Does Love Know No Borders? Culture-Crossed Lovers in Les amants désunis and Les nuits de Strasbourg

Abstract

Cross-cultural love has been a contested site of encounter in literature since the colonial period and has met with prejudice and contestation of various forms, both in colonial and postcolonial societies. Despite an uneasy acceptance of love, or even its categorical rejection, the couple is a recurring archetype in the literature produced by writers of both European nations and of those places colonised by Europeans. The stakes involved cut across questions of race, purity and hybridity, as well as nationhood, and bear the historical imprint of the pseudo-scientific understandings of racial hierarchies and miscegenation, especially in the latter's meaning of the mixing of different races through procreation. Even though uncomfortable precursors such as Pierre Loti's Le Mariage de Loti or Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste have staged colonialist figurings of mixed-race couples, a good number of contemporary Francophone writers have penned novels centring on love in both their autobiographies and novels. Through a reading of two novels by Algerians writing in French, this article will trace some of the reasons why love is such an obsessive, recurring archetype and why it should appear in contemporary francophone texts as a site of cultural and political tensions. Both novels present couples struggling to love each other against the backdrop or in the wake of war: the lovers of Assia Djebar's Les nuits de Strasbourg live with the consequences of World War 2 and the Algerian War of Independence, and Anouar Benmalek's Les amants desunis are separated first during the War of Independence and then during the Algerian civil conflict of the 1990s.Cross-cultural love in the colonial imaginaryI use the term cross-cultural in this article so as to account for the many factors that may complicate a loving relationship across cultures, including ethnic differences as well as differences in political and social power, language, religion, family organisation and the status of women. This should not be understood, however, as a desire to downplay the significance of the concept of or colour in social reactions to relationships, since the notion of different human races was vital to justifying and maintaining power over colonised peoples during the period of the second French Colonial Empire (1830-1962). Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, in her essay on metissage in Franco-Algerian relations, highlights precisely this point when she states that colonial societies used skin colour as an organising principle: souvent bien sur, le propre de la societe coloniale etant de s'organiser en fonction de la couleur, c'est la categorie de race qui sert a organiser, a legiferer, a phantasmer les unions mixtes.1The prejudice and condemnation that bi-racial relationships have engendered are most evident in cases where legal jurisdictions outlaw such mixing. Thirty-eight states in the United States, for example, had introduced laws against interracial marriages by the 1930s, and such unions continued to be outlawed by thirteen states until 1967.2 In the French encounter with its colonial peoples, despite an historical colour-blindness - in other words, the political effort to disqualify race as a category on which to claim rights or to interact with the state3 - miscegenation and the children that issued from such unions were sources of moral outrage and attempts to control sexual behaviour through judicial processes. Under Louis XV, for example, an edict of 1731 forbade interracial marriage in order to avoid staining the white race.4 This rejection of racial mixing, which was based on a political and pseudo-scientific - as well as an emotional - fear of the degeneration of the white through the existence of mixed-race children, was strongly voiced in France in the writings of Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who claimed in 1887 that miscegenation within France was resulting in degeneration and depopulation. …