History, Gender and Ethnicity in Writing by Women Authors of Maghrebian Origin in France

History, Gender and Ethnicity in Writing by Women Authors of Maghrebian Origin in France Alec G. Hargreaves F EW COMMUNITIES have a more marked tradition of male dom­ ination than the population of Maghrebian origin in France. Until the Algerian war of independence, fought between 1954 and 1962, the Maghrebian immigrant community consisted almost exclusively of young men who had come to sell their labour in the colonial motherland. The last thirty years have brought a radical transformation of this popu­ lation. In increasing numbers, immigrant workers have brought their wives over from the Maghreb; others have married French women. Today, the sons and daughters of immigrant parents, popularly known as Beurs, account for the majority of the Maghrebian population in France. Members of the younger generation began to publish their first works of narrative prose a decade or so ago.1The present essay focuses on the writings published by the small but growing number of women among this group of authors. After delimiting the corpus of works covered, it examines the ways in which history, gender and ethnicity have combined to structure these narratives. An Emerging Corpus Most first-generation immigrants were born and raised in the Maghreb at a time when it was still under colonial rule and education was reserved for Europeans together with a small minority of the indigenous population. Consequently, the great majority of Maghrebian men could neither read nor write when they came to France in search of work, and very few have since learned the necessary skills with which to construct a sustained piece of writing. Their wives were still more disadvantaged. Very few entered employment, through which some of their menfolk acquired at least the rudiments of reading and writing. Many women remained almost entirely housebound, with few opportunities for enroll­ ing in adult education classes or similar activities. Without exception, however, their children all learned to read and write as they passed through the French educational system, which served as a seedbed for the young writers with which we are concerned. Vol. XXXIII, NO. 2 23 L ’E spr it C réa te u r Narratives recounting the experiences of first-generation Maghrebian immigrants do exist, but almost all were written by outsiders. As early as the 1950s, members of the educated Maghrebian elite began writing fic­ tional accounts of the lives of immigrant workers in France. Since the 1970s, journalists and social scientists have conducted tape-recorded interviews with illiterate immigrants, mainly men, whose words have been transformed into written life-histories. Until quite recently, how­ ever, women’s voices have been heard only rarely. Prior to the 1980s, the only substantive account of a woman migrant’s experiences appears to have been that published by the French ethnographer Camille LacosteDujardin in 1977 on the basis of her conversations with the wife of an Algerian immigrant worker in Paris.2 In 1981, mothers and daughters occupied the key roles in Leila Sebbar’s narrative Fatima ou les Algériennes au square, 3 which recounts the everyday lives of Algerian immigrant families in the La Courneuve housing project to the north of Paris. This was the first of what has now become a long series of volumes by Sebbar depicting characters drawn from the Maghrebian community in France, and more particularly members of the younger, so-called Beur, generation. Her best known character is the runaway Scherazade, the heroine of no fewer than three full-length narratives.4 Because Sebbar has written so extensively about the younger generation of Maghrebians in France, she herself has often been wrongly taken for a Beur. Unlike Scherazade, whose father is an immigrant worker in a Paris car factory, Sebbar lived until the age of 17 in colonial Algeria, where her French mother and Algerian father were both schoolteachers. As Sebbar has acknowledged,5while she has much in common with the Beurs, she is not in fact one of them, for she did not, like them, spend her formative years in France as part of a working-class Maghrebian immigrant family. The first novel by a writer issued from that milieu was published in 1981.6Since then, well over twenty such authors, including half...