From North Africa to France: Family Migration in Text and Film by Isabel Hollis-Touré (review)

This relatively short book examines an eclectic corpus of novels as well as fictional and documentary films that, in one way or another, reflect ‘a shift during the 1970s in North African immigration to France, from mainly single male labour migration to predominantly family reunification’ (p. 26). Issues of displacement, migration, exile, and cultural hybridity, familiar tropes of postcolonial theory, are thus viewed through the prism of the North African immigrant family that will probably remain in France, as opposed to the individual migrant worker who will eventually return to his country of origin. Instead of focusing on single men, Isabel Hollis-Touré’s book takes into account how women and children negotiate the challenges of cultural adjustment that result from immigration and resettlement. Some of the authors, filmmakers, and works studied in this book are well known. Yamina Benguigui is represented through her documentary Mémoires d’immigrés: l’héritage maghrébin (1997) and her fictional film Inch’Allah dimanche (2001). Others include Abdellatif Kechiche’s film La Graine et le mulet (2007) and Faïza Guène’s novel Du rêve pour les oufs (2006). Lesser-known works are also studied: Elisabeth Leuvrey’s documentary La Traversée (2013), as well as novels by Fawzia Zouari (Ce pays dont je meurs (Paris: Ramsay, 1999)) and Mahi Binebine (Cannibales (Paris: Fayard, 1999). The outlier is Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005), which fits less well into the overall design of Hollis-Touré’s book. Chapter 1 provides comparative analyses of the films by Leuvrey and Benguigui, which ‘stand apart from the body of documentary work dealing with immigration, as they portray migrants discussing their own migration’ (p. 33). It includes an interesting discussion of the partly metaphorical ‘third space’ between France and the Maghreb. Chapter 2 is the most wide-ranging, examining another aspect of Benguigui’s documentary, along with the novels by Binebine, Zouari, and Guène, in order to assess ‘the troubling recurrence of physical and psychological decline in representations of male migrants’ (p. 64). Chapter 3 compares how women are represented in Benguigui’s fictional film and in Zouari’s novel, and how their bodies are the focus of different gazes and expectations within France and North Africa. Doubly isolated, the immigrant wife/mother is ‘cut off from the community of origin due to her departure, and cut off from the host society due to her absence from the social sphere’ (p. 88). Chapter 4, also partly devoted to Zouari’s novel, as well as to the films by Kechiche and Haneke, appraises the concept of ‘integration’ of immigrants into the host society. As Hollis-Touré points out, integration ‘has come to be perceived as stigmatizing not only immigrants, but in particular their descendants born in France, for whom the term should, technically, be redundant’ (p. 117). This chapter could have been enhanced by comparing the French concept of integration with the ‘mission civilisatrice’ rationale of the colonial period. While a few readers might wish that some of Hollis-Touré’s statements, such as the assertion that Islam has been unfairly maligned as ‘an enemy of gender equality’ (p. 85), were more fully argued, her book consistently provides stimulating analyses.