Leïla Sebbar: Voyage en Algéries autour de ma chambre

While I work on my chapter, "Leïla Sebbar's Review of Algerias Past," I've been catching up on her blog (thanks to Laura Reeck's Writerly Identities which references it), and I see she has continued her Voyage en Algéries autour de ma chambre, published in 2008. Of particular interest, Sebbar includes images of the fabled Jardin d'Essai in Algiers (see Cixous's Si près, among many other post-Algerian memory works that reference it) and a painting of another Algerian cemetery, Cimetière d’El Hamma Sidi M’Hamed, Alger by Catherine Rossi, 2010. The ruins of the past keep coming to the fore, both visually and textually.

My absence and others' absences

My absence from this blog, if anyone has noticed, is directly related to a wonderful project I've been working on.

Sorenne was born on December 7, 2008, and now that she's settling into her rhythm, I'm able to get back to writing about the Pieds-Noirs, exile, homeland, and nostalgia.

I'm currently working on a project for presentation at the Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston at the end of this month. "Dual, Doubled, and Divided Selves: Women Writing between Algeria and France," focuses on Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, and Hélène Cixous and how these women wrote multiple versions of themselves, each with a different strategy for representing her identity.

Although I won't have time to address it in this paper, I've also been thinking about language choice and how this has further divided authors like Sebbar and Assia Djebar (the subject of Névine El Nossery's talk on the same panel). Below is an interview with Sebbar on her work, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (Paris: Julliard, 2003).

I'm concurrently writing a book review of Assia Djebar edited by Najib Redouane and Yvette Bénayoun-Szmidt (Paris: Harmattan, 2008) for the French Review. It's taking an eternity (see above image of baby Sorenne), but the collection of essays is providing me with much to think about. Sebbar and Djebar have both stated that if they had chosen (or in the case of Sebbar, been able to) write in Arabic, they would not write at all. Djebar explains the risk of writing herself,

"Prendre conscience que l’écriture devient un dévoilement, cela m’a fait reculer. Je me suis remise en question: si je continue à écrire, je vais détruire ma vie car elle va être perturbée par l’écriture romanesque” (29).

and Sebbar focuses on her need for writing fiction,

“… me placer au cœur, au centre, dans la fiction fictionnelle, c’est me placer dans un lieu unitaire, rassembleur des divisions (…) pour moi, la fiction c’est la suture qui masque la blessure, l’écart entre les deux rives” (Lettres parisiennes, Paris: Barrault, 1986. 147).

For these women, the absence of their language and their separations became their source of expression.