Algerian Imprints

Ethical Space in the Work of Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous

Brigitte Weltman-Aron

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231539876
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Born and raised in French Algeria, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous represent in their literary works signs of conflict and enmity, drawing on discordant histories so as to reappraise the political on the very basis of dissensus.

In a rare comparison of these authors' writings, Algerian Imprints shows how Cixous and Djebar consistently reclaim for ethical and political purposes the demarcations and dislocations emphasized in their fictions. Their works affirm the chance for thinking afforded by marginalization and exclusion and delineate political ways of preserving a space for difference informed by expropriation and nonbelonging. Cixous's inquiry is steeped in her formative encounter with the grudging integration of the Jews in French Algeria, while Djebar's narratives concern the colonial separation of "French" and "Arab," self and other. Yet both authors elaborate strategies to address inequality and injustice without resorting to tropes of victimization, challenging and transforming the understanding of the history and legacy of colonized space.

PART ONE Colonial Demarcations

CHAPTER ONE

The Gravity of the Body

Djebar’s and Cixous’s Textuality

ALGERIA IN CIXOUS AND DJEBAR: THINKING DISLOCATION

The first question asked by this book about the writings of Assia Djebar and of Hélène Cixous revolves around what “Algeria” stands for in their respective oeuvres. Algeria is written in quotation marks, because both writers develop a critical, political, and ethical reflection that takes its point of departure from that site but is not circumscribed by its borders. Hélène Cixous has said that “writing was born for [her] in [her] early childhood. That is to say in Algeria, in the tension between what was beautiful and noble, and which was founded on the truly upright spirit in my family … and what I saw was foul as soon as I crossed the threshold of the door.”¹ The French Algeria where Cixous was born and grew up, then, was an awakening to constitutive dissonance, to the evidence of profound contradictions that required interpretation, which in turn informed her poetics, inseparably linked to a political and ethical stance in response to such Algerian scenes. Likewise, Djebar consistently reflects on patterns of exclusion in colonial and postcolonial Algeria. However, just as Cixous thinks through tensions rather than clear-cut oppositions in order to side with and affirm neglected outcomes, so is Djebar attentive to partial openings and overlaps that can be read as chances and even promises of other political potentialities.

When Cixous famously asked women to write their selves, she added the urgency of writing (through) the body, and called that writing “feminine” because historically woman had been less able to inscribe her own libidinal economy, her body and her jouissance.² Writing such an economy, she argued, would be a leverage allowing for the advent of another history, to the extent that libidinal economies are political (879). The spatialization of desire as “cosmic” allowed Cixous to defy assumptions about the body and to oppose a conception of desire she denounced as centralized, indeed “regionalized” (889). Woman’s body is said to defy contours and borders; it is “a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, changing ensemble, unlimited cosmos” (889). Recommending writing the body was all the more necessary since, as she noted in another contemporary essay, woman “has not been able to live in her ‘own’ house, her very body.”³ At stake, then, was a preliminary reflection concerning the delineation and the inhabitation of the body so as to rethink the organization of sociopolitical systems on the basis of this new spatiality. For, as Cixous argues in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” along lines that Djebar agrees with and promotes in her own texts, woman carries out a dislocation of the body and of place, the effect of which is to transform the way in which to address the political body: “As subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places. Woman un-thinks [dépense] the unifying regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces and herds contradictions into a single battlefield.”⁴ It is this consistent erosion of a homogeneous discourse that paradoxically functions as a common trait linking woman’s personal history to the collective history of women (882). Clarisse Zimra has pointed out the extent to which the inscription of the female body in Djebar’s oeuvre is conceived at times as “a subversion of, and alternative to, the socius”; while, on other occasions, “the text is polarized by two visions of the female body,” one in which it is obsessively and impotently being watched and another in which “the flesh has its own language,” that of the caress and the affectionate touch.⁵ Djebar’s and Cixous’s narrators often tell stories about diverse constraints faced by someone (or, more precisely, some body) who is thus led to put into question and challenge the limits of the body that is generally inhabited without reflection, as well as its inscription within a given location and a specific time. These restraints can cruelly maim, tear apart and dislocate the body, for example in ailing and in death throes (Cixous) or under torture and other wartime atrocities (Djebar). But there are also other scenes in Cixous and Djebar in which violence is not simply inflicted, but where the body, escaping the confining presumption of integrality, becomes explosive and exploring at the assumed risk of disintegration. Christa Stevens has drawn attention to Cixous’s “surgical writing,” scenes of “autopsies” and portraits of the author as “écorché,” or flayed anatomical model; likewise, Djebar often lays bare what the outermost epidermis protectively covers, “under the slow scalpel of autopsy of living flesh, showing more than one’s skin.”⁶ If the figure of flight, in the sense of flying away, not to mention that of robbing, which Cixous has made much of, has always been prevalent in the texts of the two writers, it does not contradict the evidence in their works of a body anchored or attached in, which also means, by the same token, detachable and removable from a given place.⁷ I will argue in this chapter that rethinking the body and its limits occurs within a spatiality, the imposed partitions or perceived divisions of which are themselves interrogated as a preliminary step to a different potential positioning within the political and social landscape. Specifically, Djebar and Cixous examine ways in which dislocation (of the body and of the site) may be ascertained and taken up, that is to say, not only contested and deplored but addressed as an ethical and political chance. This chapter will also examine the difficulty faced by several critics when attempting to classify each writer’s oeuvre, particularly as far as the distinction between fiction and autobiography is concerned, an opposition their works consistently complicate or collapse. This two-pronged approach frames in advance the focus of Algerian Imprints, which argues that Cixous’s and Djebar’s Algerian writings are a consistent invitation to de-limit the body in order to reframe its potentialities in an Algerian space that is manifold or heterogeneous. The project of rethinking the body or entities that are taken to be self-enclosed is inseparable from the denunciation of false dualities that restrict the possibilities or deny the actuality of a plural political body. In this chapter, I start with their reflection on the de-limitation of the body, but I contend that this initial demonstration of the articulations between body and space posited by Djebar and Cixous is confirmed in different forms in every chapter of this book.

TWO WHEELS, TWO CYCLISTS, TWO CIRCLES: WRITING THE BODY IN SPACE

Djebar’s Cycles

The figure of the circle is used massively as a means by which Djebar and Cixous respectively address and reconceive spatiality. In Djebar’s writings the figure of the circle is fundamental; it shapes her texts as well as it structures forms of sociability. In the first instance, her works are often declared to be cyclical or circular: the last section of Nulle part dans la maison de mon père starts, for instance, with the remark that “the circle that this text unfolds is the first step of the undertaking.”⁸ Socially, “the circle of women” implies, first, the hospitality of visits paid and of conversational exchanges between relatives and friends.⁹ This circle is associated with the inside or “domestic interiors” (21). Secondly, the forms taken by sociability familiarize the body with a given spatiality. The circle of women gathered inside teaches the young girl in its midst, or, perhaps more accurately, at its margin, to think of space as circular. Inside is yet another circle, “the circle that whispering elders traced around me and within me”; the question then may become how to “blow the space within me to pieces” (4). Djebar often reflects on dislocation and its effects on the body and the understanding of one’s inscription within a place. But her writings demonstrate that sidestepping the circle is only a partial break or liberation from circular spatiality. Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade examines that predicament through the destination of written words. On the one hand, the beginning of Fantasia, which displays several sorts of epistolary exchanges, official or private, sent out at different periods of Algerian history, reflects on the gesture and on the varying success of sending a letter out (44), of construing words as mobile and detachable, traveling (3) in defiance of circularity. On the other hand, circularity is not only deemed to be the devalued automaticity of cyclical repetition; when words come back to haunt or shed light on the sender, the familiar/familial circle takes up the letter and appraises it so as to criticize it, but also be touched, transformed, or altered by it as a result. This is true of the colonizer’s archive that Djebar has contributed to “rewrite” by extracting from and reacting to it, or by returning it to the site of its inscription and responding in French to French words that were not intended to be read by an Algerian. It is even true of the father’s tender postcard to the mother commented upon by the astonished circle of women because it was addressed directly to her in contradiction to custom (37–38). In such instances the return of the “mobile” words to the circle is not a return to the same.¹⁰ Djebar often makes the point that projecting one’s body or one’s words out can be figured by circularity as well as linearity, since one does not merely go around in circles with circular spatiality. The Algerian novelist and playwright Kateb Yacine explained in that respect why the circle was fundamental in his view: it figures “man’s freedom always in motion, his freedom in space and time.”¹¹ Instead of unfolding the events in his works chronologically, Kateb proposed to read them as “a rotation in time which makes them ceaselessly return to the origins and go on carrying new forces along each time” (41). His fascination with the circle was, in short, a way of delineating “my condition as a man situated on an earth in perpetual rotation. He who places himself on a single straight line never goes very far” (42).

Cixous’s Circles

Cixous, for whom “the encirclement, the Circle, the siege, are primitive figures of my Algerian scene,” also shares with Kateb and with Djebar the notion that “the time of an oeuvre is not linear, but circular or spherical.”¹² Her early fiction Inside formalizes the structure of encirclement, in which inside is both a refuge and a prison: “MY HOUSE IS SURROUNDED. IT IS ENCIRCLED BY THE IRON GRATING. INSIDE, we live. Outside, they are fifty thousand, they surround us. Inside, all the same, I’m home.”¹³ At the same time, the outsiders’ hostility is predicated on the fragility of the tie that insiders are perceived to hold to the interiority of and familiarity with the land that they tread: “the entire land outside was the temple of the others…. We would have had to have wings to be at home outside.”¹⁴ This realization gives rise to several questions as to the motives and the legitimacy of spatial division (32–34), since the narrator acknowledges a persecution conducted by the very persecuted, an encirclement by those already imprisoned within their own land. Cixous’s first book, Le Prénom de Dieu, also reconfigures topography by emphasizing the relentless separation between inside and outside (its first sentence also records that “I am inside”), while investigating its motives and the effects of the boundary on the I.¹⁵ The narrator derives encirclement from hostility, but its premises are ascribed to a “fault” that precedes and encompasses the I:

Never, as a child, did I go out of the protected garden without immediately being harassed by a gang of spectral children…. We all waited to be grown so that bread and spitting would be replaced by life and death and for war to begin at last. Then they would kill me and eat me, at last I would taste the peace of the victim, everything would be just, I would be rewarded, I would not have any more to open the gate of the garden every day on my fault of being in the garden while they were outside.

(195–96)

Inside and Le Prénom de Dieu do not directly name Algeria, but both install paradigmatic scenes of encirclement that are more explicitly linked with Algeria in later fictions, such as Reveries of the Wild Woman. One far-reaching interrogation consists in putting into question the actual location and the efficiency of the limit separating inside from outside: “Who neglected to tell me that there’s an outside and an inside?”¹⁶ Thus the figure of encirclement expands and prevents the stable location of an inside opposed to outside. Moreover, the father’s death, which is the main motif in Inside taken up in many writings of Cixous’s, induces a receptivity to the porosity of the borders between life and death—“the passage from life to death was not a door that opened and shut” (8)—which triggers in turn a radical interrogation of limits, including that between humanity and animality, which often redoubles that between being and nothingness: “I began by dismissing God, whose uselessness was only too apparent, and replaced him with my father. Then I abolished the distinction between man and woman, which seemed to me to be an excuse for every kind of sloth. Finally I pushed aside the limit of life on both sides of the present” (11–12). In another recurrent formulation of the figure of encirclement, Cixous writes about the situation of Jews in Algeria, asking for admission in a circle that apparently granted it while perpetuating several forms of exclusion: “The circles intersected. To be inside was also to be outside.”¹⁷ Encirclement proliferates, pushing out the boundaries that were supposed to hold insiders enclosed and clearly demarcated from outsiders. The marginalization that is depicted in the last instance is insidious, since it does not correspond to a peripheral expulsion, but rejects as it claims to incorporate. This assessment of the circle leads both Cixous and Djebar to reflect on the modes of inhabitation afforded by such spatiality.

I will examine their response to this inquiry throughout this book, but will start addressing it here by focusing on a similar sequence in Djebar’s Nulle part and Cixous’s Reveries of the Wild Woman, which narrates a young girl’s first attempt to ride a bicycle.¹⁸ In both cases, Djebar and Cixous start from the premise that riding a bicycle would be tantamount to conquering space autonomously (Djebar), or to “knowing Algeria” (Cixous).¹⁹ In that view, the exploration out and forward that the bicycle indicates—in spite of its rotating circular wheels—could be an invitation to break away from the cycle of circularity or encirclement. In both texts, though for different reasons, bicycling abruptly stops short and the disruption inaugurates another thinking of the link between body and space as well as of the relation of inside to outside. My point is not merely to address thematic convergences between the two writers by referring to a paradigmatic scene of apprenticeship that several authors besides Djebar and Cixous have also written about. Instead, I argue that both draw ethical/ political consequences from this existential scene, which is the convergence I aim to bring to the fore.

Disarticulation in Djebar

The metaphor of lameness or limping is frequent in Djebar’s work when bringing up the risk of disorientation, and even paralysis. In an interview with Marguerite Le Clézio, Djebar explains thus her complex relationship to French as well as to Arabic: “my bilingualism limped with both legs.”²⁰ In the foreword to one of her early fictions, Les Alouettes naïves, lameness stands for the process of decolonization: “because we are co...