Homemaking, Making Home, and Femininity in Contemporary Women’S Filmmaking and Literature of the Métropol and the Maghreb

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME: HOMEMAKING, MAKING HOME, AND FEMININITY IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FILMMAKING AND LITERATURE OF THE MÉTROPOL AND 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

Stacey Weber-Fève, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2006

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Judith Mayne, Advisor

Professor Danielle Marx-Scouras ______Advisor Professor Jennifer Willging Graduate Program in French and Italian

Stacey Weber-Fève

2006

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the problematic location of home, the traditional female activity of homemaking, and the representation of female subjectivity in contemporary cinematic, (auto)biographical, and fictional texts by several contemporary

French and Francophone women artists. These writers and filmmakers question the home as a female interior space in which female protagonists traditionally become objects or accessories. They also bring to the fore multiple representations of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian femininity. In these texts, the artists embrace and 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 subversively as a space of socio-political-historical contention.

Using Assia Djebar’s work as a source of theoretical departure, this study illustrates the representation of women in body, by voice, and through the gaze in a collection of narratives created by French-speaking women artists from the Métropol and the Maghreb. Using feminist film theoretical and lifewriting critical perspectives, I examine the functions of the gaze and the effects of voicing the personal for women of

France and North Africa. I also introduce theories of domesticity when considering the

role and position of the home in the processes of personal identity formation and social gender construction.

This dissertation considers 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. Through a postcolonial lens of destabilization and the celebration of the in-between, hybrid spaces of first-person feminine expression and representation, I show how the relationship between “center” and “margin” becomes problematized and overturned in the work of Assia Djebar, Annie Ernaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Raja Amari,

Coline Serreau, Leïla Sebbar, and Yamina Benguigui.

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For my mother, 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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my advisor, Professor Judith Mayne, for her relentless support, direction, and encouragement. Her wisdom, insight, patience, and generosity constitute a model to us all that I will strive to follow throughout my teaching and research. I am truly indebted to her and to my other committee members, Professor Danielle Marx-

Scouras and Professor Jennifer Willging, for their guidance and advice. I am equally indebted to Professor Julia Watson and Professor Karlis Racevskis for their early vision in this project’s conception and prospectus stages.

I wish to thank Professor Wynne Wong for her unwavering support and belief in me, Rebecca Bias for her inspiration and words of encouragement, and Amanda Nelson,

Kelly Campbell, and Elizabeth Bostrom for their support and friendship.

I am grateful to my family – especially my mother and father in-law, Jean-René and Eliane Fève, my sister, Laura Weber, and my parents, John and Mary Ann Weber – for their constant love, support, and faith in me. And finally, I am especially grateful to my husband, Sébastien Fève, who spent countless evenings and weekends on his own while I worked, never complaining, objecting, or questioning. I could never have succeeded without his tireless support, endless patience, and unconditional love. To him,

I also dedicate this work.

VITA

1999………………………………………………………...B.A. Westminster College

2001…………………………………………………..M.A. The Ohio State University

1999-present….……………Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

Weber-Fève, Stacey A. “Assia Djebar as Film Theorist,” December 2005.

French Review (February 2008).

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: French and Italian

Studies in:

French Cinema/ Women’s Studies..……………………………………...Judith Mayne

Twentieth/Twenty-first Century Literature in French…………Danielle Marx-Scouras

Second Language Acquisition…………………………………………...Wynne Wong

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………..……...... ii

Dedication………………………………………………………………………..……….iv

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………..……………..v

Vita………………………………………………………………………...... ……………vi

Chapters:

1. Introduction...... 1

2. Destablizing the Center(s): Making Home with Assia Djebar……………..……22

3. Dis/appointing Gender Roles: (Re)Displaying Femininity Through the Home with Annie Ernaux and Simone de Beauvoir...... 75

4. Shifting Lines of Gender Demarcation: Creating Domestic Landscapes and Soundscapes with Raja Amari and Coline Serreau…………………..….…137

5. Breaking From Tradition: (Re)Presenting Female Iconography at Home with Leïla Sebbar and Yamina Benguigui………………………………..…….193

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..……….258

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………..………..266

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INTRODUCTION

This dissertation 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 contemporary

French and Francophone women artists. The women artists considered in this dissertation question the home as a female interior space in which protagonists traditionally become objects or accessories. They also bring to the fore multiple representations of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian femininity. In these texts, the artists embrace and 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 subversively as a space of socio-political-historical contention.

I take as my point of departure two of Assia Djebar’s texts, “Regard interdit, son coupé” (1980) and Ces voix qui m’assiègent (1999), which investigate the signification, potential, and location of home within traditional Algerian and post/colonial Franco-

Algerian contexts. In using these essays as a theoretical point of departure, this study illustrates the representation of women in body, by voice, and through the gaze in a collection of narratives created by French-speaking women artists from the Métropol and

the Maghreb. In addition to this Djebarian optic, I will also engage with feminist film theoretical and autobiographical/ autoethnographical perspectives when drawing on the functions of the gaze and the problems of voicing the personal. In addition, I will introduce theories of domesticity when considering the role(s) and position(s) of the home in processes of personal identity formation and social gender construction.

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 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 as well as in the Métropol – 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, Messouda, 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. This dissertation will focus on 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 coupe” 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 dissertation 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 first-person expression in which to rewrite this past in an effort to reconceive the present and lay claim to the future.

Many 1970s feminist and psychoanalytic theorists suggested both severing the link between mothers and daughters as well as conversely returning to (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 quest 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. 1 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 (to rewrite it

if one will) and to (re)construct memory, whether an individual’s, a community’s, a

people’s, or a nation’s.

Both identity and memory are effected and affected by language, a critical issue

that feminist theorists and psychoanalysts have raised in their theorizations. Djebar’s

postcolonial and diasporan 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 theory, but certainly true in Djebar’s writings, the mother has also come to symbolize a land, a nation, a community, a génitrice . Yet in today’s examinations of

globalized, multilingual, and multicultural transnational and diasporan 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.

In this dissertation, I will specifically address the tropes of: making home in Assia

Djebar’s film “Touchia: Ouverture” from La nouba du Mont Chenoua , and her essay

“Regard interdit, son coupé” from her collection of short-stories entitled Femmes d’Alger

dans leur appartement ; displaying femininity through the home in Annie Ernaux’s novel

La femme gelée and Simone de Beauvoir’s short-story La femme rompue ; creating

domestic landscapes and soundscapes in Raja Amari’s film Satin rouge and Coline

Serreau’s film Chaos ; and representing female iconography at home in Leïla Sebbar’s

travelogue Journal de mes Algéries en France and Yamina Benguigui’s film Inch’Allah

dimanche . I have selected these specific tropes because they bring to the surface

interesting contradictions and paradoxes specific to the various cultures, 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 space of expression that many contemporary women artists’ works (and even the

artists themselves) occupy. Yet, as the women artists considered in this dissertation

demonstrate in their texts, these various tropes of domesticity curiously manage to

transcend the Self-Other divide and celebrate the hybrid and collaborative space of expression created in this divide.

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. Voice 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 dissertation, 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 the home results in a state of “homelessness at home”

for the protagonists and their authors or directors.

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 terms

the inauthentic self-identity normatively conceived, understood, imposed upon, accepted,

and played out at home by the protagonists in these primary texts. At first glance in these

primary texts, 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 children, etc. Yet upon further analysis, one finds that the female protagonists, in engaging in these domestic activities, are actively redefining their daily existence, expression, and representation. They are reconstructing their homes as a means to de/reconstruct personal and socio-political-historical identities. For this dissertation’s 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). 2

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 within the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and sociology concerning 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, has provided many cross-cultural and transnational optics for examining gender construction 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 discourses. From architectural, psychological, geographical, anthropological, ethnographic, historical, or sociological perspectives, the home manifests a deeply personal and highly political symbol that often underlies diverse 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 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 literature and filmmaking, 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. 3 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 homogeneous—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. 4

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. 5 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 many scholars show in their critical work, 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 (Johnson, 2003:

15).

Some scholars link postcoloniality and feminism in their critical interrogations of

the home through critiquing nationalist discourses that refuse, deny, or overlook women

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. 6 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. 7 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 scholars agree that housework and forms of home creativity (a term which refers to home decoration or the creation of mood or atmosphere like controlling the lighting, burning candles, playing music, etc.) can be seen as subjective actions through which individuals engage with the sensory environments of their homes. In turn, these subjective actions may be read as gender constructing agents in both cultural and social practice. 8 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 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 dissertation, 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 life writing, the

cinematic and literary backdrops of the primary texts studied in this dissertation, the

home often figures as a site of personal, social, racial, ethnic, linguistic, political, sexual,

and historical struggles. The women artists examined in this dissertation all seem to

concur that one may no longer regard (if one were even ever able to) the home

unproblematically as a geographical location or source of identity, memory, and the

personal. This realization manifests an important point of departure in analyzing the

primary texts included in this dissertation. In addition, Djebar’s postcolonial and feminist

theories surrounding the notions of home, women’s representation, collaboration, and

first-person narrative theory (in relation to the cinema and literature) also provide essential lenses for analysis in each chapter.

For the purposes of this dissertation, the cinematic interrogation of the personal serves as the principal cinematic point of critical reference. The majority of contemporary French and Francophone women’s filmmaking seeks to interrogate the personal, a course of action which draws heavily on the trope of personal history. As influenced by Freud’s notions of identity formation, the personal cinematic narrative demonstrates how one conceptually forms and visually (mis)construes identity and memory. In other words, “…cinematic personal narratives may provide the spectator with identity images, yet they may also remind the spectator that identities are unstable; change through time, location and encounters; have many facets; and are inherently unknowable” (Wilson, 1999: 19). 9 This style of filmmaking seemingly engenders the artist’s 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.

There appear in the critical field of contemporary women’s French and

Francophone cinema two general and important frameworks. On one hand, some film scholars like Françoise Audé, Brigitte Rollet, and Carrie Tarr, among others, have engaged more often in a combination of biographical criticism and genre approach in their analyses. On the other hand, other film scholars like Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and

Judith Mayne, among others, have engaged more directly with feminist film theories in their analyses. For the purposes of this dissertation, I will draw from both critical frameworks. However, this dissertation will engage more directly with feminist film

theories by specifically focusing on the trope of desire, the function of the gaze, and the enunciative apparatus.

One primary line of critical inquiry in feminist film studies centers on the trope and language of desire. For many, women’s filmmaking is not simply a matter of

“learning to speak a new language, nor of deploying new cinematic strategies, but is a desiring process itself that emerges from a locus of difference” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996:

3). 10 In addition, these scholars have also 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). 11 For this dissertation, 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 and reconstructed by female desire.

Aided by psychoanalysis, a second line of critical inquiry developed 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: 4). 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. 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, and are ever-present in the modern-day contemporary women filmmakers addressed in this dissertation. Ultimately, psychoanalysis and desire are inextricably linked; but for this dissertation, psychoanalysis contributes immeasurably in understanding the effects of language and how it affects memory and identity formation as presented in the aforementioned primary works.

Closely connected to this second line of inquiry, enunciative apparatus theory opens a third (and the most pertinent to this dissertation) 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 film-viewing experience as well as on the notion of fantasy functioning “to activate a process of slippage between the unconscious 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 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. Therefore, as the subsequent chapters of this dissertation will reveal, the enunciative apparatus is key to approaching and understanding female cinematic authorship as displayed in contemporary women’s filmmaking of the Métropol and the

Maghreb. Additionally, the enunciative apparatus—in particular its role in realizing counter-texts—becomes key to approaching and understanding female literary authorship of the Métropol and the Maghreb as well.

For the purposes of this dissertation’s examination of both women’s French- language contemporary filmmaking and writing, the literary genre of women’s life narratives serves as the principal literary point of reference. As with the cinema, the

problematics of language and memory described earlier play a large role in critical

approaches to examining life writings. The act of writing a life recaptures and

recapitulates the effects of Lacan’s mirror stage in psychoanalytic terms—the “je”

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, the “je” expressed on paper speaks as a fictionalized character.

Consequently, the writing subject presumes to know 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 life writing 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 and Watson, 2001: 9-10). 12 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 a “self-consciousnesses and a need to sift through their lives for explanation and understanding” (Smith and Watson, 2001: 9).

Feminist scholars find that these narratives characteristically depict the everyday aspects of these women’s lives and embody and reflect the reality of difference and complexity as well as stress the centrality of gender to human life. Moreover for many feminist critics, women’s life writing 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. 13 Three important critical modalities in theories of life writing—performativity, positionality, and heteroglossic dialogism—provide critical optics in examining the women’s life writing texts included in this dissertation.

A performative view of life writing finds that these narratives manifest dynamic sites for the performance of identities constitutive of subjectivity. In other words, this view takes an identity not as fixed or essentialized attributes of an autobiographical subject but rather as produced and reiterated through cultural norms. 14 As specific to this

dissertation, a performative critical view contests the previously-assumed notion of

autobiography or life narrative as a 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 view and as already discussed in relation to women’s filmmaking, desire once again surfaces from a locus of difference in which women life writers 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. In both the cinematic and literary texts discussed in the following chapters, the home is represented as a domestic space that restricts and suppresses female desire. But, these chapters will show how the home becomes a space through which the female protagonist may (or may not) perform her desire for agency.

The concept of positionality also draws on the intersections of language, memory, society, history, and identity and 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 ethnos to which the subject is tied and by which the subject is constructed. 15 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. In other words, autoethnography constitutes

a “ métissage that braids together multiple, disparate discourses” (Watson, 2001: 83).

Thus, in this view of positionality, the traditional ontological (and male) “je” has been replaced by a pluralistic (and now feminine) subjectivity. Whether as a timeless chorus of female voices recounting oral histories or as a counter-discourse to women’s positioning as object of the male gaze in both film and literature (or even History), the primary texts examined in the following chapters position women’s subjectivity as multiple and hybrid. Yet these narratives also position their female protagonists inside a

“contact zone” of contradiction and paradox.

Finally, life writing 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. 16 This view emphasizes the role of language in positioning speakers and their discourses at an intersection of multiple social- 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 life writing 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).” 17 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. For all of the primary texts included in this dissertation, the

home and domestic acts provide important jumping off points from which subjectivity

slippage may occur.

Contemporary critical work on first-person cinematic and literary narratives seeks

to understand the constitutive processes of auto/biographical subjectivity and the

components of any particular auto/biographical act. In keeping with contemporary

scholarly criticism of first-person narration when analyzing the primary texts, this

dissertation takes into consideration the autobiographical I’s, the roles of Others, multiple

gender discourses, 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 acts complicate and enrich the way one understands the

stories one reads and the way one tells stories about oneself. 18 These life writing and feminist film theoretical perspectives, as well as Djebar’s theoretical contributions to postcolonial feminist theory, are essential to investigating the function of the look, the problem of the personal, and the dis/location of home in this dissertation’s analysis of homemaking, making home, and femininity as specific to the primary texts included.

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—such as 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. I will apply these

theories, among others, to the other primary texts treated throughout the subsequent

chapters.

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 quasi-archeologist 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 stirs

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 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 ) 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 counter-texts 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 dissertation 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 dissertation 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 dissertation 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.

1 Throughout this dissertation, Memory with a capital M denotes the memories (or the historical, social, political, etc. events) as officially inscribed into history. History with a capital H refers to the history officially recorded mainly by the men of the colonial ruling class and naturally from their perspective. History with a lower-case h refers to the unofficial or marginal stories shared orally mainly by the women of the subaltern classes, primarily amongst themselves. 2 See Thomas Foster, Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Womens’ Writing: Homelessness at home (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). 3 See Erica L. Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell-Oro . (London: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2003) 14. 4 See Inderpal Grewal, House and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel . (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996) 5 See Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocation and Twentieth Century Fiction . (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996) 6 See Johnson 19. 7 See Sarah Pink, Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects, and Everyday Life . (Oxford: Berg, 2004) 8 See Pink 10. 9 See Emma Wilson, French Cinema since 1950: Personal histories (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). 10 See Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French cinema (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996). 11 For further reading on this matter, see Joan Scott, “Experience,” (Eds) Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory . (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1998) 57-71. 12 See Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001). 13 For a more detailed discussion of these characteristics, see Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 9- 11. 14 See Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 145. 15 See Julia Watson’s entry on autoethnography in Margaretta Jolly (ed.), Encyclopedia of life writing : autobiographical and biographical forms . (London : Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001) 83. 16 See Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition (1989)” (Eds) Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory 343-351 and

Françoise Lionnet, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage (1989)” (Eds) Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory 325-336. 17 See Henderson 344. 18 See Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 165.

CHAPTER 1

DESTABLIZING THE CENTER(S): MAKING HOME WITH ASSIA DJEBAR

In order to situate Assia Djebar as a source for theoretical departure and connection between the women artists in this project, one must take into consideration her varied literary, poetic, dramatic, and cinematographic work. One 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, cinematic, and postcolonial theory. Principally speaking, we know Djebar as a novelist, translator, filmmaker, poet, essayist, and playwright.

Additionally, we increasingly consider Djebar a theorist.

Throughout her work, by engaging in a variety of political and social agendas,

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 consistently brings to light in her work numerous complex contradictions embedded in Algerian society that

“engender” Algerian women.

Djebar adopts a variety of themes and preoccupations in confronting these contradictions in all of her work. By interviewing Algerian women and recording their dialogues in her work, Djebar struggles against Algeria’s dominant, nationalist discourse that excludes women’s active contribution to modern Algerian society. 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 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

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 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 postcolonial) Algerian history- writing in her work. By (re)writing and (re)recording previously silenced female voices into Algerian history, Djebar mediates textual and cinematic spaces (in collaboration with her own views and speech) in which a hybrid 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 discourses (whether literary or cinematic), since “speaking for” reinstates colonizing cultural practices. Therefore in her texts, Djebar collaboratively appears alongside her seeing/ speaking female subjects.

This multiplicity of female Algerian gazing perspectives and voices challenge and overturn hegemonic Algerian discourses, which then create new 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 discourse.

I take as my point of departure in this chapter Djebar’s text, “Regard interdit, son

coupé”—the Post-Face to her 1979 collection of short stories, Femmes d’Alger dans leur

appartement . This chapter will examine numerous theoretical positions set forth in the

Post-Face. In this text, Djebar problematizes spectatorship 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 unveiling/ writing as a veil; e.g., the anxiety

inherent in divulging personal narratives in Arab societies, which she succeeds in

mitigating by finding a collectivity of Algerian women’s voices in her work. She fleshes

out women’s duality in body and voice, which draws out a division of Algerian women’s

bodies from voices as two (in)congruent agents of narrative discourse. And she examines

women’s oral tradition or the stories, songs, histories, and legends Algerian women pass

along and instill in their children.

This chapter will additionally examine 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 will provide an analytical optic through which to examine and question 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).

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-year-old 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” Algiers. The Post-face, “Regard interdit, son coupe”, 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 . 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.

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 makes us still question ourselves (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 M. Poirel, chief engineer of the Port of Algiers and

amateur painter. Through Poirel, Delacroix made the acquaintance of a local “raïs,” who eventually allowed Delacroix to enter his home. Once inside the “raïs’” 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.

She 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 the raïs’ 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 (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

(241).

From Djebar’s point of view, Delacroix’s vision of the “raïs’” 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” (243); 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” (256). 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 gazer 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. 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.

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 or 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 coupe”, she finds that the only licit gaze in her society is Algerian and male. Djebar asserts that the eye that gazes in Algerian society maintains dominance over and always seeks out the eye of the dominated (245). Thus for

Djebar’s first conception of the gaze (like its first conception in early feminist film studies) assumes a male “bearer-of-the-look.” 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” becomes Algerian, male, and familial. This familial restructuring of the authorized spectator in her post/colonial context provides 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.

Further revisions recognized the limitations in this postulation of masculine/ feminine traditional positions of spectatorship and their implications. These 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 feminist cinema to construct within the film medium different visions and conditions of viewing for or representation of 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 of dominant cinema have sought technical and narrative ways of re-conceptualizing gender and gender roles.

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 aspects of dominant modes 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, this veil paradoxically creates a position 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 (245).

However, as Djebar continues, the female gaze is present in society, but this liberated eye, that could become a sign of a conquest towards the knowledge of others, outside a confinement, is perceived as a threat; and the vicious circle reforms (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, rendering 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).

In brief, the veil works on both ends of the spectrum and effectively challenges the binary oppositions and social contradictions facing all Algerian women. For Huughe, this 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 contradictions inherent in the Algerian woman…” (1996: 867).

Specifically concerning “Regard interdit, son coupé” and 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 theorizing.

By presenting the first spectators who are male (represented through the “raïs” 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” 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.

By presenting a series of spectators in “Regard interdit, son coupé”—male, female, masculine, feminine, authorized, unauthorized, Arab, 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. The camera in Djebar’s filmmaking

(like the critical distance taken in her writing) allows her to assume a multiplicitous perspective, which for this chapter speaks to her ability to assume different perspectives and avoid being gazed upon. In other words, the in-between or hybrid spectatorial space allows Djebar to bring to light (in print or in film) Algerian women’s perspectives and formerly marginal representations of Algerian femininity. In Djebar’s work, the position of the hybrid spectator is both textual (occupying a representative space in her writing and filmmaking that challenges Algerian nationalist discourses) as well as meta-textual

(implying a shared relationality) between the viewer or reader (the “real-world” spectator) and the text.

Trinh T. Minh-Ha has suggested that the spectator’s interaction (through the script and shots of the film) with the cinematic text enables the spectator to assemble his/ her

“own film.” 5 Although Djebar does not explicity 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 hybrid spectator in relation to

Djebar’s work as well. This (meta)textual position and Minh-Ha’s 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 work 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 more positive. For Minh-Ha, collaboration is akin to “speaking nearby.” In other words, collaboration (or the veiling of one’s voice, perspective, knowledge with other voices, perspectives, knowledge 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 most poignantly speaks to Djebar’s theorization of the hybrid 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, they are passed between the characters and the author and then to us.

This collaboration creates a position for a hybrid spectator in which s/he 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 from or in which to challenge traditional theorizations of the voice and gaze.

In Djebar’s post/colonial revisions of the gaze in 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 a male, Algerian gaze that generally represents

Algerian women as “limitée[s] certes au terroir, au village, au saint populaire local, quelquefois au ‘clan’” (257) 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 or 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 (Donadey,

885) and involvement. As Anne Donadey summarizes, “Both documentary and fiction,

La nouba follows the filmmaker’s ‘alter 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 may connect to La nouba du Mont Chenoua in seeing 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). Moreover, there is very little continuous dialogue in the film. The voices and vocalizations that one does hear in the film often 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.

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 a December night of 1976 in a country farmhouse—“une scène d’‘intérieur-nuit’ : image de fiction” (161)—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. She writes:

nous—regardons l’homme, l’Autre, regarder une femme algérienne allongée, endormie, telles les Vénus ou nonchalantes, ou absentes, ou reveuses de la peinture italienne de la Renaissance…Comme si tout commencement de l’art (le cinéma en pays arabe 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…(161)

In her essay, Djebar shares that she uses the 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. 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

(162), and she questions whether there would really be a cinema if there were not first, explicitly, a quest for desire (162). She explains, however, that this masculine gaze 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 (162). Interestingly, she asserts that this masculine gaze is not voyeuristic.

For Djebar, this masculine gaze “d’avant le désert” draws out his powerlessness and his suffering from separation (162). In Djebar’s postcolonial or hybrid theorization of spectatorship the masculine (Algerian, male, familial) gaze—when he is not the

“maître du sérail”—manifests a lack of power (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 voyeuristic “regard dominant” of the colonizer (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

off-screen 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” (my emphasis, 217) and 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. In other words, 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 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.

This 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:

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. (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 medias?) 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” (57). Therefore, through the act of

Lila’s (the French-educated daughter of the tribe) listening to the voices of the women of

Chenoua, Djebar effects a 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 not ever 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 “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 throughout all of La nouba du Mont

Chenoua .

Djebar takes up this challenge 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; peut-être, 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-t- elle. 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 !’ (165-66).

Djebar shares that, in her view, cinema made by women (and possibly all postcolonial cinema in her reasoning) always originates in a desire to speak (166). In other words, this woman’s unauthorized refusal to be gazed upon by the masculine gaze (as expressed in the voiceover) as well as by the camera gaze (as evidenced by her turning her back to the lens) suggests a privileging of speech over the gaze for postcolonial women (also heard in postcolonial filmmaker/ film theorist, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s, cinematographic work 7) and

answers how Djebar desires to present “those who gaze for the first time;” i.e., by a

voiced refusal to being 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 (Khannous, 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, her 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, ethnographic-like 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 in this essay Djebar’s textualization of the gaze as a

“phenomenological reduction” (Bensmaïa, 877), which for this essay suggests the outlawing of the “master’s” gaze and voice.

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 stares slightly off to the side. Djebar cuts back to Lila as she turns around towards 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 to interdict 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 screen-right and walks behind and then around him. She exits the frame screen-left, and then Djebar 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’ 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 cell-like 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 then quickly jump cuts to a medium one shot of Lila still framed in the window. Lila closes the window shutter blocking out the exterior light, walks towards 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 larger-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 inbetween 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 to be brought 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, this 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 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 and in her memories and to 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 coupe,” 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 documentary-like 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, (fe)male 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.

She 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 in/directly 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,

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 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 of female (on-screen as well as off-screen) spectatorship in postcolonial 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 (166), but

Djebar asserts that this desire for speech is borne only after she opens her eyes (166) and

specifically when she circulates “dans les paysages retrouvés” (166). 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 (166-67). Djebar finds that in their interweaving gazes, dialogue becomes baited on the present and on the past (167). For

Djebar, women’s gaze becomes a departure for speech (167) or in other words, an impetus for a feminine speech purporting to testify to women’s present/ past daily existence and memories of “un passé encore à vif” (167).

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 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 juxtapositionings impacting the spectator’s viewing experience is Djebar’s mise en scène in each of the images. Djebar masterfully fills each plane (foreground, middleground, and 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, Ali, occupying the middleground, sits in his wheelchair with his back quarter-turned towards 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 walks towards the room in which Ali is sitting and stops in the door frame (now occupying the middleground.) 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 middleground 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 recasted on the back wall and dramatically overshadows Ali. She enters the room from the foreground, moves to the middleground standing opposite of Ali, then moves to the background and closes the second window shutter, thus cutting off the young girl’s gaze.

The character positionings 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 (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 in 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 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” the Algerian women

multiplicitously represented in the figure of Lila.

In this instance, I wish to read Djebar more specifically in the young girl’s figure

than in Lila’s, largely because this anonymous prepubescent 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 spaces of female spectatorship and authorship through Lila’s gaze and speaking voice and her own voiceovers that meld with the gazes and voices of the countrywomen Lila interviews in various home settings.

In “Regard interdit, son coupe,” the home shelters a paradox. On the one hand, the home houses the “mystère feminin.” 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 quasi-prison. 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.

In some ways, since the cultural silencing of Algerian women is imposed by the patriarchs of Algerian society, Djebar’s literary strategy in veiling her voice reifies this silencing in so far as she denies her individual voice. Yet in more ways, Djebar’s literary strategy revises this cultural silence in so far as she is consciously “writing in order to affront and struggle against a double silence” (27). In “Etre une voix francophone,”

Djebar identifies this double silence firstly as a struggle against her own literary silence

(“autisme”) when faced with the unnamable violence in Algeria (27) and secondly as a struggle against her maternal genealogy (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.

Her 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. She 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. (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. 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 the would-be conquerors.

In this legend that Djebar recounts in her essay, while facing the advancing

Tedjini enemies, Messaouda cries out: “Où sont les hommes de ma tribu ? / Où sont mes frères ? / Où sont ceux qui chantaient pour moi des chants d’amour ?” (251). Upon hearing her cries, as legend has it, the men rushed to her aid crying out: “Sois heureuse, voici tes frères, voici tes amants !” (250). As a result, the men, “électrisés par l’appel de la jeune fille” (250), 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 “électrisés” (252) 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 always been determined by their bodies—their individual awakenings and actions, 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 especially 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 socio-political-economic status, feminists throughout the ages have examined 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 from 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 in her work but 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, 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 —that recuperates the lost voice of the archaic mother and creates a space 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 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 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 daughters) are shut-up inside the family—ce resserrement à l’intérieur des familles (256), 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 (256-57). 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 out, “Où sont mes frères?”)

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

(257). In “Regard interdit, son coupé,” the maternal also “engenders” the only official

female cultural identity, 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 (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 (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 (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. However, through the figure of the Sororal in this 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 through bringing the female body and voice in fusion to the task of discourse. 16

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 further the stakes for Maghrébine writers of first- person narratives. According to Gracki, these writers face consequences of this symbolic nudist exposure. 18 She explains:

[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)

Djebar echos Gracki’s assertions in her “Du français comme butin” from Ces voix qui m’assiègent .

“Du français comme butin” originally appeared as an article in La Quinzaine littéraire ’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 overheard) 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 this 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 (70). She asserts in this 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 (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 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 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 Maghrebian writers, the decision to divulge one’s own or a community’s 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 . 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 and contradictions inherent in Algerian women and their 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. 19 Huughe summarizes this point in her words:

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. (867)

On the 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 !” (97). From this opening statement, Djebar leads the reader through her revision in this essay of the veil and her writing as effective instruments in gazing and speaking in public and private spaces. In “De l’écriture comme voile,” Djebar undertakes the paradoxical nature of writing and publishing and compares it to the acts of veiling and unveiling in public and private spaces.

Djebar begins “De l’écriture comme voile” with a brief anecdote from her childhood of watching her mother unfold, put on, and secure her veil before stepping outdoors. She explains that every child, like her, thought that his/ her mother had the most noble and most elegant fashion of wearing this veil (98). Djebar explains 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 (98). She justifies this comparison by explaining that to write is to expose oneself, to parade oneself in others’ views, and that to veil herself in her writing was a natural mode (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 “Ecrire 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 University of Sherbroke

(Canada-Québec) in the 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 (43). 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 (98), but rather to venture outside while at the same time preserving oneself (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 speaking subject.

Djebar finds the speaking social mother in the marginal oral histories or stories of

Algerian women. By denying her individual subjectivity in her writing and by adopting a collective female voice, Djebar rehabilitates a female space of spectatorship and authorship 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 (in sometimes fictional, sometimes non- fictional modes of expression) of a community of Algerian women from a female point of view. 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 Djebar’s work echoes an important

revision in feminist theoretical discussions of the corporeal body in literature; i.e., 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; e.g. in which women may burden themselves with cosmetic and cosmetic procedures in 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 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 bodies 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 , oft times Djebar writes of the porteuses de bombes , 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 writes 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 in the “official” History of Algeria whether on the side

of the colonial French or postcolonial Algerians—as Dobi’s preceding citation

evidences—excluded Algerian women, both in body and in 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.

Djebar’s emphasis on female bodies and voices in written texts cannot fail to

bring to mind Cixous’ work on écriture féminine 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 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 (between the sexes.)

Through Djebar’s call to Algerian women to bring their bodies into the light, she

“challenges 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 precolonial 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 her work in the corporeal representation of Algerian women—particularly as evidence in the disfigured bodies of the former porteuses de bombes characters. In other words, Djebar envisions the future

of Algerian women’s writing (as she has demonstrated in her 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 site 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”—an important theoretical point of departure

in this project’s analyses of the included primary texts.

It seems as if for Djebar, the female body may effectively provide a potential

catalyst for her narration of her personal past, 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.

However, as Gafaiti views it, to this call Djebar responds again with a “double

transgression.” She asserts:

She 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. (814)

Again, Djebar principally challenges the dominant discourse of nationalism through the textualization in her work of (re)appropriated female bodies and 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 truth 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 challenging dominant discourses of nationalism in another way. She reveals this additional challenge in her analysis of Picasso’s Women of Algiers .

As Djebar explains 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, Dejbar writes that Piccaso 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 (259-260). Picasso’s work manifests a glorious liberation from confinement and awakens the bodies in dance, in its expenditure, and in free movement (260).

According to Dejbar, 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 morale 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 (260). In other words through this juxtaposition, Djebar suggests that for a future representation of Algerian women, one must find an “in-betweeness” between this particular representation of a frozen Algerian woman—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 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.

Djebar explains that two years following Picasso’s sojourn in Algiers, a line of

women bomb carriers, ‘à la bataille d’Alger,’ appeared (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 (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 (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

(261). She explains that some of these women warriors, once captured and imprisoned, found themselves “sexes électrocutés, écorchés par la torture” (261).

In effect, Djebar uses this image in the woman warrior-like 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 connection 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.

In other words, if in order to maintain traditional North African social practices

Algerian women’s bodies were to remain covered, it stands to reason that officials 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 the 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’ with its laws of invisibility and silence (262). In essence, barring the years during the Algerian war of Independence and in moments of spontaneous heroic acts of women warriors as represented in the Song of Messaouda, Algerian women’s situation has not changed. She writes 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. (263)

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 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 (or hybrid) 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 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 this chapter’s primary texts 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 space in which a hybrid gazing and speaking subject may create new, public spaces in which the next generation of hybrid gazing and speaking subjects may continue their oral tradition and collaborate on new discourses that combine their mothers’ and their own histories.

As we shall see in Chapter Two’s examination of Annie Ernaux’s La Femme gelée and Simone de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue , although normative discourses of

femininity and female representation may be grounded in the institutions of ruling-class

hegemony of any given society, Djebar’s inter-female-generational histories successfully

permeate (in varying degrees) time and class as well as ethnic and geographical boundaries.

1 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16. 6-18 (1975). 2 See Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun ,” Framework 6. 15-17 (1981). 3 See Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984). 4 See Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996) 9. 5 See Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy Chen, “Speaking Nearby,” Feminism and Film , ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). 6 See Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Third World Women’s Cinema: If the Subaltern speaks, will we listen?,” Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film , eds. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose (New York: Garland, 1997) 220-21. 7 See Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990) 212-216. 8 See Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press, 1993). 9 See the Introduction to (Eds) Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, Writing on the body (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 1997) 1. 10 See Conboy, Medina, & Stanbury 1. 11 See Conboy, Medina, & Stanbury 1. 12 See Conboy, Medina, & Stanbury 2. 13 See Conboy, Media, & Stanbury 3. 14 See Abigail Bray, Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004) 37. 15 See Bray 37. 16 See Bray 71. 17 See Jean Dejeux, Littérature maghrébine de langue française (Ottowa : Naeman, 1973). 18 See Katherine Gracki, “Writing Violence and the Violence of Writing in Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet,” World Literature Today 70 4. 835-43 (1996). 19 See Laurence Huughe, “’Ecrire comme un voile’: The Problematics of the Gaze in the Work of Assia Djebar,” World Literature Today 70 4. 867-76 (1996). 20 See Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Conboy, Medina, & Stanbury 401-18. 21 See Conboy, Medina, & Stanbury 7. 22 See Madeleine Dobie, “The Woman as Look and the Woman as Voice: Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar,” Constructions 9. 89-105 (1994).

CHAPTER 2

DIS/APPOINTING GENDER ROLES: (RE)DISPLAYING FEMININITY THROUGH THE HOME WITH ANNIE ERNAUX AND SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Annie Ernaux’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s objectives in their writing echo some of Assia Djebar’s primary 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. 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 realm 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-archeologists 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

Algeria and France.

Since many of Ernaux’s texts include much of her personal life and past, it only seems fitting in this chapter’s discussion and analysis of her third novel, La Femme gelée ,

to begin with her brief biography. Claire-Lise Tondeur provides a very useful summary. 1

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. (37)

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 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 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 contemporary (French) women (of the lower and middle social classes) in order to revise these mis/representations by revealing how they have been unilaterally constructed by the dominant social class in the interest of self-gain, but complicitly carried out by the dominated social classes. In doing so, Ernaux, like Djebar, succeeds in mediating a textual space in which a hybrid subject (or a protagonist caught in-between multiple social and gender discourses) may gaze and speak.

From a seemingly anthropological or sociological perspective, Ernaux thus underscores all of her texts with her examinations of the contemporary (and contradictory) social politics in France by questioning normative gender and class roles 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). 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 socio-culturel, 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) 2

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.

This framework of the personal “speaking nearby” the social convincingly blurs the conventional genre boundaries between fiction and autobiography. In turn, this framework permits Ernaux to revise normalizing processes of patriarchal socialization through her personal narratives and create a position for a hybrid seeing/ speaking subject. Additionally, Ernaux benefits from this framework in successfully reworking canonical forms of literature and conventional ways of writing via what scholars have called her “transpersonal I” or her “ je transpersonnel ,” which Ernaux defines 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. 3

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 life writing. 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. This assertion of a transcending subjectivity

in autobiographical writing remains central to studies of first person narrative theory.

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 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. 4 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 women 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 along side

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 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. 5 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 or rhythm 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 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. 6 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 notion of

“personhood” and a socio-cultural understanding of the narrator’s life during the times

about which the narrator is writing. In other words, 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 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 Is in first-person narratives. 7 They have found that the boundaries between any Is are often shifting and flexible. By drawing on psychoanalytic notions of the ideal or internal Other, they concur that no I may speak unless in relation to its 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. Thus, her texts create a space from which a hybrid biographical, historical, sociological, cultural, and literary subject speaks.

When asked to situate herself in relation to the genre of autobiography, Ernaux replies:

[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. (1998: 142) 8

Thus, in the first person narratives of Ernaux, Djebar, and the other women artists in this project, we see this relational form of self-narrating and self-discovery in their respective works. In addition to structuring these women’s work 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 hybrid 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 hybrid spaces and seeing and speaking subjects.

In support of her hybrid writing style, 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” (23). This phrase speaks to a search for writing techniques that free the author from codified forms and high culture rituals. 9 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’ethnologue de moi-même” (40). 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. 10 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 a

dutiful bourgeois wife, homemaker, and mother.

Ernaux 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…A 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. (68) 11

Lyn Thomas finds this novel to manifest a literary version of topics discussed among 1970s’ feminist consciousness-raising groups, in which Ernaux shares her thoughts on and experiences with personal problems stemming from traditional social and gender politics. 12 Thomas recognizes in this novel affinities with the feminist

Bildungsroman in so far 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 liberation prevalent in the existentialist literature and middleclass intellectual milieu of the time (1999: 32).

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). And she concludes that

Ernaux’s goal in this text is not one of a “revendication féministe en soi” (2000: 32) but rather “la dénonciation d’un ordre social, inapproprié à l’épanouissement de la femme— un ordre qui ne s’explicite pas clairement, mais qui sourd partout et que le langage selon les cas dénonce ou renforce” (2000: 32), thus demonstrating the ability of Ernaux’s je transpersonnel to transcend the personal to speak nearby the social in her work.

In La femme gelée , Ernaux 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. For example, the first pair she compares and contrasts is her mother and “les momans” of her neighborhood

(the “o” reflecting her working-class accent) and her classmates’ mothers and “les mamans” of the school. Additionally, 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 repas, etc. Interminable. Lourde à porter l’iconographie maternelle déballée par l’école des sœurs. (58)

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 Mothers’ 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’oserai 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. (59)

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 questioning (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” (59). 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 explains:

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. (60)

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 learning 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 working-class mother and the mothers of her neighborhood, thus

(temporarily) resolving the confusion she felt as a child regarding her mother’s

“authenticity.” The protagonist shares:

Tellement agaçante en plus la maîtresse à susurrer « votre mââman », chez moi et dans tout le quartier, on disait « moman ». Grosse 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. (60)

However, this dilemma will resurface time and time again in Ernaux’s lifetime through her ascension to the intellectual bourgeoisie (a social class space in which

“moman” does not exist) when she finds herself faced with similar conflicting portraits of motherhood; i.e., an “emancipated” Mother sharing the domestic chores and child-raising responsibilities with her partner (as 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” (60) (as her husband ultimately comes to expect from

Ernaux.) In this new context that 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 in

the language of the school. Thus both women associate their maternal language with the

oral and their acquired language with the written. And both women negotiate an in-

between space of authorship as a hybrid 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 babel of heteroglossic discourses influencing her development” (Johnson, 1999: 298). 13 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). 14 She 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).

This 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 similar upward social mobility might also experience.

Ernaux explains this point in her own words:

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. (Ernaux, 1997: 69)

Yet having just read Ernaux’s position on the misgivings of “feminine values,” 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 plights and experiences modeled on the middle-class 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 De Beauvoir’s usage of the term, the “universal” becomes a space in which the female gender struggles against the creation and imposition of different normative gender roles 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 transcends her individual first-person narratives to stir the reader’s awakening to these normalizing discourses. In turn, this awakening allows for

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 the hybrid 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 explains:

Le féminisme comme lutte pour l’égalité des droits entre les hommes et les femmes, conditions de vie, responsabilités, rôles identiques ou partagés est toujours au coeur 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. (Ernaux, 1997: 70-71).

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 – in so far as how she individually experienced it and personally perceives it.

Ernaux explains 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

narrator 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 reconnaître que ce n’était plus un roman mais une autobiographie”

(Ernaux, 1995: 38).

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. 15 In other words, Ernaux

recognizes the ambiguous 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). It is this latent “fréquentation des

autres” in all of Ernaux’s writing that constitutes a textual 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 gives birth to her hybrid speaking subject.

Ernaux states that La Femme gelée textualizes this “exil intérieur” as a loss of

identity 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 attendait 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’age, 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. (38-39)

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 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 the 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 with the domestic chores 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.

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 inbetween 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 lower-class mothers of her neighborhood. She writes:

Femmes fragiles et vaporeuse, 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 le 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 taches 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. (9)

The imagery that Ernaux evokes in this opening passage—the normative representation of femininity in the middle-class archetype of the stay-at-home mother as “misty,” a

“fairy,” and “voiceless” versus the marginal representation of femininity in the working- class archetype of the working mother as “too heavy and too flat,” with “rough fingers” and “gaudy make-up,” 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 writes:

Le matin, papa-part-à-son-travail, maman-reste-à-la-maison, elle-fait-le- ménage, elle-prápre-un-repas-succulent, j’ânonne, je répète avec les autres sans poser de questions. Je n’ai pas encore honte de ne pas être la fille des gens normaux. (16)

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 fait 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. (16)

However, Ernaux qualifies this description by stating that her family did live by a certain

“code.” She explains, “Pas tout à fait les mêmes travaux, oui il y a toujours un code,

mais celui-là ne devait à la tradition que la lessive et le repassage pour ma mère, le

jardinage pour mon père” (16). 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” (16). 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 also 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 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. (22)

She 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 de ses devoirs puisque apparemment c’en était un. (22)

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 (23), as she had believed before Brigitte’s visit.

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 (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 pas la mayonnaise, le ménage ne l’intéresse pas, et elle n’est pas « féminine ». (74)

Ernaux textualizes Brigitte’s and later other middleclass 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 (75). She confesses that their interpretations of her parents’ non-conventional gender roles shamed her (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. (76)

The protagonist explains 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 feel a certain lack in her existence, knowledge, and abilities

(76). She discovers “une étonnante complicité ménagère entre mère et fille,” of which she

had no idea (76). 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 futur métier. (76-77)

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 (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 (77-78).

Thus, Ernaux leaves us again with an in-between representation of home life,

which begins to speak to Ernaux’s ideal domestic representation. 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 towards her performance

of domestic chores) 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 asserts:

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. (60-61)

The shame as a child and adolescent when faced with the lack of normative, middleclass standards of domesticity, family life, femininity, and gender roles 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, 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 of 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 (127).

She finds a certain complicity between the 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 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 (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. (128- 129)

In retrospect, despite the seemingly egalitarian distribution of domestic roles at the start of their marriage, Ernaux describes the eventual state of their home and condition of their home life as “complètement à côté de la plaque, Le Deuxième Sexe ”

(129). In describing the “egalitarian” beginnings of their marriage and household,

Ernaux shares:

Et la dînette, charmante. Les tomates scintillent dans leur huile, odeur molle des pommes de terre rissolées, autour de la table minuscule, l’amour devient tendresse, la cuisine du meublé, intérieur hollandais 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. (129)

Unified during this time by a lack of money (129), 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 moderno-intellectuel” (130) in which they take turns preparing soup in their pressure cooker, always equally able to return to their studies (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” (130) twice a day. 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” (130) and questions:

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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. (130)

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-etre! Le genre de ton père, pas le mien!’” (130-131). 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 ai pas vu beaucoup d’hommes peler des patates.

Mon modèle à moi n’est pas le bon, il me le fait sentir” (131). 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 (131).

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. (131)

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 protaognist cannot

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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 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. (166-67)

Furthermore, the protaonist’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.

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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” (135). 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. (135)

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. (135)

At times, Ernaux writes that her mother-in-law shared confidences with her. 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 (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-in-law’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

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l’éducation de ses enfants, au bonheur de son mari, on ne pensait pas qu’elle aurait pu vivre autrement. (136)

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.

The protagonist describes:

Organiser, le beau verbe à l’usage des femmes, tous les magazines regorgent de conseils, gagnez du temps, faites ci et ça, ma belle-mère, si j’étais vous pour aller plus vite, des trucs en réalité pour se farcir le plus de boulots possible en un minimum de temps sans douleur ni déprime parce que ça gênerait les autres autour. Mois aussi, j’y ai cru au pense-bête des courses, aux réserves dans le placard , le lapin congelé pour les visiteurs impromptus, la bouteille de vinaigrette toute préparée, les bols en position dès le soir pour le petit déjeuner du lendemain. Un système qui dévore le présent sans arrêt, on ne finit pas de s’avancer, comme à l’école, mais on ne voit jamais le bout de rien. (155)

But as Ernaux reflects on this system of time management, she asserts that it does not

represent a “danse légère” (155) for her as inferred in relation to her mother-in-law’s

housekeeping system, but rather “le pas de charge” or “le galop ménager” (156) 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, simplement s’il venait quelqu’un je n’aurais pas besoin de dire comme

mes tantes, faites pas attention à la maison” (163). 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 aboutissait 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” (163). As Brigitte once made the protagonist

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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 .

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 middleclass 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

middleclass 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.

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.

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Both women were also agrégées and were (for a limited time) professors (Ernaux of

literature and de Beauvoir of philosophy.) Yet their approach to writing differs.

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. 16 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, where she found her great passion in life. She passed the agrégation de

philosophie , which allowed her to earn a living through a few high school teaching

positions, and her first novel, L’Invitée , appeared in 1943. Within the two years

following the release and success of this first text, de Beauvoir had become a leading

intellectual 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 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 ethical 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

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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 me to be a woman?”17 In attempting to answer this question, she wrote her groundbreaking essay, Le Deuxième sexe , which was

“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 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.

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Secondary criticism of de Beauvoir’s eclectic collection of texts varies widely among scholars and has quite often treated her work with antipathy.18 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. 19

Moi concludes that de Beauvoir is subject to such attacks because she claims to speak as an intellectual woman. 20 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 “unlady-like” subjects (namely de Beauvoir’s treatment of sexuality) resting 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:

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 reflects the emphasis on

the relationality present in Ernaux corpus of work, as outlined earlier in this chapter.

Scholars examining de Beauvoir’s autobiographical texts very often concentrate on the

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construction of relationships within de Beauvoir’s narratives, particularly examining

Simone’s relationship 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. 21 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. 22 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” (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 in these primary texts. 23

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 (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. 24 In relation to de Beauvoir’s Une mort très douce and

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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, describ, and recount their

mothers’ existences at the end of their lives (especially their aged bodies) and their

eventual deaths. 25

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 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” (2).

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

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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. 26

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. 27 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 (2). Ernaux shares in this essay that the image of her own mother (active shopkeeper enjoying her power, authority, and

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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 (2). She suggests that Le Deuxième sexe allowed her as a young

adult to re-read her adolescence and to situate herself as a woman in French society and

that this unveiling of the feminine condition as presented in de Beauvoir’s text was

somewhat frightening, but also profoundly liberating, and opened onto “la voie à une

prise en main de ma propre vie” for Ernaux (2-3).

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”

(103). In the last third of the text, after she and her husband marry and become the short-

lived “moderno-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 ! » (129). 28 In brief, in Ernaux’s

work, Le Deuxième sexe confirmed a formative domestic model of equality that Ernaux

desired to keep in marital practice.

Andrea Veltman provides a very helpful and recuperative reading on de

Beauvoir’s take on marriage in Le Deuxième sexe. 29 Basing her reading on de Beauvoir’s

dichotomy between transcendence and immanence, Veltman shows how Le Deuxième

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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 something durable that transforms or

annexes the world, contributes to the constructive endeavors of the human race, or

enables individual self-expression; i.e., engaging in the arts or formal education, are

transcendent acts that are often undertaken by the male in the marriage. 30 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. 31 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 ethics 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. (121)

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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 La 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 traditionally 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.

Ernaux shares in ‘Le fil conducteur’ qui me lie à de 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” and a “refus de prendre en compte la maternité autrement qu’en termes de l’aliénation” (3), 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 (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 (imminent acts) and the necessity for female financial independence (4). Ernaux found this financial independence later in life through her writing (a transcendent act).

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 (4). She explains that she, like de Beauvoir, considers literature to be an “engagement, un moyen

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d’action sur le monde, de lutte,” (5) but not a sacred thing (5), as de Beauvoir found literature to be. Ernaux suggests that for both of them, the enterprise of living and writing are inseparable (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. (5)

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” (5) and “premier jet rapide, repris ensuite” (5) suggests an indifference to writing “comme matière” (5). For Ernaux, “writing as matter” resides in the relationship between language [specifically the (carnal) language of the dominated social class] and literature (specifically as a mode of identification.) However, as Ernaux 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 representations of the feminine condition in Le

Deuxième sexe and fictional texts 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

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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 .

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 from October 19 th to November 16 th , 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. 32

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). 33

In the first novella, L’Age de discretion , de Beauvoir presents a sixty-year-old

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

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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 recent 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 to their son to allow the son to move back in with her, which is 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, 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

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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 examining how femininity is (re)displayed through the home in La Femme rompue , I will focus on two archetypal female portraits (the “cocue” middleclass housewife and the sophisticated and tempting mistress). I will also consider the process of women’s identity formation vis-à-vis the home in this third novella. 34

In Ray Davison’s reading of La Femme rompue , he shares 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. (71) 35

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). Thess conceptions in turn become politically, socially, and historically engaged discourses that challenge “freedom, fidelity, authenticity, sincerity, inauthenticity and dependency” (Davison, 1998: 71).

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 .

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The general consensus is that de Beauvoir is very much wrapped up in the task of presenting Monique as the victim of her own inauthenticity and flight into emotional dependency. 36 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 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 hybrid speaking subject residing in-

between fixed languages, discourses, and ideologies.

As opposed to pairing La Femme rompue with de Beauvoir’s philosophical

discourses (i.e., Le Deuxième sexe), as Davidson has done, Elizabeth Fallaize reads the text in comparison to the genres of the 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). 37 In her essay, Fallaize points out 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

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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 to 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 stir 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’ and to work out the “hidden” meanings of La Femme rompue for themselves. 38 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 qualities and objective in La Femme rompue , the text failed to have the same existential impact on a more popular readership.

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The question concerning the reader’s recognition of particular qualities and objectives 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. (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). He asserts that fiction for de Beauvoir still “explores the

real world and reveals it in its complexity” (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 on life writing. The question is not whether La Femme rompue is

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“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. However, rather than blurring conventional genre boundaries, 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 Noëllie (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 (210).

Thus, this first maternal portrait is one of a middle-aged woman financially,

emotionally, and psychologically dependant on her husband and children and who has for

all intents and purposes trapped herself inside her personal domestic universe. She is

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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 middle-class housewives (all of adulterous husbands) and their gossip over afternoon teas.

It is only after eighteen months of the affaire (and after Maurice confesses 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 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.

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Throughout the novella, for better or for worse, Monique constantly compares and contrasts herself to Noëllie. In comparing and contrasting these two portraits, de

Beauvoir is asking the reader to do the same with “her” (the assumed female Elle reader) own personal portrait. 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 desparate 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). 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 “inauthenticity” (the notion that Monique is acting out in complicity one of society’s and history’s limited roles bestowed upon women) and not remaining “true” to her person. 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

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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. 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 (i.e., 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 . Closing the third entry very near the beginning of La

Femme rompue , de Beauvoir presents the first portrait of the home. She writes:

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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. (125)

At this point in the narrative, Maurice has not yet disclosed his affaire 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 affaire 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 puisqu’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. (127)

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 apartment. When Maurice does finally disclose his secret to Monique, the home takes on a new dimension in both a literal and metaphorical way.

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At a later point in the narrative, after Maurice divulges his affaire 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 (150), but she finds no comfort in these activities. At the close of this 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.

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. (152)

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 her 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

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family to realize that she has created these “false” 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 sense of stronger 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 petites 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 là-dessus./ --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. (176-177)

In loaning her voice textually to Maurice (and through his silence) in this instance in the

text, 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.

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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 hybrid speaking subject in La Femme rompue that shifts gender and age. This hybrid speaking subject not only subverts traditional speaking positions but also creates new speaking spaces and speaking subjects, as we will see at the end of the narrative, for future generations.

Additionally, this argument between Maurice and her 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 and her maternal methods as a direct and personal attack. She refuses to accept that Noëllie’s methods are superior to hers and states, “Je suis sûre 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” (178).

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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

(178). 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 (178). Monique finds comforting the well stocked closest in which everything has its place (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” (178). 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 holidays 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 (220).

When she feels a bit better, she tries to read a detective novel (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 (220).

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

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vitres sales, cette saleté est une coquille qui me protège, je n’en sortirai plus jamais. (220)

The narrative never gives any indication that Monique has handled any of the cleaning responsibilities and conversely gives the impression that the 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 even present interferences into Colette and Jean-Pierre’s

(Collette’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 si 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. (224)

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

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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/ stupéfaction,” 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.

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 (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 (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

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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. (233-234)

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 Collette) 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 cumulating 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 begin 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 last 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. (250-251)

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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.

As we have come to see in this chapter, whether the protagonist is a “frozen” or

“broken or dumped” woman in their 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 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 spaces of contention on which hybrid seeing and speaking subjects from multiple perspectives descend in order to transform them into new hybrid spaces 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 transcendent expressions of (female) identity and (feminine) subjectivity for Raja Amari and Coline Serreau.

1 See Claire-Lise Tondeur, Annie Ernaux, ou, l’exil intérieur (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). 2 See Michelle Bacholle, Un passé contraignant double bind et transculturation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 3 See Annie Ernaux, “’Vers un je transpersonnel’ Autofictions et cie,” Cahiers RITM 6. 218-221 (1994). 134

4 See Chantal Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Press,” Feminists Theorize the Political . Eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992) 376. 5 See Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca : Cornell Univ. Press, 1989) 193. 6 See Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988) 105. 7 See Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others:Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography,” differences 6 1. 1-27 (1994) and Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986). 8 See Michèle Bacholle, “An Interview with Annie Ernaux: Ecrire le vécu,” Sites 2.1 (1998) 140-51. 9 See Bethany Ladimer, “Cracking the Codes: Social Class and Gender in Annie Ernaux,” Chimères 26 (Spring 2002) 53-70. 10 See Ladimder 56. 11 See Philippe Vilain, “Entretien avec Annie Ernaux; Une ‘Conscience malheureuse’ de femme,” LittéRéalité 9.1 (1997) 67-71. 12 See Lyn Thomas, Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience (New York: Berg, 1999) 10. 13 See Warren Johnson, “The Dialogic Self: Language and Identity in Annie Ernaux,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 23. (1999) 297-314. 14 See Christine Fau, “Le problème du langage chez Annie Ernaux,” French Review 68.3 (1995). 15 See Claire-Lise Tondeur, “Entretien avec Annie Ernaux,” French Review 69.1 (1995). 16 See Elizabeth Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir : A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998) 1. 17 See Fallaize 3. 18 See Fallaize 7. 19 See Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The making of an intellectual woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) 75. 20 See Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir … (73-92). 21 Fallaize 12. 22 See Fallaize 13. 23 See Fallaize 13. 24 See Monika Boehringer, “Donner la vie, donner la mort: ‘L’amèr écrite’ chez Simone de Beauvoir et Annie Ernaux,” Dalhousie French Studies 64. (2003) 13-23. 25 See Liliane Lazar, “A la recherché de la mère: Simone de Beauvoir et Annie Ernaux,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 16. (1999-2000) 123-34 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. 26 See Claude Imbert, “Simone de Beauvoir: A Woman Philosopher in the Context of her Generation,” The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir , ed./trans. Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004) 3-21. 27 See Claude Imbert 14. 28 This quotation appears in La Femme gelée at a time when the protagonist and her husband were equally sharing the domestic responsibilities. Thus, the tone in the quotation suggests that at this particular moment in the narrative and in the protagonist’s view, de Beauvoir was wrong in her understanding of marriage as an institution of slavery for the woman in the couple. In the beginning, the protagonist finds marriage an equal partnership between the man and the woman. However, as La Femme gelée will reveal in its denouement, the protagonist will revise this impression of marriage and recognize it as “à côté de la plaque, Le Deuxième sexe, ” or in other words, way off base from de Beauvoir’s model for marital equality for which she calls in Le Deuxième sexe . 29 See Andrea Veltman, “The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage,” Hypatia 19.3 (2004) 121-43. 30 See Veltman 123. 31 See Veltman 123. 32 See Elizabeth Fallaize, “Resisting romance: Simone de Beauvoir, ‘The Woman Destroyed’ and the romance script,” Contemporary French Fiction by Women: feminist perspectives eds. Margaret Atack and Phil Powrie (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990) 17-18. 33 See Catherine Savage Brosman, Simone de Beauvoir revisited (Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1991).

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34 All further use of the title, La Femme rompue , will specifically refer to this third short story, unless otherwise noted. 35 See Ray Davison, “Simone de Beauvoir, ‘La Femme rompue’,” Short French Fiction: essays on the short story in France in the twentieth century ed. J.E. Flower (Exeter: Exeter Univ. Press, 1998) 71-88. 36 See Ray Davison 72. 37 See Fallaize, Contemporary French Fiction by Women: feminist perspectives , 18. 38 See Ray Davison 75.

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CHAPTER 3

SHIFTING LINES OF GENDER DEMARCATION: CREATING DOMESTIC LANDSCAPES AND SOUNDSCAPES WITH RAJA AMARI AND COLINE SERREAU

As we saw in the first chapter, Assia Djebar entered into the cinematographic text 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 in La nouba . Yet Djebar also acknowledges that the cinematic text and the technical processes entrained in creating it have strongly influenced the literary work she has since written. We may draw a somewhat 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 cinematographic 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 first- person narration.

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If Djebar entered into the cinematographic text by a literary backdoor, then Amari entered into it through a critical side door. Although not much secondary work exists on

Amari–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 postcolonial 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 Just prior to her studies at FEMIS

(between the years of 1994 and 1998), Amari also earned a Diplôme de langue et Culture

Italiennes from the Società Dante D’Alighieri in Tunis and a Maîtrise de Littérature et

Civilisation Françaises (option Histoire de l’Art) at the Université de Tunis I (Gabous,

1998:184). Adding to her eclectic academic background, moreover, Amari also earned a

Premier prix de danse at the Conservatoire National de Musique et de Danse in Tunis.

Based on her interests in language, culture, literature, art history, dance, and film,

I believe it is fair 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). In recalling our discussion in Chapter One on Djebar’s postcolonial

or hybrid women’s cinema, we may ascertain that Amari is similarly using the cinematic

medium to privilege women’s expression that forges cinematic spaces of female

authorship by first relying on cinematic spaces of female spectatorship.

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The question of female spectatorship has proven and continues to prove essential to academic studies of Tunisian 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)] 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 (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 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 tunisiennes…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)

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

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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 educational 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). 3

The only general exception to this practice in more recent times was the need for

Tunisian actresses who, for the sake of “authenticity,” were required to play important

roles and 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 involve a combination of artistic and clerical skills, multi-

tasking abilities, and do not require one to travel with the on-site production crew, many

Tunisian women were drawn to the area of cinematic editing.

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Gabous explains that within the Tunisian film industry, 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 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. 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.

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 towards Europe and a second which looks

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east towards the Middle East. These two faces have been and continue to be critical in shaping Tunisia’s history and culture.

Due to Tunisia’s 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). 4 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.

Women’s roles and identities in Tunisian society testify to the multiplicitous

nature of Tunisian society. 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). 5 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.

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Beginning in 1956, President Bourguiba initiated and led an aggressively pro-

Western and pro-development program that instituted numerous reforms designed to make the nation competitive in the world market economy (Homes-Eber, 2003: 4). 6

Among these initiatives, Bourguiba enacted probably the most important and significant piece of legislation to women’s socio-economic position in Tunisian society—the

Personal Status Code. Historian Paula Homes-Eber explains 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). In spite of the PSC, which began to lay foundation to a more gender egalitarian society in Tunisia, 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 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 in operation in Tunisian society.

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In other words, it seems as if for every emancipating legal right Bourguiba’s administration granted to Tunisian women, social practice, religious belief, or economic reality reified traditional Muslim positions and perspectives on the popular level. This reification is most specifically lived and experienced for both Tunisian men and women in terms of gender construction and “proper” social conduct. Yet Muslim women of

Tunisia, on the whole, enjoy greater degrees of freedom and opportunity than many other

Muslim women living in other Arab societies. Furthermore, Tunisia proves rather unique in that these policies of social and political change were initiated during a time of national decolonization.

As we saw in Chapter One concerning 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 created a space 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 (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

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“homology between patriarchal norms within the domestic and the political spheres”

(Stollery, 2001: 50). 7 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. 8 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 understands this paradox:

…women frequently become the sign or marker of political goals and of cultural identity during processes of revolution or state-building, 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) 9

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 non-official, non- programmatic cultural arenas of the cinema can often publicly articulate (2003: 50).

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

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reading practice that focuses on shifting lines of demarcation that exist within each gender as well as between the two genders. 10 Stollery adopts a similar perspective in his

essay and suggests that:

…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 film Satin rouge narrates the “coming of age” of a forty-

something-year-old 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

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rather liberal and “modern” woman and mother-in-law. The world of the Tunisian cabaret and the art of the “belly dance” (or raqs sharqi , the Arabic appellation which

translates as “eastern dance”) provide the impetus for Lilia’s transformation. With

guidance from her new cabaret colleague and friend, Folla (Monia Hichri), Lilia effects

her own liberation by realizing both privately and publicly her personal desires.

The film opens with Lilia’s daily housekeeping rituals—dusting, straightening up,

and window washing—and follows her day after day throughout her routine of cleaning,

preparing meals, watching television, sewing, and waiting for her daughter to return

home from school or her girlfriend, Hela’s (Nadra Lamioum) home. Ignorant of Salma’s

relationship with Chokri (Maher Kamoun), one of the cabaret musicians and dancing

school’s accompanist, Lila does not understand why her daughter consistently returns

home later in the evening than expected. One day, Lila meets Salma after dance class.

She peers into the studio before class finishes, and she sees Salma and Chokri exchange a

few words in secret. A few days later when grocery shopping near the studio, Lilia

observes Chokri leave the school and walk over to the cabaret across the street.

Intrigued, she follows him and peeks through the front door, thus initiating a connection

with this “underground world” of the cabaret.

This underground world will soon become a “virtual home” to Lilia. The full and

lively cabaret and its associated network of employees and clients seem to represent the

antithesis of her empty and desolate “real” home. One night after receiving a disturbing

phone call from Salma, in the background of which Lilia hears music, Lila walks alone to

the cabaret in search of her daughter. (Salma is at Hela’s birthday party.) Overcome by

emotion, tobacco, and heat, she faints in the middle of the cabaret. Folla, the principal

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dancer, quickly befriends her and invites her to recover in her dressing room. The two forge a friendship, which is initially built on Lilia’s domestic sewing talent of repairing and altering Folla’s costumes. Soon, their friendship sustains itself through a genuine concern for and interest in one another. Lilia, usually sneaking out of the apartment in the night, continues to visit Folla at the cabaret.

The narrative develops at the end of one evening when Lilia tries on one of

Folla’s costumes in Folla’s dressing room, just to see what it would be like to wear one

and dance in private. Folla returns after her performance and is delighted to find Lilia in

costume. She brings Lila into the main room to show the other employees. Lilia

performs an impromptu dance with the other dancers; and in spite of Lilia’s lack of

formal dance training, Folla eventually convinces Lilia to perform for the clients on stage

with her. Lilia does, and it is during this performance that she loses herself in

unrestricted movement and catches Chokri’s attention. At the cabaret manager’s request,

Folla formally trains Lilia in the art of raqs sharqui , and Lilia becomes a featured dancer

at the cabaret. Still ignorant of her daughter’s romantic involvement with Chokri and

Chokri’s marital intentions towards Salma, Lilia and Chokri consummate their working

relationship one early morning upon leaving the cabaret. After this one encounter,

Chokri ends their intimate relationship. Lilia returns home and soon learns of her

daughter’s engagement to a young man. Salma brings her fiancé to meet Lilia. To both

Chokri’s and Lilia’s surprise, they fully understand the disastrous implications of their

earlier behavior. Knowing that the truth of their affair would destroy Salma’s happiness,

Lilia decides to keep their history a secret from Salma. The film ends with a marriage

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reception, in which family, neighbors, and Lilia’s cabaret colleagues joyfully dance and celebrate the marital union of Salma and Chokri.

Satin rouge is Amari’s first feature-length film. It offers an interesting (and

subversive) interpretation of Tunisia’s cultural hybridity as well as opens a window into

Amari’s own personal hybridization of Tunisian, Egyptian, and French cultures. In an

interview appearing as a bonus feature on the film’s North American DVD version, an

interviewer asks Amari if “the cabaret and belly dancing are an excuse to tell the story of

a woman’s independence in an Arab society?” Amari replies that:

I have always wanted to make a film revolving around belly dancing. I trained for many years as a belly dancer at the Conservatoire de Tunis. I also grew up watching the “Golden Age” Egyptian musicals from the 1940s and 1950s that are still played today on television. My mother and I loved the well-known belly dancer Samia Gamal and the singer Farid El Atrache.

Given Amari’s reference to Egyptian cinema, it is useful 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 hybridity 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.” 11 The first film shown in Egypt was

projected in the back room 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.

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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. Yet, 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 that were met with great success.

In the 1920s, Egyptian production companies as well as cine-clubs began to appear and the melodrama genre became widely successful. 12 Culhane explains 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 re-titled Laila . This film recounts the story of Laila, a beautiful village girl who gives herself to her fiancé, who 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 this film introduced a major Egyptian theme, which still exists in contemporary Egyptian films, of “the seduction of the Egyptian by the West in general, and America in particular, and the misery that results” (1995: 39).

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 was the inclusion of indigenous “oriental” Egyptian song and dance

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that 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. 13 In fact, the song performed in the concluding scene of Satin rouge —Salma and Chokri’s wedding—is of Egyptian origin. 14 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, hybridity has always existed and played a prime role in the development of the Egyptian film industry. We could also make this statement in relation 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 by all accounts 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

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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 Latin dance) in her cinematic and nightclub performances. 15 She was endowed with the title of the “National Dancer of

Egypt” by the late Egyptian King Farouk in 1949. Jasmin Jahal explains that Gamal’s performing style has been described as bold and flashy, and much attention has been paid to her stellar stage presence as well as her ability to dominate and make use of the entire stage in her performances. 16 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 .

Amari explains 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.

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 hand, the world of the night is relaxed, marginal and lascivious. I wanted them to join up at all costs through Lilia’s character. 17

Amarai continues to explain that in typical traditional Tunisian society, “their paths would never cross because nightclubs are perceived as a bit creepy and a depraved environment” (Amari, 2003). She stylizes Lilia’s cinematic maternal portrait as “a

‘regular’ woman, a model housewife with a great deal of moral conviction and a strict

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sense of duty” (Amari, 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” (Amari, 2003). In this interview, Amari connects these two social worlds through the double life that she finds every Tunisian lives. When commenting on the way in which Lilia hides her involvement with the cabaret from her family and neighbors, Amari explains 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. (Amari, 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.

It is this social hypocrisy underlying Tunisian society that Lilia discovers through her involvement with the cabaret that allows her to examine her own life and

(re)construct her own personal identity—an identity she realizes is necessarily multiple and hybrid and, by the end of the film, in which she may become a seeing and speaking hybrid subject, herself. In Satin rouge , Amari uses Lilia’s double life to present two

(post)modern portraits of contemporary Tunisian femininity (and by extension the home), in which one portrait adopts and the other questions traditional Tunisian discourses of domesticity.

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The opening scene of the film is rather unique in that it splits the opening credits into two parts. The credits (written in both French and Arabic in white lettering) begin to roll on a silent black backdrop. Then at about forty-five seconds into this opening sequence, we hear chirping birds followed by random city noises (children’s voices, 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 were 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 slow camera pans right and left and very soft 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. Ironically, the opening black-and-white credits seem to suggest that the situation in which the protagonist finds herself throughout the film is as clear as black and white.

Tunisian society would seemingly support this black-and-white reading in so far as “good, respectable” Tunisian girls and women do not frequent the cabaret. However, we will soon discover in the narrative that Tunisian society, like so many others, is full of

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gray areas. Additionally, Amari’s use of Lilia’s reflection in the bedroom mirror introduces a discursive theme running through 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 one hand on the film’s narrative level, this doubled image sets up her doubled existence and identity as model housewife during the day and cabaret performer during the 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 as well as the social pressure and repressive prevailing morality that dominate this society, in which someone almost always appears to be looking over your shoulder.

Throughout Satin rouge , Amari engages the question 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.

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The scene continues as the camera (without cutting) slowly pans right to capture the dresser top 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 dresser top 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. Again 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. Lilia again enters the frame in an almost full shot as she bends over to straighten the bedding.

In keeping with the filming style of the previous moments, Amari ironically

refuses to focus on Lilia’s movements and housekeeping motions. Rather, the bedroom

and its objects seem to capture the focus of Amari’s camera lens. The camera movement

that precipitates Lilia’s motions reinforces this reading. Thus, her actions appear

intrusive as she enters into each frame and obstructs the spectator’s view of the setting.

As we saw in the previous chapter, we once again have a sense of the home as a

“maintenance trap of things” to be kept up and as a restrictive world of immanent acts.

But, we also begin to have a sense of the home’s (and the family’s via the photographs)

dominating presence in Lilia’s life and in Tunisian society.

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As we may recall from the Introduction of this dissertation, 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 examinations of the home have begun focusing on how everyday relationships with our homes are bound up with sensory perception and metaphor. But this research also reminds us that these relationships are cultural-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 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. (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 Homes-Eber’s description. In Satin rouge , we do witness a few visits paid to Lilia at home by her neighbor, Folla, and an uncle from the countryside. On the surface, these scenes do seem to coincide with Homes-Eber’s additional description of Tunisian women’s homes as:

…noisy, active, busy social centers, filled with neighbors who have dropped in ostensibly to borrow tea; friends who have stopped by to drop

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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 this domestic portrait of the contemporary Tunisian home as social and open.

As the opening scene 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;” e.g., 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 decor. These domestic details of

Lilia’s home 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. 18 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 of 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 the home

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and revising representations and qualities of domestic spaces and women’s role(s) therein remain key objectives in all their work.

In returning to the opening scene of Satin rouge , never once in this point in the extreme long take 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 screen, yet also to reflect Tunisian ways of viewing woman’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 woman’s two traditional and primary functions for mainstream Tunisian society—maintaining the husband’s home and raising his children.

However, much of Lila’s housework in this scene occurs on the edges of the cinematic frame or even all together off screen. The irony in this fact lies in 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 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 and viewing Tunisian women. Expressed differently, housework in Amari’s filmmaking, which is represented in normative contemporary

Tunisian discourses as central to Tunisian women’s feminine condition, becomes an

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important subversive tool (positioned marginally on screen) in examining the opening onto wider cultural and political change in Tunisia.

As we will again recall from the Introduction, many feminist theorists and theorists of domesticity often align the performance of housework with the development of agency in their research and find that individual agency in the home is a key force in producing changing gender configurations in society. 19 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. 20 [We saw this 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, 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 scene of Satin rouge reveal how housework, as a performative act, allows

Lilia self-consciously to (re)constitute her gendered identity.

The opening scene 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

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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 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 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 takes 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

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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. Thus, both her housekeeping and her dancing enter into the emotional narrative in this domestic drama of Satin rouge .

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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. 21 Research shows a common correlation among “housekeepers” who often combine music with which they identify and housework movement. Pink explains 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 her home and homemaking responsibilities as initial excuses for refusing to return to the cabaret after her initial discovery of it. 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 scene performances appear within the same location of the

bedroom and in the same scene, 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

discourses (the housewife) and the other one that questions them through unrestricted

self-expression (the cabaret performer)—may not ever (or at least not easily) converge.

For some theorists of domesticity, housework and dancing entrain an intersubjectivity

through which individuals experience their home via material objects, technologies,

spaces, and sensory experiences, sometimes in conflicting and contradictory ways. 22 For

Amari in Satin rouge , this intersubjectivity in contemporary Tunisian society may only be realized through domestic and personal conflict.

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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 other films in this project, on several levels; e.g., mother versus daughter, traditional versus contemporary modes 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 example of this opening up to change, Lilia grants Salma certain liberties that the film makes us believe she otherwise would not have (i.e., going out with her friends and sleeping over at Hela’s house), and Lilia 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 spaces 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

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eventually does accept Folla’s invitation but initially only under the cover 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 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 and break through Algerian social taboos concerning the physical violation, emotional torment, and sexual assault many Algerian women suffered throughout Algeria’s history. Although Amari’s engagement with the “non-dire” 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 discourse on Tunisian femininity that publicly acknowledges female sexuality and sexual activity. Amari’s contemporary discourse 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 Lilia and Chokri towards the end of the film.

When asked to comment on these two love scenes (and the rareness of such

“explicit” scenes in Tunisian cinema), Amari predicts the controversy with which these two scenes will be interpreted when the film is released in Tunisia.

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…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. (Amari, 2003)

Although I found nothing in my research that recounted the reaction of the Tunisian moving-going population to these two love scenes, I can corroborate to a certain extent

Amari’s prediction with the reaction of a Tunisian acquaintance of mine living and studying 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. 23 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,” 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

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

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when compared to other female directors like Catherine Breillat) remains a point of controversy in her work. 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 societies, whom Amari presents with sexual desires.

When requested to comment further on Lilia’s symbolic (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 says 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. (Amari, 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 a ‘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

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of contemporary Tunisian femininity in which Tunisian women, who are caught in- between 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 that 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.

By inviting spectators to compare Lilia’s dispersed housewifery portrait with the unified model presented in the neighbor’s portrait (who embodies the social pressure and repressive prevailing morality in Tunisia), 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 scene in which dusting flows into dance and then back again 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 hybrid.

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

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film, it surfaces in the figure of the grandmother (Line Rénaud) and her function in the narrative.

Coline Serreau arrived on the French cinematographic scene through a theatrical stage door. Daughter of Jean-Marie Serreau, a stage director considered as 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, which was a feminist activist documentary titled Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (1975-78.) 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 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’ai 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 autre 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. 24

Brigitte Rollet finds that Serreau’s statement summarizes Serreau’s 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).25 Serreau’s desire to communicate with the public (in her mind) may be more

immediately realized in the theatrical medium (with a live audience present at each of her

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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” (for, in her mind, this label suggests a strict definition that she did not see her work fitting) and “auteurist filmmaker” (for, again in her mind, this label generates a sense of a sole artistic creator of the film that she does not see as accurately describing her more collaborative role in the cinematic 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. Yet the most significant issues treated in her corpus of work (women’s rights, gender and sexual stereotypes, racism, immigration, unemployment, and marginality) point to a rejection and refusal of the unjust organization of capitalist societies, which she underlies 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 (for example, 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 political parties, the elitism of French society, sexual oppression, and labor unions, have marked many of these filmmakers’ narratives (in terms of issues

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addressed) and cinematic style (in terms of the technical ways employed in addressing these issues.)

As a typical vestige of May’68 intellectual goals, scholars find that Serreau

“us[es] 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” 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.

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 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 in-depth 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.

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No study of Serreau would be complete without addressing Serreau’s cinematic or theatrical relationship to comedy and the comic genre. 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). 27 Thomas continues to suggest that, “l’universalité et la profondeur des œuvres de l’inclassable et dérangeante

Coline Serreau restent à découvrir” (1998: 1). In explaining to Thomas her choice of a comic mode of expression to address 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)

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, 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 more of a cerebral nature. In an interesting way,

Rollet compares Serreau’s comedy to the genre of the conte philosophique à la Voltaire. 28

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Rollet shows how Serreau’s films resemble Voltaire’s tales in their deployment 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 contradiction 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, pas un art ni un choix simplement léger. (Thomas, 1998: 2)

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

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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 explains, “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). Serreau maintains this perspective in her 2002 feature-length film, Chaos .

Chaos opens with the portrait of a middle-aged Parisian bourgeois couple, Hélène

(Catherine Frot) and Paul (Vincent Lindon), rushing through their evening preparations

before going out, assumingly to a dinner party. This fast-paced rhythm sets the tone and

pace for the rest of the film. Once descended 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 had 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 in a car auto-wash all physical evidence and

trace of the attack from the car.

Plagued with guilt, Hélène tracks Noémie/Malika down to the 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

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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), who hides from Hélène when she comes to visit him in his studio and who is caught up in his own domestic affairs 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 a 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 their fortunes (all the while still under the management of Pali and not supposedly keeping any of the profits for herself).

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As we learn, Noémie/Malika 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.

Serreau’s cinematic style succeeds in creating a fantastic filmic atmosphere through the representation of a mix of reality with unreal elements – the main mode of representation of the social fantastic in French cinematic tradition. This mix opens interesting points of comparison or an intertextuality between these cinematic genres. In other words, 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 genre, 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 literary and cinematographic genre.

Other elements of the social fantastic resonate in Serreau’s Chaos as well. Most immediately as inferred by the film’s title, the omnipresence of chaos surrounding the

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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), the representation of victimization and characters who have fallen on (economic or emotional) hard times (Noémie/Malika, Zora, and Mamie), 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 hotels as sites of Noémie/Malika’s prostitution schemes), and the impression that everything is illusory and to be interpreted by the spectator as s/he individually experiences and comprehends the text. All of these elements contribute to the overall phantasmagoric feel of Chaos and Serreau’s social commentary.

In response to Sylvie Thomas’ question concerning the rather ambiguous nature of Serreau’s relation to French and international politics and her refusal to express her political ideologies through direct public engagements like 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).

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)

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In other words, the goal of Serreau’s (verbal and visual) art is to make allusion to the social injustices through vivid representation of society’s contradictions 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 in their respective societies.

Serreau, like the other women in this project, uses the home 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’s, 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 prostitution) 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 and family role as represented in bourgeois gender discourses (Paul and Hélène’s apartment), that draw

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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 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.” 29

As already described, the film opens on 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 pans that follow the characters 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 extradiegetic 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 next scene of Paul and Hélène

driving down the street and then dramatically ends as Noémie/Malika, running towards

them and away from her attackers, screams for help. It then begins again as Serreau

intersperses shots of Hélène and Paul driving through the automatic car wash, following

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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 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 – to reflect both the chaotic tone as well as the comedy underlining 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 extradiegetic jazzy score during Noémie/Malika’s cardiac arrest scene (that Hélène witnesses) in the hospital upon Hélène’s first visit to

Noémie/Malika. This re-use of this jazzy musical score, in a very different context, draws an interesting comparison between the two scenes and raises one of Serreau’s social critiques.

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 for others

that she finds in contemporary mainstream French middle-class society and which she

subversively strives to bring to the surface in Chaos .

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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 replies 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 any more. What Vincent does at the beginning is all too typical – he just cleans her blood of 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 us from going on. What I’m showing in this movie is one person who can’t go on in the old way. She’s stopped in her tracks. And right beside Hélène is Paul, who’s oblivious. We see his blindness through her eyes. And that’s where the comedy comes in. It’s also tragedy. Because we’re all doing what Vincent does.

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 in “indieWIRE” to comment on her arrival in Chaos at a “genre- bending mix of comedy, social criticism, and thriller,” Serreau replies, “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 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 – not necessarily in order to inquire after her

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state 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 this 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.” The music then begins, and we are presented with a series of close-up shots of Paul’s hands attempting to iron his suit, her 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 , and the slap-stick-type comedy certainly functions on the same social commentary level in these 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 are still initially 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

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to Ernaux’s and de Beauvoir’s women who are forced to deal with the reality their men render them and who face (largely due to financial dependency on their male partners) fewer options or possibilities. 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) reeking 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 portraits 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, etc. 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 Denardaud), 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

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Hélène.) The second exception occurs at the very end of the film when Hélène,

Noémie/Malika, Zora, and Mamie are sitting on a bench (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 extradiegetic 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 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 are portrayed in ways very stereotypical of beur families in mainstream French society’s perspective (i.e., 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.”)

Additionally, the prostitution ring recruiting, training, and managing Noémie/Malika among other women appear to have eastern European names and physical features and thus do not escape the life of criminality that seems, per mainstream French society, so readily available to immigrants.

Moreover, I believe Serreau succeeds in reconciling or mitigating these controversial stereotypes through her portrayal of every character, excluding the primary

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female characters, 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 and classical), realistic sound, and silence not only works to develop the various portraits of domestic representation depicted in the film, but it often also underlines the comedy as well as helps underscore Serreau’s social commentary.

Concerning the second exception to Serreau’s cinematic sound formula employed in her representations of domestic spaces, the use of the extradiegetic 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 explains that:

…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, she concludes that music becomes “part of

[the] embodied experience of housework as [individuals often dance] while they dust or

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burst into step as they clean the kitchen surfaces” (2004: 69). For Pink, dancing during housework at home manifests “a private and uninhabited act that [individuals] would have felt embarrassed to be caught doing…yet [such 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 home and by her assumption 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 following notion of a domestic soundscape is more fitting 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 soudscapes 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

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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 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 this 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.

Although diegetic music does not play a large role in Chaos , both the

extradiegetic jazzy and classical musical scores figure largely into the ways the spectator

comprehends and engages with the representations of domestic space. We have already

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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” 30 hallmark of Serreau’s cinematographic style.

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.

Thus, the jazzy musical score (with its fast pace and 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 traditional patriarchal values and upholds traditional expectations of gender performances leads to “inauthentic” existences for both men and women and a dehabilitating 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.

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 the three generations of women (Hélène,

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Noémie/Malika, Zora, and Mamie) bask in the warm colors of the setting sun and stare out to sea. This impression more 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 ideal 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 front, 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

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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 way been abandoned and betrayed by the men, as well as the women, in 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. 31

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 former beur 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, 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 dissertation’s discussion of contemporary female artists who strive to present multiple portraits of multiplicitous female gender constructions and 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

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pitfalls of societies’ contradictions and paradoxes. It remains both Amari’s and Serreau’s wish that the spectator or reader will then work to create new social discourses and collaborative spaces of female representation in which multiple female voices may speak in unison. As we shall see in the following chapter, this wish proves very dear to the aims of Leïla Sebbar and Yamina Benguigui in their work as well.

1 See Abdelkrim Gabous, Silence, Elles tournent ! (Tunis: Cérès Editions, 1998) 184. 2 See Gabous 12. 3 It is unclear in my secondary criticism who fulfilled these cosmetic-oriented positions during foreign shoots. 4 See Kenneth J. Perkins, Tunisia: Crossroads of the Islamic and European Worlds (Bolder: Westview Press, 1986). 5 See Rafika Merini, “A Socio-Literary Perspective of Women in the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia,” The Arab-African and Islamic Worlds: interdisciplinary studies . Eds R. Kevin Lacey and Ralph M. Coury (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). 6 See Paula Holmes-Eber, Daughters of Tunis: women, family, and networks in a Muslim city (Boulder: Westview Press, 2003). 7 See Martin Stollery, “Masculinities, Generations, and Cultural Transformation in Contemporary Tunisian Cinema,” Screen 42.1 (2001) 49-63. 8 See Stollery 50. 9 See Valentine Moghadam, Modernizing Women: gender and social change in the Middle East (Boulder: Rienner, 2003). 10 See Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Paradoxes of Masculinity, Some Thoughts on Segregated Societies,” Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies Eds. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (New York: Routledge, 1994) 212. 11 See Hind Rassam Culhane, East/West and Ambiguous State of Being: the construction and representation of Egyptian cultural identity in Egyptian film (New York: Peter Lang, 1995) 33. 12 See Culhane 39. 13 See Culhane 42. 14 Salaani, Hela. Personal interview. 1 February 2005. 15 Wickipedia . 21 February 2006. Samia Gamal. 23 April 2006. . 16 A Ride on My Magic Carpet . Jasmin Jahal. December 1999. 23 April 2006. . 17 See Satin rouge , bonus features, dir. Raja Amari, Zeitgeist Films, 2003. 18 See Sarah Pink, Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects, and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2004) 13. 19 See Pink 41. 20 See Pink 42. 21 See Pink 70. 22 See Pink 53. 23 Salaani 2005. 24 See “‘Coline Serreau: la force des convictions et le plaisir du spectacle’,” Jeune Cinéma 110. 1-7 (April- May 1978). 25 See Brigitte Rollet, Coline Serreau (Manchester: Manchester Univ Press, 1998). 26 See Rollet 4. 27 See Sylvie Thomas, “Coline Serreau: ‘Je ne connais pas d’autre moyen efficace de parler à mes contemporains que de les faire rire,” L’Avant-scène du cinéma 468. 1-3 (January 1998).

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28 See Rollet 75. 29 See indieWIRE: People . Erica Abeel. “Fast-Paced Feminism: Coline Serreau Talks about ‘Chaos’”. 24 April 2006 < http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_030130serreau.html>. 30 See indieWIRE: People. 31 See The Village Voice . Leslie Camhi. “Mother Load Evolution Girl Style.” 29 January 2003. Village Voice Media, Inc. 24 April 2006 < http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0305,camhi,41466,20.html>.

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CHAPTER 4

BREAKING FROM TRADITION: (RE)PRESENTING FEMALE ICONOGRAPHY AT HOME WITH LEILA SEBBAR AND YAMINA BENGUIGUI

This chapter will pick up where the previous chapter has left us, with a discussion of representations of “ethnic Othered” French femininity and portraits of marginal domestic space and households in France. 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 hybrid. 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. They 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.

Borders (whether geographical, linguistic, ideological, socio-economic, or gender) and the physical action or metaphorical notion of border-crossing (and their

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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; 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 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 the 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 reappropriating 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

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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: 6). 3

Central to the work of transnational women artists and the scholars studying their texts are the questions surrounding social, political, 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 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. 4

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 the sense of

unbelonging, which is said to delineate:

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…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. 5 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.

Born in Aflou, Algeria, to two French language teachers – an Algerian father

(“républicain musulman laïque”) and a French mother (“républicaine catholique laïque”)

– 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). 6

He asserts that Sebbar “n’est pas une intellectuelle d’Algérie en exil mais une écrivaine

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française au nom arabe, algérien, qui porte le poids de la terre natale” (2003: 15). She currently lives, teaches, and writes in Paris but does not fluently speak Arabic. Soheila

Kian presents a helpful biographical overview of Sebbar and heuristic description of her work. 7 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 néo-orientalisme d’un côté, et la production d’une diversité culturelle et d’une société postmoderne d’un autre. (2004: 128)

For Sebbar and scholars working on her texts, these biographical factors and writing perspectives contribute to the recognition of her cultural bivalence and of the position that her two cultures (French and Algerian) mark in her conceptions of self.

Sebbar writes:

…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 mère chrétienne ; mon père citadin d’une ville maritime, ma mère terrienne de l’intérieur de la 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. 8

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. 9 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).

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:

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…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)

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

[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. 10

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)

In relation to Sebbar’s fiction and its textualized characteristic of permeable cultural borders, the most frequently analyzed self-proclaimed notion that many scholars employ as a point of departure in their criticism is her citation that “je suis une croisée.” 11

As LaRonde explains, this citation is taken up most often in an effort to characterize her work on the whole (2003: 19). At first blush, this notion of “croisement” 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

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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, identity, 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. 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. For Sebbar and other artists of transnational creative

works, the first-generation postcolonial subject of “nous” (whether directly stated in or

indirectly implied by the text) is replaced by the subject of “je” 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). For LaRonde, Sebbar’s textual “croisement” primarily surfaces

in the diverse and multiple “cultural roots” of her narratives’ characters. LaRonde finds

that these 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. 12

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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 intertexuality in her corpus of work; and second, it calls for the comparing of her “croisements” to the textual intersections established within the literary mode of magical realism. 13

Many scholars either directly or indirectly second LaRonde’s idea of a

“glissement perceptible” (or an apparent evolution) in Sebbar’s texts through examining

her recursive (yet diverging) inclusions of French, Maghrébin, and “beur” cultural

practices and her characters’ 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

for 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.

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 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 is in their aims to seize the paradox of the

union of opposites. 14 In other words, both magical realist authors and Leïla Sebbar

challenge polar opposites, present conflicting perspectives that fuse the real and the

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fantastic, and mesh dominant and marginal world views in their writings. Moreover, both literary styles primarily feature a framework of cultural hybridity or plurality of cultures and pose questions surrounding the post-colonial context as represented in contemporary socio-political-economic terms.

However, the notion of the supernatural is not as palpable to the same degree in

Sebbar’s writing 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.

Edward Said defines this academic tradition as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western Experience.” 15

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 it deepest

and most recurring images of the Other” (1979:1). In the most basic definition,

Orientalism is the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages and

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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, 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 a biological inferior— culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging—who is portrayed in dominated and sexual terms. 16 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.

The problematics of power informing 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. 17 Many scholars underline 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). In other words, by neglecting factors of gender in his account and not

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considering the portrayal and discourses of women (“Oriental” or European) as other than the odalisque or houri or European, middle-class and male, 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 scholars working on visual and written representations of

Arab cultures in the arts, traditional Orientalism must decolonize itself from its

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 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). 18

In some ways, Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France: Carnet de voyages may be read as a woman’s travelogue of her encounters with Algeria, its culture, its peoples, its

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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 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 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.

Sebbar serves as an effective example of the uselessness of traditional “Oriental” categorizations that freeze the (male or female) Other in static, monolithic representation.

Thanks to her “croisement,” she escapes through subversion essentially all traditional discourses of “otherness”—in so far as she inhabits real and virtual spaces both within and outside the “Orient” and the “Occident” and within dominant and marginal cultures.

She strives to bring these tensions 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

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project “le côté fantatique et dogmatique de sa culture d’origine” (2004: 129). 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 Moyen-Orient 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)

Upon 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.

Sebbar adopts three tropes in her writing that create real and virtual narrative

spaces for reflection (both cognitive and visual). These three tropes give rise to her

transnational literary approach. Firstly, 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.19 Secondly, Sebbar uses mimicry,

which one may define as a hybrid stance of identification and distance. 20 And thirdly,

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.

Michael O’Riley asserts that the motif of haunting and spectrality is especially

relevant to contemporary notions of postcolonial and Franco-Algerian cultural relations

because “the invisible yet perceived persistence of a colonial past and desire linked to

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orientalist practice continues to condition both postcolonial and Franco-Algerian relations 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 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). O’Riley along with many other postcolonial theorists and artists are contemplating whether the practice of returning to or including orientalist sites of memory and inscriptions of representation are (granted unwillingly) recuperating Orientalism’s original hold on European views of

Arab cultures. For example, they have returned to Alloula’s study of the European postcards featuring sexualized and/or exaggerated folkloric representations of Algerian women or 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

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perpetuate “the spectral dynamics of colonialism” (O’Riley, 2001: 49). Or, in other words, scholars question the danger of recuperating hegemonic, colonial misconceptions, myths, and discourses even in postcolonial texts purporting to challenge these vestiges of

Orientalism.

Insofar as reconstructing European engendered practices of viewing “the”

Algerian woman, Djebar responds to this theoretical concern 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 reappropriated 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)

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 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 Sebbar’s Shérazade triology, 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. 21 Anne Donadey reads the trope

of mimicry as a repetition of Orientalist discourse with a difference. 22 Mimicry as repetition with a difference espouses the notion of a mimicry that “deconstructs the

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hierarchy between master and slave, colonizer and colonized, native-born and newcomer”

(Stranges, 2003: 81) and surfaces in Sebbar’s texts when Franco-Maghrebian characters complicitly mimic the exotic clichés of Orientalism all the while (through their French citizenship and partenance 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 of Self and Other, in other words, as hybridity” (2003: 82).

Thus, this recasting of otherness as sameness in all of Sebbar’s work (only seemingly possible from the margins by a community of marginal subjects or “othered” individual subjectivity displaying both “Arabness” and “Frenchness”) differs from traditional Orientalist 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) and a revisionist history of post/colonial representation must recognize the common French-Algerian (already hybridic) ground of intertwining cultures, histories, and destinies. 23 Stranges asserts that:

On a collective level, re-membering 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 texts written and published in the 1990s, LaRonde traces a dialectic 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. 24 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 (and Sebbar’s work), the dialectics of exile and nomadism 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).

Maya Larguet sheds a positive light on the tropes or dialectics of exile and nomadism. She finds that :

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…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. 25

This is to say that exile, displacement, and nomadism are not necessarily “dead ends” in the incessant debates over national and personal identity nor are they locked into fixed, monolithic dichotomies of the country of origin and the country of residence (or destination). Rather, these tropes in “beur” and Sebbar’s writing serve “[to forge] links between the unbounded, 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 the project’s particular examinations of female representations, however, one must push Sebbar’s tropes (and their functions or benefits) beyond the responses to what it means to be “French” in order to question specifically what it means to be a “French woman.”

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” (2000: 1). 26 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. 27

Feminist scholars work to underline these women’s (albeit sometimes limited or

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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…[and] young women are often forgotten, [with] the only 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 integratation 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 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 other postcolonial 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).

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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 ” 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. 28 This also added important additional questions and debates to the 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) African women posed different questions 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; e.g., as biological

reproducers of ethnic community, reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic or national

groups, key actors in transmission of community’s values, markers of ethnic or national

distinctiveness, and active participants in national struggles. 29 Yet paradoxically in the other extreme, Freedman and Tarr find that political representations of immigrants have tended:

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…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)

The extreme right’s political representations of women of immigrant origin have falsely exploited women’s role 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. 30 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 principle responsibility lies in the essential transmission of (French) community values and those 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 minority population and to see to it that [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 within France and ensuring that these boundaries are made permeable to

French culture” (Freedman and Tarr, 2000: 15.) This question of integration – along with

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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).

In this “autobiographical,” “traveloguesque” collection of tales, fictional narratives, testimonies, interviews, portraits, reports, photographs, drawings, sketches, orange wrappers, watercolors, comic strips, 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; i.e., 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 impressions of traveling abroad in the mind of the reader. 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], pied-noire), ne s’était pas arrêtée dans la France, Paris et ses provinces, Nord/Sud, Est-Ouest, je ne

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voyagerais pas comme je le fais depuis 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. 31

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 Sebbar, “vivre dans la langue, dans cette

familiarité,” all the while discovering the country and its landscape, describes her ideal

travel experience. 32 She finds this experience time and time again while traveling throughout France and takes extensive notes of her experiences, encounters, new information gleaned, and memories recalled.

She describes the 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. 33

This hybridic 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 hybridic 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. 34

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She 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). 35 Sebbar works to deliver in this text, “[son] roman réel et imaginaire, d’Occident en Orient, d’Orient en Occident.” 36 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 n’est jamais pour fixer une histoire dans un passé mais pour lui construire un avenir. Et par ses livres, bâtir des ponts. 37

In Mes Algéries en France and everywhere else in her work, Sebbar engages the cultural component that interests her the most – the study of the dynamics between past and present, particularly in so far as Franco-Maghrebin 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-Maghrebin 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

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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 the Self and Other. 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 in so far 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 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 (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)

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This citation, which is both positive and negative, simultaneously troubles and reassures.

On one hand, this march and demonstration create a medium for subaltern 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 definitely 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” 38

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), and hybidity , or “mixité” (Il est nécessaire

d’effacer les frontières qui séparent les deux sexes pour instaurer le respect ), as

necessary instruments leading to social equality in France. 39 They are calling for

governmental intervention on behalf of the (particularly female) citizens of the banlieues for amelioration to the sub-sub-standard existence they are forced to live and from which they have few chances of escape on their own.

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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 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,” paves the way for a trope of

(subversive) mimicry in Mes Algéries en France . The first effect of this closing

statement is to recuperate (almost shockingly) mainstream French and extreme rightwing

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 intent to unsettle his or her reading experience

and understanding of his or her place in 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 Maghrebian 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.

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Her “ Mariannes métisses’ ” recasting their otherness as sameness (their displaying both “Arabness” and “Frenchness”) subverts in a transnational manner the exclusivist and demarcating intentions that traditional Orientalism sought in reifying Self-Other dichotomies. By inviting the reader to question his or 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 and subvert the images and meanings inherited from the ancient and recent pasts. This destabilization opens up new hybrid spaces for multiple discourses of and challenges to what it means to be républicain . This subversion 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

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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 this division to her “soeurs étrangères” (women storytellers, Algerian women “regrouped” with their husband 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 service came to be well-loved, respected, and appreciated by the peoples 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 differing parameters (gender, language, ideology, belief systems, (non)conventional behavior, and marginality) intersect with identity and can subvert 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 fantasies or side-effect aftermath feelings,

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which haunt the 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 Ecole 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 or headscarf, a yellowish-

green pearl necklace, and a white toga-like looking 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 towards the end of France’s colonial rule in Algeria. Opposite from

Garanger’s black-and-white “Femme algérienne” photograph, we find Djamel Farès’

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“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 (assumingly) family members and 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, renouncement, and liberation. This “roman familial” becomes a forum for the voicing of the mother’s and daughters’ 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 Hamak) of a young woman (dressed in all black European attire with no headscarf) sitting on her bed in her bedroom. Sonia is positioned in the right-hand side, slightly lower corner of the frame.

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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

(Maghrebian 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.”

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, “Alger – École indigène – Groupe de jeunes mauresques.” The lower photograph depicts groups of (presumably) men and boys

(wearing traditional dress and turbans) huddled in small masses around heaps of fabric piled on the ground. The caption reads, “Algérie – Marchande de Lain.”

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

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and poet), Tounes Brahimi (civil militant in Alger), Danièle 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 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 serious- looking 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. 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 Alger 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 or position that they do. Upon multiple readings of these texts and images, it appears now that there is a sort of theoretical progression and recursive linkage

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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 nineteenth-century 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 engage Sebbar’s study of the dynamics of past and

present. The “realness” of the Marianne métisse reflects the present dynamics of a multi-

cultural and multi-ethnic French society or nation on 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.

On one hand, 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 representation of female other in postcolonial studies.

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But, on the other hand, 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 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.

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 later, 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

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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 are at least coded photographically as such, Sebbar ensures that these boundaries are permeable within

“French” culture.

Not just in Algériennes but as 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.

As this chapter has shown, the fundamental dilemma shaping Sebbar’s body of

work and framing transnational literature of France in general is the disconnect between

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marginal multi-ethnic 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. 40 Yet as the riots of November 2005 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 multi-

ethnic 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 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 .

Carrie Tarr understands these two cinematic genres as permeable and

overlapping. She finds that they both: have a common concern with the place and

identity of the marginal and excluded in French society, 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

engender a representation of ethnicity linked to questions of gender and authorship

through the comparison of male and female, white and beur-authored films. 41 For Tarr, these two cinematic genres may be understood as two related phenomena in the history of

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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 fill 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 make-shift 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 self-representation, which many film scholars read as

“symptomatic of their need for self-affirmation as both social and artistic subjects” (Tarr,

2005: 11). Most postcolonial film scholars conclude that these genres of filmmaking 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. 42

For many postcolonial film scholars and directors, the textual operations of such a

cinema raise a number of questions largely concerning: ethnicity and identity in the

context of Republican preferences for universalist and monocultural ideologies of

Frenchness, the forming of cinematic spaces for “othered” subjectivities and agencies,

and the extent to which these films challenge dominant perceptions of ethnic difference

and stereotypes. Questions also surround these films’ abilities to produce counter-

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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.

What one finds in all of these films is a certain in-betweeness. For Tarr and this project, this in-betweeness becomes a question of whether their marginalization “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 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 these films 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. 43 These films turned French cinema into “a site of struggle for constructions of French national identity based on the realities of

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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 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 the1990s 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 independent-minded 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 explore] 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,

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their films (in which they choose to center on realistic representations of young French women of Maghrebi immigrant origin) need to situate themselves in relation to

Republican discourses on assimilation as the route to integration, and to orientalist discourses, islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. 44 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 Ghorab-Volta’s

films in our following discussion of Yamina Benguigui’s work. But, it is important to

underline Tarr’s assertion 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).

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 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

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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 explains, “…by reclaiming these histories, the beurs are challenging dominant French histories of the nation and working towards a valorization of their own place within a multicultural France” (2005: 17). These directors are able to move out of the (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). One may read many of these third-wave transnational films as “protests

against intolerance and bids for inclusion within a multi-ethnic multicultural society”

(Tarr, 2005: 17). To this list, one may also add a multiregional society. However, for at

least one contemporary filmmaker, Yamina 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 (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 (Fejria Deliba) arrival in France and learning of another

Algerian family in the area, homesick Zouina and the three children spend the next three

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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 whose husband (a French soldier) was killed in

Algeria during the war for independence and who agrees to help Zouina find 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 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 (i.e., as next-door neighbors, at the grocery store, vicariously through radio programs, in door-to-door sale visits, on buses, on Sunday outings, etc.) The most poignant relationship in question in this film surfaces in

Benguigui’s representations of the Self-Other relationship—whether this relationship manifests itself as male/female, female/female, young/elder, traditional/modern,

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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 (at least a remedy to the outwardly violence of this divide) by presenting a doubly marginalized protagonist who speaks up and begins to assert (softly yet assuredly) her desires (i.e., 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 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). 45

Inch’Allah dimanche is an emotional cinematographic work that mixes “comédie”

and “gravité” (Alion, 2001: 136). Benguigui explains 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). For Benguigui,

this cinematic Italian comedy model that she wishes to follow makes one both cry and

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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). In following this model in Inch’Allah dimanche , Benguigui expresses that:

Pour moi, il est capital que nous puissions poser un 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).

Benguigui adopts a very pragmatic, down-to-earth, or no non-sense point of view

(inspired by the Italian comic genre) in Inch’Allah dimanche . 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

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; e.g., 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 cinema and television documentary

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work, of which Mémoirs d’ immigrés (1997) remains the most discussed and analyzed in

secondary criticism in North America. 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 internationaux et sont aujourd’hui étudiés en section cinéma et sociologie dans de nombreuses universités. 46

In examining Benguigui’s work, scholars (in particular in relation to Mémoirs

d’immigrés ) have outlined three general tropes: the right to existence, a heritage of pain,

grief, and sorrow, and the notion of integration in progress. 47

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 ) as well as challenges these qualities by allowing the documented individuals to speak freely and publicly in in/direct 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; e.g. narratives of humiliation, of culpability for having accepted dehumanizing conditions, of suffering

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from exile and diaspora, and of disenchanted hope and love for France. In these cinematic instances, Benguigui’s camera “leur redonne leur dignité car elle leur permet de dire [de manifester] la douleur qu’ils ont toujours tue [couverte].” 48 These narratives

of pain, grief, and sorrow also surface in 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.

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. 49

In her “écriture cinématographique,” Benguigui organizes both her fictional as well as

documentary texts around a system of 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. 50 Thus, Benguigui theorizes that one “commence aussi à exister quand on

voit des images de soi.” 51 Therefore, in her explanation of why she makes the kinds of

films that she does, Benguigui says:

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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, pas même dans le hors champ. 52

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” and of which the mentality one has not succeeded in changing, especially in the

French professional world of enterprise and business. 53

According to Benguigui, “la culture ouvre la parole,” and she sees the cinema as

capital in this relationship because “l’image est déterminante dans le rapport

intercultural.” 54 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

(Marie-France 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. In other words, 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

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multiple dimensions of the problems and difficulties of the various women of these communities and also those 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 neither identical nor universal across

French society in the same degree. Yet they do provide common points of connection, which may (subversively) tap into the French Republican 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 explains that after making Mémoirs d’immigrés , she wanted to make a

film featuring a heroine and 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)

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

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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 explains, “le fossé culturel semblait par ailleurs infranchissable” (Alion, 2001: 136).

Benguigui instructs 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 middle-class) 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). 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)

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:

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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 Benguigui (and especially as represented in Inch’Allah dimanche ,) the essential is bound to the emotional.

The opening scene of Inch’Allah dimanche , in which Zouina, her children and her mother-in-law, board the 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, 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 to whom 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

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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 Zouina’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, rough from manual labor, 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

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close-up one and medium one shots. Yet Benguigui often paradoxically counters her agency throughout 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 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

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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 hybrid 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 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

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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 “Maman.” 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 serious of shot-reverse shots, we see 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 close-up 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 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. 55 She concludes that the Maghrebi family in France operates within a

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basic circle of social organization that differs profoundly in Maghrebi and French cultures.

She 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. 56 In opposition to this framework, Lacoste-Dujardin 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. 57

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 explains 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

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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. 58

As we see in Lacoste-Dujardin’s research as well as in 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 culture(s) of residency appears highly incompatible. Lacoste-Dujardin explains that “Daughters of Maghrebi immigrants in

France almost unanimously reject the position of women in Maghrebi societies” (2000:

61). 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) was (is) necessary to comply with

Arab rules of decency. 59

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 multi-maternal 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. 60

Within these communities, this strict division of roles functions not only to ensure

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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. 61

Scholars describe the Maghrebi hierarchic family structuring 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. (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, are comforted by a close relationship with their

mothers, and are strengthened by their communal masculine identity. 62

In opposition to the son’s privileged position within the family, the daughter’s disadvantaged position stands in sharp contrast. Lacost-Dujardin asserts that within

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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.63 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. (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 Algerian-born mother immigrating to France. However, in comparing Zouina to Aïcha and (ultra traditional)

Malika, the patrilinear mother-in-law and figurehead for the first generation of North

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African immigrants to France, Zouina’s character coding as second generation becomes quite clear through her desire to converse with Mlle Briat and relative facility with the

French language, her courage in undertaking her Sunday escapes, and her interest in

French consumerism and radio game shows and love or sexual advice programs. Yet, until the final sequence of the film in which Ahmed forbids his mother to say any more negative things about or towards 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 familial 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 middleground 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 onto Zouina. In a reverse shot from Zouina’s assumed gaze, Benguigui focuses on the bags, boxes, and suitcases that occupy the

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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 the 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-edification (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 self-indulgence (her enjoyment from listening to the radio programs and experimenting with the cosmetics given to her by Mlle Briat) 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 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 matrilinear heritage) in this work. Throughout the film, she often films

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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 position between the first and second generations,

Inch’Allah dimanche is a film narrated through a hybrid optic that mixes adults’ and children’s point of views and perspectives on the various daily life immigration and integration issues at hand.

This 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’ time frame to comment on the very contemporary position of women of immigrant origin in France and their feminine condition. Benguigui shares 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, she 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 and paradoxical discourses as both “bearers of tradition” and “agents of modernity.” For Benguigui, as well for all of the other women artists in this project, it is only through acknowledging and examining contradiction and paradox that one may arrive at ameliorated social (re)construction.

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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 hybrid optic 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 as well as the lines that exist between them.

From the very pragmatic, down-to-earth, or no non-sense point of view adopted in the Italian comedic genre that has influenced Benguigui’s cinema 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, resulting 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 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,

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heterogeneous, or hybrid social consensus of what it means to be “French” 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 hybrid female speaking subjects that challenge, appropriate, and revise hegemonic forms of gender representations and conventional modes of first-person narrative storytelling.

1 See Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Third World Women’s Cinema: If the Subaltern speaks, will we listen?,” Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film , eds. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose (New York: Garland, 1997) 214. 2 See Anissa Talahite, “Identity as ‘Secret de Guerre’: Rewriting Ethnicity and Culture in ‘Beur’ Literature,” Cultures transnationales de France . ed. Hafid Gafaïti (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001) 59. 3 See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994). 4 See Hafid Gafaïti, “Cultures et transnationalité,” Cultures transnationales de France . ed. Hafid Gafaïti (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001) 9-26. 5 See Talahite 68-69. 6 See Michel LaRonde, Leïla Sebbar (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). 7 See Soheila Kian, “Une entrevue avec Leïla Sebbar, l’écriture et l’altérité,” French Review 78.1 (October 2004) 128-36. 8 See Nancy Huston and Leïla Sebbar, Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l’exil (Paris: Barrault, 1986) 185. 9 “””(6) 10 See Huston and Sebbar 126. 11 See LaRonde 19. 12 See LaRonde 19. 13 See LaRonde 20. 14 See Magical Realism . Ed. Deepika Bahri. English Department, Emory U. 24 March 2006. . 15 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 1. 16 See Orientalism . Ed. Deepika Bahri. English Department, Emory U. 24 March 2006. . 17 See Valerie Kenedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) 6. 18 See Mary Roberts, “Contested Terrains: Women Orientalist,” Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, architecture, photography (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002) 179-204. 19 See Michael O’Riley, “Specters of Orientalism in France, Algeria, and Postcolonial Studies” Mosaic 34 (2001) 48. 20 See Peter Stranges, “Mimicry, Mixed Couples, and Odalisques : A Hybrid Re-membering of the French Republic” Esprit créateur 43.1 (2003) 81. 21 See Stranges 81. 22 See Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth, Heinemann, 2001) 103. 23 See Stranges 89. 24 See Michel LaRonde, Autour des écrivains maghrébins (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993) 22.

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25 See [mémoire] Leïla Sebbar . Ed. Maya Larguet. 28 April 2005. Altérités – Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. 25 April 2006. < http://www.alterites.com/cache/center_portrait/id_1047.php>. 26 See Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr, Women, Immigration and Identities in France (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 27 See Freedman and Tarr 1. 28 See Freedman and Tarr 1. 29 See Freedman and Tarr 14. 30 See Freedman and Tarr 14. 31 See Harfung, “3 questions” à Leïla Sebbar . Eds. Carole Netter and Anne-Marie Obajtek-Kirkwood. May 2004. ClicNet. 25 April 2006. . 32 See Harfung, “3 questions” à Leïla Sebbar . 33 See Harfung, “3 questions” à Leïla Sebbar . 34 See Harfung, “3 questions” à Leïla Sebbar . 35 See Harfung, “3 questions” à Leïla Sebbar . 36 See Harfung, “3 questions” à Leïla Sebbar . 37 See [mémoire] Leïla Sebbar . 38 See Ni putes ni soumises . 25 April 2006. . 39 See Ni putes ni soumises . 40 See Carrie Tarr, Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmkaing in France (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2005). 41 See Tarr 3. 42 See Tarr 13. 43 See Tarr 16. 44 See Tarr 87. 45 See Yves Alion, “Inch-Allah Dimanche’; Entretien avec Yamina Benguigui,” L’Avant-scène 506 (2001) 136-38. 46 See Africultures . Le cite et la revue de référence des cultures africaines. 24 March 2006. . 47 See Mémoirs d’immigrés . Ed. Anne Henriot. 2 October 2002. Télédoc. 24 April 2006. . 48 See Mémoires d’immigrés . Ed. Olivier Barlet. 24 March 2006. . 49 See Mémoirs d’immigrés , Barlet. 50 See Yaminina Benguigui: La culture ouvre la parole. Ed. Fabian Lemercier. Euromedcafé. 24 April 2006. . 51 See Yaminina Benguigui: La culture ouvre la parole. 52 See Yaminina Benguigui: La culture ouvre la parole. 53 See Yaminina Benguigui: La culture ouvre la parole. 54 See Yaminina Benguigui: La culture ouvre la parole. 55 See Camille Lacoste-Dujardin, “Maghrebi Families in France,” Women, Immigration and Identities in France eds. Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr (Oxford: Berg, 2000) 59. 56 See Lacoste-Dujardin 60. 57 See Lacoste-Dujardin 60. 58 See Lacoste-Dujardin 61. 59 See Lacoste-Dujardin 62. 60 See Lacoste-Dujardin 62. 61 See Lacoste-Dujardin 62. 62 See Lacoste-Dujardin 63. 63 See Lacoste-Dujardin 63.

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CONCLUSION

In concluding this dissertation, I hope that the reader leave this reading experience with the desire to reconsider contemporary French-language women artists’ texts and discourses through a postcolonial lens of destabilization. Through this lens, this dissertation has 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. The chapters of this dissertation, by focusing on the celebration of the in-between spaces of expression and representation in the included primary texts, have demonstrated the diverse and multiple cultural roots (or hybridity) of both the “center” (or hegemonic) and the “margin” (or subaltern) in contemporary

French-language women’s writing and filmmaking.

While much critical attention has been paid in postcolonial, comparative, and women’s studies to Assia Djebar’s hybridic literary output that destabilizes Historical accounts of Algeria’s past and colonial myths, her theoretical reflections lack serious critical engagement and commentary. It is my hope that this dissertation works to help counteract this lack. In using several key theoretical reflections (i.e., the disconnect between H/history, the speaking maternal subject, orality, interlanguages, and tradition)

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as fundamental points of theoretical departure in this dissertation, I would like the reader to recognize Djebar as a feminist, literary, and film theorist.

It is my double hope that the reader will accept the assertion that Djebar’s theoretical reflections and their applicability to both so-called “postcolonial” and so- called “métropol” works may constitute an avenue of operation in breaking through the

French/ Francophone divide that is so prevalent in North American academia and secondary criticism in the United States. Through continuous critical undertakings of the issues surrounding transnationalism and globalization in French studies, this artificial classification of texts based on geography will eventually disappear. I see the work of

Assia Djebar, among the others discussed in this dissertation, as leading to this inevitable dissolution.

In the preceding chapters, 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. 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 dissertation 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.

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To this end, this is to say that this dissertation has demonstrated how one may position these multiple portraits of French, Tunisian, and Algerian female identities and domestic spaces at an intersection of a complex web of H/history, ethnicity, race, class, and gender relations. Additionally, these multiple portraits underline the challenges that contemporary French, Tunisian, and Algerian women face in their efforts to forge new and positive cross-cultural or transnational identities. As shown, whether in

“inauthentic” or (re)appropriated portraits, these challenges reflect women’s contradictory 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 concept of border- crossing, I have brought to light an array of political and cultural interconnections (as voiced by the protagonists) that require rethinking in relation to the socio-political- historical tensions in which these interconnections 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 and experienced 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 public literary and cinematic spaces and discourses as well as private (or domestic) ones. One area that I did not touch upon in this dissertation that would also shed light on French, Tunisian, or Algerian feminine conditions and experiences is contemporary French-language women’s theater.

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In France, the post-1968 period marked an interesting and important development for women’s dramaturgy of the twentieth century. 1 The decade that followed witnessed

the emergence of an unprecedented number of women dramatists and increased

production of their plays in France. Mirroring much French women’s writing and

filmmaking of the decade, French women’s post-1968 dramaturgy marked and set the

contemporary tone for “the appropriation of the theatre as a privileged space for the

exploration of the meanings of femininity in the patriarchal context, and the possibility of

new meanings” (Noonan: 2000, 223).

Above all other tenets and goals, contemporary French women’s dramaturgy

undertakes a profound restaging of the role and function of voice and of the auditory

relationship between the spectator and the stage. 2 Contemporary French women

dramatists explore “the stage’s potential for embodying the distressed source of the

woman’s voice” and develop “the spectator’s receptivity to a voice that gives expression

to a polyphonic disruption of narrative coherence” (Noonan: 2000, 234). This

undertaking echoes Djebar’s and the other women artists considered in this dissertation’s

understanding of voice and its polyphonic and polysemous primal performative function

in textual representation.

In relation to contemporary women’s writing and filmmaking of North Africa,

women’s dramaturgy of North Africa also shares roots in the practices of orality and oral

composer-performer traditions. 3 As we have already seen in relation to women’s writing and filmmaking, these oral roots also situate North African women’s dramaturgy within a context of performance and embrace the framing of the Maghrebian female body as a public body performing within a social context. 4 Laura Chakravarty Box proposes

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reflecting on the interplay (or intersections) of North African women’s dramaturgy along three elements. She suggests concentrating on:

…the image (what the spectator sees or wishes to see), the female body in theatrical space (who may be the object of the image, its creator, or both), and the literature, a ‘body of words’ created by women to stand for them in place of, or beside, their physical body. (2005: 2)

These three elements of image, female body, and literature (or dialogue or discourses) would compliment the approaches adopted in this dissertation’s preceding chapters.

These three elements echo the manner in which we have reflected on the interplay or intersections of contemporary French-language women’s writing and filmmaking of

France and North Africa.

Yet this dramatic interplay would also provide additional insight into the specific

artistic assertions contemporary French-language women artists have made vis-à-vis their

societies or cultures, as outlined in the preceding four chapters. For contemporary

French-language women writers, filmmakers, and dramatists, these assertions (or

reappropriations of discourses) develop within their body of words and images and

manifest “strategies of resistance to the pressures placed upon them as writers,

performers, and women by their societies” (Box: 2005, 2). These strategies of resistance,

most notably calqued within the trope of (visual, verbal, or corporeal) performance as

subversion in the primary texts examined in this dissertation as well as for North African

women’s dramaturgy in general, rest somewhere in-between the image and the word/ act

and between the artist/ performer and the audience.

Thus, once again, the in-betweeness of performance and discourse creates a hybrid artistic space of self/representation in which a performing female body (of any

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medium) may re-present a self that refuses the hegemonic “reality” in which her subjectivity has been trapped. In other words, I have sought to reveal how the performing literary and cinematic female body, thanks to the in-between spaces of conflicting and contradictory discourses, is paradoxically the sign for “female” and a refusal of that sign. 5 One may easily further develop this concept within the domain of

contemporary French-language women’s dramaturgy, in particular in the following plays.

First, one may consider Michèle Foucher’s 1976 play, La Table , in which she bases the piece on conversations she had with groups of working-class women in Alsace over a twelve-month period concerning the meaning of the table in their lives. Her aim in channeling their voices, silences, hesitations, embarrassments, and body language into a single monologue is to represent the ways in which women relate to food, to children, to men, and to work.

Second, one may consider Andrée Chedid’s 1984 play, Echec à la reine , which in nine “moves” or tableaux narrates the story of a queen (of an anonymous kingdom) who rules in her husband’s absence until she is persuaded by the court jester to allow him to play the role of King and rule until her son comes of age. In a manner similar to Djebar’s challenges to power relations and rewriting of history, myth, and legend, Chedid explores various attitudes towards power in this piece through her use of character stylization, poetic language, and mythic time. Like Djebar, Chedid’s use of mythological perspective enables her to frame history in the space of the imagination or “fiction,” which allows for the (re)appropriation of (female) discourse and representation.

And third, one may consider Denise Bonal’s 1984 play, Portrait de famille , a

“slice of life” family saga-dark comedy in which she paints a vivid and acerbic portrait of

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a working-class family’s daily miseries, which eventually lead to dramatic outbursts and ruptures. In this play, the mother, a housekeeper by profession, is abandoned by her husband and worn from a difficult life of labor and worries. She attempts to cope with the trials and tribulations of her three grown children, who all appear allergic to work.

Her elder son has just failed his fifth suicide attempt; her younger son, who was just released from prison, falls in love with a young Kabyle girl; and her embittered daughter has just learned that she is pregnant by her unemployed and scroungy lover.

The predominant themes in the work of many contemporary French-language women’s dramaturgy, including the three cited above, stem from the examination of the network of relationships and the individual interacting with family, social institutions, official institutions and the world at large as well as with the forces of time and space cutting across these relationships. 6 In echoing many of the subjects treated by contemporary French-language women writers and filmmakers, contemporary French- language women dramatists are also concerned with and foreground in their work many issues that belong primarily to women; i.e., domestic violence, sequestration, subjugation, illiteracy, bureaucratic paralysis, religious hypocrisy, and changes in the familial and social structures. 7 Thus, contemporary French-language women’s dramaturgy appears to

offer a natural extension to the discussions conducted in the chapters of this dissertation.

In conclusion, Box asserts, “Refusal of the sign [of ‘female’] makes a space for

renewal in the lives of performing bodies as they collectively re-create their history”

(2005: 6). The chapters of this dissertation have shown how the subversive refusal of the

hegemonic cultural sign of female not only makes a space for renewal or recreation of

female subjectivities from women’s perspectives, but also incites the next generation or

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wave of contemporary French-language hybrid women artists (and feminist and postcolonial literary, film, and theater scholars) to create new female subjectivities from their hybrid perspectives. Hence, one may create or locate these new female subjectivities in-between the representations of home, femininity, and domesticity as delineated in the primary texts included in this dissertation. Moreover, as all of the women artists mentioned in this dissertation demonstrate, one may also create new female subjectivities and articulate their discourses specifically through representations of the acts of homemaking [the traditional (female) activities of cleaning, cooking,

laundry, etc.] and making home [the creation of “private” (female) spaces of first-person expression in body, voice, and gaze.]

1 See Mary Noonan, “Voicing the feminine: French women playwrights of the twentieth century.” (Ed) Sonya Stephens. A History of Women’s Writing in France . (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) 223. 2 See Noonan 234. 3 See Laura Chakravarty Box, Strategies of Resistance in the Dramatic Texts of North African Women . (New York: Routledge, 2005) 2. 4 See Box 2. 5 For a discussion of the sign of female and refusal of this sign, see Box 6. 6 See Box 9. 7 See Box 9.

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