6 Towards a Globalised Banlieue? Resilience through Literature in Three Narratives of the ‘Ultraperiphery’ NATHALIE SÉGERAL Over the course of recent years, France has witnessed a series of riots and protests (in 2005, 2011 and 2014), propelling its banlieues into visibility, shifting the periphery to the centre of French media attention and questioning the French state’s failed politics of ‘integration’. The 2005 riots were prompted by the accidental death of two boys of Maghrebi origin in Clichy-sous-Bois, while they were running away from the police, thus immediately focusing international attention on France’s ‘migrant crisis’. Discussions of issues pertaining to the banlieues were hardly news, since an increasing number of films and novels (from La Haine, in 1995, to Faïza Guène’s best-seller, Kiffe Kiffe Demain, in 2004) had already been devoted to them. This chapter sets out to explore echoes of some of these issues – such as immigration, exclusion and riots in underprivileged banlieues of the francophone world. It looks at the ways in which they are addressed in relation to questions of gendered violence in works by two Mauritian women writers – Ananda Devi’s Ève de ses décombres (2006) and Nathacha Appanah’s Tropique de la violence (2016) – and a Franco-Jewish female film director of Maghrebi origin, Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem (2005). These texts have in common: a central character who is coming of age in a Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 141 banlieue; a potentially redemptive identification with Western cultural models as a subplot; and the narrative culminating in a riot. Furthermore, the main characters, just like the writers, are from what Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François and Françoise Lionnet term ‘the ultraperiphery’.1 The ‘ultraperiphery’ is also the official term used by the European Union to refer to a European Union territory located outside the European continent. In light of Ossman and Terrio’s article (2006) ‘The French Riots: Questioning Spaces of Surveillance and Sovereignty’ on France’s politics of extraterritoriality, published in the wake of the 2005 riots, this chapter proposes to explore the intersection of issues relating to gender/gendered violence (in particular teenage prostitution and gang rape) and dominant discourses as represented by these three authors. The theme of salvation and redemption through literature and through positive identification with a model issued from the dominant culture seems to be an emerging trend in francophone and Beur literature and films released over the last ten years, and provides an intertextuality between these narratives, including also Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Demain, in which the character of Hamoudi, a ‘grand de la cité’ (p. 78) [older guy from the housing project] who survives by drug dealing, frequently quotes poems by Rimbaud, a homage which also finds illustration in Devi’s Ève de ses décombres. While such identifications could be read as a sign of the universalism of poetry, philosophy and literature, they also highlight the failure of the dominant culture (the former coloniser’s culture) to promote for minorities a diverse selection of textual role models drawn from their own culture, since all these models are white, male Westerners. Devi’s Ève de ses décombres tells the story of four teenagers growing up in the poor suburbs of Port-Louis, the capital city of Mauritius, in a bidonville called Troumaron. Housed in the geographic periphery of the city, they also live on the periphery of society as a consequence of their situation of extreme poverty, with the main protagonist Ève experiencing daily violence at the hands of her father, and selling her body for basic school items, while being sexually abused by her teacher, who remains nameless throughout the narrative and who is on secondment from France. As a French civil servant appointed to Mauritius on a three-year mission, he receives a generous compensation in addition to his usual paycheck in the metropole in exchange for his ‘sacrifice’. 142 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban Female teenage prostitution seems to have become a recurring theme in recent French-language films, such as François Ozon’s Jeune et jolie (2013)2 and Malgorzata Szumowska’s Elles (2012), both depicting female students resorting to prostitution to pay for their studies. However, the type of prostitution depicted in Ève de ses décombres stands in sharp contrast with those young bourgeois women’s Parisian lives. These bourgeois women sell their bodies in order to access a more luxurious lifestyle, while Ève sells her body for the purposes of accessing basic education and her prostitution is akin to self-mutilation. Arguably, self-mutilation is also a trigger for Ozon and Szumowska’s female characters’ prostitution, but their material goals are beyond mere survival in a situation of extreme marginality. Transformed and magnified through a long poetic narrative told via four intertwined voices – the voices of the four teenagers telling the story of their daily lives – Ève’s narrative unfolds as a tragedy wherein, nevertheless, marginality is ultimately transcended by one of the characters’ (named Sad, shortened from Sadiq) love for Rimbaud’s poetry. Beyond such an identification with Rimbaud, another rebellious teenager, what does the novel tell us about the cultural norms and values upheld when this redemptive identification occurs with a Western author? This identification aims to try and break the cycle of exclusion through education. However, the fact that this role model belongs to the dominant culture, i.e. the former coloniser (France), raises the issue of Mauritius’s cultural independence. Furthermore, how do Ève and the other narratives studied here problematise the many layers of exclusion specifically experienced by young women in the banlieue? We will see that the fact that none of the important role models in these narratives is a woman, or belongs to other sexual or ethnic minorities, adds a further layer of exclusion to the central characters in these novels, while also contributing to their paradoxical liberation from various constraints. Echoing Devi’s novel, Mauritian writer Nathacha Appanah’s recent fictional text, Tropique de la violence, closely mirrors Ève’s narrative structure and thematic content. The story takes place in Mayotte, a small island which is part of the Comoran archipelago off the East coast of Africa, where Appanah lived from 2008 to 2010, and which is introduced as follows by Jean-François and Lionnet (2017, p. 1224): Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 143 Of this group of islands [the Comoran archipelago], Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli became independent in 1975, but Mayotte, the closest to Madagascar, voted to retain its colonial ties to France, making it an ‘ultraperipheral region of the European Union’ (‘Mayotte’). In 2011 Mayotte officially became the 101st department of France – and the fifth overseas department (DOM) – after a 2009 referendum in which the population voted overwhelmingly for a change of status that put it on an equal footing with the other DOM in the region, La Réunion, in the Mascarene Islands … Thousands of Comorans take to the sea to reach the shores of this ‘European’ territory [and] between five hundred and one thousand Comorans die each year in the canal de la mort ‘death channel’.3 Like Ève, Tropique de la violence’s narrative is told in four voices: those of Marie, a white woman from metropolitan France; her adoptive son Moïse, born of an African refugee who came to Mayotte on a boat along with other illegal immigrants; Bruce, a young Muslim teenager and leader of the local gang; and Stéphane, a white man also from metropolitan France who has been sent to Mayotte on a three-year voluntary mission to build a cultural centre for the shanty town youths. The central event is also a gang rape, undergone by Moïse, who finds comfort and resilience in his favourite book, Henri Bosco’s L’Enfant et la rivière, a novel published in 1945 about a friendship between two boys and a dog. Ève de ses décombres and Tropique de la violence depict the kind of colonial urban planning denounced by Ossman and Terrio, who use the Moroccan capital, Rabat, as an illustration of such planning ‘as a tool of social differentiation [or] urban apartheid’ (2006, p. 7), with the poorest neighborhoods relegated to the ultraperiphery of the city. Karin Albou’s film, La Petite Jérusalem, presents a nineteen-year-old Jewish woman, Laura, who lives in Sarcelles, a mostly Jewish banlieue of Paris, and whose family has immigrated from Tunisia. Laura finds purpose in the study of philosophy and, more precisely, in Immanuel Kant’s ideas, trying very hard to become ‘French’. She rejects her family’s Jewish customs, until she finds herself left alone in Paris after her family decides to move to Israel as a result of the increasing anti-Semitism they have been experiencing, especially after Laura’s brother-in-law has been the victim of an anti-Semitic assault. 144 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban Ossman and Terrio remind us that banlieue etymologically means ‘to be banned from society’ and dates back to the thirteenth century, when it signified a liminal space associated with social marginality, uncontrolled movement, and spatialised poverty (p. 7): ‘To be au ban meant to be excluded from a group by edict; worse than to be banished from the city was to be relegated to the margins of what then constituted social life and order’. In this perspective, being relegated to the (ultra)periphery of the city, i.e. of society, can be worse than to be entirely excluded from it, especially in the case of the female characters (Ève, Savita and Laura) in the narratives examined here, as well as for Moïse, who is constantly cast as a ‘feminine’ figure because of his suspected homosexuality. By engaging with Ossman and Terrio’s theories of the banlieue, France’s politics of extraterritoriality, and colonial urban planning, I will put Devi’s and Appanah’s novels into dialogue with Albou’s film, in order to explore the complicated role played by the Western models provided by the hegemonic culture in either oppressing or liberating the teenagers involved. I will also discuss the ways in which these narratives, in turn, (re)inscribe themselves in the dominant literary canon and challenge – or not – the dominant culture. Reading first more closely and dialogically Devi’s Ève de ses décombres and Appanah’s Tropique de la violence, given their striking structural and thematic similarities, I will then move on to contrasting these two narratives with Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem. From one Banlieue to the Next: Transnational Twenty-First-Century Concentrationary Spaces4 This section examines how gang rape is used as a tool of dehumanisation and de-gendering in both Ève de ses décombres and Tropique de la violence. First, a striking similarity between Appanah’s Tropique de la violence and Devi’s Ève de ses décombres is that both narratives are built around a gang rape and culminate in teenage rioters storming the ghetto. Gang rape has increasingly been discussed over the last ten years as a major issue for women in French banlieues, along with riots as the other key problem.5 Besides providing an insight into the same issues plaguing Mauritian and Mahoran banlieues that are often silenced and marginalised by the French media, the fact that, in Tropique, the victim of gang rape is a boy, Moïse, adds an Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 145 interesting twist to this text. Namely, it seems that what is really at stake in this narrative is not so much the condition of young women as the preferred targets of gang rape, but homosexuality and, ultimately, a re-gendering and de-gendering of the immigrant or social outcast’s body, as Moïse is repeatedly depicted as ‘effeminate’ and Ève’s body is depicted as being severely underweight, thereby giving her the appearance of a small child. This is particularly striking as it echoes Holocaust narratives such as Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy (1965, 1966, 1970), Auschwitz et après,6 in which the concentration camp inmates’ bodies are described as completely de-gendered and reduced to mere body parts, thus conveying their dehumanisation. These narratives seem to point to the banlieue, or the modern ghetto, as a space of dehumanisation echoing that of the concentrationary universe. Of course, the situation in the banlieues is starkly different from that of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, depictions of twenty-first-century ghettos bear striking similarities to that of the universe of the concentration camp as described by David Rousset (1965 [1946]); daily gendered violence and the objectification of people are highlighted by the centrality of gang rape in both narratives, along with the loss of identity and exclusion from the national discourse, more evocative of the so-called jungle de Sangatte, or Calais Jungle than of an actual banlieue.7 The Calais Jungle, which was a French camp for refugees and migrants trying to enter the United Kingdom from January 2015 to October 2016, was known for human rights’ abuses by the police towards migrant children and adults alike, and for appalling sanitary conditions. Before moving to a more detailed dialogical study of Devi’s and Appanah’s novels, let me briefly present the specific circumstances in which the main characters in the texts examined here live. As Ève de ses décombres’s Sad puts it (p. 13): Je suis dans un lieu gris. Ou plutôt brun jaunâtre, qui mérite bien son nom: Troumaron. Troumaron, c’est une sorte d’entonnoir; le dernier goulet où viennent se déverser les eaux usées de tout un pays … Moi, j’y vis depuis toujours. Je suis un réfugié de naissance … Port Louis s’accroche à nos pieds mais ne nous entraîne pas. La ville nous tourne le dos. I’m in a gray place. Or rather, yellowish brown, which better suits its name: Troumaron [literally: brown hole]. Troumaron, a sort of funnel; where all the island’s wastewaters ultimately flow … I’ve 146 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban always lived there. I was born a refugee … Port Louis grabs our feet but we are stuck here. The city turns its back on us. (p. 11) Sad goes on to say that people who live in Troumaron are almost considered to be part of a new ethnicity, with their own identity, what he describes as an ‘identité […] des non-appartenants’ (p. 17) [identities … [of] those who do not belong; p. 14]. It is in this run-down neighbourhood that the four main characters of Devi’s novel live: Sad, Ève, Savita and Clélio. After Savita has been killed and Clélio erroneously charged with murdering her, Ève sets out to take revenge on the male French teacher who murdered Savita for having witnessed him abusing Ève. Sad, in love with Ève, is desperately trying to save her from the self-destructive cycle of prostitution that she imposes on herself. Ultimately, Ève manages to kill the teacher and the novel closes with the portrayal of a riot that brings chaos to Troumaron, as the youngsters’ gang decides to foment an uprising against Clélio’s imprisonment and Ève, who is now wrongly suspected of collaborating with the police. Tropique de la violence’s adolescent characters live in a bidonville ironically called Gaza, located on the periphery of Mamoudzou, Mayotte’s capital. As several characters remind us throughout the novel like a leitmotiv, Mayotte is part of France after all (‘Mais c’est la France ici quand même!’ (p. 113)), despite looking like ‘un bidonville, … un ghetto, un dépotoir, un gouffre, une favela, c’est un immense camp de clandestins à ciel ouvert’ (p. 51) [a shanty town, … a ghetto, a dump, an abyss, a favela, a gigantic illegal immigrants’ camp without a roof]. These stories of dehumanised spaces and lives at the ultraperiphery of the city raise issues of ‘integration’ and identity. Jon Henley, in his article entitled ‘Founding Principle Called into Question’ dealing with the 2005 Paris riots (The Guardian, 8 Nov. 2005) writes: ‘The modèle républicain d’intégration is based on perhaps the most sacred article of France’s grand republican creed: that “everyone is equal and indistinguishable in the eyes of the state.” No matter where they come from, all French citizens are identical in their Frenchness.’ But what does ‘Frenchness’ or the concept of a so-called French identity involve? What does it mean to be French for these teenagers growing up on the periphery of French society and of their own society? What does national identity within a supposedly multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith society Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 147 mean to Ève or Savita, or to Laura? Besides living in an underprivileged banlieue, Ève, Savita, Laura and Moïse share several similarities. Ève and Savita belong to minoritised communities in postcolonial Mauritius, while Moïse is part of a minority ethnic group in colonial Mayotte. Moïse is the son of a female African illegal immigrant who abandoned him because she was afraid of his bi-coloured eyes, which are supposed to be an omen of ill-fate in traditional African culture. Marie, a white teacher from metropolitan France who was unable to bear children and was abandoned by her Mahoran husband because of her sterility, adopted him and raised him in the well-off part of town where she lived. However, upon her sudden death, Moïse finds himself alone in the world, with the sole company of his beloved dog. Rejected by other white people because of his blackness, he joins Bruce’s gang in the Gaza ghetto. However, as he develops a friendship with a social worker Stéphane through their shared love of books, Bruce and the other youths accuse him of being a homosexual and gang-rape him so as to ‘punish’ him for his suspected homosexuality, thus echoing Ève, in which she and Savita are bitterly punished for finding comfort in their homoerotic friendship. It is important to look at how these narratives question notions of identity on the periphery, and how these characters strive to define themselves in relation to the concept of Frenchness or national identity mentioned by Henley above, in order to assess the crucial role played by education and gender as tools for social mobility in overcoming identity barriers – or not – and in allowing them to exit the urban periphery. This notion of ‘Frenchness’ is all the more elusive as Henley does not offer any specific definition, apart from the fact that it sets up the ‘centre’ against the ‘periphery’, thereby hinting that the idea of ‘Frenchness’ has to do with being ‘integrated’ into French society in various ways. In the same article, Henley adds that: ‘The people who live there [in the rundown estates going up in flames] live next door to France’. This, indeed, summarises and symbolises Laura’s situation in La Petite Jérusalem, as she stands on the periphery of several worlds: geographically, she is on the periphery of Paris, since her neighbourhood, Sarcelles, is located in the banlieue outside the city; born in Tunisia, she occupies the periphery of the very concept of ‘Frenchness’ as a consequence of her status as an immigrant. As a Jew, she is also on the periphery of French immigration in the 148 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban second half of the twentieth century, since most immigrants from North Africa are Muslims. Thus, she represents a minority within a minority. The protagonist Ève is also marginalised as a consequence of her social background, her homosexuality and her gender. The novel emphasises the fact that Ève suffers from being marginalised by her male classmates and the other boys in her neighbourhood, who, while being themselves part of a marginalised group, reproduce this marginalisation in relation to their female peers such as Ève, who is reduced by them to a mere object. She recounts having been the victim of a gang-rape (tournante): Le ruisseau se calme. Moi aussi. Un jour, j’ai été déposée ici par des hommes rendus fous par l’alcool et par mon corps. Ils ne m’avaient pas emmenée dans un bureau climatisé mais sur une île aux abords de l’île, une île de vents, d’oiseaux, de broussailles et de serpents … Quand ils se sont jetés sur moi, j’ai vu que j’étais quelque chose d’étranger à leurs yeux. On détruit ce qui nous est étranger. (p. 77) The stream quiets down. I do, too. One day, I was left here by men who had gone crazy, drinking from my body. They hadn’t taken me to an air-conditioned office but to an island right by the island, an island full of winds, birds, scrubs, and snakes … When they pounced on me, I saw that I was something foreign to them. We destroy what’s foreign to us. (p. 66) This excerpt highlights the complete objectification of Ève by her male counterparts with words such as ‘ce’ [that], ‘quelque chose’ [something], ‘mon corps’ [my body], while also inscribing her double alienation in the geographical space of the landscape, with ‘une île aux abords de l’île’ – an island on the periphery of the island. Ève and Savita are further marginalised when their homosexuality is discovered by their classmates, as it puts them in another minority category which, paradoxically, is unacceptable for their classmates. In fact, what enrages their male counterparts the most, rather than their homosexuality per se, is this deep, sisterly bond that the two young women have developed, and which makes them appear as a threat to male domination. However, it is worth noting that Sad does not love Ève less when her relationship with Savita is disclosed. He is the only one in their gang to accept Ève’s homosexuality. While riots provide the climax to both Ève and Tropique’s narratives, La Petite Jérusalem was made in 2005, just a few months before Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 149 the Paris riots, and the seeds of these riots can be seen in the movie both in the scene of the synagogue fire and when Laura’s brother-in-law is assaulted by an anti-Semitic gang. While the young people who rebelled during those riots and who rebelled again in 2016 in Paris with the Nuit Debout movement did so against a French state that they felt excluded them or failed to provide them with acceptable perspectives for the future, the opposite is true for Laura:8 her rebellion is against her family and her origins, and her identitarian ideal seems to be a model of integration, a desire to acquire or assume the very ‘Frenchness’ discussed by Henley. Ossman and Terrio’s article corroborates the interesting fact that, while their survey found that most Parisian university students claim that they feel ‘European above all’, youths in the suburbs of Paris, Lyon and Lille explained that ‘we want to be French’ (p. 15). This points to a globalisation of political views among privileged French youths while those who do not have French roots first need to identify strongly with their host country and acquire the elusive ‘Frenchness’ before being able to conceive of themselves as European or global citizens – whereby we see that ‘globalisation’ still transits, first and foremost, through the former colonial centre. Towards a New Discourse of ‘Integration’ in Francophone Literature and Film These various characters, therefore, have to find coping strategies in order to be resilient and to try to escape their environment, and, in these three stories, the strategy adopted is one of re-inscribing their life narratives into larger, Western European ones – whether through Rimbaud’s poetry, Kant’s philosophy, or Henri Bosco’s L’Enfant et la rivière. However, the fact that all of these cultural models are the products of white male Westerners immediately problematises gender and the particular position of women in the banlieue as being more marginalised than their male counterparts in that they also lack access to positive female role models. For Laura, the main goal is to become ‘integrated’ into French society. However, Laura’s example is of particular interest, as she is the only female character in the three narratives to present us with an arguably positive outcome.9 An important conflict in her life is her rejection of her past, of her Jewish and Tunisian origins, and of her 150 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban present life in Sarcelles, seen in the tensions between Laura and her family. Her mother reproaches her for this on a regular basis, until the very ironic scene in which Laura, tired of her mother’s permanent nostalgic references to life in Tunisia, screams at her: ‘Retourne en Tunisie!’ [Go back to Tunisia!], which prompts her mother to call her a ‘racist’, whereby Laura, in a comic turn, becomes the one positioned as excluding, but, also, the one who is explicitly excluded by her own family. The paradox of Laura’s situation stems from the fact that, as she gradually becomes more integrated into French culture, she finds herself increasingly rejected and misunderstood by her family, who seems to be forcing her to make a binary choice. Both her mother and her sister embody the voice of tradition and seem to fear that their own beliefs might be undermined by Laura’s behaviour. In Laura’s home, there is no physical violence, no screams and no alcoholism, unlike Ève’s home. On the contrary, most scenes depicting Laura’s family life are dimly lit, with the family members generally wearing black and speaking in hushed voices – which highlights the feeling of oppression perceived by Laura. This state of family dynamics is emphasised by the fact that Laura’s relatives are always seen in enclosed, domestic settings, whereas Laura is the only one to be depicted outside in the city. However, the fact that the vast majority of the scenes in which Laura is outside her home take place in crowded métros and RERs (regional trains linking Paris to the suburbs) paradoxically reinforces the notion of her being relegated to the periphery of the city, as her interactions with the city seem to be limited to the commuting sphere, i.e. the in-betweenness of banlieue trains linking the periphery to the centre. The Shabbat and other Jewish celebrations and rites are the only calendar used by Laura’s family, substituting itself for the so-called ‘Republican’ calendar – which is openly Catholic despite the secularity officially promoted by the French state. Ossman and Terrio also blame this for causing, at the height of the Paris riots, the then French Prime Minister de Villepin’s ‘refusal to acknowledge that the urban unrest was racial in nature’ since Republican values ‘recognize only individual citizens, no racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, and thus guarantee[s] their equal treatment under the law’ (p. 11), thereby preventing, by the same token, a multiculturalist approach to problems. Instead of acknowledging the existence Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 151 of race and religion, the French law recognises ‘culture’, hence ‘cultural origin itself becomes criminalized’ (p. 12). Laura’s admiration for Kant enables her to oppose Kantian law to the Torah law which rules her family’s life. Such an opposition echoes that between ‘reason’ and religion, which, for Laura, reflects the dichotomy between the public and the private spheres, and which climaxes in Laura’s statement about philosophy, ‘J’y crois’ [I believe in it], whereby she openly establishes philosophy as her new faith. Elevating philosophy, i.e. reason, to a religion is in itself problematic, since hyper-rationalism raises the issue of tolerance and of casting secularism as more ‘evolved’ than other beliefs. This reproduces the French Republican ‘ideal’, its blindness to diversity and multiculturalism, and the French government’s refusal to initiate a politics of affirmative action that would be in the same vein as the one practised in the United States since the 1990s, so as to acknowledge racism and discrimination and try to palliate their negative effects. Lastly, Laura’s philosophy professor comments that ‘nous avons cette année une jeune fille kantienne’ [there is among us, this year, a Kantian young lady], thereby consecrating her conversion to a new identity, as she is no longer Jewish but Kantian. While it can be argued that being ‘Kantian’ does not provide Laura with an actual identity, the film is staged in such a manner that Laura’s complete embracing of Kantian philosophy is made to appear as her new religion and identity. Ironically, she is the only student in the lecture hall to be in favour of respecting the law; the other students, who are very likely to be ‘Français de souche’ [native-born French people],10 believe that one can only be free by breaking the law. That scene appears to foreshadow the riots, which prompted many political observers to fear anarchy brought about by minorities. However, for Laura, as for Kant, ‘la liberté se gagne en obéissant à la loi’ [freedom is achieved through obedience to the law]. This statement is, thus, the very antithesis of the riots that shook France in 2005, and which – as Ossman and Terrio remind us in their essay – led to a fear of anomie and consequently to violent repression by the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy against those individuals perceived to be ‘without faith or law’ (p. 6). By contrast, Laura substitutes one law for another; she can only conceive of her identity in obeying either law. Thus, characters like Laura embody France’s current social tensions; her inner dilemmas reflect, to a certain extent, the 152 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban conflicts in the social macrocosm. And yet Laura can hardly be considered a model for integration, even though she chooses France at the end of the film, insofar as integration is here presented as a sacrifice that comes at a very high cost: Laura loses her entire family, who move to Israel. Their departure echoes the argument expressed in Ossman and Terrio’s article, in which they proceed to denounce the French government’s ‘politics of extraterritoriality’ (p. 14), which consist in believing that it is possible to resolve social problems by exiling individuals or by deporting undesirable immigrants. In an ironic twist of fate, Laura’s family decides to ‘exile’ itself voluntarily from France to Israel (though they perceive it more as a return to the Promised Land), because integrating their Jewish traditions into French society has proved impossible: the celebrated Republican values seem to leave no room for religious and cultural diversity. This also echoes Ossman and Terrio’s argument according to which marginalisation can be worse than exile, insofar as, as in the case of La Petite Jérusalem, the departure of Laura’s family for Israel is depicted as preferable to living a marginalised life on the periphery of French society. In this respect, it is quite telling that, in the same manner as Laura admires Kant, the main characters in the literary narratives examined here also resort to education in order to break the cycle of marginalisation and, more specifically, are fascinated by cultural models belonging to the ‘centre’. These models – be they the works of Rimbaud, Kant or Henri Bosco – highlight a two-fold gender bias, in that these are exclusively the products of male role models and – with the exception of Laura – it is mostly male characters who are ‘saved’ by education, thereby further highlighting women’s exclusion and marginalisation, pointing to a lack of models for women or for other minorities such as homosexuals. In these three instances, even though Kant and Rimbaud are very different figures – the former embodying obedience to the law, the latter, teenage rebellion – redeeming identification occurs with a European figure who embodies the dominant culture. Such identification can be seen as a sign of the universalism of philosophy and literature that transcends all differences and social barriers, but also, as the failure of the dominant culture to facilitate minorities’ access to role models coming from their own culture and the failure of minorities to produce or to find these models. Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 153 These narratives problematise issues relative to the decolonising of cultural models in the transnational banlieue. Namely, the fact that these models are all male allows for an ambivalent outcome for characters like Ève. On the one hand, she suffers from a double alienation as a banlieue resident and as a woman. In La Petite Jérusalem, it is logical to identify with the dominant culture if one wants to become ‘integrated’ within it, since the narrative takes place in France. However, Mauritius is no longer a colony, and yet for Sad the identification occurs with a model coming from the former coloniser, whereas Ève, on the other hand, is the only character who displays some awareness of postcolonial issues when, in the science classroom as the teacher is sexually abusing her, she says: ‘Le corps est allongé nu sur la paillasse, comme prêt à être découpé. Mais ce n’est pas une autopsie … Mon corps ne sera pas colonisé’ (p. 93) [The body is lying naked on the bench, like it’s ready to be cut up. But this isn’t an autopsy … My body won’t be colonized; p. 81]. According to Françoise Lionnet (1995), ‘the postmodern urban nightmare [depicted in Devi’s novels] may in fact be the return of an old repression: the post-colonial fin-de-siècle.’11 The city is cast as playing a crucial role in constructing postcolonial public spheres of identity, whereby the narrative itself becomes a site of articulation and contention of the postcolonial urban space, with Ève resisting ‘colonisation’ by the French teacher and her peers, despite the apparent objectification of her body. In this respect, her murdering of the white teacher takes on highly symbolic overtones, allowing her to transgress all the boundaries imposed upon her. Not only is Rimbaud a model from the former coloniser’s literary canon, but the French language is also the coloniser’s language, while Sad and the other three main characters are shown to speak Creole at home; as for Laura, her family’s language is Hebrew. Language is central in Devi’s novel, since Sad recurrently says that it is thanks to Rimbaud’s poems that he has become able to express himself and tell his story. The fact that it is the colonial culture that offers a means of articulation for the colonised subject seems to point to an ambivalent discourse regarding colonisation, in which French culture retains some positive values offering hope and agency to colonised subjects. The choice of Rimbaud is of course politically charged, since he was himself a figure of contestation. Ève denounces her father’s inability to talk and his use of physical 154 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban violence as his only language, and she also denounces the teacher’s inability to speak, in one of the streams-of-consciousness that take the form of an enigmatic dialogue between her present and future selves: ‘Tant d’inertie. Tant d’indifférence. Ce “Monsieur” dont tu le gratifies après l’acte, et qui crucifie chacun à son rôle. C’est tout ce qu’il sera pour toi: “Monsieur”. Un prof pris dans l’impossibilité de dire’ (p. 112) [So much inertia. So much indifference. This ‘Monsieur’ you bestow upon him after the act, and which nails everybody to the cross of their roles. That’s all he is to you: ‘Monsieur’. A teacher swallowed up by the impossibility of speaking; p. 98]. Through the use of the verb ‘crucifier’, Ève is thus cast as a Christ figure while reclaiming agency over her story, as she is also the one who crucifies her sexual abuser. However, while Ève, Tropique and La Petite Jérusalem all stage teenagers using education as a survival strategy, insofar as Sad can be read as Laura’s masculine alter ego, ultimately the two female characters of Devi’s novel, Ève and Savita, encounter a terrible fate: death for Savita and prostitution for Ève – even though the open ending suggests a more hopeful note for Ève, who might be saved by Sad’s love. It is Sad, and not Ève, who is ultimately redeemed by poetry. It is, however, Ève who experiences the need to free herself from colonisation and abuse, which points to Ève as the only character potentially able to de-colonise herself, while Sad remains trapped in the postcolonial predicament. It is interesting to note the theme of sisterhood uniting Ève and Savita in their friendship and love, as well as the redemptive aspect of Sad’s love for Ève, mirroring Moïse’s love for his dog, for which L’Enfant et la rivière provides a mise en abyme. And yet, again, one of the subtexts to the narrative is that the homosexual relationship between Ève and Savita proves destructive and somehow causes Savita’s death when the white male teacher breaks into their duo and decides to kill Savita. For Laura in La Petite Jérusalem, love is not redemptive. However, she is the only instance of a female character breaking the cycle of exclusion through identification with a Western model. Conclusion Thus, through the study of three coming-of-age narratives taking place on the urban (ultra)periphery, in the banlieues of Paris, Port-Louis and Mamoudzou, we have seen representations of Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 155 global issues pertaining to gendered violence, integration, and exclusion. This has been portrayed first through gang rape, prostitution and homophobia as tools for further dehumanising female characters depicted as minorities within a minority, then through issues of problematic identifications with models belonging to the dominant culture, staging a lack of satisfactory models for marginalised identities in a (post)colonial context. The overall tone of the three narratives by Albou, Appanah and Devi is very pessimistic, standing in sharp contrast with ‘successful’ immigration and integration narratives such as Azouz Begag’s autobiographical text Le Gone du Chaâba (1986) and Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe demain (2004). Karin Albou explains her choice of subject by the fact that her film sprang from her frustration at the popular image of Jews conveyed by the media; she desired to counter the stereotypical descriptions of French Jews living in specific Parisian neighbourhoods such as le Marais and le Sentier, which concealed the fact that a large percentage of Jewish immigrants from North Africa were sent to banlieues like Sarcelles or Créteil, along with other immigrants, regardless of their religious affiliations.12 Albou thus sought to reinscribe the figure of the Jew into the narrative of North African immigration to France. In this respect, one hypothesis could be that the different tone depends on the conditions and status of the immigration portrayed: namely, Omar, Le Gone du Chaâba’s main character, was born in France, unlike Laura, who was born in Tunisia; Ève de ses décombres’s characters live in a former French colony, in housing estates where the parents’ violence reflects that of society; and Tropique de la violence’s characters live in what is currently a French colony. Furthermore, the generation gap is also crucial, since Begag’s text, taking place in the 1960s, describes a successful model of integration that no longer seems to exist in the other three narratives, which are imbued with violence, exclusion, rapes and riots. Devi and Appanah actually portray a similar situation to Begag’s, with their characters living in shanty towns on the periphery of large cities. However, in the twenty-first-century suburban jungle of colonies and former colonies, it is clear that the end of colonialism has not put an end to the spatial identification of alterity and that the banlieue is increasingly turning into a space of social and cultural incarceration, at times echoing, as we have seen, the concentrationary 156 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban universe of the Nazi camps, through a de-gendering and dehumanising of the marginalised teenager’s body. And yet, the commonality shared by these narratives lies in the identification with a norm conveyed by the dominant culture through education and, more precisely, literature, which, as I have shown, raises several issues regarding dominant cultural and linguistic norms, the status of minorities, ‘integration’, gender, and the role played by education. In Ève de ses décombres, Savita is cast as the sacrificial figure who enables Ève to move from absolute passivity and victimhood to agency, when she eventually decides to murder the schoolteacher and manages to escape sexual abuse by him and her classmates – albeit that the open-ended narrative intimates that her escape might mean spending some time in jail, although her confession to the policeman may help her escape a prison sentence. In this respect, therefore, it could be argued that Devi also presents the reader with a more optimistic outcome than that of doomed victimhood for young women – even if the reclamation of agency occurs through violence. Similarly, in Tropique de la violence, Moïse eventually transcends victimhood and passivity by shooting Bruce dead. These endings certainly present us with deeply ambivalent forms of agency if ‘liberation’ can only be achieved through a crime, followed by suicide in Moïse’s case and an uncertain future for Ève. Both novels are open-ended, meaning it is possible to imagine positive story lines, such as Ève starting a new life in a different high school or Moïse being rescued from the deep waters before drowning, and absolved of his crime. What do these narratives ultimately tell us about the French banlieue, immigration and ‘neocolonialism’? It is revealing that the narrative of immigration taking place in metropolitan France – La Petite Jérusalem – highlights successful ‘integration’ into French culture – though, again, the fact that Laura is left entirely alone at the closing of the film after her family has moved to Israel can hardly be considered wholly ‘successful’ – while the two texts taking place in the colonies, Ève, de ses décombres and Tropique de la violence, present us with more pessimistic narratives: in Mauritius, an island state, as in Mayotte, the most recently acquired French overseas territory, redemption, if at all possible, comes at an extremely high cost: murder. Devi and Appanah’s narratives depict a prison-like insular world, where no upward mobility and little escape from Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 157 poverty and exclusion seem possible. The identification with a literary model from Western culture only provides a temporary mental escape and no real safeguard against violence. With reference to his rags-to-riches life story, Azouz Begag remarks: ‘Rien n’empêche un jeune d’entrer dans une bibliothèque et de s’instruire, qu’il habite dans le 16ème ou en Seine-Saint-Denis. C’est gratuit’13 [Nothing prevents any youth from stepping into a public library and educating himself, whether he lives in Paris’s 16th arrondissement or in Seine-Saint-Denis. It does not cost anything]. Going to a library is certainly free; however, both Devi’s and Appanah’s narratives show that reading books does not necessarily help you to escape from your origins if you were born into a highly marginalised and violent environment – let alone save your life. In fact, Appanah’s narrative offers a very pessimistic ending, suggesting that Moïse ends up committing suicide because he cannot stand the painful awareness of his condition and its seeming inescapability, an awareness which reading aggravates. In that respect, not only did Henri Bosco’s L’Enfant et la rivière, which he admitted to keeping as a ‘talisman’ (p. 127), not save his life, but it contributed to his further marginalisation by singling him out as ‘other’ because of his love for books and his becoming the male social worker’s protégé.14 Ultimately, however, as Jean-François and Lionnet argue with reference to Devi: ‘[A] writer now considered major but linked to a minor location can use her voice as an ambiguous site of resistance that questions authority and conventions from within’ (p. 1229). This is also the case for Appanah and Albou, whereby, regardless of the ambiguous outcomes of their narratives, the very existence of these narratives serves to re-inscribe ultraperipheral banlieue narratives into the geographical, literary and linguistic centre, thus creating new female cultural models of identification. Works Cited Albou, Karin, La Petite Jérusalem, Film (Kino, 2005). Appanah, Nathacha, Tropique de la violence (Paris: Gallimard, 2016). Avenel, Cyprien, Sociologie des quartiers sensibles (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010). Begag, Azouz, Le Gone du Chaâba (Paris: Seuil, 1986). Bellil, Samira, Dans l’Enfer des tournantes (Paris: Folio, 2002). Bosco, Henri, L’Enfant et la rivière (Paris: Gallimard, 1987 [1972]). 158 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban Brune Elisa, La Tournante (Paris: J’ai Lu, 2003). Delbo, Charlotte, Auschwitz et après I, II, III (Paris: Minuit, 1965, 1966, 1970). Devi, Ananda, Ève de ses décombres (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Devi, Ananda, Eve out of her Ruins, trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman, foreword by J. M. G. Le Clézio (Dallas, Texas: Deep Vellum Publishing, 2016). Farrier, David, Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Fassin, Didier, ‘Compassion and Repression: the Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France’, Cultural Anthropology, 20/3 (2005), 362–87. Guène, Faïza, Kiffe Kiffe Demain (Paris: Hachette, 2004). Henley, Jon, ‘Founding Principle Called into Question’, The Guardian, 8 November 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,16366 71,00.html [accessed 7 June 2017]. Kassovitz, Mathieu, La Haine (Mars films, 1995). Jean-François, Emmanuel Bruno and Françoise Lionnet, ‘Literary Routes: Migration, Islands, and the Creative Economy’, Publication of the Modern Language Association, 131/5 (2017), 1222–38. Lionnet, Françoise, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Memmi, Albert, La Statue de sel (Paris: Gallimard [Folio], 1966). Ossman, Susan and Susan Terrio, ‘The French Riots: Questioning Spaces of Surveillance and Sovereignty’, International Migration, 44/2 (2006), 5–19. Ozon, François, Jeune et jolie (Mars Films, 2013). Pollock, Griselda and Max Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). Rousset, David, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Minuit, 1965 [1946]). Ruggia, Christophe, Le Gone du Châaba, Film (AFMD, 1998). Ségeral, Nathalie, ‘Frenchness, Jewishness and “Integration” in Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem’, Jewish Culture and History, 14/2–3 (2013), 87–99. Szumowska, Malgorzata, Elles, Film (Haut et court, 2012). Zachary, Pascal, ‘The Problems with French Identity’, 19 November 2005, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2402/the_trouble_with_french_identity/ [accessed 10 November 2016]. Notes 1 Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François and Françoise Lionnet, ‘Literary Routes: Migration, Islands, and the Creative Economy’, PMLA, 131/5 (2017), 1222–38 (p. 1222). 2 Jeune et jolie’s main female character is a seventeen-year-old Parisian woman named Isabelle, who prostitutes herself, just like Ève. Yet, Isabelle is the very opposite of Ève, as she is depicted as a Parisian Towards a Globalised Banlieue? 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 159 bourgeoise attending the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in the Latin Quarter, and whose motivations for selling her body are purely gratuitous – which raises ethical questions regarding the recuperation and appropriation of the theme of the female teenage prostitute by a male author, through, and for, the male gaze. Translation is part of the original. I am here borrowing a term coined by David Rousset in his seminal analysis of the Nazi camps entitled L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Minuit, 1965 [1946]), written upon his return from Buchenwald, and also used by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman in their recent edited volume entitled Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (2015). This adjective refers to the repressive and dehumanising system of the Nazi camps. On this topic, see Samira Bellil’s autobiographical narrative, Dans l’Enfer des tournantes (Paris: Folio, 2002), translated into English as To Hell and Back, and Elisa Brune’s novel, La Tournante (Paris: J’ai Lu, 2003). For a sociological study, see Cyprien Avenel, Sociologie des quartiers sensibles (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010). Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz et après I, II et III (Paris: Minuit, 1965, 1966, 1970). For more information on how the Sangatte refugee camp turned into Europe’s largest shanty town, see http://www.lemonde.fr/immigration-etdiversite/video/2016/10/21/de-sangatte-a-la-jungle-comment-calais-s-estelle-retrouvee-au-c-ur-des-enjeux-migratoires_5018332_1654200.html and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/06/at-night-its-like-a-horrormovie-inside-calaiss-official-shanty-town, along with David Farrier’s Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Didier Fassin’s ‘Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France’, Cultural Anthropology, 20/3 (2005), 362–87. Nuit Debout is a French social movement that began on 31 March 2016, arising from protests against proposed labour reforms known as the El Khomri law. It has been compared to the Occupy movement in the USA. The protestors held nightly assemblies on Place de la République in Paris, before the movement spread to other French cities, and eventually died out after a few weeks. For a detailed study of Karin Albou’s film, see Nathalie Ségeral, ‘Frenchness, Jewishness and “Integration” in Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem’, Jewish Culture and History, 14/2–3 (2013), 87–99. In a worrying manner, the phrase Français de souche is being increasingly used, in both everyday and political discourses, in opposition to immigré de deuxième génération, thus perpetuating racism towards and exclusion of immigrants’ children born in France. Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 68. Karin Albou’s interview in La Petite Jérusalem’s press release, http:// www.cinemotions.com/interview/3929 [accessed 20 November 2016]. 160 Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban 13 Conference paper given at UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, 22 October 2009. 14 ‘Quand Stéphane me demandait pourquoi je lisais toujours le même livre, je haussais les épaules parce que je ne voulais pas lui expliquer que ce livre-là était comme un talisman qui me protégeait du monde réel, que les mots de ce livre que je connaissais par cœur étaient comme une prière que je disais et redisais’ [Whenever Stéphane would ask me why I kept reading the same book over and over again, I would just shrug because I did not feel like explaining to him that this book was akin to a talisman protecting me from reality, that the words in this book which I knew by heart were like a prayer that I would utter over and over again] (Appanah, p. 127).