Remembering North Africa in French popular music at the turn of the twenty-first century

Abstract

At the turn of the twenty-first century, memory was a recurrent theme in French songs about North Africa. This painted the region as a place of the colonial past, diminishing its current relevance to France by occulting immigrant perspectives. In the early 2000s, ‘Adieu mon pays’, Enrico Macias’s 1962 song about a departure from Algeria upon its independence, continued to be the exemplar of the song about North Africa. However, songs from the 1990s by North African artists show different views on remembering the region. The dynamics of French and Arabic in songs by Rachid Taha and Khaled indicate that an underlying malaise with remembering North Africa can manifest in a disconnection between two perspectives rooted in two different languages, and Faudel’s 2006 song ‘Mon pays’ shows the limits of memory as a mode of engagement with the lands of origin for second-generation immigrants. Although we may not extrapolate historical claims from the surge of North African memories as a theme in French music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the context of the time can help us interpret lyrics about the region in song from this period.