Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing by Kate Averis (review)

This book provides a comparative analysis of six novels by key contemporary francophone and Latin American writers Nancy Huston, Linda Lê, Malika Mokeddem, Cristina Peri Rossi, Laura Restrepo, and Cristina Siscar in order to analyse how these writers inscribe an experience of exile in their texts. Through a feminist reading of these novels, which deal explicitly or implicitly with exile, Kate Averis sets out to redress a traditionally androcentric model of exiled subjectivity by focusing on the specificity of exiled women’s experiences of home, place, national identity, and individual and collective subjectivity. Her study seeks to understand these writers’ negotiation of identity by examining the ways in which they express in their novels their inhabitation of the space of exile. The book is divided into two parts, with the first setting the theoretical scene for the comparative literary analyses of the second. The theoretical section focuses on the notion of ‘exile’, as well as on ‘home’, ‘nation’, and ‘place’, while also setting out an initial argument asserting the specificity of feminine exile, which, in Averis’s view, involves heightened alienation. Valérie Orlando has shown that exiled women’s identity is characterized by nomadism ( Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999)); Averis demonstrates that their writing, too, is nomadic, and is both hybrid and ‘overwhelmingly political’ (p. 55). Averis establishes her theoretical framework in a very engaging manner, despite the complex, contested notions presented, and integrates her textual analyses tightly within this framework. The selected corpus — one novel by two different authors in each of the three analysis chapters — is a felicitous one, in that it presents a range of experiences of exile and of literary inhabitations of the space of exile, and corresponds to three stages of exile: an initial arrival in exile, a period of transculturation, and a third stage that is an existential positioning that fosters a nomadic sense of identity. Averis skilfully negotiates a corpus that encompasses six writers, two languages, and several nations in an engaging style and with careful structuring, which unfailingly maintains her reader’s engagement. This study offers a very welcome re-evaluation of exile as a linguistic, psychological, gendered, and existential site. It succeeds in its stated goals of providing a contextualized model of nomadic subjectivity and refusing any hierarchizing of exiles or any attempt to ‘resolve’ the condition of exile. Instead, Averis shows that writing of exile is potentially a site of belonging and of negotiating a marginal, disruptive identity. Her study will be of interest to scholars of exile as well as to readers interested in any of the six authors whose novels are analysed.