'L'arbouse flamboyante que je fus': Cultivating Womanhood in Taos Amrouche's Garden

This article examines the construction of postcolonial womanhood through an ecocritical lens in Taos Amrouche'sSolitude ma mère. I focus on the three main ways the protagonist, Aména, considers vegetal being as a metaphor for womanhood: first, as a form of pure potential; second, as a mode of f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:L'Esprit créateur 2022-12, Vol.62 (4), p.135-149
Main Author: Mohammed, Nadrah
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algerian literature
Beauvoir, Simone de (1908-1986)
Colonialism
Ecocriticism
Failure
Feminism
French literature
Fruits
Gardens & gardening
Gender
Heterosexuality
Literary devices
Metaphor
Novels
Rhetorical figures
Trees
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Summary:This article examines the construction of postcolonial womanhood through an ecocritical lens in Taos Amrouche'sSolitude ma mère. I focus on the three main ways the protagonist, Aména, considers vegetal being as a metaphor for womanhood: first, as a form of pure potential; second, as a mode of failure when blooming does not occur; and finally, as a re-appropriation of this failure, a feminist and indigenous form of refusal in a colonial context. Amrouche's use of gardening tropes invokes Romanticism and the pathetic fallacy, yet, as I show, Aména's lived experience as a racialized woman complicates Amrouche's novelistic assumptions.
ISSN:0014-0767
1931-0234
1931-0234
DOI:10.1353/esp.2022.0048