Reimagining North African immigration

Identities in flux in French literature, television, and film

Véronique Machelidon

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526107664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume takes the pulse of French post-coloniality by studying representations of trans-Mediterranean immigration to France in recent literature, television and film. The writers and filmmakers examined have found new ways to conceptualize the French heritage of immigration from North Africa and to portray the state of multiculturalism within – and in spite of – a continuing Republican framework. Their work deflates stereotypes, promotes respect for cultural and ethnic minorities and gives a new dignity to subjects supposedly located on the margins of the Republic. Establishing a productive dialogue with Marianne Hirsch's ground-breaking concept of postmemory, this volume provides a much-needed vocabulary for rethinking the intergenerational legacy of trans-Mediterranean immigrants.

1

‘Qui fait la France?’ New configurations of Frenchness in contemporary urban fiction

Steve Puig

The riots of October and November 2005 will be remembered in French history as a time of conflict between the government, who passed a law aiming to promote ‘the “positive aspects” of French colonialism’ in February of that year, and the youth living on the outskirts of Paris (the banlieue), the majority of whom are descendants of formerly colonized people now living in France. Since the 1980s, the term “integration” has been used by French politicians to describe the process through which immigrants are being assimilated into French culture. In the 1980s, the concept of beur¹ culture emerged to express the feeling of belonging to two cultures: one that originated in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia) and a French one, which has been increasingly challenged by the arrival of new immigrants from former French colonies.

In the 1990s, beur literature as well as the word beur itself started to become obsolete, as this new generation felt more and more assimilated or “integrated” into French society. In 2007, a collective of writers named ‘Qui fait la France?’ (What is Frenchness?) published a collection of short stories named Chroniques d’une société annoncée (Chronicle of a society foretold), in which writers such as Faïza Guène and Rachid Djaïdani, whom some critics regard as beur writers, shared their opinion on French society. Along with newcomers like Mabrouck Rachedi, Jean-Eric Boulin, and Thomté Ryam, they gave new representations of the banlieue and its inhabitants. Not only did they change the way urban youth was perceived as a whole, they also exposed France’s colonial past, which is still taboo in many aspects of French society – whether it be history books or just public debate – in order to shed new light on contemporary social issues like unemployment or racism. At the same time, postcolonial studies began to blossom in France, notably because historians started to establish a continuum between the colonial era and the present post(-)colonial situation, in which the banlieue itself can be seen as an internal colony. In this chapter, I wish to establish a parallel between the development of postcolonial studies in France and the emergence of urban literature, as both contribute to our understanding of “postcolonial France.” My aim is to show that urban literature can be seen as a kind of postcolonial literature as it contains references to, and a critique of, France’s colonial past that are informed by a new generation of historians.

The 2005 riots were not exactly a new phenomenon. Since the 1980s, France has been beset by various forms of protest, mostly coming from the children of immigrants living on the outskirts of major cities and even within major cities. One example is the city of Vaulx-en-Velin near Lyon, a name that was ubiquitous in the media at the time when young adults of North African descent rebelled against discrimination and racism, making the news around the world, including the New York Times (October 19, 1990). Protests of this sort were part of France’s history throughout the 1990s. As Alec Hargreaves pointed out, the 2005 riots were only a little more widespread than previous ones: ‘While unprecedented in scale, the events of 2005 were not in any significant respect new. At a lower level of intensity, there had been similar disorders in the banlieues since the late 1970s’ (2007: 136).

Although I agree with Hargreaves’ statement, I would like to argue that they were different in the sense that much of the French-Maghrebi youth is now aware of France’s colonial past, and especially the French presence in Algeria, which gave these riots a new meaning. In that sense, they were not only protesting discrimination and racism on the outskirts of Paris but also expressing their anger toward a country that colonized their parents’ homeland and marginalized them once they moved to France. Paradoxically perhaps, they were also demanding to finally be treated as French citizens, which they have been for decades, and to exist in the way sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad defines the word “existence,” meaning to exist politically, to have some kind of political representation in politics and in society more generally, and in the cultural spheres as well (Sayad, 2006: 13–21).

Although the field of postcolonial studies has been vibrant for more than two decades in the anglophone world, it only started to blossom in France at the beginning of the new millennium. In the last decade, several historians have published on France’s colonial past and a few intellectuals have shown that there is a continuum between the colonial era (and the way immigrants were treated in the 1960s) and the post-colonial era (with the riots in 2005). For instance, Sadri Khiari (2009) clearly states that not much has changed between the colonial period and 2005 in terms of how the French see minorities, still perceiving them as foreigners and refusing to consider them as fully French or citoyens à part entière.

Since 2005, a plethora of books have been published on France’s colonial past in Algeria, in the Caribbean, in Africa and elsewhere, but it is mostly due to the civil unrest on the outskirts of Paris that the presence of immigrants and their descendants has become the subject of public debate. Marie-Claude Smouts (2007) claims that France cannot ignore the repercussions of the French colonial presence in the world upon today’s society. Along with a group of historians called ACHAC (Association Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine), she suggests that France is now entering a post-colonial era, one where the (lack of) space granted to minorities in political and cultural spheres must be negotiated. Just as Sartre wrote that existentialism is a kind of humanism, Smouts seems to suggest that the postcolonial lens is also a way to re-evaluate the past and its repercussions on contemporary French society. It represents an attempt to understand current events, giving the postcolonial field a humanist perspective. For instance, the curfew planned by Dominique de Villepin in November 2005 was very reminiscent of the curfew imposed by Maurice Papon in 1961 during the massacre of Algerians and French citizens of North African descent in Paris, something that Tom Heneghan from the Washington Post noted on November 8, 2005: ‘The renewed violence followed a warning by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin that he would take a firm line against lawbreakers, including reinforcements for police and curfews not seen here since the Algerian war of 1954–1962.’ Other publications, mostly led by the collective ACHAC, have informed a new generation of writers who are now much more aware of the relationship between France and its former colonies, and therefore of the reasons for their presence on the French territory. The emergence of postcolonial studies in France coincides with the realization by a new generation of French citizens that the practices of French imperialism still have a major impact on contemporary French society.

Since 2005, several novels and essays have been published about the riots and, more generally speaking, about life in the banlieue. Many of these novels include the word banlieue or cités in their title: Banlieue noire by Thomté Ryam, Cités à comparaître by Karim Amellal, Banlieue Voltaire by Didier Mandin or La guerre des banlieues n’aura pas lieu by Abd Al Malik, just to name a few. Some of these writers have united their voices to form the aforementioned collective Qui fait la France?, whose name interrogates what it means to be French or how Frenchness can (and should) be redefined in the new millennium. Most of these novels deal with daily life in the banlieue, but they also have a political aim. Some openly criticize French society today, others denounce the lack of interest for the urban (i.e. mostly non-white) youth of France by the Sarkozy government, which did very little to improve the conditions in the banlieue despite the 2008 Plan Espoir Banlieues (a kind of Marshall Plan for the projects outside Paris), which never fully came to fruition (Le Monde, February 7, 2008).² Several names have been used to describe this new trend: among them, littérature urbaine and (post-)beur literature.

In an article called ‘Authors on the Outskirts: Writing Projects and (Sub) urban Space in Contemporary French Literature,’ Harry Veivo defines urban literature as a literature of the city and analyzes novels by four writers: François Maspéro, Jean Rolin, Georges Perec, and Jacques Jouet. His definition includes mostly established writers, whose topics are linked with daily life in the city but does not include any of the writers previously mentioned in this chapter. Christina Horvath defines urban literature as a kind of literature that describes daily life in the city (2007: 16). Both scholars define urban literature in a French context as a literature based on urban topics and daily life in Paris. Since their publications came out just a couple of years after the riots, it is likely that they have not been able to include most of the new wave of urban fiction that came out in 2006 and 2007 (although Horvath dedicates a few pages to Djaïdani and Guène in her book). Andrew Gallix’s definition seems to take into account this new generation of writers:

So what is this ‘littérature urbaine’ lark really about, then? Above all, it reflects the advent of a new generation; a changing of the guard: Faïza Guène was only 13 when Georgia de Chamberet edited her anthology of fresh French fiction back in 1999. Giving voice to the vernacular of the banlieues – with its backslang (‘verlan’) and borrowings from Arabic – may not seem a big deal in post-Trainspotting Britain, but it is truly novel, and perhaps even revolutionary, given the conservative nature of the French literary establishment. (The Guardian, September 12, 2008)

Gallix’s definition suggests that urban literature not only gives a voice to the marginalized youth, but also creates a space in the literary establishment for a new kind of literature which includes the vocabulary and the collective imagination of urban youth.

Various scholars have suggested that these urban writers write from a different perspective than the beur writers torn between their origins and their “Frenchness” (like Azouz Begag’s character in Le Gone du Chaâba). In ‘New Writing for New Times: Faïza Guène, banlieue Writing, and the Post-beur Generation,’ Dominic Thomas states that banlieue writing recognizes ‘the pluridimensionality of ethnic struggles in France today (whereas Beur literature [was] predominantly constituted by a Maghrebi-centric corpus), and is accordingly working towards articulating a trajectory in which social exclusion and injustice are denounced, in order to work productively and responsibly in seeking solutions’ (Thomas, 2008: 35). Ilaria Vitali shows how themes have evolved from beur literature to urban literature and that beur writers are not the only ones who try to redefine Frenchness, as they are joined by a new generation of French urban writers with roots in Frenchspeaking sub-Saharan African countries (2009: 181–2). I have shown elsewhere the transition between beur literature and urban literature and the shift in the vocabulary linked to both genres (Puig, 2011: 21–46). Indeed, whereas beur writers struggled with the concept of integration, the new wave of writers consider themselves fully French culturally speaking and therefore demand to be treated as such. In an interview, Mohamed Razane, one of the leaders of Qui fait la France?, denounced the constant marginalization of minorities in the political and cultural spheres and insisted on the need to hear new voices in French literature. For Razane, writing is also a way to rebel against the domination of the literary establishment, ‘L’écriture comme un écho ou plutôt comme un porte-voix de cette plèbe dominée, comme une possibilité de se disputer avec ceux-là même qui vous méprisent’ (Puig, 2008: 86) (Writing as an echo or rather as a voice for the oppressed people, a way to argue with those who despise you).

The beur movement came into existence thanks to the combination of a political movement aiming to improve the conditions of second-generation immigrants and a cultural production (literature, music, dance, and theater) that echoed the 1983 Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme (March for equality and against racism).³ I would argue that the same is true of urban culture, which is not just a cultural movement but also a political one, moving from the kind of autofiction that has characterized much Parisian literary production since the nouveau roman, to a more politically inclined kind of literature. One of the main differences between beur literature and urban literature is that the latter is less ethnically marked than the former. Beur literature...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Véronique Machelidon and Patrick Saveau
• 1 ‘Qui fait la France?’ New configurations of Frenchness in contemporary urban fiction: Steve Puig
• 2 Breaking the chains of ethnic identity: Faïza Guène, Saphia Azzeddine, and Nadia Bouzid, or the birth of a new Maghrebi-French women’s literature: Patrick Saveau
• 3 From daughter to mother, from sister to brother: building identities in Faïza Guène’s novels: Florina Matu
• 4 The immigrant in Abdellatif Kechiche’s cinematic work: transcending the question of origins: Emna Mrabet
• 5 Seeking paths to existence in Rachid Djaïdani’s Rengaine: Mona El Khoury
• 6 Beur and banlieue television comedies: new perspectives on immigration: Caroline Fache
• 7 They had a dream: out-marching exclusion and hatred: Jimia Boutouba
• 8 Narrativizing foreclosed history in ‘postmemorial’ fiction of the Algerian War in France: October 17, 1961, a case in point: Michel Laronde
• 9 Unearthing the father’s secret: postmemory and identity in harki and pied noir narratives: Véronique Machelidon
• 10 Representations of the harkis in contemporary French-language films: Susan Ireland
• 11 ‘L’oued revient toujours dans son lit’: Franco-Maghrebi identity in Hassan Legzouli’s film Ten’ja: Ramona Mielusel
• 12 Rewriting the memory of immigration: Samuel Zaoui’s Saint Denis bout du monde: Mireille Le Breton
• 13 Harragas in Mediterranean illiterature and cinema: Hakim Abderrezak
• Index