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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 WRITING THE DECOLONIZED SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE FROM THE MAGHREB DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Patricia Geesey, B.A. M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1991 Dissertation Committee: Richard Bjornson Eugene Holland Danielle Marx-Scouras Department of French & Italian Copyright by Patricia Geesey 1991 To My Parents, Paul and Eileen Geesey ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Professor Richard Bjornson for his guidance and insight throughout the research and writing of this dissertation. I also extend my thanks to Professors Danielle Marx-Scouras and Eugene Holland for their helpful comments and suggestions. I wish to acknowledge the support of the Graduate School at the Ohio State University. I was able to interview Abdelkebir Khatibi and complete my research in Morocco due to a Graduate Student Alumni Research Award from The Ohio State University. iii VITA March 15, 1961................... Born— Buffalo, New York 1983...............................B.A., Daemen College, Buffalo, New York 1985...............................M.A. The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: French and Italian Studies in: French-language literature from the Maghreb, Twentieth-century French literature, and Sub-Saharan African literature of French expression. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION..................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................... iii VITA............................................iv INTRODUCTION .................................. 1 CHAPTER I. L'Amour. la fantasia; Autobiography/Auto-Autopsy ............. 25 II. Women's Writing and Women's Language.....................94 III. Collective Autobiography: Algerian Women and History.............. 138 IV. Abdelkebir Khatibi: Decolonizing Maghrebian Autobiography...193 V. "L'Autre est inscrit en moi:" Identity and Difference in La Memoire tatouee....................... 265 CONCLUSION...................................... 325 APPENDIX ........................................ 334 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................... 3 59 V INTRODUCTION Maghrebian literature of French expression exists as a direct result of the French colonization of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. The emergence of this literature during the early 1950s can be attributed to several factors, the most significant of which was the assimilationist policy that was posited on the assumption that a small number of indigenous inhabitants could be transformed into model French citizens. A select minority of Maghrebian children was chosen to attend French-language schools in the urban areas of French colonies in North Africa. The assimilationist policies that governed the instruction in these schools helped create a class of "elite" indigenous inhabitants who were trained to become active, contributing members of society in their colonized homelands. However, the colonizer's initial assumption was that this class of educated, colonized individuals would help to maintain the status cruo of foreign control. 1 These indigenous inhabitants were given jobs in the administration in the hope that they would act as mediators between the colonizers and the general, native population. The education of indigenous inhabitants eventually began to weaken the colonizers' position. The colonizers failed to reach their objectives in many cases because they refused to grant equal rights to the "dvoluds." After becoming familiar with the idealistic principles upon which French society supposedly rests (i.e., "libertd, fraternite, 6galite"), Maghrebian students at French schools felt betrayed when they recognized that they would not be accorded the same treatment as French citizens. Rejecting their earlier admiration for the French cultural achievements that they had studied in the colonial schools, intellectuals of the late 1940s and early 1950s began to utilize the French language as a vehicle for political protest, for the condemnation of colonialism, and for the articulation of demands for national liberation. Many North African intellectuals in the 1950s turned to literature, particularly the novel, as a means to communicate nationalist aspirations. Writers such as Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, Driss Chraibi, and Albert Memmi, challenged perceptions of the colonialist status 3 quo both in the metropole and in the colony by portraying the devastating effects of colonialism on individuals and on the groups that were subjected to it. Their novels were unabashedly autobiographical, and they themselves believed that a universal message about alienation and about the guest for identity could be proclaimed even if one's point of departure was a profoundly individual, culturally specific perspective. Works such as Feraoun's Le_ Fils du Pauvre (1950), Memmi's La Statue de sel (1953), and Chraibi's Le Passe simple (1954) were certainly intended to be read as fiction, but as one proceeds through the constantly growing catalog of Maghrebian French-language literature, one cannot fail to notice a predominance of autobiographical works. Often, as in the case of the works cited above, these narratives were presented as if they were really novels, but, self- referential ity is clearly the main focus of many of them. The boundaries between autobiography and autobiographical fiction tend to be blurred and indefinite. In using the term "autobiographical narrative," I apply it to works that are based on events from the author's life, but are not "pure" autobiographies according to Philippe Lejeune's definition of the word. The texts in question do not always comply with what he calls "le pacte autobiographique" because their authors deliberately foster doubts in the minds of readers as to whether or not the extra-textual author, the narrator, and the protagonist are all one and the same individual. Thus, these Maghrebian novels fall into Lejeune's category of "roman autobiographique" (5). I refer to these texts as "narratives" because the two principle works discussed in this study are not actually novels; they are narratives that borrow elements from the novelistic genre while employing dramatic dialogues and the non-linear r£cit (Khatibi) or historical chronicles and transcribed oral narratives (Djebar). Until recently, autobiography in non-Western cultural contexts has received relatively little attention, although James Olney's 1973 Tell Me Africa; An Approach to African Literature did succeed in bringing African autobiographies to the attention of literary scholars. He maintains that autobiography can be read as "the story of a distinctive culture written in individual characters and from within" and that it "offers a privileged access to an experience [.. ] that no other variety of writing can offer" ("Cultural" 13). Olney's approach implies that a reader of non-Western autobiographies (even if they are written in "Western" languages) needs to develop appropriate "strategies" for understanding African and other non-Western autobiographies in relation to the contexts in which they were produced. In other words, a reader should not assume that the author's reasons for writing an autobiography are the same in non-Western cultures as they might be in Western cultures. While autobiographical discourse allows the reader access to non-Western cultural perspectives, Olney concludes, the reader should not necessarily expect to find the exact same concepts of the self and of individuality in autobiographies written by authors from non-Western societies. French-language autobiographical narrative from the Maghreb (during the colonial as well as the post-colonial era) can be best understood when considered in light of the socio-historical context with which