EXILE IN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING by Antonia Helen Wimbush A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Modern Languages School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music College of Arts and Law Graduate School University of Birmingham October 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis examines exile in contemporary autobiographical narratives written in French by women from across the Francophone world. The analysis focuses on work by Nina Bouraoui (Algeria), Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe), Véronique Tadjo (Côte d’Ivoire), and Kim Lefèvre (Vietnam), and investigates how the French colonial project has shaped female articulations of mobility and identity in the present. This comparative, cross-cultural, and cross- generational study engages with postcolonial theory, gender theory, and autobiographical theory in order to create a new framework with which to interpret women’s experiences and expressions of displacement across the Francosphere. The thesis posits that existing models of exile do not fully explain the complex situations of the four authors, who do not have a well-defined ‘home’ and ‘host’ country. Although marginalised by their gender, they are economically privileged and have chosen to live a rootless existence, which nonetheless renders them alienated and ‘out of place’. The thesis thus argues that women’s narratives of exile challenge and complicate existing paradigms of exile which have a male, patriarchal focus. By turning our attention to these women and their specific postcolonial gendered narratives, a more nuanced understanding of exile emerges: exile is experienced as a sexual, gendered, racial, and/or linguistic otherness. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank everyone who has supported me during the preparation of this thesis. I am especially grateful to my lead supervisor Dr Louise Hardwick for all her guidance, encouragement, patience, and advice over the past three years. I would also like to thank my co-supervisors, Dr Jean-Xavier Ridon and Professor Nicki Hitchcott, for their insightful comments and suggestions which have helped to shape the thesis. Colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham have offered assistance and friendship and have shown great interest in my work. I would like to thank the Society of Francophone Postcolonial Studies for providing me with a supportive network and giving me the opportunity to co-organise conferences and gain publishing experience. I am indebted to the AHRC-funded Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, not only for making the completion of this thesis possible but also for the additional funding which enabled me to undertake fieldwork in Martinique, present my work at the Australian Society for French Studies international conference in Adelaide, interview Véronique Tadjo, and participate in various research conferences and seminars across the UK. I am extremely grateful to my family and friends for their unfaltering love and support. CONTENTS Introduction Beyond Exile and the Limitations of Postcolonial Paradigms 1 in Francophone Women’s Writing Exile, Diaspora, and Cosmopolitanism: A Question of Terminology 11 Postcolonial Theories of Exile and Diaspora 26 Metaphorical Exile 34 Chapter One Exile, Autofiction, and Women’s Writing 47 Autobiography: An Identity Quest 56 Genre: Blurring the Boundaries 71 Conclusion 87 Chapter Two The Four Problems of Nina Bouraoui 89 Contextualising Bouraoui 93 The Trauma of Exile 102 Exile: A Liberating Condition? 114 Gendered and Sexual Exile 118 Linguistic Otherness: Arabic ‘me sépare des autres’ 128 (Garçon manqué, p. 12) Conclusion 133 Chapter Three Exile as a ‘Forced Choice’: War and Migration in Gisèle Pineau’s 135 L’Exil selon Julia Exile as a ‘Forced Choice’ 141 Conscription: ‘L’armée est leur credo’ (p. 12) 144 La Dissidence: Forced or Involuntary Exile? 149 African Adventures and French Flight 154 Military Wives 162 Racial Hostility as War: ‘La peau noire comme une salissure’ (p. 80) 178 Conclusion 184 Chapter Four Return as Exile in Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père 186 Exile and Culture Shock 193 Contact: ‘Un gouffre nous sépare’ (p. 11) 195 Disintegration and Reintegration 208 Autonomy and Independence 219 Conclusion 227 Chapter Five Exile, Métissage, and Family Estrangement in Kim Lefèvre’s 230 Autobiographical Narratives Contextualising Lefèvre: War, Exile, and Internal Displacement 236 Métissage: Cross-Cultural Encounters 243 Lefèvre as Counter-Model of Métissage: Métisse blanche 248 Exile and Family Estrangement in Retour à la saison des pluies 266 Return and Reconciliation: Métisse blanche and Retour à la saison des pluies 273 Conclusion 282 Conclusion 284 Appendix: Interviews with Véronique Tadjo 293 Email from Véronique Tadjo to Antonia Wimbush, 6 June 2016 293 Telephone Interview with Véronique Tadjo by Antonia Wimbush, 6 July 2016 295 Bibliography 302 INTRODUCTION BEYOND EXILE AND THE LIMITATIONS OF POSTCOLONIAL PARADIGMS IN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN’S WRITING This thesis explores the ambiguities and complexities of different models of exile and displacement developed by women writers in the postcolonial context. The focus is on autobiographical narratives published by selected Francophone1 women writers from four formerly colonised countries, and the analysis pays careful attention to the particularities which arise from the intersection of gender and migration. By examining a range of key works, the thesis tests and refines existing postcolonial definitions and theories of migration, with the aim of demonstrating that the experience of exile is not only a unique and complex 1 This thesis uses the term ‘Francophone’ to refer to authors writing in French from a range of locations across the French-speaking world. It shows awareness of the problems of this term which, while aiming to expand critical analysis to incorporate texts written from beyond metropolitan France, in fact becomes a divisive label which is often synonymous with ‘non-white’ authors. As Roger Little points out in ‘World Literature in French; or, Is Francophonie Frankly Phoney?’, European Review, 9.4 (2001), 421–36, the situation is particularly problematic in France’s overseas departments. He explains that these writers ‘politically, […] are French, but in literature they are Francophone’, adding that second-generation writers from the Maghreb who currently live in France do not belong to either category (p. 429). Little suggests the alternative term ‘Francographic literature’, borrowed from Jean-Claude Blachère, who invented the notion of ‘la Francographie’ in Négritures: les écrivains d’Afrique noire et la langue française (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1993), p. 8. This thesis retains ‘Francophone’, the accepted term in French postcolonial literary criticism, but is aware of its problematic colonial undertones. 1 mode of migration but also a constellation of knowledge which shifts depending on geographical position, social status, gender, age, and ethnicity. In so doing, the study offers a nuanced contextualisation of how the Francophone colonial past relates to the theme of displacement in the present. Furthermore, it questions how contemporary Francophone women writers writing between the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries live through and articulate their postcolonial experiences of displacement through the genre of autobiography. What does exile signify for a set of contemporary women authors from a geographically diverse cross-section of the Francophone world, who span the formerly colonised locations of Algeria, Guadeloupe, Côte d’Ivoire, and Vietnam? Taking into account the diverse historical, geographical, cultural, and linguistic2 specificities of each location, this study addresses questions of identity, nationality, and cross-cultural transmission in Le Jour du séisme (1999), Garçon manqué (2000), and Mes mauvaises pensées (2005) by Nina Bouraoui;3 L’Exil selon Julia (1996) by Gisèle Pineau;4 Loin de mon père (2010) by Véronique Tadjo;5 and Métisse blanche (1989) and Retour à la saison des pluies (1990) by 2 The French language has a different status in each location studied throughout this thesis. While French is no longer the official language in Algeria, it is widely used in business, administration, and education. In Côte d’Ivoire, French is the official language, although approximately sixty indigenous languages are spoken across the country. French is also the official language of Guadeloupe because it is administered as part of France. Vietnam is no longer really Francophone, as only 0.5 % of the population speak French as a first or second language, as Nadine Normand-Marconnet explains in ‘French Bilingual Classes in Vietnam: Issues and Debates about an Innovative Language Curriculum’, Language and Education, 27.6 (2013), 566–79 (p. 568). However, there has been a concerted effort in recent years to promote