Female Filiations as a Locus of Politicization in Faïza Guène’s œuvre: An Intersectionalist Reading of Kiffe kiffe demain and La Discrétion

ABSTRACT

This article explores the theme of postcolonial transmission through the comparative analysis of two novels by French author Faïza Guène, her bestselling debut novel Kiffe kiffe demain and her latest narrative La Discrétion. It argues that intimate bonds between immigrant parents and their French-born children have been particularly pivotal to the politicization of the author’s writing. The article traces how Guène’s representation of women living in socio-economically disadvantaged French banlieues has evolved throughout her career. It shows how her initial optimism and faith in the Republican values has given way to an increasingly disenchanted vision. Drawing on decolonial feminist theory, the paper investigates how, in Guène’s latest and most political novel to date, the transmission of silenced colonial and postcolonial history and withheld anger is depicted through a superposition of violent episodes from the life of a 70-year-old Algerian woman with the apparently insignificant yet persistent microaggressions experienced by her grown-up children in contemporary France. This strategy enables the author to reflect on the role of cultural transmission while reconstructing the silenced history of colonization, immigration and failed social mobility while also debunking the myth of Republican meritocracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Faïza Guène
• novel
• French colonial past
• banlieue
• Maghrebi immigrants
• mother
• children
• transmission
• filiation

Introduction

Faïza Guène, born in 1985, was only nineteen when she burst onto the French literary scene with her debut novel Kiffe kiffe demain [Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow] (2004). The novel has sold 400,000 copies and it has been translated into twenty-six languages (Bouchenni 2020). Praised by critics for its ‘portrayal of the female experience of the banlieue’ (Ahonen 2016, 168, italics in original), it was applauded for its optimistic depiction of France’s peripheral housing estates as convivial, multicultural settings, as opposed to the dominant media-political discourses depicting banlieues as ethnic ghettos to be reconquered by the Republic (Horvath 2020). Constructed in the 1950s and 1960s to solve the post-war housing crisis, France’s large-scale social housing estates known as ‘banlieues’ are considered a major social issue today. Abandoned by their middle-class residents in the 1970s, these neighbourhoods have been used to house workers from the former colonies as well as some more recent immigrants (Angélil and Siress 2012, 60). From the 1980s onwards, these peripheral neighbourhoods have been plagued by unemployment and recurrent urban unrest. The top-down urban policies implemented to tackle territorial segregation through physical renovation, economic development, and restructuring failed to provide effective solutions for these issues; however, by spatializing them, they have contributed to lasting stigmatization of working-class banlieues. The stereotypes attached to the urban periphery have also been reinforced by some of the counter-narratives produced by artists from banlieues who have often depicted these areas as male-dominated spaces. Guène’s first novel challenged these clichés by focusing on a network of female relationships. This strategy helped her humanize ‘stereotypical representations of the housing projects as sites of deviance and violence through a tender mother-daughter relationship and communal affiliations found in female solidarity bonds, popular music, and the sharing of food’ (Mehta 2010, 175). The focus on female networks has also demonstrated that ‘pour Guène, le rôle des femmes en banlieue est crucial pour toute la communauté, grâce aux liens qu’elles ont tissés au sein même de la communauté maghrébine’ [for Guène, the role of women in the banlieues is crucial for the entire community, thanks to the links they have forged within the Maghrebi community] (Puig 2019, 158–159).

After the extraordinary success of Kiffe kiffe demain, Guène has continued to explore the powerful ties between immigrant parents and their French-born children in five more novels. Du rêve pour les oufs (2006) is narrated by a young immigrant woman from Algeria, Ahlème, who attempts to integrate into France while caring for her disabled father and turbulent younger brother. Les Gens du Balto (2008) subverts the genre of murder mystery by interweaving the voices of eight narrators from a Parisian banlieue, including that of a mother of Armenian descent. Un homme, ça ne pleure pas (2014) explores the complex relationship between an elderly Algerian couple living in Nice and their three grown-up children. Millénium blues (2018) investigates the sorority between two female friends involved in complex migrant genealogies reaching back to Portugal and Algeria, respectively. Finally, Guène’s latest novel, La Discrétion [Discretion] (2020), narrates the biography of a 70-year-old Algerian mother of four, Yamina Taleb, assembling fragments of her childhood during and after the war of independence and tracing her adult life in Aubervilliers, a banlieue just outside Paris.

This article proposes to examine Guène’s enduring interest in female (and male) immigrant filiations as a privileged locus for the transmission of postcolonial memory from Maghrebi parents to their Maghrebi French children. As Adalgisa Giorgio points out in Writing Mothers and Daughters (2002, 32), maternal figures in literature tend to embody ethnic roots, belonging and the transmission of the culture of origin:

The maternal figure is often a metaphor of origins, encompassing not only kinship but also race, ethnicity, and language. She comes to represent the ethnic roots which the daughter wishes simultaneously to repress in her search for assimilation to the dominant culture, and to preserve in order to remain loyal to the values and memories of her community.

Giorgio contends that, particularly in narratives produced by Maghrebi French writers, mother-daughter relations provide insights into the tensions experienced by young Maghrebi French women who are constrained to choose between the patriarchal rules prevalent in their culture of origin and the pressure to assimilate in order fully to integrate in France. Adopting a decolonial and intersectional feminist lens, this article will examine whether this observation, based on earlier narratives produced by the so-called ‘beur’ generation [second-generation Maghrebi French writers] in the 1980s and 1990s (Laronde 1993), is still relevant to novels published in the twenty-first century. I will argue that, over the past two decades, the rise of Islamophobia in France (Hajjat and Mohammed 2013; Beaman 2017) and the mobilization of a civilizational feminist discourse to stigmatize Maghrebi French citizens (Guénif-Souilamas 2006; Fernando 2016; Vergès 2019) have prompted Maghrebi French writers including Guène to express solidarity with the generation of their parents and to expose the Republic’s failure to fully integrate them as French citizens instead of scrutinizing patriarchy within their own community. I propose to read in parallel the author’s first and last novels, Kiffe kiffe demain and La Discrétion,¹ to trace how Guène’s representation of Maghrebi French female filiations has evolved during the sixteen years that elapsed between the publication of each text. The focus on postcolonial genealogies and memory will allow light to be shed on the complex strategies of resistance Guène has been developing in her texts in response to ‘the construction of a negative Muslim otherness’ (Mohammed 2020, 80), which has affected not only the integration of Maghrebi French in France but also the literary consecration of Faïza Guène herself.

The first section of the article will examine how Republican discourses about the Maghrebi French² have evolved since the early 2000s. It will also demonstrate the relevance of intersectional/decolonial feminist approaches to this analysis. The second and third sections will provide close readings of both novels with a particular focus on female filiations as central nodes of resistance. The fourth section will reflect on Guène’s increasingly disillusioned and critical stance towards the Republican model of integration. Finally, the conclusion will highlight how a glass ceiling continues to prevent Guène and other Maghrebi French, working-class and/or banlieue-based authors from being fully legitimated as French writers.

Intersectional and Decolonial Feminism: A Useful Approach to the Maghrebi French Experience in Contemporary France

In recent years, the over-politicization of themes related to postcolonial migration to France has been heavily scrutinized by an increasing number of scholars. As Bouamama (2006), Guénif-Souilamas (2006), Giry (2006), Hajjat and Mohammed (2013), Beaman (2017) and others have shown, debates about democracy, national identity, banlieues, education, Islam and the hijab have been instrumentalized to fuel suspicion against France’s four-to-five million Muslims (Giry 2006). Increasingly considered an enemy within, Maghrebi French have been depicted in dominant discourses as a monolithic community whose religious practices and cultural norms significantly differ from those of the majority. In the wake of the 1995 Paris metro bombings, the 2001 attack against the World Trade Centre, the 2015–2016 Paris and Nice attacks and the beheading of French history teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020, theories about a clash of civilizations have been gaining ground, contributing to the rise of Islamophobia, defined by Marwan Mohammed as a process of othering through amalgamation that ‘groups together individuals, communities and populations that have little in common, linking them to various acts of violence carried out by individuals and groups who claim to be acting in the name of Islam’ (2020, 79). Since the 2015 attack against the satiric newspaper Charlie Hebdo, individual citizens’ responses to calls for national unity have come under close scrutiny. Dissent from the expected collective response of solidarity has barely been tolerated, particularly in schools (Kiwan 2016). While, according to Giry, ‘most Muslims in France […] have adopted French cultural norms; […] [and] enthusiastically endorse republican values, including laïcité’ (2006, 88), the repeated calls urging Maghrebi French to show allegiance to the Republic tend to overlook the overall success of their integration and aggravate the discrimination they experience in most areas of their everyday life.

This emerging consensus about Islam’s assumed incompatibility with Republican norms also exposes some paradoxes inherent to the Republican model of integration. For instance, the legitimate presence of postcolonial immigrants and their children is conditioned by their social invisibility and political non-existence (Bouamama 2006, 198). These two interrelated principles, which imply that the immigrants and their descendants must remain as polite, invisible, and discrete as possible, are also supported by France’s rejection of racial and ethnic categorizations despite the fact that racial categories inherited from colonialism continue to inform implicit definitions of Frenchness. This invisibility was publicly challenged in 1983, 1984 and 1985 through a series of protest marches organized by the children of postcolonial immigrants to express their desire to be recognized as equal citizens and reject their parents’ subaltern status. However, successive governments encouraged abstract forms of anti-racism to prevent autonomous identarian movements from emerging and promoted new binary distinctions between Maghrebi parents and their children born in France, male and female immigrants, and legitimate and clandestine migrants. Such binary categories have also served to distinguish immigrants who could be integrated from those who could not be, and to assign postcolonial immigrants to a permanent subaltern status since their inequality was suddenly considered a consequence of their difference rather than the other way round (Bouamama 2006, 215).

The passing of the 2004 law prohibiting ‘conspicuous religious symbols’ in French public schools (Hargreaves [1995] 2007, 111–120) has drawn sustained scholarly attention to the gendered experience of Maghrebi French women. Although the law justified the measure to defend the Republican principle of laïcité [secularism] as necessary, many commentators highlighted that the prohibition was in reality aimed at Muslim girls and women wearing the Islamic headscarf, an object diabolized as the principal symbol of anti-Republican oppression against women. The law, designed to protect young women from being forced to wear the veil against their will, has resulted in coercing them while simultaneously reinforcing a mono-dimensional perception of the headscarf as ‘something aggressive’ (Hargreaves [1995] 2007, 116). Fernando highlights how gender equality and civilizational feminism were mobilized to justify anti-Muslim sentiment and to blur the boundaries between the overlapping groups of Muslims and Maghrebi French:

‘Muslim’ has become a religious and quasi-racial classification to refer to people of North and West African descent. Muslims are targeted on the basis of their race – often at the hands of police – and their religion – often through discriminatory laws, like the 2004 headscarf law and the 2010 law banning face veils in all public spaces, laws that were passed in the name of gender equality and with full-throated support from most mainstream feminist organizations. (2016, 39)

The 2004 law has also been denounced by materialist feminist theorist Christine Delphy who has cautioned against its alarming consequences: the exclusion of a group of young French women from compulsory state education and the definitive alienation of the already marginalized Maghrebi French population from the Republic (Delphy 2008, 137). What makes Delphy’s reflection particularly relevant to this analysis is her focus on the intersection of racism, classism and sexism and her recognition that the contemporary stigmatization of Maghrebi French goes back to the racist stereotypes which were assigned to their ancestors by the French colonizers, for example the assumption that ‘les indigènes ne “traitent pas bien leurs femmes”’ [the natives do not ‘treat their women well’] (Delphy 2008, 141). Delphy’s stance therefore demonstrates that an intersectional and decolonial turn in feminism is necessary to understand fully how binary, dichotomous categories imposed during colonialism such as human/non-human, male/female, or civilized/uncivilized have participated in creating lasting hierarchies which have served to justify exclusion. As decolonial theorist Maria Lugones points out, such binary categories explain social hierarchies through essentialist classification and represent racialized populations ‘as not human in species — as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild’ (2010, 743). Therefore, the analysis of colonial relations needs to include race, class and gender to be able to dismantle categorial logics and resist a normativity which ‘cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it’ (Lugones 2010, 742).

One of the first French scholars to use an intersectional framework to denounce the stereotyping of the Maghrebi French was sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas (2006). As she argues, the simultaneously racialized and sexualized figures of ‘la fille voilée’ [the veiled woman] and ‘la beurette’ [the emancipated Maghrebi French woman], and their male counterparts, ‘le musulman laïc’ [the secular Muslim man] and ‘le garçon arabe’ [the Arab boy] are anchored in a fixed, orientalist imagery (Guénif-Souilamas 2006). Guénif-Souilamas not only critiques feminist movements like ‘Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ [Neither Whores Nor Doormats]³ for their endorsement of the 2004 law, but she also denounces them as ‘consensuel, antiféministe, hétérocentré et réactionnaire autorisant l’enfermement d’ennemis intimes: victimes les beurettes, et bourreaux les garçons arabes’ [consensual, anti-feminist, hetero-centric and reactionary, authorizing the confinement of intimate enemies: Arab girls as victims, and Arab boys as executioners] (2006, 121). She concludes that French Republicanism is an alienating ideology perpetuating a dominant, homogenizing, culturalist and ethnocentric vision of Maghrebi French women by inviting them to embrace an emancipation devoid of tangible means of achievement and by encouraging them to reject their families to show their integration and loyalty to the Republic.

The relevance of an intersectional framework has also been confirmed by Tissot and Tevanian (2010) who revealed that in the early 2000s a state-promoted brand of feminism conquered the French media, broadly accusing Muslim men living in banlieues of a sexism intrinsic to their culture: ‘Le féminisme est ainsi devenu une métaphore du racisme: il alimente des représentations et des pratiques racistes mais sur un mode euphémisé et par conséquent respectable. Il est en effet devenu légitime, paré de la caution féministe, de stigmatiser l’islam et de renvoyer les femmes musulmanes à une indécrottable aliénation’ [Feminism has thus become a metaphor for racism: it feeds racist representations and practices, but in a euphemistic and therefore respectable fashion. It has indeed become legitimate, adorned with the feminist guarantee, to stigmatize Islam and to send Muslim women back to an indecipherable alienation] (2010, 215–217). More recently, a similar critique of mainstream feminism has been articulated by Françoise Vergès, claiming that the Republican consensus about feminism coincided with its appropriation by liberalism, nationalism, xenophobia, and right-extremism. In other words, the legitimation of feminism has facilitated the emergence and consolidation of a respectable brand of racism. This essentializing, civilizational variant of feminism that Vergès calls ‘femonationalism’, has betrayed racialized women by turning a blind eye to colonial, imperialist and neoliberal exploitation in exchange for an increase of legitimacy and gender equality for white middle-class women. Vergès’s (2019, 27–28) call for a more holistic, decolonial approach to feminism which sees its aim in fighting the racism-capitalism-imperialism triad has found an echo in a series of contemporary texts by intersectional feminist activists such as La France tu l’aimes ou tu la fermes? (2019) by journalist Rokhaya Diallo or La Puissance des mères (2020) by political analyst Fatima Ouassak. Although Guène has not openly positioned herself as a decolonial or intersectional feminist, these contemporary debates have inevitably marked the period in which her novels were published. As the close readings of her first and latest novels will demonstrate, she has been aware of the simultaneous effects of colonialism, patriarchy and neoliberalism on racialized women and has highlighted these in her writing since her debut novel.

The Republican Model of Emancipation in Kiffe kiffe demain

Kiffe kiffe demain was published at a time when first-person narratives by Maghrebi French women attracted a considerable public interest for scrutinizing patriarchal models in banlieues and Muslim families. This interest was to a great extent triggered by the intense debate surrounding the anti-headscarf law passed in 2004 which increased the visibility of testimonial narratives produced by victims of gendered violence in banlieues. A striking example of this was Dans l’enfer des tournantes (2002), the autobiography of gang-rape victim and NPNS sponsor Samira Bellil. In her book Branding the ‘Beur’ Author, Kathryn Kleppinger explains how, in the 1990s and early 2000s, media demand for both beurette-authored⁴ novels and unfictionalized autobiographical accounts prepared the ground for an expanded dominant discourse according to which female Maghrebi French writers ‘not only provide new insights into the dynamics of immigrant communities in France but also critique gender relations within them’ (2015, 159). Kleppinger’s detailed analysis of Guène’s engagement with audiovisual media shows that the reception of her first novel was strongly impacted upon by expectations based on previous authors identified as beurettes including the novelist Soraya Nini, author of Ils disent que je suis une beurette and testimonial writers like Bellil. It also reveals that much of the media buzz around Kiffe kiffe demain was triggered by the interviewers’ interest in Guène herself as a newsworthy person who had an authentic angle on fashionable themes including delinquency, the veil and the victimization of banlieue women by banlieue men (Kleppinger 2015, 202–203). Perceived by commentators as a predominantly optimistic narrative presenting examples of successful female emancipation in a banlieue, the novel received enthusiastic coverage in which the author’s youth, modest social origins, and demographic closeness to Doria, the novel’s Maghrebi French narrator, were repeatedly emphasized (Maameri 2016). In Keïra Maameri’s documentary Nos Plumes (2016), Guène expresses her disappointment with journalists treating her as a mere spokeswoman for banlieue youths rather than an accomplished artist able to create complex fictional characters: ‘Des fois on va dire que c’est autobiographique parce que ça ne peut pas être toi qui as inventé. Parce qu’il faut un minimum pour inventer, faire des situations, des personnages, faire un roman’ [Sometimes they’ll say it’s autobiographical because it can’t be you who invented it. Because you need a minimum to invent, to create situations, to create characters, to write a novel] (Maameri 2016, 0:33:00).

Kiffe kiffe demain certainly ticked some of the boxes a beurette narrative was expected to tick — it included images of young French Maghrebi women sequestrated by their families, examples of petty crime, and female empowerment facilitated by Republican institutions. While the novel was praised for proposing a ‘more diverse image of the banlieues by questioning stereotypes and […] gendered practices’ (Ahonen 2016, 170), Aronsson (2012) notes that its representation of Muslim men is rather ambiguous. It portrays male characters either as disloyal and authoritarian like Doria’s father or Aunt Zohra’s husband or as weak and emasculated like Nabil’s father, who is persistently mocked in the neighbourhood for doing the dishes at home. Livry-Gargan’s Muslim community itself is depicted as fairly sexist and conservative; Muslim parents seek to control their daughters, reject homosexuality, and oppose mixed marriages while they tolerate their sons’ involvement in delinquency and radicalization. Although this predominantly negative portrayal is mitigated by a few positive characters like Doria’s best friend Hamoudi and her love interest Nabil, Aronsson concludes that the representation of Muslim masculinity in the novel remains problematic and clichéd overall:

Les personnages masculins sont, en effet, souvent stéréotypés et ressemblent parfois à des caricatures d’hommes autoritaires et cruels. La communauté musulmane de Livry-Gargan est présentée comme une sous-culture orthodoxe et patriarcale, dominée par des hommes qui cherchent à restreindre la liberté des femmes. (2012, 15)

[The male characters are, indeed, often stereotypical and sometimes resemble caricatures of bossy and cruel men. The Muslim community of Livry-Gargan is presented as an Orthodox and patriarchal subculture, dominated by men who seek to restrict women’s freedom.]

Despite its ambiguous depiction of Muslim and banlieue masculinities, the complexity of female filiations and solidarity clearly dissociates the novel from the earlier beurette-authored texts and announces Guène’s awareness of intersectional/decolonial feminist trends. The narrator’s mother Yasmina is an illiterate homemaker who, after her husband’s return to Morocco, finds employment in a motel. Since her wage hardly allows her and her daughter to survive, they dress from garage sales and rely on charities, food banks and help from the neighbours to make ends meet. Rescued by the French state, Doria receives free psychotherapy sessions while a literacy course allows her mother to secure a better job at a local school. The pair’s simultaneous emancipation is facilitated by a blonde social worker whose persistent smile, Barbie-doll-like looks and slight but perceptible condescendence towards Yasmina initially irritate Doria. The young narrator notes that instead of empowering them, the social worker’s unrequested gifts tend to reinforce her and her mother’s lack of agency and dependency on aid: ‘Je me demande si elle a pas choisi ce métier parce que ça la rassurait de s’occuper de la misère des gens. […] Je me sens régresser avec tous ces gens qui me traitent comme une assistée’ [I wonder if she chose this profession because it reassured her to take care of people’s misery. […] I feel myself regressing with all these people who treat me as if I were incapable] (KKD, 67–69). However, as the story unfolds, Doria progressively overcomes her scepticism and changes her motto from ‘kif-kif’ [same old, same old] to ‘kiffe-kiffe’ [from the verb kiffer, which means to like] finally to embrace the profession and lifestyle Republican institutions encourage her to adopt. This obedience is rewarded with the perspective of a seaside vacation funded by the Livry-Gargan city council.

While the main characters’ emancipation rests on their assimilation to the figure of the ‘beurette’ rather than that of the ‘fille voilée’ described by Guénif-Souilamas (2006), a closer investigation reveals that Guène’s vision of the Republican model is more critical than it first seems. The integration of mother and daughter is seemingly facilitated by the state, yet the improvement of their social status remains marginal. Yasmina transitions from chambermaid to kitchen help but remains an unqualified, low-paid worker. Doria is oriented towards vocational training to become a hairdresser although she dreams about becoming an actress, a revolutionary or a politician. Her experience of being steered towards a blue-collar career despite her higher ambitions and intellectual abilities is far from being unique among the children of Maghrebi immigrants in France. Fatima Ouassak’s analysis of racial segregation at French schools reveals that racialized children growing up in banlieues are often disadvantaged by an education system which tends to clip their wings and pressures them into vocational training, diminishing their chances of achieving social mobility:⁵

La réduction du champ des possibles se traduit par une surreprésentation des enfants issus de l’immigration postcoloniale dans les secteurs d’activité précaires. […] Certes, on ne force pas les enfants noirs et arabes à se diriger vers cette partie la plus pécaïre du marché de travail. Mais on les éduque à y aller, on les y accompagne étape par étape, on les dissuade d’envisager autre chose. (2020, 141–142)

[The reduction in the field of possibilities results in an over-representation of children from postcolonial immigration in precarious sectors of activity. […] Of course, black and Arab children are not forced to move towards this most precarious part of the labour market. But they are trained to do so, accompanied step by step, dissuaded from considering something else.]

Yasmina and Doria both received help from the Republic to improve their lives. However it can also be argued that instead of truly empowering them, this system ultimately facilitates their absorption into a neoliberal labour market demanding a cheap, unskilled workforce, as suggested by decolonial and intersectional feminists like Vergès and Ouassak. Although Yasmina actually achieves some degree of emancipation from her ex-husband, she continues to depend on help from the state for everything but the most essential goods.

Mother’s and daughter’s limited access to the symbolic benefits of French citizenship is highlighted by their first-ever visit to the Eiffel Tower. When, after seeing the Tower from afar for over a decade, they find the courage to visit it, they do not fully enjoy the experience since they cannot afford to go up by lift or buy a souvenir. This partial disappointment mirrors the protagonists’ precarious inclusion into Frenchness since they are ‘technically citizens [, yet they] are not treated as full citizens because of their assigned otherness as racial and ethnic minorities’ (Beaman 2017, 33). The novel, nevertheless, proposes a more empowering alternative to the flawed Republican emancipation which rests on ‘le narcissisme des femmes blanches si heureuses “d’aider”’ [the narcissism of white women so happy to ‘help’] (Vergès 2019, 63). A more efficient, bottom-up female network of solidarity is set up by racialized working-class women who create hands-on solutions for their everyday problems. Examples of their self-organization include the free tutorials Doria receives from the son of her mother’s friend, or the mutually beneficial babysitting she does for Lila, a Maghrebi French single mother who works at a supermarket. The most powerful example of this agency is the strike action conducted by a group of racialized female motel cleaners who, under the leadership of the dynamic union representative Fatouma Konaré, obtain fairer pay and a lighter workload. Yasmina is delighted to see the strike’s victorious outcome in the news on national television.

Inspired by the 2002 Accor hotel strike which mostly involved African female employees, the successful mobilization in the novel demonstrates immigrant women’s ability to improve their situation without support from the state or middle-class, civilizational feminist organizations which do not even feature in the novel.⁶ This victory, also mentioned in Ouassak’s analysis (2020, 80), highlights immigrant women’s often-overlooked pioneering role as human rights activists. By incorporating in her novel this under-mediatized grassroots movement, Guène demonstrates her keen interest in the political potential of racialized women and distances herself from narratives focusing on racialized female victimhood. Her celebration of racialized women’s capacity to fight patriarchy and capitalism simultaneously can be interpreted as an understated but distinctively political intersectional feminist stance.

Recovering Colonial Memory in La Discrétion

Published in the aftermath of the 2015 and 2016 terrorist attacks and the ensuing Je suis Charlie debate which imposed a set of ‘Franco-centred values and norms that are compatible with the views and culture of a majority of French citizens’ (Marlière 2017, 52), La Discrétion (2020) denounces the growing alienation between France’s postcolonial and majority-ethnic populations. In her previous novel, Millenium Blues, Guène already expressed her nostalgia for the brief period stretching from the 1998 French football world cup victory to the 2001 terrorist attack against the World Trade Centre, during which France celebrated multiculturalism. This thought, repeatedly voiced in her interviews (Hakem 2020), also appears in La Discrétion:

C’était au début des années 2000, l’été 2001 pour être exacte, ah la bonne époque, juste avant le 11 septembre, avant Ben Laden, et avant Charlie. Au moment où les Arabes étaient à la mode, grâce à Zidane, et à ses deux buts en final de la Coupe du Monde 1998, aux blagues de Jamel Debbouze et au JT de Rachid Arhab. C’était cool d’être rebeu à cette période. (LD, 74–75, italics in original)

[It was the early 2000s, the summer of 2001 to be exact, what a great period, just before September 11, before Bin Laden, and before Charlie. When the Arabs were in fashion, thanks to Zidane, and his two goals in the final of the 1998 World Cup, the jokes of Jamel Debbouze and the news with Rachid Arhab. It was cool to be Arab back then.]

The novel revisits several of Guène’s recurrent topics including immigrant genealogies, feelings of disenchantment among the children of Maghrebi immigrants, stigmatized Muslim masculinities, the transmission of postcolonial memory and the exclusion of Maghrebi French from cultural citizenship. To highlight the primary importance of postcolonial filiations in the novel, Guène borrows two epigraphs from two prominent postcolonial thinkers who denounced racial hierarchies and highlighted the psychopathological consequences of colonization. These citations from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) allow the author to refer to the notion of ‘transnational blackness’ and reflect a racialized global ‘diasporic consciousness’ (Sharma 2010, 3–4; Beaman 2017, 85–88). By quoting two male rather than female thinkers, Guène also stresses the universal validity of her depiction of a particular, gendered and racialized, postcolonial experience, that of a female Algerian immigrant first in her home country colonized by France, and then in a French banlieue. But these explicitly political quotes also serve to position Guène as Baldwin’s and Fanon’s heir and to signal her desire to dialogue with artists and intellectuals who resisted colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism at different times, in different geographic areas.

The first epigraph, ‘il faut beaucoup de souplesse spirituelle pour ne pas haïr celui qui vous hait et dont le pied écrase votre nuque, et ne pas apprendre à vos enfants à le haïr exige une sensibilité et une charité encore plus miraculeuses’ [it demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate] (LD, 9), mirrors the dilemma of immigrant parents who hope to protect their children from their colonial trauma without however depriving them of a cultural heritage which is a powerful resource to resist assimilation and preserve one’s dignity (Ouassak 2020, 127). The citation also suggests that withholding narratives about past events may result in even more detrimental consequences than the transmission of traumas, since silence inevitably leads to alienation and loss of meaning. The second quotation, ‘chaque génération doit, dans une relative opacité, découvrir sa mission, la remplir ou la trahir’ [each generation must, in relative opacity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it] (LD, 137) highlights Guène’s own desire to preserve the memory of her parents’ generation before their passing. As she claims in an interview, ‘chaque génération a sa mission, la nôtre est de recueillir le récit de nos parents et de le raconter. […] J’ai envie que le récit de cette femme qui a l’air invisible compte’ [each generation has its mission, ours is to collect the story of our parents and to tell it. […] I want the story of this woman who seems invisible to count] (Hakem 2020).

La Discrétion is Guène’s first novel narrated in the third person. After focussing on the figure of the father in Un homme, ça ne pleure pas (2014), it reconstructs the biography of an elderly female immigrant and mother of four in chronological order from her birth in 1949 in a still colonial Algeria to her first-ever holiday in France in summer 2020. The novel is divided into thirty-five short chapters, about half of which are dedicated to Yamina’s past, while the others focus on more recent events occurring between 2018 and 2020 in the lives of Yamina’s children. Malika, Hannah, Imane and Omar are fairly integrated, lower-middle-class professionals, yet they are periodically exposed to micro-aggressions due to their ethnic, geographic and social origins. The triviality of their everyday experience contrasts with Yamina’s gripping childhood memories; her tense encounter with French soldiers during the war of independence, the exile to Morocco, deprivation and hard physical labour. Through an intersectional prism, it is possible to read these early experiences as a ‘stolen childhood’ (King 1995; Roberts [1997] 2017, 37). Introduced by African-American authors Wilma King and Dorothy Roberts, who in the late 1990s revealed the systemic abuse suffered by racialized women from the age of slavery to the present-day stigmatization of black motherhood, this term refers to the experience of enslaved children who, due to their parents’ incapacitated authority over them, were virtually deprived of their childhood. Like these children, Yamina is confronted with her parents’ inability to protect her from colonial violence and is prevented from having a proper education first by war and exile and then because her labour is needed at the family farm. The rudimentary dental surgery which leaves an infected root in her gum for decades is a compelling metaphor that stands for the toxic effects of a silenced past which needs to be exposed so that healing can take place.

Despite her disappointment with her father’s decisions to withdraw her from school and to marry her to an expatriate worker, Yamina cultivates serenity and forgiveness. She finds satisfaction in buying knick-knacks at the local market, growing flowers in her allotment garden, and praying in the open air. Like her almost-namesake Yasmina in Kiffe kiffe demain, she handles micro-aggressions in an understated manner, leaving her children wondering whether she is unaware of the doctor’s and the administrator’s condescendence, or whether her composure is actually a form of resistance:

D’une certaine façon, Yamina est préservée. […] Son innocence la protège de la violence de l’attitude du médecin. Elle ne s’aperçoit pas du rapport vertical qui se joue dans le cabinet du docteur qu’elle respecte tant. […] C’est à se demander si Yamina ne le fait pas exprès, car elle semble sourde à la colère qui l’appelle. Après tout, peut-être a-t-elle choisi de ne pas se laisser abîmer par le mépris? (LD, 16)

[In a way, Yamina is preserved. […] Her innocence protects her from the violence of the doctor’s attitude. She does not realize the vertical relationship that plays out in the doctor’s office, which she respects so much. […] It makes you wonder if Yamina is not doing it on purpose, as she seems deaf to the anger calling her. After all, maybe she chose not to be spoiled by contempt?]

Yamina’s belonging to the place she calls home is embodied by a major metaphor, the fig tree. As a child, Yamina enjoyed climbing the branches of a large fig tree in her parents’ garden in Smidra. During her exile in Morocco the tree dries out, mirroring Yamina’s ‘stolen childhood’. In 1981, Yamina marries Brahim Taleb who takes her to France. After three decades of nostalgia, she discovers a magnificent fig tree growing in her allotment in a communal garden in Aubervilliers: ‘Désormais, l’arbre de Yamina, sa baraka, n’est plus en Algérie, il est ici, à Aubervilliers, bien enraciné et généreux’ [From now on, Yamina’s tree, her baraka, is no longer in Algeria, but here, in Aubervilliers, well rooted and generous] (LD, 150). The metaphor, which signals that despite all odds Yamina has finally grown roots in France and her fruits are her French-born children, is revisited one more time at the end of the novel when, at the age of seventy-one, her children take Yamina on holiday to the south of France. Like the visit to the Eiffel Tower in Kiffe kiffe demain, this first French vacation constitutes a hopeful moment in the novel, suggesting that Maghrebi parents can finally develop a sense of belonging to France thanks to their offspring.

Filiations tend to constitute complex networks extending far beyond family genealogy in Guène’s novels. La Discrétion, which abounds in real and imaginary genealogies, is no exception. Yamina sees Algeria as a maternal entity and Houari Boumediene, the country’s first president, as a father figure. She sabotages the lineage of her physical mother, the introverted Rahma and her tribe and runs away when the ambulant Berber tattooist known as ‘la vieille mère’ [the old mother] (LD, 105), yet another mother figure, attempts to reproduce her mother’s tribal tattoo on her forehead and chin:

Cet héritage tribal se transmet aux femmes depuis des siècles, de génération en génération, et symbolise l’appartenance à la tribu. Dans la tradition berbère, le tatouage est aussi un rite de passage à l’âge adulte. Mais Yamina, n’est-elle pas née directement dans l’âge adulte ? La guerre ne l’a-t-elle pas privée de son enfance? […] Elle imagine comment la vieille mère va lui entailler la peau en dessinant le motif, […] la feuille de palmier, qui incarne la mère protectrice […]. Elle n’accepte pas ce tatouage, elle refuse d’être marquée à vie, c’est décidé, cette tradition s’arrêtera avec elle. (LD, 105–107, italics in original)

[This tribal heritage has been passed down to women for centuries, from generation to generation, and symbolizes belonging to the tribe. In the Berber tradition, it is also a rite of passage into adulthood. But wasn’t Yamina born straight into adulthood? Didn’t the war rob her of her childhood? […] She imagines how the old mother will cut her skin by drawing the pattern, […] the palm leaf, which embodies the protective mother […]. She does not accept this tattoo, she refuses to be marked for life, it’s decided, this tradition will end with her.]

Instead of wearing the mark of female coming-of-age according to Berber cultural traditions, Yamina chooses a role model from outside her family by developing an imagined sorority with Djamila Bouhired, a female resistance fighter who responded to her death sentence by the French military tribunal with defiant laughter. Cutting out Bouhired’s photograph from a newspaper and taking it with her to France encourages Yamina to reject victimhood and preserve her dignity (LD, 88). This chosen rather than inherited legacy highlights Yamina’s own heroism which resides in small, everyday acts of resistance:

Et si, aujourd’hui, pour cette femme de soixante-dix ans, refuser de se laisser envahir par le ressentiment était une façon de résister? Mais la colère, même enfouie, ne disparaît pas. La colère se transmet, l’air de rien. Ses enfants, eux, ils n’aiment pas ça. Ils ne supportent pas qu’on s’adresse à leur mère comme si elle était absolument idiote, naturellement inférieure. Eux, ils savent qui elle est, ce qu’elle a traversé, et ils exigent que le monde entier le sache aussi. (LD, 16, italics in original)

[What if, for this seventy-year-old woman today, refusing to let herself be overcome by resentment was a way of resisting? But the anger, even buried, does not disappear. Anger is transmitted, casually. Her kids don’t like it. They hate it when their mother is treated as if she were absolutely stupid, naturally inferior. They know who she is, what she’s been through, and they expect the whole world to recognize it too.]

Instead of preserving her children from past traumas, Yamina’s disruption of cultural transmission fuels their resentment about the glass ceiling they are unable to shatter ‘despite doing everything right’ (Beaman 2017, 14). They see their own marginalization as the continuation of French colonization. In a conversation about the genetic transmission of memory, Guène speaks about the intimate, bodily inheritance of previous generations’ suffering and expresses her desire to facilitate healing by reconstructing this past experience from a series of fragments and absences:

Je crois beaucoup à ce qu’on appelle la mémoire génétique, ou les traumas transgénérationnels. On hérite de choses qui ne nous sont pas racontées. C’est très fort et cela nous fait deviner la douleur, les sacrifices, c’est dans notre chair. Ces choses s’expriment parfois par le corps. (Bouchenni 2020)

[I believe a lot in what is called genetic memory, or transgenerational trauma. We inherit things that are not told to us. It is very strong and it makes us guess the pain, the sacrifices, it is in our flesh. These things sometimes express themselves through the body.]

The Transmission of Colonial Memory as a Prerequisite for Healing and Reconciliation

A major difference between Guène’s first and last novels resides in the different places the transmission of colonial trauma occupies in both narratives. Sixteen years after being used as a secondary theme in Kiffe kiffe demain, colonial memory is promoted to centre stage in La Discrétion. According to Puig, female filiations play a crucial role in the strikingly intimate way history is discussed in the novel:

Kiffe kiffe demain peut donc se lire comme un hommage aux femmes immigrées qui ont non seulement su créer des liens entre elles dans un environnement nouveau, mais également transmettre, ne serait-ce que par bribe ou de manière indirecte, quelques éléments de l’histoire coloniale à leurs enfants. (2019, 159)

[Kiffe kiffe demain can therefore be read as a tribute to immigrant women who have not only been able to create links between themselves in a new environment, but also to transmit, if only in snatches or indirectly, some elements of colonial history to their children.]

Indeed, in Kiffe kiffe demain, history is primarily addressed through intimate anecdotes Maghrebi immigrant women share with their friends and children. For instance, the memory of 17 October 1961 comes up in a conversation between Yasmina and her daughter while they are watching on television the inauguration by Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë of a plaque honouring the memory of Algerian protesters killed by the police on that day (KKD, 164). Yet, colonization is only fleetingly evoked through the backstory of Aunt Zohra who was born on the day of Algerian independence. In La Discrétion, by contrast, the stakes of transmitting colonial and postcolonial legacies are much higher since the memory of the colonial past is now on the verge of disappearing, threatened not only by state-promoted amnesia and the immigrants’ reticence or incapacity to tell their personal narratives but also the imminent passing of the generation who experienced colonial traumas. While intimate, domestic events and oral history continue to play a crucial role in revealing suppressed memories, history is now tackled from two different angles: the viewpoint of Maghrebi parents who seek to suppress their agonizing memories and that of their children whose task is actively to excavate and reassemble the fragments of the untold stories before their parents’ passing. The gravity of this looming loss and the narration in the third person, without the tempering effect of a humorous first-person voice, contribute to making La Discrétion a much more solemn and poignant narrative than Guène’s previous texts.

Though still focusing on intimate events, La Discrétion is also more turned towards collective memory. Unlike Yasmina’s and Doria’s individual hardship caused by the departure of Doria’s father, the harsh conditions encountered by Yamina in La Discrétion result from colonial violence perpetrated by the French colonizers in Algeria and are later echoed by the racial marginalization of Maghrebi French in France. Similarly, the struggle of Yamina’s children to integrate into France is the collective fate of an entire generation. Unlike Doria in Kiffe kiffe demain, Malika, Hannah, Imane, and Omar are no longer teenagers whose career choices are yet to be made. They are in their early or late thirties and have already completed their studies and chosen their careers. Their difficulty in finding jobs that correspond to their degrees mirrors their disadvantage in the French job market where Maghrebi French are 10% more likely to be unemployed and tend to be 8–13% lower paid than their majority-ethnic counterparts (Boutchenik and Lê 2017). Yamina’s daughter Malika is a civil servant, Hannah is a special needs educator, Imane has a temporary job as a saleswoman while Omar works as an Uber driver. Educated at a French Republican school, they have also acquired their parents’ culture during the summer holidays in Algeria. Compelled to find original ways to bridge their two cultures and reconcile contradicting systems of values in an increasingly hostile environment, they are regularly invited to act as ‘cultural brokers’ (Beaman 2017, 31). Besides professional integration and the search for suitable partners, dealing with their parents’ silenced memory remains one of the most important challenges in the siblings’ lives. Malika engages with this colonial past intellectually through reading and listening to lectures; Imane distances herself from it; Omar seeks evasion through playing videogames while Hannah, prone to nightmares and irrepressible outbursts of anger, confronts it through psychotherapy. One of her therapy sessions focuses on a recurrent dream in which she is drowning in the Seine during the massacre of Algerian protesters under orders from Paris Police Prefect Maurice Papon in 1961. This historical event, only briefly mentioned in Kiffe kiffe demain, is now developed into a rich metaphor evoking silenced history:

Hannah fait souvent des rêves de noyade aussi. Par exemple, elle se débat dans l’eau glacée de la Seine, et autour d’elle flottent des corps sans vie […] Qu’est-ce qu’elle doit faire de toutes ces histoires qui la hantent ? La guerre d’Algérie, le 17 octobre 1961, les ratonnades, les émeutes, les bavures, les histoires de contrôle d’identité qui tournent mal dont on lui parle au boulot. […] Cette colère immense […] Elle voudrait apprendre à apprivoiser, mais cette violence-là ne vient pas de nulle part, elle ne les invente pas, ça a existé, ça existe encore. (LD, 224)

[Hannah often has dreams of drowning too. For example, she struggles in the icy water of the Seine, and around her float lifeless bodies […] What does she have to do with all these stories that haunt her? The Algerian War, 17 October 1961, anti-Arab violence, the riots, police violence, the goofy identity check stories she was told about at work. […] This immense anger […] She would like to learn to tame it, but this violence does not come from nowhere, she did not invent it, it existed, it still exists.]

Hannah’s example demonstrates that colonial memory needs to be liberated from decades of repression through censorship and denial, otherwise the toxic past will continue to divide the nation. By suggesting that the recurrent banlieue uprisings triggered by ongoing discrimination and police violence against postcolonial immigrants form a continuum with the raids and torture perpetrated by the French during the Algerian war, Guène formulates a razor-sharp critique of the Republic’s reluctance to take responsibility for a past which continues to affect the nation’s vivre-ensemble. As she develops a harsher critique of the violence perpetrated against Algerians during and after colonization, her treatment of Maghrebi French gender relations progressively becomes increasingly tempered by tolerance and empathy. Yamina’s admiration for her handsome, blue-eyed father, depicted as a resistance hero, remains unaffected by his decision to take her out of school and to send her off to France to marry an émigré. Her husband Brahim, who showers her with flowers on Valentine’s day and hides banknotes between the pages of her Quran to surprise her, is represented as a character whose complexity challenges the negative stereotypes attached to Muslim masculinity. Yamina’s only son, the sensitive Omar, is another antithesis of the ‘garçon arabe’, described by Guénif-Souilamas, as the stereotype of the banlieue youth whose honour depends on the close control of his sisters:

Omar n’a jamais été ce genre de frère. Il n’a jamais fait la moindre remarque à ses sœurs. […] il réunissait tous les ingrédients de la caricature mais avait réussi à y échapper miraculeusement. Le petit dernier, le chouchou, le fils prodige, le bébé à sa maman. […]. Il est né sur un trône. Mais dehors, il ne sera jamais roi. (LD, 91–92, 97, italics in original)

[Omar was never that kind of brother. He never made the slightest remark to his sisters. […] He gathered all the ingredients of the caricature but had managed to escape it miraculously. The youngest, the darling, the prodigy son, the baby to his mother. […]. He was born on a throne. But outside, he will never be king.]

The siblings’ contested legitimacy as French citizens is bitterly commented upon by Hannah: ‘Quand on est légitimement français, on n’a pas besoin de le prouver, encore et encore!’ [When you are legitimately French, you don’t have to prove it, over and over again!] (LD, 237). The characters’ bitterness seems to echo Guène’s own disillusionment voiced in an interview with Snaije:

Aujourd’hui, je suis une Algérienne qui est née et qui vit en France … Je ne me définis plus du tout comme je le faisais à 20 ans […] Je pensais que j’étais française et j’aurais aimé ça, c’était une idée sympathique … [Mais] quand tu es [un citoyen] légitime, tu n’as pas à justifier qui tu es et ce que tu ressens par rapport à tes origines et au fait d’être français. (Snaije 2020)

[Today, I am an Algerian woman who was born in France and has always lived there … I no longer define myself in the same way as I did at 20 […] Back then I thought I was French and would have liked that, that would have been nice … [But] when you are legitimate [as a citizen], you don’t have to justify who you are and how you feel about your origins and being French.]

Conclusion

A focus on female filiations in Guène’s writing has allowed this article to assess how her depiction of racialized groups, in particular Maghrebi French women, has grown increasingly critical throughout her career. Signs of this progressive politicization include Guène’s efforts to appropriate the legacy of radical decolonial thinkers such as Fanon and Baldwin to reaffirm her position as an artist and intellectual contributing to a global conversation about racial, gendered, and socioeconomic inequalities inherited from colonization which continue to impose a deeply hierarchical world order. Another indicator of this evolution is the expanding importance of political themes in her novels, including colonial and postcolonial memory, the stolen childhood of colonial subjects and the transmission of traumas from immigrant parents to their offspring. Finally, the transition from a witty, playful, and irreverent first-person narrative voice in Kiffe kiffe demain to a more solemn third-person voice in La Discrétion also contributes to the novel’s disillusioned and uncompromising tone.

Less critical of Maghrebi, Muslim, and banlieue masculinities than Kiffe kiffe demain, La Discrétion participates not only in an evolution in Guène’s work but also in a larger trend that has become noticeable in the writing of Maghrebi French writers since the 2000s. As opposed to earlier novels which cast immigrant mothers as the guardians of racial, ethnic, and linguistic legacies as stated by Giorgio (2002), contemporary narratives no longer depict Maghrebi parents as antagonists whose attempts to perpetuate patriarchal cultural models incompatible with western modernity need to be overcome by their children in order to achieve full integration in France. Instead, parents are increasingly represented as appreciated allies whose self-denying sacrifice and carefully preserved cultural and affective resources enable their children to overcome the ambient enmity they face in contemporary France. This trend that humanizes Maghrebi parents and treats them with empathy as the transmitters of solid values, cultural resources and colonial memory can be observed in a range of both female- and male-authored narratives, including Habiba Mahany’s Kiffer sa race (2008), Houda Rouane’s Les pieds-blancs (2006), Kaoutar Harchi’s Comme nous existons (2021), Ahmed Djouder’s Désintégration (2006), Karim Amellal’s Bleu, blanc, noir (2016) and Mabrouck Rachedi’s Tous les mots qu’on ne s’est pas dits (2022). What all these novels have in common is the denunciation of the humiliations suffered by first-generation immigrant parents and the denial of full cultural citizenship to their children, despite their efforts to achieve a higher educational attainment and improved social status (Beaman 2017, 95). Like Yamina’s children in La Discrétion, the main characters of these novels are relatively well-integrated, yet they remain unable to achieve equality.

This shift is likely to be linked to the rise of virulently Islamophobe, anti-immigrant and femonationalist discourses in contemporary France and the demonization of Maghrebi French communities to whom ‘the nation’s colonial history and non-acknowledged racial and ethnic foundations […] [continue to deny] the real and symbolic benefits that come with being part of the French nation’ (Beaman 2017, 100). But Guène’s denunciation of the continuity between past forms of domination experienced by colonized Algerians under French rule, Maghrebi immigrants coerced into remaining ‘discrete’ in France, and the present-day frustration of their descendants who are repeatedly invited to assimilate also echoes her limited consecration as a French writer. Her feelings of being marginalized by French literary institutions despite her commercial success and international acclaim and popularity with the public are frequently voiced in the author’s interviews (Chrisafis 2008; Maameri 2016; Snaije 2020) in which she attributes the relative lack of recognition to her postcolonial, working-class and banlieue origins:

Oddly, considering her huge international success, she hasn’t won any prizes in France, just small informal awards voted by young people and readers. Does she think that will change? ‘The big prizes? Are you crazy? Never, never in my life will I get a prize. That would mean recognizing that what I write is literature, that there are intellectuals in the banlieues. That’s where nothing’s changing and the neo-colonialist vision comes in to play … the idea that the “natives” can do sport, sing and dance but not think’. (Chrisafis 2008)

Although La Discrétion received the Fetkann Maryse Condé award in 2020 and the ON-media award in 2021, Guène is yet to be awarded a major French literary prize. Yet this marginalization is hardly surprising, considering that France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, has only been awarded to twelve women since its creation 117 years ago, and only two of the female awardees, Marie N’Diaye in 2009 and Leila Slimani in 2016, have been racialized women. The reluctance of the literary elites to accept Guène and her co-signatories of the 2007 literary manifesto ‘Qui fait la France’ as their equals also demonstrates the deeply hierarchical nature of the French literary field and the subsequent difficulty for authors belonging to an intersection of race, class, and gender to achieve legitimacy. As Harchi (2016) and Hammou and Harchi (2020, 298) argue, racialized and symbolically dependant writers are often constrained to articulate their viewpoint within the place of the Other, having less control over the interactions anchored in the unequal relations of the worlds of creation. Although it goes beyond the scope of this article to investigate the extent to which Guène’s consecration has been influenced by her race, class or gender and impacted by her association with the banlieues, attraction to a series of themes and preference for specific literary forms, the question of racialized writers’ halted legitimation is a highly relevant and currently understudied issue that requires further exploration over the years to come.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina Horvath

Christina Horvath is a Reader in French Studies at the University of Bath. Her research addresses contemporary urban literature, representations of vulnerable urban neighbourhoods in different art forms as well as the use of art to create more socially just cities. She has published widely on female authors in contemporary French and Francophone literature as well as representations of women in urban and banlieue narratives. Her latest book, Co-Creation in Theory and Practice (Policy Press 2020) conceptualizes new ways of decolonizing knowledge production with communities using art and creativity.

Notes

1. To reference citations from both novels, I will use the acronyms KKD for Kiffe kiffe demain and LD for La Discrétion. The English translations of the extracts from the novels as well as all other citations provided between brackets are mine.

2. Maghrebi French and Muslim French are two largely overlapping categories that have been widely used in reference to French citizens of postcolonial origins. While in this article I give preference to the term ‘Maghrebi French’ for its focus on the geographic origins of the population described in Guène’s novels, ‘Muslim French’, a term used by Fernando (2016), will be used when I am referring to populations specifically targeted by Islamophobic discourses arguing the inassimilability of populations on the grounds of their irreconcilable difference based on their religion, real or assumed.

3. ‘Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ (NPNS), a much-mediatized feminist movement, emerged in 2003 with a manifesto and protest march that denounced the domination of racialized women by racialized men in French banlieues. This strategy of blaming postcolonial minorities as the principal oppressors of women in the French Republic paid off when the movement’s president Fadela Amara was named the Secretary of State for Urban Policies in the right-wing conservative government of Prime Minister François Fillon in June 2007.

4. In everyday French, ‘beurette’ is used as the female version of ‘beur’ and refers to the children of Maghrebi immigrants born and raised in France. This meaning is different from the conceptualization of the term by sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas (2006) explained earlier in this article. Popular in the 1980s, the term is rarely used today by Maghrebi-French women as a way of self-identification. When used to label others, it has a perceptibly condescending undertone.

5. Founder of France’s first parents’ syndicate, Le Front de Mères, Fatima Ouassak is a political activist who advocates the necessity of transmitting a cultural capital based on the knowledge of the culture of origin to provide minority ethnic children with a positive image of themselves and protect them from alienation. She suggests that ‘ce système hostile, raciste, a bien compris que nos familles, le lien qui nous lie à nos enfants, la transmission que nous leur devons, notre histoire, nos mémoires, nos luttes, nos communautés, nos racines, nos langues et notre religion sont des ressources pour nos enfants: un soutien, une écoute, un partage d’expériences, un réseau d’entraide, un front de résistances collectives’ [this hostile, racist system has understood that our families, the bond that binds us to our children, the transmission that we owe to them, our history, our memories, our struggles, our communities, our roots, our languages and our religion are resources for our children: support, listening, sharing of experiences, a support network, a collective resistance front] (Ouassak 2020, 136).

6. This representation also calls attention to ‘l’existence d’une industrie où se combinent racialization, féminisation, exploitation, mise en danger de la santé, invisibilité, sous-qualification, bas salaires, violence et harcèlement sexuels et sexistes’ [the existence of an industry that combines racialization, feminization, exploitation, endangerment of health, invisibility, underqualification, low wages, sexual and gender-based violence and harassment] (Vergès 2019, 9).