Polygraphies

Francophone Women Writing Algeria

Alison Rice

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813932934
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Algeria's independence, Polygraphies is significant and timely in its focus on autobiographical writings by seven of the most prominent francophone women writers from Algeria today, including Maïssa Bey, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, and Malika Mokeddem. These authors witnessed both the "before" and "after" of the colonial experience in their land, and their fictional and theoretical texts testify to the lasting impact of this history. From a variety of personal perspectives and backgrounds, each writer addresses linguistic, religious, and racial issues of crucial contemporary importance in Algeria. Alison Rice engages their work from a range of disciplines, striving both to heighten our sensitivity to the plurality inherent in their texts and to move beyond a true/false dichotomy to a wealth of possible truths, all communicated in writing.

PART I

The Autobiographical Springboard

CHAPTER 1 | Le moi à plusieurs reprises | From Confession to Testimony in the Autobiographical Writings of Hélène Cixous and Assia Djebar

There is autobiography circulating through all the transfers of meaning. The circulation of readability, of iterability, is the circulation of a deviation and of autobiography as always already the autobiography of the other. Or, in still other terms, one could say that there is autobiography of a “we” given by the division, the deviation, and the sharing of voices.—Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces

Hélène Cixous and Assia Djebar have composed prolific oeuvres that are quite different, but that have in common recurring autobiographical elements. Cixous, in works both theoretical and fictional, repeatedly comes back to personal topics, establishing a veritable “myth” surrounding her history and her family as they are presented from different angles in the written text. Djebar has also often returned to idiosyncratic themes, especially in the three volumes of the projected autobiographical quartet, as well as in her 2007 novel titled Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (Nowhere in my father’s house). These various autobiographical texts provide readers with multiple perspectives for examining how testimony works in contemporary works by women writers from Algeria, and this first chapter will engage in an exploration of the ways in which bearing witness to events experienced in their homeland takes place again and again in the literary text.

Both Cixous and Djebar have addressed questions of the autobiographical in their writing and made provocative statements that challenge our conceptions of the term. In Rencontre terrestre (Terrestrial meeting), Cixous claims that she avoids the word altogether, asserting that all literature begins with personal experience: “‘Autobiographical’ is a word I avoid. I have always been it, not more or less than Montaigne and every littérateur” (31). Cixous’s resistance to employing the term is partly due to her belief that the self is always in relation to the other, particularly when it comes to the “translation” of the literary text: “‘The self’ [‘L’auto-’] is always already other, translation has always already begun” (31). She goes on to argue that while some texts are more or less autobiographical than others, the three grammatical persons always come back to the first person pronoun “I”:

All begins with the experience of the subject, a fact Montaigne firmly established in French literature. Just like Scève, Louise Labbé, François Villon, Viau, Proust, and Stendhal. I don’t see how anyone could write differently. Novels that don’t begin with personal experience are fakes [sont du toc]. The distance between the source and the text is larger or smaller, and the period of writing changes, like in painting, that’s all. But I is always all three persons, first, second, third, it is the second who is the first and the third who comes back to begin. (31)

It is interesting that Cixous neglects to name Jean-Jacques Rousseau among the great writers mentioned in this passage, especially since he has had such a strong influence on her work. She often cites him outright, though she occasionally makes more subtle intertextual references to his writing. It might be that she wants to avoid in this instance an immediate association between her writing and the Confessions, since she is arguing precisely against a strictly, canonically autobiographical understanding of her work. But it would be hard not to appreciate the blatantly autobiographical aspects of Cixous’s many publications, especially when one text seems to respond to and build on an earlier text in an ongoing search for adequate written representations of the intimate.

When Assia Djebar turns to the “violence of autobiography” in an essay of that title published in Ces voix qui m’assiègent (These voices that besiege me), she cannot avoid the confessional model: “In sum, the ‘I haven’t told you everything,’ a little like in the visiting room of the Catholic confession. I have never found myself in a confessional, but there is of course something of the confession of the penitent in the autobiographical text. In this place, in this situation, once you have avowed a fact, a detail, nothing can be taken back: it’s too late! Your word, your text, are uneffaceable” (110–11). Even as she addresses the indelible nature of the printed word, she admits that the opportunity to continue writing, and to publish again, always adding to the previous volume and complicating it, providing nuance and admitting change, seems to repeal in some ways what Djebar calls “the irreversibility of the autobiographical act” (110). This is how she explains it: “On the contrary, doubtless thanks to this encounter, autobiography offers a continuous unfolding. It can continue uninterrupted in the form of a journal until the last day; until the last word, as long as it remains lucid, and even beyond, the writer could, sometimes, behave like a sovereign” (111). The emphasis Djebar places here on the possibility of unending autobiographical writing offers an alternative to the singular, alldefining “autobiography” by hinting that the author of numerous written works is engaged in a continual search for textual truths that may change from one year to the next, from one publication to another.

If Cixous shies away from the use of the word autobiographical to describe her writing, it may be because of the word’s close association with confession and the muddy definitions and outcomes for this loaded term. In Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, the critic Peter Brooks articulates this lack of clarity: “The fact remains that our sense of what confession is and does hovers in a zone of uncertainty that has much to do with the multiform nature of confession and its uses for cleansing, amelioration, conversion, counseling, as well as conviction” (87). While it is unlikely that she would object to its “multiform nature,” Cixous would be reluctant to embrace all of the outcomes in this list. Brooks hones in on what he calls the “notion of transparency” in Rousseau’s Confessions, identifying the “desire to abolish all veils between” the writer and his readers as “a repeated motif” in his seminal eighteenth-century tome (161). Brooks points out that a concern with total openness can easily lead to what he calls the “tyranny of transparency,” created by “an imperative to confess” that leads to “the abolition of all zones of privacy around the individual” (163).

In her deeply personal work of fiction Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (Reveries of the Wild Woman), Cixous presents the reader with a powerful “primal scene,” in accordance with the book’s subtitle, that reveals the pain of forced confession. When a friend’s mother forbids her to attend a planned outing, it is the first-person narrator who claims responsibility for the misdeed: “Grant me one day with my fiancée I admit my crimes I’ll admit whatever you like, the pen I know it, I lost it myself, don’t punish me tomorrow” (74). Cixous makes it evident that she who confesses her crimes in this passage is not guilty, that she admits to losing a pen herself in order to absolve her friend of this wrongdoing, in the hope of regaining her company at the next day’s event. This scene illustrates very effectively two problematic ideas that are bound up with the idea of confession in the autobiographical text. The first is in the person of the confessor to whom one admits wrongdoing. In the hierarchical confessional scene, the confessor is the one with the power. This binary relation places the confessor in the superior position, able to judge the guilt of the confessant. The second troublesome concept in the term confession is that of implied guilt. It is assumed that one is confessing one’s sins, and that one has been naughty and must be punished before one is exonerated.

It is my conviction that to address the autobiographical writings of contemporary writers like Hélène Cixous and Assia Djebar we must make a shift in terminology, moving away from the idea of confession toward an understanding of testimony as it operates in their work. I am certainly not arguing for eliminating confession from our vocabulary, because it is a crucial and unavoidable concept for this autobiographical writing. But I ascertain that an oscillation characterizes the movement of these texts between confession and testimony as two different models for writing the self in contemporary autobiographical fiction. While confession is an inevitable point of reference for reflections like those by Djebar cited above, testimony presents a pertinent counterpoint for readings of this innovative writing that does not hold to static concepts of truth, sincerity, and authenticity. As Leigh Gilmore contends in The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, contemporary works demonstrate that a “culture of confession” and a “culture of testimony” can “coexist,” albeit “with a certain tension” (2). When I argue that women’s autobiographical writings in French are moving toward testimony, this understanding does not therefore preclude confession but seeks instead to explore the tension between these terms, the tension inherent to current autobiographical writing in French, at once in line with a tradition of “autobiographical” texts from Montaigne to Rousseau and in harmony with postcolonial women’s writing.

In their autobiographical writings, Cixous and Djebar do not seek forgiveness. In fact, they seldom admit to any crime. One notable exception is found in the occasional shocking avowals of Cixous, but even in these textual moments, she proudly claims her act and even defends it; she does not want to be absolved, asserting that great literature results from such transgressions. In a number of texts, notably Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Cixous indicates that expiation is not the goal of her writing project, and warns that atonement is something to be avoided, not sought: “The moment we avow we fall into the snare of atonement: confession—and forgetfulness. Confession is the worst thing: it disavows what it avows” (45).

When Derrida asks if there has ever been an autobiography unmarked by confession, he just may be pointing to this “crossing of borders” toward a new term, testimony, that occupies much of his work on the law, on hospitality, and on the law(s) of hospitality. Derrida locates confession geographically and chronologically, indicating its emergence—and persistence—as a distinctively Christian phenomenon: “Is there … an ancient form of autobiography immune to confession, an account of the self free from any sense of confession? … Autobiography and memoir before Christianity, especially before the Christian institutions of confession?” (“L’animal que donc je suis” 21). While he seems to be searching here for a confessional form situated outside the confines of religion and its history, Derrida does not seem to be pushing for a simple “secularization” of confession.¹ Rather, he is gesturing toward a horizon with different premises, distanced from “our culture of subjectivity” (“L’animal que donc je suis” 271),² on the other side of the “border” between self and other, in line with this movement described in “Sauf le nom”: “For Augustine does not respond only to the question: Why do I confess to you, God, who know all in advance? Augustine speaks of ‘doing the truth’ (veritatem facere), which does not come down to revealing, unveiling, nor to informing in the order of cognitive reason. Perhaps it comes down to testifying” (39). If testifying is defined here as contributing to the communication of truth apart from the revealing of information appealing to cognitive reason, then Derrida is effectively describing the works of such writers as Cixous and Djebar. But his analysis reveals that this understanding of how testimony works in the written text is not new. In fact, the transition from confession to testimony is present in the very Confessions of Saint Augustine: “He responds to the question of public, that is to say, written testimony. A written testimony seems more public and thus, as some would be tempted to think, more in conformity with the essence of testimony, that is also to say, of its survival through the test of testamentary attestation” (“Sauf le nom” 39).

TESTING TESTIMONY: STANDING UP TO THE SYRINGE

The words témoignage and témoin appear with remarkable frequency in both Cixous’s and Djebar’s texts. In Djebar’s collection of short stories titled Oran, langue morte (The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry), we find narrative voices expressing their status as witness, affirmations that are curiously rendered as bystander in the English translation: “I believe that I am an invisible bystander, omnipresent” (28; je me crois témoin invisible, omniprésente [42]); “I felt myself turning into a pure bystander” (74; Je me sentais me muer en pur témoin [125]). In L’amour, la fantasia (Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade), an evocative passage on mothers and daughters in Algeria introduces the crucial idea that one can witness one’s own life, in a sense, and in this case the English translation is slightly more faithful to the original: “Ainsi se déroule le théâtre des citadines assises qui se font témoins, tant bien que mal, de leur propre vie” (175) (So these city ladies sit there and bear witness, as best they can, to the unfolding drama of their own lives [154]). While a witness may be a bystander, in many cases she is much more, precisely because of her capacity to speak, and to therefore turn a passive visual act into an active verbal one. In this text, as in others by Djebar, the author is in essence taking down the testimony of other women, noting in literary form the stories that her Algerian country-women have told her in their native Berber tongue and that she has rendered in French in the text. In a somewhat similar manner, Cixous has often listened to the narratives of others and turned them into literary works, whether in plays, essays, or in what she calls “fictions.” Perhaps the greatest inspiration to her comes from her inimitable mother, the German Jew who worked for years as a midwife in Algeria and whose unfailing energy comes through in the autobiographical text. Cixous indicates in Benjamin à Montaigne: Il ne faut pas le dire (From Benjamin to Montaigne: It shouldn’t be said) that the maternal muse works in a particular way: “Now, I noted, I have stopped wanting to collect her memory. It is time that I judge my mother’s testimonies and trophies more for what they summarize than for their panoramic art of the extravagance of their opinions” (207). While the use of the concept of testimony comes through in many passages in these writers’ work, perhaps the strongest example can be found in a similar episode that occurs in two different autobiographical texts.

In L’amour, la fantasia, Djebar depicts the scene of an attempted suicide. The narrative voice recounts in the first person this eventful day in detail, which I am abbreviating here: “I am seventeen. … We have had a trivial lovers’ tiff, which I make into an issue; I hurl a defiant ultimatum at him; an invisible breach occurs and spreads … Frenzy, impetuosity, exhilaration of the all-or-nothing; I rush headlong down the street. Even though I have put nothing into words, probably planned nothing, except to let myself be borne along by this pure spontaneous impulse, my body hurls itself under a tram as it turns a sharp corner of the avenue” (113). Fortunately, the tramway driver was able to stop the vehicle in time, and the narrative voice speculates about a gesture the driver must have made toward those who had seen the traumatic event: “He must have held up his hand to show the crowd of witnesses what had saved me by controlling the speed of the tram” (114). Djebar goes on in this chapter to address another incident in which a stranger plays a significant role: the first-person narrator describes herself as an older individual walking along a Parisian street at the end of a fifteen-year love relationship and screaming without realizing it, until a stranger draws her attention to the piercing cry she is letting out and gently begs her to stop. These crucial incidents in her personal itinerary are introduced with the following two sentences at the outset of the chapter: “Two men, two strangers intruded so intimately into my life as to seem for a few brief moments to be of my own flesh and blood: we engaged in neither philosophical discourse nor in polite or friendly conversation. Two complete strangers crossed my path, each close encounter accompanied by a cry, a scream—it is of little significance from whom it came, from one or other of those strangers or indeed from myself” (113).

This portrayal of the other as témoin, as a witness even closer to her than she is to herself, is a striking element in Djebar’s autobiographical text. While she observes herself from the standpoint of the outsider (“I perceive this nauseating sling of sounds as a nearly indifferent witness” [131]), those who see her distress in these moments seem to feel as intensely as if the pain were their own.³ Djebar says that she responded to the man on the Parisian street with a soft tone, so surprised was she by “the emotion shown by the stranger” (132). In her own textual testimony, she is bearing witness to the witness of the other, in a circle of witnessing that itself bears witness to how even anonymous observation is not “innocent” but filled with meaning for all those involved. When it comes to the possibility of witnessing, spectators are never disengaged from the action they observe but instead are inevitably concerned, caught up in the scene simply because of their presence. This is what Cixous’s testimony reveals, but before we turn to her memorable experience with a tramway, I would like to examine the suicide attempt depicted by Djebar in greater detail.

It is significant that the identity of the man who saved the seventeen-year-old girl’s life is revealed through his voice: “I was struck by one detail which assumed a curious importance: the ‘Poor White’ accent of the man who was so upset that he cried over and over again, ‘My hand’s still trembling. Look!’” (L’amour 114). The narrator reveals that this resonant voice inspired her to open her eyes and contemplate this being who had made such a decisive movement in her life, and maintains that she has since forgotten everything about him, except this voice that still echoes within her: “the timbre of his voice, in the midst of that crowd, still resonates within me” (L’amour 130).⁴ In her 2007 novel Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, Djebar returns to her impetuous plunge before the moving tram, a near-fatal movement that she qualifies in this text as a “self-murdering gesture” (379; geste auto-meurtrier). When Djebar revisits this pivotal, defining moment from her past in this later work, she provides a great deal of background information, retracing her thoughts and steps leading up to the acte, turning around it, repeating it in textual terms, and then reflecting on it. Instead of devoting less than two pages to the event, as she did in L’amour, la fantasia, she has dedicated to it the entire third part of the latter novel, as well as the epilogues, approximately 150 pages of a 400-page text. Rather than serving as an anecdote, a word Djebar herself employs to hint at the role it might be considered to play in L’amour, la fantasia (130), t...