ABSTRACT
This chapter analysis the contemporary exiled women's writing by looking at two narratives which do explicitly manifest the concerns and experiences of exile, representing exiled protagonists in the highly charged period of arrival in exile. It examines the writing of Nancy Huston and Cristina Siscar, two women who departed from their respective countries of birth, Canada and Argentina, for Paris as young women in the 1970s. The chapter also examines Huston's L'Empreinte de l'ange and Siscar's La sombra del jardin, two fictional works which recount the arrival and initial period in exile of their protagonists, and which explicitly stage the literal and metaphoric nomadism of their exiled protagonists. Language, or more precisely, the acquisition of a new language, is foregrounded in both L'Empreinte de l'ange and La sombra del jardin as an obstacle. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the role of alternative modes of communication in the negotiation of identity of the female exiled subject.
