Abstract
The twenties saw an increase in the literary output of women in both colonies.1In Kenya it was the early beginning of a literature that would expand in the thirties and forties; in Algeria the period marked the consolidation of colonial women’s voices into a “female” genre that was seen to have a true understanding of interracial relations, and thus to be its most accurate representation. Colonial women’s novels, whether in Kenya or Algeria, reflected metropole anxieties as much as they depicted a particular vision of the colony. In the aftermath of World War I, when the need was to forget the horror and devastation by recreating a semblance of stability, women responded by producing fiction in which the prewar status quo was packaged in an exoticism that belied colonial realities, while formulating a seductive image of the colony. The representational tropes they created and used laid the groundwork for the nostalgia that would become a part of the post-independence collective memory of the colonial past. The exotic in both Algeria and Kenya was perceived in the land and its peoples, and performed by the settlers in their leisure activities. In Algeria it was associated with the Mediterranean beauty of the land and the eroticism of Orientalism; in Kenya it was associated with the wildness of the flora, fauna and landscape and the pleasures their proximity could bring. In Algeria, Elissa Rhaïs (1876–1940) and Magali Boisnard (1882–1945) wrote and performed via the medium of the exotic.2
I loved those walks in the quiet darkness of Africa…All these things wove their spell upon me. They were part of the strange soul of Africa—the land that had taken us as her own, to make or to break…
Florence Riddell
Oh! Cette patrie d’Afrique! Maintenant qu’on l’arrachait à elle, combien il l’aimait Elissa Rhaïs
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Notes
P. O. Graillet, “Rhaïs (Elissa)—Les Juifs ou la fille d’Eléazar” in Revue Bibliographique, no. 5 (1921), 278.
Luigi Pirandello, Les Oeuvres Libres, (Paris, Fayard, 1927).
Elissa Rhais, Saada, Marockanskan (Stockholm: Sv. førl., 1920).
Lucien Maury, “L’Orient des Orientaux” in Revue Bleue, 58, no. 1 (1920): 25–28.
Magali Boisnard, Sultans de Touggourt (Paris: Geuther, 1933).
Elissa Rhaïs, Saâda, la Marocaine (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1919).
Jules Roy, “Le mythe d’une Algérie heureuse” Le Monde, le 4 juin, 1982, 19.
Magali Boisnard, Mâadith (Amiens: Malfère, 1921).
Nora Kathleen Strange, An Outpost Wooing: A Romance of East Africa, (London: Stanley Paul, 1927), 12.
Nora Kathleen Strange, A Wife in Kenya (London: Stanley Paul, 1925), 199–200.
Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right. British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–1939 (London: Constable, 1980).
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© 2012 Patricia M. E. Lorcin
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Lorcin, P.M.E. (2012). Writing and Living the Exotic. In: Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013040_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013040_5
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