Game of hypocrites: Beurs break silence in Faïza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain

Abstract

This article analyses the cultural crisis of beur youth by calling attention, in Faïza Guène’s novel, Kiffe kiffe demain (2004), to how Maghrebi immigrants as well as the French state attempt to manipulate young bodies and minds. The struggle that underlies the narrative is an exploitation of Islam within France’s Moroccan immigrant community to preserve honneur at the immigrant community level, while enjoying bonheur at the individual level. As religion is used to subjugate the younger generation, Islam loses credibility in the eyes of beurs. I also seek to explore how la laïcité of French culture marginalises individuals who do not accept assimilation into a superior racist system that is based on an exclusionary notion of citizenship. Who falls victim in the end? It is the young beur, who cannot tolerate the extremism of either French Orientalist views or their parents’ Occidentalist views.