SOURCE: Ha, Marie-Paule. “Outre-Mer/Autre Mère: Cardinal and Algeria.” Romance Notes 36, no. 3 (spring 1996): 315-23.

In the following essay, Ha explores the similarities between Cardinal's search for personal identity within mother-daughter relationships and her search for national identity between Algeria and France.

The critical works that have been devoted to Marie Cardinal tend to focus mainly on either feminist issues such as female textuality, female identity and female discourse or on psychoanalytical discussions that center on her rapport to her mother.¹ In these readings, Cardinal's relationship to Algeria is either ignored or broached in an unproblematic way.² This essay proposes to examine the complexity of Marie Cardinal's relationship to Algeria which she refers to as her Motherland. This complexity arises from the fact that as pied-noir, the writer belongs both to France, the Me(re)tropolis, and Algeria, the Outre-Mer, which are presented in her works as diametrically...