Memorial Traces as Tropes of Postcolonial Hauntings in Robert Lalonde’s Sept Lacs plus au Nord and Nina Bouraoui’s Mes mauvaises pensées

Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani

doi:10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.007

Abstract

This article is a comparative analysis of the language of memory in two auto-fictional narratives by two postcolonial francophone authors of mixed background, belonging to the area of Québec (Robert Lalonde) and Algeria (Nina Bouraoui). It will be argued that both authors seek to deconstruct the binary relationship of the spaces and identities they each belong to (white-Amerindian for Robert Lalonde vs. Franco-Algerian for Nina Bouraoui) through a specific poetics of writing or language of memory. At the same time, they each return cyclically in their writing to the postcolonial spaces, memories and histories of their respective non-Western cultures, as if ‘haunted’ by these spaces. Using the method of close textual reading in a comparative postcolonial francophone context, the article aims to show how the language of memory is deployed in the two narratives chosen. It demonstrates that both authors use the figure of the memorial trace as a trope of haunting in order to construct that language. It concludes that the figures of memory identified in the two texts analyzed give rise to a series of ‘postcolonial hauntings’ producing a postcolonial discourse of ambiguity rather than resistance.

Highlights

In the analysis that follows, I will use the method of close textual reading combined with an anthropological and postcolonial perspective to uncover the presence of the memorial traces and the tropes of haunting underpinning the language of memory in two auto-fictional narratives by Robert Lalonde (Québec) and Nina Bouraoui (France-Algeria)
In Bouraoui’s novels, the ‘return of the repressed’ manifests itself through the recurrent appearance of memorial traces as postcolonial hauntings that punctuate all of her texts dealing with Algeria
I have argued that in both of the auto-fictional narratives analyzed, this language is generated by a series of memorial traces expressed as ghostly presences/absences recovered from and through the repressed memories of the authors’ native spaces in moments of ‘stillness’

Summary

Introduction

In the analysis that follows, I will use the method of close textual reading combined with an anthropological and postcolonial perspective to uncover the presence of the memorial traces and the tropes of haunting underpinning the language of memory in two auto-fictional narratives by Robert Lalonde (Québec) and Nina Bouraoui (France-Algeria). Both Algiers and Rennes reemerge as spaces of the divided or fractured self in Mes mauvaises pensées, something that indicates that the feeling of reconciliation of identity described in Garçon manqué was temporary It is the narrator’s real, imagined and symbolic paternal and maternal spaces of Algeria and France that are being deconstructed in the novel: ‘je vous dis, tout de suite, je suis de mère française et de père algérien, comme si mes phobies venaient de ce mariage’ (I am telling you my mother is French and my father is Algerian, it’s as if my phobias were born from this marriage).[36]. She regains her full identity in the North American town of Provincetown, where she is able to liberate herself from the dual Franco- Algerian heritage and is free to embrace her (homo)sexuality: ‘Je ne confonds rien à Provincetown, je sais ce que je suis, je sais ce que je désire’, asserts the narrator (Everything is clear to me in Provincetown, I know what I am, I know what I desire).[39]

Conclusion

Lalonde’s texts that explore the theme of Amerindian identity are