Pulmonary physiology Book

To imagine that Ourika is a simply a tale about a woman who is distraught over a man is to severely misread the richness of this novel, which offers a complex regard of race, blackness, womanhood, identity, and intercultural acceptance. With its harsh criticisms of political fervor generated by the French Revolution as well as social behaviors--namely, French upper-class elitism--this was a risky novel for its time. It tells the story of a Senagalese girl who, one day, suddenly realizes she is "not-French" (which is to say, black) while overhearing a conversation with her adopted mother and her mother's companion. This remarkable scene is telling of the novel's main premise: whose right is it to negate you as a person, to negate your very being? Yet Ourika comes to discover (and despair) over just this: her status as an outsider is developed by being talked about by the very woman she trusted, loved, and admired. With it begins a continued recognition of negation that accompanies alientation--in addition to not-French, she is not-daughter, not-wife, not-mother, etc. and has no recourse to return home because she is also not-Senegalese, distanced even from understanding the nature of the violent uprisings .

A quote from Trinh Minh-Ha may well summarize how to approach Ourika: "In trying to tell something, a woman is told, shredding herself into opaque words while her voice dissolves on the walls of silence." (Minh-Ha, "Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism") Throughout Ourika's life she is told who she is and who she is not; even the story itself, told by Claire de Duras, is based on a true story; by being retold by a French woman, the true Ourika (the woman whom the story is based on) is erased; the true referent cannot even tell her own story. And yet, Claire de Duras uses her own French-born privilege to tell Ourika's story, in essence giving voice to a woman who otherwise could not.

Ourika's development throughout the novel is a remarkable one; though in some instances she resigns herself to utter despondency, she ultimately comes to realize the advantage knowledge has over ignorance: "Mes peines altéraient sensiblement ma santé; mais, chose étrange! elles perfectionnaient mon esprit." ("What I lost in happiness, and above all health, in what seemed a contradiction perfected my wit/mind") and, "Un sage d'Orient a dit: 'Celui qui n'a pas souffert, que sait-il?'" ('A wiseman from the Orient once said: 'Those who have not suffered, what do they know?'") The knowledge of her status as an outsider brings about her misery, but it ultimately brings about her freedom from her misery and the prison built by socially-constructed means of exclusion.

Lastly, Ourika is the only French novel I have read so far that testifies to the Christian faith. In an interesting and even riskier twist (particularly due to the French Revolution's fervent and obsessive desire to destroy anything resembling a higher power) Ourika finally finds peace in belief in a universal, divine God. Without this key aspect Ourika would be just another novel of endless, pointless despair, but she is able to come to terms with her own adoption by seeing it as a metaphor for the adoption of mankind by a heavenly father. Through God's grace she is able to finally make sense of misery and the problem of Evil, and is ultimately able to make peace with her being.