Gendered genealogies in North African Jewish women’s writing: The case of Paule Darmon’s Baisse les yeux,Sarah

Abstract

This article analyses gendered genealogies in an example of North African Jewish women’s writing in French: Paule Darmon’s Baisse les yeux, Sarah (1980), which draws heavily on the author’s personal experience. This autofictional novel recounts the chequered personal history of autodiegetic narrator Sarah Lévy, born to an Algerian father and a Moroccan mother, and raised in Morocco until the age of 17 when her family leave for France. The articles focuses on a three-generational female genealogy of Moroccan-Jewish women, and its problematic relationship with the stereotypical Eastern model of woman. Sarah’s ambivalence towards her matrilineal heritage throws into relief the fault lines that can occur in lines of descent. Although allied with her mother in the latter’s partial rejection of female oppression, she is also sensitive to her mother’s always already subaltern and therefore undesirable status as doubly stigmatized object – female and Oriental – within the French colonial discourses internalized by her father.