The Plural Conjugation of Nadia in Tahar Ben Jelloun`s Les Raisins

French Cultural Studies
The Plural Conjugation of Nadia
in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Les Raisins
de la galère
French Cultural Studies
21(2) 97–114
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0957155810361808
http://frc.sagepub.com
Pat Duffy
University of Otago
Abstract
During her 2007 presidential campaign, Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, was asked to comment
on solutions to the continuing violence in the immigrant-dominated suburbs of French cities. She
responded by asserting, somewhat enigmatically, that the suburbs ‘ne doivent plus être considérés
comme un problème mais comme une partie de la solution aux problèmes qu’a la France’ (France
2, 2007a). Her response pulls into focus a desirable change in attitude towards immigrants that
reveals a shift away from the condemnatory reactions of the past to a more constructive approach
to their presence – one that privileges the positive contribution they make to the plural society
that is modern France. I would like to explore further this notion of accentuating the positive by
examining a text by Moroccan author, Tahar Ben Jelloun, whose ‘récit’, Les Raisins de la galère
(1996),1 explores the trials and tribulations of Nadia, a young woman of Algerian descent. Nadia
is featured attempting to come to terms with her own plural identity, while working tirelessly to
improve the lives of others like herself whose identities have had, in the past, to be negotiated
around the historically rigid definition of what it is to be French.
Keywords
exclusion, hybridity, identity, immigration, plurality
Nous nous méfions, trahison
Vous nous mentez aux élections
Nous nous méfions, répression
Vos gardes de la paix
Nous nous méfions
Hors de question
Que nous soyons jugés coupables
pour votre manque d’attention
La jeunesse de ce pays est en ébullition.
Corresponding author:
Pat Duffy, French Programme, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin 9010, New Zealand
Email: [email protected]
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French Cultural Studies 21(2)
So sings the rapper, Delta, in Faudel’s song, ‘Dis-moi’ (1997).2 The words of the song go a long
way to explaining the still volatile relationship between France and its populations of immigrant
origin, resulting in an unhealthy atmosphere of mistrust, frustration and disappointment on the part
of those whom France persists in treating as unwelcome visitors. Yet when Ségolène Royal stated,
during her 2007 presidential campaign, that the suburbs must be considered in a positive rather
than a negative light (France 2, 2007a), political jargon aside, she did put a refreshing, positive spin
on the presence of France’s immigrant populations – one that gave rise to the hope that France is
finally preparing to embrace cultural plurality. For too long people of immigrant origin have been
held entirely to blame for problems associated with their lack of integration. France has persisted
in viewing their presence as a peripheral, often irksome, foreign intrusion hovering on the margins
of core French identity and, as a result, they have had to bear the brunt of profoundly negative
French responses to their presence. Yet, very often, these problems have been exacerbated, if not
caused, by lack of positive attention by the French to the economic and social welfare of immigrants. I intend, therefore, to expand on Ségolène Royal’s comments by examining a case showing
the benefits to be reaped from accentuating the positive. In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s ‘récit’, Les Raisins
de la galère (1996), we follow the progress of Nadia (whose testimony was inspired by the real-life
experiences of Saadia).3 Nadia is a gifted and proactive young woman who struggles to harmonise
her plural identity and to contribute to French society. While of Algerian descent, Nadia is not of
Arab origin but Kabyle, a member of a Berber tribe inhabiting northern Algeria. Her marginalisation in France is therefore multilayered; not only is she is from a minority within a minority, but
also risks suffering from ancestral codes that traditionally render women subordinate to men. As
Liliane Vassberg sums up, women such as Nadia ‘�����������������������������������������������
doivent assumer “leur différence dans la différence”. Elles sont Maghrébines en France et elle[s] sont femmes dans la culture maghrébine’
(Vassberg, 1997: 711). In combating the status quo, in both her inherited and French cultures,
Nadia becomes a vocal witness to the stultifying effects of rigid tradition, as well as to the despair
engendered by the ongoing social and economic neglect of minorities. Consequently, her own
endeavours to break these cycles expand to embrace the diverse struggles of other young people,
like herself, trying to fit their differences into a France still resistant to their efforts, as we shall see.
Nadia is always going to be different from her peers. Around the age of ten she dreams of a
future as a mechanic. While her exceedingly superstitious mother shrieks and wrings her hands in
despair, ‘persuadée que la voisine nous avait jeté un mauvais sort parce que je réussissais à l’école,
à la différence de ses enfants à elle’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 7), her father, showing surprising liberalism
in respect of his daughter’s future, reassures her:
Fais ce que tu veux. Tu es celle qui ne me donne aucun souci. Tu es mieux que tes frères, qui se croient
tout permis depuis qu’on leur a dit qu’ils étaient des hommes. J’ai confiance en toi. Fais ce que tu veux
et ne viens jamais pleurer à mes genoux. (1996: 8)
To which Nadia replies with what is to become characteristic resilience: ‘Pleurer, moi? Plutôt me
cogner la tête contre les murs’ (1996: 8).
The converse reactions of the two parents to her dream job are typical of the divided home lives
that children like Nadia often experience: ones frequently shaped by the amount of contact each
parent has with the host culture. In Nadia’s case, her mother, with her strong religious adherence,
clings to the culture of her homeland, while her father, uncharacteristically forward-thinking and
adaptable, is prepared to make concessions in respect of the host culture. Rejecting her mother’s
insular approach to life in France, Nadia instead derives strength of character and determination to
succeed from her father’s own repudiation of a rigid traditional culture that is often out of step with
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the context of life in France. Indeed, ‘Dès qu’il entendait parler de religion’, she comments, ‘mon
père courait au frigidaire et buvait une bière. Juste pour se donner le courage de répondre à ma
mère quand elle se mettait à invoquer Dieu et ses prophètes’ (1996: 12).
Nadia’s relationship with each of her parents is also undoubtedly dictated by their level of education, as well as the value that each places upon it. Of her father she states: ‘Mon père était simple
maçon, mais, à force de travailler la pierre, il était presque devenu architecte … il avait pris grand
plaisir à dessiner [notre] maison’ (1996: 16). The passion for learning, detail and beauty that she gains
from her father’s love of building overshadows any possible influence from her fanatical mother. The
mother–daughter relationship stalled at an early age, as she explains: ‘En fait, entre ma mère et moi
se dressait un tel mur d’ignorance que je ne pouvais discuter avec elle’ (1996: 11). The mother’s
enclosed world, characterised by obsession with superstition and rigid tradition (1996: 10–11), constitutes an insurmountable barrier to any sort of close relationship with her progressive daughter. We
see the same dynamic in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba in which the visionary father encourages his son to embrace education, while his mother, preoccupied with the daily struggle of keeping
body and soul together, dreams of turning her sons into canny shopkeepers (Begag, 1986: 21–2).
Indeed, Nadia’s worst experience of her own mother’s rigidly traditional world, at the age of
ten, becomes the trigger for her subsequent defiance of traditional female behaviour. On the day in
question, she can only rebel inwardly against what is considered to be an honour – the carrying of
the bloodied sheet, from her 16-year-old sister’s brutal wedding night with Kader, to the crowd
awaiting confirmation of the bride’s virginity (1996: 8). Nadia’s reaction is one of complete disgust
at the barbarous ritual in which she is required to take part. She states: ‘je me sentais toute vieille
… Pas fière … des femmes poussaient des youyous stridents … Moi, je râlais … tout en ruminant
déjà quelque vengeance … tout le monde était satisfait. Sauf moi et ma sœur’ (1996: 8–9). Highly
intelligent, she is also undoubtedly aware that an arranged marriage may well await her, yet her
nights are filled with imaginative dreams of other, much less restrictive, futures (1996: 8–9). As a
result of this brutal introduction to life as a traditional Algerian woman, Nadia’s good-for-nothing
brother-in-law comes to serve as the catalyst for her dislike of all Arab men who, refusing to adapt
to life in France, continue to treat their wives as slaves. At the age of ten, Nadia earnestly makes
her first vow to help another, ambitiously promising her devastated sister: ‘on partirait un jour
toutes les deux à Vancouver … où les gens comme Kader n’ont pas le droit d’exister’ (1996: 10).
While Nadia’s own determination provides her with momentum, many children of immigrants
find the demands of thriving in two diametrically opposed environments, one very restrictive and
the other openly hostile to their efforts, too difficult to meet, and subsequently fall by the wayside.
This is particularly the case of her own brother, Aziz, whom Nadia observes with a mixture of
resignation and pity. A talented footballer, Aziz gradually succumbs to pressure to conform to the
model of failure that has been inculcated in young maghrébin males by an indifferent host culture.
Nadia assesses his situation thus:
Il aurait pu devenir un grand joueur dans une équipe importante. Mais il aurait fallu prendre le sport au
sérieux, avoir envie de réussir, de devenir quelqu’un, de quitter cette petite vie sans histoires qui ne fera
jamais le quart de la moitié d’un destin. Non, il s’est laissé glisser dans le j’m’en-foutisme, l’à-quoi-bon.
(1996: 73)
Sapped of the will to pursue his talent, he is gradually propelled down the same path of nonachievement trodden by many before him. Sadly, despite his father’s best efforts to achieve a better
life for his son, Aziz ends up working in the Renault factory. For Nadia, her brother’s case is simply
the tip of the iceberg as she confirms:
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Ailleurs, il aurait fait des choses formidables. Son handicap à lui, c’est d’être né à Resteville, dans une
famille d’immigrés, à une époque où il n’y avait personne pour s’occuper de cette génération qu’on a
laissée pousser comme le chiendent dans un terrain vague. Tout ce que médias et spécialistes ont trouvé
à faire, ç’a été de donner un numéro à cette génération: la deuxième! Ainsi classés, nous étions forcément
mal partis. On oublie que nous ne sommes pas du tout des immigrés: nous n’avons pas fait le voyage …
nous sommes nés ici, en terre française, avec des gueules d’Arabes, dans des banlieues d’Arabes, avec
des problèmes d’Arabes et un avenir d’Arabes. (1996: 76–7)
Nadia’s observations on the miserable lives of young people thus begin with an example from her
own family, but expand to include stories of many others in difficulty. Indeed, she becomes a witness for the prosecution of a country that, through wilful neglect, allows certain groups to flourish
while others founder. When Nadia and her French boyfriend, Marc, go to help the five little boys
arrested for robbing the town hall of 1200 francs, she witnesses more evidence of the negative
mind-set inculcated in young Arab kids when one of them declares: ‘Le prof m’a dit que j’étais nul,
bon à rien, que je serai toujours un reub’ (1996: 38). The other children echo these sentiments, one
in particular lamenting:
Quand on est moche, inutile et nul, on essaie de se débrouiller comme on peut … Quand un prof te dit
que t’es rien et que tu feras jamais rien de ta vie, à force de l’entendre répéter, tu finis par lui donner
raison. (1996: 40)
Nadia comments bitterly on the fate of these boys: ‘les garçons sont sollicités dès leur douzième
année par l’ange noir de l’échec … Ils voient leurs grands frères tourner mal et en viennent à croire
que c’est ça, la vie’ (1996: 75). Azouz Begag himself devotes discussion to the self-esteem issues
of young Maghrebins who ‘commonly experience marginalisation that severely hinder[s] their will
and the opportunity to join French society’ (Begag, 1990: 6). Thus is handed down an inheritance
of failure, as their children, socio-economically disadvantaged like their parents, will most likely
emulate them. Such a cycle of underachievement inculcated in the young is also alluded to by
Mohamed Sellam, ‘bac plus cinq, spécialité droit du travail’ who found work thanks to the help of
the ‘dérouilleurs’4 after seven years of job-hunting: ‘On était presque les héritiers de nos parents.
C’est-à-dire qu’il fallait qu’on prenne leurs places dans les usines, dans les chantiers. C’était évident, on était préparés à cela’ (France 2, 2009).
Nadia lists other sad cases of wasted young lives and strangled potential, among them Solo, a
young Algero-Portuguese boy and talented musician who turned to drugs; Rahim, a talented actor
who becomes more interested in casual sex until he succumbs to syphilis, and Jojo, who also turns
to drugs (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 74–5). Nadia later reinforces the notion of social rejection and its
relationship to failure:
le racisme restera fidèle à lui-même … Hier c’était le Juif, aujourd’hui c’est l’Arabe, l’immigré. Même
s’il n’a jamais fait le voyage, même s’il est né sur cette terre … il y a toujours quelque chose qui bloque.
Et plus les gamins sentent ce rejet, plus ils ont envie de lui fournir des motifs. Le cercle vicieux: ça tourne
en rond et ça se dégrade. (1996: 116)
Predictably, hatred towards them converts into self-loathing as the boys assume the persona of
‘failure’, thus effectively closing a seemingly never-ending cycle. Aziz and boys like him are
indeed typical of immigrant children who, made to feel worthless, are thus robbed of all motivation to succeed in the francocentric school environment and often choose another, devastating,
option – the street.5
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Nadia, on the other hand, determines not to give in to the cycle of failure, but to fight. Aged only
13, she mounts her first major campaign – one that involves the house her father built, and which
she lovingly describes:
Notre maison était belle, insolite. Une maison toute blanche, aux murs irréguliers, semblable à ces
constructions du Péloponnèse que vantent les agences de voyages … Notre maison faisait figure d’erreur
dans un ensemble grisâtre, rationnel et étriqué. Une maison avec dix-sept fenêtres, deux portes, une
terrasse, des patios, et surtout une grande salle de bains équipée de toilettes. (1996: 17)
Such a blatant emblem of North Africa in the centre of a French town, built in total contrast to the
cités, dubbed ‘cages à lapins’ (1996: 18), becomes too much for the Communist council that seeks
every means possible to evict the family and demolish the house. For the council, ‘house’ serves
as a potent symbol of ‘ownership’, ‘belonging’ and above all ‘France’. Ownership of ‘house’
changes Nadia’s father from ‘visitor’ to ‘host’, therefore ‘French’, and for the racist mayor this
constitutes an unacceptable situation, which is in his eyes a reversal of the natural order (see
Rosello, 2001: 18). While Nadia’s family caves in to pressure to move, she, characteristically,
undertakes to fight the injustice, as she explains: ‘je résolus de me battre seule. Je n’avais que
treize ans, mais je devais avoir en moi cent ans de colère et de rancœur accumulées’ (Ben Jelloun,
1996: 18). Nadia confronts the mayor, her reaction to his intransigence revealing the mixture of
influences in her life. First, she cries (she is, after all, only 13); then, reminiscent of her superstitious mother, she threatens him with ‘le mauvais œil’ and, finally, the influence of her life in
France manifests itself as she warns him that she will go to the papers and make the affair public
(1996: 19). Yet, despite her brave initiative, the family is forced out on the pretext that the land is
needed for a Maison de la Culture where workers’ children can congregate (1996: 19). To add
insult to injury, we learn later that a supermarket was built on the spot (1996: 88). Having lost the
battle, Nadia notes bitterly in her diary:
Aujourd’hui, j’ai subi une grande défaite. Mais, ils ne m’auront pas. Je ne serai jamais la petite Beur qui
passe à la télé pour dire combien elle est assimilée, intégrée, rangée. Non. J’ai la rage! J’ai la haine! Trop
d’injustice. Je ne serai jamais galérienne. (1996: 22)6
Once forced to vacate their home and move into an apartment building, the fabric of the formerly
tight-knit family unit begins to unravel. The apartment is too small, so Kader and Nadia’s sister
have to live elsewhere. Nadia’s father is forced into retirement and, robbed of useful occupation,
ages visibly, spending his days silently staring out the window at the walls of the building opposite.7 Nadia places the blame for her father’s retreat from life squarely on a French culture predicated towards hostility to immigrants:
Mon père n’est pas mort de solitude, mais des suites de très profondes blessures. Son corps était en bonne
santé; pas son honneur ni sa fierté. Tout le travail d’une vie avait été balayé d’un revers de main par un
maire qui avait gardé en lui la haine de l’Algérie. (1996: 47)8
Nadia’s mother, despairing of her husband’s deteriorating psychological state, tries to exorcise
her anxiety by obsessively cleaning the apartment, praying and giving free rein to her superstitions. Meanwhile Nadia’s youngest brother is knocked down by a car and suffers irrevocable
brain damage. Nadia subsequently describes both her brother and father as ‘ailleurs’ (1996: 26,
46), the former as a result of result of physical damage and the latter in response to psychological trauma which sees him fade away until he dies. Indeed, his silent withdrawal, in
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response to the brutal treatment of his family, contrasts strongly with Nadia’s increasingly
outspoken activism – a point that counts against her among her own people for many of whom
‘la femme qui crie’9 is anathema.
Nadia’s first direct experience of injustice spurs her on. In due course she realises that her family is not alone in suffering misfortune; its situation is mirrored in that of other families in the same
building whose lives have also been adversely affected by difficult relations with the host country.
Exposed to a toxic combination of social, political and economic pressures, many others have seen
the fabric of their families torn apart. Nadia, the witness, makes an inventory of the conflict and
destruction it provokes: on the third floor a Moroccan father purges the frustrations of his factory
job by beating his children mercilessly (1996: 43–5); a family on the fourth floor has one son in
and out of prison and another involved with the mafia (1996: 45). Nadia’s own cousin, Nourredine,
takes to drugs; then, through his thirst for inclusion, he is seduced into joining a group of Islamic
fundamentalists. Under their influence he eschews his family, which runs a bar, refuses to eat his
mother’s food, and eventually, clutching the Koran, dies of starvation (1996: 49–51). Then there is
old Brahim, a broken man, whose nine children have all succumbed to prostitution and drugs
before his eyes (1996: 58–9).
Nadia’s fervent desire to destroy the partly self-imposed cycle of negativity that entwines
around those of immigrant origin leads her to intervene in two cases in particular. The first concerns the disappearance of three young sisters who are spirited away by their father to Algeria
ostensibly to protect them from a life of corruption in France. Incarcerated in their uncle’s house
and forbidden unsupervised access to the outside world, one of them eventually commits suicide
(1996: 77–84). Despite Nadia’s best efforts to raise French public awareness of their plight, nothing is ever heard of the other two girls. In the second case, Nadia goes to Italy on behalf of a father
searching for his daughter who has run away (1996: 96ff). Expecting to find her working as a prostitute (the normal expectation of young Algerian women who run away), Nadia instead discovers
that Naïma is a highly successful fashion model who, when encouraged by Nadia to make peace
with her family, is declared dead by the father on the basis that, by exhibiting her body, she has
brought deep shame upon the family. He even organises a funeral for her, much to Nadia’s disgust.
In both cases, Nadia despairs of a deeply entrenched Algerian patriarchy that, by its actions, not
only denies the success of its own children, but also helps perpetuate French prejudices in respect
of North African immigrants. This is indeed true when she remembers her father’s comments on
how much negative press they receive:
Il faut un crime raciste, une bagarre … entre bandes rivales de délinquants parmi lesquels on trouve aussi
bien des Français de souche que des Maghrébins … le suicide d’une gamine … le braquage d’une stationservice … La vie tranquille, le bonheur de vivre en paix ne font pas les bonnes histoires ni les gros titres.
(1996: 85–6)10
Alec Hargreaves confirms the determining role played by the media in the generally negative presentation of ethnic minorities, noting them as being ‘mainly visible as “problems” in news and current affairs broadcasts’ (Hargreaves, 1995: 158) because, of course, scandal makes for more
gripping news than feel-good stories. Generally speaking the perception by minorities of the media
is one of ‘report and distort’; excessive sensationalisation of events leading to journalists being
regarded as a very unwelcome presence in some of the more troubled banlieues (see Saubaber
et al., 2006), although every now and again there will be a story with a positive spin such as that of
the ‘dérouilleurs’, the talented young people of immigrant descent helping others to succeed in the
job market (France 2, 2009).
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In the wider community, other responses speak volumes about the distress of minority life in
France: for example: the prostitute Agnès, ‘Fausse blonde, faux cils, faux seins, faux nom’ (Ben
Jelloun, 1996: 38), who thus hides her Arab origins, and real name (Bahia), by making herself into
a Barbie doll to achieve acceptance. Her case is in strong contrast to that of Naïma who has made
a success of her life without betraying her roots, literally. Then there is Mohand, the young man
who, to achieve acceptance, quits his family, changes his name to David Kohen and adopts Judaism
(1996: 23). Both Bahia and Mohand effect an extreme form of cultural betrayal: a chameleon-like
existence that will be hard to maintain and that is unlikely to provide relief in the long term, given
that their new identities are merely borrowed constructs (see Hargreaves, 1997).
In every case documented by Nadia, an identity crisis is triggered by the clash of two incompatible cultures as the weaker one tries and fails to impose its structural integrity, based on rigid traditional patriarchal models, on an often resistant younger generation. Rendered dysfunctional,
families implode, usually resulting in a split between the uncompromising parents, still firmly
grounded in the culture of their homeland, and the children, necessarily straddling two exclusive
worlds, to whom the parents refuse to grant concessions. As Liliane Vassberg summarises regarding the children: ‘Les relations sont souvent difficiles avec le père, dont la situation sociale déva��
lorisée peut les inciter à la tyrannie domestique (qui n’est pas sanctionnée par la communauté)’
(Vassberg, 1997: 715). As Farida Belghoul explains, volatile relationships develop as a result of
contact with a predatory host culture that desires ‘nous digérer et la résistance à cette voracité
prend parfois les allures d’une guerre’ (Belghoul, 1985: 19: Hargreaves, 1997: 236; cf. Rosello,
2001: 29ff), with the home environment more often than not the battleground. The situation is
often particularly difficult for females (Nadia being the exception), as fathers and brothers attempt
to use control over their mobility apparently as ‘a means of preserving identity … a means of
avoiding contact with Western society and ensuring a certain impermeability symbolic of the purity
of the inherited culture’ (Begag, 1990: 7). Notwithstanding the unique difficulties immigrants and
their children have to contend with in their home lives, given the intrusive influence of the host
culture, Nadia’s criticisms do not spare her own people. In her estimation immigrants must take
some responsibility for the problems they face as a result of their own inadaptability and their
apparent willingness to wallow in the self-hatred that racism encourages them to feel.
Such self-hatred spreads like a cancer and leads to hatred between immigrants. As Charron and
Huseman (2003: 74) note, ‘the psychology of racism touches everyone and … the victims of racial
oppression can be vicious against their own kind as they struggle to establish social dominance’.
Thus Nadia witnesses the vicious beating of a West Indian shoplifter by a North African security
guard in the supermarket where she works. According to Nadia, the security guards are merciless
towards immigrant shoplifters, no doubt enjoying the rare opportunity to torment the defenceless.
In a twisted form of revenge, they take out their frustrations on their own kind, tragically mimicking the behaviour of their own tormentors and, once again, reaffirming the cycle of brutality.
Armed thus with numerous examples of the downside of immigrant life in France, Nadia adopts
initiatives to fight back constructively. Highly mobile (another point that counts against her as a
woman), she immerses herself in welfare work for the young people of her town, Resteville (the
very name of which, synonymous with prison, both spatial and psychological, is heavily symbolic
of the futureless lives of its young ethnic North Africans).11 Resteville, a dumping ground for the
unwanted, comes to encapsulate all that is undesirable in the ‘multiethnic banlieues, those bleak
zones of high-rises, minimal public facilities, substandard schooling and exceptional rates of unemployment’ (McMurray, 1997: 37). Hargreaves and McKinney (1997: 12) go even further in their
description of this unhealthy space, both undesired by ethnic French and unwelcoming to those
who are obliged to live there, when they speak of the ‘anonymous public housing projects’ where
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postcolonial minorities ‘are corralled’. Didier Lapeyronnie, sociologist and co-author of Ghetto
urbain: ségrégation, violence, pauvreté en France aujourd’hui (2008), elucidates the phenomenon
of the ‘counter-societies’ that are taking root in the banlieues of France. These, he contends,
encourage ‘conduites de ghetto’, the reason for which he explains thus: ‘Pauvres et ségrégés, se
sentant ostracisés par la République et plongés dans un véritable vide politique, [les gens] ont
organisé une contre-société qui les protège même si elle est un handicap face au monde extérieur
(Anquetil and Armanet, 2008: 18). Despairing of the fragile position of immigrant populations
herded into the margins of society and forced, through neglect, to invent their own solutions, Nadia
sums up French indifference to the situation they are helping perpetuate:
On est foutus. Pas prévus. Ni programme, ni projet. On est juste bons à se faire repérer par les vigiles et
les flics. On a regroupé les familles bien en tas, puis on les a oubliées comme de vieilles fringues glissées
sous un lit. Qu’elles se débrouillent. Ça n’est plus notre problème. Ils font des enfants? Et alors? Ces
enfants sont mal élevés? Et alors? Mal accueillis à l’école? Et alors? N’ont pas où jouer? C’est pas notre
problème! Ils cassent tout? On les casse. Ils gueulent? On les frappe. Ils brûlent les autos? On les met au
trou. Ils récidivent? On les expulse. (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 55–6)
Indifference is not the only factor aggravating relations between immigrants and France though, as
Nadia’s comments show. The overwhelming perception is one of repression and this has been
highlighted by the unrest in the banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis (Paris) where the police presence is
viewed by the population as largely antagonistic and overly aggressive towards its young people.
A report on the difficulties in the area is highly critical of the police whose ‘contrôles incessants’
have led the population to feel victimised. One woman interviewed describes them as ‘un petit peu
trop virulents et pas assez dans le rapport humain … avec les gens’. Another girl claims that ‘les
policiers n’aiment pas tous les jeunes des cités’ (France 2, 2007b).
As Nadia’s father perceptively once commented: ‘La France s’est arrangée pour aggraver nos
défauts’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 63). Yet, as we have also seen in the case of Nadia’s family home, if
immigrants try to take steps to create a tolerable life for themselves, they encounter resistance from
some French people who appear actively to desire to render their lives unbearable as payback for
grievances real or imagined. What emerges from the evidence is an apparently endless cycle of
action and counteraction, as opposed to proaction, on the part of the French authorities who persist
in viewing the existence of immigrants as a peripheral anomaly: as a group whose problems are
allowed to get out of control and who are then crushed because of them. Azouz Begag, has spoken
of the ramifications of such behaviour towards immigrant populations in terms of a mutual contract;
if the French continue to pursue policies that basically encourage illegal activities and violence
among young Arabs, then, as he says, ‘la société doit fermer les yeux pour ne pas voir ce qui se
passe’ (Andrewes, 1994).12 The trouble is, the French are not, so far, prepared to accept the consequences of their negligence; hence the seemingly unbreakable cycle of neglect and enforcement.
Nadia’s other initiative against the status quo is political activism, as we have seen with her
campaign to save her home. At school she is easily singled out as the class representative and her
engagement against any and all injustice makes of her the ideal candidate, as she confirms: ‘On
disait que j’avais une grande gueule’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 24). For example, she organises a successful strike for the creation of an extra class at her school (1996: 24). Later, after being fired from
her supermarket job for trying to intervene on behalf of the hapless West Indian shoplifter (1996:
28), she takes a low-paid job looking after children at the local Maison de la Culture and her protective instincts toward a little handicapped child named Ali lead her to crystallise her feelings
about where to start in the struggle against racism: ‘Pour moi, la lutte contre le racisme devait
commencer dès les petites classes’ (1996: 31).
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When it is suggested to Nadia that she run for election (1996: 87), she is initially revolted at the
thought of rubbing shoulders with people she considers lacking in honesty and social conscience,
but, mastering her disgust, she dreams of promoting the place of minorities in the community. She
muses: ‘voici qu’aujourd’hui, moi, Nadia, née en France, devenue française, avec encore de la terre
algérienne collée à la plante des pieds, moi, la rebelle qui refuse d’être réduite à la condition de
Beur, je me présente aux législatives’ (1996: 90). She is indefatigable in her campaigning, enlisting
the media (press and radio) to spread her message. She imposes a daunting schedule upon herself
of which the following is a portion:
accorder un entretien au journaliste du Monde, rédiger un article pour la presse locale, poser avec Harlem
Désir [SOS Racisme], téléphoner à quelques maires, s’arranger pour être reçue à l’Élysée, faire une
émission en direct sur Radio-Beur, recevoir deux ou trois correspondants étrangers … téléphoner à
l’avocat pour savoir où en est le procès contre le Front national pour insultes racistes à mon endroit …
donner un coup de main à Sadia qui fait une enquête pour Banlieuescopies, rappeler le père Delorme.
(1996: 115)
Her failure to be elected, stemming partly from her stubborn refusal to cave in to fundamentalist
demands to stop promoting Arab women’s rights (1996: 93),13 makes her once again deeply aware
of the seemingly endless struggle for recognition as equal, and obliges her to question her path and
sense of self:
Quel pays est le mien? Celui de mon père? Celui de mon enfance? Ai-je droit à une patrie? Il m’arrive
parfois de sortir ma carte d’identité – non, on dit: ‘carte nationale d’identité’. En haut et en majuscules:
RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE. Je suis fille de cette république-là. (1996: 124)14
Abderrahmane Dahmane, Nicolas Sarkozy’s representative in charge of campaign relations with
immigrant communities, confirms French resistance to the presence of minorities: ‘when a policeman stops an immigrant youth, the youth might say something like “I’m as French as you”, and the
policeman might agree, but they would both know it wasn’t true’ (Rieff, 2007). It seems France is
still too in love with exclusive labels, to view everyone on the same basis. Salem Kacet, UMP
(Union pour un mouvement populaire) candidate defeated at Roubaix in 2007, crystallises frustrations over such labels: ‘Avant, ça s’appelait “issu de l’immigration”, puis on était devenus “des
minorités visibles”, et, maintenant, on est “issus de la diversité”. Je me considère pas comme un
candidat de la diversité. Je me considère comme un candidat tout court’ (France 2, 2007c).
A week after the above report went to air, Le Nouvel Observateur published an article entitled
‘Diversité: les ratés du PS’ (Askolovitch, 2007), in which it profiled some of those who had missed
out on being elected to the Assemblée Nationale. What is of particular interest in this article is the
predominance of, at times, pejorative ethnic labels to designate the candidates, for example: Bariza
Khiari ‘gauche tajine’, ‘représentante de la beurgeoisie’; Fawaz Karimet ‘né au Liban’, ‘le musulman laïque’; Salem Kacet ‘un enfant de Kabylie’; George Pau-Langevin ‘l’Antillaise’, and so on.
As for two of the three women Nicolas Sarkozy appointed to government office, they are labelled
‘la perle noire’ (Rama Yade), the ‘fille d’un maçon marocain’ (Rachida Dati), and collectively ‘les
ministresses’. In general terms candidates from ethnic minorities are designated in the article using
the following terminology: ‘issue de la diversité’, ‘les ratés’, ‘une France black blanc beur’, ‘dans
la case gentil colonisé’, ‘maghrébin’, ‘exclus’, ‘issus de l’immigration’, ‘les Arabes’. What strikes
the reader first and foremost in the string of labels is the language of exclusion. The terms used
emphasise their alienness, set them apart from the average French citizen and so enshrine them as
candidates originating from, and destined for, exclusion – yet another unsubtle means by the press
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to colour the perception of minorities in France. Essentially, their difference is recognised only in
so far as it can be used as a means to prevent their participation in a French state based on the
monocultural secular republican model that advocates suppression of difference in favour of the
universal model of citizenship (see Blatt, 1997; cf. Duffy, 2000; Hargreaves, 1995): a model of
national identity that effectively denies the possibility ‘for identity-based participation in the political process’ (Blatt, 1997: 41). Hence the negative connotations associated with ethnicity that are
regularly topped up by appeals to French paranoia through links made between ‘immigrants’ (read
also ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims’, even though, of course, only a certain percentage can be described as
being all three), economic crisis (the French are obsessed with their ‘pouvoir d’achat’) and fear of
terrorism. David Blatt warns of the perils of such exclusion from the political process as likely to
encourage ethnic minorities to turn to hard-line political initiatives that will bring them into direct
conflict with the state (Blatt, 1997: 53), namely those forged along religious lines.
Questions are starting to be raised concerning the reasons for the low profile of people of immigrant descent on the French political scene, despite its record, far exceeding the United States in
the past, of deputies and senators from its former colonies. According to historian and writer, Pap
N’Diaye there are at least 10,000 black, elected politicians in the United States, while France
boasts only one elected deputy from mainland France, four Senators, three ministers (although that
is about to go down), three Prefects, and only one town councillor in 260 is of immigrant descent
(France 2, 2008b, 2008c). The answer to the imbalance lies in history: the United States came
about as a result of immigration, whereas France has always considered immigration to be a peripheral phenomenon on the margins of French identity. The persistence of divisive labels surely hinders progress in this domain and, in our text, Nadia vents deep frustration at the lack of acceptance:
nous nous retrouvons à vivre ici avec des visages presque humains, à nous exprimer dans un langage
presque civilisé, avec des mœurs et des manières presque françaises, nous sommes là à nous demander
pourquoi nous sommes là et ce qu’il nous reste à faire pour mériter d’y rester. (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 117)
For his part, Nadia’s father echoes his daughter’s appraisal of the inhospitality faced by people of
immigrant origin, himself calling into question the depth of French exclusion with its basis in
name tags:
N’oublie pas une chose, n’oublie jamais: où que tu ailles, quoi que tu fasses et dises, tu seras toujours
renvoyée à tes racines. Tu es kabyle, on te prendra pour une Arabe, alors même que tu es citoyenne de
France. Tu ne seras jamais française. Notre terre couvre notre peau, masque notre visage. Nous aimons
bien la terre d’ici, mais est-ce qu’elle nous aime, elle? (1996: 35)15
Indeed, Nadia’s father puts his finger on the root of immigrant woes – skin colour. No matter how
much people of immigrant origin seek to be accepted on their merits, their skin colour will always play
a determining role. This notion is explored at length in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba, in which
the young Begag seeks to assimilate by doing well at school, thinking this will be the key to ultimate
acceptance. However, his ethnicity and the fact that he is poor and lives in a bidonville constantly
hampers his progress. Likewise, Nadia is not only obviously Algerian but also female and living in the
banlieues (nowadays a synonym for ‘ghettoes’), ‘while her Oriental features make her visible as Other,
they at the same time make her invisible in a society that does not value them’ (Ireland, 1998: 459).
Skin colour effectively makes both Nadia, Azouz and all those like them prisoners of their
Otherness. In such a unilateral environment, both exhaust themselves attempting to deflect the
negative light under which they are automatically placed, in order to impose themselves as subjective
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beings with equal rights. Fatima Hani, a well-educated but unemployed political activist, interviewed
in English by David Brill for his documentary, The Slums of Paris (2008), and herself a victim of
the unjust negative gaze, passionately hammers home her no-nonsense take on the issue:
It’s scandalous, it’s very scandalous. When you see him, when you hear him, you can hear that he don’t
want to see us. He don’t want to hear us and he doesn’t want to see us. He is French. He’s the first
generation of French, Mr Sarkozy. Me, Hani, Fatima, I am French, but it’s not the first generation. I’m the
fourth generation. Then I am French more than he is because my grandfather fight for France, to have
France get free, last war. And, after, my father came here to help France build this town, this country. Okay?
We came here to help this country with our blood and with our work and today they say that we are not the
French like the other one. I am French more than him and we are living in ghettoes. (Brill, 2008)
Confronted with the seemingly unattainable goal of being accepted at face value, Nadia, for her
part, reviews her own life in the form of a panoply of seemingly disparate objects that she amasses
in a large black trash sack. The inventory is strongly indicative of her plural identity for, once the
objects are combined, another, ‘Third’, space is created, one separate from both France and Algeria.
It is a space enriched by the combination of various cultural influences, which holds the promise
of new directions with its dynamic mix of colours and identities, notably ‘un béret rouge’, ‘un
foulard indien’, ‘un keffieh palestinien’, ‘un nounours tyrolien’, ‘une djellaba’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996:
132–3).16 Once filled she gets inside and closes the sack. There, in the dark, sitting on all the elements that contribute to her hybrid identity, she feels strangely at ease. Ironically, this dark trash
sack, deeply symbolic of French rejection, triggers an opposite reaction in Nadia. She views it as a
comforting enclosure, in which, she says, ‘mes pensées … sont plus libres que jamais … je vois
clair dans le noir’ (1996: 133).17 For Nadia, hopelessness will never be an option. Instead, the darkness of the trash sack allows her to crystallise her thoughts, draw strength, and renew her focus on
the fight to raise the positive profile of immigrants based on an embrace of the cultural heterogeneity that characterises France. To illustrate this fact, in 1996 David McMurray made a week-long
study of the presence of Arab culture in France, guided by levels of saturation in the French media.
He took into account music, television, radio, movies and sport and concluded, whatever certain
right-wing French may fondly believe, that ‘French culture is already irremediably hybridised’,
with popular Arab culture, in particular its music, achieving dominance in France (McMurray,
1997: 28; cf. Hargreaves, 1995: 92ff).18
Homi Bhabha in his own discourse on hybrid identity affirms the ‘productive capacities of this
Third Space’ (Bhabha, 1994: 38). His theories support Nadia’s proactive approach on the basis that
‘a willingness to descend into that alien territory’, symbolised here by the trash sack, ‘may open
the way to conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism
or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity’ (1994: 38).
Indeed, according to our evidence, hybridity must not be viewed as the weakening of cultural
fabric – an outlook so often touted by far-right extremists with their notions of cultural purity.
Hybridity must be seen, according to Bhabha, as a way to ‘elude the politics of polarity and emerge
as the others of ourselves’ (1994: 39). Julia Kristeva alludes to the same perception of our selves
and others as evolving ‘id-entities’ when she speaks of ‘la cohabitation de ces étrangers que nous
reconnaissons tous être’ (Kristeva, 1998: 11). Both writers share a belief in culture as the manifestation of multiple influences on the individual who is enriched by the experience, and so is created
‘an unanchored, constantly open and self-generating form of identity’ (Hargreaves, 1995: 93).
Thus in the dark trash sack filled with its eclectic mixture of items from often vastly different
cultures, Nadia sees nothing but possibilities.
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For her part, Nadia’s mother despairs of her daughter, as Nadia explains:
Pour elle, je passerai le reste de mes jours en réunions à défendre la veuve et l’orphelin. Elle me reproche
de ne pas assez penser à moi, à ma vie, à mon avenir. Elle n’a rien compris: en m’occupant des autres, je
pense précisément à moi, à ma vie et à mon avenir. (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 74)
Nadia’s far-sighted approach is therefore undoubtedly the legacy of her father’s outlook. Even
though a hostile French world would eventually wear him down, he has passed on to her the gift of
being able to see past individual concerns and look to the future, and we observe this in Nadia’s
ongoing commitment to collective welfare and political activism. At one point, she comments on
the number of young people who run away: ‘Dans nos milieux, les fugues sont fréquentes’ (1996:
99–100). Significantly, she never considers this path for herself. Instead, she issues a grim warning
to France, one that reminds us strongly of the words of Faudel’s song:
La génération de l’oubli voudrait sortir de l’ombre, soulever les grosses pierres qui la recouvrent, rejeter
ce linceul de mépris et ébranler l’arbre des ancêtres. Nous ne voulons plus vivre hors les murs, relégués
dans les banlieues, nous ne piétinerons pas indéfiniment sur la rive de l’attente, nous ne nous contenterons
plus longtemps des cages d’escalier, des hangars humides, des garages insalubres. Nous allons descendre
en ville, la tête bouillante, la bouche pleine de mots durs comme des cailloux. (1996: 131–2)19
In Les Raisins de la galère Tahar Ben Jelloun succeeds in revealing a variety of responses to the
not inconsiderable challenges of immigrant life, some of which also signal four possible directions
for French immigration policy. In addition to those who allow themselves to be worn down by the
host culture, there are those who passively play along with their assigned label as ‘immigrant’
therefore odious, unwelcome, a burden and a failure (see Begag, 1990). We see this occurring
among a good number of children in the text, such as the boys who are caught stealing, and even
Nadia’s own brother succumbs to this least demanding path. Then there are those who, choosing
‘assimilation’, attempt to blend in, such as Bahia and Mohand, completely hiding their origins, but
at what cost not only to their integrity as human beings, but also to the cultural richness of France?
In contrast, Nourredine takes a ‘counter-social’ stance by completely refusing to make any concessions to life in France; it is a choice no less damaging for him and just as dangerous an option for
the nation to permit. For his stubbornness Nourredine pays the ultimate price. Finally, we have
Naïma and Nadia. They have chosen the most difficult path – that of insisting on being accepted as
they are, products of diversity. However, Naïma runs away to Italy to carve out a life for herself. In
so doing, she avoids direct conflict with her uncompromising parents, and with France, but her
choice of self-‘expulsion’ is doubly expensive since her family disowns her. In Naïma’s case, Ben
Jelloun thus provides a cautionary tale of how immigrant families, by virtue of their vulnerable
position must be willing to make some concessions to their children or risk being isolated from
them, and destroyed by their loss. In the end, only Nadia bravely remains in Resteville to champion
the fourth option, that of ‘acceptance’ of the ‘Third’ space represented by diversity in France.20 She
alone serves as an example of the sort of commitment needed to effect positive changes in the lives
of minorities. Her mobility, motivation, Gidean disponibilité (willingness to embrace newness) and
true grit are inspirational.21
In conclusion, the reader who has participated in this intimate account of an immigrant life,
mingling small success and great tragedy, cannot fail to be moved by Nadia’s testimony. A brave
young woman of indomitable spirit, for whom the principle of acceptance is key, she strives for
an all-inclusive France – one in which cultural mixing is viewed as enrichment, rather than as
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contamination of something inviolable. She strenuously rejects labels; hers would be a plurally
conjugated society where the singular notions of mainstream or minority would have no place
and where, as Hargreaves states, ‘the co-existence of diverse cultural systems’ would not only
be allowed but positively fostered (Hargreaves, 1995: 203). Indeed, of herself Nadia ruminates:
‘Tu ne vis bien que dans le mélange. Tu as horreur de la pureté … Tu mélanges la vie de ton père
à la tienne’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 93). While, according to Tahar Ben Jelloun, ‘La France a besoin
d’une politique soutenue par une philosophie, une pensée qui mette soi et l’autre dans un faceà-face créateur, sain, sans rancœur, sans ressentiment’ (Ben Jelloun, 1997: 16). However, it
remains to be seen whether intransigence over notions of French identity can be softened enough
to admit the notion of plurality and exchange. As long as ‘those who live in the cités have the
sense that they are unwelcome in a France whose treatment of them, whether hostile or indifferent, utterly contradicts the claim … that in France everyone is treated equally’ (Rieff, 2007),
there will be confrontation.
While, as Nadia has shown, education, politics and the media (for increased visibility and the
ability to raise the profile of diversity in France) are key areas that people of immigrant origin must
target in order to gain ground, the difficulties have never been more obvious, as is demonstrated by
observations on the newly elected, but overwhelmingly monochrome, French National Assembly
in 2007. According to a news report on the subject, the two main parties fielded candidates of
immigrant origin in about 20 constituencies in France. Yet, of the 577 seats in the 2007 Assembly
(470 now occupied by men and 107 by women), ‘George Pau-Langevin sera la seule représentante
élue en métropole de ce que l’on appelle pudiquement “la diversité”’ (France 2, 2007c). For
Jeannette Bougrab, UMP candidate eliminated in Paris, political success all comes down to social
class: ‘le profil, aujourd’hui … à l’Assemblée Nationale, c’est un homme qui est cadre sup, blanc
et qui a cinquante-cinq ans. Je ne crois pas que ce soit là la France’ (France 2, 2007c).22 Azouz
Begag, himself a defeated MoDem (Mouvement Démocratique) candidate for Lyons, blames the
main players, the UMP and the PS (Parti Socialiste), on the grounds that, by not offering their
immigrant candidates winnable constituencies, they effectively torpedoed their chances (France 2,
2007c). According to David Blatt, for whom ‘The precepts of the republican model additionally
serve to legitimise and hide the exclusion of identity-based groups’, such a ‘situation reflects the
extent to which French electoral politics is dominated by a socially narrow elite that has neither the
inclination nor the capacity to integrate excluded groups’ (Blatt, 1997: 51). Despite the widely
talked-of ‘Obama effect’ bringing issues of diversity and equality to the fore,23 Nadia may well
have long to wait before she can realise her dream of acceptance for those occupying that ‘Third’
Space, so that, one day, ‘elle va accéder au Parlement [et] … elle y portera non pas le drapeau de
l’Algérie, mais celui d’une autre France’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 90).24
Notes
1 The title of the book, a play on Steinbeck’s Les Raisins de la colère, came from a research report that had
the same name.
2 Earlier in the song, Delta sings: ‘Prévenir du pire, telle est ma mission’; a premonitory statement indeed,
given the rioting that boiled over in the banlieues in late 2005 and which has cropped up sporadically
ever since.
3 At the end of the text the author extends his thanks to Saadia who, he says, ‘m’a parlé plus des raisins que
de la galère’. He also acknowledges the team of researchers, who drew up the report with the same title as
his account, and the director of Banlieuescopies who provided input to the project (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 137).
4 A term deriving from the description often attributed to young Maghrébins who, without hope or education,
are left to rust. The ‘dérouilleurs’ are a group of self-appointed and often highly qualified facilitators who
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make it their business to put other highly qualified job-seekers of immigrant origin (previously hampered
by their skin colour) in touch with the right connections to ensure they have equal access to job opportunities. The organisation has grown from 40 helpers into a network of 4000 members on three continents who,
once they have been helped to find work, in their turn help others in a ‘pay-it-forward’ system of good turns,
thus broadening the network of support. Zoubeir Ben Terdeyet, founder of the ‘dérouilleurs’ network,
appears to have found a chink in France’s armour that he explains thus:
On s’est rendu compte qu’on est dans une France des réseaux qui discrimine non pas forcément en
raison d’une appartenance raciale, mais avant tout sociale. C’est certaines castes … Il y a des gens qui
dominent et qui se reproduisent à travers les Grandes Écoles, c’est les élites. (France 2, 2009)
5 Indeed a 2007 report highlights an even more disturbing trend among young people in France as a result
of scholastic failure – the rise in the number of suicides and cases of depression amongst young people
struggling to succeed at school. As Jason Burke states:
Three successive studies of around 15,000 children reveal that, among young people aged from 12 to
18, 9% of boys and 22% of girls show signs of depression and anxiety – three times the total in 1993.
For the older adolescents the levels are even higher, with an increase to 14% among boys and 35%
among girls aged 17 to 18.
6
7
8
9
10
11
The report also quotes Véronique Pierre-Hublot, teacher and textbook publisher, who explains the enormous pressure to succeed at school: ‘In France a great deal depends on getting the right qualifications …
There are very few employers who are prepared to risk hiring someone just on what they have made of
themselves’ (Burke, 2007: 11). The report does not provide the percentage of young people of immigrant
origin involved in these statistics, but one can surmise that their participation would be significant given
the greater socio-economic obstacles that bar their way.
Nadia’s militant spirit often manifests itself: ‘J’allais ainsi, le corps en avant, la mémoire retenue, avec
la rage de vaincre’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 88).
The father’s reaction, silent retreat from hostility, is a common occurrence. The narrator in Marlène
Amar’s La Femme sans tête, whose Algerian family suffers greatly from its exposure to the dominant
culture in France, encapsulates the situation with her bleak affirmation: ‘Pour vivre, on m’avait appris à
“faire le mort”’ (Amar, 1993: 65; Ireland, 1998: 458).
For the mayor, in particular, the dwelling constitutes a hated reminder of his time spent fighting in
Algeria. Indeed, Algerians in France would appear to have the hardest time of it amongst their North
African counterparts precisely because some French people bear an ongoing grudge for the war that cost
so many French lives at home and abroad.
Algerian writer Assia Djebar discusses in detail the stigma attached to the woman who dares to speak
out. Such a woman is considered obscene and is ostracised; the reason given is that she draws attention
to the tight restrictions imposed on women by patriarchal society. Speaking out merely reminds them of
their miserable lives (Djebar, 1995: 284–5).
The presence of ‘the marginalised and the unemployed of every ethnic group’ was also noted during the
2005 riots despite claims that the rioters were all of immigrant origin (Dyer, 2005: 9).
The word ‘carcan’ (‘straitjacket’) also crops up from time to time in reference to this imprisoning environment. For example, in response to the mind-broadening effects of vocabulary extension from a
teacher dedicated to extracting her pupils from what she terms ‘un ghetto linguistique’ at a Seine-SaintDenis high school, a young woman exclaims: ‘Ça m’a complètement sortie du carcan de la cité’ (France
2, 2007d). Similarly, during Barack Obama’s lightning visit to Europe in July 2008, a young ‘slameuse’,
Delphine II, inspired by his example, dedicated a ‘slam’ to him:
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Duffy
J’aime Barack Hussein Obama
Même si pour lui je ne peux voter
Un inconditionnel love pour ce fils d’Africa
Ce love, personne ne peut me l’ôter
Un noir Président
Plus de carcans, ni de cancans
Yes, we can! Yes, we can! (France 2, 2008a)
Nadir Dendoune, author of Lettre ouverte à un fils d’immigré (1997), a book written to Nicolas Sarkozy,
himself of immigrant origin (he had Hungarian father), about the life of someone raised in the ghetto ‘not
starting his life with the same choices as a white, rich man’ also alludes to the psychological damage that
incarceration in the grim cage-like apartment blocks, built in the 1960s and seemingly not renovated
since, engenders and fosters: ‘It’s a physical prison. It’s a mental prison too because, when you are born
here, you think that your life is gonna be crap, is gonna be shit’ (Brill, 2008).
12 Fatima Hani, whose lucidity and commitment are entirely reminiscent of Nadia, echoes Azouz Begag’s
pragmatic comments on the frustration and desperation felt by immigrants who are driven to flout the
law just to survive and are then punished for it:
If you don’t have any money because you don’t have any job, you don’t have any help to get a job.
What can you say? You are going here like this (she throws up, then crosses, her arms in a gesture of
defeat) and you are waiting to die? We can’t get waiting to die, we have to fight to get living and we
have to fight for our children. It’s not as simple that they say, that if my daughter is hungry, I have to
get her something to eat. If I don’t have any job, if no one can help me, I’ll do what I have to do to
take care of my daughter. That’s it. (Brill, 2008)
13 Such is the condition attached to their support for her campaign (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 93).
14 Such self-interrogation recurs in the text, for example:
Retourner au pays … Ah, la belle promesse! Mais quel pays? Le mien est irrigué par mon sang, sa
carte est mon visage. C’est même pas la France, c’est le Val-de-Nulle-Part, ses provinces portent le
nom de mes souvenirs d’enfance, jeux dans le parc, regard méfiant de la voisine, le ballon que j’offre
un jour à David, le ballon que le père de David me rapporte … Mon père parlait de lui-même comme
d’un vieux dattier transplanté sur le balcon d’une cité de banlieue. Moi, je suis plutôt du genre herbacée, sans doute de la mauvaise herbe, celle qui pousse n’importe où et qu’on arrache machinalement
sans se poser de questions. (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 120)
15 Cf.: ‘où que tu ailles, n’oublie jamais qui tu es, d’où tu viens’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 135).
16 The entire inventory of objects is formidable:
Je commence par les fringues, mes jeans usés, mes pulls troués au coudes, mes chaussettes dont
l’élastique ne tient plus, les chemises de mon père que j’utilisais comme pyjamas, le manteau de Marc
oublié dans ma chambre, mes lunettes de soleil cassées, une veste en daim moisie, un chemisier en
soie étriqué, un béret rouge, un châle de laine, cinq soutiens-gorge, un vieux peigne, une brosse michauve, un foulard indien, un keffieh palestinien, une vieille montre-gousset aux aiguilles bloquées,
un drapeau noir, une banderole semée de fautes d’orthographe, un miroir fêlé, un sac imitation LV, un
nounours tyrolien, un bouquet de fleurs imputrescibles, un paquet de tracts non distribués, un plan de
ville, une affiche jaunie mettant en cause un maire communiste qui avait accusé une famille marocaine
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de se livrer au trafic de drogue, de vieilles godasses, des bottes, une assiette à dessert à rébus ébréchée, une photo de David sur sa moto, des dossiers sur l’écologie, quelques médicaments périmés, un
tube de cirage noir, une djellaba, une bougie entamée, un flacon de parfum bon marché, ma licence
en économie encadrée par mon père, mon diplôme de secouriste, mon troisième cycle en socio, la
photo d’un pique-nique avec Marc. (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 132–3)
17 This is in stark contrast to the defeatist comments of a 16-year-old girl, interviewed concerning an alarming rise in the rates of youth suicide in France in 2007, who claimed: ‘There is nothing wrong with me.
I just see things clearly and the world is dark. It is black’ (Burke, 2007: 11).
18 I myself have been struck by the high number of Arab names that feature in the credits for France 2 news
items on the evening news every day.
19 Nadia’s account is dated November 1994 to September 1995, two years before Faudel’s song was
released. The violence of her feelings is often apparent when she considers the way immigrants are
treated in France:
Notre besoin de consolation est impossible à rassasier, notre fringale de compréhension infinie, notre
volonté d’exister farouche, notre folie n’est pas loin, notre patience est déraisonnable, notre rage
ardente, notre soif de reconnaissance inextinguible, nous avons été faits dans l’improvisation, pour le
provisoire, nous sommes les enfants des cités de transit, nous sommes arrivés sans que personne en
soit prévenu, nous sommes des centaines arrivés par le bateau du soir qui attend que la lune soit voilée pour débarquer ses passagers sans papiers. (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 116–17)
20 Hargreaves evokes another approach ‘co-option’, contending that it is the approach that dominated for at
least ten years from the mid-1980s. Co-option ‘tolerates differences but seeks to ensure that minorities
limit their distinctive patterns of behaviour in ways that are compatible with the dominant cultural norms’
(Hargreaves, 1995: 203). Since the election of the Sarkozy government, however, a plethora of measures
aimed at containing the influx of immigrants, and forcing them to meet increasingly rigorous requirements for entry, would appear to be distancing France from this model. These measures include integration tests, restrictions on family regrouping, language requirements, the integration contract, DNA tests,
proof of financial stability and selective entry. All of these had been brought into play in various forms
before the economic crisis of 2008, which augurs badly for immigrants who will undoubtedly be subject
to even tighter controls on immigration to France as a result.
21 Franco-Algerian writer, Tassadit Imache, who has herself been obliged to confront many labels and questions about her identity, evokes its mercurial nature: ‘L’identité d’une personne est mouvante et doit
rester vive, sans cesse à construire’ (Chevillot, 1998: 635).
22 This is supported by the statistics. According to a news report, 50 per cent of students in France’s Grandes
Écoles, the elite universities, have a parent who is an executive and only 5 per cent of students come from
worker backgrounds. The glaring disparities can be seen all through the French schooling system: doctoral students (38.3 per cent from privileged backgrounds, 11.6 per cent from disadvantaged backgrounds); pupils at baccalauréat level (24.6 per cent from executive backgrounds, 17.8 per cent from a
working-class background). One reason given is that children from poorer socio-economic backgrounds
are not aware of the possibilities for higher study and, as we have seen, have not been encouraged to
strive towards higher education (France 2, 2008c). In response, Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken of a raft of
measures to combat inequality: an increase in the number of bursary students in the Grandes Écoles,
anonymous curricula vitae which would see minority job-seekers at least get to show off their talents in
an interview, and rules for business and political parties (France 2, 2008d).
Duffy
113
23 There is no doubt that the election of Barack Obama has caught the imagination of minority populations
the world over. In France, for example, from 4 November 2008 (the date of his election) to 21 January
2009 (the day after he assumed office), France 2 evening news carried seven feature items dealing with
immigrant issues (integration, political diversity, the talents of those of immigrant descent – including
some who go offshore (for example to London) for better opportunities – and ways to increase the profile
of minorities in all domains of French life) with only one item being a negative report about clandestine
immigration. We may compare this frequency with the rest of 2008 (1 January to 3 November) during
which time only 14 features directly related to immigrant issues in France were broadcast, and the majority of these items concerned the ‘problem’ of immigration.
24 The emphasis is mine. Cf. ‘un autre pays qui ne sera ni la France ni l’Algérie’ (Ben Jelloun, 1996: 123).
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Author biography
Pat Duffy is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Otago. Her primary area of research is French
postcolonial theory, with a special interest in autobiography and women’s writing. Most recently she has
published ‘Realising identity: the process and the product: an analysis of Au pays de mes racines by Marie
Cardinal’, French Cultural Studies (2007) 18(3): 293–305.