MLN

This essay focuses on how Hélène Cixous’s mourning for Algeria, in “Mon Algériance” and Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, is linked to the death of her father, buried in Algiers. Cixous’ suffering (“malgérien:” a neologism to express both the evil and the illness -“le mal”- of Algeria) stems from her metonymic constellation of Algeria retrospectively viewed as “evil” during the Vichy regime, and also as the carrier of illness that contaminates the father. Cixous’ “malgérien” is also the experience of mourning the defunct father whose fatal illness becomes in her imaginary Algeria an allegory of the situation of the Jew during the Vichy regime in occupied Algeria. The father’s illness also allegorizes other fatal conflicts for Cixous, such as the relationship between Jews and Arabs, French and Jews, as well as colonizer and colonized in Algeria before 1954. The essay explores Cixous's fracturing of memory occasioned by her departure from Algeria in 1954 and draws out the meaning and implications of the metaphors of suffering and illness in relation to the father’s tuberculosis.