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61 chapter 3 | La Terre Maternelle | Algeria and the Mother in the Work of Marie Cardinal, Hélène Cixous, and Assia Djebar Every mother is wild. Wild in that she belongs to a memory older than she is, to a body more original than her own body.—Anne Dufourmantelle, La sauvagerie maternelle (Maternal savagery) Yes, that’s it, my body is my mother . . . I have the impression that my body belongs to my mother.—Marie Cardinal, Autrement dit (In Other Words) My beautiful land, my mother, my progenitor, how lowly and basely I lost you! —Marie Cardinal, Au pays de mes racines (In the country of my roots) L a terre et la mère—the native land and the mother—arguably constitute the subjects of reflection at the heart of Marie Cardinal ’s oeuvre.∞ While homeland and family are central to most autobiographical works, these two themes of predilection are particularly striking in the case of this woman writer from Algeria. As a pied-noir child, born in 1929 to a French bourgeois family in Algiers, the young Cardinal lived for years between the two very di√erent cultures that surrounded her, feeling part of neither one and yet earnestly desiring acceptance from both. The external environment of the multilingual, multiethnic ‘‘mother country’’ she inhabited clashed with her biological mother ’s distinctly ‘‘French’’ way of life and its complex value system related to class and religion. The competitive coexistence of these two mothers (one metaphorical, the other physical) is perhaps most salient in Les mots pour le dire (The Words to Say It), a novel that depicts the connections between a personified Algeria and the mother in explicit terms, as Françoise Lionnet demonstrates in detail in Autobiographical Voices (201).≤ While Cardinal’s personal struggle to find her own identity in relation to these conflicting forces is unique, it is not the only one of its kind. As Colette Hall asserts, ‘‘This bi-culturalism, source of joy and conflict, is a sentiment Cardinal shares with other French writers from Algeria’’ (12–13). For diverse reasons and in di√erent ways, Cixous and Djebar have also paid considerable attention to both mother and land, and Cardinal’s work takes on new light and new resonance when placed alongside their essays and novels. The autobiographical writings of these three women born in Algeria to 62 Takeo√ Points very di√erent mothers reveal that, whether their maternal lineage stems from France, Germany, or Algeria itself, Algerian-born women writers in French have relations to their native land that are complex and di≈cult to define. This birthplace is not exactly a ‘‘homeland’’; instead, it is a place where not one of them has managed to fit in, where scholastic, linguistic, and political conditions have definitively barred ‘‘entry’’ into this elusive country. While it is certainly not the only reason these writers cannot gain access to this geographic site, the fact that they are women renders even more di≈cult the challenging task of belonging to this land. Despite its inaccessibility, all three writers claim that their roots are undeniably located in this tumultuous North African territory under French rule during their early years. For each of these writing subjects, it is in relation to land and mother that the complex underlying questions of nation and sex play themselves out. This chapter will address the specificity of the experience of each of these three Algerian-born women writers in an e√ort to determine in what ways the women’s experience of the country in their formative years gave rise in each case to an inimitable autobiographical oeuvre in French. In Les mots pour le dire, the narrator describes two worlds that seem diametrically opposed. There is the external world of the street, and the internal world of the mother. The narrator makes reference to the ‘‘harmful father planet’’ from which she is distanced in an upbringing limited to contact with women (63). But the ordered, regulated ‘‘mother planet’’ she inhabits as a youngster is not only di√erent from the world of men; it can also be placed in contrast to the bustling, disorderly street. It is outside, walking the roads, that Marie comes into contact with the people, the sounds, and the smells of her native land that clash so vehemently with her education. Trekking to school each morning entails a trip between two worlds, as this passage reveals: ‘‘The tra≈c, the...

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