“Le Corps de Félicie,” part of a
collection of short stories entitled Oran
langue morte (1997)1 tells
of the life and death of a French Catholic named Félicie Marie Germaine. Unable
to look after his two teenage daughters following his wife’s death, Félicie’s
father places twelve-year-old Félicie2
as a servant in a wealthy upper class family in Le Havre. In 1939, at the eve of the Second
World War, the then 19-year-old meets and falls in love with a handsome
Algerian named Mohammed Miloudi, a sergeant-major ten years her senior. Félicie
marries Mohammed and follows him to his native Oran,
a coastal town in Algeria,
where they settle and start a family. A Catholic in a Muslim society, unable to
speak Arabic, Félicie happily spends over fifty years—her entire adult life—in Oranwith her beloved
husband and their eight children.3 Felicie
thus experiences both colonial (Algeria was a French colony from 1830 until 3
July 1962 when the French government acknowledged its independence) and
post-colonial Algeria as well as the Algerian War of Independence, which lasted
from 1 November 1954 (when FLN [Front de Libération National] military activity
started throughout Algeria) until the conclusion of the Evian treaty on 19
March 1962 and the country’s yes vote for self-rule on 1 July of the same
year.
Maghrebian French literature written by
women tends to depict an identitary “in-between” state either because the
authors live abroad while their novels are set in Algeria —as is the case of
Assia Djebar who lives in New York— or because they deal with intrinsically
maghrebian subjects such as the Algerian War of Liberation (Segarra 151). Assia
Djebar’s “Le Corps de Félicie” is a fine example of “in-between-ness”, as will be shown by an
analysis of the main character’s life in exile and post-mortem transformation
as well as her children’s selfhood problems. Oran, Langue Morte breathes post-colonial discourse, a historical
condition, rather than a chronological period, a way of contending with
colonial oppression, the discourse of the colonized,
which “begins at the moment of invasion and doesn’t stop when the colonizers go
home” (Ashcroft “Hyphen” 24). Through close textual analysis, this essay defines and explores
post-colonial aspects in the historical context of a violent colonial and
post-colonial Algeria,
revealing how concepts of selfhood and identity depend on certain religious,
linguistic and national binaries as well as family ties.
The story starts out with a description of comatose 74-year-old
Félicie, a woman who has experienced both colonized and decolonized Algeria at
first hand, at this point widowed for ten years and seemingly on her deathbed.
Unable to reflect aloud on her life, the two narrators, her eldest son Armand/Karim
and her youngest daughter Ourdia/Louise, tell her story in the hopes that she
may awaken from her coma, resulting, as we will see, in a post-colonial
discourse that is “crucially concerned with the intersections of marginality,
the dismantling of the center/margins binarisms and giving a voice to those who
live in the blank white spaces at the edge of print… in the gaps between the
stories, but principally the stories through which imperial dominance has been
formed.” (Ashcroft “Hyphen” 24).
In a sense, Félicie clearly is a post-colonial subject: married to an Algerian
and a French citizen and thus a colonial subject herself, yet refusing to
befriend any of the so-called pieds-noirs, “around one million French
settlers in 1954 who have lived and worked in Algeria for generations” (Stora
4) and unable to truly communicate with the Arabic indigenous population,
Félicie inhabits such a blank space or no man’s land. Through her nonconventional
marriage—a female citizen of the colonizing nation wedding a male Muslim
Algerian citizen who is by definition a colonized subject—she has broken
taboos, thus entering the “very domain of post-colonial theory … the
domain of overlap between these imperial binary oppositions, the area in which
ambivalence, hybridity and complexity continually disrupt the certainties of
imperial logic” (Ashcroft Post-Colonial 26-7).
The story mentions only five 4 of the Mildoudi children by name, in
particular the two narrators, Armand/Karim, Louise/Ourdia as well as
Marie/Khadidja, Yvon/Khellil and Kader/Jean. It further mentions an adopted
son, Younès as well as a little girl that died during infancy. When Félicie
passes away in a Parisian hospital, her children debate whether or not to “repatriate” (the
word is not entirely correct since she never gave up her French citizenship in
her lifetime, nor did she adopt Algerian citizenship) or transfer her corpse to
Algeria and lay her to rest in the matrimonial tomb. After lengthy discussions,
Félicie’s corpse is finally transferred and inhumed in Algeria, but
not without having beforehand received a new, Muslim identiy and Arab name:
Yasmina Miloudi. As Edward Said notes, “identity—who we
are, where we come from, what we are—is difficult to maintain in exile” (Sky
16). Ironically, in
contrast to her children, the exiled Félicie had no
problem whatsoever maintaining a sense of identity. It is only when her life
ends and her body becomes the focus of conflict that her children perform a
drastic change of identity without her prior knowledge or consent. Ultimately,
Félicie alias Yasmina follows, as will be shown, in her children’s footsteps.
The greater part of the text is devoted to the
dialogue of the narrator Armand/Karim
even though, as the title suggests, Félicie’s body is the bone of contention
and one could arguably say that the whole text is “written”
on Félicie’s body. Sitting
by his mother’s bed next to his younger sister Ourdia/Louise, Armand/Karim
hopes to wake his mother from her coma by addressing a long internal dialogue
to her, convinced that she can hear his thoughts:
Ils
ne savent pas, moi, je sais ! Je te parle en silence et tu es seule à
m’écouter ! Je te parle en silence et tu es seule à m’écouter,
Mman ! (Oran
239)
In his daily, deaf “dialogues” (247)5 or rather monologues, “silence violent” (Oran 286), Armand/Karim mulls over childhood
memories of a happy life in Oran,
hoping to pry his mother from the grip of death. Finally, a small miracle
happens. For a short instant, Félicie regains consciousness, turns to her son,
silently gazes at him for about a minute, then falls back and expires:
Mman
se redresse, s’assoit. Tourne la tête, vers sa gauche, vers moi. Une minute au
moins. Retombe d’un coup en arrière. Ferme les yeux. Mman !(Oran 286)
Thus, to some extent, the story certainly is a “long reconciliation with the idea
that Félicie won’t ever speak again, not even to tell her eldest son
Karim-Armand-Titi one more time that she loves him” (Rosello 136). But, more
importantly, the story bears testimony to colonial and post-colonial violence,
outlining the journey of a woman, a French citizen, marginalized in a society
eager to free itself from the shackles of the former colonizer. In this
context, Félicie emerges as a victim in situations of postcolonial violence but
at the same time as a woman empowered to unify apparently unbridgable
differences of race, religion, language and nationality. For instance, the
story refers to the massacres that took place during the celebrations of
independence day in Oran on 5 July 1962 when parts of the Muslim population invaded the European
quarters where the Miloudi family resided5.
This grim day in the history of the city accounted for numerous deaths, not
just among Europeans but also among the local population :
… un jour noir qui fit une centaine de victimes
pas seulement des Européens ou des gens qui en avaient l’air . . . Il y eut des
Tlemceniens au teint clair et à l’allure occidentalisée qui furent, également
massacrés . . . ! (Oran 344)
The official numbers provided by Dr. Mostefa Naït, director of Oran’s
Hospital Center, points to 95 people killed (twenty of whom where Europeans,
thirteen of whom were knived to death) and 161 injured. The European victims of
the attacks witnessed numerous scenes of torture, looting and abductions (Stora
85). Félicie, an obvious target for the French-hating indigenous Muslim
population, was lucky to escape unhurt from this carnage, thanks to a necklace
in the shape of a Coran adorned with a calligraphy of the name of Allah in Arab
letters, a good-luck charm given to her as a gift by her husband. The story
dramatically tells how a young man with a knife in his hand readies himself to
stab Félicie only to stop short when he sees the necklace around her neck. The
Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun stresses the powerful symbolism of the Coran
in a Muslim society stating that every society has “a screen of acceptable signs,
banning everything outside of those authorized signs. In our [Muslim] society,
the whole of these signs is a book” (Harrouda 21). In this
instance, the Coran clearly functions as a life saver, deterring any devout
Muslim from killing another devout Muslim. But Félicie is not a devout Muslim.
Why then is it that Félicie, a practicing Catholic, does not have the slightest
scruple to wear the ultimate symbol of Islam around her neck ? This fetish
as the narrator Armand/Karim puts it, is certainly a
symbol of conjugal love, transcending opposed religious beliefs but at the same
time it “marks” Félicie’s body, arguably claiming it as her husband’s property.
Apart from
depicting post-colonial violence (for example when Armand/Karim remembers a
machine-gun attack carried out by O.A.S. [Organisation armée secrète]
activists 8 against the family when suspecting that
the family was aiding Arab guerilla fighters, the so-called fellaghas or
maquisards, another attack from which Félicie escaped unscathed. Félicie did
indeed help the maquisards, supplying them with medication and foods), the
story’s underlying interest lies in the symbolic meaning of Félicie’s
extraordinary post-mortem journey from a Catholic/Frenchwoman to a Muslim and
Algerian. The story is also interesting because it addresses the couples’
offspring’s identity problems. An analysis of Félicie’s situation will help
shed light on her children’s dilemma.
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