Mouloud Feraoun, Masculinist Systems and Feminine Thanatos

Abstract

Postcolonial literary criticism has long acknowledged the importance of the work of Mouloud Feraoun (1913–1962) as an expression of autochthonous lived experience in opposition to the orientalist narratives that had previously defined the Algerian literary domain. This article argues that contained within Feraoun's re-drawing of the terms of Kabyle existence from a Kabyle perspective is a critique of the symbolic reality of Kabyle life itself, particularly of its gendered divisions. Specifically, this article illuminates the potential for Feraoun's texts to be read through the prisms of Bourdieusian sociological and Lacanian psychoanalytical epistemologies where they evoke oppressive masculinist symbolic structures and women's capacity to manipulate, resist and subvert these structures. Special attention is paid to evocations of a feminine revolutionary 'death drive' or Thanatos in the novels Le Fils du pauvre (1950), La Terre et le sang (1953) and Les Chemins qui montent (1957), and to a feminine awareness of the 'phallic' nature of pernicious Kabyle masculinist epistemes that lead to the ruin of Feraoun's protagonists.