From Inner Exile to Imaginary Shelter in Nina Bouraoui’s La Voyeuse interdite, Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées

Abstract

This article examines La Voyeuse interdite, Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées through a single imaginary trajectory, leading from inner exile to the progressive construction of shelters. The analysis shows that exile in Bouraoui’s fiction extends beyond geographical displacement. It involves the subject’s relation to origin, body, memory and language. In La Voyeuse interdite, urban space closes around characters deprived of stable landmarks and produces an experience of non-belonging. Garçon manqué deepens this experience by constructing identity within the in-between space of countries, cultures and gender categories. Mes mauvaises pensées moves the problem toward a writing of memory in which the house, the room, objects, sensations and words become sites of recovery. Drawing on Gilbert Durand, Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Pierre Richard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, together with critical studies devoted to Bouraoui, we argue that shelter is less a fixed place than an act of recomposition. Memory revives lost places, writing restores them within the texture of the book, and language becomes a dwelling of its own. A poetics of shelter thus emerges through the passage from imposed space to inhabited space and finally from inhabited space to written space.