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Taos Amrouche, romancière,
Artistic creation often derives from pain. As for Taos Amrouche, sister of the well-known author Jean Amrouche, her artistic expressions, both written and sung, swell from her exile and hybridity -- sources of her feelings of separation, loss, and division -- in her effort to find peace with herself and to connect with others. Yet Denise Brahimi, in her literary study of Taos Amrouche's four novels, Jacinthe noire, Rue des tambourins, L'amant imaginaire, and Solitude ma mère, wishes to portray these writings as more than just expressions of pain. Rather she celebrates the author's tenacity to "truth" and the elaboration of her selfs "totality." As Taos herself says in L'amant imaginaire, her work that most reflects upon the act of writing, this act is necessarily autobiographical for her. She cannot separate her work from her life, the two being intimately connected in the process of artistic creation. Likewise, Brahimi identifies the fundamental purpose behind Taos's writing as attempts at understanding herself while making herself understood to others. In spite of the divisions within herself and between her and others, often cause for failures in her personal relationships, Taos and her narrators and protagonists search for unity and understanding.
Among the many themes Brahimi identifies in Taos's novels, exile and hybridity appear the most important in her earlier works. Her first novel, Jacinthe noire, addresses her exile, which is double, due to her family's move from Kabylie to Tunis before her birth and then her immigration to France as a young woman. Her family's Kabyle origin is key to her feeling of otherness, whether it be in the Paris boarding school, as in Jacinthe noire, or in her childhood Tunis, central to Rue des tambourins. She, like her heroines, are caught between two cultures -- the Catholic, canonical, highly rationalized, gray, and monotone France and the pagan, free-spirited, instinctive, colorful, and passionate homeland she imagines and idealizes. However, and this is the source of her pain, Kabylie, the homeland she so lovingly aspires to recreate in her surroundings, can no more be recreated than found as she envisions it. Following the French colonization of North Africa, her family left Kabylie for the more prosperous and Westernized Tunis, and from there she and her...