“I wanted them to breathe between my sentences”:1 the place of Paul Cézanne's Card Players in Colette Fellous's postcolonial life-writing

Abstract

Born to a Jewish family in Tunisia in 1950 near the end of the French Protectorate, Colette Fellous grew up among multiple worlds. Educated entirely in French, her parents passed on only fragments of a disappearing Judeo-Arab past. Her autobiographical works return incessantly to the family's apartment and daily life, focusing on everyday objects which bridge family history and History writ large. This article analyzes her relationship with the most frequently recurring of these objects, a reproduction of Paul Cézanne's Card Players that hung in the middle of the Fellous home. Through a complex play of verbal and visual, Fellous constantly destabilizes the traditional ekphrastic scenario through an emphasis on silence, fragmentation, and chance. Imagining the Card Players as surrogate parents in a colonial family romance, she uses card playing itself as a metaphor for memory. Hence, the relationship between author, reader, and image becomes multi-layered, with each partner in the game continually drawing memories.