Rewriting the Story in Tassadit Imache's Une Fille sans histoire

WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES Rewriting the Story in Tassadit Imache's Une Fille sans histoire Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is ... an act of survival. Adrienne Rich Recent years have seen growing interest in the history, politics and literature of the postcolonial world. In the case of France, scholars have examined the consequences of decolonization for both the former colonies in North Africa and immigrant communities now living in France. Today, the current political situation in Algeria, the Front National's campaigns against immigration, and the tensions between immigrants and the rest of the population in many areas of France continue to focus public attention on the political and social issues born of decolonization. Like many other Western nations, France is now facing the consequences of its colonial past, particularly in the form of immigrants from the former colonies who have made the Metropolis their home. This migration from the colonial periphery to the metropolitan center literally "brings home" the nature ofthe new postcolonial order and raises questions about the nature of French national identity and the place in society of immigrants and their French-born children. The protagonist of Tassadit Imache's Une Fille sans histoire (Lili) symbolizes the hybrid cultural space of the late twentieth-century urban center. Like Imache herself, Lili has a French mother and an Algerian father, and the novel examines what it means to be a by-product ofcolonialism. As the child of French and Algerian parents, Lili constitutes a third term in the traditionally bipolar colonial relationship, a term for which there is no pre-defined place. Consequently, society does not take account of her mixed heritage and views her in terms of the old binary order by ignoring one side of her identity: her Algerian relatives do not consider her to be Arab, and the French do not think of her as French. Leila Sebbar, who, like Imache and her protagonist, has a French mother and an Algerian father, comments on the way in which she in turn is forced to use a series of negatives to correct similar erroneous interpretations of her identity: "je ne suis pas celle que vous croyez, que vous cherchez, que vous souhaitez ... je ne suis pas immigrée, ni enfant de l'immigration... Je ne suis pas un écrivain maghrébin d'expression française... Je ne suis pas une Française de souche... Ma langue maternelle n'est pas l'arabe" (Sebbar and Huston 125). The repetition of the negative focuses attention on the repeated negation of her true identity through the elimination of one side of her self. Imache's use of the preposition "sans" in the title of her 112 WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES novel emphasizes the role such negatives play in Lili's life, and the allusion to a missing story ("sans histoire") places the themes of place and identity at the heart of the text. In Portrait du colonisé, Albert Memmi describes how the colonial relationship deprives the colonized of a place: "La carence la plus grave subie par le colonisé est d'être placé hors de l'histoire et hors de la cité" (129). Lili's position in postcolonial France is characterized by a similar lack of place: relegated to an immigrant neighborhood in the Paris suburbs, she lives on the geographical margins "hors de la cité," and the location of her home reflects her marginal position in society, where she is deprived of a place and thus finds herself "hors de l'histoire"—"sans histoire"—in a society in which unitary notions of Frenchness still predominate. Une Fille sans histoire tells the story of her family and examines the ways in which personal identity and family history ("histoire") intersect with the national past ("Histoire"). Here again, Sebbar's definition of herself, with its emphasis on "histoire" and "Histoire" describes Lili's position: "je suis une croisée qui cherche une filiation .... une place dans l'histoire d'une famille, d'une communauté, d'un peuple, au regard de l'Histoire et de l'univers" (Sebbar and Huston 138). Throughout Une Fille sans...