An Amputated Elsewhere: Sustaining and Relieving the Phantom Limb of Algeria

Abstract

Since their departure from Algeria in and around 1962, the former French citizens of Algeria, or Pieds-Noirs, have been writing about their traumatic separation from their homeland. Many of these authors, including Marie Cardinal and Nobel laureate Albert Camus, write to cultivate memory and communal identity. Their literature is filled with colorful recreations of the physical landscape of Algeria, sustaining their amputated homeland through writing. This continuing connection to the amputated past haunts the Pieds-Noirs like phantom limb pains that plague amputees, and the group uses its literature like a prosthesis to reconnect to what they have lost. This article demonstrates how most of the former French of Algeria perpetuate their phantom limb in their writing to maintain a connection to the past, while others such as Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous have embraced their amputated identities because they were separated while still in Algeria. By accepting this always absent or escapable elsewhere, the two use their writing to lay the ghostly limb to rest.