The Red Shoes: Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous's Mon Algériance

"My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria" testifies to Cixous as exile and refugee. Cixous is more uprooted than she knows. She has been torn from a place and a heritage by violence. She has been torn from those who might be her people. This deracination is an artifact of colonialism in its late stages, haunting the postcolonial. That which is severed in her divided France.

Cixous knows she has been torn from Europe, from the heritage that belonged to Northern European Jews. She does not seem to know that she has been torn from Algeria, robbed of the heritage of Andalusia and the Maghreb, separated not only from Algeria, but from Algeria in France. If she does not value the loss, it is no less a robbery. If she accepts, or has been taught to welcome the separation, she is no less wounded by it. Cixous's essay "Mon Algériance" reveals this severing. In reading it, I hope to show how it might be repaired.

"Mon Algériance" was not presented, as it is in the United States, as a rather rarefied work in theory, but as an intervention in French cultural politics. The essay was first published in Les Inrockuptibles.¹ Les Inrocks is a journal of politics and culture, publishing pieces on music, visual arts, and commentaries on politics and current events. It regularly features by significant intellectual figures. Cixous's article appears in Les Inrocks as a theorist's postcolonial memoir, speaking to the continuing debates over Islam, Muslims, and what Paul Silverstein has called "Algeria in France."² Americans would call it the work of a public intellectual. When Cixous published this account of her relation to the Algerian, France had already seen unrest in the banlieux of Paris. Mathieu Kassovitz's acclaimed 1995 film La Haine (Hate) had made solidarity, alienation, police brutality and discrimination visible as conditions of immigrant experience. France continued to consider its colonial past, and the legacy of torture in Algeria. Benjamin Stora's La gangrene et l'oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie was only the latest of his works to address the tangled French relation with Algeria and the Algerian.³ The question of the politics of memory was very much to the fore. A month before Cixous's article appeared, Eduardo Galeano wrote in Le monde diplomatique, "As the years pass and we change the memory of what we have lived, seen and heard changes as well. And often, it happens that we place in the memory what we want to find, like the police during the searches."⁴ Cixous's essay speaks to each of these: to the question of the rioting alienated chebab of the banlieux; to France's fraught colonial past; and to the temptations of memory.

One might, following Bourdieu, read Cixous's postcolonial memoir as an instance of the trials peculiar to one "dominated fraction of the dominant class." One might, following Memmi, read it as another instance of the futilities that attend the "colonizer who refuses." One might, following Derrida, remain silent. I hope to read the testimony of the Algérienne sleeping in Cixous, and recover for her a solidarity that overcomes, albeit partially and imperfectly, the divisions of sex, religion and ethnicity in contemporary France. It is a reading she resists.

Cixous's account of her birthplace among the Arabs, among the Muslims, in the Maghreb begins in an echoing disavowal. She writes of "My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria."⁵ She is not Algerian, Algérienne, une Algérienne, jazriyya. She departs. She has never arrived. She speaks in other words than theirs.

Cixous's title, "Mon Algériance" claims both domesticity and dominion. The title is possessive. Mireille Calle-Gruber reads "allegiance" "alliance" and "riance" in Cixous's "Algériance." The word can then be read as a benign, smiling linkage of the political and the personal, of alliance, allegiance and an object of familiarity and affection.⁶ Cixous, however, refuses a home...