Abstract
Beur literature designates artistic production by the second generation of Algerian immigration to France, gaining attention after the 1983 ‘Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racism’. Since the late 1980s, French and American scholars working with postcolonial and poststructuralist theories have tended to situate Beur literary production vis-à-vis French identity and conceptualise it as a site of social critique. This scholarship sees in Beur literary production an instance of hybridisation and ambivalence, estranging French identity. Useful and necessary as it is, historicising the Beur might require rethinking this approach. Following early activists’ struggles that constituted in part the historic conditions of Beur identity reveals a heterogeneous field of competing identities and political strategies. Activists’ accounts suggest a process of identity centralisation in which Beur identity, as a cultural hybrid, rewrote other more radical positions and rendered them illegible. These struggles, revolving around questions of work and alternatives forms of social organisation, allow us, first, to recognise the fact that current Beur scholarship has been, for the most part, limited to a critique of the French state, and, second, to situate Beur history and Beur literature in the larger context of globalisation.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, almost 20 years after the Algerian war ended and with it direct colonial rule, France began to experience what psychoanalysts sometimes refer to as the ‘return of the repressed’: the coming-of-age of the second generation of Algerian immigrants on its own soil. Sons and daughters of migrant workers, mostly born in France after or immediately before 1962, this generation was educated in France, spoke French in school and some Arabic at home, and was eligible, for the most part, for French citizenship. Changing the historic status of their parents from ‘Arabes en France’ to ‘Arabes de France’, 1 these changes and others, spurred endless conversations and debates about French identity, some of which are still going on today and showing no less uncertainty as to their outcome. At a certain moment, and I will problematise this moment, they came to be known popularly as Beurs, which is said to be a double verlan inversion (arabe – rebeu – beur). The designation ‘Beur’ itself was mostly known in Paris and was first popularised via Radio Beur, established in 1981 (Durmelat, 2008). The designation gained national and historic significance thanks to the 1983 ‘Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racism’ (dubbed: ‘Marche des Beurs’). 2 The participants and organisers of the march, numbering barely 15 in the beginning, set out from a banlieue of Lyon on 15 October and arrived at the place de la Bastille in Paris on 3 December with a hundred thousand supporters. Socialist Party president, François Mitterrand, who owed his 1981 electoral victory not least to the support of the North African community, met eight of the organisers that evening, and by the end of the night, despite much disillusionment to come and many new beginnings, Beurs had won their place in official French history.
Novels written by Beurs began to appear – at least according to the official account by Alec Hargreaves (1997) – in 1981, but gained popularity only in February 1983 with the overnight success of the novel Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed by the young mechanic and petty criminal, Mehdi Charef. In 1986 nine Beur novels were published, and one novel in particular, Le Gone du Chaâba by Azouz Begag – a doctor in economics – caught the attention of French readers. Ever since, French and American literary scholarship on Beur literature, has been for the most part affirming and approving. Whether their interpretive schema draws on poststructuralist theory, postcolonial or sociological studies, critics tend to situate Beur literary production vis-à-vis French nationalism, understanding it as an example of hybridisation that challenge and defamiliarises French identity. In what follows I provide a short critique on this scholarship and offer an alternative.
Reading scholarly studies on Beur literature (Emery, 2004; Hargreaves, 1987, 1990, 1997; Ireland, 1988), one cannot but notice the direct expressive relation critics establish between social phenomena and artistic production. Furthermore, considering that Beur novels first received attention thanks to Beur activism and social movement, one wonders about the lack of any serious discussion as to the relation between the two. In the simplest version, the ‘expressive’ relation takes on an unmediated discussion of themes. For example, Susan Ireland (1988: 72, emphasis added) argues that:
since the 1940s, large numbers of workers and refugees have left their homelands for economic or political reasons, creating large diasporas that seek a place, a voice, and a sense of belonging in a new country. During the same period, the corresponding literary trope of exile … has become a leitmotiv in texts written in many parts of the world.
While putting aside the nominalist critique of representation advanced by poststructuralist theorists since the 1960s, this kind of homology disregards what is now a widespread acceptance of conceptualising any act of representation as, if not as ideologically motivated, then at least more neutrally as an act of figuration (Jameson, 1981; Ricœur, 1984; White, 1973). As Pierre Macherey (2006 [1966]: 132), critiquing orthodox Marxist readings of Tolstoy, reminds us, ‘the text is not directly rooted in historical reality but only through a complex sequence of mediations … the relationship between text and ideology is not spontaneous … [thus we ask] what is specifically literary in the text’. Without accounting for the ‘work of the literary’, much like the work of the dream, interpretation is quite simply reduced to reproducing the conscious materials of the artwork.
In more poststructuralist readings (Hochberg, 2005; Durmelat, 1996), scholars criticise this very thematic approach and direct our attention to the discursive subversion of identity. They conceptualise identity as discursively produced by normative institutions (the state, the school, the media and so forth) and find examples where such discursive normativity is interrupted. We can find such an example in Gil Hochberg’s reading of Georgette! a novel by Farida Belghoul (1986), a writer and an activist. Working with Judith Butler’s elaborations on the abject, Hochberg concludes by saying,
If we get lost trying to make sense of Georgette’s … condensed, mad, and idiosyncratic narratives; if we are blinded and dazed by endless transfigurations of identity, spinning adjectives … delivered through the use of incorrect or archaic syntax, mismatched linguistic registers, or grammatical errors [it is because] these failures are the means by which … Belghoul redirect[s] the disruptive force of racial abjection in order to invite us to question ‘the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility’. More specifically, in revisiting the so-called ‘problem of immigration’ through the failed narratives of the outcast … Belghoul remind[s] us that this problem is in fact ‘produced’ through a continual process of signification that locates in the immigrant the border of the legitimate national subject. (Hochberg, 2005: 175, emphasis added)
Although I share Hochberg’s concern about essentialism, other issues are at stake here. It is evident that Hochberg does not consider the institutional and political discontinuities between her position as a first-world critic on the poststructuralist left in the United States and that of a dominated subject in France whose relation to the French left ever since 1981 has been fraught with contradictions, to say the least. If, for Hochberg, or indeed for other similar poststructuralist readings, minority literature becomes the battleground for waging philosophical wars against essentialism, then for Belghoul the activist essentialising identity is the very condition of political action. Belghoul (1987: 97) made this very clear in her programmatic article about Algerian immigration. After acknowledging that Algerian youth are in solidarity with French youth of the banlieues she insists also on their difference. She argues that this solidarity ‘n’empêche pas que les jeunes algériens détiennent une spécificité qui constituera longtemps encore le moteur principe d’une action qui ne peut se confondre avec l’ensemble du mouvement social et politique français, au risque de se perdre’. Clearly Belghoul insists here on that difference that the poststructuralist critic seeks to demystify. If Belghoul’s novel could be said to demystify identity while her political position insists on it, I would suggest moving more cautiously between the political and the literary, and consider the conditions for this contradiction.
Disregarding these determinations, the poststructuralist critic subsumes Belghoul in her own political agenda and quite simply, in the process of theoretical rewriting, takes Belghoul’s text as a literary exemplar of poststructuralist theory. This subsumption, together with a lack of historical research, turns Hochberg’s conceptual apparatus into the very condition of legibility for the literary text. And yet, in an act of projection, Hochberg locates in the object – that is, in the novel itself – the independent capacity to subvert normative discourse. And when this projection has been secured, it is Belghoul herself who is awarded with subjectivity and agency, and with ‘rescuing’ the discussion of cultural difference from its ‘typical representation’. Here, however, one must ask: is it Belghoul who ‘rescues’ the reification of cultural difference or the poststructuralist critic? While I understand the motivation of the first-world critic to articulate Belghoul’s agency, this desire should be questioned. In sociological terms, what transpires in Hochberg’s reading could be explained by reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on the literary field (1966, 1996), where (and I simplify) the properties of artistic objects are produced by the system of relations within the literary field in a given historical moment. And yet this system is obscured by an act of ‘objectification’ where the work itself is said to express this or that aesthetic value. In more philosophical terms, turning to Adorno’s critique of philosophy (1984 [1958]: 165) and adapting it to this context, it seems that Hochberg’s poststructuralist critique ‘translates the exigencies of the object into those of its conceptual organization’.
The point here is not to be satisfied with pointing a finger at poststructuralist thought and accuse it of projection, but rather reflect on the more dialectical question, namely: under what circumstances do thought or subjectivity pass themselves off so unreflectively as objectivity? Under what conditions does poststructuralism turn so idealistic as to suggest that reified consciousness could be changed by yet another act of thought, by reminding us that identity is discursively produced?
When critics do incorporate dissenting positions on Beur literature it is usually done in order to dismiss them. Thus, for example, Samia Mehrez (1993: 31), reading Azouz Begag’s novel in order to debunk Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of ‘deterritorialisation’, ends up delegitimising Beurs’ critique on Beur writers and questioning their representation. As she argues:
the attack from within the North African community at large, which simply accuses Beur cultural production of being complicitous with the dominant culture and portrays it as having been bought, eradicates the importance of Beur contribution to the struggle against exile.
Underplaying the critique of Beur activists – those mounting the attack – who were engaged in the struggle against racism and discrimination, one wonders again if the critic did not rewrite his/her object according to the interests of their own field. Taking the opposite position from Hochberg, Mehrez leads one to believe that Beur literature is in the service of debunking poststructuralism.
These are just a few examples of a relatively prevalent literary practice to consider questions of social struggles as questions of symbolic signification, and it is not difficult to notice with what ease a Beur text is recruited as evidence in the service of any theoretical tendency. Prevalent and popular as they are, these readings tend to abstract cultural practices from their material conditions of possibility and offer us a skewed account of their significance. Pheng Cheah, in critiquing Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity from a position quite sympathetic to poststructuralism, explains more generally the limitations of such readings, and their over-investment in acts of signification.
Any extrapolation from this negative use of hybridity to articulate a general theory of transformative agency inevitably exaggerates the role of signification and cultural representation in the functioning of sociopolitical life and its institutions … These linguistic culturalisms elide the point that even though culture is not reducible to empirical determinations such as politics and economics, it is not entirely autonomous or free from the taint of such determinations because it emerges from its relationships with these forces. These sociological and empirico-material constraints constitute and bind culture. (Cheah, 1998: 298–9)
The affirming nature of Beur scholarship, I suggest, is not a matter of this or that critic’s tendency, and should be understood as a more general condition. To engage that condition, I will recall that what I believe is missing from Beur scholarship is a mediating term between Beurs (as an imagined social group) and Beur literary production. More precisely, it seems to me that for institutional and historical reasons too broad to engage here, Beur scholarship conflates the two and as a consequence lacks the critical distance that will allow it, on the one hand, to affiliate itself with the just struggles of a minority group, but, on the other hand, to remain critical of its symbolic productions. The concept of ideology, especially if we take Louis Althusser’s now classic definition (1971), could do the work of mediation and interpretation, allowing us to conceive of Beur literary production as an imaginary relation to Beurs’ real conditions of existence. Understood as an imaginary act, the text will not be grasped as a repository of reality, nor as its subversion or production, but, as Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961) once argued about myth, as an imaginary resolution of a social contradiction. Understood in this way, we should be attuned not only to Beurs’ conscious political interventions, but also, and perhaps primarily, to their unconscious – to what they cannot say.
Although the ‘social contradiction’ in relation to which the imaginary act is understood as a ‘resolution’, is itself, as Bourdieu might say, a stake in the struggle over meaning, it is still a matter of historical context. Few will object to this statement, but most will take this history for granted. It will be useful at this moment to problematise the historical level on which Beur novels are read. I suggest beginning with two sites, the political and the economic: the former refers to the state and the latter to the more encompassing category of social formation. With this provisional separation of sites, we can now observe that Beur scholarship, invoking French identity, uniform French education, and so forth, has focused primarily on the state and its tendency to unify identity and culture. As a rejoinder, cultural expression of ethnicised subjects, its multiplicity and diversity, is conceptualised as a source of resistance. But, as we know from anthropological, sociological and historical accounts, Beurs and their parents, the so-called ‘first generation’, emerged into French consciousness not only in the sites of the cultural and political, but also in the sites of the economic (Balibar, 1984; Dubet, 1987; Llaumett, 1985; Sayad, 1977; Tapinos, 1975; Tripier, 1990; Zeharoui, 1976). The first generation were migrant workers, immigrating to France with the advent of its reconstruction after World War II, and the second generation came of age precisely at the moment of the global economic crisis of 1973 that brought about France’s de-industrialisation and mass layoffs, especially in the automobile and heavy industries where the majority of immigrants were employed. These economic phenomena pertain to what Ernest Mandel (1975) called ‘late capitalism’ whose ‘cultural logic’ was dubbed by Fredric Jameson (1991) ‘postmodernity’. On this level, it is now possible to situate Beur literature not only in relation to the state, but also in relation to a larger historical narrative, i.e. postmodernity or, more aptly, globalisation. 3
Suggesting a general dialectic between social and cultural phenomena (not unsimilar to Beur history) and globalisation, Jameson argues:
If you insist on the cultural contents of this new communicational form [postmodernism/globalization], I think you will slowly emerge into a postmodern celebration of difference and differentiation … the emergence of a whole immense range of groups, races, genders, ethnicities into the public sphere; a falling away of those structures that condemned whole segments of the population to silence and to subalternity … If, on the other hand, your thoughts turn economic … what comes to the fore is increasing identity … the rapid assimilation of hitherto autonomous national markets and productive zones into a single sphere … the forced integration of countries all over the globe into precisely the new global division of labor … Here what begins to infuse our thinking of globalization is a picture of standardization on an unparalleled new scale. (Jameson, 2009: 437)
Following Jameson (without, however, completely accepting his notion of ‘standardisation’), if understanding Beur literature vis-à-vis the state was marked as a positive phenomenon associated with multiplicity, then on the economic level this very multiplicity is reversed and aligned with the commodification of the market. Here it is important to note what we usually underplay in this context, i.e. that Beur literature wages its battle on a political level, against a uniform French identity, on the grounds of the cultural, which, if we follow Jameson as well as Adorno, and Horkheimer before him (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002), takes on more and more the logic of the market. Collapsing the political and the cultural, we at times underplay the important fact that writing a novel for a commercial publishing house means submitting to different structural conditions than, say, organising a Beur strike or founding a Beur association that fights for housing rights, education and labour. By distinguishing the two levels I do not mean to suggest that works of art are not ‘political’, but that it is advisable to reflect on what the ‘political’ means in the age of globalisation, and what kind of political thoughts are possible within the culture industry and, in contradistinction, in social struggles.
The familiar argument that cultural production was turning more and more economic (and vice versa) was already noticed in France when Beur literature first began. In 1984, Monique Gadant (1984: 1989) voiced concerns about the new Beur discourse:
Métissage culturel, biculturalité, interculturalité … dans cette inflation du discours sur la culture ne se cache-t-il pas une mystification? Le discours sur la culture ne masque-t-il pas de enjeux de classe? … L’émigré peut-il se situer comme un producteur de culture dans ce champ où on le vise comme un objet à consommer?
Gadant draws our attention to a displacement affected by Beur literature and the Beur discourse in general: she maintains that Beur discourse obscures questions of social relations, and reminds us that Beur cultural production is inscribed within the logic of consumption. Relying on Gadant and Jameson, and taking my cue from Hargreaves’ own remark (1997: 51), 4 I suggest asking why questions of class or work – or, more generally, questions pertaining to the relation between Beurs and capitalism – are quite rare in Beur literature and Beur scholarship. To suggest a possible answer to this absence let me turn to Beur activism and to those events preceding the emergence of Beur discourse.
Beurs or loubards?
As I mentioned earlier, Beur discourse became popular in France with the unprecedented success of the 1983 march. However, the ‘second generation’ entered the consciousness of French society a little earlier, in the late 1970s. According to sociologists Saïd Bouamama (1994), Adil Jazouli (1986) and François Dubet (1987), the 1973 economic crisis, together with a heightened xenophobic atmosphere, produced one of the most spectacular events of 1981: North African youth stealing expensive cars, racing them with the police, and burning them during the night for everyone to see. Taking place in Minguettes (a suburb of Lyon), this was called the ‘1981 rodéos of Minguettes’. As Jazouli explained (1986: 84), the spectacular nature of these events, made sensational by the media, was perceived to be a new phenomenon, in that not only was the violence of a spectacular nature, but the youth could not be aligned with any recognisable political organisation. How were the perpetrators of these acts designated? Reporting on these incidents in September 1981, one of TF1’s television news shows signed off the story about a rodéo incident saying: ‘c’est peut-être le début d’une escalade dont rêvent précisément les loubards [hooligans]’. 5 It was in 1981, in Lyon, far from the Parisian Beur and well before the 1983 march. So how did the loubard turn into a Beur, and why do we not have a loubard literature but do have a Beur one?
Saïd Bouamama, a sociologist and an activist who participated in and organised political activities during the 1980s, argues that the shift from loubards to Beurs was a highly politicised one, designating an ideological rewriting of political and media discourses:
Avant la marche de 1983, les jeunes issue de l’immigration n’existent pas pour la société française. Plus précisément, leur sortie de l’invisibilité sociale a connu deux périodes contrastées: la première, connotée négativement, s’enclenche avec les rodéos de l’été 81. La seconde, connotée positivement, démarre avec la Marche. Entre-temps, les méchants casseurs et délinquants se sont transformés en ‘gentils Beurs.’ S’il y a effectivement une nouvelle réalité sociologique avec l’émergence d’une génération née de l’immigration, les contours et les ruptures sont loin d’être là où le discours politique et médiatique les ont situés pendant et après la Marche. (Bouamama, 1994: 68)
Bouamama, in one of the most important accounts of the Beur movement, maps in detail its contradictory development: how the spectacular violence of the loubards turned into local organised action of independent activists, how these then moved from the neighbourhoods of Lyon, Paris and elsewhere into the national space of the French nation, and how, since 1984, the fledgling attempts to build a national and independent Beur movement have failed to materialise. What is of import and relevance in Bouamama’s account is his claim that during and after the 1983 march, as a result of contact with French Christian organisations and political parties on the left, the materialist and more radical discourse of the so-called loubards was recoded in humanist and cultural terms. The irony, it seems, is that at the moment when the Beur movement was able to speak of its claims in the national space of the French republic and ‘enter’ into French history, these claims had to change. Similarly, sociologist Maria Llaumett recognises this split between ‘cultural’ and ‘social-economic’ aspects, and cites the following statement from the members of the Lyon group l’Association d’Expression des Jeunes Immigrés:
L’appartenance de nos familles à ce qu’on appelle la classe ouvrière, notre exclusion sociale, nos cités de béton quadrillées, surveillées, encadrées en permanence, constitue le code de notre identité … s’interroger sur notre ‘identité’ (comme il est de mode dans les enceints universitaires) en faisant abstraction de ce qui nous entoure et nous étouffe, aboutit à une impasse. Ce culturel n’existe pas en soi. (Llaumett, 1983: 21, emphasis in original)
Accounts by activists, journalists and sociologists such as Bouamama (1994), Abdallah and Le Réseau No Pasaran (2000), Boubeker and Beau (1986) and others, attest to the same split between the cultural identity celebrated by the media and the political left and the socio-economic conditions of the immigrants. In interviews and testimonies of activist groups such as Rock Against Police (RAP), Zaâma d’Banlieue and Association Gutenberg (Abdallah, 1982; Boubeker and Beau, 1986; IRL, 1981; Quo Vadis, 1993) one discerns an emphasis on both cultural issues and unemployment, popular education and legal rights. At their most extreme, some of these groups took direct action, occupying buildings, organising demonstrations and discussing openly the legitimacy of violence and civil disobedience. In short, this brief social history of North African activism seems to attest to breaks and discontinuities between the social and political objectives of Beurs and their literary production, as well as the academic scholarship that studied them. To make these discontinuities more concrete let me give one example.
The biography of Azouz Begag – who grew up in a banlieue of Lyon, become one of the most successful Beur writers, was a minister for equality in Dominique de Villepin’s 2005 government, and is an active politician today 6 – crystallises the contradictions between political and literary representation. The question already seems to have been on Begag’s mind early in his career. In 1986, after the successful publication of his first novel, Begag makes the following comment in an interview, explicitly tying his position on the Beur social movement to a central scene in his novel.
Begag [the journalist begins] a toujours l’impression d’être ‘à côté,’ devant les mouvements qui veulent rassembler sa communauté, et qu’il soutient. ‘Je [ne] suis pas associatif du tout. Je pense au petit Azouz à l’école, en train de fayoter. Lui, il enlève tout de suite ses chaussettes quand le maître lui demande. L’autre [Moussaoui] refuse: ‘T’es pas mon père.’ Je sais qu’il à raison de ne pas vouloir les enlever. Et moi l’intégré, j’ai honte d’être à côté du mouvement déclenché par l’élève rebelle, d’avoir le mauvais rôle. (Cressole, 1986: 42)
Although I do not suggest reading Begag’s novel as an allegory of the Beur social movement, it is quite evident that Begag does so here. He moves quite seamlessly from his own apolitical tendency (‘Je [ne] suis pas associatif du tout’)
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to Moussaoui’s fictional refusal of French authority and then to the rebellious Beur social movement (‘j’ai honte d’être à côté du mouvement déclenché par l’élève rebelle’) How then does one represent the ‘second generation’ if one refuses its most fundamental and most hopeful claims? What forms must literature invent in order not to face this claim and yet purport to be its public face? Due to limits of space, I cannot elaborate on Moussaoui’s act of refusal at great length, but it is important to note here the following relationship: Moussaoui’s exchange with his French teacher develops into one of the most violent and troubling acts in the novel, ending in Moussaoui accusing the teacher of being a racist and Azouz for not being an Arab because he did not resist the teacher’s humiliating attitude. But this act of loubardisme is narrated or reported through the perspective of a Beur (young Azouz) and because of this narrative mediation the scene turns into an illegible act of violence. This mediation is compounded when, in the transition from France to the United States, the critic, equipped with Bhabha’s theory of ambivalence (in contradistinction to anti-colonial direct opposition), misrecognises Moussaoui’s alternative form of resistance and judges it to be illegitimate. Citing Moussaoui’s accusation, ‘T’es pas un Arabe, toi!’ (Begag, 1986: 94), Emery (2004: 1158, emphasis added) concludes:
the manner in which he [Azouz] and the others approach the tensions inherent to their dual position, grasping onto smoky absolutes or withstanding this temptation through personal fortitude, ultimately determines who will become polluted by stereotypes [read: Moussaoui] and who will rise above them.
In passages like these one can observe how alternative forms of resistance are acknowledged, only to be denied. Moussaoui’s revolt is labelled as illegitimate and ‘sick’ (it is polluted), and Azouz’s ambivalence, his personal fortitude [read: his individualism] is preferred. Although the scene between Azouz and Moussaoui is cast as an infantile fight, it is possible to discern how for Moussaoui the designation ‘Arab’ has an implicit sense of direct resistance to discrimination, while for the Beur ‘Arab’ means ‘cultural’ practices. And indeed, after this incongruity between the two meanings of ‘Arab’ is allowed in the world of the novel, it is immediately covered up and Azouz moves to a long flashback, the only one in the novel, where we learn of his circumcision. Now that the meaning of ‘Arab’ has been reinscribed in its cultural connotation, Azouz can declare: ‘non, cousin Moussaoui, j’ai passé mon diplôme d’Arabe. J’ai déjà donné’ (Begag, 1986: 113).
Contrary to the assumption underlying postcolonial scholarship on Beurs that direct oppression ended with Algeria’s independence, the experience of North Africans in France during the late 1970s and 1980s was fraught with overt racism and extreme violence. Indeed, one of the recurring phenomena one finds in publications by North Africans in the 1980s are lists of racial killings, comprising the names of those who were killed by either civilian or police brutality.
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Days before the onset of the 1983 march, the following statement was given to the press:
Être frisé, c’est être la proie des tontons flingueurs malades de la gâchette: dans la banlieue parisienne, les crimes racistes sont nombreux, et pour les amateurs de 22 long rifle, la chasse est ouverte … À ceux-là nous rétorquons: rengainez, on arrive, la chasse est fermée. (Jazouli, 1992: 59)
Critics of Beur literature, working with postcolonial theory, tend to avoid questions of violence and their relation to literary representation, but such questions were widely debated across France during the early days of the Beur social movement, and continue to inform their history, as in the case of the spectacular violence of the 2005 civil disobedience. For example, in the early 1980s, when deportations of North Africans were a matter of course, activists debated two different forms of resistance: one involved hunger strikes, the other direct confrontation with the police. The first hunger strike in Minguettes in March 1981, partly organised by the priest Christian Delorme as a protest against the imminent deportation of Abdenabi Kebaili, is a cornerstone of Beur history, but is rarely discussed in the context of Beur scholarship. 9 Initiated less than two months before the presidential campaign, the strike reached the national media, prompting the Socialist Party presidential candidate, François Mitterrand, to send a telegram of support promising, if elected, to suspend all deportations. In sympathy with the hunger strikers and those deported, Mitterrand writes, ‘c’est une atteinte aux Droits de l’Homme que de séparer de leur familles et d’expulser vers un pays dont bien souvent ils ne parlent même pas la langue’ (Delorme, 1981: 49). Eventually, the hunger strike succeeded: the deportations of Kebaili and others were suspended until after the elections and Delorme and the hunger strike became a reference and a model of action that would be central to the mobilisation and success of the 1983 march. The details of the strike exceed the scope of this inquiry, but I would like to note how activist groups reacted to it. The members of Zaâma, in an interview with the journal IRL, were very critical of Delorme’s actions:
Si on parlait de la grève de Delorme? Comment l’avez-vous ressentie?
Un creux à l’estomac! …
Les gens qui ont fait ça, l’ont fait de manière très ‘assistance sociale,’ c’est-à-dire qu’ils se battaient pour les immigrés mais pas avec eux.
Au niveau de revendications, cette histoire de circulaire pour l’arrêt des expulsions, on n’y croit pas tellement … c’est pour cela qu’one croit à une organisation directe sur le terrain. (IRL, 1981: 6, emphasis in original)
Here again it is evident that emphasis is put on mediation and representation. Very much like Begag’s fictional character Azouz and Begag himself, Delorme and the Christian/humanist organisations established themselves as mediators or as representatives, and as such turned the youth into an object of representation (pour) instead of treating them as allies, or subjects (avec). Discussing an analogical case of political representation, Zaâma proposes a more direct representational structure:
On voulait absolument montrer qu’il pouvait y avoir une initiative sans intermédiaire de la part de jeunes, immigrés et française de banlieues, qui ne soit pas un fait de notables, de personnalités. Mais avec un moindre impact, ou de moindre possibilités. (IRL, 1981: 7)
A similar critique was raised two years later, when another hunger strike was organised, with the mediation of Delorme, as a response to an incident between the police and the youth of Minguettes. This pattern of response was quite different from the form of action by Zaâma and RAP, who supported a kind of loubardisme as long as its objectives were collective. Bouamama, then a young activist in an autonomous group in Roubaix writes:
Alors que l’on tue nos frères et que la police nous provoque, certains, comme Christian Delorme à Lyon, voudraient que l’on réagisse sagement et proprement, Nous ne sommes pas Jésus-Christ, nous ne sommes pas prêts à tendre l’autre joue. La seule réaction possible est de nous organiser et d’obliger, par tous les moyens, à de véritables sanctions contre la police qui nous harcèle et les racistes qui nous assassinent. (Bouamama, 1994: 53)
The group from Roubaix, in line with Zaâma and RAP, identified the non-violent action as particularly Christian (and humanist) and alluded to other forms of action that in turn, as I suggest, had very different social and political objectives than those usually discussed in Beur scholarship.
By stepping outside literary debates and inviting those whose work pertains to Algerian immigration to look into the chronicles of activist groups, I do not mean to measure literature with the yardstick of action. Rather, by enlarging the scope of the investigation to include such local histories I hope to defamiliarise our reading habits and to make more apparent our own cognitive limits and institutional tendencies, which in a very real way restrict our understanding of Beur literature.
The Beur movement of the late 1970s and the early 1980s was one of the most fascinating episodes of French history, and yet its protagonists, events and dramas have rarely reached Beur literature, let alone Beur scholarship. It should be sought in journals, magazines, pamphlets, one-off newspapers – the dregs of history, which, for those still on the margins, might always be the only possible history.