Being outside inside Oran: Deconstruction, translation and architecture in Hélène Cixous’s ‘Promised cities’

Abstract

ABSTRACT ‘I am from Oran. I translate: I am from Hors En [Out In]’ (Cixous 2006, 30). Throughout her autobiographical account entitled ‘Promised Cities’, Hélène Cixous talks about her cities and her many languages. She deconstructs the significant cities of her life, and in particular the city of Oran in Algeria, where she spent her early years at the onset of the Second World War. In this journey across former cities, exodus cities, cities of the past, reconstructed cities, imagined cities, she tells us how personal experience and historical political events have merged at specific locations. Through close reading of ‘Promised Cities’, this essay shows that Cixous’s writing is an embodied practice that extends beyond the French language and embraces cultural multiplicity. Being outside inside Oran, her experience does not follow the delineation of linguistic and national borders, instead Cixous lives in a permanent state of translation, where not only does every language contain the possibility of other languages but every city contains the possibility of other cities. This essay proposes to learn from Cixous’s embodied and situated writing, and her sense of ‘doubly open belonging’, in order to rethink post-colonial identities and architectures in conflicted cities.