Exile and Its Discontents: Malika Mokaddem's Forbidden Woman

Since Homi Bhabha's celebrated idea of :third space," it has become customary among readers of postcolonial literatures to look at exile as an emancipatory experience, one that allows writers to challenge and ultimately subvert conventional boundaries—whether those pertaining to language, religion, politics, gender, or literary genres. In my article, however, I expose the difficulties germane to the condition of exile through the example of Malika Mokeddem's heroine, Sultana, in Forbidden Woman. I argue that Sultana's story of suspension between Algeria and France, origin and destination, Arabic/Berber and French illustrates a deep-seated malaise of contemporary Maghrebian discourse on identity and difference. Given the never-ending suspension between Western and Arab-Islamic narratives of identity, postcolonial cultural transformations in the Maghreb communicate a miserable Hegelianism: miserable because its dialectics seems to lead nowhere, but an Hegelianism all the same.