Strangers in their own Homes: Displaced Women in Léonora Miano's L'Intérieur de la nuit and Conto urs 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. The bilingual dictionary provides us with these possibilities: 'séparation' [separation], 'brouille' [quarrel], 'désunion' [disunion or division] or 'sentiment d'éloignement' [feeling of distance]. 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'. 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 nousmêmes [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].

It is only upon accepting our own 'self-estrangement', Kristeva suggests, that we can learn to tolerate the strangeness of others. 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 the very factors from which his or her identity is comprised. In this sense, the internal 'condition' of estrangement, and estrangement as a response to external, socio-cultural factors, are two sides of the same coin. The exiled subject is not only physically removed from a place of belonging, but also psychologically detached from the familiar points of reference that are distinct to that place and the people who reside there. In this respect, the new encounters experienced by the displaced subject occur alongside their growing self-estrangement, which sees the pre-departure self gradually become unfamiliar, or even inaccessible. Kristeva states that we are all strangers to ourselves, yet ever more so, surely, when we displace.

This leads us to question the uniqueness of estrangement that comes as a consequence of mobility, or its assumed specificity. If estrangement is not contingent upon a movement of departure from 'home', then what can we make of the distinctive status we give to mobile subjects and the texts that they write? The purpose of this chapter is to argue for a nuanced interpretation of the literature of mobility that allows for estrangement...