Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Letter to Zohra Drif

2003; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lit.2003.0007

1542-4286

Hélène Cixous, Eric Prenowitz,

African history and culture studies

I have not written this letter. It is still there. Speechless, present, shy, it is my letter to Zohra Drif It stays with me, unwritten, patient. I have a blank letter that does not leave. It is addressed To Zohra Drif But it is held back. This letter has its reasons. For not writing itself. For not vanishing. It has been addressing Zohra Drif in Algeria on my behalf for decades. What halts it just before the paper and suspends it between my shores, my countries, is a long story. The loss of words I never had. It all began in January 1957. When I wanted to write my letter to Zohra Drif. Such an impulse broke out in me. I was reading in the Paris newspapers what was happening in Algeria. The birth war raged. The war I had despaired of, and which had bloomed at last on the day of my despair, in November 1954, the great quake of time, the shackled country had finally broken its fetters, and it shook the pillars of the metropolitan temple at last! The day before, I had left, I had fled this earth in pain that I could neither caress nor help nor call my mother without offending it. I arrive in France, a foreign distinguished elegant country. I arrive in France, I thought. There I am not. I can't get my footing. This country is not my country I am savage, a bit furious, alarmed, overwhelmed to the point of being crushed by its constructions and its customs, I can't manage to arrive. I go nuts, I goat and ram. I stumble on the carpets of the bourgeois buildings I who went barefoot yesterday. But no nostalgia, I had not been at home behind the fences of my native cradle. From Algeria my love my terror I am liberated by the Algeria that is being born. She frees herself. It is this combat-which I had despaired ofthat liberates me at last: I can go my way without the dread, the shame of powerless anger following me, and without remorse. My childhood grief at having been fated to a thankless birth in spite of myself stops persecuting me. Africa gives me my first departure. Algeria freeing itself frees me of the sins I did not commit and which had been deposited as a poisoned gift in my cradle. I who had been born under the guise of citizenship, a frail semblance dating nonetheless, on the side of my father, an Algerian Jew with Spanish ancestors, to 1867, and which was broken overnight by the antiJewish laws of Vichy. In Le Monolinguisme de l'autre, Jacques Derrida has described this maneuver, unique in history, of the State subjugated to Hitler, which made us, we who were French but Jewish, in October 1940 and for two years, we who were born French, into passport-less, law-less, shelter-less, identity-less, school-less, profession-less people. The sea alone, our good sea mother, protected us from the deportation that took those like us captured in France. We fell outside inside. The outside became my inside. I have never left it since. My German Jewish grandmother with all our German-speaking family had just lived through the same annulment. How could I have been able to believe that we were French, or want to be when we were recitizenized after 1943, puppets of the whims of a State that established its authority on a colonial Empire the jewel of which was North Africa. I was three years old when I was driven out of the true garden into which I had just been admitted as the daughter of an officer doctor of the army, and which had never been open to the natives. In October 1939 my father Doctor Cixous was lieutenant doctor in the army, on the Tunisian front. In October 1940 the little girl that I was saw him unscrew his doctor's plaque from the door of our house: he was no longer or doctor. Jew. Gates as high as the sky, invisible and mobile ones, used to encircle my childhoods. I was always separated from my true kin as from myself. Undecidable but decided and condemned by an iniquitous State to be one or another of the things I wasn't. I survived between the bars. …