ABSTRACT
The work of Leila Sebbar constitutes a repeated movement between a reflection on the solitude of exile and an affirmation of cultural polyphony. Sebbar's Sherazade trilogy is concerned with how to achieve a sense of singularity from a series of multiple engagements with different cultural references. The texts occupy a territory which is neither wholly French nor North African, but which actively subverts fantasies of national communities in favour of a performance of cultural metissage. Sebbar's textual voyage across time and space in the Sherazade texts gives way to a more anxious position in some of her more recent work on memory. While Sherazade counters her sense of exile with a confident reappropriation of selected fragments of cultural memories, many of Sebbar's more recent characters shift indeterminately between a desire to recreate the past and an awareness of the fragmentary, dissolute nature of memory.
