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Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Abstract

The fertile territory of exile, inhabited and explored by displaced writers, has yielded myriad personal narratives. In this article, I discuss the strategy that Andrée Chedid chooses to broach in Le jardin perdu. Instead of relating a personal account of her own uprooting, she recreates the archetypal story of exile, that of Adam and Eve banished from paradise. By imagining what would have been their fears and hopes as they faced the unknown, she evokes the typical emotions of all exiles. By removing the story of displacement from the temporal and personal spheres, she brings it into the realm of the universal, thus producing a narrative of exile which lends itself to identification by all displaced people.

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