Undoing Shame: Women Writing and Political Disidentification in Postcolonial France

ABSTRACT

By the end of French colonization of Algeria, a new population category had been produced, the harkis, often forced to assist the French army of occupation on Algerian territory prior to 1962. Then repatriated to France and relegated to internment camps, invisibilized on the national territory and administratively constituted as second-class citizens, and they took on the shame associated with an uninhabitable condition that was nonetheless transmitted from generation to generation until now. I look here at how those who describe themselves as “daughters of harkis” have opened up a double horizon of emancipation by writing: turning shame against itself to politicize a subjective condition from its own point of impossibility, and speaking from a position explicitly designated as feminine to free oneself from postcolonial prohibitions on existence.

RÉSUMÉ

À la fin de la colonisation française de l’Algérie, une nouvelle catégorie de population est apparue, les harkis, souvent contraints d’assister l’armée française d’occupation sur le territoire algérien avant 1962. Rapatriés ensuite en France et relégués dans des camps d’internement, invisibilisés sur le territoire national et administrativement constitués en citoyens de seconde zone, ils ont assumé la honte d’une condition inhabitable qui s’est pourtant transmise de génération en génération jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Je m’intéresserai ici à la manière dont celles qui se définissent comme “filles de harkis “ont ouvert un double horizon d’émancipation par l’écriture: retourner la honte contre elle-même pour politiser une condition subjective à partir de son propre point d’impossibilité; parler à partir d’une position explicitement désignée comme féminine pour s’affranchir des interdits postcoloniaux sur l’existence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the authors(s).

Notes

¹ For a more in-depth look at the political implications of this method, see Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recently published text, La resistance des bijoux (2023, in French), and the original English text from which the French essay derives: “Unlearning our settler colonial tongues” at

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/unlearning-our-settler-colonial-tongues.

² This Lacan’s play on words is untranslatable from French into English: It condenses the French word for “shame” and the word “ontology” into one term, which makes shame the support of all ontology.

³ The use of torture on a large scale to break the resistance of the FLN (National Liberation Front), although documented by Algerians and French opponents, was denied by the state for several decades.

⁴ The author Nedjma Kacimi (2021, p. 118): “Thus one becomes a harki or a traitor for not having denounced the colonial yoke to which one has become accustomed, for not having contributed to the resistance fund, for having remained clinging to this life that one has always led, for not having understood the stakes of this struggle.”

⁵ The French word for “shame” is honte.

⁶ A contraction of fraternity and ferocity, this neologism/wordplay by Lacan is also untranslatable into English.

⁷ This concept appears in a course held by Michel Foucault at Collège de France in 1979–1980, entitled Du gouvernement des vivants [Governing the living] (Foucault, 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophie Mendelsohn

Sophie Mendelsohn, M.D., has been practicing psychoanalysis in Paris since 2005. She works as an independent researcher on the possible intersections between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theories of gender and race; she has been published in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Swedish. She is the founder of the Collectif de Pantin, which since 2018 has been working on issues of racism and racialization in postcolonial France (www.collectifdepantin.org). She recently published a book co-authored with Livio Boni, which is the first volume in a forthcoming series, La vie psychique du racisme. 1. L’empire du démenti [The psychic Life of Racism. 1. The empire of denial] (Paris, La découverte, 2021). She has also coordinated the publication of a collective volume (Psychanalyse du reste du monde, Géohistoire d’une subversion (Paris, La découverte, 2023)) on the crystallizations and circulations of psychoanalysis in the global South.