SOURCE: Proulx, Patrice J. “Representations of Cultural and Geographical Displacement in Marie Cardinal.” Centennial Review 42, no. 3 (fall 1998): 527-38.

In the following essay, Proulx maintains that Cardinal's feelings toward her mother—as described in several of the author's works—are inextricably tied to her sense of belonging to Algeria, her “motherland.” Proulx explores Cardinal's difficulties with her emotional separation from her mother and her physical separation from her homeland.

We have to accept, however reluctantly, the simple fact that we live in an age of refugees, of migrants, vagrants, nomads roaming about the continents and warming their souls with the memory of their—spiritual or ethnic, divine or geographical, real or imaginary—homes.

—Leszek Kolakowski (191-92)

According to Michael Seidel, in his work Exile and the Narrative Imagination, “an exile is someone who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another” (ix). This quote epitomizes the...