Narrations on borderlines

 

 

Nadia Setti

Etudes Féminines,

Université de Paris 8

 

 

 

First, I have to apologize to you, for I am asked to speak in English, and I should say, English it's not my everyday language, even if I can speak it rather well. I imagine that what I am going to present to you in this language is quite different of what I have thought or written in Italian, my mother language or in French, my adoptive language. Thus, English is truly my foreign language, which makes of me a stranger.

How can I speak of "my languages", in which way the languages I currently speak and write are they "mine" or not "mine" ? You understand, it's not only a question of knowledge, or usage, or ability (it's not a technical question) but a question of belonging, of familiarity, and nearness, "confiance", "affidamento". Language is a country, is a body which carries me and brings  me out of myself.

 

In fact much of the writers I like, whose works I've been reading and interpreting for several years now, write in their language other languages : they let the strangeness or otherness of language pass across/ through their writing. Should we consider this as a refusal to appropriate their "mother language"? Some of them already have many languages in their cradle : for Hélène Cixous there were already French (her father) and German (her mother) and in the neighborhood Spanish, Jew, Arab ; Tsvetaeva learnt from her childhood Russian, German (from her mother) and French. Clarice Lispector has always written in Brazilian, even if, as she says, she could have written in American, if her Jew family coming from Russia, had decided to go to the States, instead of becoming Brazilian citizens. That simple possibility was enough to stimulate her permanent desire and feeling of being another. Marguerite Duras who always wrote in French, remembers in an interview with Michelle Porte, that her first language was in fact Vietnamese, and that as a child she considered herself as Vietnamese.[1]

Hélène Cixous remarked in one of her seminars that in the word "mother" there are me and other, so if we write it like this "m'other" that suggests the little interval, that makes me separated, other in relation with mother. This borderline becomes a living fact of individual life, a symbolical link with maternal and mother, that is gratitude, if it is not repressed or converted in hate. [2]

The most recent books by H.Cixous are Osnabrück [3] and Les rêveries de la femme sauvage, Scènes primitives [4], the title of the first one is the name of the mother's birthplace, in Germany, the last one is about her complex relationship to Algeria her native country. The question understated is : how to tell the story of the other, mother or my/other country without appropriating her or her story, being close to her and nonetheless different.

The writer (the daughter) says that she doesn't know if she ever went to Osnabrück with her German grandmother or not, perhaps she only dreamt of it ; so Osnabrück continues to be her mother's town, coming out from the stories she tells to her daughter/biographer.

And Les rêveries begins with half a page written just after a dream, a dream of Algeria, the first lines are : "Tout le temps où je vivais en Algérie je rêvais d'arriver un jour en Algérie,"[5] Was Algeria a dream or a reality out of dream, nothing that you can hold, that you can keep? Where is the border between the dream of Algeria, the promised land, and Algeria out of her, without dreams ? She can say "Algeria, my native country" but immediately after she must retire it and write "Algeria, not mine". What is mine isn't mine, it's out of question to have Algeria. In anyway, that is not the way of her desire : hers is a movement towards : "I dreamt of arriving one day in Algeria". The country of her dream is more than a promised land, is a female body that she desires to touch, to kiss, but unfortunately Algérie is soon out of touch.

Are these the terms of a personal story which concerns the destiny of the author and her relations, or should we consider that through this singular, unique history appears the way in which a woman refers to her own origin and relationships constituting her identity as different ?

 

In La venue à l'écriture,[6] Cixous asks several times "Qui suis-je ?" but she can't find an immediate answer. She knows the danger of being trapped in the identity of a so-called woman (what she should be). She prefers to answer "Personne" that means nobody, but in fact is many ones. Later the question changes and becomes "Qui sont-je?" "Who are I". It's not a refutation of identity, but a refusal to answer before the Law which for a woman who wants to write means immediate censorship of her strongest desire.

In a previous article, "The Laugh of the Medusa"[7] she corrected the so-called neutral gender of the Subject, writing "sujet universelle" "she-universal subject". This deliberate error in the grammatical concordance exposes the subject more masculine than neutral to difference. But in fact what interests Cixous is not to think or try to represent a feminine universal subject, but to encourage women to explore all their possible ways to write their singular yet different subjectivities. For, their multiplicity of desires, images, sexuality can't be represented in an universal subject, even feminized. So let's give away the idea of a "femme générale, femme type", and if the questions still is : "But, what does she want ? " (Freud's question then Lacan's) let's answer : she does want.

Each woman as each story is singular, unique but at the same time is the meeting point of several lives and stories. That's why Antoinette Fouque prefers to write "une(s) origine's) as "une(s) femme (s)". [8]

But again, how may a woman come to writing when she is, as Cixous remarks, without any legitimate place, or land, or native country, or history of her own ? [9]

I think we can find an answer in the story of Emilia and Amalia, told in Non credere di avere dei diritti (Don't believe you have rights)[10], and more recently commented by Adriana Cavarero in Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti,[11] who qualifies the friendship between these two women as a "narrative friendship" because founded and nourished by the exchange of the narration of their lives. This exchange is asymmetrical, because on one side there is Emilia with her vital need to tell again and again her story, on the other side Amalia, who, having listened for a long time to her, decides one day to write this story for her friend, and to give it to her. Probably without the patient presence of Amalia, Emilia couldn't find by herself the way to tell her story. Writing it, Amalia completes the cycle of self/giving the story, passing through the other : self/other giving which is in the meantime to give meaning, words, language to life. What I'd call the coming to writing of this story of life is composed of a double feminine narrator and of all the different moments of narration : the oral narration of Emilia, the writing on paper of Amalia and further the reading of it by Emilia. The link that makes the coherence, is friendship, the confidence and the trust between two women. Does that mean that to make out a story one (woman) needs to be at least two? Me more other?

The narrator of A paixão segundo G.H.[12] by Clarice Lispector begins her narration with a similar question, because she is alone, coming out of an experience so upsetting that to survive she has to tell it, otherwise she is definitively lost. She knows that she can no more come back to her precedent life, that of a woman who had her place, her belongings, in a well arranged world. Now that the entire world is ruined, she has become a stranger to her previous self. She knows intimately that she experienced her deeper and most uprooting human life as a woman : the root of human that is woman, and she has to save it, for her sake. But to write this (which is still a recent, new and weak knowledge bordered of incomprehension) she needs someone to tell her story, so she creates a presence, a hand she will keep all along, while she writes, a hand to hold to herself, to keep in touch with, so to go on and come back. Her symbolical hand, body, land. For the moment she cannot give a body, a face, or a sex to this hand, because she is less than a person.

I open the last pages of A paixão and I read : "I was going to approach what I think was — confiança trust […] On me? On the world? On God? On the cockroach? I don't know. […] I would never reach my root, but my root existed."[13] It is this trust confiança which allows her to write a sentence like this "A vida se me é, e eu não entendo, o que digo. E então adoro – – – – –"[14]Life is to itself myself, and I don't understand what I say. And so I adore ……" She is finally, capable of writing in a few words this link, nearness, touchness between life itself and me : relationship, trusting more than possession. The end of the book is a beginning. To come to this diminution of the self, which is not a complete dilating, she has abandoned a full self-identity, the what-I-am, [15]for the deep almost unspeakable who-I-am.

The "not-understanding" signifies a loss and an opening : the loss of a definite image of oneself as a woman more or less like "la femme type", an opening to any possible signifying of oneself. That means that even if she comes back to the social space where she has to be some one, this or that woman, for convenience, somewhere in her will subsist a light detachment, suspension, difference, which is the trace of life itself, in herself-not-herself.

 

 

Every story is actually an attempt to answer the question "who am I". Sometimes the answers are incoherent, disordered because of the resistance to what Adriana Cavarero calls "la rappresentazione di un soggetto universale che è palesemente maschile". The fact is that this question needs time, takes time, time of expectation, to let the answers come. This time of research, of openness, is also that of difference. For undoubtedly there are answers, many, different, complex but perhaps we need a long lifetime to hear them.

 

This could explain why, Marguerite Duras re-discovers only very lately under her French identity, her Vietnamese origins that she was obliged to forget. [16]

Should we say as well that Algeria comes back in Hélène Cixous most recent texts as a repressed country living in unconscious? Who is then telling this story? Does the woman, who is going to write her story, come from this repressed country? that's why she is still "the savage woman" the other one, which society, nationality, culture haven't yet educated.

Almost at the end of the book, she confesses that she never thought to go back to Algeria, or to write about Algeria. But Algeria has come back to her through a dream and a piece of writing that is almost immediately lost.

Like the previous one, this attempt of story, autobiographical, starts with an irreparable loss :"J'avais perdu un trésor irremplaçable" [17]A few pages of notes written between waking and sleeping, where all the complex relations with this country were finally revealed ; so, a double loss : of truth and words for truth. The story's loss, already beautifully written, is her loss, almost her death. And it is like a survivor, that she notes again what this loss says of her and of Algeria : dispossession :" c'est exactement ce qui se passait avec Algérie, du temps où j'y vivais : je l'avais, je la tenais – je ne l'avais plus, je ne l'avais jamais eue, je ne l'ai jamais embrassée." [18] This actual loss recalls the ancient one : so strong is the impossibility to reach, to touch, to attain the land where she lives.

This story has many sides and at least three protagonists : herself, her brother, her mother. Her brother especially is the necessary other side, not a contrary one, just the other voice of a conversation which lasts throughout the years. Her only witness too, besides her mother, of course. So she writes out of three memories.

She writes as well her brother version, which is different from her's, and this diversity comes out of sexual difference.

While she has no real desire to possess Algeria, her brother, like his father, took Algeria by the earth, "la même façon, – mon frère – mon père, de prendre l'Algérie par la terre – mon frère n'ayant jamais cessé de tenir et d'être tenu, moi au contraire ayant un jour lâché et allongé les orteils –."[19]

In fact, he takes her/his Vélo – "la bicyclette allemande" that their German mother bought for both – to go into Algeria and know it, while she stays at home, with books, her other land.

This doesn't mean that she renounces to any closeness to Algeria but she is divided between two opposite sensations :"cette sensation d'être possédée par une sensation de dépossession et la réponse que je produisais, ce combat pour conquérir l'introuvable" [20] In fact she keeps alive her dream to arrive one day in Algeria, that is the dream of another Algeria, not the Algeria of all the wars : sexes war, nationalistic war, anti-Semitism.

She can just catch a glimpse of her "m'other" Algeria when she stays for a few moments close to the body of Aïcha : "dans le jardin du Clos-Salembier je me nichais contre Aïcha dès qu'elle avait ôté son voile […] je me serrais contre le corps d'Aïcha et elle me laissait en riant serrer son pays pendant un mince instant " [21]

So it is Aïcha's country which she touches, still not her own. That is the imperceptible, but still concrete, sensuous border between reality and dream, desire and satisfaction of it, me and her, her country and my promised one, mine as always dreamt of. This country is between them, but also between me and myself, me and my language, the thin borderline of separation. Through this gap, one day she left, I is the one who cut the "attachment" and left, to go elsewhere.