Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women's Writing

Introduction

Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing

KATE AVERIS AND ISABEL HOLLIS-TOURÉ

The displacement of the human subject is viewed today as commonplace. For an ever greater number of people, leaving home becomes a reality, though one that is often unrelated to a personal desire for mobility. As a result of the increased ease of international travel for some, and the movement imposed on others by the forces of globalisation, political change, war or natural disasters, more people today than ever before will live their lives somewhere other than their place of birth.¹ The speed of travel and the distances covered, meanwhile, become ever greater. The ways in which this transnational mobility is experienced by both individuals and societies as a whole forms the constant subject of scrutiny in politics, in the media and in literature.

Seen in this light, any contemporary attempts to ‘rethink’ mobility in literature run the risk of asserting human mobility as an exceptional, distinctive phenomenon, thus underestimating the commonality of movement, or singling out mobility as a defining quality of an author’s work. The present collection of essays posits the current and increasingly widespread phenomenon of women’s mobility, and the heterogeneous nature of its literary representation. It is astonishing to note that just as human mobility has become increasingly conventional in life as in literature, women’s mobility has remained decidedly marginal in the latter. Travel writing, migrant writing, exile writing, expatriate writing, and even the fictional travelling protagonists that emerge in literary works from around the globe have historically tended to depict mobility as a masculine phenomenon. The presence of such genres in women’s writing is, however, a rich and unique body of work.

In Francophone literature, historical reasons may be cited for the gradual emergence of women’s writing of mobility. Prior to the colonial era, when the French language was systematically disseminated throughout the empire, those who wrote in French tended to come from Europe, and their mobility was consequently often a movement away from the metropole towards unknown places, in a cosmopolitan spirit of travel, discovery, research, religious mission and sometimes settlement. The kinds of employment that enabled such travel were usually only available to men, though they did not always travel alone or only with other members of their own sex. For social reasons, women who undertook such exploratory and adventurous, even dangerous, travel were few and far between (though not non-existent). Women’s writing of mobility is therefore an emergent body of work that has gained rapid momentum in recent times largely because of the social, cultural and political shifts that characterised the twentieth century, and continue into the twenty-first.

Associated with the recent nature of the genre is a persistent reluctance to envisage the possibility of mobility as a feminine phenomenon, and consequently to engage with the specificities of women’s mobility. Research into mobility has often taken a limited selection of men’s experiences to be paradigmatic of human experiences as a whole, overlooking specificities of genre, ethnicity and class, amongst others, and the power relations there embedded.² Mobility is held to be exceptional as associations between women and the home persist, constraining discourse in this area to the unique social and identitarian issues that face women simply because they have left the space of home. The topos that situates women in a fixed space is apparent in the language that we associate with place, roots and identity: mother tongue, motherland, mother earth. As Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith point out, the nation is sexualised in dominant discourses that name and allegorise it as female (as in the cases of ‘Germania’, ‘Britannia’ and ‘Marianne’). In others, the family operates as trope for the nation, whereby the traditional hierarchical relationships of children to parents, and wife to husband provide an ideal model for its proper functioning.³ A woman’s movement away from home and nation is central to the formation and articulation of her identity, and the consequent disruption of the association of women with the spaces of home and nation proves to have a profound effect on both a woman’s sense of self and the way in which she is regarded by others, both at ‘home’ and ‘away’. As Iain Chambers points out, ‘Our sense of being and identity is extrapolated from movement: the I does not pre-exist this movement and then go out into the world, the I is constantly being formed and reformed in such movement in the world.’⁴ This disruption may even constitute a perceived threat to broader social, cultural or religious structures.

On the other hand, there is a fear that to acknowledge and affirm those specificities is to fall into the trap of denying women’s writing of mobility the right to be read with other issues at stake than the tired contradictions mobility raises for the values of home, family and nation. For Edward Said, exile is a move away from ethnocentricity insofar as it disrupts the unquestioned assumptions reinforced by a homogenous cultural environment.⁵ The exile, in his or her relationship to two different spaces, is part of a constant contrapuntal movement, whereby ‘both the old and the new environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally’.⁶ Rerooting the self within this complex, shifting duality requires a questioning of home, tradition and the self within those tropes. In what respect does it also require a reconfiguring of the feminine? Women’s movement away from ‘motherland’ and ‘mother tongue’ must inevitably provoke a revision of the association of home and stasis with women, as historically constructed.

Yet to focus on women’s writing of mobility because of its ‘perceived exceptionalism’ risks an analysis that diminishes the importance of literary quality, thereby framing authors and their works according to definitions that limit their scope.⁷ The limits of analysis are aggravated by the variously defined and often contested categories that exist around mobility, namely travel writing, migrant writing, expatriate writing and exile writing. Scholars engaged in the study of mobility have tended to base their work within these seemingly discrete categories. Criticism that considers these genres alongside each other and that problematise the discrete handling of these categories of mobility are the exception rather than the rule.⁸ And it is rarer still that a study assesses the intersections and overlaps between these categories, and interrogates ‘the rigid compartmentalization of mobility’.⁹ Each category posits certain conditions of its author and/or protagonists, and yet those conditions seem to vary greatly from one scholarly analysis to the next. It is this problem that this book sets out to unravel. The following chapters question our use of existing categories of mobility by examining the texts of Francophone women who have experienced or reflected upon the aforementioned categories of transnational movement. Informed by the rich body of theory on transnational mobility, identities and writing, this book addresses the proximities and overlaps that exist between exiles, migrants, expatriates and travellers, interrogating these, and positing emerging tropes of women’s transnational mobility. The essays here collected seek to interrogate and evaluate the scope, relevance or validity of such terms when the mobile subject is a woman, and ask how the particular perspective of women’s mobility can help us to conceptualise the complexities of transnational mobility.

The initial problem here is the clear convergence between categories of movement. Can a migrant not also be a traveller, because she has undertaken a journey, or an expatriate an exile, if she feels irreparably cut off from the country of origin? If writers are all too easily fixed in arbitrary categories determined by personal and biographical features, so too are their texts, resulting in limiting reading strategies. Readers might tend to approach ‘literature of immigration’ in search of tales of ethnographic insight or triumph over difficult social circumstances, or seek discovery and adventure by proxy in travel writing, relegating such writing to the ‘functional’ as opposed to the ‘literary’. This reductive approach denies a true poetics of mobility that is apparent across the different categories and genres of the literature produced in and by mobility. Beyond the categories imposed on writers and their texts is the inflection of the perspective and positionality of readers and those attributing such categories. Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing asserts that our understanding of women’s experiences is curtailed by textual approaches which assign women and their texts to predetermined categories, such that Chinese writers in Quebec are labelled as ‘immigrant writers’ by local audiences, and North American writers in Paris are labelled ‘expatriate’ by virtue of moving from one relatively privileged situation to another. Such classifications reveal more about their readership and place within the literary and cultural landscape than they do about the texts themselves. As Susan Stanford Friedman warns, critics in the ‘West’ should be wary of the simplistic, linear, binary models of mobility that ‘tend to reinstate the center/periphery, West/Rest binaries’. She rightly posits more fluid, heterogeneous and mutually transformative understandings of diasporic groups.¹⁰

The problem of classification of works and their authors according to a given modality of mobility also raises the problem of canon formation, and the question of belonging or not to the French literary canon. In this respect, ‘literature of immigration’ tends to be posited as exterior to the domain of French literature, whilst ‘travel writing’ has the ‘privilege’ of being included. Such inclusions and exclusions suggest that the ethnic origin of the author contributes more to their categorisation than the language they choose to write in. Meanwhile, certain authors have been more readily claimed by the French literary canon, whereas others remain associated with that of their place of origin. As the manifesto ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’ published in Le Monde in 2007, as well as scholars’ responses to it, have shown, the classification of their writing within either French or Francophone literature situates authors within a hierarchy whereby, for example, a ‘Francophone author’ is more likely to be an exile or immigrant, whilst a ‘French author’ is more readily assumed to be a travel writer.¹¹ However, the thematic crossovers that exist between the literatures of immigration, exile, travel and expatriation undermine such nationalised categories by virtue of the transnationalism they take as their point of departure. As Mireille Rosello has observed in reference to Les Passagers du Roissy Express, Maspéro and Frantz are not exactly tourists yet they are not immigrants either.¹² Such category-shifters demonstrate the difficulty of separating and defining self-contained modes of displacement.

Indeed, writers of migration commonly draw on metaphors of travel, or allude to the temporary nature of their stay as though to provide a solution to their sense of not belonging.¹³ Similarly, the motif of the journey may emerge as part and parcel of a storytelling tradition.¹⁴ Yet this does not qualify either as ‘travel writers’ as such. Indeed, despite the variety of forms that may constitute ‘travel writing’, the genre is complicated by certain limitations, for does not travel writing suppose a certain experiencing of the exotic, a tasting of the unknown, uncomfortably ridden with orientalist tendencies? Moreover, are not travel writers afforded the luxury, as Mary Louise Pratt has shown, of producing ‘the rest of the world’, whilst exiled writers, for example, are shown to be more preoccupied with fitting in to the countries in which they arrive?¹⁵ Paul Gilroy has warned us of ‘the folly of assigning uncoerced or recreational travel experiences only to whites’, demonstrating the erroneous but common association of travel writers with privilege.¹⁶ Similarly, Sara Mills has cautioned against the error of assigning those same travel experiences only to men.¹⁷ In other words, whilst rethinking modes of mobility may play a role in disrupting established hierarchies, the approaches and strategies that readers of the literature of mobility bring to a work may re-establish those hierarchies, by applying categories that reproduce them.

Postcolonial scholars have been instrumental in attempting to resolve some of the difficulties and contradictions posed by attempts to conceptualise patterns of displacement and the identities produced therein. A frequent obstacle is indeed the terminology used, and the understandings and assumptions that lie behind them. Frequent slippage in terminology suggests that the debate remains inadequately defined, or at least points to a resistance to being pinned down and a susceptibility to opacity. Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr refer to ‘the French use [of] the term "immigré" to refer not only to those who have actually migrated from another country into France, but also to those of ethnic origin within France’,¹⁸ whilst Christiane Albert describes how the term ‘immigrant’ has been used to designate any foreigner living in France at the turn of the twenty-first century, thus subsuming all differentiated groups into a collective ‘other’, and effectively eliding any differentiation between immigration and exile, explained as different stages of the same phenomenon.¹⁹ At the time of writing, a media debate roars surrounding the term ‘migrant’, since it implies that the growing number of refugees in Europe who have made a dangerous Mediterranean crossing are guided by choice and not fear or desperation.²⁰ The slippage of terminology used to refer to individuals and groups also extends to writing, where writers born in France are often referred to as practitioners of ‘migrant literature’, such as, for example, the notorious case of Azouz Begag.

Dominique Bourque and Nellie Hogikyan, in articulating a more nuanced and pluralist definition of exile which underscores the complexity of social and cultural power relations, draw attention to a correlation between articulations of women’s exile and recent developments in feminist and postcolonial thought.²¹ Their intermittent use of the term ‘migration’ in their discussion of exile highlights the way in which an individual’s situation can be one of both exile and migration, whilst distinguishing between these by framing as ‘exil’ experiences of an individual’s journey of intellectual, political or identarian struggle, and ‘migration’ where their social, economic or cultural accommodation is at stake. In addressing ‘the ways in which the experiences and identities of women of immigrant origin in France differ from both those of their male contemporaries and those of white French women’, Freedman and Tarr highlight the ethnicity of immigrant women, apparently precluding the possibility of white immigrants, raising the question of the difference in the way ‘expatriate’ and ‘(im)migrant’ are used in both general and academic discourse.²²

Charles Forsdick is one of the few scholars to have explored the proximity of travel and exile, commonly dealt with separately. Although exiles as well as travellers can be said to ‘employ the geographical, discursive and ideological aspects of the journey as elements in a process of self-distinction’, there is also a political nature to travel which travellers may endeavour to protect from absorption into ‘practices of colonial exploration or neo-colonial leisure’.²³ The fact that terms are frequently interchangeable in discourses and debates underscores the need to re-evaluate our use of terminology and designation, to recognise the limitations that such categories impose, and to consider the possibilities that become available to us with the recognition of their permeable and porous nature. Forsdick ponders ‘the possible transformation of the exile into the traveller’, noting that travel and exile exist side by side in the work of Said, who himself identifies as both an exile and a traveller.²⁴ As illustrated in his case, ‘exile and travel co-exist, conflict, intertwine and overlap’, and ‘Exile and travel, far from being self-sufficient and independent practices, are themselves intertwined and overlapping’.²⁵

Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing builds on this binary, positing that the exile is traveller, is migrant, is expatriate, is nomad, for different people, in different contexts, for different reasons. Rosi Braidotti has offered the model of the ‘nomad’ as particularly resonant to women’s experience of mobility, in an extrapolation of her own experience as a transcultural cosmopolitan subject. Here, she emphasises a model of subjectivity that deterritorialises itself from fixed structures, and that is non-hierarchical, multiple, flexible and, most importantly, constantly in the process of becoming.²⁶ Criticisms of Braidotti’s model range from citing blind spots of elitism and ethnocentricism whereby ‘nomadic subjects function as if they are free-floating signifiers without psychic and material investment in one or more given particular geopolitical spaces’²⁷ to reminders that the liberating effects of transnational mobility and rootlessness are not equally available to all and that the radical potential of home and ‘staying put’ is not to be overlooked.²⁸ Janet Wolff, meanwhile, shows how the ideological gendering of travel as male both impedes female travel and renders problematic the self-definition of and response to women who do travel, arguing that a new vocabulary is required: ‘The already gendered language of mobility marginalises women who want to participate in cultural criticism. For that reason, there is no point tinkering with the vocabulary of travel to accommodate women. Crucially, this is still the wrong language’.²⁹ Wolff suggests an overhaul of existing vocabulary and offers the figure of the ‘stranger’ to express a new mode of mobile female subjectivity, shifting the focus away from mode of travel, to the resulting effect of mobility on women’s relation to place of arrival and departure. Sara Ahmed further explores the figure of the ‘stranger’, and the corresponding concept of ‘estrangement’, in the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, in ways that illuminate the analysis of women’s transnational mobility.³⁰ Displacement, then, might not necessarily entail physical mobility: we can be displaced within the ‘comfort’ of our own home, as ‘the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions’.³¹ As Sara Ahmed et al. warn us, we must be wary of romanticising mobility, take into account the forces that entrench or prevent movement, and recognise that homes may be sites of subversion and change as much as sites of violence and alienation.³²

This brings us to the vexed question of ‘choice’, for how can women’s situations of expatriation be reasonably or justifiably compared when these are motivated by circumstances as diverse as violence, war, political persecution, economic hardship, cultural or intellectual dissonance at home, or travel? It proves difficult, if not impossible, to coherently narrow down concrete cases of expatriation to either choice or imposition: Kate Averis demonstrates that these prove to incorporate varying degrees of both, and posits the aporia that remains as a kind of ‘forced choice’.³³ The notion of ‘forced choice’ allows us to account for the possibility – in fact, the necessity – of speaking of the ‘choice’ exercised by the political exile from an authoritarian regime, to refer to a limited, yet nevertheless existing set of choices, as well as of the ‘need’ for flight from a home environment perceived as culturally inhibiting or disabling in the case of intellectual dissonance at home. ‘Choice’ may be questioned further due to the legal and financial status of many mobile women for, as Catherine Rassiguier has shown, legal systems have failed in the past to accommodate immigrant women as individuals in their own right, preferring to accord them a status that is dependent on their marital situation.³⁴ Thus the circumstances of women’s mobility may also include the financial or legal circumstances of male members of the family, often regardless of or despite the resultant uprooting implied for female members. The positive tone that is discernible in an expression such as ‘family reunification’ tends to extinguish the problem of women’s autonomy within such a process. Legal categories are often inadequate to the task of reflecting whether or not women’s mobility is voluntarily or involuntarily undertaken. Friedman argues that women’s displacement and alienation often occurs even before the journey from home to elsewhere,³⁵ and, as Mildred Mortimer has shown, it is often by moving beyond the home that women may affirm a sense of self.³⁶

Underlying this volume is the assertion that women’s identities are irrevocably altered, if not constituted by the fact and experience of mobility. This collection of essays is not an attempt to abolish existing categories, or to blend all modes of mobility into an indistinguishable morass of shared experience. Our aim here is to rethink categories of mobility and, perhaps more importantly, to rethink our use of these categories, to consider their use both by those to whom they refer, and by those who use them to designate others, to understand the stakes at hand, why and how they are used, and to consider their currency today. Whilst recognising the specificity of and difference between situations of transnational mobility, this volume posits that the current use of existing categories of mobility runs the risk of asserting a misleading sense of division and compartmentalisation, in turn leading to structures of hierarchisation and exclusion. This book contributes to the ongoing project to redefine, compare and contrast modes of transnational mobility in an effort to avoid typecasting works and their authors. Just as we rethink mobility, we are also rethinking national literatures and the academic disciplines with which they are associated.

The contributions to this volume represent a variety of approaches. Some argue for the permeability and porosity of categories. Others bring to our attention a shift of focus from the material, to the cultural and intellectual aspects of mobility, while others propose innovative, alternative conceptualisations of mobility, or propose to uphold existing modes of classification and the literary genres associated with them as useful tools through exposing their diverse and evolving potential. In recognition of the persistence of familial considerations in the history of women’s mobility, Part I opens with a focus on ‘Familial Frames, Transnational Tropes’. Embedded in the complex historical backdrop shared between France and Sub-Saharan Africa, Isabel Hollis-Touré’s chapter argues for a nuanced interpretation of women’s writing of mobility that recognises certain forms of mobility as an affirmation or realisation of an existing condition of estrangement. An analysis of the early work of Léonora Miano demonstrates how the fetishisation of home denies the possibility that women may be considered strangers, or consider themselves as strangers, within the home space. In Chapter 2, Jeanette den Toonder presents the experience of mobility as one of duality, an experience of both rupture and continuity as expressed in the poetic prose of Kim Thúy, resident in Quebec since her departure from her native Vietnam at ten years of age. Describing an experience of fragmented simultaneity that is reflected in her narrative style, den Toonder locates Thúy’s transnational mobility in a wider space of transculturality that transgresses divisions between nations and cultures, and defies the boundaries of migration, exile and expatriation. Christopher Hogarth focuses on the ways in which Fatou Diome contributes to and diversifies the tradition of Senegalese ‘migrant literature’ in Chapter 3, where such a classification is argued not to be used as a tool for dismissing or oversimplifying a body of work, but rather as a means to illuminating its complexity and the unique nature of each writer’s, and in particular Diome’s, continually developing contribution. Alison Rice concludes this section with an exploration of the articulation of the separation from home, family and nation in the works of women writers in Paris who hail from a diverse array of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. She posits the resulting multiple itineraries and mobilities, which supersede the historical back-and-forth movement which has characterised transnational movement, and which give rise to the ‘travelling texts’ that bear witness to the experience.

The chapters of Part II, ‘Rewriting Identities as Displaced Subjects’, reflect on the central role of women’s writing in the reconstruction of mobile identities, beginning with an analysis of the writings of the nineteenth-century ‘vagabond’ Isabelle Eberhardt. Here, Dúnlaith Bird proposes an alternative formulation for female mobility through the appropriation in Eberhardt’s works of ‘vagabondage’, a kind of uncontrolled movement historically inscribed as criminal and viewed with suspicion especially when associated with women, to explore how Eberhardt’s physical motion combines with textual and sexual experimentation. In an analysis of the juxtaposition of words and images in Mes Algéries en France, Jane Hiddleston discusses Sebbar’s negotiation of her own dynamic experience of cultural hybridisation in Chapter 6. Hiddleston questions the possibility of constructing a collective history that might attenuate the introspective melancholia of ‘exile’, demonstrating the appropriation of the term ‘exile’ to express Sebbar’s persistant sense of separation and alienation in the departure from Algeria to France. Siobhán McIlvanney’s contribution shifts the focus from physical mobility to the mobility of ideas, and the emphasis from geographical exile to an internal, intellectual exile that is not dependent on physical displacement. McIlvanney explores the exilic function of French literature and the representation of the French education system in post-Independence Algeria in the texts of two key contemporary Algerian women writers, Maïssa Bey and Malika Mokeddem, as a significant means of refiguring women’s mobility through intellectual liberation. Boukary Sawagodo’s study engages with the discrepancies between the juridical and socio-economic designations of displacement and women’s actual lived experiences through a comparative analysis of autobiographical writing of displacement from Senegal to France in the works of Fatou Diome and Thérèse Parise Bernis. Interrogating the indicators through which identities in displacement are located and assigned, Sawadogo reveals the hybrid and heterogeneous nature of women’s transnational mobility. Exploring writing that contests the limits of both women’s mobility and Francophone literature, Bonnie Thomas illustrates the ways in which the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat harnesses a multiplicity of perspectives in her non-fictional texts to portray a variety of experiences of transnational mobility that blur the distinction between exile and immigration whilst pushing the very boundaries of travel writing, in Chapter 9.

The final section of this volume considers ‘Future Directions in Women’s Mobility’, and points to imminent ‘lines of flight’ in women’s transnational writing.³⁷ Charles Forsdick’s opening chapter explores the literary response of Haitian women writers to the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath. Through an analysis of the representation of women’s journeys through the highly policed spaces of post-earthquake Haiti, Forsdick reflects on the ways in which literary responses to the disaster represent the tensions between immobility and mobility, between the static and the unstable, to reveal the ways in which the spaces of Haiti, despite being disrupted by the earthquake, continue to be identified with borders and boundaries. Anna-Louise Milne then offers a long overdue study of the works of Leslie Kaplan, an American French writer who straddles genres, languages, and cultural and geographical spaces. Chapter 11 traces the trajectory of Kaplan’s narrative voice and generic span over the last ten years, demonstrating her bilingual, bicultural background as actively deployed in her writing to gain access to different patterns of belonging, mobility and anchorage. To close this section, and the volume as a whole, Margarita Alfaro identifies the emergence of a literature that disrupts historical conceptions of a French literary canon. ‘Ectoptic literature’, a literature that is ‘out-of-place’, is exemplified, as Alfaro argues, in the works of European writers Eva Almassy and Rouja Lazarova, whose writing can be located in a post-national, transcultural literary space which many of the writers examined in this volume might also be said to inhabit, and which offers productive new directions and possibilities for rethinking women’s mobility and the disruptive literature to which it gives rise.

Part I

Familial Frames, Transnational Tropes

1

Strangers in their own Homes: Displaced Women in Léonora Miano’s L’Intérieur de la nuit and Contours du jour qui vient

ISABEL HOLLIS-TOURÉ

Estrangement, it has been shown, is a trope of twentieth-century French literature, despite the absence of an adequate French translation of the English word.¹ The bilingual dictionary provides us with these possibilities: ‘séparation’ [separation], ‘brouille’ [quarrel], ‘désunion’ [disunion or division] or ‘sentiment d’éloignement’ [feeling of distance].² Yet none of these words renders the sense of a previous intimacy that is lost, or even become strange to those who used to share it. As ‘désunion’ suggests, we can only be estranged from one another if we were previously united in some way, in one another’s company, yet ‘désunion’ is unwieldy, and does not capture the sense of something familiar that becomes unknown and unfamiliar. Estrangement is distinct from separation, since it implies a prolonged distance, whilst a separation might be momentary. Estrangement does not, moreover, need to be the result of a quarrel; it may occur consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly. In English, meanwhile, estrangement is defined alongside the now politically laden term of ‘alien’. To estrange, the dictionary tells us, is to ‘render alien; to regard or treat as alien; to sever from a community; to remove (possessions, subjects) from the ownership or dominion of any one’, or ‘To alienate in feeling or affection’.³ This insistence on the ‘alien’ brings the meaning of estrangement close to terms such as ‘strange’ and ‘stranger’.

The motif of the stranger and the condition of estrangement has particular resonance when a narrative is concerned with human mobility, whether this comes in the form of travel, exile or economic migration. Such narratives are a mainstay of franco-phone postcolonial literature. The postcolonial condition, itself a form of estrangement, is a catalyst for mobility not just from place to place, but also between different cultural and linguistic backdrops. This is not to categorise postcolonial literature as a literature of mobility and migration, merely to acknowledge the cultural crossings that it frequently represents. Yet though estrangement in the contemporary literature of mobility is often understood as a consequence of the external conditions in which the author writes – a context including not only postcolonialism, but also globalisation, mass migrancy and deterritorialisation – estrangement has been described in French literary theory as an inherent part of the human psyche. Julia Kristeva’s Etrangers à nous-mêmes [Strangers to Ourselves] (1988) draws on Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the foreignness, or ‘Otherness’, residing within the self: ‘La psychanalyse s’éprouve alors comme un voyage dans l’étrangeté de l’autre et de soi-même, vers une éthique du respect pour l’inconciliable’ [Psychoanalysis is experienced then like a journey into the strangeness of the other and of the self, towards an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable].⁴

It is only upon accepting our own ‘self-estrangement’, Kristeva suggests, that we can learn to tolerate the strangeness of others.⁵ Kristeva’s work provides us with the understanding that the ‘stranger’ is both within us and outside us. On this basis, we can understand estrangement as a condition that is present within the self, insofar as the self is both strange and familiar at once, both united and divided. The detachment that an individual might experience from Others they encounter is a manifestation, seen in this light, of the divided self. By welcoming the irreconcilable strangeness of the self it becomes possible, then, to tolerate the difference encountered elsewhere. The ‘self-estrangement’ of Kristeva’s work has relevance for the distinction, made by several authors in this volume, between internal and external exile. Whilst ‘self-estrangement’ may be part and parcel of the human condition, it may also exist, in different form, as a consequence of the separation between an individual and a home, language, country and community that they previously inhabited, insofar as this separation removes the individual from