Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women's Writing
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Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women's Writing
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Overview
Travel writing, migrant writing, exile writing, expatriate writing, and even the fictional travelling protagonists that emerge in literary works from around the globe, have historically tended to depict mobility as a masculine phenomenon. The presence of such genres in women’s writing, however, poses a rich and unique body of work. This volume examines the texts of Francophone women who have experienced or reflected upon the experience of transnational movement. Due to the particularity of their relationship to home, and the consequent impact of this on their experience of displacement, the study of women's mobility opens up new questions in our understanding of the movement from place to place, and in our broader understanding of colonial and postcolonial worlds. Addressing the proximities and overlaps that exist between the experiences of women exiles, migrants, expatriates and travellers, the collected essays in this book seek to challenge the usefulness, relevance or validity of such terms for conceptualising today’s complex patterns of transnational mobility and the gendered identities produced therein.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783169313 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2016 |
| Series: | French and Francophone Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 550 KB |
About the Author
Isabel Hollis-Touré is Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, with research specialism is North African migration to France.
Read an Excerpt
Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds
Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women's Writing
By Kate Averis, Isabel Hollis-Touré
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2016 The ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-931-3
CHAPTER 1
Strangers in their own Homes: Displaced Women in Léonora Miano's L'Intérieur de la nuit and Conto urs du jour qui vient
ISABEL HOLLIS-TOURÉ
Estrangement, it has been shown, is a trope of twentieth-century French literature, despite the absence of an adequate French translation of the English word. The bilingual dictionary provides us with these possibilities: 'séparation' [separation], 'brouille' [quarrel], 'désunion' [disunion or division] or 'sentiment d'éloignement' [feeling of distance]. Yet none of these words renders the sense of a previous intimacy that is lost, or even become strange to those who used to share it. As 'désunion' suggests, we can only be estranged from one another if we were previously united in some way, in one another's company, yet 'désunion' is unwieldy, and does not capture the sense of something familiar that becomes unknown and unfamiliar. Estrangement is distinct from separation, since it implies a prolonged distance, whilst a separation might be momentary. Estrangement does not, moreover, need to be the result of a quarrel; it may occur consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly. In English, meanwhile, estrangement is defined alongside the now politically laden term of 'alien'. To estrange, the dictionary tells us, is to 'render alien; to regard or treat as alien; to sever from a community; to remove (possessions, subjects) from the ownership or dominion of any one', or 'To alienate in feeling or affection'. This insistence on the 'alien' brings the meaning of estrangement close to terms such as 'strange' and 'stranger'.
The motif of the stranger and the condition of estrangement has particular resonance when a narrative is concerned with human mobility, whether this comes in the form of travel, exile or economic migration. Such narratives are a mainstay of franco-phone postcolonial literature. The postcolonial condition, itself a form of estrangement, is a catalyst for mobility not just from place to place, but also between different cultural and linguistic backdrops. This is not to categorise postcolonial literature as a literature of mobility and migration, merely to acknowledge the cultural crossings that it frequently represents. Yet though estrangement in the contemporary literature of mobility is often understood as a consequence of the external conditions in which the author writes – a context including not only postcolonialism, but also globalisation, mass migrancy and deterritorialisation – estrangement has been described in French literary theory as an inherent part of the human psyche. Julia Kristeva's Etrangers à nousmêmes [Strangers to Ourselves] (1988) draws on Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the foreignness, or 'Otherness', residing within the self: 'La psychanalyse s'éprouve alors comme un voyage dans l'étrangeté de l'autre et de soi-même, vers une éthique du respect pour l'inconciliable' [Psychoanalysis is experienced then like a journey into the strangeness of the other and of the self, towards an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable].
It is only upon accepting our own 'self-estrangement', Kristeva suggests, that we can learn to tolerate the strangeness of others. Kristeva's work provides us with the understanding that the 'stranger' is both within us and outside us. On this basis, we can understand estrangement as a condition that is present within the self, insofar as the self is both strange and familiar at once, both united and divided. The detachment that an individual might experience from Others they encounter is a manifestation, seen in this light, of the divided self. By welcoming the irreconcilable strangeness of the self it becomes possible, then, to tolerate the difference encountered elsewhere. The 'self-estrangement' of Kristeva's work has relevance for the distinction, made by several authors in this volume, between internal and external exile. Whilst 'self-estrangement' may be part and parcel of the human condition, it may also exist, in different form, as a consequence of the separation between an individual and a home, language, country and community that they previously inhabited, insofar as this separation removes the individual from the very factors from which his or her identity is comprised. In this sense, the internal 'condition' of estrangement, and estrangement as a response to external, socio-cultural factors, are two sides of the same coin. The exiled subject is not only physically removed from a place of belonging, but also psychologically detached from the familiar points of reference that are distinct to that place and the people who reside there. In this respect, the new encounters experienced by the displaced subject occur alongside their growing self-estrangement, which sees the pre-departure self gradually become unfamiliar, or even inaccessible. Kristeva states that we are all strangers to ourselves, yet ever more so, surely, when we displace.
This leads us to question the uniqueness of estrangement that comes as a consequence of mobility, or its assumed specificity. If estrangement is not contingent upon a movement of departure from 'home', then what can we make of the distinctive status we give to mobile subjects and the texts that they write? The purpose of this chapter is to argue for a nuanced interpretation of the literature of mobility that allows for estrangement as a precondition for mobility, and not just a consequence. Without denying the deeply unsettling circumstances that may be specific to migrants and their lived experience, certain forms of mobility can act as an affirmation or realisation of an existing condition of estrangement. Crucially, this detracts from the physical departure and the journey travelled as a foundational moment in the estrangement of the mobile subject, since their estrangement may in fact have taken root long before.
This argument has particular resonance for women, who are frequently subject to a fixing of gender roles from which they nonetheless feel detached, or displaced. In this respect, a key characteristic of the women's writing of mobility is the manner in which their societal displacement may precede their physical displacement.
In the works we will study, women are estranged not because of their choice to leave, but crucially because they are women. Women may not be simply strangers to themselves, but more precisely strangers in their own homes. Their departure can be, then, the physical affirmation of a pre-existing estrangement. This raises further the question of the 'home' itself, how this space is understood and perceived, and whether indeed it might be fetishised as a utopian space of wholeness and belonging. In her recent study of narratives of migration and estrangement, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how the binary that opposes displacement with homeliness denies mobile subjects the possibility to construct homes, not despite their displacement, but precisely as a result of this mobility. For Ahmed, 'the space that is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance [...] but the very space in which one is almost, but not quite, at home'. This is because the home is not static, but is a space in which the subject possesses 'a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future'. In the work of Cameroonian author Léonora Miano, the mobility of numerous women protagonists provides a rich array of representations in which the construction of a home space occurs both through and within displacement. Miano was born in Cameroon in 1973 and has lived in France since 1991. Winner of multiple literary prizes, including the Grand Prix littéraire de l'Afrique noire in 2012 for her collection of work, Miano is currently author of eleven novels, essays and theatrical works since 2005. Though widely read, there is not yet a vast body of literary research on her writing, though this is emerging. Only one of her texts has been translated into English thus far, a translation that sparked a revealing controversy: her first novel, L'Intérieur de la nuit (2005), which includes a powerful and devastating scene of cannibalism, was translated as Dark Heart of the Night by Tamsin Black in 2010. With its clear allusion to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), which has been criticised widely since Chinua Achebe's 1975 accusation of racism in the text, the translation seemed to problematically associate Miano's novel with a work that had projected 'the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.' Teresa Svoboda's foreword to the novel endorsed this erroneous understanding of the work, situating it in Cameroon, instead of the imaginary country of Mboasu, and stating that it drew inspiration from Cameroonian history, though Miano references instead the recent conflicts involving child soldiers in Liberia as inspiration. This eagerness to contextualise Miano's work according, quite simply, to her origins, is symptomatic of a broader reluctance to understand the aesthetic preoccupations of an author as separate and distinct from the socio-political preoccupations of his or her nation of origin, especially when that nation of origin happens to be in Africa.
As an author, then, Miano is problematically situated according to her Cameroonian origins despite her decision to renounce Cameroonian nationality in order to acquire French nationality. As this episode demonstrates, Miano describes herself as having to 'habiter la frontière' [live on the frontier] as a consequence of her cultural métissage. She does not consider herself estranged from a place of origin as a result either of the cultural interventions imposed by the colonial era or of her own displacement; instead she inhabits 'le lieu de l'oscillation constante: d'un espace à l'autre, d'une sensibilité à l'autre, d'une vision du monde à l'autre' [a place of constant oscillation: from one space to another, from one tendency to another, from one vision of the world to another]. Her home, then, is far from static. Her earlier novels represent the mobile trajectories of women forced to leave their homes due frequently to trauma and exclusion, yet who have travelled within West Africa, whilst later works have focused on the experience of women who have left the continent to live in Europe. Though settled in France for over twenty years now, Miano herself expresses a continued desire for mobility. Her work is marked, then, by migrancy and movement, and though Miano's current 'rootedness' in France renders the term 'migrant' problematic, she corresponds to Andrew Smith's definition of the migrant writer, who 'armed with their awareness of cultural relativity and linguistic dislocation, is best placed to reveal the fallacy of "foundationalism"'.
Miano presents us with multiple forms of women's mobility, from voluntary intellectual migration to banishment and forced exclusion. Crucially, the gender of her protagonists is, in many cases, the root cause of their displacement, so though her texts deal frequently with traditional communities demonstrating rigid gender roles, this is pitted against a detailed exploration of displaced women's lives as providing potential frameworks for opposition to this formal gender categorisation. The women to whom she gives voice in her novels are frequently those who challenge the status quo, whether through their departure, their exclusion or their wielding of power over male protagonists. These women choose, or are in some cases forced, to estrange themselves from a community that situates their gender alongside stasis and often stagnation: 'Les filles, quant à elles, demeuraient sur place, à tourner et à retourner une terre qui ne laissait pousser que ce qu'on lui arrachait' [As for the girls, they remained here to dig up time and time again a soil in which they would only grow what they needed] (IN, p. 14). My aim here is to explore the forms of mobility that have characterised her earlier work, notably the first two novels, L'Intérieur de la nuit and Contours du jour qui vient [Contours of the Coming Day] (2006).
In L'Intérieur de la nuit, Ayané returns to her home village, Eku, upon learning that her mother is close to death. Ayané is a young Mboasu woman who has been living in France as a student. Her education and experience of travel places her in opposition to the other women who had remained in the village, with the sole prospect of undertaking agricultural and domestic work, 'les dents serrées, le dos bien rigide, l'espérance vaincue' [teeth clenched, back straight, hope lost] (IN, p. 14). Her mother, Aama, is victim of constant hostility since she is an outsider: from the nearby village of Losipotipè, she only came to Eku upon marrying a villager, whose choice to marry an outsider 'contravenait aux règles qui avaient toujours régi le clan' [broke the rules by which the clan had always abided] (IN, p. 17). The novel gives an account of Ayané's return, the death of Aama and, during the period of mourning that follows, the brutal intervention of rebel troops in village life during the night. When the troops leave, a new questioning of village life becomes necessary, in which Ayané plays a key role.
The novel opens with the death of Ayané's mother, described as 'l'étrangère' [the stranger, or the outsider] (IN, p. 21). Ayané inherited from birth the status of outsider accorded to her mother, who offended local rituals by giving birth in hospital and by giving to her daughter 'un nom qui ne correspondait à rien, à aucune appartenance. Ce faisant, ils avaient décrété que leur enfant serait seule à jamais' [a name that was unlike any other, that belonged nowhere. In doing so, they had decreed that their child would be alone forever] (IN, p. 29). Ayané's estrangement from the Eku community in which she is raised therefore begins at birth and finds its affirmation in her decision to leave:
Personne n'avait pu vérifier cette rumeur selon laquelle Ayané avait quitté le pays pour une terre lointaine, mais on l'imaginait bien, franchissant les frontières d'un monde qu'aucune femme ne s'était jamais aventurée à explorer. On ne lui avait rien enseigné de valable, et elle ignorait qu'il n'appartenait pas aux femmes de courir les routes. (IN, p. 24)
Nobody had been able to verify the rumour that Ayané had left the country for a far-off land, but it was easy enough to imagine, crossing over boundaries into a world that no woman had ever ventured to explore. She had never been taught anything of value, and did not know that women weren't meant to take to the road.
Ayané is a figure of multiple forms of estrangement. First, she is estranged from her community, where she is shunned for her family's choice to abide by their own rules. In this instance, her estrangement corresponds to the wavering motion between familiarity and unfamiliarity that she represents. She belongs, yet she is marked by difference, and so not acknowledged as such. Later, her estrangement is exacerbated by her mobility, since she chooses to leave her mother and home and study abroad. The markers of her difference multiply as a result of this cultural distancing – she returns wearing jeans, with short hair, and forgets to bring gifts for her relatives. Yet unlike many narratives of mobility, Ayané is unique in that her categorisation as 'stranger' is not determined by her decision to leave home; her estrangement precedes her departure, which in turn determines her choice to leave: 'Elle avait toujours su qu'elle partirait' [She always knew that she would leave] (IN, p. 40). She is therefore emblematic of a condition of estrangement that is unrelated to mobility as such, a status as 'stranger' that does not have its ontological basis in the fact of displacement.
Ayané's decision to travel to France is a further source of incomprehension, sealing her fate as a stranger for those she left behind. Though the nation described in L'Intérieur de la nuit is the imaginary place of Mboasu, the text clearly draws on French colonial history as a backdrop for the political strife that underlies the narrative. To the villagers of Eku, France represents little more than 'des missionaires blanches [...] qui avaient pris possession des terres de l'autre versant et qui y avait semé ces graines de changement' [white missionaries who had taken possession of land on the other side of the hill, and who had sown the seeds of change there] (IN, pp. 30–1). Miano nuances the nonchalant disdain in which France is held when a rebel leader, Isilo, evokes the country's history as justification for the brutal actions he commits, supposedly in order to unite the community in a common understanding of their heritage:
au moment de l'occupation coloniale, les identités africaines furent mutilées, la spiritualité détruite. Les envahisseurs emportèrent tous nos grands totems, afin de les enfermer dans des musées et de les réduire au silence! Ils firent croire aux Africains qu'ils ne connaissaient pas Dieu, et qu'Il ne pouvait que les ignorer! Ils s'employèrent à effacer le nom qu'ils lui donnaient dans leur langue, pour le remplacer par des vocables vides! (IN, p. 95)
during the colonial occupation, African identities were mutilated and spirituality destroyed. The invaders took away our great totems and locked them up in museums, reducing them to silence! They made Africans believe that they didn't know God, and that He could only be ignoring them! They made sure that the name He was given in our own language was erased, replacing it with empty terms!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds by Kate Averis, Isabel Hollis-Touré. Copyright © 2016 The Contributors. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Series Editors' Preface,Acknowledgements,
Notes on contributors,
Introduction: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women's Writing Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré,
Part I. Familial Frames, Transnational Tropes,
Chapter 1: Strangers in Their Own Homes: Displaced Women in Léonora Miano's L'Intérieur de la nuit and Contours du jour qui vient Isabel Hollis-Touré,
Chapter 2: Migrant Writing in Quebec: Female Mobility in Kim Thúy's Ru Jeanette den Toonder,
Chapter 3: Gendering Migrant Mobility in Fatou Diome's Novels Christopher Hogarth,
Chapter 4: 'Exilées de famille': Travelling Texts by Worldwide Women Writers Alison Rice,
Part II. Rewriting Identities as Displaced Subjects,
Chapter 5: Travelling in Trouble: Vagabondage in Isabelle Eberhardt's Travel Writing Dúnlaith Bird,
Chapter 6: Reappropriating 'Exile'? Transculturality between Word and Image in Leïla Sebbar's Mes Algéries en France Jane Hiddleston,
Chapter 7: Education and Exile in the Writings of Maïssa Bey and Malika Mokeddem Siobhán McIlvanney,
Chapter 8: Cross-Atlantic Mobility: The Experience of Two Shores in Fatou Diome's Le Ventre de l'Atlantique Boukary Sawadogo,
Chapter 9: Restarting the Stopped Clock of Time: Rethinking Mobility in Edwidge Danticat's Non-Fiction Bonnie Thomas,
Part III. Future Directions in Women's Mobility,
Chapter 10: Mobility, Motility, Gender: Travelling Haiti Charles Forsdick,
Chapter 11: 'Things Coming From Every Direction': Leslie Kaplan's 'Cubist' Explorations Anna-Louise Milne,
Chapter 12: Ectopic Literature: The Emergence of a New Transnational Literary Space in Europe in the Works of Eva Almassy and Rouja Lazarova Margarita Alfaro,
Afterword: Women on the Move Mildred Mortimer,
Notes,
What People are Saying About This
“This thoughtful volume offers diverse angles on gender, space, and place, from ‘ectopic literature’ to women who become strangers in their own homes. Its distinguished contributors explore the many forms of mobility—imagined, virtual and real, and voluntary and involuntary—that have shaped today’s literary and political worlds.”