Multilingual Strategies in Rachid Bouchareb's Hors la loi

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the complex entanglement of the French and Arabic languages and notes the unfortunate absence of Berber languages in Bouchareb's 2010 Algerian war feature film Hors la loi. Starting from Hamid Naficy's insights about “accented cinema,” the essay analyzes the main characters’ accents in both French and Arabic, various levels of phonological and morphological integration of French loan words into Spoken Algerian Arabic (darija) in the film, as well as the presence of Arabic words in French, demonstrating that colonial contact and migration have created a situation in which both languages and cultures have influenced each other over time. The essay also analyzes the use of specific darija words and the role of code-switching in developing a double-voiced critique of both French and Algerian cultural politics. Finally, the essay explains how Bouchareb's multilingual strategies contribute to making the film relevant at the national, transnational, and regional levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Rachid Bouchareb
• Hors la loi
• multilingualism
• French language
• spoken Algerian Arabic

Notes

1. Smith, Alison. “Crossing the Linguistic Threshold: Language, Hospitality and Linguistic Exchange in Philippe Lioret's Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb's London River.” Studies in French Cinema 13.1 (2012): 75–90. Web.

2. We thank Ziad Bentahar and Laila Amine for their help with Standard Moroccan Arabic and Maya Boutaghou for her careful reading and helpful suggestions. We use a non-conventional way of transliterating Arabic words to simplify the spelling. It is hard to know to what extent the darija used in the film is based on historical research on the part of Bouchareb and his team; no dialect coach is listed in the credits, and it is probable that the actors and the director based their language on their personal knowledge of the speech patterns of their parents’ generation, perhaps influenced as well by their growing up in France. Maya Boutaghou notes that in documentary sources of the time, one can hear the presence of Arabicized French in Algerian witnesses’ testimonies (personal communication, September 11, 2017).

3. Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh. “The Swinging Pendulum: Linguistic Controversy in Post-Colonial Algeria.” Middle Eastern Studies 32.4 (1996): 264–280. Web.

4. The MNA was an older independence party led by long-time independence leader Messali Hadj. It was well established among Algerians in France and the FLN worked to eliminate it in order to emerge as the sole independence party. Hors la loi highlights this aspect of the war.

5. Donadey, Anne. “Gender, Genre and Intertextuality in Rachid Bouchareb's Hors la loi.” Studies in French Cinema 16.1 (2016): 48–60. Web.

6. Another hint of the religious context, which is more noticeable for an audience from a Muslim background, is the family's last name, Souni. Sunni Islam is the branch of Islam primarily followed in Algeria.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Donadey

Anne Donadey is Professor of French and Women's Studies at San Diego State University. She has published books and articles on Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, Rachid Bouchareb, Moufida Tlatli, Fatima Mernissi, Azar Nafisi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Maryse Condé, Daniel Maximin, Octavia E. Butler, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Her edited volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar was published by the Modern Language Association in 2017.

Wissem Brinis

Wissem Brinis holds a B.A. in French from Hadj Lakhdar University of Batna, Algeria. She is currently an M.A. candidate in French at San Diego State University.