Re-hybridizing

Transnational
Domesticity and
Femininity
 After the Empire:
The Francophone World and
Postcolonial France
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History’s Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature, by Seth
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Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War (1954–1962), by Jo

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Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures, by

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Frankétienne and Rewriting: A Work in Progress, by Rachel Douglas

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Re-hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity: Women’s

Contemporary Filmmaking and Lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia,
by Stacey Weber-Fève
 Re-hybridizing
Transnational
Domesticity and
Femininity
Women’s Contemporary
Filmmaking and Lifewriting in
France, Algeria, and Tunisia

STACEY WEBER-FÈVE

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Excerpts from The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, translation copyright © 1969 by
Collins Publishers, and G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of
Random House, Inc.

Annie Ernaux, excerpts from A Frozen Woman, translated by Linda Coverdale. Translation
copyright © 1995 by Seven Stories Press. Reprinted with the permission of Seven Stories Press,
www.sevenstories.com.

Excerpts in the first half of chapter 2 are reproduced from Annie Ernaux, La femme gelée, ©
Éditions Gallimard, 1981, all rights reserved.

Excerpts in the second half of chapter 2 are reproduced from Simone de Beauvoir,
La femme rompue, © Éditions Gallimard, 1967, all rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weber-Feve, Stacey, 1977–

Re-hybridizing transnational domesticity and femininity : women’s contemporary filmmaking and
lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia / Stacey Weber-Feve.
p. cm. — (After the empire: the francophone world and postcolonial France ; 12)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-3451-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3453-5 (ebook)
1. French literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. French literature—French-
speaking countries—History and criticism. 3. Feminist films—French-speaking countries—History
and criticism. 4. Women motion picture producers and directors—French-speaking countries.
5. Home in literature. 6. Home in motion pictures. 7. Femininity in literature. 8. Femininity in
motion pictures. 9. Gender identity in literature. 10. Gender identity in motion pictures. I. Title.
PQ149.W38 2010
840.9'3522—dc22 2009036732

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/
NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

 To Sébastien, whom I’d be utterly lost without.

For my mother and father, who gave my sister and me our allowances “just for
breathing.”

In memory of my grandmothers, Rose Migliorino and LaRue Weber, who in-

spired me to learn how to knit, cook, and bake.
Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Interrogating and Re-hybridizing the Personal xiii

1 Making Home with Assia Djebar: Destablizing the Center(s) 1

2 (Re)Displaying Femininity and Home with Annie Ernaux and
Simone de Beauvoir 41
3 Creating Domestic Landscapes and Soundscapes with Raja Amari
and Coline Serreau 103
4 (Re)Presenting Female Iconography at Home with Leïla Sebbar
and Yamina Benguigui 151

Conclusion 207
Bibliography 215
Index 233
About the Author 239

ix
Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to all the filmmakers, writers, former professors, and

scholars who have inspired me to write this book and to the friends, col-
leagues, family members, and students who have supported me throughout
the process of doing so. I would like to thank my editor, Mr. Michael Sis-
skin, who worked with me on the completion and production of this book
and promptly answered my many queries. I am also grateful to the “After
the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France” series edi-
tor, Dr. Valérie Orlando, and the advisory board members, Drs. Robert
Bernasconi, Alec Hargreaves, Chima Korieh, Obioma Nnaemeka, Kamal
Salhi, Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting, Frank Ukadike, and Mildred Mortimer,
for giving me the opportunity to publish this study with them. I owe special
thanks to the anonymous external reader whose insightful feedback and
commentary helped me improve the clarity and organization of my discus-
sion and enrich my study. I warmly thank the following scholars who either
read early drafts of this manuscript or were involved in its conception stage:
Drs. Judith Mayne, Danielle Marx-Scouras, Jennifer Willing, Julia Watson,
and Karlis Racevskis. I wish to thank my friend and colleague Dr. Wynne
Wong for her unwavering support and belief in me. I am most grateful to
my family—especially my mother- and father-in-law, Jean-René and Eliane;
my sister, Laura; and my parents, John and Mary Ann—for their love and
support. I am very lucky to have my own personal cheerleader, a sweet
and loving beagle named “Queenie” who likes to cuddle and give kisses
and whose tail is in perpetual motion. Finally, I infinitely thank and am
especially grateful to my husband, Sébastien, who spent countless evenings
and weekends on his own while I worked, never complaining, objecting,

xi
xii A C K N O WLEDG MENTS

or questioning. I could have never succeeded without his tireless support,

endless patience, and unconditional love.
The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce the
following copyrighted material:
A shortened version of my study of Assia Djebar, which first appeared
as “Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in ‘Touchia: Ouverture’ and Ces voix qui
m’assiègent” in the French Review 81.3 (February 2008): 60–68.
An earlier version of my study of Raja Amari appeared under the title:
“Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in French-Tunisian Filmmaker
Raja Amari’s Satin rouge (2002)” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video
(forthcoming).
Introduction
INTERROGATING AND RE-HYBRIDIZING
THE PERSONAL

This study examines the problematic location of home, the traditional female
activity of homemaking, and representation of female subjectivity in contem-
porary cinematic, (auto)biographical, and fictional texts by several prominent
contemporary French and Francophone women artists. The women artists
(filmmakers, authors, and screenplay writers) in this study question the no-
tion of home as a female interior space in which protagonists traditionally
become objects or accessories. They bring to the fore multiple representations
of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian femininity. In their texts,
the artists 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, often subversively, as a space of
socio-political-historical contention and a complex framework for identity
and subjectivity construction.
I take as my point of departure in this study the notion of the transna-
tional; but in following Shohat and Stam’s approach, I also wish to postco-
lonialize as well as feminize and domesticize this notion. In the same spirit as
Shohat and Stam, I likewise strive to shape a conceptual space in this book
that questions any single theory or theoretical approach by echoing their
call to see the practice of theorization itself as grounded within implicated
historical, geographical, socio-political, and gendered contexts (2003: 1). By
bringing together a few primary tenets of critical inquiry from postcolonial-
ism, feminism, and domesticity in this book, I argue that these theoretical
frameworks must be considered in relation to one another and suggest the

xiii
xiv I N T R O D U C TION

lenses of transnationalism and by extension transvergence as useful tools of

analysis in such an endeavor. From this transnational point of departure, this
study illustrates the representation of women in body, by voice, and through
the gaze in a collection of first-person cinematic and literary narratives cre-
ated by French-speaking women artists from France, Algeria, and Tunisia.
Specifically, I take up the functions of the gaze and the problems of voicing
the personal when considering the role and place of the home in transnational
processes of identity formation, gender performances, and constructions of
culture and society.
Transnational is a polysemic term with different tenets and applications
in film, literary, media, and cultural studies. Yet, the transnational—regard-
less of specific field of study—is rooted in the notion of the inter- and intra-
national natures of media and their messages and interpretations. This is to
say that the transnational often investigates both the so-called “local” and
so-called “global” audiences and their interpretations of these media and
messages. In an oversimplification of the concept, the transnational world
is generally typified by a global circulation of images, sounds, products, and
peoples. In this transnational world, the media and its messages have a com-
plicated and complex impact on notions of national identity and communal
belonging. In this book, “media” is defined as first-person films and lifewrit-
ing narratives. Like the other, more commonly considered “media,” such as
television and the Internet, first-person films and lifewriting narratives also
“partially deterritorialize the process of imaging communities” (Shohat &
Stam, 2003: 1). Shohat and Stam explain that

while the media can fashion spectators into atomized consumers

or self-entertaining monads, they can also construct identity and
alternative affiliations. Just as the media can exoticize and other-
ize cultures, they can also reflect and help catalyze multicultural
affiliations and transnational identifications. (1)

The first-person films and lifewriting narratives included in this book capture
the inter- and intra-national natures of media and their messages as well as
exoticize and otherize French and North African cultures and diversify and
multiply so-called national or hegemonic points of identification.
Film, literary, and cultural studies research has seen since the turn of the
millennium an intensification of academic interest in issues concerning na-
tion, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of identity. Once believed in the
past to be objects of separate and specialized disciplines, the study of different
visual and written systems of representation today elicits many overlapping
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xv

and interdisciplinary analytic investigations and theoretical methodologies.

The juxtaposition and echoing of questions from a range of academic dis-
ciplines and varying critical perspectives and approaches—from anthropol-
ogy to archaeology, from theology to art history, from psychoanalysis to
post-structuralism, and so forth—have multiplied and diversified the lines
of inquiry into the meanings of imagery in both so-called high and so-called
low forms of literature and visual culture. Moreover, these multiple yet in-
terconnected discourses have challenged and reconfigured understanding and
discussion of how different peoples and individuals around the globe inscribe
themselves or are inscribed into their or other various visual and written sys-
tems of representation.
In scholarly practice, these discourses often follow a tripartite process.
First, scholars interpret how different peoples and individuals see and project
themselves in and through their visual or written system of representation.
Second, scholars analyze how historical, political, ideological, and social
structures or belief systems determine and define the relationships between
peoples and individuals and their visual or written systems of representation.
And third, scholars consider how different peoples and individuals relate to
and see one another as they are interpolated in visual and written systems of
representation. Some of the key questions concern the social production and
exchange of signs and their function in offering a vehicle for social cohesion
or subversion; questions about style or the significance of form; the tradition
of social history; the study of material technologies; or methods of interpret-
ing unconscious desire, drives, and fantasy. The field of feminist studies has
greatly impacted literary and media studies by opening up additional key
questions regarding sexual differences that inflect the visual and the written.
Furthermore, postcolonial exploration of visual and written texts has also
impacted literary and media studies through its aim of exploding the tradi-
tional stereotypical, limited, and exclusive ways of seeing individuals in which
gender, race, and sexuality are bound together and grafted onto monolithic
or hegemonic visual or written representation. One cannot underestimate the
importance of such critical investigation in contemporary scholarly practice
and artistic production for many scholars and artists around the globe.
The female protagonists of the contemporary first-person films and
lifewriting narratives examined in this book are all multifarious and multi-
sited. These subjects do not exist independently but rather as part of a
complex network of political, social, and historical practices and ideological
cultural values. Their authors show how these subjects often work against,
through, in relation to, or in-between other subject positions in differ-
ent and diverse ways. The artists are wary of claims of “authenticity” and
xvi I N T R O D U C TION

“realism.” They assert that these false claims are always fraught with power
relations and imbued with a priori frameworks that regulate and govern the
relationship of seeing and knowing. The artists in this study are interested in
exploring how the process of uncovering or articulating new identities and
subjectivities ushers in new ways of seeing, knowing, and being. Their works
illustrate an interactive process in which meaning is always in production and
a state of transition, dependent on the spectator or reader who must decode
or interpret and assign the new identities and subject positions and construct
the new ways of seeing, knowing, and being. Their work supports the notion
that written and visual inscriptions cannot be predetermined nor narrowly
prescribed. My hope in this book is to bring together all of these postcolonial,
feminist, and domesticity concerns and practices under the same transna-
tional umbrella and to discuss them in relation to one another.
Shohat and Stam remind us that, “Communities, societies, nations, and
even entire continents exist not autonomously but in a densely woven web
of connectedness, within a complex and multivalent relationality” (2003: 1).
In following their lead, I too take a relational approach in this book by cross-
ing borders between geographies, communities, practices, and disciplines.
I bring together France, Algeria, and Tunisia not because of their shared
historical colonial past—Algeria and Tunisia are two former colonies of the
French Empire—but because of their shared contemporary transnational,
linguistic, and transcultural heritages. Their cultures, languages, cuisines,
religions, economies, politics, and art have overlapped, melded, clashed with,
and complemented one another for more than a century. Mostly though, as
I will show, I bring together France, Algeria, and Tunisia in this study be-
cause many French, Algerian, and Tunisian artists share common artistic and
aesthetic aspirations and points of reference; albeit the kinds of socio-cultural
perspectives and motifs and individual tropes, devices, and specificities in
their work vary widely.
The French, Algerian, and Tunisian women artists and their protagonists
included in this study are all engaged in the common pursuit of challenging
traditional stereotypical, limited, and exclusive ways of seeing women within
and outside the borders of their respective societies and cultures in which the
women’s race or ethnicity, social class or level of education, and sexuality or
sexual activity conform to monolithic or hegemonic ideals of their respec-
tive societies and cultures. These women artists work from within as well as
beyond their so-called national systems of visual and written representation
to open up new ways of seeing, knowing, and being. At times, they adopt
an Orientalist paradigm in their pursuit (e.g., seeing North African women
through the French-European gaze). Other times, they reverse this paradigm
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xvii

(e.g., seeing French women through a North African or Other perspective).

In all instances, though, these women artists ultimately play with these para-
digms and challenge previously conceived notions of spectatorship, power
and gender relations, and performances, definitions, and discourses of femi-
ninity. Bringing together women artists from France, Algeria, and Tunisia
in this book effectively calls into question the inscription of neatly separate
communities or personal narratives. Yet doing so still brings to the fore in a
complementary manner the different, multiple, and diverse ways communi-
ties of women or individual women engage with and articulate this question
of inscription within the context of “Nation” or “Republic.”
This book also crosses disciplinary borders. I bring together film and
literature and theory and practice for I desire to forge links between seem-
ingly disparate or compartmentalized fields of study; for example, film studies
and film theory, literary studies and literary theory, lifewriting, domesticity,
postcolonialism, feminist theory, and transnationalism. While I do not wish
to suggest that the different theoretical methodologies, lenses, and approaches
are interchangeable or may easily replace one another, as I will unravel in
the following discussion of this introduction, there are certain similar echoes
and optics that reverberate and refract across these disciplines. Thereby, once
again in the spirit and coinage of Shohat and Stam, this book offers a kind
of “methodological cubism.” This is to say, the use of multiple critical per-
spectives and theoretical frameworks—especially with regard to subjectivity,
identity construction, gender performance and discourse, space, and modes
of articulation and enunciation—as they are imbricated and reflected across
various disciplines. This methodological cubism informs the different tropes
I undertake in my analyses and allows a multitude of viewpoints from which
to examine and theorize more richly women’s contemporary first-person film-
making and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia.
In this study, I will specifically address the tropes of: making home in the
first segment, Touchia: Ouverture, of Assia Djebar’s film La nouba du Mont
Chenoua (1976) and in her essay Regard interdit, son coupé from her collection
of short-stories entitled Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980); display-
ing femininity through the home in Annie Ernaux’s novel La femme gelée
(1981) and Simone de Beauvoir’s short-story La femme rompue (1967); creat-
ing domestic landscapes and soundscapes with Raja Amari’s film Satin rouge
(2002) and Coline Serreau’s film Chaos (2000); and representing female ico-
nography at home in Leïla Sebbar’s travelogue Mes Algéries en France: Carnet
de voyage (2004) and Yamina Benguigui’s film Inch’Allah dimanche (2002). I
have selected these specific tropes because they bring to the surface interesting
contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes specific to the various cultures,
xviii I N T R O DU C TION

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 spaces of expression that many
contemporary women artists’ works (and even the artists themselves) occupy.
Yet, as the women artists considered in this study demonstrate in their texts,
these various tropes of domesticity curiously manage to transcend the Self-
Other divide and celebrate the hybrid and collaborative spaces of expression
created in this divide, in turn offering new manners in which and approaches
through which to contemplate the Self-Other divide.
A serious treatment of the Self-Other divide in this book requires some
preliminary discussion of the theoretical methodologies that inform the ap-
proach I adopt in this study and that scaffold its subsequent chapters. First,
however, a brief look at Assia Djebar’s Ces voix qui m’assiègent lays the concep-
tual groundwork vis-à-vis the theoretical methodologies in question. 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 sys-
tem 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. Voices and discourses are of prime concern and occupy primal po-
sitions. 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 study, 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 home results in a state
of “homelessness at home” for the protagonists and their authors or film-
makers. 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” cap-
tures in almost existentialist and postcolonial terms a diasporic space and the
inauthentic self-identity normatively conceived, understood, imposed upon,
accepted, and performed at home by the protagonists in these primary texts.
At first glance in the primary texts I examine in this study, 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 and raising children). Yet upon further analysis, one
finds that the female protagonists, in engaging in these domestic activities,
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xix

are actively redefining their daily existence, expression, and representation.

They are reconstructing their homes as a means to deconstruct and then re-
construct personal and socio-political-historical identities. For these women
artists, gender identity grounded in the institution of the middle-class home
(and normative domesticity) is shown to be inherently unstable and there-
fore 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 ad-
vance” (Foster, 2002: 11).1 This is to say, an elusive, unpredictable, and ever-
shifting multiplicity of markers, definitions, constructions, and ways of being
female and significances of keeping home. In order to investigate better the
revised approaches through which we may contemplate the Self-Other divide
in relation to the home in this study, let us now turn to a brief overview of
the critical methodologies and tenets informing this study and shaping our
contemplations.

Domesticity as Lens of Analysis

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 cui-
sine 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 in the social
sciences with regard to the variations, functions, and roles of different ex-
amples of domesticity in a variety of cultural settings. One specific mode of
domesticity, housework and its associated representation of the housewife,
proffers many cross-cultural and transnational optics for examining gender
performances, constructions of culture and society, 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
discourse. From architectural, psychological, geographical, anthropological,
ethnographic, historical, or sociological perspectives, the home manifests
a deeply personal and highly political symbol that often underlies diverse
xx I NT R O D U C TION

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 and social
concerns, to colonial texts in which politics of domestic assimilation abound,
and to postcolonial texts in which the discourses of the motherlands are chal-
lenged in pursuit of an independent nationalist identity.
In contemporary French-language filmmaking and literature, 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.2 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 homogenous—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.3 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 differ-
ence 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.4 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 Johnson postulates, 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
(2003: 15).
Still, some scholars link postcoloniality and feminism in their critical in-
terrogations of the home through critiquing nationalist discourses that refuse,
deny, or overlook women’s contributions 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.5 In this view,
home reveals “its deeper affiliation with the public realm, as a patriarchal
space where power relations vital to the nation and culture are negotiated”
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxi

(Strehle, 2008: 1).6 Home reflects and resembles “nation”: it expresses the
same ideological pressures that contend within the nation and does not serve
as a retreat from the public and political spheres.7 As such, the home cannot
be viewed as women’s space, but rather as a space designated—and perhaps
deliberately designed—to teach, form, and shape women to enact their impe-
rial function of (re)constructing the homeland.
In this sense, the home is a receiver of public languages and values, a
location in which national, global, and/or hegemonic discourses speak and re-
produce themselves through magazines, newspapers, television, radio, books,
how-to manuals, the Internet, and so on. Moreover, many contend that
nation, world, and/or hegemony speak in the privacy of the home through
the traditions and practices related to the imperial mission of engendering
legitimate, obedient, civilized children.8 In Strehle’s words, “Far from being
a ‘separate sphere’ of insulated privacy, home has permeable walls and a vital
function in the nation, which explains why it is vigorously defended as a pub-
lic good” (2008: 2). Thus, many scholars advocate a transnational approach
to the reading of seemingly “local” and “domestic” texts that illuminate struc-
tures overlapping home and elsewhere.
The women artists in this project reflect a variety of specific cultural
locations and individual positions inside and/or outside the home/land and
all are aware of either a colonial legacy of domesticity or an imperial ideology
of home and its associated values. I explore these women’s representations
of first-person domestic experience in their texts in relation to public and
national discourses or social and personal crises. I am concerned with how
these domestic experiences, performances, and relationalities inflect identity
and understandings of self and gender.
Regarding the theorization of self and gender, 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 ex-
aminations of the home have begun focusing on how everyday relationships
with our homes are bound up with sensory perception and metaphor.9 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 performa-
tivity and agency (Pink, 2004: 10). Many argue that housework and forms
of home creativity (a term which refers to home decoration or the creation of
mood or atmosphere, such as controlling the lighting, burning candles, play-
ing music, etc.) can be seen as conscious or subconscious subjective actions
through which individuals engage with the sensory environments of their
homes. In turn, these subjective actions may be read as gender constructing
xxii I NT R O D U C TION

agents in both cultural and social practice.10 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 and economic contexts. Sarah Pink explains that “dif-
ferent 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 study, we will see how these women
artists engage differently with the location of home and with varying prac-
tices 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 in this
study, the home often figures as a site of personal, social, racial, ethnic,
linguistic, political, sexual, and historical struggles. The women artists I
examine in this study all seem to concur that one may no longer regard the
home un-problematically as a geographical location or source of identity,
memory, and the personal. In each account, home is unsettled as the protago-
nists realize that it was or still is “an illusion of coherence and safety based on
the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression
of difference even within oneself” (Martin & Mohanty, 1986: 196).11 This re-
alization manifests an important point of departure in analyzing the primary
texts included in this study.

Postcolonial Discourse as Lens of Analysis

As already hinted at, the home manifests a powerful political symbol in much
postcolonial discourse theory and practice. Postcolonial discourse theory
refers to an interdisciplinary academic field that brings together primarily
history, economics, literature, and cinema. It is a diverse and amalgam-like
field in which scholars explore issues of the colonial archive (or “History”)
and postcolonial identity, using approaches centering on nationalism, the
“Third World” allegory, the subaltern, and the work of postcolonials proper
(i.e., Bhabha and Spivak and many more). Growing out of post-structuralism,
postcolonial discourse theory built a solid foundation primarily on the work
of three important thinkers: Edward Said’s theorizations of the ways that
Western imperial power and discourse constructed a stereotypical Orient
through asymmetrical power relations (i.e., rational Europe/irrational Ori-
ent), Frantz Fanon’s studies on the effects of colonialism on the psyche of the
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxiii

colonized peoples (i.e., the desire to mimic the colonizer) and call to return
to a pre-colonial past, and Michel Foucault’s notions of discourse and the
power/knowledge nexus (i.e., discourse has social materiality and efficacy and
is always imbricated with power, emerging from everywhere). Although these
scholars and their thinking have been much challenged and expounded upon
in postcolonial discourse theory, their work opened up the dialogic process
in which scholars—coming from many points of view—sought to expose the
linking of Western knowledge with oppression (i.e., imperialism/colonialism)
and to re-think the very way in which knowledge has been constructed.12
European enlightenment thinking of the eighteenth century had closely
aligned the terms democracy, nationalism, and citizen-subject and under-
stood them as interrelated on a one-to-one basis. With the fall or decline of
the French and British Empires in the twentieth century, scholars en masse
began to perceive the relationship between these terms—especially with re-
gard to citizen-subject and the nation-state—as far too narrow and limiting,
suggesting a homogeneity that did not and does not exist. Scholars began to
question and critique the historicism of the West, which posited Europe as its
theoretical subject, and started to investigate history in an anti-chronological
manner along three syncretic key concepts: precolonialism, colonialism, and
postcolonialism. Yet, postcolonial discourse theory is not a single theory
or approach but rather an amalgam of theories and approaches, a dialogic
process of re-thinking knowledge and the construction of that knowledge.
Within postcolonial studies, terms like ambivalence, hybridity, and the third
space of negotiation become widely applied tools facilitating and effecting the
re-thinking of knowledge and its construction. These interdisciplinary tropes
are much debated in postcolonial discourse theory and are far-reaching and
widespread, with profound implications in other disciplines and discourses.
Ambivalence, hybridity, and the third space of negotiation (also some-
times called an “in-betweeness”) are important terms most often utilized
when analyzing and theorizing the location and construction of the post-
colonial subject, a prime preoccupation in the field of postcolonial studies.
One of the primary assertions with regard to the postcolonial subject in the
field of postcolonial studies is the notion that the postcolonial subject is hy-
brid; that is, that s/he occupies a space in-between two cultures.13 Hybridity
illustrates an important practice in postcolonial studies: the avoidance of
binaries or pairings of oppositions such as self/other, center/margin, speak-
ing subject/silent native and so on, since such binary terms of opposition
are hierarchically constructed and based on ontological notions of subjec-
tivity common to Western thinking. Unlike binary terms of opposition,
this hybridity or in-betweeness directly illustrates the contradictions and
xxiv I NT R O DU C TION

ambivalences of culture that ontological binary thinking does not account

for. Thus, a primary tenet in postcolonial studies is the acceptance that no
culture is unified per se and that the postcolonial subject is a product of the
hybridization of the two interdependent first and second cultures. Further-
more, this third space or in-betweeness occupied by the postcolonial subject is
a space of potential resistance that allows the postcolonial subject to embody
the contradictions and ambivalences of the two cultures. By exposing these
contradictions and ambivalences, in turn, the postcolonial subject has the
power to invalidate or subvert the rhetoric and discourse of imperialism and
colonialism. The postcolonial subject evidences the fact that discourse and
meaning are never fixed; therefore Western knowledge cannot fix the Other
in a predetermined set of characteristics, categories of identity, subjectivities,
or subject or object positions.
The notion of hybridity and the third space have been and continue to
be challenged in postcolonial studies. The hybrid subject is in essence such
an entirely scattered and fragmented subjectivity that it “runs the risk of lack-
ing specificity, of being unrooted in history or space” (Hayward, 2006: 298).
Many scholars argue that the cultural hybridity occupied by this subject is
a specific condition experienced by migrant intellectuals living in the West,
in which these individuals become “Truth-Subjects,” detached from nation,
class, or gender constructs.14 As a critical concept, though, hybridity is highly
valued in postcolonial studies; many have shown it to be lacking, however,
mostly because the concept also inevitably excludes, as feminist studies has
pointed out. There is no such single category of identity or subjectivity called
“colonized,” as women are subjected to a double colonization or oppression
in terms of both race and gender.
In an effort to tease out the problems associated with the hybrid-speaking
postcolonial subject, scholars found inspiration in Gramsci’s thinking and
postulations concerning the subaltern. Although the term runs the risk of re-
appropriating a binary (i.e., elite/subaltern) and recuperating the modernist
tendency to see subjectivity as Self/Other, the term is useful as it refers to a
collectivity of voices (especially oral voices and cultural traditions) who seem
even more disempowered than the elite postcolonial subjects.15 The subaltern
in postcolonial studies reminds us that there are many other voices to listen
to and recognize, and many other stories to hear and inscribe in history and
culture. In this book, the subaltern connects with an approach in film stud-
ies commonly referred to as the interrogation of the personal. The majority
of contemporary women’s filmmaking and lifewriting from France, Algeria,
and Tunisia seeks to interrogate the personal, a course of investigation and
exploration which draws heavily on the trope of personal history. As influ-
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxv

enced by Freud’s notions of identity formation, the personal narrative dem-

onstrates how one conceptually forms and visually (mis)construes identity
and memory. In other words,

personal narratives may provide the spectator [or reader] with

identity images, yet they may also remind the spectator [or reader]
that identities are unstable; change through time, location and
encounters; have many facets; and are inherently unknowable.
(Wilson, 1999: 19)16

This style of filmmaking and writing seemingly engenders the artist’s personal
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 experi-
ence.
Thus, the hybrid postcolonial subject, as seen through the lens of the in-
terrogation of the personal in this book, is well situated in history, class, gen-
der, and “nation.” However, as I will argue, the emphasis here is on changing
notions of history, class, gender, and “nation” and their long-standing ideolo-
gies. Although marginalized within their respective societies, the protagonists
examined in this study are neither restrictively described as nor necessarily
seen as the mouthpiece for an anonymous subaltern group. Rather, they are
personalized and individualized (this is to say re-hybridized) in different and
diverse ways. The women artists included in this study are careful not to
speak for the women of the communities or social groups they put into rep-
resentation in their narratives, since doing so runs the risk of re-appropriating
colonial practices and power relations and reinstating colonial dichotomies
and identities. Instead, the artists speak with the voices of the women they
bring to life in their narratives.
Furthermore, the artists multiply and diversify these female voices and the
representations of the female bodies and female activities of the owners of these
voices so as to show the very fluid, permeable, and shifting natures of the in-
terminable processes of identity formation and gender construction. Thereby,
the hybrid postcolonial subject no longer remains strictly either a diasporic
intellectual elite or a subaltern collectivity of anonymous voices in unison or
in tandem. The hybrid postcolonial subject, through the lens of the inter-
rogation of the personal, becomes a polyphony of personalized and dispersed
individual voices that share a common origin or source and that individually
expose, resist, and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in
which they are implicated. Moreover, the re-hybridized postcolonial subject
xxvi I NT R O DU C TION

generally looks more to the present and future as opposed to the past. These
are important postulations to which we will often return in this book.

Feminist Discourse as Lens of Analysis

Feminist theory’s impact on postcolonial studies in general and the issue of
the hybrid-speaking postcolonial subject in particular has been substantial.
It is worth returning briefly once again to Assia Djebar’s work to consider a
case in point. 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 (or social constructions) 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 (or North Africa) as well as in
the Métropole (or France)—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, Messaouda, 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. In this study, I find inspiration in 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 repre-
sentations, 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 coupé 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 pri-
mary texts this study 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 (re)conceive the
present and lay claim to the future. Yet, in every instance, the maternal (like
the hybrid postcolonial subject) is diversified, personalized, individualized,
and dispersed in each narrative.
Feminist and psychoanalytic theorists have suggested both severing the
link between mothers and daughters as well as conversely returning to (i.e.,
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxvii

forgiving) the mother—a victim herself who unknowingly molded her daugh-
ter 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 em-
phasis on pushing the filial question 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. 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 and to (re)construct the history and memory of the
individual, the community, a people, or a republic or nation.
Both identity and memory are effected and affected by language, a
critical argument often raised in both feminist and psychoanalytic theory.
Djebar’s postcolonial and diasporic 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 dis-
courses, particularly those that concern women’s representation. In what is
now a commonplace and almost trite comparison in postcolonial discourse
theory, but certainly true in Djebar’s early writings, the mother has come to
symbolize a land, a nation, a community, a génétrice. Yet in today’s examina-
tions of globalized, multilingual, multifarious, multi-sited, and multicultural
transnational and diasporic subjects, Djebar’s maternal-filial dialogic ex-
changes (voice) and filial observations (gaze) of the mother and her home-
making activities serve as site and source of women’s symbiotic identity and
her (re)location in History, home, and socio-political discourse. This is one
of the principal tropes I examine in the personal cinematic and lifewriting
narratives I treat in this study.

CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST FILM THEORY POINTS OF ENTRY

The primary line of critical inquiry in feminist film studies centers on the
trope and language of desire. For many scholars, women’s filmmaking is not
simply a matter of “learning to speak a new language, nor of displaying new
cinematic strategies, but is a desiring process itself that emerges from a locus
of difference” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996: 3).17 These scholars have 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.18 In this
xxviii I NT R O DU C TION

study, 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 (like the “third space”) and recon-
structed by female desire through re-hybridized female-speaking subjects.
Aided by psychoanalysis, a second line of critical inquiry developed in
feminist film theory 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 circu-
lation of desire” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996: 11). 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.
In contrast, many 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 coun-
ter-discourses emerged as early as the 1920s by Germaine Dulac, were contin-
ued through the 1930s by Marie Epstein, were carried throughout the 1950s
to the early twenty-first century by Agnès Varda, and are ever-present in the
modern-day contemporary women filmmakers examined in this study.
Closely connected to this second line of inquiry, enunciative apparatus
theory opens a third line of critical inquiry. Within the context of psycho-
analytic 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 acti-
vate a process of slippage between the subconscious 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
so-named enunciative apparatus) employed by the director to render his/her
imagined film text coherent to the spectator. However, the enunciative ap-
paratus 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 chal-
lenging and (re)appropriating in a different way the traditionally patriarchal
enunciative apparatus to their purposes in presenting their texts from their
own perspectives.
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxix

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S LIFEWRITING POINTS OF ENTRY

As with the cinema, the problematics of enunciation, language, and memory

described above also play a large role in critical approaches to analyzing life
writings. The act of writing a life recaptures and recapitulates the effects of
Lacan’s mirror stage in psychoanalytic terms—the je (or “I”) 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, it is often argued that the first-person subject pronoun (je or
I) expressed on paper speaks as a fictionalized character. Consequently, one
typically theorizes that the writing subject presumes to know him/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 dif-
ferentiation from others in language, memory, discourse, and consciousness.
Scholars now consider women’s lifewriting a “privileged site for thinking
about issues of writing at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, and post-
modern critical theories, where the processes of subject formation and agency
occupy a prime position” (Smith & Watson, 2001: 9–10).19 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 sto-
ries that reveal “self-consciousnesses and a need to sift through their lives for
explanation and understanding” (Smith & Watson, 2001: 9). This trope of
“sifting through life experiences” from the past and in the present—so com-
monly found in the vast majority of contemporary first-person cinematic and
literary narratives of France, Algeria, and Tunisia—occupies an almost primal
or primordial place of importance in this current study. This notion of sift-
ing connects with Djebar’s turn to the mother and her stories and underlines
the active role protagonists must play in selecting the stories (or histories) to
put forth. Moreover, the agency or action implied by this notion of “sifting”
also connects with how the artists construct and formulate these narratives (or
discourses), which is a primary focus in each chapter of this study.
Feminist scholars find that these narratives characteristically depict the
everyday aspects of these women’s lives—lived or imagined by the writers
and/or their protagonists—and embody and reflect the reality of difference
and complexity as well as stress the centrality of gender to human life. In ad-
dition, for many feminist critics, women’s lifewriting 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.20 Three important critical modalities
xxx I N T R O D U C TION

primarily surface in the theoretical approaches to lifewriting: performativity,

positionality, and heteroglossic dialogism.
A performative view of lifewriting finds that these narratives manifest
dynamic sites for the performance of identities constitutive of subjectivity.
This is to say that this view takes an identity not as fixed or essentialized at-
tributes of an autobiographical subject but rather as produced and reiterated
through cultural norms.21 In theoretical practice, a performative critical view
contests the previously assumed notion of autobiography or life narrative as
site of “authentic identity” and seeks to investigate the underlining complexi-
ties 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 performative view, and as already discussed in relation to
women’s filmmaking, desire once again surfaces from a locus of difference
in which women lifewriters 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, norma-
tive, or marginal desire.
The concept of positionality also draws on the intersections of language,
memory, society, history, and identity but 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 marginal-
ized 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 prac-
tices and situate themselves in and through a social milieu or ethos to which
the subject is tied and by which the subject is constructed.22 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.23 In other words, autoethnography constitutes a “métissage that braids
together multiple, disparate discourses” (Watson, 2001: 83). It most richly
speaks to the theoretical investigations into the relationships between Self and
Others (and by extension the relationships between the Self and the various
“Others” residing within the Self) that currently occupy many postcolonial
studies scholars and their reflections as shown above. Thus, in this view of
positionality, the traditional ontological (and male) je/I has been replaced by
a pluralistic (and now feminine) subjectivity. Whether as a timeless chorus of
female voices recounting oral histories or as an individual counter-discourse
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxxi

to women’s positioning as object of the male gaze in both film and literature
(or even History), women’s subjectivity is multiple and hybrid and firmly
situated inside a “contact zone” of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox.
Finally, lifewriting scholars of heteroglossic dialogism, or the “multiplic-
ity of tongues” through which subjectivity is enunciated, seek to explore the
interfaces of orality and writing. In this view, the spaces or “margins” be-
tween languages manifest sites of interdiscursivity and contest the notion that
self-narration is a monologic utterance of a solitary, introspective subject.24
This view emphasizes the role of language in positioning speakers and their
discourses at an intersection of multiple socio-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 con-
text 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 lifewriting 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 iden-
tification with the “other(s).”25 We will see in the chapters that follow how,
like the enunciative apparatus, this heteroglossic dialogism engenders a sub-
jectivity that slips between multiple socio-political-historical discourses and
the author’s, the protagonist’s, and the reader’s desires while paradoxically
still managing to root itself in time and history and push to the surface new
or revised ideologies. For all of the primary texts included in this study, the
home and domestic acts provide important jumping off points from which
subjectivity slippage and new ideological prospects may occur.

Transnational Umbrella as
Overarching Framework
I have underscored thus far in this introductory chapter a number of critical
tenets in the theoretical approaches of domesticity, postcolonial discourse
theory, and feminist film and literary theory. In each instance, these interdis-
ciplinary tenets work to flesh out the Self/Other relationship(s) much debated
xxxii I N T R O DU C TION

in contemporary academic investigation and are all crucial to this study. From
domesticity we saw three important postulations: the home as the original site
of nationalism and a space of return and of consolidation of the Self enabled
by encounters with the Other; how the sensory perception of the home and
home creativity may be read as gender constructing agents of the Self; and
how the location of home and the politics of domesticity have the potential
to challenge and (re)appropriate specific sets of cultural values and belief
systems and long-term historical processes. In postcolonial discourse theory,
we understand that Western knowledge (or the Self) cannot fix the Other in
predetermined sets of characteristics, categories of identity, or subjectivities
or subject (or object) positions and that identity (or the Self) is unstable;
changes through time, location, and encounters; has many facets; and is in-
herently hybrid, ambivalent, and contradictory. From feminist studies, as we
just saw, we underline the enunciative apparatus and heteroglossic dialogism
that engender a subjectivity (or the Self) that slips between multiple socio-
political-historical discourses and desires while still managing paradoxically to
root itself in contemporary time and history and push to the surface various
Others and new or revised ideologies. The Self/Other divide proves an equally
critical tenet to transnationalism; where diaspora, borders, globalization, and
the politics of location figure largely in this divide.
It is perhaps more befitting to discuss transnationalism as an interdis-
ciplinary academic field or critical optic than as an institutionalized school
of critical theory, per se. Rather like postcolonial studies in some regard,
transnational studies is also not a single theory but an amalgam of many in-
terdisciplinary theories and theoretical positions. It, too, is a dialogic process
of re-thinking knowledge and discourse and the construction of that knowl-
edge and discourse. Transnational studies brings together history, sociology,
economics, literature, cinema, art, popular culture, and mass media. Scholars
working in this tradition explore issues like migration, immigration, citizen-
ship, nationalism, marginality, diaspora or displacement, borders and border
crossing, representation, transculturation, ethnography, consumerism, and
politics of location in the primary texts they analyze. In scholarly practice,
the term transnational is often used to qualify tropes and perspectives like:
“transnational spaces,” “transnational identities,” “transnational subjectivity,”
and so on. Transnational studies has amassed more scholarship in the fields
of cinema and mass media studies as well as in other areas of visual culture,
especially architecture, than necessarily in traditional literary studies. Yet
transnational studies has significant implications for the field of literature,
especially with regard to lifewriting narratives of migrant and immigrant or
“other” so-called marginal communities and “minor” literatures.
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxxiii

Transnational studies also shares several foci with postcolonial studies, in

particular the notion of nationalism, the concept of “center” versus “margin(s),”
and the postulation that no culture is ever unified. However, transnational ar-
guments tend to approach these concerns from a slightly different starting point
and in a slightly different manner. Transnational studies is more concerned
with the present (and even the future to some degree) than may be postcolonial
studies, which has tended to focus and concentrate on the past. Yet, just as
globalization has not produced a smooth, borderless, integrated global order,
transnationalism has neither produced consistent kinds of social formations
or practices.26 As a manifestation of globalization, transnational studies takes
shape in the “multiple, complex, messy proximities and interconnections” of
social morphologies, types of consciousness, modes of cultural reproduction,
avenues of capital, sites of political engagement, and (re)constructions of place
and locality (Vertovec, 2009: 2). Transnationalism investigates the cross-border
relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations, and social formations spanning
nation-states as typically couched in terms of “local” (or within the borders of
nation) and “global” (or beyond the borders of nation).
Transnationalism describes a condition in which

despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of in-

ternational borders (and all the laws, regulations and national
narratives they represent), certain kinds of relationships have
been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a
planet-spanning yet common—however virtual—arena of activ-
ity. (Vertovec, 2009: 3)

In the field of cultural studies, considerable transnational discussion has con-

centrated on a kind of “diaspora consciousness” (a globally-intensified rela-
tionship) that is marked by double or multiple identifications. Depictions of
individuals’ awareness of de-centered attachments—the feelings of a “home
away from home” or of a “being here and there at the same time”—have
been and continue to be much considered. For Stuart Hall and many other
scholars working in transnational studies today, this diaspora consciousness
comprises constantly changing representations and subjectivities that provide,
in the age of cyberspace, an “imaginary coherence” for a set of malleable
identities that are no longer strictly tied to the patterns or the experiences of
migration, as once argued before the invention of the Internet and widespread
use of telecommunications.
In this sense, transnationalism is often associated with a fluidity of con-
structed styles, social institutions, and everyday practices, which are described
xxxiv I N T R O DU C TION

in terms of syncretism, creolization, bricolage, cultural translation, transcul-

turation, and hybridity.27 Transnationalism is part and parcel of the process
of globalization but may also “be less scripted and more scattered” (Lionnet
& Shih, 2005: 5).28 Some scholars find that the common practice in transna-
tional studies of adopting the construction of global/local as a binary model
has romanticized the local as not necessarily pure but certainly as the site of
resistance to the global. Many argue that this research has overlooked the
creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within
and across national or “local” boundaries.29 The national is “no longer the
site of homogenous time and territorialized space but is increasingly inflected
by a transnationality that suggests the intersection of multiple spatiotemporal
(dis)orders” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005: 6). The transnational, therefore, is not
restricted to something created only in the interface of the local or global but
rather claims a potentiality to span national, local, or global spaces and modes
of expression occupying multiple spatialities and temporalities.
Thus, these scholars have turned to transversal movements of culture
(or a cultural transversalism) in an effort to interpret and comprehend better
so-called minor or so-called marginal cultural articulations in productive re-
lationship with so-called major or so-called dominant cultural reproductions.
Thereby, transnational studies, through an optic of cultural transversalism,
“produces new forms of identification that negotiate with national, ethnic,
and cultural boundaries, thus allowing for the emergence of the minor’s
[or the “margins’”] inherent complexity and multiplicity” (Lionnet & Shih,
2005: 8). In other words, the transnational becomes the signifier for multi-
plicity or creolization within and across all levels of the “local,” “national,”
and “global.” As mentioned briefly before in this discussion, in the realm of
literature, scholars have mostly used this transnational approach in the inves-
tigation of “minor” or so-called marginal literatures. However, in the field of
cinema, the transnational approach—probably due to the more self-evident
global economic factors inherent to the film industry—is well established as
a lens of analysis for dominant as well as marginal filmmaking. Thus, a more
in-depth discussion of a transnational approach in film studies, an approach
which overlaps with some methodological pursuits in literary studies, will
help us better grasp the overarching theoretical framework that informs my
analyses and discussion of contemporary women’s first-person filmmaking
and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia in this study.
In her goals to examine the utility of the concept of the transnational to
French cinema studies and to assess the appropriateness of such a concept in
relation to more conventional approaches to French cinema organized around
the construction of the “national,” Carrie Tarr brilliantly summarizes the sit-
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxxv

uation. She explains that in the field of French film studies (as it developed in
the United Kingdom)—although always recognizing the contribution of émi-
grés filmmakers to the French film industry—scholars initially focused most
energies and attention on examining how “the canonization of [“French”]
films, filmmakers, film movements, and film genres . . . contribute[s] to the
vexed notion of French cinema as a ‘national’ cinema” (Tarr, 2007: 3). From
this critical perspective, Tarr argues, “the specificities of French cinema at
particular moments in time through its love/hate relationship with, and need
to differentiate itself from, Hollywood” accounts for the principal line of
investigation into the concept and construction of French National Cinema
(Tarr, 2007: 3). In other words, the national approach that dominated much
scholarly European but particularly French film criticism in the UK in the
1990s sought to analyze how film texts enunciate the national.
Scholars analyzed individual film texts and cinematic genres and ques-
tioned the meanings they mobilized vis-à-vis constructions of the national.
They considered what typologies needed tracing into a cartography of the
national.30 Scholars looked for what was coded in the film as national (e.g.,
language, costuming, setting, décor, music, themes, historical figures or
events, and other cultural elements) and took into consideration the country
responsible for the financial backing of the film and other more technical
matters like the origins, nationalities, training, and schooling of the pro-
duction and editing crews as well as the cast members. Scholars illustrated
how this enunciation of the national in the cinema worked to construct and
perpetuate myths of the given society and culture. As Hayward summarizes,
“Traditionally the ‘national’ of a cinema is defined in terms of its difference
from other cinemas of other nations, primarily in terms of its difference from
the cinema of the United States (i.e., Hollywood)” (Hayward, 2005: 8).
Scholars still adopt this national approach in scholarly practice today, where
much attention is paid to the economic and political forces pressuring or in-
fluencing particular film industries and productions. However, the national
approach has mostly evolved and expanded its preoccupations to the realm
of the transnational, where it generally seeks to decode and debunk such cul-
tural myths and constructions of “nation” via counter-cinematic productions,
styles, or techniques of filmmaking, or ideological perspectives.
In the late 1990s and with the turn of the millennium, film scholars be-
gan to speak to the reductionist nature inherent in the national approach to
film analysis. Influenced by post-structuralist and multiculturalist arguments,
scholars began to see this approach as built on a paradigm of exclusion. That
is to say that the “national” in the mainstream films under analysis tended to
recuperate and proliferate dominant or hegemonic views and definitions of
xxxvi I N T R O DU C TION

“nation” at the expense of excluding marginal or periphery views of the very

same “nation.” Scholars began to call for the recognition and acceptance of
the belief that what the “national” enunciates and signifies will change ac-
cording to social, economic, and political mutations and pressures.31 Thus,
not only did scholars turn more widely to counter-cinema productions, but
they also began to decode the national signs “against the grain” in twenty-
first-century mainstream and “other” films as challenges to or subversions of
the static and monolithic mythologies of “nation.” Scholars were interested in
seeking new definitions, constructions, and ideologies that mobilized revised
representations and conceptions of the “nation.” In light of these develop-
ments, Tarr asserts that

it is not surprising, then, that over the last twenty years or so a key
strand within film studies has been the investigation of cinema as,
variously, a “hybrid,” “postnational,” “supranational,” “sub-state”
or . . . “transnational” phenomenon, in relation to which the “na-
tional” is bypassed, decentered or hybridized. (2007: 4)

Tarr’s reading of contemporary French film studies echoes some observa-

tions made of contemporary “minor” literatures or migration narratives as
articulated above.
Informed by Deleuze’s work on deterritorialization, or a weakening of
ties between culture and place, many film scholars now posit that mainstream
French cinema must be read as both national and transnational for three main
reasons. First, cinema and the film industry have always been international
and thus trans/national since the very beginning. Second, financial backing
and production crews and casts of contemporary films are often international.
Third, the forms of discursive, technical, and narrative enunciation are in-
creasingly more “globalized”; for example, the increased universal uses of
computer-generated imagery (CGI); various telecommunicative devices like
the Internet and satellites figuring in the narratives; geographical, linguistic,
and spatial border-crossings; real or virtual foreign or remote sets or locations;
and so on. Tarr summarizes:

“French” cinema is imbricated with and transformed at a supra-

national level by its dialogic relationship with other cinemas, not
just Hollywood, but also European, francophone, Mediterranean
and (other) world cinemas, and at a subnational level by the work
of deterritorialized, notably postcolonial, migrant and diasporic
filmmakers, among others. (2007: 4)
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxxvii

Furthermore, Tarr explains that, “The increasing fluidity between these vari-
ous categories means that the identity of any given film or filmmaker is be-
coming increasingly difficult to pin down in purely national terms” (2007: 4).
This fluidity led to a rather wide-spread adoption of the term transnational in
film studies on a number of different continents as well as to the discussion
of two specific and quite paradoxical notions: the homogenizing effects of
Hollywood in “other” cinemas and the diversity of multicultural particulari-
ties which are also the result of globalization.32 With the first notion, as Tarr
elucidates, there is a risk that a transnational perspective will continue to
position Hollywood as central to its concerns and with the second, that it will
underestimate the asymmetrical power relations between various constituen-
cies (2007: 4). Hence, most scholars consequently began to engage with the
“transnational” not as a dialectical or oppositional term to “national,” which
was (and still sometimes is) the temptation in some scholarly work (i.e., genre
studies approach).
Rather, scholars taking up the transnational cause view it as a “necessary
framework for analyzing how films are produced, circulated, and received in
the era of globalization” and as a “relational concept which remains in dia-
logue with the national as well as with the global and the local” (Tarr, 2007:
4–5). Thus, in this inclusivist reworking of the transnational—which espouses
the concept of fluidity and permeable boundaries of various categories—cine-
matic genres, styles, content matter, and discourses are not necessarily viewed
in opposition to or in conflict with one another but rather appear as converg-
ing within one another; thereby including the “national” and that which was
formally supposedly considered “not” or just simply previously ignored or
unseen. In simplified terms, a transnational approach to film studies creates
an opportunity to define and construct diacritically one “nation” in relation
to another as well as to define and diacritically construct multicultural facets
existing inside the “nation.” Most important to emphasize, though, and more
than just a de-centering of the “national” or “dominant” or an international
collaboration or exchange with multinational financial backers, casts, and
production crews, a transnational approach proposes a polycentric look at the
film industry and its inter/national productions.
Like postcolonial studies, transnational studies is also a “post-” move-
ment. It is postnationalist and can be understood as a number of different
“modes of production and consumption as well as ideology, genre and
aesthetics” (Lim, 2007: 39). Yet, one may read the “trans” prefix more as a
spatial marker as opposed to the temporal marker indicated by “post.” The
transnational functions to destabilize or has the effect of destabilizing the
xxxviii I N T R O D U C TION

notion of place, for the transnational “is most at home in the in-between
spaces of cultures, in other words, between the local and the global” (Ezra
and Rowden, 2005: 4).33 Transnational artists and transnational texts often
foreground a number of common concerns, critical devices, and enunciative
tropes. Many scholars agree with Vijay Devadas’ definition of transnational
cinema, which also more-or-less fits a definition of transnational literature.
He summarizes that transnational cinema is

defined and used in reference to cinema made by displaced film-

makers living in exile or diaspora; used as a mode of expressing
the interstitial and artisanal modes of production, distribution,
and consumption; marked by the use of hybrid stylistic forms,
patterns of identification, and ideological concerns; and defined
by the affirmation of difference. (2006: ¶3)34

Echoing attestations in postcolonial discourse theory, transnational studies

also challenges the parameters of the national and constructions of social
networks, families, identities, public spaces, and public cultures. Scholars
working in the field of transnational studies in relation to both cinematic
and literary texts are interested in exploring a variety of issues, in particular
issues related to: how families are split between countries of origin and
destination; the emotional ties binding individuals to one or both countries
of origin and destination; the ebb and flow of border crossings and com-
munications across borders; the hybridization of cultures; and the counter-
hegemonic actions and discourses of the nonelite who refuse assimilation
to a nation-state.
Very recently, scholars have started suggesting that the notion of the
transnational entrains a necessary revisiting of the term “postcolonial.” Will
Higbee concludes that postcolonial discourses in film are concerned with
challenging fixed, Eurocentric assumptions around cultural identity and
the nation and asserts that “the kind of films most readily identified with
postcolonial cinema deals broadly with the global circulation of peoples and
cultural goods in a mediated and interconnected world” (2007: 52).35 Yet,
Higbee maintains that the problematic and contested category of the post-
colonial has been largely bypassed, elided, or rejected by critics and scholars
attempting to theorize around the idea of transnational cinema (2007: 52). As
described in the discussion above, transnational cinematic critical scholarship
has primarily focused on issues of production (i.e., movement of filmmakers
between different film cultures and national cinemas), distribution (i.e., the
global circulation of films and film products as cultural commodities), and
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xxxix

reception (i.e., the different ways in which individual films are interpreted by
foreign audiences).36 As already hinted at, other scholarship centered on the
transnational in relation to film, mass media, popular culture, and literature
has concentrated on migration and diaspora. Reasons for omitting the post-
colonial from the transnational vary among scholars, but the most common
reasons why include that the term is ambiguous in socio-historical terms,
largely apolitical, and fundamentally Eurocentric in its privileging of the
colonial era.37
In drawing from Stuart Hall’s and Bill Ashcroft’s work on globalization,
Higbee proposes that we should include the postcolonial in our thinking
about the transnational in the context of contemporary French cinema for
“an appreciation of postcolonial theoretical discourses and their histori-
cal context is vital if we are to fully understand what is at stake in French
films that deal with issues of migration, displacement, and the imbalance of
power involved in intercultural exchange” (2007: 53). Thus, two potentially
separate yet interconnected approaches to theorizing the transnational are
developing in the field. On one hand, transnational studies has looked to the
“technical” components of the aesthetic project (the financers, production
crews, filmmaking tools like CGI, cast members, and audiences) and the
mechanisms of distribution and circulation of these artistic products around
the globe. These scholars seek to investigate the interstices between “national”
and “transnational” in the texts, audiences, and cultures they analyze through
an optic of globalization.
In this account, globalization comes to represent “the increasing concen-
tration of economic, political and media powers . . . and the fragmentation
of nation states, social and cultural formations” (Higbee, 2007: 52). On the
other hand, transnational studies is also starting to look to the “postcolonial”
components of the aesthetic project (the categories of exile, diaspora, and “ac-
cent”) and the provisionality of inherited boundaries and pressures of global
hegemony. These scholars seek to investigate the interstices between “global”
and “local” in the texts, audiences, and cultures they analyze also through an
optic of globalization. But in this account, globalization comes to represent
(à la Hall) a centuries-old phenomenon of which we are simply experienc-
ing the latest (albeit highly accelerated) phase and of which colonialism is an
earlier manifestation and (à la Ashcroft) as predication of the fluidity of the
concept of home and a basis for how local communities and minority groups
achieve agency.38 This revised consideration of the transnational in which the
postcolonial is taken into account connects with another approach to film
studies, the discussion of “Third Cinema,” and it recalls Bhabha’s “Third
Space of Negotiation.”
xl I NT R O D U C TION

Various categories of classification exist in film studies. Two categories,

Third Cinemas and Third World Cinemas, are the most pertinent to this
discussion of a revised concept of transnational cinema. Generally speaking,
First Cinema refers to the USA and more precisely Hollywood; Second Cin-
ema designates European art and auteur cinema. The terms First and Second,
in this context, do not refer to First or Second World economies, although
the terms were coined intentionally as ironic parody of designation of domi-
nant economic powers.39 The terms ignore geographic situation and refer
rather to dominant cinematic practices: Hollywood-style cinema and auteur-
style cinema; both of which may theoretically be practiced anywhere in the
world and by any filmmaker. Importantly, though, neither of these cinemas is
an engagé cinema, which is a cinema of political protest. Auteur cinema may
effectively challenge Hollywood or mainstream cinema, but auteur cinema is
not necessarily or categorically committed to inspiring or realizing profound
political change.
Inspiring or realizing profound political change is the role of Third Cin-
ema, which is a “cinema committed to a direct confrontation of the political
and cinematic systems . . . [operating] . . . from a third space that is distinct
from First and Second cinema positions” (Hayward, 2006: 423). Third
Cinema largely refers to cinema of the so-called Third World countries, but
not all Third World Cinema is necessarily Third Cinema and not all Third
Cinema is necessarily Third World Cinema. Third Cinema seeks “to promote
the cause of socialism and to counter the ideologically unsound filmmaking
practices of the other two cinemas, especially Hollywood.40 Third Cinema
challenges First Cinema’s consumerist tendencies and Second Cinema’s
aesthetic principles. Third Cinema films make a political statement about
their own country of origin either directly or through allegory and tend to be
political also in terms of stylization (as in a counter-cinema) and target their
own culture’s mainstream films and filmmaking practices as well as style and
content enunciated in dominant international film practice.41 Third Cinema,
as it is constituted by a number of different cultures and countries, is not a
homogenous category of film or filmmaking, but its films do by-and-large
share a common desire to address the effects and legacy of colonialism or
imperialism.
Third Cinema strives to create new cinematic codes and conventions and
discusses major issues of class, race, culture, religion, gender, and national
identity and integrity. Class struggle—especially between the rich and the
poor—is a key theme, and the preservation of popular indigenous (or minor-
ity) cultures and their representation in opposition to dominant colonial or
imperialist cultural values are key tropes. As Hayward explains, “In a sense
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xli

Third Cinema asserts difference within its own indigenous cinema, but also
dissolves geographical boundaries with ‘a virtual geography of its own’”
(2006: 421). It is a cinema committed to social liberation and to a school of
anti-aesthetics. It is not to be confused, however, with Third World Cinema,
which is a term that refers to the cinemas of the African continent, the Middle
Eastern territories, the Indian continent, China and Asian territories, and
Latin America.42
As already indicated, not all Third World Cinema is necessarily Third
Cinema in project, stylization, content, and design and vice-versa. And fur-
thermore, as the previous discussion of transnational and deterritorialization
has shown, to think in geographical terms is not always the most productive
and helpful approach. Thus, many scholars, myself included, prefer to em-
ploy the terms postcolonial or transnational cinema instead of Third World
Cinema in their work. It should be noted, though, that postcolonial and
transnational are not completely synonymous terms with Third World Cin-
ema and that Third World Cinema is a cinema with its own history, codes,
conventions, canon, and theory. However, it lies beyond the scope of this
book to engage with this particular cinema, especially given the fact that I am
more interested in the notion of Third Cinema and where it intersects with
the postcolonial cinematic optic.
In his theorization of “accented cinema,” Hafid Naficy does not assert
that all diasporic, exilic, or Third cinema can (or indeed must or should) be
viewed through a postcolonial optic.43 Nevertheless, including a postcolonial
optic in the transnational readings I present in this study is not only a valuable
contribution; it is essential to this study as I will show in the subsequent chap-
ters. As I mentioned before, this revised consideration of the transnational
that takes into account the postcolonial optic recalls Bhabha’s third space of
negotiation. For Bhabha, this Third Space, like the Third Cinema, enables
other positions to emerge. It is a mode of articulation, a productive space that
engenders new possibility and in which cultural meaning, representation, and
interpretation have no “primordial unity or fixity.”44 In essence, this Third
Space encodes a counter-hegemonic practice and hybrid strategy in which
meaning may be renegotiated and rearticulated. As I already pointed out, this
may be problematic, for this Third Space is left unrooted in history and space.
I suggested before the possibility of a re-hybridization of the postcolonial hy-
brid subject through the lens of the interrogation of the personal. In addition,
I would like to argue for the possibility of a re-hybridization of this Third
Space also through the lens of the interrogation of the personal and propose
the construction: a ²⁄³ (or two-third) space; or in other words, a space or spaces
in-between the second space and the third space.
xlii I N T R O D U C TION

Drawing from the cinematographic methodology just outlined, Second

Cinema refers to a Eurocentric or auteur cinema. Since the publication of
François Truffaut’s la politique des auteurs, the interrogation of the personal
has become synonymous with and a basis for auteur cinema. In Truffaut’s
vision, as a move away from the realm of social and political concern that
dominated French cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, he called for an expressly
formalist style of filmmaking in which form over content and an exploration
of the aesthetic and technical aspects of filmmaking took precedence over
political messages and the historical or social import of the narrative. The
interrogation of the personal was initially understood as the personal vision
of the auteur filmmaker. André Bazin, in response to Truffaut’s la politique
des auteurs, challenged Truffaut’s position with regard to subject matter by
suggesting that Truffaut’s vision opened the possibility for over-valuation of
any film just because it was made by a particular auteur filmmaker.45
In Bazin’s nuanced construction of the interrogation of the personal,
attention shifts from the director’s vision to emphasize his/her voice in con-
junction with his/her vision. In other words, for Bazin, an auteur is a film-
maker who speaks in the first person and in whose filmmaking personal his-
tory works to bring together form and content in equal footing. By personal
history, Bazin is suggesting the director’s perspective: his/her personal “take”
on the story, whether autobiographical or not.46 As Emma Wilson describes
the role of personal history in Second Cinema, “Through both form and con-
tent, a director may seek to unravel or deconstruct an identity; be it artistic
or personal, his own or a protagonist’s” (1999: 19). Bazin’s postulations have
overwhelmingly become the standard trademark or signature of contempo-
rary French “national” cinema since 1950 with the birth of French New Wave
Cinema that adopted this manifesto, and its legacy is still practiced, paid
homage to, and felt even today.
Yet, a significant portion of France’s cinema today—thanks to the work
of émigré and other ethnic minority or politically conscientious or politically
minded filmmakers—has maintained the personal history approach while
effectively returning to, equally emphasizing, and clearly situating personal
history inside the historical or social import of the narrative and political mes-
sages surrounding the film. Thus, the interrogation of the personal in much
contemporary French filmmaking has evolved, intentionally or unintention-
ally, to include aspects of Third Cinema filmmaking. As we recall, Third
Cinema makes a political statement about its country of origin either directly
or through allegory; tends to be political also in terms of stylization; strives
to create new cinematic codes and conventions; and discusses major issues of
class, race, culture, religion, gender, and national identity and integrity. Third
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xliii

Cinema asserts difference within its own indigenous cinema but also dissolves
geographical boundaries with a virtual geography of its own.
These characteristics of Third Cinema do not address in the same way
or to the same degree all of the films and filmmakers I include in this study;
and not all of the filmmakers I include are considered auteurs and not all
the texts I analyze here fit the category of Second Cinema. Yet, all of the
filmmakers and their texts theoretically fit within the third space of negotia-
tion and in-between the categories of Second and Third Cinemas in terms
of project, stylization, and content. Hence, I propose an articulation of a ²⁄³
Space in transnational film and literary studies in this book. I recognize that
mathematically speaking, ²⁄³ (or two-thirds) is not a fraction in-between the
integers two and three; but linguistically-speaking, thanks to the diacritical
slash mark, ²⁄³ may be read as 2 and/or 3. This construction neatly expresses
my consideration and suggestion to re-hybridize the Third Space and Second
and Third Cinemas by situating the postcolonial hybrid subject in personal
history, as I will show in the following analyses in each subsequent chapter.

A “TRANSVERGENT” CONSIDERATION

If personal history is a criterion of Second Cinema (the “local” or “national”)

and socio-historical-political import a characteristic of Third Cinema (the
“global”), artists who incorporate both and speak from this ²⁄³ Space in their work
effectively exemplify a transnational [or (trans)national] identity, historicity,
subjectivity, and speaking position. In the context of this study with my focus
on women artists from France, Algeria, and Tunisia, the transnational—which
espouses the postcolonial optic and enables this re-hybridization of subject
and space—is critical if we are to understand what is at stake in contemporary
women’s filmmaking and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia that treat
issues of migration, immigration, geographical or psychological displacement,
and the imbalance of power involved in “local” and “global” intercultural
exchange. This line of thinking, in the context of French trans/national film-
making, has prompted Higbee and other scholars to turn to Marcus Novak’s
notion of “transvergence” in art and architecture to “better describe how both
postcolonial and diasporic cinemas function not only across borders, nations,
and cultures but also within them” and for how the notion of transvergence
“helps us better appreciate how postcolonial and diasporic cinemas engage,
function, and produce meaning within and across national and transnational
positions” (Higbee, 2007b: 80). Although Higbee develops his theorizations
specifically in relation to the work of North African émigré filmmakers living
xliv I N T R O D U C TION

and working in France, his postulation of a “cinema of transvergence” has

solid implications for the fields of French and Francophone women’s film-
making and lifewriting as we shall see.
Higbee delineates a cinema of transvergence along Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s rhizome, for doing so rightly acknowledges

a “foregrounding of difference,” completed by the realization that

a certain degree of interconnectedness between these apparently
isolated or oppositional groups or individuals [that make up the
landscape of transnational and/or postcolonial cinemas] exists
nonetheless. (2007b: 87)

In his view, a cinema of transvergence manifests a powerful means of analyz-

ing postcolonial and diasporic cinema in terms of “transcultural phenomena
that operate on both a transnational level—the relationship between the
global and the local—and with the context of specific national cinemas and
film cultures” (2007b: 87). Higbee asserts that a cinema of transvergence does
not limit itself to “the largely artificial borders and boundaries of national
cinema although it may often work within a national cinema to subvert and
bring into question the ideology of nationalism and the problematic con-
struct of nation” (2007b: 87). Instead, Higbee maintains that a cinema of
transvergence proposes

a clear understanding of the discontinuity, differences and im-

balances of power that exist between various filmmakers, film
cultures, and film industries as well as the elements of intercon-
nectedness that may bind a filmmaker to a given film culture or
national identity at a given time. (2007b: 87)

Thus, a cinema of transvergence, especially in the context of French contem-

porary cinema and like the re-hybridized postcolonial subject, is also situated
in the re-hybridized ²⁄³ Space of artistic and ideological expression. But what
is meant by this term “transvergence?”
As defined by the self-described transarchitect and cultural theorist Mar-
cus Novak in his essay, “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on
the Production of the Alien,” transvergence refers to a non-linear, or rather
trans-linear relation between two or more systems. Novak explains, “while
convergence and divergence are simple linear extrapolations that proceed by
strategies of alignment, transvergence advances translinearly through tactics
of derailment” (2002: 66).47 For Daniela Berghagn, Novak’s concept of trans-
vergence can be conceived of “as the opposite of convergence” (2008: ¶2).48
The notion of convergence suggests movement and direction toward a fixed
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xlv

and final point of resolution, consensus, or destination or at the very least, a

coming together in a finite way. Transvergence, on the other hand, as used
by Novak, implies a complexity, incompleteness, fragmentation, derailment,
and chaos.49 As Higbee explains:

In the context of national/transnational cinemas we might say

that whereas a nationalist ideology [or convergence] might at-
tempt to paper over the cracks of difference, tranvergence, in a
very postmodern way, aims to expose and foreground (celebrate
even) such differences. (2007b: 87)

In this way, a cinema of transvergence, like the concept of the rhizome, shares
the postcolonial optic’s agenda to re-frame “marginality” (or difference) as
well as “dominant” by challenging hegemonic modes of thought and binary
structures through a deconstruction of “center” and “margin” and through a
revelation of how the so-called center and so-called margins, themselves, exist
as constructed ideologies and positionings that serve hegemony. There are
two main positions or tropes that emerge from Novak’s logic of transvergence
that have been most often discussed in scholarly discourse and that have inter-
esting implications for this study. They are the notion of derailment and the
concept of allogenesis or the alloself, which is to say the “alien from within”
(Novak, 2002: 65).
Novak coins the term transvergence as a way in which to discuss the
postmodern experiences of relations and relationships with otherness. He
calls this experience the “production of the alien,” but he does not perceive
this otherness as negative or in classical accordance with typical science-
fiction or political themes of alienation. For Novak, rather, this production
of the alien represents a centrifugal (and thus derailed) process of becoming
and being the other of the self. This process results in the formation of a
subjectivity he names the alloself. In architecture, Novak accomplishes this
transvergent paradigm by employing the virtual processes of contemporary
digital architecture that are able to conceive of and design spaces beyond the
limits of human experience of spatial and temporal dimensions. By using a
computer’s ability to entirely disregard physical laws and the constraints of
geometry, Novak designs his “liquid architectures,” that is to say new forms of
virtual reality or new objects and areas in cyberspace that combine time and
space with little-to-no rational constraints. Thus, some scholars in various
disciplines have looked to Novak’s work and designs as discourses and texts
that transcend the traditional boundaries between art and science. For these
thinkers, transvergence exposes the artificial construction that art and science
are binary opposites.
xlvi I NT R O D U C TION

In the field of art history, a transvergent ethics has come to view new
idioms of expression as conditioned by exodus, invention, and eventual col-
laboration. In this context, collaboration does not stem from democratically
disseminated or proportionally allocated resources but from the permanent
re-appropriation of shared resources, resulting in a re-territorialization of
production, creation, and artifacts. Transvergent ethics has redefined some
contemporary art by creating a home for several new “genres” or “media”; as
in: BioArt—which includes the use of biological matters as part of the artistic
production and context creation, EcoArt—which are artistic acts in which
artists attempt to influence the ecologies in which one lives by reclaiming or
restoring damaged environments artistically or in which artists revision the
human relationship to nature by proposing and inspiring new ways for people
to co-exist with their local environments, Technozoosemiotics—which is the
study of signs elaborated by all natural or artificial living species, as well as
various other new cutting-edge media in which artists explore the relations
between technology and material culture.
In the field of cultural studies, a transvergent ethics concentrates on the
logic of becoming the other and being the alloself. In borrowing a construc-
tion from postcolonial studies, the first and second cultures (the particular
cultural roots or identities of both cultures) in this paradigm of transvergence
no longer count, per se. Rather, as Michael Goddard explains, “the capacity
to be transformed through a cross-cultural encounter with otherness” is at
the heart of the transvergent project (2007: 114).50 Transvergence privileges
a forging ahead as opposed to a retreat into pre-existing cultural, familial, or
psychological identities and a priori social, historical, or political frameworks
and discourses. As such, Novak’s notion of transvergence is quite different
from Lacan’s mirror stage, although both address the Self/Other relation-
ship paradigm. Whereas both ego (or the Self) and the other simultaneously
embrace, oppose, fix, and fixate each other in the mirror in the Lacanian
theorization of otherness, the Novakian theorization of otherness articulates
dynamic and shifting relationships of opposition and confluence for the al-
loself (or the other within the self) that is never separated, fixed, or fixated
in binary opposition. These dynamic and shifting relationships of opposition
and confluence for the alloself are made possible through centrifugal forces or
derailment in Novak’s perspective.
This trans-linear, centrifugal, or derailed movement between two systems
allows for a myriad of possibilities. For Higbee, tranvergence articulates “an
open-ended challenge to the fixed positionings typically offered by hege-
monic structures of knowledge and power” (207b: 85). The identification
with the alien/allo-/other as an integral element of transvergence enables a po-
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xlvii

tentially subversive and destabilizing influence on the relationships between

center/margin and Self/Other. Through the fragmented, incomplete, chaotic,
and centrifugal or derailed nature of transvergence, a logic of transvergence
also opens up the possibility that these marginal or “othered” positions—this
identification with the alien/allo-/other construct—can occupy shifting and
multiple positionings. As Higbee explains:

At one moment, placed on the peripheries, [the marginal or “oth-

ered” positions] point away from the center but is also, and at
certain times, temporarily coming into contact with the notional
‘center,’ only to move off at a later time on another, new trajec-
tory. (2007b: 86)

Therefore, a cinema of transvergence—as also articulated in postcolonial

studies—can negotiate a position that is both center and margin and has the
power to deny the fixity of binary epistemology. This is precisely the agenda
of postcolonial and diasporic cinemas and literatures in their common pur-
suits of challenging fixed notions of nation, center/margin, self/other, and
home/exile. Thus, a cinema and literature of transvergence may re-frame
marginality as a point of resistance and allow for continuities as well as differ-
ences in “national” identity and integrity to exist side by side. In essence, they
function from a ²⁄³ Space of expression filtered through the lens of the inter-
rogation of the personal and are articulated through a re-hybridized subject
speaking position situated in personal history.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

Once again in the spirit of Shohat and Stam, my challenge in this study was
to produce knowledge within a kind of “kaleidoscope framework” of com-
munities, ideologies, disciplines, and discourses in relation to one another
without suggesting that their positionings are identical and interchangeable.
For this reason and from my own ²⁄³ Space of expression in this book, I do not
adopt a single theoretical methodology and restrictively apply it to the close
readings in each chapter. Rather, I am more interested in exploring the mul-
tichronotopic links of theory and practice that bypass the proverbial feminist
studies versus transnationalism versus postcolonialism and so-on scenario.
In this study, I aim to investigate the relationalities between trans/national
representations of French, Algerian, and Tunisian women on the page and
on the screen in a trans-linear or derailed-like fashion through a diversity of
domestic, feminist, postcolonial, and transnational optics.
xlviii I NT R O DU C TION

Contemporary critical work on first-person cinematic and literary nar-

rative seeks to understand the constitutive processes of auto/biographical
or trans/national subjectivities and the components of any particular auto/
biographical or trans/national act. In keeping with contemporary scholarly
criticism of auto/biographical and trans/national first-person literary and
cinematic narration when analyzing the primary texts, this study takes into
consideration in every chapter the autobiographical I’s, the roles of Others,
multiple gender and domestic discourses and representations, various structur-
ing 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
and trans/national acts complicate and enrich the way one understands the
stories one reads and the ways one tells stories about oneself.51 The domestic,
feminist, postcolonial, or transnational theoretical perspectives—the “meth-
odological cubism” discussed in this introduction—are collectively essential
to investigating the function of the look, the problem of the personal, the
construction of gender ideology, and the dis/location of home in this study’s
analysis of homemaking, making home, and gender performance as specific
to the primary texts included.

Overview of Chapters
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 pro-
vides 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. Specifically, I will
discuss the concept of a double gaze, the importance of the audience’s posi-
tioning as listener, and the recognition of women’s desire to speak in refusing
the dominant masculine gaze.
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
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G xlix

quasi-archaeologist 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 has the potential to stir 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 land-
scapes and soundscapes in Tunisian and French societies as shown to be pos-
sible 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 trans/national 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 femi-
ninity created in portraits of beur (or French citizens of North African heri-
tage) 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 posi-
tion the home and homemaking activities as site and source of socio-politi-
cal 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 study will pursue the issue of home by specifically ex-
amining women’s representations of self, diverse communities of women, rela-
tional identities, sexuality and corporality, and orality and discourse. This study
l I NT R O D U C TION

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 study 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. In every case, as this study will develop,
the women artists make possible these self-referential modes of storytelling
through re-hybridized speaking positions in which protagonists speak and
gaze from a ²⁄³ Space of expression. This notion or position of subjectivity
opens up our discussion in Chapter One and begins to define the parameters
of the concept of “making home.”

Notes
1. Thomas Foster, Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women’s Writing
(New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002).
2. Erica L. Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by
Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell-Oro (London, UK: Fairleigh Dickin-
son Univ. Press, 2003), 14.
3. Inderpal Grewal, House and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures
of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1996).
4. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocation and
Twentieth Century Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
5. Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa, 19.
6. Susan Strehle, Transnational Women’s Fiction: Unsettling Home and Homeland
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
7. Strehle, Transnational Women’s Fiction, 1.
8. Strehle, Transnational Women’s Fiction, 2.
9. Sarah Pink, Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects, and Everyday Life (Ox-
ford, UK: Berg, 2004).
10. Pink, Home Truths, 10.
11. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s
Home Got to Do with It,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Theresa de Lau-
rentis (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), 191–212.
12. Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge,
2006), 295.
13. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 296.
14. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 298.
15. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 298.
 INTERROG A TING A ND RE-H Y BRIDIZIN G li

16. Emma Wilson, French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
17. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cin-
ema (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996).
18. Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory, eds. Sidonie
Smith and Julia Watson (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 57–71.
19. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001).
20. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 9–11.
21. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 145.
22. Julia Watson, “Autoethnography,” in Enclyclopedia of Life Writing, ed. Marga-
retta Jolly (London, UK: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 83.
23. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialects, and
the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory,
eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,
1998), 343–351, and Françoise Lionnet, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage,”
in Women, Autobiography, Theory, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison,
WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 325–336.
24. Henderson, Speaking in Tongues, 344.
25. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 165.
26. Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism: Key Ideas (London: Routledge, 2009).
27. Vertovec, Transnationalism, 7.
28. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih, Minor Transnationalism (Durham:
Duke Univ. Press, 2005).
29. Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 6–7.
30. Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005),
5–6.
31. Hayward, French National Cinema, 8.
32. Carrie Tarr, “French Cinema: ‘Transnational’ Cinema?” Modern & Contem-
porary France 15.1 (2007), 3–7.
33. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “General Introduction: What is transna-
tional cinema?” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Elizabeth Ezra and
Terry Rowden (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–12.
34. Vijay Devadas, “Rethinking Transnational Cinema: The Case of Tamil Cinema,”
Senses of Cinema, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/transnational
-tamil-cinema.html (22 July 2009).
35. Will Higbee, “Locating the Postcolonial in Transnational Cinema: The Place
of Algerian Émigré Directors in Contemporary French Film,” Modern & Contempo-
rary France 15.1 (2007), 51–64.
36. Higbee, Locating the Postcolonial, 52.
37. Higbee, Locating the Postcolonial, 52.
38. Higbee, Locating the Postcolonial, 52–53.
39. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 422–423.
lii I NT R O D U C TION

40. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 415.

41. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 415.
42. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 423.
43. Hafid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princ-
eton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001).
44. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
45. Emma Wilson, French Cinema since 1950 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
1999), 17.
46. Wilson, French Cinema since 1950, 19.
47. Marcos Novak, “Speciation, transvergence, allogenesis: Notes on the produc-
tion of the alien,” Architectural Design 72:3 (2002), 64–71.
48. Daniela Berghagn, “Cinema of transvergence,” Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in
Contemporary Europe, 2008, http://www.migrantcinema.net/glossary/term/cinema_ of
_transvergence/ (22 July 2009).
49. Will Higbee, “Beyond the (trans)national: toward a cinema of transvergence
in postcolonial and diasporic francophone cinema(s),” Studies in French Cinema 7:2
(2007), 79–91.
50. Michael Goddard, “East-West European Superpositions as Transvergent Cin-
ema,” Studies in French Cinema 7:2 (2007), 107–117.
51. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 9–11.
CHAPTER 1

Making Home with

Assia Djebar
DESTABLIZING THE CENTER(S)

As I have illustrated briefly by the two short case studies of Assia Djebar’s
Ces voix qui m’assiègent and the Song of Messouada in the Introduction of this
book, Djebar’s contributions to the fields of postcolonial and feminist stud-
ies and my own particular study of women’s contemporary filmmaking and
lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia cannot be understated. I posit that
scholars may now discuss much of her work not simply as primary artistic ex-
amples in which feminist and postcolonial literary and film theories resound,
but as actual theoretical discourses, themselves, in feminist, film, and postco-
lonial theory. Principally speaking, we know Djebar as a novelist, translator,
filmmaker, poet, essayist, and playwright. Increasingly, we consider Djebar
a theorist. As we shall see in this chapter, Djebar puts in theory and prac-
tice self-referential modes of storytelling articulated through re-hybridized
speaking positions in which protagonists speak and gaze from a ²⁄³ Space of
expression. Let us begin with a cursory overview of her literary and cinematic
project and agenda so as to better contextualize and comprehend her employ-
ment of this speaking position and space of expression.
Throughout her work, by engaging with a variety of political and social
themes and content, 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

1
2 C H A PT E R 1

consistently brings to light in her work numerous complex contradictions

embedded in Algerian society that “engender” Algerian women.
Djebar adopts a variety of motifs and preoccupations in confronting
these contradictions in all of her work. First, by interviewing Algerian women
and recording their dialogues in her work, Djebar struggles against Algeria’s
dominant, nationalist discourse that excludes women’s active contributions
to modern Algerian society, her primary preoccupation throughout her cor-
pus. Second, 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 ap-
propriates 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, third, 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 discus-
sion 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 be-
yond the immediate 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 more
critical 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 Al-
gerian 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 Dje-
bar to revise traditional, official French colonizers’ and official post-indepen-
dence, Algerian history-writing in her work. By (re)writing and (re)recording
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 3

previously silenced female voices into Algerian history, Djebar mediates tex-
tual and cinematic spaces in collaboration with her own views and speech in
which a re-hybridized 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 literary or cinematic
discourses since “speaking for” reinstates colonizing cultural practices. There-
fore, in her texts Djebar collaboratively appears alongside her seeing/speaking
female subjects. In effect, this multiplicity of female Algerian gazing perspec-
tives and voices challenge and overturn hegemonic Algerian discourses, which
then in turn create new transnational cultural discourses for future genera-
tions of Algerian hybrid gazing/speaking subjects in Algeria. Thus, her work
lends itself well to and continues debates central to feminist, autobiographi-
cal, cinematic, and postcolonial modes of critical discourses.
I take as my point of departure in this chapter Djebar’s text, Regard in-
terdit, son coupé—the postface to her 1979 collection of short stories, Femmes
d’Alger dans leur appartement. This chapter will examine numerous theo-
retical positions set forth in the postface. In this text, Djebar problematizes
spectatorship and the gaze 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 both processes of veiling and unveiling (i.e.,
the anxiety inherent in divulging personal narratives in Arab societies; unveil-
ing), which she succeeds in mitigating by finding a collectivity of Algerian
women’s voices (veiling) in her work. She fleshes out women’s duality in
body and voice, which draws out a division between Algerian women’s bodies
and voices as two (in)congruent agents of narrative discourse. Importantly,
she also examines women’s oral tradition of the stories, songs, histories, and
legends Algerian women pass along to and instill in their children. I also take
into consideration in this chapter 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 con-
tribute to the methodological cubism in this study by helping to explore
the multichronotopic links of theory and practice concerning the represen-
tations 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). In
order to understand how Djebar’s first-person cinematic and literary nar-
ratives have the potential to partially deterritorialize the process of imaging
4 C H A PT E R 1

communities, and thus contribute to this study’s methodological cubism as

established in the Introduction, we would do well to start with a discussion
of the gaze and positions of spectatorship as they are realized and created in
Djebar’s work, in particular, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement.

The Gaze and Positions of Spectatorship

Djebar’s treatment of the gaze and positions of spectatorship in both theory
and practice in her corpus is key to grasping how her work supports the no-
tion that written and visual inscriptions cannot be predetermined nor nar-
rowly prescribed. Furthermore, her use and discussion of the gaze and posi-
tions of spectatorship form the basis to an exploration of how the process of
uncovering or articulating new identities and subjectivities ushers in new ways
of seeking, knowing, and being. 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” Algeria. The postface, Regard interdit, son coupé, recapitulates
the motifs of these stories through Djebar’s analysis of two specific paint-
ings—Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and Pablo
Picasso’s Women of Algiers. As I have already argued in Assia Djebar as Film
Theorist in “Touchia: Ouverture” and “Ces voix qui m’assiègent” (Weber-Fève,
2008), 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.
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 5

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 in-
troduces Delacroix’s masterpiece as one that still makes us question ourselves
(1979: 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 a
Monsieur Poirel, chief engineer of the Port of Algiers and amateur painter.
Through Poirel, Delacroix made the acquaintance of a local rich man, who
eventually allowed Delacroix to enter his home. Once inside the man’s 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. Djebar 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 this man’s home.
For Djebar, the full sense of Delacroix’s painting plays on the relation-
ship 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 (1979: 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 (1979: 241). From
Djebar’s point of view, Delacroix’s vision of the man’s home manifests a sto-
len 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” (1979: 243) / [“within a luxurious and
silent semidarkness” (1992: 137)]; 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 apart-
ment” 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” (1979: 256) / [“feminine mystery” (1992: 146)]. 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 relation-
ship between the gaze 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.
6 C H A PT E R 1

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 as well.
The gaze for Djebar and other feminist film scholars refers to the ex-
change 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 on screen or assume the
male positioning.1
In relation to Djebar’s theoretical work on the spectator (gazer) in Al-
gerian society in her text Regard interdit, son coupé, she finds that the only
licit gaze in her society is Algerian and male. In paraphrasing an important
reading of the gaze in this essay, Djebar asserts that the eye that gazes in Al-
gerian society maintains dominance over and always seeks out the eye of the
dominated (1979: 245). Thus 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 Re-
gard 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” is qualified as Algerian, male, and familial. This familial
restructuring of the authorized spectator in her post/colonial context provides
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 7

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 revi-
sion 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 al-
lowed for a position of spectatorship for the female viewer, but the gender
binaries of masculine/feminine were still strictly maintained. Yet, still further
revisions recognized the limitations in this postulation of masculine/feminine
traditional positions of spectatorship and their implications. These “third
wave” 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 pro-
cess 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 an objective in feminist cinema to construct within the film me-
dium different visions and conditions of viewing/representation for 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 and
enunciation of dominant cinema have sought technical and narrative ways
of re-conceptualizing gender and gender roles on screen and in the audience.
“Feminist” filmmakers have often challenged and continue to challenge the
female viewing experience and the representations of femininity in the cin-
ema. Primarily through subversion and requisition, they work to defamiliarize
conventional characteristics, codes, conventions, modes, tropes, and motifs of
dominant modes or enunciations 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 Dje-
bar’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, their veil paradoxically creates a position
8 C H A PT E R 1

for the female spectator in an Algerian male space as well as erases her iden-
tity. 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 (1979: 245). However, as Djebar
continues, the female gaze is present in society, but this liberated eye, that
could become a sign of a conquest toward the knowledge of others, outside
a confinement, is perceived as a threat, and the vicious circle reforms (1979:
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 contradic-
tory 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, renders her an in-
visible 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 appro-
priating—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). Recalling the discussion
from the Introduction concerning the home’s deeper affiliation with the pub-
lic realm, the domestic universe is a receiver of public languages, values, and
discourses and reflects and resembles “nation.” Thereby, the veil works on
both ends of the spectrum, as a marker of masculine presence and feminine
absence and national and domestic discourses; thus effectively challenging the
binary oppositions and social contradictions facing all Algerian women.
For Huughe, this ambivalent 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 contradic-
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 9

tions inherent in the Algerian woman” (1996: 867). For Djebar, as expressed
in Regard interdit, son coupé, and for this chapter, this “new relation to mean-
ing” 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 theorizations.
By presenting the first spectators who are male (represented through the
local man and by extension, Delacroix) and a second spectator who is female
(represented by the figure of the veiled woman), Djebar creates a third spec-
tatorial space (represented through her use of “nous” [“we”] when discussing
the effects of Delacroix’s painting on the observer) that fluidly shifts gender
through its interpolation between the authorized Algerian-familial-male spec-
tator 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 or positions.
Through presenting a series of spectators in Regard interdit, son coupé—male,
female, masculine, feminine, authorized, unauthorized, Algerian, Western—
Djebar asserts (although she does not yet articulate it as such in Regard inter-
dit, son coupé) a certain “in-betweeness” or hybridity of spectator positions.
In this instance, the re-hybridized postcolonial subject is clearly situated in
personal history or rather personal histories: Djebar’s experiences and reflec-
tions examining Delacroix’s painting, Delacroix’s experiences and reflections
during the visit to this home, and our experiences and reflections reading
Djebar’s essay. At once, the spectator position is both center and margin and
begins to imply a complexity, incompleteness, or fragmentation.
With regard to the spectator position created in Djebar’s filmmaking,
just like the critical distance she takes in her writing, the camera allows her
to assume a multiplicitous perspective. For this chapter of this study, this
multiplicitous perspective speaks to Djebar’s ability to assume different
perspectives and avoid being gazed upon. In other words, the re-hybridized
²⁄³ Space of expression allows Djebar to bring to light in print or in film Al-
gerian women’s first-person perspectives and both marginal and hegemonic
representations of Algerian femininity. In Djebar’s work, the position of the
re-hybridized spectator is both textual (occupying a representative space or
position in her writing and filmmaking that challenges Algerian nationalist
discourse) as well as meta-textual (implying a shared relationality) between
the viewer or reader (the “real-world” spectator) and the text.
As already briefly discussed in the Introduction, much contemporary
women’s filmmaking and lifewriting emphasize an interactive process in
10 C H A PT E R 1

which meaning is always in production and a state of transition, dependent

on the spectator or reader who must decode or interpret and assign the new
identities and subject positions and construct the new ways of seeing, know-
ing, and being. Djebar’s corpus is no exception to this rule. Trinh T. Minh-
Ha has suggested that the spectator’s interaction with the cinematic text
through the script and shots of the film enables the spectator to assemble his/
her “own film.”5 Although Djebar does not explicitly 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 re-hybridized
spectator position in relation to Djebar’s work as well. This (meta)textual po-
sition and Minh-Ha’s working 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: “ ‘Collabora-
tion’ 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 word 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 much more positive. For Minh-Ha, col-
laboration is akin to “speaking nearby.” This is to say that, collaboration—or
the veiling of one’s voice, perspective, and knowledge with other voices 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 some-
thing that belongs to neither of them comes to pass between them” (1999:
244). This notion of collaboration captures the interstitial spaces of counter-
hegemonic strategies of renegotiating and rearticulating meaning called for in
transnational and postcolonial studies and most poignantly speaks to Djebar’s
theorization of the re-hybridized 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 in-
digenous 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,
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 11

they are passed between the character and the author and then to us. This
collaboration creates a position for a re-hybridized spectator in which she 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 or position from or in which to challenge traditional
theorizations of the voice and gaze. In all of Djebar’s work, this re-hybridized
postcolonial subject position—situated in personal history and speaking and
seeing from the ²⁄³ Space—is perhaps most strikingly prominent in her 1976
film, La nouba du Mont Chenoua. Let us consider this cinematic text more
closely.

LA NOUBA DU MONT CHENOUA (1976)

In Djebar’s post/colonial revisions of the gaze in contemporary Algeria, Al-

gerian women must read against the grain of two gazes in order to refuse the
normalizing processes of patriarchal socialization and post/colonial represen-
tation. For Djebar in Regard interdit, son coupé, this double gaze stems from
two sources: a male, Algerian gaze that generally represents Algerian women
as “limitée[s] certes au terroir, au village, au saint populaire local, quelquefois
au ‘clan’” (1979: 257) [“limited to the land, to the village, to the popular lo-
cal saint, sometimes to the ‘clan’ ” (1992: 147)] 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 rep-
resented as the land/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 repre-
sented 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 moun-
tains 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 and involvement (Donadey, 1996: 885). As Anne
Donadey summarizes, “Both documentary and fiction, La nouba follows the
12 C H A PT E R 1

filmmaker’s ‘alger 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 suggested manner in which one may initially interpret
or decode La nouba du Mont Chenoua is to see 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). There is very little
continuous dialogue in the film. The voices and vocalizations that one does
hear in the film 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 ef-
fectively 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 recol-
lections 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 pro-
jected.
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 13

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 on a December night of 1976 in a country farmhouse—“une
scène d’‘intérieur-nuit’: image de fiction” (1999: 161) [“an inside night scene:
image of fiction”]—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. Djebar writes:

nous—regardons l’homme, l’Autre, regarder une femme algéri-

enne allongée, endormie, telles les Vénus ou nonchalantes, ou
absentes, ou rêveuses de la peinture italienne de la Renaissance.
. . . Comme si tout commencements de l’art (le cinéma en pays
arabes 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 . . .
(1999: 161)
[we (the technicians and I)—watch the man, the Other, looking
at an Algerian woman stretched out, asleep, such as the Venuses
or the nonchalant, absent, or dreaming women of Italian painting
from the Renaissance. . . . As if all beginnings in art (cinema in
Arab countries finds itself objectively in a situation analogous to
that of the Florentine or Venetian painters of the Quattrocento!)
went through this original experience: how the other gazes at the
woman in her abandonment and how, in our turn, we gaze at him
watching . . . (my translation)]

This insight is significant for, in her essay, Djebar shares that she uses this
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
practices. 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 (1999: 162), and she questions whether there would really be a cinema
if there were not first, explicitly, a quest for desire (1999: 162). She stresses,
however, that this masculine gaze in this shot 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 (1999: 162). Quite interestingly and almost
14 C H A PT E R 1

counter-intuitively, she asserts that this masculine gaze is not voyeuristic. For
Djebar, this masculine gaze “d’avant le desert” [“before the desert”] draws out
this man’s powerlessness and his suffering from separation (1999: 162). In
Djebar’s theorization of re-hybridized spectatorship, the masculine (Algerian,
male, familial) gaze—when he is not the “maître du sérail” [“master of the se-
raglio”]—manifests a lack of power (1999: 163). As Djebar sees it, this pow-
erless masculine gaze proves reminiscent of colonization in which this “regard
d’avant le désert” is made subordinate to a voyeurstic “regard dominant”
[“dominant gaze”] of the colonizer (1999: 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) multi-
plicitous 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 repre-
sented 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 generaliza-
tions. 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 posi-
tion of the listener, rather than the dominant position of the gazer/criticizer”
(1997: 217). Thus, the spectator as listener should listen to the critical testi-
mony—explicitly or implicitly stated—in postcolonial women filmmakers’
work. Djebar reconciles this inherent danger in her work through the quali-
fication of her artistic design to “speak nearby” and not “for” the (subaltern)
women of Algeria. This is to say that, 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
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 15

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.
The privileging of Algerian women’s voices instantly brings to mind
Gayatri Spivak’s groundbreaking essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? After analyz-
ing 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 in this regard:

Spivak’s implication is that within certain discourses of represen-

tation, 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. (2000: 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 media?) 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 film-
making—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” (2000: 57). Therefore, through the act of Lila, the
French-educated daughter of the tribe, listening to the voices of the women of
Chenoua, Djebar effects a ²⁄³ 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 never capable of speaking
without another’s written, cinematic, political, etc. mediation. Djebar ap-
pears 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
16 C H A PT E R 1

“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 through all of La nouba du Mont Chenoua.
Yet, as we established in the Introduction of this study, the original hybrid
subject of postcolonial studies—now re-situated in this study in a ²⁄³ Space
through the lens of the interrogation of the personal and echoing Minh-Ha’s
concept of collaboration—is no longer strictly a subaltern collectivity of
anonymous voices but a polyphony of personalized and dispersed individual
voices that share a common origin, source, location, agenda, or position. This
reworking of the hybrid postcolonial subject in La nouba du Mont Chenoua
as a re-hybridized speaking and gazing subject is textualized in the very first
installment or “movement” of the film.

“Touchia: Ouverture”
As I have already demonstrated in Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in “Touchia:
Ouverture” and “Ces voix qui m’assiègent” (Weber-Fève, 2008), Djebar takes
up this challenge to foreground collaborative female communication and a
re-hybridized subject position 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 pour-
tant 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! ’
(1999: 165–166)
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 17

[A woman, in close-up, appears; she turns her back to the viewers;

we only see her hair, only the mass of her head et she is against a
wall; she slides her forehead on the Stone; maybe as a sign of im-
patience or powerlessness, she just literally taped her head against
this wall!. . . It’s possible. For she refuses us, she refuses me, the
camera’s gaze. It is in this relationship, however, that I choose to
show her. She continues to walk, to look, to insist on saying no to
the viewers; suddenly her voice, and with it her revolt, explodes:
‘I speak, I speak, I speak!’—silence—‘I do not want anyone to see
me!’ she sighs. Then she adds, when we understand that, in the
bedroom, the man is also there, waiting: ‘I do not want you to see
me!’ (my translation).]

Djebar shares that, in her view, cinema made by women and possibly all post-
colonial cinema in her reasoning always originate in a desire to speak (1999:
166). That is, this woman’s unauthorized refusal to be gazed upon by the
masculine gaze—as the protagonist expresses this in the voiceover—and by
the camera gaze—as evidenced by her turning her back to the lens—suggests
a privileging of speech over the gaze. This refusal is also heard in Minh-Ha’s
cinematographic work7) and illustrates how Djebar desires to present “those
who gaze for the first time”; that is, by a voiced refusal to be 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”
(Knannous, 2000: 53). Ali—Lila’s mute and paralyzed husband (injuries
sustained in a horse-riding accident)—and Aicha—Lila’s daughter—ac-
company Lila. Throughout the film, Djebar films Lila at home with Ali
and Aicha, 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 Djebar’s textualization of the gaze as a “phenomenological
reduction” (Bensmaïa, 1996: 877), a notion which suggests the outlawing
of the “master’s” gaze and voice.
18 C H A PT E R 1

This segment of the film opens with Djebar’s aforementioned descrip-

tion 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 gazes slightly off
to the side. Djebar cuts back to Lila as she turns around toward 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 of interdicting 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.
Djebar then jump cuts to a close-up one shot of the back of Lila’s head look-
ing 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’s representa-
tion 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
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 19

then quickly jump cuts to a medium shot of Lila still framed in the window.
Lila closes the window shutter blocking out the exterior light, walks toward
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 large-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 ad-
dition 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 rep-
resent a community of shadows (an in-between or ²⁄³ 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 fi-
nally, 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 bringing into the light.
The scene continues with a cut to a longer medium one shot of the pro-
file of Ali wheeling himself into the shot from screen-left. Lila remains stand-
ing 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, the 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
20 C H A PT E R 1

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 illu-
minates 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, sift
through her memories, and 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 coupé, one of the only ideologically accepted ways of representing
Algerian women in Algeria is in connection to the land. Further editing be-
tween 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 defamiliariza-
tion) 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, male and female 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.
Djebar 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 back-
ground. 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 directly or indirectly 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 in Touchia: Ouverture, 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
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 21

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 or position of female (on-screen as well as
off-screen) spectatorship in transnational 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, Dje-
bar challenges the traditional gaze through Algerian women’s désir de parole
(1999: 166) / [“desire for speech” (my translation)], but Djebar asserts that
this desire for speech is borne only after she opens her eyes (1999: 166) and
specifically when she circulates “dans les paysages retrouvés” (1999: 166) /
[“in refound landscapes” (my translation)]. 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 (1999: 166–167). Djebar finds
that in their interweaving gazes, dialogue becomes baited on the present and
on the past (1999: 167). For Djebar, women’s gaze becomes a departure for
speech (1999: 167) or in other words, an impetus for a feminine speech pur-
porting to testify to women’s present (and past) daily existence and memories
of “un passé encore à vif” (1999: 167) / [“a past still alive”]. Through a per-
sonal investigation or a sifting through life experiences that shares common
points of origin, reference, or destinations with others in Djebar’s work, this
re-hybridized subject—through the gaze and in speech—exposes, resists, and
challenges the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which it is impli-
cated.
For the remaining roughly ten minutes of Touchia: Ouverture, the
film juxtaposes sequences of ethnographic-like images of Algerian coun-
trywomen 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 various 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 juxtapositions impacting
the spectator’s viewing experience is Djebar’s mise en scène in each of the
images. Djebar masterfully fills each plane (foreground, middle ground, and
22 C H A PT E R 1

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 in Touchia: Ouverture, Ali, occupying the
middle ground, sits in his wheelchair with his back quarter-turned toward 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 approaches the room in which
Ali is sitting and stops in the door frame (now occupying the middle ground).
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
middle ground 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 recast on the back wall and dramatically overshadows Ali. She enters the
room from the foreground, moves to the middle ground standing opposite
of Ali, then moves to the background and closes the second window shutter,
thus cutting off the young girl’s gaze. The characters’ positions 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, which
is 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 under-
standing of the Algerian women’s situation in Algeria as well as symbolically
functions to warn Algerians by foreshadowing Algerian women’s rather pes-
simistic 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 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 and political 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” by the
Algerian women multiplicitously represented in the figure of Lila. In this
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 23

instance, I wish to read Djebar more specifically in the young girl’s figure
than in Lila’s, largely because this young 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 positions of female spectatorship and authorship
through Lila’s gaze and speech as well as through her own voiceovers that
meld and collaborate with the gazes and voices of the countrywomen Lila
interviews in various home settings.
In Regard interdit, son coupé, the home shelters a paradox. On the one
hand, the home houses the “mystère féminin.” 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.
As such, the home in Djebar’s essay is unsettled, destabilized, and becomes a
site for a repression of difference. Yet, as we saw above, the home also has the
potential to become a ²⁄³ Space of contradiction, ambivalence, paradox, and
resistance. It is a contact zone in which gazes, voices, speeches, and bodies
may collaborate together to produce trans/national representations of Alge-
rian women on the page and on the screen. A brief overview of Djebar’s utili-
zation and theorization of the voice, the body, and speech in Regard interdit,
son coupé and Ces voix qui m’assiègent will show us how.

The Voice, the Body, and Speech

In some ways, since the cultural silencing of Algerian women is imposed by
the patriarchs of Algerian society, which is how Djebar presents the situation
in Regard interdit, son coupé, her literary strategy to veil her voice with her
24 C H A PT E R 1

fellow countrywomen in her writing reifies this silencing since she claims to
deny her individual voice in her work. Yet in more ways, Djebar’s literary
strategy in Regard interdit, son coupé, and by extension in all her work, revises
this cultural silencing insofar as she is consciously “writing in order to affront
and struggle against a double silence” (1979: 27). In Être une voix francophone
from Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Djebar identifies this double silence firstly as
a struggle against her own literary silence (“autisme”) when faced with the
unnamable violence in Algeria (1999: 27) and secondly as a struggle against
her maternal genealogy (1999: 27). As she demonstrates in La nouba du Mont
Chenoua, by veiling her individual voice in the shadows (or “timeless cho-
rus”) 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.
Djebar’s struggle against a female autism—the first of the threatening
silences against which she writes—returns us to Regard interdit, son coupé, spe-
cifically when Djebar explains that the silencing of female voices in their oral
transmission of history leads to their autism. Djebar 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” (1979: 259).
Thus, Djebar suppresses her individual voice so that she may successfully
muffle it and blend it with the whispers of her fellow countrywomen recount-
ing the songs, legends, and stories testifying to Algerian women’s role in his-
tory so as to avoid her personal and her female community’s collective autism.
The suppression of her individual voice does not suggest complete anonym-
ity, however. Djebar’s voice speaking alongside her fellow countrywomen in
her writing is still personalized and collaboratively recounts a personal history
or histories; in other words, her perspective and personal take on the story in
which she seeks to (re)claim a multiplicity of female identities.
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 Re-
gard 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 vol-
untarily revealing herself as she climbs over the village wall to face the would-
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 25

be conquerors. In this legend that Djebar recounts in her essay, while facing
the advancing Tedjini enemies, Messaouda cries out: “Où sont les homes de
ma tribu? / Où sont mes frères? / Où sont ceux qui chantaient pour moi des
chants d’amour?” (1979: 251). [“Where are the men of my tribe? / Where are
my brothers? / Where are those who used to sing songs of love to me?” (1992:
143).] Upon hearing her cries, as legend has it, the men rushed to her aid cry-
ing out: “Sois heureuse, voici tes frères, voici tes amants!” (1979: 250). [“Be
happy, here are your brothers, here are your lovers!” (1992: 143).] As a result,
the men, “électrisés par l’appel de la jeune fille” (1979: 250) [“electrified by
the young girl’s call” (1992: 143)], 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 “éléctrisés” by hear-
ing her voice. The recognition of the female body and voice as a mobilizing
(especially creative) force has prolifically proven central to many feminist ap-
proaches and readings of literature and film.
Historically speaking, women and their socio-political-economic posi-
tion and status have typically been determined by their bodies—their indi-
vidual awakenings and action, 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 rea-
son 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 This appears especially true
with regard to 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
26 C H A PT E R 1

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 tran-
scendent 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
of 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
to some extent in her work, but she 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 of her village, 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 Hé-
lène 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 [“a feminine writing”]—that recuperates the lost voice of the
archaic mother and creates a space or position 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 as 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 spon-
taneous language which is capable of translating those moments when lan-
guage 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
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 27

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 the daughter, are shut-up
inside the family—ce resserrement à l’intérieur des familles (1979: 256) [“this
tightening within the families” (1992: 146)]—which she finds leads to a reat-
tachment 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 (1979: 256–257). 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, “Where
are my brothers?”).
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 (1979: 257). In Regard interdit, son coupé, the mater-
nal also “engenders” the only official female cultural identity constructed,
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
(1979: 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 Dje-
bar, the maternal provides not just a procreative link between the genera-
tions 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
(1979: 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 (1979: 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.
28 C H A PT E R 1

However, through the figure of the sororal in her 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 con-
clude 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 Cix-
ous 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 by
bringing the female body and voice in fusion to the task of discourse.16 This
process is perhaps best illustrated in Djebar’s collection of essays, Ces voix qui
m’assiègent.

CES VOIX QUI M’ASSIÈGENT

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 more specifically the stakes for
women writers of first-person narratives of the Maghreb. According to
Gracki, these writers face consequences of a symbolic nudist exposure.18
She explains:
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 29

[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 circumlo-
cutions is akin to unveiling or denuding oneself. (1996: 835)19

Djebar echos Gracki’s assertions in her own words in her Du français comme
butin from Ces voix qui m’assiègent.
Du français comme butin originally appeared as an article in La Quin-
zaine littéraires’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 overhead) 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 her 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 (1999:
70). She asserts in her essay that censorship and curses sometimes result, ac-
companied by a premature prolixness and more new, freshly “modernized”
orators than female elders of the suspicious tribe (1999: 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 personal histories in her work. Djebar interrogates
the nationalist discourses of Algeria as solely privileging and elaborating mas-
culine subjects and their contributions to Algerian history, effectively ignor-
ing Algerian women and their contributions. Djebar will directly affront the
30 C H A PT E R 1

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 un-
derline in this chapter that for Maghrebi writers, the decision to divulge one’s
own or a community 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
[“unveiling”]. 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, ambivalence,
and contradictions inherent in Algerian women’s social constructions and their
personal situations. On one hand, Djebar situates the act of writing as the equiv-
alent to unveiling herself in a public space and thus renders herself the object of
a panoptic gaze. Huughe summarizes this point:

Thus, by dint of writing and of its social impact when pub-

lished, 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. (1996: 867)

On 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 !” (1999: 97).
[I tell myself right now that I wrote while remaining veiled. I would even say
that I clung to it: writing as a veil!] Djebar elucidates 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 (1999: 98). She justifies this
comparison by explaining that to write is to expose oneself, to parade oneself
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 31

in others’ views, and that to veil herself in her writing was a natural mode
(1999: 98). As Huughe proposes, the first veil Djebar donned was her pseud-
onym. 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 Écrire 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 inter-
national de l’ARIC” on “Identité, culture, et changement social” at the Un-
viersity of Sherbroke (Canada-Québec) in 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” (1999: 43). [“I have used the French language until now as
a veil. Veil covering my individual person, veil covering my woman’s body, I
could almost say veil coving my own voice” (my translation).] 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 (1999: 98), but rather to venture outside
while at the same time preserving oneself (1999: 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
re-hybridized speaking subject. By denying her individual subjectivity in her
writing and by adopting a collective yet still personal female voice, Djebar
rehabilitates a ²⁄³ female space or position of spectatorship and authorship
32 C H A PT E R 1

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 of a com-
munity of Algerian women from a personalized female point of view in some-
times fictional and sometimes non-fictional modes of expression. 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 coun-
try 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 personal history in Dje-
bar’s work echoes an important revision in feminist theoretical discussions of
the corporeal body in literature; that is, 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 be-
gan seeing representations and standards of conventional or normative femi-
ninity as performative acts. Scholars began turning their attention to the ex-
amination of “feminine” behaviors, in which women may burden themselves
with cosmetics and cosmetic procedures in an 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 and
activities 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 ide-
ologies (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 bod-
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 33

ies 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, often times Dje-
bar writes of the porteuses de bombes [“women bomb carriers”], 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 testimo-
nies. On this point, Madeleine Dobie argues 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 percep-
tion—had to be silenced and disavowed. (1994: 91)

The inscription of women into the “official” History of Algeria whether on

the side of the colonial French or postcolonial Algerians—as Dobie’s preced-
ing citation evidences—excluded Algerian women, both in body and 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. In so doing, Djebar believes they will present what we
recognize today as a transnational view of Algerian women both within and
34 C H A PT E R 1

beyond the borders of the nation-state. She drives this argument home par-
ticularly in the Postface of Femmes d’Alger dans leurs appartement.

REGARD INTERDIT, SON COUPÉ

Djebar’s emphasis on female bodies and voices in written texts once again
cannot fail to bring to mind Cixous’ work on écriture feminine 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 (transnational) set of Algerian H/historical discourses that would
take into account Algerian women’s existence and contributions. This revi-
sion 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,
certainly between the sexes.
Djebar calls to Algerian women to bring their bodies into the light,
thereby “challeng[ing] 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” postco-
lonial 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 pre-colonial 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
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 35

her work in the corporeal representation of Algerian women—particularly as

evidenced in the disfigured bodies of the former porteuses de bombes characters.
To this end, Djebar envisions the future of Algerian women’s writing, as she has
demonstrated in her own 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 sight of the female body while at the same time paradoxically ef-
facing 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.”
It seems as if for Djebar, the female body may effectively provide a po-
tential catalyst for her narration of her personal history, 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 discus-
sion 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.

Djebar’s Reading of Picasso’s

Women of Algiers
In response to this “shedding of light on female bodies,” Djebar responds
again with a “double transgression.” Gafaiti outlines the situation by assert-
ing that

[Djebar] 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. (2001: 814)

Again, Djebar principally challenges the dominant discourse of nationalism

through the textualization in her work of (re)appropriated female bodies and
36 C H A PT E R 1

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 truism 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 another way with regard to the chal-
lenges she levels at the dominant discourses of nationalism. Djebar reveals
this additional challenge in her analysis of Picasso’s Women of Algiers at the
end of her essay.
As Djebar presents 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, Dje-
bar writes that Picasso 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 (1979: 259–260). Picasso’s work manifests
a glorious liberation from confinement and awakens the bodies in dance, in
expenditure, and in free movement (1979: 260). According to Djebar, the
juxtaposition of the “impenetrable” figure of one Algerian woman in Picas-
so’s painting to the figures of the other Algerian women in motion represent
a proposed moral of a connection to be recovered between the former and
parried calmness—the lady, frozen as before in her sullen sadness, is hence-
forth immobile, but like a rock of interior strength—and the improvised
bursting out in an open space (1979: 260). In other words, one must find
an “in-betweeness” between this particular representation of a frozen Alge-
rian—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 histori-
cal in-betweeness or re-hybridization 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 recount-
ing 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.
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 37

Djebar elucidates that two years following Picasso’s sojourn in Algiers,

a line of women bomb carriers, “à la bataille d’Alger” appeared (1979: 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 (1979: 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 (1979: 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 (1979: 261). She explains that some of these women
warriors, once captured and imprisoned, found themselves “sexes electro-
cutes, écorchés par la torture” (1979: 261) [“sex electrocuted, flayed through
torture” (1992: 150)]. 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 fol-
lowing 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 discus-
sion of the threats imposed upon Algerian patriarchal society by the female eye
that gazes in public. Djebar draws a correlation between the female “eye” and
the other “eyes” of her body—including the nipples of breasts. Thus by paral-
leling 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 carri-
ers equally challenges and disrupts this very paradigm. This is to say that, if in
order to maintain traditional North African social practices Algerian women’s
bodies were to remain covered, it stands to reason that the postcolonial elites
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 French soldiers—became taboo. For Djebar, sound becomes
cut: The subject becomes taboo and is no longer discussed following the libera-
tion, which ultimately leads to the (re)imposition of the “structure du sérail”
[“structure of the seraglio”] with its laws of invisibility and silence (1979: 262).
38 C H A PT E R 1

In essence, barring the years during the Algerian war of independence and
its moments of spontaneous heroic acts of women warriors as represented in
the Song of Messaouda, Algerian women’s situation has not changed, Djebar
reckons. She expresses 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. (1979: 263)
[Only in the fragments of ancient murmuring do I see how we
must look for a restoration of the conversation between women,
the very one that Delacroix froze in his painting. Only in the door
open to the full sun, the one Picasso later imposed, do I hope for
a concrete and daily liberation of women. (1992: 151)]

Djebar makes possible in all of her work self-referential modes of storytelling

through re-hybridized speaking positions in which protagonists speak, gaze,
and act from a ²⁄³ Space of expression. For Djebar, this space is character-
ized by oral tradition, shifting gender perspectives, multivalent positions of
spectatorship and authorship, an illumination of tabooed subjects, changing
constructions of power and power relations, and the recounting of multiple
personal histories as they are all effected by and through the home.

Conclusion
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 mas-
culine 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
 M A K ING HOME WIT H ASSIA DJ EBAR 39

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 women’s cinema and litera-
ture work to subvert the double gaze and “master’s” voice by outlawing male
gazing through gender reversal and by (re)claiming multiplicitous representa-
tions 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 or positions of cinematic and literary author-
ship, 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 the primary texts discussed in this chapter 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 ²⁄³ Space of expression in which a re-hybridized gazing and
speaking subject may create new, public spaces in which the next generation
of even further re-hybridized gazing and speaking subjects may continue their
oral tradition and collaborate on new discourses that combine their mothers’,
grandmothers’, sisters’, and their own histories.
As we shall see in Chapter Two’s examination of Annie Ernaux’s La
Femme gelée (1981) and Simone de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue (1967),
although normative discourses of femininity and female representation may
be grounded in the institutions of the ruling-class hegemony of any given
society, Djebar’s motif and mode of inter-female-generational histories re-
surface in Ernaux’s and de Beauvoir’s first-person narratives and successfully
permeate, in varying degrees, time and class as well as ethnic and geographical
boundaries.

Notes
1. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975), 6–18.
2. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ In-
spired by Duel in the Sun,” Framework 6 (1981), 15–17.
3. Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984).
4. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently (New York, NY: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1996), 9.
40 C H A PT E R 1

5. Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy Chen, “Speaking Nearby,” in Feminism and

Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 317–335.
6. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Third World Women’s Cinema,” in Interven-
tions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, eds. Bishnu-
priya Ghosh and Brinda Bose (New York, NY: Garland, 1997), 220–221.
7. Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1990), 212–216.
8. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press,
1997), 1–12.
9. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 1–12.
10. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 1.
11. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 1.
12. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 2.
13. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 2.
14. Abigail Bray, Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference (New York, NY:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 37.
15. Bray, Hélène Cixous, 37.
16. Bray, Hélène Cixous, 71.
17. Jean Déjeux, Littérature maghrébine de langue française (Ottowa, CA: Naeman,
1973).
18. Katherine Gracki, “Writing Violence and the Violence of Writing in Assia
Djebar’s Algerian Quartet,” World Literature Today 70.4 (1996), 835–843.
19. Laurence Huughe, “ ‘Écrire comme une voile’: The Problematics of the Gaze
in the Work of Assia Djebar,” World Literature Today 70.4 (1996), 867–876.
20. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phe-
nomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Writing on the Body, eds. Conboy et al. (New
York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 401–418.
21. Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 7.
22. Madeleine Dobie, “The Woman as Look and the Woman as Voice: Assia
Djebar and Leïla Sebbar,” Constructions 9 (1994), 89–105.
CHAPTER 2

(Re)Displaying Femininity and

Home with Annie Ernaux and
Simone de Beauvoir

Neither Annie Ernaux nor Simone de Beauvoir in the field of French liter-
ary studies is a modern or contemporary women writer that one immedi-
ately or even generally associates with Diaspora or diasporic spaces. To my
knowledge, there are no “official” postcolonial approaches to or postcolonial
readings of their work and ideas, per se. Although both Simone de Beauvoir
and Jean-Paul Sartre championed Francophone African literatures in the
mid-twentieth century and were fervent supporters of the independence
movements in Southeast Asia and North and West Africa, they were not so-
called “postcolonial” writers. With regard to Annie Ernaux, the prototypical
postcolonial questions concerning nationality, citizenship, nation-states, bor-
ders, and political engagement never surface. She is categorically considered a
French writer of the auto/biographical tradition in both theory and practice.
However, if we recall the trope I elaborated in the Introduction, all of
the artists in this study address a state of “homelessness at home” in their
narratives. This notion speaks to the feelings of unease, nervousness, dissat-
isfaction, 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, this dis/location captures a kind of diasporic
space in which the protagonists are both “here and there,” caught in an
inauthentic self-identity normatively conceived, understood, imposed upon,
accepted, and performed at home. It is this diasporic-like experience of an
unsettled home and its in-authenticity that becomes a catalyst for the female
protagonists (re)awakening to the hegemonic and personal discourses giving
shape and form to their multiplicitous identities, thereby creating their sense
of existing both “here and there” or neither “here nor there.” Calling to mind

41
42 C H A PT E R 2

Strehle’s theorization of the home as I laid out in the Introduction, the home
reflects and resembles “nation” by expressing the same ideological pressures
that contend within the nation and does not serve as a retreat from the public
and political spheres. We recall that the home has permeable walls and is a
receiver of public languages and values as well as a space in which national,
global, and/or hegemonic discourses speak and reproduce themselves.
It is through this lens that I include de Beauvoir and Ernaux in this
study. Both women are keenly aware of the “imperial” ideology of home and
its associated values, which is to say the “deeper affiliation[s] with the public
realm as a patriarchal space where power relations vital to the nation and cul-
ture are negotiated” (Strehle, 2008: 1). In this case, “nation” is understood as
hegemonic middle-class, mid-twentieth-century, metropolitan France. In this
chapter, we will explore how the diasporic space of home—this “homelessness
at home”—inflects transnational identity and transnational understanding of
self and gender in contemporary women’s lifewriting from France. Transna-
tional in Chapter Two does not suggest the international borders between
two independent nation-states but rather the virtual intra-national borders
between social class and sex within the homeland of France. In order to real-
ize this transnational reading of femininity and home in this study, let us first
begin with an overview of de Beauvoir’s and Ernaux’s literary corpuses.
Annie Ernaux’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s objectives in their writing
echo some of Assia Djebar’s primary artistic and theoretical agendas. On the
surface, all three women are concerned with bringing to light numerous con-
tradictions that engender the representations of Algerian or French women
within various societies and circumstances. Whereas Djebar has represented
these contradictions in a variety of artistic media and academic forms, Er-
naux has principally remained within the realm of literature, and de Beauvoir
worked within the realms 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-archaeologists 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 con-
ventional 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. Addition-
ally, all three women’s texts tease out multiple theoretical interrogations of
women’s contemporary representations, subjectivities, and identities in Alge-
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 43

ria and/or France. Let us continue this overview with a more in-depth look at
Annie Ernaux’s corpus and then explore in close detail her novel La Femme
gelée with regard to the re-hybridized speaking and gazing subject position she
creates and the ²⁄³ Space of expression she adopts in this text.

Annie Ernaux
Since many of Ernaux’s texts include much of her personal life and personal
history, it only seems fitting in this chapter’s discussion and analysis of her
third novel, La Femme gelée (1981), to begin with her brief biography. Claire-
Lise Tondeur provides a very useful summary. She writes:

Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux est née en 1940 à Lillebonne en

Normandie. Ses parents Alphonse et Blanche Duchesne, d’ori-
gine 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.
(1996: 37)
[Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux was born in 1940 in Lillebonne
in Normandy. Her parents Alphonse and Blanche Duchesne, of very
modest origin, owned and ran a grocery store-café in a working-class
neighborhood of Yvetot. Annie attended an independent school,
at the Saint Michael boarding school in Yvetot, then went to the
Joan of Arc high school in Rouan before pursuing her studies at
the universities of Rouen and Bordeaux. Agrégée in literature, she
was a high school teacher in Bonneville, Annecy et Pontoise. Since
1977 she is linked to the National Center of Distance Teaching
where she writes answer keys for students preparing to take the
CAPES. (my translation)]

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/represen-
tations. In these texts, Ernaux introduces the reader to her struggles with
44 C H A PT E R 2

social class and gender stereotypes brought about by her parents’ social ascen-
sion 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-class 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 see-
ing, in this case contemporary French women of the lower and middle social
classes in order to revise these mis/representations. She reveals in her writing
how these representations have been unilaterally constructed by the dominant
social class in the interest of self-gain and complicitly carried out by the domi-
nated social classes. In doing so, Ernaux, like Djebar, succeeds in mediating
a textual ²⁄³ Space or mode of articulation in which a re-hybridized subject,
which is to say a protagonist caught in-between multiple social and gender
discourses and personal histories, may gaze and speak.
From a seemingly anthropological or sociological perspective, Ernaux
thus underscores all of her texts with a rather post-modern examination of
the contemporary contradictory and ambivalent French social politics and
cultural discourses by questioning normative gender and social class roles and
ideologies 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). [“the author writes texts in order to better under-
stand the linguistic and social alienation that represents for this intellectual
her original belonging to the working classes” (my translation).] 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 socioculturel, 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 sen-
timent 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)
[All these texts are in fact variations on the same theme. They
speak, all of them, about socio-cultural uprooting, the pain of this
passage from the “dominated” class to the “dominating” class, the
shame that the adolescent author feels in respect to her parents,
the feeling of betrayal and of guilt later felt for them and the need
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 45

to rehabilitate through them a world judged inferior by those who

are in the majority. (my translation)]

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 indi-
vidual provincial family that reflects a macrocosm of contemporary French
society at large. It is this auto/biographical personalization, this form of
personal history, that enables Ernaux to re-hybridize the speaking and gazing
subject in her work. Specifically speaking, it is the critical literary device of
her je transpersonnel in her work that manifests the ²⁄³ Space from which both
this re-hybridized subject and the author speak and gaze.

ERNAUX’S JE TRANSPERSONNEL

Ernaux’s microcosm of an individual provincial family that reflects a mac-

rocosm of contemporary French society at large reminds us somewhat of
Djebar’s project to “speak nearby” in her work. Whereas Djebar collabora-
tively appears alongside her seeing/speaking female subjects and their personal
histories, Ernaux authoritatively speaks through her seeing/speaking female
subjects and their personal histories. Varyingly throughout her narratives,
Ernaux fluctuates between the protagonist, the antagonist, a by-stander, or a
seemingly omniscient narrator. Yet, her presence or authority—noted in the
text through her incessant use of je or first person—is always felt nearby. I
wish to pause for a moment to emphasize that by “speaking nearby” I am not
talking about the use of the first person in character dialogue. I am referring
to the self-referential uses of Ernaux’s first person that stem either from her
direct involvement in the narrative as a character in the story or the paren-
thetical contributions she makes as she remembers and recounts the events of
the story/memory in the narrative. I will return to this discussion of Ernaux’s
presence in her texts in just a moment, but I would like to underline first that
this framework of the personal “speaking nearby” the familial or the social
convincingly blurs the conventional genre boundaries between fiction and
autobiography in the field of literary studies.
In addition to blurring the boundaries of literary categorization, this
framework permits Ernaux to revise normalizing processes of patriarchal
socialization through her personal narratives and creates a position for a re-
hybridized seeing and speaking subject. Furthermore, Ernaux benefits from
this framework by successfully reworking canonical forms of literature and
46 C H A PT E R 2

conventional ways of writing via the critical device that scholars have named
the “transpersonal I” or her je transpersonnel. Ernaux defines this device 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 diamétrale-
ment opposées. (Ernaux, 1994: 218)
[The je that I use . . . does not constitute a means to construct
for myself an identity through a text, to autofiction myself, but
to seize, in my experience, the signs of a familial, social, or pas-
sionate reality. I believe that the approaches are even diametrically
opposed. (my translation)]

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 lifewriting.
For Ernaux, her je seizes “signs” or referents of a familial, social, or pas-
sionate reality. In her writing, her je transcends the individual to encompass
the social, but not without demonstrating the conflicts and contradictions en-
trained in such a process. I underscore here that a literary presence and a liter-
ary identity are not the same thing in Ernaux’s work and thinking. Ernaux is
clearly felt on every page of her narrative, thus we come to feel that we know
her personally to some degree. But as we read and reflect, we realize that what
we are coming to know is rather a subjectivity that is multiple and multifari-
ous and that transcends time and person. In effect, we find a contact zone of
contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox in her personal history as she sifts
through her own life experiences and those of her family members whose
personal histories she also speaks through and intertwines with her own in her
texts. This notion of a transcending subjectivity in auto/biographical writing
remains central to studies of first-person narrative theory. A brief look at an
important tenet focusing on the first-person subject pronoun in first-person
narrative theory will help to illuminate our discussion of Ernaux’s je transper-
sonnel and its role in the constructions of transnational representations of
home and femininity in this chapter.
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
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 47

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.1 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 woman and mother in the 1960s. As scholars and read-
ers, 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 alongside or through
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 other 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.2 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 Nar-
rated 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, rhythm, or verb tense 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 or position 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.3 Since we (and all narrators) are always historically,
culturally, and economically situated in time and place, we/narrators are pro-
duced in a particular way unique to our/their particular time. Scholars thus
advocate for a reading practice that situates the narrator within a historical
48 C H A PT E R 2

notion of “personhood” and a socio-cultural understanding of the narrator’s

life during the times about which the narrator is writing. This is to say that
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 Narrat-
ing 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 transperson-
nel. 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 ide-
ological, social, and cultural contradictions and ambivalences 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 “I’s” in first-person narratives.4 They have found that
the boundaries between any “I’s” are often shifting and flexible. By drawing
psychoanalytic notions of the ideal or internal Other, they concur that no “I”
may speak unless in relation to others. This theoretical assertion unseats first
wave autobiographical theory, which traditionally understood the life narra-
tive 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. Furthermore, through the
lenses of the interrogation of the personal and personal history, Ernaux’s
hybrid subjects are well situated in history, class, gender, and “nation.” It is
the clash between the multiple contradictory, ambivalent, and paradoxical
discourses of history, class, gender, and “nation” that surround her subjects
that unsettle them and re-hybridize them in transnational identity, historic-
ity, subjectivity, and speaking positions. Thus, her texts create a ²⁄³ Space that
combines personal history (the “local” or “national”) and socio-historical
import (the “global”) from which a re-hybridized biographical, historical,
sociological, cultural, and literary subject speaks and gazes.
When asked to situate herself in relation to the genre of autobiography,
Ernaux replies:
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 49

[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 surve-
nus, 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. (Bacholle, 1998: 142)
[My texts are in one way or another autobiographical, that is to
say that all of them take my life as material . . . my life, not only
as an ensemble of events that have taken place, but also my family
relations, all that I have seen, all that I have heard. I would say
rather that I have a subject matter that is linked to my life and
that is the subject of my books. What I do is then something in-
between biography, history, sociology, and literature. In fact, I use
this autobiographical subject matter like a scientist would do with
an object that he is studying and that he is using to move toward
something else. (my translation)]

Thus, in the first-person narratives of Ernaux, Djebar, and the other women
artists in this project, we continually see a relational form of self-narrating
and self-discovery in their respective works. In addition to structuring these
women’s works 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 re-hybridized speaking
subjects in challenging, appropriating, and revising hegemonic forms of gen-
der representation and conventional modes of writing. This, in turn, allows
these artists (and others after them) to continue creating new re-hybridized
spaces and seeing and speaking subjects. We will pause for a moment to con-
sider Ernaux’s writing style and the manners in which it realizes ²⁄³ Spaces or
modes of articulation and expression.

ERNAUX’S HYBRID WRITING STYLE

Scholars often refer to Ernaux’s writing style as “hybrid.” In support of this

qualification or categorization, 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” (1989: 23)
50 C H A PT E R 2

[“underneath literature” (my translation)]. This phrase speaks to a search for

writing techniques that free the author from codified forms and high culture
rituals.5 For Ernaux, this approach specifically rejects a romanticized representa-
tion of her working-class origins and family life. Secondly, Ernaux has shared
in her text, La honte, a desire to be “en somme l’éthnologue de moi-même”
(1997: 40) [“in sum the ethnologist of myself” (my translation)]. 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 con-
ditions, which are unparalleled in other French texts by working-class women
writers.6 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 uni-
versity 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 re-
bellious 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 dutiful bourgeois wife, homemaker, and mother.
Ernaux expresses in an interview with Philippe Vilain that she 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 dé-
voiement, 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 respon-
sabilité; 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. . . . À 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 sup-
pose qu’on puisse refuser, exercer sa liberté. (1997: 68)
[a research study of the trajectory of a woman who meets up
with herself, her life of about thirty years, who has the feeling of
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 51

being led astray, wasted things. She has moved into ‘the differ-
ence’ that characterizes the feminine condition. Where is the cul-
tural portion, the progressive conditioning, education, religion,
confrontation with the masculine world, where is the freedom,
in other words the possibility that was given to not accept, in
some fashion, the responsibility; perhaps even the more or less
conscious acceptance of the role of the woman, for all sorts of
reasons, for example to please a man, to perform seduction, etc.
. . . Inside the book, there is often a sway of discourse between
‘here the influence, the conditioning’ and ‘but why did I accept?’
That which supposes that one can refuse, exercise his/her free-
dom. (my translation)]

Lyn Thomas finds this novel to manifest a literary version of topics discussed
among 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups, for Ernaux shares her
thoughts on and experiences with personal problems stemming from tradi-
tional social and gender politics.7 Thomas recognizes in this novel affinities
with the feminist Bildungsroman insofar 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 and liberation prevalent in the existentialist literature
and middle-class intellectual milieu of the time (1999: 32). Gender roles and
discourses of power and power relations are common lenses adopted by many
scholars as they discuss this text in their secondary criticism.
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) [“shows how the annihilation of feminine power that strangely is lost as
cultural and social power is won, has disappointed the hopes of the young
twenty-year-old girl” (my translation).] And she concludes that Ernaux’s goal
in this text is not one of a “revendiation féministe en soi” (2000: 32) [“a
feminist demand for self” (my translation)] but rather “la dénunciation d’un
ordre social, inapproprié à l’épanouissement de la femme—un order qui ne
s’explicite pas clairement, mais qui sourd partout et que le langage selon les
cas dénonce ou renforce” (2000: 32). [“the denunciation of a social order,
inappropriate to the blossoming of the woman—an order that does not make
itself clearly explicit, but that bursts everywhere and that language accordingly
denounces or reinforces” (my translation)]. Each of these aforementioned
readings or summaries of La Femme gelée thereby demonstrates the ability of
Ernaux’s je transpersonnel to transcend the personal to speak nearby the social
52 C H A PT E R 2

in her work through content, portraiture, and mundane details of common

everyday life. Let us now turn to the close reading of this novel, considering in
particular the manners in which Ernaux uses written representation to open
up new ways of seeing, knowing, and being “female.”

LA FEMME GELÉE

In La Femme gelée, Ernaux employs the literary device of comparison as her

first means to opening up new ways of seeing, knowing, and being “female.”
She compares and contrasts at some length multiple representations of
motherhood and various scenes of home life. Throughout this text at vari-
ous points, Ernaux mobilizes against one another multiple portraits of the
mother and maternal conduct in an effort to draw out society’s contradic-
tions and ambivalences. For example, the first pair of portraits she compares
and contrasts is her mother and “les momans” of her neighborhood (the
“o” reflecting her working-class accent) and her middle-class classmates’
mothers and “les mamans” of the school (the “a” manifesting the standard-
ized spelling and pronunciation). Later on in the novel, 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 res-
pect 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 re-
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 53

pas, etc. Interminable. Lourde à porter l’iconographie maternelle

déballée par l’école des sœurs. (1981: 58)
[One always leaves less of it, however, than one thinks. Especially
since it’s difficult, even impossible, to figure out all the connec-
tions involved, like the one between that admiration they instill
in us for the Virgin, the mother of us all (and the Church is our
mother as well), and the respect we owe to “your dear mama.” I
hope that you help out at home, girls, because you could never
show her enough gratitude! Who does the cleaning? She does.
Who irons your dress? She does. And the meals, and so on. And
on. It’s a heavy burden, the maternal iconography dispensed by
the good sisters. (1995: 62)]

Very shortly afterwards in her recollection, Ernaux contrasts this representa-

tion of the self-sacrificing mother, whom the female students should honor
with their hand-woven baskets, with the reality of what will follow on Moth-
er’s Day at her individual home. Ernaux recalls:

Prouver à toute force sa reconnaissance. Napperons brodés, cor-

beilles 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 ridi-
cules toutes les deux. Je n’osera 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. (1981: 59)
[Do your best to show your gratitude. Embroidered doilies, raf-
fia baskets, sashes of corded cotton—we start getting ready right
after Easter, spending the end of every afternoon busily working
on our Mother’s Day presents. . . . Sudenly, the icy reprimand:
“Mademoiselle, I have my eye on you. You aren’t doing a thing
and you will never finish your doily in time!” . . . No question of
me reciting the short poem we’ve all been taught—the two of us
would feel absolutely ridiculous. I’d never dare admit such things,
especially when the teacher announces in front of the whole class,
“If you don’t finish your doily, it means you do not love your
mama!” I beaver away at my embroidery, convinced that I’m a
54 C H A PT E R 2

monster, even if Mother’s Day in my house is a load of poppy-

cock. (1995: 62–63)]

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 stan-
dard, she becomes further displaced as a child and adolescent by internalizing
the school’s image of motherhood and questions (as she continues in this
recounting) her mother’s “authenticity.”
The protagonist explains that she felt uncomfortable and began to won-
der if her mother was “une vraie mère, c’est-à-dire comme les autres” (1981:
59) [“a real mother, one like all the others” (1995: 63)]. 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 ex-
presses:

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. (1981: 60)
[The spirit of self-sacrifice, the perpetual smile, and that deference
toward the man of the house—imagine my surprise and skepti-
cism (but not too much embarrassment yet) when I don’t see
these traits in my mother. And if the teacher only knew that she
uses bad language, and sometimes leaves the beds unmade all day
long, and tosses customers out of the café when they’ve tied one
on too tightly! (1995: 63)]

One manner in which the protagonist reconciles the differences (ultimately

irreproachable in Ernaux’s later works) between these two “motherly” por-
traits is through language. As if acquiring 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, subservi-
ent, 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) resolv-
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 55

ing the confusion she felt as a child regarding her mother’s “authenticity.”
The protagonist clarifies:

Tellement agaçante en plus la maîtresse à susurrer “votre mââ-

man”, chez moi et dans tout le quartier, on disait “moman”.
Gross différence. Ce mââman-là s’applique à d’autres mères que la
mienne. Pas celles que je connais bien de ma famille ou du quar-
tier, 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. Ou celles qu’on
appelle dans l’Echo de la mode des “maîtresses de la maison”, qui
mijotent de bons petits plats dans des intérieurs coquets, dont les
maris sont dans des bureaux. La vraie mère, c’était lié pour moi à
un mode de vie qui n’était pas le mien. (1981: 60)
[And it’s so irritating, the way the teacher whispers “your ma-
mah”; at home and all around my neighborhood, we may “ma-
ma.” Big difference. That ma-mah stuff is for other mothers
than mine. Not the ones I know well in my family or among our
neighbors: always in a complete snit, griping about how children
don’t come cheap, walloping kids right and left to keep them in
line—it’s just unbelievable how much they lack that “inner glow”
so characteristic of the ma-mahs out teacher describes. I see them
after school, when I go to meet my father, who waits for me with
his bike. Elegantly dressed, refined ladies. The kind referred to in
fashion magazines as “the mistress of the house,” who simmers
delicious dishes in their cunningly decorated homes while their
husbands are busy at the office. I see the ideal mother as part of a
way of life that has precious little to do with ours. (1995: 64)]

However, this dilemma will resurface time and time again in Ernaux’s life-
time through her ascension to the intellectual bourgeoisie, a social class space
and status in which “moman” does not exist, when she finds herself faced
with similar conflicting portraits of motherhood; that is, an “emancipated”
mother sharing the domestic chores and child-raising responsibilities with her
partner that 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” (1981: 60) [“who simmers delicious dishes in
their cunningly decorated homes while their husbands are busy at the office”
(1995: 64)] that her husband ultimately comes to expect from Ernaux. In
56 C H A PT E R 2

this new context 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, Er-
naux 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 mainly in the language of the
school and peppers her writing with her “language of origin” when pertinent
or necessary. Thus both women associate their maternal language with the
oral and their acquired language with the written.
Furthermore, both women negotiate a ²⁄³ Space of authorship as a re-
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 connec-
tions” (Johnson, 1999: 298) and is a “paratactic hodgepodge that mirrors the
babble of heteroglossic discourses influencing her development” (Johnson,
1999: 298). 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). Fau 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).
The word “authentic” often appears in many scholars’ descriptions of
Ernaux’s writing style and is regularly implied in Ernaux’s own textual rep-
resentations. 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 a similar upward trajectory of
social mobility might also experience. Ernaux elucidates this point in her own
words:
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 57

Pour La Femme gelée, c’est différent. Je me situe dans une pers-

pective 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 théo-
rie. 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 fémini-
nes” propres me paraissant un énorme piège, j’avais le désir de
montrer par l’analyse concrète de situations que celles-ci étaient
une illusion. (1997: 69)
[For La Femme gelée, it is different. I situate myself in a feminist
perspective, in the sense that my research could be summarized
as: “how did I become a woman?” how this “frozen” woman
that I think I became was molded. One sees the relationship
with Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase, “One is not born woman,
one becomes woman.” I did not write research. No development
of a theory. Yet, there existed in the 1970s a very theorizing
discourse on women, the affirmation of an essential difference
that, in addition, never took into account social belonging.
The woman taken as a reference was more or less the middle-
class woman. La Femme gelée is inscribed in this landscape, it is
underlied by the refusal of feminist doctrine in which I did not
recognize a part of my experience. And this exaltation of “femi-
nine values” proper appeared to me a huge trap, I had the desire
to show by manner of concrete analysis of situations that these
values were an illusion. (my translation)]

Yet having just read Ernaux’s position on the misgivings of “feminine

values,” as expressed in this citation, 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
experiences modeled on the middle-class metropolitan woman. Rather,
Ernaux’s “universal” is more akin to Simone de Beauvoir’s understand-
ing of the term within the realm of the philosophical. In Ernaux’s and
58 C H A PT E R 2

de Beauvoir’s usage of the term, the “universal” becomes a location in

which the female gender struggles against the creation and imposition of
different normative gender role discourses that stretch across cultural bor-
ders in varying degrees.
In this Existentialist context of mauvaise foi created by the “exalta-
tion de ‘valeurs féminines,’ ” Ernaux’s je transpersonnel, like Minh-Ha’s
(meta)textual spectator position, transcends the individual first-person nar-
ratives to stir the reader’s awakening to these normalizing discourses and
their socio-historical-political import. In turn, this awakening allows 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 a re-hybridized speaking
subject who asserts that normative gender roles should be built on a bilat-
eral 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 develops this
thought:

Le féminisme comme lutte pour l’égalité des droits entre les homes
et les femmes, conditions de vie, responsabilités, rôles identiques
ou partagés est toujours au cœur 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 suppo-
sent 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. (1997: 70–71)
[Feminism as a struggle for equal rights between men and women,
conditions of life, responsibilities, identical or shared roles are always
at the heart of my preoccupations. I think that there are very few
women and men who are truly feminist, certain of them would like
to conserve the advantages (or what they consider as such) of tradi-
tional masculine/feminine roles, taboos and censorship that remain.
I surprise myself when I do not do something, when I do not go
somewhere because I am a woman. All of this reveals the necessity of
feminist thought. Not feminine writing, of course. It is not up to me
to decide if my books are feminist or not. (my translation)]
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 59

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—insofar as how she individually experienced and
personally perceives it.
With regard to the organization and structure of the “text,” Ernaux
clarifies that with La Femme gelée she takes a certain distance from the liter-
ary form of the novel largely because there really is no difference between
the narrative 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 reconnatire que ce n’était plus un roman mais une au-
tobiographie” (Ernaux, 1995: 38) [“but in fact in interviews I was able to
give on the subject of this book, I was almost obliged by the people who
were speaking with me to recognize that this was no longer a novel but an
autobiography” (my translation)]. 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 feel-
ings of guilt.9 In other words, Ernaux recognizes the ambiguous and ambiva-
lent 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) [“And I believe that
the me, our me, is revealed to us through the company of others, not only
by the gaze that they hold on us, but also by the interest and the memories
that they awake in us” (my translation)]. It is this latent “fréquentation des
autres” in all of Ernaux’s writing that constitutes the ²⁄³ 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 reframes her
re-hybridized speaking subject.
60 C H A PT E R 2

Ernaux states that La Femme gelée textualizes this “exil intérieur” as a loss
of identity and period of suffering 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. An-
necy, j’y étais entre vingt-cinq et trente-cinq ans. C’est très com-
plexe. Dans cette ville je suis entrée dans le rôle qu’on attendant
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’âge, 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 souf-
france. (1995: 39–39)

[Yvetot where I spent my entire youth, is the strongest place.

Annecy, I was there for the time when I was between twenty-five
and thirty-five years old. It’s very complex. In this city I went to
school in the role that everyone expected of me. During this time,
however, I prepared for the CAPES, the aggregation, I wrote Les
Armoires vides. It’s in fact ten years of an intellectually active life,
which could have also not been the case. But it’s very mutilating,
to have, in hindsight, all one’s existence subjected to the transmis-
sion of life. I am happy to have had children but the imprison-
ment was complete. I did not know how to pull myself out of
it. When I return to Annecy, I see again this woman, a double
suffering. As that was a suffering. (my translation)]

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 and ambivalent 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 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 in the domestic chores
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 61

and child-raising responsibilities before their marriage) shortly comes to ex-

pect 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 nos-
talgia as well as shame and abjection. Concerning her new home, she finds
frustration and oppression as well as pride and conformity.
Throughout the novel, 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 in-between
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 iden-
tity crisis arise from her sense of feeling trapped inside these three contradic-
tory maternal portraits and three conflicting domestic portraits.
Ernaux opens her third novel by comparing our first two maternal por-
traits—the stay-at-home bourgeois mother and the working-class mothers of
her neighborhood. She writes:

Femmes fragiles et vaporeuses, 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 l 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 tanches 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. (1981: 9)
62 C H A PT E R 2

[Fragile and vaporish women, spirits with gentle hands, good

fairies of the home who silently create beauty and order, mute,
submissive women—search as I may, I cannot find many of them
in the landscape of my childhood. Not even in the next-best
model, less elegant, more frumpy, the ones who work miracles
with leftovers, scrub the sink until you can see your face in it, and
take up their posts outside the school gates fifteen minutes before
the last bell rings, all their housework done. Perfectly organized
unto death. The women in my life all had loud voices, untidy
bodies that were too fat or too flat, sandpapery fingers, faces with-
out a trace of make-up or else slathered in it, with big blotches
of color on the cheeks and lips. Their cooking skills did not go
much beyond stewed rabbit and rice pudding, they had no idea
dust was supposed to be removed on a daily basis, they worked
or had worked on farms, in factories, in small businesses open all
day long. (1995: 9–10)]

The imagery that Ernaux evokes in this opening passage—the normative rep-
resentation of femininity in the post-war middle-class archetype of the stay-
at-home mother as “vaporish,” a “fairy,” and “voiceless” versus the marginal
representation of femininity in the working-class archetype of the working
mother as “too fat or too flat,” with “sandpapery 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 disappoint-
ment in these representations of femininity.
In the same manner as the afore-cited opening paragraph, Ernaux com-
pares just a few pages later two contradictory portraits of the home. When
recalling the “home economics” lessons learned at school, she expresses:

Le matin, papa-part-à-son-travail, maman-reste-à-la-maison, elle-

fait-le-ménage, elle-prépare-un-repas-succulent, j’ânonne, je ré-
pète avec les autres sans poser de questions. Je n’ai pas encoure
honte de ne pas être la fille des gens normaux. (1981: 16)
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 63

[In the morning, Papa-goes-to-work, Mama-stays-home, she-

does-the-housework, she-prepares-a-tasty-meal, I drone along
with the others, repeating everything without asking any ques-
tions. I am not yet ashamed that my parents aren’t normal. (1995:
16–17)]

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 faut la vais-
selle, 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. (1981: 16)

[My father doesn’t leave in the morning, or in the afternoon, or

ever. He stays home. He waits on customers in the café and the
grocery store, he does the dishes, the cooking, the weeding. He
and my mother live together in the same activity, with the men
coming and going on one side, the women and children on the
other, and all this makes up my world. (1995: 17)]

However, Ernaux qualifies this description by stating that her family did live
by a certain “code.” She explains, “Pas tout à fait les memes travaux, oui il
y a toujours un code, mais celui-là ne devait à la tradition que la lessive et
le repassage pour ma mere, le jardinage pour mon père” (1981: 16) [“Not
exactly the same work, true, there’s always a code, but theirs owes nothing to
tradition except the laundry and ironing for my mother, the gardening for
my father” (1995: 17)]. 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 cor-
respondence to their “goûts” and “capacités” (1981: 16) [“personal preferences
and abilities” (1995: 17)]. In other words, the domestic and child-raising tasks
were shared in a practical way between her parents that took into consider-
ation 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 through the
examples of her classmates’ family life the aforementioned normative descrip-
tions 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
64 C H A PT E R 2

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 quel-

que chose de naturel, pas gênant. Pour moi aussi, un voile sec qui
poudre mon cosy, dessinant des dentelles quand j’enlève des li-
vres, 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. (1981: 22)
[But dust doesn’t exist for her, or rather, it’s something natural,
not a problem. I feel the same way: it’s just a dry veil powdering
my cozy, a trail of lace when I take a book from the shelf, motes
dancing in the sunbeams, something to be wiped off a vase or
notebook with one’s sleeve. Between twelve and fourteen years
old, I will be amazed to discover that it’s ugly and dirty, this dust
I don’t even notice. (1995: 22–23)]

Ernaux 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 des ses devoirs puisque
apparemment c’en était un. (1981: 22)
[“Say, that hasn’t been done in a long time!” remarks that snake
Brigitte, pointing at a spot low on the wall. I look. “What hasn’t?”
My girlfriend shows me the thin top edge of the baseboard, all
gray. She’s right. You mean to tell me we’re supposed to clean
there, too? I’d always thought that was normal dirt, like finger-
prints on doors and the yellow smudge over the stove. I’m vaguely
humiliated by the realization that my mother is failing in one of
her duties, since apparently this is one. (1995: 23)]

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 (1981: 23), as she had believed before Brigitte’s visit.
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 65

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 (1981: 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 protago-
nist 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 la mayonnaise, le ménage ne l’intéresse pas, et elle n’est
pas ‘féminine’ ” (1981: 74). [“On my own home ground, Brigitte makes me
see what I had hitherto felt without attaching any importance to it. No, my
mother doesn’t know how to cook, not even to make mayonnaise, housework
doesn’t interest her, and she isn’t ‘feminine’ ” (1995: 78).] Ernaux textualizes
Brigitte’s and later other middle-class 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 (1981: 75).
She confesses that their interpretations of her parents’ non-conventional gen-
der roles shame her (1981: 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 lava-
ges, petite couture minutieuse, et nous interdisant la salle à man-
ger, 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. (1981: 76)
[Brigitte’s house is a shining example of normality for me. Mme.
Desfontaines, always there, busy-busy in her kitchen, a little wash-
ing, a little sewing, dainty chores, and don’t go into the dining
room, you’ll get it dirty. A tiny universe, to my eyes, preoccupied
with trivial tasks, like polishing the doorknobs, what a joke, and
how can anyone seriously spend five minutes wondering whether
to make noodles or shepherd’s pie? (1995: 80–81)]

The protagonist recounts 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
66 C H A PT E R 2

feel a certain lack in her existence, knowledge, and abilities (1981: 76). She
discovers “une étonnante complicité ménagère entre mère et fille” (1981:
76) [“an astonishing and unexpected domestic complicity between mother
and daughter” (1995: 81)] of which she had no idea. 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 future métier. (1981: 76–77)
[Everyone understands that for a girl, not knowing how to do a
thing means being incapable of cooking, cleaning, ironing prop-
erly. How will you cope later on when you’re married? The big
question, with its irrefutable logic, to rub your nose right in it,
can’t even boil an egg, well just wait, you’ll see how your husband
lies eating out of cans! . . . Since all girls and women have to look
after their homes, I should learn those things too, as well as my
future profession. (1995: 81–82)]

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 (1981: 77)—to teach her a few basic housekeep-
ing 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, re-
passage 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” (1981: 77–78). [“But I shouldn’t make too much
of this ironing and baking; it’s fun, a game, a relaxing change from reading,
a way to stave off boredom toward the end of vacation. . . . As soon as school
starts again, that’s the end of domestic diversions. First things first” (1995:
82).] Thus, Ernaux leaves us again with an in-between representation of home
life, which begins to speak to Ernaux’s ideal domestic representation.
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 67

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 toward her performance of domestic chores
in lieu of reading and homework, 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 describes:

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. (1981: 60–61)
[The dark hall, hung with paintings, opens onto a gleaming white
kitchen like the ones in catalogues. A slender woman in a pink
blouse moves quietly between the sink and the table . . . Peace
and quiet. Paradise. Ten years later, I will be the one in a silent,
sparking kitchen, with flour and strawberries: I have stepped into
the picture, and it’s killing me. (1995: 64–65)]

The shame as a child and adolescent when faced with the lack of normative,
middle-class standards of domesticity, family life, femininity, and gender
roles—these national and sometimes global discourses—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
as an adult, 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 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 stud-
ies. Ernaux describes this period of time as moments before marriage began
to weigh on her (1981: 127). She finds a certain complicity between the
68 C H A PT E R 2

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 and fashionable neighborhoods surrounding the university,
where the protagonist would have preferred to live, to the less expensive pe-
ripheries of the city, she still finds this new chapter in their lives a great and
exciting adventure (1981: 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 dis-
parates, 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. (1981: 128–129)
[And the excitement of moving in: we’ll put some hessian cloth
over there, the record player here, the first record, exploring the
kitchen, seeing if the gas works. A ridiculous house with its mis-
matched rococo furniture, rubbishy rejects, to be abandoned next
year after our final exams. The first months of marriage are like a
return to childhood. (1995: 136)]

In retrospect, Ernaux describes the seemingly egalitarian distribution of

domestic roles at the start of their marriage as “complètement à côté de la
plaque, Le Deuxième Sexe” (1981: 129) [“completely off base from the Second
Sex” (1995: 137)]. In describing the “egalitarian” beginnings of their marriage
and household, Ernaux recollects:

Et la dînette, charmante. Les tomates scintillent dans leur huile,

odeur molle des pommes de terre rissoles, autour de la table
minuscule, l’amour devient tendresse, la cuisine du meublé, inté-
rieur hollandaise 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 dé-
bordements, 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. (1981: 129)
[And dinner for two, charming. The tomatoes gleaming in their
vinaigrette, the inviting aroma of fried potatoes, us at the little
table, loving tenderness, cooking for newlyweds, a Dutch interior
of peace and harmony. Our mini-tableware: two plates, silverware
for two, a couple of glasses, and a frying pan. . . . Too bad about
the stove top turning brown from all the boiled-over food, and the
dust beneath the furniture, the unmade beds. Once in a while we
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 69

borrow the landlady’s vacuum cleaner, and he’s the one who runs
it, without complaining. (1995: 136)]

Unified during this time by a lack of money, 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” (1981: 130) [“young, modern, intellectual couple” (1995: 137)]
in which they take turns preparing soup in their pressure cooker, always
equally able to return to their studies (1981: 130). The crack in this harmo-
nious imagery arrives when the university restaurant (cafeteria) closes for the
summer. When this occurs the protagonist finds herself abandoned “devant
les casseroles” twice a day (1981: 137). 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” (1981: 130) [“neither one of us used to help Mama
in the kitchen” (1995: 138)] and questions

pourquoi de nous deux suis-je la seule à devoir tâtonner, combien

de temps un poulet, est-ce qu’on enlève les pépins des concom-
bres, 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.
(1981: 130)
[so why am I the only one who has to muddle through (how long
does a chicken take, and do you take the seeds out of summer
squash?), who has to pore over a cookbook, scrape the carrots,
wash the dishes as a reward for fixing dinner—while he studies his
constitutional law? Who gave him the right? (1995: 138)]

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 pota-
toes, the protagonist’s husband retorts, “non mais tu m’imagines avec un ta-
blier peut-être! Le genre de ton père, pas le mien!” (1981: 130–131) [“Come
on, do you think I’m going to wear an apron? That sort of thing is for your
father, not me!’ (1995: 138)]. 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 as pas vu beaucoup
d’hommes peler des patates. Mon modèle à moi n’est pas le bon, il me le fait
sentir” (1981: 131) [“No, I haven’t seen many men peeling potatoes. My
father, out in the kitchen, is not the right role model, that’s made very clear”
70 C H A PT E R 2

(1995: 138)]. 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” (1981: 131) [“His father is beginning to loom on the
horizon, the master of the house who lets his wife do all the housework, such
a cultivated, eloquent gentleman—and you want him to pick up a broom,
that’s a good one, are you crazy or what? Period. Just get on with it, old girl”
(1995: 138)]. 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. Mainten-
ant c’est la nourriture corvée. (1981: 131)
[Despair and discouragement in front of the canary yellow cup-
board in the apartment. Pasta, eggs, endives, all this stuff waiting
to be dealt with, prepared, no more décor-food, the stacks of
canned goods from my childhood, the rainbow-colored candy
jars, the surprising dishes of the cheap little Chinese restaurants of
the good old days. No it’s chore-food. (1995: 138)]

Moreover, she alone is expected to affront this culinary chore. And unfortu-
nately, 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
protagonist cannot successfully break out of her state of frozenness brought
on by her disappointment in conventional gender roles and her disillusion-
ment 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
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 71

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 mes-
quin 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. (1981: 166–167)
[Of course one can keep track all the time: I fix him breakfast, I
brush his suit; he should unplug the sink and take out the garbage.
You buy yourself a record, so I get a book. Shit? Fine, I reply: son
of a bitch! It doesn’t seem much like a fair exchange of freedoms
here. I keep tabs anyway. Exhausting, this nitpicking that leads me
to spend money on a book or leave the garbage can full—neither
for pleasure nor through real rebellion, but for revenge. Ever since
the beginning of the marriage, I’ve had the impression of chasing
after an equality that continually eludes me. (1995: 175)]

Furthermore, the protagonist’s consistent comparison of the portrait of her

and her husband’s family life to that of her in-laws continues to immobi-
lize 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 child-
hood schoolmates’ mothers: a portrait in which intellectual and professional
pursuits are abandoned for the preservation of conventional familial gender
roles.
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” (1981: 135) [“the right model” (1995: 142)]. She asserts:

Ne s’imposent pas, gens bien éduqués, brèves visites, petits repas,

un couple charmant. Monsieur père, toujours aussi parleur, per-
pétuel 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. (1981: 135)
[Would never impose themselves, well-bred people, short visits,
the occasional dinner invitation, a charming couple. The man of
the house, as talkative as ever, a constant flow of witty remarks
and spoonerisms of all kinds as his indulgent wife looks on,
beaming. But watch out, no fool he, behind all the jests there’s
authority in his voice and eye, in the way he calls for the menu in
72 C H A PT E R 2

restaurants, makes pronouncements on the subject of wine or the

tactics of bridge. (1995: 142)]

The protagonist continues:

Toujours gaie, madame mère, sautillante, jamais assise, elle m’en-

traîne, 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. (1981: 135)
[Always perky, his lady wife, never still for a moment, she drags
me away, let’s leave the men to their talking, we’ll go fix the din-
ner, no no no son, we’ll take care of everything, you’d just be
in the way! On goes the apron, out comes the chopping board,
parsley on the cold sliced meats, a tomato cut in the shape of a
rose, tralali, a hard-boiled egg to garnish the salad, tralala. (1995:
142–143)]

At times, Ernaux writes that her mother-in-law shared confidences with her
on these occasions. In one such episode, the mother-in-law tells the protago-
nist 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 (1981: 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 abandon-
ment 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’ensa-
ble, 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 l’éducation de ses enfants, au bonheur
de son mari, on ne pensait pas qu’elle aurait pu vivre autrement.
(1981: 136)
[She commiserates maternally with me, makes excuses for me,
doesn’t all that studying wear you out—it’s no wonder you
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 73

haven’t time to clean things properly. I hate that insidious way

of minding someone else’s business. Her indomitable niceness
bothers me, it’s like a sticky trap, obliging me to answer the same
way, all sweetness and light, puerility and fakery at the same time.
How can I dare say anything? So even-tempered and agreeable
. . . No one else finds her twittering or her domestic spriteliness
ridiculous; everyone—her sons, her other daughters-in-law—
admires her for having devoted herself to her children’s education
and her husband’s happiness. It never occurs to anyone that she
might have had a different life. (1995: 143–144)]

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. But as Ernaux reflects on this system of time
management, she asserts that it does not represent a “danse légère” (1981:
155) [“sprightly dance” (1995: 164)] for her as implied in relation to her
mother-in-law’s housekeeping system, but rather “le pas de charge” or “le
gallop ménager” (1981: 156) [“full tilt” and “stampeding” (1995: 164)] 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, simplment s’il venait quelqu’un je
n’aurais pas besoin de dire comme mes tantes, faites pas attention à la mai-
son” (1981: 163) [“Why this tidyness? For whom? Simply so that if anyone
were to drop by I wouldn’t have to say, like my aunts, please excuse the
mess?” (1995: 172)]. 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 aboutissent 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” (1981: 163) [“I’ve been
busy since seven in the morning to reach this void. This must be the time of
day when women swallow pills, pour themselves a little glass, or take the train
to Marseille. The world at a standstill” (1995: 172)]. As Brigitte once made
the protagonist 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 re-
turn, 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.
74 C H A PT E R 2

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 middle-class 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 middle-class 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 represen-
tations surface in Simone de Beauvoir’s writing, but the former is not associ-
ated with the working class but rather the intelligentsia of French society.
Before moving onto the close reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s short story
La femme rompue and a discussion of the re-hybridized speaking and gazing
subject and ²⁄³ Space of expression in this short story, let us begin with some
biographical background information and a cursory overview of her literary
corpus and agendas.

Simone de Beauvoir
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. Both women were also agrégées and
were for a limited time professors: Ernaux of literature and de Beauvoir of
philosophy. However, their individual approaches to writing differ greatly.
De Beauvoir was deeply committed to a variety of writing forms, includ-
ing the philosophical essay, the novel, drama, autobiography, travel writing,
correspondence, newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, and interviews.9
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. She passed
the agrégation de philosophie, which allowed her to earn a living through a
few high school teaching positions. She also began writing and publishing.
Her first novel, L’Invitée, appeared in 1943. Within two years following the
release and success of this first text, de Beauvoir had become a leading intel-
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 75

lectual 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 own 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 ethnical 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 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 be a woman?”10 In attempting to answer
this question, she wrote her groundbreaking essay, Le Deuxième sexe, which
was considered “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 nega-
tive 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 before in her life. She celebrated the defeat of
the French colonial presence in Vietnam and wrote about the French system-
atic 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 sell-
ers 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.
Secondary criticism of de Beauvoir’s eclectic collection of texts varies
widely among scholars and has quite often treated her work with antipathy.11
76 C H A PT E R 2

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” (1994:
75). Moi concludes that de Beauvoir is subject to such attacks because she
claims to speak as an intellectual woman.12 Fallaize reads de Beauvoir’s com-
mitment to engage in serious intellectual activity (and especially in philosoph-
ical 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—that rest 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. Fallaize writes, “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 resembles
somewhat Ernaux’s emphasis on the relationality in her corpus of work, as
outlined earlier in this chapter. Scholars examining de Beauvoir’s autobio-
graphical texts very often concentrate on the construction of relationships
within de Beauvoir’s narratives; in particular Simone’s relationships 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.13 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 philosophi-
cal theories.14 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” (1998: 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
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 77

in these primary texts.15 It is through these last perspectives that de Beauvoir

and Ernaux share several discursive commonalities. A brief discussion on this
matter will enrich our close reading of de Beauvoir’s La femme rompue and
her multifarious and multi-sited protagonist in this story.

‘LE FIL CONDUCTEUR’ QUI ME LIE À BEAUVOIR

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 ma-
ternal serve as points of connection in comparing their literary work. Exist-
ing research has primarily focused on analyzing certain themes common to
both their writings (e.g., 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.16 In relation to de Beauvoir’s
Une mort très douce and 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, describe, and recount their mothers’ existences at the end of
their lives—especially the representations of their mothers’ aged bodies—and
their eventual deaths.17
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 Beau-
voir Society Conference. Although unable to deliver her presentation at the
actual event, she sent to the society 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” (2000: 2) [“it’s the mythical image of the fruit from the tree
78 C H A PT E R 2

of knowledge eaten by Eve that imposed itself on me: blinding clarity of a dis-
enchantment of the world, a liberating light of knowledge” (my translation)].
This is an interesting insight into their takes on the sociological situation of
women in twentieth-century metropolitan France. We will pause briefly to
take a closer look at Le Deuxième sexe before continuing our discussion of de
Beauvoir’s influence and impact on Ernaux.
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 wom-
en’s status, in de Beauvoir’s view, is 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 de-
bates 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.18 Feminist scholars as-
sert that de Beauvoir blocks Sartre’s central argument that contingency and
freedom of choice are available to everyone in face of an open situation.19
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 histori-
cal and social situation. She shows how this female consciousness in norma-
tive 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, mar-
riage, the family] governed society and the “union libre” was considered
scandalous) (200: 2). Ernaux shares in this essay that the image of her own
mother, active shopkeeper enjoying her power, authority, and 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 (200: 2). She suggests that Le Deuxième sexe
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 79

allowed her as a young adult to re-read her adolescence and to situate herself
as a woman in French society. She feels that this unveiling of the feminine
condition as presented in de Beauvoir’s text was somewhat frightening, but
also profoundly liberating, and opened on “la voie à une prise en main de ma
propre vie” (2–3) [“an avenue to taking charge of my own life” (my transla-
tion)] for Ernaux.
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 pre-
senting 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” (1981: 103) [“So
it’s still boys. De Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe is a real eye-opener. Prompt
resolutions: neither marriage, not even love, with someone who sees me as an
object” (1995: 109)]. In the last third of the text, after she and her husband
marry and become the short-lived “young, modern, intellectual couple” shar-
ing the domestic chores and continuing their academic and intellectual pur-
suits, 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!” (1981: 129) [“Where’s the slavery I’d
read so much about? I have the feeling our life from before is simply going
on in closer quarters, that’s all. The Second Sex? Completely off base!” (1995:
137)]. In brief, in Ernaux’s work, Le Deuxième sexe inversely confirmed (by
initially thinking de Beauvoir got it wrong) a formative domestic model of
quality that Ernaux desires to keep in marital practice. As we saw, of course,
Ernaux comes to realize that de Beauvoir got it right about the conventional
bourgeois institution of marriage.
Andrea Veltman provides a very helpful and recuperative reading on
de Beauvoir’s take on marriage in Le Deuxième sexe. Basing her reading on
de Beauvoir’s dichotomy between transcendence and immanence, Veltman
shows how Le Deuxième 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 institu-
tion 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
80 C H A PT E R 2

something durable that transforms or annexes the world, that contributes to

the constructive endeavors of the human race, or that 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.20 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.21 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 ethnics 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. (2004: 121)

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 por-
trait of what her marriage comes to be in Le 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 as-
signed systematically to men and immanent acts 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. Without this, each of these women artists seems to suggest that the
home will continue to exclude specific histories of oppression and resistance,
especially the repression of difference even within oneself. Thus, women will
continue to reside diasporically in a state of “homelessness at home.” Neither
a complete attack on nor a full defense of womanhood, de Beauvoir in Le
Deuxième sexe ultimately calls to her women readers to recognize the separa-
tion of nature and culture and see how this formula has been mis/construed
in domestic spaces and discourses.
Ernaux shares in ‘Le fil conducteur’ qui me lie à 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” [“a disgust
of the feminine sex nearing misogyny”] and a “refus de prendre en compte la
maternité autrement qu’en termes de l’aliénation” (2000: 3) [“refusal to take
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 81

up maternity as anything other than in terms of alienation” (my translation)],

these readings would never damage or weaken in her eyes what remains fun-
damental in de Beauvoir’s text—the definitive separation of nature and cul-
ture and the demystification of the eternal feminine and the maternal image
(2003: 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, which are immanent
acts, and the necessity for female financial independence (2003: 4). Ernaux
found this financial independence later in life through her writing, a tran-
scendent act. Although they may have seen similar alternative discourses to
domesticity, their visions for literary discourses were quite different.
In explaining the influence de Beauvoir’s writing had on her own writ-
ing, Ernaux states in ‘Le fil conducteur’ that she never took Simone de Beau-
voir as a model (2003: 4). She explains that she, like de Beauvoir, considers
literature to be an “engagement, un moyen d’action sur le monde, de lutte”
(2003: 5) [“engagement, a means of action on the world, a means to struggle”
(my translation)] but not a sacred thing (2003: 5), as de Beauvoir found lit-
erature to be. Ernaux suggests that for both of them, the enterprise of living
and writing are inseparable (2003: 5), but that

je suis convaincue que la forme, c’est-à-dire le choix de la struc-

ture 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. (2003: 5)
[I am convinced that the form, in other words the choice of the
text’s structure and words, a putting into permanent question
a language that conveys, in an invisible way, hierarchies, sex-
ism, play an integral part in this action on the world, constitute
the means to this sought-after truth and in this regard, must be
worked, without it being so much a question of esthetics. (my
translation)]

The aesthetics of writing, for Ernaux, are what specifically separate her writ-
ing process from de Beauvoir’s. She finds that de Beauvoir’s approach to
writing “comme un apprentissage de techniques” (2003: 5) [“as an acquisi-
tion of techniques”] and “premier jet rapide, repris ensuite” (2003: 5) [“quick
first draft, revisions following”] suggests an indifference to writing “comme
matière” (2003: 4) [“as matter”]. For Ernaux, “writing as matter” resides in
the relationship between language and identification. However, as Ernaux
82 C H A PT E R 2

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 inher-
ent desire to compare and contrast the feminine condition as represented in
La Femme gelée and Le Deuxième sexe. This desire to compare and contrast
representation of the feminine condition in Le Deuxième sexe and fictional
texts by women writers 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 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. Let us pause to consider some
background information concerning La Femme rompue before moving onto
our close reading, so as to better contextualize our forthcoming discussion of
de Beauvoir’s re-hybridized speaking and gazing subject and the ²⁄³ Space of
expression from which she writes.

LA FEMME ROMPUE

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 magazine from October 19th to
November 16th, 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. In this last volume
of “fiction,” de Beauvoir composes three novellas, which are loosely associ-
ated 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). Differing from Djebar’s
and Ernaux’s use of the first-person subject pronoun speaking position in
which the “I” speaks as a collective or in relation to the social, respectively, in
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 83

each of de Beauvoir’s novellas, this woman’s voice is singular and somewhat

ontological. However, as we shall see in this chapter—mainly through the ini-
tial publication of the three novels in a magazine periodical medium, we will
find elements of de Beauvoir’s “speaking nearby” in these stories in a similar
manner to Djebar and Ernaux in their respective first-person narratives.
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 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 recently published 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
of her son to allow the son to move back in with her, a request 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 pro-
tagonist) 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 Mo-
nique’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 from the other two short stories, 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 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 this study, we focus on the third short story.
84 C H A PT E R 2

In examining how femininity is (re)displayed through the home in La

Femme rompue (the third short story) in this study, I consider two archetypal
female portraits: the “cocue” middle-class housewife and the sophisticated and
tempting mistress. Drawing on Ray Davison’s work, I wish to investigate the
process of women’s identity formation vis-à-vis the home in this third no-
vella. In Davison’s reading of La Femme rompue, he finds that de Beauvoir:

takes a quasi-exhausted and, some would say, totally exhausted

thematic—the married woman discovering her husband’s infi-
delity, the triangularity thereby created, the fragmentation and
near dissolution of the woman under pressure—and manages to
reanimate and redynamize it. (1998: 71)

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). These conceptions in turn become politically, socially, and his-
torically engaged discourses that challenge “freedom, fidelity, authenticity,
sincerity, inauthenticity, and dependency” (Davison, 1998: 71). Moreover,
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 sug-
gests 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 infidel-
ity and eventual abandonment” (1998: 72). Scholars often concur on this
reading of de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue, and Davison’s assertions put us
on the path to understanding de Beauvoir’s re-hybridized speaking and gazing
subject as well as her ²⁄³ Space of expression in this study.
The general consensus in the critical scholarship on this short story is
that de Beauvoir is very much wrapped up in the task of presenting Monique
as the victim of her own in-authenticity and flight into emotional depen-
dency.23 De Beauvoir’s use of the diary form transcends her “fictionalized”
first-person narrative to stir the reader’s awakening to the normalizing dis-
courses in operation around him or her. De Beauvoir’s end goal in awaken-
ing 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 contem-
porary society and gives voice to a re-hybridized speaking subject residing
in-between fixed languages, discourses, and ideologies.
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 85

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

cal discourses (i.e., Le Deuxième sexe) as Davison has done, Elizabeth Fallaize
(1990) reads the text in comparison to the genres of 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). In this essay, Fallaize raises the
point 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 en-
couraged 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 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 with 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 rouse the reader into seeing the complic-
ity 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 dem-
onstrate 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” [“read between
the lines”] and to work out the “hidden” meanings of La Femme rompue for
themselves.24 However, by examining Elle reader responses to de Beauvoir’s
serialization, scholars find that de Beauvoir’s metaphysical goal was not en-
tirely 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 Beau-
voir’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
86 C H A PT E R 2

qualities and agenda in La Femme rompue, the text failed to have the same
existential impact on a more popular readership.
The question concerning the reader’s recognition of particular qualities
and objectives or agendas 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 un-
dertaking 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 vic-

tim 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. (1998: 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 au-
tobiography and fiction and simultaneously enhances the interpretative pos-
sibilities 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) [“the lived
meaning of the being in the world” (my translation)]. He asserts that fiction
for de Beauvoir still “explores the real world and reveals it in its complexity”
(1998: 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 speak-
ing “in-between the lines” of the text.
In effect, Davison’s assertion speaks to the very theoretical debates cen-
tral to the critical discourses of lifewriting. The question is not whether La
Femme rompue is “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 simi-
lar to the way in which Ernaux’s personal transcends the social, de Beauvoir’s
“speaking nearby” provides a useful mode through which to revise normal-
izing processes of patriarchal socialization through a first-person narrative.
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 87

However, rather than blurring conventional genre boundaries as practiced

by Djebar and Ernaux, 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 Noëlie (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, Co-
lette and Lucienne. Aside from a few girlfriends from the same social clique
and the theater and the cinema, which Monique often attends at the begin-
ning 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 (1967: 210). Thus, this first maternal
portrait is one of a middle-aged woman financially, emotionally, and psycho-
logically dependent on her husband and children and who has for all intents
and purposes trapped herself inside her personal domestic universe. She is
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 symp-
tomatic 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 affair and after Maurice confesses
it to Monique that Monique learns of Noëllie’s existence in Maurice’s life. Al-
though Monique sees Noëllie as a manipulative, cold-hearted home wrecker
who would drop Maurice in an instant for another man with better con-
nections, 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
88 C H A PT E R 2

domestic self-importance (ironically, she has employed a housekeeper to do

the household cleaning), and her lack of professional occupation—all charac-
teristics missing in Noëllie’s portrait—prove fatal in Maurice’s and eventually
Monique’s own eyes. Throughout the novella, for better or worse, Monique
constantly compares and contrasts herself to Noëllie. In comparing and con-
trasting these two portraits, de Beauvoir is effectively asking the reader to do
the same with “her” (the assumed female Elle reader) own personal portrait.
It is worth digressing for a moment to investigate a bit more the medium of
the women’s magazine and its attendant relationship with its readers for this
will enrich our close reading of La Femme rompue.
Magazines are an endlessly popular medium whose appeal has not been
diminished by all the technologies (from radio and film to television and
the Internet) that have superseded them.25 Rosalind Gill summarizes that
women’s magazines overwhelmingly share a number of important features.26
First, they tend to address readers as equals and friends and to adopt an in-
timate tone. Second, they are organized around the shared pleasures and
labors of femininity. Third, they are invariably constructed in opposition
to masculinity (focused on what women share by dint of being women).
Fourth, they are also structured by implicit exclusions relating to age, race,
sexuality, and class. And fifth, they adopt a language of individualism, with
an emphasis on personal solutions at the expense of collective social or
political struggle. Gill concludes that the various ideologies of femininity
at play in women’s magazines “draw attention to the different versions of
femininity on offer in different magazines” (2007: 183). To this end, Gill
explains that one version of femininity may be organized around nation and
tradition, the pleasures and difficulties of home, and success as a wife and
mother; and the other focused on sexual relationships, beauty, and career
success (2007: 183). Usually, one kind of magazine will posit one version
of femininity (e.g., Martha Stewart Living for the “national and traditional”
version of American femininity), whilst another magazine will construct
another (e.g, Cosmo for the “sexually-active, beautiful, and career-oriented”
version of modern femininity).
Yet oft times, two versions of femininity (as well as many other varia-
tions) will appear in the same magazine, although one particular “type” will
overwhelmingly dominate. Further, many magazines will also change signifi-
cantly over time, as they reflect and adapt to shifts in cultural pursuits, trends,
and interests as well as are affected by historical events, economic realities,
and new ideologies. One of the most striking characteristics of the magazine
medium that is pertinent to this chapter’s discussion of de Beauvoir’s La
Femme rompue is the first characteristic outlined by Gill: women’s magazines
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 89

tend to address readers as equals and friends and to adopt an intimate tone. It
is worth noting that this is often said about the diary form as well, although
the intended diary “reader” is often imaginary, a higher power (i.e., “God”),
or the author him/herself.
This intimate and friendly tone, a diehard steadfast from the very be-
ginning of the development of women’s magazines in the late nineteenth
century, has underpinned many different versions of femininity over time.
Women’s magazines (at least in several Anglophone cultures) offer survival
skills to cope with the dilemmas of femininity at particular moments in time
(Gill, 2007: 183). For example, they adopted a feminist tone in the 1940s
during wartime, emphasizing independence and work outside the home. But
in the 1950s, women’s magazines celebrated a return to family life and the
virtue of the housewife by encouraging women to make their homes even
cleaner and more inviting through the purchases of new consumer goods
and domestic appliances (Gill, 2007: 183). In the 1960s and ’70s—the
particular moment in time of the serialized publication of La Femme rompue
in Elle magazine in France—romance was identified as the dominant theme,
pervading nearly everything in popular culture and media.27 Gill asserts that
an iconography of “great moments” of romance was found in all the stories,
with images of “the proposal,” the “engagement ring,” and the “wedding
day” that were particularly favored (2007: 184). Gill explains that during
this period of time in mainstream women’s magazines, romance eclipsed sex
(which was often portrayed as dirty or sordid) and instead was presented in
terms of its social effects—the status of being part of a couple, paired with
a handsome boyfriend, or able to flash one’s engagement ring (2007: 184).
Angela McRobbie argues that the messages conveyed were relatively stable
across issues—namely a girl has to fight to get and keep a man; she can never
really trust another female unless the other is old and hideous; and yet, despite
all of this, romance and being a girl are fun.28
Gill finds that today, this version of femininity would be “hard to find
in magazines aimed at teenage girls [and young adult women]” and that
“the code of romance has given way to a focus on pop, fashion, beauty and
(celebrity) boy-watching” (2007: 185). Concerning today’s women’s maga-
zines, Gill postulates that the most common version of femininity posits an
increasing focus upon celebrity; a dramatic sexualization of the female body;
an increased adoption of feminist registers of discourses that stress being in
control and pleasing yourself; a focus on work outside as well as inside the
home with attention placed upon activity, multitasking, and organization;
and an increasing emphasis on (heterosexual) sexuality as a key focus of atten-
tion in order to please men and to fulfill oneself (Gill, 2007: 184).
90 C H A PT E R 2

I must point out that both Gill and McRobbie have based their work
on British, Canadian, and American women’s and teenage girls’ magazines;
but as many of their samples included international magazines (i.e., Cosmo
and Marie-Claire), it stands to reason that we can extend their readings (to
a limited degree) to our context in this chapter of Elle magazine in France.
And furthermore, as we shall see in subsequent discussion in this chapter, de
Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue clearly textualizes McRobbie’s observations of
the messages conveyed in 1970s women’s and teenage girls’ magazines and
would constitute similar “romance” tropes of which de Beauvoir makes use
and thus which her Elle readers would have recognized. McRobbie identifies
the “romance” trope of “a girl has to fight to get and keep a man,” which
raises the notion of competition between women. Women’s magazines’ ad-
vice columns are riddled with inquiries and solutions on the topic, and much
(if not all) of the content in women’s magazines is fraught with the subject
(i.e., how to be more/less . . . in order to . . .). In La Femme rompue, competi-
tion between women surfaces most blaringly in the form of comparison. Let
us now return to our discussion of this short story.
Throughout the novella, for better or for worse, Monique constantly
compares and contrasts herself to Noëllie. 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 desperate attempt to
comprehend why Noëllie has become so important to Maurice, she feels com-
pelled 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.) In essence, she stops living. 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 fleet-
ing moments here and there in the narrative that she may be at fault for her
victimization, she remains ultimately blind to her “in-authenticity” (this is to
say the notion that Monique is acting out in complicity with one of society’s
and history’s limited roles bestowed upon women) and not remaining “true”
to her person.
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 91

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 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 ac-
tivities 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. As we shall see, 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 (e.g., the Egyptian statuette, the fireplace, the kitchen table, the
bed, and bedroom dresser), but de Beauvoir presents nothing in clear, con-
crete 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.
Very near the beginning of La Femme rompue, de Beauvoir presents the
first portrait of the home. She writes:

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.
(1967: 125)

[How hard Paris is! Even on these balmy autumn days this hard-
ness weighs me down. I feel obscurely low-spirited this evening. I
92 C H A PT E R 2

have made plans for changing the girls’ room into a cozier place to
sit in than Maurice’s consulting room or the waiting room. And I
am coming to realize that Lucienne will never live here anymore.
The house will be not quite, but very empty. But above all I am
racked with anxiety about Colette. What a good thing Maurice is
coming home tomorrow. (1969: 127)]

At this point in the narrative, Maurice has not yet disclosed his affair 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 affair 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 puis qu’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.
(1967: 127)
[The window was black. I had expected it. Before—before
what?—when by some extraordinary chance I went out without
Maurice there was always a streak of light between the red cur-
tains when I came back. I would run up the two flights of stairs
and ring, too impatient to look for my key. This time I went up
the stairs without running; I pushed my key into the lock. How
empty the apartment was! How empty it is! Of course it is, since
there is no one in it. No, that’s not it: usually when I come home
I find Maurice here, even when he is out. This evening the doors
open onto wholly empty rooms. (1969: 129)]

This description also functions to foreshadow the end of the text, when Mo-
nique 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 apart-
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 93

ment. When Maurice does finally disclose his secret to Monique, the home
takes on a new dimension in both a literal and metaphorical way.
At a later point in the narrative, after Maurice divulges his affair 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 (1967:
150), but she finds no comfort in these activities. At the close of the entry,
she torments herself by wondering how Maurice and Noëllie are spending
their time together. She laments on snippets of happy memories with Mau-
rice as they flash through her mind. She begins to lose her grip on reality. De
Beauvoir writes:

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. (1967: 152)
[I am tired of asking myself questions and not knowing the an-
swers. I am out of my depth. I no longer recognize the apartment.
The things in it have the air of imitations of themselves. The mas-
sive table in the sitting room—it is hollow. As though both I and
the house had been projected into a fourth dimension. If I were
to go out it would not astonish me to find myself in a prehistoric
forest, or in a city of the year 3000. (1969: 153)]

For Monique, the home has always kept things faithfully in perspective. She
found a purpose for her adult life in her domestic and maternal responsibili-
ties 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 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 family to realize that she has created these “false”
94 C H A PT E R 2

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 stronger sense of 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 petits filles se plaignent de leur mère, à cet âge-là:

rappelle-toi tes difficultés avec Lucienne. En fait Noëllie ne né-
glige 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 làdessus./ -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 mien-
nes. 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’en-
fant. Alors que j’ai toujours fait le contraire. (1967: 176–177)
[At that age all girls complain of their mothers: remember your
difficulties with Lucienne. In fact Noëllie does not neglect her
daughter at all. She is teaching her to manage by herself and to
stand on her own feet, and she is quite right to do so. This was
a jab at me. He has often made fun of my hen-and-chicks at-
titude. We even had a certain number of disagreements over it./
-It doesn’t worry the child that a man should spend the night in
her mother’s bed?/ -It is a big apartment, and Noëllie takes great
care. Besides, she does not hide from her that since her divorce
there are men in her life./ -Quaint confidences from a mother
to a daughter. Frankly, don’t you find that a trifle shocking?/
-No./ -I can’t see myself ever having a relationship of that kind
with Colette or Lucienne. He made no reply; his silence made it
quite plain that he thought Noëllie’s ideas on the bringing up of
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 95

children were quite as good as mine. That wounded me. It is only

too obvious that Noëllie behaves just as she chooses, without the
least care for the interests of the child. Whereas I always did the
very opposite. (1969: 178)]

In loaning her voice textually to Maurice (and through his silence) in this in-
stance in La Femme rompue, 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. This fact func-
tions 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 opin-
ions 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
re-hybridized speaking subject in La Femme rompue that shifts gender and
age. This re-hybridized speaking subject not only subverts traditional speak-
ing positions through inversion but also creates new speaking spaces and
speaking subjects (“male-female,” “dominant-marginal”) within the ²⁄³ Space
(in-between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses), as we will see at
the end of the narrative, for future generations.
Additionally, this argument between Maurice and Monique 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’s methods as a direct and personal
attack. She refuses to accept that Noëllie’s methods are superior to hers and
states, “Je suis sure 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”
(1967: 178) [“I am sure Noëllie is not a good mother. So hard and cold a
woman cannot possibly give her daughter what I gave mine” (1969: 180)].
96 C H A PT E R 2

In response to this argument and in her effort to gain ground over Noël-
lie and (in her mind) Noëllie’s influence on Maurice, Monique decides to
fight on her own terrain (1967: 178): domesticity. 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 (1967: 178). Monique finds comforting the well-stocked
closet in which everything has its place (1967: 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” (1967: 178) [“The heaps of delicate
handkerchiefs and stockings and lingerie gave me the feeling that the future
could not possibly let me down” (1969: 180)]. 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 holiday 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 (1967: 220). When
she feels a bit better, she tries to read a detective novel (incidentally, 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 (1967: 22).

A quel degré de laisser-aller on peut atteindre, quand on est entiè-

rement 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 vitres sales, cette saleté est une coquille qui me
protège, je n’en sortirai plus jamais. (1967: 220)
[How far one can let oneself go, when one is entirely alone and
shut in! The bedroom stinks of stale tobacco and spirits; there is
ash everywhere; I am filthy, the sheets are filthy, the sky is filthy
behind the filthy windows: this filth is a shell that protects me; I
shall never leave it again. (1969: 223)]

The narrative never gives any indication that Monique has handled any of
the cleaning responsibilities and conversely gives the impression that the
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 97

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 ever present interferences into Colette and Jean-Pierre’s
(Colette’s husband) life (especially during Colette’s flu-like illness). There-
fore, 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 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. (1967: 224)
[She rang and beat on the door with such force that I let her in.
She looked so shocked and amazed that I saw myself through her
eyes. I saw the apartment, and I too was stupefied. She made me
wash and do my hair and pack a bag and go and stay with her.
The daily woman will put everything straight. (1969: 226)]

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 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/stupefaction,” 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 “main-
tenance 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.
98 C H A PT E R 2

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
(1967: 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 (1967: 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 posi-
tion. 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 casse-
role, 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 jour-
née. 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 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 déses-
poir. 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. (1967: 233–234)
[What useless energy you need for even the simplest things, when
all liking for life is gone! In the evening I get the teapot, the cup
and the saucepan ready; I put each thing in its place so that life
may start in the morning with the least possible effort. And even
so it is almost more than I can bring myself to do, creeping out
of my bed, starting the day. I get the daily woman to come in the
afternoon so that I can stay in bed as long as I like in the morning.
Sometimes I get up just as Maurice is coming home to lunch at
one o’clock. Or if he does not come back, then at the very mo-
ment Mme. Dormoy turns the key in the lock. Maurice frowns
when he sees me at one o’clock in a dressing gown and with my
hair undone. He thinks I am putting on a desperation act for his
benefit. Or at least that I am not making the necessary effort “to
 ( RE) DISP LA YING F EMIN IN IT Y AN D H OME 99

live the situation decently.” He too tells me over and over again,
-You ought to ses a psychiatrist. (1969: 236)]

Although in Maurice’s gaze Monique does not appear to see herself as the ob-
ject 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
Colette) 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 exis-
tence culminating 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 be able 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
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. (1967: 250–251)
[There. Colette and Jean-Pierre were waiting for me. I had dinner
at their apartment. They brought me here. The window was dark:
it always will be dark. We climbed the stairs; they put my bags
down in the sitting room. I would not let Colette stay and sleep
here: I just have to get used to it. I saw down at the table. I am sit-
ting there now. And I look at those two doors—Maurice’s study,
our bedroom. Closed. A closed door: something that is watching
behind it. It will not open if I do not stir. Do not stir: ever. Stop
the flow of time and of life. But I know that I shall move. The
100 C H A PT E R 2

door will open slowly, and I shall see what there is behind the
door. It is the future. The door to the future will open. Slowly.
Unrelentingly. I am on the threshold. There is only this door
and what is watching behind it. I am afraid. And I cannot call to
anyone for help. I am afraid. (1969: 253–254)]

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 mak-
ing decisions and accepting responsibility and accountability for them.
Through the various portraits of femininity and speaking and gazing
positions created in this narrative, de Beauvoir clearly illustrates how women’s
subjectivity is multiple and hybrid and firmly situated inside a contact zone
of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox. Moreover, we see how in this
contact zone or ²⁄³ Space of first-person literary enunciation, imperial and
diasporic legacies function, clash, and converge across and within indigenous
social class and gender borders. As we previously established, these discursive
and technical commonalities predominantly figure in Ernaux’s work as well.

Conclusion
As we have come to see in this chapter, whether the protagonist is a “fro-
zen” or “broken or dumped” woman in their respective 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 add countless demands for immanent acts
or as an entire “universe” sheltering the protagonist from the responsibil-
ity of “outside” transcendent acts—become politically and socially charged
transnational spaces of contention on which hybrid seeing and speaking
subjects from multiple perspectives descend in order to transform them into
new re-hybridized spaces or positions 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 transcended
 ( RE) D ISP LA YING F EMININ IT Y AN D H OME 101

expressions of female identity and feminine subjectivity that move beyond

questions of “in/authenticity,” as seen in this chapter, to deal more directly
with more “inclusive” transnational portraits of multiplicitous female gender
constructions in Raja Amari’s and Coline Serreau’s filmmaking.

Notes
1. Chantal Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Press,” in
Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York, NY:
Routledge, 1992), 376.
2. Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), 193.
3. Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, WI: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1988), 105.
4. Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobi-
ography,” Differences 6.1 (1994), 1–27; and Paul John Eakin, How our Lives Become
Stories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986).
5. Bethany Ladimer, “Cracking the Codes: Social Class and Gender in Annie
Ernaux,” Chimères 26 (2002), 53–70.
6. Ladimer, Cracking the Codes, 56.
7. Lyn Thomas, Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience
(New York, NY: Berg, 1999), 10.
8. Claire-Lise Tondeur, “Entretien avec Annie Ernaux,” French Review 68.3
(1995), 37–44.
9. Elizabeth Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (New York, NY:
Routledge, 1998), 1.
10. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 3.
11. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 7.
12. Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford,
UK: Blackwell, 1994), 73–92.
13. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 12.
14. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 13.
15. Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir, 13.
16. Monika Boehringer, “Donner la vie, donner la mort: ‘L’amère écrite’ chez
Simone de Beauvoir et Annie Ernaux,” Dalhousie French Studies, 64 (2003), 13–23.
17. Liliane Lazar, “A la recherché de la mère: Simone de Beauvoir et Annie
Ernaux,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 16 (1999–2000), 123–134; and Catherine R.
Montfort, “La Vieille Née: Simone de Beauvoir, Une mort très douce, and Annie Er-
naux, Une femme,” French Forum 21.3 (1996), 349–364.
18. Claude Imbert, “Simone de Beauvoir: A Woman Philosopher in the Context
of her Generation,” in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Emily R. Grosholz (Ox-
ford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2004), 3–21.
102 C H A PT E R 2

19. Imbert, Simone de Beauvoir, 14.

20. Andrea Veltman, “The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir
and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage,” Hypatia 19.3 (2004),
121–143.
21. Veltman, The Sisyphean Torture of Housework, 123.
22. Catherine Savage Brosman, Simone de Beauvoir Revisited (Boston, MA:
Twayne Publishers, 1991).
23. Elizabeth Fallaize, “Resisting romance: Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman De-
stroyed and the romance script,” in Contemporary French Fiction by Women, eds. Mar-
garet Atack and Phil Powrie (Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990), 18.
24. Ray Davison, “Simone de Beauvoir, La Femme rompue,” in Short French Fic-
tion: Essays on the short story in France in the twentieth century, ed. J. E. Flower (Exeter,
UK: Exeter Univ. Press, 1998), 71–88.
25. Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007).
26. Gill, Gender and the Media, 183.
27. Gill, Gender and the Media, 184.
28. Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: from ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’
(Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1991).
CHAPTER 3

Creating Domestic Landscapes

and Soundscapes with Raja
Amari and Coline Serreau

Our close readings and discussion in Chapter Two concentrated on Ernaux’s

and de Beauvoir’s agendas to re-frame difference in the social constructions
of femininity in mid-to-late-twentieth-century metropolitan French society.
We have seen how they deterritorialized both “marginality” and “dominant”
by challenging “imperial” modes of thought and binary structures with regard
to the “feminine” through a deconstruction of home and homemaking or
housewifery. They revealed how these institutions and categories of identi-
ties exist as constructed ideologies and positionings that serve hegemony and
reify the “nation.” The project of reconfiguring understanding of the Self-
Other divide in contemporary women’s lifewriting of France underpins all
of the analyses in Chapter Two. Whether victims of the perilous side effects
of social class mobility or living in-authentically, we saw how Ernaux’s and
de Beauvoir’s protagonists allowed their homes to repress difference within
themselves (i.e., their inabilities to perform gender beyond the limits of social
norms), which resulted in their states of frozenness or brokenness.
From the perspective of a “homelessness at home” and the trope of “sift-
ing through life experience,” we recognized in La Femme gelée and La Femme
rompue the processes by which these protagonists began to recognize the need
to re-form their identity and reconstruct their gender as something “other”
than the monolithic representation of traditional or conventional discourses
of femininity that surrounded them. We will elaborate on this line of critical
inquiry in Chapter Three and will draw out more directly a discussion of the
reconfiguring of understanding of the Self-Other divide. In this chapter, we
will continue to explore how the diasporic space of home inflects transnational
identity and transnational understanding of self and gender in contemporary

103
104 C H A PT E R 3

women’s filmmaking of Tunisia and France via Raja Amari’s Satin rouge
(2002) and Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2000). In Chapter Three, transnational
refers again to the virtual intra-national borders between social class and sex
within the homeland but also begins to open up a new exploration in this
study of the international socio-cultural borders between Tunisia and France
and Second and Third Cinemas. Let us first begin with a background look
at Amari’s and Serreau’s filmmaking so that we may better contextualize our
trans/national readings of their work and project; which is to say the manner
in which their work signifies difference both across and within particularities
of location and situation.
As we saw in Chapter One, Assia Djebar entered into the cinemato-
graphic text and medium 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 and primary position in La nouba du Mont Chenoua. Yet
Djebar also acknowledges that the cinematic text and the technical processes
entrained in creating her films have strongly influenced the literary work she
has since written. We may draw a related conclusion concerning the two film-
makers 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 writ-
ing fiction, but Amari has written several critical reviews for an Algerian film
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. We will lead off with Raja Amari and a cursory look at the
Tunisian film industry and a few critical ideologies of nation and gender in
contemporary Tunisian society before we begin to examine the re-hybridized
subject position and ²⁄³ Space of expression in her work.

Raja Amari
If Djebar entered into the cinematographic medium by a literary backdoor,
then Amari entered it through a critical side door. Although not much sec-
ondary work exists on Amari in North America at the time of preparing this
manuscript—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 postco-
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 105

lonial 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 Tunisi-
enne pour la promotion de la critique cinématographique.1 Again before her
studies at La FEMIS, Amari earned a “Diplôme de langue et culture ital-
iennes” from the Società Dante D’Alighieri in Tunis and a “Maîtrise de lit-
térature et civilisation française (option Histoire de l’art)” at the Université de
Tunis I (Gabous, 1998: 184). Adding to her eclectic academic background,
Amari also earned a “Premier prix de danse” at the Conservatoire National
de Musique et de Danse in Tunis. Based on these established varied interests
in language, culture, literature, art history, dance, and film, I believe it fit-
ting to state that the relationships between differing cultural, social, political,
artistic, and ideological discourses (their contradictions, paradoxes, and over-
laps) provide the foundation on which Amari builds her first feature-length
film, Satin rouge (2002). Moreover, the tropes of gaze and voice resurface in
Amari’s work and, as with Djebar’s cinema, they both again offer interesting
insight into the relationships at play in Amari’s film.
In recalling our discussion in Chapter One on Djebar’s postcolonial
women’s cinema, we may ascertain that Amari is similarly using the cin-
ematic medium to privilege women’s expression that forges a cinematic ²⁄³
Space of female authorship by first relying on conventional cinematic spaces
or positions of female spectatorship. This is an important assertion, for the
question of female spectatorship has proven and continues to prove essential
to academic studies of Tunisian cinema and critical approaches to Amari’s
filmmaking. A brief history on the topic of spectatorship in the Tunisian film
industry is useful to our understanding of its role and importance in Amari’s
cinema.
Beginning with the very arrival of the cinema in Tunisia with the Lu-
mière Brothers [who came to “chasser des images exotiques” (Gabous, 1998:
11) [“to chase or hunt exotic images”] 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 back-
ground, typically as if part of the setting or backdrop. Their appearance was
usually exaggerated in the same folkloric fashion as described by Mark Al-
loua 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
106 C H A PT E R 3

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 tunisienne . . . 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)
[one was not seeing the faces of Tunisian women . . . blurry blobs,
they seemed like indefinable masses . . . the Tunisian woman
was moving on the screens like a ghost with a poorly defined
silhouette . . . a Bedouin turbaned in her multicolored fabrics
with exaggerated folds, collapsing under the weight of her jewelry
and attire, her bundled head enveloped in flowery scarves. (my
translation)]

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 occasions.
When Tunisian women did begin to enter into the Tunisian film in-
dustry, due largely to President Bourguiba’s progressive measures to educate
women in Tunisia through a nationalized public education 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 Tu-
nisian women found themselves caught in a double standard. Due to social
conceptions of the home and domestic discourses of the time, women want-
ing 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). The only exception to
this general practice in more recent times was the need for Tunisian actresses
who, for the sake of “authenticity,” were required to play important roles and
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 107

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 fam-
ily 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
involved a combination of artistic and clerical skills, multitasking abilities,
and did not require one to travel with the on-site production crew, many
Tunisian women were initially drawn to the field of cinematic editing.
Gabous explains that within the Tunisian film industry even today, 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 in Tunisia 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. In effect,
through technical cinematic subversion, male and female directors and edi-
tors may raise questions in their work that open onto wider cultural and
political change in Tunisian society and ideology. But what do we already
know about 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 sover-
eign (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 toward Europe and a second which looks east
toward the Middle East. These two maritime faces have been and continue
to be critical in shaping Tunisia’s history and culture.
108 C H A PT E R 3

Due to this geographical position, Tunisia has been open to foreign in-
vaders and colonists from both the east (Andalusian Muslims) and the north-
east (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 addi-
tional layer of cultural and ethnic hybridity. Tunisia manifests such a hybrid-
ity of ethnic diversity that anthropologists describe contemporary Tunisians
as “an amalgamation of many ethnic groups” (Perkins, 1986: 5). 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.
As I have already discussed in Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in
French-Tunisian Filmmaker Raja Amari’s “Satin rouge” (forthcoming, 2010),
women’s roles and identities in Tunisian society testify to the multiplicitous
and multi-sited nature of Tunisian society as just described. 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). 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. Although, a rather limited and quite narrow and con-
servative view exists regarding how Tunisian nationals should and should not
be. It lies beyond the scope of this book to engage in a full discussion on this
matter, thereby I will limit subsequent attention to the topic as it relates to
the female gender, which is the focus of this project. However, I must note
there is much room and interest in the field to develop the matter as it relates
to the male gender as well.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when an independent, postcolonial
Tunisia emerged from under French colonial rule and began to engage in
“modernized” nation-building practices, questions addressing the role of
Tunisian women—and more importantly their image in this “new,” postco-
lonial, and independent society—took precedence. Many political, artistic,
and intellectual figures were concerned with how Tunisian women’s images
were constructed in the public eye, in the arts, and in the media. These con-
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 109

cerns led to a variety of reformist thoughts during this nationalist movement

and even still today, but all postulations appeared to coalesce in the perceived
belief in the need to construct “modern” Tunisian women’s images into a
single, unifying image of motherhood. An overview of many of the reform-
ist thoughts during both the colonial and postcolonial periods reveals both
conformity and resistance toward earlier, colonial or imperial discourses on
Tunisian women and their image.3
On one hand, the post-independence call for Tunisian women’s educa-
tion and participation in the building of an independent Tunisia reproduces
earlier discourses on women’s roles in the project of national regeneration.
In these kinds of discourses, womanhood was conceived as the basis for a
(French-)Tunisian nationalist or imperialist project in which educated moth-
ers’ primary duty was to raise male children, who thus in turn either formed
loyal subjects (during the French colonial period) or promised future nation
builders (after independence) (Zayzafoon, 2005: 101). On the other hand,
the post-independence campaign to abolish the veil, which was regarded as a
“foreign custom” after the independence, flew in the face of earlier colonial
discourse in which the veil was seen as a symbol of Tunisia’s Arab-Islamic
identity and marker of resistance to French colonial rule and cultural influ-
ence (Zayzafoon, 2008: 117). However, despite the various conformities and
resistances toward the diversity of reformist discourses, the overarching ques-
tion concerning the gender construction of Tunisian women in society and in
the arts and media persisted and continues to persist today.
In Tunisian nationalist discourses, Zayzafoon argues that Tunisian
women’s gender construction is bound to the manner in which Tunisian
women’s identity is perceived. She argues that a Tunisian woman’s identity
“lies in her unpaid services and sacrifices to the umma (‘nation’) through her
dedication to her husband and children” (2005: 107). Zayzafoon postulates
that, “Whereas Tunisian men embody the political and economic agency of
the umma, women are the keepers of Islamic tradition and the umma’s moral
and spiritual mission” (2007: 107). Given this emphasis, it is not difficult to
see how, by extension, Zayzafoon concludes that “preoccupation with female
purity and modesty is at the center of the social norms governing gender rela-
tions in [North Africa]” (2007: 107), for this preoccupation “appears in the
value of ird or the general code of honor” (Charrad, 2001: 63). As Charrad
explains, ird refers inclusively to the honor or moral purity of a group, its
prestige in the community, and its strength, and is a collective characteristic
(2001: 63). It is essentially a reflection of family lineage and depends on the
behavior of the women of the given lineage and can be lost in cases of female
misconduct (Charrad, 2001: 63).
110 C H A PT E R 3

Thus, women carry a large share of the burden—or some would say
the honor—for safeguarding the family lineage. Charrad asserts that family
reputation depends a great deal on “the virginity of daughters and sisters,
the fidelity of wives, and the continence of widowed and divorced daugh-
ters or sisters” (2001: 63). Yet, female sexual activity is not the only factor
on which a family’s reputation may ride. According to Charrad, “norms of
chastity and modesty [also] apply to women’s behavior in public,” which
favor modes of discretion and a certain degree of invisibility. The emphasis
on the normative perception of Tunisian women in their family lineage as
married mothers (the prescribed monolithic and homogenous representa-
tion of “acceptable” contemporary female identity) collectively persists
and pervades most female gender constructions in contemporary Tunisian
cultural and social thought.4
One common underlying characteristic of the various socio-political
nationalist discourses of post-independence Tunisia presented in this chapter
rests on this assumed, monolithic, and homogenous collectivity of Tunisian
women’s “modern” identity. As Zayzafoon provides insight:

[The Tunisian] woman remains subordinate to man and exists

only inside the family unit. Tunisian law recognizes only the fam-
ily unit: the Personal Status Code of 1956 is silent on the status
of single mothers and the Tunisian judicial system criminalizes
same-sex relations. . . . Thus the “Tunisian woman” does not exist
as a single mother, or a lesbian; she has rights only as a [married
or widowed] mother and a wife. (2005: 107)

Although women in Tuinisia today “enjoy the same legal status as men,”5
inequalities between social classes and between urban and rural women per-
sist.6 For example, the situation of a single mother with an illegitimate child
is still ignored by Tunisian law.7 And, homosexuality is still illegal in Tunisia
and can carry a punishment of up to three years in prison.8 However, many
still-marginalized individuals in Tunisian society do attest to improvements
in the social and cultural rights of Tunisian citizens since 1956.9 Yet, despite
the amendments to Tunisia’s constitution effected throughout the late 1980s
and 1990s in the areas of domestic violence, women’s rights in marriage and
divorce, and women’s political rights, the vestiges of the 1950s past remain.
The emphasis on the normative perception of Tunisian women as mothers—
the prescribed monolithic and homogenous representation of contemporary
female identity—collectively persists.
Beginning in 1956, President Bourguiba initiated and led an aggressively
pro-Western and pro-development program that instituted numerous re-
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 111

forms designed to make the nation competitive in the world market economy
(Holmes-Eber, 2003: 4). Among these initiatives, Bourguiba enacted prob-
ably the most important and significant piece of legislation to women’s socio-
economic position in Tunisian society: the Personal Status Code. Historian
Paula Holmes-Eber shares 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 ad-
ministration, 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 em-
ployment through protection of their rights in the workplace (Homes-Eber,
2003: 4).
The PSC began to lay foundation to a more gender-egalitarian society
in Tunisia. In spite of the PSC, though, 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 and touted as 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 and cultural values in operation in contemporary Tunisian society.
The political and social status of Tunisian women and their image or cultural
value in contemporary Tunisian society is one example of how Tunisia finds
itself at the center of a complex web of a variety of so-called traditional and
so-called progressive belief systems and ideologies. As we shall see in this
chapter, one important cultural domain of contemporary Tunisian society,
its cinema, is playing a critical role in challenging the widespread traditional
belief systems and their underlying normative cultural values and attitudes.
As we saw in Chapter One with regard to 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 made room 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 more-
over, it is these very cultural double standards, ideological paradoxes, and
social contradictions that shape the landscape of Tunisian cinema and that,
112 C H A PT E R 3

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 gen-
eral level, there is a clear “homology between patriarchal norms within the
domestic and the political spheres” (Stollery, 2001: 50). We have also seen in
many theorists’ writings an underlying emphasis on the overarching affirma-
tions of paternal authority in both domestic and political spaces. This empha-
sis 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.10 Scholars concur that although such representations con-
fer 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 undertakes 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)

Scholars often consider these broad assertions on the connections between

gender and nation as useful points of departure for analyzing representa-
tions 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). Stollery’s observation of the cinema’s potentiality to
resist and re-frame gender is critical to our understanding of the re-hybridized
postcolonial subject and the ²⁄³ Space of expression in this chapter.
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 begin-
ning any analysis with the traditional, unified, and fixed definitions of Arab
masculinity or femininity. She advocates for a reading practice that focuses on
shifting lines of demarcation that exist within each gender as well as between
the two genders.11 Stollery adopts a similar perspective in his essay and sug-
gests that
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 113

the identification of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities,

related to factors such as age, social status, and institutional hier-
archies, 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 politi-
cal 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 Satin rouge, her début feature-length film, offers interesting
insights into this opening up onto wider cultural and political change in Tu-
nisia by challenging Tunisia’s widespread conventional and traditional belief
systems and underlying cultural values and attitudes through its examination
of postcolonial female gender construction and processes of (urban) contem-
porary female identity formation in Tunis, Tunisia. Through her cinematic
portrait of the film’s protagonist, a forty-something widowed housewife and
mother of one, Amari’s film also poses important questions concerning wom-
en’s representation (understood in the sense of constructed cultural identities)
in contemporary Tunisian society. Moreover, Amari’s insights and questions
indirectly speak to larger preoccupations at play in many contemporary
North African cinematic domestic dramas concerning the need to shift lines
of gender representation and ways of seeing gender on screen and in society.
As I will develop in my discussion of Satin rouge below, Amari’s illustra-
tion of female housework and its associated representation provide useful
points of critical inquiry since they may proffer a new or different vantage
point in examining the Self-Other divide and the role this divide plays in
constructing identity and gender in film and society. Through a detailed
analysis of the opening sequence of Satin rouge, a sequence which, in my view,
captures concretely the possibility for (re)appropriating female representation
114 C H A PT E R 3

in contemporary North African cinema, I turn to several formal aspects of

Amari’s filmmaking and question how they may begin to flesh out these shift-
ing lines of women’s representation in contemporary Tunisia. In this detailed
analysis, I will focus primarily on Amari’s use of the panning shot and fram-
ing because both are key cinematic techniques for creating cinematic agency
(an operation critical to understanding and interpreting the representation of
the female protagonist) and because both the panning shot and framing work
in Satin rouge to subvert traditional representations of Tunisian women in
a cinematic domestic drama. In turn, this subversion, which is grounded in
intercultural social and artistic exchanges within as well as beyond Tunisia’s
cultural borders, opens up new paths to challenging many prevalent Tunisian
belief systems and underlying cultural values and attitudes. Let us now begin
to take a closer look at the film.

SATIN ROUGE (2002)

This film showcases an interesting case study of contemporary Tunisian do-

mestic (albeit urban) drama built on the congruous and conflicting relation-
ships between different cultural, social, political, artistic, and ideological dis-
courses—largely their contradictions, paradoxes, ambivalences, and overlaps.
The film pays particular attention to gender roles and gender relations and is
reflective of or at least illustrates many of the scholarly debates taking place
concerning contemporary Tunisian culture and society.12 At the intersection
of these discourses, in both Satin rouge and contemporary urban Tunisian so-
ciety, often rests the primordial figure of the housewife and stereotypical por-
trayal of her “moral and spiritual” way of life, which typically translates into
her silent domestic obedience and incessant housekeeping and child-raising
practices. In Satin rouge, Amari levies new debates addressing interpretations
of performances of women’s traditional roles and desire for self-expression
in contemporary Tunisian society by engaging in a multivalent manner the
ideological implications of this traditional social construct of the housewife
and her comportment. Amari’s multivalent approach in Satin rouge offers a
timely interpretation of Tunisia’s intercultural exchanges within, as well as
beyond, its normative discourses of conventional female behavior.
In relation to Amari’s intercultural cinematic exchanges in Satin rouge,
we may turn to both France and Egypt in finding sources of inspiration
for what we may call Amari’s transvergent style of filmmaking. As we recall
quickly from the Introduction, a transvergent style of filmmaking suggests a
method which is “not limited to artificial borders or boundaries of national
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 115

cinemas” but that instead “proposes a clear understanding of the elements of

the interconnectedness that may bind a filmmaker to a given film culture or
national identity at a given time” (Higbee, 2007: 87). In addition, a transver-
gent style of filmmaking may also aim to expose and foreground (celebrate
even) the differences whose cracks a nationalist ideology might attempt to
paper over.13 A secondary aim in this discussion in Chapter Three is to de-
velop (in)directly how these characteristics apply to Raja Amari, a Tunisian
emigrant graduate of La FEMIS and filmmaker home-based in Paris, France,
and Satin rouge, a French-Tunisian co-production.
In an interview given to IndieWIRE around the time of the New York
theatrical release of Satin rouge (in early summer 2002), when answering a
question concerning the filmmakers who have inspired her, Amari responds
“the new French cinema” and directors like François Ozon and Arnaud
Desplechin for “the way they deal with their characters.”14 Although Amari
does not develop in this interview what she understands as the way Ozon and
Desplechin “deal with their characters,” it is not difficult to see when analyz-
ing her “dealing with” the character of Lilia (the protagonist) in Satin rouge
that she perhaps appreciates and emulates the intricate and elaborate multidi-
mensionality (in terms of gender construction, sexuality, attitudes, behaviors,
internal conflicts, and psychological dilemmas) of Ozon’s and Desplechin’s
principal characters as seen in such films as Under the Sand (Ozon, 2001) or
Esther Kahn (Desplechin, 2000). Yet, what appears more striking in Amari’s
construction of Lilia’s character in Satin rouge lies not necessarily with her
transnational hybridization of “new French cinema” and contemporary Tu-
nisian cinema but rather her interconnectedness with Egyptian filmmaking
of the 1940s and 1950s.
In an interview appearing as a bonus feature on Satin rouge’s North
American DVD version, an interviewer asks Amari if the cabaret and belly
dancing are merely an excuse to tell the story of a woman’s independence in
an Arab society (2003). In her reply, Amari explains that, as a dancer herself
who had studied for many years at the Conservatoire de Tunis, she had al-
ways wanted to make a film revolving around belly dancing. She shares that
she grew up watching the “Golden Age” Egyptian musicals from the 1940s
and 1950s and that both she and her mother loved the well-known dancer
Samia Gamal and singer Farid El Atrache. One could argue that Amari’s
reworking of the Egyptian musical, as epitomized by Gamal and Atrache,
through Satin rouge’s soundtrack and Lilia’s cabaret performances pay hom-
age to this cinematic genre or evidence Amari’s authorial presence in the
film, since the Egyptian musical genre has clearly influenced Amari’s specta-
tor experience (and thus by extension her filmmaking) and by all accounts
116 C H A PT E R 3

her personal interests in studying the art of raqs sharqi (an Arabic term for
“belly dancing.”) Given Amari’s reference to Egyptian cinema, it is useful to
our discussion to gloss the first few decades of this industry in order to con-
nect the Egyptian cinematic musical genre, which Amari grew up watching,
to the cinematic ²⁄³ Space and re-hybridized speaking subject witnessed in her
filmmaking
In his discussion of Egyptian film history from 1896 to 1994, Hind
Rassam Culhane identifies a common discursive theme running through-
out 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 domi-
nance/hegemony” (1995: 33). The first film shown in Egypt was projected
in the backroom 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.15 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 Egyp-
tian spectators. These films, made with Egyptian actors, met little success.
However, 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.
In contrast, these films met great success.
In the 1920s, Egyptian production companies as well as ciné-clubs
began to appear and the melodrama genre became widely successful.16
Culhane shares 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 later re-titled Laila. This film recounts the
story of Laila, a beautiful village girl who gives herself to her fiancé, but he
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 vil-
lagers and seeks refuge in Cairo. The rest of the film then tracks the miser-
ies she experiences in Cairo. Culhane explains that the film introduced a
major Egyptian theme of “the seduction of the Egyptian by the West in
general, and America in particular, and the misery that results” (1995: 39).
Many scholars of Middle Eastern and North African cinemas believe that
this theme still often operates by and large today in much contemporary,
generally non-Eurocentric, World Cinema.
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 117

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 posits the inclu-
sion of indigenous “oriental” Egyptian song and dance which presented
Egyptian filmmakers a “great opportunity to combine technological devel-
opment 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.17 In fact, the song performed in the con-
cluding scene of Satin rouge (the wedding reception) is of Egyptian origin.18
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, a transnationality has al-
ways existed and played a prime role in the development of the Egyptian film
industry.
We could extend this same statement to the development of the Tuni-
sian 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 assumingly 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 gaze accepts and returns the gaze through a perfor-
mance 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
118 C H A PT E R 3

Latin dance, in her cinematic and nightclub performances.19 She is also well-
known for performing in high-heels, this costume element symbolizing the
West when typically and traditionally in the East dancers perform barefoot.
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.
Satin rouge narrates the “coming of age” of a forty-something widow,
Lilia (Hiam Abbass), living and raising her teenage daughter, Salma (Hend
El Ahem), in contemporary Tunis, Tunisia. The narrative follows Lilia’s pro-
gression from a seemingly conservative and traditional housewife and mother
to a rather liberal and “modern” woman and mother-in-law. In the beginning
of the film, Lilia’s daily existence is mostly limited to Salma and taking care
of their home. One night when Salma does not return home as expected,
Lilia suspects that she may be in a local cabaret. She enters the cabaret but is
overcome by its atmosphere. She faints but recovers in the dressing room of
the cabaret’s lead dancer, Folla (Monia Hichri). The two forge a friendship,
and Lilia soon becomes a cabaret performer herself. Lilia begins a short-
lived romance with Chokri (Maher Kammoon), who unbeknownst to her
is romancing Salma. In the penultimate scene, Chokri learns of Lilia’s and
Salma’s mother-daughter relation, and Lilia learns of Salma’s and Chokri’s
engagement. Chokri and Lilia vow to keep their affair a secret from Salma,
and the film ends with a marriage reception in which family, neighbors, and
Lilia’s cabaret colleagues joyfully dance and celebrate the marital union of
Salma and Chokri.
Amari clarifies that in Satin rouge she desired to present an image of con-
temporary Tunisian society as divided into two worlds. Not the traditional
social division of masculine and feminine but rather the opposition of day
and night. On this point Amari expresses in the DVD interview:

We’re talking about two quite opposite worlds where everything

is opposed. On the one hand, the world of the day is strict, domi-
nant and prudish. On the other, the world of the night is relaxed,
marginal and lascivious. I wanted them to join up at all costs
through Lilia’s character. (2003)

Amari explains that in typical traditional Tunisian society, “their paths would
never cross because nightclubs are perceived as a bit creepy and a depraved
environment” (2003). She stylizes Lilia’s cinematic maternal portrait as “as
‘regular’ woman, a model housewife with a great deal of moral conviction
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 119

and a strict sense of duty” (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” (2003).
In this interview, Amari connects these two social worlds through the double
life that she believes every Tunisian lives. When commenting on the way
in which Lilia hides her involvement with the cabaret from her family and
neighbors, Amari asserts 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. (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.
In Satin rouge, Amari uses Lilia’s double life as housewife by day (the
Self) and cabaret performer by night (the Other) to present two portraits
of contemporary Tunisian femininity. The former portrait adopts and the
latter portrait questions traditional Tunisian discourses of domesticity and
the modern Tunisian woman’s supposed “moral and spiritual mission.” Yet
Amari does not rely on oppositional and isolated settings of home and caba-
ret to present these portraits throughout the film. As the opening sequence
reveals, these two portraits may co-exist and merge within domestic space, al-
though not without personal or familial conflict, as the film will later develop.
Moreover, in addition to setting up Lilia’s doubled femininity, which seems
to respond to Kandiyoti’s call to focus on shifting lines of demarcation in
North African cinemas that exist within each gender (1994: 51), the opening
sequence also suggests that these two portraits of femininity in the film—the
dancer and the mother—share the same point of origin. Thereby, they are
not strictly pitted against one another in quasi-binary terms as seemingly
witnessed in Tunisian hegemonic discourses of femininity.
Furthermore, the opening sequence is also significant for it suggests
that both portraits of femininity (the dancer and the mother) become part
of Lilia’s multiple form of feminine resistance to the institutions of home
120 C H A PT E R 3

and homemaking from within the home. From the very opening sequence
of the film, the home clearly presents a contact zone of contradiction, am-
bivalence, and paradox. As we have already established in previous chapters
of this study, once again—but this time in relation to Amari’s text—the
home captures a kind of diasporic space in which the protagonist is both
“here and there.” Again, the home reflects and resembles “nation” by ex-
pressing the same ideological pressures that contend within the nation and
does not serve as a retreat from the public and political spheres. As I have
analyzed elsewhere (forthcoming, 2010), Amari cinematically captures this
multiple form of feminine resistance and complexity of home in the open-
ing sequence when filming Lilia’s housekeeping acts with the panning shot
and framing, two cinematic tools which both subtly work to subvert and
challenge these institutions and many traditional discourses of Tunisian
femininity in this film.
The opening sequence of the film splits the opening credits into two
parts. The credits, written in both French and Arabic in white lettering,
which literally reads as a marker or sign of Amari’s transnational or transver-
gent cinema, 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 voice, automobile traffic sounds, and muffled
footsteps shuffling by). The credits continue to roll for about one minute lon-
ger, 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
are being changed, an announcement by a female voice informing the listen-
ers 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 bed-
room window. For the remaining almost three minutes of this scene, Amari
captures with no cuts and only very subtle camera pans right and left and very
slow 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. However, Amari’s use of Lilia’s reflection in the bedroom
mirror introduces a discursive theme running throughout the narrative sug-
gesting 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 the one hand on the film’s
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 121

narrative level, this doubled image sets up her doubled existence and identity as
model housewife during the day and cabaret performer at 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 even-
tual 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 through its social
discourses of the pressure to conform and the repressive prevailing morality
that dominates this society in which someone almost always appears to be
looking over your shoulder.
Throughout Satin rouge, Amari raises this motif and engages with the
issue 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 specta-
tor 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.
The opening sequence continues as the camera, without cutting, slowly
pans right to capture the dressertop 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
dressertop 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. With-
out 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.
Once more 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.
It is often said that the panning shot tends to emphasize the unity of
space and the connectedness of people and objects within that space (Gi-
annetti, 2008: 126). This is a useful definition to apply to discussions of
Amari’s panning shot—and by extension framing—in Satin rouge since both
tools, in general, emphasize the literal cinematic contiguity of people and ob-
jects sharing the same space (Giannetti, 2008: 126), a key to decoding most
122 C H A PT E R 3

if not all cinematic domestic dramas. In this opening sequence, the unity of
space is preserved but not in the traditional reactionary way. Rather than pan-
ning to keep Lilia in the center of the frame as she moves about the bedroom,
Amari ironically refuses to focus on Lilia’s movements and housekeeping
motions. As a result, the bedroom and its objects seem to capture the focus
on Amari’s camera lens. The camera’s panning movement that precipitates
Lilia’s motions reinforces this reading. Thus, Lilia’s actions appear intrusive
as she enters into each frame and obstructs the spectator’s view of the setting.
As seen in Ernaux’s presentation of her childhood home and first homes
with her husbands in La Femme gelée and in de Beauvoir’s treatment of the
protagonist’s Parisian apartment in La Femme rompue, we again have a sense
of the home as depot of “stuff” that requires maintenance and as a restrictive
world of immanent acts.
As we may recall from the Introduction of this book, 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 theoretical examination of the home has
begun to explore how everyday relationships with our homes are bound up
with sensory perception and metaphor. But this research also reminds us that
these relationships are culture-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 de-
scribe and understand the normative 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 con-
trary, 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. (2003: 16)

In contrast to Djebar’s portrait of the Algerian home as represented in Dela-

croix’s painting of the home as Algerian women’s “prison,” Amari’s portrait
of the Tunisian home does reflect to a certain degree Holmes-Eber’s descrip-
tion. In Satin rouge, we do witness a few visits paid to Lilia at home by her
neighbor, her friend Folla, and an uncle from the countryside.
On the surface, these scenes do seem to coincide with Holmes-Eber’s
additional description of Tunisian women’s homes as:
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 123

noisy, active, busy social centers, filled with neighbors who have
dropped in ostensibly to borrow tea; friends who have stopped
by to drop 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 film-
making—largely the absence of sound within the home when Amari films
these scenes—that undermines the domestic portrait of the contemporary
Tunisian home as social and open in Satin rouge. As the opening sequence of
the film establishes, the home in Satin rouge assumes a more ominous pres-
ence and does not portray the “happening” place that Holmes-Eber describes.
Although it is perhaps too restrictive to label Amari’s portrait of the contem-
porary Tunisian home a “prison,” there are certainly qualities to the home
which may be read as “prison-like”; for example, 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
décor. Furthermore, one may also read these friends, neighbors, and family
members who visit Lilia at home as agents of hegemony or nation who express
the same ideological pressures—whether intentionally or unwittingly—through
their evaluations of and interferences in Lilia’s homemaking and child-raising
practices. Thus, these domestic details of Lilia’s home and the activities oc-
curring therein 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.20 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 over-
arching and monolithic definitions or stereotypes of cultures. This avocation
recalls Kandiyoti’s and Stollery’s suggestion for 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 demarca-
tion within and beyond the home and revising representations and qualities
of domestic spaces and women’s role(s) therein and beyond remain key objec-
tives in all their work.
With the panning shot and framing in the opening sequence of Satin
rouge, Amari limits the qualities of the on-screen domestic space (its con-
nectedness or literary contiguity within the space) to Lilia and the bedroom
124 C H A PT E R 3

objects. Not only does this create a feeling of isolation—for no one else is
humanly present in this sequence with Lilia—but we also begin to have a
sense of the home and family via the photographs’ dominating presence and
priority in Lilia’s life and in traditional Tunisian female society. This detail
appears to capture and reinforce the so-called modern Tunisian women’s
moral and spiritual mission. Furthermore, the filming of Lilia at the edges of
the cinematic frame also create a greater implied distance between her char-
acter and the spectator or even a lack of identification with the character, for
the spectator’s eye is drawn first to the bedroom objects and not Lilia. This
use of framing allows the spectator to more easily take a critical distance in
examining the traditional discourse of femininity on display at this point in
the opening sequence. Additionally, the “body cropping” secondary effect
of Amari’s framing in this opening sequence also makes evident traditional
discourses of Tunisian femininity and hints at the aforementioned nationalist
project of regeneration, which Amari wishes to undo in Satin rouge.
Never once at this point in the extreme long take of the opening sequence
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 the cinematic screen (at least in Western filmmaking prac-
tices), yet also to reflect Tunisian ways of viewing women’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 house-
work, childbearing, and childrearing—foregrounds women’s two important
functions for traditional Tunisian society: first, maintaining domestic order
and second, transmitting values and morality to the next generation—her
“moral and spiritual mission.”
However, much of Lilia’s housework in this scene occurs on the edges
of the cinematic frame or even all together off screen. The irony lies in the
fact 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 specifically within the cinematic frame thus renders
her housework almost marginal or secondary. Therefore, from the very be-
ginning of Satin rouge, Amari articulates a challenge to traditional Tunisian
ways of thinking, representing, and viewing Tunisian women. Expressed dif-
ferently, housework in Amari’s filmmaking, which is represented in norma-
tive contemporary Tunisian discourses as rather central to Tunisian women’s
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 125

feminine condition, becomes an important instigating agent of change (posi-

tioned marginally on screen) in establishing counterpoints in Lilia’s cinematic
portrait of femininity. We may in turn use these counterpoints to examine
how they in particular and the film in general begin a process of opening up
onto wider cultural and political change.
As we will again recall from the Introduction, many feminist theorists and
theorists on domesticity often align the performance of housework with the
development of agency in their work and find that individual agency in the
home is a key force in producing changing gender configurations in society.21
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.22 We clearly saw this notion illustrated in Chapter Two’s discus-
sion 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 from the Introduction, 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 sequence of Satin rouge reveal how
housework, as a performative act in the process of the constitution of the Self,
allows Lilia self-consciously to (re)constitute her gendered identity.
The opening sequence continues as Lilia stands up after having straight-
ened 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 reflec-
tion. 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 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 danc-
ing. From this angle and for the first time, we are able to see a full frontal
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
126 C H A PT E R 3

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 makes 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 mo-
ments 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 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 represen-
tation 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 cre-
ates 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 reflec-
tions 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 performa-
tivity 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.
Researchers studying housekeeping practices have often drawn a con-
nection between housework and dancing, with the former understood as an
act of performing the private self at home.23 Research shows a common cor-
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 127

relation among “housekeepers” who often combine music with which they
identify and housework movement. Pink elucidates that this combination of
music, movement, and housework “enables individuals to connect their expe-
riences of housework to other activities, thus incorporating it into part of the
vision they have of themselves as individuals” (2004: 70). For Lilia, house-
work 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 the home
and homemaking responsibilities as initial excuses for refusing to return to the
cabaret after her initial discovery of it at a later point in the film. 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
sequence performances appear within the same location of the bedroom and
in the same sequence, they are not simultaneous. Lilia must temporarily stop
cleaning in order to dance and then stop dancing in order to return to clean-
ing. It is as if to suggest that these two portraits of femininity—the one that
adopts traditional domestic discourse (the housewife) and the other one that
questions traditional domestic discourse through unrestricted self-expression
(the cabaret performer)—may not ever (or at least not easily) converge.
However, this is not to say that these two portraits of femininity may
not transverge. They are clearly imbricated as they both involve the same
performer and occur within the same space. Yet, the opening sequence—the
change from one kind of performer (housewife) into another (cabaret dancer)
and then back again—implies a complexity, incompleteness, fragmentation,
and derailment of these two portraits and begins to open up the possibility of
a re-hybridized subject position (i.e., Lilia) born in-between these two por-
traits. Thus, Amari effectively creates imbrication as well as interstices in this
opening sequence. She maintains these two structures throughout the film
and uses them to suggest a certain ambivalence or multifariousness in the rep-
resentation of contemporary Tunisian femininity. Furthermore and perhaps
more importantly, Amari uses this imbrication and these interstices to estab-
lish an intersubjectivity on the part of the protagonist. For some theorists
of domesticity, housework and dancing entrain an intersubjectivity through
which individuals experience their home via maternal objects, technologies,
spaces, and sensory experiences, sometimes in conflicting and contradictory
ways.24 For Amari in Satin rouge, this intersubjectivity in contemporary Tuni-
sian society may only be realized through domestic and personal conflict.
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 the other cinematic and literary narratives in this study on several
levels (e.g., mother versus daughter, traditional versus contemporary modes
128 C H A PT E R 3

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 suspi-
cion 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 open-
ing up onto domestic and social change and resolution of this tension.
In an example of this opening up to change, Lilia grants Salma certain
liberties that the film leads us to believe she otherwise would not have done
(e.g., going out with her friends and sleeping over at her friend Hela’s house).
Seemingly because of the intermediary of the cabaret, Lilia also discovers con-
temporary 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 space 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 eventually
does accept Folla’s invitation but initially only undecover 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 the discussion in Chapter One, Djebar’s representa-
tions of the “non-dire” include the discussion and recognition of Algerian
women’s contribution to the war for independence from France as well as
frank discussion of Algerian social taboos with regard to the physical viola-
tion, 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 con-
temporary representation of Tunisian femininity that publicly acknowledges
female sexuality and sexual activity.
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 129

Amari’s contemporary representation 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 Lila and Chokri toward the end of the film. When
asked to comment on these two love scenes and the rareness of such “explicit”
scenes in Tunisian cinema in general, Amari predicts the controversy with
which these two scenes will be greeted when the film is released in Tunisia.
She says

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. (2003)

Although I found nothing in my research that recounted the reaction of the

Tunisian movie-going population to these two love scenes, I can corroborate
to a certain extent Amari’s prediction within the reaction of a Tunisian ac-
quaintance of mine living and working in the United States. After viewing
the film, my acquaintance made a particular point to “correct” Amari’s por-
trayal 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.25 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,” as
Amari would put it, 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 accus-
tomed to more explicit or public displays of visual sexuality more common
to European and American cultures than Arab or Islamic societies. And
therefore, we could say that my acquaintance’s hybrid or affected viewing
experience is not representative of mainstream Tunisian society. Nonethe-
less, in Amari’s mind, her more explicit love scene between Lilia and Chokri
(which is quite conservative when compared to other female directors like
Catherine Breillet, for instance) remains a point of controversy in her work.
130 C H A PT E R 3

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 or Is-
lamic societies, whom Amari presents with sexual desires.
When requested to comment further on Lilia’s symbolic and almost al-
legorical 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 replies 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 go-
ing to do everything in her power to fulfill her desire up to the
very end, in the final scenes, when she becomes literally perverse.
(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 ‘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 meta-
phorical veil of abstinence and chastity under which Tunisian women are
not to be looked at and desired. For Amari, this veil contradicts her portrait
of contemporary 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 who resigns herself to and accepts tra-
ditional 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.
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 131

What becomes significant in Lilia’s return to dusting and straightening

up at the close of the opening sequence follows Pink’s theorizations in that
Lilia performs these acts on her terms. Pink asserts:

To be conversant with existing (hegemonic) discourses and the

constraints they imply, performative actions must be sufficiently
recognizable on their terms, but because they are creative, expres-
sive and transgressive, they might also stretch these constraints
and be instrumental in processes of change. (2004: 59)

Rather than just performing a prescribed set of actions for dusting and
straightening in a routine or housekeeping manual–like fashion, Lilia inter-
rupts the housekeeping performative act with her impromptu raqs sharqi per-
formance. Each performative act, then, may be recognized in resistance to the
other as well as in its own terms as “central” (housekeeping) and “marginal”
(dancing) to hegemonic ways of seeing women’s roles in contemporary Tuni-
sia. Amari’s use of the panning shot and framing in this sequence, in which
the lens marginalizes Lilia’s housekeeping and centers her dancing, underpins
in an “outside-in” manner Lilia’s gradual reconstruction or rewriting of her
shifting identity and introduces Amari’s goal in the film to bring these two
“worlds” or discourses of femininity together.
Thus, both her housekeeping and her dancing enter the narrative as
counterpoints that paradoxically work as binaries to divide Lilia’s subjectivity
between “domesticated, good” Self and “emancipated, bad” Other. Whilst at
the same time they also (increasingly throughout the film) work together to
resist such a reification of doubled subjectivity in favor of a plurality of in-
between or re-hybridized female subjectivities (her intersubjectivity). Lilia’s
domestic world broadens through her association with the cabaret network of
employees (i.e., “other” women) she joins whilst still maintaining (albeit per-
haps unrealistically) her respectable position as widowed housewife. In other
words, we see in Satin rouge how a “modern Tunisian woman” transgresses
(or perhaps even transcends) the “Self-Other” divide by embracing and not
repressing the “Others” residing within her “Self.” As we recall from the
Introduction, Marcus Novak would call this the alloself—the alien within.
In relation to contemporary Tunisian cultural and social thought, such
engagement enables new ways of seeing, constructing, and (re)presenting
various “other” forms of femininity or “other” notions about or definitions
of “womanhood.”
By inviting spectators to compare Lilia’s dispersed housewifery portrait
with the unified model presented in the neighbor’s portrait, who embodies
132 C H A PT E R 3

the social pressure and repressive prevailing morality in Tunisia in the film,
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 sequence in which dusting
is replaced by dance and then brought back 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 multivalent. In Satin rouge, this reconstructive process may only
be realized through initial rejection and then eventual revision of the ma-
tronly figure. One may also find this symbolic mode of gender reconstruction
in Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2002). In Serreau’s film, it surfaces in the figure of
the grandmother (Line Rénaud) and her function in the narrative. Let us now
move onto a discussion of contemporary French filmmaker Coline Serreau
and a close reading of Chaos.

Coline Serreau
Coline Serreau arrived on the French cinematographic scene through a
theatrical stage door. Daughter of Jean-Marie Serreau, a stage director con-
sidered 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, a feminist activist docu-
mentary titled Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (1977–1978). For Serreau, her
background and continual involvement with the theater does not only in-
fluence her filmmaking but also provides a useful insight into her definition
or understanding of the role or function of the cinema and performance 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’en 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 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. (1978)
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 133

[I would like to continue fiction as well, and I itch to continue to

act: for me, all of this is the same thing. . . . Fiction is an essential
means to say many things at once. I can come back to one or the
other. And I can return to the theater because that’s one of the
rare moments, one of the only moments when one truly learns
how to communicate with the public. (my translation)]

Brigitte Rollet finds that this statement by Serreau summarizes Serreau’s

entire 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). In Serreau’s mind, her desire
to communicate with the public may be more immediately realized in the
theatrical medium with a live audience present at each of her 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” and “auteurist filmmaker.” This is
because in her reasoning these labels suggest, respectively, a strict and reduc-
tive definition that she does not see her work fitting and the sense of a sole
artistic creator of the film that does not accurately describe her more collab-
orative role in the cinematic production 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. The most significant issues she treats in her corpus of
work—women’s rights, gender and sexual stereotypes, racism, immigration,
unemployment, and social marginality—all point to a rejection and refusal of
the unjust organization of capitalist societies, a thematic she underlines 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 (e.g., 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; tra-
ditional and conservative political parties; the elitism of French society; sexual
oppression; and the rights of labor unions and their causes) have marked
many of these filmmakers’ narratives in terms of issues addressed in the film’s
134 C H A PT E R 3

content and subject matter and have marked cinematic style in terms of the
technical tools or elements employed in addressing these issues. As a typical
vestige of May ’68 intellectual goals, scholars find that Serreau “use[s] main-
stream 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” [“speaking out”] 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 in France.
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 (at the time of preparing this manuscript) 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 criti-
cism 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. No study of Serreau, moreover, would
be complete without addressing Serreau’s cinematic or theatrical relationship
to comedy and the comic genre. Let us pause for a quick moment to consider
this important relationality in Serreau’s work before moving onto our close
reading of Chaos.
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) [“But the comic in France is treated lightly and
to speak with humor about society’s major problems is not done” (my transla-
tion)]. Thomas continues to suggest that, “l’universalité et le profondeur des
oeuvres de l’inclassable et dérangeante Coline Serreau restent à découvrir”
(1998: 1) [“the universality and the depth of the works of the unclassable
and troublesome Coline Serreau remain to be discovered” (my translation)].
In explaining to Thomas her choice of a comic mode of expression to address
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 135

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)
[I do not think in terms of hope, I am not messianic. My comedy
comes from despair, from a sharp consciousness of what is not go-
ing well. It always stems from serious situations, it is not light and
I have the impression that I am crying out very strongly! But I do
not know any other efficient way to speak to my contemporaries
than by making them laugh. (my translation)]

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, effectively resists definition.
Her comedy works to subvert and transgress the main audience’s conven-
tional 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 of a more cerebral nature. In an in-
teresting way, Rollet compares Serreau’s comedy to the genre of the conte
philosophique à la Voltaire.27 Rollet shows how Serreau’s films resemble
Voltaire’s tales in their development 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 permit-
ted 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 cin-
ematographic genres in her texts allow her to critique the governing dis-
courses 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
136 C H A PT E R 3

contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox. She sees comedy as a necessary

component to the “engagé”-like modes of questioning, challenging, and com-
prehending 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, par un
art ni un choix simplement léger. (Thomas, 1998: 2)
[But I see the world in its contradictions that provoke laughter.
When one does not see the comic, that’s when one has a trun-
cated vision. A complete vision inevitably embraces humor, which
generates a distance, a reflection on oneself and the ability not to
take oneself as the center of the world. It’s a philosophy, not an
art neither a mere light choice. (my translation)]

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 personal manner.
Thus, the result or end goal of her comedy rests with the hope of eventu-
ally leading to socio-political change in French society, all the while subver-
sively making the spectator laugh at capitalist society’s absurdity. As Serreau
clarifies, “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) [“I do not fetishize the
means of expression. What mobilizes is the thing you have to say . . . the role
of art is to make felt or experienced the contradictions, the subtleties, instead
of explaining them” (my translation)]. Serreau maintains this perspective in
her 2002 feature-length film Chaos. We will now look more closely at this
film and the manners in which she unsettles home in this text.

CHAOS (2001)

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

Hélène (Catherine Frot) and Paul (Vincent Lindon), rushing through their
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 137

evening preparations before going out, we assume, to a dinner party. This

fast-paced rhythm sets the tone and pace for the rest of the film. Once de-
scended from their apartment and traveling by car to their evening destina-
tion, Paul and Hélène witness the violent attack by a group of male criminals
on a young woman, Noémie/Malika (Rachida Brakni), who 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 from the car in a car auto-wash
all physical evidence and trace of the attack. Plagued with guilt, Hélène tracks
Noémie/Malika down to a 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 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), hides
from Hélène when she comes to visit him in his studio and who is caught
up in his own domestic affair, 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 some kind of
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 becom-
ing a higher-class call girl who targets rich old men only to deplete them of
138 C H A PT E R 3

their fortunes—all the while still under the management of Pali and suppos-
edly not keeping any of the profits for herself. As we learn in this sequence,
Noémie/Malika explains to Hélène that she 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. They rescue Noémie/Malika’s younger sister from an ar-
ranged, forced marriage and save Mamie from her solitude.
Serreau’s cinematic style in this sequence in particular and throughout
the film in general succeeds in creating a fantastic filmic atmosphere through
the representation of a mix of reality with unreal elements. In French Cin-
ema, this cinematographic styling is the main mode of representation of the
social fantastic in French cinematic tradition. This mix of reality with unreal
elements opens interesting points of comparison or an intertextuality between
these cinematic genres. This is to say that Chaos’ multi-meta-narrative quality
(especially as illustrated in Serreau’s extended flashback sequence of Noé-
mie/Malika’s childhood and adolescence and the sting operation) revolves on
surreal scenes that Serreau documents with such realistic details that their ab-
surdity appears plausible. As noted by scholars examining the social fantastic,
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 social fantastic literary and cinemato-
graphic genre.
Other elements of the social fantastic resonate in Serreau’s Chaos as well.
Most immediately as implied by the film’s title, the omnipresence of chaos
surrounding the 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 (Noé-
mie/Malika). There is the representation of victimization and characters who
have fallen on economic or emotional hard times (Noémie/Malika, Zora,
and Mamie) and 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
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 139

hotels as sites of Noémie/Malika’s prostitution schemes). Finally, we have the

impression that everything in the film is illusory and is to be interpreted by
the spectator as s/he individually experiences and comprehends the text. In
addition to representing standardized and typified characteristics of the social
fantastic genre, all of these elements contribute to the overall phantasmagoric
feel of Chaos and Serreau’s social commentary.
In response to Sylvie Thomas’ questions with regard to the multivalence
of Serreau’s social commentary in her work and the rather ambiguous nature
of her relation to French and international politics—notably her refusal to
express her political ideologies through direct public engagements (i.e., 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) [“I don’t like to point out my
political opinions. I speak about them in my films, in my plays. I don’t have
any other explanations to give” (my translation)]. 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 réduc-

teur. 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’ex-
pliquer. (1998: 3)
[That is not at all my mode of expression, and it’s rather reduc-
tive. One expresses him/herself, though, with the maximum of
contradictions, but it’s only the congruous portion that remains
in articles. A film, a play makes possible through laughter, emo-
tion, and color the apprehension of these subtitles. As soon as we
leave our means of communication, it’s no longer the same thing.
. . . The role of art is to make felt the contradictions, the subtle-
ties, instead of explaining them.” (my translation)]

In other words, the goal of Serreau’s verbal and visual art, whether cinematic
or dramatic, is to make allusion to social injustices through vivid representa-
tion of society’s contradictions and ambivalences 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 play-
ing in contemporary Tunisian society, as well as the other women artists dis-
cussed in this project who see their work as avenues leading to social change
140 C H A PT E R 3

in their respective societies or communities. Serreau, like the other women in

this project, unsettles the home and uses it 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 en-
vironment of Paul and Hélène’s bourgeois Parisian apartment, of which their
son 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 street prostitution and drug abuse) 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 pur-
chased seaside home at the end of the film is an extension. These three cat-
egories of domestic representation function to represent contradictory social
spaces that challenge women’s traditional domestic/family role as represented
in bourgeois gender discourses (Paul and Hélène’s apartment), that draw on
the notion of women’s (especially post/colonial) victimization and subservi-
ent 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 contra-
dictive and multi-sited 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.”28
As already described, the film opens with a quasi-back story of Paul and
Hélène who are running late (a typical characteristic of their character por-
traits) and rushing about their home in preparation of the evening’s plans.
Serreau films their rushing about the apartment, switching off lights, finish-
ing 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 panning shots 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 extra-diegetic soundtrack of upbeat and quick-tempo jazzy
music, which also works to establish the urgent feel of the scene, accompa-
nies these chaotic opening moments. The music seamlessly carries into the
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 141

next scene of Paul and Hélène driving down the street and then dramatically
ends as Noémie/Malika (running toward them and away from her attackers)
screams for help. The music then begins again as Serreau intersperses shots
of Hélène and Paul driving through the automatic car wash, following 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 again
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: first to reflect the cha-
otic tone and then to underscore the comedy and chaos that both underline
the entire film. As just outlined above, this jazzy musical score mirrors the
chaotic rushing about the apartment witnessed in Paul and Hélène’s behav-
ior in the opening scene. Serreau also employs this extra-diegetic jazzy score
during Noémie/Malika’s cardiac arrest scene (which Hélène witnesses) in the
hospital upon Hélène’s first visit to Noémie/Malika. This re-use of the jazzy
musical score, in a very different context, draws an interesting comparison be-
tween the two scenes and raises one of Serreau’s social critiques in the film.
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 be-
hind 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 of others that
she finds in contemporary mainstream French middle-class society and which
she subversively strives to bring to the surface in Chaos. 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 responds 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 anymore. What Vincent does at the beginning is all
too typical—he just cleans her blood off 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
142 C H A PT E R 3

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 by indiWIRE to comment on her arrival in Chaos at a
“genre-bending mix of comedy, social criticism, and thriller,” Serreau an-
swers, “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,
which also aids Serreau’s genre-bending cinematographic mix, is heard one
more time in relation to Paul and Hélène’s home. Later in the narrative—af-
ter 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. He is not necessarily
trying to contact her in order to inquire after her state and well-being 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 his 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 termi-
nates by telling him to “trouver une autre poire” [“find another sucker”]. The
music begins, and we are presented with a series of close-up shots of Paul’s
hands attempting to iron his suit; his 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. The slap-stick-type, “fish-out-of-water”-style
comedy certainly functions on the same social commentary level in these
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 143

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 remain still at first blush 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 to Ernaux’s and de Beauvoir’s
women who are forced to deal with the reality their men render unto them
and who face fewer options or possibilities, largely due to financial depen-
dency on their male partners. Therefore, although traditional bourgeois gen-
der 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) wreaking 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 portrait 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 extra-
diegetic 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 tele-
phone ringing, knocks at the front door, the television playing in the back-
ground, et cetera. 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
Denaudaud), the girl with whom Fabrice has been cheating on Florence, en-
joying a snack in the kitchen with (diegetic) salsa-type music playing through-
out 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 Hélène. The second
exception occurs at the very end of the film when Hélène, Noémie/Malika,
Zora, and Mamie are sitting on a bench outside Noémie/Malika’s newly pur-
chased sea-side home behind them, looking out to sea. In this closing scene,
we first hear diegetic sounds of the sea and then an extra-diegetic 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
144 C H A PT E R 3

Rosario’s presence, I believe Serreau is subversively commenting on the social

status and employment difficulties facing many foreign nationals who immi-
grate 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 is portrayed in ways very stereotypical of beur
families from mainstream French society’s perspective; that is, 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”
[“easy money and women who obey them”]. Additionally, the members of
prostitution ring recruiting, training, and managing Noémie/Malika among
other women appear to have eastern European names and physical features
and accents and thus do not escape the life of criminality that seems, per
mainstream French society, so readily available to immigrants.
However, I believe that Serreau succeeds in reconciling or mitigating
these controversial and racist stereotypes through her portrayal of every char-
acter, excluding the primary female characters (the heroines), 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 indi-
vidual (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 con-
cluding utopian vision and throughout all of the representations of domestic
space in Chaos are sound and the soundtrack. Serreau’s blending of music
(jazz, Latin, and classical), realistic sound, and silence not only work to de-
velop the various portraits of domestic representation depicted in the film,
but they often also underline the comedy as well as help underscore Serreau’s
social commentary. Concerning the second exception to Serreau’s cinematic
sound formula employed in her representations of domestic spaces, this use
of the extra-diegetic 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 develops that
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 145

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 and sound, she concludes that

music becomes “part of [the] embodied experience of housework as [individ-
uals often dance] while they dust or burst into step as they clean the kitchen
surfaces” (2004: 69). For Pink, dancing during housework at home manifests
“a private and uninhibited act that [individuals] would have felt embarrassed
to be caught doing . . . yet [such an activity remains] simultaneously an inten-
tional 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 homes and by her assumptions 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 subsequent notion of a domestic soundscape is
more fitting to 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 soundscapes are “person-
alized and expressive forms, created in negotiation with existing sounds and
silences that each individual hears in his/her home and the ‘mood’ or ‘atmo-
sphere’ s/he imagines and aspires to” (2004: 72). Furthermore, Pink main-
tains 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 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 domes-
tic soundscapes depicted in Chaos. The cries, shouts, arguing, disrespectful
tones of voice, fake pleasantries, and silences that do fill the diegetic domestic
146 C H A PT E R 3

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 the
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.
Even though diegetic music does not play a large role in Chaos, the extra-
diegetic jazzy and classical musical scores figure largely in the ways the spec-
tator comprehends and engages with the representations of domestic space.
We have already underlined in this discussion the upbeat and quick-paced
tempo to the jazzy musical score. In addition to enhancing the comedy or ac-
tion in various scenes, this musical score also highlights the “rapid-fire pace”
hallmark of Serreau’s cinematographic style.29 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 go-
ing to the essential in every single shot. And then it’s over, going
to the next point. The audience is clever and can understand.
(2006)

The jazzy musical score (with its fast pace and quick tempo) works to drive
home the essential calls underlying Serreau’s work for a much-needed rejec-
tion and refusal of unjust organization of capitalist societies. With the aid of
the jazzy musical score, Serreau shows how a domestic space that embraces
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 147

traditional patriarchal values and upholds traditional expectations of gender

performances leads to “inauthentic” existences for both men and woman
and a debilitating 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
or construction.
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 satisfac-
tion in which three generations of women—Hélène, Noémie/Malika, Zora,
and Mamie—bask in the warm colors of the setting sun and stare out to sea.
This impression 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 idealized 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
frontal, 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/Ma-
lika 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 to-
gether 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 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 an-
other been abandoned and betrayed by the men, as well as other women, in
148 C H A PT E R 3

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 dimin-
ishing; women tend to maintain some vestige of concern for others, perhaps
as an anachronistic legacy of their maternal function.”30 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 cer-
tain biologism, Serreau overrides this essentialist critique by favoring a multi-
plicitous portrait of contemporary French femininity in which a middle-class
mother with a successful professional career, a beur female adolescent, a beur
former 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, for Serreau as for the other women artists in this study, the re-
hybridized subjects she presents in this film, as seen through the lens of the
interrogation of the personal, become a polyphony of personalized and dis-
persed individual, expressly female voices. These re-hybridized subjects share
a common origin, source, or experience and expose, resist, and challenge the
contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which they are implicated. In this
film and for much of Serreau’s work, her ²⁄³ Spaces of expression or enun-
ciation combine comedy, social satire, theatrical elements, cinematographic
medium and language, hyper-reality, and phantasmagoria.

Conclusion
In conclusion, 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 study’s discussion of contemporary French, Algerian,
and Tunisian women artists who strive to present multiple portraits of female
gender constructions and a variety of 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” shortcom-
ings and pitfalls of societies’ contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes. It
remains both Amari’s and Serreau’s wish that the spectator or reader will then
reflect on re-appropriated and revised ways to create new transnational social
discourses and collaborative spaces of female representation in which multiple
 C REA TING DOM EST IC L AN DSCAPES 149

female voices may speak from ²⁄³ Spaces of expression by recounting personal
history and emphasizing socio-historical-political import. As we shall see in
the following chapter, this wish proves very dear to the aims of Leïla Sebbar
and Yamini Benguigui in their work as well.

Notes
1. Abdelkrim Gabous, Silence, Elles tournent! (Tunis, Tunisia: Cérès Éditions,
1998), 184.
2. Gabous, Silence, 12.
3. Lamia Ben Youseef Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negoti-
ating Text, History, and Ideology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 99.
4. Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman, 107–108.
5. “U.S. Department of State on Tunisia,” http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/
hrrpt/2006/78864.htm (accessed June 22, 2008).
6. “Freedom House Report on Tunisia,” http://www.freedomhouse.org/template
.cfm?page=184 (accessed June 22, 2008).
7. “Violence Against Women in Tunisia,” http://www.omct.org/pdf/VAW/
TunisiaEng2002.pdf (accessed June 22, 2008).
8. “Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada,” http://www.orb-cisr.gc.ca/en/
research/rir/?action=record.viewrec&goterec=444335 (accessed June 22, 2008).
9. “Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.”
10. Martin Stollery, “Masculinites, Generations, and Cultural Transformation in
Contemporary Tunisian Cinema,” Screen 42.1 (2001), 49–63.
11. Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Paradoxes of Masculinity, Some Thoughts on Segre-
gated Societies,” in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, eds. Andrea
Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 212.
12. Kenneth J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2004); Mournira M. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of
Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press,
2001); and Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chi-
cago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000).
13. Will Higbee, “Beyond the (trans)national: Towards a Cinema of Transver-
gence in Postcolonial and Diasporic Francophone Cinema(s),” Studies in French
Cinema 7.2 (2007): 79–97.
14. Kate Schultz, “INTERVIEW: Self-Empowerment by Way of the Midriff; Raja
Amari’s Satin rouge,” IndieWIRE, http://www2.indiewire.com/people/int_Amari
_Raja_020820.html (accessed April 26, 2008).
15. Hind Rassam Culhane, East/West and Ambiguous State of Being (New York,
NY: Peter Lang, 1995).
16. Culhane, East/West, 39.
17. Culhane, East/West, 42.
150 C H A PT E R 3

18. Hela Salaani. Interview by author. Columbus, Ohio, February 1, 2005.

19. “Samia Gamal,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samia_Gamal (accessed Febru-
ary 21, 2006).
20. Sarah Pink, Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects, and Everyday Life (Ox-
ford, UK: Berg, 2004), 13.
21. Pink, Home Truths, 41.
22. Pink, Home Truths, 42.
23. Pink, Home Truths, 70.
24. Pink, Home Truths, 53.
25. Salaani Interview.
26. Brigitte Rollet, Coline Serreau (Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press,
1998).
27. Rollet, Coline Serreau, 75.
28. Erica Abeel, “Fast-Paced Feminism: Coline Serreau Talks about ‘Chaos,’”
indieWIRE, http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_030130serreau.html (accessed
April 24, 2006).
29. Erica Abeel, “Fast-Paced Feminism.”
30. Leslie Camhi, “Mother Load Evolution Girl Style,” The Village Voice 2003,
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0305,camhi,41466,20.html (accessed April 24,
2006).
CHAPTER 4

(Re)Presenting Female
Iconography at Home
with Leïla Sebbar and
Yamina Benguigui

Our close readings and discussion in Chapter Three focused on Amari’s and
Serreau’s agendas to explore how the processes of uncovering or articulating
new identities and subjectivities usher in new ways of seeing, knowing, and
being “female” in their respective societies. We have seen how they attempt
to derail traditional race-, class-, religious-, and patriarchal-based ideologies
and markers of identities by drawing out the latent contradictions, am-
bivalences, and paradoxes of their “imagined communities” with regard to
“home/making,” “gender,” and “nation.” As evidenced in our close readings,
both artists privilege a forging ahead as opposed to a retreat into pre-existing
cultural, familial, or psychological identities and a priori social, historical, or
political frameworks and discourses. Through their “transnational” multiple
portraits of female gender construction and performance, we observed a few
manners in which a protagonist or subjectivity transforms through a cross-
cultural encounter with otherness and effectively becomes the other by em-
bracing, in Novakian terms, the “alien within” or the alloself. In this sense or
construction of the Self-Other divide as allogenesis, we began to see how the
notion of otherness articulates dynamic and shifting relationships of opposi-
tion and confluence for the alloself, which is never separated, fixed, or fixated
in binary opposition.
From the critical perspective of transvergence and cinematographic prac-
tice in the work of Amari and Serreau, the possibility that marginal or “oth-
ered” positions—rooted in the identification with the alien/allo-/other—can
occupy shifting, multiple, and re-hybridized subjectivities is clear. Through
this lens in Chapter Three, we saw how the ²⁄³ Space of cinematic expression
and articulation re-frames marginality as a point of resistance and allows

151
152 C H A PT E R 4

for continuities as well as differences in “national” gender identity and in-

tegrity to exist side by side. We will elaborate on this line of critical inquiry
in Chapter Four and will engage more directly in a discussion of a “virtual
geography” and reconfiguration of “fixed” notions of nation, center/margin,
self/other, and home/exile. In this chapter, we will continue to explore how
the diasporic space of home inflects transnational identity and transnational
understanding of self and gender in contemporary women’s filmmaking and
lifewriting of France via Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France: Carnet de voyage
and Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah dimanche (2001). In Chapter Four, trans-
national takes up again the virtual intra-national borders between social class
and sex within the homeland but also considers more prominently questions
of international inter-cultural exchanges as they are realized through the mo-
tifs of travel, immigration, and culture(s) of origin; especially between France
and Algeria. In order to better enrich our trans/national readings of Sebbar’s
and Benguigui’s work and projects in this chapter, let us first consider some
pertinent background information, with particular attention paid to the issue
of multiculturalism in relation to each artist.
In many ways, this chapter picks up where the previous chapter has left
us: with a discussion of representation of “ethnic Othered” French femininity
and portraits of marginal domestic space and households in the Métropole
and the Maghreb. 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 pro-
cesses of constructing gendered female identity as multiple and re-hybridized.
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. The four women artists 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 in-
formed 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. Let us pause for a moment
to consider better what this means.

A Virtual Geography
Borders (whether geographical, linguistic, ideological, socio-economic, politi-
cal, or gendered) and the physical action or metaphorical notion of border-
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 153

crossing and its 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 applica-
tion of the term due to her birth in Algeria to a French mother and Algerian
father—given that the term refers specifically to the children born in France
to both parents of North African immigrant origin, which does “fit” Ben-
guigui’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 better-yet 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 frame-
work, many postcolonial artists (including Sebbar and Benguigui) often ar-
ticulate these challenges through examinations of the intersection(s) between
the discourses of nationhood, race, gender, sexuality, and economic exploi-
tation. 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 re-appropriating 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 that as
invented, unstable discursive fabrications, they could be transformed, recre-
ated, 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: 63). These insights illustrate a few specific applica-
tions of the thinking of the transnational as a dialogic process of re-thinking
knowledge and discourse and the construction of that knowledge and dis-
course that I mentioned in the Introduction, especially with regard to issues
like migration, citizenship, displacement, and representation which constitute
a focus or preoccupation for many transnational literary artists.
In this vein and central to the work of transnational women artists and
the scholars studying their texts are the questions surrounding social, political,
154 C H A PT E R 4

and economic conditions that comprise imperialism as well as the connections

between colonialism and nationalism. These artists and scholars, in construct-
ing 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 Hafid 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.3
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 nar-
ratives 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 this sense of unbelonging, which is said to delineate “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.4 One may argue
that transnational artists residing in France succeed in moving beyond the
specifically ethnic “othered” experience through their exploration of con-
flicting 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 rela-
tion to Leïla Sebbar and her first-person narratives. We will begin with a
cursory look at her “intermedial” literary and first-person narrative corpus
before tackling a close reading of Mes Algéries en France.

Leïla Sebbar
Born in Aflou, Algeria, to two French-language teachers—an Algerian fa-
ther (“républicain musulman laïque”) [“republican, Muslim, secular”] and
a French mother (“républicaine catholique laïque”) [“republican, Catholic,
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 155

secular”]—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). He asserts that Sebbar “n’est pas une intellectuelle d’Algérie en
exil mais une écrivaine française au nom arabe, algérien, qui porte le poids
de la terre natale” [“is not an intellectual from Algeria in exile but a French
writer with an Arab, or more precisely Algerian, name who carries the weight
of her birth land”] (2003: 15). At the time of preparing this manuscript,
she was living, teaching, and writing in Paris and was not fluently speaking
Arabic. Soheila Kian presents a helpful biographical overview of Sebbar and
a heuristic description of her work.5 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)
[Leïla Sebbar, French-Algerian writer who lives in France and
writes in French, examines the cultural identifications of immi-
grants who live the interlaced legacies of France and its former
colonies. This examination is presented at the same time nega-
tively and positively, generating violence, racism, and Neo-Orien-
talism on one side and the production of cultural diversity and of
a postmodern society on the other. (my translation)]

For Sebbar and many scholars working on her texts, these biographical factors
and writing perspectives account for the recognition of her cultural bivalence
and the importance that her two cultures (French and Algerian) mark in her
conceptions of self.
On this critical insight, Sebbar writes in Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de
l’exil:

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, essen-
tielle: mon père arabe, ma mère française; mon père musulman, ma
156 C H A PT E R 4

mère chrétienne; mon père citadin d’une ville maritime, ma mère

terrienne de l’intérieure de 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. (1986: 185)
[I will not escape the biological division of where I was born.
Nothing, I know it, will ever prevent, will abolish the first,
essential rupture: my Arab father, my French mother; my
Muslim father, my Christian mother; my city dwelling father
of a maritime city, my land-oriented mother of a land-locked
region of France. . . . I hold myself in a cross-road, in constant
unbalance, out of fear of craziness and denial if I am from this
side or that side. Thus, I am at the edge of each one of these
borders. (my translation)]

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.6
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) [“in a slightly particular position, not
‘Beure,’ not ‘Maghrebine,’ not entirely French” (my translation)]. 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:

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)
[is not an immigrant nor a child of immigration; she is not the
daughter of European colonists in Algeria; she is only Algerian
by her father and French by her mother. Moreover, her maternal
language is not Arabic, and she is neither a North African writer
of French expression. (my translation)]

In addition to these conflicting characteristics of her persona or “bios,” Seb-

bar outlines additional intersections in her understanding of self. She writes
again in Les Lettres parisiennes:
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 157

[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 moder-
nité, de l’Orient et de l’Occident. (1986: 126)
[(My books) are the sign, the signs of my criss-crossed history, of
a half-breed obsessed by the surrealist encounter of the Other and
the Self, of the crossing with nature and lyricalness of the land and
the city, of science and flesh, of tradition and modernity, of the
Orient and the Occident. (my translation)]

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 prin-

cipalement 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 cultu-
relle (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)
[evokes a landscape of cultural diversity for a public principally
French. She says that she writes ‘my father’s body in my mother’s
language’ (Le Corps, 1991). Sebbar contests the traditional no-
tion of unification and of cultural identity (either Oriental or
Occidental). In its place (as does Homi Bhabha in Locations of
Culture) she proposes some models that describe culture as a fluid
and negotiable entity. (my translation)]

Sebbar carries this description of culture as fluid and negotiable throughout

all of her corpus of work. Moreover, this image or conception of culture
resonates just as well with the other women artists discussed in this project
and underpins either directly or indirectly and in various expressions or dem-
onstrations their understanding of culture as well. There are two important
phrases or notions associated with Sebbar and her work that shed an interest-
ing light onto this multichronotopic link between the women artists included
in this study. Let us briefly examine each one.
158 C H A PT E R 4

“JE SUIS UNE CROISÉE” AND “CROISEMENTS”

In specific relation to Sebbar’s fiction and its textualized presentation of

contemporary French culture—most notably the characteristic of permeable
cultural borders—the most frequently analyzed self-proclaimed notion that
many scholars employ as a point of departure in their criticism of her work
is her citation “je suis une croisée”7 [“I am a cross-breed” but also “I am a
crusader”]. As LaRonde introduces, this citation is taken up most often in an
effort to characterize her work on the whole (2003: 19). At first blush, the sec-
ond phrase or terminology, the notion of “croisement” [“criss-crossing”], 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 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, and history. How-
ever, the notion of “croisement” for Sebbar and her work extends beyond
the coming together of two cultures in creating a new hybrid one—the tra-
ditional and most basic understanding and theorization of “métissage”—by
accounting for a vast plurality or multiplicity of cultures within the “local”
culture or “nation.” 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. More multivalent and
“messy” or complex than Bhabha’s Third Space, Sebbar’s “croisement” ef-
fectively supports the possibility of discourses from and the textualizations of
a re-hybridized transnational subject speaking from a ²⁄³ Space of intermedial
expression.
For Sebbar and other artists of transnational creative works, the first-
generation postcolonial subject of “nous” [“we”]—whether directly stated in
or indirectly implied by the text—is replaced by the subject of “je” [“I”] 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) [“the interference and cross-roads of places are imposed because what is
important for me, at the same time in my writing, in the imaginary and in
the real, is this work of all the cross-roads” (my translation)]. For LaRonde,
Sebbar’s textual “croisement” primarily surfaces in the diverse and mul-
tiple “cultural roots” of her narratives’ characters. LaRonde finds that these
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 159

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.8
LaRonde’s reading confirms the project of transnational studies as I defined it
in the Introduction. Like the field of study, Sebbar’s “criss-crossed” work also
takes shape in differing degrees in the multiple, complex, messy proximities
and interconnections of social morphologies, types of consciousness, modes
of cultural reproduction, avenues of capital, sites of political engagement, and
(re)constructions of place and locality. Much scholarship on her “croisement”
investigates the cross-border relationships and patterns of exchanges in her
corpus as well as those between the text and its reader. Yet, there are other
manners in which scholars engage with this trope of “croisement.”
A second approach to Sebbar’s notion of “croisement” is through ex-
amining 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 intertextuality in her
corpus of work; and second, it calls for the comparison of her “croisements”
to the textual intersections established with the literary mode of magical
realism.9 Many scholars either directly or indirectly second LaRonde’s idea
of a “glissement perceptible” (or an apparent evolution) in Sebbar’s texts
through examining two motifs: her recursive yet diverging inclusions of
French, Maghrebi, and “beur” cultural practices and her character’s 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 from 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 fic-
tion. All of these critical engagements with and approaches to Sebbar’s work
speak to a diasporic consciousness of her protagonists who are consistently
marked by multiple identifications and/or malleable categories of identifica-
tion and by an awareness of de-centered attachments, a feeling of “being here
and there at the same time.”
To return momentarily to the notion of magical realism, where it is
said that Sebbar’s notion of intermedial “croisement” and “glissement”
sometimes intersect: in the strictest sense of the term, scholars’ connec-
tion 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
160 C H A PT E R 4

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, however, is in their aims to seize the paradox
of the union of opposites.10 In other words, both magical realist authors and
Leïla Sebbar challenge polar opposites, present conflicting perspectives that
fuse the real and the fantastic, and mesh dominant and marginal world views
in their writings. Moreover, both literary styles primarily feature a framework
of transnational socio-cultural re-hybridization (or plurality of cultures, cre-
olization, bricolage, or cultural transversalism) and pose questions surround-
ing the postcolonial context as represented in contemporary socio-political-
economic terms. However, the notion of the supernatural is not palpable to
the same degree in Sebbar’s writing style 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. A brief exploration of these dialectics and methodologies will
enrich our close reading and understanding of Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France:
Carnet de voyage.

Orientalism, Travelogues, and

Neo-Orientalist Tropes
Edward Said defines the academic tradition of Orientalism as “a way of com-
ing to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in
European Western experience.”11 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 its deepest and most recur-
ring images of the Other” (1979: 1). In the most basic definition, Oriental-
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 161

ism is the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages,
and 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, pornography, 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 biologically
inferior—culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging—who is portrayed
in dominated and sexual terms.12
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. In
Said’s theorizations, Western imperial powers and discourses constructed
a stereotypical Orient through asymmetrical power relations (i.e., rational
Europe/irrational Orient), an assertion composing a foundational tenet in
the field of postcolonial studies. However, it appears that Said’s own work
may also be guilty of asymmetrical power relations. The problematics of
power informing Said’s construction of 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.13 Many scholars raise 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). This is to say that by ne-
glecting factors of gender in his account and not considering the portrayal
and discourses of women (“Oriental” or European) as other than the odalisque
or houri or European and middle-class, he reproduces (albeit unwittingly) the
sexual or inferior stereotyping of the Orient as “Other,” which is a represen-
tation 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
162 C H A PT E R 4

and transnational scholars working on visual and written representations

of Arab cultures in the arts, traditional Orientalism must decolonize itself
from its own 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 and transnational 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). In some ways, Leïla
Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France: Carnet de voyages may be read as a women’s
travelogue of her encounters with Algeria, its culture, its peoples, its dis-
courses, 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 or lifewriting 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
or ²⁄³ 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 constitu-
ents of gender in her theorizations of “Orientalist” gender representation.
Moreover, her work overcomes the gender-blindness in Said’s theoretical
account of “Oriental” categorizations.
Sebber serves as an effective example of the uselessness of traditional
“Oriental” categorizations that freeze the Other in static, monolithic repre-
sentation. Thanks to her “croisement,” Sebbar escapes this restriction through
subversion of essentially all traditional discourses of “otherness” in her work.
In her narratives, she and/or her protagonists inhabit real and virtual spaces
both within and outside the “Orient” and the “Occident” and within domi-
nant and marginal cultures and rather freely circulate within a multitude of
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 163

different cultural values and exchanges. She strives to bring the inherent com-
plexity and multiplicity of cultural transversalism and cultural reproduction
(i.e., the similarities and differences) 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 project “le côté fantastique et dogmatique de sa culture d’origine”
(2004: 129) [“the fantastic and dogmatic side of her culture of origin” (my
translation)]. In considering Sebbar’s Shérazade trilogy, Kian asserts that:

Sebbar a l’intention d’agiter fortement les croyances fixes qui exis-

tent à propos de la France. Elle va déstabiliser les notions domi-
nantes (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)

[Sebbar has the intention of strongly shaking up the fixed beliefs

that exist concerning France. She is going to destabilize the domi-
nant notions (the preconceived images) that the Occident keeps
of the Middle East and of North Africa, but she also wants to
subvert the widespread geographical myths that have their origins
in traditional Arabic and oriental cultures. (my translation)]

Upon close study of Sebbar’s corpus of work, it is my opinion that this ob-
jective—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. In carrying out this objec-
tive in her corpus, Sebbar adopts three tropes in her writing that create real
and virtual narrative spaces for both cognitive and visual reflection. These
three tropes give rise to her individual transnational literary approach and
effectively allow Sebbar and her protagonists to sift through life experiences
in the narratives.
First, Sebbar employs what postcolonial scholars consider the motif of
haunting and spectrality, which is to say the textual or emotive reappear-
ances of past colonial images and fantasies or side-effect aftermath feelings
that haunt the contemporary postcolonial cultural scene.14 Second, Sebbar
uses mimicry, which one may define as a hybrid stance of identification and
distance.15 And third, 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.
164 C H A PT E R 4

They also support the claim shared by all the women artists in this study
that written and visual inscriptions cannot be predetermined nor narrowly
prescribed; thereby aiding to partially deterritorialize the process of imaging
their respective communities and explore how the process of uncovering or
articulating new identities and subjectivities ushers in new ways of seeing,
knowing, and being across all levels of “local,” “national,” and “global” visual
and written systems of representation.
Michael O’Riley asserts that the motif of haunting and spectrality is
especially relevant to contemporary notions of postcolonial Franco-Algerian
cultural relations and systems of representation because “the invisible yet per-
ceived persistence of a colonial past and desire linked to orientalist practice
continues to condition both postcolonial and Franco-Algerian relations [and
systems of representation] 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 and transnational 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 circum-
stances. (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-in-
scription of an orientalist practice as a critique of new forms of orientalism”
(2001: 49). In other words, Sebbar wonders if the recuperation of traditional
images that were originally inscribed into orientalist-styled visual and written
systems of representation may serve as a jumping off point or trampoline for
a discourse of criticism.
In response, O’Riley along with many other postcolonial theorists and
artists are contemplating whether the practice of returning to or including
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 165

orientalist sites of memory and inscriptions of representation are (albeit

unwillingly) recuperating Orientalism’s original hold on European views
of Arab cultures. For example, many scholars and writers have returned to
Alloula’s study of the European postcards featuring sexualized and/or exag-
gerated folkloric representations of Algerian women or to 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 perpetuate “the
spectral dynamics of colonialism” (O’Riley, 2001: 49). Or, expressed dif-
ferently, scholars question the danger of recuperating hegemonic, colonial
misconceptions, myths, and discourses even in postcolonial texts purporting
to challenge these vestiges of Orientalism. No consensus seems to have been
reached yet, but this remains an important question.
As an extension of this critical concern and insofar as reconstructing Eu-
ropean engendered practices of viewing “the” Algerian woman is concerned,
Djebar responds to this theoretical dilemma 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
reapproriated 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)
[Orientialism . . . was foremost a gaze coming from elsewhere: it
made into an object . . . the being who attempted to speak, tried
to speak to the Other, to the foreigner . . . The writing would
be, from his/her point, a silent speech in movement, that would
prolong a body, visible to the other as well as to him/herself.
Thus, a true feminine writing, in Muslim countries of this next
21st century, will only be able to go deeper and develop itself once
women’s bodies are liberated (or are in the process of liberating
themselves or being liberated). (my translation)]

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
166 C H A PT E R 4

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 relation to Sebbar’s Shérazade trilogy, 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.16 Anne Donadey reads the trope of mimicry as a repetition of Orien-
talist discourse with a difference.17 Mimicry as repetition with a difference es-
pouses the notion of a mimicry that “deconstructs the hierarchy between mas-
ter and slave, colonizer and colonized, native-born and newcomer” (Stranges,
2003: 81) and surfaces in Sebbar’s texts when Franco-Maghrebi characters
complicitly mimic the exotic clichés of Orientalism all the while through
their French citizenship and partenance [“belonging”] 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 [“brewing” or “mixing”] of Self and Other,
in other words, as hybridity” (2003: 82). Thus, this recasting of otherness as
sameness (or “the alien within”) in all of Sebbar’s work, which only seems
possible from the margins by a community of marginal subjects or “othered”
individual subjectivity displaying both “Arabness” and “Frenchness,” differs
from traditional Orientialist 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 sub-
jectivity, a kind of allogenesis in Novakian terms) and a revisionist history of
post/colonial representation must recognize the common French-Algerian
grounding of intertwining cultures, histories, and destinies.18 Stranges asserts
that:

On a collective level, remembering 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 com-
plexities 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 “reterritorial-

ization 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.
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 167

In outlining Sebbar’s narratives written and published in the 1990s,

LaRonde traces a dialect of exile hemmed throughout these texts, most nota-
bly 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).19 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 in general and Sebbar’s work in particular,
the dialectics of exile and nomadism most often surface in their protagonists’
all-consuming anxiety brought about by their attempts to assimilate (or voic-
ing the pressure they feel to assimilate) to a “national” culture all the while
recognizing their desire and right not to belong to this monolithic representa-
tion 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). Within the transnational project as I outlined it in the Introduc-
tion of this study following the thinking of Lionnet and Shih, this double
articulation becomes the signifier for multiplicity or creolization within and
across all levels of the “local,” “national,” and “global.”
Maya Larguet sheds a positive light on the tropes or dialectics of exile and
nomadism within a similar context. She finds that

pour Leïla Sebbar, l’exil, plus qu’une déchirure, est avant tout un
apprentissage, susceptible même de procurer du plaisir. Mais en-
visageable comme tel seulement à condition d’être armé intellec-
tuellement, capable de transformer l’intranquillité et le tourment
en un matériau positif. (2005)
[for Leïla Sebbar, exile, more than a tear, is foremost an acquisi-
tion, likely even to bring about pleasure. But imaginable as such
only in the condition of being armed intellectually, capable of
transforming the untranquility and the torment into positive
material. (my translation)]

This is to say that exile, displacement, and nomadism are not necessarily
“dead ends” in the incessant debates over national and personal identity, nor
168 C H A PT E R 4

are they locked into fixed, monolithic dichotomies of the country of origin
and the country of residence or destination. Rather, these tropes in “beur”
writing and Sebbar’s lifewriting serve to forge “links between the unbound,
pleasantly anonymous scene of writing, the lost ‘symbolic land[s] . . . the
‘social terrain’ of the French nation, and . . . immigrant populations” (Wood-
hull, 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 this project’s particular examinations of female representation,
however, one must add a gender perspective to Sebbar’s tropes and their
functions or advantages. We must extend the question of what it means to
be “French” to ask more specifically what it means to be a “French woman.”
Let us pause to consider how the life experiences of exile, displacement no-
madism, and immigration of women to France have given shape to or been
ignored in the (re)constructions of French femininity and “the” French fe-
male experience.

French Women of (North African)

Immigrant Origin
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” (2001: 1). 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 immi-
gration are victims of both gendered and racial oppression.20 Feminist schol-
ars work to underline these women’s (albeit sometimes limited or 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 catego-
ries. For example, they suggest that
older women are generally portrayed as wives and mothers, re-
sponsible for the “integration” of the family in French society…
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 169

[and] young women are often forgotten, [with] only the 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 re-
sponsibility for the integration 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 conscientiously to account for and represent the dif-
ferences 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 many other postcolonial and transnational 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). One means
through which these artists accomplish their primary goal is through the
employment of personal history in their life narratives. Through the lens
of the interrogation of the personal in their work, they create re-hybridized
postcolonial subjects who articulate transnational discourses of identity and
historicity and occupy ²⁄³ Spaces of subjectivity and speaking positions. In ef-
fect, these re-hybridized postcolonial subjects often recount for the first time
their experiences of immigration and its aftershocks upon settling in the ad-
opted culture and new homeland. We will pause momentarily to take a look
at some of the important social, political, historical, and economic factors that
helped shape these women’s personal narratives.
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 ” [“family regrouping”] 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 femi-
nization of the population of immigrant origin as wives and children came
to join male workers.21 This also added important specific questions and
debates to the “general” 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)
170 C H A PT E R 4

African women posed different questions and problems 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; for example, as biological reproducers of ethnic
community, reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic or national groups, key
actors in transmission of community values, markers of ethnic or national dis-
tinctiveness, and active participants in national struggles.22 Yet paradoxically
in the other extreme, Freedman and Tarr find that political representations
of immigrants have tended

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)

In either scenario, what is clear is that women’s personal and individual ex-
periences with immigration and life afterwards are elided from History and
mainstream media.
The extreme right’s political representations of women of immigrant origin
have falsely exploited women’s roles in biological reproduction of ethnic com-
munities 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 bear-
ing numerous, illegitimate children and expecting the French state to support
them.23 Freedman and Tarr conclude that other political agents who maintain
a discourse of integration (and not racist expulsion) in France also place repre-
sentations 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 principal responsibility lies in the essential transmission of so-
called “French” community values; in other words, those cultural values 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 population and to see to it that
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 171

[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 with France and ensuring that these boundaries
are made permeable to French culture” (Freedman and Tarr, 2000: 15). This
question of integration—along with 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). Let us now turn to our close reading of
this life narrative.

MES ALGÉRIES EN FRANCE: CARNET DE VOYAGES

In this “autobiographical,” “traveloguesque” collection of tales, fictional nar-

ratives, testimonies, interviews, portraits, reports, photographs, drawings,
sketches, orange wrappers, watercolors, comics trips, 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—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
in the mind of the reader impressions of traveling abroad. 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 Al-
geria. However, upon closer examination, the reader realizes that traveling in
France and not Algeria has provided the impetus to Sebbar’s multiple recol-
lections 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-
noir), ne s’était pas arrêtée dans la France, Paris et ses provinces,
Nord/Sud, Est-Ouest, je ne voyagerais pas comme je le fais depuis
172 C H A PT E R 4

plus de vingt-cinq ans, avec la même excitation affective et intel-

lectuelle. Et si je ne voyage pas en Algérie c’est parce que mon
pays natal a perdu ses étrangers. (Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood,
2004)
[I like to travel in France, the France inhabited by Algeria. If the
Algerian migration (Jewish, Muslim [Arabic and Berber], ‘pied-
noir’]) didn’t stop in France, Paris, and its provinces, North/
South, East-West, I would not travel as I have done so for more
than twenty-five years, with the same affective and intellectual
excitement. And I would not travel in Algeria because my native
country lost its foreigners. (my translation)]

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 Sebber, “vivre
dans la langue, dans cette familiarité” [“to live in the language, in this famil-
iarity”], all the while discovering the country and its landscape, describes her
ideal travel experience.23 She finds this experience time and time again while
traveling throughout France and takes extensive notes on her experiences,
encounters, new information gleaned, and memories recalled.
For Sebbar, these extensive notes form the basis of much of her recent
writing. She describes the rather organic and intermedial 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. (Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood, 2004)
[I note the date and place precisely, if I’ve taken a souvenir photo
(I rarely photograph landscapes) with a disposable camera. I cut
out articles that interest me, in the national and regional press.
Upon return to Paris, I tear out the pages from the notebook
and glue them in a red notebook, my diary, with or without
commentary, I also glue the cut-out articles, all of this in disarray
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 173

most often, I know that I will find again what I want if I need it
for a short story, a tale, an article. The photos don’t go in the di-
ary. I store them in a kind of soft photo-album that the Chinese
photographer from my neighborhood gives me, then in a white
cardboard file-box by year, place, subject. (my translation)]

This hybridic or intermedial physical process of suturing together multiple

discourses and texts gives shape to Sebbar’s textual “croisement” that she struc-
tures throughout her body of work. Echoing scholars’ theorizations of the
intermedial and unconventional construction of her postcolonial narratives
in general, Sebbar asserts specifically that:

Mes Algéries en France qui ne s’inscrit dans aucune rubrique tra-

ditionnelle, 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. (Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood,
2004)
[Mes Algéries en France does not subscribe to any traditional ru-
bric, other than the travelogue and still, it’s an exocentric travel
notebook as well, a kind of curio cabinet where the literary and
iconographic genres blend together. One could say that this book
is an austere curiosity. (my translation)]

Sebbar’s narrative still stems from a ²⁄³ Space of expression, like the other
primary texts analyzed in this study; but in this case, the re-hybridization of
subject and subject position are not just a polyphony of personalized and dis-
persed individual voices that share a common origin or source but are also a
mish-mash of personalized and dispersed individual media which Sebbar uses
to expose, resist, and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses,
borders, and cultural values of “nation.”
Sebbar 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).24 Sebbar works to deliver in this
text, “[son] roman réel et imaginaire, d’Occident en Orient, d’Orient en Oc-
cident”25 [“her real and imagined novel, of Occident in Orient, of Orient in
Occident” (my translation)]. 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 témoi-
gnages autobiographiques, participe à un travail de mémoire, ce
174 C H A PT E R 4

n’est jamais pour fixer une histoire dans un passé mais pour lui
construire un avenir. Et par ses livres, bâtir des ponts. (2004)
[Leïla Sebbar refuses however all nostalgia of a past time. . . . In
effect, if Leïla Sebbar, through her essays, her fictions or her au-
tobiographical testimonies, participates in a work of memory, it’s
never in order to fix history in a past but in order to construct it a
future. And through her books, build bridges. (my translation)]

In Mes Algéries en France as well as everywhere else in her work, Sebbar en-
gages the cultural component that interests her the most: the study of the
real or imagined dynamics between past and present, particularly insofar
as Franco-Maghrebi 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 dynam-
ics of representations of past and present Franco-Maghrebian 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 under-
line what I consider the strongest feminine and domestic portraits—specifi-
cally 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 France for Algeria, family photographs of Seb-
bar 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 Self and Other or a Novakian reading of Sebbar’s “production
of the alien.” In this division, the reader confronts a revisionist sense of post/
colonial history, the intertwining cultures and destinies of France and Alge-
ria and their occupants, at least insofar 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
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 175

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 sou-
mises”—the Mariannes of today who on July 14, 2003, costumed themselves
as Marianne and demonstrated at the frontispiece of the National Assembly
(Sebbar, 2004: 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)
[From the maternal house to the house of France, these
Mediterranean-crossers, daughters of fathers and mothers of the
former colonial Empire, give voice and body to the Republic that
is running out of breath. When some of their brothers screw the
Republic, they fertilize it. (my translation)]

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

and reassures. On one hand, this march and demonstration create a medium
for so-called subaltern or marginal expression in (female) body and voice, a
positive leap forward for women’s movements and the goal of many post-
colonial artists or scholars (Djebar, Minh-Ha, etc.). But on the other hand,
Sebbar’s citation recuperates mainstream and certainly Front national stereo-
types 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”26 [“a new feminism
that would oppose itself to the confrontation of sexes”]. 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 an-
gulaire de notre pacte républicain, la laïcité est le garant de la cohésion sociale
et de l’égalité de Toutes et Tous devant la loi” [“In sum, the keystone of our
176 C H A PT E R 4

republican pact, secularism is the shelter of social cohesion and of equality

for all men and women before the law”], and hybridity, or “mixité” (“Il est
nécessaire d’effacer les frontiers qui séparent les deux sexes pour instaurer
le respect” [“It is necessary to erase the borders that separate the two sexes
in order to establish respect”]), as necessary instruments leading to social
equality in France.27 They are calling for governmental intervention on
behalf of the particularly female citizens of the banlieues for amelioration to
the sub-standard existence they are forced to live and from which they have
few chances of escape on their own.
Sebbar’s “Mariannes métisses” demonstrate Djebar’s post-orientalist aes-
thetic 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” daugh-
ters of the République fuse both body and voice in a hybrid or intermedial
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” [“When some of her
brothers screw the Republic, they fertilize it”], paves the way for a trope of
perhaps subversive mimicry in Mes Algéries en France. The first effect of this
closing statement is to recuperate almost shockingly mainstream French
and extreme right-wing stereotypes of “beur” existence, lifestyle, male delin-
quency, 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 intention of unsettling his or her reading experience and understand-
ing of his or her place in French 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 Maghrebi 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. Her
“Mariannes métisses’ ” recasting their otherness as sameness—their displaying
both “Arabness” and “Frenchness”—shakes up in a transnational manner the
exclusivist and demarcating intentions that traditional Orientalism sought in
reifying Self-Other dichotomies.
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 177

True, the donning of the bonnet phrygien—the liberty cap that every
Marianne always sports—in French socio-cultural thought is known as the
symbol of the people of Paris, thus suggesting that all those wearing it are
recognized as citizens of the Republic and, in effect, become “French.” Albeit
a gift of citizenship and rights in one perspective, this recognition pivots,
however, on an official policy of assimilation in which the new immigrant
citizen is supposed to (more or less) leave his/her culture of origin at his/her
point of entry into the nation and assimilate to all things “French.” Tradi-
tionally since the establishment of the Fifth Republic, the Mariannes, which
are renewed every three years upon vote by the mayors of French cities, have
been modeled after famous French actresses or models—Brigitte Bardot,
Mireille Mathieu, Catherine Deneuve, Inès de la Fressange, Laetitia Casta,
and Évelyne Thomas.
These Mariannes have (perhaps unwittingly) recuperated monolithic
representations of the “French” nation in terms of race, social class, and
(Western) conventional standards of feminine beauty. Reportedly, however,
in 2002 following some controversy regarding Casta’s personal life, finances,
and relocation to London, England, a new Marianne, not bearing the features
of a famous French women but those of an anonymous beurette (or young
woman of North African descent), was born and was intended to symbol-
ize a modern, multiethnic France. Sadly, this construction of Marianne was
short-lived, not widely or prominently displayed or advertised, and quickly
replaced a year later by Évelyne Thomas.28 Also reportedly, in 2006 it was
rumored that the new Marianne (that would replace Thomas) was planned
to be anonymous and black.29 But, at the time of preparing this manuscript
in 2008, no mention of this possibility or corresponding photograph of the
constructed bust appears on the official website of the French Presidency,
which contains a link to the history and explanation of Marianne along with
a gallery of photographs of the different “official” busts that have been fash-
ioned in the past.
In relation to Sebbar’s representation of the “Mariannes métisses” in
Mes Algéries en France, by inviting the reader to question his/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 atten-
tion 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
178 C H A PT E R 4

and subvert the images and meanings inherited from the ancient and recent
pasts. This destabilization opens up new re-hybridized spaces and points of
departures for multiple discourses of and challenges to what it means to be
républicain. This “shaking up” 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 chal-
lenging 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 renegotia-
tion of dominant and subaltern discourses of the female self is repeated. How-
ever, this division adopts the motif of haunting and spectrality, rather than
mimicry, in representing “ethnic 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 rep-
resentation of Algerian femininity. Sebbar introduces the reader throughout
the division to her “soeurs étrangères,” who are: women storytellers, Algerian
women “regrouped” with their husbands 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 follow-
ing World War II, through whose fearless efforts and services came to be well-
loved, respected, and appreciated by the people 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 sew-
ing. 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 differ-
ent parameters, markers, and categories of identity—gender, language, ideol-
ogy, belief systems, (non)conventional behavior, and marginality—intersect
with visual and written systems of representation and can subvert the 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 the fantasies or side-effect aftermath feelings which haunt the
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 179

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 Ori-
entalist 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 École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris painter Sébastien
Pignon. This painting reflects the “Mariannes métisses” iconography just out-
lined in the last section of this chapter. We see a young woman with ambigu-
ous ethnic coding wearing a red bonnet phrygien (or possibly a headscarf), a
yellowish-green pearl necklace, and a white toga-like 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 up-
per 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 toward the end of France’s
colonial rule in Algeria. Opposite from Garanger’s back-and-white “Femme
algérienne” photograph, we find Djamel Farès’ “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 whom we assume are family members
and a collection of drawings of men, women, children, and animals presum-
ably 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,
180 C H A PT E R 4

renouncement, and liberation. This “roman familial” becomes a forum for

the voicing of the mother’s and daughter’s opinions regarding maternal edu-
cation, marriage, the life of a woman, and the traditional values and practices
the mother imposes upon the five daughters. In this photograph of Bouk-
hobza, 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 Mamak) of a young woman dressed in all black Eu-
ropean attire with no headscarf sitting on her bed in her bedroom. Sonia is
positioned on the right-hand side, slightly lower corner of the frame. 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 (Maghrebi 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” [“Sonia at home. Kabylie, near 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, “Algérie—Marchande de Lain” [“Algeria—Wool Trader”].
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 col-
lage of four black-and-white photographed portraits of Anna Greki (freedom
fighter and poet), Tounes Brahimi (civil militant in Alger), Danière 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
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 181

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 Avi-
gnon, France. In this painting, a young woman elaborately dressed in a stun-
ning 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 Algers
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 al-
ways apparent to me why all of these images were included among the texts
or why they appeared in the order, position, or arrangement that they do.
Upon multiple readings of these texts and images, it appears to me now that
there is a sort of theoretical progression and recursive linkage 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 representa-
tion 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
engages Sebbar’s study of the dynamics of past and present. The “realness”
of the Marianne métisse reflects the present dynamics of a multicultural and
multiethnic French society or nation on the potential verge of official rec-
ognition 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.
182 C H A PT E R 4

From one angle, 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
or re-hybridized representation of female other in postcolonial studies. But,
from another angle, 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 written and visual representation, against which
she writes throughout all of her work. Sebbar shows how multiple portraits of
Algerian women as mothers, grandmothers, French, Kabylie, freedom fight-
ers, 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 and Franco-Maghrebi cultures.
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 recu-
perating 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 latter, 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 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 free-
dom fighters, all figures with intimate knowledge of “French” culture or who
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 183

are at least coded photographically as such, Sebbar ensures that these bound-
aries are seen and lived as permeable within “French” culture.
Not just in Algériennes but 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 pas-
toral or village scenes) to challenge the hegemonic discourses of community
values in the French Republic by opening them up to new images, iconogra-
phy, 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. Through her intermedial framework in Mes Algéries en
France—the narratives, photographs, cultural artifacts, portraits, and other
objects of textual analysis—Sebbar aims to explore and textualize a number
of transnational issues of identity with particular regard to how families and
loved ones are split between countries of origin and destination and to the
emotional ties binding individuals to one or both countries of origin and
destination. The ebb and flow of border crossings and communications
across borders and the (re-)hybridization of cultures serve as crucial dialectics
throughout her corpus that mobilize her artistic agenda to “raise conscious-
ness” and textualize the counter-hegemonic actions and discourses of the
nonelite who refuse assimilation to a nation-state.
With this dialectic in mind and as this discussion has shown in this chap-
ter, the fundamental dilemma shaping Sebbar’s body of work and framing
contemporary transnational literature of France in general is the disconnect
between marginal multiethnic 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 ir-
relevant.31 Yet as the riots of November 2005 and continual discussion in the
media witness, one can no longer overlook the limits of Republican univer-
salist discourses and must now recognize France’s (official, political) identity
transformation into a plural and multiethnic society. French cultural studies
scholars of late have repeatedly turned to French cinema as a medium of ar-
tistic and popular expression requiring further review of the “ways in which
184 C H A PT E R 4

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, consider-
able 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: ci-
néma beur and cinéma de banlieue. A closer look at these two cinematographic
genres will help inform our discussion and treatment of Yamina Benguigui’s
film, Inch’Allah dimanche (2001), in this chapter, and in retrospect will shed
another interesting and useful light on Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France.

CINÉMA BEUR AND CINÉMA DE BANLIEUE

Carrie Tarr understands these two cinematographic genres as permeable and

overlapping. She finds that they both share three fundamental and founda-
tional projects. First, they have a common concern with regard to the place
and identity of the marginal and excluded in French society. Second, they of-
fer a “touchstone” for measuring the extent to which universalist Republican
assumptions about Frenchness can be challenged and particular forms of mul-
ticulturalism envisaged and valued. And third, they engender a representation
of ethnicity linked to questions of gender and authorship through the com-
parison of male and female, white and beur-authored films.31 For Tarr, these
two cinematographic genres may be understood as two related phenomena in
the history of 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 a growing need for marginal
voices in French cinema, a collection of independent video films and docu-
mentaries by filmmakers of Maghrebi descent—creating and producing in
artisanal and sometimes makeshift conditions outside normal French produc-
tion 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). Fur-
thermore, most postcolonial film scholars conclude that these genres of film-
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 185

making 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.32 These filmmakers present subjectivity as multiple and
hybrid, firmly situated inside a contact of zone of contradiction, ambivalence,
and paradox and articulated through personal history.
For many postcolonial film scholars and directors, the textual operations
of such a cinema raise a number of questions largely concerning three critical
dialectics. For the first dialectic, we investigate how the textual operations of
the cinema enunciate and challenge the concepts of ethnicity and identity
in the context of Republican preferences for universalist and monocultural
ideologies of Frenchness. Second, we consider how the enunciative apparatus
engages both narratively and technically with the forming of cinematic spaces
for “othered” subjectivities and agencies. And third, we analyze the extent
to which these films challenge dominant perceptions of ethnic difference
and stereotypes. Thinking also deals with these films’ abilities to produce
counter-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 mis-
fortunate inhabitants of the banlieue but also the homeless, the unemployed,
the working-class, and the poor. Thus, these films function to partially de-
territorialize the process of imaging communities and locations by turning
to the multichronotopic links between displaced and/or disadvantaged (i.e.,
subaltern or nonelite) individuals and communities in an effort to shake up
the dynamics of past and present and to transnationalize understandings and
formulations of identity, historicity, subjectivity, and speaking positions.
What one finds in all of these films is a certain in-betweeness, imbrica-
tion, interstitiality, or ²⁄³ Spaces of expression. For Tarr and this book, these ²⁄³
Spaces of expression in beur and banlieu cinemas become a question of whether
the cinematographic genres’ and their narratives’ marginalization within the
industry “can be transcended [through] the creation of alternative spaces
beyond binary oppositions, which value hybridity” (2005: 21). Thus, in bor-
rowing Bill Ashcroft’s words, Tarr concludes that the struggle for postcolonial
186 C H A PT E R 4

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 homo-
geneous image of self” (2005: 21). The majority of films of these genres 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.33
These films turned French cinema into “a site of struggle for constructions
of French national identity based on the realities of 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 insists on this point and asserts that

even after two decades of settlement in France of the families of

immigrants from the Maghreb, there were relatively few represen-
tations 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 the 1990s that offered a secondary
or minor role to young actresses of Maghrebi descent tended “either to sub-
ordinate 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 narra-
tive” (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 explores] female subjectiv-
ity 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, their films—in which they foreground realistic rep-
resentations of young French women of Maghrebi immigrant origin—need
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 187

to situate themselves in relation to Republican discourses on assimilation as

the route to integration, and to orientalist discourses, Islamophobia, and anti-
Arab racism.34 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, unemploy-
ment, 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 assertions that, “Souviens-toi de moi sug-
gests 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). Let us now continue in this chapter with a background
overview of Benguigui and her corpus before treating Inch’Allah dimanche
(2001).

Yamini Benguigui
One manner in which “beur” or “banlieue” filmmakers have begun to
reframe gender difference and create alternative spaces beyond binary op-
positions is by returning to their parents (notably their mothers) and telling
their parents’ 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 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 provides insight that,
“by reclaiming these histories, the beurs are challenging dominant French
histories of the nation and working towards a valorization of their own place
188 C H A PT E R 4

within a multicultural France” (2005: 17). These directors are able to move out
of the typically-Parisian banlieue and “claim new spaces away from Paris and
its banlieues by focusing on aspects of the provinces not frequented by tour-
ists, particularly the areas around Marseilles, Lyons, and the North of France”
(Tarr, 2005: 16). For at least one contemporary filmmaker, Yamini 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, who has been an es-
tablished 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 (Ferjria Deliba) ar-
rival in France and learning of another Algerian family in the area, homesick
Zouina and the three children spend the next three Sundays in secret try-
ing 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 (Marie-France Pisier) whose
husband (a French solider) was killed in Algeria during the war for indepen-
dence and who agrees to help Zouina and 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 (Jalil Lespert) 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 relation-
ships as its primary focus and examines the power relations entrained when
peoples’ lives intersect in the most banal of ways—as next-door neighbors, at
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 189

the grocery store, vicariously through radio programs, in door-to-door sale

visits, on buses, on Sunday outings, and so forth. The most poignant relation-
ship in question in this film surfaces in Benguigui’s representation of the Self-
Other relationship, whether this relationship manifests itself as male/female,
female/female, young/elder, traditional/modern, French/Algerian, “Français
de souche”/”immigré,” or colonial/postcolonial. Benguigui shows through-
out 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 or at the very least a remedy to the outward violence of this divide by
presenting a doubly marginalized protagonist who speaks up and begins to
assert (softly yet assuredly) her desires; in the concluding scene, Zouina as-
serts 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 moving 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 con-
cluding 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) [“an instrument of knowledge and emo-
tion”].
Inch’Allah dimanche is an emotional cinematographic work that mixes
“comédie” and “gravité” (Alion, 2001: 136). Benguigui offers that, “L’émo-
tion 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) [“Emotion takes priority. People put my films
most often in the category of ‘North African cinema,’ but I feel infinitely
closer to the Italian comedy” (my translation)]. For Benguigui, this cinematic
Italian comedy model that she wishes to follow makes one both cry and 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)
[“through opera glasses”]. In following this model in Inch’Allah dimanche,
Benguigui expresses that, “Pour moi, il est capital que nous puissions poser un
190 C H A PT E R 4

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) [“For me, it is capital
that we can take a look at our own community, without Manichaeism or pre-
conceived ideas. I assert my belonging to a piece of French society: I recount
French stories” (my translation)]. Like the other women artists included in
this study, Benguigui presents a polyphony of personalized and dispersed in-
dividual voices that share a common origin or source and that expose, resist,
and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which they are
implicated across her corpus.
Benguigui adopts a very pragmatic, down-to-earth, or no nonsense point
of view (inspired by the Italian comic genre) in her work in general and in
Inch’Allah dimanche in particular. 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 earlier discussion concerning the connection between Serreau’s com-
edy 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, his-
torical 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—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 im-
migrant origin, is perhaps most known in France for her cinematic and tele-
vision documentary work, of which Mémoirs d’immigrés (1997) remains the
most discussed and analyzed in secondary criticism in North America at the
time of preparing this manuscript. 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 docu-
mentaires . . . qui ont été tous distingués par de nombreux prix
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 191

internationaux et sont aujourd’hui étudiés en section cinéma et

sociologie dans de nombreuses universités. (Africultures, 2006)
[exploration of the human part of the North African immigration
experience to France and of Muslim identity through documen-
tary sagas . . . that have all been distinguished with numerous
international prizes and today are studied in cinema and sociology
courses in numerous universities. (my translation)]

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

d’immigrés—have outlined three general tropes that she hems throughout her
corpus: the right to existence; a heritage of pain, grief, and sorrow; and the
notion of integration in progress.35 Let us briefly examine each one so that
we may better contextualize our close reading and treatment of Inch’Allah
dimanche in this chapter.

Right to Existence, Heritage,

and Integration in Progress
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).
This approach also challenges these qualities by allowing the documented in-
dividuals to speak freely and publicly in direct and indirect ways about these
representations and their existence from their personal perspective and experi-
ence. 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; for example., narratives of humiliation, of culpability for hav-
ing accepted dehumanizing conditions, of suffering from exile and diaspora,
and of disenchanted hope and love for France.
In these cinematic instances, Benguigui’s camera “leur redone leur dig-
nité car elle leur permet de dire [de manifester] la douleur qu’ils sont toujours
tue [couverte]” (Barlet, 2004) [“gives them back their dignity as it allows
them to say [to manifest] the pain that they have always kept silent or hidden”
(my translation)]. These narratives of pain, grief, and sorrow also surface in
192 C H A PT E R 4

Benguigui’s work within the representations of the family structure, as cul-

tural 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.
The family importantly resurfaces in scholarly and artistic treatment of the
question of integration. 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’expres-
sion. 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.
(Barlet, 2004)
[brings to light a face hidden of racism: the face that consists in
denying the history of cultural mutations, or in covering them
up in expression. Her work should be able to serve as an example
and comfort teachers desiring to develop multiple forms that this
expression can take for children of all origins. (my translation)]

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

as well as documentary texts around a system of audio-visual 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.36 Thus,
Benguigui theorizes that one “commence aussi à exister quand on voit des
images de soi” (Lemercier, 2006) [“begins to exist when one sees images of
him/herself” (my translation)]. Therefore, in her explanation delivered in her
interview with Fabian Lemercier of why she makes the kinds of films that she
does, Benguigui discloses:

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, par
même dans le hors champ. (Lemercier, 2004)
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 193

[It was necessary to put into image this story/history and this
memory as we were having a lot of trouble situating ourselves: we
don’t exist anywhere. The first generation was living in the wait-
ing room of France, was quasi invisible, in any case in the cinema
and on television, even off-screen. (my translation)]
Thus, Benguigui strives to overcome this lack of representation by challeng-
ing in her work the French collective memory in which “un Mohamed est un
balayeur ou un ouvrier” [“a Mohamed is a street sweeper or a factory worker”]
and of which the mentality one has not succeeded in changing, especially in
the French professional world of enterprise and business.37
According to Benguigui, “la culture ouvre la parole” [“culture opens
up speech”], and she sees the cinema as capital in this relationship because
“l’image est déterminante dans le rapport intercultural” (Lemercier 2006)
[“the image is determining in intercultural relationships”]. 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 rec-
ognition of a heterogeneity of identities and representations within marginal
communities and domestic spaces. This is to say that, 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 multiple
dimensions of the problems and difficulties of the various women of these
communities and also those problems and difficulties 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
194 C H A PT E R 4

neither identical nor universal across French society in the same degree. Yet
they do provide common points of connection, which may (perhaps subver-
sively?) tap into the French Republican popular 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 clarifies that after making Mémoirs d’immigrés, she wanted
to make a film featuring a heroine and focusing on women’s conditions in
France. She knew that fiction would provide the only avenue to such a proj-
ect. 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 beau-
coup 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)
[I always wanted to have a heroine. We have seen a certain num-
ber of films featuring immigrants or their children, but the moth-
ers had always remained withdrawn. However, I had interviewed
many women for Mémoirs d’immigrés. They had the same very
dark memories of their arrival in France. For me, fiction alone was
able take this into account. (my translation)]

In her interview with Yves Alion, Benguigui provides a brief summary or his-
tory of these women’s arrivals in France. She explains that when the women
arrived, they were very often strangers to their husbands, who had been re-
siding 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 summarizes
that “le fossé culturel semblait par ailleurs infranchissable” (Alion, 2001: 136)
[“the cultural gap seemed moreover impassable”]. Benguigui elucidates 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) [“anonymity
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 195

prevailed”]. 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)
[Thus, I wanted to show their daily life between four walls, in
the darkest solitude. 95% of the mothers were depressed: that’s
the official statistic from the Minister of Social Affairs. They saw
nothing of the France that yet entered their homes through the
intervention of the radio. (my translation)]

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, “Pour moi, c’est un film qui fonctionne sur de pe-
tits 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 me, this is a film that
functions on little details: Zouina’s too-large shoe, the words she hears in other
people’s mouths . . . I believe in the universal value of little particularities. You
have to get to the essential” (my translation)]. For Benguigui and especially as
represented in Inch’Allah dimanche, the essential is bound to the emotional.
Now we will turn to our close reading of the film and a discussion of her use
of self-referential modes of storytelling through which re-hybridized speaking
positions speak and gaze from a ²⁄³ Space of expression.

INCH’ALLAH DIMANCHE (2001)

The opening scene of Inch’Allah dimanche in which Zouina, her children, and
her mother-in-law board a 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,
196 C H A PT E R 4

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 whose
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 opening sequence establishes several functions that Ben-
guigui will maintain throughout Inch’Allah dimanche.
In its first function, Benguigui’s filmmaking, as established in the ex-
treme 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 fea-
tured 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 move-
ments 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 Zounina’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 de-
marcation that comments on the multiple subjectivities that exist within the
film. Whether decorated with henna or nail polish; rough from manual labor;
smooth from kneading bread made with olive oil; authoritatively stamping
nationality; driving a public service bus, running a small grocery shop; gar-
dening; 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 even-
tually overturn throughout the film. Zouina is clearly the protagonist in the
film and is the character the most often filmed in close-up one and medium
one shots. Yet Benguigui often paradoxically counters her agency through-
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 197

out 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 im-
migration 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 third function of her filmmaking: 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 (spe-
cifically 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 employ-
ment throughout the film as a whole, also functions to establish the immedi-
ate (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 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 mac-
rocosm 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 mar-
ginal or minority artists’ work, Benguigui’s “je transpersonnel ” gives voice to
a re-hybridized speaking subject who asserts that normative gender roles and
their discourses should be built on a multilateral system of “croisé” represen-
tation 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
198 C H A PT E R 4

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 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 call-
ing out “Mama.” 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
series of shot-reverse-shots, we witness 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 open-
ing 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 that 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.38 She concludes that the Maghrebi family in France operates within
a basic circle of social organization that differs profoundly in Maghrebi and
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 199

French cultures. Lacoste-Dujardin 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 (2000: 60). In opposi-
tion to this framework, she 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 con-
tinuum, to which women are joined in function in their role in preserving
and expanding the patrinlineage (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 60).
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 elucidates 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 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.39
As we see in Lacoste-Dujardin’s research as well as in many 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
200 C H A PT E R 4

culture(s) of residency appears highly incompatible. Lacoste-Dujardin con-

tends that “Daughters of Maghrebi immigrants in France almost unanimously
reject the position of women in Maghrebi societies” (2000: 610). 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 be-
tween them, which historically (and still contemporarily in more conservative
families) was (is) necessary to comply with Arab rules of decency (2000: 62).
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.40 Within these communi-
ties, this strict division of roles functions not only to ensure collective, effi-
cient, 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 (Lacoste-Dujardin, 2000: 62).
Scholars describe the Maghrebi hierarchic family structure as one in
which

the father is clearly dominant through a combination of his su-

premacy in terms of gender [(male)] and generation [(elder)] . . .
the mother and son each compensate an inferiority in one hierar-
chic category—that of gender for the mother, that of generation
for the son—by a superiority in the other category . . . the daugh-
ter 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 hierar-
chic 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” (Lacoste-Dujardin, 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,
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 201

are comforted by a close relationship with their mothers, and are strengthened
by their communal masculine identity.41
In opposition to the son’s privileged position within the family, the
daughter’s disadvantaged position stands in sharp contrast. Lacoste-Dujardin
asserts that within 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. 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 rela-

tions 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. (Lacoste-Dujardin,
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.
In comparing/contrasting Zouina to Aïcha and ultra-traditional Malika,
respectively the patrilinear mother-in-law and figurehead for the first genera-
tion of North African immigrants to France, Zouina’s character coding as
second generation becomes quite clear. As more characteristic to the second-
generation’s coding, Zouina desires to converse with Mlle Briat and has a
relative facility with the French language. Furthermore, her courage in under-
taking her Sunday escapes and her interest in French consumerism and radio
game shows and love or sexual advice programs also identifies her as “second
202 C H A PT E R 4

generation” and “transnational.” Yet, until the final sequence of the film in
which Ahmed forbids his mother to say any more negative things about or
toward 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 family hierarchy—a dynamic Ben-
guigui 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 middle-ground 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 in onto Zouina. In a reverse shot
from Zouina’s assumed gaze, Benguigui focuses on the bags, boxes, and
suitcases that occupy the 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 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 dis-
advantaged 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-education (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 experi-
menting with the cosmetics Mlle Briat gave her) are either met with physical
abuse by Ahmed or more verbal abuse from Aïcha. Zouina is expected to re-
produce the essentially maternal role that is assigned to women above all other
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 203

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 matrilineal heritage)
in this work. Throughout the film, she often films 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 or “two-thirds” position in-between the first and second generations,
Inch’Allah dimanche is a film narrated through a hybrid optic that mixes
adults’ and children’s points of views and perspectives on the various daily life
immigration and integration issues at hand.
The 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’ historical time frame to comment on the very contemporary position
of women of immigrant origin in France and their feminine condition. Ben-
guigui appears to share 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,
Benguigui 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, ambivalent, and paradoxi-
cal discourses as both “bearers of tradition” and “agents of modernity.” For
Benguigui, as well as for all of the other women artists in this project, it is
only through acknowledging and examining contradiction, ambivalence, and
paradox that one may arrive at ameliorated social (re)construction.
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 ²⁄³ Space 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
204 C H A PT E R 4

as well as the lines that exist between them. Thereby, she unsettles “home”
by revealing its illusion of coherence and safety—an illusion based on the
exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, even the repres-
sion of difference within oneself. But, in this case, Benguigui’s re-hybridized
postcolonial subject realizes this process and system of repression and refuses
to resign herself to it any longer.
Benguigui breathes life into the possibility that marginal or “othered” posi-
tions—constructed in the moment of identification with and acceptance of the
alien/allo-/other residing within the self—can occupy shifting and multiple po-
sitionings. This foregrounding of difference and interconnectedness transcends
the traditional boundaries of “local,” “national,” and “global” and exposes how
these constructions are, in the first place, artificial and primarily function to
serve hegemony. Inch’Allah dimanche illustrates a protagonist’s (as well as other
secondary characters’ but to a lesser degree) capacity to be transformed through
a cross-cultural encounter with otherness or “alienation.” This identification
with the alien/allo-/other negotiates a position that is both center and margin
and that has the power to deny the fixity of binary epistemology. Read through
a transvergent lens of analysis, Benguigui’s work re-frames marginality (i.e., a
“marginal” or “different” representation of multicultural French femininity or
of French women of North African heritage as other than victims of Islam or
patriarchy) as a point of resistance. Moreover, her re-framing of marginality
allows for continuities as well as differences in “national” identity and integrity
to exist side by side, even as next-door neighbors.

Conclusion
From the very pragmatic, down-to-earth, or no nonsense point of view ad-
opted in the Italian comedic genre that has influenced Benguigui’s camera and
which looks beyond official discourses of hegemonic or ideological systems of
reification, Benguigui reveals a “talking cure” in her work that moves a com-
munity (or Republic) beyond frozen monolithic or Manichaeism-like repre-
sentations 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 that results 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
 (R E )PR E S E N TING F EMA LE IC ONOGRAPH Y AT H OME 205

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 het-
erogeneous or transnational social consensus of what it means to be “French”
in general or a “French woman” in particular 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 follow-
ing Djebar’s call to women artists for the creation of re-hybridized female
speaking subjects that challenge, appropriate, and revise hegemonic forms
of gender representations and conventional modes of first-person narrative
storytelling.

Notes
1. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Third World Women’s Cinema: If the Subaltern
Speaks, Will We Listen?” in Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s
Literature and Film, eds. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose (New York, NY: Gar-
land, 1997), 214.
2. Anissa Talahite, “Identity as ‘Secret de Guerre’: Rewriting Ethnicity and
Culture in ‘Beur’ Literature,” in Cultures transnationales de France, ed. Hafid Gafaïti
(Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 2001), 59.
3. Hafid Gafaïti, “Cultures et transnationalité,” in Cultures transnationales de
France, ed. Hafid Gafaïti (Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 2001), 9–26.
4. Talahite, “Identity as ‘Secret de Guerre,’ ” 68–69.
5. Soheila Kian, “Une entrevue avec Leïla Sebbar, l’écriture et l’altérité,” French
Review 78.1 (2004), 128–136.
6. Nancy Houston and Leïla Sebbar, Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l’exil (Paris,
France: Barrault, 1986), 185.
7. Michel LaRonde, Leïla Sebbar (Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 2003).
8. LaRonde, Leïla Sebbar, 19.
9. LaRonde, Leïla Sebbar, 20.
10. Deepika Bahri, “Magical Realism,” Emory University English Department,
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Magical_Realism/html (accessed March 24,
2006).
11. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979), 1.
12. Deepika Bahri, “Orientalism,” Emory University English Department, http://
www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism/html (accessed March 24, 2006).
13. Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Pol-
ity Press, 2000), 6.
14. Michael O’Riley, “Specters of Orientalism in France, Algeria, and Postcolonial
Studies,” Mosaic 34 (2001), 48.
206 C H A PT E R 4

15. Peter Stranges, “Mimicry, Mixed Couple, and ‘Odalisques’: A Hybrid Re-
membering of the French Republic,” Esprit créateur 43.1 (2003), 81.
16. Stranges, “Mimicry, Mixed Couple, and ‘Odalisques,’ ” 81.
17. Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds
(Portsmouth, UK: Heinemann, 2001), 103.
18. Stranges, “Mimicry, Mixed Couple, and ‘Odalisques,’ ” 83.
19. Michel LaRonde, Autour des écrivains maghrébins (Paris, France: L’Harmattan,
1993), 22.
20. Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr, Women, Immigration and Identities in France
(Oxford, UK: Berg, 2000), 1.
21. Freedman and Tarr, Women, Immigration and Identities in France, 1.
22. Freedman and Tarr, Women, Immigration and Identities in France, 14.
23. Carole Netter and Anne-Marie Obajtek-Kirkwood, “Harfung, 3 questions à Leïla
Sebbar,” Clicknet 2004, http://clicknet.swarthmore.edu/leila_sebbar/virtuel/carnet
.html (accessed April 25, 2006).
24. Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood.
25. Netter and Obajtek-Kirkwood.
26. “Ni putes ni soumises,” http://niputesnisoumises.com.
27. “Ni putes ni soumises.”
28. At the time of preparing this manuscript, no search on Google Images revealed
any depictions of the “Marianne beurette.”
29. “Marianne noire,” Sundries 2005, http://futuremd.blogspot.com/2005/11/
marianne-noire.html (accessed June 27, 2008).
30. Carrie Tarr, Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France
(Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 2005).
31. Tarr, Reframing Difference, 3.
32. Tarr, Reframing Difference, 13.
33. Tarr, Reframing Difference, 16.
34. Tarr, Reframing Difference, 87.
35. Anne Henriot, “Mémoirs d’immigrés,” Télédoc 2002, http://www.cndp.fr/tice/
teledoc/dossiers/dossier_ immigres.htm (accessed April 24, 2006).
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medcafé, http://www.euromedcafe.org/interview.asp?lang=fra&documentID=15 (ac-
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37. Lemercier, Yamina Benguigui.
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39. Lacoste-Dujardin, “Maghrebi Families in France,” 62.
40. Lacoste-Dujardin, “Maghrebi Families in France,” 62.
41. Lacoste-Dujardin, “Maghrebi Families in France,” 63.
Conclusion
²⁄³ SPACES: HOME, NATION,
GENDER, SELF-OTHER

In concluding this monograph, I hope that the reader will take away from his
or her reading experience the motivation to reconsider contemporary wom-
en’s filmmaking and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia through a
transnational lens of deterritorialization. We have seen throughout this study
the manners in which women’s coming to voice via the (re)appropriation of
hegemonic discourses of representation, use of language, and authority in
speaking is made possible through the domestic space of the home and the
arts of homemaking. All of the women artists in this study reveal how the
home and homemaking either function or have the potentiality to function
as physical or symbolic locations of socio-political-historical contention and
complex frameworks for identity, gender, and subjectivity construction.
Drawing inspiration from Shohat and Stam’s notions of a “methodologi-
cal cubism” or a “kaleidoscope framework,” I set out to explore in this study
the multichronotopic links of theory and practice that bypass the proverbial
feminist studies versus transnationalism versus postcolonialism and so on
scenario. Thus, rather than adopting a single theoretical methodology, I
aimed to investigate the relationalities between transnational representations
of French, Algerian, and Tunisian women on the page and on the screen in
a translinear or derailed-like fashion through multiple domestic, feminist,
postcolonial, and transnational optics. Yet, for the sake of organization and
in order to be able to apply these perspectives and frameworks more coher-
ently and with greater impact in this study, each chapter emphasized one
theoretical positioning slightly more than another when examining the artists’
shared projects of defining, challenging, and re-framing the “national” and
the “feminine” in the primary texts analyzed.

207
208 C O N C L U SION

In Chapter One, I emphasized postcolonial studies and feminist literary

and film theory and where they importantly intersect and interface. We saw
how Assia Djebar’s theorizations of the gaze and voice contribute to debates
argued in both disciplines. I discussed how her 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 multiple feminine perspectives. I concluded that as a
film and literary theorist, Djebar asserts that women’s cinema and literature
privilege female voices that in turn forge spaces or positions 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.
In Chapter Two, I emphasized the field of lifewriting when analyzing
Annie Ernaux’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s work. Through their use of non-
conventional literary form, authorial voice, and a transpersonal first-person
speaking position, we saw how both writers deterritorialize the constructions
of both “marginality” and “dominant” by challenging “imperial” modes of
thought and binary structures with regard to the “feminine.” I concluded
that the act of sifting through life experiences, a prime trope in women’s life-
writing, enables a process of discovery for both the authors and readers that
transcends expressions of fixed female identity and fixating female subjectivity
by moving beyond the limiting and restrictive questions of “in/authenticity”
to deal more directly with more “inclusive” and diverse portraits of multiplit-
ictous female gender construction.
In Chapter Three, I emphasized the field of domesticity in Raja Amari’s
and Coline Serreau’s reconfigurations of understanding of the Self-Other di-
vide by using homemaking and home creativity as catalysts to the recognition
of the need to re-form identity and reconstruct gender as something “other”
than the monolithic representations of traditional or conventional discourses
of femininity that surround these filmmakers and their protagonists. I con-
cluded that both filmmakers seek to explore how the processes of uncovering
or articulating new identities, subjectivities, and performances usher in new
ways of seeing, knowing, and being “female” in their respective societies. In
my discussion, we have seen how they attempt to derail traditional race-,
class-, religious-, and patriarchal-based ideologies and markers of identity by
drawing out the latent contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes of their
“imagined communities” with regard to “home/making,” “gender,” and “na-
tion.”
In Chapter Four, I emphasized the burgeoning critical approach of trans-
vergence with its desires to re-frame marginality as a point of resistance and to
 ²⁄³ S PA C E S: HOME, NA TION, G ENDER, SEL F-OT H ER 209

allow for continuities as well as differences in “national” gender identity and

integrity to exist side by side. Through the concept of a “virtual geography,”
we saw how Leïla Sebbar and Yamina Benguigui re-configure “fixed” notions
of nation, center/margin, self/other, and home/exile and create the possibility
for marginal or “othered” positions that are rooted in the identification with
the alien/allo-/other to occupy shifting, multiple, and re-hybridized subjec-
tivities. I concluded that through cross-cultural encounters with otherness,
these artists reveal the “alien within” (or the alloself ) and show how this no-
tion of allogenesis (or production of the alien within) articulates dynamic and
shifting relationships of opposition and confluence for an alloself that is never
separated, fixed, or fixated in binary opposition.
Bringing together these critical perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and
close readings in this book have been my overarching critical methodology of
transnationalism and my thematic discursive of “homelessness at home.” In
my treatment of Assia Djebar, the transnational surfaced in her inter-female-
generational histories that successfully permeate time and class as well as eth-
nic and geographical borders. For Simone de Beauvoir and Annie Ernaux, the
transnational suggests the virtual intra-national borders between social class
and sex within the homeland of France. For Raja Amari and Coline Serreau,
the transnational refers again to the virtual intra-national borders between
social class and sex within the homelands of France and Tunisia but also
begins to open up a new exploration of international socio-cultural borders
between both nations. Finally, in my analysis of Leïla Sebbar and Yamina
Benguigui, the transnational takes up again the virtual intra-national borders
between social class and sex within the homelands of France and Algeria but
also considers more prominently questions of international inter-cultural
exchanges as they are realized through the motifs of travel, immigration, and
culture(s) of origin.
With regard to my thematic discursive of “homelessness at home,” this
notion suggests different experiences or different realities for each woman
artist. For Djebar, “homelessness at home” captures a shift from the home
as representation of a site of Algerian women’s audiovisual occultation and
imprisonment to a liberating site of female political action and appropri-
ated location of female spectatorship and authorship. For both Ernaux and
de Beauvoir, the notion implies a dis/location in which protagonists are
both “here and there,” caught in an inauthentic self-identity normatively
conceived, understood, imposed upon, accepted, and performed at home.
With respect to Amari and Serreau, “homelessness at home” reveals how
the institutions and categories of identity of home and homemaking or
210 C O N C L U SION

housewifery exist as constructed ideologies and positionings that serve hege-

mony and reify the “nation.” And finally concerning Sebbar and Benguigui,
the notion speaks to the recognition for the need of a break from the tradi-
tion of hachouma (or the interdiction of free and open communication) in
the home, which results in the establishment of communication between the
sexes and between generations.
In each instance throughout this study, “home” and “nation” are in-
tricately bound to one another in a number of different ways. The home
reflects and resembles “nation” by expressing the same ideological pressures
that contend within the nation and does not serve as a retreat from the pub-
lic and political spheres. The home has permeable walls and is a receiver of
public languages and values as well as is a space in which national, global,
and/or hegemonic discourses speak, are performed, and reproduce themselves.
Both terms are polysemic and have been defined in several ways throughout
this book. Understood as hegemonic middle-class, mid-twentieth-century,
metropolitan France or post-independence, normative, political, conserva-
tive Algeria or Tunisia, to name only two, “home” and “nation” function
in this study to situate and re-configure understanding of the Self-Other
divide. Both constructs typically seek to repress difference as illustrated in
the primary texts included in this study. As posited in each earlier discussion,
Djebar, Ernaux, de Beauvoir, Amari, Serreau, Sebbar, and Benguigui all seek
to counter this repression by recounting personal history as experienced in the
home and emphasizing the socio-historical-import of these personal histories
in reference to the nation.
Their design to recount personal history and emphasize its socio-historical
import in print and film is realized through these women artists’ play with
the various paradigms of seeing, knowing, and being that are at their indi-
vidual disposal. Working within as well as beyond their “national” systems of
visual and written representation, these women artist all challenge previously
conceived notions of spectatorship; power and gender relations; and per-
formances, definitions, and discourses of femininity. Through the multiple
critical perspectives and theoretical frameworks applied in this study—espe-
cially with regard to subjectivity, identity construction, gender performance
and discourse, space, and modes of articulation and enunciation—I have at-
tempted to show how these approaches and optics of analysis are imbricated
and reflected across various disciplines and media; but without suggesting
that their positionings are identical and interchangeable.
Through this kaleidoscope framework and the lens of the interrogation
of the personal, I have argued for a re-hybridized subject this is well situated
 ²⁄³ S PA C E S: HOME, NA TION, G ENDER, SEL F-OT H ER 211

in history, class, gender, and “nation.” This re-hybridized subject in artistic

practice becomes a polyphony of personalized and dispersed individual voices
that share a common origin, source, situation, or experience and that expose,
resist, and challenge the contradicting and ambivalent discourses in which
they are implicated. I have also argued for ²⁄³ Spaces of expression and forms
of enunciation from and in which artists and their re-hybridized protagonists
exemplify a transnational identity, historicity, subjectivity, and speaking posi-
tion.
As we have seen, these re-hybridized subjects and ²⁄³ Spaces of expression
and modes of enunciation have taken many forms. With regard to Djebar,
we saw how the home shelters a ²⁄³ Space in which re-hybridized gazing and
speaking subjects may create new, public spaces and modes of articulation in
which the next generation of even further re-hybridized gazing and speaking
subjects may continue their oral tradition and collaborate on new discourses
that combine their mothers’, grandmothers’, sisters’, and their own personal
histories. For Ernaux and de Beauvoir, I showed how their homes—seen
either as a maintenance trap of things that adds countless demands for im-
manent acts or as an entire “universe” sheltering the protagonist from the
responsibility of “outside” transcendent acts—become politically and socially
charged transnational spaces of contention on which hybrid seeing and speak-
ing subjects from multiple perspectives descend in order to transform them
into new re-hybridized spaces or positions of female spectatorship and author-
ship from within. Concerning Amari and Serreau, we saw how the diasporic
space of home inflects transnational identity and transnational understanding
of self and gender and privileges a forging ahead as opposed to a retreat into
pre-existing cultural, familial, or psychological identities and a priori social,
historical, or political frameworks and discourses. And finally for Sebbar and
Benguigui, I asserted that their cinematic expression and articulation re-frame
marginality as a point of resistance and allow for continuities as well as differ-
ences in “national” gender identity and integrity to exist side by side.
Throughout this study I have shown how the relationship between “cen-
ter” 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
of France, Algeria, and Tunisia. We have seen how the essentialist dangers im-
plicit 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.
212 C O N C L U SION

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 study 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 engage-
ment. To this end, this is to say that this project has demonstrated how
one may position these multiple portraits of French, Tunisian, and Algerian
female identities and domestic spaces at the crosshairs of a complex web of
H/history, ethnicity, race, class, and gender relations. As shown, whether in
“inauthentic” or (re)appropriated portraits, these challenges reflect women’s
contradictory, ambivalent, and paradoxical position(s) in their respective
societies and cultures.
As “bearers of tradition” and “agents of modernity,” the female protago-
nists 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 concepts of border-crossing and derailment, I have brought
to light an array of political and cultural interconnections and transversals
that require rethinking in relation to the socio-political-historical tensions in
which these interconnections and transversals 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,
experienced, and enunciated 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 contemporary seemingly public literary and cinematic spaces and
discourses as well as seemingly private or personal ones.
I have sought to show in the individual chapters of this study how the
subversive refusal of the hegemonic cultural sign of female not only makes
a space or position for renewal or recreation of female subjectivities from
women’s perspectives, but also incites the next generation or wave of con-
temporary re-hybridized women artists (and feminist, postcolonial, and
transnational literary and film scholars) to create new female subjectivities
from their own individual and personal ²⁄³ perspectives. Hence, one may cre-
ate or locate these new female subjectivities in-between the representations of
home, femininity, and domesticity but always squarely in personal history.
Moreover, as all of the women artists included in this study demonstrate, one
may also create new re-hybridized female subjectivities and articulate their
 ²⁄³ S PA C E S: HOME, NA TION, G ENDER, SEL F-OT H ER 213

transvergent discourses in their collective re-creation of H/history specifically

through the representations of two important tropes: the performative acts of
homemaking (the traditional female activities of cleaning, cooking, laundry,
etc.) and making home (the creation of personal female spaces of first-person
expression in body, voice, and gaze). In all instances, these tropes function as
points of resistance for both the female protagonists and the women artists to
many of the pressures placed upon them as writers, filmmakers, performers,
wives, mothers, daughters, travelers, or females.
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Index
Abeel, Erica, 141–42, 146
L’Age de discretion, 83
Algeria: commonalities with France and
Tunisia, xvi–xvii; cultural relations with
France, 164; gender issues, 2–3, 111–
12; history and female body, 32–35;
nationalism, 33, 35–36; women in,
20–23
alloself, xlv, 131, 209
Alloua, Mark, 105–6
Amari, Raja: agenda, xlix, 151, 208;
Benguigui comparison, 152;
biography, 104–5; Djebar comparison,
104; Sebbar comparison, 152;
Self/Other representations, 119,
131–32; spectatorship, 105–7; style of
filmmaking, 114–15, 117; 2/3 Space of
expression, 105, 211. See also Satin rouge
Ashcroft, Bill, xxxix
Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in “Touchia:
Ouverture” and “Ces voix qui
m’assiègent,” 4, 16
authenticity, 56–58
autobiographical narratives, 46–49, 86
autoethnography, xxx
Bacholle, Michèle, 44, 51
banlieue, 175–76. See also beur writing/
filmmaking
233
Bartók, Béla, 12
Bazin, André, xlii
Bedouin women representations,
105–6
Les Belles Images, 75
belly dancing, 115–17, 126
Benguigui, Yamina: agenda, xlix, 209;
Amari comparison, 152; as beur
filmmaker, 187–88; capturing right
to existence, 191–95; Inch’Allah
dimanche, 188–90, 193–98; Self/
Other representations, 204. 189;
Serreau comparison, 152; 2/3 Space
of expression, 203–4, 211
Bensmaïa, Réda, 12
Berghagn, Daniela, xliv
beur writing/filmmaking, 153, 184–91.
See also banlieue
Bhabha, Homi, xxxix, xli
BioArt, xlvi
borders and identity, 152–53
Bouhkobza, Noria, 179–80, 182–83
Brahimi, Tounes, 180–81
Brigitte Rollet, 133
caberet dance roles in film, 126–27
The Call of God, 116–17
Can the Subaltern Speak?, 15
Carnhi, Leslie, 148
234 I ND E X
Ces voix qui m’assiègent, 3, 9–10, 13,
21, 28–34. See also Être une voix
francophone; Regard de l’autre, regard
sur l’autre
Chaos: cinematic style, 138–40; gender
issues, 146–48; home representations,
140, 146; housework images, 142–43;
sound and soundtrack, 140–47; three
narratives, 136–38
Character Zone, 10
Charrad, Mournira M., 109–10
child-raising chores, 70
Cinema Interval, 10
Cixous, Hélène, 26–27, 28, 34, 126
collaboration, 10
collective female voice, 32
comedy, 134–36
communication, subaltern, 15–16
“croisement,” 158–60
Culhane, Hind Rassam, 116–17
cultural diversity, 154–57
dance roles in film, 118–21, 126–27
Davison, Ray, 84
de Beauvoir, Simone: agenda, xlviii–
xlix, 41–42, 103, 208; biography,
74–75; criticism of, 75–77; Djebar
comparison, 42; Ernaux comparison,
74, 77–82; Serreau comparison, 143;
2/3 Space of expression, 100, 211; Une
mort très douce, 77. See also La Femme
rompue; Le Deuxième sexe
Déjeux, Jean, 28
Delacroix, Eugène, 4–6, 8, 9, 23, 36, 38
De l’écriture comme voile, 30–31
départenance, 154
desire, xxvii–xxviii
Desplechin, Arnaud, 115
Le Deuxième sexe, 75, 77–82
Devadas, Vijay, xxxviii
diary formats, 89
diaspora spaces, 41–42, 120
Djebar, Assia: agenda, xlviii, 1–2, 208;
Algerian gender issues, 2–3, 111–12;
Amari comparison, 104; Bedouin
women representations, 105–6; de
Beauvoir comparison, 42; Ernaux
comparison, 42, 56; gaze, 4, 11–17,
165–66, 208; pseudonyms, 28, 31;
Self/Other, xviii–xix, 126; Serreau
comparison, 104; Touchia: Ouverture,
16–23; 2/3 Space of expression, 9,
15–16, 39, 56, 211. See also Ces voix
qui m’assiègent; La Nouba du Mont
Chenoua; Regard interdit, son coupé;
Song of Messaouda
Dobie, Madeleine, 33
domesticity. See home representations;
housework; marriage
Donadey, Anne, 11–12, 35, 166
double lives, 119–21, 131–32
double silence, 24
Du français comme butin, 29
Eakin, John, 48
EcoArt, xlvi
Écrire dans la langue de l’autre, 31
egalitarian marriages, 68–69
Egyptian film history, 115–17
Elle magazine, 85–86
enunciative apparatus theory, xxviii
Ernaux, Annie: agenda, xlviii–xlix,
41–42, 103, 208; biography, 43–45;
de Beauvoir comparison, 74, 77–78;
Djebar comparison, 42, 56; gender
issues, 58–59; hybrid writing style,
49–52; Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit,
77; je transpersonal, 45–46, 48–49; ‘Le
Fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir,
77; philosophy of writing, 59–60, 81;
Serreau comparison, 143; 2/3 Space
of expression, 48–49, 56, 211; Une
femme, 77. See also La Femme gelée; ‘Le
Fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir
Esther Kahn, 115
Être une voix francophone, 24
exile motif, 163–64, 167–68
existence, right to, 191–95

Fallaize, Elizabeth, 76, 82, 85–86
familial hierarchy, 198–203
Fanon, Frantz, xxii–xxiii
Farès, Djamel, 179
Fau, Christine, 56
femininity: Algerian history and female
body, 32–35; magazine portrayals,
85–90; overcoming silences, 24–26;
portraits, 178–84
feminist perspectives, xxvii–xxviii, 56–
59. See also gender issues
La Femme gelée: feminist perspectives,
56–59; gender roles, 100; home
representations, 62–74, 100, 122;
housework, 125–26; Inch’Allah
dimanche comparison, 197; lack of
identity, 60–61; La Femme rompue
comparison, 97–98; Le Deuxième
sexe references, 79–80, 82; maternal
portraits, 50–56, 61–74
La Femme rompue: autobiographical
mode, 86; competition between
women, 90; diary format, 83–85;
La Femme gelée comparison, 97–98;
first person comparison, 82–83;
gaze, 97–100; gender roles, 84, 100;
home representations, 91–94, 96–97,
100, 122; L’Age de discretion, 83;
maternal portraits, 87–88, 94–95;
Monologue, 83; women’s magazines,
88–90
Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement,
4, 32. See also Regard interdit, son
coupé
‘Le Fil conducteur’ qui me lie à Beauvoir,
77–82
filmmaking: beur, 153, 184–91; French,
xxxvi; Tunisian, 105–7, 111–14
first person narratives, 28–30, 82–83
Fontaine, Anne, 186–87
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 14
Foucault, Michel, xxiii
France: Algerian cultural relations,
164; commonalities with Algeria
IN DEX 235
and Tunisia, xvi–xvii; national/
transnational film, xxxvi; social
revolution, 133–34
Freedman, Jane, 168–71
Gabous, Abdekrim, 106
Gafaïti, Hafid, 32, 35, 154
Garanger, Marc, 179, 182
gaze: in Algerian society, 2–3; desire and,
xxvii–xxviii; Inch’Allah dimanche, 197;
La Femme rompue, 97–99; La Nouba
du Mont Chenoua, 11–16; Regard de
l’autre, regard sur l’autre, 11–17, 21;
Regard interdit, son coupe, 38–39,
165–66, 208; spectatorship and, 4–11,
105–7
gender issues: in Algerian society, 2–3,
111–12; Ernaux on, 58–59; feminist
scholars on, 32–33; La Femme gelée,
100; home representations, xxi–xxii,
62–74; immigration, 168–71;
Inch’Allah dimanche, 203–4; La Femme
gelée, 51; La Femme rompue, 84, 100;
Orientalism, 161–62; in Tunisian
society, 108–11
Ghorab-Volta, Zaïda, 186–87
Gill, Rosalind, 88–90
Giraud, Eugène, 181
“glissement,” 159
Goddard, Michael, xlvi
Gracki, Katherine, 28–29
Greki, Anna, 180–81
Guerry, Jacques, 180
Hall, Stuart, xxxix
hands as social markers, 195–96
haunting/spectrality motif, 163–64,
178–84
Hayward, Susan, xxxv, xl–xli
“here and there” spaces, 41–42
heritage of pain, 191–92
Hermouche, Arezki and Fatha, 180–81
heteroglossic dialogism, xxxi
Higbee, Will, xxxviii–xxxix, xliii–xlvii
236 I ND E X
Les Histoires d’amour finissent mal en
général, 186–87
Historical I, 46–47
Holmes-Eber, Paula, 111, 122–23
homelessness at home, xviii–xix, 80, 209–
10. See also diaspora spaces
home representations: Chaos, 140, 146;
defined, xix–xxii; gender roles and,
xxi–xxii, 62–74; Inch’Allah dimanche,
204; La Femme gelée, 62–74, 100, 122;
La Femme rompue, 91–94, 96–97, 100,
122; La Nouba du Mont Chenoua, 20;
as nation, xxi, 42, 210; Regard interdit,
son coupé, 23; Satin rouge, 120, 122–23,
127–28
La Honte, 50
housework, 121–27, 131–32
Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in
French-Tunisian Filmmaker Raja Amari’s
“Satin rouge,” 108
Huughe, Laurence, 8–9, 30–31
hybridity terminology, xxiv–xxvi
hybrid writing style, 49–52
Idealogical I, 47
identity, lack of, 60–61
Il n’y a pas d’exil, 4
immigration issues, 168–71, 192–95
Inch’Allah dimanche, 188–90, 193–98, 201,
203–4
indieWIRE, 115, 141–42, 146
integration, 192–95
interactive process, 9–10
Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, 77
je transpersonal, 45–46, 48–49, 57–58, 197
Johnson, Erica L., xx
Jour de Ramadan, 4
juxtiposition of images, 21–22
Kandiyoti, Deniz, 112, 123
Kelly, David, 8
Kennedy, Valerie, 161
Khannous, Touria, 15
Kian, Soheila, 154, 157, 163
Lacoste-Dujardin, Camille, 198–201
Laila, 116–17
landscape of Algerian women, 20
Larguet, Maya, 167, 173–74
LaRonde, Michel, 155, 156, 158–59, 167
Lemercier, Fabian, 192–93
Lettres parisiennes, 155–57
lifewriting as point of entry, xxix–xxxi. See
also autobiographical narratives
Lionnet, Françoise, 158
love scenes, 129–30
Maghrebi culture/background, 184–91,
198–99
magical realism, 159–60
Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent?, 132
male speaking position, 95
Mamak, Farida, 180
“maman” and “moman” terminology,
54–55
marginality, 211–12
Mariannes, 174–77, 179, 181–82
marriage, 68–69, 71, 78–82
maternal portraits: body, 34–35;
Inch’Allah dimanche, 201, 203; La
Femme gelée, 50–56, 61–74; La Femme
rompue, 87–88, 94–95; Regard interdit,
son coupé, xxvi–xxvii, 27, 33; Satin
rouge, 118–19, 130
McRobbie, Angela, 89, 90
media terminology, xiv
Mémoirs d’immigrés, 190–91, 194
Mémoirs d’une jeune fille rangée, 75, 77
Mes Algéries en France: haunting/
spectrality motif, 163–64, 166, 178–
84; mimicry, 174–78; as travelogue,
162, 171–74
methodological cubism, xvii, xlviii, 3–4,
207–11
Miller, Nancy K., 48
mimicry motif, 163–64, 166, 174–78
Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 10, 16
Minne, Danière, 180–81
Moghadam, Valentine, 112
Moi, Toril, 76

Monologue, 83
multiplicitous figure, 14, 126
Mulvey, Laura, xxviii
music/sounds of Chaos, 140–47
Naficy, Hafid, xli
Narrated I, 47, 59
Narrating I, 47
nation and home, xxi, 42, 210
nation approach to film analysis, xxxv–
xxxvii
non-dire, 2, 128
Nostalgie de la horde, 4
La Nouba du Mont Chenoua, 3, 11–16,
18, 20, 23, 24, 38
Novak, Marcus, xliii–xlv, 131
Occident, 162–63
Orientalism, 160–66
O’Riley, Michael, 164–65
Ozon, François, 115; Les Mots parlent, 4
personal, interrogation of, xxiv–xxvi
Personal Status Code (PSC), 111
Picasso, Pablo, 4, 35–38
Pignon, Sébastien, 179, 181
Pink, Sarah, xxii, 127, 131, 144–45
positionality, xxx–xxxi
postcolonial discourse terminology, xxii–
xxvi, xxxviii–xxxix
Pourquoi pas!, 132
preformativity, xxx
PSC (Personal Status Code), 111
pseudonyms, 28, 31
raqs sharqi, 115–17, 126
Regard de l’autre, regard sur l’autre, 16–17,
21
Regard interdit, son coupé: cultural
silencing, 23–25, 33; gaze and
spectatorial spaces, 3, 4–11, 38–39;
home representations, 23; maternal
portraits, xxvi–xxvii, 27, 33; veils, 7–9.
See also Song of Messaouda
Le Rire de la Méduse, 26–27, 28
IN DEX 237
Rollet, Brigitte, 133, 135
romance, 89
Rosello, Mireille, 154
Rosti, Istefane, 116–17
Said, Edward, xxii, 160–62
Samal, Samia, 115–18
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 75, 78
Satin rouge: double lives, 119–21,
131–32; home representations, 120,
122–23, 127–28; housework, 121–27,
131–32; Housework and Dance as
Counterpoints in French-Tunisian
Filmmaker Raja Amari’s “Satin rouge,”
108; maternal portraits, 118–19, 130;
societal divisions, 118–19; Tunisian
culture, 113–14, 117–19; veils, 130
Sebbar, Leïla: agenda, xlix, 209; Amari
comparison, 152; biography, 154–57;
“croisement,” 158–60; gender and
immigration issues, 168–71; motifs,
163–68; Serreau comparison, 152; 2/3
Space of expression, 158, 162, 173,
211. See also Mes Algéries en France
Second Cinema, xlii–xliii
Self/Other representations: Amari,
119, 131–32; Benguigui, 189, 204;
Djebar, xviii–xix, 126; Sebbar, 166;
terminology, xvii–xix, xlvi–xlvii;
theory, xxxi–xxxii
Serreau, Coline: agenda, xlix, 151,
208; Benguigui comparison, 152;
biography, 132–34; comedy of, 134–
36; Djebar comparison, 104; Ernaux
comparison, 143; Sebbar comparison,
152; social commentary, 139–40,
141–42; 2/3 Space of expression, 148–
49, 211. See also Chaos
Shérazade trilogy, 163, 166
Shobat, Ella, xiii–xiv, xvi, xlvii
silencing, cultural, 23–25, 33
Smith, Paul, 47
social commentary, 43–45, 136, 139–40,
141–42
social fantastic, 138–39
238 I ND E X
Song of Messaouda, xxvi, 24–28, 36–38
soundtrack/sound of Chaos, 140–47
Souviens-toi de moi, 186–87
“speaking nearby,” 45–48, 95
spectatorship. See gaze
spectrality motif. See haunting/spectrality
motif
speech, desire for, 21
Spivak, Gayatri, 15
Stam, Robert, xiii–xiv, xvi, xlvii
stereotypes, 144
Stollery, Martin, 112–13, 123
Stranges, Peter, 166
subaltern communication, xxiv, 15–16
taboos. See non-dire
Tarr, Carrie, xxxiv–xxxvi, 168–71,
184–88
Technozoosemiotics, xlvi
Third Cinema, xxxix–xliii
“Third Space of Negotiation,” xxxix
Third World Cinema, xxxix–xli
Thomas, Lyn, 51
Thomas, Sylvie, 134, 139
Tondeur, Claire-Lise, 43, 44
Touchia: Ouverture, 16–23
transnational terminology, xiv, xxxii–
xxxviii, 153–54, 209
transvergent considerations, xliii–xlvii
travelogues, 162, 171–74
Trois hommes et un couffin, 133, 142–43
Tunisia: cinema, 105–7, 111–14;
commonalities with France and
Algeria, xvi–xvii; cultural divisions,
118–21; history, 107–11; home,
122–23; in Satin rouge, 113–14,
117–19
2/3 Space of expression: Amari, 105,
211; Benguigui, 203–4, 211; “beur/
banlieue” cinemas, 185; de Beauvoir,
100, 211; Djebar, 9, 15–16, 39, 56,
211; Ernaux, 48–49, 56, 211; Sebbar,
158, 162, 173, 211; Serreau, 148–49,
211; terminology, xli–xliii, xlvii
Under the Sand, 115
Une femme, 49–50, 77
Une mort très douce, 77
“universal” levels, 57–58
veils: Ces voix qui m’assiègent, 30–31;
Regard interdit, son coupé, 7–9; Satin
rouge, 130; symbolism of, 30–32;
Tunisian women and, 109
Veltman, Andrea, 79–80
Vilain, Philippe, 50–51
Voltaire, 135–36
Wilson, Emma, xlii
women bomb carriers, 33, 35, 36–38
Women of Algiers, 4
Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 4–6,
8, 9, 23, 35–38
women’s magazines, 85–86, 88–90
women’s roles. See gender issues
writing styles: autobiographical narratives,
46–49, 86; hybrid, 49–52; lifewriting,
xxix–xxxi; travelogues, 162, 171–74
Zayzafoon, Lamia Ben Youseef, 109–10
About the Author

Stacey Weber-Fève is assistant professor of French at Iowa State University

of Science and Technology, Ames, in the Department of World Languages
and Cultures. She is a specialist of French and Francophone cinemas whose
research interests primarily concern women’s contemporary filmmaking
and lifewriting of France, Algeria, and Tunisia. Her publications include
“Housework and Dance as Counterpoints in French-Tunisian Filmmaker
Raja Amari’s Satin rouge (2002)” (Quarterly Review of Film & Video, forth-
coming); “Assia Djebar as Film Theorist in ‘Touchia: Ouverture’ and Ces voix
qui m’assiègent” (French Review, 2008); “Integrating Language and Literature:
Teaching Textual Analysis with Input and Output Activities and an Input-
to-Output Approach” (Foreign Language Annals, 2009); “A Writing Design:
Using Abstracts in the Writing Process” (French Review, 2009); and Liaisons:
Beginning-Level French Program (Cengage-Heinle, working title, forthcom-
ing). She is passionate about the classroom and seeks ways to explore how
second-language research study can directly inform teaching, especially in
the design of instructional materials and literacy-based approaches to the
teaching and learning of French language and French/Francophone cin-
emas, literatures, and cultures. Her current research project centers on the
(inter)relationality and interstices between word, image, and frame in Mar-
jane Satrapi’s feature-length animated film and graphic novel, Persepolis.

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