ou prennent des trains pour Marseille. Le monde arrête” (1981: 163) [“I’ve been busy since seven in the morning to reach this void. This must be the time of day when women swallow pills, pour themselves a little glass, or take the train to Marseille. The world at a standstill” (1995: 172)]. As Brigitte once made the protagonist envision before, the protagonist once again sees the home as a maintenance trap of things. However, it is now an empty space of physical fatigue and a constant feeling of listening for the baby’s cry, the husband’s return, or a visitor’s knock at the door—far from her idealized domestic portrait of a home as a space of a shared, egalitarian pursuit of familial, intellectual, and professional goals as called for in Le Deuxième sexe.

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Thus, the third maternal portrait with which Ernaux leaves us is that of a young mother privately suffering as she is emotionally and ideologically caught between two domestic portraits—the normative middle-class portrait in which the couple maintains the conventional division of labor and 1950s’ housekeeping standards and the marginal working-class portrait in which the couple reverses the conventional division of labor and in which things are left alone with their dust and their wear. Furthermore, the protagonist is emotionally and ideologically caught between two maternal portraits—the normative middle-class representation of femininity as silent or voiceless, self-sacrificing, and willing to abandon professional and intellectual pursuits and the marginal working-class representation of femininity as outspoken, employed, and “wearing the pants in the family.” Similar feminine representations surface in Simone de Beauvoir’s writing, but the former is not associated with the working class but rather the intelligentsia of French society. Before moving onto the close reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s short story La femme rompue and a discussion of the re-hybridized speaking and gazing subject and ²⁄³ Space of expression in this short story, let us begin with some biographical background information and a cursory overview of her literary corpus and agendas.

Simone de Beauvoir Many scholars have compared some of Ernaux’s work with some of Simone de Beauvoir’s. Both women share a feminist desire to see the institution of marriage (and its attendant domestic and familial responsibilities) as grounds for equal sharing of domestic work and intellectual and professional pursuits in restructuring normative gender roles. Both women were also agrégées and were for a limited time professors: Ernaux of literature and de Beauvoir of philosophy. However, their individual approaches to writing differ greatly. De Beauvoir was deeply committed to a variety of writing forms, including the philosophical essay, the novel, drama, autobiography, travel writing, correspondence, newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, and interviews.9 Benefiting from a financial crisis in the family—her father having lost the family fortune and not being able to guarantee Simone’s marriage dowry— de Beauvoir’s parents turned her to education as an adolescent. She passed the agrégation de philosophie, which allowed her to earn a living through a few high school teaching positions. She also began writing and publishing. Her first novel, L’Invitée, appeared in 1943. Within two years following the release and success of this first text, de Beauvoir had become a leading intel-

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lectual figure in the post-Liberation culture of Paris, a fact often linked to the “intellectual fashionability of existentialism” at the time (Fallaize, 1998: 2). During this time, she worked very closely with Jean-Paul Sartre on his L’Etre et le néant, to which she was both intellectually and emotionally committed, even though she reportedly disagreed with certain elements of Sartre’s theory and reworked them when wanting to employ them in her own writing. Following the war, de Beauvoir decided not to return to teaching and opted to turn her pen to her left-wing political journal with Sartre, Les Temps modernes, and her writing. During the early to mid 1940s, she wrote a number of important philosophical essays which questioned a variety of ethnical and ontological problems within the phenomenological and existential traditions (i.e., the ethical problem of the individual’s relation to others and the situating of the individual as an ambiguous subject). In the second half of the 1940s, de Beauvoir became interested in the female condition and the autobiographical project. Wanting to write something autobiographical, de Beauvoir began asking herself “What has it meant to be a woman?”10 In attempting to answer this question, she wrote her groundbreaking essay, Le Deuxième sexe, which was considered “an onslaught on contemporary ideas about women and a founding text of the women’s movement in the second half of the twentieth century” (Fallaize, 1998: 3). The stormy reaction in the press to the release of this essay’s two volumes was overwhelming to de Beauvoir. The public’s reaction and the reactions from her friends and colleagues ranged from negative and condemning to positive and supportive. Much criticism focused on her frank discussion of female sexuality in the essay and obscured the political engagement of the text. Following the publication of Le Deuxième sexe, de Beauvoir became more politically active than previously before in her life. She celebrated the defeat of the French colonial presence in Vietnam and wrote about the French systematic use of torture on Algerians during the war with Algeria. Later, she became more active in the growing women’s and students’ movements of post-1968. An explicitly autobiographical phase in her writing came to fruition in the end of the 1950s with the publication of her Mémoirs d’une jeune fille rangée (1958) and led to subsequent autobiographical texts, which were all best sellers and widely popular in France. Finally, a decade later, de Beauvoir returned to the novel form in Les Belles Images (1966) and experimented with the short story form in La Femme rompue (1967). Her literary career ended with an account of the last ten years of Sartre’s existence and the publication of her correspondences to Sartre and Nelson Algren. Secondary criticism of de Beauvoir’s eclectic collection of texts varies widely among scholars and has quite often treated her work with antipathy.11

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Toril Moi argues, “Comparable French women writers are not treated in this way: nothing in the criticism of say, Simone Weil, Marguerite Yourcenar, Marguerite Duras or Nathalie Sarraute matches the frequency and intensity of virulence displayed by so many of Simone de Beauvoir’s critics” (1994: 75). Moi concludes that de Beauvoir is subject to such attacks because she claims to speak as an intellectual woman.12 Fallaize reads de Beauvoir’s commitment to engage in serious intellectual activity (and especially in philosophical discourse) as a “central challenge to patriarchy” (1998: 7) and suggests that this provides the reason for such “virulence” as Moi sees in the critical reaction to de Beauvoir’s work. Fallaize also takes into account the “unladylike” subjects—namely de Beauvoir’s treatment of sexuality—that rest at the heart of de Beauvoir’s work and proposes this as yet another reason for the difficult reception of and reaction to her work. Fallaize writes, “Beauvoir was so aware of the danger of being dismissed as a writer of ‘ladies’ books’ . . . that she was determined to underline her own distance from such parochial pursuits and stressed the universal, philosophical aspects of her work rather than the personal ones” (1998: 8). Fallaize asserts that de Beauvoir’s work “cannot be fitted into a tradition of French women’s writing and has largely been read against works by her male contemporaries” (1998: 8). However, de Beauvoir’s autobiographical works have received much more favorable critical response and more recent engagement. Scholars focusing on de Beauvoir’s autobiographical texts emphasize the relational nature of these texts. This critical optic or approach resembles somewhat Ernaux’s emphasis on the relationality in her corpus of work, as outlined earlier in this chapter. Scholars examining de Beauvoir’s autobiographical texts very often concentrate on the construction of relationships within de Beauvoir’s narratives; in particular Simone’s relationships with her father, her mother, her childhood friend Zaza, and Sartre. Concerning de Beauvoir’s novels, some scholars have shown a tendency to underline the relationship between the text and the reader, which is also at the heart of de Beauvoir’s fictional enterprise.13 Other scholars have preferred to examine de Beauvoir’s novels in relation to her philosophical essays, thus reading the narratives as illustrations or a playing out of de Beauvoir’s philosophical theories.14 According to Fallaize, “later studies [of de Beauvoir’s novels] tended to be thematic, focusing on death, nature, and politics” (1998: 13) and have discussed her novels “in light of Le Deuxième sexe” (1998: 13) or “in the context of new feminist debates” (1998: 13). Moreover, recent treatment of de Beauvoir’s novels and short stories have drawn on psychoanalysis in examining the language used, the formation of identities witnessed, and the writing process (specifically the role of memory played therein) as textualized

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in these primary texts.15 It is through these last perspectives that de Beauvoir and Ernaux share several discursive commonalities. A brief discussion on this matter will enrich our close reading of de Beauvoir’s La femme rompue and her multifarious and multi-sited protagonist in this story.

‘LE FIL CONDUCTEUR’ QUI ME LIE À BEAUVOIR De Beauvoir and Ernaux share no common familial, French geographical, or social backgrounds, with de Beauvoir having been born into the Parisian haute bourgeoisie social milieu thirty-some years before Ernaux. Yet, their autobiographical texts and their representations of and writings on the maternal serve as points of connection in comparing their literary work. Existing research has primarily focused on analyzing certain themes common to both their writings (e.g., transgressions, sexual taboos, women’s awakening to social injustices and inequalities, women’s corporality, and their mothers’ deaths). Scholars have often compared de Beauvoir’s Mémoirs d’une jeune fille rangée with Ernaux’s Une femme by focusing on the mother-daughter rupture during the authors’ adolescent years.16 In relation to de Beauvoir’s Une mort très douce and Ernaux’s Une femme and Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, scholars have also analyzed the quasi-clinical way in which both women writers present, describe, and recount their mothers’ existences at the end of their lives—especially the representations of their mothers’ aged bodies—and their eventual deaths.17 The most striking comparison made between these authors, however, stems from Ernaux’s own thoughts as shared in the presentation that she had planned to give in 2000 at the Eighth International Simone de Beauvoir Society Conference. Although unable to deliver her presentation at the actual event, she sent to the society the text of the remarks she was planning to make with permission to publish them in the Simone de Beauvoir Studies under the title of “Le fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir.” In this brief text, Ernaux discusses the impact that de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe and a few other texts (Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, La Force de l’âge, Les Mandarins, L’Invitée, Une mort très douce, and Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté) had on her conception of the heterosexual couple in theory and in social and personal practice and on her own literary work. Ernaux writes in this text that when she thinks of the effect Le Deuxième sexe had on her, “c’est l’image mythique du fruit de l’arbre de la connaissance mangé par Eve qui s’impose à moi: la clarté aveuglante d’un désenchantement du monde, la lumière libératrice de la connaissance” (2000: 2) [“it’s the mythical image of the fruit from the tree

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of knowledge eaten by Eve that imposed itself on me: blinding clarity of a disenchantment of the world, a liberating light of knowledge” (my translation)]. This is an interesting insight into their takes on the sociological situation of women in twentieth-century metropolitan France. We will pause briefly to take a closer look at Le Deuxième sexe before continuing our discussion of de Beauvoir’s influence and impact on Ernaux. Much literary, sociological, and philosophical criticism exists on de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe. These readings often differ depending on the academic nature or discipline of the scholar, but one of the common points of connection between these readings is on de Beauvoir’s understanding of the status of women in Occidental societies. These readings focus on how women’s status, in de Beauvoir’s view, is opposed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “universal” existentialist human condition, which states that all human beings are born with the freedom (and burden) of making their own decisions. Although debates continue concerning de Beauvoir’s role and influence in Sartre’s work and vice-versa, the fact that Le Deuxième sexe challenges Sartre’s existentialism remains in the forefront of much feminist criticism on their work. In Le Deuxième sexe, de Beauvoir denies that she and all women have access to the instruments of Sartrean existentialism.18 Feminist scholars assert that de Beauvoir blocks Sartre’s central argument that contingency and freedom of choice are available to everyone in face of an open situation.19 Instead, de Beauvoir argues that women face “a destiny, a necessity, a limited range of roles and figures [young girl, adolescent, lesbian, married woman, mother, prostitute, and servant] in the closed chamber of history’s conspiracy against her” (Imbert, 2004: 14). In the two volumes of Le Deuxième sexe, de Beauvoir presents a female consciousness that takes into account her historical and social situation. She shows how this female consciousness in normative social practice succumbs to “an oppressive relation that gives her second place, supposing [that] it [first] does not cast her down into nothingness or turn her into a thing” (Imbert, 2004: 16), which in many social instances is a likely threat. In ‘Le fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir, Ernaux describes the climate in 1949 French society (when de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe appeared) as a total opacity on women’s condition (e.g., traditional values [religion, marriage, the family] governed society and the “union libre” was considered scandalous) (200: 2). Ernaux shares in this essay that the image of her own mother, active shopkeeper enjoying her power, authority, and freedom— despising housekeeping chores—and who was convinced that women must have financial independence, occulted the reality of society’s workings at the time when she was an adolescent (200: 2). She suggests that Le Deuxième sexe

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allowed her as a young adult to re-read her adolescence and to situate herself as a woman in French society. She feels that this unveiling of the feminine condition as presented in de Beauvoir’s text was somewhat frightening, but also profoundly liberating, and opened on “la voie à une prise en main de ma propre vie” (2–3) [“an avenue to taking charge of my own life” (my translation)] for Ernaux. Ernaux makes specific reference to Le Deuxième sexe at two conflicting moments in La Femme gelée—once around the middle of the text when she decides to prioritize her academic goals over family and then later when presenting her newlywed life and the third maternal and domestic portraits. In the first reference, Ernaux writes, “Alors toujours les garçons. Le Deuxième sexe m’a fichu un coup. Aussitôt les résolutions, pas de mariage mais pas non plus d’amour avec quelqu’un qui vous prend comme objet” (1981: 103) [“So it’s still boys. De Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe is a real eye-opener. Prompt resolutions: neither marriage, not even love, with someone who sees me as an object” (1995: 109)]. In the last third of the text, after she and her husband marry and become the short-lived “young, modern, intellectual couple” sharing the domestic chores and continuing their academic and intellectual pursuits, Ernaux writes, “Qui parle d’esclavage ici, j’avais l’impression que la vie d’avant continuait, en plus serré seulement l’un avec l’autre. Complètement à côté de la plaque, Le Deuxième sexe!” (1981: 129) [“Where’s the slavery I’d read so much about? I have the feeling our life from before is simply going on in closer quarters, that’s all. The Second Sex? Completely off base!” (1995: 137)]. In brief, in Ernaux’s work, Le Deuxième sexe inversely confirmed (by initially thinking de Beauvoir got it wrong) a formative domestic model of quality that Ernaux desires to keep in marital practice. As we saw, of course, Ernaux comes to realize that de Beauvoir got it right about the conventional bourgeois institution of marriage. Andrea Veltman provides a very helpful and recuperative reading on de Beauvoir’s take on marriage in Le Deuxième sexe. Basing her reading on de Beauvoir’s dichotomy between transcendence and immanence, Veltman shows how Le Deuxième sexe critiques the continuation of gender inequities in the institution of marriage, specifically in the division of domestic work and not of marriage itself. As opposed to making the “easy” conclusion that de Beauvoir is dismissing marriage as an unjust social and religious institution in Le Deuxième sexe, Veltman asserts that de Beauvoir is actually dismissing the unjust traditional division of labor maintained within the normative institution of marriage. She arrives at this conclusion through de Beauvoir’s basing of traditional gender role discourses within the marriage on a dichotomy of transcendent and immanent acts. For de Beauvoir, the act of producing

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something durable that transforms or annexes the world, that contributes to the constructive endeavors of the human race, or that enables individual selfexpression (i.e., engaging in the arts or formal education) are transcendent acts that are often undertaken by the male in the marriage.20 Conversely, the act of producing nothing durable through which human beings move beyond ourselves or which simply perpetuates life or maintains the status quo (i.e., everyday labors like cooking and cleaning) constitute immanent acts and are traditionally assigned to the female in the marriage.21 Veltman suggests that de Beauvoir is not calling for the reader of Le Deuxième sexe to refuse marriage but rather asserts that the reader should transform marriage by challenging the normative marital divisions of domestic labor. Veltman asserts: Beauvoir’s existentialist ethnics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work. (2004: 121)

This notion of a restructuring or equalizing of the domestic tasks within the normative institution of marriage reflects Ernaux’s vision in La Femme gelée as well. As Veltman documents in her essay, Ernaux demonstrates in the portrait of what her marriage comes to be in Le Femme gelée—and Djebar raises throughout much of her writing—transcendent acts in a variety of social and cultural arenas have traditionally, socially, ideologically, or publicly been assigned systematically to men and immanent acts to women. In one form or another in their work, each of these women artists in this project argues for an equal sharing and recognition of transcendent and immanent acts between the sexes. Without this, each of these women artists seems to suggest that the home will continue to exclude specific histories of oppression and resistance, especially the repression of difference even within oneself. Thus, women will continue to reside diasporically in a state of “homelessness at home.” Neither a complete attack on nor a full defense of womanhood, de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième sexe ultimately calls to her women readers to recognize the separation of nature and culture and see how this formula has been mis/construed in domestic spaces and discourses. Ernaux shares in ‘Le fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir that even though she has heard criticisms of Le Deuxième sexe that suggest that de Beauvoir demonstrates “un dégoût du sexe féminin voisin de la misogynie” [“a disgust of the feminine sex nearing misogyny”] and a “refus de prendre en compte la maternité autrement qu’en termes de l’aliénation” (2000: 3) [“refusal to take

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up maternity as anything other than in terms of alienation” (my translation)], these readings would never damage or weaken in her eyes what remains fundamental in de Beauvoir’s text—the definitive separation of nature and culture and the demystification of the eternal feminine and the maternal image (2003: 3). Ernaux finds in Le Deuxième sexe an alternative discourse echoing the “feminine” example she saw in her mother and in her own upbringing: the traps laid by housekeeping chores and maternity, which are immanent acts, and the necessity for female financial independence (2003: 4). Ernaux found this financial independence later in life through her writing, a transcendent act. Although they may have seen similar alternative discourses to domesticity, their visions for literary discourses were quite different. In explaining the influence de Beauvoir’s writing had on her own writing, Ernaux states in ‘Le fil conducteur’ that she never took Simone de Beauvoir as a model (2003: 4). She explains that she, like de Beauvoir, considers literature to be an “engagement, un moyen d’action sur le monde, de lutte” (2003: 5) [“engagement, a means of action on the world, a means to struggle” (my translation)] but not a sacred thing (2003: 5), as de Beauvoir found literature to be. Ernaux suggests that for both of them, the enterprise of living and writing are inseparable (2003: 5), but that je suis convaincue que la forme, c’est-à-dire le choix de la structure du texte, des mots, une mise en question permanente d’un langage qui véhicule, de façon invisible, les hiérarchies, le sexisme, font partie intégrante de cette action sur le monde, constituent les moyens de cette recherché de la vérité et, à ce titre, doivent être travaillés, sans qu’il s’agisse pour autant d’esthétisme. (2003: 5) [I am convinced that the form, in other words the choice of the text’s structure and words, a putting into permanent question a language that conveys, in an invisible way, hierarchies, sexism, play an integral part in this action on the world, constitute the means to this sought-after truth and in this regard, must be worked, without it being so much a question of esthetics. (my translation)]

The aesthetics of writing, for Ernaux, are what specifically separate her writing process from de Beauvoir’s. She finds that de Beauvoir’s approach to writing “comme un apprentissage de techniques” (2003: 5) [“as an acquisition of techniques”] and “premier jet rapide, repris ensuite” (2003: 5) [“quick first draft, revisions following”] suggests an indifference to writing “comme matière” (2003: 4) [“as matter”]. For Ernaux, “writing as matter” resides in the relationship between language and identification. However, as Ernaux

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reveals in this essay as well as shows in La Femme gelée, de Beauvoir and Le Deuxième sexe clearly had a profound effect on her understanding of the feminine condition. Due to the references to de Beauvoir’s text and Ernaux’s treatment of domestic and marital gender roles in La Femme gelée, there resides an inherent desire to compare and contrast the feminine condition as represented in La Femme gelée and Le Deuxième sexe. This desire to compare and contrast representation of the feminine condition in Le Deuxième sexe and fictional texts by women writers also exists among readers of de Beauvoir’s “auto/ fiction.” Elizabeth Fallaize underlines this tendency in scholars’ analyses of de Beauvoir’s fiction, “The feminist credentials of Simone de Beauvoir’s fictional texts are sometimes assumed to be guaranteed by the fact that their author also produced The Second Sex, and indeed Beauvoir’s fiction is most usually read against her essay” (1998: 15). Although not as much secondary criticism specifically focuses on La Femme rompue as on Le Deuxième sexe, what does exist has quite often read the third short story (also bearing the same title as the collection) against Le Deuxième sexe. Let us pause to consider some background information concerning La Femme rompue before moving onto our close reading, so as to better contextualize our forthcoming discussion of de Beauvoir’s re-hybridized speaking and gazing subject and the ²⁄³ Space of expression from which she writes.

LA FEMME ROMPUE La Femme rompue is a collection of three short stories, each depicting the family lives and problems of three separate middle-aged women. The stories were first serialized over five issues of Elle magazine from October 19th to November 16th, 1967. The text was accompanied in the magazine by a series of illustrations of the story drawn by de Beauvoir’s sister, Hélène de Beauvoir, and by large photographs of the author herself. In this last volume of “fiction,” de Beauvoir composes three novellas, which are loosely associated to one another through the discursive themes of the feminine condition and female aging. The relationship of mother to children, a shared secondary theme, is also examined in each of the stories. Furthermore, in each of the novellas, de Beauvoir consistently employs a first-person narration either in the form of the diary or through direct speech, and “a woman’s voice is heard, uniquely or preponderantly” (Brosman, 1991: 93). Differing from Djebar’s and Ernaux’s use of the first-person subject pronoun speaking position in which the “I” speaks as a collective or in relation to the social, respectively, in

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each of de Beauvoir’s novellas, this woman’s voice is singular and somewhat ontological. However, as we shall see in this chapter—mainly through the initial publication of the three novels in a magazine periodical medium, we will find elements of de Beauvoir’s “speaking nearby” in these stories in a similar manner to Djebar and Ernaux in their respective first-person narratives. In the first novella, L’Age de discretion, de Beauvoir presents a sixty-yearold retired literature professor and active writer, mother to an independent son in his twenties, and wife to a sixty-something-year-old retired chemist. In this text, de Beauvoir reveals the unnamed protagonist’s process in coming to terms with and accepting her aging body, her aging husband, her maturing and newlywed son, her diminishing role as mother in her son’s life and in whose eyes she is now secondary to her daughter-in-law, and the unfavorable critical response of her most recently published literary work. In de Beauvoir’s second novella, Monologue, Murielle (the protagonist) recounts in a rather stream-of-consciousness-like style her twisted conceptions of her present and past conditions. This story presents a mother (Murielle) who has recently lost her daughter, Sylvie, to suicide. Murielle is estranged from her son and second husband (divorced from the first, who was Sylvie’s father) and on the verge of a complete mental and emotional breakdown. In this text, Murielle is encouraging her second and current husband and father of her son to allow the son to move back in with her, a request not being met with a favorable response from the current husband. La Femme rompue is the third and final short story in this collection of novellas. In this text, de Beauvoir recapitulates themes central to the other two novellas as well, including the fate of the financially dependant housewife, the consequences of overbearing and domineering mothers, female aging, and husband adultery. The entire “narrative” is presented in the form of the diary, and no conventional plot exists, per se. In this novella, Monique (the protagonist) is a forty-something-year-old housewife who has just learned that her husband of almost twenty-five years is currently involved with a younger, beautiful, and professionally employed divorcée. De Beauvoir presents Monique’s use of the diary as an attempt by Monique to evaluate objectively and accurately her marital situation in the hopes that the diary will help her to see how to recapture her husband’s love and salvage their marriage. As is the case with the other two protagonists from the other two short stories, de Beauvoir represents Monique as a domineering and oppressive mother. In this story, Monique is a mother of two daughters, one who has followed in her mother’s footsteps and leads a life of normative, bourgeois domesticity and the other who fled to New York to lead her own financially independent, professional, and single lifestyle. In this study, we focus on the third short story.

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In examining how femininity is (re)displayed through the home in La Femme rompue (the third short story) in this study, I consider two archetypal female portraits: the “cocue” middle-class housewife and the sophisticated and tempting mistress. Drawing on Ray Davison’s work, I wish to investigate the process of women’s identity formation vis-à-vis the home in this third novella. In Davison’s reading of La Femme rompue, he finds that de Beauvoir: takes a quasi-exhausted and, some would say, totally exhausted thematic—the married woman discovering her husband’s infidelity, the triangularity thereby created, the fragmentation and near dissolution of the woman under pressure—and manages to reanimate and redynamize it. (1998: 71)

He finds that de Beauvoir manages to revise this banal and trite scenario by “situating her fiction discreetly at the interface of her philosophical ideas, including her conceptions of independent and complicitous womanhood” (1998: 71). These conceptions in turn become politically, socially, and historically engaged discourses that challenge “freedom, fidelity, authenticity, sincerity, inauthenticity, and dependency” (Davison, 1998: 71). Moreover, these conceptions also raise the question of “power relations between the sexes” (Davison, 1998: 72). For Davison, the most effective stylistic tool in La Femme rompue stems from de Beauvoir’s use of the diary form. He suggests that, “Beauvoir felicitously uses the optical advantages of the diary form (Monique’s self-awareness, self-deception, evasion strategies and so forth) to pose the central question of Monique’s agency in her fate as victim of infidelity and eventual abandonment” (1998: 72). Scholars often concur on this reading of de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue, and Davison’s assertions put us on the path to understanding de Beauvoir’s re-hybridized speaking and gazing subject as well as her ²⁄³ Space of expression in this study. The general consensus in the critical scholarship on this short story is that de Beauvoir is very much wrapped up in the task of presenting Monique as the victim of her own in-authenticity and flight into emotional dependency.23 De Beauvoir’s use of the diary form transcends her “fictionalized” first-person narrative to stir the reader’s awakening to the normalizing discourses in operation around him or her. De Beauvoir’s end goal in awakening the reader to these normalizing discourses is to lead the reader to his or her more “authentic” being-in-the-world. As was the case with Ernaux, this objective entails an eventual revision of hegemonic gender roles in contemporary society and gives voice to a re-hybridized speaking subject residing in-between fixed languages, discourses, and ideologies.

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As opposed to pairing La Femme rompue with de Beauvoir’s philosophical discourses (i.e., Le Deuxième sexe) as Davison has done, Elizabeth Fallaize (1990) reads the text in comparison to the genres of women’s magazine short story writing and the “dime store” romance script (le roman de gare). She understands the importance of the diary form in La Femme rompue as playing right into these genres since the diary constitutes the narrative and provides the woman-centered focus and confessional tone of the women’s magazine short story or romance script (1990: 18). In this essay, Fallaize raises the point that de Beauvoir’s narrative and the women’s magazine short story and romance script all usually originate in a first-person account with the point of view belonging to the central female protagonist with whom the reader is encouraged to identify. As Fallaize outlines, these narrative modes often employ a confessional type of tone that is highly personal and intimate and usually take place in a contemporary setting. Fallaize also suggests that these genres generally focus on a conflict within the narrative that most often centers on love and its problems. Additionally, Fallaize finds that these genres draw on a strong emphasis on the family. And finally, Fallaize asserts that they most often represent the protagonist’s problems as routinely raised on a personal or individual level and not at all associated with social class or gender (1990: 18). All of these characteristics accurately correspond to La Femme rompue. Fallaize asserts that de Beauvoir draws upon these genre characteristics in a subversive manner in order to rouse the reader into seeing the complicity in Monique’s actions and thoughts in her own self-victimization. In other words, de Beauvoir tries to subvert the common characteristics of the women’s magazine or romance writing in La Femme rompue in order to demonstrate to her readership how women who blindly accept normative gender roles and assumptions play a large role in their own “inauthentic” existence. De Beauvoir asks her reading public to “lire entre les lignes” [“read between the lines”] and to work out the “hidden” meanings of La Femme rompue for themselves.24 However, by examining Elle reader responses to de Beauvoir’s serialization, scholars find that de Beauvoir’s metaphysical goal was not entirely realized. Fallaize states, “The rules of romantic fiction, which Beauvoir tried to bend to her own purposes, turn out . . . to be insidiously recuperative. But the structures of the story are not the only thing working against Beauvoir’s subversive enterprise. There is also the question of the readers” (1990: 21). Fallaize concludes that many of de Beauvoir’s Elle readers at the time suffered from the same blindness afflicting Monique in La Femme rompue. These readers identified with the heroine, attributed all virtues to her, and were astonished by Monique’s remaining attached to her adulterous husband (1990: 21). Although a more academic readership recognized the subversive

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qualities and agenda in La Femme rompue, the text failed to have the same existential impact on a more popular readership. The question concerning the reader’s recognition of particular qualities and objectives or agendas raises a slightly more uncommon but very pertinent reaction to de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue. In our contemporary theoretical challenges to the conventional tenets of “fiction” and “autobiography” and in our recognition that de Beauvoir wrote La Femme rompue and Les Belles images during a period in her life when she was also heavily engaged in undertaking her autobiographical project, some scholars see La Femme rompue as employing an autobiographical mode. Davison explains because Beauvoir so resolutely believed that Monique is a victim of herself and of dependency, and that she herself, Simone, has avoided these safe-same traps, as an authentic independent woman, this short story enables Beauvoir to talk about herself unconsciously in a manner that autobiography does not. In other words and paradoxically, because Beauvoir is so distanced in her conscious mind from Monique Lacombe, the victim, precisely because she does not think she is talking about herself, she does manage to talk about herself more interestingly than when she uses the direct autobiographical mode. (1998: 72)

Davison supports this argument by basing his reading on the Freudian notion of repression. He finds that de Beauvoir reverses the claims made about autobiography and fiction and simultaneously enhances the interpretative possibilities and vitality of this short story (1998: 72). Davison cites de Beauvoir’s claim in her Mon Expérience d’écrivain that the “role of the writer in general is to communicate ‘le sens vécu de l’être dans le monde’ ” (1998: 73) [“the lived meaning of the being in the world” (my translation)]. He asserts that fiction for de Beauvoir still “explores the real world and reveals it in its complexity” (1998: 74) and that for her, “Fiction is not to be solipsized in self-referentiality” (1998: 74), but he suggests that de Beauvoir paradoxically does this by speaking “in-between the lines” of the text. In effect, Davison’s assertion speaks to the very theoretical debates central to the critical discourses of lifewriting. The question is not whether La Femme rompue is “fiction” or “autobiography,” since these categorical labels of writing modes or genres no longer neatly exist independently. Rather, the question is how the personal affects the social in this work. In a manner similar to the way in which Ernaux’s personal transcends the social, de Beauvoir’s “speaking nearby” provides a useful mode through which to revise normalizing processes of patriarchal socialization through a first-person narrative.

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However, rather than blurring conventional genre boundaries as practiced by Djebar and Ernaux, de Beauvoir’s narrative works to subvert specific tropes appearing in conventional forms of writing. De Beauvoir centers La Femme rompue on the triangular relationship between Monique, Maurice (Monique’s husband), and Noëlie (Maurice’s mistress); and in doing so, de Beauvoir brings to the surface two female (and by extension maternal since both women are mothers) portraits. The first portrait is of Monique—the archetypal middle-class, oppressive and oppressed, housewife and mother. Monique freely admits that she has dedicated her life and identity to caring for her husband and daughters, Colette and Lucienne. Aside from a few girlfriends from the same social clique and the theater and the cinema, which Monique often attends at the beginning of the novella, Monique has no connection or responsibility to the world outside the walls of her home. She openly admits that since their marriage she has let her intelligence atrophy; that she no longer cultivates herself; and that the young student Maurice married who was impassioned by events, ideas, and books was very different from the woman she is today whose apartment walls construct her entire universe (1967: 210). Thus, this first maternal portrait is one of a middle-aged woman financially, emotionally, and psychologically dependent on her husband and children and who has for all intents and purposes trapped herself inside her personal domestic universe. She is facing and coping with bouts of depression, chronic hemorrhaging, constant paranoia and anxiety, a complete emotional breakdown, and a full identity crisis now that she and her husband are in the process of separation and her daughters have grown and left the home. The second portrait is of Noëllie—the archetypal cultivated, articulate, younger, attractive, enticing, and sophisticated mistress. She is divorced and a practicing lawyer in an important Parisian law firm. Although there are suggestions throughout the text from Monique and the other women of their social milieu that Noëllie has used her sexuality and sex to advance her legal career, de Beauvoir presents this information as speculative and rather symptomatic of the collective boredom and malicious intent of oppressed middleclass housewives (all of adulterous husbands) and their gossip over afternoon teas. It is only after eighteen months of the affair and after Maurice confesses it to Monique that Monique learns of Noëllie’s existence in Maurice’s life. Although Monique sees Noëllie as a manipulative, cold-hearted home wrecker who would drop Maurice in an instant for another man with better connections, Maurice constantly refutes these suggestions and defends Noëllie’s life choices and lifestyle. As Monique will discover at the end of the story, her over-protectiveness and coddling of their daughters, her inflated sense of

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domestic self-importance (ironically, she has employed a housekeeper to do the household cleaning), and her lack of professional occupation—all characteristics missing in Noëllie’s portrait—prove fatal in Maurice’s and eventually Monique’s own eyes. Throughout the novella, for better or worse, Monique constantly compares and contrasts herself to Noëllie. In comparing and contrasting these two portraits, de Beauvoir is effectively asking the reader to do the same with “her” (the assumed female Elle reader) own personal portrait. It is worth digressing for a moment to investigate a bit more the medium of the women’s magazine and its attendant relationship with its readers for this will enrich our close reading of La Femme rompue. Magazines are an endlessly popular medium whose appeal has not been diminished by all the technologies (from radio and film to television and the Internet) that have superseded them.25 Rosalind Gill summarizes that women’s magazines overwhelmingly share a number of important features.26 First, they tend to address readers as equals and friends and to adopt an intimate tone. Second, they are organized around the shared pleasures and labors of femininity. Third, they are invariably constructed in opposition to masculinity (focused on what women share by dint of being women). Fourth, they are also structured by implicit exclusions relating to age, race, sexuality, and class. And fifth, they adopt a language of individualism, with an emphasis on personal solutions at the expense of collective social or political struggle. Gill concludes that the various ideologies of femininity at play in women’s magazines “draw attention to the different versions of femininity on offer in different magazines” (2007: 183). To this end, Gill explains that one version of femininity may be organized around nation and tradition, the pleasures and difficulties of home, and success as a wife and mother; and the other focused on sexual relationships, beauty, and career success (2007: 183). Usually, one kind of magazine will posit one version of femininity (e.g., Martha Stewart Living for the “national and traditional” version of American femininity), whilst another magazine will construct another (e.g, Cosmo for the “sexually-active, beautiful, and career-oriented” version of modern femininity). Yet oft times, two versions of femininity (as well as many other variations) will appear in the same magazine, although one particular “type” will overwhelmingly dominate. Further, many magazines will also change significantly over time, as they reflect and adapt to shifts in cultural pursuits, trends, and interests as well as are affected by historical events, economic realities, and new ideologies. One of the most striking characteristics of the magazine medium that is pertinent to this chapter’s discussion of de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue is the first characteristic outlined by Gill: women’s magazines

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tend to address readers as equals and friends and to adopt an intimate tone. It is worth noting that this is often said about the diary form as well, although the intended diary “reader” is often imaginary, a higher power (i.e., “God”), or the author him/herself. This intimate and friendly tone, a diehard steadfast from the very beginning of the development of women’s magazines in the late nineteenth century, has underpinned many different versions of femininity over time. Women’s magazines (at least in several Anglophone cultures) offer survival skills to cope with the dilemmas of femininity at particular moments in time (Gill, 2007: 183). For example, they adopted a feminist tone in the 1940s during wartime, emphasizing independence and work outside the home. But in the 1950s, women’s magazines celebrated a return to family life and the virtue of the housewife by encouraging women to make their homes even cleaner and more inviting through the purchases of new consumer goods and domestic appliances (Gill, 2007: 183). In the 1960s and ’70s—the particular moment in time of the serialized publication of La Femme rompue in Elle magazine in France—romance was identified as the dominant theme, pervading nearly everything in popular culture and media.27 Gill asserts that an iconography of “great moments” of romance was found in all the stories, with images of “the proposal,” the “engagement ring,” and the “wedding day” that were particularly favored (2007: 184). Gill explains that during this period of time in mainstream women’s magazines, romance eclipsed sex (which was often portrayed as dirty or sordid) and instead was presented in terms of its social effects—the status of being part of a couple, paired with a handsome boyfriend, or able to flash one’s engagement ring (2007: 184). Angela McRobbie argues that the messages conveyed were relatively stable across issues—namely a girl has to fight to get and keep a man; she can never really trust another female unless the other is old and hideous; and yet, despite all of this, romance and being a girl are fun.28 Gill finds that today, this version of femininity would be “hard to find in magazines aimed at teenage girls [and young adult women]” and that “the code of romance has given way to a focus on pop, fashion, beauty and (celebrity) boy-watching” (2007: 185). Concerning today’s women’s magazines, Gill postulates that the most common version of femininity posits an increasing focus upon celebrity; a dramatic sexualization of the female body; an increased adoption of feminist registers of discourses that stress being in control and pleasing yourself; a focus on work outside as well as inside the home with attention placed upon activity, multitasking, and organization; and an increasing emphasis on (heterosexual) sexuality as a key focus of attention in order to please men and to fulfill oneself (Gill, 2007: 184).

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I must point out that both Gill and McRobbie have based their work on British, Canadian, and American women’s and teenage girls’ magazines; but as many of their samples included international magazines (i.e., Cosmo and Marie-Claire), it stands to reason that we can extend their readings (to a limited degree) to our context in this chapter of Elle magazine in France. And furthermore, as we shall see in subsequent discussion in this chapter, de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue clearly textualizes McRobbie’s observations of the messages conveyed in 1970s women’s and teenage girls’ magazines and would constitute similar “romance” tropes of which de Beauvoir makes use and thus which her Elle readers would have recognized. McRobbie identifies the “romance” trope of “a girl has to fight to get and keep a man,” which raises the notion of competition between women. Women’s magazines’ advice columns are riddled with inquiries and solutions on the topic, and much (if not all) of the content in women’s magazines is fraught with the subject (i.e., how to be more/less . . . in order to . . .). In La Femme rompue, competition between women surfaces most blaringly in the form of comparison. Let us now return to our discussion of this short story. Throughout the novella, for better or for worse, Monique constantly compares and contrasts herself to Noëllie. For Monique, this obsession to compare and contrast her qualities to Noëllie’s, the past to the present, her relationship with her daughters to Maurice’s, her relationship with Maurice to Noëllie’s, and her role as a mother to Noëllie’s drives her to the brink of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. In her desperate attempt to comprehend why Noëllie has become so important to Maurice, she feels compelled to pump the women of her clique by telephone and in person several times a day for information on Noëllie, she looks for advice in astrological guides, and she seeks character insight from a graphologist to whom she sends three writing samples—hers, Maurice’s, and Noëllie’s. In her obsession, she makes a mockery of herself in the eyes of her friends and in our eyes. Eventually, the manifestations of this obsession become physical (mainly her weight loss and chronic hemorrhaging) and begin affecting her quality of life (she remains in bed all day and stops bathing, eating, reading, listening to music, and attending the theater and cinema.) In essence, she stops living. At this point in the narrative, she resigns to her daughter Colette’s and Maurice’s pleas to see a psychiatrist. Although Monique begins to realize at certain fleeting moments here and there in the narrative that she may be at fault for her victimization, she remains ultimately blind to her “in-authenticity” (this is to say the notion that Monique is acting out in complicity with one of society’s and history’s limited roles bestowed upon women) and not remaining “true” to her person.

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The home in La Femme rompue works to shelter Monique from her being-in-the-world and fosters her “bad behavior.” It provides her with a plethora of excuses for not pursuing professional activity. It allows her to hide from outside responsibilities (transcendent acts) and absorb herself and her entire existence in domestic activities (immanent acts.) The problem arises, then, when she is no longer needed to perform these immanent acts. This is the condition in which we meet and come to know Monique. In an ironic manner, de Beauvoir presents the home and its associated activities and people, which have comprised and “protected” Monique’s entire adult existence and raison d’être, as the catalyst to her undoing in La Femme rompue. By shrugging off transcendent responsibilities, Monique has trapped herself inside a restrictive world of immanent acts destined for people who no longer need (nor desire) them. As we shall see, this irony plays out as well on the level of descriptive details concerning the setting in the text. Irony in La Femme rompue also stems from the rather empty portrait of the home. For a middle-class housewife who spends a great deal of time at home and whose whole universe rests within the walls of this home, it is quite striking that we have no explicit portrait of this home in the text. There are moments when Monique describes particular pieces of furniture or decorations found in the apartment (e.g., the Egyptian statuette, the fireplace, the kitchen table, the bed, and bedroom dresser), but de Beauvoir presents nothing in clear, concrete detail. Unlike Ernaux’s writing, in which many details of the home(s) and its/their objects adorn the text, de Beauvoir’s portrait of the home is quite sparse. Rather than the home and its objects diegetically entering into the narrative to the extent that they do in La Femme gelée, the home and its objects function more on a metaphorical level for the narrative of La Femme rompue. Very near the beginning of La Femme rompue, de Beauvoir presents the first portrait of the home. She writes: Que Paris est dur ! Même par ces moelleuses journées d’automne, cette dureté m’oppresse. Je me sens vaguement déprimée ce soir. J’ai fait des plans pour transformer la chambre des enfants en un living-room plus intime que le cabinet de Maurice et que le salon d’attente. Et je réalise que Lucienne ne vivra plus jamais ici. La maison sera paisible, mais bien vide. Surtout je me tourmente, à cause de Colette. Heureusement que Maurice rentre demain. (1967: 125) [How hard Paris is! Even on these balmy autumn days this hardness weighs me down. I feel obscurely low-spirited this evening. I

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At this point in the narrative, Maurice has not yet disclosed his affair with Noëllie to Monique. Maurice is away in Rome for a “research trip.” She is completely unsuspecting of what the very near future has in store for her, but her realization of the “empty nest” into which her home has changed foreshadows the “emptiness” which she will realize her life will become once Maurice shares his secret. Two entries later, still ignorant of Maurice’s affair and not expecting him home before midnight due to “lab work,” Monique once again describes in her journal the empty house upon returning home from the cinema. La fenêtre était noire. Je m’y attendais. Avant—avant quoi?— quand par extraordinaire je sortais sans Maurice, au retour il y avait toujours un rai de lumière entre les rideaux rouges. Je montais les deux étages en courant, je sonnais, trop impatiente pour chercher ma clé. Je suis montée sans courir, j’ai mis la clé dans la serrure. Comme l’appartement était vide! Comme il est vide! Evidemment puis qu’il n’y a personne dedans. Mais non, d’ordinaire, quand je rentre chez nous, je retrouve Maurice, même en son absence. Ce soir les portes s’ouvrent sur des pièces désertes. (1967: 127) [The window was black. I had expected it. Before—before what?—when by some extraordinary chance I went out without Maurice there was always a streak of light between the red curtains when I came back. I would run up the two flights of stairs and ring, too impatient to look for my key. This time I went up the stairs without running; I pushed my key into the lock. How empty the apartment was! How empty it is! Of course it is, since there is no one in it. No, that’s not it: usually when I come home I find Maurice here, even when he is out. This evening the doors open onto wholly empty rooms. (1969: 129)]

This description also functions to foreshadow the end of the text, when Monique returns from her trip to New York visiting Lucienne and knows that Maurice has moved out and taken all of his things to his new separate apart-

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ment. When Maurice does finally disclose his secret to Monique, the home takes on a new dimension in both a literal and metaphorical way. At a later point in the narrative, after Maurice divulges his affair to Monique, Maurice and Noëllie leave for a weekend trip together. Monique tries to pass the time on her own by seeing a double Bergman feature at the cinema, knitting, listening to music, lighting a fire in the fireplace (1967: 150), but she finds no comfort in these activities. At the close of the entry, she torments herself by wondering how Maurice and Noëllie are spending their time together. She laments on snippets of happy memories with Maurice as they flash through her mind. She begins to lose her grip on reality. De Beauvoir writes: Je suis fatiguée de me poser des questions, d’ignorer les réponses. Je perds pied. Je ne reconnais plus l’appartement. Les objets ont l’air d’imitations d’eux-mêmes. La lourde table du living-room: elle est creuse. Comme si on avait projeté la maison et moi-même dans une quatrième dimension. Je ne serrais pas étonnée, si je sortais, de me trouver dans une forêt préhistorique, ou dans une cité de l’an 3000. (1967: 152) [I am tired of asking myself questions and not knowing the answers. I am out of my depth. I no longer recognize the apartment. The things in it have the air of imitations of themselves. The massive table in the sitting room—it is hollow. As though both I and the house had been projected into a fourth dimension. If I were to go out it would not astonish me to find myself in a prehistoric forest, or in a city of the year 3000. (1969: 153)]

For Monique, the home has always kept things faithfully in perspective. She found a purpose for her adult life in her domestic and maternal responsibilities played therein. The home (and the people living inside) reassured and “authenticated” her lifestyle and her identity. She has always depended on them, and at this point in the narrative, she still depends on them. She never realized and still does not realize the importance of developing an identity and lifestyle that exist outside the home and beyond an immediate close circle of family members and social clique (i.e., the importance of having professional employment). Now that Maurice and her daughters only minimally desire Monique’s domestic and maternal roles, Monique begins to feel betrayed by the home. She is lost in another dimension, as if the rug has been pulled out from under her feet. She is not able to look beyond the home and what she perceives as the needs of her family to realize that she has created these “false”

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needs for her own benefit. De Beauvoir loans her voice in the narrative to Maurice in driving this point home. During an argument between Monique and Maurice at a later point in the narrative concerning Monique’s and Noëllie’s opposite manners of raising their daughters, de Beauvoir implies through Maurice’s silence that Monique exploits her “mother hen” behavior to gain a stronger sense of self-importance since she had no opportunity to earn one through a profession. The argument begins as Monique shares with Maurice what one of her friends told Monique about the relationship Noëllie has with her daughter—that Noëllie’s daughter complains of being neglected by her mother. Toutes les petits filles se plaignent de leur mère, à cet âge-là: rappelle-toi tes difficultés avec Lucienne. En fait Noëllie ne néglige pas du tout sa fille. Elle lui apprend à se débrouiller seule, à vivre par elle-même, et elle a bien raison. Ça, c’était une pierre dans mon jardin. Il s’est souvent moqué de mon côté mère poule. Nous avons même eu quelques disputes làdessus./ -Ça ne la gêne pas cette petite qu’un homme passe des nuits dans le lit de sa mère?-L’appartement est grand et Noëllie fait très attention. D’ailleurs elle ne lui a pas caché que depuis son divorce il y a des hommes dans sa vie./ -Drôles de confidences d’une mère à sa fille. Franchement tu ne trouves pas ça un peu choquant?/ -Non./ -Je n’aurais jamais imaginé d’avoir ce genre de rapports avec Colette et Lucienne. Il n’a rien répondu; son silence impliquait clairement que les méthodes d’éducation de Noëllie valaient bien les miennes. J’en était blessée: il est trop clair que Noëllie se conduit de la manière qui l’arrange le mieux, sans se soucier de l’intérêt de l’enfant. Alors que j’ai toujours fait le contraire. (1967: 176–177) [At that age all girls complain of their mothers: remember your difficulties with Lucienne. In fact Noëllie does not neglect her daughter at all. She is teaching her to manage by herself and to stand on her own feet, and she is quite right to do so. This was a jab at me. He has often made fun of my hen-and-chicks attitude. We even had a certain number of disagreements over it./ -It doesn’t worry the child that a man should spend the night in her mother’s bed?/ -It is a big apartment, and Noëllie takes great care. Besides, she does not hide from her that since her divorce there are men in her life./ -Quaint confidences from a mother to a daughter. Frankly, don’t you find that a trifle shocking?/ -No./ -I can’t see myself ever having a relationship of that kind with Colette or Lucienne. He made no reply; his silence made it quite plain that he thought Noëllie’s ideas on the bringing up of

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children were quite as good as mine. That wounded me. It is only too obvious that Noëllie behaves just as she chooses, without the least care for the interests of the child. Whereas I always did the very opposite. (1969: 178)]

In loaning her voice textually to Maurice (and through his silence) in this instance in La Femme rompue, de Beauvoir appears to be “speaking nearby,” but from a very curious subject position. Rather than disguising her individual voice in a timeless chorus of female oral tradition (as in Djebar’s writing) or through a transpersonal I (as in Ernaux’s writing), de Beauvoir communicates her message from a speaking, authoritative male’s position. This fact functions on the levels of irony and subversion in La Femme rompue. This proves ironic in that a male speaking position is correcting Monique in the text for female behavior to which de Beauvoir theorized women were socially and historically limited by hegemony. Unlike the middle-class literature, to which Ernaux alludes in La Femme gelée, that revered and praised the bourgeois wife and mother’s dedication and self-sacrifice to the home and domestic and maternal acts, de Beauvoir paints a middle-class portrait in La Femme rompue that favors women’s pursuit of professional activity over maternal methods and behavior. Moreover, she subversively suggests this reading by engaging an authorized male speaking position that challenges the traditional hegemonic discourse on women’s role in the home and family. Furthermore, many of Maurice’s thoughts and opinions are echoed later in the text by Lucienne, Monique’s younger daughter living independently in New York. This echoing results in the creation of a re-hybridized speaking subject in La Femme rompue that shifts gender and age. This re-hybridized speaking subject not only subverts traditional speaking positions through inversion but also creates new speaking spaces and speaking subjects (“male-female,” “dominant-marginal”) within the ²⁄³ Space (in-between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses), as we will see at the end of the narrative, for future generations. Additionally, this argument between Maurice and Monique concerning maternal roles poignantly showcases Monique’s obsession to compare and contrast herself with Noëllie at any given opportunity on any given subject. Monique takes Maurice’s defense of Noëllie’s methods as a direct and personal attack. She refuses to accept that Noëllie’s methods are superior to hers and states, “Je suis sure que Noëllie n’est pas une bonne mère. Une femme aussi sèche, aussi froide, ne peut pas donner à sa fille ce que j’ai donné aux miennes” (1967: 178) [“I am sure Noëllie is not a good mother. So hard and cold a woman cannot possibly give her daughter what I gave mine” (1969: 180)].

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In response to this argument and in her effort to gain ground over Noëllie and (in her mind) Noëllie’s influence on Maurice, Monique decides to fight on her own terrain (1967: 178): domesticity. She spends the next day arranging everything in the armoires, putting away all of the summer things and pulling out all of the winter clothes, and makes an inventory of items needing replacing—some of Maurice’s socks, sweaters and pajamas, and a pair of slippers (1967: 178). Monique finds comforting the well-stocked closet in which everything has its place (1967: 178). De Beauvoir writes, “Les piles de fins mouchoirs, de bas, de tricots m’ont donné l’impression que l’avenir ne pouvait pas me faire défaut” (1967: 178) [“The heaps of delicate handkerchiefs and stockings and lingerie gave me the feeling that the future could not possibly let me down” (1969: 180)]. However, as the following day will reveal, these immanent acts go unnoticed by Maurice, as he has a larger bone to pick with Monique concerning her gossiping with and pumping for information from Noëllie’s mutual acquaintances. Thus, once again Monique feels betrayed by the home but still does not realize (in de Beauvoir’s eyes) that she is the one responsible for her current condition. Almost two months following this entry, in a subsequent entry, Monique begins to see her responsibility for her current condition. It is during the winter holiday season, and Maurice and Noëllie have left for a ten-day ski vacation in the Alps. Monique is home alone and has hit the lowest point in her depression. She has given the housekeeper a vacation and passes her time swallowing alcohol, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills (1967: 220). When she feels a bit better, she tries to read a detective novel (incidentally, another ironic detail in the narrative, as Monique begins her journal in an attempt to uncover the “truth” of her condition, to which she remains ultimately blind) or listen to the radio (1967: 22). A quel degré de laisser-aller on peut atteindre, quand on est entièrement seul, séquestrée! La chambre pue le tabac froid et l’alcool, il y a des cendres partout, je suis sale, les draps sont sales, le ciel est sale derrière les vitres sales, cette saleté est une coquille qui me protège, je n’en sortirai plus jamais. (1967: 220) [How far one can let oneself go, when one is entirely alone and shut in! The bedroom stinks of stale tobacco and spirits; there is ash everywhere; I am filthy, the sheets are filthy, the sky is filthy behind the filthy windows: this filth is a shell that protects me; I shall never leave it again. (1969: 223)]

The narrative never gives any indication that Monique has handled any of the cleaning responsibilities and conversely gives the impression that the

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housekeeper makes daily visits to the house to take care of these tasks. The narrative suggests that Monique is responsible for the cooking, shopping, and arranging of household items, furniture, and clothing—de Beauvoir never once mentions laundry in the text—and of course alludes to her past maternal duties and ever present interferences into Colette and Jean-Pierre’s (Colette’s husband) life (especially during Colette’s flu-like illness). Therefore, there is no impression in the text that Monique should clean up the ashes and “dirt” residing in the bedroom, but there is every suggestion in the text that Monique usually takes pride in her home and highly esteems its state or condition. Therefore, de Beauvoir is again using the home to function metaphorically in La Femme rompue, but this time she has it reflect the mess Monique has made of her life. In a manner quasi-reminiscent to the protagonist of La Femme gelée’s discovery through the eyes of another of the degree of “saleté” residing in her home(s), Monique makes a similar discovery. After a few days pass of Monique not visiting Colette nor inviting her over to visit, Colette becomes worried and pays Monique a visit. Elle a sonné et tambouriné avec tant de violence que je lui ai ouvert. Elle a eu un air stupéfait que je me suis vue dans ses yeux. J’ai vu l’appartement, et j’ai été stupéfaite aussi. Elle m’a forcée à faire ma toilette et une valise, et à venir m’installer chez elle. La femme de ménage remettra tout en état. (1967: 224) [She rang and beat on the door with such force that I let her in. She looked so shocked and amazed that I saw myself through her eyes. I saw the apartment, and I too was stupefied. She made me wash and do my hair and pack a bag and go and stay with her. The daily woman will put everything straight. (1969: 226)]

Although Monique does not reside in the ignorant bliss of not knowing that the state of her home is socially “unacceptable,” as was the case for Ernaux’s protagonist, the effect of another’s gaze carries the same weight in La Femme rompue as it does in La Femme gelée. Both women even use the same term, “stupéfait/stupefaction,” in describing another’s reaction (and their reaction to this other) in viewing the state of their homes. Whereas the gaze functions in La Femme gelée to make Ernaux’s protagonist see the house as a “maintenance trap of things,” the gaze functions in La Femme rompue to make Monique begin to see the house as something beyond which to move and from which to disassociate her identity. Additionally, the gaze also functions in La Femme rompue to introduce a spectator position that fluidly shifts age and gender.

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A couple of weeks following this entry and Colette’s discovery of her mother’s state and condition of her childhood home, Diana (one of Monique’s friends) pays a visit. Monique explains that she did not have the strength or energy to turn Diana away, so she allowed Diana to enter. Diana’s immediate reaction is that Monique has lost weight and seems very fatigued (1967: 231). Monique immediately sees the error in opening her door to Diana and allowing her to enter. She realizes that Diana has just come out of curiosity and meanness (1967: 232). Thus, the effects of the gaze (as also felt in La Femme gelée) also function to humiliate and ridicule the protagonist in La Femme rompue. The gaze successfully brings about self-awareness in both positive and negative ways. However, the gaze also shifts gender, as four days following Diana’s visit, Monique sees herself from Maurice’s spectator position. De Beauvoir begins this entry with: Quel courage inutile, pour les plus simples choses, quand le goût de vivre est perdu! Le soir, je prépare la théière, la tasse, la casserole, je dispose chaque chose à sa place pour que, le matin, la vie reprenne avec le moins d’effort possible. Et c’est quand même presque insurmontable de sortir de mes draps, de réveiller la journée. Je fais venir la femme de ménage l’après-midi pour pouvoir rester au lit autant que je veux le matin. Il m’arrive de me lever juste quand Maurice rentre à une heure pour déjeuner. Ou s’il ne rentre pas, juste quand Mme. Dormoy fait tourner la clé dans la serrure. Maurice fronce le sourcil quand je l’accueille à une heure en peignoir, décoiffée. Il pense que je lui joue la comédie du désespoir. Ou que du moins je ne fais pas l’effort nécessaire pour “vivre correctement” la situation. Lui aussi il me serine: -Tu devrais voir un psychiatre. (1967: 233–234) [What useless energy you need for even the simplest things, when all liking for life is gone! In the evening I get the teapot, the cup and the saucepan ready; I put each thing in its place so that life may start in the morning with the least possible effort. And even so it is almost more than I can bring myself to do, creeping out of my bed, starting the day. I get the daily woman to come in the afternoon so that I can stay in bed as long as I like in the morning. Sometimes I get up just as Maurice is coming home to lunch at one o’clock. Or if he does not come back, then at the very moment Mme. Dormoy turns the key in the lock. Maurice frowns when he sees me at one o’clock in a dressing gown and with my hair undone. He thinks I am putting on a desperation act for his benefit. Or at least that I am not making the necessary effort “to

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live the situation decently.” He too tells me over and over again, -You ought to ses a psychiatrist. (1969: 236)]

Although in Maurice’s gaze Monique does not appear to see herself as the object of ridicule and nastiness, as was the case with Diana’s gaze, she sees herself as the object of disappointment. This sensation only fuels her obsession to press others for more information. She overwhelms her daughters (especially Colette) with endless questions concerning their impressions of Monique’s and Maurice’s marriage and relationship, Monique’s maternal habits, and their relationship with Monique. The thought of her life, identity, and existence culminating in failure and disappointment sets her beside herself. Yet, it is through the other’s gaze that Monique comes to recognize her current state of “bad faith.” The gaze enables her at the end of the narrative to be able to move beyond this condition and to take responsibility for her existence and identity. When Monique returns to Paris after Maurice has moved out all of his belongings to his new apartment, de Beauvoir closes the narrative with the last diary entry, in which she writes: Voilà. Colette et Jean-Pierre m’attendaient. J’ai dîné chez eux. Ils m’ont accompagnée ici. La fenêtre était noire; elle sera toujours noire. Nous avons monté l’escalier, ils ont posé les valises dans le living-room. Je n’ai pas voulu que Colette reste dormir: il faudra bien que je m’habitue. Je me suis assise devant la table. J’y suis assise. Et je regarde ces deux portes: le bureau de Maurice; notre chambre. Fermées. Une porte fermée, quelque chose qui guette derrière. Elle ne s’ouvrira pas si je ne bouge pas. Ne pas bouger; jamais. Arrêter le temps et la vie. Mais je sais que je bougerai. La porte s’ouvrira lentement et je verrai ce qu’il y a derrière la porte. C’est l’avenir. La porte de l’avenir va s’ouvrir. Lentement. Implacablement. Je suis sur le seuil. Il n’y a que cette porte et ce qui guette derrière. J’ai peur. Et je ne peux appeler personne au secours. J’ai peur. (1967: 250–251) [There. Colette and Jean-Pierre were waiting for me. I had dinner at their apartment. They brought me here. The window was dark: it always will be dark. We climbed the stairs; they put my bags down in the sitting room. I would not let Colette stay and sleep here: I just have to get used to it. I saw down at the table. I am sitting there now. And I look at those two doors—Maurice’s study, our bedroom. Closed. A closed door: something that is watching behind it. It will not open if I do not stir. Do not stir: ever. Stop the flow of time and of life. But I know that I shall move. The

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In this citation, we see that once again the home is transformed. The walls that originally constituted her universe have transformed into a door that will slowly open upon a new identity and existence (her being-in-the-world). Although the apartment is still physically empty behind this door, it is no longer the past that resides therein but rather her future. In keeping with her existentialist philosophies of living, de Beauvoir completes Monique’s portrait by giving the impression that she will look to the future instead of to the past, as she has done throughout the entire narrative, and live in the present making decisions and accepting responsibility and accountability for them. Through the various portraits of femininity and speaking and gazing positions created in this narrative, de Beauvoir clearly illustrates how women’s subjectivity is multiple and hybrid and firmly situated inside a contact zone of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox. Moreover, we see how in this contact zone or ²⁄³ Space of first-person literary enunciation, imperial and diasporic legacies function, clash, and converge across and within indigenous social class and gender borders. As we previously established, these discursive and technical commonalities predominantly figure in Ernaux’s work as well.

Conclusion As we have come to see in this chapter, whether the protagonist is a “frozen” or “broken or dumped” woman in their respective narratives, both protagonists appear disappointed in and by conventional gender roles and disillusioned by their normative discourses. Their homes—seen either as a maintenance trap of things that add countless demands for immanent acts or as an entire “universe” sheltering the protagonist from the responsibility of “outside” transcendent acts—become politically and socially charged transnational spaces of contention on which hybrid seeing and speaking subjects from multiple perspectives descend in order to transform them into new re-hybridized spaces or positions of female spectatorship and authorship from within. In the following chapter, we will again see domestic spaces as politically and socially charged locations of contention, but we will discover how the performance of immanent domestic acts may lead to transcended

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expressions of female identity and feminine subjectivity that move beyond questions of “in/authenticity,” as seen in this chapter, to deal more directly with more “inclusive” transnational portraits of multiplicitous female gender constructions in Raja Amari’s and Coline Serreau’s filmmaking.

Notes 1. Chantal Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Press,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 376. 2. Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), 193. 3. Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, WI: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 105. 4. Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography,” Differences 6.1 (1994), 1–27; and Paul John Eakin, How our Lives Become Stories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986). 5. Bethany Ladimer, “Cracking the Codes: Social Class and Gender in Annie Ernaux,” Chimères 26 (2002), 53–70. 6. Ladimer, Cracking the Codes, 56. 7. Lyn Thomas, Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience (New York, NY: Berg, 1999), 10. 8. Claire-Lise Tondeur, “Entretien avec Annie Ernaux,” French Review 68.3 (1995), 37–44. 9. Elizabeth Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), 1. 10. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 3. 11. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 7. 12. Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), 73–92. 13. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 12. 14. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 13. 15. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 13. 16. Monika Boehringer, “Donner la vie, donner la mort: ‘L’amère écrite’ chez Simone de Beauvoir et Annie Ernaux,” Dalhousie French Studies, 64 (2003), 13–23. 17. Liliane Lazar, “A la recherché de la mère: Simone de Beauvoir et Annie Ernaux,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 16 (1999–2000), 123–134; and Catherine R. Montfort, “La Vieille Née: Simone de Beauvoir, Une mort très douce, and Annie Ernaux, Une femme,” French Forum 21.3 (1996), 349–364. 18. Claude Imbert, “Simone de Beauvoir: A Woman Philosopher in the Context of her Generation,” in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2004), 3–21.

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19. Imbert, Simone de Beauvoir, 14. 20. Andrea Veltman, “The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage,” Hypatia 19.3 (2004), 121–143. 21. Veltman, The Sisyphean Torture of Housework, 123. 22. Catherine Savage Brosman, Simone de Beauvoir Revisited (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1991). 23. Elizabeth Fallaize, “Resisting romance: Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed and the romance script,” in Contemporary French Fiction by Women, eds. Margaret Atack and Phil Powrie (Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990), 18. 24. Ray Davison, “Simone de Beauvoir, La Femme rompue,” in Short French Fiction: Essays on the short story in France in the twentieth century, ed. J. E. Flower (Exeter, UK: Exeter Univ. Press, 1998), 71–88. 25. Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007). 26. Gill, Gender and the Media, 183. 27. Gill, Gender and the Media, 184. 28. Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: from ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’ (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1991).

CHAPTER 3

Creating Domestic Landscapes and Soundscapes with Raja Amari and Coline Serreau

Our close readings and discussion in Chapter Two concentrated on Ernaux’s and de Beauvoir’s agendas to re-frame difference in the social constructions of femininity in mid-to-late-twentieth-century metropolitan French society. We have seen how they deterritorialized both “marginality” and “dominant” by challenging “imperial” modes of thought and binary structures with regard to the “feminine” through a deconstruction of home and homemaking or housewifery. They revealed how these institutions and categories of identities exist as constructed ideologies and positionings that serve hegemony and reify the “nation.” The project of reconfiguring understanding of the SelfOther divide in contemporary women’s lifewriting of France underpins all of the analyses in Chapter Two. Whether victims of the perilous side effects of social class mobility or living in-authentically, we saw how Ernaux’s and de Beauvoir’s protagonists allowed their homes to repress difference within themselves (i.e., their inabilities to perform gender beyond the limits of social norms), which resulted in their states of frozenness or brokenness. From the perspective of a “homelessness at home” and the trope of “sifting through life experience,” we recognized in La Femme gelée and La Femme rompue the processes by which these protagonists began to recognize the need to re-form their identity and reconstruct their gender as something “other” than the monolithic representation of traditional or conventional discourses of femininity that surrounded them. We will elaborate on this line of critical inquiry in Chapter Three and will draw out more directly a discussion of the reconfiguring of understanding of the Self-Other divide. In this chapter, we will continue to explore how the diasporic space of home inflects transnational identity and transnational understanding of self and gender in contemporary 103

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women’s filmmaking of Tunisia and France via Raja Amari’s Satin rouge (2002) and Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2000). In Chapter Three, transnational refers again to the virtual intra-national borders between social class and sex within the homeland but also begins to open up a new exploration in this study of the international socio-cultural borders between Tunisia and France and Second and Third Cinemas. Let us first begin with a background look at Amari’s and Serreau’s filmmaking so that we may better contextualize our trans/national readings of their work and project; which is to say the manner in which their work signifies difference both across and within particularities of location and situation. As we saw in Chapter One, Assia Djebar entered into the cinematographic text and medium through a literary backdoor. This suggests that since she began her artistic endeavors first in the literary domain, the “scripts” (the poems, nursery rhymes, tales, shared accounts, and legends) occupy a prime importance and primary position in La nouba du Mont Chenoua. Yet Djebar also acknowledges that the cinematic text and the technical processes entrained in creating her films have strongly influenced the literary work she has since written. We may draw a related conclusion concerning the two filmmakers we will examine in this chapter, Raja Amari and Coline Serreau. All three artists share the same authorial presence in their filmmaking, as most readily marked in the writing credits as screenwriters to their films that they all hold. Neither Amari nor Serreau share with Djebar the practice of writing fiction, but Amari has written several critical reviews for an Algerian film journal and Serreau has written several plays for the theater. Thus, one may suggest that women’s discourses maintain a primal significance throughout Amari’s and Serreau’s work as well—especially in the form of female firstperson narration. We will lead off with Raja Amari and a cursory look at the Tunisian film industry and a few critical ideologies of nation and gender in contemporary Tunisian society before we begin to examine the re-hybridized subject position and ²⁄³ Space of expression in her work.

Raja Amari If Djebar entered into the cinematographic medium by a literary backdoor, then Amari entered it through a critical side door. Although not much secondary work exists on Amari in North America at the time of preparing this manuscript—due to her rather recent arrival to the realm of cinema—pieces of information exist here and there in cinematic secondary texts that purport to broaden spectators’ awareness of women filmmakers, especially postco-

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lonial women filmmakers. One such text informs us that before starting her training and studies at the famous FEMIS (L’Institut de Formation et d’Enseignement pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son) in Paris in 1994, she had spent much of the prior two years writing critical articles for the Tunisian cinematic magazine, Cinécrits, which was edited by the Association Tunisienne pour la promotion de la critique cinématographique.1 Again before her studies at La FEMIS, Amari earned a “Diplôme de langue et culture italiennes” from the Società Dante D’Alighieri in Tunis and a “Maîtrise de littérature et civilisation française (option Histoire de l’art)” at the Université de Tunis I (Gabous, 1998: 184). Adding to her eclectic academic background, Amari also earned a “Premier prix de danse” at the Conservatoire National de Musique et de Danse in Tunis. Based on these established varied interests in language, culture, literature, art history, dance, and film, I believe it fitting to state that the relationships between differing cultural, social, political, artistic, and ideological discourses (their contradictions, paradoxes, and overlaps) provide the foundation on which Amari builds her first feature-length film, Satin rouge (2002). Moreover, the tropes of gaze and voice resurface in Amari’s work and, as with Djebar’s cinema, they both again offer interesting insight into the relationships at play in Amari’s film. In recalling our discussion in Chapter One on Djebar’s postcolonial women’s cinema, we may ascertain that Amari is similarly using the cinematic medium to privilege women’s expression that forges a cinematic ²⁄³ Space of female authorship by first relying on conventional cinematic spaces or positions of female spectatorship. This is an important assertion, for the question of female spectatorship has proven and continues to prove essential to academic studies of Tunisian cinema and critical approaches to Amari’s filmmaking. A brief history on the topic of spectatorship in the Tunisian film industry is useful to our understanding of its role and importance in Amari’s cinema. Beginning with the very arrival of the cinema in Tunisia with the Lumière Brothers [who came to “chasser des images exotiques” (Gabous, 1998: 11) [“to chase or hunt exotic images”] very late in the nineteenth century and continuing through the following several decades, Tunisian women played only very marginal and stereotypical roles on screen and a non-role off screen. Tunisian women were not trained in operating cinematographic equipment in these early decades and appeared on screen only in the background, typically as if part of the setting or backdrop. Their appearance was usually exaggerated in the same folkloric fashion as described by Mark Alloua and Assia Djebar in their work on the images of Bedouin women and children in indigenous dress that were printed on the thousands of postcards

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that circulated throughout Western Europe from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century.2 Postcolonial film scholar Abdekrim Gabous describes these representations: on ne voyait point de visages de femmes tunisienne . . . taches floues, celles-ci paraissaient comme des masses indéfinissables . . . la femme tunisienne bougeait sur les écrans comme un fantôme aux contours mal définis . . . une bédouine enturbannée dans ses étoffes multicolores aux plis exagérés, croulant sous le poids de ses bijoux et atours, la tête en balluchon enveloppée dans des foulards fleuris. (1998: 12) [one was not seeing the faces of Tunisian women . . . blurry blobs, they seemed like indefinable masses . . . the Tunisian woman was moving on the screens like a ghost with a poorly defined silhouette . . . a Bedouin turbaned in her multicolored fabrics with exaggerated folds, collapsing under the weight of her jewelry and attire, her bundled head enveloped in flowery scarves. (my translation)]

Gabous reports that there were many incidences in these early decades of cinematic public screening in Tunisia of governmental officials banning Tunisian women from viewing films in public cinemas (1998: 20). Therefore, for the first fifty years or so of the Tunisian film industry’s presence in Tunisian society, Tunisian women’s relationship to the cinema was relatively non-existent, as they played little-to-no role in the film or in its production processes and were even denied spectatorship on many occasions. When Tunisian women did begin to enter into the Tunisian film industry, due largely to President Bourguiba’s progressive measures to educate women in Tunisia through a nationalized public education system in the 1960s, most Tunisian women working in the cinematic industry of their country found themselves in positions socially gendered as feminine (i.e., either cosmetic in nature—hairdressing, wardrobe, make-up—or clerical in nature—script girl, production secretary, archivist). Additionally, many Tunisian women found themselves caught in a double standard. Due to social conceptions of the home and domestic discourses of the time, women wanting to work within the cinematic industry who had families to take care of at home found themselves trapped into job descriptions that did not require them to shoot on location with the production crew that would relocate them outside their home city (Gabous, 1998: 38). The only exception to this general practice in more recent times was the need for Tunisian actresses who, for the sake of “authenticity,” were required to play important roles and

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therefore traveled with the production crew. However, it would appear that Tunisian women desiring to pursue acting careers in the 1960s and 1970s were faced with choosing between their cinematic careers or having a family and working in one of the aforementioned more “stationary” cinematic employment positions. Yet many feminist film scholars of Tunisian cinema underline the silver lining in this arrangement of employment possibilities. Due to the general nature and demands of editing in the cinematic industry, which involved a combination of artistic and clerical skills, multitasking abilities, and did not require one to travel with the on-site production crew, many Tunisian women were initially drawn to the field of cinematic editing. Gabous explains that within the Tunisian film industry even today, women dominate this editing aspect of the filmmaking process. One may argue that the editing process is what actually creates the cinematic text that the spectator views. The director may maintain the ultimate authority on any cinematic text, but the editor(s) (in conjunction with the director) must assemble the sequences of shots in creating the narrative. This assembling or sequencing, which underlines the entire film, most effectively gives the film its character and depth and establishes its mood and tone. It is the editing that makes a film “whole” and determines whether it “works” or not. Therefore, it appears that many Tunisian men and women working in the still ultimately male-dominated cinematic industry in Tunisia may find themselves in a unique position to challenge this industry through editing subversion. Many postcolonial Tunisian filmmakers and editors have often capitalized on this arrangement and these technical possibilities. In effect, through technical cinematic subversion, male and female directors and editors may raise questions in their work that open onto wider cultural and political change in Tunisian society and ideology. But what do we already know about Tunisian society and ideology? Many scholars (literary, sociological, historical, and anthropological) label Tunisia as a hybrid nation of a hybrid culture and hybrid people. Much of Tunisia’s hybridity can be traced through its history as a land under sovereign (and intermittently foreign) rule. In examining Tunisia’s hybridity, one must start with the obvious: Tunisia’s geographical position on the globe. Tunisia lies directly in the center of the North African coastline at an almost equal distance from the Nile Valley to the east and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The Mediterranean shoreline of Tunisia gives Tunisia two maritime faces—one which looks north toward Europe and a second which looks east toward the Middle East. These two maritime faces have been and continue to be critical in shaping Tunisia’s history and culture.

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Due to this geographical position, Tunisia has been open to foreign invaders and colonists from both the east (Andalusian Muslims) and the northeast (Italians, Sicilians, Maltese, and Turks) as well as from the northwest (Spaniards and French). In addition, during the times of the African slave trade, Sub-Saharan Africans were brought into Tunisia, thus adding an additional layer of cultural and ethnic hybridity. Tunisia manifests such a hybridity of ethnic diversity that anthropologists describe contemporary Tunisians as “an amalgamation of many ethnic groups” (Perkins, 1986: 5). In addition to the aforementioned ethnic groups, one must also include the indigenous North Africans (the Berbers) and Jews. These ethnic groups (sometimes transient, sometimes permanent) left behind or instilled in Tunisia various religious, lingual, political, philosophical, and ideological institutions that continue to shape Tunisian identity and culture for both Tunisian men and women even in the present day. As I have already discussed in Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in French-Tunisian Filmmaker Raja Amari’s “Satin rouge” (forthcoming, 2010), women’s roles and identities in Tunisian society testify to the multiplicitous and multi-sited nature of Tunisian society as just described. On one hand, in a manner similar to Djebar’s discussion of the Algerian woman, Tunisian society reveres the Tunisian woman as “mother” and perceives her as the “true guardian of tradition, the glue that holds [her] people together in the face of many threats from without as well as from within the national sphere” (Merini, 2000: 156). Yet on the other hand, the family generally regards her needs and concerns as secondary. However paradoxically, Tunisia does stand alone among its Maghrebi neighbors for the extensive degree of freedom it has extended, since its liberation from France in the 1950s, to both its male and female nationals. Although, a rather limited and quite narrow and conservative view exists regarding how Tunisian nationals should and should not be. It lies beyond the scope of this book to engage in a full discussion on this matter, thereby I will limit subsequent attention to the topic as it relates to the female gender, which is the focus of this project. However, I must note there is much room and interest in the field to develop the matter as it relates to the male gender as well. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when an independent, postcolonial Tunisia emerged from under French colonial rule and began to engage in “modernized” nation-building practices, questions addressing the role of Tunisian women—and more importantly their image in this “new,” postcolonial, and independent society—took precedence. Many political, artistic, and intellectual figures were concerned with how Tunisian women’s images were constructed in the public eye, in the arts, and in the media. These con-

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cerns led to a variety of reformist thoughts during this nationalist movement and even still today, but all postulations appeared to coalesce in the perceived belief in the need to construct “modern” Tunisian women’s images into a single, unifying image of motherhood. An overview of many of the reformist thoughts during both the colonial and postcolonial periods reveals both conformity and resistance toward earlier, colonial or imperial discourses on Tunisian women and their image.3 On one hand, the post-independence call for Tunisian women’s education and participation in the building of an independent Tunisia reproduces earlier discourses on women’s roles in the project of national regeneration. In these kinds of discourses, womanhood was conceived as the basis for a (French-)Tunisian nationalist or imperialist project in which educated mothers’ primary duty was to raise male children, who thus in turn either formed loyal subjects (during the French colonial period) or promised future nation builders (after independence) (Zayzafoon, 2005: 101). On the other hand, the post-independence campaign to abolish the veil, which was regarded as a “foreign custom” after the independence, flew in the face of earlier colonial discourse in which the veil was seen as a symbol of Tunisia’s Arab-Islamic identity and marker of resistance to French colonial rule and cultural influence (Zayzafoon, 2008: 117). However, despite the various conformities and resistances toward the diversity of reformist discourses, the overarching question concerning the gender construction of Tunisian women in society and in the arts and media persisted and continues to persist today. In Tunisian nationalist discourses, Zayzafoon argues that Tunisian women’s gender construction is bound to the manner in which Tunisian women’s identity is perceived. She argues that a Tunisian woman’s identity “lies in her unpaid services and sacrifices to the umma (‘nation’) through her dedication to her husband and children” (2005: 107). Zayzafoon postulates that, “Whereas Tunisian men embody the political and economic agency of the umma, women are the keepers of Islamic tradition and the umma’s moral and spiritual mission” (2007: 107). Given this emphasis, it is not difficult to see how, by extension, Zayzafoon concludes that “preoccupation with female purity and modesty is at the center of the social norms governing gender relations in [North Africa]” (2007: 107), for this preoccupation “appears in the value of ird or the general code of honor” (Charrad, 2001: 63). As Charrad explains, ird refers inclusively to the honor or moral purity of a group, its prestige in the community, and its strength, and is a collective characteristic (2001: 63). It is essentially a reflection of family lineage and depends on the behavior of the women of the given lineage and can be lost in cases of female misconduct (Charrad, 2001: 63).

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Thus, women carry a large share of the burden—or some would say the honor—for safeguarding the family lineage. Charrad asserts that family reputation depends a great deal on “the virginity of daughters and sisters, the fidelity of wives, and the continence of widowed and divorced daughters or sisters” (2001: 63). Yet, female sexual activity is not the only factor on which a family’s reputation may ride. According to Charrad, “norms of chastity and modesty [also] apply to women’s behavior in public,” which favor modes of discretion and a certain degree of invisibility. The emphasis on the normative perception of Tunisian women in their family lineage as married mothers (the prescribed monolithic and homogenous representation of “acceptable” contemporary female identity) collectively persists and pervades most female gender constructions in contemporary Tunisian cultural and social thought.4 One common underlying characteristic of the various socio-political nationalist discourses of post-independence Tunisia presented in this chapter rests on this assumed, monolithic, and homogenous collectivity of Tunisian women’s “modern” identity. As Zayzafoon provides insight: [The Tunisian] woman remains subordinate to man and exists only inside the family unit. Tunisian law recognizes only the family unit: the Personal Status Code of 1956 is silent on the status of single mothers and the Tunisian judicial system criminalizes same-sex relations. . . . Thus the “Tunisian woman” does not exist as a single mother, or a lesbian; she has rights only as a [married or widowed] mother and a wife. (2005: 107)

Although women in Tuinisia today “enjoy the same legal status as men,”5 inequalities between social classes and between urban and rural women persist.6 For example, the situation of a single mother with an illegitimate child is still ignored by Tunisian law.7 And, homosexuality is still illegal in Tunisia and can carry a punishment of up to three years in prison.8 However, many still-marginalized individuals in Tunisian society do attest to improvements in the social and cultural rights of Tunisian citizens since 1956.9 Yet, despite the amendments to Tunisia’s constitution effected throughout the late 1980s and 1990s in the areas of domestic violence, women’s rights in marriage and divorce, and women’s political rights, the vestiges of the 1950s past remain. The emphasis on the normative perception of Tunisian women as mothers— the prescribed monolithic and homogenous representation of contemporary female identity—collectively persists. Beginning in 1956, President Bourguiba initiated and led an aggressively pro-Western and pro-development program that instituted numerous re-

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forms designed to make the nation competitive in the world market economy (Holmes-Eber, 2003: 4). Among these initiatives, Bourguiba enacted probably the most important and significant piece of legislation to women’s socioeconomic position in Tunisian society: the Personal Status Code. Historian Paula Holmes-Eber shares that the Personal Status Code (PSC), “continues to be one of the most radical and liberal sets of laws on women and the family in the Arab and Muslim world today, granting women numerous rights and protections paralleled by few Middle Eastern countries” (2003: 4). The PSC granted women citizenship and the right to vote, forbade the veil, abolished polygamy, improved women’s rights in divorce by allowing women to initiate it, and challenged the practice of arranged marriages. Under Bourguiba’s administration, women’s education and employment were also encouraged, and free schooling at all levels through the university was offered to both women and men. In addition, further laws were decreed encouraging women’s employment through protection of their rights in the workplace (Homes-Eber, 2003: 4). The PSC began to lay foundation to a more gender-egalitarian society in Tunisia. In spite of the PSC, though, the people’s unwavering support (at least in public if not always in practice) of Arab tradition, social customs, and religious beliefs—which were often understood and touted as in opposition to Bourguiba’s politics of political and social change—continues to challenge the political, cultural, and social balance between European and Middle Eastern ideologies and cultural values in operation in contemporary Tunisian society. The political and social status of Tunisian women and their image or cultural value in contemporary Tunisian society is one example of how Tunisia finds itself at the center of a complex web of a variety of so-called traditional and so-called progressive belief systems and ideologies. As we shall see in this chapter, one important cultural domain of contemporary Tunisian society, its cinema, is playing a critical role in challenging the widespread traditional belief systems and their underlying normative cultural values and attitudes. As we saw in Chapter One with regard to Djebar’s reading of Algeria’s national decolonizational discourses that deny Algerian women any voice and any identity outside their biological role within the family, we see in this chapter how official political discourses conversely granted Tunisian women a voice and made room for Tunisian women in educational institutions and the workplace, thus an identity outside the family. But as we just saw in the earlier discussion of Tunisian women’s roles within the cinematic industry in Tunisia, double standards, paradoxes, and contradictions do exist. And moreover, it is these very cultural double standards, ideological paradoxes, and social contradictions that shape the landscape of Tunisian cinema and that,

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in terms of cinematic gender subjectivity and representation, remain central to analyses and discussions of contemporary Tunisian cinema. As we have seen in Djebar’s analyses of public (male and official) versus private (female and unofficial) Algerian discourses, some theorists of gender working within and on North African cultures assert that, on the most general level, there is a clear “homology between patriarchal norms within the domestic and the political spheres” (Stollery, 2001: 50). We have also seen in many theorists’ writings an underlying emphasis on the overarching affirmations of paternal authority in both domestic and political spaces. This emphasis generally constitutes the basis of many postcolonial artists’ representations of women as the nation, which metaphorically define how the nation should and should not be.10 Scholars concur that although such representations confer a sense of symbolic agency to women as subjects in processes of national identification, these representations do not necessarily “signify autonomy for women since they are typically formulated within male-dominated projects” (Stollery, 2001: 50). As Valentine Moghadam undertakes this paradox: women frequently become the sign or marker of political goals and of cultural identity during processes of revolution or statebuilding, and when power is being contested or reproduced . . . women’s behavior and appearance . . . come to be defined by, and are frequently subject to, the political or cultural objectives of political movements, states, and leaderships. (2003: 2)

Scholars often consider these broad assertions on the connections between gender and nation as useful points of departure for analyzing representations of gender in contemporary North African cinema. Stollery finds that these assertions, “may indicate abiding cultural trends [but that they often overlook] the nuances, subtleties, and contradictions which the nonofficial, non-programmatic cultural arenas of the cinema can often publicly articulate” (2003: 50). Stollery’s observation of the cinema’s potentiality to resist and re-frame gender is critical to our understanding of the re-hybridized postcolonial subject and the ²⁄³ Space of expression in this chapter. In her theorizations of cinematic representations of gender in the Maghreb, Deniz Kandiyoti offers a useful optic through which to examine gender construction within North African cultures. Her optic avoids beginning any analysis with the traditional, unified, and fixed definitions of Arab masculinity or femininity. She advocates for a reading practice that focuses on shifting lines of demarcation that exist within each gender as well as between the two genders.11 Stollery adopts a similar perspective in his essay and suggests that

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the identification of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, related to factors such as age, social status, and institutional hierarchies, becomes a central concern. Attention is redirected to the ways in which boundaries between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities are fluid and permeable. They are negotiated within individual life experiences, and redefined over time. (2003: 51)

Stollery proposes that “piercing this ‘façade’ and seeking out ‘discrepancy’ between ideology and actions is precisely what some contemporary Tunisian cinema attempts to do” (2003: 51). In his essay, Stollery reveals how male privilege and authority, traditionally embodied in the father figure, become the “objects of scrutiny and contestation” (2003: 51). He concludes that contemporary Tunisian films that focus on domestic drama raise questions concerning “relationships across generations and between different types of masculinity [that] hint at potential openings onto wider cultural and political change” (2003: 51). It is evident to me that Amari is approaching the domestic drama in Satin rouge with similar questions in mind. Her specific cinematic focus raises critical lines of inquiry that concern relationships across female generations and between different types of femininity. Yet I believe her end goal is the same in Satin rouge: the opening onto wider cultural and political change in Tunisia. Raja Amari’s Satin rouge, her début feature-length film, offers interesting insights into this opening up onto wider cultural and political change in Tunisia by challenging Tunisia’s widespread conventional and traditional belief systems and underlying cultural values and attitudes through its examination of postcolonial female gender construction and processes of (urban) contemporary female identity formation in Tunis, Tunisia. Through her cinematic portrait of the film’s protagonist, a forty-something widowed housewife and mother of one, Amari’s film also poses important questions concerning women’s representation (understood in the sense of constructed cultural identities) in contemporary Tunisian society. Moreover, Amari’s insights and questions indirectly speak to larger preoccupations at play in many contemporary North African cinematic domestic dramas concerning the need to shift lines of gender representation and ways of seeing gender on screen and in society. As I will develop in my discussion of Satin rouge below, Amari’s illustration of female housework and its associated representation provide useful points of critical inquiry since they may proffer a new or different vantage point in examining the Self-Other divide and the role this divide plays in constructing identity and gender in film and society. Through a detailed analysis of the opening sequence of Satin rouge, a sequence which, in my view, captures concretely the possibility for (re)appropriating female representation

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in contemporary North African cinema, I turn to several formal aspects of Amari’s filmmaking and question how they may begin to flesh out these shifting lines of women’s representation in contemporary Tunisia. In this detailed analysis, I will focus primarily on Amari’s use of the panning shot and framing because both are key cinematic techniques for creating cinematic agency (an operation critical to understanding and interpreting the representation of the female protagonist) and because both the panning shot and framing work in Satin rouge to subvert traditional representations of Tunisian women in a cinematic domestic drama. In turn, this subversion, which is grounded in intercultural social and artistic exchanges within as well as beyond Tunisia’s cultural borders, opens up new paths to challenging many prevalent Tunisian belief systems and underlying cultural values and attitudes. Let us now begin to take a closer look at the film.

SATIN ROUGE (2002) This film showcases an interesting case study of contemporary Tunisian domestic (albeit urban) drama built on the congruous and conflicting relationships between different cultural, social, political, artistic, and ideological discourses—largely their contradictions, paradoxes, ambivalences, and overlaps. The film pays particular attention to gender roles and gender relations and is reflective of or at least illustrates many of the scholarly debates taking place concerning contemporary Tunisian culture and society.12 At the intersection of these discourses, in both Satin rouge and contemporary urban Tunisian society, often rests the primordial figure of the housewife and stereotypical portrayal of her “moral and spiritual” way of life, which typically translates into her silent domestic obedience and incessant housekeeping and child-raising practices. In Satin rouge, Amari levies new debates addressing interpretations of performances of women’s traditional roles and desire for self-expression in contemporary Tunisian society by engaging in a multivalent manner the ideological implications of this traditional social construct of the housewife and her comportment. Amari’s multivalent approach in Satin rouge offers a timely interpretation of Tunisia’s intercultural exchanges within, as well as beyond, its normative discourses of conventional female behavior. In relation to Amari’s intercultural cinematic exchanges in Satin rouge, we may turn to both France and Egypt in finding sources of inspiration for what we may call Amari’s transvergent style of filmmaking. As we recall quickly from the Introduction, a transvergent style of filmmaking suggests a method which is “not limited to artificial borders or boundaries of national

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cinemas” but that instead “proposes a clear understanding of the elements of the interconnectedness that may bind a filmmaker to a given film culture or national identity at a given time” (Higbee, 2007: 87). In addition, a transvergent style of filmmaking may also aim to expose and foreground (celebrate even) the differences whose cracks a nationalist ideology might attempt to paper over.13 A secondary aim in this discussion in Chapter Three is to develop (in)directly how these characteristics apply to Raja Amari, a Tunisian emigrant graduate of La FEMIS and filmmaker home-based in Paris, France, and Satin rouge, a French-Tunisian co-production. In an interview given to IndieWIRE around the time of the New York theatrical release of Satin rouge (in early summer 2002), when answering a question concerning the filmmakers who have inspired her, Amari responds “the new French cinema” and directors like François Ozon and Arnaud Desplechin for “the way they deal with their characters.”14 Although Amari does not develop in this interview what she understands as the way Ozon and Desplechin “deal with their characters,” it is not difficult to see when analyzing her “dealing with” the character of Lilia (the protagonist) in Satin rouge that she perhaps appreciates and emulates the intricate and elaborate multidimensionality (in terms of gender construction, sexuality, attitudes, behaviors, internal conflicts, and psychological dilemmas) of Ozon’s and Desplechin’s principal characters as seen in such films as Under the Sand (Ozon, 2001) or Esther Kahn (Desplechin, 2000). Yet, what appears more striking in Amari’s construction of Lilia’s character in Satin rouge lies not necessarily with her transnational hybridization of “new French cinema” and contemporary Tunisian cinema but rather her interconnectedness with Egyptian filmmaking of the 1940s and 1950s. In an interview appearing as a bonus feature on Satin rouge’s North American DVD version, an interviewer asks Amari if the cabaret and belly dancing are merely an excuse to tell the story of a woman’s independence in an Arab society (2003). In her reply, Amari explains that, as a dancer herself who had studied for many years at the Conservatoire de Tunis, she had always wanted to make a film revolving around belly dancing. She shares that she grew up watching the “Golden Age” Egyptian musicals from the 1940s and 1950s and that both she and her mother loved the well-known dancer Samia Gamal and singer Farid El Atrache. One could argue that Amari’s reworking of the Egyptian musical, as epitomized by Gamal and Atrache, through Satin rouge’s soundtrack and Lilia’s cabaret performances pay homage to this cinematic genre or evidence Amari’s authorial presence in the film, since the Egyptian musical genre has clearly influenced Amari’s spectator experience (and thus by extension her filmmaking) and by all accounts

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her personal interests in studying the art of raqs sharqi (an Arabic term for “belly dancing.”) Given Amari’s reference to Egyptian cinema, it is useful to our discussion to gloss the first few decades of this industry in order to connect the Egyptian cinematic musical genre, which Amari grew up watching, to the cinematic ²⁄³ Space and re-hybridized speaking subject witnessed in her filmmaking In his discussion of Egyptian film history from 1896 to 1994, Hind Rassam Culhane identifies a common discursive theme running throughout the Egyptian cinematic industry in which many Egyptian filmmakers address “a basic dilemma in Arab society: the construction of Arab/Islamic identity and culture in the face of Western political and cultural dominance/hegemony” (1995: 33). The first film shown in Egypt was projected in the backroom of a café called Zavani, in Alexandria, in 1896. It was a Lumière Brothers’ film. The spectacle was so successful that by 1908, five cinemas “in the French style” were operating and showing imported films.15 However, within a few years, Culhane explains that the Egyptian movie-going public wanted films that “expressed themselves, their country and their society” (1995: 36). Thus, French filmmakers arrived in Egypt to shoot local scenes for Egyptian spectators. In 1917, Italian filmmakers entered the Egyptian film industry and also began making films for Egyptian spectators. These films, made with Egyptian actors, met little success. However, around the same time, an Egyptian filmmaker—returning from studying film in Germany—named Mohammed Baoumi began shooting films that reflected common popular Egyptian social concerns of the time. In contrast, these films met great success. In the 1920s, Egyptian production companies as well as ciné-clubs began to appear and the melodrama genre became widely successful.16 Culhane shares that during this decade in Egyptian film history, the first major theme of Egyptian filmmaking was introduced in Istefane Rosti’s The Call of God, which was later re-titled Laila. This film recounts the story of Laila, a beautiful village girl who gives herself to her fiancé, but he then falls in love with an American woman and follows her to the United States. Laila, abandoned and pregnant, is run out of the village by the villagers and seeks refuge in Cairo. The rest of the film then tracks the miseries she experiences in Cairo. Culhane explains that the film introduced a major Egyptian theme of “the seduction of the Egyptian by the West in general, and America in particular, and the misery that results” (1995: 39). Many scholars of Middle Eastern and North African cinemas believe that this theme still often operates by and large today in much contemporary, generally non-Eurocentric, World Cinema.

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With the advent of sound cinema in Egypt in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the musical genre entered the cinematic scene with great success. This film genre dominated the Egyptian film industry until the outbreak of World War II. One reason for this genre’s dominance posits the inclusion of indigenous “oriental” Egyptian song and dance which presented Egyptian filmmakers a “great opportunity to combine technological development with the reinforcement of traditional cultural identity” (Culhane, 1995: 39). Scholars assert that Egyptian music has played a major role in connecting the Arab World, and Egyptian films have been a major vehicle for communicating that music.17 In fact, the song performed in the concluding scene of Satin rouge (the wedding reception) is of Egyptian origin.18 Culhane writes that: Until today, the Egyptian music and song industries, like the Egyptian film industry, dominate the Middle East, with Lebanon coming second. Radio played the greatest role in disseminating these sounds, but after radio came the Egyptian sound film. And it would happen, over the next 57 years, that Egyptian music and song would connect Arabs from North Africa to Baghdad to one another in a common identity, through the agency of the sound film. (1995: 42)

As we have just seen in this discussion of the beginnings of the Egyptian film industry, whether in regards to East-West relations or a “Pan-Arab” context stretching from North Africa to the Middle East, a transnationality has always existed and played a prime role in the development of the Egyptian film industry. We could extend this same statement to the development of the Tunisian film industry. One could argue that Amari’s reworking of the Egyptian musical through Satin rouge’s soundtrack and Lilia’s cabaret performances pays homage to this genre or evidences Amari’s authorial presence in the film, since the Egyptian musical genre has clearly influenced Amari’s spectator experience (and thus her filmmaking) and assumingly her personal interests in studying the art of raqs sharqi at the Conservatoire de Tunis. Furthermore, the Egyptian musical genre in general and Samia Gamal in particular offer Amari a privileged discourse on a representation of Arab femininity in which a woman as object of the gaze accepts and returns the gaze through a performance of self-expression in movement. Among scholars of “oriental” dance as well as Egyptian cinema, Samia Gamal is well-known for her unique performance style of blending both Eastern and Western styles of dance and movements, including ballet and

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Latin dance, in her cinematic and nightclub performances.19 She is also wellknown for performing in high-heels, this costume element symbolizing the West when typically and traditionally in the East dancers perform barefoot. One aspect of Gamal’s performances, the cabaret or nightclub-like influence on her cinematic performance style, proves an interesting underlying element shared in common with the venue in which Amari showcases Lilia’s public performances in Satin rouge. Satin rouge narrates the “coming of age” of a forty-something widow, Lilia (Hiam Abbass), living and raising her teenage daughter, Salma (Hend El Ahem), in contemporary Tunis, Tunisia. The narrative follows Lilia’s progression from a seemingly conservative and traditional housewife and mother to a rather liberal and “modern” woman and mother-in-law. In the beginning of the film, Lilia’s daily existence is mostly limited to Salma and taking care of their home. One night when Salma does not return home as expected, Lilia suspects that she may be in a local cabaret. She enters the cabaret but is overcome by its atmosphere. She faints but recovers in the dressing room of the cabaret’s lead dancer, Folla (Monia Hichri). The two forge a friendship, and Lilia soon becomes a cabaret performer herself. Lilia begins a shortlived romance with Chokri (Maher Kammoon), who unbeknownst to her is romancing Salma. In the penultimate scene, Chokri learns of Lilia’s and Salma’s mother-daughter relation, and Lilia learns of Salma’s and Chokri’s engagement. Chokri and Lilia vow to keep their affair a secret from Salma, and the film ends with a marriage reception in which family, neighbors, and Lilia’s cabaret colleagues joyfully dance and celebrate the marital union of Salma and Chokri. Amari clarifies that in Satin rouge she desired to present an image of contemporary Tunisian society as divided into two worlds. Not the traditional social division of masculine and feminine but rather the opposition of day and night. On this point Amari expresses in the DVD interview: We’re talking about two quite opposite worlds where everything is opposed. On the one hand, the world of the day is strict, dominant and prudish. On the other, the world of the night is relaxed, marginal and lascivious. I wanted them to join up at all costs through Lilia’s character. (2003)

Amari explains that in typical traditional Tunisian society, “their paths would never cross because nightclubs are perceived as a bit creepy and a depraved environment” (2003). She stylizes Lilia’s cinematic maternal portrait as “as ‘regular’ woman, a model housewife with a great deal of moral conviction

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and a strict sense of duty” (2003). However, by the conclusion of the film, Lilia has gradually (and almost in spite of herself and her convictions) gone against “everything she originally stood for and everything that she forbade or reproached her daughter with: sleeping over, going out with a man” (2003). In this interview, Amari connects these two social worlds through the double life that she believes every Tunisian lives. When commenting on the way in which Lilia hides her involvement with the cabaret from her family and neighbors, Amari asserts that: [In Tunisia,] it is the way things are done; everybody leads a double life in a way. It is very much linked to the relationship between men and women. In Arab society, there is a restrictive code surrounding the family, women and their place in society. My friends all have boyfriends and girlfriends but their families don’t know about it or at least pretend not to. Social hypocrisy begets this behavior. (2003)

Although this double life perhaps most frequently manifests itself in male and female romantic relations in modern Tunisia, Amari uses this concept in Satin rouge to interrogate and challenge normative as well as marginal cultural representations of femininity. In Satin rouge, Amari uses Lilia’s double life as housewife by day (the Self) and cabaret performer by night (the Other) to present two portraits of contemporary Tunisian femininity. The former portrait adopts and the latter portrait questions traditional Tunisian discourses of domesticity and the modern Tunisian woman’s supposed “moral and spiritual mission.” Yet Amari does not rely on oppositional and isolated settings of home and cabaret to present these portraits throughout the film. As the opening sequence reveals, these two portraits may co-exist and merge within domestic space, although not without personal or familial conflict, as the film will later develop. Moreover, in addition to setting up Lilia’s doubled femininity, which seems to respond to Kandiyoti’s call to focus on shifting lines of demarcation in North African cinemas that exist within each gender (1994: 51), the opening sequence also suggests that these two portraits of femininity in the film—the dancer and the mother—share the same point of origin. Thereby, they are not strictly pitted against one another in quasi-binary terms as seemingly witnessed in Tunisian hegemonic discourses of femininity. Furthermore, the opening sequence is also significant for it suggests that both portraits of femininity (the dancer and the mother) become part of Lilia’s multiple form of feminine resistance to the institutions of home

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and homemaking from within the home. From the very opening sequence of the film, the home clearly presents a contact zone of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox. As we have already established in previous chapters of this study, once again—but this time in relation to Amari’s text—the home captures a kind of diasporic space in which the protagonist is both “here and there.” Again, the home reflects and resembles “nation” by expressing the same ideological pressures that contend within the nation and does not serve as a retreat from the public and political spheres. As I have analyzed elsewhere (forthcoming, 2010), Amari cinematically captures this multiple form of feminine resistance and complexity of home in the opening sequence when filming Lilia’s housekeeping acts with the panning shot and framing, two cinematic tools which both subtly work to subvert and challenge these institutions and many traditional discourses of Tunisian femininity in this film. The opening sequence of the film splits the opening credits into two parts. The credits, written in both French and Arabic in white lettering, which literally reads as a marker or sign of Amari’s transnational or transvergent cinema, begin to roll on a silent black backdrop. Then at about fortyfive seconds into this opening sequence, we hear chirping birds followed by random city noises (children’s voice, automobile traffic sounds, and muffled footsteps shuffling by). The credits continue to roll for about one minute longer, but now they are set against a soundtrack. We hear percussion rhythms sounding on a drum, a man singing, a meshing of sound as if radio channels are being changed, an announcement by a female voice informing the listeners of a new Tunisian soccer team and its latest match results, and then a male singer performing a song. At this point, the first image appears on the screen, and we see Lilia’s reflection (although we do not realize it at first) in one of her bedroom mirrors as she is straightening the curtains of her bedroom window. For the remaining almost three minutes of this scene, Amari captures with no cuts and only very subtle camera pans right and left and very slow camera tilts up and down Lilia’s movements as she cleans and dances. In a very defamiliarized and quasi-documentary way, Amari introduces the main preoccupation in Satin rouge: Lilia’s sense of social and moral duty and the conflict entrained by her desire to pursue her own interests and longing for self-expression. However, Amari’s use of Lilia’s reflection in the bedroom mirror introduces a discursive theme running throughout the narrative suggesting that nothing is quite as it seems. In a very literal and physical way through this first representation of Lilia in this opening shot, Amari uses the bedroom mirror to manifest Lilia’s double life and double portrait of femininity. On the one hand on the film’s

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narrative level, this doubled image sets up her doubled existence and identity as model housewife during the day and cabaret performer at night. Yet on the other hand and not too unlike Lacan’s mirror stage, the reflected image which the spectator misrecognizes as the flesh and body of Lilia bespeaks Lilia’s own eventual awakening to her initial misrecognition. This reflection—not from Lilia’s own perspective as depicted on screen but from that of the spectator—raises the role that Tunisian society plays throughout the film through its social discourses of the pressure to conform and the repressive prevailing morality that dominates this society in which someone almost always appears to be looking over your shoulder. Throughout Satin rouge, Amari raises this motif and engages with the issue of social labels and expected social conduct as well as their associated stigmas and prejudices. It seems that from the outset of the film, Amari wants the spectator to identify with preconceived notions of acceptable Tunisian female activities, namely her housekeeping practices. However, when Lilia’s hand surprisingly enters into the shot to clean the mirror, making the spectator realize that the first representation of Lilia was a reflection, Amari begins to challenge these preconceived notions of acceptable and expected social conduct and the double life that she feels Tunisians live, which the film will eventually wipe away by the end. The opening sequence continues as the camera, without cutting, slowly pans right to capture the dressertop on which rests a framed photograph of a man, whom we assume is her late husband. Lilia has not yet entered the frame, as the camera precedes her movements. Moving more quickly than the camera’s panning, Lilia then enters the medium shot in order to dust the dressertop and photograph frame. Again preceding Lilia’s movements, the camera continues slowly to pan right to film Lilia’s vanity table on which a framed photograph of her daughter rests. As before in the previous shot, Lilia quickly enters this shot to dust this piece of furniture and photograph. Without hesitating, the camera continues to pan right, filming the other side of the vanity table upon which rest some of Lilia’s hairstyling tools and products. Once more Lilia moves into the shot, and the camera continues to pan right to film a bedside table on which is placed a framed photograph of a baby. At this point, the camera comes to rest. It is often said that the panning shot tends to emphasize the unity of space and the connectedness of people and objects within that space (Giannetti, 2008: 126). This is a useful definition to apply to discussions of Amari’s panning shot—and by extension framing—in Satin rouge since both tools, in general, emphasize the literal cinematic contiguity of people and objects sharing the same space (Giannetti, 2008: 126), a key to decoding most

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if not all cinematic domestic dramas. In this opening sequence, the unity of space is preserved but not in the traditional reactionary way. Rather than panning to keep Lilia in the center of the frame as she moves about the bedroom, Amari ironically refuses to focus on Lilia’s movements and housekeeping motions. As a result, the bedroom and its objects seem to capture the focus on Amari’s camera lens. The camera’s panning movement that precipitates Lilia’s motions reinforces this reading. Thus, Lilia’s actions appear intrusive as she enters into each frame and obstructs the spectator’s view of the setting. As seen in Ernaux’s presentation of her childhood home and first homes with her husbands in La Femme gelée and in de Beauvoir’s treatment of the protagonist’s Parisian apartment in La Femme rompue, we again have a sense of the home as depot of “stuff” that requires maintenance and as a restrictive world of immanent acts. As we may recall from the Introduction of this book, many scholars link postcoloniality and feminism in their critical interrogations of the home as metaphors for critiquing nationalist discourses that refuse, deny, or overlook women within the nationalist landscape or national identity of the country. We may also recall that recent theoretical examination of the home has begun to explore how everyday relationships with our homes are bound up with sensory perception and metaphor. But this research also reminds us that these relationships are culture-specific and must be read differently as such. In illustration of this vital concept of situating the home within a context of cultural difference, it is helpful to this project to examine how researchers describe and understand the normative Tunisian home. Holmes-Eber explains that Tunisian women’s social life takes place within the home. The domestic domain in Tunis . . . is not a “private haven” or “prison” where Muslim women are secluded from the important political and economic activities of the “real world.” On the contrary, the “happening” place to be is inside the home: sitting and talking and drinking tea and eating sunflower seeds and peanuts and visiting with one’s friends and family. (2003: 16)

In contrast to Djebar’s portrait of the Algerian home as represented in Delacroix’s painting of the home as Algerian women’s “prison,” Amari’s portrait of the Tunisian home does reflect to a certain degree Holmes-Eber’s description. In Satin rouge, we do witness a few visits paid to Lilia at home by her neighbor, her friend Folla, and an uncle from the countryside. On the surface, these scenes do seem to coincide with Holmes-Eber’s additional description of Tunisian women’s homes as:

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noisy, active, busy social centers, filled with neighbors who have dropped in ostensibly to borrow tea; friends who have stopped by to drop off the magazines they had promised during the last week; and relatives who live in the house, next door, upstairs, or are visiting for a few weeks. (2003: 16)

Yet there is also a subversive technical quality to these scenes in Amari’s filmmaking—largely the absence of sound within the home when Amari films these scenes—that undermines the domestic portrait of the contemporary Tunisian home as social and open in Satin rouge. As the opening sequence of the film establishes, the home in Satin rouge assumes a more ominous presence and does not portray the “happening” place that Holmes-Eber describes. Although it is perhaps too restrictive to label Amari’s portrait of the contemporary Tunisian home a “prison,” there are certainly qualities to the home which may be read as “prison-like”; for example, its constrictive and cramped living areas, the prevailing sensation of always being under surveillance, the lack of mood-setting sounds or soundtrack and lighting, and the bareness of home décor. Furthermore, one may also read these friends, neighbors, and family members who visit Lilia at home as agents of hegemony or nation who express the same ideological pressures—whether intentionally or unwittingly—through their evaluations of and interferences in Lilia’s homemaking and child-raising practices. Thus, these domestic details of Lilia’s home and the activities occurring therein in Satin rouge may be read in different ways. Scholars concur that the values and beliefs which constitute a society’s or individual’s conception of the home inform our interpretations of different uses of space and things in the home and reveal how various domestic spaces and objects are implicated in social and family relationships.20 Therefore, contemporary scholars of domesticity advocate for a reading practice that foregrounds the home and its associations within a broad context of cultural difference, which they reason may only be understood by first avoiding overarching and monolithic definitions or stereotypes of cultures. This avocation recalls Kandiyoti’s and Stollery’s suggestion for a reading practice of North African cinema that shifts lines of gender demarcation. For Amari, as well as for the other women artists in this project, shifting lines of gender demarcation within and beyond the home and revising representations and qualities of domestic spaces and women’s role(s) therein and beyond remain key objectives in all their work. With the panning shot and framing in the opening sequence of Satin rouge, Amari limits the qualities of the on-screen domestic space (its connectedness or literary contiguity within the space) to Lilia and the bedroom

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objects. Not only does this create a feeling of isolation—for no one else is humanly present in this sequence with Lilia—but we also begin to have a sense of the home and family via the photographs’ dominating presence and priority in Lilia’s life and in traditional Tunisian female society. This detail appears to capture and reinforce the so-called modern Tunisian women’s moral and spiritual mission. Furthermore, the filming of Lilia at the edges of the cinematic frame also create a greater implied distance between her character and the spectator or even a lack of identification with the character, for the spectator’s eye is drawn first to the bedroom objects and not Lilia. This use of framing allows the spectator to more easily take a critical distance in examining the traditional discourse of femininity on display at this point in the opening sequence. Additionally, the “body cropping” secondary effect of Amari’s framing in this opening sequence also makes evident traditional discourses of Tunisian femininity and hints at the aforementioned nationalist project of regeneration, which Amari wishes to undo in Satin rouge. Never once at this point in the extreme long take of the opening sequence does Amari film Lilia in a full shot revealing her entire body. Nor has Amari ever fully captured her face on screen. Rather, Amari cinematically dissects Lilia’s body—filming her hands, shoulders and upper back, hips, and torso as if all separable from her body as Lilia moves into each frame. The effect of this manner of filming Lilia is to defamiliarize conventional ways of seeing women represented on the cinematic screen (at least in Western filmmaking practices), yet also to reflect Tunisian ways of viewing women’s traditional role in traditional Tunisian society (i.e., housework, childbirth, and childrearing). In other words, Amari’s focusing independently on Lilia’s hands, shoulders, hips, and torso—parts of the female body commonly associated with housework, childbearing, and childrearing—foregrounds women’s two important functions for traditional Tunisian society: first, maintaining domestic order and second, transmitting values and morality to the next generation—her “moral and spiritual mission.” However, much of Lilia’s housework in this scene occurs on the edges of the cinematic frame or even all together off screen. The irony lies in the fact that although Amari does foreground Lilia’s housework and introduces her in the text as a housewife from her very first portrait, Amari’s refusal to center Lilia’s movements specifically within the cinematic frame thus renders her housework almost marginal or secondary. Therefore, from the very beginning of Satin rouge, Amari articulates a challenge to traditional Tunisian ways of thinking, representing, and viewing Tunisian women. Expressed differently, housework in Amari’s filmmaking, which is represented in normative contemporary Tunisian discourses as rather central to Tunisian women’s

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feminine condition, becomes an important instigating agent of change (positioned marginally on screen) in establishing counterpoints in Lilia’s cinematic portrait of femininity. We may in turn use these counterpoints to examine how they in particular and the film in general begin a process of opening up onto wider cultural and political change. As we will again recall from the Introduction, many feminist theorists and theorists on domesticity often align the performance of housework with the development of agency in their work and find that individual agency in the home is a key force in producing changing gender configurations in society.21 There also exists a general consensus that housework and home creativity are both processes of representation and sometimes intentional and creative strategies of affirmation of or resistance to perceived conventions, norms, or discourses.22 We clearly saw this notion illustrated in Chapter Two’s discussion of the domestic and maternal portraits represented in Annie Ernaux’s La Femme gelée in which normative domestic roles were reversed in Ernaux’s childhood home (a form of social resistance) but expected to be maintained in her home with her husband (a form of social affirmation). And moreover, as we recall from the Introduction, one may read both housework and home creativity as “processes of the constitution of self that involve embodied performative actions, material objects and sensory experience” (Pink, 2004: 42). The closing moments in the opening sequence of Satin rouge reveal how housework, as a performative act in the process of the constitution of the Self, allows Lilia self-consciously to (re)constitute her gendered identity. The opening sequence continues as Lilia stands up after having straightened the bedding. The camera tilts slightly up and begins to pan left but this time following Lilia as she moves back to the mirror in her vanity table. Lilia begins to wipe the mirror, but in this mirror she pauses to look at her reflection. Her actions slow down and soon stop. She touches the gold pendant necklace she is wearing and begins to examine her reflection more closely. She removes her barrette from her hair and lets her long dark hair fall down past her shoulders. For the first time, Amari allows us to see Lilia’s full face, albeit in her reflection in the bedroom mirror. With the traditional North African music playing in the background, Lilia begins to dance before the vanity mirror. The camera pans left as Amari films Lilia moving over to the dresser to the left of the vanity and dancing before her husband’s photograph. The camera follows her as she moves back to her original position before the vanity mirror. At this point, the camera remains in place and films Lilia dancing. From this angle and for the first time, we are able to see a full frontal shot of Lilia, but again only via her reflection. After a moment, Lilia stops dancing, pulls her hair back up, picks up her cleaning items, and returns to

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the dresser to dust it once more. The camera follows her but Lilia quickly steps out of the shot, returning to her initial position on the opposite side of the bedroom, where Amari first filmed her at the opening shot of the scene. Again, the camera finds Lilia’s reflection in the original mirror and then films her back as she prepares to exit the room. The camera rapidly swish pans left in time to capture Lilia grabbing the can of furniture polish as she exits the room and cleaning spots on the walls as she walks down the hallway. Amari slightly raises the angle in order to look straight upon Lilia as she walks down the hallway, still wiping the walls, until she makes the bed at the end of the hallway and disappears. The camera fades to black as she exits the frame. Amari uses the motif of the bedroom mirror within these closing moments of this opening scene to represent a portrait of contemporary Tunisian femininity as one of alterity. In other words and as also shown in Djebar’s representations of the multiplicitous female subject and aided by Cixous’ theorization of alterity as a form of Otherness which is not reducible to the binary Self/Other but which exceeds it, Amari positions Lilia as the cultural Other of herself. The reflected image of Lilia’s body expressed in the language of raqs sharqi as she dances raises her “othered” or unconventional desire to pursue her own interests and pleasures. In contrast to this reflected representation of the unrestricted female body in dance, Amari primarily shows Lilia’s actual body throughout the scene performing housework—the conventional activity of a Tunisian woman of Lilia’s socio-economic status—which reflects her sense of social and moral duty. In this split filming of Lilia, Amari creates a doubled-Other. Additionally, the fact that Amari directs Lilia to step away from the mirror momentarily and move over to the dresser in order to capture the late husband and the dancing Lilia in the same shot reifies Lilia’s social “Otherness” as a dependent and constrained housewife. Yet unlike the earlier camera movement which preceded Lilia’s movements in cleaning and thus rendered them marginal and secondary, the camera in this sequence of actions follows Lilia’s movements in dance and thus suggests an importance and agency in her self-identity and self-expression in raqs sharqi. The reflections of her dancing self upon returning to her original position before the mirror ushers in her doubled-Other as an independent and liberated woman with personal desires. Lilia’s return to her everyday housekeeping performativity at the close of this scene becomes part of the process through which her conscious actions (cleaning or dancing) produce the gendered identities that are multiple and conflicting in Lilia’s portrait. Researchers studying housekeeping practices have often drawn a connection between housework and dancing, with the former understood as an act of performing the private self at home.23 Research shows a common cor-

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relation among “housekeepers” who often combine music with which they identify and housework movement. Pink elucidates that this combination of music, movement, and housework “enables individuals to connect their experiences of housework to other activities, thus incorporating it into part of the vision they have of themselves as individuals” (2004: 70). For Lilia, housework is clearly incorporated into the vision she has of herself, for she initially has nothing else in her life beyond her home and daughter and uses the home and homemaking responsibilities as initial excuses for refusing to return to the cabaret after her initial discovery of it at a later point in the film. However, in Satin rouge, Amari does not present Lilia’s experiences of housework in connection to her dancing, but rather in contrast. Although both opening sequence performances appear within the same location of the bedroom and in the same sequence, they are not simultaneous. Lilia must temporarily stop cleaning in order to dance and then stop dancing in order to return to cleaning. It is as if to suggest that these two portraits of femininity—the one that adopts traditional domestic discourse (the housewife) and the other one that questions traditional domestic discourse through unrestricted self-expression (the cabaret performer)—may not ever (or at least not easily) converge. However, this is not to say that these two portraits of femininity may not transverge. They are clearly imbricated as they both involve the same performer and occur within the same space. Yet, the opening sequence—the change from one kind of performer (housewife) into another (cabaret dancer) and then back again—implies a complexity, incompleteness, fragmentation, and derailment of these two portraits and begins to open up the possibility of a re-hybridized subject position (i.e., Lilia) born in-between these two portraits. Thus, Amari effectively creates imbrication as well as interstices in this opening sequence. She maintains these two structures throughout the film and uses them to suggest a certain ambivalence or multifariousness in the representation of contemporary Tunisian femininity. Furthermore and perhaps more importantly, Amari uses this imbrication and these interstices to establish an intersubjectivity on the part of the protagonist. For some theorists of domesticity, housework and dancing entrain an intersubjectivity through which individuals experience their home via maternal objects, technologies, spaces, and sensory experiences, sometimes in conflicting and contradictory ways.24 For Amari in Satin rouge, this intersubjectivity in contemporary Tunisian society may only be realized through domestic and personal conflict. The notion of the home as a site of conflict is certainly not unique to Amari’s portrait of the home in Satin rouge. Conflict exists in this film as well as in the other cinematic and literary narratives in this study on several levels (e.g., mother versus daughter, traditional versus contemporary modes

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of living, neighbor in opposition to neighbor, and the desired in contrast to the expected). Lilia endures several scenes in which her personal conflict (her on-screen agonizing about whether to return to the cabaret or not that results in her sneaking down the apartment building staircase in the dark with shoes in hand) leads to domestic conflict (her not having finished the sewing repairs to Salma’s dress; Salma, without a house key, having to wait in the stairwell for Lilia to return from shopping; and the neighbor’s interference and suspicion of Lilia’s maternal abilities in raising her daughter). Thus, on one hand, Lilia’s intersubjectivity—the way in which Lilia comes to see her home as a site of domestic oppression through her sensory experiences with the cabaret and its associations—creates tension within the domestic space. Yet, on the other hand, Lilia’s intersubjectivity also conversely leads to an eventual opening up onto domestic and social change and resolution of this tension. In an example of this opening up to change, Lilia grants Salma certain liberties that the film leads us to believe she otherwise would not have done (e.g., going out with her friends and sleeping over at her friend Hela’s house). Seemingly because of the intermediary of the cabaret, Lilia also discovers contemporary fashion trends (her handbag, high heels, and new hairstyle) that become points of connection with Salma. Thus, Lilia’s intersubjectivity first restricts her to domestic space and associated activities (she stops dancing in the bedroom mirror to return to housework, refuses Folla’s initial invitations to return to the cabaret based on Salma’s need of her, and then eventually does accept Folla’s invitation but initially only undecover as Folla’s costume seamstress). But as the narrative progresses, Lilia’s intersubjectivity becomes a trope of resistance, mainly through the (re)discovery of her sexuality, which brings to mind Djebar’s call to women artists to engage with the “non-dire” in their work. As we recall from the discussion in Chapter One, Djebar’s representations of the “non-dire” include the discussion and recognition of Algerian women’s contribution to the war for independence from France as well as frank discussion of Algerian social taboos with regard to the physical violation, emotional torment, and sexual assault many Algerian women suffered throughout Algeria’s history. Although Amari’s engagement with the “nondire” in Satin rouge does not perhaps carry the same historical and political weight as Djebar’s engagement, their artistic inclusion of the “non-dire” in both of their work focuses on the representations of the female body. Amari’s engagement of the “non-dire,” stemming from the representations of Lilia’s body performing various activities and discourses, entrains an important contemporary representation of Tunisian femininity that publicly acknowledges female sexuality and sexual activity.

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Amari’s contemporary representation purports to open Tunisian society’s eyes to the “stifling morality” it imposes on women when filming Salma dressing while Chokri remains between the bed sheets, and portraying an act of lovemaking between Lila and Chokri toward the end of the film. When asked to comment on these two love scenes and the rareness of such “explicit” scenes in Tunisian cinema in general, Amari predicts the controversy with which these two scenes will be greeted when the film is released in Tunisia. She says in the social context of Arab culture, these scenes are probably going to shock some people because you don’t show “that kind of thing” in such an explicit way. . . . For me, if there is anything to be shocked about, it is more the fact that people refuse to see reality as it is. In the film, the mother is a widow but she still has sexual desires. Thanks to what she goes through, she puts an end to the stifling morality that was imposed upon her. (2003)

Although I found nothing in my research that recounted the reaction of the Tunisian movie-going population to these two love scenes, I can corroborate to a certain extent Amari’s prediction within the reaction of a Tunisian acquaintance of mine living and working in the United States. After viewing the film, my acquaintance made a particular point to “correct” Amari’s portrayal of Salma’s pre-marital sexual relations with Chokri. My acquaintance explained to me that (in her mind) pre-marital sexual relations are “just not had” and would be considered unthinkable in families.25 She had no reaction to the more explicit lovemaking scene between Lilia and Chokri but was disturbed by the suggestion of Salma and Chokri’s pre-marital lovemaking. I do not know whether my acquaintance is “refusing to see reality as it is,” as Amari would put it, but she accepted Lilia’s cinematic sexuality more easily, which ironically was more explicitly portrayed, than Salma’s, which was only implied on screen. My acquaintance’s reaction to Amari’s cinematic controversy does not seem to follow Amari’s prediction to the extent that Amari had envisioned. One could argue that my acquaintance, like Amari, is a hybrid viewer accustomed to more explicit or public displays of visual sexuality more common to European and American cultures than Arab or Islamic societies. And therefore, we could say that my acquaintance’s hybrid or affected viewing experience is not representative of mainstream Tunisian society. Nonetheless, in Amari’s mind, her more explicit love scene between Lilia and Chokri (which is quite conservative when compared to other female directors like Catherine Breillet, for instance) remains a point of controversy in her work.

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In the preceding quotation, Amari finds the root of this controversy not so much in the visualness of the sex act portrayed on screen, but rather in the fact that Lilia is a widow, a highly symbolic and sacred figure in Arab or Islamic societies, whom Amari presents with sexual desires. When requested to comment further on Lilia’s symbolic and almost allegorical status in Tunisian society and when questioned if she “were afraid of shocking by tackling the symbolic figure of the ‘mother’ who is, moreover, represented by a widow,” Amari replies that: It is true that what may bother people the most is the fact that the main character is a mother. The mother is supposed to represent the pillar on which the whole society—i.e., the family, the virtues and values to be passed on—is based. Making her lose control in a way unbalances the perception of “good morality.” Lilia is going to do everything in her power to fulfill her desire up to the very end, in the final scenes, when she becomes literally perverse. (2003)

Amari explains that Lilia no longer wants to fight her desires and decides to indulge in her needs (2003). “She follows her dream, without rebellion; her experience at the nightclub will enable her to leave her position as ‘mother’ and become a woman who is looked at and desired” (Amari, 2003). As we have seen in our discussion of the Algerian woman as object of the gaze in Algerian society, this is strictly forbidden. Although the physical veil does not enter at all into Amari’s work and historical documents testify to Bourguiba’s banning of the veil in Tunisia, there is still the impression that the Tunisian perception of “good (female) morality” relies on a metaphorical veil of abstinence and chastity under which Tunisian women are not to be looked at and desired. For Amari, this veil contradicts her portrait of contemporary femininity in which Tunisian women, who are caught inbetween conflicting feelings of desire, love, humiliation, and jealousy, strive for self-expression and corporeal voices that allow them to become both the subject and object of the gaze. Thus, through Amari’s defamiliarization of Lilia’s portrait as the model housewife who resigns herself to and accepts traditional discourses of domesticity, she reveals the cultural double-standards imposed upon contemporary Tunisian women. Amari opens the film with the traditional, unified, and fixed portrait of the Tunisian housewife only in order to employ it as a tool in challenging normative and marginal cultural representations of the feminine condition and experience in contemporary Tunisia.

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What becomes significant in Lilia’s return to dusting and straightening up at the close of the opening sequence follows Pink’s theorizations in that Lilia performs these acts on her terms. Pink asserts: To be conversant with existing (hegemonic) discourses and the constraints they imply, performative actions must be sufficiently recognizable on their terms, but because they are creative, expressive and transgressive, they might also stretch these constraints and be instrumental in processes of change. (2004: 59)

Rather than just performing a prescribed set of actions for dusting and straightening in a routine or housekeeping manual–like fashion, Lilia interrupts the housekeeping performative act with her impromptu raqs sharqi performance. Each performative act, then, may be recognized in resistance to the other as well as in its own terms as “central” (housekeeping) and “marginal” (dancing) to hegemonic ways of seeing women’s roles in contemporary Tunisia. Amari’s use of the panning shot and framing in this sequence, in which the lens marginalizes Lilia’s housekeeping and centers her dancing, underpins in an “outside-in” manner Lilia’s gradual reconstruction or rewriting of her shifting identity and introduces Amari’s goal in the film to bring these two “worlds” or discourses of femininity together. Thus, both her housekeeping and her dancing enter the narrative as counterpoints that paradoxically work as binaries to divide Lilia’s subjectivity between “domesticated, good” Self and “emancipated, bad” Other. Whilst at the same time they also (increasingly throughout the film) work together to resist such a reification of doubled subjectivity in favor of a plurality of inbetween or re-hybridized female subjectivities (her intersubjectivity). Lilia’s domestic world broadens through her association with the cabaret network of employees (i.e., “other” women) she joins whilst still maintaining (albeit perhaps unrealistically) her respectable position as widowed housewife. In other words, we see in Satin rouge how a “modern Tunisian woman” transgresses (or perhaps even transcends) the “Self-Other” divide by embracing and not repressing the “Others” residing within her “Self.” As we recall from the Introduction, Marcus Novak would call this the alloself—the alien within. In relation to contemporary Tunisian cultural and social thought, such engagement enables new ways of seeing, constructing, and (re)presenting various “other” forms of femininity or “other” notions about or definitions of “womanhood.” By inviting spectators to compare Lilia’s dispersed housewifery portrait with the unified model presented in the neighbor’s portrait, who embodies

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the social pressure and repressive prevailing morality in Tunisia in the film, Amari is asking the spectator to recognize the shifting lines of demarcation that exist within “the” feminine portrait of Tunisian women. By linking domestic skills to self-expression—the opening sequence in which dusting is replaced by dance and then brought back and the act of sewing cabaret costumes that leads into cabaret dancing—Amari reveals how housework as a performative act may lead to a (re)construction and hopefully eventual public acceptance of gendered female identity in contemporary Tunisian society as multiple and multivalent. In Satin rouge, this reconstructive process may only be realized through initial rejection and then eventual revision of the matronly figure. One may also find this symbolic mode of gender reconstruction in Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2002). In Serreau’s film, it surfaces in the figure of the grandmother (Line Rénaud) and her function in the narrative. Let us now move onto a discussion of contemporary French filmmaker Coline Serreau and a close reading of Chaos.

Coline Serreau Coline Serreau arrived on the French cinematographic scene through a theatrical stage door. Daughter of Jean-Marie Serreau, a stage director considered one of the most important of the 1950s, and Geneviève Serreau, a writer and translator, Coline Serreau had already acted in approximately six plays and had even co-written one with the famous French comic, Colouche, before making her first film in 1977, a feminist activist documentary titled Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (1977–1978). For Serreau, her background and continual involvement with the theater does not only influence her filmmaking but also provides a useful insight into her definition or understanding of the role or function of the cinema and performance in French society. In an interview published after the release of her first two films—the aforementioned documentary and one fiction film, Pourquoi pas! (1977)—when asked if she would continue to make documentaries, Serreau replied: J’ai envie de continuer la fiction aussi, et j’en envie de continuer à jouer: pour moi, tout cela c’est la même chose. . . . La fiction est un moyen essential pour dire d’autres choses à un moment. Je peux revenir à l’un comme à l’autre. Et je peux revenir au théâtre parce que c’est un des rares moments, un des seuls moments où on apprend vraiment à communiquer avec le public. (1978)

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[I would like to continue fiction as well, and I itch to continue to act: for me, all of this is the same thing. . . . Fiction is an essential means to say many things at once. I can come back to one or the other. And I can return to the theater because that’s one of the rare moments, one of the only moments when one truly learns how to communicate with the public. (my translation)]

Brigitte Rollet finds that this statement by Serreau summarizes Serreau’s entire career. Rollet asserts, “[Serreau] has remained faithful to the artistic versatility she so valued at her cinematographic debut, and has always refused to be restricted to a specific genre” (1998: 6). In Serreau’s mind, her desire to communicate with the public may be more immediately realized in the theatrical medium with a live audience present at each of her performances; but the political, social, and cultural contexts of her filmmaking also speak to her desire to communicate with the public in a direct manner. Throughout her filmmaking career, Serreau has repeatedly refused the “serious” labels of “feminist filmmaker” and “auteurist filmmaker.” This is because in her reasoning these labels suggest, respectively, a strict and reductive definition that she does not see her work fitting and the sense of a sole artistic creator of the film that does not accurately describe her more collaborative role in the cinematic production process. She has expressed, however, her wish “to make her audience think while at the same time entertaining them” (Rollet, 1998: 10). Serreau underlines in all her work an artistic license employed to create a text that addresses important and/or serious issues, while at the same time amusing the audience. Serreau undertakes many social issues in her work. The most significant issues she treats in her corpus of work—women’s rights, gender and sexual stereotypes, racism, immigration, unemployment, and social marginality—all point to a rejection and refusal of the unjust organization of capitalist societies, a thematic she underlines as the foundation of her texts. This rejection and refusal is most readily witnessed in her portraits of working-class women and the representation of the female body on screen. Serreau’s work, like that of other female directors of her “baby-boomer” generation (e.g., Diane Kurys, Claire Denis, and Catherine Breillat), testifies to the legacy of the social revolution that took place on a national scale in France during the month of May in 1968. Many issues foregrounded in this event (i.e., the protests against the French higher education system; war; traditional and conservative political parties; the elitism of French society; sexual oppression; and the rights of labor unions and their causes) have marked many of these filmmakers’ narratives in terms of issues addressed in the film’s

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content and subject matter and have marked cinematic style in terms of the technical tools or elements employed in addressing these issues. As a typical vestige of May ’68 intellectual goals, scholars find that Serreau “use[s] mainstream cinema (and cinematographic genres) to communicate more ‘radical’ ideas and to lead her audience to think differently” (Rollet, 1998: 40). She appropriates a “prise de parole” [“speaking out”] that gives a voice in most of her texts to those who have not traditionally had access to public speech (such as the working class, ethnic minorities, and women) in her quest for social justice. This mediation may provide one reason for her widespread popularity in France. Serreau is one of the most famous living female French directors of our contemporary time, not only in France but also outside of France. She is the only woman (at the time of preparing this manuscript) with a film figuring in the list of the twenty most popular French movies since the start of the Fifth Republic (1958), reaching the fourth position with Trois hommes et un couffin (1985).26 Yet relatively little academic investigation of her work exists in Anglophone studies of French cinema. Biographical entries of her life and filmographies of her work are abundant in secondary texts, but indepth examination of her work proves harder to find. The secondary criticism available in North America tends to focus on her blockbuster comic hit, Trois hommes et un couffin. Critical readings of this film have focused on the representation of maternity, fatherhood, and family construction as well as comparisons to Leonard Nimoy’s 1987 American remake, Three Men and a Baby. What this criticism and Rollet’s French Film Directors text most often underline is Serreau’s use of comedy and the comic genre in reaching her public and conveying her messages. No study of Serreau, moreover, would be complete without addressing Serreau’s cinematic or theatrical relationship to comedy and the comic genre. Let us pause for a quick moment to consider this important relationality in Serreau’s work before moving onto our close reading of Chaos. In discussing how French society treats comics and the attempt to discuss social problems in a humorous way, Sylvie Thomas writes, “Mais le comique en France est traité à la légère et parler avec humour des grands problèmes de société ne se fait pas” (1998: 1) [“But the comic in France is treated lightly and to speak with humor about society’s major problems is not done” (my translation)]. Thomas continues to suggest that, “l’universalité et le profondeur des oeuvres de l’inclassable et dérangeante Coline Serreau restent à découvrir” (1998: 1) [“the universality and the depth of the works of the unclassable and troublesome Coline Serreau remain to be discovered” (my translation)]. In explaining to Thomas her choice of a comic mode of expression to address

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a much-needed rejection and refusal of the unjust organization of capitalist societies, Serreau shares: Je ne pense pas en terme d’espoir, je ne suis pas messianique. Mon comique vient du désespoir, de la conscience aigue de ce qui ne va pas. Il part toujours de situations graves, il n’est pas léger et j’ai l’impression que je crie très fort! Mais je ne connais pas d’autre moyen efficace de parler à mes contemporains que de les faire rire. (Thomas, 1998: 2) [I do not think in terms of hope, I am not messianic. My comedy comes from despair, from a sharp consciousness of what is not going well. It always stems from serious situations, it is not light and I have the impression that I am crying out very strongly! But I do not know any other efficient way to speak to my contemporaries than by making them laugh. (my translation)]

Thus, one may not reduce her cinematic comedy to slap-stick, vaudeville, farce, or quid pro quo, although she does draw on these genres in much of her work, perhaps most notably in Trois hommes et un couffin. One may neither restrict her comedy to dialogic banter and language play, which incidentally are also important agents of humor underscoring all of her work. Serreau’s comedy, which combines these aforementioned characteristics with other narrative characteristics such as irony and satire, effectively resists definition. Her comedy works to subvert and transgress the main audience’s conventional conceptions of the particular subject(s) at hand, whether the spectator is aware of this subversive or transgressive process at play or not. Serreau’s comedy is ultimately of a more cerebral nature. In an interesting way, Rollet compares Serreau’s comedy to the genre of the conte philosophique à la Voltaire.27 Rollet shows how Serreau’s films resemble Voltaire’s tales in their development of a mixture of narrative forms with the goal of critiquing French society. As Voltaire had adapted the fairy tale genre and the picaresque novel to create a hybrid literary form that permitted him to critique (indirectly) the governing institutions of his day (e.g., the monarchist State and the Catholic Church), Serreau’s “tales” surface as a hybrid cinematographic form stemming from a wide variety of cinematic genres that include comedy, tragedy, domestic and love dramas, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, and documentary. These traces of the various cinematographic genres in her texts allow her to critique the governing discourses of her day (e.g., race, social class, gender, immigration, and family structures). In other words, Serreau’s comedy is a comedy that stems from

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contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox. She sees comedy as a necessary component to the “engagé”-like modes of questioning, challenging, and comprehending social issues in a complete and full manner. Serreau explains: Moi je vois le monde dans ses contradictions, qui font rire. Quand on ne voit pas le comique, c’est qu’on a une vision tronquée. Une vision complète englobe forcément l’humour, qui suscite une distance, une réflexion sur soi-même et la capacité de ne pas se prendre pour le centre du monde. C’est une philosophie, par un art ni un choix simplement léger. (Thomas, 1998: 2) [But I see the world in its contradictions that provoke laughter. When one does not see the comic, that’s when one has a truncated vision. A complete vision inevitably embraces humor, which generates a distance, a reflection on oneself and the ability not to take oneself as the center of the world. It’s a philosophy, not an art neither a mere light choice. (my translation)]

Therefore, Serreau’s comedy functions on two levels throughout her work. First, it amuses the spectator and sets him or her at ease with the transgressive or quasi-taboo nature of her social commentary. And second, like Voltaire’s sense of humor, it works “philosophically” to distance the spectator from the social issues present in the work, which then allows the spectator to turn back to the issues in a more reflexive and reflective personal manner. Thus, the result or end goal of her comedy rests with the hope of eventually leading to socio-political change in French society, all the while subversively making the spectator laugh at capitalist society’s absurdity. As Serreau clarifies, “Je ne fétichise pas le moyen d’expression. Ce qui mobilise, c’est la chose à dire . . . le propre de l’art est de faire éprouver les contradictions, les subtilités, au lieu d’expliquer” (Thomas, 1998: 3) [“I do not fetishize the means of expression. What mobilizes is the thing you have to say . . . the role of art is to make felt or experienced the contradictions, the subtleties, instead of explaining them” (my translation)]. Serreau maintains this perspective in her 2002 feature-length film Chaos. We will now look more closely at this film and the manners in which she unsettles home in this text.

CHAOS (2001) Chaos opens with the portrait of a middle-aged Parisian bourgeois couple, Hélène (Catherine Frot) and Paul (Vincent Lindon), rushing through their

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evening preparations before going out, we assume, to a dinner party. This fast-paced rhythm sets the tone and pace for the rest of the film. Once descended from their apartment and traveling by car to their evening destination, Paul and Hélène witness the violent attack by a group of male criminals on a young woman, Noémie/Malika (Rachida Brakni), who begged Paul and Hélène for assistance. Paul locks the car doors in response, and they watch passively as the young woman is beaten and left for dead on the street. Once the gang has run off, Hélène and Paul exit the car—Hélène to inspect the young woman and Paul to clean her blood off the windshield. Hélène dials for emergency assistance, but Paul forbids this act out of fear of suspected prosecution of having hit Noémie/Malika with his car. Paul drives off, leaving Noémie/Malika where she lay, to wash away from the car in a car auto-wash all physical evidence and trace of the attack. Plagued with guilt, Hélène tracks Noémie/Malika down to a critical care hospital unit where she is recovering and visits her. For reasons unclear to Hélène at the time, she feels obliged to abandon her family and career in her need to remain by Noémie/Malika’s side and to assist her in her recovery from the attack. (Noémie/Malika suffers temporary paralysis and has initially lost her ability to speak.) Meanwhile, Serreau presents simultaneous scenes of Hélène’s family’s daily existence—in which Paul hides from his mother (Line Renaud) who has come to Paris for a visit and their son, Fabrice (Aurélien Wiik), hides from Hélène when she comes to visit him in his studio and who is caught up in his own domestic affair, complicated by his infidelity to his fiancée. Additionally, Serreau adds a third parallel narrative level in which we catch quick scenes of suspicious-looking men [Touki (Ivan Franek) and Pali (Wojciech Pszoniak)] in their efforts to locate Noémie/Malika, threatening her in the hospital, and attempting to coerce her into signing some kind of legal document. Throughout Chaos, Serreau interweaves these three mini-narratives— Paul and Hélène’s marriage portrait, Fabrice’s engagement and infidelity, and Noémie/Malika’s attempts to escape her crime-filled past and rescue her younger sister from a forced marriage to an older Algerian man—with a long flashback sequence recounting Noémie/Malika’s past. Serreau presents a past in which we learn of Noémie/Malika’s father’s attempt to marry her to an older Algerian man shortly after her sixteenth birthday and her consequently running away from this future forced marriage. Noémie/Malika succumbs to begging on the streets of Marseille, only to be “rescued” by Toki who quickly forces her into a life of heroin and street prostitution. She eventually is able to “escape” this street-life existence by learning the stock market and becoming a higher-class call girl who targets rich old men only to deplete them of

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their fortunes—all the while still under the management of Pali and supposedly not keeping any of the profits for herself. As we learn in this sequence, Noémie/Malika explains to Hélène that she has swindled Pali out of a great fortune by hiding in secret accounts small percentages of the money she has earned through her prostitution and stock market ventures. This, in turn, led to the brutal attack witnessed by Paul and Hélène at the opening of the film once the organization discovered her secret. After Noémie/Malika and Hélène forge their friendship and Hélène has vowed to help Noémie/Malika, the two women concoct a sting operation that succeeds in Pali’s arrest and Touki’s murder (by Pali), thus securing a future of freedom and safety for Noémie/Malika. They rescue Noémie/Malika’s younger sister from an arranged, forced marriage and save Mamie from her solitude. Serreau’s cinematic style in this sequence in particular and throughout the film in general succeeds in creating a fantastic filmic atmosphere through the representation of a mix of reality with unreal elements. In French Cinema, this cinematographic styling is the main mode of representation of the social fantastic in French cinematic tradition. This mix of reality with unreal elements opens interesting points of comparison or an intertextuality between these cinematic genres. This is to say that Chaos’ multi-meta-narrative quality (especially as illustrated in Serreau’s extended flashback sequence of Noémie/Malika’s childhood and adolescence and the sting operation) revolves on surreal scenes that Serreau documents with such realistic details that their absurdity appears plausible. As noted by scholars examining the social fantastic, this conclusion, as well as the genre’s emphasis on beginning with a realistic situation (i.e., (post)modern portrait of a “traditional” modern-day family in crisis) that ends with a phantasmagoria (i.e., the dream-like closing image of Hélène, Zora, Noémie/Malika, and Mamie sitting on a bench looking out to sea), remain important tenets of this social fantastic literary and cinematographic genre. Other elements of the social fantastic resonate in Serreau’s Chaos as well. Most immediately as implied by the film’s title, the omnipresence of chaos surrounding the characters’ daily existence dominates the film as well as the literary and cinematographic genre’s main narrative. Additionally, one may note the representation of a hero (heroine for Serreau) with a “good” as well as “bad” side who toes the line between righteousness and criminality (Noémie/Malika). There is the representation of victimization and characters who have fallen on economic or emotional hard times (Noémie/Malika, Zora, and Mamie) and the subversion of the picturesque qualities of the setting in order to portray the criminality and delinquency that surrounds it (the outskirts and back alleyways of Paris and Marseille and the swank and posh

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hotels as sites of Noémie/Malika’s prostitution schemes). Finally, we have the impression that everything in the film is illusory and is to be interpreted by the spectator as s/he individually experiences and comprehends the text. In addition to representing standardized and typified characteristics of the social fantastic genre, all of these elements contribute to the overall phantasmagoric feel of Chaos and Serreau’s social commentary. In response to Sylvie Thomas’ questions with regard to the multivalence of Serreau’s social commentary in her work and the rather ambiguous nature of her relation to French and international politics—notably her refusal to express her political ideologies through direct public engagements (i.e., the signing of petitions)—Serreau responds, “Je n’aime pas mettre en avant mes opinions politiques. J’en parle dans mes films, dans mes pièces. Je n’ai pas d’explications à donner en plus” (1998: 3) [“I don’t like to point out my political opinions. I speak about them in my films, in my plays. I don’t have any other explanations to give” (my translation)]. Thomas asks if this is the same reason why she rarely accords interviews. Serreau replies: Ce n’est pas du tout mon mode d’expression, et c’est assez réducteur. On s’exprime pourtant avec le maximum de contradictions, mais il n’en reste dans les articles que la portion congrue. Un film, une pièce rendent l’appréhension de ces subtilités possible par le rire, l’émotion, la couleur. Dès que l’on sort de notre moyen d’expression, ce n’est plus la même chose. . . . Le propre de l’art est de faire éprouver les contradictions, les subtilités, au lieu d’expliquer. (1998: 3) [That is not at all my mode of expression, and it’s rather reductive. One expresses him/herself, though, with the maximum of contradictions, but it’s only the congruous portion that remains in articles. A film, a play makes possible through laughter, emotion, and color the apprehension of these subtitles. As soon as we leave our means of communication, it’s no longer the same thing. . . . The role of art is to make felt the contradictions, the subtleties, instead of explaining them.” (my translation)]

In other words, the goal of Serreau’s verbal and visual art, whether cinematic or dramatic, is to make allusion to social injustices through vivid representation of society’s contradictions and ambivalences so that the spectator may draw his or her own conclusion and (re)act accordingly. This goal recalls this chapter’s earlier discussion of the role Amari envisions her cinematic art playing in contemporary Tunisian society, as well as the other women artists discussed in this project who see their work as avenues leading to social change

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in their respective societies or communities. Serreau, like the other women in this project, unsettles the home and uses it and acts of homemaking as a site for and source of socio-political contention. Throughout Chaos, the spectator is introduced to six “homes,” which fall into three basic categories of domestic representation in the film. The first category of domestic representation consists of the cluttered and chaotic environment of Paul and Hélène’s bourgeois Parisian apartment, of which their son Fabrice’s studio in another Parisian neighborhood is an extension. The second category of domestic representation centers on the bare and abusive environment of Noémie/Malika’s childhood home, of which the “training school” (or the prison-like country home where Noémie/Malika, along with six other young women, are repeatedly beaten, raped, drugged, and prepared for their eventual lives of street prostitution and drug abuse) is an extension. And the third category of domestic representation is of the peaceful refuge of Mamie’s traditional country home, of which Noémie/Malika’s newly purchased seaside home at the end of the film is an extension. These three categories of domestic representation function to represent contradictory social spaces that challenge women’s traditional domestic/family role as represented in bourgeois gender discourses (Paul and Hélène’s apartment), that draw on the notion of women’s (especially post/colonial) victimization and subservient status in the “master’s” home (Noémie/Malika’s childhood home), and that offer an avenue to independence and autonomy from patriarchal values (Mamie’s country home). Through the successful negotiation of these contradictive and multi-sited social spaces, the women of Chaos at the conclusion of the film eventually arrive together at a “utopian” maternal vision of a future that denies patriarchal values, values which for Serreau “Are not the ones that make people happy [and that] in fact, . . . destroy men.”28 As already described, the film opens with a quasi-back story of Paul and Hélène who are running late (a typical characteristic of their character portraits) and rushing about their home in preparation of the evening’s plans. Serreau films their rushing about the apartment, switching off lights, finishing dressing, and engaging in last-minute primping with quick cinematic cutting and editing, a series of medium shots (shots that capture the actors from about mid-thigh to the top of the head), and rapid panning shots as they hurry across rooms and down hallways. With the camera not resting in any position or angle for any substantial length of cinematic time, these technical components all succeed in helping to foster a sense of “urgency” in the scene. Additionally, an extra-diegetic soundtrack of upbeat and quick-tempo jazzy music, which also works to establish the urgent feel of the scene, accompanies these chaotic opening moments. The music seamlessly carries into the

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next scene of Paul and Hélène driving down the street and then dramatically ends as Noémie/Malika (running toward them and away from her attackers) screams for help. The music then begins again as Serreau intersperses shots of Hélène and Paul driving through the automatic car wash, following their abandonment of the unconscious Noémie/Malika on the street, and the film’s opening credits. One hears this score of upbeat, quick-tempo jazzy music repeated again at several key moments throughout the film. Although it appears to be the same (or at least very similar) score of music at these various moments, the jazzy music works in two distinct ways in the narrative: first to reflect the chaotic tone and then to underscore the comedy and chaos that both underline the entire film. As just outlined above, this jazzy musical score mirrors the chaotic rushing about the apartment witnessed in Paul and Hélène’s behavior in the opening scene. Serreau also employs this extra-diegetic jazzy score during Noémie/Malika’s cardiac arrest scene (which Hélène witnesses) in the hospital upon Hélène’s first visit to Noémie/Malika. This re-use of the jazzy musical score, in a very different context, draws an interesting comparison between the two scenes and raises one of Serreau’s social critiques in the film. When comparing the apartment scene to the hospital scene, which the film invites the spectator to do through the use of the same musical score, the spectator comes to recognize the fake urgency of Paul and Hélène’s rushing. By drawing on the sense in French of the word urgence as “emergency,” I wish to suggest that Serreau invites the spectator to examine the “mauvaise foi” of Paul and Hélène’s existence by comparing the bourgeois social label behind which they hide and shrug responsibility to Noémie/Malika’s marginal or outcast social label under which she is victimized and hospitalized. For Serreau, this comparison is representative of a general apathy of others that she finds in contemporary mainstream French middle-class society and which she subversively strives to bring to the surface in Chaos. In Serreau’s interview with indieWIRE, Erica Abeel describes Vincent Lindon’s “dead-pan portrayal of a clueless man [as] a scary example of indifference to the plight of others.” In this interview, Serreau responds that: The first thing we see in the film is the attack on this girl, which puts everything into a new perspective. The supposedly “normal” doesn’t apply anymore. What Vincent does at the beginning is all too typical—he just cleans her blood off the window and runs. Hélène is different; her life is transformed by the event. But most people just don’t care. If you take five people on this planet, one is on a diet and four are starving. Yet that doesn’t seem to prevent

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Not only does Serreau’s comment capture the tragedy of the indifference to others that she finds in French middle-class society, which she immediately represents through Paul’s reaction to the attack on Noémie/Malika, Serreau’s comment also highlights the second way that this jazzy musical score works in the film: enhancing comical domestic moments. When asked by indiWIRE to comment on her arrival in Chaos at a “genre-bending mix of comedy, social criticism, and thriller,” Serreau answers, “Humor is the best weapon that artists have. It’s the strongest and most dangerous weapon. I’ll never give it up. Movies help us think about our lives. Otherwise, I don’t see the point of making them.” The jazzy musical score, which also aids Serreau’s genre-bending cinematographic mix, is heard one more time in relation to Paul and Hélène’s home. Later in the narrative—after Hélène has befriended Noémie/Malika, abandoned her family and career, and has begun helping Noémie/Malika emotionally and physically recover from the attack—Serreau strings together a series of mini-scenes of Paul trying to contact Hélène via cell phone and voicemail. He is not necessarily trying to contact her in order to inquire after her state and well-being but to complain about the mail that is piling up, the dishwasher that is clogged, and his linen suit that needs ironing before a business dinner. In his voicemail, Paul expresses that he neither knows how to do these things nor knows the personal phone number of their housekeeper (Rosario) in order to make the request for her to take care of these affairs. He wants Hélène to return home to take care of these problems so that their lives can go back to “normal.” Hélène returns Paul’s voicemail with a message of her own, which she terminates by telling him to “trouver une autre poire” [“find another sucker”]. The music begins, and we are presented with a series of close-up shots of Paul’s hands attempting to iron his suit; his face bearing expressions of exasperation; the core of his body (he is ironing only wearing his boxer shorts) accompanied by little cries of pain as he loses hold of the iron; and the ironing board, bowl of water, and suit all in disarray. In many ways, this series of close-up shots of a male performing domestic work (accompanied by a jazzy musical score) proves reminiscent of Serreau’s Trois hommes et un couffin. The slap-stick-type, “fish-out-of-water”-style comedy certainly functions on the same social commentary level in these

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two films. It seems that Serreau is suggesting in Chaos that within the almost twenty years of French social evolution (since 1985, the year Trois hommes et un couffin was released), expected bourgeois norms of traditional domestic practices and responsibilities remain still at first blush intact. Unlike Ernaux’s and de Beauvoir’s frozen and broken/dumped women, Serreau’s women fight back and in some respects, perform a preemptive strike. In other words, Serreau’s women, although initially caught up in their social victimization, eventually create their own exit strategies and choose to leave on their own terms. This is opposed to Ernaux’s and de Beauvoir’s women who are forced to deal with the reality their men render unto them and who face fewer options or possibilities, largely due to financial dependency on their male partners. Therefore, although traditional bourgeois gender roles may be initially expected and anticipated in Chaos, Serreau shows how contemporary French women may either subversively challenge these expectations through their refusal to comply or by physically overturning them, as shown in Florence’s (Chloé Lambert) wreaking havoc on the studio apartment after learning of Fabrice’s infidelity and indiscretions and then eventually claiming the domestic space as her own and putting Fabrice out to the curb. With the opening scene of the film and Paul’s adventures in ironing aside, what is most striking in the cinematic portrait of the three categories of domestic representation in Chaos is the general absence of a soundtrack during the scenes playing out in the characters’ homes. Replacing the extradiegetic jazzy musical score are the sounds of natural noise as the actors move about the sets and speak to one another as well as diegetic noises like the telephone ringing, knocks at the front door, the television playing in the background, et cetera. There are only two additional exceptions to this cinematic sound formula in the film. The first exception occurs when Hélène returns to the apartment after having been away for a few days. She finds Florence and Charlotte (Marie Denaudaud), the girl with whom Fabrice has been cheating on Florence, enjoying a snack in the kitchen with (diegetic) salsa-type music playing throughout the apartment. When Hélène first enters the apartment, she calls out for “Rosario,” whom we assume must be a housekeeper under their employment based on Paul’s earlier reference to her in his voicemail to Hélène. The second exception occurs at the very end of the film when Hélène, Noémie/Malika, Zora, and Mamie are sitting on a bench outside Noémie/Malika’s newly purchased sea-side home behind them, looking out to sea. In this closing scene, we first hear diegetic sounds of the sea and then an extra-diegetic classical musical score of an aria composed by Bach. Concerning the first exception and the inclusion of the salsa-type or Latin music and Hélène’s assumption of

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Rosario’s presence, I believe Serreau is subversively commenting on the social status and employment difficulties facing many foreign nationals who immigrate to France in search of a new life and existence. For other than Noémie/ Malika who manages to escape her “inauthenticity” and life of prostitution, no other ethnic minority character escapes social stereotyping in the film. Noémie/Malika’s family is portrayed in ways very stereotypical of beur families from mainstream French society’s perspective; that is, large families with many children in which the women and girls are treated as second-class citizens; residing in suburban Parisian HLMS; the male exploitation of Islamic law when it favors the patriarch; and the men and boys generally uninterested in and unmotivated by school and who as Noémie/Malika explains to Zora, share a common desire for “l’argent facile et les meufs qui leur obéissent” [“easy money and women who obey them”]. Additionally, the members of prostitution ring recruiting, training, and managing Noémie/Malika among other women appear to have eastern European names and physical features and accents and thus do not escape the life of criminality that seems, per mainstream French society, so readily available to immigrants. However, I believe that Serreau succeeds in reconciling or mitigating these controversial and racist stereotypes through her portrayal of every character, excluding the primary female characters (the heroines), in a stereotyped and stylized way. The vast majority of the “Français de souche” characters in Chaos—especially Paul and Fabrice—are portrayed in ways very stereotypical of middle-class egocentrism, apathy, misogyny, narcissism, and callousness. Therefore, nobody escapes stereotypical prosecution in Chaos unless the individual (like Noémie/Malika, Hélène, and Mamie) decides to help his or her fellow wo/man and hold society accountable for its abuse and exploitation of hegemonic principles, standards, and ideologies. Two of the cinematographic elements that Serreau employs in this concluding utopian vision and throughout all of the representations of domestic space in Chaos are sound and the soundtrack. Serreau’s blending of music (jazz, Latin, and classical), realistic sound, and silence not only work to develop the various portraits of domestic representation depicted in the film, but they often also underline the comedy as well as help underscore Serreau’s social commentary. Concerning the second exception to Serreau’s cinematic sound formula employed in her representations of domestic spaces, this use of the extra-diegetic classical musical score at the close of the film brings to mind Sarah Pink’s anthropological research on the function of sound in the construction of domestic environments. According to Pink, sound becomes an “inescapable part of the home” (2004: 69). She develops that

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speech and conversation, music, radio, television, domestic dogs barking, uninvited bats squeaking, windows knocking against frames in the wind, the running water and clanking ceramics of washing up or an intentionally slammed door [are] crucial elements of ways people communicate in their homes. (2004: 69)

In Pink’s anthropological study of housework and sound, she concludes that music becomes “part of [the] embodied experience of housework as [individuals often dance] while they dust or burst into step as they clean the kitchen surfaces” (2004: 69). For Pink, dancing during housework at home manifests “a private and uninhibited act that [individuals] would have felt embarrassed to be caught doing . . . yet [such an activity remains] simultaneously an intentional and expressive practice” (2004: 69). Specific to the sounds of the radio or music in the home, Pink theorizes that these sounds “form an important part of the home . . . usually offering a different type of ‘atmosphere’ and sentiment . . . contributing greatly to the creation of domestic environments, a textured ‘soundscape’ in the home within which people move around and live daily lives” (2004: 71). We may recognize Pink’s linking of music and dancing and housework through the sounds of the Latin music playing as Hélène returns homes and by her assumptions of Rosario’s presence in the apartment. Moreover, we have seen this connection in this chapter’s earlier discussion of Amari’s Satin rouge and Lilia’s performances of housework and dance at home. But, Pink’s subsequent notion of a domestic soundscape is more fitting to this discussion of Serreau’s Chaos and its closing scene. Pink asserts that domestic soundscapes are “implicated in what people see as the therapeutic and relaxing processes of self-definition [that] they engage in at home” (2004: 72). She suggests that domestic soundscapes are “personalized and expressive forms, created in negotiation with existing sounds and silences that each individual hears in his/her home and the ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ s/he imagines and aspires to” (2004: 72). Furthermore, Pink maintains that the domestic soundscape requires constant maintenance, as radios and television sets require switching on and off, channels and broadcasts need changing, and CDs need constant programming. She concludes that these acts—which she calls “active intervention” in the domestic space—form “part of the everyday performativity of life at home, and the choices made are part of the process of living out a certain gendered self” (2004: 72). Barring the Latin music scene, music does not figure diegetically into any of the domestic soundscapes depicted in Chaos. The cries, shouts, arguing, disrespectful tones of voice, fake pleasantries, and silences that do fill the diegetic domestic

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soundscapes all work to establish the home as a site of chaos and turmoil and as a battlefront between the sexes. This active intervention of the characters within their domestic spaces (their dialogues and the actors’ delivery of their lines) captures very much the performativity of chaotic life in a turbulent home. And the choices these characters make throughout the film (albeit often quite extreme or “fantastic” and occasionally coerced) reveal their own responsibility in their processes of living out certain gendered selves. The women of the film understand the process at play and work to subvert their traditional gendered identities and existences by eventually refusing to comply with the traditional domestic expectations of their family roles in cooking, grocery shopping, paying bills, laundry, and running household errands. The men, however, remain blind to this process, which culminates in rendering them powerless and unable to comprehend and negotiate the changes taking place. In essence, the men become their own (self-inflicted) victims of their own traditional gendered identities and discourses—a development in the narrative which corroborates Serreau’s personal understanding of the function of patriarchal principles in capitalist societies. Even though diegetic music does not play a large role in Chaos, the extradiegetic jazzy and classical musical scores figure largely in the ways the spectator comprehends and engages with the representations of domestic space. We have already underlined in this discussion the upbeat and quick-paced tempo to the jazzy musical score. In addition to enhancing the comedy or action in various scenes, this musical score also highlights the “rapid-fire pace” hallmark of Serreau’s cinematographic style.29 In the indieWIRE interview, Abeel likens this hallmark characteristic of Serreau’s filmmaking to American styles of filmmaking in general and asks Serreau to comment further on her appropriation of such a cinematic pace in her cinematographic work. Serreau responds: The pace is probably one of the good things in American cinema. In my films the pace is not about maintaining attention, but going to the essential in every single shot. And then it’s over, going to the next point. The audience is clever and can understand. (2006)

The jazzy musical score (with its fast pace and quick tempo) works to drive home the essential calls underlying Serreau’s work for a much-needed rejection and refusal of unjust organization of capitalist societies. With the aid of the jazzy musical score, Serreau shows how a domestic space that embraces

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traditional patriarchal values and upholds traditional expectations of gender performances leads to “inauthentic” existences for both men and woman and a debilitating sense of individuality that emphasizes an inability to look beyond one’s own condition and state. The classical musical score, on the other hand, appears to offer a counterpoint to this domestic representation or construction. The classical musical score affects the spectator’s viewing experience in a manner contrary to the effects rendered by the jazzy musical score. Instead of emphasizing a fast-paced comedy, action, or feel to the sequence of cinematic images, Bach’s aria in the closing moments of Chaos allows the spectator to linger on a series of serene images of female bliss and satisfaction in which three generations of women—Hélène, Noémie/Malika, Zora, and Mamie—bask in the warm colors of the setting sun and stare out to sea. This impression closely recalls Pink’s conclusion on the function of music in creating a domestic soundscape to which the individual aspires in his or her daily life and domestic existence, as the music, lighting, and lack of action communicate a sense of calm and restfulness—two characteristics commonly associated with idealized representations of domestic spaces. In this closing scene, Serreau cuts from a long shot of the sea-side home to a reverse long shot of the back of the women sitting on the bench with the sea in the background. She then cuts to a medium shot of Hélène’s profile and then travels screen right one by one to Zora’s profile, Noémie/Malika’s profile, and then finally freezeframes on Mamie’s face (captured in a quasi-full frontal, lateral angle). The first three women sit expressionless, but Mamie’s face is frozen in a smile. Therefore, in quite a visual way, Serreau presents the images of a reconfiguring process of French female gender construction as multiple and hybrid. Near the beginning of the film, Mamie has come to Paris for her annual visit with Paul, Hélène, and Fabrice. Paul does his best to avoid Mamie, and only after an awkward and rather silent visit in a café does Mamie leave Paris to return home. At a later point in the film, when Hélène and Noémie/Malika leave Paris to hide from the criminal organization, the two women seek initial refuge at Mamie’s country home, where Noémie/Malika is moved to tears by Mamie’s hospitality and kindness. The three women then leave together to hide from the organization as well as from the Parisian police, who believe Hélène may be responsible for kidnapping Noémie/Malika. During this trip, the three women bond, and it is no “surprise” (within the social fantastic context of the film) that Mamie appears at the end of the film. The four women of the closing scene realize that they have all in one way or another been abandoned and betrayed by the men, as well as other women, in

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their lives. However, only the women (in Mamie’s image) seek to atone for this abandonment. As Leslie Camhi explains, “[Mamie’s] character highlights the somber truth . . . . In a world where empathy and consideration are rapidly diminishing; women tend to maintain some vestige of concern for others, perhaps as an anachronistic legacy of their maternal function.”30 As Serreau shows, this atonement may only be made possible through initial rejection and then eventual recuperation of the maternal figure. Although this notion may raise vestiges of essentialist images of maternity or maternal functions or even a certain biologism, Serreau overrides this essentialist critique by favoring a multiplicitous portrait of contemporary French femininity in which a middle-class mother with a successful professional career, a beur female adolescent, a beur former drug-addicted prostitute, and a retired middle-class grandmother who cooks, cleans, and gardens appear on the utopian verge of starting a new life together. We are left with the notion that instead of taking care of the men in their lives, these women will learn to take care of themselves and each other. Thus, for Serreau as for the other women artists in this study, the rehybridized subjects she presents in this film, as seen through the lens of the interrogation of the personal, become a polyphony of personalized and dispersed individual, expressly female voices. These re-hybridized subjects share a common origin, source, or experience and expose, resist, and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which they are implicated. In this film and for much of Serreau’s work, her ²⁄³ Spaces of expression or enunciation combine comedy, social satire, theatrical elements, cinematographic medium and language, hyper-reality, and phantasmagoria.

Conclusion In conclusion, as we have seen in our discussion of Raja Amari’s Satin rouge as well as in our discussion of Coline Serreau’s Chaos, we may easily situate both women within this study’s discussion of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian women artists who strive to present multiple portraits of female gender constructions and a variety of discourses that transgress race, class, politics, religion, patriarchy, hegemony, time, and ideologies in an effort to awaken the spectator’s or reader’s awareness of the “inauthentic” shortcomings and pitfalls of societies’ contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes. It remains both Amari’s and Serreau’s wish that the spectator or reader will then reflect on re-appropriated and revised ways to create new transnational social discourses and collaborative spaces of female representation in which multiple

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female voices may speak from ²⁄³ Spaces of expression by recounting personal history and emphasizing socio-historical-political import. As we shall see in the following chapter, this wish proves very dear to the aims of Leïla Sebbar and Yamini Benguigui in their work as well.

Notes 1. Abdelkrim Gabous, Silence, Elles tournent! (Tunis, Tunisia: Cérès Éditions, 1998), 184. 2. Gabous, Silence, 12. 3. Lamia Ben Youseef Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 99. 4. Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman, 107–108. 5. “U.S. Department of State on Tunisia,” http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/ hrrpt/2006/78864.htm (accessed June 22, 2008). 6. “Freedom House Report on Tunisia,” http://www.freedomhouse.org/template .cfm?page=184 (accessed June 22, 2008). 7. “Violence Against Women in Tunisia,” http://www.omct.org/pdf/VAW/ TunisiaEng2002.pdf (accessed June 22, 2008). 8. “Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada,” http://www.orb-cisr.gc.ca/en/ research/rir/?action=record.viewrec&goterec=444335 (accessed June 22, 2008). 9. “Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.” 10. Martin Stollery, “Masculinites, Generations, and Cultural Transformation in Contemporary Tunisian Cinema,” Screen 42.1 (2001), 49–63. 11. Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Paradoxes of Masculinity, Some Thoughts on Segregated Societies,” in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, eds. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 212. 12. Kenneth J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004); Mournira M. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2001); and Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000). 13. Will Higbee, “Beyond the (trans)national: Towards a Cinema of Transvergence in Postcolonial and Diasporic Francophone Cinema(s),” Studies in French Cinema 7.2 (2007): 79–97. 14. Kate Schultz, “INTERVIEW: Self-Empowerment by Way of the Midriff; Raja Amari’s Satin rouge,” IndieWIRE, http://www2.indiewire.com/people/int_Amari _Raja_020820.html (accessed April 26, 2008). 15. Hind Rassam Culhane, East/West and Ambiguous State of Being (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1995). 16. Culhane, East/West, 39. 17. Culhane, East/West, 42.

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18. Hela Salaani. Interview by author. Columbus, Ohio, February 1, 2005. 19. “Samia Gamal,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samia_Gamal (accessed February 21, 2006). 20. Sarah Pink, Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects, and Everyday Life (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2004), 13. 21. Pink, Home Truths, 41. 22. Pink, Home Truths, 42. 23. Pink, Home Truths, 70. 24. Pink, Home Truths, 53. 25. Salaani Interview. 26. Brigitte Rollet, Coline Serreau (Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 1998). 27. Rollet, Coline Serreau, 75. 28. Erica Abeel, “Fast-Paced Feminism: Coline Serreau Talks about ‘Chaos,’” indieWIRE, http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_030130serreau.html (accessed April 24, 2006). 29. Erica Abeel, “Fast-Paced Feminism.” 30. Leslie Camhi, “Mother Load Evolution Girl Style,” The Village Voice 2003, http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0305,camhi,41466,20.html (accessed April 24, 2006).

CHAPTER 4

(Re)Presenting Female Iconography at Home with Leïla Sebbar and Yamina Benguigui Our close readings and discussion in Chapter Three focused on Amari’s and Serreau’s agendas to explore how the processes of uncovering or articulating new identities and subjectivities usher in new ways of seeing, knowing, and being “female” in their respective societies. We have seen how they attempt to derail traditional race-, class-, religious-, and patriarchal-based ideologies and markers of identities by drawing out the latent contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes of their “imagined communities” with regard to “home/making,” “gender,” and “nation.” As evidenced in our close readings, both artists privilege a forging ahead as opposed to a retreat into pre-existing cultural, familial, or psychological identities and a priori social, historical, or political frameworks and discourses. Through their “transnational” multiple portraits of female gender construction and performance, we observed a few manners in which a protagonist or subjectivity transforms through a crosscultural encounter with otherness and effectively becomes the other by embracing, in Novakian terms, the “alien within” or the alloself. In this sense or construction of the Self-Other divide as allogenesis, we began to see how the notion of otherness articulates dynamic and shifting relationships of opposition and confluence for the alloself, which is never separated, fixed, or fixated in binary opposition. From the critical perspective of transvergence and cinematographic practice in the work of Amari and Serreau, the possibility that marginal or “othered” positions—rooted in the identification with the alien/allo-/other—can occupy shifting, multiple, and re-hybridized subjectivities is clear. Through this lens in Chapter Three, we saw how the ²⁄³ Space of cinematic expression and articulation re-frames marginality as a point of resistance and allows 151

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for continuities as well as differences in “national” gender identity and integrity to exist side by side. We will elaborate on this line of critical inquiry in Chapter Four and will engage more directly in a discussion of a “virtual geography” and reconfiguration of “fixed” notions of nation, center/margin, self/other, and home/exile. In this chapter, we will continue to explore how the diasporic space of home inflects transnational identity and transnational understanding of self and gender in contemporary women’s filmmaking and lifewriting of France via Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France: Carnet de voyage and Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah dimanche (2001). In Chapter Four, transnational takes up again the virtual intra-national borders between social class and sex within the homeland but also considers more prominently questions of international inter-cultural exchanges as they are realized through the motifs of travel, immigration, and culture(s) of origin; especially between France and Algeria. In order to better enrich our trans/national readings of Sebbar’s and Benguigui’s work and projects in this chapter, let us first consider some pertinent background information, with particular attention paid to the issue of multiculturalism in relation to each artist. In many ways, this chapter picks up where the previous chapter has left us: with a discussion of representation of “ethnic Othered” French femininity and portraits of marginal domestic space and households in the Métropole and the Maghreb. Like Serreau’s and Amari’s reconstructive processes at play in Chaos and Satin rouge, the two women artists examined in this chapter, Leïla Sebbar and Yamina Benguigui, also engage in the (re)appropriating processes of constructing gendered female identity as multiple and re-hybridized. Additionally, like Serreau and Amari, in their work Sebbar and Benguigui use domestic representation as site and source of socio-political contention and an avenue leading to social change in France. The four women artists all share the same fundamental goal of making allusion in their work to social injustices through the textual representation of capitalist, patriarchal societies’ contradictions so that the spectator or reader may draw his or her own informed conclusion and (re)act accordingly. One manner in which they realize this goal is through their inclusion and examination of various borders and the act of border crossing in their respective texts. Let us pause for a moment to consider better what this means.

A Virtual Geography Borders (whether geographical, linguistic, ideological, socio-economic, political, or gendered) and the physical action or metaphorical notion of border-

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crossing and its consequences entrained play important roles and occupy primal space in both Sebbar’s and Benguigui’s work on the whole. Although Sebbar may not be considered beur in the strictest or most technical application of the term due to her birth in Algeria to a French mother and Algerian father—given that the term refers specifically to the children born in France to both parents of North African immigrant origin, which does “fit” Benguigui’s biography—some scholars situate both women artists’ work within the tradition of beur or banlieue writing and filmmaking. However, despite Sebbar’s and Benguigui’s points of connection with beur or banlieue writing and filmmaking, I feel it more fitting to discuss these women as artists of the postcolonial or better-yet transnational tradition. The transnational term better describes Sebbar’s and Benguigui’s hybrid projects of circumventing static definitions of identity through their rejection of all fixed labels of ethnic, economic, and national demarcation. Sebbar’s and Benguigui’s transnational aims reflect one of the primary goals of many postcolonial artists: to challenge inherent hegemonic presumptions of reading texts from Other worlds that have been based on the notions of fixed identity and fixed historicity.1 Within a transnational literary and filmmaking framework, many postcolonial artists (including Sebbar and Benguigui) often articulate these challenges through examinations of the intersection(s) between the discourses of nationhood, race, gender, sexuality, and economic exploitation. Within this intersecting space of multiple discourses, transnational literature is said to have constructed itself as a counter-voice to preconceived and imposed notions of identity and as a way of re-appropriating meaning for oneself and fulfilling a need for the articulation of a new sense of self.2 It may be said that this literature “contributed to [the development of] the idea that both culture and identity are the products of discourse and that as invented, unstable discursive fabrications, they could be transformed, recreated, redefined” (Talahite, 2001: 60). It may also be said that transnational literature proffers an edifying model that “rather than pitting a rotating chain of oppositional communities against a . . . European dominant . . . stresses the horizontal and vertical links threading [diverse] communities together” (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 63). These insights illustrate a few specific applications of the thinking of the transnational as a dialogic process of re-thinking knowledge and discourse and the construction of that knowledge and discourse that I mentioned in the Introduction, especially with regard to issues like migration, citizenship, displacement, and representation which constitute a focus or preoccupation for many transnational literary artists. In this vein and central to the work of transnational women artists and the scholars studying their texts are the questions surrounding social, political,

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and economic conditions that comprise imperialism as well as the connections between colonialism and nationalism. These artists and scholars, in constructing and deconstructing the “nation” and “other” identities in their work, also question the roles that gender, the State, race, class, and sexuality play in shaping strategies of resistance to various hegemonies. Within Hafid Gafaïti’s context of “cultures transnationales de France,” the individual yet collective voices that emerge constitute a specific challenge to accepted notions of French national identity, all the while bringing to the fore notions of cultural multiplicity.3 Scholars often read and present transnational narratives of France as “counter-texts to conventional discourses of race and ethnicity based on fixed, essentialist, and static definitions of self and culture” (Talahite, 2001: 60). They highlight the marginal identities textualized in these narratives and the narrators’ abilities, in their quest for an identity, to engage continuously with self-definitions in different and diverse ways by their asserting the right not to belong and their enjoying the freedom of the margin. Mireille Rosello has coined the term départenance in an attempt to capture this sense of unbelonging, which is said to delineate “a refusal to define one’s identity as well as a way of acknowledging that one had been called upon to belong while fully recognizing what would be lost if one remained satisfied with a national or cultural identity fashioned by others” (Talahite, 2001: 63). Scholars concur that the act of (re)writing the margin from the margin—the idea of a “secret identity” invisible in the eyes of the dominant culture and enabling the protagonist to seek a sense of self outside fixating and fixated concepts of “otherness”—provides a useful optic for comprehending the dynamics of self-definition.4 One may argue that transnational artists residing in France succeed in moving beyond the specifically ethnic “othered” experience through their exploration of conflicting and contradicting multiplicitous identities within the context of hybrid, post-modern, and globalized French society. A transnational lens of analysis and the concept of active, interpellating, and protesting voices speaking from and redefining the margins prove very illuminating in relation to Leïla Sebbar and her first-person narratives. We will begin with a cursory look at her “intermedial” literary and first-person narrative corpus before tackling a close reading of Mes Algéries en France.

Leïla Sebbar Born in Aflou, Algeria, to two French-language teachers—an Algerian father (“républicain musulman laïque”) [“republican, Muslim, secular”] and a French mother (“républicaine catholique laïque”) [“republican, Catholic,

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secular”]—during the colonial period, Sebbar was born into a multicultural existence. She grew up and conducted her public schooling in Algeria but came to France at the age of nineteen, following the end of the Algerian war for independence, in order to begin her academic career in higher education (des études supérieures de lettres) in Aix-en-Provence. Michel LaRonde explains that during her time at the university in Aix-en-Provence, she cultivated her French cultural heritage when she adopted her mother’s country and distanced herself from Algeria, her birth land and the country of her father (2003: 15). He asserts that Sebbar “n’est pas une intellectuelle d’Algérie en exil mais une écrivaine française au nom arabe, algérien, qui porte le poids de la terre natale” [“is not an intellectual from Algeria in exile but a French writer with an Arab, or more precisely Algerian, name who carries the weight of her birth land”] (2003: 15). At the time of preparing this manuscript, she was living, teaching, and writing in Paris and was not fluently speaking Arabic. Soheila Kian presents a helpful biographical overview of Sebbar and a heuristic description of her work.5 Kian writes: Leïla Sebbar, écrivaine franco-algérienne qui vit en France et écrit en français, examine les identifications culturelles des immigrés qui vivent les legs des histories entrelacées de la France et de ses anciennes colonies. Cet examen est présenté à la fois négativement et positivement, engendrant la violence, le racisme, et le néoorientalisme d’un côté, et la production d’une diversité culturelle et d’une société postmoderne d’un autre. (2004: 128) [Leïla Sebbar, French-Algerian writer who lives in France and writes in French, examines the cultural identifications of immigrants who live the interlaced legacies of France and its former colonies. This examination is presented at the same time negatively and positively, generating violence, racism, and Neo-Orientalism on one side and the production of cultural diversity and of a postmodern society on the other. (my translation)]

For Sebbar and many scholars working on her texts, these biographical factors and writing perspectives account for the recognition of her cultural bivalence and the importance that her two cultures (French and Algerian) mark in her conceptions of self. On this critical insight, Sebbar writes in Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l’exil: je n’échapperai pas à la division biologique d’où je suis née. Rien, je le sais, ne préviendra jamais, n’abolira la rupture première, essentielle: mon père arabe, ma mère française; mon père musulman, ma

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C H A PT E R 4 mère chrétienne; mon père citadin d’une ville maritime, ma mère terrienne de l’intérieure de France. . . . Je me tiens au croisement, en déséquilibre constant, par peur de la folie et du reniement si je suis de ce côté-ci ou de ce côté-là. Alors je suis au bord de chacun de ces bords. (1986: 185) [I will not escape the biological division of where I was born. Nothing, I know it, will ever prevent, will abolish the first, essential rupture: my Arab father, my French mother; my Muslim father, my Christian mother; my city dwelling father of a maritime city, my land-oriented mother of a land-locked region of France. . . . I hold myself in a cross-road, in constant unbalance, out of fear of craziness and denial if I am from this side or that side. Thus, I am at the edge of each one of these borders. (my translation)]

In some ways, it is due to this cultural bivalence and the fact that her birth land is not France that she is excluded from collections of works by “beur” writers.6 But moreover and more convincingly, Sebbar has proclaimed that she is “dans une position un peu particulière, ni ‘Beure’, ni ‘Maghrébine,’ ni tout à fait Française” (LaRonde, 2003: 16) [“in a slightly particular position, not ‘Beure,’ not ‘Maghrebine,’ not entirely French” (my translation)]. Scholars also add to the list that she is not Pied-Noire. Her hybrid existence between many cultures confirms her postcolonial state of being and transnational status of self-identification. In addition, LaRonde explains that Sebbar, in effect: n’est pas immigrée ni enfant de l’immigration; elle n’est pas fille de colons européens en Algérie; elle n’est algérienne que par son père et Française que par sa mère. De plus, sa langue maternelle n’est pas l’arabe, et elle n’est pas plus une écrivaine maghrébine d’expression française. (2003: 16) [is not an immigrant nor a child of immigration; she is not the daughter of European colonists in Algeria; she is only Algerian by her father and French by her mother. Moreover, her maternal language is not Arabic, and she is neither a North African writer of French expression. (my translation)]

In addition to these conflicting characteristics of her persona or “bios,” Sebbar outlines additional intersections in her understanding of self. She writes again in Les Lettres parisiennes:

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[Mes livres] sont le signe, les signes de mon histoire de croisée, de métisse obsédée par la rencontre surréaliste de l’Autre et du Même, par le croisement contre nature et lyrique de la terre et de la ville, de la science et de la chair, de la tradition et de la modernité, de l’Orient et de l’Occident. (1986: 126) [(My books) are the sign, the signs of my criss-crossed history, of a half-breed obsessed by the surrealist encounter of the Other and the Self, of the crossing with nature and lyricalness of the land and the city, of science and flesh, of tradition and modernity, of the Orient and the Occident. (my translation)]

To say that these multiple intersections inspire Sebbar’s “mixed” writing proves an understatement, for their textual representations in her work form the basis of all of her fictional narratives and the vast majority of the scholarly criticism surrounding her work. Kian succinctly summarizes Sebbar’s fiction by describing how it évoque un paysage de diversité culturelle pour un public principalement français. Elle dit qu’elle écrit ‘le corps de mon père dans la langue de ma mère’ (Le Corps, 1991). Sebbar conteste la notion traditionnelle de l’unification et de l’identité culturelle (soit orientale, soit occidentale). A sa place (comme le fait Homi Bhabha dans Location of Culture) elle propose des modèles qui décrivent la culture comme une entité fluide et négociable. (2004: 128) [evokes a landscape of cultural diversity for a public principally French. She says that she writes ‘my father’s body in my mother’s language’ (Le Corps, 1991). Sebbar contests the traditional notion of unification and of cultural identity (either Oriental or Occidental). In its place (as does Homi Bhabha in Locations of Culture) she proposes some models that describe culture as a fluid and negotiable entity. (my translation)]

Sebbar carries this description of culture as fluid and negotiable throughout all of her corpus of work. Moreover, this image or conception of culture resonates just as well with the other women artists discussed in this project and underpins either directly or indirectly and in various expressions or demonstrations their understanding of culture as well. There are two important phrases or notions associated with Sebbar and her work that shed an interesting light onto this multichronotopic link between the women artists included in this study. Let us briefly examine each one.

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“JE SUIS UNE CROISÉE” AND “CROISEMENTS” In specific relation to Sebbar’s fiction and its textualized presentation of contemporary French culture—most notably the characteristic of permeable cultural borders—the most frequently analyzed self-proclaimed notion that many scholars employ as a point of departure in their criticism of her work is her citation “je suis une croisée”7 [“I am a cross-breed” but also “I am a crusader”]. As LaRonde introduces, this citation is taken up most often in an effort to characterize her work on the whole (2003: 19). At first blush, the second phrase or terminology, the notion of “croisement” [“criss-crossing”], seems to reflect the idea of métissage or the “contact zone” outlined in Françoise Lionnet’s theorizations of Francophone postcolonial writing. Both theoretical notions carry positive associations and are seen as progressive hybrid sites for identity and cultural formation. And both notions are born in the converging yet often contradictory intersections of country, culture, and history. However, the notion of “croisement” for Sebbar and her work extends beyond the coming together of two cultures in creating a new hybrid one—the traditional and most basic understanding and theorization of “métissage”—by accounting for a vast plurality or multiplicity of cultures within the “local” culture or “nation.” Moreover, Sebbar’s “croisement” is less a question of theorizing collective national or racial identity (which is often found at the heart of “métissage” debates) and more a question of forging an individual or personal identity vis-à-vis a plurality of cultures. More multivalent and “messy” or complex than Bhabha’s Third Space, Sebbar’s “croisement” effectively supports the possibility of discourses from and the textualizations of a re-hybridized transnational subject speaking from a ²⁄³ Space of intermedial expression. For Sebbar and other artists of transnational creative works, the firstgeneration postcolonial subject of “nous” [“we”]—whether directly stated in or indirectly implied by the text—is replaced by the subject of “je” [“I”] that is singular and individual. LaRonde underlines Sebbar’s insistence on the notion and importance of “croisement” in her fictional writing. He shares Sebbar’s words, “L’interférence et les croisements de lieux se sont imposés parce que ce qui est important pour moi, à la fois dans le travail d’écriture, dans l’imaginaire et dans le réel, c’est ce travail de tous les croisements” (2003: 19) [“the interference and cross-roads of places are imposed because what is important for me, at the same time in my writing, in the imaginary and in the real, is this work of all the cross-roads” (my translation)]. For LaRonde, Sebbar’s textual “croisement” primarily surfaces in the diverse and multiple “cultural roots” of her narratives’ characters. LaRonde finds that these

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multiple “cultural roots,” which Sebbar’s fictional characters carry inside themselves, rather than melting together into a lack of differentiation, add to each other and create plural identities among and within the individuals.8 LaRonde’s reading confirms the project of transnational studies as I defined it in the Introduction. Like the field of study, Sebbar’s “criss-crossed” work also takes shape in differing degrees in the multiple, complex, messy proximities and interconnections of social morphologies, types of consciousness, modes of cultural reproduction, avenues of capital, sites of political engagement, and (re)constructions of place and locality. Much scholarship on her “croisement” investigates the cross-border relationships and patterns of exchanges in her corpus as well as those between the text and its reader. Yet, there are other manners in which scholars engage with this trope of “croisement.” A second approach to Sebbar’s notion of “croisement” is through examining its structural effects in her texts and its affective relation with the reader. Many situate this “croisement” within a “dialectic of proliferation” (LaRonde, 2003: 20), which reflects the branching yet traceable nature of Sebbar’s corpus of work. This dialectic functions on two critical planes. First, it speaks to the textual presence of polysemy and intertextuality in her corpus of work; and second, it calls for the comparison of her “croisements” to the textual intersections established with the literary mode of magical realism.9 Many scholars either directly or indirectly second LaRonde’s idea of a “glissement perceptible” (or an apparent evolution) in Sebbar’s texts through examining two motifs: her recursive yet diverging inclusions of French, Maghrebi, and “beur” cultural practices and her character’s common extra/diegetic actions of fleeing and rebelling or shared experiences with exile and displacement. Scholars also focus on a linguistic “glissement” in Sebbar’s work, which speaks to her fluid use of interlanguages—a term from Winifred Woodhull that takes into account the oral, written, national, extranational, transnational, sacred, profane, and popular forms of speech, dialogue, and discourse—that is abundantly available in any given example of Sebbar’s fiction. All of these critical engagements with and approaches to Sebbar’s work speak to a diasporic consciousness of her protagonists who are consistently marked by multiple identifications and/or malleable categories of identification and by an awareness of de-centered attachments, a feeling of “being here and there at the same time.” To return momentarily to the notion of magical realism, where it is said that Sebbar’s notion of intermedial “croisement” and “glissement” sometimes intersect: in the strictest sense of the term, scholars’ connection of Sebbar’s work to the literary mode of magical realism—a primarily Latin American literary style of the 1940s in which its authors attempted to

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express the realistic American mentality and create an autonomous style of literature—seems rather a bit of a stretch. Where the two styles of writing do seem immediately to converge, however, is in their aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites.10 In other words, both magical realist authors and Leïla Sebbar challenge polar opposites, present conflicting perspectives that fuse the real and the fantastic, and mesh dominant and marginal world views in their writings. Moreover, both literary styles primarily feature a framework of transnational socio-cultural re-hybridization (or plurality of cultures, creolization, bricolage, or cultural transversalism) and pose questions surrounding the postcolonial context as represented in contemporary socio-politicaleconomic terms. However, the notion of the supernatural is not palpable to the same degree in Sebbar’s writing style as typically felt in magical realist texts. As in Assia Djebar’s work, the “supernatural” in Sebbar’s texts surfaces in the indigenous North African oral histories (or legends) she shares and the photographs or portraits of notable or everyday historical, political, or familial individuals she depicts or includes in her narratives. These indigenous Maghrebian histories and North African or “beur” family or community portraits do not seem to capture in the same degree the so-called “primitive” or “primeval” indigenous American characterizations existing in magical realist works. Yet the relationship between a “European, civilized Self” and an “exotic, savage Other” informs the subtexts, subplots, and subcultures of both literary writing styles. This distorted relationship between “an Orient” (the “exotic, savage Other”) and “an Occident” (the “European, civilized Self”) rests at the heart of the system of thought and scholarship surrounding Orientalism, which strongly influences Sebbar’s corpus of work. A brief exploration of these dialectics and methodologies will enrich our close reading and understanding of Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France: Carnet de voyage.

Orientalism, Travelogues, and Neo-Orientalist Tropes Edward Said defines the academic tradition of Orientalism as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.”11 He identifies the Orient as “the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (1979: 1). In the most basic definition, Oriental-

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ism is the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, and peoples by Western scholars. It also denotes the imitation or exaggerated depictions of often exotic and eroticized representations of Eastern cultures in the West by primarily late nineteenth and early twentieth-century artists of a variety of media, including literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, film, photography, pornography, music, and dance. Orientalism succeeded in depicting a single “Orient,” that is, the notion of a cohesive whole of a vast region spreading across a myriad of cultures and countries situated in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Anatolian peninsula, and the Balkan region. Orientalism essentializes an image of a prototypical “Oriental” as biologically inferior—culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging—who is portrayed in dominated and sexual terms.12 The primary discourses and visual imagery of Orientalism are laden with the problematics of power, and at their conception, were generally formulated to facilitate (defend and strengthen) the mission civilisatrice of the West. In Said’s theorizations, Western imperial powers and discourses constructed a stereotypical Orient through asymmetrical power relations (i.e., rational Europe/irrational Orient), an assertion composing a foundational tenet in the field of postcolonial studies. However, it appears that Said’s own work may also be guilty of asymmetrical power relations. The problematics of power informing Said’s construction of Orientalism have also been raised by feminist scholars in relation to Said’s theorizations as well. One of the major challenges directed at Said’s account of Orientalism includes his obliteration of gender. Valerie Kennedy calls this challenge, “Said’s blindness to gender,” and she finds that this characterizes all of his work.13 Many scholars raise that it is rare in Said’s work for him to analyze a work by a woman and find this neglect ironic for two important reasons. First, this gender-blindness parallels the conventionally stereotyped view of women by compounding the “diagnosis of the West’s view of the Orient as something both desired and feared, as something relatively unfamiliar and therefore both attractive because exotic, and dangerous or repulsive because unknown and threatening” (Kennedy, 2000: 41). This is to say that by neglecting factors of gender in his account and not considering the portrayal and discourses of women (“Oriental” or European) as other than the odalisque or houri or European and middle-class, he reproduces (albeit unwittingly) the sexual or inferior stereotyping of the Orient as “Other,” which is a representation he is supposed to be criticizing. Second, by neglecting the discourses of “Oriental” women and European women travelers to North Africa, Said overlooks their contributions in challenging the traditional male, Eurocentric claims and representations of non-European cultures. Thus, for postcolonial

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and transnational scholars working on visual and written representations of Arab cultures in the arts, traditional Orientalism must decolonize itself from its own conventional scholarship and second-hand representation (or imitation). However, the scholar must importantly take into account the constituents of gender when turning to the narratives, discourses, and forms of self-representation by the formerly so-called (male or female) “Oriental.” One manner in which several postcolonial and transnational feminist scholars of various media have recently taken gender into account in their critical work is by turning to the travelogues kept and paintings created by European women during their journeys throughout North Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These scholars find that women’s travelogues and paintings “in the Orientalist tradition” proffer a “centrality of a female subject who was both an eyewitness to and a participant” and as a text which is both “informed by preexisting discourse” and that depicts “the negation of . . . masculine fantasy” (Roberts, 2002: 181). In some ways, Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France: Carnet de voyages may be read as a women’s travelogue of her encounters with Algeria, its culture, its peoples, its discourses, its H/history, and its institutions. The text is certainly not a “travelogue” in the genre’s strictest definition, however. Mes Algéries en France is a work of literature or lifewriting that records the people, events, sights, and feelings of an author who is touring a “foreign” place (like a travelogue), but the text does not have a coherent narrative, which is traditionally considered necessary to the genre. Sebbar’s recounting of adventure, exploration, and conquest—traditional travelogue genre characteristics—in Mes Algéries en France are episodic, fragmented, and interspersed with visual images—a structure which is not characteristic of the traditional genre. In other words, Sebbar’s text shares the in-between literary or ²⁄³ Space of first-hand expression, reflection, and experience as common to the women’s travelogue, but this text, when compared to the conventional women’s travelogue, more intuitively and consciously challenges the constituents of gender in her theorizations of “Orientalist” gender representation. Moreover, her work overcomes the gender-blindness in Said’s theoretical account of “Oriental” categorizations. Sebber serves as an effective example of the uselessness of traditional “Oriental” categorizations that freeze the Other in static, monolithic representation. Thanks to her “croisement,” Sebbar escapes this restriction through subversion of essentially all traditional discourses of “otherness” in her work. In her narratives, she and/or her protagonists inhabit real and virtual spaces both within and outside the “Orient” and the “Occident” and within dominant and marginal cultures and rather freely circulate within a multitude of

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different cultural values and exchanges. She strives to bring the inherent complexity and multiplicity of cultural transversalism and cultural reproduction (i.e., the similarities and differences) to the fore in her work; and in doing so, she has created what some scholars label a neo-Orientalist approach. Kian finds that Sebbar bases a large portion of her novels not only on the representation of the Orient by the Occident, but also on the analysis of images that project “le côté fantastique et dogmatique de sa culture d’origine” (2004: 129) [“the fantastic and dogmatic side of her culture of origin” (my translation)]. In considering Sebbar’s Shérazade trilogy, Kian asserts that: Sebbar a l’intention d’agiter fortement les croyances fixes qui existent à propos de la France. Elle va déstabiliser les notions dominantes (les images préconçues) que garde l’Occident du MoyenOrient et de l’Afrique du Nord, mais elle veut aussi subvertir les mythes géographiques répandus qui ont leurs origines dans les cultures traditionnelles arabes et orientales. (2004: 129) [Sebbar has the intention of strongly shaking up the fixed beliefs that exist concerning France. She is going to destabilize the dominant notions (the preconceived images) that the Occident keeps of the Middle East and of North Africa, but she also wants to subvert the widespread geographical myths that have their origins in traditional Arabic and oriental cultures. (my translation)]

Upon close study of Sebbar’s corpus of work, it is my opinion that this objective—to destabilize hegemonic East/West (mis)conceptions and to subvert widespread geographical and gender myths existing on all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea—informs all of Sebbar’s work. In carrying out this objective in her corpus, Sebbar adopts three tropes in her writing that create real and virtual narrative spaces for both cognitive and visual reflection. These three tropes give rise to her individual transnational literary approach and effectively allow Sebbar and her protagonists to sift through life experiences in the narratives. First, Sebbar employs what postcolonial scholars consider the motif of haunting and spectrality, which is to say the textual or emotive reappearances of past colonial images and fantasies or side-effect aftermath feelings that haunt the contemporary postcolonial cultural scene.14 Second, Sebbar uses mimicry, which one may define as a hybrid stance of identification and distance.15 And third, Sebbar draws on the motif of (often self-imposed) exile. These three tropes work together to destabilize French national hegemonic discourses and subvert widespread French colonial (especially gender) myths.

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They also support the claim shared by all the women artists in this study that written and visual inscriptions cannot be predetermined nor narrowly prescribed; thereby aiding to partially deterritorialize the process of imaging their respective communities and explore how the process of uncovering or articulating new identities and subjectivities ushers in new ways of seeing, knowing, and being across all levels of “local,” “national,” and “global” visual and written systems of representation. Michael O’Riley asserts that the motif of haunting and spectrality is especially relevant to contemporary notions of postcolonial Franco-Algerian cultural relations and systems of representation because “the invisible yet perceived persistence of a colonial past and desire linked to orientalist practice continues to condition both postcolonial and Franco-Algerian relations [and systems of representation] as well as critical responses to them” (2001: 48). He concludes that in postcolonial France, “movements toward global and multicultural unions . . . remain haunted by orientalist images or practices from the colonial period in Algeria transposed onto new contexts” (2001: 49). He suggests that in an effort to envision another approach to postcolonial relations between France and Algeria, postcolonial and transnational French authors of Algerian heritage writing and publishing in France (including Sebbar), offer “critical insight into the oppositional and productive limits and potential of the postcolonial practice of re-inscribing orientalist sites of memory within the contemporary context” (2001: 49). O’Riley asserts that the texts of such authors demonstrate the vicissitudes of postcolonial criticism that remains haunted by the reappearance of colonial images and ideologies of orientalism and is therefore unable to question effectively whether such an examination of colonial-era orientalist images is still operative and relevant in ever-increasing postmodern and postcolonial circumstances. (2001: 49)

He theorizes that in her writing and associated artistic projects, Sebbar “urges those working in postcolonial studies to examine the relevance of the re-inscription of an orientalist practice as a critique of new forms of orientalism” (2001: 49). In other words, Sebbar wonders if the recuperation of traditional images that were originally inscribed into orientalist-styled visual and written systems of representation may serve as a jumping off point or trampoline for a discourse of criticism. In response, O’Riley along with many other postcolonial theorists and artists are contemplating whether the practice of returning to or including

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orientalist sites of memory and inscriptions of representation are (albeit unwillingly) recuperating Orientalism’s original hold on European views of Arab cultures. For example, many scholars and writers have returned to Alloula’s study of the European postcards featuring sexualized and/or exaggerated folkloric representations of Algerian women or to Djebar’s analyses of Delacroix’s and Picasso’s Femmes d’Alger in her Regard interdit, son coupé and question whether these texts might counter-intuitively perpetuate “the spectral dynamics of colonialism” (O’Riley, 2001: 49). Or, expressed differently, scholars question the danger of recuperating hegemonic, colonial misconceptions, myths, and discourses even in postcolonial texts purporting to challenge these vestiges of Orientalism. No consensus seems to have been reached yet, but this remains an important question. As an extension of this critical concern and insofar as reconstructing European engendered practices of viewing “the” Algerian woman is concerned, Djebar responds to this theoretical dilemma in Ces voix qui m’assiègent by calling for a post-orientalist discursive practice and politics. She recognizes the potentiality for a post-orientalist aesthetic that would enable the female body objectified in the orientalist gaze of the past to return as a liberated and reapproriated figure. L’orientalisme . . . était avant tout regard venu d’ailleurs: il rendait objet . . . l’être qui tentait de parler, de s’essayer à parler à l’Autre, à l’étranger . . . L’écriture serait, dès son argument, une parole silencieuse en mouvement, qui prolongerait un corps, visible autant à autrui qu’à soi-même. Aussi, une écriture véritable et au féminin, dans les pays musulmans de ce prochain XXIe siècle, ne pourra s’approfondir et se développer qu’à partir du corps libéré (ou en train de se libérer) de la femme. (1999: 28) [Orientialism . . . was foremost a gaze coming from elsewhere: it made into an object . . . the being who attempted to speak, tried to speak to the Other, to the foreigner . . . The writing would be, from his/her point, a silent speech in movement, that would prolong a body, visible to the other as well as to him/herself. Thus, a true feminine writing, in Muslim countries of this next 21st century, will only be able to go deeper and develop itself once women’s bodies are liberated (or are in the process of liberating themselves or being liberated). (my translation)]

For Djebar, this true, feminine writing or “écriture féminine” depends on a post-orientalist aesthetic that brings into the light a liberated female body that returns the gaze not just upon the traditional orientalist male and colonial

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dominating gaze, but that also gazes upon herself and her own body. This female turning of the gaze upon herself resounds in Sebbar’s trope of mimicry employed in her writing. In relation to Sebbar’s Shérazade trilogy, Peter Stranges asserts that Shérazade mimics odalisque paintings and other discursive figurations of hegemony, but this mimicry manifests a hybrid stance of identification and distance.16 Anne Donadey reads the trope of mimicry as a repetition of Orientalist discourse with a difference.17 Mimicry as repetition with a difference espouses the notion of a mimicry that “deconstructs the hierarchy between master and slave, colonizer and colonized, native-born and newcomer” (Stranges, 2003: 81) and surfaces in Sebbar’s texts when Franco-Maghrebi characters complicitly mimic the exotic clichés of Orientalism all the while through their French citizenship and partenance [“belonging”] to the Hexagon recast this otherness as sameness. Stranges explains that, “By repeating stereotypes about the Other as sameness, the [individual] reconfigures the collective identity as an inclusivist brassage [“brewing” or “mixing”] of Self and Other, in other words, as hybridity” (2003: 82). Thus, this recasting of otherness as sameness (or “the alien within”) in all of Sebbar’s work, which only seems possible from the margins by a community of marginal subjects or “othered” individual subjectivity displaying both “Arabness” and “Frenchness,” differs from traditional Orientialist imitation in that the goal of neo-Orientalism is to subvert the exclusivist and demarcating intentions of Orientalism that sought to reify Self-Other dichotomies. The brassage of Self and Other (or the acceptance of the Other’s subjectivity, a kind of allogenesis in Novakian terms) and a revisionist history of post/colonial representation must recognize the common French-Algerian grounding of intertwining cultures, histories, and destinies.18 Stranges asserts that: On a collective level, remembering hybridity is a non-repressive means by which France’s minority and majority communities can find a sense of unity, of sameness, without erasing cultural complexities of either group. Mimicry, mixed couples, and odalisques reterritorialize France’s segregated landscape as common ground. (2003: 89)

However, as Sebbar’s and Djebar’s narratives demonstrate, this “reterritorialization of France’s segregated landscape as common ground” takes place over a slow and often painful process of exile and marginalization that is difficult, frustrating, many times dangerous, traumatic, and always troubling.

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In outlining Sebbar’s narratives written and published in the 1990s, LaRonde traces a dialect of exile hemmed throughout these texts, most notably witnessed in Le négresse à l’enfance (1990), La jeunne fille au balcon (1995), Le baiser (1997), and Soldats (1999). In these narratives, Sebbar examines the discursive conditions of exile and its corollaries (e.g., memory, forgetting, cultural transmissions, History, the colonial wars and their consequences, and post-colonial migrations).19 For many scholars, this dialectic of exile particularly revolves around questions raised in Sebbar’s work concerning the often traumatic roles History and memory play in identity formation and politics of culture. Woodhull specifically links this dialectic of exile with nomadism, which for her refers to “an array of political and cultural concerns whose interconnections need to be rethought in relation to the tensions that have developed . . . within an ethnically diverse French nation” (1993: 88). In relation to transnational narratives in general and Sebbar’s work in particular, the dialectics of exile and nomadism most often surface in their protagonists’ all-consuming anxiety brought about by their attempts to assimilate (or voicing the pressure they feel to assimilate) to a “national” culture all the while recognizing their desire and right not to belong to this monolithic representation of culture. In other words, the tropes of exile and nomadism capture “the double articulation of a young people’s identity [and desire] for integration, but against an assimilation that would obliterate their difference” (Woodhull, 1993: 107). Within the transnational project as I outlined it in the Introduction of this study following the thinking of Lionnet and Shih, this double articulation becomes the signifier for multiplicity or creolization within and across all levels of the “local,” “national,” and “global.” Maya Larguet sheds a positive light on the tropes or dialectics of exile and nomadism within a similar context. She finds that pour Leïla Sebbar, l’exil, plus qu’une déchirure, est avant tout un apprentissage, susceptible même de procurer du plaisir. Mais envisageable comme tel seulement à condition d’être armé intellectuellement, capable de transformer l’intranquillité et le tourment en un matériau positif. (2005) [for Leïla Sebbar, exile, more than a tear, is foremost an acquisition, likely even to bring about pleasure. But imaginable as such only in the condition of being armed intellectually, capable of transforming the untranquility and the torment into positive material. (my translation)]

This is to say that exile, displacement, and nomadism are not necessarily “dead ends” in the incessant debates over national and personal identity, nor

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are they locked into fixed, monolithic dichotomies of the country of origin and the country of residence or destination. Rather, these tropes in “beur” writing and Sebbar’s lifewriting serve to forge “links between the unbound, pleasantly anonymous scene of writing, the lost ‘symbolic land[s] . . . the ‘social terrain’ of the French nation, and . . . immigrant populations” (Woodhull, 1993: 110). Following the edifying functions or benefits as outlined by Larguet, exile, displacement, and nomadism work to broaden the responses to what it means to be “French” in public spaces and discourses as well as private or domestic ones. In light of this project’s particular examinations of female representation, however, one must add a gender perspective to Sebbar’s tropes and their functions or advantages. We must extend the question of what it means to be “French” to ask more specifically what it means to be a “French woman.” Let us pause to consider how the life experiences of exile, displacement nomadism, and immigration of women to France have given shape to or been ignored in the (re)constructions of French femininity and “the” French female experience.

French Women of (North African) Immigrant Origin As Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr point out, “Studies about immigration and postcolonial society in France tend to ignore or marginalize the gendered nature of their subject” (2001: 1). As many feminist scholars recognize, the experiences and identities of women of immigrant origin are located at an “intersection of a complex web of ethnic, race, class, and gender relations” (Freedman and Tarr, 2000: 1). The French women of North African immigration are victims of both gendered and racial oppression.20 Feminist scholars work to underline these women’s (albeit sometimes limited or restricted) abilities in forging new and positive cross-cultural identities within French society. One reason for the challenges facing French women of immigration’s ability to forge new and positive cross-cultural identities resides in the archaic representations of these women in mainstream French society. Freedman and Tarr assert that women of immigrant origin in France are often ignored in mainstream media or are represented in stereotyped categories. For example, they suggest that older women are generally portrayed as wives and mothers, responsible for the “integration” of the family in French society…

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[and] young women are often forgotten, [with] only the issue of Islamic headscarves in French school bring[ing] the problems of young women of immigrant origin to the foreground. (2000: 2)

For Freedman and Tarr, the stereotyped representations of French women of immigrant origin as wives, mothers, and daughters bearing the burden of responsibility for the integration of immigrant communities in France or when seen uniquely as victims of patriarchal Muslim cultures become “obstacles to full understanding of the heterogeneity of identities and representations and multiple dimensions of problems and difficulties that touch women’s lives” (2000: 3). Many feminist scholars and artists strive to overcome these obstacles in attempting conscientiously to account for and represent the differences of class, age, and sexuality within different ethnic communities in their texts. As we will see in following discussions in this chapter, the primary goal for Sebbar and many other postcolonial and transnational artists and theorists “seeks to capture this heterogeneity and multiplicity whilst at the same time highlighting certain themes that are of concern to all women of immigrant origin, especially women from France’s ex-colonies” (2000: 3). One means through which these artists accomplish their primary goal is through the employment of personal history in their life narratives. Through the lens of the interrogation of the personal in their work, they create re-hybridized postcolonial subjects who articulate transnational discourses of identity and historicity and occupy ²⁄³ Spaces of subjectivity and speaking positions. In effect, these re-hybridized postcolonial subjects often recount for the first time their experiences of immigration and its aftershocks upon settling in the adopted culture and new homeland. We will pause momentarily to take a look at some of the important social, political, historical, and economic factors that helped shape these women’s personal narratives. With Chirac’s suspension of immigration to France for employment in 1974, the main source of immigration to France at that time became what was called “le regroupement familial ” [“family regrouping”] in which (North) African men who were already working in France were allowed to have their families still residing in their countries of origin join them in France. The new wave of immigrants changed the face of immigration and led to a feminization of the population of immigrant origin as wives and children came to join male workers.21 This also added important specific questions and debates to the “general” concern of immigration by opening lines of political inquiry regarding “immigrant” religious practices involving family, marriage, polygamy, excision, and so forth. In other words, the immigration of (North)

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African women posed different questions and problems for French society by revealing how the experiences and processes of immigration (and integration) were clearly gendered and lived out differently by men and women. In the former colonizer’s discourses on immigration and integration—and especially in reactionary discourses like those of the Front national—a linkage between gender and national identity occupies a precarious position. In one extreme, Freedman and Tarr assert that women are considered participants in ethnic and national processes of cultural construction and identification in a number of specific ways; for example, as biological reproducers of ethnic community, reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic or national groups, key actors in transmission of community values, markers of ethnic or national distinctiveness, and active participants in national struggles.22 Yet paradoxically in the other extreme, Freedman and Tarr find that political representations of immigrants have tended to concentrate on the image of the male worker, [often ignoring] women’s varied migratory projects and trajectories [by] either rendering women of immigrant origin ‘invisible’ or confining them to the family and representing them principally as wives and mothers. (2000: 14)

In either scenario, what is clear is that women’s personal and individual experiences with immigration and life afterwards are elided from History and mainstream media. The extreme right’s political representations of women of immigrant origin have falsely exploited women’s roles in biological reproduction of ethnic communities in France by creating fears of an “immigrant invasion” boosted by the supposedly high birth rate amongst communities of immigrant origin and by capitalizing on the persistent image of women of immigrant origin bearing numerous, illegitimate children and expecting the French state to support them.23 Freedman and Tarr conclude that other political agents who maintain a discourse of integration (and not racist expulsion) in France also place representations of women of immigrant origin within the family. Like the extreme right, these centralist politicians emphasize women of immigrant origin’s role as biological reproducers of the ethnic community but differ in suggesting that these women’s principal responsibility lies in the essential transmission of socalled “French” community values; in other words, those cultural values which will aid their children’s integration into French society. Tarr and Freedman explain that in this political and social view, it is the mother’s “duty to ensure the stability of ethnic population and to see to it that

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[her] children integrate or assimilate and become ‘French’” (2000: 15). Thus, women of immigrant origin in France are represented in a variety of multiple socio-political discourses as both “bearers of tradition” as well as “agents of modernity” who are paradoxically responsible for “both perpetuating the boundaries of ethnic groups with France and ensuring that these boundaries are made permeable to French culture” (Freedman and Tarr, 2000: 15). This question of integration—along with the tropes of mimicry and haunting and spectrality—importantly frame one of Sebbar’s more recent texts, Mes Algéries en France: Carnet de voyages (2004). Let us now turn to our close reading of this life narrative.

MES ALGÉRIES EN FRANCE: CARNET DE VOYAGES In this “autobiographical,” “traveloguesque” collection of tales, fictional narratives, testimonies, interviews, portraits, reports, photographs, drawings, sketches, orange wrappers, watercolors, comics trips, and postcards, Sebbar weaves together what her publisher calls affective mythology and an intimate and political geography of her places of memory and encounters. She divides this work into eight different sections, with each section featuring a series of discursively related texts. Each division of Mes Algéries en France carries a different focus related to Sebbar’s (often chance) encounters with Algerians and manifestations of Algerian culture in France—stumbling across postcards and photographs bearing images of Algeria and Algerians, receiving letters from Algerian acquaintances, and catching on television the “friendly game” between the national soccer teams of France and Algeria. The secondary title to this text, Carnet de voyages, immediately stirs up in the mind of the reader impressions of traveling abroad. Quick readings of many of the work’s texts would seem to support this impression, as most of their narrators or subjects (the ever-changing “je” or subjectivity of each text) recount stories that took place or describe locations and objects found in Algeria. However, upon closer examination, the reader realizes that traveling in France and not Algeria has provided the impetus to Sebbar’s multiple recollections of individual memories and interpretations of history. In explaining the text’s title, Mes Algéries en France, Sebbar states: J’aime voyager en France, la France habitée par l’Algérie. Si la migration algérienne (juive, musulmane [arabe et berbère], piednoir), ne s’était pas arrêtée dans la France, Paris et ses provinces, Nord/Sud, Est-Ouest, je ne voyagerais pas comme je le fais depuis

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C H A PT E R 4 plus de vingt-cinq ans, avec la même excitation affective et intellectuelle. Et si je ne voyage pas en Algérie c’est parce que mon pays natal a perdu ses étrangers. (Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood, 2004) [I like to travel in France, the France inhabited by Algeria. If the Algerian migration (Jewish, Muslim [Arabic and Berber], ‘piednoir’]) didn’t stop in France, Paris, and its provinces, North/ South, East-West, I would not travel as I have done so for more than twenty-five years, with the same affective and intellectual excitement. And I would not travel in Algeria because my native country lost its foreigners. (my translation)]

Sebbar shares that she does not like to travel abroad and that each time she is in a foreign land, she would like not to be a foreigner. For Sebber, “vivre dans la langue, dans cette familiarité” [“to live in the language, in this familiarity”], all the while discovering the country and its landscape, describes her ideal travel experience.23 She finds this experience time and time again while traveling throughout France and takes extensive notes on her experiences, encounters, new information gleaned, and memories recalled. For Sebbar, these extensive notes form the basis of much of her recent writing. She describes the rather organic and intermedial processes in which her travel notes transform into writing material by explaining: Je note la date, le lieu précisément, si j’ai pris une photo-témoin (je photographie rarement les paysages) avec un appareil jetable. Je découpe des articles qui m’intéressent, dans la presse nationale et régionale. De retour à Paris, je déchire les pages du carnet pour les coller dans un cahier rouge, mon journal intime, avec ou sans commentaires, je colle aussi les articles découpés, tout cela dans le désordre, le plus souvent, je sais que je retrouverai ce que je veux si j’en avais besoin pour une nouvelle, un récit, un article. Les photos ne figurent pas dans le journal intime. Je les range dans une sorte de porte-photos souple que me donne le photographe chinois de mon quartier, puis dans une boîte-dossier en carton blanc par année, lieu, sujet. (Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood, 2004) [I note the date and place precisely, if I’ve taken a souvenir photo (I rarely photograph landscapes) with a disposable camera. I cut out articles that interest me, in the national and regional press. Upon return to Paris, I tear out the pages from the notebook and glue them in a red notebook, my diary, with or without commentary, I also glue the cut-out articles, all of this in disarray

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most often, I know that I will find again what I want if I need it for a short story, a tale, an article. The photos don’t go in the diary. I store them in a kind of soft photo-album that the Chinese photographer from my neighborhood gives me, then in a white cardboard file-box by year, place, subject. (my translation)]

This hybridic or intermedial physical process of suturing together multiple discourses and texts gives shape to Sebbar’s textual “croisement” that she structures throughout her body of work. Echoing scholars’ theorizations of the intermedial and unconventional construction of her postcolonial narratives in general, Sebbar asserts specifically that: Mes Algéries en France qui ne s’inscrit dans aucune rubrique traditionnelle, sinon le carnet de voyages et encore, c’est un carnet excentrique aussi, une sorte de cabinet des curiosités où se mêlent les genres littéraires et iconographiques. On pourrait dire que ce livre est une curiosité austère. (Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood, 2004) [Mes Algéries en France does not subscribe to any traditional rubric, other than the travelogue and still, it’s an exocentric travel notebook as well, a kind of curio cabinet where the literary and iconographic genres blend together. One could say that this book is an austere curiosity. (my translation)]

Sebbar’s narrative still stems from a ²⁄³ Space of expression, like the other primary texts analyzed in this study; but in this case, the re-hybridization of subject and subject position are not just a polyphony of personalized and dispersed individual voices that share a common origin or source but are also a mish-mash of personalized and dispersed individual media which Sebbar uses to expose, resist, and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses, borders, and cultural values of “nation.” Sebbar concludes that Mes Algéries en France is an elaborated or refined travel notebook that traces and retraces her routes that run across a France (her own) inhabited by an Algeria (her own).24 Sebbar works to deliver in this text, “[son] roman réel et imaginaire, d’Occident en Orient, d’Orient en Occident”25 [“her real and imagined novel, of Occident in Orient, of Orient in Occident” (my translation)]. Larguet summarizes that in this text: Leïla Sebbar réfute pourtant toute nostalgie d’un temps révolu. . . . En effet, si Leïla Sebbar, par ses essais, ses fictions ou ses témoignages autobiographiques, participe à un travail de mémoire, ce

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C H A PT E R 4 n’est jamais pour fixer une histoire dans un passé mais pour lui construire un avenir. Et par ses livres, bâtir des ponts. (2004) [Leïla Sebbar refuses however all nostalgia of a past time. . . . In effect, if Leïla Sebbar, through her essays, her fictions or her autobiographical testimonies, participates in a work of memory, it’s never in order to fix history in a past but in order to construct it a future. And through her books, build bridges. (my translation)]

In Mes Algéries en France as well as everywhere else in her work, Sebbar engages the cultural component that interests her the most: the study of the real or imagined dynamics between past and present, particularly insofar as Franco-Maghrebi representations are concerned. She routinely questions what these dynamics hold in store for France’s and Algeria’s futures. It lies beyond the scope of this project to examine all of Sebbar’s dynamics of representations of past and present Franco-Maghrebian femininity and domesticity that she portrays throughout the various divisions of Mes Algéries en France. Although many portraits do overlap in terms of their ideological implications or metaphorical functions in the text, the portraits are simply too numerous to delineate properly in individual discussion. Thus, I will underline what I consider the strongest feminine and domestic portraits—specifically in relation to the tropes of mimicry and haunting and spectrality—as I work my way through an analysis of the text as a whole. In the first division, Portrait de famille, Les Écoles, Sebbar strings together the story of her parents’ meeting, photographic portraits of her parents around the age when they would have met, stories of her father’s schooling, stories of her mother’s leaving France for Algeria, family photographs of Sebbar and her brother and sisters as children, descriptions of the école coranique and the école de la République, photographs of different schools in the area, class portraits of students at various points of time in Algeria’s French colonial history, school registration papers, and images of textbook covers and school materials. This section evidences the earlier discussion of Stranges’ notion of the brassage of Self and Other or a Novakian reading of Sebbar’s “production of the alien.” In this division, the reader confronts a revisionist sense of post/ colonial history, the intertwining cultures and destinies of France and Algeria and their occupants, at least insofar as the school systems are concerned. However, as an extension of the State and potentially the most powerful (and subversive) arena for perpetuating colonial discourses, the school becomes a much broader symbol of la République in Portrait de famille, Les écoles. Sebbar harnesses this semiotic in the closing text in this section, Les écoles de la République, when examining les Mariannes rouges: the rare busts of the

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famous effigy whose toga-like apparel is painted red and which stand before certain schools of the République, even those located in the former colonies. She draws a correlation between these “colored” busts that represent the French nation to the “métisse” girls of the Parisian suburbs “ni putes ni soumises”—the Mariannes of today who on July 14, 2003, costumed themselves as Marianne and demonstrated at the frontispiece of the National Assembly (Sebbar, 2004: 44). In a very clear example of peoples of French and Algerian heritage sharing joint destinies, Sebbar writes: De la maison maternelle à la maison de France, ces traversières, filles des pères et mères de l’ancien Empire colonial, donnent voix et corps à la République qui s’essouffle. Quand certains de leurs frères niquent la République, elles la fécondent. (2004: 44) [From the maternal house to the house of France, these Mediterranean-crossers, daughters of fathers and mothers of the former colonial Empire, give voice and body to the Republic that is running out of breath. When some of their brothers screw the Republic, they fertilize it. (my translation)]

This citation, which is both positive and negative, simultaneously troubles and reassures. On one hand, this march and demonstration create a medium for so-called subaltern or marginal expression in (female) body and voice, a positive leap forward for women’s movements and the goal of many postcolonial artists or scholars (Djebar, Minh-Ha, etc.). But on the other hand, Sebbar’s citation recuperates mainstream and certainly Front national stereotypes of “beur” existence in France. In this example of mimicry, the “beur” women imitate important French iconography through their costumes and succeed in displaying their otherness as sameness. In an effort to bring national and cross-social class awareness to many banlieue women’s second-class or even third-class conditions of life and to their subjugation to la loi de la cité—often as the targets of domestic violence and victims of forced marriages, forced prostitution, harassment, excisions, and gang rapes—the men and women associated with the “ni putes ni soumises” organization in France actively campaign for “un nouveau féminisme qui s’opposerait à l’affrontement des genres”26 [“a new feminism that would oppose itself to the confrontation of sexes”]. By adopting the motto “laïcité, égalité mixité,” members of “ni putes ni soumises” envision the separation of Church and State, or “laïcité” (“En somme, [la] pierre angulaire de notre pacte républicain, la laïcité est le garant de la cohésion sociale et de l’égalité de Toutes et Tous devant la loi” [“In sum, the keystone of our

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republican pact, secularism is the shelter of social cohesion and of equality for all men and women before the law”], and hybridity, or “mixité” (“Il est nécessaire d’effacer les frontiers qui séparent les deux sexes pour instaurer le respect” [“It is necessary to erase the borders that separate the two sexes in order to establish respect”]), as necessary instruments leading to social equality in France.27 They are calling for governmental intervention on behalf of the particularly female citizens of the banlieues for amelioration to the sub-standard existence they are forced to live and from which they have few chances of escape on their own. Sebbar’s “Mariannes métisses” demonstrate Djebar’s post-orientalist aesthetic in which she theorizes the female body objectified in the orientalist gaze of the past (“les mères de l’ancien Empire colonial”) is able to return as a liberated and reappropriated figure. By reclaiming and reconstructing the iconography of the French Republic in public discourse, the “beur” daughters of the République fuse both body and voice in a hybrid or intermedial campaign to bring about social change. These women turn the “stolen” gaze upon themselves and their own bodies in an effort to hold those guilty parties accountable for the grievances committed against them. And furthermore, they invite French society to do the same. The closing sentence to Les écoles de la République, “Quand certains de leurs frères niquent la République, elles la fécondent” [“When some of her brothers screw the Republic, they fertilize it”], paves the way for a trope of perhaps subversive mimicry in Mes Algéries en France. The first effect of this closing statement is to recuperate almost shockingly mainstream French and extreme right-wing stereotypes of “beur” existence, lifestyle, male delinquency, and familles nombreuses. Keeping in mind that Sebbar is writing for a primarily mainstream French public, she flings this statement at the reader with the intention of unsettling his or her reading experience and understanding of his or her place in French society. In a technique similar to Amari’s use of the model housewife image in the opening scene of Satin rouge, Sebbar embraces the dominant representation of women of Maghrebi immigration origin as mothers of many children only in order to pit this representation against the irrefutable representation of Marianne as (maternal) nation state. Sebbar wants the reader to question what it means to be “French” and to (re)negotiate his or her position in the traditional Self-Other divide. Her “Mariannes métisses’ ” recasting their otherness as sameness—their displaying both “Arabness” and “Frenchness”—shakes up in a transnational manner the exclusivist and demarcating intentions that traditional Orientalism sought in reifying Self-Other dichotomies.

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True, the donning of the bonnet phrygien—the liberty cap that every Marianne always sports—in French socio-cultural thought is known as the symbol of the people of Paris, thus suggesting that all those wearing it are recognized as citizens of the Republic and, in effect, become “French.” Albeit a gift of citizenship and rights in one perspective, this recognition pivots, however, on an official policy of assimilation in which the new immigrant citizen is supposed to (more or less) leave his/her culture of origin at his/her point of entry into the nation and assimilate to all things “French.” Traditionally since the establishment of the Fifth Republic, the Mariannes, which are renewed every three years upon vote by the mayors of French cities, have been modeled after famous French actresses or models—Brigitte Bardot, Mireille Mathieu, Catherine Deneuve, Inès de la Fressange, Laetitia Casta, and Évelyne Thomas. These Mariannes have (perhaps unwittingly) recuperated monolithic representations of the “French” nation in terms of race, social class, and (Western) conventional standards of feminine beauty. Reportedly, however, in 2002 following some controversy regarding Casta’s personal life, finances, and relocation to London, England, a new Marianne, not bearing the features of a famous French women but those of an anonymous beurette (or young woman of North African descent), was born and was intended to symbolize a modern, multiethnic France. Sadly, this construction of Marianne was short-lived, not widely or prominently displayed or advertised, and quickly replaced a year later by Évelyne Thomas.28 Also reportedly, in 2006 it was rumored that the new Marianne (that would replace Thomas) was planned to be anonymous and black.29 But, at the time of preparing this manuscript in 2008, no mention of this possibility or corresponding photograph of the constructed bust appears on the official website of the French Presidency, which contains a link to the history and explanation of Marianne along with a gallery of photographs of the different “official” busts that have been fashioned in the past. In relation to Sebbar’s representation of the “Mariannes métisses” in Mes Algéries en France, by inviting the reader to question his/her perception of iconographic imagery of the French Republic, Sebbar is shaking up the dynamics of past and present histories and is bringing to the reader’s attention a “mixed” effigy of Frenchness. She shows how her “Mariannes métisses” embody a double brassage of Self and Other—doubled in the sense that these women are “othered” in both race and gender. Thus, Sebbar creates a reverse neo-Orientalism which, through the power of iconography and semiotics, turns the past colonial gaze upon the République itself in order to destabilize

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and subvert the images and meanings inherited from the ancient and recent pasts. This destabilization opens up new re-hybridized spaces and points of departures for multiple discourses of and challenges to what it means to be républicain. This “shaking up” works to bring to light the double standards entrained by républicain ideals or tenets as non-exercised in banlieue reality and to offer a modality in which the relationships between dominant and subaltern discourses can be renegotiated. Therefore, the first most striking portrait of femininity in Mes Algéries en France embraces a neo-Orientalist representation of a plurality of feminine identities politically engaged in challenging accepted notions of French national femininity and articulating a new sense of female self “ni pute ni soumise.” In Algériennes, the second text of Mes Algéries en France, this renegotiation of dominant and subaltern discourses of the female self is repeated. However, this division adopts the motif of haunting and spectrality, rather than mimicry, in representing “ethnic Othered” forms of French femininity and portraits of marginal domestic space and households in France. Algériennes is primarily composed of a series of stories and portraits of a multiplicitous representation of Algerian femininity. Sebbar introduces the reader throughout the division to her “soeurs étrangères,” who are: women storytellers, Algerian women “regrouped” with their husbands working in France, grandmothers who remained in Algeria while children and grandchildren moved to France, the “indigenous” women of the turn-of-century postcards, and photographs of various Algerian women intellectuals and Kabylie women. In this division, we also meet Juliette Grandgury, a French nurse working near Aflou following World War II, through whose fearless efforts and services came to be wellloved, respected, and appreciated by the people of the area. We meet Sebbar’s mother’s Singer sewing machine and the young local seamstress (Fatima) who would come every Thursday to Sebbar’s parents’ home to help with the sewing. We also meet other academic French-Algerian mixed couples (colleagues and friends of Sebbar’s parents), young women warriors of the Algerian war for independence, prostitutes, women of the “Goutte d’Or” neighborhood in Paris, three of Sebbar’s childhood girlfriends, and Shérazade. These multiple portraits of femininity work together to show how different parameters, markers, and categories of identity—gender, language, ideology, belief systems, (non)conventional behavior, and marginality—intersect with visual and written systems of representation and can subvert the images and meanings inherited from the past. Yet these multiple portraits also scare up motifs of haunting and spectrality that continue to dominate much of postcolonial studies. These textual and emotive reappearances of past colonial images and the fantasies or side-effect aftermath feelings which haunt the

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contemporary postcolonial scene, surface primarily in the photographs or painted or sketched portraits of the various women displayed along the pages of this division of Mes Algéries en France. When flipping from one photograph or portrait to the next, one is struck by the multitude of images that both recuperate and challenge expected Orientalist codes of Algerian female representation. The first image is a 2002 watercolor portrait of a young Algerienne by the Parisian-born and graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris painter Sébastien Pignon. This painting reflects the “Mariannes métisses” iconography just outlined in the last section of this chapter. We see a young woman with ambiguous ethnic coding wearing a red bonnet phrygien (or possibly a headscarf), a yellowish-green pearl necklace, and a white toga-like draping. Her face overall seems rather expressionless, but a subtle lost or troubled look resides about the eyes. From this image we move to a collection of three photographs of older women storytellers in conservative Algerian female dress (headscarves, shawls, bangle bracelets, and long skirts). The two women’s hands in the upper photographs are stained with henna. The third woman’s hands are not visible in the bottom photograph. All three women are actively engaged in their storytelling. On the very next page, we come face-to-face with an Algerian woman (veil removed) photographed sitting against a wall by Marc Garanger. Her appearance is disheveled, but there seems a rather blank expression on her face. This is one example from the thousands of photo identification portraits of Algerian women Garanger was ordered to take toward the end of France’s colonial rule in Algeria. Opposite from Garanger’s back-and-white “Femme algérienne” photograph, we find Djamel Farès’ “Gida, la grand-mère de Djamel” photograph (also in black-and-white.) This image reveals an elderly Algerian woman in headscarf and dress standing in a room inside her home to the right of a collage of photographs of whom we assume are family members and a collection of drawings of men, women, children, and animals presumably done by her grandchildren. The grandmother stands with her arms clasped behind her back with a small smile upon her face. From this photograph of Gida we move onto a photograph (in color) of Noria Bouhkobza, French-Algerian ethnologist by training but practicing sociologist, writer, and “Maîtresse de conférence en Anthropologie à l’IUFM de Midi-Pyrénées.” Her 2002 “fiction ethnologique,” Les femmes dans l’ombre du jour, is a story based on a collection of narratives between Algeria and France recounted by the women (mother and daughters) of a Toulousian family under Bouhkobza’s observation. Like Sebbar, Bouhkobza’s work also draws on the idea of a mixed destiny of the two countries’ submission, revolt,

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renouncement, and liberation. This “roman familial” becomes a forum for the voicing of the mother’s and daughter’s opinions regarding maternal education, marriage, the life of a woman, and the traditional values and practices the mother imposes upon the five daughters. In this photograph of Boukhobza, she is fully centered within the frame in a rather close-up shot with her face turned a quarter-turn away from the lens. She is looking off frame with an evident (although closed) smile upon her face. As we turn the page, we encounter Sonia. This is a two-page color photograph (by Farida Mamak) of a young woman dressed in all black European attire with no headscarf sitting on her bed in her bedroom. Sonia is positioned on the right-hand side, slightly lower corner of the frame. The rest of the frame captures her bedroom surroundings of a table covered in a red flowered-motif tablecloth, chair, and wall coverings of celebrity magazine photos (Maghrebi and European) and posters. Sonia with legs crossed at the knee sits on her bed and leans forward—elbow resting on knee, chin resting on fist—and directly engages the camera lens. She fully returns the spectator’s gaze in a captivating way. The caption reads, “Sonia chez elle. Kabylie, près de Tizi-Hibel, 2001” [“Sonia at home. Kabylie, near Tizi-Hibel, 2001”]. From this image we move to another “Kabylie” image, a photograph by Jacques Guerry, of an almost full-shot profile of an adolescent indigenous Kabylie girl in the traditional “mountain” or “peasant” attire and headscarf carrying a child on her back. In the middle-ground and on the very edge of the right-hand side of the frame, an older woman looks back over her shoulder at the camera. The two women gaze into the lens and bear bright, broad smiles on their faces. The mountain and farmland landscapes in the background are clearly visible under the bright-blue sunny sky. From this image we move to two other “indigenous” images two pages later. In these black-and-white postcard photographs, we meet a group of five Algerian girls standing along the railing of a balcony. The extract of the postcard reads, “Algérie—Marchande de Lain” [“Algeria—Wool Trader”]. Five pages later, we are presented with a color photograph of a face of a brick building in Paussac (Périgord) bearing a sign advertising the nearest Singer sewing machine dealer. Three pages after the Singer photograph, Sebbar includes a small collage of four black-and-white photographed portraits of Anna Greki (freedom fighter and poet), Tounes Brahimi (civil militant in Alger), Danière Minne (member of the Algerian resistance and freedom fighter), and Arezki and Fatha Hermouche (two medical support staff members responsible for the region of Wilaya). The three close-up head shots of the women depict three women in European-style clothing, all centered within their head shots and

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smiling. The photograph of the two men is much grainier but does show two men standing with an arm around each other. They appear much more seriouslooking in their expression than the three women, but it is difficult to tell due to the quality of the image whether there is a trace of a smile or not. Our final image of this division is a photograph taken of Eugène Giraud’s painting entitled Odalisque en rouge that resides in the Musée Calvet in Avignon, France. In this painting, a young woman elaborately dressed in a stunning red dress with a tapestry-like motif trim and strings of beaded necklaces lounges on a sort-of chaise with one arm resting on a cushion propping up her chin. In her other hand resting at her side, she appears to be holding the coil of a hookah. The setting appears to be a palatial boudoir, but the colors are quite dark surrounding the woman, thus rendering distinct details obscure. She returns our gaze, but she is as much frozen as Delacroix’s Women of Algers whom Djebar described and theorized in Regard interdit, son coupé. Although Giraud’s odalisque bears no wide grin, there is most definitely an expression of satisfaction and contentment painted on her face. When first reading this section of Mes Algéries en France, it was not always apparent to me why all of these images were included among the texts or why they appeared in the order, position, or arrangement that they do. Upon multiple readings of these texts and images, it appears to me now that there is a sort of theoretical progression and recursive linkage between each of these eleven just-described images in Algériennes. Pignon’s watercolor of “Marianne métisse” not only provides an organizational or structural link from the first division of Mes Algéries en France to the second, but this image also sets a tone or gives a context to Algériennes that echoes the multiple “cultural roots” of the women we are about to meet in this division. The watercolor speaks to Sebbar’s theorization of the creation of plural identities among and within the individuals of both France and Algeria, which she fleshes out in the subsequent images. It is interesting to compare this opening representation to the representation that closes this second division: the photograph of Giraud’s nineteenthcentury Orientalist painting, Odalisque en rouge. The effect of bookending this division with these two representations functions to present conflicting perspectives entrained in fusing the real and the fantastic, which in their turn engages Sebbar’s study of the dynamics of past and present. The “realness” of the Marianne métisse reflects the present dynamics of a multicultural and multiethnic French society or nation on the potential verge of official recognition in dominant French political discourse. And, the “fantasticality” of the odalisque recalls the spectrality or underlying haunting quality of France’s and Algeria’s torrid histories of de/colonization of the past.

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From one angle, in terms of symbolic or metaphoric function in this division, it would seem to make more sense to reverse the order of these two representations. Reverse order, beginning with the odalisque and concluding with the Marianne métisse would better capture a chronological evolution of Algerian women’s representation in the postcolonial scholar’s view: from the colonized and eroticized female other of Orientalism to a multiplicitous or re-hybridized representation of female other in postcolonial studies. But, from another angle, Sebbar’s concluding with the odalisque (the odalisque’s haunting qualities and spectrality) speaks to the essentialist dangers implicit in past studies and systems of written and visual representation, against which she writes throughout all of her work. Sebbar shows how multiple portraits of Algerian women as mothers, grandmothers, French, Kabylie, freedom fighters, academics, and seamstresses—the other women in Algériennes—run the risk of being collapsed into this Orientalist image of the odalisque that haunts postcolonial studies and Franco-Maghrebi cultures. Therefore, Sebbar recuperates the odalisque with her transnational, post-orientalist aesthetic because this representation, although exaggerated in the mind of the European, is part of the cohesive multiplicitous portrait of Algerian and Algerian descendents’ femininity in France. The odalisque remains part of the multiple experiences and identities affecting many marginalized, minority women inside the French Republic; and by recuperating this myth in Mes Algéries en France, Sebbar wishes to demonstrate how one may position contemporary notions of French femininity at an intersection of a complex web of ethnicity, race, class, and gender relations. By bookending Algériennes with the “Mariannes métisses” and the Odalisque en rouge and concluding with the latter, Sebbar underlines the challenges that French women of immigrant origin face in their efforts to forge new and positive cross-cultural identities, especially since archaic representations (i.e., the odalisque) often retain their strong hold in mainstream French society still to this present day. Concerning the other images that fall in-between Marianne métisse and Odalisque en rouge in Algériennes, Sebbar adopts the assumed and paradoxical female roles of “bearer of tradition” and “agent of modernity.” Through the haunting and spectral qualities of the odalisque, the homage photographs of the storytellers, the ID portrait by Garanger, the photographs of Gida the Grandmother and the Kabylie adolescent girl, and the turn-of-the-century postcard portraits, Sebbar reifies and perpetuates the boundaries between ethnic groups and their representation within French discourses. Yet, through the photographs of Noria Bouhkobza, Sonia “chez elle,” and the female freedom fighters, all figures with intimate knowledge of “French” culture or who

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are at least coded photographically as such, Sebbar ensures that these boundaries are seen and lived as permeable within “French” culture. Not just in Algériennes but in the other divisions of Mes Algéries en France as well—Arts et lettres, Une passion algérienne, Les hommes assis, le champ des morts, Parcs et jardins Bestiaire—Sebbar shares the female responsibility in the transmission of community values. But, rather than “aiding the children born in France to parents of immigrant origin integrate into French society,” Sebbar uses the remaining representations of Algerian femininity (the young Jewish girls, female professors, intellectuals and ethnologues, women visiting Muslim cemeteries, and peasant women depicted on postcards bearing pastoral or village scenes) to challenge the hegemonic discourses of community values in the French Republic by opening them up to new images, iconography, representations, and associations of French society. Throughout all of Mes Algéries en France, Sebbar desires to show how both women and men, but particularly women, are active participants in the ethnic and national processes of cultural reconstruction and social re-identification in contemporary France. Through her intermedial framework in Mes Algéries en France—the narratives, photographs, cultural artifacts, portraits, and other objects of textual analysis—Sebbar aims to explore and textualize a number of transnational issues of identity with particular regard to how families and loved ones are split between countries of origin and destination and to the emotional ties binding individuals to one or both countries of origin and destination. The ebb and flow of border crossings and communications across borders and the (re-)hybridization of cultures serve as crucial dialectics throughout her corpus that mobilize her artistic agenda to “raise consciousness” and textualize the counter-hegemonic actions and discourses of the nonelite who refuse assimilation to a nation-state. With this dialectic in mind and as this discussion has shown in this chapter, the fundamental dilemma shaping Sebbar’s body of work and framing contemporary transnational literature of France in general is the disconnect between marginal multiethnic groups of French citizens and the universalist discourses of French Republicanism. For centuries, France has prided itself on being the land of equality, founded on an abstract concept of universal citizenship which renders ethnic, gendered, religious or class difference irrelevant.31 Yet as the riots of November 2005 and continual discussion in the media witness, one can no longer overlook the limits of Republican universalist discourses and must now recognize France’s (official, political) identity transformation into a plural and multiethnic society. French cultural studies scholars of late have repeatedly turned to French cinema as a medium of artistic and popular expression requiring further review of the “ways in which

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filmmaking in France might contribute to such debates by foregrounding the voices and subjectivities of ethnic others and thereby reframing the way in which difference is conceptualized [in French society]” (Tarr, 2005: 1). For these scholars as well as scholars of contemporary French cinema, considerable attention has been paid (and continues to be paid) to the appearance and after-effects of two related phenomena in the history of French cinema: cinéma beur and cinéma de banlieue. A closer look at these two cinematographic genres will help inform our discussion and treatment of Yamina Benguigui’s film, Inch’Allah dimanche (2001), in this chapter, and in retrospect will shed another interesting and useful light on Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France.

CINÉMA BEUR AND CINÉMA DE BANLIEUE Carrie Tarr understands these two cinematographic genres as permeable and overlapping. She finds that they both share three fundamental and foundational projects. First, they have a common concern with regard to the place and identity of the marginal and excluded in French society. Second, they offer a “touchstone” for measuring the extent to which universalist Republican assumptions about Frenchness can be challenged and particular forms of multiculturalism envisaged and valued. And third, they engender a representation of ethnicity linked to questions of gender and authorship through the comparison of male and female, white and beur-authored films.31 For Tarr, these two cinematographic genres may be understood as two related phenomena in the history of French cinema because (until relatively recently) dominant or mainstream French cinema has “tended to suppress or marginalize the voices and narratives of the nation’s troubling postcolonial others and (re)produce ethnic hierarchies founded on the assumed supremacy of white metropolitan culture and identity” (2005: 3). In response to a growing need for marginal voices in French cinema, a collection of independent video films and documentaries by filmmakers of Maghrebi descent—creating and producing in artisanal and sometimes makeshift conditions outside normal French production and distribution circuits—appeared in the early 1980s. These cinematic texts gave a voice and image to the identity crisis and socio-economic disadvantages facing the second generation of “beurs,” and they significantly contributed to making this second generation players in the French cultural market force. These films share a common desire for selfrepresentation, which many film scholars read as “symptomatic of their need for self-affirmation as both social and artistic subjects” (Tarr, 2005: 11). Furthermore, most postcolonial film scholars conclude that these genres of film-

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making not only draw attention to the directors’ achievements in breaking through the barriers of the cultural market force but also provide a perspective on the evolving significance of ethnic difference in a contemporary period in French media history.32 These filmmakers present subjectivity as multiple and hybrid, firmly situated inside a contact of zone of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox and articulated through personal history. For many postcolonial film scholars and directors, the textual operations of such a cinema raise a number of questions largely concerning three critical dialectics. For the first dialectic, we investigate how the textual operations of the cinema enunciate and challenge the concepts of ethnicity and identity in the context of Republican preferences for universalist and monocultural ideologies of Frenchness. Second, we consider how the enunciative apparatus engages both narratively and technically with the forming of cinematic spaces for “othered” subjectivities and agencies. And third, we analyze the extent to which these films challenge dominant perceptions of ethnic difference and stereotypes. Thinking also deals with these films’ abilities to produce counter-narratives of nation which require the white majority to rethink their positioning as well as narratives of mobility and transgression which break through fixed identities. Tarr asserts that these second-wave “beur or banlieue” films, appearing from the mid-1990s to the present day, “avoid construction of mono-ethnic ghettoes, emphasizing instead the multi-ethnic nature of French banlieue,” “focus on issues linked to contemporary ‘fracture sociale’ (the perceived ‘social divide’),” and put in motion a “political activism [which] center[s] on the excluded and the marginalized in France” (2005: 18). In these films, the excluded and marginalized do not just constitute immigrants and the misfortunate inhabitants of the banlieue but also the homeless, the unemployed, the working-class, and the poor. Thus, these films function to partially deterritorialize the process of imaging communities and locations by turning to the multichronotopic links between displaced and/or disadvantaged (i.e., subaltern or nonelite) individuals and communities in an effort to shake up the dynamics of past and present and to transnationalize understandings and formulations of identity, historicity, subjectivity, and speaking positions. What one finds in all of these films is a certain in-betweeness, imbrication, interstitiality, or ²⁄³ Spaces of expression. For Tarr and this book, these ²⁄³ Spaces of expression in beur and banlieu cinemas become a question of whether the cinematographic genres’ and their narratives’ marginalization within the industry “can be transcended [through] the creation of alternative spaces beyond binary oppositions, which value hybridity” (2005: 21). Thus, in borrowing Bill Ashcroft’s words, Tarr concludes that the struggle for postcolonial

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or transnational filmmakers then becomes the construction of “‘an effective identifying relationship between self and place, [which] suggests that their ways of reframing difference both reassure and disturb the nation’s homogeneous image of self” (2005: 21). The majority of films of these genres are considered male-authored films widely addressing the problematic personal identities and aspirations of young heterosexual males as well as other diverse subject matter related to the banlieue and realist modes of filmmaking.33 These films turned French cinema into “a site of struggle for constructions of French national identity based on the realities of France as a multicultural, multi-ethnic society” (Tarr, 2005: 86). However, scholars underline the fact that gender only marginally figures into this site of cinematic struggle. Tarr insists on this point and asserts that even after two decades of settlement in France of the families of immigrants from the Maghreb, there were relatively few representations of young “beur” women. The majority of these films figure an ethnic minority presence primarily through black or “beur” males or black females. (2005: 86)

She further explains that French films in the 1990s that offered a secondary or minor role to young actresses of Maghrebi descent tended “either to subordinate the female role to the drama of the white central male character” or “construct her as object of desire and punish her for attempting to assert her autonomy” (2005: 87). In the films prior to 1997, Tarr concludes that “sympathetic independentminded young beur women characters [were primarily] exploit[ed] . . . as objects of the gaze or contain[ed] . . . through the structuring of the narrative” (2005: 87). In her study of the representations of “beur” women of the banlieue in French cinema, Tarr only finds two films made prior to 1997 that take up as the central preoccupation the “way in which a young woman of Maghrebi descent negotiates her identity [and explores] female subjectivity through relatively complex characters who enjoy some narrative agency” (2005: 87). These two films were Anne Fontaine’s Les Histoires d’amour finissent mal en général (1993) and Zaïda Ghorab-Volta’s Souviens-toi de moi (1996). Tarr’s reading of these two films calls for recognition of the need for gender specificity in discussions on “beur” or “banlieue” filmmaking in French cinema secondary criticism. Tarr explains that in addition to Fontaine’s and Ghorab-Volta’s need to negotiate a place for themselves within a fundamentally male-dominated French cinema industry, their films—in which they foreground realistic representations of young French women of Maghrebi immigrant origin—need

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to situate themselves in relation to Republican discourses on assimilation as the route to integration, and to orientalist discourses, Islamophobia, and antiArab racism.34 We have already seen this need in relation to Sebbar’s writing in this chapter. Though, in contrast to some of Sebbar’s work, Tarr finds that Fontaine and Ghorab-Volta avoid the narratives and iconography typical of male-authored banlieue films centered on streetwise male youths, unemployment, crime, drugs, violence and confrontation with the police. Instead they focus on female-centered interpersonal relationships, articulated through the presence of a geographically mobile independent-minded female character who lives in the Parisian banlieue, is alienated from her parents, has French friends and an unrewarding low-paying job, and is engaged in an impossible relationship with a French man. (2005: 89)

We will revisit many of these characteristics identified in Fontaine’s and GhorabVolta’s films in our following discussion of Yamina Benguigui’s work. But, it is important to underline Tarr’s assertions that, “Souviens-toi de moi suggests that the young woman’s refusal of conventional gender roles and her syncretic acquisition of aspects of both French and Maghrebi culture can lead to a different sort of social solidarity and unbelonging” (2005: 98), for one may also draw the same conclusion in regards to Benguigui’s Inch’Allah dimanche (2001). Let us now continue in this chapter with a background overview of Benguigui and her corpus before treating Inch’Allah dimanche (2001).

Yamini Benguigui One manner in which “beur” or “banlieue” filmmakers have begun to reframe gender difference and create alternative spaces beyond binary oppositions is by returning to their parents (notably their mothers) and telling their parents’ story for the first time. From the late 1990s to present day, many “beur”-authored films have shifted from the director’s personal story or history to his or her parents’ stories and histories. Directors of Maghrebi heritage began making films which “explore the experience of immigration in France in the 1960s and 1970s from the point of view of North African immigrants and their children” (Tarr, 2005: 17). Tarr provides insight that, “by reclaiming these histories, the beurs are challenging dominant French histories of the nation and working towards a valorization of their own place

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within a multicultural France” (2005: 17). These directors are able to move out of the typically-Parisian banlieue and “claim new spaces away from Paris and its banlieues by focusing on aspects of the provinces not frequented by tourists, particularly the areas around Marseilles, Lyons, and the North of France” (Tarr, 2005: 16). For at least one contemporary filmmaker, Yamini Benguigui, this protest against intolerance and bid for inclusion surfaces not just on the “national” French sphere but also within the domestic and gender ones. Benguigui’s film, Inch’Allah dimanche, whose title one may translate into English as “Allah be willing, it’s Sunday,” recounts the story of a thirty-something Algerian woman’s (accompanied by three young children and mother-in-law) arrival in France to join her husband, who has been an established laborer in Picardie, France, for the past ten years, during the period of the regroupement familial in the mid-1970s. The film chronicles the first month of the protagonist’s transition to living in France and French society and adopts an episodic-like structure. In other words, Inch’Allah dimanche follows a very simple and basic narrative. Upon Zouina’s (Ferjria Deliba) arrival in France and learning of another Algerian family in the area, homesick Zouina and the three children spend the next three Sundays in secret trying to find this other Algerian family after her husband, Ahmed (Ainedine Soualem), and mother-in-law (Rabia Mokeddem), leave the home each time in search of a sheep at a nearby Moroccan’s ranch. During these clandestine Sunday adventures, they meet a French widow (Marie-France Pisier) whose husband (a French solider) was killed in Algeria during the war for independence and who agrees to help Zouina and the other family. Upon meeting Malika (Amina Annabi), the mother of the other Algerian family, and her children on the third Sunday, Zouina meets the handsome, young French bus driver (Jalil Lespert) with whom she exchanges quick looks through her kitchen window as he passes by the bus stop outside her home each day. What complicates or interrupts this simple and basic structure are the domestic episodes that constitute Zouina’s daily existence in her new homeland. These episodes are often abusive (Zouina is verbally abused and degraded by her mother-in-law and violently struck and pushed by Ahmed) but also touching (the images of Zouina and her children around the kitchen table and close-up shots of Zouina as she struggles to endure the transition) and even comical at times (Zouina attacking Mme. Donze {France Darry} who has just punctured and torn apart her children’s soccer ball). Inch’Allah dimanche is a film that “engenders” primarily female relationships as its primary focus and examines the power relations entrained when peoples’ lives intersect in the most banal of ways—as next-door neighbors, at

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the grocery store, vicariously through radio programs, in door-to-door sale visits, on buses, on Sunday outings, and so forth. The most poignant relationship in question in this film surfaces in Benguigui’s representation of the SelfOther relationship, whether this relationship manifests itself as male/female, female/female, young/elder, traditional/modern, French/Algerian, “Français de souche”/”immigré,” or colonial/postcolonial. Benguigui shows throughout the film how the Self is always at odds with the Other and how the two are eternally locked into unwavering struggles for power. But, by the film’s conclusion, Benguigui does seem to suggest a potential transcendence of this divide or at the very least a remedy to the outward violence of this divide by presenting a doubly marginalized protagonist who speaks up and begins to assert (softly yet assuredly) her desires; in the concluding scene, Zouina asserts that she will take the children to school tomorrow—an act Ahmed never permitted her before. This sense of understated physical emotion in the closing moments of the film is quite poignant and rather singular in Benguigui’s work. Rather than the emotional and physical outbursts Zouina has directed toward others earlier in the film, in the closing moment, Zouina calmly and matter-of-factly usurps the power in this one instance and assumingly wins out. The lack of strong emotion in this scene’s acting is quite striking, and thus perhaps more emotional and riveting, as it is replaced by a slow zoom on Zouina’s face moving into a close-up shot in which she is fully centered inside the frame. Through the absence of physical emotion on Zouina’s part, the concluding image emotively captures why many scholars of Benguigui’s work consider her understanding of the camera as “un instrument de connaissance et d’émotion” (Alion, 2001: 136) [“an instrument of knowledge and emotion”]. Inch’Allah dimanche is an emotional cinematographic work that mixes “comédie” and “gravité” (Alion, 2001: 136). Benguigui offers that, “L’émotion est ce qui prime. On range le plus souvent mes films dans la catégorie ‘cinéma maghrébin,’ mais je me sens infiniment plus proche de la comédie italienne” (Alion, 2001: 136) [“Emotion takes priority. People put my films most often in the category of ‘North African cinema,’ but I feel infinitely closer to the Italian comedy” (my translation)]. For Benguigui, this cinematic Italian comedy model that she wishes to follow makes one both cry and laugh over the most serious of matters as well as demonstrates the directors’ abilities to look at Italian society “par le petit bout de la lorgnette” (Alion, 2001: 136) [“through opera glasses”]. In following this model in Inch’Allah dimanche, Benguigui expresses that, “Pour moi, il est capital que nous puissions poser un

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regard sur notre propre communauté, sans manichéisme ou idée toute faite. Je revendique mon appartenance à une composante de la société française: je raconte des histoires françaises” (Alion, 2001: 136) [“For me, it is capital that we can take a look at our own community, without Manichaeism or preconceived ideas. I assert my belonging to a piece of French society: I recount French stories” (my translation)]. Like the other women artists included in this study, Benguigui presents a polyphony of personalized and dispersed individual voices that share a common origin or source and that expose, resist, and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which they are implicated across her corpus. Benguigui adopts a very pragmatic, down-to-earth, or no nonsense point of view (inspired by the Italian comic genre) in her work in general and in Inch’Allah dimanche in particular. In desiring to look at the things that truly matter in (and to) French society and how they affect its people, Benguigui shares a similar lens in her filmmaking as Serreau in hers. In many ways, both women’s cinematic comedy is of a cerebral nature. As we recall from Chapter Three’s earlier discussion concerning the connection between Serreau’s comedy and that of Voltaire’s contes philosophiques, Benguigui’s “tale” in Inch’Allah dimanche also surfaces as a hybrid cinematographic form stemming from a wide variety of cinematic genres that include comedy, domestic drama, historical drama, documentary, “beur” or “banlieue,” and personal cinema. Like Serreau, these traces of the various cinematographic genres allow Benguigui to critique the governing discourses of contemporary times—race, social class, gender, immigration, and family structures (or familial hierarchy)— while philosophically distancing the spectator from these social issues. This philosophical distance in turn allows the spectator to turn back to the issues in a more reflexive and reflective personal and individual manner. Yamina Benguigui, French citizen born in Lille to parents of Algerian immigrant origin, is perhaps most known in France for her cinematic and television documentary work, of which Mémoirs d’immigrés (1997) remains the most discussed and analyzed in secondary criticism in North America at the time of preparing this manuscript. Scholars distinguish Benguigui’s work by the consecration in her films to memory (and its role and function in society) and the question of immigration, especially immigration from the Maghreb. Since 1994, she has engaged through the cinematic medium in the exploration de la part humaine de l’immigration maghrébine en France et de l’identité musulmane au travers de sagas documentaires . . . qui ont été tous distingués par de nombreux prix

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internationaux et sont aujourd’hui étudiés en section cinéma et sociologie dans de nombreuses universités. (Africultures, 2006) [exploration of the human part of the North African immigration experience to France and of Muslim identity through documentary sagas . . . that have all been distinguished with numerous international prizes and today are studied in cinema and sociology courses in numerous universities. (my translation)]

In examining Benguigui’s work, scholars—in particular in relation to Mémoirs d’immigrés—have outlined three general tropes that she hems throughout her corpus: the right to existence; a heritage of pain, grief, and sorrow; and the notion of integration in progress.35 Let us briefly examine each one so that we may better contextualize our close reading and treatment of Inch’Allah dimanche in this chapter.

Right to Existence, Heritage, and Integration in Progress In capturing the right to existence on film, Benguigui creates a physical cinematic space in which marginalized individuals can exist in mainstream French society. This approach constitutes a space that paradoxically reifies the silent haunting or spectral qualities of representations of the past (i.e., images of boatloads of workers crossing the Mediterranean, factories, or bidonvilles). This approach also challenges these qualities by allowing the documented individuals to speak freely and publicly in direct and indirect ways about these representations and their existence from their personal perspective and experience. Their narratives often speak to Benguigui’s second trope of a heritage of pain, grief, or sorrow. In many ways, Benguigui’s work demonstrates a sort-of “talking cure” in which individuals and protagonists (in many cases for the first time ever) recount or restage experiences that they have never shared with their children; for example., narratives of humiliation, of culpability for having accepted dehumanizing conditions, of suffering from exile and diaspora, and of disenchanted hope and love for France. In these cinematic instances, Benguigui’s camera “leur redone leur dignité car elle leur permet de dire [de manifester] la douleur qu’ils sont toujours tue [couverte]” (Barlet, 2004) [“gives them back their dignity as it allows them to say [to manifest] the pain that they have always kept silent or hidden” (my translation)]. These narratives of pain, grief, and sorrow also surface in

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Benguigui’s work within the representations of the family structure, as cultural gaps between generations or between individuals often grow inside the family. These cultural gaps and a family’s attempts to stifle or work through them in turn provide the foundational theme to most of her texts. The family importantly resurfaces in scholarly and artistic treatment of the question of integration. In showing how integration is a process in progress, Benguigui often focuses on the lives of children in her work or portrays her protagonists’ narratives through a hybrid optic that mixes adults’ and children’s various (or “progressively” integrationist) points of view and perspectives on the issues at hand in the film. Scholars conclude that Benguigui’s work met à jour une face cachée du racisme: celle qui consiste à nier l’histoire des mutations culturelles, ou à en étouffer l’expression. Son travail devrait pouvoir servir d’exemple et conforter les enseignants désireux de développer les multiples formes que cette expression peut prendre chez les enfants de toutes origines. (Barlet, 2004) [brings to light a face hidden of racism: the face that consists in denying the history of cultural mutations, or in covering them up in expression. Her work should be able to serve as an example and comfort teachers desiring to develop multiple forms that this expression can take for children of all origins. (my translation)]

In her “écriture cinématographique,” Benguigui organizes both her fictional as well as documentary texts around a system of audio-visual representation that focuses on episodic portraits or “tableaux vivants.” These living portraits underline the fact that her protagonists are neither “from here nor there” and emphasize the manners in which they are considered foreigners.36 Thus, Benguigui theorizes that one “commence aussi à exister quand on voit des images de soi” (Lemercier, 2006) [“begins to exist when one sees images of him/herself” (my translation)]. Therefore, in her explanation delivered in her interview with Fabian Lemercier of why she makes the kinds of films that she does, Benguigui discloses: Il fallait mettre en image cette histoire et cette mémoire car nous avions beaucoup de mal à nous situer: nous n’existons nulle part. La première génération vivait dans l’antichambre de la France, était quasi invisible, en tout cas au cinéma et à la télévision, par même dans le hors champ. (Lemercier, 2004)

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[It was necessary to put into image this story/history and this memory as we were having a lot of trouble situating ourselves: we don’t exist anywhere. The first generation was living in the waiting room of France, was quasi invisible, in any case in the cinema and on television, even off-screen. (my translation)]

Thus, Benguigui strives to overcome this lack of representation by challenging in her work the French collective memory in which “un Mohamed est un balayeur ou un ouvrier” [“a Mohamed is a street sweeper or a factory worker”] and of which the mentality one has not succeeded in changing, especially in the French professional world of enterprise and business.37 According to Benguigui, “la culture ouvre la parole” [“culture opens up speech”], and she sees the cinema as capital in this relationship because “l’image est déterminante dans le rapport intercultural” (Lemercier 2006) [“the image is determining in intercultural relationships”]. In specific respect to women’s interculturality, as represented in Inch’Allah dimanche [in other words the relationships between Zouina and her mother-in-law Zouina and her two next-door female neighbors, and Zouina and Melle Manant (MarieFrance Pisier)], the hegemonic, stereotypical image of the Algerian wife and mother as victim of patriarchal Muslim culture remains an obstacle to the recognition of a heterogeneity of identities and representations within marginal communities and domestic spaces. This is to say that, as Benguigui theorizes and demonstrates, to stop at the representation of French women of North African immigrant origin as victims of patriarchal Muslim culture is to freeze these women as Delacroix has done in his painting. Benguigui calls for and offers in Inch’Allah dimanche a “tableau vivant” that breaks through this frozen representation and that hopefully incites the spectator (and French society in general) to follow suit. Additionally, such static and traditional representation of women of immigrant origin as solely victims of patriarchal society denies the diverse representations and multiple dimensions of the problems and difficulties of the various women of these communities and also those problems and difficulties that touch many women’s lives (of all races, classes, and ethnicities) in France. Thus, one may understand Benguigui’s goal in Inch’Allah dimanche as one that attempts to capture this subaltern heterogeneity and multiplicity all the while at the same time highlighting certain themes that are of concern to the majority of women in France—whether they be of immigrant origin or not—such as women’s right to work, women’s financial independence, and women’s sexuality and “ownership” of their bodies. However, one must also situate Benguigui’s goal within a context of doubled difference, for these shared common themes are

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neither identical nor universal across French society in the same degree. Yet they do provide common points of connection, which may (perhaps subversively?) tap into the French Republican popular conscious in challenging its collective memory of the past and collective take on the present, especially in terms of examining la condition féminine in France. Benguigui clarifies that after making Mémoirs d’immigrés, she wanted to make a film featuring a heroine and focusing on women’s conditions in France. She knew that fiction would provide the only avenue to such a project. She shares that: J’avais envie d’avoir une héroïne. On a vu un certain nombre de films mettant en scène les immigrés ou leurs enfants, mais les mères étaient toujours restées en retrait. Or, j’avais interrogé beaucoup de femmes pour Mémoirs d’immigrés. Elles avaient toutes des souvenirs très noirs de leur arrivée en France. Pour moi, seule la fiction pouvait rendre compte de cela. (Alion, 2001: 138) [I always wanted to have a heroine. We have seen a certain number of films featuring immigrants or their children, but the mothers had always remained withdrawn. However, I had interviewed many women for Mémoirs d’immigrés. They had the same very dark memories of their arrival in France. For me, fiction alone was able take this into account. (my translation)]

In her interview with Yves Alion, Benguigui provides a brief summary or history of these women’s arrivals in France. She explains that when the women arrived, they were very often strangers to their husbands, who had been residing and working in France for many years and who had most often only returned home on vacation once every two years. Per Benguigui, the men did not know how to welcome the women. For these women, she summarizes that “le fossé culturel semblait par ailleurs infranchissable” (Alion, 2001: 136) [“the cultural gap seemed moreover impassable”]. Benguigui elucidates that in their country of origin, space was not lived or occupied in the same manner (i.e., women met up together in common courtyards on a regular, daily basis). In France, at the time, Benguigui counters that women remained relatively alone at home throughout the day, a representation we saw in Chapter Two’s discussions of de Beauvoir’s and Ernaux’s representations of (albeit middleclass) femininity and female activities. Benguigui explains that most of the North African women immigrating to France were coming from rural communities in which everybody knew one another and were rocked to the core when finding themselves in a new community where “l’anonymat prévalait” (Alion, 2001: 136) [“anonymity

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prevailed”]. Thus, Benguigui sheds light on her motivation in writing and directing Inch’Allah dimanche by stating that: Alors j’ai voulu montrer leur quotidien entre quatre murs, dans la solitude la plus noire. 95% des mères étaient dépressives: c’est le chiffre officiel du Ministère des affaires sociales. Elles ne voyaient rien de la France, qui rentrait pourtant en catimini chez elle par le truchement de la radio. (Alion, 2001: 136) [Thus, I wanted to show their daily life between four walls, in the darkest solitude. 95% of the mothers were depressed: that’s the official statistic from the Minister of Social Affairs. They saw nothing of the France that yet entered their homes through the intervention of the radio. (my translation)]

As we see in Inch’Allah dimanche, Benguigui’s incorporation of the radio (or reference to radio programs) in many scenes throughout the film supports her attention to the details of daily life that she wanted to highlight and use in structuring the various episodes or living portraits in the film. Benguigui asserts that, “Pour moi, c’est un film qui fonctionne sur de petits détails: la chaussure trop grande de Zouina, les mots qu’elle entend dans la bouche des autres…je crois à la valeur universelle des petites particularités. Il fallait aller à l’essentiel” (Alion, 2001: 136) [“For me, this is a film that functions on little details: Zouina’s too-large shoe, the words she hears in other people’s mouths . . . I believe in the universal value of little particularities. You have to get to the essential” (my translation)]. For Benguigui and especially as represented in Inch’Allah dimanche, the essential is bound to the emotional. Now we will turn to our close reading of the film and a discussion of her use of self-referential modes of storytelling through which re-hybridized speaking positions speak and gaze from a ²⁄³ Space of expression. INCH’ALLAH DIMANCHE (2001) The opening scene of Inch’Allah dimanche in which Zouina, her children, and her mother-in-law board a boat in Algeria to ferry them to France, captures Benguigui’s immediate emphasis on the emotional in quite a riveting way. The sequence opens with an extreme close-up from a high angle on a pair of an Algerian immigration agent’s hands stamping a passport. Benguigui cuts to another close-up shot but of an anonymous traveler’s hands holding a suitcase. From this image, she cuts to a close-up of Zouina’s youngest child,

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Ali (Anass Behri), back to the immigration agent, to an older couple standing in line ahead of Zouina and her family (Zouina is visible in the background), and then comes to rest on Zouina’s profile standing across the table from the immigration agent. Aïcha (the mother-in-law) hands over the family’s passports to the agent and is the only family member to speak during this process of passport regulation. Benguigui captures this exchange for roughly eight seconds and then cuts to a close-up of Zouina’s daughter, who is leaning on her hands with elbows resting on the agent’s table. The agent asks whose are these children, and the mother-in-law replies that they are her son’s. Benguigui pans left to Zouina’s hands and then tilts vertically up to her face. Benguigui cuts to the younger son and remains centered on him, horizontally at his level, as the family advances forward and out of the shot. The editing and framing of this opening sequence establishes several functions that Benguigui will maintain throughout Inch’Allah dimanche. In its first function, Benguigui’s filmmaking, as established in the extreme close-up shots of various pairs of hands throughout the film, introduces a primary motif that she carries throughout the film. Hands, a tangible and tactile symbol or metaphor for relationships of all sorts, are repeatedly featured in various ways throughout the film. From the forced shaking of hands between Zouina and Mme Donze following their “neighborly” dispute to the caressing hands of Zouina as she comforts the children in various scenes, from the violent hands of Ahmed when striking Zouina to his more gentler movements when playing the guitar, and from the henna-stained hands of Aïcha thrown up in the air during her daily brow-beating assaults directed at Zouina to Zounina’s and her mother’s hands being torn apart on the docks when boarding the boat for France (or Zouina’s injured hand after she punches through Malika’s window), hands and their gestures create a narrative of demarcation that comments on the multiple subjectivities that exist within the film. Whether decorated with henna or nail polish; rough from manual labor; smooth from kneading bread made with olive oil; authoritatively stamping nationality; driving a public service bus, running a small grocery shop; gardening; or engaged in the preparation of North African dishes, coffee, and bakery items, hands become social markers demarcating class, gender, and ethnicity in Inch’Allah dimanche. In its second function, Benguigui’s filmmaking, as seen in the editing throughout this opening sequence, also works to establish a narrative of dynamics and character relationships that Benguigui will maintain and eventually overturn throughout the film. Zouina is clearly the protagonist in the film and is the character the most often filmed in close-up one and medium one shots. Yet Benguigui often paradoxically counters her agency through-

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out the film through cutting to shots of others who either have more social power or familial authority in relation to Zouina (i.e., Ahmed and Aïcha) or who hold more importance (i.e., the two sons) in the eyes of those with the power or authority than Zouina. As the opening sequence establishes by the mother-in-law’s holding of the family passports and speaking with the immigration agent, the spectator quickly discovers that Zouina ranks very low (if not the lowest) in the family’s hierarchy. Additionally, Benguigui’s editing also works to establish the third function of her filmmaking: the film’s theme of surveillance by reminding us through the frequent cutting to others that follows the close-up and medium one shots of Zouina that Zouina walks a very taunt tightrope between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Although the characters never gaze directly into the camera lens, which would make the spectator feel as if under direct and explicit surveillance, the editing (specifically Benguigui’s use of shot-reverse-shot) implicitly draws the spectator into the film by positioning him or her in the middle of the exchanges of gazes and looks. This technique reifies his or her empathetic association with Zouina and engages more fully his or her interaction with and connection to the film. Moreover, in its fourth function, Benguigui’s filmmaking, as illustrated in the tight framing of the opening sequence and almost exclusive employment throughout the film as a whole, also functions to establish the immediate (trans)personal nature of this cinematic first-person narrative. In a manner very similar to Ernaux’s use of the “je transpersonnel,” the living portrait of Zouina that Benguigui paints in Inch’Allah dimanche works to transcend the individual to encompass the social, but not without demonstrating the conflicts and contradictions entrained in such a process. In a way similar to Une Femme gelée, Inch’Allah dimanche transcends the personal to speak on the level of the social and presents a sort of personal microcosm of a social macrocosm in which the female second generation of immigrant origin in France struggles against the creation and imposition of normative first-generation and colonial Orientalist gender role discourses. In keeping with Minh-Ha’s theoretical understanding of the collaborative network of exchange in marginal or minority artists’ work, Benguigui’s “je transpersonnel ” gives voice to a re-hybridized speaking subject who asserts that normative gender roles and their discourses should be built on a multilateral system of “croisé” representation within the French Republic. She further develops this hypothesis as the opening sequence continues. Following the immigration check-point scene, Benguigui cuts to a long shot of a group of Algerian travelers waiting in line on the dock to board the ferry bound for France. Benguigui captures this image for roughly four

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seconds, at which point in time a woman’s voice calling out “Zouina” breaks the frozen image. Benguigui cuts to a medium of an older woman standing behind the tall fence on the dock surrounded by a group of younger women who are encouraging the older woman to let Zouina leave. Benguigui cuts to another medium shot of the crowded ramp of travelers boarding the boat with Zouina positioned in a right profile shot (as she is looking back over her left shoulder) inside the left-hand side of the screen. The mother-in-law is centered within the shot directly behind Zouina gesturing violently and nudging (almost pushing) Zouina forward. Benguigui cuts to a medium shot focusing on the left profile of the older woman on the dock screaming “my daughter.” Benguigui returns to Zouina (in the same shot or framing as just outlined) who then turns around to exit the ramp and return to the dock. Benguigui cuts to a reverse shot of Zouina in the center of the frame struggling against the boarding passengers to make her way back down the ramp. Zouina is calling out “Mama.” As Zouina makes her way off the ramp and runs off screen, Benguigui rests momentarily on the confused expression of a crew member standing on the dock. Benguigui returns to the original shot from the ramp in which the mother-in-law with back turned to the camera is yelling at Zouina who is now at the fence on the dock. Benguigui cuts to a close-up shot of Zouina on one side of the fence reaching through the bars. Then through a series of shot-reverse-shots, we witness the painful departure and separation of Zouina and her mother in which the crew member must physically tear her away from her mother’s embrace extended through the fence. The scene ends with Zouina climbing back up the ramp—her mother-in-law insulting her and yelling at her for the disgraceful scene she just made—to the sounds of much wailing from Zouina and her family members present and a closeup on her mother fainting. The action and emotion captured in this opening sequence foregrounds in quite a visual and auditory way the structure of Maghrebi familial hierarchy, which has become a discursive commonality highlighted in many contemporary “beur” artists’ work of various media. In her research on Maghrebi families in France, Camille Lacoste-Dujardin posits an unequal clash of cultures as the source of most of the problems and conflicts found within the “beur” familial hierarchy in France. She asserts that for the personal relations of young people within the French society that they inhabit, only Western culture is operative; whereas for the Maghrebi culture of the parents, Western culture is merely a component of the young peoples’ identity or at best an “added extra,” which is contained within the private domain.38 She concludes that the Maghrebi family in France operates within a basic circle of social organization that differs profoundly in Maghrebi and

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French cultures. Lacoste-Dujardin outlines that in normative individualist French society, the family is “founded” by a man and a woman who, on the basis of ties of affection, build it from a basis of an autonomous couple who keeps up more or less distant ties with other relations (2000: 60). In opposition to this framework, she explains that within normative holistic Maghrebi societies, the sentiment of belonging to a community is still so strong that identity cannot be other than collective and that family is a large patrilinear ensemble composed of forefathers and all male descendants in a long continuum, to which women are joined in function in their role in preserving and expanding the patrinlineage (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 60). Lacoste-Dujardin asserts that the second generation’s parents’ family of reference “provides them with their identity and [manifests a structure] within which they must assume the fixed roles imposed upon them” (2000: 60). However, the French community and society remain outside the family’s immediate control. Thus, she elucidates that far from the control of this community, fathers feel as though they are exposing their wife and children to other transgressions which risk compromising the honor of the family name . . . this honor is guarded, and thus also threatened, by women and in particular by young women, who are perceived as the most vulnerable link in the family chain. . . . Maghrebi families in France often attempt to exercise a very strict control over their children, particularly the girls, and this is all the more so because they feel that they have been reduced to a fragment of a family. . . . A strong demand is placed on the young to conform to the Maghrebi family model. (2000: 61)

Lacoste-Dujardin concludes that the young have a tendency to identify themselves as individuals and to have more “resolutely personal aspirations” (2000: 61). She finds that the patrilinear model outlined above becomes inoperative when the young are inserted into French society, which garners individual experiences. For Lacoste-Dujardin, the second generation shares to a much greater extent the French conception of the family that is founded on an affective relationship between a couple, a partnership where roles and gender relations are on seemingly much more egalitarian footing than those laid down in the Maghrebi patriarchal order.39 As we see in Lacoste-Dujardin’s research as well as in many artistic works, such as Chapter Three’s discussion of Serreau’s Chaos, relations between the sexes within the Maghrebi familial hierarchy manifest the crucial conflict, as the place of women (and their roles) within the culture(s) of origin and the

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culture(s) of residency appears highly incompatible. Lacoste-Dujardin contends that “Daughters of Maghrebi immigrants in France almost unanimously reject the position of women in Maghrebi societies” (2000: 610). She bases this rejection on the large extended family structure in the Maghreb in which the distribution of roles between men and women imposes a segregation between them, which historically (and still contemporarily in more conservative families) was (is) necessary to comply with Arab rules of decency (2000: 62). Lacoste-Dujardin states that, “Within the cultures of origin, masculine and feminine roles are assumed collectively within each sex and each age group so that no man or woman is isolated” (2000: 62). In traditional North African communities, for example, the raising of children is undertaken in a multimaternal fashion by all of the women of a certain age, and numerous other tasks (such as agriculture and construction for men and cooking, cleaning, and shopping for women) are taken up collectively.40 Within these communities, this strict division of roles functions not only to ensure collective, efficient, and practical undertaking (and accomplishment) of domestic labor and professional income but also to strengthen the solidarity within each gender group as well as reify a familial hierarchy that facilitates both mutual control and mediation in the case of conflicts (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 62). Scholars describe the Maghrebi hierarchic family structure as one in which the father is clearly dominant through a combination of his supremacy in terms of gender [(male)] and generation [(elder)] . . . the mother and son each compensate an inferiority in one hierarchic category—that of gender for the mother, that of generation for the son—by a superiority in the other category . . . the daughter combines two disadvantages and is doubly dominated because of her gender and her generation. (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 64)

Many “beur” and North African first-person narratives testify to this hierarchic familial structure in which is privileged a parent-son (or more specifically mother-son) relationship. Lacoste-Dujardin reads this privileging within the context of patrilineage. She asserts that, “Most parents show little anxiety for sons whose mere existence satisfies the demands of the reproduction of the family genealogy . . . young men (by virtue) are accorded a pre-eminent status and satisfy their parents in symbolic order” (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 62–63). Lacoste-Dujardin finds in her research that young “beur” men are granted a great amount of freedom of movement, without having to give any account of their activities outside the household and are conscious of their masculine authority. She argues that these men are encouraged to express their virility,

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are comforted by a close relationship with their mothers, and are strengthened by their communal masculine identity.41 In opposition to the son’s privileged position within the family, the daughter’s disadvantaged position stands in sharp contrast. Lacoste-Dujardin asserts that within parent-daughter relations, the daughter “is expected to reproduce the essentially maternal role that is assigned to women above all other social roles, especially over any role that takes them outside of the home” (2000: 63). She explains that young “beur” women have few chances to go out and establish relationships outside the home even though they wish to participate in society through outside activities. She finds a huge disparity existing between parents’ representations of an ideal woman who conforms to community norms and the reality of their daughters’ aspirations which are composed of more individualistic goals. Yet Lacoste-Dujardin asserts that many young “beur” women appreciate how their mothers have been cheated as they fell in-between two family structures, since they have been deprived both of the life as a couple in France and of the solidarity of their gender group in the extended family in the Maghreb. She cites this realization and appreciation as one of the strongest reasons for many young “beur” women’s attachments to their mothers and primary cause of a “strong interdependence between [them], particularly [with] the oldest daughters” (2000: 63). Thus, she concludes that: The reinforcement and prolongation of mother-daughter relations compensates for the weakening of the mother-son tie which up until now sufficed to satisfy Maghrebi mothers, as well as all Maghrebi men, for whom the influence of their mother was more important than that of any other woman. (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 64)

Benguigui represents this hierarchic familial structure in Inch’Allah dimanche as the opening sequence continues, but with one very clear twist. The “second generation daughter” archetype or figure in this film is Zouina, an Algerianborn mother immigrating to France. In comparing/contrasting Zouina to Aïcha and ultra-traditional Malika, respectively the patrilinear mother-in-law and figurehead for the first generation of North African immigrants to France, Zouina’s character coding as second generation becomes quite clear. As more characteristic to the secondgeneration’s coding, Zouina desires to converse with Mlle Briat and has a relative facility with the French language. Furthermore, her courage in undertaking her Sunday escapes and her interest in French consumerism and radio game shows and love or sexual advice programs also identifies her as “second

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generation” and “transnational.” Yet, until the final sequence of the film in which Ahmed forbids his mother to say any more negative things about or toward Zouina and in which Zouina claims some independence by asserting that she will take the children to school tomorrow, Zouina and her daughter occupy the two lowest ranks within the family hierarchy—a dynamic Benguigui depicts quite physically upon the family’s first entrance into their new French home within the opening sequence. This moment from the opening sequence begins with a slow zoom from a high angle on Zouina and the three children huddled together in the doorway of the salon/kitchen. They are positioned in the background with the mother-in-law occupying the front and middle-ground pacing back and forth as she inspects the space and approvingly comments on their new lodgings. Benguigui cuts to a medium shot of Aïcha asking for a key to the kitchen cupboard. Ahmed enters the shot stating there is no key as there is no lock on the cupboard. Aïcha insists that Ahmed install a lock, as she does not trust Zouina with the family’s food supply, and Ahmed shares that he only has a key to the house that he hands over to Aïcha. Benguigui cuts back to the original high angle shot of Zouina and the children waiting in the doorway. The children then enter the room and start to explore their new dwelling. Benguigui continues to zoom in onto Zouina. In a reverse shot from Zouina’s assumed gaze, Benguigui focuses on the bags, boxes, and suitcases that occupy the kitchen shelves and storage units. She then cuts to Ahmed with the children going upstairs to see their bedrooms. Ahmed stops in the doorway, opposite from Zouina, and tells his mother to rest. He heads up the stairs, and Zouina follows him up the stairs. Benguigui cuts to a close-up of Aïcha in the corner of the salon opening her suitcase and removing her sheepskin rug. Again, the framing and editing in this scene work to establish Zouina as the protagonist but also to show her in relation to the others in the household. As female and second generation, she is positioned and treated as the doubly disadvantaged Other, whose needs, interests, and desires come last. Until the end of the film, any public attempt for self-affirmation (her “winning one-thousand francs” from the vacuum cleaner salesman), self-education (her learning to read and write the French language), self-assertion (her physical or emotional outbursts when defending her children from Mme Donze’s destruction of their soccer ball or in response to her mother-in-law’s insults and nagging), or selfindulgence (her enjoyment from listening to the radio programs and experimenting with the cosmetics Mlle Briat gave her) are either met with physical abuse by Ahmed or more verbal abuse from Aïcha. Zouina is expected to reproduce the essentially maternal role that is assigned to women above all other

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social roles, especially over any role that takes them outside of the home or offers them self-fulfillment outside their maternal role. As we already witnessed in the emotional separation of Zouina from her mother on the docks back in Algeria and as the film will show in the repeated close-up embraces between Zouina and her daughter, Benguigui clearly privileges the mother-daughter relationship (or a matrilineal heritage) in this work. Throughout the film, she often films Zouina and her daughter occupying the same positions or planes within the cinematic frame, whereas Zouina and Aïcha or Zouina and Ahmed are often captured in oppositional positions and planes. Thus, many critics have reviewed Inch’Allah dimanche as a film in which the daughter tells her mother’s story from the daughter’s (or child’s) perspective. Although I acknowledge clear moments in the film that echo this perspective, I believe that like Zouina herself who occupies a hybrid or “two-thirds” position in-between the first and second generations, Inch’Allah dimanche is a film narrated through a hybrid optic that mixes adults’ and children’s points of views and perspectives on the various daily life immigration and integration issues at hand. The film maintains a “generational” feel that is well-situated within a certain historical period of time in France, but the contradictions, problems, conflicts, and themes addressed in this generational narrative transcend the 1970s’ historical time frame to comment on the very contemporary position of women of immigrant origin in France and their feminine condition. Benguigui appears to share Djebar’s point of view in agreeing that on a national political or hegemonic level of discourse, these women’s representations and conditions have remained frozen. And like Sebbar’s post-Orientalist aesthetic, Benguigui presents a protagonist who embodies this frozen representation of victim of patriarchy only in order to subvert it so that she may reveal in the end how these women occupy contradictory, ambivalent, and paradoxical discourses as both “bearers of tradition” and “agents of modernity.” For Benguigui, as well as for all of the other women artists in this project, it is only through acknowledging and examining contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox that one may arrive at ameliorated social (re)construction. As we have seen in Chapter Three’s discussion of North African domestic dramas that raise questions concerning the relationships across generations and between different types of gender roles that hint at potential openings onto wider cultural and political change, Benguigui’s ²⁄³ Space also succeeds in transcending traditional, unified, and fixed definitions of French and Other masculinity or femininity. Rather, like Amari as well as the other women artists in this project, Benguigui advocates a reading practice that focuses on the shifting lines of demarcation that exist within each gender and nationality

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as well as the lines that exist between them. Thereby, she unsettles “home” by revealing its illusion of coherence and safety—an illusion based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, even the repression of difference within oneself. But, in this case, Benguigui’s re-hybridized postcolonial subject realizes this process and system of repression and refuses to resign herself to it any longer. Benguigui breathes life into the possibility that marginal or “othered” positions—constructed in the moment of identification with and acceptance of the alien/allo-/other residing within the self—can occupy shifting and multiple positionings. This foregrounding of difference and interconnectedness transcends the traditional boundaries of “local,” “national,” and “global” and exposes how these constructions are, in the first place, artificial and primarily function to serve hegemony. Inch’Allah dimanche illustrates a protagonist’s (as well as other secondary characters’ but to a lesser degree) capacity to be transformed through a cross-cultural encounter with otherness or “alienation.” This identification with the alien/allo-/other negotiates a position that is both center and margin and that has the power to deny the fixity of binary epistemology. Read through a transvergent lens of analysis, Benguigui’s work re-frames marginality (i.e., a “marginal” or “different” representation of multicultural French femininity or of French women of North African heritage as other than victims of Islam or patriarchy) as a point of resistance. Moreover, her re-framing of marginality allows for continuities as well as differences in “national” identity and integrity to exist side by side, even as next-door neighbors.

Conclusion From the very pragmatic, down-to-earth, or no nonsense point of view adopted in the Italian comedic genre that has influenced Benguigui’s camera and which looks beyond official discourses of hegemonic or ideological systems of reification, Benguigui reveals a “talking cure” in her work that moves a community (or Republic) beyond frozen monolithic or Manichaeism-like representations and discourses. Inch’Allah dimanche and the rest of Benguigui’s work demonstrate a willingness to communicate, which is a break from the strict interpretation of the Maghrebi tradition of hachouma, “a tradition that blocks communication between the sexes” (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 67). This break from tradition that results in the establishment of communication between men and women and between generations in both Benguigui’s and Sebbar’s work, for many postcolonial literary and cinema scholars, appears to be “the determining factor in arriving at a familial consensus that allows for

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the individual fulfillment of the children of Maghrebi immigrants in France” (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 67). Additionally, one may consider this break from tradition a crucial factor in arriving at a revised, post-Orientalist heterogeneous or transnational social consensus of what it means to be “French” in general or a “French woman” in particular in the contemporary French “Republic.” Thus, in conclusion, this break for both Sebbar and Benguigui permits their protagonists as well as themselves to “speak nearby” in following Djebar’s call to women artists for the creation of re-hybridized female speaking subjects that challenge, appropriate, and revise hegemonic forms of gender representations and conventional modes of first-person narrative storytelling.

Notes 1. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Third World Women’s Cinema: If the Subaltern Speaks, Will We Listen?” in Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, eds. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose (New York, NY: Garland, 1997), 214. 2. Anissa Talahite, “Identity as ‘Secret de Guerre’: Rewriting Ethnicity and Culture in ‘Beur’ Literature,” in Cultures transnationales de France, ed. Hafid Gafaïti (Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 2001), 59. 3. Hafid Gafaïti, “Cultures et transnationalité,” in Cultures transnationales de France, ed. Hafid Gafaïti (Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 2001), 9–26. 4. Talahite, “Identity as ‘Secret de Guerre,’ ” 68–69. 5. Soheila Kian, “Une entrevue avec Leïla Sebbar, l’écriture et l’altérité,” French Review 78.1 (2004), 128–136. 6. Nancy Houston and Leïla Sebbar, Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l’exil (Paris, France: Barrault, 1986), 185. 7. Michel LaRonde, Leïla Sebbar (Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 2003). 8. LaRonde, Leïla Sebbar, 19. 9. LaRonde, Leïla Sebbar, 20. 10. Deepika Bahri, “Magical Realism,” Emory University English Department, http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Magical_Realism/html (accessed March 24, 2006). 11. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979), 1. 12. Deepika Bahri, “Orientalism,” Emory University English Department, http:// www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism/html (accessed March 24, 2006). 13. Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000), 6. 14. Michael O’Riley, “Specters of Orientalism in France, Algeria, and Postcolonial Studies,” Mosaic 34 (2001), 48.

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15. Peter Stranges, “Mimicry, Mixed Couple, and ‘Odalisques’: A Hybrid Remembering of the French Republic,” Esprit créateur 43.1 (2003), 81. 16. Stranges, “Mimicry, Mixed Couple, and ‘Odalisques,’ ” 81. 17. Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth, UK: Heinemann, 2001), 103. 18. Stranges, “Mimicry, Mixed Couple, and ‘Odalisques,’ ” 83. 19. Michel LaRonde, Autour des écrivains maghrébins (Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 1993), 22. 20. Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr, Women, Immigration and Identities in France (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2000), 1. 21. Freedman and Tarr, Women, Immigration and Identities in France, 1. 22. Freedman and Tarr, Women, Immigration and Identities in France, 14. 23. Carole Netter and Anne-Marie Obajtek-Kirkwood, “Harfung, 3 questions à Leïla Sebbar,” Clicknet 2004, http://clicknet.swarthmore.edu/leila_sebbar/virtuel/carnet .html (accessed April 25, 2006). 24. Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood. 25. Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood. 26. “Ni putes ni soumises,” http://niputesnisoumises.com. 27. “Ni putes ni soumises.” 28. At the time of preparing this manuscript, no search on Google Images revealed any depictions of the “Marianne beurette.” 29. “Marianne noire,” Sundries 2005, http://futuremd.blogspot.com/2005/11/ marianne-noire.html (accessed June 27, 2008). 30. Carrie Tarr, Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France (Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 2005). 31. Tarr, Reframing Difference, 3. 32. Tarr, Reframing Difference, 13. 33. Tarr, Reframing Difference, 16. 34. Tarr, Reframing Difference, 87. 35. Anne Henriot, “Mémoirs d’immigrés,” Télédoc 2002, http://www.cndp.fr/tice/ teledoc/dossiers/dossier_ immigres.htm (accessed April 24, 2006). 36. Fabian Lemercier, “Yamina Benguigui: La culture ouvre la parole,” Euromedcafé, http://www.euromedcafe.org/interview.asp?lang=fra&documentID=15 (accessed April 24, 2006). 37. Lemercier, Yamina Benguigui. 38. Camille Lacoste-Dujardin, “Maghrebi Families in France,” in Women, Immigration and Identities in France, eds. Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2000), 59. 39. Lacoste-Dujardin, “Maghrebi Families in France,” 62. 40. Lacoste-Dujardin, “Maghrebi Families in France,” 62. 41. Lacoste-Dujardin, “Maghrebi Families in France,” 63.

Conclusion ²⁄³ SPACES: HOME, NATION, GENDER, SELF-OTHER

In concluding this monograph, I hope that the reader will take away from his or her reading experience the motivation to reconsider contemporary women’s filmmaking and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia through a transnational lens of deterritorialization. We have seen throughout this study the manners in which women’s coming to voice via the (re)appropriation of hegemonic discourses of representation, use of language, and authority in speaking is made possible through the domestic space of the home and the arts of homemaking. All of the women artists in this study reveal how the home and homemaking either function or have the potentiality to function as physical or symbolic locations of socio-political-historical contention and complex frameworks for identity, gender, and subjectivity construction. Drawing inspiration from Shohat and Stam’s notions of a “methodological cubism” or a “kaleidoscope framework,” I set out to explore in this study the multichronotopic links of theory and practice that bypass the proverbial feminist studies versus transnationalism versus postcolonialism and so on scenario. Thus, rather than adopting a single theoretical methodology, I aimed to investigate the relationalities between transnational representations of French, Algerian, and Tunisian women on the page and on the screen in a translinear or derailed-like fashion through multiple domestic, feminist, postcolonial, and transnational optics. Yet, for the sake of organization and in order to be able to apply these perspectives and frameworks more coherently and with greater impact in this study, each chapter emphasized one theoretical positioning slightly more than another when examining the artists’ shared projects of defining, challenging, and re-framing the “national” and the “feminine” in the primary texts analyzed. 207

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In Chapter One, I emphasized postcolonial studies and feminist literary and film theory and where they importantly intersect and interface. We saw how Assia Djebar’s theorizations of the gaze and voice contribute to debates argued in both disciplines. I discussed how her cinema and literature work to subvert the double gaze and “master’s” voice by outlawing male gazing through gender reversal and by (re)claiming multiplicitous representations of Algerian women from multiple feminine perspectives. I concluded that as a film and literary theorist, Djebar asserts that women’s cinema and literature privilege female voices that in turn forge spaces or positions of cinematic and literary authorship, but she shows how these voices rely on the female gaze that first must appropriate cinematic and literary spaces of spectatorship. In Chapter Two, I emphasized the field of lifewriting when analyzing Annie Ernaux’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s work. Through their use of nonconventional literary form, authorial voice, and a transpersonal first-person speaking position, we saw how both writers deterritorialize the constructions of both “marginality” and “dominant” by challenging “imperial” modes of thought and binary structures with regard to the “feminine.” I concluded that the act of sifting through life experiences, a prime trope in women’s lifewriting, enables a process of discovery for both the authors and readers that transcends expressions of fixed female identity and fixating female subjectivity by moving beyond the limiting and restrictive questions of “in/authenticity” to deal more directly with more “inclusive” and diverse portraits of multiplitictous female gender construction. In Chapter Three, I emphasized the field of domesticity in Raja Amari’s and Coline Serreau’s reconfigurations of understanding of the Self-Other divide by using homemaking and home creativity as catalysts to the recognition of the need to re-form identity and reconstruct gender as something “other” than the monolithic representations of traditional or conventional discourses of femininity that surround these filmmakers and their protagonists. I concluded that both filmmakers seek to explore how the processes of uncovering or articulating new identities, subjectivities, and performances usher in new ways of seeing, knowing, and being “female” in their respective societies. In my discussion, we have seen how they attempt to derail traditional race-, class-, religious-, and patriarchal-based ideologies and markers of identity by drawing out the latent contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes of their “imagined communities” with regard to “home/making,” “gender,” and “nation.” In Chapter Four, I emphasized the burgeoning critical approach of transvergence with its desires to re-frame marginality as a point of resistance and to

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allow for continuities as well as differences in “national” gender identity and integrity to exist side by side. Through the concept of a “virtual geography,” we saw how Leïla Sebbar and Yamina Benguigui re-configure “fixed” notions of nation, center/margin, self/other, and home/exile and create the possibility for marginal or “othered” positions that are rooted in the identification with the alien/allo-/other to occupy shifting, multiple, and re-hybridized subjectivities. I concluded that through cross-cultural encounters with otherness, these artists reveal the “alien within” (or the alloself ) and show how this notion of allogenesis (or production of the alien within) articulates dynamic and shifting relationships of opposition and confluence for an alloself that is never separated, fixed, or fixated in binary opposition. Bringing together these critical perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and close readings in this book have been my overarching critical methodology of transnationalism and my thematic discursive of “homelessness at home.” In my treatment of Assia Djebar, the transnational surfaced in her inter-femalegenerational histories that successfully permeate time and class as well as ethnic and geographical borders. For Simone de Beauvoir and Annie Ernaux, the transnational suggests the virtual intra-national borders between social class and sex within the homeland of France. For Raja Amari and Coline Serreau, the transnational refers again to the virtual intra-national borders between social class and sex within the homelands of France and Tunisia but also begins to open up a new exploration of international socio-cultural borders between both nations. Finally, in my analysis of Leïla Sebbar and Yamina Benguigui, the transnational takes up again the virtual intra-national borders between social class and sex within the homelands of France and Algeria but also considers more prominently questions of international inter-cultural exchanges as they are realized through the motifs of travel, immigration, and culture(s) of origin. With regard to my thematic discursive of “homelessness at home,” this notion suggests different experiences or different realities for each woman artist. For Djebar, “homelessness at home” captures a shift from the home as representation of a site of Algerian women’s audiovisual occultation and imprisonment to a liberating site of female political action and appropriated location of female spectatorship and authorship. For both Ernaux and de Beauvoir, the notion implies a dis/location in which protagonists are both “here and there,” caught in an inauthentic self-identity normatively conceived, understood, imposed upon, accepted, and performed at home. With respect to Amari and Serreau, “homelessness at home” reveals how the institutions and categories of identity of home and homemaking or

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housewifery exist as constructed ideologies and positionings that serve hegemony and reify the “nation.” And finally concerning Sebbar and Benguigui, the notion speaks to the recognition for the need of a break from the tradition of hachouma (or the interdiction of free and open communication) in the home, which results in the establishment of communication between the sexes and between generations. In each instance throughout this study, “home” and “nation” are intricately bound to one another in a number of different ways. The home reflects and resembles “nation” by expressing the same ideological pressures that contend within the nation and does not serve as a retreat from the public and political spheres. The home has permeable walls and is a receiver of public languages and values as well as is a space in which national, global, and/or hegemonic discourses speak, are performed, and reproduce themselves. Both terms are polysemic and have been defined in several ways throughout this book. Understood as hegemonic middle-class, mid-twentieth-century, metropolitan France or post-independence, normative, political, conservative Algeria or Tunisia, to name only two, “home” and “nation” function in this study to situate and re-configure understanding of the Self-Other divide. Both constructs typically seek to repress difference as illustrated in the primary texts included in this study. As posited in each earlier discussion, Djebar, Ernaux, de Beauvoir, Amari, Serreau, Sebbar, and Benguigui all seek to counter this repression by recounting personal history as experienced in the home and emphasizing the socio-historical-import of these personal histories in reference to the nation. Their design to recount personal history and emphasize its socio-historical import in print and film is realized through these women artists’ play with the various paradigms of seeing, knowing, and being that are at their individual disposal. Working within as well as beyond their “national” systems of visual and written representation, these women artist all challenge previously conceived notions of spectatorship; power and gender relations; and performances, definitions, and discourses of femininity. Through the multiple critical perspectives and theoretical frameworks applied in this study—especially with regard to subjectivity, identity construction, gender performance and discourse, space, and modes of articulation and enunciation—I have attempted to show how these approaches and optics of analysis are imbricated and reflected across various disciplines and media; but without suggesting that their positionings are identical and interchangeable. Through this kaleidoscope framework and the lens of the interrogation of the personal, I have argued for a re-hybridized subject this is well situated

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in history, class, gender, and “nation.” This re-hybridized subject in artistic practice becomes a polyphony of personalized and dispersed individual voices that share a common origin, source, situation, or experience and that expose, resist, and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which they are implicated. I have also argued for ²⁄³ Spaces of expression and forms of enunciation from and in which artists and their re-hybridized protagonists exemplify a transnational identity, historicity, subjectivity, and speaking position. As we have seen, these re-hybridized subjects and ²⁄³ Spaces of expression and modes of enunciation have taken many forms. With regard to Djebar, we saw how the home shelters a ²⁄³ Space in which re-hybridized gazing and speaking subjects may create new, public spaces and modes of articulation in which the next generation of even further re-hybridized gazing and speaking subjects may continue their oral tradition and collaborate on new discourses that combine their mothers’, grandmothers’, sisters’, and their own personal histories. For Ernaux and de Beauvoir, I showed how their homes—seen either as a maintenance trap of things that adds countless demands for immanent acts or as an entire “universe” sheltering the protagonist from the responsibility of “outside” transcendent acts—become politically and socially charged transnational spaces of contention on which hybrid seeing and speaking subjects from multiple perspectives descend in order to transform them into new re-hybridized spaces or positions of female spectatorship and authorship from within. Concerning Amari and Serreau, we saw how the diasporic space of home inflects transnational identity and transnational understanding of self and gender and privileges a forging ahead as opposed to a retreat into pre-existing cultural, familial, or psychological identities and a priori social, historical, or political frameworks and discourses. And finally for Sebbar and Benguigui, I asserted that their cinematic expression and articulation re-frame marginality as a point of resistance and allow for continuities as well as differences in “national” gender identity and integrity to exist side by side. Throughout this study I have shown how the relationship between “center” and “margin” in various forms (e.g., gender discourses, representation, iconography, ideology, identity, and behavior) becomes fully problematized in the work of contemporary French-language women writers and filmmakers of France, Algeria, and Tunisia. We have seen how the essentialist dangers implicit in normative discourses concerning home, femininity, and domesticity remain part of the multiple experiences and identities affecting many revered, repudiated, minority, or middle-class women residing either in the “margins” or in the “center” of French, Tunisian, or Algerian discourses and societies.

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Yet we have also seen how these women succeed in (re)appropriating these discourses to various degrees and through different forms of self-referential modes of storytelling. Through these modes of first-person narration, the women artists included in this study create representations of a plurality of feminine identities, bodies, and voices politically engaged in challenging the normative notions at hand. Consequently, we have seen how these women artists arrive at powerful articulations of new senses of female selves that in turn inspire additional political, social, theoretical, and artistic engagement. To this end, this is to say that this project has demonstrated how one may position these multiple portraits of French, Tunisian, and Algerian female identities and domestic spaces at the crosshairs of a complex web of H/history, ethnicity, race, class, and gender relations. As shown, whether in “inauthentic” or (re)appropriated portraits, these challenges reflect women’s contradictory, ambivalent, and paradoxical position(s) in their respective societies and cultures. As “bearers of tradition” and “agents of modernity,” the female protagonists of the preceding chapters (and their creators) are conventionally expected by their societies to reify (to differing degrees) national, cultural, religious, lingual, social, gender, and domestic boundaries as well as transcend them. Linked to the concepts of border-crossing and derailment, I have brought to light an array of political and cultural interconnections and transversals that require rethinking in relation to the socio-political-historical tensions in which these interconnections and transversals have developed and continue to develop. In each chapter, I have strived to reveal some of the contradictions and points of contention existing in “the” feminine condition as it is known, experienced, and enunciated in France, Tunisia, or Algeria. I have also strived to broaden the responses to what it means to be a French-speaking woman in a variety of contemporary seemingly public literary and cinematic spaces and discourses as well as seemingly private or personal ones. I have sought to show in the individual chapters of this study how the subversive refusal of the hegemonic cultural sign of female not only makes a space or position for renewal or recreation of female subjectivities from women’s perspectives, but also incites the next generation or wave of contemporary re-hybridized women artists (and feminist, postcolonial, and transnational literary and film scholars) to create new female subjectivities from their own individual and personal ²⁄³ perspectives. Hence, one may create or locate these new female subjectivities in-between the representations of home, femininity, and domesticity but always squarely in personal history. Moreover, as all of the women artists included in this study demonstrate, one may also create new re-hybridized female subjectivities and articulate their

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transvergent discourses in their collective re-creation of H/history specifically through the representations of two important tropes: the performative acts of homemaking (the traditional female activities of cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc.) and making home (the creation of personal female spaces of first-person expression in body, voice, and gaze). In all instances, these tropes function as points of resistance for both the female protagonists and the women artists to many of the pressures placed upon them as writers, filmmakers, performers, wives, mothers, daughters, travelers, or females.

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Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002. Watson, Julia. “Autoethnography.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, ed. Jolly Margaretta (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001). Weber-Fève, Stacey. “Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in French-Tunisian Filmmaker Raja Amari’s Satin rouge (2002).” Quarterly Review of Film & Video (forthcoming, 2010). ———. “Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in Touchia: Ouverture and Ces voix qui m’assiègent.” French Review 81.3 (2008), 60–68. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess.” Feminist Film Theory, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1999), 267–281. Willis, Michael J. “Islamism in Algeria: the Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion.” The Arab-African & Islamic Worlds, eds. R. Kevin Lacey and Ralph M. Coury (New York: Peter Lang, Ltd., 2000), 51–64. Wilson, Emma. French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Wood, Roy C. The Sociology of the Meal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, Ltd., 1995. Woodhull, Winifred. Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993. Yalom, Marilyn. Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1985. Yamina Benguigui: La culture ouvre la parole. Ed. Fabian Lemercier. Euromedcafé. April 24, 2006. http://www.euromedcafe.org/interview.asp?lang=fra@document ID=15. Zayafoon, Lamia Ben Youssef. The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.

Index

Abeel, Erica, 141–42, 146 L’Age de discretion, 83 Algeria: commonalities with France and Tunisia, xvi–xvii; cultural relations with France, 164; gender issues, 2–3, 111– 12; history and female body, 32–35; nationalism, 33, 35–36; women in, 20–23 alloself, xlv, 131, 209 Alloua, Mark, 105–6 Amari, Raja: agenda, xlix, 151, 208; Benguigui comparison, 152; biography, 104–5; Djebar comparison, 104; Sebbar comparison, 152; Self/Other representations, 119, 131–32; spectatorship, 105–7; style of filmmaking, 114–15, 117; 2/3 Space of expression, 105, 211. See also Satin rouge Ashcroft, Bill, xxxix Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in “Touchia: Ouverture” and “Ces voix qui m’assiègent,” 4, 16 authenticity, 56–58 autobiographical narratives, 46–49, 86 autoethnography, xxx Bacholle, Michèle, 44, 51 banlieue, 175–76. See also beur writing/ filmmaking

Bartók, Béla, 12 Bazin, André, xlii Bedouin women representations, 105–6 Les Belles Images, 75 belly dancing, 115–17, 126 Benguigui, Yamina: agenda, xlix, 209; Amari comparison, 152; as beur filmmaker, 187–88; capturing right to existence, 191–95; Inch’Allah dimanche, 188–90, 193–98; Self/ Other representations, 204. 189; Serreau comparison, 152; 2/3 Space of expression, 203–4, 211 Bensmaïa, Réda, 12 Berghagn, Daniela, xliv beur writing/filmmaking, 153, 184–91. See also banlieue Bhabha, Homi, xxxix, xli BioArt, xlvi borders and identity, 152–53 Bouhkobza, Noria, 179–80, 182–83 Brahimi, Tounes, 180–81 Brigitte Rollet, 133 caberet dance roles in film, 126–27 The Call of God, 116–17 Can the Subaltern Speak?, 15 Carnhi, Leslie, 148

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I ND E X

Ces voix qui m’assiègent, 3, 9–10, 13, 21, 28–34. See also Être une voix francophone; Regard de l’autre, regard sur l’autre Chaos: cinematic style, 138–40; gender issues, 146–48; home representations, 140, 146; housework images, 142–43; sound and soundtrack, 140–47; three narratives, 136–38 Character Zone, 10 Charrad, Mournira M., 109–10 child-raising chores, 70 Cinema Interval, 10 Cixous, Hélène, 26–27, 28, 34, 126 collaboration, 10 collective female voice, 32 comedy, 134–36 communication, subaltern, 15–16 “croisement,” 158–60 Culhane, Hind Rassam, 116–17 cultural diversity, 154–57 dance roles in film, 118–21, 126–27 Davison, Ray, 84 de Beauvoir, Simone: agenda, xlviii– xlix, 41–42, 103, 208; biography, 74–75; criticism of, 75–77; Djebar comparison, 42; Ernaux comparison, 74, 77–82; Serreau comparison, 143; 2/3 Space of expression, 100, 211; Une mort très douce, 77. See also La Femme rompue; Le Deuxième sexe Déjeux, Jean, 28 Delacroix, Eugène, 4–6, 8, 9, 23, 36, 38 De l’écriture comme voile, 30–31 départenance, 154 desire, xxvii–xxviii Desplechin, Arnaud, 115 Le Deuxième sexe, 75, 77–82 Devadas, Vijay, xxxviii diary formats, 89 diaspora spaces, 41–42, 120 Djebar, Assia: agenda, xlviii, 1–2, 208; Algerian gender issues, 2–3, 111–12;

Amari comparison, 104; Bedouin women representations, 105–6; de Beauvoir comparison, 42; Ernaux comparison, 42, 56; gaze, 4, 11–17, 165–66, 208; pseudonyms, 28, 31; Self/Other, xviii–xix, 126; Serreau comparison, 104; Touchia: Ouverture, 16–23; 2/3 Space of expression, 9, 15–16, 39, 56, 211. See also Ces voix qui m’assiègent; La Nouba du Mont Chenoua; Regard interdit, son coupé; Song of Messaouda Dobie, Madeleine, 33 domesticity. See home representations; housework; marriage Donadey, Anne, 11–12, 35, 166 double lives, 119–21, 131–32 double silence, 24 Du français comme butin, 29 Eakin, John, 48 EcoArt, xlvi Écrire dans la langue de l’autre, 31 egalitarian marriages, 68–69 Egyptian film history, 115–17 Elle magazine, 85–86 enunciative apparatus theory, xxviii Ernaux, Annie: agenda, xlviii–xlix, 41–42, 103, 208; biography, 43–45; de Beauvoir comparison, 74, 77–78; Djebar comparison, 42, 56; gender issues, 58–59; hybrid writing style, 49–52; Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, 77; je transpersonal, 45–46, 48–49; ‘Le Fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir, 77; philosophy of writing, 59–60, 81; Serreau comparison, 143; 2/3 Space of expression, 48–49, 56, 211; Une femme, 77. See also La Femme gelée; ‘Le Fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir Esther Kahn, 115 Être une voix francophone, 24 exile motif, 163–64, 167–68 existence, right to, 191–95

IN DEX Fallaize, Elizabeth, 76, 82, 85–86 familial hierarchy, 198–203 Fanon, Frantz, xxii–xxiii Farès, Djamel, 179 Fau, Christine, 56 femininity: Algerian history and female body, 32–35; magazine portrayals, 85–90; overcoming silences, 24–26; portraits, 178–84 feminist perspectives, xxvii–xxviii, 56– 59. See also gender issues La Femme gelée: feminist perspectives, 56–59; gender roles, 100; home representations, 62–74, 100, 122; housework, 125–26; Inch’Allah dimanche comparison, 197; lack of identity, 60–61; La Femme rompue comparison, 97–98; Le Deuxième sexe references, 79–80, 82; maternal portraits, 50–56, 61–74 La Femme rompue: autobiographical mode, 86; competition between women, 90; diary format, 83–85; La Femme gelée comparison, 97–98; first person comparison, 82–83; gaze, 97–100; gender roles, 84, 100; home representations, 91–94, 96–97, 100, 122; L’Age de discretion, 83; maternal portraits, 87–88, 94–95; Monologue, 83; women’s magazines, 88–90 Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, 4, 32. See also Regard interdit, son coupé ‘Le Fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir, 77–82 filmmaking: beur, 153, 184–91; French, xxxvi; Tunisian, 105–7, 111–14 first person narratives, 28–30, 82–83 Fontaine, Anne, 186–87 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 14 Foucault, Michel, xxiii France: Algerian cultural relations, 164; commonalities with Algeria

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and Tunisia, xvi–xvii; national/ transnational film, xxxvi; social revolution, 133–34 Freedman, Jane, 168–71 Gabous, Abdekrim, 106 Gafaïti, Hafid, 32, 35, 154 Garanger, Marc, 179, 182 gaze: in Algerian society, 2–3; desire and, xxvii–xxviii; Inch’Allah dimanche, 197; La Femme rompue, 97–99; La Nouba du Mont Chenoua, 11–16; Regard de l’autre, regard sur l’autre, 11–17, 21; Regard interdit, son coupe, 38–39, 165–66, 208; spectatorship and, 4–11, 105–7 gender issues: in Algerian society, 2–3, 111–12; Ernaux on, 58–59; feminist scholars on, 32–33; La Femme gelée, 100; home representations, xxi–xxii, 62–74; immigration, 168–71; Inch’Allah dimanche, 203–4; La Femme gelée, 51; La Femme rompue, 84, 100; Orientalism, 161–62; in Tunisian society, 108–11 Ghorab-Volta, Zaïda, 186–87 Gill, Rosalind, 88–90 Giraud, Eugène, 181 “glissement,” 159 Goddard, Michael, xlvi Gracki, Katherine, 28–29 Greki, Anna, 180–81 Guerry, Jacques, 180 Hall, Stuart, xxxix hands as social markers, 195–96 haunting/spectrality motif, 163–64, 178–84 Hayward, Susan, xxxv, xl–xli “here and there” spaces, 41–42 heritage of pain, 191–92 Hermouche, Arezki and Fatha, 180–81 heteroglossic dialogism, xxxi Higbee, Will, xxxviii–xxxix, xliii–xlvii

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I ND E X

Les Histoires d’amour finissent mal en général, 186–87 Historical I, 46–47 Holmes-Eber, Paula, 111, 122–23 homelessness at home, xviii–xix, 80, 209– 10. See also diaspora spaces home representations: Chaos, 140, 146; defined, xix–xxii; gender roles and, xxi–xxii, 62–74; Inch’Allah dimanche, 204; La Femme gelée, 62–74, 100, 122; La Femme rompue, 91–94, 96–97, 100, 122; La Nouba du Mont Chenoua, 20; as nation, xxi, 42, 210; Regard interdit, son coupé, 23; Satin rouge, 120, 122–23, 127–28 La Honte, 50 housework, 121–27, 131–32 Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in French-Tunisian Filmmaker Raja Amari’s “Satin rouge,” 108 Huughe, Laurence, 8–9, 30–31 hybridity terminology, xxiv–xxvi hybrid writing style, 49–52 Idealogical I, 47 identity, lack of, 60–61 Il n’y a pas d’exil, 4 immigration issues, 168–71, 192–95 Inch’Allah dimanche, 188–90, 193–98, 201, 203–4 indieWIRE, 115, 141–42, 146 integration, 192–95 interactive process, 9–10 Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, 77 je transpersonal, 45–46, 48–49, 57–58, 197 Johnson, Erica L., xx Jour de Ramadan, 4 juxtiposition of images, 21–22 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 112, 123 Kelly, David, 8 Kennedy, Valerie, 161 Khannous, Touria, 15 Kian, Soheila, 154, 157, 163

Lacoste-Dujardin, Camille, 198–201 Laila, 116–17 landscape of Algerian women, 20 Larguet, Maya, 167, 173–74 LaRonde, Michel, 155, 156, 158–59, 167 Lemercier, Fabian, 192–93 Lettres parisiennes, 155–57 lifewriting as point of entry, xxix–xxxi. See also autobiographical narratives Lionnet, Françoise, 158 love scenes, 129–30 Maghrebi culture/background, 184–91, 198–99 magical realism, 159–60 Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent?, 132 male speaking position, 95 Mamak, Farida, 180 “maman” and “moman” terminology, 54–55 marginality, 211–12 Mariannes, 174–77, 179, 181–82 marriage, 68–69, 71, 78–82 maternal portraits: body, 34–35; Inch’Allah dimanche, 201, 203; La Femme gelée, 50–56, 61–74; La Femme rompue, 87–88, 94–95; Regard interdit, son coupé, xxvi–xxvii, 27, 33; Satin rouge, 118–19, 130 McRobbie, Angela, 89, 90 media terminology, xiv Mémoirs d’immigrés, 190–91, 194 Mémoirs d’une jeune fille rangée, 75, 77 Mes Algéries en France: haunting/ spectrality motif, 163–64, 166, 178– 84; mimicry, 174–78; as travelogue, 162, 171–74 methodological cubism, xvii, xlviii, 3–4, 207–11 Miller, Nancy K., 48 mimicry motif, 163–64, 166, 174–78 Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 10, 16 Minne, Danière, 180–81 Moghadam, Valentine, 112 Moi, Toril, 76

IN DEX

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Monologue, 83 multiplicitous figure, 14, 126 Mulvey, Laura, xxviii music/sounds of Chaos, 140–47

Rollet, Brigitte, 133, 135 romance, 89 Rosello, Mireille, 154 Rosti, Istefane, 116–17

Naficy, Hafid, xli Narrated I, 47, 59 Narrating I, 47 nation and home, xxi, 42, 210 nation approach to film analysis, xxxv– xxxvii non-dire, 2, 128 Nostalgie de la horde, 4 La Nouba du Mont Chenoua, 3, 11–16, 18, 20, 23, 24, 38 Novak, Marcus, xliii–xlv, 131

Said, Edward, xxii, 160–62 Samal, Samia, 115–18 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 75, 78 Satin rouge: double lives, 119–21, 131–32; home representations, 120, 122–23, 127–28; housework, 121–27, 131–32; Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in French-Tunisian Filmmaker Raja Amari’s “Satin rouge,” 108; maternal portraits, 118–19, 130; societal divisions, 118–19; Tunisian culture, 113–14, 117–19; veils, 130 Sebbar, Leïla: agenda, xlix, 209; Amari comparison, 152; biography, 154–57; “croisement,” 158–60; gender and immigration issues, 168–71; motifs, 163–68; Serreau comparison, 152; 2/3 Space of expression, 158, 162, 173, 211. See also Mes Algéries en France Second Cinema, xlii–xliii Self/Other representations: Amari, 119, 131–32; Benguigui, 189, 204; Djebar, xviii–xix, 126; Sebbar, 166; terminology, xvii–xix, xlvi–xlvii; theory, xxxi–xxxii Serreau, Coline: agenda, xlix, 151, 208; Benguigui comparison, 152; biography, 132–34; comedy of, 134– 36; Djebar comparison, 104; Ernaux comparison, 143; Sebbar comparison, 152; social commentary, 139–40, 141–42; 2/3 Space of expression, 148– 49, 211. See also Chaos Shérazade trilogy, 163, 166 Shobat, Ella, xiii–xiv, xvi, xlvii silencing, cultural, 23–25, 33 Smith, Paul, 47 social commentary, 43–45, 136, 139–40, 141–42 social fantastic, 138–39

Occident, 162–63 Orientalism, 160–66 O’Riley, Michael, 164–65 Ozon, François, 115; Les Mots parlent, 4 personal, interrogation of, xxiv–xxvi Personal Status Code (PSC), 111 Picasso, Pablo, 4, 35–38 Pignon, Sébastien, 179, 181 Pink, Sarah, xxii, 127, 131, 144–45 positionality, xxx–xxxi postcolonial discourse terminology, xxii– xxvi, xxxviii–xxxix Pourquoi pas!, 132 preformativity, xxx PSC (Personal Status Code), 111 pseudonyms, 28, 31 raqs sharqi, 115–17, 126 Regard de l’autre, regard sur l’autre, 16–17, 21 Regard interdit, son coupé: cultural silencing, 23–25, 33; gaze and spectatorial spaces, 3, 4–11, 38–39; home representations, 23; maternal portraits, xxvi–xxvii, 27, 33; veils, 7–9. See also Song of Messaouda Le Rire de la Méduse, 26–27, 28

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I ND E X

Song of Messaouda, xxvi, 24–28, 36–38 soundtrack/sound of Chaos, 140–47 Souviens-toi de moi, 186–87 “speaking nearby,” 45–48, 95 spectatorship. See gaze spectrality motif. See haunting/spectrality motif speech, desire for, 21 Spivak, Gayatri, 15 Stam, Robert, xiii–xiv, xvi, xlvii stereotypes, 144 Stollery, Martin, 112–13, 123 Stranges, Peter, 166 subaltern communication, xxiv, 15–16

122–23; in Satin rouge, 113–14, 117–19 2/3 Space of expression: Amari, 105, 211; Benguigui, 203–4, 211; “beur/ banlieue” cinemas, 185; de Beauvoir, 100, 211; Djebar, 9, 15–16, 39, 56, 211; Ernaux, 48–49, 56, 211; Sebbar, 158, 162, 173, 211; Serreau, 148–49, 211; terminology, xli–xliii, xlvii

taboos. See non-dire Tarr, Carrie, xxxiv–xxxvi, 168–71, 184–88 Technozoosemiotics, xlvi Third Cinema, xxxix–xliii “Third Space of Negotiation,” xxxix Third World Cinema, xxxix–xli Thomas, Lyn, 51 Thomas, Sylvie, 134, 139 Tondeur, Claire-Lise, 43, 44 Touchia: Ouverture, 16–23 transnational terminology, xiv, xxxii– xxxviii, 153–54, 209 transvergent considerations, xliii–xlvii travelogues, 162, 171–74 Trois hommes et un couffin, 133, 142–43 Tunisia: cinema, 105–7, 111–14; commonalities with France and Algeria, xvi–xvii; cultural divisions, 118–21; history, 107–11; home,

veils: Ces voix qui m’assiègent, 30–31; Regard interdit, son coupé, 7–9; Satin rouge, 130; symbolism of, 30–32; Tunisian women and, 109 Veltman, Andrea, 79–80 Vilain, Philippe, 50–51 Voltaire, 135–36

Under the Sand, 115 Une femme, 49–50, 77 Une mort très douce, 77 “universal” levels, 57–58

Wilson, Emma, xlii women bomb carriers, 33, 35, 36–38 Women of Algiers, 4 Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 4–6, 8, 9, 23, 35–38 women’s magazines, 85–86, 88–90 women’s roles. See gender issues writing styles: autobiographical narratives, 46–49, 86; hybrid, 49–52; lifewriting, xxix–xxxi; travelogues, 162, 171–74 Zayzafoon, Lamia Ben Youseef, 109–10

About the Author

Stacey Weber-Fève is assistant professor of French at Iowa State University of Science and Technology, Ames, in the Department of World Languages and Cultures. She is a specialist of French and Francophone cinemas whose research interests primarily concern women’s contemporary filmmaking and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia. Her publications include “Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in French-Tunisian Filmmaker Raja Amari’s Satin rouge (2002)” (Quarterly Review of Film & Video, forthcoming); “Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in ‘Touchia: Ouverture’ and Ces voix qui m’assiègent” (French Review, 2008); “Integrating Language and Literature: Teaching Textual Analysis with Input and Output Activities and an Inputto-Output Approach” (Foreign Language Annals, 2009); “A Writing Design: Using Abstracts in the Writing Process” (French Review, 2009); and Liaisons: Beginning-Level French Program (Cengage-Heinle, working title, forthcoming). She is passionate about the classroom and seeks ways to explore how second-language research study can directly inform teaching, especially in the design of instructional materials and literacy-based approaches to the teaching and learning of French language and French/Francophone cinemas, literatures, and cultures. Her current research project centers on the (inter)relationality and interstices between word, image, and frame in Marjane Satrapi’s feature-length animated film and graphic novel, Persepolis.

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