As with any of Hélène Cixous’s fictions, it is difficult to determine a unique and defined story line for the content of Le jour où je n’étais pas là. The narration is marked by a multiplicity of wanderings pulling on and combining numerous stories or histories at once. In this way the structure of the narration mimics its content with its “diasporic” tendencies. A central line, however, which functions as a guiding narrative thread, is the story of the memory of the life and death of the narrator’s first-born son, a Down’s syndrome child who lived just beyond a year. This Mongoloid child with his physical and expected intellectual abnormalities is stamped as an outsider upon his birth where he is surrounded by the curious inspecting and suspicious eyes of the narrator’s Jewish family. He is a “not quite human,” an “almost human,” or an “other human still (human)” being who like all beings born outside the norm is condemned to abandonment. This child born here is from there, Mongolia, that vast unexplored region, the uncharted land of bizarre foreigners. The history of the Mongoloid people rapidly confronts the historical heritage of the narrator’s own people, the Jews. Like the Israelites, the Mongoloids, as they are found in all parts of the world, experience a Diaspora of sorts. The consideration of the Diaspora is further explored through the eventual historical consequences for these two people. The Mongoloids and the Jews, the unwanted “abandonable” peoples face the threat of near erasure.

The purpose of this paper is to expose these two dominant narrative threads in Le jour où je n’étais pas là in order to highlight the interweaving of the one upon the other and the mimicking of the form itself that supports the notion of interior Diaspora within the memory constructions of the narrator. There is no linear narration, which holds the text together as a coherent whole; rather this text explodes into multiple fragments of histories and in this dispersion accents the Diaspora it contains.