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value. Yet such a summary evaluation would
not do justice to the range and quality of beur
writing. On the one hand, it shows a variety of
forms, including short stories, poems, plays and
essays, as well as novels which depart from the
semi-autobiographical format and texts which
freely use a mix of genres. On the other hand,
striking stylistic qualities in the handling of lan-
guage, humour and modes of narration can be
identified in many of the texts, as in the work
of Farida Belghoul, Leïla Houari, Ahmed
Kalouaz and Ramdane Issaad.
Certain key themes can be traced across a
number of texts. The fundamental problem-
atic of language, naming and identity is raised
in the titles of novels, such as Sakinna
Boukhedenna’s Journal ‘Nationalité:
immigré(e)’ (1987), Akli Tadjer’s 1984 publi-
cation Les ANI du ‘Tassili’ (where ANI stands
for Arabes Non Identifiés), Tassadit Imache’s
1989 work Une Fille sans histoire (An Ordi-
nary Girl) and Soraya Nini’s 1993 Ils disent
que je suis une beurette! (They Say I’m a
Beurette!), while titles like Azouz Begag’s Le
Gone du Chaâba (which mixes Lyonnais slang
with Arabic), Belghoul’s Georgette! (a sign of
the narrator’s inability to enunciate her own
name) and Ferrudja Kessas’s anglicized Beur’s
Story (1990) provide further indications of the
perceived limitations of the French language
for the expression of the author’s concerns.
These texts demonstrate an ability to articu-
late a variety of types of language, including
popular speech forms, slang and backslang,
English, Arabic and Berber borrowings, and
heavily accented spoken French. The imme-
diacy of this hybrid language, to be found in
particular in the work of Moussa Labkiri,
Tadjer, Begag and Belghoul, constitutes one of
the ‘pleasures’ of beur writing.
Many, though not all, of the texts are
semiautobiographical romans d’apprentissage,
which focus on the struggle of a central charac-
ter of the same age and gender as the author to
come to terms with the double marginalization
experienced by being at odds with both paren-
tal culture and the majority culture. Critical
descriptions of the school and the housing es-
tate or project form the backdrop to narratives
relating the protagonists’ anguished negotiation
of relationships with peer groups and family,
both in the early works of Charef and Begag
and in novels of the 1990s like Brahim
Benaïcha’s Vivre au paradis: d’une oasis à un
bidonville (Life in Paradise…) and Djura’s Le
Voile du silence (The Veil of Silence). Represen-
tations of the parents are generally informed by
an intense love-hate relationship, and the role
of the Arab father is particularly problematic,
especially in female-authored novels which chal-
lenge traditional Maghrebin gender roles. Many
of these texts also demystify aspirations of a
‘retour au pays’ (homecoming) through ac-
counts of travels to the Maghreb, as in Houari’s
1985 novel Zeïda de nulle part (Zeïda, from
Nowhere), which confirm that the beur genera-
tion has no place there.
A structuring element of most beur-authored
texts is French racism and its effects. Racist
murders are the starting point for the elabora-
tion of the subjectivity of the central protago-
nists in Nacer Kettane’s 1985 text Le Sourire
de Brahim (Brahim’s Smile), which invokes the
events of 17 October 1961, when peaceful Al-
gerian demonstrators died at the hands of the
French police, Ahmed Kalouaz’s Point
kilométrique 190 (1986) which reworks the
incident in which Habib Grimzi was thrown
from a train by three French legion-naires, and
Charef’s 1989 novel Le Harki de Mériem
(Mériem’s Harki), which traces the origins of
conflict to French colonial rule in Algeria. In
the more autobiographical texts, confrontations
with unemployment, crime, drugs, prison and
death, as in Mehdi Lalloui’s Les Beurs de Seine
(1986), are attributable to French racism. These
texts therefore invite their French readers to
acknowledge the beurs’ pain and aspire to-
wards a more just, integrated French society.
Beur writing proposes a new, critical look
at both French and Maghrebin society. While
it may not constitute a ‘minor literature’ as
proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, its
foregrounding of voices from the margins calls
into question dominant assumptions about
French culture and identity.
CARRIE TARR
beur writing