Territoires féminins ed. by Sylvie Mongeon (review)

1 48Women in French Studies life with a host family who has accepted her in their home. She does the housework for them in exchange for room and board. She lives comfortably in their house where, for the first time in her life, she has her own room. " My only desire now," she states, "is to be able to get my son back one day" (151). She had to leave him with her mother. In her introduction, Baya Gacemi explains that she met Nadia while doing a news story on women victimized by terrorism. She makes clear as well her sincere desire to inform people, both in Algeria and in the world beyond, by presenting specifics about destructive factional activities. She also reiterates her promise to Nadia to ensure that actual people and places are protected by the consistent use of fictitious names. In the book's foreword, an informative essay by Fanny Calonna contextualizes Nadia's account by pointing out pertinent facts and figures with regard to the violent struggle in Algeria in the decade between 1992 and 2002. She focuses particularly on the plight of women during this time whose situation worsened by the imposition of a regressive Family Code inspired by Muslim religious law, code still enforced in Algeria today. Also included in the prepages , an especially insightful essay by Edmund Burke III further contextualizes Nadia's narrative as he traces and analyzes modem Algerian political history and its continuing legacy ofviolence and repression. Côté and Mitchell's adept and carefully annotated translation of Gacemi's narrative now makes Nadia's fascinating and important story available to English readers. As such, it can serve as a valuable resource for teaching and research, as well as a compelling read. Pamela PaineAuburn University Mongeon, Sylvie, ed. Territoiresféminins. Montréal: CELAT, 2006. Pp 242. ISBN 2-920576-80-1. $15.00 (Paper). These essays represent a response to the fluidity of a contemporary society in which traditional territorial boundaries such as class, race, and gender can no longer serve to encompass an individual's identity. Specifically, they propose to examine literary depictions of women's relationships to these very mobile perimeters, and most importantly, the connections between women, the territories they inhabit, and the identity they derive from these territories. Each contributor approaches the theme of spatiality in her own manner, with the result that diversity is ever-present in this collection: in the breadth of the critical approaches it embraces, in the genres represented by the authors (and one filmmaker) considered, in the national provenance of the authors included (notwithstanding an understandable penchant toward Canadian authors). The "territories" of the title range from the concrete, physical area women inhabit to spaces that are more figurative entities. Indeed, the past, death, gender, and even Book Reviews149 language itself are presented as constructs of spaces capable of defining a woman's identity. The "space" of this collection comprises four sections that contain a total of nine essays (in addition to an introduction). Each section offers two (in one case three) pieces that suggestively and effectively juxtapose similar takes on a particular spatiality. The first section, "Mouvements dans l'espace: départ et égarement," considers space defined in a traditional, geographical sense. The opening essay, by editor Sylvie Mongeon, deftly sets a tone for the rest of the collection. She examines Christine Angot's Quitter la ville in the same terms set forth in the introduction: Angot is a writer whose work illustrates the modem condition of finding traditional territorial markers of class, race, nationality, and language to be useless anchors of identity. In Mongeon's view identity for Angot is drawn more from movement within space than it is from the space's delimiting boundaries. Chantai Ringuet's rich exploration of Marie de l'Incarnation and her La Relation de 1654 both continues and expands on the direction set by the initial essay. Ringuet reads this early text from the "pre-Canadian" territory as both the writer's physical experience of a new land and as an account of the spiritual, interior domain she created in response to this encounter. The third essay in this section, Katri Suhonen's...

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