TO BE OR NOT TO BE MÉTIS: nina bouraoui’s embodied memory of the colonial fracture

AbstractThis essay deals with Nina Bouraoui’s mixed-race (metis) identity as presented in her autobiographical novels Garcon manque and Mes mauvaises pensees. The metis question takes the shape of a representation of an ethnicized, dual and fractured identity. My argument explores a contradiction at work in Bouraoui’s texts: while reclaiming the existence of a Franco-Algerian metis identity, Bouraoui represents the metis as the incarnated perpetuation of the historical tensions that divided France and Algeria. The narratives simultaneously construct and deconstruct Bouraoui’s Franco-Algerian metis identity. I examine how Bouraoui represents her Algerian legacy and appropriates a familial history to construct herself as Algerian. I analyze how traumatic memories of asphyxiation are a metaphor for Bouraoui’s difficult relationship with her French self, symbolized by the motif of white skin. And I consider how the ends of the two novels provide a problematic acceptance and fulfillment of Bouraoui’s metis ide...