Problématiques identitaires et discours de l’exil dans les littératures francophones (review)

Anissa Talahite-Moodley’s collection of essays on exile forms part of an intriguing new series on ‘transferts culturels’ from the Presses Universitaires d’Ottawa, and promises to offer a fresh critical perspective on the now familiar themes of marginality and alienation in francophone literature. Charles Bonn’s preface sets out the volume’s ambition not to treat exile and identity ‘comme des évidences, essentia-listes, et inséparables de ces littératures dont elles fonderaient même l’existence’, but as literary and aesthetic concepts (p. ii). Taking into account the polemic surrounding the ‘littérature-monde’ movement, the work resists tendencies to reduce literature to sociology, and also troubles efforts to categorize francophone literary texts into discrete ethnic groups or ‘aires culturelles’. Both Bonn’s preface and Moodley’s postface cite Dominique Combe’s call for a ‘poétique comparée’ and, certainly, the volume juxtaposes the readings of very different sorts of works by writers from a diversity of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The result is that the collection proposes no particular definition of exile but explores the many facets of this complex condition, its potential to act as a trigger for creative activity but also its association with suffering and deprivation. Indeed, Moodley notes that the term ‘exil’ bears meaning only when conceived in relation to a range of lived experiences, and reminds us that Christa Jones’s reading of Assia Djebar’s ‘Il n’y a pas d’exil’ demonstrates how ‘l’exil est donc un espace à l’intérieur duquel l’écrivain se définit comme libre et sujet de son discours’ (p. 344). The diverse forms of exile analysed here are divided into four sections: ‘l’exil, le pays et la langue’, ‘l’exil postcolonial’, ‘l’exil au féminin’ and ‘l’exil existentiel’. Common themes crop up between the sections, however, and one interesting parallel is the way in which writers such as Leïla Sebbar, Azouz Begag, Marguerite Duras and Linda Lê, for example, share a preoccupation with unresolved parental relationships. Almost all the writers discussed experiment with the French language and seek new idioms in their attempts to understand experiences exile and uprooting. While the comparative approach and the commitment to treat texts as literary works rather than sociological testimonies are both highly laudable, however, the collection is ultimately somewhat formless. Some of the essays are both provocative and original, but others fall into the trap of feeding off their primary material, and the editor only briefly attempts to bring the articles together to articulate a larger conceptual purpose. This is another edited collection which, while containing intermittent insights, could have been more tightly unified so as to offer a more distinct innovation to the field.