Algerian Schizoidia, Marouane’s Anti-memory, and Writing in Tongues
Anjuli Raza Kolb
Columbia University
Department of English and Comparative Literature
In the tropological figure of the post-independence Algerian woman, philosophers, revolutionaries, filmmakers, novelists, and politicians have recognized a force both singular and translatable, compelling of its own accord and obliging as a signifier for ideologies divided by apparently great chasms. Here provocatively veiled, there masquerading in forthright urban elegance, she stands effectively, and by turns, for tradition and revolution, mystery and courage, modesty and unabashed madness. Her psychic landscape, sketched out in memoirs, journalism, novels, and histories—both of her own making and drafted by those who would seek to represent her—traces through personal memory the political history of one of the most emblematic anti-colonial revolutions and its aftermath: the story of independent Algeria.
In the face of such wildly incommensurate ideological burdens, narrative schizoidia appears almost inevitable for a woman bearing the weight of a national tropology. In conversation with Fanon’s psychological and theoretical work on the postcolonial subject and contemporary psychoanalytic treatments of textual schizophrenia, this paper seeks to address the indications of and openings made possible through the collapse of time and identity that characterize Leïla Marouane’s 1998 novel, Ravisseur.
The novel is set in an unnamed, coastal semi-urb in the Algeria of the 1990s. Four sisters, one the victim of a horrific rape and subsequent beating, bear witness to the dissolution of their family. The short opening chapters establish the titular motivating turn of the plot: the father’s irrevocable repudiation of the mother, who has left the house unaccompanied. The novel’s clearest moment of allusion for readers of Francophone Algerian literature, the repudiation, quietly subsumes Rachid Boudjedra’s seminal autofiction of 1969, La Repudiation. Thus begins Marouane’s intricate challenge to Algeria’s collective literary memory.
Polyvocality exists, I suggest, in two registers of the text, the first being structural and exoskeletal. Here Marouane erects an atypically closed intertextuality in which the works she draws on function as linked plates of a textual barrier whose effective impenetrability overturns the kind of free play and easy movement associated with more exuberant collage-like models. This move offers an alarming hypothesis about the instantiation of anti-memory as a strategy of representation that simultaneously incorporates and effaces text, fact, and history.
The second register is that of the narrator’s voice, which seems to trill in each of the intertextual tonal registers. The narrator continually ‘mis’-represents the traumatic events of her life; and so drastically ‘mis’-represents her own identity that she eventually becomes indistinguishable from her own mother. As the narrative begins to display increasingly acute symptoms of unreliability, the reader is forced to make a difficult diagnosis that will surely complicate the reading process: the narrative, and perhaps too the narrator, is writing in tongues, hallucinating, schizing, and refusing to remember, while unflaggingly continuing to narrate.
Marouane’s novel breaks
emphatically with paradigmatic postcolonial schizophrenic writing, however.
This paper suggests that in the immediacy of Marouane’s chaotic
anti-memory, revolutionary history paradoxically inscribes itself in
secret to sustain those who suffer the most as newly independent nations
struggle to write, in clear and indelible strokes, their own narratives.