Blessures des frontières

Supported by Judith Butler’s work, and also by the theme of ambivalence and nonsense as defined by Homi Bhabha, this article initiates thoughts on agency in the historic, literary and cultural context of postcolonial narrations around the reconfiguration of borders in an era of globalization. This analysis of the works of Malika Mokeddem, Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé and Marie NDiaye concentrates on the way in which the texts’ main female characters are all presented as trespassers – human beings struggling to exist, to speak, to give an account of themselves, and who are breaking away from the standards and displacing borders. A strong feeling of ‘inseparation’ emanates from what divides through unity, from the border as a wound uniting and separating both narrations and people. This includes wounds of sexual difference, of the sexual body. Traces of wounds consecutive to crossing borders can be found in these wounded narrations where memories attempt to express themselves, often through the necessity of delaying the accounts through repetitions which in themselves act as means of working through the trauma.