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  • Virtual Homes:Space and Memory in the Work of Yamina Benguigui
  • Isabelle McNeill

In an interview included on the DVD of Mémoires d'immigrés (1997), Yamina Benguigui describes memory in terms of a building in need of construction. She says that the image "peut aussi devenir une petite pierre pour construire cette édifice qui est la mémoire, et que, à mieux connaître son histoire on finira par s'enraciner." In this article I will explore how Benguigui has sought to construct this sense of enracinement through her filmmaking. Moving between the genres of fiction and documentary, her work can be seen as an attempt to create a virtual home by establishing a place in French collective consciousness for otherwise marginalised memories.

Benguigui is a French filmmaker, born in Lille in 1953 to Algerian parents. She made her way into filmmaking in the late 1980s by working as a production assistant, going on to found the production company Bandits Productions in 1989 with Rachid Bouchareb. She began making her own films in the mid-1990s, making two three-part documentaries. Femmes d'Islam (1994) explores female Muslim identity through interviews with women in France as well as in a range of other countries. Mémoires d'immigrés: l'héritage maghrébin (1997) focuses on the often untold and unheard memories of North African migration to France, in particular in the decades following the Second World War. Benguigui took up this theme from a different perspective in her fiction feature film Inch'Allah dimanche (2001), which focuses on one woman's arrival in France in the 1970s during the regroupement familial, when immigrant labourers were permitted to bring their wives and children over to France. Since then, Benguigui has made another documentary, Le Plafond de verre, les défricheurs (2006), which scrutinizes the insidious discrimination, still inherent in the job market in France, against those from immigrant backgrounds. More recently still she has worked on another fiction project that also focuses on the present rather than the past: Aïcha, which was conceived as a television series for France 2 and currently exists as a film available on DVD.1 The eponymous protagonist dreams of leaving her cité and living in central Paris, or "in France" as she calls it. At the same time she is profoundly attached to her family and the Maghrebi community of the cité, and she finds herself torn between the different aspects of her identity. [End Page 12]

In this article I will be concerned with the works that engage most directly with the history of North African immigration to France: Mémoires d'immigrés and Inch'Allah dimanche. It is these films that most explicitly combine questions of memory in the sense of an engagement with the past, with problems of space and place, and most particularly of home. As the quotation with which I began this article shows, Benguigui sees the filmic construction of a "memory edifice" as a means of putting down roots. Seen in this way, film, whose petites pierres allow the construction of memory, becomes a virtual space that creates a sense of "home." Ultimately, I will argue that this filmic construction (made not just from images but also, importantly, from sounds) is one into which a wide community of spectators, perhaps particularly the so-called français de souche, are invited as guests. This inclusion is a crucial aspect of the creation of a virtual home, both because it reverses the expected structures of hospitality in which the "host country" welcomes or rejects immigrants, but also because it creates a cultural space in which France itself is conceived as shared homeland.

Conceiving of home

From this introduction, it will be clear that I am drawing on different but related meanings of the English word "home." It is important to acknowledge that in both French and Arabic, the languages that are relevant to the material being discussed, there is no single equivalent signifier for "home" (chez soi is perhaps the closest in French). However, this lack of a semantic equivalent does not invalidate the conceptual nexus suggested by the word. As it is understood across a...

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