An Argentine in Paris

Abstract

In her autobiographical novel El arbol de la gitana (1997), Argentine author Alicia Dujovne Ortiz narrates her political exile during the 1976–83 “Dirty War” in which tens of thousands of Argentine citizens were persecuted by their country’s military dictatorship. Although Paris has long been a preferred destination for Latin American writers, Dujovne Ortiz’s narrator, Alicia, struggles with the difficulty of establishing a home in France. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, in which the narrator is portrayed as reading during the course of the novel, this essay develops the notion of how as an exile herself, but also as the granddaughter of immigrants, the protagonist seems to feel that a real home is beyond her reach and instead relies on her family history to construct a “house of memory.”.