France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (review)

This publication is timely in view of recent violence among North African minorities in Paris and its spread to other cities across France. The civil strife is caused by alienation and frustration among Muslims who have not been integrated into French society and who instead live in urban slums, suffering from inequality, poverty, and unemployment. They straddle two worlds but belong to neither.

Mireille Rosello is not a stranger to this topic; she has several publications on immigrants and ethnicity in French culture. France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters examines the work of writers of Maghrebi origin, focusing on immigrants, whose stories are important not only in rendering their painful experience but also in touching on so many issues that are relevant today. Despite their importance, historians often ignore these stories. Rosello has produced a well-written and highly informative book not only because she skillfully uses the rich materials available but also because of the truly prodigious research she conducted. Her book provides a broad but critical review of relevant literature on the subject. She presents case studies to illustrate performative encounters, which she describes as "mak[ing] something happen where nothing was."

The book is divided into six chapters. Each discusses a different form of performative encounter. Rosello begins the first chapter with the reconciliation of France and Algeria in the 1990s after forty years of estrangement. She deals with the question of whether the two countries are best considered as members of a couple (hybridity) or as separate entities (metissage). She examines several literary models of encounter to determine "which new protocols of encounter have emerged between the two 'complementary enemies' and to ascertain what consequences such changes have had on the definition of the parties."

In the second chapter, Rosello examines several books that did not choose theoretical models of hybridity. Assia Djebar's narratives strongly suggest "the need for imaginative protocols of encounters between historically estranged identities." In Felicie's Body, Djebar created a French-Algerian couple (Felicie and Mohammed) that events put in asymmetrical positions. As the narrative begins, Mohammed has been dead for quite some time and Felicie lies in coma in a Paris hospital. This silence gives their children the opportunity to describe the choices the parents had made. Each child was given a Muslim and Christian name. The double names give them "a new understanding of the connection between the name of a person, their identity and their singular agency or desire." According to Rosello, Djebar used this duality not as a bridge linking two parts but as a point of departure that generated multiple encounters with others and with self.

In the third chapter, Rosello uses semi-autobiographical novels and essays as the basis for discussion of linguistic encounters. She convincingly argues that there is "a direct and conscious link . . . between the language one decided to use and the result one wants to achieve." From the outset, she rejects the use of "arabization," which, in her judgment, is "a restrictive word" that does not take into account the existence of other languages (French, Berber, and other spoken dialects). She prefers "lingualization" or "creolization" to describe the continuing linguistic encounters that take place in the Maghreb. She is in agreement with Fouad Laroui, who claims that "Moroccan [language] does not exist." He describes the language spoken by his mother and others during his childhood as "a ratatouille of Arabic, Berber, and French words, plus a few words of Spanish and ad hocs to round it all up." Rosello states that his use of ratatouille is not only "an obviously negative version of the melting pot, but also a symptom of the author's determination to avoid pathos." She points out that his narrators take language out of conventional dyads and instead treat encounter as "humorous storytelling that manages to go beyond the crippling alternative between mother's tongue and mother tongue."

Rosello acknowledges that Maghrebi writers seem to have a love-hate...