Parisian Dystopias: : The Mothers of Maghrebi Migration in Yamina Benguigui’s Mémoires D’immigrés, Mehdi Charef’s Le Thé au Harem D’Archi Ahmed and Leïla Sebbar’s Fatima ou les Algériennes au Square

This essay analyzes the ‘life trajectories’ of first-generation Algerian women or the mothers of Maghrebi migration who came to France to join their husbands in the 1960s and 1970s. This migration was a result of the family reunification process legislated by the government of President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing in 1974. The analysis seeks to answer the following questions: What are the political, social and spatial impasses the mothers encounter when they are forced into the suburban housing projects? How are migrating gender roles reconfigured in diaspora through the women’s multiple displacements as North-African-Muslim-immigrant-women-in-France? In turn, how do the women de-colonize and feminize memory through orality, new definitions of ‘literariness’, and gendered affirmations of their identity in an attempt to elude patriarchal silencing and cultural erasure? These questions are explored in three texts: a series of interviews with the mothers in Yamina Benguigui’s Mémoires d’immigrés: l’héritage maghrébin, Mehdi Charef’s semi-autobiographical novel Le thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (Tea in the Harem) and Leïla Sebbar’s Fatima ou les Algériennes au square.