The Female Face of Shame

15. Shame and Belonging in Postcolonial Algeria

229 Shame and Belonging in Postcolonial Algeria Anna Rocca Man above all other animals insists on walking erect. In lowering his eyes and bowing his head, he is vulnerable in a quite unique way. . . . [T]he nature of the experience of shame guarantees a perpetual sensitivity to any violation of the dignity of man. Silvan Tomkins In Assia Djebar’s last autobiographical work, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, shame is experienced in several forms and cultural settings. The earliest memory of shame that the author recalls is when she was a baby. Sleeping in the same room as her parents at approximately eighteen months old, she remembers hearing her mother’s moaning of pleasure. The “dérangeante” (disturbing) proximity to the parents’ bed makes her feel ashamed (97). Once she becomes an adult, the author recaptures the confused sensation that she felt at that time, describing it as a “malaise” (uneasiness), a discomfort that takes the form of a “culpabilité, pour ainsi dire animale. Comme si je ne devais pas entendre!” (culpability, so to speak savage. As if I should not hear!) (96).1 Her feeling of shame therefore influences both her adolescence and adulthood. This experience echoes Silvan Tomkins’s words, when he says that the sensation of shame implies the inevitability of “a perpetual sensitivity to any violation” of dignity (Affect , Imagery, Consciousness, 2:132). By searching for the causes of her suicide attempt in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, Assia Djebar meticulously recaptures the overlapping causes of personal and social abuses in order to make sense of the loss of self-respect that she and her people experience. In this chapter, by using both literary and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that in Nulle part the author confronts the daughter’s disillusionment with paternal love and progressively reveals its connections and layered perversions with shame. Furthermore , by representing the reality of no return and placelessness for the narratorauthor , and by extension for Algerian women, Djebar fights against the oblivion that would condemn her to self-effacement. Additionally, by means of exposing her deeper feelings and emotions, the narrator-author-and-reader-of-herself discovers the origins and dynamics of the shame of being. Eventually, her progressive awareness will allow 15 230 | Anna Rocca the re-creation of new forms of belonging, for one can say that she belongs when she starts to face and trust her own feelings. I will first analyze the relationship between shame and belonging and then discuss the problematic association between Assia Djebar and belonging. I will lastly examine the ways in which shame, belonging, and desire interrelate with each other in Nulle part. Shame and Belonging In 1962 and 1963, the publication of the first two volumes of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness marked the beginning of the profound impact that American psychologist Silvan Tomkins had on our understanding of human emotions and motivations. Tomkins used literary works to support his discoveries in the study of shame. Almost forty years later, the essay collection Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame and Writing cogently proves the centrality of literature to understanding affects and the potential of collaboration between psychoanalysts and literary scholars in the study of shame. In fact, as co-editors Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark underscore: “[O]ne of the most important functions of literature has been to provide a privileged place of redress, a sphere of expression where emotional life can be explored and refined in ways that are discouraged elsewhere” (6). Additionally, Donald Nathanson reminds us how this collection “forces new awareness of all affective experience on those who search for the source of meaning in the writers who have moved them” (Foreword, viii). At the present time, Tomkins’s idea that shame originates from the profound experience of being not wanted has taken root in psychology. This feeling of being both cast out and unaccepted undermines one’s ability to fit into one’s own community. For this reason we can say that shame is at the same time a personal and a social experience engaging, as J. Brooks Bouson reminds us, “not only the individual’s feelings of inferiority and inadequacy in comparison to others but also the individual’s deep inner sense of being flawed or defective or of having failed to meet the expectations of the ‘ideal self’” (“‘Quiet As It’s Kept,’” 208). Scenes of Shame ties shame to disempowerment in a variety of ways, on the basis of gender...