The Other Language, the Language of the Other in the Work of Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous

— langue de l’Autre, devenue pour certainstunique, voile ou armure, mais elle est, pourles plus rares, quasiment leur peau!

Assia Djebar, Le blanc de l’Algérie

For both Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous, the relationship to French, the language in which they primarily write, is a complicated one and linked to familial and social histories. Each of these writers was born in Algeria—Djebar in 1936, Cixous in 1937—and each came to the French language in a way that was determined both by parental decisions and by the politics of the time. Djebar has written extensively, since the publication of L’Amour, la fantasia in 1985, of her father’s decision to have her educated in French, a decision that made her life very different from that of most girls of her background at that time, and has ultimately become a significant factor in her decision to live outside of Algeria. Cixous has written, both in essays and in fiction based on the events of her own life, about her childhood in Algeria, growing up in a multilingual family with a mother whose first language was German, a father whose family spoke Spanish and French, who had her educated in French and whose nationality was, except for the years of Vichy France, French.

In this essay I will analyze the ways in which these two writers use the French language to express a division within themselves, working with and on the language to signify the ruptures or splittings within which they live. I suggest that the use of this “other” language, not the mother tongue, enacts a fragmentation of identity upon Djebar and Cixous that could be seen as paralleled by the fragmentation of the language that is a fundamental part of each writer’s work.

This identity fragmentation is connected to each writer’s legacy from her father, legacies that symbolize loss in very different ways for the two. Hélène Cixous lost her father to tuberculosis at a young age; this loss was in many ways linked to the tenuous existence of Jews in Algeria, particularly during the Second World War, and a sense of isolation that was possibly accentuated by the various languages and nationalities of the family. Assia Djebar writes of her deep respect and love for her father yet compares his decision to allow her to be educated in French to the cloak of Nessus, the gift that was given with love to Hercules by his wife who did not know that it would burn him so terribly it would make his life unbearable: “La langue encore coagulée des Autres m’a enveloppée, dès l’enfance, en tunique de Nessus, don d’amour de mon père. …” (L’Amour 243).

It is also important to look at some of the ways in which language and place are connected for these writers: the relationship to Algeria is one of loss for each yet differently. Cixous writes of Algeria as a place that was never home even though she was born there and lived there until she was eighteen. For Djebar, Algeria is a home that was occupied by French colonizers for the first decades of her life and then in recent decades has gradually been taken from her due to the fact that writers, particularly those who write in French, have been targeted in Algeria since the 1990s: her condemnation of the groups that have carried out massacres of writers, journalists, teachers, and artists as well as her defense of women’s rights have led to her decision to live outside of her country.¹ For each writer language both expresses and mediates the loss of the homeland: Cixous writes of the “infinite hospitality of language” to describe the place where she feels she belongs as being in words rather than a physical location and at the same time acknowledging her ambivalence toward her French citizenship; Djebar describes French as the language that freed her from the constraints...