The Body Besieged: The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar by Helen Vassallo (review)

The aim of Helen Vassallo's impressive book is to consider the question of 'fractured cultural heritage' in the autobiographical writings of Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar. She examines a number of their texts from the critical perspective of historical memory and theories of embodiment, and in so doing draws on and develops the work of scholars such as Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Michael Rothberg, Edward Said, Elaine Scarry, and Susan Sontag. Vassallo makes a convincing case for a book-length comparative study, as both authors, who are of mixed Algerian and French parentage, consciously write about their experiences of being torn between two cultures. Consequently, she argues that Bouraoui's and Sebbar's texts become sites of 'embodied memory' on both a personal and a collective level, that is, pertaining to their own familial trajectories as well as to the collective memory of France's colonial past in Algeria. In the first two chapters Vassallo examines the work of Bouraoui (Garçon manqué, Poupée Bella, La Vie heureuse, Mes mauvaises pensées), arguing that, while a hybrid identity is shown to be impossible for the narrator in Garçon manqué and Poupée Bella, Mes mauvaises pensées can be described as a 'recuperative' text, whereby the author is able to construct a 'fusional "in-between" identity' (pp. 58-59). Vassallo contends that life writing therefore allows Bouraoui to externalize embodied memory, whether that memory concerns her personal memories of being a cultural outsider in both Algeria and France, or whether it relates to the collective amnesia regarding the Algerian War of Independence. In the third and fourth chapters Vassallo turns her attention to Leïla Sebbar, with a focus on Lettres parisiennes: histoires d'exil, Journal de mes Algéries en France, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, and L'Arabe comme un chant secret. Here she shows that Sebbar's autobiographical works, through the author's resiting and reclaiming of 'Algerias in France', can be seen as attempts to break with a past characterized by the voluntary silencing and forgetting of the Algerian War of Independence. In this second half of the book, Vassallo's reflections on community, exile, and linguistic alienation are particularly interesting, since she convincingly shows how in Sebbar's case an exilic condition has enabled the author to reclaim a '(fusional) subjectivity' through writing. In conclusion, Vassallo's study ably demonstrates how Bouraoui and Sebbar make important contributions to post-colonial writing, as their texts project a multiplicity of 'subaltern' voices that resist discourses of power. Given that Vassallo includes psychoanalysis and France's integration policies among those power discourses, it would have been interesting if she had given greater consideration to the question of psychoanalysis as well as a more detailed contextualization of recent French governments' policies regarding immigration and integration. The Body Besieged is nevertheless an immensely readable, well-researched, and engaged study and will be of considerable use to specialists and non-specialists alike.