TO BE OR NOT TO BE MÉTIS

Abstract

This essay deals with Nina Bouraoui’s mixed-race (métis) identity as presented in her autobiographical novels Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées. The métis question takes the shape of a representation of an ethnicized, dual and fractured identity. My argument explores a contradiction at work in Bouraoui’s texts: while reclaiming the existence of a Franco-Algerian métis identity, Bouraoui represents the métis as the incarnated perpetuation of the historical tensions that divided France and Algeria. The narratives simultaneously construct and deconstruct Bouraoui’s Franco-Algerian métis identity. I examine how Bouraoui represents her Algerian legacy and appropriates a familial history to construct herself as Algerian. I analyze how traumatic memories of asphyxiation are a metaphor for Bouraoui’s difficult relationship with her French self, symbolized by the motif of white skin. And I consider how the ends of the two novels provide a problematic acceptance and fulfillment of Bouraoui’s métis identity.

Keywords:

• Franco-Algerian
• colonialism
• memory
• body
• trauma

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Garçon manqué [Tomboy] and the Renaudot Prize-winning Mes mauvaises pensées [My Bad/Evil Thoughts] are considered autobiographical by Trudy Agar-Mendousse, in her Violence et créativité de l’écriture algérienne au féminin.

2 The translations throughout are mine.

3 On the reasons for such a relative quantitative difference, see Saada 37. Essentially, Algeria being a colony of settlement, with therefore a relatively proportionate male–female ratio, and the structure of feminine sexuality in the Maghreb region would explain the low frequency of sexual relations between colonists and the colonized people.

4 Unlike Saada, Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, in Coloniser, exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’Etat colonial (2005), and Patricia Lorcin, in Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (1995), contend that “race” was, in fact, invoked in colonial political discourses regarding Algeria and that the motif was used precisely to exclude the indigenous population from the nation.

5 House n. pag. In his The Invention of Decolonization, Todd Shepard shows that between 1956 and 1962 the French Republic relied on this category to establish quotas to redress the effects of discrimination on its Muslim Algerian minority – a sort of affirmative action that, according to Shepard, goes against the idea that France’s practice has always been “color-blind.”

6 See, for example, Coquio’s Retours du colonial?; Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson’s Les Guerres de mémoires; and Bancel, Blanchard, and Boubeker’s Le Grand Repli.

7 Le Monde, “Nadine Morano évoque la race blanche de la France”; Le Point, “ONPC: Nadine Morano, La France un pays de race blanche.”

8 The idea of an intergenerational transmission of a wound in a context of silenced history is expressed by Nadine Fresco in her article “La Diaspora des cendres” about families of Holocaust’s victims. She draws from Michel Schneider’s notion of “blessures de mémoire” (wounds of memory), defining parents who suffered and who would not communicate their traumatic memory. Fresco argues that this interruption of transmission of memory makes the wound become the idea standing for memory (“blessures pour mémoire” (wounds as memory)): “Aux enfants, à qui la mémoire était refusée, on transmettait seulement la blessure […] Du deuil inachevé des parents les enfants héritent” (Only the wound was transmitted to the children, to whom memory has been refused […] The children inherit their parents’ unfinished mourning) (217).

9 Just to mention some occurrences of “skin” (peau) in Mes mauvaises pensées, see 24, 45, 54, 62, 69, 70, 76, 81, 82, 85, 88, 90, 102, 117, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130, 139, 143, 145, 193, 196, 197, 202, 203, 204, 210, 254, 283.

10 Rennes, in Brittany, is where Bouraoui was born. Her mother is from this region, and her maternal grandparents live there.

11 As psychiatrist Judith Herman says:

Traumatic memories […] are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story […] [They] lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensation and images. (37–38)

12 Bouraoui’s emphasis on her Algerian skin also entails a deconstruction of her gender, and progressively leads to her claim of lesbianism. The theme of “Algerianness” is linked to that of gender in the two novels. However, I do not develop the gender question here, as a discussion of Bouraoui’s lesbian identity is not relevant to my general argument.