Algeriance, Exile, and Helene Cixous

Abstract

My way of thinking was born with thought that I could have been born elsewhere, in one of twenty countries where living fragment of my maternal family had landed after it blew up on Nazi minefield. With thought of chanciness, of accidence of fall. Lucretius's Rain of atoms, in raining, atom of my mother had met atom of my father. The strange molecule detached black skies of north had landed in Africa. In smiling and happy little girl I was, I hid (from others and myself secret, restless, clandestine little girl, who knew well that in truth she had been born elsewhere. The obscure feeling of having appeared there by chance, of belonging to any here by inheritance or descent, physical feeling of being frail mushroom, spore hatched over night, who only holds to earth with hasty and frail roots. Another feeling in shadows: unshakeable certainty that the Arabs were true offspring of this dusty and perfumed soil. But when I walked barefoot with my brother on hot trails of Oran, I felt sole of my body caressed by welcoming palms of country's ancient dead, and torment of my soul was assuaged. (Helene Cixous, Mon Algeriance)2 In any discussion of cultural representations of exile, literary texts assume place of prominence. From time immemorial creative artists have used written word to communicate, articulate, and disseminate their sense of isolation and alienation from, as well as their longing for, place and space which for one reason or another-political, social, economic-has been banished their lives. Helene Cixous is one such writer. In sense, virtually entire corpus of her writing could be placed under sign of exile. Born in Algeria, her childhood spent in Oran and Algiers, she has lived her adult life, her writing life, in France. At first glance then, would seem to be place which she had been banished, space to which she might long to return. Indeed, two of writers about whom she has written extensively, James Joyce and Clarice Lispector, were themselves displaced persons writing far land of their birth.3 Yet case of Cixous's writing as it might relate to concept of exile from proves more elusive, more complex than situation of either Lispector or Joyce. In sense, is both everywhere and nowhere in Cixous's writing. And very concept of exile from is one, which, in Cixous's case, would be difficult to argue.Yet it is perhaps this very concept ofexile in fullest sense of both its ambiguity and its complexity that serves as basic creative motor behind all her writing. Perhaps in end we discover that it is Algeria and her Algeriance about which she has rarely written directly which truly inform much of her work. As Susan Rubin Suleiman points out in her introduction to Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (1998) word exile itself varies both in meaning and connotation. But word nonetheless universally designates a state of being `not home' (or of being `everywhere at flip side of same coin), which means, in most cases, at distance one's own native tongue (1). But, Suleiman goes on to ask,[i]s this distance falling away some original wholeness and source of creativity, or is it on contrary spur to creativity? Is exile cause for optimism (celebration, even) or its opposite? (1), and for Helene Cixous, we might ask, does represent home or not home? Or both? Or neither? Helene Cixous was born on June 5, 1937, in Oran, daughter of Georges Cixous, physician, and Eva Klein Cixous, who later trained as midwife. She spent her childhood years in Mediterranean atmosphere of French colony in North Africa, first in Oran and later in Algiers, as child of Jewish parents living through historic and political turbulence of World War II. …