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
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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’.
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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):
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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]).
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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].
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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).