SOURCE: Cairns, Lucille. “Roots and Alienation in Marie Cardinal's Au Pays de mes racines.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29, no. 4 (October 1993): 346-58.

In the following essay, Cairns appraises Cardinal's conflicting nationalistic views of France and Algeria in Au Pays de mes racines, commenting that the novel “inscribes the psychological conflict created by aspirations to biculturalism (particularly when the two cultures in question are so antithetical).”

In the writings of Marie Cardinal, a pied noir born in Algeria in 1929, national identity is a source of psychological unease and powerfully ambivalent feelings. Of a privileged colonist class, Cardinal was brought up in accordance with the traditional values of the French Catholic bourgeoisie. Her family identified firmly with the French patrie of the original settlers, taking it as the centre of civilization, in relation to which Algeria was viewed as the uncivilized and inferior Other. Her own sense of national identity...