Identités en guerre. Violence, fracture et métissage dans les romans de Nina bouraoui: Garçon manqué et Mes mauvaises pensées
Identities at war. Violence, fracture and hybridity in Nina Bouraoui’s novels: Garçon manque and Mes mauvaises pensees

Summary/Abstract: Nina Bouraoui’s novels portray characters who seem to embody the meeting point between macro-history and micro-history, becoming indisputable evidence of the violence of war and of murderous History. Bearers of a duty of remembrance, coming from mixed families, torn between conflicting and irreconcilable identities (whether national Franco-Algerian identity or gender identity), descendants of families involved in the Algerian civil war, the characters in Nina Bouraoui’s work disseminate the unease of the in-between, embodying both violence and division, but above all a fundamental hybridity — a hybridity that makes it possible to transcend racial and gender categories and thus to undo divisions and dichotomies. In a context in which we are witnessing a displacement of the violence of History and its inscription onto a body whose troubling biology questions the norms of binary thinking, one may wonder: what strategies are used to turn the problematic hybrid body into an object of narrative? Furthermore, do the strategies developed to conceptualize the mixed-race body and to turn it into an object of literary discourse present themselves as possible ways of repairing a world scarred—and a body wounded—by the violence of conflict?

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