The mother as other: intimacy and separation in the maternal memories of Assia Djebar's Nulle part dans la maison de mon père

Abstract

The figure of the mother is a prominent one in francophone Maghrebian literature, and, through the association with the motherland and the mother tongue, is often presented as a source of anxiety in this context. This article focuses on Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere (2007) [Nowhere in My Father’s House] and demonstrates the potential complexity of the mother–daughter relationship and the inadequacy of existing models of motherhood. A number of North African male writers have tended to fetishize the role of the mother, for better or for worse, as the bearer of tradition, and feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Marianne Hirsch have argued that the Oedipus myth provides a highly limiting account of motherhood. Djebar’s depiction of her narrator’s mother in Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere conversely at once captures the intimacy of the mother–daughter relationship and preserves a respectful distance. This simultaneous communality and separation can be conceived using Jean-Luc Nanc...