Francophone Women Coming of Age
Transcription
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.