Born in Algiers in 1929, Marie Cardinal was a child of wealthy colonial landowners. In 1980, she returned for her first visit in 24 years, a trip whose goal was to permit her to become "tranquillement bi-culturée sans que la névrose s'empare de ma personne bicéphale, sans que le reniement guillotine l'une de mes deux têtes, sans avoir à faire un choix impossible" (Au pays de mes racines 17). The revolutionary allusion in the choice of 'guillotiner' enacts one of the paradoxes of Cardinal's situation as a both a feminist and a pied noir writer, both 'bourreau' (colonial oppressor) and 'victime' (victim not only of her mother's cruelty but also of the Algerian war of independence that led to her definitive exile from her motherland and, as a woman, of the oppression of patriarchy). Shortly before her departure from France, she tells us, she reads Assia Djebar's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement and is moved by the women in these stories: "Elles sont si proches de moi, ces femmes, et si lointaines" (97).

Viewed through the lens of childhood in Cardinal's writing, Algerian women appear as disjointed part objects-especially as voices or hands-available through the girl's senses. This romanticized vision of Algeria as motherland and Algerian women as nurturing beings persists even in the "adult" narratives, however, belying Cardinal's claims of solidarity with Algerian women through feminist politics. Whereas Cardinal claims the right to be free of 'mauvaise conscience' about her complicity in the oppression of Algerian men and women because Algeria is her true motherland ["C'est chez moi, il n'y a pas à dire, et je n'ai pas à avoir mauvaise conscience de ça, malgré TOUT" (73)], Winifred Woodhull points out that her narrator fails to come to terms with how she "is implicated in postcolonial structures of domination" through creating an Algeria that is "an autonomous, acultural, ahistorical realm of jouissance" (Transfigurations of the Maghreb 167). In my paper, I will show how this paradox informs the portrayal and functions of Algerian women in Cardinal's work.