Sabrina Kherbiche’s La Suture: Writing in Search of the Self

by Shannon K. Winston

Sabrina Kherbiche is one of the most compelling emerging women writers writing in French today. I first discovered her work when I read L’Anorexie Créatrice and Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures by Isabelle Meuret, which examines the relationship between writing and anorexia as limit experiences in which the subject is continually in question. Meuret argues that the act of writing is a moment in which food and words rival each other. Writing, therefore, is both In her own words: “It seems that some fall prey to the disease following a language problem, and can paradoxically get back into life through writing itself, which is their saving grace” (Meuret, Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures, 3).

The interrelationship between writing and anorexia is quite pronounced in La Suture, which is why Meuret draws on Kherbiche’s work. Kherbiche’s “hybrid” (Meuret) identity as a daughter of an Algerian man and French woman is central to the narrative. Through her writing, she struggles to unite non-Western and Western parts of her self. Equally prominent to her autobiography, however, is her battle with anorexia and depression, which stemmed largely from her with her traumatic past: Kherbiche lost her virginity before marriage and had a hymen reconstruction surgery (or a “suture”) before her wedding. However, her secret was found out on her wedding night and afterwards escaped to France (Ibid, 4).

Kherbiche’s narrative, then, is her attempt to “suture” herself and to move beyond her past. Her style is poetic and, at times, difficult to grasp because of its deeply fragmented quality. And it is not difficult for readers to intuit Kherbiche’s detachment from herself, her uncertainty and, at times, her desperation to find herself. Her anorexia is not just corporeal but, as Meuret suggests, also related to her writing; she suffers from a verbal and creative anorexia, which continually disorients her and upsets her already troubled sense of self. The most powerful aspect of his autobiography is that it does not offer any solutions or remedies to Kherbiche’s diffiuculties but exists, rather, as testimony to her troubles. Her voice is an important and poetic one that grapples with important questions of the body, women and immigrant narratives, and relationships of ex-colonies to their colonizers.

It is my hope that Kherbiche’s work will receive more attention in North America. As it stands, she is being read more widely and she now writes in English as well as French. She has also done some translation work.

For more on her work: Kherbiche, Sabrina. La Suture. Alger: Editions Laphomic, 1993. Meuret, Isabelle. L’anorexie Créatrice. Paris: Klincksieck, 2006. Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures. Brussels: Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2007.