An Odyssey of No Return: the Female Memory of Collective Crossing by Sylvie Kandé and Julie Otsuka

Abstract

Sylvie Kandé’s epic La quête infinie de l’autre rive and Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic embrace the collective memory of forgotten women by recounting their ordeal of sea crossing. This paper examines how writing about sea crossing takes part in the construction of a collective memory, while renewing the representations of female migrants. Otsuka’s choral narration and Kandé’s textual polyphony are thus articulated with individual experience, as each passenger is plunged into a geographical and identity in-between that requires a double movement of self-deconstruction and construction. While the odyssey journey is motivated by a return to the native land, Kandé and Otsuka’s passengers embark on a one-way journey into the unknown, forcing them to forge a new identity over the course of a harrowing crossing. Finally, this work demonstrates how writing about the maritime crossing contributes to the reconfiguration of the epic register, notably through new female heroic figures, but also through an aesthetic of the “crossing” that needs to be defined.