Deportation, The Maternal Abject, and the Impossibility of Selfhood: Jacqueline Saveria Huré's 1954 Ni sains ni saufs

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1954, Jacqueline Saveria Huré, a non-Jew resistant deported to Ravensbrück in 1942, published Ni sains ni saufs [Neither Safe nor Sound] a work of fiction drawing in large part from her experience. Divided into four parts, the novel follows the lives of a group of female inmates, from their last days in the fictional camp of Graffenburg, to their liberation and ensuing return. In a pattern similar to other deportation novels by women, the narrative focuses largely on the women themselves, deliberately pushing the German perpetrator to the margins of the story. Told in a realist mode and focalised by an implacable omniscient narrator, the reader is spared nothing of the crude reality of communal life in the camp, and of the women's physical and moral debasement. This is particularly salient in the case of Mme Buze, incarcerated with her daughter, the tone being peculiarly scathing in its depiction of this maternal figure, portrayed not only as physically repulsive, but also as fundamentally stupid and narrow-minded. Following a comprehensive contextualization of this relatively unknown text, the article proceeds to decipher the function of Mme Buze in relation to the novel's protagonist, Florence Mesnil. Drawing from Julia Kristeva's conceptualization of abjection, it argues that in the context of this deportation novel, the maternal figure serves both to denote the abject existential devouring that is deportation, and to delineate a symbolic unshackling leading to the protagonist's survival. It concludes by showing that given the central figure's inability to fully attain individuality, the text illustrates its author's generalized contempt, conservative nihilism, and conception of deportation as fundamentally nonsensical.