The wild becoming of childhood : writing as monument in Nina Bouraoui's Sauvage.

• Published in: Forum for Modern Language Studies
• Main Author: Damlé, Amaleena
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2013
• Subjects: sami
• Online Access: http://dro.dur.ac.uk/32067/; http://dro.dur.ac.uk/32067/1/32067.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqs069

This article explores the writing of childhood in Sauvage (2011) by the contemporary francophone writer Nina Bouraoui, a text that narrates the experiences of fourteen-year-old Alya in Algeria as she struggles to comprehend the disappearance of her friend, Sami. The article analyses the depiction of childhood in the text as a state of unbounded wildness, interpreting this wildness as a kind of ‘becoming’, as understood by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It further draws on the work of these thinkers in examining the relationship between childhood memories and writing in the text, in which temporality is dislocated and the past is enfolded into the present, creating a kind of ‘monument’ to childhood.