Maghreb and Melancholy: A Reading of Nina Bouraoui

An astute critic once said of Flaubert that he could find happiness only in a perfectly crafted sentence. Only in the clean, pre-sterilized realm of language could he indulge in levels of purity unthinkable in real life; his quixotic concern for immateriality, his quest for a sphere untouched by contingency, all led to the cult of a type of art exemplified by Kafka or Mondrian, artists who would practice extreme levels of abstraction and nonreferentiality. ¹ Flaubert's pronouncement—"Je voudrais faire des livres où il n'y eût qu'à écrire des phrases" 'I would like to write a book made up only of sentences' ² —suggests that only art can provide contentment, only the rigor of a sentence can make up for the inevitable compromises of life. One of the great queries in Nina Bouraoui's La voyeuse interdite is how writing, and more precisely the writing up of melancholy, can assume the function of a cure. Bouraoui adds a crucial dimension to what theoreticians of melancholy (from Aristotle to Freud, through Starobinski, Kristeva, and Agamben) have considered the fundamental relationship between loss and the work of art. In this case, the connection between pain and writing helps in diagnosing and treating a threefold case of exile (linguistic, psychological, and political). This essay focuses on the remarkable way in which Bouraoui's protagonist teaches us how depression can become a counterculture powerful and secret enough to become art.

Nina Bouraoui's short novel La voyeuse interdite was published in Paris in 1991, and can be added to the increasing number of narratives about Muslim women—works such as Zoubida Bittari's O mes soeurs musulmanes,pleurez!, which appeared in Paris in 1964, Assia Djébar's collection of short stories Femmes d'Alger dans leurs appartements, or Farida Belghoul's poignant Georgette!, works that struck audiences because of their political content and disclosures about North African culture. Bouraoui was only twenty-four when La voyeuse interdite was published; hers is the account of an Algerian teenager, locked up by her father in their Algiers apartment, forced to live according to two gospels, two chronologies—the world of her father who lives in "l'an 1380 du calendrier hégirien" 'the year 1380 of the Hegirian calendar' and her own: "pour nous, c'était le tout début des années soixante-dix [. . .]" 'for us, it was the very beginning of the seventies [. . .]. ³ The underlying message of the novel could read as a proverb from Kabylia: Une fille, on l'élève pour la maison des autres ("A girl is brought up for somebody else's house"). The novel's heroine, the eponymous "voyeuse," unwittingly uses her melancholy as a cure that will turn her scandalous seclusion into cohesion and rebirth. Bouraoui presents two very different, but equally violent sides of melancholy: the grief-stricken adolescent, prisoner in her own home, whose depression is in no way abstract, and the resourceful woman of sorrows who manages to escape from her world of grief through a complicated machination that I will call creative pain, and which constitutes an acute example of therapeutic melancholy.

This is a book that has all the ingredients of the social pot boiler: politically charged, graphic as far as the condition of Muslim women goes, it never shies away from dramatic content. There is no dearth of shocking episodes—the mother hurls her baby girl out of a window, for she is too ashamed to admit to her husband that she has failed again to produce a son. Told entirely from the narrator's perspective, also an unwanted daughter, the story is endowed with tremendous pathos: the tale is told by one who would have been better off dead, and who hints that any trace of her existence is considered sinful, an insult to her father, a reminder that she will never be the boy who will carry...