Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (review)

The main title, glossed by Alison Rice as ‘a metaphorical term that refers directly to a piece of music, highlighting the rhythm and the speed of phrasing, and providing a key to reading (or playing) the written work’ (p. 21), signals the approach this book seeks to take, developed in the opening sentence as ‘reading the texts of Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, and Abdelkébir Khatibi in terms of music’ (p. 1). In a praiseworthy attempt to hear the individual music of these writers (and of Jacques Derrida, another name from the Maghreb who in fact features as much as Khatibi), Rice grants herself the freedom to interpret ‘music’ differently in relation to each, focussing on the soundtrack of Djebar’s films but on the orality and rhythm of Cixous’s texts, for example. The attention to the phonic effects of Cixous’s writing is most fruitful, although it remains a little unclear how the principal claim to demonstrate that ‘far from constituting a “neutral” medium, music is capable of effecting change, of writing—and righting— wrongs’ (p. 187) is borne out by the subsequent analysis. There are a number of other intriguing claims the reader would like to see developed in greater detail; in particular, the assertion that, for Cixous, ‘writing is music’ (p. 220) could paradoxically seem to reduce rather than foreground its political dimension. More discussion of a tension already apparent in the relation (or lack of relation?) between the title and subtitle would also be welcome. While the former indicates a desire to attend to the differences between the writers in question, the latter stresses the importance of a common context that seems to work in the opposite direction. Notwithstanding the declared intention to ‘shift the focus to their writing rather than their origins’ (p. 4), the book retains a surprising degree of biographical and geo-cultural determinism. Some claims—for example that ‘Cixous reveals that her conversion to literature is directly due to Algeria’ (p. 247), or that ‘Derrida’s reflection on différance may be due, in part, to his unusual upbringing in plural Algerian society’ (p. 270)—are of indubitable interest, if on occasion overstated. Others, however, run the risk of obscuring rather than explaining the creative transformations which are ultimately why these writers are important. This is especially problematic in Chapter Six, where the question of movement in these writers’ texts is considered in relation to a ‘Maghrebian subject’ (p. 263). Conclusions such as ‘The importance of language and translation—as well as silence and untranslatability—becomes strident when Maghrebian-born writers take to the road’ (p. 272) or ‘Their freedom of movement and desire to travel is ultimately due to the fact that those from Algeria and Morocco are not scared of getting lost. They are not petrified about finding their way home’ (p. 277) appear to attribute the power of these texts to their specific country of origin more than to their authors’ originality. These reservations aside, the book succeeds in contextualizing these writers well and will be especially useful as an introduction to their study.