Romance Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yros20

Female Filiations as a Locus of Politicization in

Faïza Guène’s œuvre: An Intersectionalist Reading
of Kiffe kiffe demain and La Discrétion

Christina Horvath

To cite this article: Christina Horvath (2022) Female Filiations as a Locus of Politicization
in Faïza Guène’s œuvre: An Intersectionalist Reading of Kiffe kiffe demain and La Discrétion,
Romance Studies, 40:3-4, 233-252, DOI: 10.1080/02639904.2022.2133464

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2022.2133464

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.

Published online: 22 Dec 2022.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 211

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yros20
ROMANCE STUDIES
2022, VOL. 40, NOS. 3–4, 233–252
https://doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2022.2133464

Female Filiations as a Locus of Politicization in Faïza Guène’s

œuvre: An Intersectionalist Reading of Kiffe kiffe demain and
La Discrétion
Christina Horvath
French Studies, University of Bath, Bath, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article explores the theme of postcolonial transmission Faïza Guène; novel; French
through the comparative analysis of two novels by French author colonial past; banlieue;
Faïza Guène, her bestselling debut novel Kiffe kiffe demain and her Maghrebi immigrants;
mother; children;
latest narrative La Discrétion. It argues that intimate bonds between
transmission; filiation
immigrant parents and their French-born children have been parti­
cularly pivotal to the politicization of the author’s writing. The
article traces how Guène’s representation of women living in
socio-economically disadvantaged French banlieues has evolved
throughout her career. It shows how her initial optimism and faith
in the Republican values has given way to an increasingly disen­
chanted vision. Drawing on decolonial feminist theory, the paper
investigates how, in Guène’s latest and most political novel to date,
the transmission of silenced colonial and postcolonial history and
withheld anger is depicted through a superposition of violent
episodes from the life of a 70-year-old Algerian woman with the
apparently insignificant yet persistent microaggressions experi­
enced by her grown-up children in contemporary France. This
strategy enables the author to reflect on the role of cultural trans­
mission while reconstructing the silenced history of colonization,
immigration and failed social mobility while also debunking the
myth of Republican meritocracy.

Introduction
Faïza Guène, born in 1985, was only nineteen when she burst onto the French literary
scene with her debut novel Kiffe kiffe demain [Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow] (2004). The novel has
sold 400,000 copies and it has been translated into twenty-six languages (Bouchenni
2020). Praised by critics for its ‘portrayal of the female experience of the banlieue’ (Ahonen
2016, 168, italics in original), it was applauded for its optimistic depiction of France’s
peripheral housing estates as convivial, multicultural settings, as opposed to the domi­
nant media-political discourses depicting banlieues as ethnic ghettos to be reconquered
by the Republic (Horvath 2020). Constructed in the 1950s and 1960s to solve the post-war
housing crisis, France’s large-scale social housing estates known as ‘banlieues’ are con­
sidered a major social issue today. Abandoned by their middle-class residents in the
1970s, these neighbourhoods have been used to house workers from the former colonies

CONTACT Christina Horvath c.horvath@bath.ac.uk Reader in French Studies, University of Bath, Bath, UK
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med­
ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
234 C. HORVATH

as well as some more recent immigrants (Angélil and Siress 2012, 60). From the 1980s
onwards, these peripheral neighbourhoods have been plagued by unemployment and
recurrent urban unrest. The top-down urban policies implemented to tackle territorial
segregation through physical renovation, economic development, and restructuring
failed to provide effective solutions for these issues; however, by spatializing them, they
have contributed to lasting stigmatization of working-class banlieues. The stereotypes
attached to the urban periphery have also been reinforced by some of the counter-
narratives produced by artists from banlieues who have often depicted these areas as
male-dominated spaces. Guène’s first novel challenged these clichés by focusing on
a network of female relationships. This strategy helped her humanize ‘stereotypical
representations of the housing projects as sites of deviance and violence through
a tender mother-daughter relationship and communal affiliations found in female soli­
darity bonds, popular music, and the sharing of food’ (Mehta 2010, 175). The focus on
female networks has also demonstrated that ‘pour Guène, le rôle des femmes en banlieue
est crucial pour toute la communauté, grâce aux liens qu’elles ont tissés au sein même de
la communauté maghrébine’ [for Guène, the role of women in the banlieues is crucial for
the entire community, thanks to the links they have forged within the Maghrebi commu­
nity] (Puig 2019, 158–159).
After the extraordinary success of Kiffe kiffe demain, Guène has continued to explore
the powerful ties between immigrant parents and their French-born children in five more
novels. Du rêve pour les oufs (2006) is narrated by a young immigrant woman from Algeria,
Ahlème, who attempts to integrate into France while caring for her disabled father and
turbulent younger brother. Les Gens du Balto (2008) subverts the genre of murder mystery
by interweaving the voices of eight narrators from a Parisian banlieue, including that of
a mother of Armenian descent. Un homme, ça ne pleure pas (2014) explores the complex
relationship between an elderly Algerian couple living in Nice and their three grown-up
children. Millénium blues (2018) investigates the sorority between two female friends
involved in complex migrant genealogies reaching back to Portugal and Algeria, respec­
tively. Finally, Guène’s latest novel, La Discrétion [Discretion] (2020), narrates the biogra­
phy of a 70-year-old Algerian mother of four, Yamina Taleb, assembling fragments of her
childhood during and after the war of independence and tracing her adult life in
Aubervilliers, a banlieue just outside Paris.
This article proposes to examine Guène’s enduring interest in female (and male)
immigrant filiations as a privileged locus for the transmission of postcolonial memory
from Maghrebi parents to their Maghrebi French children. As Adalgisa Giorgio points out
in Writing Mothers and Daughters (2002, 32), maternal figures in literature tend to embody
ethnic roots, belonging and the transmission of the culture of origin:

The maternal figure is often a metaphor of origins, encompassing not only kinship but also
race, ethnicity, and language. She comes to represent the ethnic roots which the daughter
wishes simultaneously to repress in her search for assimilation to the dominant culture, and
to preserve in order to remain loyal to the values and memories of her community.

Giorgio contends that, particularly in narratives produced by Maghrebi French writers,

mother-daughter relations provide insights into the tensions experienced by young
Maghrebi French women who are constrained to choose between the patriarchal rules
prevalent in their culture of origin and the pressure to assimilate in order fully to integrate
 ROMANCE STUDIES 235

in France. Adopting a decolonial and intersectional feminist lens, this article will examine
whether this observation, based on earlier narratives produced by the so-called ‘beur’
generation [second-generation Maghrebi French writers] in the 1980s and 1990s (Laronde
1993), is still relevant to novels published in the twenty-first century. I will argue that, over
the past two decades, the rise of Islamophobia in France (Hajjat and Mohammed 2013;
Beaman 2017) and the mobilization of a civilizational feminist discourse to stigmatize
Maghrebi French citizens (Guénif-Souilamas 2006; Fernando 2016; Vergès 2019) have
prompted Maghrebi French writers including Guène to express solidarity with the gen­
eration of their parents and to expose the Republic’s failure to fully integrate them as
French citizens instead of scrutinizing patriarchy within their own community. I propose
to read in parallel the author’s first and last novels, Kiffe kiffe demain and La Discrétion,1 to
trace how Guène’s representation of Maghrebi French female filiations has evolved during
the sixteen years that elapsed between the publication of each text. The focus on
postcolonial genealogies and memory will allow light to be shed on the complex strate­
gies of resistance Guène has been developing in her texts in response to ‘the construction
of a negative Muslim otherness’ (Mohammed 2020, 80), which has affected not only the
integration of Maghrebi French in France but also the literary consecration of Faïza Guène
herself.
The first section of the article will examine how Republican discourses about the
Maghrebi French2 have evolved since the early 2000s. It will also demonstrate the
relevance of intersectional/decolonial feminist approaches to this analysis. The second
and third sections will provide close readings of both novels with a particular focus on
female filiations as central nodes of resistance. The fourth section will reflect on Guène’s
increasingly disillusioned and critical stance towards the Republican model of integration.
Finally, the conclusion will highlight how a glass ceiling continues to prevent Guène and
other Maghrebi French, working-class and/or banlieue-based authors from being fully
legitimated as French writers.

Intersectional and Decolonial Feminism: A Useful Approach to the Maghrebi

French Experience in Contemporary France
In recent years, the over-politicization of themes related to postcolonial migration to
France has been heavily scrutinized by an increasing number of scholars. As Bouamama
(2006), Guénif-Souilamas (2006), Giry (2006), Hajjat and Mohammed (2013), Beaman
(2017) and others have shown, debates about democracy, national identity, banlieues,
education, Islam and the hijab have been instrumentalized to fuel suspicion against
France’s four-to-five million Muslims (Giry 2006). Increasingly considered an enemy
within, Maghrebi French have been depicted in dominant discourses as a monolithic
community whose religious practices and cultural norms significantly differ from those of
the majority. In the wake of the 1995 Paris metro bombings, the 2001 attack against the
World Trade Centre, the 2015–2016 Paris and Nice attacks and the beheading of French
history teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020, theories about a clash of civilizations have
been gaining ground, contributing to the rise of Islamophobia, defined by Marwan
Mohammed as a process of othering through amalgamation that ‘groups together
individuals, communities and populations that have little in common, linking them to
various acts of violence carried out by individuals and groups who claim to be acting in
236 C. HORVATH

the name of Islam’ (2020, 79). Since the 2015 attack against the satiric newspaper Charlie
Hebdo, individual citizens’ responses to calls for national unity have come under close
scrutiny. Dissent from the expected collective response of solidarity has barely been
tolerated, particularly in schools (Kiwan 2016). While, according to Giry, ‘most Muslims
in France [. . .] have adopted French cultural norms; [. . .] [and] enthusiastically endorse
republican values, including laïcité’ (2006, 88), the repeated calls urging Maghrebi French
to show allegiance to the Republic tend to overlook the overall success of their integra­
tion and aggravate the discrimination they experience in most areas of their everyday life.
This emerging consensus about Islam’s assumed incompatibility with Republican
norms also exposes some paradoxes inherent to the Republican model of integration.
For instance, the legitimate presence of postcolonial immigrants and their children is
conditioned by their social invisibility and political non-existence (Bouamama 2006, 198).
These two interrelated principles, which imply that the immigrants and their descendants
must remain as polite, invisible, and discrete as possible, are also supported by France’s
rejection of racial and ethnic categorizations despite the fact that racial categories
inherited from colonialism continue to inform implicit definitions of Frenchness. This
invisibility was publicly challenged in 1983, 1984 and 1985 through a series of protest
marches organized by the children of postcolonial immigrants to express their desire to
be recognized as equal citizens and reject their parents’ subaltern status. However,
successive governments encouraged abstract forms of anti-racism to prevent autono­
mous identarian movements from emerging and promoted new binary distinctions
between Maghrebi parents and their children born in France, male and female immi­
grants, and legitimate and clandestine migrants. Such binary categories have also served
to distinguish immigrants who could be integrated from those who could not be, and to
assign postcolonial immigrants to a permanent subaltern status since their inequality was
suddenly considered a consequence of their difference rather than the other way round
(Bouamama 2006, 215).
The passing of the 2004 law prohibiting ‘conspicuous religious symbols’ in French
public schools (Hargreaves [1995] 2007, 111–120) has drawn sustained scholarly attention
to the gendered experience of Maghrebi French women. Although the law justified the
measure to defend the Republican principle of laïcité [secularism] as necessary, many
commentators highlighted that the prohibition was in reality aimed at Muslim girls and
women wearing the Islamic headscarf, an object diabolized as the principal symbol of
anti-Republican oppression against women. The law, designed to protect young women
from being forced to wear the veil against their will, has resulted in coercing them while
simultaneously reinforcing a mono-dimensional perception of the headscarf as ‘some­
thing aggressive’ (Hargreaves [1995] 2007, 116). Fernando highlights how gender equality
and civilizational feminism were mobilized to justify anti-Muslim sentiment and to blur
the boundaries between the overlapping groups of Muslims and Maghrebi French:

‘Muslim’ has become a religious and quasi-racial classification to refer to people of North and
West African descent. Muslims are targeted on the basis of their race – often at the hands of
police – and their religion – often through discriminatory laws, like the 2004 headscarf law
and the 2010 law banning face veils in all public spaces, laws that were passed in the name of
gender equality and with full-throated support from most mainstream feminist organizations.
(2016, 39)
 ROMANCE STUDIES 237

The 2004 law has also been denounced by materialist feminist theorist Christine Delphy
who has cautioned against its alarming consequences: the exclusion of a group of young
French women from compulsory state education and the definitive alienation of the
already marginalized Maghrebi French population from the Republic (Delphy 2008,
137). What makes Delphy’s reflection particularly relevant to this analysis is her focus on
the intersection of racism, classism and sexism and her recognition that the contemporary
stigmatization of Maghrebi French goes back to the racist stereotypes which were
assigned to their ancestors by the French colonizers, for example the assumption that
‘les indigènes ne “traitent pas bien leurs femmes”’ [the natives do not ‘treat their women
well’] (Delphy 2008, 141). Delphy’s stance therefore demonstrates that an intersectional
and decolonial turn in feminism is necessary to understand fully how binary, dichotomous
categories imposed during colonialism such as human/non-human, male/female, or
civilized/uncivilized have participated in creating lasting hierarchies which have served
to justify exclusion. As decolonial theorist Maria Lugones points out, such binary cate­
gories explain social hierarchies through essentialist classification and represent racialized
populations ‘as not human in species — as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild’ (2010,
743). Therefore, the analysis of colonial relations needs to include race, class and gender
to be able to dismantle categorial logics and resist a normativity which ‘cuts across
questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and knowl­
edge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world
or to destroy it’ (Lugones 2010, 742).
One of the first French scholars to use an intersectional framework to denounce the
stereotyping of the Maghrebi French was sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas (2006). As
she argues, the simultaneously racialized and sexualized figures of ‘la fille voilée’ [the
veiled woman] and ‘la beurette’ [the emancipated Maghrebi French woman], and their
male counterparts, ‘le musulman laïc’ [the secular Muslim man] and ‘le garçon arabe’ [the
Arab boy] are anchored in a fixed, orientalist imagery (Guénif-Souilamas 2006). Guénif-
Souilamas not only critiques feminist movements like ‘Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ [Neither
Whores Nor Doormats]3 for their endorsement of the 2004 law, but she also denounces
them as ‘consensuel, antiféministe, hétérocentré et réactionnaire autorisant l’enferme­
ment d’ennemis intimes: victimes les beurettes, et bourreaux les garçons arabes’ [con­
sensual, anti-feminist, hetero-centric and reactionary, authorizing the confinement of
intimate enemies: Arab girls as victims, and Arab boys as executioners] (2006, 121). She
concludes that French Republicanism is an alienating ideology perpetuating a dominant,
homogenizing, culturalist and ethnocentric vision of Maghrebi French women by inviting
them to embrace an emancipation devoid of tangible means of achievement and by
encouraging them to reject their families to show their integration and loyalty to the
Republic.
The relevance of an intersectional framework has also been confirmed by Tissot and
Tevanian (2010) who revealed that in the early 2000s a state-promoted brand of feminism
conquered the French media, broadly accusing Muslim men living in banlieues of a sexism
intrinsic to their culture: ‘Le féminisme est ainsi devenu une métaphore du racisme: il
alimente des représentations et des pratiques racistes mais sur un mode euphémisé et par
conséquent respectable. Il est en effet devenu légitime, paré de la caution féministe, de
stigmatiser l’islam et de renvoyer les femmes musulmanes à une indécrottable aliénation’
[Feminism has thus become a metaphor for racism: it feeds racist representations and
238 C. HORVATH

practices, but in a euphemistic and therefore respectable fashion. It has indeed become
legitimate, adorned with the feminist guarantee, to stigmatize Islam and to send Muslim
women back to an indecipherable alienation] (2010, 215–217). More recently, a similar
critique of mainstream feminism has been articulated by Françoise Vergès, claiming that
the Republican consensus about feminism coincided with its appropriation by liberalism,
nationalism, xenophobia, and right-extremism. In other words, the legitimation of femin­
ism has facilitated the emergence and consolidation of a respectable brand of racism. This
essentializing, civilizational variant of feminism that Vergès calls ‘femonationalism’, has
betrayed racialized women by turning a blind eye to colonial, imperialist and neoliberal
exploitation in exchange for an increase of legitimacy and gender equality for white
middle-class women. Vergès’s (2019, 27–28) call for a more holistic, decolonial approach
to feminism which sees its aim in fighting the racism-capitalism-imperialism triad has
found an echo in a series of contemporary texts by intersectional feminist activists such as
La France tu l’aimes ou tu la fermes? (2019) by journalist Rokhaya Diallo or La Puissance
des mères (2020) by political analyst Fatima Ouassak. Although Guène has not openly
positioned herself as a decolonial or intersectional feminist, these contemporary debates
have inevitably marked the period in which her novels were published. As the close
readings of her first and latest novels will demonstrate, she has been aware of the
simultaneous effects of colonialism, patriarchy and neoliberalism on racialized women
and has highlighted these in her writing since her debut novel.

The Republican Model of Emancipation in Kiffe kiffe demain

Kiffe kiffe demain was published at a time when first-person narratives by Maghrebi French
women attracted a considerable public interest for scrutinizing patriarchal models in
banlieues and Muslim families. This interest was to a great extent triggered by the intense
debate surrounding the anti-headscarf law passed in 2004 which increased the visibility of
testimonial narratives produced by victims of gendered violence in banlieues. A striking
example of this was Dans l’enfer des tournantes (2002), the autobiography of gang-rape
victim and NPNS sponsor Samira Bellil. In her book Branding the ‘Beur’ Author, Kathryn
Kleppinger explains how, in the 1990s and early 2000s, media demand for both beurette-
authored4 novels and unfictionalized autobiographical accounts prepared the ground for
an expanded dominant discourse according to which female Maghrebi French writers ‘not
only provide new insights into the dynamics of immigrant communities in France but also
critique gender relations within them’ (2015, 159). Kleppinger’s detailed analysis of
Guène’s engagement with audiovisual media shows that the reception of her first novel
was strongly impacted upon by expectations based on previous authors identified as
beurettes including the novelist Soraya Nini, author of Ils disent que je suis une beurette
and testimonial writers like Bellil. It also reveals that much of the media buzz around Kiffe
kiffe demain was triggered by the interviewers’ interest in Guène herself as a newsworthy
person who had an authentic angle on fashionable themes including delinquency, the veil
and the victimization of banlieue women by banlieue men (Kleppinger 2015, 202–203).
Perceived by commentators as a predominantly optimistic narrative presenting examples
of successful female emancipation in a banlieue, the novel received enthusiastic coverage
in which the author’s youth, modest social origins, and demographic closeness to Doria,
the novel’s Maghrebi French narrator, were repeatedly emphasized (Maameri 2016). In
 ROMANCE STUDIES 239

Keïra Maameri’s documentary Nos Plumes (2016), Guène expresses her disappointment
with journalists treating her as a mere spokeswoman for banlieue youths rather than an
accomplished artist able to create complex fictional characters: ‘Des fois on va dire que
c’est autobiographique parce que ça ne peut pas être toi qui as inventé. Parce qu’il faut un
minimum pour inventer, faire des situations, des personnages, faire un roman’
[Sometimes they’ll say it’s autobiographical because it can’t be you who invented it.
Because you need a minimum to invent, to create situations, to create characters, to write
a novel] (Maameri 2016, 0:33:00).
Kiffe kiffe demain certainly ticked some of the boxes a beurette narrative was expected
to tick — it included images of young French Maghrebi women sequestrated by their
families, examples of petty crime, and female empowerment facilitated by Republican
institutions. While the novel was praised for proposing a ‘more diverse image of the
banlieues by questioning stereotypes and [. . .] gendered practices’ (Ahonen 2016, 170),
Aronsson (2012) notes that its representation of Muslim men is rather ambiguous. It
portrays male characters either as disloyal and authoritarian like Doria’s father or Aunt
Zohra’s husband or as weak and emasculated like Nabil’s father, who is persistently
mocked in the neighbourhood for doing the dishes at home. Livry-Gargan’s Muslim
community itself is depicted as fairly sexist and conservative; Muslim parents seek to
control their daughters, reject homosexuality, and oppose mixed marriages while they
tolerate their sons’ involvement in delinquency and radicalization. Although this predo­
minantly negative portrayal is mitigated by a few positive characters like Doria’s best
friend Hamoudi and her love interest Nabil, Aronsson concludes that the representation of
Muslim masculinity in the novel remains problematic and clichéd overall:

Les personnages masculins sont, en effet, souvent stéréotypés et ressemblent parfois à des
caricatures d’hommes autoritaires et cruels. La communauté musulmane de Livry-Gargan est
présentée comme une sous-culture orthodoxe et patriarcale, dominée par des hommes qui
cherchent à restreindre la liberté des femmes. (2012, 15)

[The male characters are, indeed, often stereotypical and sometimes resemble caricatures of
bossy and cruel men. The Muslim community of Livry-Gargan is presented as an Orthodox
and patriarchal subculture, dominated by men who seek to restrict women’s freedom.]

Despite its ambiguous depiction of Muslim and banlieue masculinities, the complexity of
female filiations and solidarity clearly dissociates the novel from the earlier beurette-
authored texts and announces Guène’s awareness of intersectional/decolonial feminist
trends. The narrator’s mother Yasmina is an illiterate homemaker who, after her husband’s
return to Morocco, finds employment in a motel. Since her wage hardly allows her and her
daughter to survive, they dress from garage sales and rely on charities, food banks and
help from the neighbours to make ends meet. Rescued by the French state, Doria receives
free psychotherapy sessions while a literacy course allows her mother to secure a better
job at a local school. The pair’s simultaneous emancipation is facilitated by a blonde social
worker whose persistent smile, Barbie-doll-like looks and slight but perceptible condes­
cendence towards Yasmina initially irritate Doria. The young narrator notes that instead of
empowering them, the social worker’s unrequested gifts tend to reinforce her and her
mother’s lack of agency and dependency on aid: ‘Je me demande si elle a pas choisi
ce métier parce que ça la rassurait de s’occuper de la misère des gens. [. . .] Je me sens
régresser avec tous ces gens qui me traitent comme une assistée’ [I wonder if she chose
240 C. HORVATH

this profession because it reassured her to take care of people’s misery. [. . .] I feel myself
regressing with all these people who treat me as if I were incapable] (KKD, 67–69).
However, as the story unfolds, Doria progressively overcomes her scepticism and changes
her motto from ‘kif-kif’ [same old, same old] to ‘kiffe-kiffe’ [from the verb kiffer, which
means to like] finally to embrace the profession and lifestyle Republican institutions
encourage her to adopt. This obedience is rewarded with the perspective of a seaside
vacation funded by the Livry-Gargan city council.
While the main characters’ emancipation rests on their assimilation to the figure of the
‘beurette’ rather than that of the ‘fille voilée’ described by Guénif-Souilamas (2006),
a closer investigation reveals that Guène’s vision of the Republican model is more critical
than it first seems. The integration of mother and daughter is seemingly facilitated by the
state, yet the improvement of their social status remains marginal. Yasmina transitions
from chambermaid to kitchen help but remains an unqualified, low-paid worker. Doria is
oriented towards vocational training to become a hairdresser although she dreams about
becoming an actress, a revolutionary or a politician. Her experience of being steered
towards a blue-collar career despite her higher ambitions and intellectual abilities is far
from being unique among the children of Maghrebi immigrants in France. Fatima
Ouassak’s analysis of racial segregation at French schools reveals that racialized children
growing up in banlieues are often disadvantaged by an education system which tends to
clip their wings and pressures them into vocational training, diminishing their chances of
achieving social mobility:5

La réduction du champ des possibles se traduit par une surreprésentation des enfants issus
de l’immigration postcoloniale dans les secteurs d’activité précaires. [. . .] Certes, on ne force
pas les enfants noirs et arabes à se diriger vers cette partie la plus pécaïre du marché de
travail. Mais on les éduque à y aller, on les y accompagne étape par étape, on les dissuade
d’envisager autre chose. (2020, 141–142)

[The reduction in the field of possibilities results in an over-representation of children from

postcolonial immigration in precarious sectors of activity. [. . .] Of course, black and Arab
children are not forced to move towards this most precarious part of the labour market. But
they are trained to do so, accompanied step by step, dissuaded from considering something
else.]

Yasmina and Doria both received help from the Republic to improve their lives. However it
can also be argued that instead of truly empowering them, this system ultimately
facilitates their absorption into a neoliberal labour market demanding a cheap, unskilled
workforce, as suggested by decolonial and intersectional feminists like Vergès and
Ouassak. Although Yasmina actually achieves some degree of emancipation from her ex-
husband, she continues to depend on help from the state for everything but the most
essential goods.
Mother’s and daughter’s limited access to the symbolic benefits of French citizenship is
highlighted by their first-ever visit to the Eiffel Tower. When, after seeing the Tower from
afar for over a decade, they find the courage to visit it, they do not fully enjoy the
experience since they cannot afford to go up by lift or buy a souvenir. This partial
disappointment mirrors the protagonists’ precarious inclusion into Frenchness since
they are ‘technically citizens [, yet they] are not treated as full citizens because of their
assigned otherness as racial and ethnic minorities’ (Beaman 2017, 33). The novel,
 ROMANCE STUDIES 241

nevertheless, proposes a more empowering alternative to the flawed Republican eman­

cipation which rests on ‘le narcissisme des femmes blanches si heureuses “d’aider”’ [the
narcissism of white women so happy to ‘help’] (Vergès 2019, 63). A more efficient, bottom-
up female network of solidarity is set up by racialized working-class women who create
hands-on solutions for their everyday problems. Examples of their self-organization
include the free tutorials Doria receives from the son of her mother’s friend, or the
mutually beneficial babysitting she does for Lila, a Maghrebi French single mother who
works at a supermarket. The most powerful example of this agency is the strike action
conducted by a group of racialized female motel cleaners who, under the leadership of
the dynamic union representative Fatouma Konaré, obtain fairer pay and a lighter work­
load. Yasmina is delighted to see the strike’s victorious outcome in the news on national
television.
Inspired by the 2002 Accor hotel strike which mostly involved African female employees,
the successful mobilization in the novel demonstrates immigrant women’s ability to improve
their situation without support from the state or middle-class, civilizational feminist organi­
zations which do not even feature in the novel.6 This victory, also mentioned in Ouassak’s
analysis (2020, 80), highlights immigrant women’s often-overlooked pioneering role as
human rights activists. By incorporating in her novel this under-mediatized grassroots
movement, Guène demonstrates her keen interest in the political potential of racialized
women and distances herself from narratives focusing on racialized female victimhood. Her
celebration of racialized women’s capacity to fight patriarchy and capitalism simultaneously
can be interpreted as an understated but distinctively political intersectional feminist stance.

Recovering Colonial Memory in La Discrétion

Published in the aftermath of the 2015 and 2016 terrorist attacks and the ensuing Je suis
Charlie debate which imposed a set of ‘Franco-centred values and norms that are
compatible with the views and culture of a majority of French citizens’ (Marlière 2017,
52), La Discrétion (2020) denounces the growing alienation between France’s postcolonial
and majority-ethnic populations. In her previous novel, Millenium Blues, Guène already
expressed her nostalgia for the brief period stretching from the 1998 French football
world cup victory to the 2001 terrorist attack against the World Trade Centre, during
which France celebrated multiculturalism. This thought, repeatedly voiced in her inter­
views (Hakem 2020), also appears in La Discrétion:

C’était au début des années 2000, l’été 2001 pour être exacte, ah la bonne époque, juste avant
le 11 septembre, avant Ben Laden, et avant Charlie. Au moment où les Arabes étaient à la
mode, grâce à Zidane, et à ses deux buts en final de la Coupe du Monde 1998, aux blagues de
Jamel Debbouze et au JT de Rachid Arhab. C’était cool d’être rebeu à cette période. (LD, 74–
75, italics in original)

[It was the early 2000s, the summer of 2001 to be exact, what a great period, just before
September 11, before Bin Laden, and before Charlie. When the Arabs were in fashion, thanks
to Zidane, and his two goals in the final of the 1998 World Cup, the jokes of Jamel Debbouze
and the news with Rachid Arhab. It was cool to be Arab back then.]

The novel revisits several of Guène’s recurrent topics including immigrant genealogies,
feelings of disenchantment among the children of Maghrebi immigrants, stigmatized
242 C. HORVATH

Muslim masculinities, the transmission of postcolonial memory and the exclusion of

Maghrebi French from cultural citizenship. To highlight the primary importance of post­
colonial filiations in the novel, Guène borrows two epigraphs from two prominent post­
colonial thinkers who denounced racial hierarchies and highlighted the
psychopathological consequences of colonization. These citations from James Baldwin’s
The Fire Next Time (1963) and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) allow the
author to refer to the notion of ‘transnational blackness’ and reflect a racialized global
‘diasporic consciousness’ (Sharma 2010, 3–4; Beaman 2017, 85–88). By quoting two male
rather than female thinkers, Guène also stresses the universal validity of her depiction of
a particular, gendered and racialized, postcolonial experience, that of a female Algerian
immigrant first in her home country colonized by France, and then in a French banlieue.
But these explicitly political quotes also serve to position Guène as Baldwin’s and Fanon’s
heir and to signal her desire to dialogue with artists and intellectuals who resisted
colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism at different times, in different geographic areas.
The first epigraph, ‘il faut beaucoup de souplesse spirituelle pour ne pas haïr celui qui
vous hait et dont le pied écrase votre nuque, et ne pas apprendre à vos enfants à le haïr
exige une sensibilité et une charité encore plus miraculeuses’ [it demands great spiritual
resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of
perception and charity not to teach your child to hate] (LD, 9), mirrors the dilemma of
immigrant parents who hope to protect their children from their colonial trauma without
however depriving them of a cultural heritage which is a powerful resource to resist
assimilation and preserve one’s dignity (Ouassak 2020, 127). The citation also suggests
that withholding narratives about past events may result in even more detrimental
consequences than the transmission of traumas, since silence inevitably leads to aliena­
tion and loss of meaning. The second quotation, ‘chaque génération doit, dans une
relative opacité, découvrir sa mission, la remplir ou la trahir’ [each generation must, in
relative opacity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it] (LD, 137) highlights Guène’s own
desire to preserve the memory of her parents’ generation before their passing. As she
claims in an interview, ‘chaque génération a sa mission, la nôtre est de recueillir le récit de
nos parents et de le raconter. [. . .] J’ai envie que le récit de cette femme qui a l’air invisible
compte’ [each generation has its mission, ours is to collect the story of our parents and to
tell it. [. . .] I want the story of this woman who seems invisible to count] (Hakem 2020).
La Discrétion is Guène’s first novel narrated in the third person. After focussing on the
figure of the father in Un homme, ça ne pleure pas (2014), it reconstructs the biography of
an elderly female immigrant and mother of four in chronological order from her birth in
1949 in a still colonial Algeria to her first-ever holiday in France in summer 2020. The novel
is divided into thirty-five short chapters, about half of which are dedicated to Yamina’s
past, while the others focus on more recent events occurring between 2018 and 2020 in
the lives of Yamina’s children. Malika, Hannah, Imane and Omar are fairly integrated,
lower-middle-class professionals, yet they are periodically exposed to micro-aggressions
due to their ethnic, geographic and social origins. The triviality of their everyday experi­
ence contrasts with Yamina’s gripping childhood memories; her tense encounter with
French soldiers during the war of independence, the exile to Morocco, deprivation and
hard physical labour. Through an intersectional prism, it is possible to read these early
experiences as a ‘stolen childhood’ (King 1995; Roberts [1997] 2017, 37). Introduced by
African-American authors Wilma King and Dorothy Roberts, who in the late 1990s
 ROMANCE STUDIES 243

revealed the systemic abuse suffered by racialized women from the age of slavery to the
present-day stigmatization of black motherhood, this term refers to the experience of
enslaved children who, due to their parents’ incapacitated authority over them, were
virtually deprived of their childhood. Like these children, Yamina is confronted with her
parents’ inability to protect her from colonial violence and is prevented from having
a proper education first by war and exile and then because her labour is needed at the
family farm. The rudimentary dental surgery which leaves an infected root in her gum for
decades is a compelling metaphor that stands for the toxic effects of a silenced past which
needs to be exposed so that healing can take place.
Despite her disappointment with her father’s decisions to withdraw her from
school and to marry her to an expatriate worker, Yamina cultivates serenity and
forgiveness. She finds satisfaction in buying knick-knacks at the local market, growing
flowers in her allotment garden, and praying in the open air. Like her almost-
namesake Yasmina in Kiffe kiffe demain, she handles micro-aggressions in an under­
stated manner, leaving her children wondering whether she is unaware of the
doctor’s and the administrator’s condescendence, or whether her composure is actu­
ally a form of resistance:

D’une certaine façon, Yamina est préservée. [. . .] Son innocence la protège de la violence de
l’attitude du médecin. Elle ne s’aperçoit pas du rapport vertical qui se joue dans le cabinet du
docteur qu’elle respecte tant. [. . .] C’est à se demander si Yamina ne le fait pas exprès, car elle
semble sourde à la colère qui l’appelle. Après tout, peut-être a-t-elle choisi de ne pas se laisser
abîmer par le mépris? (LD, 16)

[In a way, Yamina is preserved. [. . .] Her innocence protects her from the violence of the
doctor’s attitude. She does not realize the vertical relationship that plays out in the doctor’s
office, which she respects so much. [. . .] It makes you wonder if Yamina is not doing it on
purpose, as she seems deaf to the anger calling her. After all, maybe she chose not to be
spoiled by contempt?]

Yamina’s belonging to the place she calls home is embodied by a major metaphor, the fig
tree. As a child, Yamina enjoyed climbing the branches of a large fig tree in her parents’
garden in Smidra. During her exile in Morocco the tree dries out, mirroring Yamina’s
‘stolen childhood’. In 1981, Yamina marries Brahim Taleb who takes her to France. After
three decades of nostalgia, she discovers a magnificent fig tree growing in her allotment
in a communal garden in Aubervilliers: ‘Désormais, l’arbre de Yamina, sa baraka, n’est plus
en Algérie, il est ici, à Aubervilliers, bien enraciné et généreux’ [From now on, Yamina’s
tree, her baraka, is no longer in Algeria, but here, in Aubervilliers, well rooted and
generous] (LD, 150). The metaphor, which signals that despite all odds Yamina has finally
grown roots in France and her fruits are her French-born children, is revisited one more
time at the end of the novel when, at the age of seventy-one, her children take Yamina on
holiday to the south of France. Like the visit to the Eiffel Tower in Kiffe kiffe demain, this
first French vacation constitutes a hopeful moment in the novel, suggesting that
Maghrebi parents can finally develop a sense of belonging to France thanks to their
offspring.
Filiations tend to constitute complex networks extending far beyond family genealogy
in Guène’s novels. La Discrétion, which abounds in real and imaginary genealogies, is no
exception. Yamina sees Algeria as a maternal entity and Houari Boumediene, the country’s
244 C. HORVATH

first president, as a father figure. She sabotages the lineage of her physical mother, the
introverted Rahma and her tribe and runs away when the ambulant Berber tattooist
known as ‘la vieille mère’ [the old mother] (LD, 105), yet another mother figure, attempts
to reproduce her mother’s tribal tattoo on her forehead and chin:

Cet héritage tribal se transmet aux femmes depuis des siècles, de génération en génération,
et symbolise l’appartenance à la tribu. Dans la tradition berbère, le tatouage est aussi un rite
de passage à l’âge adulte. Mais Yamina, n’est-elle pas née directement dans l’âge adulte ? La
guerre ne l’a-t-elle pas privée de son enfance? [. . .] Elle imagine comment la vieille mère va lui
entailler la peau en dessinant le motif, [. . .] la feuille de palmier, qui incarne la mère protectrice
[. . .]. Elle n’accepte pas ce tatouage, elle refuse d’être marquée à vie, c’est décidé, cette
tradition s’arrêtera avec elle. (LD, 105–107, italics in original)

[This tribal heritage has been passed down to women for centuries, from generation to
generation, and symbolizes belonging to the tribe. In the Berber tradition, it is also a rite of
passage into adulthood. But wasn’t Yamina born straight into adulthood? Didn’t the war rob
her of her childhood? [. . .] She imagines how the old mother will cut her skin by drawing the
pattern, [. . .] the palm leaf, which embodies the protective mother [. . .]. She does not accept
this tattoo, she refuses to be marked for life, it’s decided, this tradition will end with her.]

Instead of wearing the mark of female coming-of-age according to Berber cultural tradi­
tions, Yamina chooses a role model from outside her family by developing an imagined
sorority with Djamila Bouhired, a female resistance fighter who responded to her death
sentence by the French military tribunal with defiant laughter. Cutting out Bouhired’s
photograph from a newspaper and taking it with her to France encourages Yamina to
reject victimhood and preserve her dignity (LD, 88). This chosen rather than inherited
legacy highlights Yamina’s own heroism which resides in small, everyday acts of
resistance:

Et si, aujourd’hui, pour cette femme de soixante-dix ans, refuser de se laisser envahir par le
ressentiment était une façon de résister? Mais la colère, même enfouie, ne disparaît pas. La
colère se transmet, l’air de rien. Ses enfants, eux, ils n’aiment pas ça. Ils ne supportent pas
qu’on s’adresse à leur mère comme si elle était absolument idiote, naturellement inférieure.
Eux, ils savent qui elle est, ce qu’elle a traversé, et ils exigent que le monde entier le sache aussi.
(LD, 16, italics in original)

[What if, for this seventy-year-old woman today, refusing to let herself be overcome by
resentment was a way of resisting? But the anger, even buried, does not disappear. Anger
is transmitted, casually. Her kids don’t like it. They hate it when their mother is treated as if she
were absolutely stupid, naturally inferior. They know who she is, what she’s been through, and
they expect the whole world to recognize it too.]

Instead of preserving her children from past traumas, Yamina’s disruption of cultural
transmission fuels their resentment about the glass ceiling they are unable to shatter
‘despite doing everything right’ (Beaman 2017, 14). They see their own marginalization as
the continuation of French colonization. In a conversation about the genetic transmission
of memory, Guène speaks about the intimate, bodily inheritance of previous generations’
suffering and expresses her desire to facilitate healing by reconstructing this past experi­
ence from a series of fragments and absences:

Je crois beaucoup à ce qu’on appelle la mémoire génétique, ou les traumas

transgénérationnels. On hérite de choses qui ne nous sont pas racontées. C’est très fort et
 ROMANCE STUDIES 245

cela nous fait deviner la douleur, les sacrifices, c’est dans notre chair. Ces choses s’expriment
parfois par le corps. (Bouchenni 2020)

[I believe a lot in what is called genetic memory, or transgenerational trauma. We inherit

things that are not told to us. It is very strong and it makes us guess the pain, the sacrifices, it
is in our flesh. These things sometimes express themselves through the body.]

The Transmission of Colonial Memory as a Prerequisite for Healing and

Reconciliation
A major difference between Guène’s first and last novels resides in the different places the
transmission of colonial trauma occupies in both narratives. Sixteen years after being used
as a secondary theme in Kiffe kiffe demain, colonial memory is promoted to centre stage in
La Discrétion. According to Puig, female filiations play a crucial role in the strikingly
intimate way history is discussed in the novel:

Kiffe kiffe demain peut donc se lire comme un hommage aux femmes immigrées qui ont non
seulement su créer des liens entre elles dans un environnement nouveau, mais également
transmettre, ne serait-ce que par bribe ou de manière indirecte, quelques éléments de
l’histoire coloniale à leurs enfants. (2019, 159)

[Kiffe kiffe demain can therefore be read as a tribute to immigrant women who have not only
been able to create links between themselves in a new environment, but also to transmit, if
only in snatches or indirectly, some elements of colonial history to their children.]

Indeed, in Kiffe kiffe demain, history is primarily addressed through intimate anecdotes
Maghrebi immigrant women share with their friends and children. For instance, the
memory of 17 October 1961 comes up in a conversation between Yasmina and her
daughter while they are watching on television the inauguration by Paris mayor
Bertrand Delanoë of a plaque honouring the memory of Algerian protesters killed by
the police on that day (KKD, 164). Yet, colonization is only fleetingly evoked through the
backstory of Aunt Zohra who was born on the day of Algerian independence. In La
Discrétion, by contrast, the stakes of transmitting colonial and postcolonial legacies are
much higher since the memory of the colonial past is now on the verge of disappearing,
threatened not only by state-promoted amnesia and the immigrants’ reticence or inca­
pacity to tell their personal narratives but also the imminent passing of the generation
who experienced colonial traumas. While intimate, domestic events and oral history
continue to play a crucial role in revealing suppressed memories, history is now tackled
from two different angles: the viewpoint of Maghrebi parents who seek to suppress their
agonizing memories and that of their children whose task is actively to excavate and
reassemble the fragments of the untold stories before their parents’ passing. The gravity
of this looming loss and the narration in the third person, without the tempering effect of
a humorous first-person voice, contribute to making La Discrétion a much more solemn
and poignant narrative than Guène’s previous texts.
Though still focusing on intimate events, La Discrétion is also more turned towards
collective memory. Unlike Yasmina’s and Doria’s individual hardship caused by the
departure of Doria’s father, the harsh conditions encountered by Yamina in La
Discrétion result from colonial violence perpetrated by the French colonizers in Algeria
246 C. HORVATH

and are later echoed by the racial marginalization of Maghrebi French in France. Similarly,
the struggle of Yamina’s children to integrate into France is the collective fate of an entire
generation. Unlike Doria in Kiffe kiffe demain, Malika, Hannah, Imane, and Omar are no
longer teenagers whose career choices are yet to be made. They are in their early or late
thirties and have already completed their studies and chosen their careers. Their difficulty
in finding jobs that correspond to their degrees mirrors their disadvantage in the French
job market where Maghrebi French are 10% more likely to be unemployed and tend to be
8–13% lower paid than their majority-ethnic counterparts (Boutchenik and Lê 2017).
Yamina’s daughter Malika is a civil servant, Hannah is a special needs educator, Imane
has a temporary job as a saleswoman while Omar works as an Uber driver. Educated at
a French Republican school, they have also acquired their parents’ culture during the
summer holidays in Algeria. Compelled to find original ways to bridge their two cultures
and reconcile contradicting systems of values in an increasingly hostile environment, they
are regularly invited to act as ‘cultural brokers’ (Beaman 2017, 31). Besides professional
integration and the search for suitable partners, dealing with their parents’ silenced
memory remains one of the most important challenges in the siblings’ lives. Malika
engages with this colonial past intellectually through reading and listening to lectures;
Imane distances herself from it; Omar seeks evasion through playing videogames while
Hannah, prone to nightmares and irrepressible outbursts of anger, confronts it through
psychotherapy. One of her therapy sessions focuses on a recurrent dream in which she is
drowning in the Seine during the massacre of Algerian protesters under orders from Paris
Police Prefect Maurice Papon in 1961. This historical event, only briefly mentioned in Kiffe
kiffe demain, is now developed into a rich metaphor evoking silenced history:

Hannah fait souvent des rêves de noyade aussi. Par exemple, elle se débat dans l’eau glacée
de la Seine, et autour d’elle flottent des corps sans vie [. . .] Qu’est-ce qu’elle doit faire de
toutes ces histoires qui la hantent ? La guerre d’Algérie, le 17 octobre 1961, les ratonnades, les
émeutes, les bavures, les histoires de contrôle d’identité qui tournent mal dont on lui parle au
boulot. [. . .] Cette colère immense [. . .] Elle voudrait apprendre à apprivoiser, mais cette
violence-là ne vient pas de nulle part, elle ne les invente pas, ça a existé, ça existe encore.
(LD, 224)

[Hannah often has dreams of drowning too. For example, she struggles in the icy water of the
Seine, and around her float lifeless bodies [. . .] What does she have to do with all these stories
that haunt her? The Algerian War, 17 October 1961, anti-Arab violence, the riots, police
violence, the goofy identity check stories she was told about at work. [. . .] This immense
anger [. . .] She would like to learn to tame it, but this violence does not come from nowhere,
she did not invent it, it existed, it still exists.]

Hannah’s example demonstrates that colonial memory needs to be liberated from dec­
ades of repression through censorship and denial, otherwise the toxic past will continue
to divide the nation. By suggesting that the recurrent banlieue uprisings triggered by
ongoing discrimination and police violence against postcolonial immigrants form
a continuum with the raids and torture perpetrated by the French during the Algerian
war, Guène formulates a razor-sharp critique of the Republic’s reluctance to take respon­
sibility for a past which continues to affect the nation’s vivre-ensemble. As she develops
a harsher critique of the violence perpetrated against Algerians during and after coloniza­
tion, her treatment of Maghrebi French gender relations progressively becomes increas­
ingly tempered by tolerance and empathy. Yamina’s admiration for her handsome, blue-
 ROMANCE STUDIES 247

eyed father, depicted as a resistance hero, remains unaffected by his decision to take her
out of school and to send her off to France to marry an émigré. Her husband Brahim, who
showers her with flowers on Valentine’s day and hides banknotes between the pages of
her Quran to surprise her, is represented as a character whose complexity challenges the
negative stereotypes attached to Muslim masculinity. Yamina’s only son, the sensitive
Omar, is another antithesis of the ‘garçon arabe’, described by Guénif-Souilamas, as the
stereotype of the banlieue youth whose honour depends on the close control of his
sisters:

Omar n’a jamais été ce genre de frère. Il n’a jamais fait la moindre remarque à ses sœurs. [. . .] il
réunissait tous les ingrédients de la caricature mais avait réussi à y échapper miraculeuse­
ment. Le petit dernier, le chouchou, le fils prodige, le bébé à sa maman. [. . .]. Il est né sur un trône.
Mais dehors, il ne sera jamais roi. (LD, 91–92, 97, italics in original)

[Omar was never that kind of brother. He never made the slightest remark to his sisters. [. . .]
He gathered all the ingredients of the caricature but had managed to escape it miraculously.
The youngest, the darling, the prodigy son, the baby to his mother. [. . .]. He was born on
a throne. But outside, he will never be king.]

The siblings’ contested legitimacy as French citizens is bitterly commented upon by

Hannah: ‘Quand on est légitimement français, on n’a pas besoin de le prouver, encore
et encore!’ [When you are legitimately French, you don’t have to prove it, over and over
again!] (LD, 237). The characters’ bitterness seems to echo Guène’s own disillusionment
voiced in an interview with Snaije:

Aujourd’hui, je suis une Algérienne qui est née et qui vit en France . . . Je ne me définis plus du
tout comme je le faisais à 20 ans [. . .] Je pensais que j’étais française et j’aurais aimé ça, c’était
une idée sympathique . . . [Mais] quand tu es [un citoyen] légitime, tu n’as pas à justifier qui tu
es et ce que tu ressens par rapport à tes origines et au fait d’être français. (Snaije 2020)

[Today, I am an Algerian woman who was born in France and has always lived there . . . I no
longer define myself in the same way as I did at 20 [. . .] Back then I thought I was French and
would have liked that, that would have been nice . . . [But] when you are legitimate [as
a citizen], you don’t have to justify who you are and how you feel about your origins and
being French.]

Conclusion
A focus on female filiations in Guène’s writing has allowed this article to assess how her
depiction of racialized groups, in particular Maghrebi French women, has grown increas­
ingly critical throughout her career. Signs of this progressive politicization include Guène’s
efforts to appropriate the legacy of radical decolonial thinkers such as Fanon and Baldwin
to reaffirm her position as an artist and intellectual contributing to a global conversation
about racial, gendered, and socioeconomic inequalities inherited from colonization which
continue to impose a deeply hierarchical world order. Another indicator of this evolution
is the expanding importance of political themes in her novels, including colonial and
postcolonial memory, the stolen childhood of colonial subjects and the transmission of
traumas from immigrant parents to their offspring. Finally, the transition from a witty,
playful, and irreverent first-person narrative voice in Kiffe kiffe demain to a more solemn
248 C. HORVATH

third-person voice in La Discrétion also contributes to the novel’s disillusioned and

uncompromising tone.
Less critical of Maghrebi, Muslim, and banlieue masculinities than Kiffe kiffe demain, La
Discrétion participates not only in an evolution in Guène’s work but also in a larger trend
that has become noticeable in the writing of Maghrebi French writers since the 2000s. As
opposed to earlier novels which cast immigrant mothers as the guardians of racial, ethnic,
and linguistic legacies as stated by Giorgio (2002), contemporary narratives no longer
depict Maghrebi parents as antagonists whose attempts to perpetuate patriarchal cultural
models incompatible with western modernity need to be overcome by their children in
order to achieve full integration in France. Instead, parents are increasingly represented as
appreciated allies whose self-denying sacrifice and carefully preserved cultural and affec­
tive resources enable their children to overcome the ambient enmity they face in
contemporary France. This trend that humanizes Maghrebi parents and treats them
with empathy as the transmitters of solid values, cultural resources and colonial memory
can be observed in a range of both female- and male-authored narratives, including
Habiba Mahany’s Kiffer sa race (2008), Houda Rouane’s Les pieds-blancs (2006), Kaoutar
Harchi’s Comme nous existons (2021), Ahmed Djouder’s Désintégration (2006), Karim
Amellal’s Bleu, blanc, noir (2016) and Mabrouck Rachedi’s Tous les mots qu’on ne s’est
pas dits (2022). What all these novels have in common is the denunciation of the
humiliations suffered by first-generation immigrant parents and the denial of full cultural
citizenship to their children, despite their efforts to achieve a higher educational attain­
ment and improved social status (Beaman 2017, 95). Like Yamina’s children in La
Discrétion, the main characters of these novels are relatively well-integrated, yet they
remain unable to achieve equality.
This shift is likely to be linked to the rise of virulently Islamophobe, anti-immigrant and
femonationalist discourses in contemporary France and the demonization of Maghrebi
French communities to whom ‘the nation’s colonial history and non-acknowledged racial
and ethnic foundations [. . .] [continue to deny] the real and symbolic benefits that come
with being part of the French nation’ (Beaman 2017, 100). But Guène’s denunciation of
the continuity between past forms of domination experienced by colonized Algerians
under French rule, Maghrebi immigrants coerced into remaining ‘discrete’ in France, and
the present-day frustration of their descendants who are repeatedly invited to assimilate
also echoes her limited consecration as a French writer. Her feelings of being marginalized
by French literary institutions despite her commercial success and international acclaim
and popularity with the public are frequently voiced in the author’s interviews (Chrisafis
2008; Maameri 2016; Snaije 2020) in which she attributes the relative lack of recognition to
her postcolonial, working-class and banlieue origins:

Oddly, considering her huge international success, she hasn’t won any prizes in France, just
small informal awards voted by young people and readers. Does she think that will change?
‘The big prizes? Are you crazy? Never, never in my life will I get a prize. That would mean
recognizing that what I write is literature, that there are intellectuals in the banlieues. That’s
where nothing’s changing and the neo-colonialist vision comes in to play . . . the idea that the
“natives” can do sport, sing and dance but not think’. (Chrisafis 2008)

Although La Discrétion received the Fetkann Maryse Condé award in 2020 and the ON-
media award in 2021, Guène is yet to be awarded a major French literary prize. Yet this
 ROMANCE STUDIES 249

marginalization is hardly surprising, considering that France’s most prestigious literary

prize, the Prix Goncourt, has only been awarded to twelve women since its creation
117 years ago, and only two of the female awardees, Marie N’Diaye in 2009 and Leila
Slimani in 2016, have been racialized women. The reluctance of the literary elites to accept
Guène and her co-signatories of the 2007 literary manifesto ‘Qui fait la France’ as their
equals also demonstrates the deeply hierarchical nature of the French literary field and
the subsequent difficulty for authors belonging to an intersection of race, class, and
gender to achieve legitimacy. As Harchi (2016) and Hammou and Harchi (2020, 298)
argue, racialized and symbolically dependant writers are often constrained to articulate
their viewpoint within the place of the Other, having less control over the interactions
anchored in the unequal relations of the worlds of creation. Although it goes beyond the
scope of this article to investigate the extent to which Guène’s consecration has been
influenced by her race, class or gender and impacted by her association with the
banlieues, attraction to a series of themes and preference for specific literary forms, the
question of racialized writers’ halted legitimation is a highly relevant and currently under­
studied issue that requires further exploration over the years to come.

Notes
1. To reference citations from both novels, I will use the acronyms KKD for Kiffe kiffe demain and
LD for La Discrétion. The English translations of the extracts from the novels as well as all other
citations provided between brackets are mine.
2. Maghrebi French and Muslim French are two largely overlapping categories that have been
widely used in reference to French citizens of postcolonial origins. While in this article I give
preference to the term ‘Maghrebi French’ for its focus on the geographic origins of the
population described in Guène’s novels, ‘Muslim French’, a term used by Fernando (2016), will
be used when I am referring to populations specifically targeted by Islamophobic discourses
arguing the inassimilability of populations on the grounds of their irreconcilable difference
based on their religion, real or assumed.
3. ‘Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ (NPNS), a much-mediatized feminist movement, emerged in 2003 with
a manifesto and protest march that denounced the domination of racialized women by
racialized men in French banlieues. This strategy of blaming postcolonial minorities as the
principal oppressors of women in the French Republic paid off when the movement’s
president Fadela Amara was named the Secretary of State for Urban Policies in the right-
wing conservative government of Prime Minister François Fillon in June 2007.
4. In everyday French, ‘beurette’ is used as the female version of ‘beur’ and refers to the children
of Maghrebi immigrants born and raised in France. This meaning is different from the
conceptualization of the term by sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas (2006) explained earlier
in this article. Popular in the 1980s, the term is rarely used today by Maghrebi-French women
as a way of self-identification. When used to label others, it has a perceptibly condescending
undertone.
5. Founder of France’s first parents’ syndicate, Le Front de Mères, Fatima Ouassak is a political
activist who advocates the necessity of transmitting a cultural capital based on the knowledge
of the culture of origin to provide minority ethnic children with a positive image of themselves
and protect them from alienation. She suggests that ‘ce système hostile, raciste, a bien compris
que nos familles, le lien qui nous lie à nos enfants, la transmission que nous leur devons, notre
histoire, nos mémoires, nos luttes, nos communautés, nos racines, nos langues et notre religion
sont des ressources pour nos enfants: un soutien, une écoute, un partage d’expériences, un
réseau d’entraide, un front de résistances collectives’ [this hostile, racist system has understood
that our families, the bond that binds us to our children, the transmission that we owe to them,
250 C. HORVATH

our history, our memories, our struggles, our communities, our roots, our languages and our
religion are resources for our children: support, listening, sharing of experiences, a support
network, a collective resistance front] (Ouassak 2020, 136).
6. This representation also calls attention to ‘l’existence d’une industrie où se combinent
racialization, féminisation, exploitation, mise en danger de la santé, invisibilité, sous-
qualification, bas salaires, violence et harcèlement sexuels et sexistes’ [the existence of an
industry that combines racialization, feminization, exploitation, endangerment of health,
invisibility, underqualification, low wages, sexual and gender-based violence and harass­
ment] (Vergès 2019, 9).

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Christina Horvath is a Reader in French Studies at the University of Bath. Her research addresses
contemporary urban literature, representations of vulnerable urban neighbourhoods in different art
forms as well as the use of art to create more socially just cities. She has published widely on female
authors in contemporary French and Francophone literature as well as representations of women in
urban and banlieue narratives. Her latest book, Co-Creation in Theory and Practice (Policy Press 2020)
conceptualizes new ways of decolonizing knowledge production with communities using art and
creativity.

References
Ahonen, Mirka. 2016. “Redefining Stereotypes: The Banlieue and Female Experience in Faïza Guène’s
Kiffe kiffe demain.” French Cultural Studies 27 (2): 168–177. doi: 10.1177/0957155815616587.
Amellal, Karim. 2016. Bleu, blanc, noir. Paris: L’Aube.
Angélil, Marc, and Cary Siress. 2012. “The Paris Banlieue: Peripheries of Inequity.” Journal of
International Affairs 65 (2): 57–67.
Aronsson, Mattias. 2012. “Trahison, hypocrisie et violence: La représentation de la masculinité
musulmane dans Kiffe kiffe demain de Faïza Guène.” Moderna Språk 106 (2): 1–16.
Baldwin, James, 1963. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press.
Beaman, Jean. 2017. Citizen Outsider: Children of North-African Immigrants in France. Oakland:
University of California Press.
Bellil, Samira. 2002. Dans l’enfer des tournantes. Paris: Denoël.
Bouamama, Saïd. 2006. “De la visibilisation à la suspicion: La fabrique républicaine d’une politisa­
tion.” In La République mise à nue par son immigration, edited by Nacira Guénif-Souilamas,
196–218. Paris: La Fabrique.
Bouchenni, Nadia. 2020. “Avec ‘La Discrétion’, Faïza Guène veut ‘réparer l’offense de l’oubli’.” TV5
Monde, 12 October. Accessed 8 January 2020. https://information.tv5monde.com/info/avec-la-
discretion-faiza-guene-veut-reparer-l-offense-de-l-oubli-376756
Boutchenik, Béatrice, and Jérôme Lê. 2017. “Les Descendants d’immigrés maghrébins: Des
difficultés d’accès à l’emploi et aux salaires les plus élevés.” In Emploi, chômage, revenus du
travail, edited by Marceline Bodier, 21–33. Paris: INSEE.
Chrisafis, Angelique. 2008. “High Riser.” The Guardian, June 5. Accessed 1 April 2022. http://www.
guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/05/culture.news
Delphy, Christine. 2008. Classer, dominer: Qui sont les “autres”. Paris: La Fabrique.
Diallo, Rokhaya. 2019. La France tu l’aimes ou tu la fermes? Paris: Textuel.
Djouder, Ahmed. 2006. Désintégration. Paris: Stock.
Fanon, Frantz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. Paris: François Maspero.
 ROMANCE STUDIES 251

Fernando, Mayanthi. 2016. “Liberté, Égalité, Féminisme?” Dissent 63 (4): 38–46. doi: 10.1353/dss.
2016.0072.
Giorgio, Adalgisa. 2002. “Writing the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and
Literary Criticism.” In Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western
European Narratives by Women, edited by Adalgisa Giorgio, 11–46. Oxford: Berghahn.
Giry, Stéphanie. 2006. “France and Its Muslims.” Foreign Affairs 85: 87–104. 5 doi: 10.2307/20032072.
Guène, Faïza. 2004. Kiffe kiffe demain [Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow]. Paris: Hachette Littérature.
Guène, Faïza. 2006. Du rêve pour les oufs. Paris: Fayard.
Guène, Faïza. 2008. Les Gens du Balto. Paris: Fayard.
Guène, Faïza. 2014. Un homme, ça ne pleure pas. Paris: Fayard.
Guène, Faïza. 2018. Millénium blues. Paris: Fayard.
Guène, Faïza. 2020. La Discrétion [Discretion]. Paris: Plon.
Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira. 2006. “La Française voilée, la beurette, le garçon arabe et le musulman
laïc. Les figures assignées du racisme virtueux.” In La République mise à nue par son immigration,
edited by Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, 109–130. Paris: La Fabrique.
Hajjat, Abdellali, and Marwan Mohammed. 2013. Islamophobie: Comment les élites françaises
fabriquent le “problème musulman.” Paris: La Découverte.
Hakem, Tewfik. 2020. “Faïza Guène: Chaque génération a sa mission, la nôtre est de recueillir le récit
de nos parents et de le raconter.” Le Réveil culturel, September 21, France Culture. Accessed 20
May 2021. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/le-reveil-culturel/faiza-guene-est-une-
generation-qui-na-pas-honte-qui-ne-baisse-pas-la-tete
Hammou, Karim, and Kaoutar Harchi. 2020. “Nos plumes, nos voix?” In Racismes de France, edited by
Omar Slaouti and Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, 292–307. Paris: La Découverte.
Harchi, Kaoutar. 2016. Je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la mienne. Paris: Pauvert.
Harchi, Kaoutar. 2021. Comme nous existons. Arles: Actes Sud.
Hargreaves, Alec G. [1995] 2007. Multi-ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society.
London: Routledge.
Horvath, Christina. 2020. “The French ‘Banlieues’: Realities, Myths, Representations.” In The Routledge
Handbook of French Politics and Culture, edited by Aurélien Mondon, Marion Demossier,
Nina Parish and David Lees, 133–144. Abingdon: Routledge.
King, Wilma. 1995. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Kiwan, Nadia. 2016. “Freedom of Thought in the Aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo Attacks.” French
Cultural Studies 27 (3): 233–244. doi: 10.1177/0957155816648103.
Kleppinger, Kathryn. 2015. Branding the ‘Beur’ Author. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Laronde, Michel. 1993. Autour du roman beur. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Lugones, Maria. 2010. “Towards a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypathia 25 (4): 742–759. doi: 10.1111/j.
1527-2001.2010.01137.x.
Maameri, Keïra. 2016. Nos Plumes. Documentary.
Mahany, Habiba. 2008. Kiffer Sa Race. Paris: J. C. Lattès.
Marlière, Philippe. 2017. “The Meaning of ‘Charlie’: The Debate on the Troubled French Identity.” In
After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech, edited by Gavan Titley, Des Freedman,
Gholam Khiabany and Aurélien Mondon, 46–94. London: Zed Books.
Mehta, Brinda J. 2010. “Negotiating Arab–Muslim Identity, Contested Citizenship, and Gender
Ideologies in the Parisian Housing Projects: Faïza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain.” Research in African
Literatures 41 (2): 173–202. doi: 10.2979/ral.2010.41.2.173.
Mohammed, Marwan. 2020. “The Political Transversality of Islamophobia: An Analysis of Historical
and Ideological Foundations.” In The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture, edited by
Aurélien Mondon, Marion Demossier, Nina Parish and David Lees, 79–86, Abingdon: Routledge.
Ouassak, Fatima. 2020. La Puissance des mères. Paris: La Découverte.
Puig, Stève. 2019. Littérature urbaine et mémoire postcoloniale. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Rachedi, Mabrouck. 2022. Tous les mots qu’on ne s’est pas dits. Paris: Grasset.
Roberts, Dorothy E. [1997] 2017. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty.
New York: Penguin Random House.
252 C. HORVATH

Rouane, Houda. 2006. Les Pieds-blancs. Paris: Philippe Rey.

Sharma, Nitasha Tamar. 2010. Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness and a Global Race
Consciousness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Snaije, Olivia. 2020. “‘On attend de moi que je parle des banlieues’: Le succès n’a pas libéré Faïza
Guène des clichés.” Middle East Eye, 5 September. Accessed 8 January 2020. https://www.mid
dleeasteye.net/fr/reportages/faiza-guene-litterature-immigration-france-banlieues-cliches
Tissot, Sylvie, and Pierre Tevanian. 2010. Les Mots sont importants. Paris: Libertalia.
Vergès, Françoise. 2019. Un féminisme décolonial. Paris: La Fabrique.