International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2012

Supported by Judith Butler’s work, and also by the theme of ambivalence and nonsense as defined by Homi Bhabha, this article initiates thoughts on agency in the historic, literary and cultural context of postcolonial narrations around the reconfiguration of borders in an era of globalization. This analysis of the works of Malika Mokeddem, Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé and Marie NDiaye concentrates on the way in which the texts’ main female characters are all presented as trespassers – human beings struggling to exist, to speak, to give an account of themselves, and who are breaking away from the standards and displacing borders. A strong feeling of ‘inseparation’ emanates from what divides through unity, from the border as a wound uniting and separating both narrations and people. This includes wounds of sexual difference, of the sexual body. Traces of wounds consecutive to crossing borders can be found in these wounded narrations where memories attempt to express themselves, often through the necessity of delaying the accounts through repetitions which in themselves act as means of working through the trauma.

Yamina Benguigui is a pioneer in the representation of Maghrebi immigration to France, and has produced a number of works of documentary and fictional film on the subject. This article discusses her fictional film Inch’Allah dimanche (2001). The film portrays the trajectory of a young woman, Zouina, who takes her children and mother-in-law to join her husband in France. The film is unique for its close focus on the space of the home, and the negotiation of gendered spaces within the strict confines set by Zouina’s husband. In this article, I consider Zouina’s tentative steps towards emancipation from these confines, focusing on preconceived notions of gendered spaces across different cultures. I consider possible interpretations of the final moment of wounding in the film, in which Zouina breaks through a window with her bare hands, destroying the barrier between the interior, private space of the home and the exterior, public space of the street.

This article examines the dimensions of pain and woman’s subjective difference in French film-maker Marina de Van’s feature-length films Dans ma peau/In My Skin (2002) and Ne te retourne pas/Don’t Look Back (2009). While the first film focuses foremost on the female protagonist’s physical injury and subsequent episodes of self-harm, the second film highlights the protagonist’s wounded psyche and divided sense of self as she is faced with a past trauma that threatens to reveal itself; an identificatory secret that inscribes itself on the morphing body. De Van’s privileging of the sensorial in these two concrete examples of ‘wounded women’ is further developed in this article by incorporating phenomenological film theory, and by considering the notion of fetish and the uncanny as it relates to the female subject.

This article offers a critical analysis of the articulation of wounds in two recent exile narratives: Nina Bouraoui’s Mes mauvaises pensées (2005) and Linda Lê’s In Memoriam (2007). Arguing for a new understanding of exile as a form of repetition compulsion, in which trauma is repeatedly revisited and restaged in writing, the article investigates the frequent references to different kinds of wounds, both literal and imagined, physical and psychical, which emerge from these experimental texts. The analysis focuses on two specific aspects: first, drawing on the theoretical work of Kathryn Robson and Cathy Caruth, which highlights the difficulty of articulating traumatic experience (and the wounds which result), it considers why these exile narratives so frequently resort to the use of such violent, bodily imagery; second, it investigates the notion of scriptotherapy in order to evaluate the very different accounts of the relationship between writing and the wounds of exile which emerge from these texts.

The female characters in Lorette Nobécourt’s works have to cope with a multitude of types of violence: physical and verbal violence, rapes, miscarriages and abortions. A wide range of maternal relationships within the canon of her work showcase the notion of a repetition of ambivalent, violent relationships with maternity through a female genealogy, which is characterized by suffering stemming from miscarriages and abortions. Motherhood is in fact at the centre of Nobécourt’s traumatic representations, shown both as a celebration and a desecration of maternity and maternal violence. She undertakes a re-evaluation of the representations of both femininity and maternity. The aim of this article is to analyze how Nobécourt’s works enable the creation of a space for thought and of re-appropriation of the female body and of the discourses surrounding it, redefining the subject ‘woman’.

In Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007), the narrator recalls a suicide attempt which she made as an adolescent shortly before the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence. This article explores the motives behind the narrator’s death wish. Djebar portrays a woman who has moved through two cultures, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized, but feels exiled from both; this feeling is summarized by her sense that she has ‘no place’ in her father’s house. At the same time, the narrator connects the suicide attempt with the role of the father in her formative years; he and her first boyfriend, together, are jointly responsible (‘deux responsables’) for her inability to lead the kind of life she believes would have brought her fulfilment. But rather than pin the blame on these two individuals, she fits lost opportunities within a wider social and political context, in which not only she, but her parents had been caught up in the tensions of colonized Algeria that were soon to explode into violence. Meanwhile, the whole text is impregnated by nostalgia for the lost paternal grandmother, and everything she represented for the narrator’s younger self.

For more than ten years, many francophone (Franco-)Algerian and (Franco-)Moroccan women writers have been breaking the silence on the persistent taboo of female virginity in their traditional patriarchal societies. At a time when the demands for certificates of virginity and hymen repairs appear to be growing, and considering the lack of sociological studies conducted in Algeria or Morocco on sexual practices, they help to highlight the violent forms – physical or symbolic – of socialization and dominations which compelled or still constrain female sexuality in an androcentrist system. Based on the works of some of these authors, as well as on unpublished interviews, this article seeks to shed light on the strategies of resistance and transgression that these writers – and their characters – implement speaking about this ‘ordinary’ violence against North African women.

Anomia: Nostalgia for a Forbidden Sense, Ezza Agha Malak(trans. Cynthia Hahn), (2009) New Orleans: University Press of the South, 137 pp., ISBN: 1-931948-89-5, $29.95

How Belgium colonized the mind of the Congo: Seeking the memory of an African people, LieveSpaas, (2007) Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 236 pp., ISBN 978-0-7734-5167-4,Hardback

As French as Everyone Else? A survey of French Citizens of Maghrebin, African and Turkish Origin, Sylvain Brouard and Vincent Tiberj (trans. Jennifer Fredette), (2011) Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 131 pp., ISBN 978-14399-0296-7,Paperback, $23.95

Rewriting the Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers, Anne M. François, (2011) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 111 pp., ISBN 978-0-7391-4826-6, Hardback, $59.99/ £37.95

The Wounded Soul of a Black Elephant & A Prayer to the Ancestors, Gabriel MwènèOkoundji(trans.Peter Figueroa with assistance from Carol Sanders), (2008) London: Books of Africa, 72pp., ISBN 97809566380-7-6,Paperback, £12

Images of Switzerland. Crossing Frontiers: Cultural Exchange and Conflict – Papers in Honour of Malcolm Pender, Barbara Burns and Joy Charnley (eds), (2010) Amsterdam &New York: Rodopi, 268pp., ISBN 978-90-420-2997-2, Paperback, €54/ US$ 73

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, Paul B. Miller, (2010) Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 230 pp., ISBN 978-0-8139-2980-4,Paperback, $21.50

Toussaint Louverture:The Haitian Revolution, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, (2008) London &New York: Verso, 123 pp., ISBN 978-1-84467-261-5, 16.95 / £7.99

De l’acteur vedette au théâtre de festival. Histoire des pratiques scéniques montréalaises 1940–1980, Sylvain Schryburt, (2011) Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 400 pp., ISBN 978-2-7606-2240-1, C$ 34.95, €31

Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography, Natalie Edwards, (2011) Newark: University of Delaware Press, 171 pp., ISBN 978-1-61149-030-5, Hardback, £37.95

The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures, Ayo A. Coly, (2010) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 176 pp., ISBN 978-0-7391-4511-1, Hardback, $62.99 (£39.95)

Diversité littéraire en Algérie, Najib Redouane (éd.), (2011) Paris: L’Harmattan, 300 pp., ISBN 978-2-296-11979-6, €28

L’Œuvre romanesque de Gérard Étienne: E(cri)ts d’un Révolutionnaire, Redouane Najib et Yvette Bénayoun-Szmidt (eds), (2011) Paris: L’Harmattan, coll. Espaces littéraires, 254 pp., ISBN 978-2-296-54382-9, Paperback, €23.50

Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages, Michelle R. Warren, (2010) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 379pp., ISBN 978-0-8166-6526-6,Paperback, $25

Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society, Valérie K. Orlando, (2011) Athens: Ohio University Press, 190 pp., ISBN 978-0-89680-281-0, Paperback