À la mémoire de ma mère: souvenirs et identité dansLes saisons de passage D’Andrée Chedid

Abstract

Andree Chedid’sLes Saisons de passage is a collection of selected personal memories published more than two years after her mother’s death. Dedicated to the memory of Alice Godel, this text serves as a process of mourning and a celebration of life. Through this maternal portrait, the narrator offers us intersections of real and imagined memories, biography and autobiography, and national and personal histories whose content determines its form. This hybrid approach to the text reveals not only a subjective perspective of the mother, source of identity and language, but also a socio-historical vision of Cairo and Paris in the middle of the last century. This article is divided into three parts. First, I derive certain specificities fromLes Saisons de passage and compare them to traditional autobiography in order to show how Chedid’s approach, organization, and refusal of mimesis excludes it from classification as any single genre. Second, I consider biographical aspects ofLes Saisons de passage and the effects of a mother-daughter (con)fusion on the aging process, identity, and textual fluidity. Third, I analyze intersections between national history and autobiography inLes Saisons de passage in order to highlight the influences of certain historical events on Chedid’s personal life and their effects on her beliefs, her writing process, and her body of works.