Summary (The identity of the transcultural character in Rachid Boudjedra's La Répudiation and Printemps)
Alexis N'Dui-Yabela§
§ University of Bangui / [email protected]
Summary: The encounters between the various characters in Rachid Boudjedra's texts often set the scene for a complex, conflicted world. Analysis reveals that the character-foreigner is always perceived by the character-narrator as an Other, and therefore likely to be a danger. This situation creates a permanent tension that is perceptible both in the discourse produced by the protagonists and in their interactional attitudes. Thus, in this corpus of novels by Rachid Boudjedra, the characters follow a fairly identical path in three stages: a situation of conflict between the protagonist characters, then a rapprochement of different identities, and finally an overcoming of differences, creating an identity of difference. Our aim is to show that the construction of the transcultural character in Boudjedra's texts bears witness to the aestheticization of a style of writing inclined to cultural dialogue. We will also show that the transcultural character is itself the bearer of an essential problematic, that of identity.
Key words: Conflict, Alteration, Otherness, identity of difference, transcultural character.
Abstract: The encounter between the different characters in the texts of Rachid Boudjedra often depicts a complex and conflicting world. Upon analysis, we realize that the stranger-character is always perceived by the narrator-character as an Other and therefore likely to be a danger. This situation creates a permanent tension which is perceptible as much in the discourse produced by the protagonists as in their interactional attitudes. Thus, in this corpus of novels by Rachid Boudjedra, the characters experience a fairly identical path in three stages: a situation of conflict between the protagonist characters, then a rapprochement of different identities and finally an overcoming of differences thus creating an identity of difference. Our reflection consists in showing that the construction of the transcultural character in the texts of Boudjedra testifies to the aestheticization of a writing inclined to cultural dialogue. We will also indicate that the transcultural character carries within himself an essential issue, that of identity.
Keywords: Conflict, Alteration, Otherness, identity of difference, cross-cultural character.
Introduction
In most of Rachid Boudjedra's texts, the interactive relationship between the protagonist characters is often quite complex and conflictual. In this balance of power, the foreign character constitutes a nodal point insofar as he or she is perceived by the narrator-character, who is often of Arab-Muslim culture, as an Other who carries a culture at odds with Arab-Muslim socio-cultural values. This foreign character is likely to be a danger to the narrator. This situation creates a permanent tension between the protagonists. In our corpus, the diegetic relationships between the characters often follow a fairly identical pattern, starting with a situation of conflict between the protagonists, such as the acquisition of traditional Arab-Muslim values, mistrust of the Other, and subversion of the excesses of one's own culture. This is followed by an alteration of identity, paving the way for a rapprochement with the Other, characterized by otherness and acceptance of the Other. Finally, at the end of the alteration stage, the character-narrator finds himself in a transcultural situation, having acquired other identities along the way. He becomes aware of his cultural contingency, but finds it difficult not only to identify the transferred elements, but also to separate himself from them. This situation explains the notion of the "identity of difference" (Bueno 7-22). What is this process of transcultural identity? To answer this question, we use the transcultural approach proposed by Hédi Bouraoui (2005) to discuss the various foundations of transcultural identity. We also use elements of the bibliographical approach to highlight the characteristics of transcultural identity in Boudjedra's characters.
1. From H. Bouraoui's "identity of difference": questioning self-identity
The question of the difference of identities finds its implication in the adjectival term "transcultural", which seems more applicable to the level of identity and aesthetics. Semantically, there is an oppositional relationship between "identity" and "difference", but this oppositional relationship between the two terms refers to one and the same reality when we use the expression "identity of difference", which introduces a new perspective into the evaluation of diversity, while at the same time conferring an oxymoronic quality on it for reading and analyzing works that pose the problem of identity contradiction or plurality.
Thus, identity and difference remain two key concepts in Boudjedra's fiction, as the oppositional relationship between these two terms implies the character of all human identity, whose essential component is an unknown strangeness by which we are all foreign beings condemned to absolute strangeness (Bouraoui 14). The discovery of the other and of difference leads to an awareness of this strangeness that is inherent in all human beings, and the approach to the other is but one particular form of migration. And according to Boudjedra, writing is the perfect form of the migratory experience; and according to the Algerian author, a migrant is essentially a foreigner.
Boudjedra's transcultural perspective is seen as both a conscious participation in and tension between the cultures of the native and foreign characters. Often, these protagonists of the narrative see these exchanges as the manifestation of a dynamic of "loss and gain" in Tassinari's terms between the culture of origin and the host culture (Tassinari 23). The notion of evolution remains at root an anthropologically highly dynamic perspective, since according to (Lamore 43-48) the notion of transculturation is not linked to a moment or an isolated factor, but is indeed a secular, constant, permanent process. This permanence in the process of transcultural identity construction is both objective and necessary.
Played out entirely in terms of reconciling contrasts, the notion of an identity of difference proves to be an effective approach to the evolution of the conflict generated by culture shock, both in terms of individual identity and interaction. It is through this choice that the character, as an evolving subject in the diegetic universe, manages to transform the different identities acquired into an identity of difference.
In La Répudiation ou Printemps, Boudjedra makes his characters adopt characters that reflect the identity of difference. He presents most of his characters-narrators as subjects lost in their own society, unknown to themselves, enigmatic and without a fixed identity. As such, these characters are the source of all societal ills: violent, transgressors, homosexuals, lesbians, sadomasochists, alcoholics, psychopaths and others. They are also the source of the conflicts that constantly pit them against the Islamist clan. In fact, this contingency status of subversive characters often has a link with history, since these characters remarkably base themselves on the history of their country's colonization, or decolonization, to either distrust the foreigner, or castigate all the Clan's accomplices, whom they see as another form of colonization.
Better still, Boudjedra describes the diegetic space of the characters-narrators as a space historically under Western domination, which engenders cultural and identity transformations in him, a phenomenon that would be at the origin of their identity transmutation.[1] which explains why they oscillate between attraction to and rejection of theOther. This attitude is all the more evident in Rachid and Teldj, characters whom we consider to be essentially transcultural subjects. We should also mention that the transcultural subject is a transcendent subject.
The transcultural character Rachid's portrayal of his foreign lover Céline in La Répudiation takes a transcendental approach. The proof is that Boudjedra stages a fictitiously complex world, made up of two entities: on the one hand, Algeria, still attached to a patriarchal tradition represented by the fundamental unit that is the family, and on the other, the Stranger, France, symbol of aggressive modernity that forces openness. It should also be pointed out that the conflict between Rachid and Céline is a social-historical one, that of an Algeria in search of an identity after its tragic colonization by France, Céline's country of origin. And yet, there was something in common between these two characters from historically conflicting backgrounds. Nevertheless, Boudjedra uses cross-cultural strategies to create situations of reciprocity or confluence between Rachid and Céline. Clearly, Céline too has been repudiated by her native society, forcing her to immigrate in search of an identity, just like the narrator Rachid. This is how she resembled Rachid, in terms of identity: "Céline resembled me! I was double and so was she" (15).
So, from this point on, all the interactional relationships between Rachid and Céline change. Henceforth, the narrator refers to her as: mon double (15), ma congénère (16), mon amante (18). With the negotiation of identities complete, the narrator, who initially resisted narrating his account of a trashed childhood, regained his wits and adopted the normal disposition to begin his tale (19).
To succeed in such an exercise, which is both an outlet and a catharsis, Céline's presence is crucial, for without her, Rachid would never find the opportunity to recount his memories. Her function is to free the narrator to speak: "There's no need to chew over all that," she says, "tell me about your mother instead..." (14); "Tell me more about your mother." (16); "Raconte, disait-elle" (41). She is far from being consumed by curiosity, and gives the impression of living a tale without becoming involved in it, since she is not a speaking subject (Maingueneau 71), but a veritable clutch of Rachid's discourse with her injunctive phrase, which is fairly recurrent in the text: "parle-moi" ("speak to me").
Rachid, aware of the cooperative power his words have on his lover, never stops talking. He enchants her with his eloquence, the better to hold her back: "I was left with this desire to make her suffer by enclosing her in a white veil where she would have wiggled like a tentacled octopus" (18).
Similarly, there is an almost congenital resemblance between Teldj and his Spanish lover Nieve, as the letter carrier informed him:
But one morning, the letter carrier rang Teldj's doorbell to ask him to sign a registered letter, and chatting away he said: "Did you know that your neighbor's name is Nieve? They say it means snow in Spanish. So she's named after you! You have the same first name! Isn't that funny? And she's Spanish! She's from Granada. That's funny too, isn't it? Granada, the land of our Andalusian ancestors" (...) (Teldj = Nieve (in Spanish) = Snow!) (Spring 140-141)
All these similarities between characters from different cultures are neither trivial nor gratuitous. They are nurtured by Boudjedra's deliberate cross-cultural pretexts. Reading Rachid Boudjedra's novels takes us into a world of disillusionment, intimately linked to the eternal confrontation of identities between European/African, Colonizer/Colonized, here/elsewhere, Self/Other, Native/foreign, male/female , etc. Thus, through his modern writing style, Boudjedra has succeeded in tracing a world of encounter and recognition of differences, even an identity of difference. He marks a turning point in the representation of the Other, an Other who is defined by the Self, through language as well as culture, notably values relating to history, politics and sexuality; in short, we accept the way in which the Other perceives the world and we undergo it. And all this is woven into a complex imaginary that translates transcultural identity.
2. The different foundations of transcultural identity
2.1. Biographical and social foundations
Rachid Boudjedra's novels are a space where identities are produced; for the Algerian author, it's quite simply a breeding ground for identity encounters. The present analysis focuses on the social foundations of literary creation and, more specifically, on the influence of a writer's various socialization frameworks on the identity modalities of his literary practice. These frameworks reveal potential correlations between the aesthetic form of the text and the social contexts in which it is produced (Harchi). From this perspective, the case of the French-speaking Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra is of particular interest.
Investigating identities in Boudjedra's literary work thus leads us to consider intimate and collective history as the crossroads at which a series of transpositions, negotiations and readjustments take place, which, once brought to light, are likely to reveal "the mechanisms of the literary factory" (Lahire 67). Drawing on a corpus comprising biographical elements, novel texts and a set of comments made by Rachid Boudjedra, as well as critical discourses on his literary work, we will seek to understand the writer's various identity constructions.
When we look at Rachid Boudjedra's social trajectory from a biographical point of view, we can see that he has built up a social identity over time, marked by a solid educational background. Born into a bourgeois family, his mother was a housewife, busy bringing up her three children, two boys and one girl, while his father was a wealthy merchant. Rachid Boudjedra grew up in Ain Beida, in the Aurès region of Algeria. Interviewed by Hafid Gafaïti, Rachid Boudjedra himself looks back on this early period of his life:
I first went to Koranic school at the age of four. Then French school from the age of six. Doubled by an Arabic curriculum. In other words, I went to Arabic school in the evenings, after leaving French school. That meant I spent around fifteen hours a day at school. It should be remembered that Arabic was not taught in schools during the French colonial period. There were private schools operating in the evenings, which were free but financed by donations from citizens and volunteers. This dual learning took place in Ain Beida, the village where I was born (Gafaïti 13).
Boudjedra then began his studies in Constantine and continued them in Tunis at the Collège Sadiki, renowned at the time for its courses in literature, science and mathematics. Often described as modern, they were taught in Arabic as well as French. As the writer explains
Then my father sent me to high school in Tunis. I went to Collège Sadiki, just to study, where Arabic was taught alongside French. It was a bilingual and elitist education. All courses were doubled. For example, we studied maths in French and Arabic, natural sciences too, and so on. All subjects were taught in both languages (Gafaïti 13-14).
All these elements seem to be good indicators that Rachid Boudjedra belongs to an affluent social universe where capital, particularly economic capital, was deployed to help the young child acquire solid linguistic and intellectual skills. This parental and paternal investment in the son's education signals, on the one hand, an acute awareness of the opportunities for social advancement offered by schooling in an "elitist" establishment and, on the other, a strategic know-how likely to give concrete expression to the family's ambition. This seems to us all the more remarkable, and therefore significant, given that this ambition is part of a colonial context in which the education system is the privileged place for the exercise of symbolic domination, in that it "aims principally at the appropriate acculturation of the workforce destined for the colonists or for emigration, since the school dispenses both: knowledge and the ways of using it well" (Colonna 128).
The family environment in which Rachid Boudjedra grew up was thus characterized by a singular ability to circumvent the social determinisms that the colonial system imposed on the vast majority of the Algerian population at the time. Thus, from a social (or family) identity in opposition to the colonial system, young Rachid, as a social product, constructed an individual identity, this time in opposition to his progenitor father and, through him, to the patriarchal system based on religion.
This time, we'll be analyzing another identity that the Algerian author forged through his political commitment. At the turn of the 1960s, Rachid Boudjedra, then aged 19, chose to take part in the pro-independence struggle. His fight against the French presence in Algeria took the form of a particularly active Marxist militancy. It's all about identity politics. Here's how the writer talks about it:
I discovered Marxism when I was seventeen, and I immediately embraced this ideology because I was a rebellious child. Rebellious to a whole sociological context characterized essentially by the feudal relations that existed within my family. Hypocrisy, lies and exploitation reigned supreme. So, very early on, Marxism seemed to me to be a philosophy, a worldview that opposed this family feudalism. At first, of course, and in an almost sensitive, affective, sentimental way. There was a ground for me to become a Marxist. For example, my father employed hundreds of workers, and by working with them I became aware of exploitation and injustice. When I was very young, I was shocked by the fact that one of my father's workers slept in the stables with the horses, on the hay, winter and summer alike. Above all, I was struck by the situation of women within the family, by the contempt in which they were held, by their blind passivity, by their fear. At the same time, I realized that there was something rotten in the Algerian way of life in the early 1950's. (Gafaïti 25-26)
And he adds, a little further on:
The situation was conducive to understanding social injustice, in that my mother's family was very poor, whereas my father's was immensely wealthy. So, naturally, I was drawn to my maternal family and in particular to my grandfather, whom I didn't know very well. He died when I was barely ten years old. Living within this contradiction, I understood what political sociology was all about. Class. Exploitation. History. My maternal grandfather was a railway worker. My maternal uncle was also a worker. This opposition brought me to a certain awareness, and I think it was even decisive. But I was only at the sensitive stage. My maternal grandfather and uncle were Communists. They always fascinated me because they were very human, very concerned about others and very original. To be a Communist in the 1940s, in a village located in a very rich agricultural region where French colonists and Algerian feudalists ruled the roost, was no mean feat. And then, after this sentimental adhesion, came the conscious adhesion. At the age of twenty-two, I joined the P.C.A. I remained faithful to it for the rest of my life, since I'm still with it today, without interruption. (Gafaïti 28)
What we find particularly interesting here is the way in which Rachid Boudjedra subjectively defines his own political identity through the constitution of family history and Marxist commitment. Indeed, throughout his text, the writer makes little reference to the difficult political context in which Algeria found itself at the time, with the most violent war of liberation raging in the country from November 1954 to July 1962. Rachid Boudjedra uses the term "family" five times, and "colon" only once, to create a strong, direct link between his experience of social injustice within his own family and his political activism within the Algerian Communist Party. The writer's acute sensitivity to the issue of class conflict thus seems to have been formed very early on, in childhood. In this sense, his belief in the communist ideal does not seem to us to be so much a new and spontaneous stance on historical and colonial issues, but rather the reinforcement of an old attitude towards the theme of injustice.
After suffering a serious knee injury, Rachid Boudjedra became a representative of the Front de Libération Nationale. He then embarked on a period marked by numerous trips to Spain and Eastern Europe. As an Algerian, I was confronted with anti-colonialist resistance at a very early age. I saw the war at close quarters, and it made me realize the vital importance of history" (35), or: "I was involved and structured in the Algerian war at a very early age" (36).
In Rachid Boudjedra's retrospective discourse, we see associations between individual and collective identities, on the one hand between family realities and the colonial fact, and this through a form of personal and intimate knowledge forged to the rhythm of the ordeals encountered; and on the other, a deep interest in collective history. As with any creative process, all these biographical and socio-historical data would have implications for Boudjedra's novels.
2.2. The basis of conflict: the balance of power between characters
On reading the texts in the corpus, four characters distributed two by two in the novels in the corpus represent figures of subversion. They have all been revolted by the same situation and share the same vision: that of overturning taboos and breaking down fanaticism of any kind. We will focus on characters such as Rachid and Zahir in La Répudiation, and Teldj and Malika in Printemps.
- Rachid
Rachid is one of the narrator-characters in La Répudiation who has experienced enormous torment and hallucinations because his mother has been repudiated by Si Zoubir. From that moment on, Rachid will hate his father and all Islamic dignitaries, as well as the precepts of the Muslim religion. He decided to confront those he now considered his tormentors. His act of subversion focused on religion, politics and sexuality, desecrating religious dogma as an alienating, castrating system(19-21) "My parricidal pleasure was blissful. To kill the cat, all the cats" (139). He revolts against his father to avenge his mother. He fantasizes and sharpens his desire for parricide.
- Zahir
Zahir is a character in La Répudiation, Rachid's older brother. As such, he shares Rachid's conviction. When Zahir declares: "I'm a bad Muslim". Basically, the adjective "bad" says everything about Zahir's status or position vis-à-vis Islam. Moreover, in the statement " Zahir is a bad Muslim ", we deduce the negative phrase "Zahir is not a good Muslim". In this logic, it is suggested that he ignores the precepts of the Muslim religion, or simply that Zahir is "a bad practitioner": he transgresses the laws of the religion by indulging in alcohol, fornication, homosexuality, ataraxia, refusing to pray five times a day, and paradoxically considers Mecca a place of kleptomaniacs and hypocrites, and so on.
From all these analyses, we note that Zahir seems more subversive than his brother Rachid, since in the text, Zahir's revolt against his father and religion seems to be more pronounced, especially through his acts of desecration. This state of affairs has also led him to commit acts of fanaticism. Yet Boudjedra is determined to fight fanaticism at all costs. This may justify Zahir's death in the plot.
- Teldj
The construction of the characters in the corpus is virtually identical. Teldj's revolt against the Islamists stems from the latter's beheading of her mother Selma. The reasons for this crime are based on one of the ideological-religious precepts that strictly prohibits abortion in all its forms. Teldj's mother had violated this prescription by performing abortions on women, as we read on pages 76 and 77 of Le Printemps: "Selma (...) performed abortions strictly forbidden by law, to help peasant women who were having too many children to please their husbands."
In Printemps, Teldj decides for herself about her sexuality, choosing not only to be a lesbian but also to practice it with a non-Muslim woman, May, a Chinese woman:
She [May] is naked and her body, now open, shows off the vagina's wound. "My mediocre vagina, then, which pisses daily urine and menstrual blood, where the male long ago decided to stick his penis and nose for eternity. And that's what females use for their coquetry and seduction, even though it's nothing more than an anatomical lizard, a physiological fistula, a cyclonic red eye that regulates the world! (...) May is very beautiful too (...) Back and forth. Her nimble hand pokes into her sex. May is a mischievous girl(Spring 14-15).
The homosexuality, lesbianism and other acts of sexual perversity practiced by Teldj and her friends characterize her as a subversive character in Printemps. Malika, the novel's other character-narrator, is also a victim of Islamist fanaticism.
- Malika
Malika's nymphomania is first triggered by her excision, a practice imposed on pubescent girls in traditional societies. Then, her rape by an old Arab man. These events provoke traumas that manifest themselves in violent hallucinations. She decides to take revenge with her sex, and therefore with her body. Boudjedra describes female circumcision, ritually performed with roosters, and male rape of young girls as crimes fueled by religious fanatics. So he animalizes one of these fanatics, the old Arab, whom he compares to a black rooster:
The black rooster (...) stuck his beak into the voluminous vagina, as if puffed up, as if swollen, and in everything he found in this space surrounded and limited by Malika's two spread legs, held upright or seated by two or three women, pecked happily into Malika's lump of flesh incised into two equal parts (...) the cats making a circle around the victim and ready to meow to catch the first drop of blood.(Printemps, 87-88)
After this rape, Malika loses her dignity and decides to lead a life of debauchery. She swindles the clan's bourgeoisie using her sex. Swindling and debauchery have become her daily life in the city. She doesn't hesitate to use black magic to better tame and despoil those she now calls the bastards of civilization, the Islamists. As was the case with Zahir in La Répudiation, Malika is a particularly subversive character who also meets a tragic fate. She is run over by a streetcar.
At the end of our analysis, we conclude that both the novels we have chosen feature subversive characters. In fact, the author offers symmetrical characters in terms of the similarity of their actions and fates. Zahir and Malika seem more subversive than Rachid and Teldj. This gives two visions of subversion: constructive subversion, which proposes a social ideal, and negative subversion, which leads subjects like Zahir and Malika to fatality and death. All these acts of vengeance give these characters subversive traits, since it is presumed that the pragmatic aim of these acts is to break social taboos by attacking everything considered sacred. This positioning of each of these subversive characters subsequently produces subversive discourses.
2.3. The foundation of otherness: the narrator-character's view of the stranger
- Rachid / Céline
Rachid is a young Algerian who tells the story of his mother's repudiation. This repudiation is the starting point for the events and images of a traumatized childhood. The young Rachid grew up in the bosom of reclusive women, surrounded by the tenderness of a terribly lonely, illiterate mother who nonetheless bequeathed him a taste for Arab-Berber culture. In the empire and under the sway of a polygamous, feudal father, Si Zoubir, the young narrator suffers many wounds.
This brief presentation of the character already reveals two identities in Rachid the narrator. The first is social, linked to his community: he is Algerian and Muslim. The second is individual, born of the narrator'sinner self . He is in revolt against the father figure, the clan and the religion in the name of which his mother was repudiated. As such, he considers himself a stranger in his clan.
Céline, a female character in the novel, is French and has immigrated to Algeria. She, too, is an outsider on a quest to fill the identity void inside her. Despite socio-cultural differences, Céline, the Frenchwoman, is Rachid's foreign lover. As in the statement: "I had to defend her, because she too was a victim in the same way as the other women of the country she had come to live in"(La Répudiation 13).
The word "victim" in this excerpt suggests that Céline is also a woman repudiated by her homeland, France. This would justify her adventure in search of identity. Earlier, after his mother's repudiation, Rachid said to himself: "I didn't want to contradict the principles I had forged throughout my nightmares, in which women always played very important roles". (13)
In fact, Céline is said to have suffered the same fate as Rachid's mother, creating a rapprochement that fosters otherness between Céline and Rachid. Céline, the foreign lover, is now a figure who defines Rachid'sinner self . The proof is that she becomes the clutch of the narrative, asking Rachid, whenever the need arises, to take up the story of repudiation.
Céline is an essential figure in the construction of discourse by her interlocutor Rachid. The text even goes so far as to say that the relationship between Rachid and Céline has become very intimate as a result of the discourse. Already at the start of the story, Rachid referred to Céline as his "lover", then his "similar", then his "double" and finally his "mistress", his "congener" or his "French lover" (213). So we consider this resemblance to be not insignificant.
The reasons for the coexistence of Rachid-narrator and Céline can also be found in paratextual data, which constitute significant referential clues in discourse analysis. For example, Boudjedra's thesis on one of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline's masterpieces was based on a number of biographical sources (Gafaïti 35).[2]another writer excluded and marginalized in his own country, France. In real life, Boudjedra married a French woman. All these extratextual clues would justify Boudjedra's ultimate adoption of Céline as an alter ego. From these analyses, we can deduce that otherness is an existential reality between Rachid and Céline.
- Teldj / Nieve
It's true that in today's globalized world, relations between cultures are becoming increasingly frequent and take on all sorts of configurations: exchanges, confluences, influences, frictions and even conflicts. Yet literature remains by far the most emblematic place where certain questions about interculturality are asked and often answered. In Printemps, Teldj takes a look at his immigrant neighbors. Teldj's desire for otherness stems from his quest to discover the real causes of his neighbors' immigration.
Initially (p.9), relations between Teldj and her immigrant neighbors were very complex and tense, precisely because she was culturally ignorant of her neighbors. She found them strange and rude, and therefore hated them. So far, we assume that this character is in non-alterity. But, some time later, what brought Teldj closer to her neighbors were the foreign languages in which the neighbors communicated when they talked on the phone:
They telephoned, or rather shouted into their cell phones, their instructions or orders to interlocutors in offices in London, Barcelona, Paris, Moscow, Dubai, Shanghai or New York"; "And so, unwittingly, Teldj learned a few phrases of Russian and a few snatches of German, and perfected her English and Spanish. But what annoyed her most was the dump that had become the terrace they occupied.(Spring 9.)
From this moment on, Teldj puts into perspective her initial image of her neighbors. From then on, a process of interaction, exchange and reciprocity is set in motion. As Carmel Camilleri points out: "We speak of interculturality when the concern arises to regulate relations between these carriers [carriers of different systems], at the very least to reduce the untoward effects of the encounter, at best to enable them to benefit from its supposed advantages" (Camilleri 35), Teldj too understood that her neighbors, whether immigrants or expatriates, had nothing to do with it, because it could happen to anyone. She recalled that she too "had spent two years in China, teaching Arabic language and civilization at Shanghai University, thanks to cultural exchanges".
Apart from this first aspect of otherness made possible by language teaching and cultural reciprocity, Teldj will have another interaction with Nieve, her new Spanish neighbor who occupied the terrace after the departure of this horde of immigrants.
This time, with Teldj's predisposition to otherness, everything seems to move fast. Like Boudjedra's other character-narrators, notably Rachid and Zahir, Teldj has been in revolt against her society, culture and religion ever since her mother was beheaded by Islamists. As a result, her desire to reform this society is gaping inside her. She wanted this "open society, that is, a society betting on building its performance on exchange, diversity and respect" (Badie and Sadoun 18-19).
The otherness between Teldj and Nieve is not only physical but also biological, despite their differences. Teldj (Algerian) and Nieve (Spanish) have the same first names, referring to the same referent in both languages. Their first names mean "Snow". The two young women were all born in January, in the middle of winter, and in the same year, 1984. They are the same age: 30. They share the same passions, the same characters (83). So many natural and cultural coincidences bring the two women together, and they end up loving each other, frolicking and expressing their otherness.
From all these analyses based on the alteration and otherness of the characters in the two novels, we have been able to see that each of the characters carries an individual or social identity, depending on his or her history. By understanding the cultural and social systems of the Other, each character adapts his or her identity to a format that resembles neither the initial identity nor the one acquired through the system of cross-fertilization with the Other, which is precisely how he or she becomes a transcultural subject (Kanga 7-21).
Conclusion
At the end of our analysis of the novels in Rachid Boudjedra's corpus, we realize that the character, taken as a creative datum, constitutes in Boudjedra's text a pretext for social reconfiguration. Firstly, he presents himself as a figure of conflict for reasons of cultural, historical and sometimes even sexual divergence. Secondly, as in any situation of conflict, the character undergoes a phenomenon of alteration as he rubs his stereotypes against those of the Other. In this way, he becomes modalized, transfigured and finally gives in to otherness. And it is precisely otherness, as a parameter of negotiation and contingency of differences, that finally favors the emergence in the subject-character of an identity of difference, which is in reality no more than an identity of cultural transcendence, thus placing the cultural consciousness of the transcultural subject in an intermediate zone. In this way, Bouraou's approach to identity is based on a dynamically metamorphosing "split self" that harmonizes the self and the for-self of otherness. We are thus faced with a new type of character, which we are attempting to call the " transcultural character". The transcultural process leading to the construction of the transcultural character can be summed up as follows: Conflict-Alteration /Alterity-Transcultural Identity. This process could be the subject of even more in-depth analysis to improve it, but what we can be sure of is that new French-language writing is increasingly characterized by cross-views, cultural rapprochements, the recognition of differences as an element of diversity rather than conflict, and the birth of a transfugal identity stripped of all individuality and culturocentric narcissism.
Works quoted
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How to cite this article:
MLA: Akakpo, Kokouvi Jean-Paul. "De l'identité du personnage transculturel dans La Répudiation et Printemps de Rachid Boudjedra". Uirtus 2.1 (April 2022): 370- 387.
§ University of Lomé / [email protected]
[1] Romuald Fonkoua quoted in Anissa Talahite-Moodley, Problématiques identitaires et discours de l'exil dans les littératures francophones, Ottawa, Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa, 2007, p. 1.
[2] Rachid Boudjedra, Praxis et catharsis chez Louis-Ferdinand Céline, DES, La Sorbonne, 1967.