Nina Bouraoui’s sismopoetics: 'Trembling thinking' and fractured identity in Le jour du séisme (1999)

Abstract

Through the prism of Edouard Glissant’s « trembling thinking » [pensée du tremblement] which promotes a productive vision of chaos as a relational model , this article aims to examine the aesthetics of tremor as it unfolds in Nina Bouraoui's novel Le jour du séisme (1999). Based on the evocation of the earthquake that occurred in El Asnam in 1980, the Franco-Algerian author summons other equally traumatic places and temporalities. Following the cataclysm, the protagonist’s identity, her memory and rootedness in her fatherland appear illusory: seismic writing wipes the slate clean of fixity and homogeneity to favor unstable textual arrangements and a relational mode of knowledge seemingly chaotic. This study examines how the ontological precariousness that emerges in the face of natural disaster gives rise to new modalities of being in the world for the narrator, and offers a renewed writing ethos. Such is Bouraoui's « sismopoetics », both ekphrasis and conceptual strategy to rethink the fragility of the existence of the postcolonial subject and their precarious relationship to nature, a subject that escapes the immurements of identity, whether they be based on national, gender, or religious affiliations.