French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, and Leïla Sebbar are three women writers from Algeria whose work in French has made a profound impact on the current literary landscape. They are not the first women born in the Maghreb to take up the pen to express themselves, but they are in many ways “pioneers” of women’s writing in French who began publishing at a significant moment in the twentieth century. They witnessed and participated in three important changes in the field of French literature: the theoretical explosion of the 1960s, the feminist revolution in the 1970s, and the rise of Francophone studies. Their work cannot be understood apart from these three crucial developments, and because of this history, their writing now exerts an influence that extends around the globe.

Cixous, Djebar, and Sebbar, who do not share the same background, embody the multiplicity (ethnic, linguistic, religious) that characterizes the Maghreb. Their differences illustrate the tremendous diversity that has long been a part of this particular region of North Africa and point to the difficulty of defining many individuals who were born there when it was still under French colonial rule. Each of these writers has shown through a number of literary texts in a variety of genres that her story and her focus are unique, and that in each case, the place of origin has sparked a prolific oeuvre with an idiosyncratic perspective. Cixous has forged new theoretical and stylistic ground in inventive compositions that connect the personal, the political, and the philosophical. Djebar has translated previously ignored women’s voices from Berber and Arabic to French and then from oral to written form in rich, dense texts. Sebbar was among the first to call attention to the situation of Algerian immigrants in France and to the present hardships many experience when seeking a place in either country due to a troubled past.

Each of these three women writers has posed unique challenges to those who seek to classify them and their work. Since they are situated both inside and outside France, they elude easy definition and thereby have been placed in differing categories, depending on the perspective of the critic. Cixous, Djebar, and Sebbar challenge the implicit suppositions contained in the descriptors “French” and “Francophone,” since they are arguably neither, and both. Their own misgivings about embracing the loaded term “francophonie” to describe themselves and their work indicate that the division of French-language works into two categories, “French” and “Francophone,” is insufficient to appropriately address the global nature of French literature. And this is not a new phenomenon. The proclamation of the “death of francophonie” and the call for a new understanding of “world-literature in French” in the manifesto published in Le Monde in March 2007 was long overdue. Literature in French by writers from the Maghreb has always been global, in many senses, and the work of these three discerning writers helps illuminate to what extent.

Near the conclusion of her essay Algerian White, Assia Djebar revisits the history of literature from her homeland: “Algerian literature—we must begin it with Apuleius in the second century and continue to Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri, passing Augustine, the emir Abdelkader, and Camus—has continuously been inscribed in a linguistic triangle.”¹ What is most remarkable about this brief list of authors who have contributed to “Algerian literature,” besides the fact that they span nearly twenty centuries, is that they are not limited to a particular language or tradition. Indeed, Djebar emphasizes the linguistic diversity of works that make up “Algerian literature” when she comes back to this list of writers in Ces voix qui m’assiègent (These Voices That Besiege Me) and indicates that this ample definition of Algerian texts allows her “to inscribe the multiplicity of languages (Latin, Arab, Berber and French) at the very root of Algerian culture.”² These different tongues reflect a long history of conquest and domination, of mixing and interacting that have marked the Maghreb as a place that is particularly multilingual, or “plurilingue,” according to Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi. In line with his understanding of the plurality of languages that make up the North African region he comes from, Khatibi advocates the development of a “pensée plurielle,” a “plural thought” that “does not reduce others (societies and individuals) to the sphere of one’s own self-complacency [autosuffisance].” He argues that those from former colonies should “decenter” [décentrer] Western thought within them, and “decenter” themselves from Western thought, in favor of a thought that is not only “plural” but also “planetary,” that reveals a “difference that fights against its reduction and domestication.”³ Khatibi’s support for a way of thinking that is “planetary” and not Eurocentric or Euro-focused does not mean that he is not well-versed in European philosophy and literature; to the contrary, he encourages knowledge of the Western tradition so that it can be the target of the Maghrebian’s “double critique” of his or her dual inheritance.

By placing authors such as Augustine and Albert Camus alongside Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri, Djebar destabilizes preconceived notions about who can be considered an “Algerian writer.” While French readers would be quick to agree that Kateb and Mammeri belong to this grouping, they would less readily place Augustine and Camus in this category. Djebar has often referred to Augustine as a forerunner whose autobiographical work, composed in a language that could not be called his “mother tongue,” is a precursor to her own. Insisting on this affinity with the Christian saint, she demonstrates that questions of literary identity often cannot be easily confined within national boundaries. It was not until rather recently that the Nobel Prize–winning French-language author Albert Camus came to be viewed as an “Algerian writer.” The posthumous publication of his autobiographical text, The First Man, did much to contribute to a newfound emphasis on the importance of this birthplace—and his Algerian mother—on the fiction of this esteemed author. In a recent essay, critic David Carroll unequivocally presents the renowned writer as Algerian: “If, as Camus put it in The First Man, it was ‘the Algerian in him’ that his Parisian critics did not like and could not accept (at least during the Algerian war), it could also be claimed that it was that same ‘Algerian in him’ that distinguished him from the other important French writers of his era. He was not only one of the best-known and most influential French writers of the postwar period but also the first internationally recognized Algerian writer.”⁴ We might identify this emphasis on the Algerian background of Camus as part of a new trend that seeks to revisit origins and question assumptions about identity in order to better appreciate the work of a variety of thinkers.

Philosopher Jacques Derrida was not widely recognized as a “Juif d’Algérie,” an Algerian Jew, until the 1990s, when an influential book titled The Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, was published both in French and, shortly thereafter, in English translation. In this provocative text, Derrida calls attention to his status as a “Franco-Maghrebian,” and asserts that he is even the “most Franco-Maghrebian”—more than his friend Abdelkébir Khatibi, for instance—all while putting into question the very notion of identity that this hyphenated descriptor conveys. He explains that the particularities of his preschool experience as a “French Jewish child from Algeria,” prior to the moment when Jews saw their French citizenship revoked under Vichy, made him feel “more and less French but also more and less Jewish than all the French, all the Jews, and all the Jews of France. And here as well, [more Francophone Maghrebian] than all the Francophone Maghrebians.” This “hyperbolism” influenced his life and work in undeniable ways, according to Derrida’s own account, as he always sought to “speak in good French, in pure French, even at the moment of challenging in a million ways everything that is allied to it, and sometimes everything that inhabits it.” The apparent paradox contained in this statement is partly attributable to Derrida’s perception of “French literature” when he encountered it as a schoolboy in the French colonial educational system. The “first thing” he received ‘from French education in Algeria” and the “only thing” that he “enjoyed receiving,” literature was nonetheless far removed from his daily reality: “The discovery of French literature, the access to this so unique mode of writing that is called ‘French-literature’ was the experience of a world without any tangible continuity with the one in which we lived, with almost nothing in common with our natural or social landscapes.” Derrida reached the striking conclusion that “one entered French literature only by losing one’s accent” and in this text articulates his own ongoing desire that none of his publications “permit [his] ‘French Algerian’ to appear”: “I do not believe that anyone can detect by reading, if I do not myself declare it, that I am a ‘French Algerian.’”⁵

When Derrida expresses his wish to escape detection as an individual from elsewhere, as someone possessing a slight accent that betrays non-French roots and points toward a birthplace and an upbringing outside the French mainland, the intellectual admits to deeply ingrained ideals of “purity” that have long accompanied French education and characterized understandings of the French language. Even if Derrida’s work has ceaselessly called “into question the motif of ‘purity’ in all its forms,” he confesses that he is susceptible to suffering when it comes to this question put in linguistic terms. Derrida moves beyond this admission to make two crucial points about language and literature. He evokes his dream “to make something happen to this language,” to “this language that has remained intact, always venerable and venerated,” “something so intimate that it comes to take pleasure in it as in itself,” “at the time when an incomprehensible guest, a newcomer without assignable origin, would make the said language come to him, forcing the language then to speak itself by itself, in another way, in his language.”⁶ Even if he has avowed his subservience to French, Derrida holds onto a dream of dramatically transforming this language, not with violence, but rather in an intimate way. It is no accident that this statement immediately follows a paragraph that addresses an important literary event that took place during the Second World War:

In the middle of the war, just after the landing of the Allied forces in North Africa in November 1942, we witnessed the constitution of a sort of literary capital of France in exile at Algiers: a cultural effervescence, the presence of ‘famous’ writers, the proliferation of journals and editorial initiatives. This also bestows a more theatrical visibility upon Algerian literature of—as they call it—French expression, whether one is dealing with writers of European origin (such as Camus and many others) or with writers of Algerian origin, who constitute a very different mutation.⁷

Derrida highlights here the possibility—and the reality—of other “literary capitals,” far from Paris. In this case, Algiers served as an impromptu literary center due to the particular circumstances of war. Though the literatures represented in this space were quite different in nature and in scope, depending on the background of the author, they nonetheless were composed in a common language, French. It is worth noting that Derrida specifically mentions Camus, just as Djebar does, even if he doesn’t go so far as to label the writer “Algerian.”

David Carroll declares that “Algeria was never completely absent from either [Camus’s] political essays or his literary texts.”⁸ The same could be said for Hélène Cixous, though her place of origin has only recently attained a substantial degree of “theatrical visibility,” to take up Derrida’s expression. Cixous was born in Oran in 1937 to Jewish parents with roots in Eastern and Western Europe. Thanks to the itineraries of her ancestors on both sides of the family, Cixous grew up with a geographical awareness that was not limited to Algeria or France, but that extended to all of Europe. In a poignant autobiographical text, Rootprints, she revisits her childhood perspective, placing herself on an Algerian beach looking simultaneously northwest and northeast: “Geography of my genealogical memory: I stand at the edge of North Africa. On its beach. To my left, that is, to the West, my paternal family—which followed the classic trajectory of the Jews chased from Spain to Morocco.”⁹ On her mother’s side, the flight from persecution was much more recent, entailing a departure from Germany due to Hitler’s increasing power. An awareness of her own extended family’s fate has certainly provided her with a perspective that reaches far beyond the individual, and even the familial, to encompass people from the entire globe:

The global perspective that was in many ways an inheritance from both of her parents, as well as from Algeria, where Cixous was exposed to a variety of languages and cultures, has contributed to her approach to the French language and culture. Cixous attests to her surprise to discover that misogyny was prevalent in France when she arrived there in 1955; she had been used to observing it in a “crude” form in Algeria, but was taken aback to find that misogyny was “much more insidious and perfidious” in France “than anywhere else in Europe.”¹¹ Her awareness of injustices and prejudices led her to protest the status quo in France in the following decade. Cixous was an active participant in the events of May 1968, and she was instrumental in the creation of the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes (now at Saint-Denis), a place of higher learning that sought to transform the repressive relationship between professors and students in traditional French universities. She is still on the faculty of this institution, where she served for over thirty years as the director for the Centre d’Études Féminines, a degree-granting center for scholars in women’s studies, the only program of its kind in France, which Cixous herself founded in 1974. Cixous insists that she created this doctoral program for two reasons:

I was a professor of English Literature, and I felt I was hemmed in, since I had become an academic, in a definition of which the referent is national. For me, a literature cannot be a literature enclosed within borders. That is the first thing. Literature is a transnational country. The authors we read have always been the citizens of another world, border-crossers and out-laws. And they have always strangered their own language. And the second thing is that literature—like all discourses—is in its great majority masculine.¹²

Cixous’s early understanding of literature and gender as transcending established categories and resisting national boundaries resonates with her comments about language in the same interview: “There are ways of writing French that are ways of writing ‘good’ or proper French in setting up its borders and defending at all costs French nationalism and nationality.” This however, is not the type of French that Cixous hopes to reproduce in her work, for she seeks to “degrammaticalize French” to make it an “open, receptive, stretchable, tolerant, intelligent language, capable of hearing the voices of the other in its own body.” Cixous, the theorist who was initially known—and is still celebrated to this day—for exhorting women to write their bodies, has recently elaborated a new corporeal metaphor.¹³ She expresses her sensitivity and aversion to catchwords such as “integration” and “assimilation” in discourse that refers to the appropriate posture for immigrants in France. As Cixous puts it, “All these ‘foreign’ elements that we would like to make one, that we would like to assimilate: that’s assimilation—I always think of it in terms of bad digestion.”¹⁴

Mireille Rosello identifies in French feminism today a “changing relationship between a historically universalist French tradition and two categories (gender and ethnicity) that challenge, in different ways, the utopian ideal of a genderless and, even more persistently, raceless Republican subject.” She goes on to refer to Cixous’s recent work as “involved in the engendering of a long overlooked colonial past,” as well as the “ethnicization” of her “own French history,” acknowledging “France’s relationship with the African continent.” In Rosello’s view, this emphasis marks a departure from Cixous’s earlier writings: “Long associated with the ‘laugh of the Medusa’ and the first wave of ‘écriture feminine,’ Cixous joined a more recent cultural movement when she started exploring her North African roots, her multicultural and Jewish upbringing in colonial Oran and Alger.”¹⁵ While Cixous has alluded to Algeria in early texts, it is true that she has not explicitly dealt with her personal relationship to this country until rather recently. Just as with Derrida, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Cixous “returned” to Algeria in very real ways in her writing, and I would argue that this is in large part thanks to the emergence of “Francophone” literatures in the United States. Farid Laroussi and Christopher Miller explain in the preface to a special issue of Yale French Studies how the addition of new texts in the 1980s and 1990s meant much more than an expanded curriculum: “It was the arrival of new points of view and new questions about the nature of literature and culture. Rather suddenly, the horizons expanded, and French studies became ‘multicultural.’”¹⁶

A number of Cixous’s recent writings, ranging from essays such as “My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria” to books such as Reveries of the Wild Woman, deal at length with the writer’s place of birth. They explore in depth her own experience of exclusion in this land alongside that of others who were also on the outside, rejected by the French inhabitants as well, those with whom Cixous identifies, and for whom she creates a neologism “inseparab.”¹⁷ But this focus on Algeria also seems to open up space for other places, for other textual explorations that leap across the Atlantic to the United States: the result is Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory, an inventive work that sheds new light on many of the topics central to Cixous’s corpus because of this point of reference in which much of the book is set. Cixous underscores the fictional nature of this piece of writing, but she also uses the work of fiction to communicate a number of vital truths about her life, and particularly about a specific moment in her life when she visited American libraries as a young scholar. The decor inspires a whirlwind text that seamlessly jumps from French to English, playing on both tongues at once, as in this passage:

“Every day, road construction crews, State and Federal transportation authorities and local developers are working to make your maps and atlases out of date,” American Map states. Only in American could you make such an apocalyptic statement. I translate the words but not the tone: Chaque jour, les équipages de travaux d’aménagement routier, les pouvoirs et autorités des Transports d’Etat et de l’Etat Fédéral et les entrepreneurs locaux se liguent pour rendre vos cartes vos plans vos atlas et vos mémoires, nuls et périmés.¹⁸

Revisiting the details of a stay in New York that preceded the creation of this text by nearly forty years, the narrative voice places the English words of advice in italics within the French text: “Don’t drive today with yesterday’s map. Which means: don’t write today with yesterday’s memory. One cannot write yesterday today.”¹⁹ This circular exploration of the past and the present, of the impossibility of fully capturing the past in the present, hints at the difficulty of recovering any part of that past, particularly in written form. And yet, despite the resistance, the narrative voice must evoke what has returned to her in spite of herself: the memory of this trip to another place, at a distance from both Algeria and France. Her destination was not a specific country, but something else entirely: “I had no port of arrival in view even when I took the giant boat for the USA it certainly wasn’t for the USA but for the Library thus secretly for my home base at no permanent address.”²⁰ These comments are echoes of other affirmations by Cixous that she was “destined to leave” Algeria, but that she will never “arrive” in France, that she will always “stay passing.”²¹ As she passes from one library to another “from Paris to London to New York to New Haven to Buffalo,” the narrator explains that she is going “straight for literature as banishment.” The libraries she frequents are places located in their own world, and the narrator chooses to inhabit literature.

What is particularly revealing about a change in location in Manhattan, is that one’s points of reference are altered, and the identity the first-person narrator projects is modified to adjust to her surroundings. When a woman asks her if she is from Ithaca on a small plane that is heading from that town toward Buffalo, New York, she opts for the easy answer and responds affirmatively: “I decide vaguely on my American-being. In the end I decide that it is impossible to tell her: I was born in Algeria. In America Algeria doesn’t exist.” Whereas anyone in France would certainly know where Algeria was, the narrator assumes that an American would have no idea of the existence of this newly independent country. She avows, “Soon I found myself confiding the details of my supposed identity to strangers, I never said Algeria, which would have been in vain, but closer more familiar, whatever’s most widespread in the world.”²² The account she gives of herself to her American interlocutors is one that they will find more comprehensible.

It is hardly surprising that the United States should figure in a text by Cixous, since her professional life has often taken her across the Atlantic for invited lectures. Assia Djebar’s career has also propelled her to North America, where she headed the Francophone Studies program at Louisiana State University from 1995 to 2001 before accepting the Silver Chair Professorship at New York University in 2002. It is not an accident that Djebar, born in Cherchell in 1936 to an Arab father and a Berber mother, has occupied these positions in the United States and not in France. In 1955, after a year of preparatory work at the Parisian Lycée Fénelon, Djebar became the first Algerian to gain entrance into the École Normale Supérieure. The Algerian War had begun, however, and Djebar manifested solidarity with her compatriots by refusing to take her exams and as a result was forced to leave the institution before completing her studies. She published her first novel in 1957 but received little recognition in France until her work was crowned by her election in 2005 to the Académie Française. Djebar is only the second person from the African continent to be chosen by this illustrious body, after Léopold Sédar Senghor, and her initial reaction to the honor was to proclaim to inquiring journalists that she was pleased with what this meant for Francophone writing from the Maghreb: “J’étais contente pour la francophonie du Maghreb.” The question of whether this election was indeed an acknowledgement of Djebar’s stellar written work or an “homage to francophonie” was raised in a variety of articles announcing the news, and Djebar felt compelled in her 2006 acceptance speech to explain why she felt that she alone had not been honored by the Academy’s decision but that this distinction was also intended for other Algerians who had lost their lives in their homeland during the 1990s because they had sought to expose their ideas in French.

Djebar emphasizes in her speech before the Académie Française that when she was a child in “colonial Algeria,” at a time when she was called a “French Muslim” and learned about “our ancestors the Gauls,” her “ancestral land already had a written literature of high quality, in Latin.”²³ The newly elected “immortal” thus reminds her audience that writing in French is not the only option for Algerians and that her homeland has been the source of great literature for centuries. She also indicates that for years now, the problematic relationship she once knew with the language that accompanied the conquest of her homeland has been resolved: “For decades, this language is no longer for me the language of the Other. It is almost a second skin, or a language that is infiltrated in yourself, its beating against your pulse, or right next to your aortic artery . . . providing the rhythm for your walk.” Physical movement is a crucial theme in Djebar’s work, and it also serves as a pivotal impetus for her writing process. She explains in the same phrase that she writes and walks on a daily basis in New York, and that she does these things in French, a tongue that accompanies her wonder before all that she sees: “I feel then that I am only eyes [regard] in the immensity of the birth of the world.” When she emphasizes the central role French plays in her everyday experience, even when she is in New York, Djebar seems to reaffirm the global possibilities of “francophonie” that she has already praised in other contexts: “A francophonie in constant and irresistible displacement, why not? . . . Test its vitality, outside its genealogy and very far from an old dismantled Empire.”²⁴

As these phrases indicate, Djebar has been an eloquent voice with respect to the adjective “francophone,” expressing her reluctance to accept this word in its current currency and her desire to redefine it in much broader terms. The subtitle of her 1999 essay hints at her position with respect to this designator: Ces voix qui m’assiègent . . . en marge de ma francophonie. She allows the word to describe her “intellectual and critical activity,” but indicates that she wishes to push the concept in new directions: “to break out of the geographical limits of the French language in order to analyze, discuss, and put into question this ambiguous notion of francophonie.” She desires to test the borders, to push the boundaries, in her work: “in this linguistic territory called ‘francophonie,’ I place myself at the borders.”²⁵ In the same text, Djebar singles out three women writers of French whom she considers the most important in the latter half of the twentieth century: Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Yourcenar. Djebar argues that it is not an accident that all three are expatriates, putting into question any facile identification as “French writers.” The Algerian writer who is also an expatriate gathers inspiration from the works of these authors who have forged an individual language that is connected to the particular “transformations and movements” they have experienced. Djebar suggests, without stating it explicitly, that what might be considered “French” rather than “Francophone” literature is not as straightforward as it might seem at first glance.

In the March 2006 Magazine littéraire, an issue dedicated to “the year of francophonies” in France, Romuald Fonkoua contends that “a literary history of francophonie” should date back to the work of the Abbé Grégoire. In his 1808 text titled De la littérature des nègres, the bishop pleaded for “the creation of a foreign literature in French and for an opening up to foreign authors.” He perceived the tremendous potential for such a literature as being “inside and outside French literature, in permanent dialogue with it.”²⁶ Despite the auspicious beginnings of this literary history, something has gone awry. Instead of understanding francophone literature as a part of French literature, many critics and publishers have relegated the former to an entirely separate category, and this has had devastating consequences not only on this work and its reception, but also, and especially, on writers who have frequently been denied full recognition as authors of French literature. Patrick Corcoran clearly addresses the shortcomings of this subcategory: “In blunt terms, being able to state that one is ‘French’ is to claim a particular identity whereas the fact of being ‘francophone’ merely indicates a relationship to an ‘identity’ that belongs to someone else or, at best, to locate oneself in terms of a culture that is not one’s own. The word ‘francophone’ alludes to identity without ever quite conferring it. Inevitably, this is a context of incompletion, marked by difference, an inescapable sense of lower status and ultimately, possibly, exclusion rather than inclusion.”²⁷

What further complicates this literary identity is that it is quite unrelated to national identity. One may very well have French nationality but still be labeled a “francophone” writer, so the label “French” appears to be related to suppositions of origin and ethnicity that remain implicit in this categorization.

Djebar tackles questions of identity with enthusiasm in Les nuits de Strasbourg, a novel situated in a European border city, as the title suggests, that represents a very “multicultural,” “diverse” place of exchange and interaction. Whereas Cixous’s work began to explore Algeria in earnest in the 1990s, this was the moment Djebar turned away from her country of origin and toward Europe, to compose a work of fiction that brings together a variety of characters from different countries. Djebar explains that for her, “writing in and on Europe means intertwining memories: those of people on-site and my own—or those of any other foreigner.”²⁸ The foreigners depicted in this book are sometimes surprising, revealing family stories and histories that are little known, and detailing unexpected ties between Algeria and Alsace:

The most striking couple is composed of Eve, an Algerian Jew, and Hans, a German. Eve studied German in high school, but she refuses to speak to her lover in his native language. In contrast, Hans has made a real effort to become better acquainted with his beloved’s culture and is learning Arabic in order to communicate more intimately with her. During their frequent disputes, Hans discovers that when French fails, Eve’s mother tongue proves effective, as does English, a “neutral terrain” that calms their anger when he exclaims: “My love, my sweet love!” But something remains amiss in their relationship, until the couple finally decides to engage in an act that will mark the end of their quarreling. Eve comes up with this therapeutic gesture, and explains to Hans what she has in mind: “Yes, the Oaths of Strasbourg, you learned about them in elementary school. Remember, in 842 of the Christian era, thirty years after Charlemagne.” She insists on the fact that she studied the details of this period in her native Algeria: “Myself, I read them in Tebessa, in those years when they still taught us French, as in the time of France . . . it’s a history of the French language.”³⁰ Eve then reminds Hans that brothers Charles the Bald and Louis the German pledged allegiance to each other, each in “the language of the other,” not in Latin nor in his own native tongue, but in the vernacular of the other. Eve and Hans thus follow this example and pledge their love to each other, not in their common second language, French, but in each other’s native tongue. For Eve, there could be no greater gesture of love: “never has a woman from Western Francia so totally given herself to another.” This speech act has implications not only for the relations between those who have pronounced it, but for their offspring as well: “Prior to the child’s arrival, we extinguished all memory of genealogy.”³¹ Here, in the “city of routes,” the effacement of the past does not entail stifling history, but moving beyond it toward the construction of new identities. Protagonists in Strasbourg draw from multiple backgrounds to overcome strife and abolish longstanding prejudices in favor of a better future, less entrenched in national and linguistic identifications and open to the rich results that intermingling can bring.

Leïla Sebbar, born to an Algerian father and a French mother in Aflou in 1941, moved to Aix-en-Provence for her studies in 1961, and then on to Paris two years later. In her autobiographical L’arabe comme un chant secret (Arabic Like a Secret Song), Sebbar reflects on why it took her so many years of writing to finally be able to compose a text in the first person singular: “In order to arrive at myself, to say ‘I’, . . . I had to hear, far from my native country, everywhere where it was spoken, the language of my father, the voice of the Arab, the foreign tongue, the intimate foreigner.” Among her loved ones, “memory is white, empty, without religious or familial inscription to give it depth, . . . without a ground on which I can read and decipher geological, genealogical strata.” She laments that the unspoken rule in her family is that personal expression is forbidden: “Nothing is said, but the ‘I’ is proscribed, on both sides, maternal and paternal.”³² Sebbar revisits the events of May 1968 and the women’s movement in Paris, recalling all of the demonstrations she participated in during this time and the enchantment of these collective protests when her individual identity was no longer an issue and her own cause became synonymous with a larger movement:

The liberation she felt when collaborating on journals like Histoires d’Elles and Sorcières in the late 1970s was inextricably tied to the freedom from the burden of self-definition that usually haunts the writer: “Every time I have to talk about myself as a writer, I have to situate myself in my métissage, repeat that French is my mother tongue and explain that I am not an immigrant, nor a beur.”³⁴ As Sebbar clarifies in her correspondence with Nancy Huston in Lettres parisiennes (Parisian Letters), the métissage that defines her is precisely the element that made the women’s movement so satisfying: “I loved the mix of genres in the team and the journal. It is this métissage of countries, cultures, bodies, clothes, accents, voices, and gestures that attached me to it and that I have not found elsewhere, except . . . in works of fiction.”³⁵

Sebbar attests that it was the Arab women whom she met in the context of the women’s movement in France who brought the memory of Algeria back to her. Following this experience, she sought out those who spoke Arabic in the parks and squares of Paris and closely observed their gestures, looks, and laughs, even if the meaning of their words escaped her, and her first book was born: “They became Fatima ou les Algériennes au square, the first Fatima of French literature in France, the first literary Algerian woman, an illiterate immigrant.”³⁶ Sebbar is right to underscore the novel aspect of evoking inhabitants of France from elsewhere in her written work. Her publications in the 1980s, characterized especially by the creation of a second-generation Algerian immigrant teenager named Shérazade, have made their mark on French-language literature. They were particularly innovative because they were situated in France but depicted situations that pointed beyond the borders of the hexagon, as Françoise Lionnet argues: “Her novels are examples of texts that are ‘unclassifiable’ according to the traditional criteria that oppose ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’ literatures, since the standard opposition between the center and the margin is rendered inoperable.”³⁷ Not only does Sebbar defy the definitions of “French” and “Francophone” in her work, but she also expands conceptions of alterity in France to include people from around the world, not only from Algeria or perhaps other postcolonial regions but from locations in Eastern Europe as well, in an inclusive gesture that prefigures the global explosion of literature in French that we are currently witnessing. As Winifred Woodhull notes about the immigrant youth in Shérazade, they “are attempting both to invent new social relationships with each other—avoiding traditional family ties as well as bonds determined by rigidly defined class, sexual, ethnic, or racial identities—and, more broadly, to redraw the cultural map of France in the eighties.”³⁸

Sebbar’s Métro: Instantanés (Metro: Snapshots), demonstrates an ongoing concern for those who have come to France from afar, from a great variety of locations: “The metro in Paris is Babel. The faces, gestures, and bodies are posed there without voices.”³⁹ Sebbar takes notes in fragmentary, poetic language on the encounters she observes as she travels from one metro station to the next. She draws a comparison between her own indiscrete observations and the work of Orientalist photographers who took pictures of foreigners during the time of French colonization. In her interpretation, the whole of the former Empire is visible in this mode of transportation: “Photographers traveled in the Empire beyond the seas. Their images live here, in the metro.” Sebbar seems to look with great tenderness on the young African reading the Qu’ran, the radiant couple from Madagascar, the Japanese teenagers, the Asians, the Indians, and of course the Maghrebians. She is especially attentive to unexpected exchanges between people of visibly different convictions, and to the formation of unlikely couples in this unusual space. The snapshots Sebbar renders are not embellished or commented upon: they are simply placed before us, presenting a vision of the diverse French capital today.

It is possible to view Sebbar, like Djebar, as part of “the next generation” of writers from Algeria, following in the footsteps of “Jean Pélégri, Kateb Yacine, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohamed Dib” who “founded Algerian literature in French and opened a major route.”⁴⁰ Sebbar inscribes herself in this lineage in Mes Algéries en France (My Algerias in France): “I am the daughter of these sons who write books so far from the house they left and to which they never return because they have gone, because they underwent the ordeal of passage for all others, we write, I write.”⁴¹ But, despite this acknowledgement of her male literary forebears, Sebbar is continually drawn to women when she addresses her inspirations. She is not alone in establishing a connection between her own writing and that of other women in Algeria. Djebar has exhibited a familiarity with Cixous’s writings, as evidenced by the following epigraph taken from Cixous’s The Newly Born Woman: “I learned to read, to write, to scream, to vomit in Algeria.”⁴² Elsewhere, Djebar acknowledges another woman to whom she owes a great deal, ethnographer Germaine Tillion, whom she considers to be ahead of all Algerian woman (devancière de nous toutes) for her research in the Aurès mountains in the 1930s, her active dialogue during the 1957 Battle of Algiers, and The Republic of Cousins, a study Djebar praises for its lucidity.⁴³ Sebbar has also sought common ground with Cixous, whose work she mentions frequently,⁴⁴ and has expressed admiration for Tillion as well. This “pioneer researcher,” as Michelle Perrot refers to the French ethnographer, has set an undeniable example: “Leïla has learned much from Germaine Tillion’s ‘Algerian passion’: audacity, rigor, manners of investigating and classifying.”⁴⁵ In addition, Sebbar has often evoked Isabelle Eberhardt in her work, expressing her high regard for this “adventurer and mystic,” a fearless woman born in Geneva to parents from elsewhere, who lived among the Arabs in Algeria beginning in 1897 when she was just twenty years old. Sebbar, who is haunted by her own lack of proficiency in her father’s language, is fascinated with the productive writer of French who mastered Arabic, converted to Islam and traveled across Algeria on horseback, disguised as a man.⁴⁶ It is significant that Sebbar does not limit her references to women who were born in Algeria, but extends her list of influences to women who have crossed borders, blurred strict identifications and challenged expectations, whether related to language, nationality, religion, or gender.

Sebbar’s literary production has been caught up with representing Algeria, France, and Algeria in France, with translating Algeria for a French-speaking readership, and with providing someone special with a gift: “For him I invent an immense family on both sides of the sea. I try thus to restore a broken filiation. It is this filiation that I offer to my father.”⁴⁷ This vital figure who has provided Sebbar with the impetus for such a prolific oeuvre, this “man on the border” (homme-frontière), was a schoolteacher of French, just like Djebar’s father. Sebbar alludes to the opening paragraph of Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia, in which the girl walks with her father on the way to school, in order to establish an intimate initial connection before asking a critical question: “Assia and I are daughters of the father, speakers of memory [diseuses de mémoire]. As writers, will we know how to transmit a new filiation?”⁴⁸

The groundbreaking work of Cixous, Djebar, and Sebbar is the result of specific familial histories and the geographical and political context of their birthplace. Their unique literary creations are also the result of a linguistic awareness that is heightened in the case of Maghrebian writers, as Derrida explains in The Monolingualism of the Other: “anyone should be able to declare under oath: I have only one language and it is not mine; my ‘own’ language is, for me, a language that cannot be assimilated. My language . . . is the language of the other.”⁴⁹ None of these women can take for granted her relationship to the language in which she writes, and each of their texts constantly puts into question the “given” nature of any identity. This crucial contribution to literature in French allows us to answer Sebbar’s question about filiation affirmatively. Not only have these women writers from the Maghreb paved the way for other Algerian-born women’s voices to find textual expression, such as Maïssa Bey, Nina Bouraoui, and Malika Mokeddem, but they have also opened up the path for a rather new phenomenon, that of “global women’s writing in French.” I would argue that the unprecedented proliferation of contemporary writing composed in French by women from around the world has much to do with the courageous innovations found in these three writers’ very different corpuses. Women writers of French who hail from places like Canada, China, Hungary, Japan, Mauritius, Senegal, Slovenia, and South Korea are moved to write in response to these prominent precedents from the Maghreb. The increasingly “global” content of recent writings by Cixous, Djebar, and Sebbar has provided additional inspiration for these literary inheritors, for these works demonstrate the true potential of literature in French to originate from and extend to any location on the globe, to figuratively and literally take readers “all over the place.”