Entre partidas e chegadas: a escrita em fuga de Assia Djebar, no romance "Nulle part dans la maison de mon père"

Abstract

Migratory flows between distinct nations are one of the most discussed themes these days. The displacement rates of individuals who leave their communities of origin to build a new life in the receiving communities have been excessive. The scholar of the Algerian migratory flows Abdelmalek Sayad (1998) places the immigrant as that who leaves his homeland to arrive in elghorba, that is the exile, thus being perceived as a provisional/foreigner individual who is sometimes tolerated but never accepted as a citizen of the country where he is. Therefore, he becomes destitute of a homeland. In this context, we place the Algerian writer Assia Djebar (1936-2015), who immigrated to France at the age of eighteen, where she became a writer, history teacher, and filmmaker. In her literary works, she denounces both the subordination of the Maghreb woman and the exploitation of her country, colonized by France. Some literary works can be autofictional, leading to the perception of a state of melancholy probably caused by the uncomfortable place of exile, allocated in the contradiction of writing to free themselves, even if it is in the colonizer's language. In this bibliographical work (GIL, 2008), we aim to identify how the identity construction of the Algerian woman in exile is revealed in the novel Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007), by the writer Assia Djebar. The theoretical framework consists of Sayad's (1998) studies on immigration, Aprile's (2008) reflections on female exile and the concept of autofiction, by Serge Doubrovsky (2005), updated by Gasparini (2004) and the biographical setting, by Leonor Arfuch (2010). This research is also based on Freud's (1930) death drive postulates, as well as on studies about memory by Agostinho (undated), Bergson (1990), Halbwachs (1990) and Ricœur (2008), in addition to the studies by Fanon (1961), related to the Algerian situation at the time of colonization. Throughout the analysis, we identified that the retaking of memories of the protagonist Fatima, full of conflicts and traumas experienced in her homeland, is narrated in a context of exile, in an in-between place where the sufferings are even more acute. Such resumption reveals itself as a strategy to overcome the prohibitions imposed on her and the mother, the father's severity – a metaphor of the abusive look of the French colonizer to the Algerian people –, the restriction of freedom and, also, the verbal aggression practised by the groom. Thus, the protagonist, who confesses to being a writer, writes fragmented memoirs as a way of transgressing and of understanding the in-between place where she finds herself: Algerian writer, writing in French, in Paris and New York. The reading of this novel offers a closer view of the difficulties faced by a Muslim woman before arriving in a foreign country - in this case, France -, favouring a look of otherness concerning immigrant women. Moreover, the work allows us to realize that the Franco-Algerian duality of the writer Assia Djebar is revealed through her autofictional writing, projecting life experiences in the literary work, recreating them and transforming them into fiction.