L’espace carcéral comme lieu d’évasion dans Riz noir d’Anna Moï

Abstract

In this study, I explore the descriptions of enclosed spaces in Anna Moï's novel Riz noir, the main plot of which takes place a few months after the outbreak of the Tet Offensives in Vietnam. In this novel, the imagination of the 15-year-old autodiegetic narrator constantly wanders between two spaces opposed in their function: her bourgeois house protected from the violent killings occurring outside the walls, and the enclosed space of a prison cell termed “the tiger cage,” in which she spends seventeen months. It is in this space of incarceration that the story takes shape through multiple flashbacks. The constant back and forth between two spaces, one welcoming and the other hostile, which the young prisoner explores so obsessively, merge into a single place at the time of the unexpected ending of the story. The confusion following the merging of the two separate spaces occurs in particular when the reader discovers the allusion to what happened in the life of the young girl at her home until her imprisonment. In this study, I will employ thematic analysis to highlight how and why this prison space becomes a place of introspection, one which will paradoxically save the protagonist from her isolation relative to the outside world by becoming a way of escaping from her inner abyss.