Francophone Women Coming of Age

Francophone Women Coming of Age
Francophone Women Coming of Age
Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence from
France, Africa, Quebec and the Caribbean
Edited by
Debra Popkin
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING
Francophone Women Coming of Age: Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence from France, Africa,
Quebec and the Caribbean, edited by Debra Popkin
This book first published 2007 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2007 by Debra Popkin and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-322-0; ISBN 13: 9781847183224
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstracts.................................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Debra Popkin
Chapter One................................................................................................. 3
“Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia”
Beth Gale
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 18
“An Absent Presence: Adolescence and the Inadequate Female Role
Model in Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit…
As the Sorcerer Said… ”
Leah Tolbert Lyons
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 34
“Growing up with Julia: Gisèle Pineau and her Grandmother,
a Caribbean Girl’s Journey to Self-Discovery”
Debra Popkin
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 51
“La terre ne ment pas”: Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceurs du bercail
as Bildungsroman”
Natalie Edwards
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 63
“Female Portraits of Childhood and Adolescence in Selected Works
of Gabrielle Roy”
Myrna Delson-Karan
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 79
“Salvation through Writing in Marie-Claire Blais’ Manuscrits de Pauline
Archange “
S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey
vi
Table of Contents
Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 97
“Female Adolescence in Quebec’s Post-Quiet Revolution Novels:
Gabrielle Gourdeau’s L'écho du silence, Monique Proulx’s Le sexe des
étoiles, and Marie Laberge’s Annabelle.”
Edith B. Vandervoort
Contributors............................................................................................. 114
ABSTRACTS
Chapter One
Most adults can remember some sort of play with the notion of a
malleable identity during adolescence. In her novel Les Armoires vides,
Annie Ernaux takes this notion and constructs a novel around it, showing
how one adolescent girl copes with the different pressures and traumas in
her life by creating two worlds for herself, each of which has its own rules,
language, and characters. It is the only way that she can understand and
process the traumatizing conflict between what she experiences at home
and at school, and the ways she is expected to behave in each place.
This chapter studies the specific ways in which Denise comprehends
and orders her two worlds as a response to stress and various sources of
pressure to conform. The second part of this chapter analyzes a counter
example, Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia, as another text in which
two worlds collide.
Djebar's adolescent narrator uses language as a means of navigation
between her two worlds, which she associates with her father and mother,
different cultures and traditions. Language is problematized in various
ways, particularly the relationship to French, the language of the
colonizers. For both of these adolescents, malleable identity becomes a
soothing coping mechanism that allows them to negotiate conflict and to
embrace different aspects of themselves during the turbulence of
adolescence.
Chapter Two
Guadeloupean writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra paints a chaotic canvas
of teen angst in her first novel Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit…. At first
glance, it would appear that Suzette (Zétou), the novel’s protagonist, is
driven by an obsessive desire to continue her education and that this desire
leads to her downfall. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes
evident that Zétou’s downfall may be attributed to her mother’s
extraordinarily bad parenting. Zétou’s mother, Rosemonde, abandons her
children and her husband and moves to France with her lover, the
Frenchman Roger Milan. The irony, then, is that even through her
viii
Abstracts
absence because of abandonment, Rosemonde’s presence serves as
hindrance to Zétou and foils her life plans.
The events described in Warner-Vieyra’s novel create a disturbing
depiction of what happens in a girl’s life when there are no appropriate
female role models to assist in the process of becoming. As an “absent
presence” in Zétou’s life, Rosemonde’s character shows that the mother
figure, whether absent or present, is always serving as a role model,
whether good or bad. Zétou’s failure to receive the formal education that
she seeks is compounded by the improper moral education that she
unwittingly receives from her mother. The purpose of this chapter is to
examine the impact of the absent female role model in Myriam WarnerVieyra’s Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit…in an attempt to better understand
the writer’s view of the importance of women as role models in the
process of leading girls to womanhood.
Chapter Three
This chapter focuses on the ties that bind Gisèle Pineau to her proud
and staunchly nationalistic grandmother Julia (Ma Ya) during their time
together in Paris in involuntary exile from their native Guadeloupe. The
grandmother teaches young Gisèle memorable lessons on how to
safeguard and cherish her Caribbean identity, by refusing to surrender to
Parisian customs while clinging to her Creole language, her favorite
recipes, legends and folk tales. Every time the sadistic teacher punishes
young Gisèle by making her stay under the teacher’s desk, Gisèle blocks
out the suffering by dreaming of being transported to her homeland:
Guadeloupe. In her semi-autobiographical memoir L’Exil selon Julia
(1996), Gisèle Pineau examines the roles of the family and education in
forming her character. Racism, social unrest, and the changes in French
society in the 1960s all come to light in this sometimes humorous but
often serious memoir.
This study then analyzes the light, cheerful tale Un Papillon dans la
cité (1992) in which Félicie, the young narrator, experiences the pains of
separation from her beloved grandmother after Félicie is taken to Paris to
live with her birth mother, who abandoned her ten years earlier. Félicie’s
friendship with a North African boy, Mohamed Ben Doussan, a poor
student but a delightful companion, leads to self-discovery and an
appreciation of multi-cultural society in a Paris apartment complex during
the 1980s. In conclusion, this chapter examines Gisèle’s difficult
adjustment to the Caribbean lifestyle after she and her family return to
Guadeloupe and the role of her grandmother in helping her to re-adjust.
Francophone Women Coming of Age
ix
Included are references to an interview with Gisèle Pineau conducted by
Debra Popkin in Oct. 2003.
Chapter Four
In ““La terre ne ment pas”: Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceurs du bercail
as Bildungsroman,” Natalie Edwards analyzes the Bildung of a female,
postcolonial subject. The chapter begins with an overview of theories of
traditional, male Bildungsroman and a discussion of more recent
scholarship on specifically female Bildungsroman. Edwards then reads a
text by contemporary Senegalese author Aminata Sow Fall in relation to
these theories. The protagonist of Douceurs du bercail is a Senegalese
woman who travels from her native land to France but, upon her arrival, is
stopped and detained at the unnamed French airport. Edwards examines
the protagonist’s Bildung in each of the three spaces that constitute her
journey: the airport, the cave in which she is detained, and the Senegalese
Embassy in France. Edwards shows how Fall deconstructs these
successive man-made spaces that each denote nations and national
belonging, thus casting doubt upon categories of identity used to theorize
the Bildungsroman genre: “society,” “hero,” “self-knowledge,” “maturity”
and “stage of completeness,” for example. This chapter argues that stories
become the protagonist’s only strategy for survival in this precarious
journey, and that Fall’s text thus constitutes a valorization of behaviors
and alternative communities, rather than of nations or of the much-hyped
“third space” between them. The protagonist’s final Bildung is that
categories of monolithic cultures are unreliable as cultures and subcultures
are constantly changing, international relations affect individuals in any
number of ways, and the cultural mixing that occurs as nations come
together is not necessarily a positive or emancipatory experience.
Chapter Five
Children are central to most of the works of Gabrielle Roy. In her
books, children grow up in a society where their mothers suffer severely
from the misery of the feminine condition and, under the domination of
the Catholic Church, they give birth to large numbers of children while
living in abject poverty, with husbands who are either absent or unable to
provide for their families. Women at that time had little or no
opportunities for personal growth.
In this study, portraits of female children growing up before the Quiet
Revolution in Quebec will be elaborated upon. It will also be shown that
x
Abstracts
Roy offers two solutions as to how female adolescents could be able to
come of age. By becoming either a teacher, who can become a spiritual
mother to children, or a writer, who can become her authentic self through
her creativity, a woman could fulfill her potential and gain a personal
identity. Many of Roy's works are fictionalized autobiographical
memoirs. She herself took these two avenues to escape the conventional
societal role of women by first becoming a teacher, and then a writer.
Some of the works to be explored in this study are: Bonheur d'occasion,
La Petite Poule d'eau, La Route d'Altamont and Ces enfants de ma vie.
Chapter Six
Québéc authors frequently develop themes related to childhood misery
in order to exorcise the darkness of past repression, former spiritual and
intellectual restraints. Marie-Claire Blais, in particular, often chooses to
narrate from a child's innocent perspective to examine a world of dark
misery: her protagonist Pauline Archange in The Manuscripts of Pauline
Archange (1968) is victim of the depravity she exposes. Pauline
Archange, who interprets her early years from the perspective of her more
mature self, debunks the bucolic and idealistic vision the traditional roman
du terroir had depicted.
This study connects Pauline’s experiences to the political and social
repression of the 1940s and 1950s during Premier Maurice Duplessis’
repressive regime. Pauline's father symbolically represents the patriarchal
order as we see him as both victim and perpetrator of this order. Pauline's
mother is also portrayed a victim of the system she serves. She devotedly
upholds the religious beliefs that keep her sick and impoverished as she
dutifully bears more children destined to die one after the other. Moreover,
she burdens her daughter with a legacy of repressive teachings and
catholic guilt.
Marie-Claire Blais' focus is on the personal and private rather than on
the public and political. Her critique is grounded in Pauline's personal
experiences, formed by her milieu. While the story is never explicitly
related to specific events in the Quebec political realm, the personal
liberation that structures The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange
corresponds to a gradual and progressive dismantling of outmoded and
authoritarian religious, political, educational and familial structures before
the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s that propelled Quebec into the modern
age.
Francophone Women Coming of Age
xi
Chapter Seven
In this chapter, the three novels, Gabrielle Gourdeau’s L'écho du
silence, Monique Proulx’s Le sexe des étoiles, and Marie Laberge’s
Annabelle, are examined to compare the depiction of female adolescents
with those found in novels written before the Quiet Revolution. This
portrayal includes themes such as sexuality, religion, family life, coming
of age, and physical, spiritual, and cognitive development.
The
conclusions drawn, although noteworthy, are perhaps not surprising to
those interested in Quebec’s culture, history, and society: In comparison
to the earlier novels with female adolescent protagonists, the decreased
influence of the Catholic Church is quite apparent in these works. Indeed,
the pre-Quiet-Revolution myths, which rest on Catholicism, the French
language, and large families, are not apparent; rather, most evident are the
importance of the individual and the need for self-expression. The Quiet
Revolution serves not only as a catalyst for economic changes, but also
social changes, such as the church and clergy’s marginal importance to
Quebec’s citizens and an increasingly secular society. Predominant also
are the material pleasures of Montreal, which have replaced the spiritual
comfort offered by religion and communal pleasures of traditional large
families often depicted in earlier novels.
Although women were granted the right to vote in 1940 and despite the
passing of a law in 1964 granting equality to both spouses, most women’s
duties before the 1960s revolved around staying at home, having many
children, and taking care of their husbands and the household. Thus,
many women in novels with female adolescents (before the Quiet
Revolution) were not encouraged to obtain a higher education and follow
a career. The post-Quiet Revolution novels, however, reveal that the
young women have created their own destinies in a relatively short period
of time.
INTRODUCTION
DEBRA POPKIN
The present study began as a panel of papers presented at a session on the
theme of Coming of Age, the Quest for Identity in Francophone Women
Writers, organized and chaired by Professor Debra Popkin, at the NEMLA
(Northeast Modern Language Association) annual Conference in
Philadelphia in March 2006. The papers were expanded and additional
contributors joined the project, resulting in this book, a collection of
articles centering on the plight of growing up female in male-dominated
Francophone cultures. Issues of culture, tradition, religion, parental
conflicts and sibling rivalry will be addressed in the works of authors from
France, Quebec, Africa and the Caribbean. Authors to be analyzed include
Annie Ernaux (France) and Assia Djebar (North Africa), Gabrielle Roy,
Marie-Claire Blais, Monique Proulx, Marie Laberge (from Quebec),
Aminata Sow Fall (Senegal, West Africa), Gisèle Pineau and Myriam
Warner-Vieyra (from the Caribbean). The seven chapters in this book
explore the challenges faced by women from late 19th century through the
20th and into the 21st century as they gradually gained a voice to express
their changing roles in society.
The focus is on growing up in a paternalistic society that defines and limits
the potential of young girls. Themes to be examined include religion
(Catholic and Muslim), customs, education, mother-daughter
relationships, father-daughter relationships, teenage pregnancy, and the
rituals of coming of age. In many cases, the author/narrator, as the oldest
daughter, is expected to follow traditions, do the housework, care for and
help raise younger siblings. Conflicts occur between daughter and parents
who inculcate traditional values and try to restrict their child's freedom.
These conflicts are especially prevalent during adolescence when
daughters face the challenges of education, the lure of romance with the
opposite sex, and the temptations of more open societies.
The importance of writing as a source of liberation and self-definition will
be explored in light of the young girl’s quest for freedom. Why write
2
Introduction
memoirs? Why write in French? These issues are discussed at length,
especially in cases where French is the language of the colonizer (Assia
Djebar and Gisèle Pineau) or where French is essential to the preservation
of one’s cultural identity, as it is for Quebec writers.
Authors whose memoirs and fiction are analyzed in this study span three
continents––Europe, North America (Quebec and the Caribbean) and
Africa––but they share a common search for identity and self-definition.
This book will be a fine resource for college and university professors and
students in programs of French, Women's Studies, and French/Francophone
Literature as well as African, Caribbean, and Quebec Studies. The works
analyzed are by well-known, award-winning authors with international
reputations. Assia Djebar, for example, was recently elected to the French
Academy, and has won worldwide recognition. Gabrielle Roy and MarieClaire Blais are the foremost writers from Quebec. Above all this book
will be a welcome companion to anthologies currently assigned as
required reading in feminist courses throughout the USA and Canada.
Professors may assign the essays in this book as required reading or as
secondary sources to stimulate discussion, essay writing, and debate in
their courses on 20th century literature and on contemporary French
women writers.
CHAPTER ONE
MULTIPLE IDENTITIES AS ADOLESCENT
COPING MECHANISM IN ANNIE ERNAUX’S
LES ARMOIRES VIDES AND ASSIA DJEBAR’S
L’AMOUR, LA FANTASIA
BETH GALE
Most of us can remember some sort of play with the notion of a
malleable identity during adolescence. This play with identity can take the
form of experimentation with handwriting, role-playing, or conscious
manipulation of personality in various situations. The following is a brief
look at two novels by Annie Ernaux and Assia Djebar, whose protagonists
engage in this kind of conscious manipulation of the self so as to cope
with the struggles of adolescence. In both novels, the protagonists
describe their identities as divided according to the different spaces they
inhabit and associated languages they speak. This fracturing of the self
can be both liberating and suffocating; it can leave the young narrator
feeling detached from herself, or it can allow her to tell her story with
greater accuracy and detail.
Les Armoires vides
In her novel Les Armoires vides (1973), Annie Ernaux depicts how one
adolescent girl, Denise, copes with the different pressures and traumas in
her life by creating two worlds for herself, each of which has its own rules,
language, and characters. It is the only way that she can understand and
process the traumatizing conflict between what she experiences at home
and at school, and the ways she is expected to behave in each place.
Denise comprehends and orders her two worlds as a response to stress
and pressure to conform. At first, though, identity play is mere fantasy, a
playful exploration of potential future identities: secretary, cyclist,
4
Beth Gale
pharmacist, ballet star... (33). In the carefree world of her youth, the shop
and café run by her parents, a certain language is spoken, particular values
are reinforced, and it is not until she goes to private school that she learns
to judge her past, to weigh it against the new life she discovers at school:
“Même pas la même langue,” (not even the same language) Denise
observes (53). In this other world, with its own rules and official
language, she learns a new kind of role-play that enables her to fit in: “A
l’école, c’était le faire comme si continuel, faire comme si c’était drôle,
faire comme si c’était intéressant, faire comme si c’était bien” (Les
Armoires vides 54). “School was a constant make-believe, make believe
it’s funny, make believe it’s interesting, make believe all’s well” (Cleaned
Out. Translated by Carol Sanders, 36).
Sensing the differences between her and her classmates Denise yearns
to be like everyone else: “je me vois, je me vois et je ne ressemble pas
aux autres... Je ne veux pas le croire, pourquoi je ne serais pas comme
elles” (59). “I see myself, I see myself and I am not like the others... I
don’t want to admit it, why can’t I be like them” (39). The humiliation
she feels in comparison with her peers makes her long to be like those
around her, and she does her best to gain their approval, even embellishing
her life so that she will be more acceptable to them. Playing a role
(mastering a new language, doctoring the story of her life, pretending to
like school) thus becomes the means by which Denise can fit into the new
world and be accepted there.
For a time, Denise is able to manage the two sets of rules in her two
worlds. She masters both for a few years:
Un bel équilibre pendant quelques années. Double, jusqu’à la sixième
avec pas mal d’aise... Les deux mondes côte à côte sans trop se gêner. ”
(Armoires vides 73).
I struck a happy balance for several years. A double act, up to the
beginning of later grades, pulled off with reasonable ease... Two worlds
side by side without too many problems (Cleaned Out 48).
Then the lure of her new world begins to seduce her. She learns a new
language in books, one so powerful that she can only use it in writing, not
speaking:
je n’employais mes nouveaux mots que pour écrire, je leur restituais leur
seule forme possible pour moi. Dans la bouche, je n’y arrivais pas. (...) Je
porte en moi deux langages. (Armoires vides, 77).
Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia
5
I used my new words only for writing, I was giving them the only shape I
knew to be possible. I couldn’t bring myself to speak them. (...) I carry in
me two languages. (Cleaned Out 51).
Literary writing gives her the feeling of superiority, of triumph over the
plain language of her youth. Yet she accepts both languages as part of
herself. Warren Motte writes that “the notion of class is as intimately
bound up in language as it is in economy. Clearly, changing one’s class
means changing one’s language” (60). Both languages, both worlds
represent important aspects of Denise’s inchoate identity.
Eventually, mastering both worlds becomes more difficult and the
second world, that of learning, begins to predominate. Slowly, the “vraie
Denise Lesur, la nouvelle Denise Lesur” (79), the school star, takes over
and Denise’s dream of becoming someone else seems possible: “Le rêve,
être une autre fille”(80), her dream: to be a different girl. She begins to
associate academic success with becoming someone else:
Rêver à la Denise que je serai quand j’aurai maîtrisé les équations à trois
inconnues, (...) me voir dans l’avenir (...). Je savais bien que ça me ferait
changer, forcément . (Armoires vides 93).
Dream about the Denise I shall be when I have mastered equations with
three unknowns, visions of myself in the future, (...) I knew I’d be
different then, inevitably. (Cleaned Out 62)
She seems here to yearn to be another Denise, to embrace new parts of
herself and leave others behind. But investing solely in her studies
distances Denise from her parents: “Quatorze ans et le monde avait fini de
m’appartenir. Etrangère à mes parents, à mon milieu, je ne voulais plus
les regarder” (119). “Fourteen years old and the world was no longer
mine. I was a stranger to my parents, and to everyone around me. I
wanted nothing to do with them” (79). Interestingly, she states here that
“the world” no longer belongs to her. It is as though being estranged from
one part of herself separates her from the rest of the world. She is quite
conscious of being the one moving ahead, moving away from the life she
had at home with her parents.
Language is still an important part of this movement: as Warren Motte
observes,
Once having acceded to the bourgeois linguistic world, it is clearly
impossible to return, and Ernaux finds that she is irrevocably separated
from her parents by her language—the very language that she proposes to
use in order to recount that separation. (62)
6
Beth Gale
Yet despite the pain of willful distancing from her first home linguistic
and otherwise, she doesn’t feel at home at school either: “Le pire, c’était
que la classe, les filles, ce n’était pas non plus mon vrai lieu” (Les
armoires vides 119). “Worst of all, I no longer felt really at home in class
with the other girls either” (Cleaned Out 79).
For her developing identity, Denise needs and yet criticizes her two
worlds; neither is perfect enough to exclude the other. One can read into
her statement that school wasn’t her true place either that she feels like a
stranger to both worlds, that she has no true place. This leaves Denise
feeling lost and disoriented. In a 1993 interview with Claire-Lise
Tondeur, Ernaux addresses this feeling of alienation in each of her worlds.
As she explains, “Le sujet des conversations est différent, gestes et
langage sont différents parce que globalement les deux mondes diffèrent.
C’est la position très inconfortable d’être entre deux chaises” (38). (The
subject of conversations is different; gestures and language are different
because on the whole the two worlds are different. It’s a very
uncomfortable position to be between two chairs.) She continues to
describe how this experience of being different has affected her writing:
Mon regard restera différent. Je suis exilée de mon propre milieu. Jamais
je ne me départirai de cela. J’ai le regard fait par cet exil intérieur
(Ernaux, Interview with Tondeur, 38).
(My perspective will remain different. I am exiled from my own
environment. I will never deviate from that. I see things based on this
inner exile.)
Boys soon provide a distraction and another means by which Denise
can access a new reality and escape from her former self: “Je ne suis plus
Denise Lesur (...). Je rêve à celle que je deviendrai dans ce monde où ils
m’entraîneront. Cette fois, elle vous vaudra bien la Lesur, décontractée, à
la page...” (Armoires vides, 130). “I’m no longer Denise Lesur (...). I
dream about the person I shall become in the new world they’ll take me to.
There is a marked improvement on Denise Lesur, elegant and at ease...”
(87). Here, the rivalry inherent in the class differences she observes
between herself and her classmates comes to the fore. The motivation for
her project of becoming someone else is revealed to be the desire to be
hip, to be admired, to be what she imagines the others to be. Boys become
the means to an end. In her mind, catching a boy she perceives as elegant
and intelligent will help her transform herself: “il faut le harponner pour
devenir autre” (134). “I’ve got to catch him so as to become someone
different” (90).
Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia
7
When she is with a date, Denise feels that total escape from the
shameful past of her parents’ café is possible: “le café-épicerie est au bout
de la ville, au bout de la terre, je ne suis plus Lesur, à côté de mon flirt”
(143). “the store is at the other end of town, at the other end of the earth,
I’m not Denise Lesur, I’m with my date” (97). In this passage, total
divorce from her roots is suggested by the distancing from her family
name and from her home.
Ultimately, Denise’s project of leaving her former self behind seems to
be a failed one. The frame story of her wrenching abortion experience
provides the emotional backdrop for her sense of never being good
enough, of never succeeding in escaping from the past. “Vingt ans pour
arriver là. La faute de personne. Moi toute seule, moi d’un bout à
l’autre” (15). “Twenty years to come to this. No one’s fault. Only myself
to blame, from beginning to end” (10). Denise’s sense of her multiple
identities appears in what follows:
Qui? D’abord la fille de l’épicier Lesur, puis la première de la classe, tout
le temps. Et la dadaise en soquettes de dimanche, l’étudiante boursière.
Et puis rien peut-être, tringlée par la faiseuse d’anges.. (Armoires vides
15)
Who? First I was the storekeeper’s daughter, always top of the class.
Then a great big lump wearing socks on Sundays, the scholarship student.
Then screwed up by a back-street abortionist, and that might be the end of
it. (Cleaned Out 10)
In her article on Les Armoires vides, Nora Cottille-Foley suggests that
the violent abortion represents a rejection of Denise’s proletariat inner
self: “the abortion becomes synonymous with a scouring, or a violent
emptying of her social identity” (895). Of course, like her other attempts,
this last one cannot erase the pain associated with Denise’s manipulations
of her identity. Her sense of having failed herself, of not realizing her
ideal, remains toward the end of the text. As she observes, “Je n’arriverai
jamais à entasser assez de diplômes pour cacher la merde au chat, ma
famille, les rires idiots des poivrots, la connasse que j’ai été, bourrée de
gestes et de paroles vulgaires” (161). “How can I ever get through enough
exams to make up for the skeletons in the family closet, for the crazy
laughter of the drunks, for the vulgar manners and language of the oaf that
used to be me?” (108).
8
Beth Gale
She then introduces the notion of doing violence to her former self
with her studies:
Je n’arriverai jamais à écraser à coups de culture, d’examens, la fille Lesur
d’il y a cinq ans, d’il y a six mois. Je me cracherai toujours dessus!
(Armoires vides 161)
All the education and exams in the world won’t be enough to cover up the
Lesur girl of five years, of six months ago. I’ll always despise her!
(Cleaned Out 108).
Denise’s disgust for her childhood, her background, and even her former
selves ends up poisoning her sense of identity and convincing her that she
will never be good enough. As Ernaux remarks in her interview with
Tondeur, “On s’autolimite quand on est d’une classe populaire. On est sûr
qu’on n’y arrivera pas” (42). “You limit yourself when you are from the
working class. You are sure you’ll never succeed.” Denise finishes the
frame narrative with despair and an overwhelming sense of hatred for both
worlds that fuels the central narrative, an attempt to discover the cause of
this hatred: “Ce n’est pas vrai, je ne suis pas née avec la haine, je ne les ai
pas toujours détestés, mes parents, les clients, la boutique…” (17). “I don’t
believe it, I didn’t hate them from birth, I didn’t always hate my parents,
the customers, the store...” (11).
Members of both worlds receive her hate: “Les autres, les cultivés, les
profs, les convenables, je les déteste aussi maintenant. J’en ai plein le
ventre” (17). “I hate the others too now, those with an education, the
professors, respectable people. I’m sick to death of them” (11). This
reference to her full belly suggests her frustration with both the people
around her and her unwanted pregnancy. She resorts to the notion of
vomiting on them in protest, feeling “screwed from all sides”: “A vomir
sur eux, sur tout le monde, la culture, tout ce que j’ai appris. Baisée de
tous les côtés…” (17). “Puke all over them, my education, culture,
everything I’ve learned. Completely fucked up...” (11).
She concludes toward the novel’s end that her hatred came from
feeling stuck between her two worlds: “Le cul entre deux chaises, ça
pousse à la haine, il fallait bien choisir” (181). “Falling on your ass
between two stools makes you a prey to hatred, the time came when I had
to choose” (122).
In his commentary on Ernaux’s novel La Place, Warren Motte writes
that “Ernaux finds herself caught once again between two kinds of culture,
unable to come to terms with either one, telling only the manner in which
they clash” (65). Denise is similarly unable to come to terms with the
Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia
9
warring parts of her identity. Her choice of one world, one language, one
Denise over another ultimately leaves her feeling lost and empty.
L’Amour, la fantasia
In L’Amour, la fantasia (1985),1 set in Algeria, Djebar’s adolescent
narrator also uses language as a means of navigation between her two
worlds, which she associates with her father and mother, different cultures
and traditions. Language is problematized in various ways in the novel,
particularly the relationship to French, the language of the colonizers.
This tension dominates the passage that begins, like the novel, with the
image of the young narrator going to the French school with her father.
She feels pride at having “définitivement (...) échappé à l’enfermement”
(permanently escaped cloistering) and exaltation at being the only one to
savor such rare freedom, but at the same time there is also “une réticence,
un scrupule”, “un doute” that haunt her: “Pourquoi à moi seule, dans la
tribu, cette chance?” (239). “qualms” “doubt” “Why me? Why do I alone,
of all my tribe, have this opportunity?” (Fantasia: An Algerian
Cavalcade. trans. by Dorothy S. Blair 213). This “luck” of having
escaped the confinement imposed on the other girls, of being able to go to
the French school, is both positive and negative for the narrator. Her
father gives her the gift of leaving the harem to attend the French school,
but the same liberating gesture also forces her to leave the other women,
the safety and comfort of the female milieu she has inhabited. Critic
Mildred Mortimer compares this first walk to school to the start of an
ambiguous journey: “The day that Assia Djebar’s father escorted her to
school… he set her on a bilingual, bicultural, indeed an ambiguous
journey that freed her from the female enclosure but sent her into a form
of exile away from the majority of her sisters” (302). The gift is thus both
lucky and unlucky, a paradox which dominates the novel as a whole.
The narrator continues her description of the ambiguous nature of the
French language, this gift from her father. In an article on the novel, critic
Hédi Abdel-Jaouad observes that “the language of the Other is at once a
gift and a burden… It is both a source of liberation… and alienation” (28).
The narrator accentuates this ambiguity when she compares her
relationship to the French language to a “mariage forcé” (“forced into a
‘marriage’”). Her father gave it to her, she suggests, “avant l’âge nubile”
(“before I was nubile”); he gave her to the “camp ennemi,” “the enemy
camp” (213), symbolized by the French language (239).
This violent imagery of a father forcing his daughter to accept as
husband an enemy for whom she is not physically ready underlines the
10
Beth Gale
problematic relationship to the French language in the colonial context.
For her father, teaching French is a way of ameliorating his family’s way
of life, of escaping from financial trouble. For her, it is both a gift of
freedom and a curse, taking her away from what she knows before she is
prepared. The narrator’s studies cause a different sort of trouble with the
other women.
In one section of the text, “L’Ecole Coranique,” (The Quranic School)
when her mother is asked why the narrator doesn’t wear a veil, her mother
answers that she reads. “’Elle lit’, autant dire que l’écriture à lire, y
compris celle des mécréants, est toujours source de révélation: de la
mobilité du corps dans mon cas, et donc de ma future liberté” (203). “’She
reads’ is tantamount to saying that writing to be read, including that of the
unbelievers, is always a source of revelation: in my case of the mobility
of my body, and so of my future freedom” (180). Reading is thus linked
to freedom, to escape from the harem and from the symbolic veil as well
as from precocious exile and a negative reaction from her community.
This negative image of a father giving his daughter in “mariage” to the
other side, “le camp ennemi”, is followed by a more positive description
of the narrator’s position: “Je jouissais du privilège reconnu d’être
‘l’aimée’ de mon père, puisqu’il m’avait préservée, sans hésiter, de la
claustration” (240). “I was privileged to be my father’s ‘favourite’ since he
had unhesitatingly preserved me from cloistering” (214). She seems
unready to give herself a definitive place, hesitating between two
possibilities: is her father’s gift a proof of love or of condemnation?
According to David Lloyd, who has written about autobiography:
A perpetual tension subsists between the desire for self-origination, to
produce oneself as if without a father, and the awkward knowledge of
indebtedness to what precedes and influences the subject (Lloyd 162).
The narrator recognizes that she owes her education to her father, but
reveals a certain resistance to paternal authority, particularly with regard
to writing.
The novel begins with an episode where the adolescent revolts against
her father’s rule. He destroys a letter that she has received from a
stranger. She puts back together the letter that so angered her father and
observes the effect of her father’s ban:
Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia
11
Les mots conventionnels et en langue française de l’étudiant en vacances
se sont gonflés d’un désir imprévu, hyperbolique, simplement parce que
le père a voulu les détruire (L’amour, la fantasia 12).
Simply because my father wanted to destroy the letter, I interpreted the
conventional French wording used by this student on holiday as the
cryptic expression of some sudden, desperate passion (Fantasia, An
Algerian Cavalcade 4).
This effect lingers:
Les mois, les années suivantes, je me suis engloutie dans l’histoire
d’amour ou plutôt dans l’interdiction de l’amour; l’intrigue s’est épanouie
du fait même de la censure paternelle (12).
During the months and years that followed, I became absorbed by this
business of love, or rather by the prohibition laid on love; my father’s
condemnation only served to encourage the intrigue (4).
Interestingly, French becomes the language of forbidden love:
Dans cette amorce d’éducation sentimentale, la correspondance secrète se
fait en français: ainsi, cette langue que m’a donnée le père devient
entremetteuse et mon initiation, dès lors, se place sous un signe double,
contradictoire…(L’amour, la fantasia 12).
In these early stages of my sentimental education, our secret
correspondence is carried on in French: thus the language that my father
had been at pains for me to learn, serves as a go-between, and from now a
double, contradictory sign reigns over my initiation... (Fantasia 4).
The paternal prohibition of reading the letter only increases the appeal of
the secret correspondence. When she discovers as a young girl the
epistolary relationship between her female cousins and Arab strangers, she
joins in with pleasure, seduced by “l’audace que cette correspondance
clandestine nécessitait,” (12) “the audacity needed to carry on this
clandestine correspondence” (4).
More than the letters themselves, the girls savor the risk that they
represent:
Nous en évoquions les terribles dangers. Il y avait eu dans nos villes, pour
moins que cela, de nombreux pères ou frères devenus “justiciers”; le sang
12
Beth Gale
d’une vierge, fille ou soeur, avait été versé pour un billet glissé...
(L’amour, la fantasia 21).
We conjured up the terrible dangers they were exposed to. There had
been numerous cases in our towns of fathers or brothers taking the law
into their own hands for less than this; the blood of an unmarried daughter
or sister shed for a letter slipped surreptitiously into a hand… (Fantasia
12).
In this atmosphere, participating in the epistolary exchange is a form of
revolt: “Dans cette maison, désormais une révolte sourde s’était infiltrée”
(21). “A secret spirit of subversion had now seeped into the house” (12).
Writing French letters from inside becomes for the girls a means of
escaping from the closed space of the house, and of subverting paternal
authority. The danger of the enterprise gives them the opportunity to tell
each other stories, to imagine possibilities, to create, which hints at the
career of the young narrator. For Djebar, the act of writing is always
double, at once liberating and dangerous.
Despite the narrator’s ambivalent attitude toward her father’s
authority, it is while observing him that she discovers the subversive
power of writing. One day, her father writes a postcard to her mother, at a
time when an Algerian man did not refer directly to his wife in writing:
La révolution était manifeste: mon père, de sa propre écriture, et sur une
carte qui allait voyager de ville en ville, qui allait passer sous tant et tant
de regards masculins… mon père avait donc osé écrire le nom de sa
femme (L’amour, la fantasia 48).
The radical change in customs was apparent for all to see: my father had
quite brazenly written his wife’s name, in his own handwriting, on a
postcard which was going to travel from one town to another which was
going to be exposed to so many masculine eyes (Fantasia 37).
This unheard of act reveals an element of subversion in the narrator’s
family, a tendency to move away from traditional customs by means of the
French language. Adel-Jaouad suggests that this transgression must take
place in the language of the Other:
This audacious act of breaking away from tradition is and can only be
made in the Conqueror’s language. Hence the contradictory appeal and
ambivalent status of this foreign (imposed) but liberating (cathartic)
medium… The parental cultural transgression and its psychological
significance were not lost on the adolescent…. (Adel-Jaouad 29).
Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia
13
Thus the imposed foreign language is also a liberating one that facilitates
the family’s revolt.
French is a language that the narrator often places on the paternal side.
Djebar explains in an interview with Mildred Mortimer: “le français est
aussi pour moi la langue paternelle. La langue de l’ennemi d’hier est
devenue pour moi la langue du père du fait que mon père était instituteur
dans une école française” (“Entretien,” 201). (French is also for me the
paternal language. The language of yesterday’s enemy became for me the
language of the father because in fact my father was a teacher in a French
school. Interview). Mortimer admits that associating French with the
paternal side may appear problematic:
Some critics may argue that it is false to characterize the French language
as paternal, since Algerian men have continued to speak Arabic in their
family and social groups. However, I believe that Djebar views the
French language as a source of power and dominance to which certain
men (such as her father) had access during the colonial period and to
which women did not. (“Language,” 304)
French, the paternal language, becomes in this chapter “langue marâtre”,
“stepmother’ tongue,” while Arabic remains the mother tongue, but that of
an absent mother: “Quelle est ma langue mère disparue, qui m’a
abandonnée sur le trottoir et s’est enfuie?” (240). “Which is my long-lost
mother-tongue, that left me standing and disappeared?” (215). The
narrator uses this unnatural mother tongue that does not belong to her and
to which she feels no ties. French is described as “aride” and associated
with the desert, while the lost mother tongue, the language of love, is
associated with “richesse,” “luxuriance” and sumptuousness (240). The
narrator describes her body as “nude” and in this state of nudity, “il ne
s’agit plus d’écrire que pour survivre” (240). “it is no longer a question of
writing only to survive” (214). Abandoned by her two parents, the narrator
tries to survive by using this unloved language that has undressed her.
Often linked to unveiling, this image of nudity returns constantly in
the novel. Djebar associates unveiling and writing in French with nudity:
Tenter l’autobiographie par les seuls mots français, c’est, sous le scalpel
de l’autopsie à vif, montrer plus que sa peau. Sa chair se desquame,
semble-t-il, en lambeaux du parler d’enfance qui ne s’écrit plus”
(L’Amour, la fantasia 178).
14
Beth Gale
To attempt an autobiography using French words alone is to lend oneself
to the vivisector’s scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. The flesh
flakes off and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language
of my childhood (Fantasia 156).
She continues with a vivid image of language opening wounds: “Les
blessures s’ouvrent, les veines pleurent, coule le sang de soi et des autres,
qui n’a jamais séché…” (178). “Wounds are reopened, veins weep, one’s
own blood flows and that of others, which has never dried” (156). Here,
using French to tell her story both unveils the narrator and separates her
from her childhood:
Parler de soi-même hors de la langue des aïeules, c’est se dévoiler certes,
mais pas seulement pour sortir de l’enfance, pour s’en exiler
définitivement (L’Amour, la fantasia, 178).
Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to
unveil oneself, not only to emerge from childhood but to leave it, never to
return. (Fantasia 156)
The language itself reinforces the link between nudity and unveiling.
“Le dévoilement, aussi contingent, devient, comme le souligne mon arabe
dialectal du quotidien, vraiment ‘se mettre à nu’ ” (178). “Such incidental
unveiling is tantamount to stripping oneself naked, as the demotic Arabic
dialect emphasizes” (156-7). Djebar insists: the act of writing herself in
French, a painful act that reminds her of the pains of the past, is a kind of
unveiling, a revealing. The exile mentioned by the narrator is a reference
to the fact that French draws the speaker away from the oral Arabic
tradition and from the community of women (“les aïeules”). Though one
can see this unveiling as a betrayal of Arab culture, the autobiography
written in French is an even more serious transgression. It shows more
than the body: it reawakens the past of oppression with which the
language is associated, and reopens wounds.
The narrator feels the tension between Arab oral tradition and French
written language as an interior struggle. Her body becomes a battlefield
where neither language can dominate the other. In an article on the novel,
H. Adlai Murdoch writes of this tension as a menacing trap, both for the
narrator and her text:
It is the cultural conflict suggested by this duality, this inability to choose
from among discourses… that faces Djebar’s discursive reconstruction of
a postcolonial Algerian subjectivity at this juncture, threatening this
intrinsically ambiguous construct with dissolution. Such a conflict also
Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia
15
presents itself to the narrator, for… she finds herself caught between
French and Arabic, between the delimiting impositions of the colonizer on
the one hand, and the desire for recognition and affirmation of identity on
the other. (88)
This pessimistic description of the narrator’s position as trapped between
two discourses culminates in an image hardly more positive: “neither
French nor Arabic, neither literacy nor orality, is sufficient to allow
Djebar’s narrator—-trapped as she is between discourses—to continue, yet
she knows that she must” (91). To say that the narrator cannot choose a
sole tradition or a sole discourse to write herself seems logical; one can
nevertheless observe that for her, being caught between two discourses is
not a trap, but an exit. Free to choose certain aspects of each discourse,
she can make her text more fully reflective of her experience. She
succeeds in blending the two traditions in order to write herself in as
honest, as true a manner as possible. Nada Turk writes that these two
discourses do not at all threaten Djebar’s text, but rather facilitate its
creation: “le rapport de Djebar à la langue persiste à être un rapport
dualiste. Son univers est divisé en deux…. Accepter cette dualité a donné
à Djebar le courage d’écrire une autobiographie” (22). “Djebar’s
relationship to language continues to have a double nature. Her universe is
divided in two… The acceptance of this duality has given Djebar the
courage to write an autobiography.”
This is not a pain-free process for Djebar or for her narrator, defining
and distinguishing herself by borrowing elements of the identity of the
other, the enemy. In order to tell herself as a colonized subject in the
adopted language, Djebar’s narrator plays with a pluralized identity, in
which she recognizes the influences of her two cultures. She notes that by
trying to write her story and distinguish herself with French words, she
understands that all she has done is to “choisir un autre voile”, “s’engloutir
davantage dans l’anonymat des aïeules!” (243). “choosing another veil,”
“progressively sucked down into the anonymity of those women of old—
my ancestors!” (217).
All returns to the paradox according to which single identity is but
ancestral collectivity, and unveiling is but a new veil. Djebar has observed
in an interview that blending her voice with other female voices in her text
helped her to say certain things. Paradoxically, the single voice can best
be heard, can only be heard, surrounded by multiple voices.
In the same way, for both of these adolescents, a single identity can
only be found in mixed or multiple identities. Djebar’s narrator needs
16
Beth Gale
both languages; Denise needs both worlds. Shifting, fragmented or plural
identities become a coping mechanism that allows them to negotiate
internal conflict caused by the external conflict of two different worlds,
two different languages, and to embrace different aspects of themselves
during the turbulent period of adolescence.
Bibliography
Abdel-Jaouad, Hédi. "L'Amour, la fantasia: Autobiography as fiction."
Revue Celfan vol. 7. 1-2, 1987-88: 25-29.
Cottille-Foley, Nora. “Abortion and Contamination of the Social Order in
Annie Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides. The French Review vol. 72. 5,
April 1999: 886-96.
Djebar, Assia. L’Amour, la fantasia. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995.
—. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993.
—. "Du français comme butin." La Quinzaine littéraire 436 (16-31
mars 1985).
Ernaux, Annie. Les Armoires vides. Paris: Gallimard, 1974
—. Cleaned Out. Trans. Carol Sanders. Normal, Illinois:
Dalkey
Archive Press, 1990.
Lloyd, David. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence
Mangan and the
Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Mortimer, Mildred. "Entretien avec Assia Djebar." Research in African
Literatures vol. 19. 2, Summer 1988: 197-205.
—. "Language and Space in the fiction of Assia Djebar and Leila
Sebbar." Research in African Literatures vol. 19.3, Fall
1988: 301-311.
Motte, Warren. “Annie Ernaux’s Understatement”. The French Review
vol. 69, 1, October 1995: 55-67.
Murdoch, H. Adlai. "Rewriting Writing: Identity, Exile and Renewal in
Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia." Yale French Studies vol. 83,
1993: 71-92.
Tondeur, Claire-Lise. “Entretien avec Annie Ernaux.” The French
Review vol. 69, 1, October 1995: 37-44.
Turk, Nada. "L'Amour, la fantasia d'Assia Djebar: 'Chronique de
guerre, voix des femmes.'" Revue Celfan vol. 7. 1-2, 1987-88:
21-24.
Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia
1
17
Sections of this article on L’Amour, la fantasia appeared previously in French in
“Un cadeau d'amour empoisonné: Les paradoxes de l'autobiographie postcoloniale dans L'Amour, la fantasia.” Neophilologus. Vol. LXXXVI, No. 4,
October 2002. 525-536.
CHAPTER TWO
AN ABSENT PRESENCE: ADOLESCENCE
AND THE INADEQUATE FEMALE ROLE MODEL
IN MYRIAM WARNER-VIEYRA’S
LE QUIMBOISEUR L’AVAIT DIT
(AS THE SORCERER SAID…)
LEAH TOLBERT LYONS
Guadeloupean writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra paints a chaotic canvas
of teen angst in her first novel Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit (1980) (As the
Sorcerer Said….). At first glance, it would appear that Zétou (Suzette), the
novel’s protagonist, is driven by an obsessive desire to continue her
education and that this desire leads to her downfall. Upon closer
examination, however, it becomes evident that Zétou’s mental decline
may be attributed to her mother’s extraordinarily bad parenting and the
lessons that Zétou learns from her mother as a consequence of this bad
parenting. Zétou’s mother, Rosemonde, abandons her children and her
husband and leaves her island home, moving to France with her lover,
Frenchman Roger Milan. Ironically, even through her absence because of
abandonment, Rosemonde’s presence serves as hindrance to Zétou and
foils her life plans. When Rosemonde returns years later and agrees to take
Zétou to France to live with her, Rosemonde’s presence in Zétou’s life is
marked by the absence of maternal love and compassion. Whether
Rosemonde is absent or present, her influence in Zétou’s life leads to a
negative outcome for Zétou. By examining the impact of mothering in
Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s As the Sorcerer Said…, we will gain a better
understanding of the writer’s view of the importance of women, and
mothers in particular, as role models in the process of leading girls to
womanhood.