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The Day I Wasn’t There, by Hélène Cixous, tr. Beverley Bie Brahic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006. 103 pp. $17.95.
Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, by Hélène Cixous, tr. Beverley Bie Brahic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006. 96 pp. $17.95.
The English translation by Beverley Bie Brahic of these two remarkable books of fiction—as Hélène Cixous sometimes refers to her works—is a valuable addition to the increasing number of publications available to Anglophones by this major writer. Both appeared originally in French in 2000 and were linked by a focus on private events that happened in Algeria, the country in which Cixous was born and grew up. They were by no means Cixous’s first texts mentioning Algeria, although her later works seem to refer more explicitly to the location of inaugural scenes at the origin of her writing, that early books, such as Inside (1969, translated into English in 1986), had addressed more obliquely, or more fictionally. Cixous generally contests the autonomy of autobiography, generalizing the implication of the self in any text, regardless of its genre, or, conversely, radicalizing the notion of fiction so as to encompass autobiography. However, she has said repeatedly that writing was in her case coextensive with Algeria, originating in the early death of her father, and in the social, racial, religious, and political inequities that she witnessed in that French colony. Each new book could be shown to propose a different articulation of these recurring themes. In addition, Cixous’s poetic style and unique relation to the French language make the task of the translator particularly challenging. Brahic is well aware of the difficulties involved in rendering the motifs of Cixous’s thought (such as the French homophonic word niais linking denial and simplicity in The Day I Wasn’t There) and proposes substitutes that do justice to Cixous’s concatenation of sound and meaning.
If Algeria is thematized and addressed through several of her writings, in what sense are these two books specific?
In The Day I Wasn’t There, Cixous evokes her elder son, a Down syndrome child, who died in her absence. The book starts with the announcement of a fault, and wonders about the possibility, not of forgetting it, but of burying its memory. The fault concerns the child, who is warded off as much as he is preserved, kept in the mother, just as the fault might be discarded but not forgotten, and who like a gentle, injured animal, for instance the three-legged dog encountered in a walk in the Bois near the beginning of the book, heartrendingly begs for acceptance and love. The mother felt that at birth, her child had not yet arrived, that in a sense he was not and that she had no son. Likewise his death has not been fully registered by the mother, and he is therefore neither received nor lost. The death of her son was rapidly followed by the birth of another, and in a staggering passage, Cixous depicts experiencing for the first time, through a chance photocopy of administrative family documents that inverted chronological order, “her two sons before her together, side by side with death at their side.” In this book Cixous questions, as she often does, the border between life and death, and reflects on what giving birth or life implies, as well as what would be entailed in giving death to the other. If the unexpected child disorients, if he forces the writer as well as the mother to interrupt and realign herself on him, it is also because the questions he triggered about life and death occurred in a place, Algiers, that was already haunted by the death of the father, and where nurture —the child’s grandmother also stands for his absent mother, and likewise his uncle could as appropriately be called his elder brother or father—has always in Cixous’s Algeria been in tension with loss, and social and ethnic rejection. Furthermore, the child is not simply part of the narrative, but becomes tantamount to the book that is written in spite of the author, telling what cannot or should not be told.
Both The Day I Wasn’t There and Reveries of the Wild Woman have in common an opening to the Algerian past that forces itself unbidden on the author. One of the returns to Algerian scenes that punctuate Cixous’ writing involves the position of the family house with respect to a hostile neighborhood, and with the French school, a position which is also affected by the threshold between life and death, for after the premature death of her father, the house is viewed as a besieged place under attack, encircled by assailants. Reveries of the Wild Woman performs such an impossible return. Impossible, because right from the start, Algeria is declared to be out of reach, impossible to grasp and to enter, as if its door had never been kept open. Thus its only access, if it could happen, would occur through writing. Cixous’ reflection on the opposition inside/outside—an opposition that is anything but firm in her writings—, her observation that admittance within was immediately followed by exclusion, and the ethics this gives rise to are profoundly determined by her experience of living in the family home in Algiers and her early life in French Algeria in general. In Reveries of the Wild Woman, Cixous pursues her reflection on admission as expulsion as a “form of relationship to the world,” positing an ethical stance stemming from dispossession, indeed embracing it as a way of fostering an unexpected chance to interpret and act in the world, without nostalgia, and with a sharpened attention to the disenfranchised.
Readers acquainted with Cixous’s works will welcome these elegantly translated books, while new readers will discover a fascinating writer with an inimitable style.
Brigette Weltman-Aron
University of Florida |
