Woman Search for an authentic identity beyond time and space in Claire Messud’s The last life

Abstract

Space and place have historically been the subject matter of geographers. Yet, due to the humanistic and the historical geographies, they have been attached to the human being since s/he seems to be the only responsible for their transformations, over time, from space to place or vice versa. Creating a personal geography then may depend on the individuals’ endeavours and drives. Claire Messud’s Bildungsroman The Last Life, for instance, stands for a clear image of three pieds-noirs generations and their dis/integration in a place, i.e. France. Their sudden departure and the end of the ‘French Algeria’ have caused a great despair among them when their paradise was officially lost in 1962. Because a structured and a traditional documentation could not be sufficient to understand why certain events have taken place in the past as they are still confusing generations over time, the aforementioned work seems to be an adequate means to reconsider them. Algeria, for the pieds-noirs still exists as they are still querying about what remains of their memories which can be found, only, in the moans of their stories on the one hand and about what they can tell to their children about it on the other. The present work’s main objective then is to picture the extent to which Claire’s protagonist is affected by her ancestors’ past and how could their traumatic memories about a place transgress her mind’s and psych’s space. Because their Original Sin which is related to Augustine of Hippo’ s philosophy as it has been adapted by Albers Camus’s ‘La Chute’, ‘The Fall’, Sagesse has decided to detach herself from the other selves, i.e. her family. She has found in America her lure as she considers it a land of opportunity which may help her to seek a new identity.