Writing Home: Explorations of Exile and Cultural Hybridity in the Correspondence of Nancy Huston and Leïla Sebbar

Writing Home: Explorations of Exile and Cultural Hybridity in the Correspondence of Nancy Huston and Leila Sebbar Patrice J. Proulx C'est un beau mot, correspondance. D'abord parce qu'il dit l'échange, la relation—et que la relation dit à son tour et le rapport et le récit. Rapport entre des termes, des êtres, des lieux. Et récit du rapport. —Michel Field1 Toi et moi, par exemple, on n'est pas spécialement amies, même si je découvre à travers cette correspondance à quel point je tiens à toi, et même—ce qui est vraiment une surprise—à quel point on se ressemble. —Nancy Huston, Lettres parisiennes FRANCOPHONE WRITERS Nancy Huston and Leïla Sebbar are becoming increasingly well known in France and abroad2 for a thoughtprovoking corpus of works which deals with such significant critical issues as socio-cultural identity, the condition of women, and the nature of the creative process itself. In Lettres parisiennes: Autopsie de l'exil? Huston and Sebbar work together to elicit the problematic situation of crossing borders— whether they be geographic, linguistic, or psychological—and make manifest the transgressive nature (especially for women)4 of living in an Other culture. Both Sebbar, born in Algeria to a French mother and an Algerian father, and Huston, born in Canada to an English-speaking family, associate their "coming to writing" with their relocation to France, and they resolve to trace out the relationship between their exile(s) and their socio-cultural and linguistic identities through an exchange of letters which they plan to publish in book form after the completion of their project. By means of this epistolary exchange, they conceptualize exile in its different facets, while concomitantly addressing the effects of cultural hybridity—métissage—as it relates to the construction of identity, and the consequences of extrinsicality. In this article, I will examine the ways in which Huston and Sebbar, through an exploration of the complexities of their own origins, evoke the restorative and transformative possibilities of positioning oneself at the crossroads, showing how both women succeed in creating their own geographical and psychological space(s) through their textual inscriptions. From May 1983 to January 1985, Huston and Sebbar engage in a com80 Winter 2000 Proulx pelling correspondence in which they encourage one another to reflect upon the effects of separation from the mother/land on their own relationship to writing, as étrangères living in France and creating fictional and non-fictional texts in the French language. That they choose to express themselves through letters, despite the fact that they often reside in the same city, conveys their belief in the liberatory potential of the epistolary form itself. What originates in their common desire to seek out a fresh perspective on questions related to identitarian concerns, however, soon becomes a necessary and strategic element in the legitimation of the self, as they adapt the tone and content of the correspondence to reflect their respective objectives. Sebbar addresses this issue in an early letter to Huston: Est-ce par volontarisme qu'on s'écrit ces lettres parisiennes sur l'exil, la division, les croisements, nos histoires différentes, politiques et amoureuses? Peut-être bien à l'origine, mais à mesure que les lettres se succèdent j'y vois une nécessité, un travail qui me fait plaisir, une parole épistolaire. (31) Indeed, the very nature of the letter-writing process privileges the examination of identity issues, as the letter can be considered a form of self-address which allows the writer to engage in an analysis of self while simultaneously positing an addressee, thereby reflecting the desire for interpersonal exchange. In her study of the cultural codes informing the letter, Diane Cousineau theorizes that the very materiality of the letter serves to encode identity, while at the same time making manifest a dialogic potential: [T]he letter leads us to questions fundamental to all discourse. Indeed, because of its material nature ... it reifies such principles as stable and unified identity (signature), certainly of destination and destiny (address), and the possibility of human exchange. The letter thus might be seen as guaranteeing the reciprocity of intersubjective communication.5 Cousineau later elaborates on this, however...