À la recherche de soi-même

Gisèle Halimi

pp. 70-86

in: Imogen Long, Women intellectuals in post-68 France, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Gisèle Halimi's journey into autobiography and other writing, her legal career and roles as feminist activist and public intellectual will all be examined in this chapter. The backdrop to the personal and the political is Halimi's intercultural background as expressed in her seminal work, La cause des femmes.¹ In fact, her formative experiences have influenced her work as a lawyer and her direction as a writer such that autobiographical elements together with her search for herself have been crucial to her career in literature and beyond.² Her early days and later professional life are recounted in the 1988 Le lait de l"oranger,³ her first major book length piece of autobiography. The difficult emotional relationship with her mother is the basis of her 1999 Fritna,⁴ and her work in representative politics as a deputée is the subject of her 1995 Une embellie perdue.⁵ In 2009 she oversaw the publication of another personal meditation, Ne vous résignez jamais,⁶ which was followed by Histoire d"une passion,⁷ where she wrote of the emotional bond formed with her granddaughter and their later separation. In addition to these longer works, Halimi has also written shorter texts which focus on cases from her legal work: these include Djamila Boupacha in 1962 and La cause des femmes in 1972, texts which blend the facts of the cases with Halimi's personal story.