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Algeriance, exile, and Helene Cixous (1).

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My way of thinking was born with the thought that I could have been born elsewhere, in one of the twenty countries where a living fragment of my maternal family had landed after it blew up on the Nazi minefield. With the thought of the chanciness, of the accidence of the fall. Lucretius's Rain of atoms, in raining, the atom of my mother had met the atom of my father.

The strange molecule detached from the black skies of the north had landed in Africa.

In the smiling and happy little girl I was, I hid (from others and from myself) a secret, restless, clandestine little girl, who knew well that in truth she had been born elsewhere. The obscure feeling of having appeared there by chance, of not belonging to any here by inheritance or descent, the physical feeling of being a frail mushroom, a spore hatched over night, who only holds to the earth with hasty and frail roots. Another feeling in the shadows: the unshakeable certainty that "the Arabs" were the true offspring of this dusty and perfumed soil. But when I walked barefoot with my brother on the hot trails of Oran, I felt the sole of my body caressed by the welcoming palms of the country's ancient dead, and the torment of my soul was assuaged. (Helene Cixous, "Mon Algeriance") (2)

In any discussion of cultural representations of exile, literary texts assume a place of prominence. From time immemorial creative artists have used the written word to communicate, articulate, and disseminate their sense of isolation and alienation from, as well as their longing for, a place and space which for one reason or another--political, social, economic--has been banished from their lives. Helene Cixous is one such writer. In a sense, virtually the entire corpus of her writing could be placed under the sign of exile. Born in Algeria, her childhood spent in Oran and Algiers, she has lived her adult life, her writing life, in France. At first glance then, Algeria would seem to be the place from which she had been banished, the space to which she might long to return. Indeed, two of the writers about whom she has written extensively, James Joyce and Glance Lispector, were themselves displaced persons writing far from the land of their birth. (3) Yet the case of Cixous's writing as it might relate to the concept of exile "from" Algeria proves more elusive, more complex than the situation of either Lispector or Joyce. In a sense, Algeria is both everywhere and nowhere in Cixous's writing. And the very concept of exile "from" is one, which, in Cixous's case, would be difficult to argue. Yet it is perhaps this very concept of "exile" in the fullest sense of both its ambiguity and its complexity that serves as the basic creative motor behind all her writing. Perhaps in the end we discover that it is "Algeria" and her "Algeriance" about which she has rarely written directly which truly inform much of her work.

As Susan Rubin Suleiman points out in. her introduction to Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (1998) the word exile itself varies both in meaning and connotation. But the word nonetheless universally designates "a state of being 'not home' (or of being 'everywhere at home,' the flip side of the same coin), which means, inmost cases, at a distance from one's own native tongue" (1). But, Suleiman goes on to ask, "[i]s this distance a falling away from some original wholeness and source of creativity, or is it on the contrary a spur to creativity? Is exile a cause for optimism (celebration, even) or its opposite?" (1), and for Helene Cixous, we might ask, does Algeria represent "home" or "not home"? Or both? Or neither?

Helene Cixous was born on June 5, 1937, in Oran, the daughter of Georges Cixous, a physician, and Eva Klein Cixous, who later trained as a midwife. She spent her childhood years in the Mediterranean atmosphere of a French colony in North Africa, first in Oran and later in Algiers, as the child of Jewish parents living through the historic and political turbulence of World War II. Her complex family situation, as well as her place of birth, has obviously had a lasting and profound effect on her and on her writing.

In an essay describing her own "coming to writing," Cixous says that she had the "luck" to take her first steps "in the blazing hotbed between two holocausts" (1991,17) and in interviews over the years she has...