Migration and the Inhospitable Reader in Leila Sebbar's Le Silence des rives

Annedith M. Schneider Sabanci University

Much of the work of writer Le'ila Sebbar has explored the cultural and emotional aspects of immigration. In writing of her own experiences living in France as someone who came from somewhere else, Sebbar , describes the difficulty of belonging to a place and of having others not accept her as belonging. As the daughter of a French mother and an Algerian father, she rejects the labels of both immigrant and native. Instead, she claims a French identity that is more chosen than inherited. As she writes in a published exchange of letters with Canadian writer Nancy Huston, "Je ne suis pas un 'ecrivain maghrebin d'expression franyaise' ... Je ne suis pas une Franyaise de souche [ ... J Mais desormais je sais qu'il faut que je puisse dire, declarer, affirmer sans ambigulte, sans culpabilite. [ ... J: je suis franyaise" (Sebbar and Huston 1986: 133-134). Rather than any yssentialized -identity based on origin, she emphasizes the importance of writing in establishing a place, a sense of belonging. As she said in a 1996 interview, ''je crois que j'ecris parce que j' ai quitte I' Algerie".1 What is it then about having left Algeria that causes her to write? The answer is suggested in the exchange of letters with Nancy Huston, when Sebbar describes the written word as one of the only places where she feels at home: "II me semble parfois que rna seule terre [ ... J c'est l'ecriture, l'ecole, Ie livre" (Sebbar and Houston

1 Private interview of the author with L. Sebbar.

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1986: 131), thus echoing Theodor Adorno, who writes, "For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live" (in Said 1994: 58). This need to write is mirrored by the unnamed immigrant protagonist of Sebbar's narrative Le Silence des rives, who fills pages and pages of scrap paper with "parfois des vers, parfois non, des histoire decousues qu'il est Ie seul it. comprendre" (Sebbar 1993: 112). Unlike Sebbar and Adorno, however, he is unable to find a home in his writing which, in fact, provides no sense of belonging in his adopted country or anywhere else. This essay will argue that he fails to fmd a home in his writing because to do so he depends on finding a hospitable reader. Only once a hospitable reader takes in his writing might he then find a home in his writing, from which he in turn might offer hospitality. Writing is thus the means by which the protagonist seeks -and fails to fmd- a hospitable community.

The themes of exile and exclusion have traversed Sebbar's writing since the early 1980s. As is the case with her well known Sherazade trilogy, her novels of the 1980s tended to focus on adolescents and young adults and their experiences as the children of immigrants. Le Silence des rives (1993), although it has not received extensive critical attention, is worth coming back to as one of Sebbar's first novels to focus on immigration and feelings of belonging with adult characters who are first-generation immigrants. One might be tempted to discount the earlier novels as more typical of teenage angst than of the conflict born of immigrant experience, but Sebbar's later work makes it clear that for her these issues are not limited to adolescents. As Roswitha Geyss (2008) notes, Le Silence can be seen as the first of an extended trilogy reflecting on exile and language, followed by Je ne parle pas la langue de man pere (2003) and L 'Arabe comme un chant secret (2007). Although these latter two works are more autobiographical reflection than fiction, they do indeed continue to explore many of the issues raised in Le Silence.

In literary contexts, exile has often been idealized. Some postcolonial and postmodern theorists define exile in opposition to the repressive nation-state and to monolithic notions of identity, seeing in exile the possibility of subversive non-belonging, of the person who belongs neither here nor there, who has loyalties to more than one community or indeed to no community at all. Homi Bhabha (1994), in particular, has argued for the notion of the "third space" as an alternative to fixed and essentialized identities. Similarly, Edward Said, who has written extensively on exile and exilic writers, praises the "pleasure of being

Migration and the Inhospitable Reader in Leila Sebbar 's... 49

surprised, of never taking anything for granted, of learning to make do in circumstances of shaky instability that would confound or terrify most people" (1994: 59) and notes the advantages of a "double perspective that never sees things in isolation" (60), what he refers to elsewhere as "contrapuntal" awareness (2000: 186). But Said does temper his apparent enthusiasm for the in-betweeness of exile by noting that the real lived experience of exile is also a state of "miserable loneliness" (176). These contrary aspects of exile are reflected in the literature of exile as described by another critic: simultaneous nostalgia for the home left behind and attempts to "fmd relevance in the new environment", a search for "symbolic links with the 'imagined community' of the diaspora" in other places and times (Chandramohan 2001: 149).

In all the many discussions of writing and exile, whether writing is seen as a way to create a home where one is or as a way to connect with the home one came from, little is said about the role of the reader. If writing is a way of creating a home as Adorno suggests, it does so by welcoming others in; these others can be none other than reader. If writing, on the other hand, is a way of asking to be taken in, then once again, the host can be none other than the reader. For Sebbar's unnamed protagonist, however, his writing provides neither a home in exile, nor entrance to someone else's home. When he fails to find a hospitable reader, his writing loses its meaning for the protagonist, and he destroys it.

Sebbar's narrative follows the last day in the life of a man who immigrated to France in his youth, married a French woman and never returned to his home on the "other shore". While the two shores are not named in the novel, it is clear from the context that one is Christian France and the other Muslim Algeria and that the narrative follows the experiences of a man who emigrated shortly after the end of the Algerian War in 1962. As someone who apparently emigrated primarily for economic rather than political reasons, the unnamed protagonist of Le Silence des rives might not at first glance seem to fit the classic image of an exile. Whether one is forced by political circumstances or economic desperation to leave one's home, however, the lived experience of exile may not differ greatly. While the man's refusal to return to the country of his birth seems to be self-imposed, he nonetheless experiences it as cultural and linguistic disruption, as well as physical displacement. As he contemplates his own death, he remembers the rituals surrounding death in the lan,d of his birth and listens to the conversations of others about

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such rituals. While he demonstrates no other attachment to religion, much of the narrative, which is focalized through the protagonist and his memories, revolves around religious rituals for the dead. Significantly, whereas the man at first appears relatively unconcerned with what will happen to his body, he returns again and again to his worry about who will say the prayers for the dead for him. Not coincidentally, he also shows detailed and ritualistic attention to the fate of his writing, as another sort of bodily remains.

Despite his apparent disinterest in the -fate of his own body, the narrative returns repeatedly to the rituals . surrounding death. His memories of what one does with the body after death in the country of his birth are dominated by the image of three women dressed in black, who would arrive as if by magic whenever someone died or was about to die. They terrified the man as a young boy, as they did his mother when she was a girl and they also appeared at the moment of her grand­mother's death. Apparently unbounded by time, the women in black are wanderers without connection to any single place or family, as they travel the countryside, attending to the dead and receiving hospitality given as much out of fear as goodwill.

Elles viennent de loin, personne ne sait OU se trouve leur village natal, elles ne disent rien d'elles, pas meme leur pn!noms, on les appelle -les sreurs­lorsqu'elles arrivent dans Ie village, on ignore de qui elles sont les filles. Les sorcieres ont une mere? Elles sont les filles d'un homme et d'une femme?

(Sebbar 1993: 13)

The narrative creates several conflicting versions of the history of these three women. While no story is corroborated by more than gossip, they all agree that the women's pasts include the loss of family and home, whether through choice or misfortune. This lack of family ties has particular resonance for the protagonist of the novel: his brother has been killed, he has broken his ties to his mother on the other shore, he and his wife barely speak to each other, and they have no children.

While the mysterious origins of the three women contribute to their aura of power, perhaps most terrifying is that they seem able to predict death, or even to cause death. The three female figures dressed in black inevitably call to mind the Eumenides, or Furies, of classical Greece, the three goddesses who were associated with vengeance, particularly in the case of broken oaths or those who violated ties of kinship, for example, through crimes such as matricide. They are perhaps best known through

Migration and the Inhospitable Reader in Leila Sebbar 's ... 51

their depiction in Aeschylus's Oresteia, in which they pursue Orestes to exact vengeance for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra. As in Sebbar's novel, the Oresteia is also a story about what happens when men have abandoned the home and it is women who remain behind with the responsibility to maintain a crumbling home or homeland.2 And like the Eumenides, the three sisters of Sebbar' s novel must be appeased with proper respect and offerings: "Les sceurs quittent la maison du deuil, on a fait pour elles des galettes du meilleur ble, elles emportent du fromage de brebis, des figues, de l'huile d'olive et du miel, on les gate pour qU'elles ne reviennent pas, si on les maltraite, elles pourraient se venger" (37). That the man feels pursued by these three women, even on the other shore, seems unsurprising, given what he himself perceives as his betrayal of the promise to his mother that he would keep the three women away from her when she dies and that he would ensure that her young granddaughter would be there to say the prayers for the dead. "Lui, Ie fils arne encore enfant, il a promis [ ... ] Et puis, il est parti. [ ... ] sa mere I' attend, il sait pourquoi, il ne reviendra pas vivant au village" (58-59). From the first lines of the text, he reflects on his failure to return home, as he had promised his mother. It is this broken promise that haunts him throughout the last day of h'is life.

Just as the man's promise concerns rituals surrounding his mother's death, he is also tormented in his exile with his own death and the absence of anyone to say the ritual prayers. While he refuses to return to the country of his birth, he also cannot avoid the pull of tradition. This link between death and exile is not accidental. Said says of exile that "like death but without death's ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography" (2000: 174). It is this sense of rupture or fragmentation that Sebbar's novel captures and that her chara9ters, except for the protagonist, seek at all costs to avoid in their focused, even obsessive, attention to rituals surrounding death. The novel portrays the disposal of the physical remains as a way that characters make a claim to belonging to a particular family and location, in some cases a homeland. Whether it is a question of being buried in the family plot or the "repatriation" of the dead, such concerns deny the rupture of death, re-establishing a physical

2 Mortimer suggests that the crumbling home allegorizes the crumbling nation of Algeria, abandoned by its young men at the end of the Independence War (2000: xiv).

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connection to home and to one's descendants. Rituals anchor memory and the body to a particular space, the home.

Having found no community on either shore, however, the protagonist refuses the comfort of symbolic union in death. He meets another immigrant worker, who tells him that he will forego the expense of having his body returned to the other shore and instead have only his ashes returned. "11 ecrira a son fils aine, pour lui expliquer, [ ... J qu'il enterre I'urne sous l'olivier centenaire, celui de l' Ancetre, sur la colline a ble" (Sebbar 1993: 143). Sebbar's protagonist gives no answer when the man asks, "A-t-il reflechi a ce jour?" (ibid.). Similarly, when his wife tells him that there is a place for him in the family burial plot, he laughs. "Alors qu'est-ce que tu veux me proposer pour rna mort, toi rna femme qui n'as pas su me donner un peu de ta vie ici [ ... J Toi et moi, unis dans la mort, aprcs toutes ces annees chacun avec son malheur, incapables d'en bouger, accroches l'un a I'autre, pour que lIe vie?" (120). In a novel filled with reflections on death rituals and the fate of the body, especially returning the body to or keeping the body in familiar "home" spaces, the protagonist stands out for his disinterest in reserving a space for his remams.

In attempts to maintain or establish connection to a social body, the individual body must be preserved. Sebbar's protagonist, separated from his community of origin and unconnected to the communities where he lives, has given up on any sense of attachment to the living. For other characters in the novel, however, the integrity of the body, whether in life or death, must be preserved through ritual, so that it may be returned whole to the earth from which it came. Anything removed from the body places it at risk. Although protecting the body takes different forms on each shore, for both, this means not leaving such remains where anyone can access them. When the protagonist was a child, he remembers that

les meres defendaient a leurs fiUes d'abandonner leurs cheveux aux rigoles, jusqu'ou iraient-ils ainsi, quelqu'un s'en saisirait et qU'arriverait-il? Les seeurs des ruines cherchaient les cheveux des filles vierges et pas seulement les cheveux. Tout ce qui se separe du corps sans Ie blesser, jusqu'a l'eau du bain, I' eau sale avec les poils et les peaux mortes. [ ... ] Les meres recommandaient de jeter les rognures d'ongles au feu, surtout ne pas les laisser n'importe ou.

(85)

F or the French women the man overhears talking in a cafe, the specific rituals differ, but the concern that these bodily remains be cared for is the

Migration and the Inhospitable Reader in Leila Sebbar 's... 53

same. Speaking of baby teeth, one of the women reflects that "il valait mieux les cacher sous les pierres du seuil de la maison ou dans Ie mur du cimetiere, surtout pas Ie jeter dans Ie feu, pour etre sur de les retrouver a la Resurrection" (78), thus linking the eventual reconstitution of the individual body and the community of believers.

In contrast to such believers, the protagonist seeks to destroy all physical signs of possible community in life or in death. He comments, "qu'on laisse son corps la ou il sera sans vie [ ... J II aura peut-etre dit, en riant, a ses compagnons de nuit que rien n'est prevu pour lui, qu'il n'est qu'un pauvre diable et qu'on peut jeter son corps dans une fosse commune" (55-56). At first, it may seem that he is unconcerned with the fate of his bodily remains, but as the narrative continues, it becomes clear that while he does indeed care about what will happen to his body after death, he wants to avoid death rituals that connect the body to a particular place. Just as he refuses his wife's offer of place in the family tomb and fails to understand the man who will insist that his family spend large sums of money for his burial in the holy land, so Sebbar's protagonist chooses a place for his body that fixes it to no single location. "La prochaine fois, il n'oubliera pas de preciser au patron, s'il tombe raide chez lui au pied du comptoir, comme on Ie lui a predit, qu'il donne son corps a la mer, mais la OU les eaux du fleuve croisent les eaux de la mer, exactement, voila ce qu' il desire" (115). This very specific request for his remains differs from other rituals described in the novel, which insist on connection between place and memory, and instead designates a place of movement and in-between, a neither-here-nor-there. Whereas other rituals ensure the memory of the individual, the integrity of the body, and the attachment of the physical remains to a single place (as seen for example, in the French women's interest in tombstones and horror at the idea of crel!lation), Sebbar's protagonist creates a ritual which will ensure that he is forgotten and that his body will be dispersed as widely as possible. Being buried on land means leaving a trace (bodily remains, a gravestone, a burial site), whereas throwing his body out to sea makes any kind of physical memorial impossible -unless that of a tombstone at an empty gravesite, a situation where writing would attempt to stand in for the missing body. But with no ties to living and the destruction of his writing, he denies the possibility of even written remains. His desire for ritualized oblivion and the refusal of all ties to home and community is clear in his treatment of his identity card, the only official document he carries. "11 detache la photographie qu' il brule

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avec son briquet sur la grille de fer qui dessine comme des damiers en rand au pied du tilleul; il enfonce les cendres dans la terre, se penche vers Ie fleuve et lance la carte qu'il suit des yeux un moment" (144). Having failed to find real lived community, he also destroys one of the markers of theoretical communal identity, that found through national belonging.

In the introduction to the English translation of Sebbar's novel, Mildred Mortimer notes that the sea may separate the two shores, but that it also links them (2000: xiii). While this may be generally true, Sebbar's novel emphasizes yet another function for the sea -that of a space of possible but missed encounter. In one of several moments in the text in which bodies are linked to writing, the protagonist carefully destroys and disperses his writing:

11 tient les pages en miettes dans ses mains, s'avance a la croisee des eaux qui tourbillonnent, et les jette, avec les gestes amples et solennels des Anciens qui ont dQ jeter les cendres d'etres chers, sur les rivages de la mer fermee par des terres qui se sont fait si longtemps la guerre, et ce n' est pas fmi, mais la guerre c'est aussi larencontre, Ie tourbillon des eaux OU les papiers disparaissent, c'est I 'echange turbulent du f1euve avec la mer.

(Sebbar 1993: 116-117, my emphasis)

Like the remains of his body, the man wants his writing left not just anywhere, but at a place of movement, where the river flows into the sea. Sebbar's language suggests the possibility of encounter when she writes of "la croisee des eaux", "la rencontre" and "1' echange". Yet even if there are possibilities for meeting, the sea is still closed off, inhospitable, "fermee par des terres". And not all encounters are friendly meetings: "la guerre c' est aussi la rencontre". Thus the sea, like one's writing, may suggest a potential meeting, but it is not guaranteed nor is it necessarily positive.

The sea may be a space of encounter, but it is not a way home. The man sees himself (and the sea) as aimless in comparison to the swallows that migrate from Africa across the sea to Europe, "des migrantes qui ne se trompent pas, elles savent, et lui ne sait rien de lei OU il doit vivre, il suit Ie hasard au Ie destin, pas comme les hirondelles qui ne font rien de travers" (73). They also return to the other shore every year, unlike the protagonist, thus serving as more reliable sources of connection and communication between the shores than either the man or the sea. The sea here fails to create a link to the other shore as the protagonist instead

Migration and the Inhospitable Reader in Leila Sebbar 's... 55

imagines migratory birds who might carry his writing to the other shore, but even this is unlikely. Questioning and using the hypothetical, the narrative asks,

Ses poemes en morceaux dans Ies eaux croisees parviendront-ils intacts sur la rive opposee? Si des troupes d'hirondelles happent, chacune dans son bec, un confetti de poete sans Ie lacher jusqu'au bord des mines qU'elles connaissent, ou sur la terrasse de la grande maison, qui prendra la peine de ramasser de si minuscules papiers, pour reconstruire les poemes jetes a la mer?

(124, my emphasis)

Unlike the river along which the man walks, the movement of the sea back and forth would carry neither him nor his writing in any single direction and cannot be counted on to carry them to the other shore. If return home is unlikely or impossible, as I have argued above, the sea may not provide a way home, but it may become a kind of home in and of itself. Sara Ahmed argues for the need to think of home not a as a fixed location with fixed inhabitants, but rather as a place that "always involvers] encounters between those who stay, those who arrive, and those who leave" (2000: 88). This idea of the encounter, or more correctly, missed encounter, may apply to the protagonist's writing, as well.

Sebbar's novel explicitly links the fate of the man's body to the fate of his writing. Just as the man ritually buries the ashes of his identity card photograph, and as he also throws away his writing "avec les gestes amples et solennels des Anciens qui ont dfi jeter les cendres d'etres chers, sur les rivages de la mer" (Sebbar 1993: 116), so in a more enigmatic passage linking the body and poetry, the man remembers a photo he tore out of a newspaper and kept folded in his wallet. In the photo there are,

allonges sur des civieres po sees au sol, alignes sur plusieurs rangs, trente, peut­etre cinquante corps, noues a la tete et aux pieds dans des couvertures mili­taires. Une photographie sans legende [ ... ] Ces corps seraient Ie prix de croise­ments impossibles? De poemes jamais Ius par d'autres yeux, d'autres voix? Qui saura s' ils sont beaux? L' etemite des bouts de papier reduits a des grains de cendre par Ies eaux melees.

(117)

In this striking passage, bodies are equated with writing which will remain unknown and unread. Just as the bodies, "de poemes jamais Ius

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par d' autres yeux", cannot make it alive to potential hosts, so the man's writing fails to reach a hospitable reader. Perhaps the victims of a failed attempt to emigrate across the sea from Africa to Europe, the bodies recall one kind of impossible crossing born of economic necessity; the man's writing suggests other failed crossings, such as his attempt to communicate through his writing with his wife and others on "this shore", whether of French or Algerian origin.

The man's story is one of failing to find a hospitable reader for his writing and thus a failure to find home. Whereas he had once sought connection through his writing, linking his writing to himself, notably by giving poems to his French wife, their failure to communicate has led the man to hide his writing. "Les premieres annees, il a ecrit pour [sa femme] des poemes, quelques-uns qu'illui a donnes, elle a dfi les lire, est-ce qu'elle les a gardes? Elle ne lui en a jamais parle, comme s'il n'avait rien ecrit. Depuis longtemps, il ecrit et il ne Ie dit pas a ceux qu'il pourrait revoir" (113). He remembers how he once wrote a story, the pages of which he left scattered about the kitchen one night. When he woke up, he could fmd nothing but "minuscules papiers calcines" about which "il n' a rien dit, ni sa femme" (114). On the day of his death, he may destroy his writing or scatter it in a ritualized manner, but as the numerous discussions of death rituals in the novel make clear, ritual works to create a place (a home) for the dead and maintain their connection to the living. His wife's destruction of his writing, on the other hand, by pretending the writing never existed at all, denies it a hospitable reading and thus denies all connection to her husband.

While his wife views his writing with outright ill will, he faces simple indifference from others; yet in all cases his writing fails to find a hospitable reader.

II ecrit, personne ne Ie sait que ses compagnons, nomades des villes comme lui, et qu'il ne rencontre qu'une fois. [ ... J II etale sur la table les feuilles, les distribue comme des cartes a jouer, puis les range en ligne pour une reussite, il lit les numeros dans Ie desordre, les melange, donne au hasard une page a chacun des compagnons qui la regarde, sans fa lire. [ ... J HIes lit de temps en temps, a haute voix, a des hommes qui lui ressemblent et qui l'ecoutent. [ ... J II rassemble les feuilles, il commence a lire, Ie patron encaisse, sans ecouter, il dit qu'il ferme.

(112-114, my emphasis)

Migration and the Inhospitable Reader in Lei'la Sebbar 's... 57

Here his anonymous companions and the cafe owner, with whom he has no ongoing relationship, accept his writing but without reading it or listening to him read it. Certainly a less hostile reaction than that of his wife, but one that still results in a similar lack of connection or communi­cation.

One way death is made palatable to the living is the conviction that something of one's life will remain after one has passed away, whether one's work or one's family. If in death one is separated from family and community, many of the rituals surrounding death are designed to mitigate the sense of separation. Like the three women who attend the dead, the protagonist of Sebbar's novel has no significant ties -although, with their clear and necessary function as those necessary for the proper care of the dead, they are more integral to the community than he is. His mother, brother (and apparently, father) are all dead; he and his wife barely speak to each other, and they have no children. If any connection to the living were to remain after his death, it would be his writing. An author's written work is often expected to be that which remains after death and which links the writer to future generations and readers -but only if there are hospitable readers. In Sebbar's novel, the protagonist's potential readers are the men he meets in cafes and his wife. His wife ignores and even destroys his writing. The men in the cafe patiently listen to him read, but do not seem to understand his writing and never read it themselves, but only listen as he reads. Failing to find a hospitable reader, the protagonist fails to establish connection and destroys his writing.

Writing may indeed be a home -if one can find a hospitable reader. As noted earlier, Adorno describes writing as a "homeland", but later he counters this by saying, "in the end, the writer is not allowed to live in his writing" (in Said 1994: .58). We can see Sebbar's novel as a response to this contradiction in Adorno's comments. Her protagonist identifies himself with his writing only as long as it has the potential to establish connection, and eventually community as when he writes poetry for his wife early in their marriage. Once belief in the possibility of connection fades, especially the possibility of connection through writing, it is not that the man's writing is no longer important to him (it is, as is clear from his ritualized treatment of it), but that he no longer sees any point in preserving it or identifying himself with it. The writing becomes the product of an anonymous person. Writing and ritual are usually both a means of remembering and keeping alive, something that remains after

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the destruction of the body. Sebbar's protagonist refuses this memorializing aspect as futile when he belongs to no community who would remember him. Ironically, Sebbar's text as a whole, with its emphasis on the dead and dying, is itself a kind of funeral monument (M6nager 1997: 58), thus contradicting the protagonist's despairing wish for oblivion. But while the text may preserve something, it also main­tains the anonymity of the protagonist by refusing to name him or even to specify in which language he writes. And if he is unnamed and if he can destroy the writing that would identify him with a particular commu­nity, then he avoids both the ritual of being remembered and the neces­sity of choosing the shore to which he will belong.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London: Routledge.

Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location o/Culture, London: Routledge. Chandramohan, Balasubramanyam (2001) "Diasporic (exilic; migrant) Writings" in 10hn

C. Hawley (ed.), Encyclopedia o/Postcolonial Studies, Westport: Greenwood Press, pp. 144-150. '

Geyss, Roswitha (2008) "Refiexions sur Ie rapport entre langue(s) et identite(s) dans la litterature feminine de langue fran9aise: Ie cas d' Assia Djebar et de LelIa Sebbar", in Annals of the University of Craiova, Series Philology. Linguistics (Analele Universitalii din Craiova. Seria $tiinle Filologice. Lingvistica), n° 12, pp. 189-229.

Menager, Serge D. (1997) "Sur la forme du roman de LelIa Sebbar Le Silence des rives", in Etudes Francophones, vol. 12, nO 2, pp. 55-65.

Mortimer, Mildred (2000) "Introduction" in Lena Sebbar, Silence on the Shores, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. v-xix.

Said, Edward (1994) "Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals" in Representations of the Intellectual, London: Vintage, pp. 47-64.

Said, Edward (2000) "Reflections on Exile" in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 173-186.

Sebbar, Lena (1993) Le Silence des rives, Paris: Stock. Sebbar, Lena (2003) Je ne parle pas la langue de mon pere, Paris: 1ulliard. Sebbar, Lena (2007) L 'Arabe comme un chant secret, Saint-Pour9ain-sur-Sioule: Bleu

autour. Sebbar, Lena and Nancy Huston (1986) Lettres parisiennes, autopsie de l'exil, Paris:

Barrault.