Marie Cardinal, ten years and so much more

on my desk today

Ten years ago today, Marie Cardinal passed away. I was in Paris when I heard the news. I had hoped to meet her in 2001 while I was living in Switzerland and frequently traveling to France for my doctoral research, but that was not to be in my future.

Her passing, though, had little bearing on the direction of my research. Hardly a day has gone by when I haven't thought of something that she has written or that her work hasn't in some way influenced the way I think or see things. When I first discovered her, thanks very much to an undergraduate professor at Truman State University, I thought I had discovered my adoptive mother. "Les Mots pour le dire," je les ai trouvés. It was as though someone was finally speaking my language, albeit in French. Her words soothed, her pain made me feel understood, her vulnerability drew me in.

While I read, obsessed, and wrote about her during the dissertating years, I also grew to loathe the woman. She truly was like a literary mother to me. I became so sick of her whining, so unforgiving of her obsessive recreation of Algeria, so intolerant of her struggles and supposed victories. Why wasn't she strong enough to divorce her husband? Why was she so afraid of losing Algeria and so unable to see or really accept that it had gone on without her? Why did she refuse to openly criticize the Pied-Noir people, as she blatantly said in Les Pieds-Noirs.

And now I'm writing about her again, and again and again, all these years later. She kept repeating and I can't stop writing about her need to repeat. I have even found new angles to look at that obsessive memory and its manifestations. As I have come to know members of her community and understand the struggles the Pieds-Noirs have faced, I find she is much easier to forgive. She openly confronted traumas that many could not articulate, some I still cannot understand, even though I feel I've tracked her down and pinpointed so many details of her past.

Marie Cardinal, I'm sorry I've only known you through your writing, but perhaps that is the best way to know you, to keep you at your word, there in front of me, always within arm's reach.