V - Rachid Djaïdani and the Shift from Beur to Banlieue Writing

Summary

‘J'ai voulu écrire pour montrer que des gars issus de l'univers du quartier sont capables d'avoir une autre sensibilité que celle du cliché.’

– Rachid Djaïdani, Culture!, TF1, April 19, 1999.

By the time Rachid Djaïdani published his first novel, Boumkoeur, in 1999, journalists had new ideas about why books written by young men of North African heritage deserved attention. Coming on the heels of—and parallel to—the rise of the ‘beurette,’ the men implicated in debates about gender within the North African population in France had also begun to express their frustration regarding what they saw as unfair stereotyping and ongoing discrimination by police, teachers, and potential employers. Their writing conveyed these concerns through darker, more critical plots and characters, and the banlieues came to be presented in these books as a lawless zone, a ghetto full of frustrated youth who turn to violence because they see no other viable option to make their voices heard. Their dreams have been crushed by unemployment and poor treatment by French authorities, so they resort to car burnings, vandalism, and theft as an expression of their anger.

At this time, recognition of a loose genre of contemporary urban writing had also emerged in the mainstream media and in literary studies. Christina Horvath theorizes the ‘urban novel’ as a genre present in French literature since the 1830s, beginning with Balzac's Comédie humaine, a literary project to portray various slices of life in France. With growing urbanization, the genre has become increasingly prevalent, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Horvath argues that urban writing must focus on the extreme contemporary by addressing social questions and debates from the era in which it is released and must also incorporate the city as a character or even protagonist. In an urban novel, the city is much more than a simple backdrop; it shapes the progression of the plot and plays a fundamental role in characters’ lives. And in order to provide a complete representation of life in a city, urban novels also avoid an exclusive focus on one social group or class.

Today's iteration of French urban novels, according to Horvath, centres on the banlieue, an area that has received significant attention in the media since its development as a solution to the post-Second World War housing shortage.