Mother’s Death and the Demise of the Judeo-Maghrebi Motherland in Nine Moati’s “Mon enfant, ma mère” and Gisèle Halimi’s “Fritna"

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Comparative Ashkenazi-Sephardi Studies

Abstract

This paper explores the depiction of Mother’s death, which mirrors the demise of Sephardi Maghrebi lifeworlds after Tunisia’s independence, in two French-written novels, authored by Nine Moati (born 1938 in Tunis) and Gisèle Halimi (born 1927 in La Goulette, Tunisia). In Moati, her mother’s death, mourned in this novella-epitaph, temporally coincides with the decolonization of Tunisia and the narrator’s “return” to France. Mother’s decease thus stands for the protagonist’s uprootedness and loss of identity. Contrarily, Halimi’s "Fritna" tells a story of a rebellious daughter, an ardent feminist, who challenges “the Law of the Mother,” rebukes Judaism as patriarchy par excellence, and willingly distances herself from her mother Fortunée’s Mizrahi-Bedouin genealogy. Briefly, applying feminist reading strategies, I intend to interrogate the mother-daughter bond as simultaneously the locus of intergenerational transfer of Jewishness and the site of matrophobic pitfalls and temptations in the shadow of colonialism.

Author

• Alexey Pekov, Columbia University