Un cadeau d'amour empoisonné: Les paradoxes de l'autobiographie postcoloniale dans L'Amour, la fantasia d'Assia Djebar

The Algerian novelist Assia Djebar has expressed her reluctance to write about herself in the French language, that of her country's colonizers. In her novel L'Amour, la fantasia, the author explores this conflict, yielding a text rich in paradox. Linguistic tension appears most clearly in one particular chapter of the novel, "La Tunique de Nessus." I analyse the chapter with respect to two models, Plato's pharmakon and the tunic referred to in the chapter's title. Like them, the language adopted by the young narrator to tell her story functions both as a burden and as a blessing; it can be considered a poisoned gift. Djebar has thus found an appropriate symbol for the problematic nature of postcolonial autobiography. The novel can be read as a liberating rewriting of the models, reproducing cultural and linguistic tension as a means of preserving individual postcolonial identity.