SOURCE: Ha, Marie-Paule. “The (M)Otherland in Marie Cardinal.” Romance Quarterly 43, no. 4 (fall 1996): 206-16.

In the following essay, Ha argues that Cardinal's opinions concerning the colonization of Algeria and Pied-Noirs/native relations are both condescending and naïve.

A common critical move in discussing Marie Cardinal's relation to Algeria, her motherland, is to conflate the latter with the maternal body and to see all three as equal victims of colonialism. For instance, in Françoise Lionnet's reading of Les Mots pour le dire,¹ the tragic fates of the narrator and her mother, both Pieds-Noirs, have been unproblematically assimilated to the colony's struggle for independence: “The agony of the mother, the bleeding of the daughter, the torturing of Algeria—all collapse into one and the same image: that of pain inflicted on the female body of women and the geographical body of Algeria by the discourses of patriarchy and...