SOURCE: Lionnet, Françoise. “Métissage, Emancipation, and Female Textuality in Two Francophone Writers.” In Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, edited by Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller, pp. 254-74. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Lionnet suggests parallels between the struggles of Cardinal's female protagonists to achieve autonomy within patriarchal society and the striving of Algeria to achieve self-rule after years of colonization.

PROSPERO:

… 

MIRANDA:

But how is it 

That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else 

In the dark backward and abysm of time? 

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

… Mais je rêve, j'utopographe, je sais.

—Annie Leclerc, Parole de femme

To read a narrative that depicts the journey of a female self striving to become the subject of her own discourse, the narrator of her own story, is to witness the unfolding of an autobiographical project. To raise the...