Cixous, Hélène, 1937-

Hélène Cixous was born in 1937 in Oran, Algeria, a hybrid city “full of neighborhoods, of peoples, of languages,” which inspired one of her earlier poetic fictions, the bilingual Vivre l’orange/To Live the Orange. She was the first child of Eve Cixous, née Klein (b. 1910), a refugee from Osnabrück in Nazi Germany, and her husband Georges Cixous (1909–1948), whose ancestors had come to Algeria through the expulsion and trade routes from Spain and Morocco. Hélène’s father was a physician, who had written his dissertation on tuberculosis, to which he succumbed in 1948, thus turning into a figure of contradictory associations for his daughter. Her mother, Eve, took up midwifery to support her family. Known as “the ‘Arabs’ midwife’ in Algiers,” she practiced until her expulsion with the last French doctors and midwives in 1971.

For Hélène Cixous, these circumstances of her genealogy, birth and life story, or, more precisely, the psychological and political conflicts inherent in these circumstances, were the seeds of her work: “My own writing was born in Algeria out of a lost country of the dead father and the foreign mother.” Playing with the “aberrant, extravagant” question of nationality became part of the diasporic lifelong exercise of their daughter Hélène, who “never thought I was at home [in Algeria], nor that Algeria was my country, nor that I was French.” Instead, her adolescent experience of Algerian Jewishness made her realize that the logic of nationality was usually accompanied by such “unbearable behaviors” as colonialism or antisemitism. It also made her think of herself and her family in the provocative terms of a multiple alterity constituted by the logic of nationality, but which also undermines it with a form of speech seeking moral and political precision rather than authority: “How could I be from a France that colonized an Algerian country when I knew that we ourselves, German Czechoslovak Hungarian Jews, were other Arabs.”

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