MICHELLE MIELLY

            FILLING THE CONTINENTAL SPLIT: SUBJECTIVE EMERGENCE IN
            KEN BUGUL'S LE BAOBAB FOU AND SYLVIA MOLLOY'S EN BREVE CÁRCEL

FILLING UP THE SOMETIMES vast expanses between one's homeland and adoptive home often becomes the primary
task of the exiled life-writer in the search for an identity wedged somewhere in between. In the transition from the familiar to the foreign, a certain degree of native command is lost, generating ambivalence in the writerly voice. This is especially true for the female voices of the Senegalese Ken Bugul and Argentine Sylvia Molloy, whose autobiographical works, Le baobab fou and En breve cárcel, respectively, will be examined under this light. Both writers undertake a re-construction and re-invention of the self through the act of writing from elsewhere. Both Bugul and Molloy create newfound identities through an evocative process of mental pilgrimage to past memories and eventually reconcile themselves with an alienating present. In Le baobab fou and En breve cárcel, Bugul and Molloy engage in a self-writing process implying temporal and conceptual breaches between past and present selves, native authority and exilic ambivalence, the written and the oral subject. In this framework, I suggest that the Derridian notion of the enunciative split as conceptualized by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture is central to the production of these writers' exilic selves. In other words, the intersection of the space of production with the différance of writing fosters working within the margins, a zone where a displaced and dislocated identity can flourish.