The Exile of the Body and Existential Wandering in Nina Bouraoui’s Work

Abstract

This article examines the representation of exile in La Voyeuse interdite, Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées on the basis of an existential conception of unmooring. The analysis shows that exile in Nina Bouraoui simultaneously engages belonging, the body, perception and language. Through these three novels, Nina Bouraoui questions the multiple forms of identity instability and the experiences that make the quest for the self complex. Exile, confinement, the relation to the body, the gaze of others, memory and speech constitute so many places from which the subject attempts to understand his or her own existence. The Franco-Algerian in-between, the blurring of gender categories and the difficulty of inscribing the body within a stable identity bring forth a consciousness marked by doubling, uncertainty and the feeling of never coinciding with a definition of the self. Memory, wounds and love experiences then become a matter from which writing seeks a form of coherence, giving the subject the possibility of taking possession of his or her history again and of redrawing the contours of his or her identity. By crossing Gilbert Durand’s anthropology of the imaginary with the contributions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Pierre Richard, we show that Bouraouian wandering is defined here by an experience of distance and discrepancy, which affects the subject’s relation to space, to the other and to himself or herself.