Between Algeria and the Parisian suburbs, with Faïza Guène
Audio 03:51
The novelist Faïza Guène.
Her sixth novel "La Discrétion" was published in September 2020. © Fanny Renard / RFI
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
12 mins
It is a unique journey that of Faïza Guène.
Coming from the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb where she was born in 1985 and where she grew up with her parents from Algeria, the young woman was just 19 when she burst onto the literary scene with her first novel "Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow", which was an unexpected success.
Since this inaugural success, Faïza Guène has continued to write, cultivating the social sensitivity for which he is renowned.
She returns with "La Discrétion", her sixth novel whose action takes place between Algeria and the Parisian suburbs.
Publicity
Sixteen years ago the Franco-Algerian Faïza Guène published
Kiffe Kiffe tomorrow
, which has since become a cult novel.
The novelist is still amazed at the resonance that her book had.
“
For me, writing has always been about leisure,
” she says.
There was no real role model for me in that direction.
In my social environment too, I grew up in a working-class neighborhood.
Even your ambition is conditioned by where you grow up.
I hadn't imagined that I was going to make it my job.
"
No one has forgotten the teenager with round cheeks, with a sharp tongue, who in 2004 took the world of French letters by storm by publishing her first novel.
It was a self-fictional story that depicted the good and bad times of a youth from immigrant backgrounds, seeking their bearings in a violent and unjust world dominated by the majority culture.
The novel sold 400,000 copies and has been translated into 26 languages.
It was a true editorial phenomenon that revealed the talents of its author and through her, those of a whole generation of young commuters bubbling with energy and creative dynamism.
The Thirty Glorious
Now in her thirties, Faïza Guène is in her sixth novel.
Published this fall, his latest book
La Discrétion
is a historical and social novel, which shows through the portrait of an Algerian family living in the Parisian suburbs, the difficult integration of two generations of North African immigrants in France. post-colonial.
Cleverly mixing the turbulences of the past and contemporary tensions, the novelist establishes the socio-temporal framework within which her characters evolve, questioning the national novel which has suddenly become too narrow, unable to embrace the diversity of destinies that History brought together on French soil at the dawn of the new millennium.
At the heart of this novel, the Taleb family.
The parents are part of the first generation of Algerians who came to settle in France during the post-war boom years, in search of work.
Their four children are born and grow up in the adopted country.
Confronted with racism, but also with their own resentments in the face of a host society that is slow to make peace with its heavy colonial past, the Taleb children are struggling to find their place.
On them weigh the weight of the humiliations and traumas that their parents suffered in silence, suppressing their revolts.
This heritage is an obstacle today to their construction.
Also, the second generation is caught as in a vice, between their need to claim their presence and the attitude of their parents who closed their eyes to condescension, racism, repeating at will to their children: "
We have to accept, we are like their guests, we are at their place.
"
Yamina "with honey-colored eyes"
Faïza Guène recounted how the idea of weaving her fiction around “discretion” as a framework for reading the experience of the generation came to her from a text she had written for the radio.
“It's a text called“ The heaviness of the clouds ”that I read three years ago on France Inter
, she remembers
.
I was given carte blanche.
I let myself be carried away.
And naturally I started to write the story of this woman with a poetic dimension, this woman who was crushed by the heaviness of the clouds in the gray sky.
For a moment, I am talking about her husband who is repatriated to Algeria to be buried and I said that he died of discretion.
As soon as I said that, it resonated with me.
I thought of my father who was of that generation.
It caused something in me that I couldn't explain well.
This is what made the novel germinate.
"
The novelist likes to say that she wrote this new book as a tribute to her parents' generation, especially to her mother who was the inspiration for the beautiful character of the mother in the story, the sweet and luminous Yamina "
with honey-colored eyes
”.
Yamina refuses to raise her voice in the face of everyday humiliations.
The novel follows in the footsteps of this woman whose incredible journey led her from a small Berber village to the Parisian suburbs.
She has known colonization, the war of independence, exile, the reality of migration, while letting the brutalities of men and of history slip over her.
His resignation appears less as a survival strategy than as a form of self-assertion, as if, as Faïza Guène writes with delicacy and insight, "
refusing to be overcome by resentment was a way of resisting
".
This is how the Arab mothers of the cities enter literature.
"France from below"
The Discretion
is undoubtedly the most successful novel of the one that the English-speaking media have taken to calling "the Françoise Sagan of the cities".
Its strength lies in its social sensitivity that Faïza Guène has not ceased to cultivate since his first so much publicized novel, hammering on whoever wants to hear it his ambition to see his novels classified in the category of popular literature.
"
I would say that for me, in my work, what is important, much more than my Algerian origins, are my modest, suburban, proletarian, popular origins, close to what we have called" France from below. " ".
This is where I am
, ”she likes to recall.
During two decades of literary practice, Faïza Guène's writing has also matured, confirming its literary qualities.
Moving away from the systematic use of suburban jargon, verlan and slang, it has gained in fluidity and simplicity.
In the press, the perception of the novelist as "
the beurette phenomenon
" or as "
the voice of the suburbs
" has gradually given way to more literary considerations of her work.
“
This literary aspect, we neglected a lot when we talked about me,
says the novelist
.
We were talking about the social phenomenon, the suburbs, immigration.
In fact, I take care to ensure that precisely the emotion and the truth of what I say, that they go directly to the readers.
It's part of the literary process.
All of this work that I do has been covered up.
I rewrite a lot and really try to make my text accessible.
Making it simple is really hard.
It is really in this sense that I work.
Sometimes when I write I spend hours looking, then I find.
I find the word, the sentence that rings true.
As in music, we could compose a song and we find the right note.
It is exactly the same.
"
Today author of six novels, Faïza Guène is also a screenwriter for the cinema.
She has directed several mediums and short films.
The writer likes to remind people that writing screenplays for the cinema was her first love.
It was in fact in the film workshops for young people that she attended assiduously in the early 2000s when she was growing up in the city of Courtilières, in Pantin, in the near Parisian suburbs, that Faïza Guène met the guardian angel professor. , who would change her life by transmitting to a great Parisian publisher the first pages of her future first novel that she wrote in her spare time.
The rest is history, literary history of course.
Needless to say.
The Discretion
, by Faïza Guène.
Editions Plon, 256 pages, 19 euros.
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