Reveries of the Wild Woman

Primal Scenes

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by Helene Cixous and Helene Cixous,

Translated by Brian Mallet and Beverley Bie Brahic

Northwestern University Press

Due/Published April 2006, 128 pages, cloth

ISBN 0810118726

Born in Oran, Algeria, Helene Cixous spent her childhood in France's former colony. Reveries of the Wild Woman is her visceral memoir of a preadolescence that shaped her with intense feelings of alienation, yet also contributed, in a paradoxically essential way, to her development as a writer and philosopher.

Born to a French father and an Austro-German mother, both Jews, Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crisis. In her moving story she recounts how small events -- a new dog, the gift of a bicycle -- reverberate decades later as symbols filled with social and psychological meaning. She and her family endure a double alienation, by Algerians for being French and by the French for being Jewish, and Cixous builds her story on the themes of isolation and exclusion she felt in particular under the Vichy government and during the Algerian Civil War. Yet she also concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her a longing for her home country, and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought.

A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, Reveries of the Wild Woman is also a recollection of how a girl's childhood is, indeed, author to the woman.