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The Generation of Generations 151 5 / The Generation of Generations: Beur Identity and Political Agency Sonya was twenty-five when she met Kamel, five years her senior, in the northern Paris suburb of Villetaneuse. She was finishing a degree in education at the university; he was studying sociology. Her Kabyle parents didn’t approve of this relationship—they dismissed Kamel, who was born in western Algeria and raised in France, as an “Arab” and not suitable son-in-law material. But Sonya is independent and determined to have a different life than that of her mother and maternal aunt, and today the couple live together, in spite of parental objections, in Sonya’s state employee apartment in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Sonya was born in Paris to parents born in the late 1940s to patrilineally related families of notable lineage of the same Kabyle village near Bejaïa. At the start of the war in Algeria, in the familiar pattern of lghorba (exile), members of both families came to Aubervilliers to join their husbands and fathers, who had been there since the mid-1930s working in the north-suburban factories. Although both sets of Sonya’s grandparents would return to Algeria after the war ended, Sonya’s parents would come back to France together after their marriage in 1966 and settle in a private apartment in a recently built cité in Saint-Denis, where Sonya was born shortly later. Educated for the most part in France, Sonya’s father worked as a designer in a sports equipment factory, eventually opened his own small sportswear production business, and moved his family into a singlefamily pavilion in Aubervilliers. Sonya grew up with her younger brother and sister in the northern suburbs of Paris, and feels very attached to her département of Seine–Saint-Denis, or what she refers to simply as “93.” 152 Algeria in France At the same time, Sonya feels largely “at ease” in Kabylia. She spent her summer vacations with her father, mother, and three siblings in her family’s village in Kabylia until 1993, when the civil war in Algeria made these visits too dangerous. During the last visit, she stayed in the village for an extra two weeks by herself, but while she felt completely “at home” (chez moi), she did not want to stay any longer. Her two brothers felt the same way, for while their paternal grandfather very much wanted them to do their military service in Algeria, they insisted on doing it in France. On this issue, they had support from their parents, who taught them that it was important, as second-generation immigrants, to be integrated in France. Likewise, Sonya’s parents never put pressure on her to conform to Muslim orthopraxy, though Sonya abstains from alcohol and pork out of respect for their cultural and religious values. However, her parents did oversee her sexual life and expressed a strong desire that she marry another Kabyle. Absolutely not wanting to follow the example of her mother or her mother’s sister, who is only two years older than Sonya—married at fourteen and fifteen years old respectively to men from their village—Sonya spent five years from the age of sixteen convincing her parents to let her live by herself. They have never fully accepted her independence nor her exogamously dating an “Arab,” which they view as almost as bad as her dating a “Frenchman.” Even today, when her grandparents return for a visit from their retirement in Algeria, she returns to her parents’ house and “plays the good daughter.” As teenagers in the early 1980s, both Sonya and Kamel, like many of their peers, became involved in the multicultural and anti-racist movements that swept France. For his part, Kamel became very active in the burgeoning milieu of Beur associations, participated in the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism (widely known as the Marche des Beurs), and eventually took part in the organizing committee of the 1985 March for Civic Rights. His decision to take an active role in community development sprang from two directions: first, his discovery as a late teenager of the richness of his Arab heritage that had been obfuscated in school; and second, his everyday experiences of racism growing up as a young Algerian in France. Kamel was born in western Algeria, but came to France with his parents when he was a baby just after the war. In one instance that he recounted, “I was playing...

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