Disorientation and Accompaniment: Paris, the Metro and the Migrant

Abstract

In his 1975 novel, Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée [Ideal Topography for an Aggravated Assault], Algerian novelist Rachid Boudjedra reminds us that disorientation is a fascinating but life-threatening experience. His main protagonist, a Berber migrant newly arrived from his village, is lost in the Parisian metro. Boudjedra's attempt at writing from the perspective of the disoriented traveller disrupts generic conventions and confronts his readers with an unreadable textual labyrinth that exhausts and confuses us. Disorientation in and by a novel forces us to find answers to such questions as: How do we know we have arrived somewhere or that we belong? What does the representation of a disoriented subject teach us about the (reading) skills we need to integrate into a foreign place/culture? Is integration a form of violent reorientation? Boudjedra tempts us, dares us, to give up and abandon the book and the migrant to his fate (in the book, he is murdered) but also encourages us to think about an alternative practice of ‘accompaniment’. He invites us to consider what happens to the idea of integration if we cannot conceptualise arrival. His book exposes the invisible violence experienced by the migrant who is expected to reorient him or herself, and suggests that we might see accompaniment as a two-way integration that requires a permanent, mutual and disorienting process of differed arrival.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹The narrative is extremely non-linear. Like the character who is not getting anywhere, who turns in circles and retraces his steps without realizing it, the book focuses on objects that function as fake landmarks: it is obsessed by what happens to the suitcase, what it looks like, how the traveller carries it, what happens to it when it is dropped, noticed by others, searched by a suspicious officer. Many pages are also devoted to a meticulous description of the advertisements that fascinate and disorient the traveller.

²All translations are the author's unless otherwise indicated.

³The subtitle of La Traversée du Luxembourg is Paris, 20 Juillet 1984: ethno-roman d'une journée française considérée sous l'angle des mœurs, de la théorie et du Bonheur [Passing Through the Luxemburg Gardens: Paris, 20 July 1984: Ethno-Novel of a French Day Observed from the Point of View of Mores, Theory and Happiness].

⁴Augé explicitly credits de Certeau and adapts his opposition between place and space: ‘Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities . . . space is the word when it is spoken’ (de Certeau 1984: 117).

⁵Wrona (2008) mentions Henri Thomas 1956's La Nuit de Londres and Guy Konopnicki's 2005 Ligne 9 (in which the 38 chapters correspond to the 38 stations of Line 9 which the 38-year-old Joseph Kaplan uses as a hermeneutic grid to understand the city).

⁶See also Vatin (1976), who claims that the novel is closer to a ‘pamphlet’ than to fiction and calls Topographie a ‘roman d'accusation’ (Vatin 1976: 69).

⁷See Boudjedra (1989: 42).

⁸See Ross Chambers' analysis of accompaniment in the context of AIDS (1998) and Emma Wilson's Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (2012).

⁹See Graebner's remark on the disappearance of the character's name: ‘the narrative never lets him arrive; his designation in the text, as l’émigrant, itself seems to obviate any possibility of ever arriving anywhere’ (2007: 291).

¹⁰This is the opposite of what happens in Cedric Klapisch's L'Auberge espagnole, where the narrator (an Erasmus student who has just arrived in Barcelona) fantasises about the moment when he will already have learned to navigate the city: he perceives the unknown and disorienting environment not as a threat but as a promise of future familiarity and belonging.

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Notes on contributors

Mireille Rosello

Mireille Rosello teaches at the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis). She focuses on globalised mobility and queer thinking. Her latest publications are a collection of essays on queer Europe What's Queer about Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-Enchanting Paradigms (edited by Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello, Fordham University Press, 2014) and a collection of articles on multilingualism in Europe (Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans, edited by László Marácz and Mireille Rosello, 2012). She is currently working on issues of rudimentariness.