Femmes et écriture de la transgression (review)

This recent publication in the book series “Transnational, Francophone and Comparative Studies,” directed by Hafid Gafaïti at the Parisian publishing house L’Harmattan, brings together eight provocative essays that address transgression in/and contemporary writing by women. The writers whose work is examined in this volume hail from places as different as Algeria and Madagascar, but the common theme of narrative and textual strategies of subversion unites them. According to an eloquent introduction penned by editors Gafaïti and Armelle Crouzières-Igenthron, these novelists employ innovative techniques in order to transgress the patriarchal literary tradition. Each of the essays in this collection is valuable in its own right, but gains interest in comparison with the others; the result is a noteworthy, insightful book that sheds light on current literary production by women across national and linguistic borders.

The introductory essay provides a useful theoretical frame for understanding transgression in women’s writing, whether that writing is in French, Spanish, or Portuguese. Drawing from the work of Edouard Glissant, Michel Foucault, Françoise Lionnet, Homi Bhabha, and Maurice Blanchot, the editors convincingly argue that “the theories of métissage, creolization, hybridization, and adulteration” all begin with “multiplicity,” but arrive at “unity” in “difference” and “in the expression of difference” (17). These concepts share a concern to destabilize hierarchical binary systems of opposition and give place to unpredictability and uncertainty. The writing of transgression, according to Gafaïti and Crouzières- Igenthron, allows for a new definition of woman as an individual—and a writer— no longer pinned down by sexual difference. There is no question that the groundbreaking novels by the writers featured in this publication move convincingly in this direction: just like their personal histories, these authors’ creative writings defy convention and categorization, thereby transgressing established rules and definitions.

Two original essays on Assia Djebar grace the book’s opening pages. Anne Donadey addresses the double literary tradition to which Djebar belongs, focusing on the Arab rather than the European strand and exposing the influence of fourteenth-century Muslim writer Ibn Khaldun. Réda Bensmaïa’s contribution complements the first essay by engaging in an analysis of Djebar’s rewriting of history; extensive footnotes bolster the critic’s points on the relationship between fiction and history, memory and the nation. In other essays of particular note to scholars of African literatures, Pascale Perraudin examines exile, distance, and the position of women in Madagascar in her study of Michèle Rakotoson; Sherry Simon explores identity, sexuality, and cultural context in her reading of Nina Bouraoui; and Christiane Makward reveals the ways magical realism, ambiguity, paradox and irony allow the writings of Maryse Condé to transcend stereotypical representations of African or Antillean reality and liberate the postcolonial writer. The book concludes with a substantial essay by Anne-Emmanuelle Berger on the important, timely issue of contemporary women who don the veil; Berger incorporates the work of theorist Luce Irigaray in a thought-provoking treatment of the historical and societal complexities influencing the question of the hijab and women’s “power” today.