1 Introduction

The¹ prominent Moroccan-French author, Tahar Ben Jelloun is an essayist, poet and novelist. Born in Morocco in 1944, Ben Jelloun studied philosophy at Mohammed V University in Rabat before venturing to Paris in 1971 to pursue his doctoral studies in Social Psychiatry. The author has published many poem collections, novels and non-fiction books and articles.² Les Yeux Baissés translated as With Downcast Eyes and published in 1993 is one of the well-read novels for whom Ben Jelloun was awarded the Prix des Hémisphères in Guadeloupe. As a case study of literature of Maghrebian migration, the novel incarnates the indeterminacy of location which characterises today’s global cultures at large, but it is manifested better in the context of migration. It thematizes the experience of displacement and its ramification of migrancy, the effects of which last long after the act of migration is complete; it engages in negotiating the possibilities and pitfalls of a postcolonial subject’s displacement and migrancy, which are characterized by reality as “delirium,” the concept which Ben Jelloun coined himself and which I will discuss later in my analysis. As such, Les Yeux Baissés embodies postcolonial migrants’ painful stories of their physically and culturally displaced and alienated selves. It shows that postcolonial displacement is not enabling homogenizing cultures, but rather reinforcing boundaries at both social and cultural level, and this is the reason behind choosing this literary work to be a subject of analysis in this article.

It is often the case that Ben Jelloun deals with the same socio-cultural issues in both his fiction and non-fiction books. His non-fiction books include Le Racisme expliqué à ma fille (Racism Explained to My Daughters, 1999), Hospitalité Française (French Hospitality, 1999), L’Islam expliqué aux enfants (Islam Explained to Children, 2002) and Le Terrorisme expliqué à nos enfants (Terrorism Explained to our Children, 2020) (Baba 2023, 37). Like in most of his literary works, in these books, the author often deals with how to fight racism, exclusion, Islamophobia and extremism in French society, but also in the West as a whole. In French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, Ben Jelloun reflects upon the concept of hospitality within the framework of French immigration policies and the attitudes of the French towards Maghrebian immigrants. Similarly, the author writes about the limits of French hospitality and racism in his novel Les Yeux Baissés (1991). Drawing on his personal experiences with racism and his insights as a practicing psychologist and novelist, he sheds light on the experience of the Other in the diaspora and elucidates the racial divisions that plague contemporary French society.³

Ben Jelloun’s work highlights, then, his engagement with current social concerns, solidifying his role as an engaged intellectual and critic, both in France and in Morocco. As a nomad living between Tangier and Paris, Ben Jelloun narrates, too, the experience of migration, the turbulence of postcolonial displacement, the issue of identity crisis in the diaspora and the limits of French hospitality and racism against Maghrebian migrants (migrants from North Africa including Morocco). In his fictional works, the author creates most of his literary characters as hybrid, usually Moroccans living in diaspora. These characters are represented as often facing the psycho-social effects of migration, displacement and a hostile environment to migrants. With his elegant and imaginative prose, Ben Jelloun’s novel Les Yeux Baissés shows us French racism’s face and the immigrant’s heartbreak; but it also evokes the ideal of hospitality, offering a kind of hope in extricating displaced people from racism’s incoherencies.

Postcolonial displacement is understood as both physical and cultural movement as a result of voluntary or forced migration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The term “migrants” has become more politically loaded and remains a contentious point of discussion in contemporary Europe. Displaced migrants and their children often seek to integrate in the host society, but they are faced with patterns of social and cultural exclusion, as well as daily racism. This hostile environment leads migrants to foster their homeland memories and identities, which often hinder integration into a new community. This situation even led to distrust and the segregation or ghettoization of migrants and their children, feeling “out of place” in a new society and culture. Postcolonial displacement explores, then, the multiple ways in which Maghrebians’ migration to Northern Europe contributes to the imagining, questioning and reframing of territories, nations and communities.

Intriguingly, displacement is a key notion and theme in postcolonial theory and literature, particularly in literature of migration. The idea of displacement is legitimately a construct of postcolonial theory to interpret the literature created by displaced authors, or people who migrated to newly countries. As a critical notion, it aims to interpret the turbulence of postcolonial migration, cultural expatriation and identity crisis. In the aftermath of colonialism, Maghrebians were not only forced to abandon their homelands, but symbolically also their cultures, traditions and even languages. In their writings, displaced writers draw on their experience in diaspora to create fictional characters that are suffering pangs of alienation, seeking return to their homelands and a wish to reclaim their cultural identity. In other words, displacement essentially gives birth to a series of problematics, as well as of possibilities. On the one hand, one cannot forget the people, culture and language of the abandoned homeland; on the other hand, migrants find it difficult due to a variety of reasons to disassociate themselves from the new place, country and language that they chose to adopt or were forced to adopt. This kind of juxtaposition results on one side in an ambivalent or hybrid view of their host society and culture and on the other side in a birth of an indefinite crisis of identity. Once displacement takes place, reclaiming a singular, monolithic identity comes to end, but the possibilities of fluid and hybrid identity open up.

In postcolonial theory, prominent scholars have discussed the issue of displacement regarding one’s culture and identity. In his book The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha claims that at the turn of the new millennium complex figures of difference and identity are produced in the “beyond” or in diaspora as a result of displacement. He contends that “the social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (1994, 2). Bhabha’s concept of hybridity has been celebrated as having emancipatory potential for discussions of cultural identity with its non-hierarchical perspective in postcolonial theory and literature. Like Bhabha, other postcolonial theorists in the 1990s and beyond view the concept⁴ as a liberating break from cultural essentialism, rejecting subjectivities as rooted and exclusionary. In his article “The Space of Culture, the Power of Space,” Lawrence Grossberg underlines the idea that in the context of globalisation, we are forced as cultural critics to confront the challenge of culture’s equation with a particular location or place (1996, 169). Grossberg identifies “space as the milieu of becoming” within which identities are never static and are neither favoured nor disfavoured (178–180). Becoming here implies identities becoming “out of place,” even settling in a space that is difficult to define in a conventional way. In this space there are no fixed realities, no local histories and no stable identities, but a space of dislocation (Baba 2015, 73).

In light of these theories, I analyse the Moroccan-French author Tahar Ben Jelloun’s 1991 novel Les Yeux Baissés, translated into English as With Downcast Eyes. As a migrant intellectual himself, the author shares with his protagonist in Les Yeux Baissés the experience of migration and the turbulence of displacement in diaspora. A winner of the Prix Goncourt, the author narrates the challenges of postcolonial migration and the predicament of displacement owing to patterns of exclusion and racism in French society. In my reading of Les Yeux Baissés, I focus on its narration of the psycho-social ramifications of postcolonial migration, the patterns of social and cultural displacement, as well as the French’s hostility towards Maghrebian migrants and their children. More specifically, the novel explores the subject of displacement as both a migration process, as well as a sense of being socially and culturally “out of place”. I examine, then, the question of the Other’s culture and difference across both real and symbolic boundaries. As such, this article illustrates how Les Yeux Baissés is a resistant narrative that offers a critical intervention in narrating postcolonial displacement, contesting patterns of exclusion and demonizing racism against migrants.

Interestingly, the novel follows a female protagonist who, as a child, immigrated with her parents from a marginalized village in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to the Parisian suburb of La Goutte-d’Or. While the novel revolves around several essential themes including a rethinking of the celebratory potential of cultural hybridity, as well as a critique of patriarchal culture and gender relations, this article primarily focuses on the turbulence of postcolonial displacement and the limits of French hospitality. Through the protagonist’s case, a daughter of Moroccan migrants, the novel unfolds postcolonial Maghrebian displacement as a turbulence, owing to the patterns of social and cultural exclusion, as well as racism against migrants. Through my close reading as a method of analysis, I explore the articulations of, and even the interface between displacement, Otherness and identity construction in a work of literary imagination, which I believe need further discussion in academic research. Therefore, this article shows how Ben Jelloun’s narrative problematizes postcolonial displacement, contests social and cultural exclusion and demonizes racism against migrants.

2 Narrating the Turbulence of Postcolonial Displacement

Migrancy or new experiences that result from the coming together of multiple influences and peoples lead to altered or evolving representations of the experience of displacement and of the (re)construction of identity. About this concept of migrancy, in her article “Mythologies of Migrancy: Postcolonialism, Postmodernism and the Politics of (Dis)Location,” Revathi Krishnaswamy draws upon two variations in the formulation of migrancy: one invokes an existential condition of homelessness with a concomitant attitude of autonomy and detachment as the privileged locus of imaginative experience; the other validates multiplicity and hybridity of subject positions, generating a feeling of belonging to several homes (1995, 137). For Krishnaswamy, the novel idea of de-linking distress from dislocation and the attendant idea of belonging everywhere by belonging nowhere are what characterize migrancy (1995, 137). With a focus on a framework of difference, migrancy offers a “hybridized and syncretic view of the modern world,” in Krishnaswamy’s phrase (1995, 36–37). It is the outcome of social and cultural displacement.

Les yeux baissés is a good narrative witness of the “delirious” reality of postcolonial displacement and its ramifications. The theme of postcolonial displacement and migrancy as a mode of existence in the world involves feelings of cultural expatriation and alienation. This psycho-social reality of postcolonial displaced people situates the text within the parameters of a postcolonial poetic-realism (Baba 2023, 42). However, in an interview with Thomas Spear, Ben Jelloun strongly rejects the idea of realism, claiming that the writer’s role is “to be a witness to that reality, an engaged witness,” “not to practice realism,” but to consider reality as “DE-LI-RI-OUS” and that “[d]elirium is what matters” (1993, 43). Retrospectively, the text traces the female protagonist’s and her family’s migration/displacement from the village of Imiltanout to Paris’ suburb, La Goutte-d’Or and the anxieties of this migratory process. The female protagonist, Fathma who migrated with her parents at the age of eleven is an example of this “delirium reality,” representing both her unease experience of displacement and her trajectory of migrancy. The novel’s structure reflects this compelling situation as it takes double narrative positions: in the few first chapters, the protagonist narrates from her homeland and in the rest of the novel, she narrates from diaspora (Baba 2023, 43). As the text traces the dynamic of a multicultural neighbourhood in Paris, the narrative displays strategies of demonization in which the immigrant is represented. This “delirious” reality extricates Fathma from her extravagant dreams about the host society, which she had prior to her migration (Baba 2023, 43).

Taking double narrative positions, the narrative attests to the growing cultural and spatial hybridization as a legacy of the protagonist’s displacement. The in-betweeness of the narrative locations signifies the in-betweeness of the protagonist as a displaced subject caught between two cultures, two different worlds. As the daughter of labour immigrants, the protagonist confronts both the hostility of the host society, its intolerance and racism towards immigrants and the hostility of her patriarchal family towards her desire to assimilate into the host culture. This double-edged displacement marks at once the protagonist’s impossible assimilation into the new society and her impossible “return” to her homeland. Featured attempting to come to terms with her double-consciousness, the female protagonist’s narration contains frequent moments of textual irruption where the present of the narrative is broken with memory-scenes from the past. According to Gérard Genette’s theory of narrative, frequency in fictional text is the result of “the detailed depiction of the state of mind,” and analepsis in the novel is a subversive technique employed by the author to explore the splitting of a migrant subject between past and present, seeking self-autonomy in the future (Fludernik 2009, 101). Although the narration appears linear as the story narrates retrospectively different stages of the protagonist’s age (as child, adolescent, and adult), fragmentation in terms of place, time and Self overrides the story, reflecting on the postcolonial migrant’s cultural expatriation and painful displacement from a focalized female perspective.

Intriguingly, in his “pseudo-autobiographical” novel Les Yeux Baissés, which “focalize[s] on a character’s experience” in Genette’s definition (1990, 763), Ben Jelloun, as an authorial ego, speaks from a distanced perspective of a female migrant subject, expressing her hopes and fears. In other words, the authorial perspective is embedded in the female protagonist-narrator who speaks against her double-marginalization: as a woman who belongs to patriarchal family and as a migrant facing extreme hostility in French society. Since he shares with his protagonist not only the experience of migration, but also the homeland culture, Ben Jelloun attributes the voice to the voiceless to narrate the shackles of her patriarchal culture, as well as the intolerance of the host society. In an interview with Spears, while asked about his interest in viewing the feminine condition “through the other’s eyes,” Ben Jelloun responds: “I go towards woman because, in our society, she is the victim of a not-so-nice situation. So I serve as her witness” (1993, 41). Indeed, seeing the world from the other’s eyes, the author attributes to himself the task of defending a migrant woman’s “delirious reality” in her patriarchal culture and in diaspora alike. Within her subversive act of writing as a university student taking Law lasses, Fathma incarnates Ben Jelloun’s critical perspective toward homeland culture, as well as the French hostility towards immigrants.

What distinguishes Ben Jelloun’s novel, then, is that it is bound up with the question of gender. The choice of a female protagonist-narrator in his male-orientated literary presentation adds an interesting dimension to the portrait of the postcolonial displaced migrant. Nevertheless, Ben Jelloun’s feminist perspective is critically received by some postcolonial scholars, accusing him of employing an exotic Orientalist perspective in his literature. In Sexuality and War, Evelyne Accad describes him as a chauvinist “who superficially seems to advocate women’s liberation, while deeply perpetuating all the stereotypes that feed the male fantasy of women” (1990, 153). Rather, in my view, Ben Jelloun narrates those gender stereotypes in an exaggerated way, to draw attention to their injustice, and to deconstruct them artistically. Similarly, in his article “The Politics of Feminism in Islam,” Anouar Majid considers that “the West’s crusade against Islam has been joined by Westernized Muslim writers such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Driss Chraibi and the Indian-born Salman Rushdie, who have all attempted to depict Islam as a reactionary force that has set back or destroyed the freedoms of women and writers and eclipsed the traditions of non-Arab peoples” (1998, 325). This over-generalized view may apply to some of these writers, but not to all Westernized writers. Having read Les yeux baissés, I do not think that the author attempts to Orientalize his religion or to demonize it, but he writes against the grain on migrant women’s marginalization in patriarchal traditions, as well as in the diaspora.

With a focus on this “delirious reality”, the novel locates the Moroccan female-character as a displaced subject telling the experience of double-marginalization: as a woman grappling with her family’s patriarchal traditions and as a migrant facing the intolerance of the host society. Upon her arrival to Paris the protagonist’s imaginative memory intermingles her homeland and the host country, creating an overlapping hybrid space. While Fathma got lost in the city of Paris, two policemen brought her home. As the atmosphere of the city was still lingering in her mind, during the night Fathma intersects different cultural spaces in her imagination as she narrates in the following passage:

I soon went to sleep and spent the night watching the Seine, Paris, and its lights parade by until the images began to crisscross and intersect. The Seine was flowing through our village, the Koran school was set up at the cathedral of Notre Dame, the two policemen were driving their grocery van through the hinterland of Morocco. And I was passing from country to country in a split second. I saw my aunt in the cloudy water of the Seine. The policemen concluded that it was an accident; my brother was biking along the great boulevards.⁵

Ben Jelloun 1993, 67

Je m’endormis tôt et passai la nuit à revoir défiler la Seine, Paris et ses lumières, jusqu’au moment où les images se mirent à se chevaucher et à s’entrecroiser. La Seine coulait dans notre village, l’école coranique s’était installée dans la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, les deux agents parcouraient le bled avec leur camionnette-épicerie. Moi, je passais d’un pays à l’autre en une fraction de seconde. Je voyais ma tante dans l’eau trouble de la Seine. Les agents conclurent que c’était un accident; mon frère faisait de la bicyclétte sur les grands boulevards.

Ben Jelloun 1991, 85–86

As a result of displacement, Fathma’s imaginative memory exposes important notions of cultural and spatial hybridity which operate in this passage symbolically. The Koran school, which is located in the village, is set up at the Cathedral of Notre Dame as one symbolic institution in which different cultural-religious elements are overlapping and intersecting in a synthesized arrangement. This suggests in a symbolic way that the idea that cultures are internally homogenous, distinct and geographically bounded is no longer practical in Fathma’s mind. The hybridization of the two religious institutions signifies that cultures conflate religious borders and national territories in diaspora; in the contact zone, different cultures are subject to metamorphoses, changes and synthesisation. As a postcolonial migrant subject, Fathma no longer thinks in binary opposites, but in a hybridized way. Instead of dichotomizing and binarizing, she starts thinking plural beyond the differences of cultural and national boundaries. These blurred distinctions between homeland and the host society indicate that in the postcolonial era cultures and spaces are, rather, unbounded and deterritorialized as they create a global melange. Thus, this narrative imagination squares with Bhabha’s theory that hybridity of culture “resists any binary opposition of racial and cultural groups” (1994, 207). This in a way demolishes the idea of “pure” subjectivity and rootedness in a postcolonial zone of hybridity owing to migration and displacement. Fathma’s imaginative memory unfolds that national borders are where different cultures come into contact with each other. The heroine’s subjectivity is, therefore, deemed to be composed from different locations and different cultural narratives, as I will discuss further.

Fathma’s imagination displays that the cultural union of two religious aspects is intertwined with ironical twists of time and space. “The Seine”, a river which flows through the city of Paris, is imagined flowing through Fathma’s homeland where she saw her aunt in the cloudy water of the river. Also, while her brother – who died in the village before Fathma’s migration – is biking along the “boulevards,” the two French policemen are driving their grocery through the hinterland of Morocco. These overlapping images suggest that postcolonial displacement symbolically breaks national boundaries as it leads to the emergence of new geographic attachments. The point I want to emphasize her is that these mixed spaces are viewed as a single geographical entity that encloses two distinct cultural spaces to become a hybrid one. As a result of her displacement, Fathma is shuttling between the two worlds, passing from one country to another in a split second. The implication is that notions of time and space are in the process of hybridisation in which Fathma is enabled to move across borders in fluctuating motion. In other words, Fathma is at home everywhere, in a split second at her homeland and in Paris. Her constant state of interaction between homeland and host society indicates that these places are no longer bounded and fortified, but rather, they are dynamic and changeable spaces. In this sense, Fathma’s imagination charts new forms of national affiliations which transcend territorial boundaries and familiar attachments to the nation-state.

However, settled in La Goutte-d’Or, which represents a neighbourhood known as Little Africa in Paris, Fathma discovers that the living “delirium reality” in the multi-ethnic and multicultural neighborhood contradicts her imaginative memory of a celebrated hybrid culture and space. Delegated to the periphery, the heroine explores the experience of displacement and migrancy as becoming both more commonplace and more complex. With an emphasis on the politics of exclusion, she narrates disappointedly from within the structure of the neighborhood that there is little interaction between the multicultural and multi-ethnic migrant community and the host society:

The French were gradually abandoning our neighborhood. The shops were run by Arabs; from dawn till dusk, the sidewalks turned into an African souk. The Senegalese song and danced in order to sell their wares. As I watched them living and laughing, I wondered if they too guarded a secret in the depths of their soul, an ancestral world, a face illuminated by time, an immense tree that would protect them and give them the energy to live and to endure exile.

Ben Jelloun 1993, 81

Notre quartier avait été peu à peu abandonné par les Français. Les commerces étaient tenus par des Arabes ; les trottoirs se transformaient du matin au soir en souk africain. Les Sénégalais chantaient et dansaient pour vendre leurs objets. En les observant vivre et rire, je me demandais si eux aussi gardaient au fond de leur âme un secret, une parole ancestrale, un visage illuminé par le temps, un arbre immense qui les protégerait et leur procurerait l’énergie pour vivre et supporter l’exil.

Ben Jelloun 1991, 100–101

Fathma’s narration of La Goutte-d’Or, as a crossroad of foreign cultures and ethnicities, illustrates how postcolonial migration/displacement has transformed and changed the French social milieu. Anti-Arab and anti-immigrant feelings force the native French people to leave the neighborhood which reinforces their hostility toward a culturally and ethnically diverse migrant community. This feeling of demonizing migrants contradicts Fathma’s imagination of the contact zone as a zone of cultural interaction; rather, she discovers that it is one of marginalization, exclusion and isolation. It is as a “zone of occult instability” to use Frantz Fanon’s definition of a hybrid zone in connection with the postcolonial (Fanon 1963, 183). The use of the possessive pronoun “our neighbourhood” implies the pre-existent divisions of “us” and “them,” the binary opposites between the native French and the migrant community.

In his book Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Avtar Brah captures this point as well in discussing “diaspora space” as a zone whose possibilities are contested by established discourses of power which attempt to organise people into communities of “us” and “them” (1997, 209). Fathma’s description shows the ghetto as a cultural cliché of “composite communities,” creating a sense of “shared history,” in Brah’s words (1997, 183). In this contact zone, there is lack of cultural exchange and interaction between the native French and the migrant community. Hence, diaspora in this narrative is not a celebrated hybrid space where cultures are harmoniously in contact with each other, but it imposes an endurable life for migrants. This presupposes that displacement imposes challenges and pitfalls which migrants have to endure and to grapple with in diaspora.

3 Facing the Delirious-Reality of Exclusion and Racism

As the narration progresses, the heroine explores that La Goutte-d’Or is an unsettling zone plagued with problems and anxieties which migrants have to face daily. At an earlier stage of narration, Fathma expresses her fascination with the French modernity, the city and its everyday charming activities. She valorises everything that is Western and denigrates everything which is related to her homeland in an attempt to get immersed in the new society. But now she finds that her host country is at odds with its Maghrebian minority, whose ethnic and migrant background are inferiorized in the eyes of the mainstream White French people. In the following quote, Fathma narrates one scene in which the neighbourhood is a target to the police’s invasion as they look for drugs:

Early one morning, when everyone was still asleep, the neighborhood was barricaded as in a movie, and police cars invaded the streets. Within minutes, we were surrounded by an army of policemen clutching tommy guns. They stormed the apartments, scoured every nook and cranny, turned over tables, and threw belongings out the window. Our building was spared that disorder and panic.

Ben Jelloun 1993, 81–82

Un jour, tôt le matin, alors que tout le monde dormait encore, comme dans le film le quartier fut fermé, et des voitures de police envahirent les rues. En quelques minutes, nous fûmes assiégés par une armée de policiers, mitraillette au bras. Ils entrèrent dans les appartements, fouillèrent partout, renversèrent les tables et jetèrent des affaires par les fenêtres. Notre immeuble fut épargné de ce désordre et cette panique.

Ben Jelloun 1991, 101

This scene makes Fathma aware that La Goutte-d’Or is involved in drug-trafficking, and hence, the whole neighborhood is exposed at any time to the unrest of the police. The scene pictures the disorder and the panic the police’s harrowing invasion caused to all the inhabitants of this community during an early morning. This incident dismantles Fathma’s dream and ambition that in France she would be protected from the cruelty of her village as she finds herself living in an everyday disorder, anxiety and hostility. It is worth mentioning that Fathma views migration as a survival strategy in search of security, escaping a miserable “village that was barely grazed by life” (Ben Jelloun 1993, 17) (C’était un village que la vie effleurait à peine) (Ben Jelloun 1991, 26) and a cruel aunt who treated her badly in the absence of her father’s protection. Fathma now realizes: “that morning was the first time I felt that we weren’t at home, that Paris was not my city, and that France would never be entirely my country” (Ben Jelloun 1993, 83). [Je sentis pour la première fois, ce matin-là, que nous n’étions pas chez nous, que Paris n’était pas ma ville, et que la France ne serait jamais tout à fait mon pays] (Ben Jelloun 1991, 103). In short, the police incident operates as a turning point in Fathma’s life as she discovers that she is a stranger in an alien and hostile country to immigrants. If home means protection and security, a place where we are welcomed, loved, at ease and safe, Fathma feels “out of place.”

The protagonist-narrator recalls more memories of shocking incidents through which she becomes conscious that France does not only constitute an object of attraction and hope, of civilization and modernity, but also one of frustration and disappointment, of exclusion and racism. Fathma comes to terms with the fact that the perceived reality of France before migration as a country of tolerance and its present reality of intolerance after migration are contradictory delirium realities. She outlines this contradiction as she narrates in the following passage how France is riddled with racist violence against foreigners:

It was 9:10 A.M., that Sunday, October 27, 1971, when a bullet pierced the heart of a child playing a pinball machine at a café in Goutte-d’Or.

The mourning observed by the entire neighborhood could not restore the child to his family or make justice more just or prevent other gunshots. Mourning was our way of speaking to a country that had gotten into the habit of easily killing a foreigner.

Ben Jelloun 1993, 89–90

Il était neuf heures dix, ce dimanche 27 octobre 1971, lorsqu’une balle traversa le coeur d’un enfant qui jouait au flipper dans un café de la Goutte-d’Or.

Le deuil observé par tout le quartier ne pouvait rendre l’enfant à sa famille, ni rendre la justice plus juste, ni empêcher d’autres coups de fusil. Le deuil, c’était notre manière à nous de parler à un pays où l’on a pris l’habitude de tuer facilement l’étranger.

Ben Jelloun 1991, 109–111

The passage projects the shooting of Djellali, a fifteen-year old boy of Algerian parents, in la Goutte-d’Or as an act of hostility and racism against Maghrebian migrants. Joseph Rovan is right when he remarks that “French racism is to look more “literary” than “scientific,” it produces more insults and curses than theory” (“le racisme français est d’aspect plus “littéraire” que “scientifique,” il produit plus d’injures et d’imprécations que de theories”) (1983, 37). The passage shows that racism is indeed literary, one that kills and instils feelings of hurt and outrage manifested in the migrant community’s “mourning”. As a reaction, Fathma appropriates a plural voice uniting all multi-ethnic migrants in the neighbourhood as one community as she claims: “mourning was our way of speaking to a country [that] had gotten into the habit of easily killing a foreigner” (Ben Jelloun 1993, 90). In this sense, French racism renders France an endurable multicultural environment, a painful displacement migrant community has to face.

Intriguingly, the art of “mourning” as a strategic way of speaking to, and expressing anger towards, their hostile country demonstrates that migrant communities are avoid from any agency; they are not able to prevent “other gunshots” or to bring justice to the shooting of Djellali. In a bitter sense, the passage shows that migrants’ “mourning” is the only way of expressing the injustice of racism towards their host society that adopts politics of exclusion. Since it is addressed to the foreigners, exclusion and racism are provoked on the simple rhetoric of Frenchness versus Otherness, superiority versus inferiority, on the politics of demonization of the Other, the migrant, the ex-colonized. In this context, Anjali Prabhu argues in her book Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects, how “hybridization as a process does not occur without reliance upon the implicit notion of confrontation” (2007, 148). If hybridity leads the subaltern migrants “out of various constraints in conceiving agency” (2007, xi), agency which “must be tied to social change in which some inequality and injustice is addressed” (2007, 2), the passage shows that racism in France makes such potential a far-reaching value. Even though Djellali is culturally hybrid, a child of Algerian parents, born in France, his hybridity does not provide the ground for the intervention and agency to stand against racist violence and ethnic confrontations with a hostile society.

While searching for the reasons behind Djellali’s murder, Fhatma says: “ “Some people said, “He was killed because he’s a Moslem.” Others said, “He was killed because he’s Algerian, and the Algerian war isn’t over yet for certain people” ” (Ben Jelloun 1993, 91) (Certains disaient : “On l’a tué parce qu’il est musulman”; d’autres: “Ils l’ont tué parce qu’il est algérien et la guerre d’Algérie n’est pas tout à fait terminée pour certains”) (Ben Jelloun 1991, 112). These comments show that Djellali fell a victim of French racism, in David Beriss’s phrase, as the “incorrect or unjust invocation of cultural difference” (2004, 124), as well as the victim of the legacy of colonialism in which the displaced migrant is trapped in the logic of the always-Other. Caught up in France’s phobia of Islam and the complex legacy of Algerian war for independence, Djellali and his community are seen as Beriss puts it, “France’s “bad savages,” ” “[f]eared because they are thought not to have taken to French “civilization” that was offered in colonialism” (2004, 128). Les Yeux Baissés suggests, then, that the imaginative legacy of colonialism remains after colonialism has formally ended in Algeria, mainly as a means by which migrant people and their children are represented. In his book Immigration and Identity in Beurs Fiction, Alec G. Hargreaves states that “More than thirty years on, memories of the Algerian war still make it difficult for many people in France to conceive of young Maghrebis as part of the French nation” (1997, 174).

In this respect, it is right when Nikos Papastergiadis argues in the The Turbulence of Migration that “[m]igration may have spawned new diasporic communities and facilitated the critique of the nation-state, but this in itself has not necessarily produced greater levels of freedom and cross-cultural understanding” (2000, 6). Indeed, Ben Jelloun’s novel reflects on delirium situations of a lack of cross-cultural understanding and intolerant interaction. Fathma, who expressed an idealized feeling to France before migration and upon arrival, narrates that the incident of Djellali plays a turnabout in her life. The incident permeates her life in her host society as she becomes conscious of racism as a practice of Otherness and exclusion. She has acquired new consciousness, new attitude towards her host country: one of revision and reconsideration. In her melodramatic tone, Fathma writes as follows:

That day, as if by magic, I attained a new age. I had grown several years older. I was no longer the little girl who marveled at everything she discovered, I was a girl struck to the quick by the death of a boy who could have been her brother. I had skipped years and destroyed the images that made me dream. Naturally, I thought of my brother Driss. But as of that Sunday morning, life had a bitter taste. I learned the meaning of the word racism. Whenever someone at school didn’t like me, I blamed it on my backwardness, not on the color of my eyes or my skin. […] I wouldn’t have understood. But Djellali’s death made me enter a harsher and more complicated world.

Ben Jelloun 1993, 90–91

Ce jour-là, j’accédai comme par magie à un autre âge. J’avais vieilli de quelques années. Je n’étais plus la petite vieilli de quelques années. Je n’étais plus la petite fille émerveillée par tout ce qu’elle découvrait, j’étais une jeune fille frappée dans son coeur par la mort d’un garçon qui aurait pu être son frère. J’avais sauté les années et détruit les images qui me faisaient rêver. Je pensais, bien sûr, à mon frère Driss. Mais à partir de ce dimanche matin, la vie avait un goût amer. J’appris le sens du mot « racisme ». A l’école, quand quelqu’un ne m’aimait pas, j’attribuais cela à mon retard, non à la couleur de mes yeux et de ma peau […] Je n’aurais pas compris. La mort de Djellali me fit entrer dans un monde plus compliqué et plus dur.

Ben Jelloun 1991, 111

The incident of Djellali has entered Fathma in a more complicated world, a world in which she understands now the meaning of racism and the feelings of exclusion. The heroine explores that the reality in La Goutte-d’Or is plagued with racism, violence and marginalization. This represented delirium reality is paradoxical to her prior imagination and subjectivity that France is a tolerant and humanist country. She is now disillusioned with that humanist discourse she has dreamt of before her migration. If the death of her brother by her insane aunt caused her alienation from her home-village, the shooting of Djellali initiates her into a new perspective on the host society and makes her realize that her displacement is indeed a “turbulence”, in Papastergiadis’ words. In other words, the incident of Djellali is translated into an impact on Fathma’s life as she rethinks her own Otherness and her ethnic and cultural difference. She becomes conscious that the host society is hostile to her identity and her appearance on which the parameters of inclusion and exclusion are operated. Rethinking her colour-difference, Fathma now views that the colour of her eyes and her skin is also an object to racism, as a marker of difference and of non-Frenchness.

With regards to the question of difference, in his article “Anti-Racism Without Races: Politics and Policy in a “Color-Blind” State,” Erik Bleich argues that “[a]lthough the motive for disliking these groups [Arabs, Muslims, beurs] may be (real or perceived) differences in culture, individuals in these categories are also targeted for discrimination, harassment, or violence based simply on their appearance” (2004, 166). Beriss, along with his argument that racism is understood as “incorrect, unjust invocation of culture,” contends that “[c]olor does serve as a marker of difference, of non-Frenchness [;] it is one term in a complex ideology defining belonging and foreignness in France” (2004, 124). In a similar vein, the passage shows that Fathma’s color marks her appearance in the society as a foreign body visible to racist eyes. Her colour is one term in a complex ideology defining belonging and foreignness. Negotiating her different appearance is a way of reinforcing her self-representation and self-consciousness in a complicated world.

Interestingly, the author’s psycho-analysis theory of French racism encapsulates the idea that racist behaviour is psychologically stimulated on the basis of difference. In his book Hospitalité Française: Racism et Immigration Maghrèbine, Ben Jelloun states: “[Racism in France] is a reactive racism, obedient to an unsophisticated, instinctive psychology: the racist reacts to the mere manifestation of foreign body, the body automatically suspects because it is different” (C’est un racisme réactif, obeisant à une psychologie primaire, instinctive: le raciste réagit à la simple manifestation du corps ètranger, corps automatiquement suspect parce qu’il est different [1984, 36]). Drawing upon his experience in social psychiatry, Ben Jelloun’s psycho-analysis theory of racism in France underlines that the foreign body is only suspicious in an obedient instinctive psychology because of its Otherness and its difference. Such theory meets the argument of his literary text that the abject body of Djellali is a victim of racist murder on the basis of his perceived Otherness and difference. Understanding the nature of French racism, we might argue that Ben Jelloun’s text presents cultural difference-based racism as one of the shortcomings of hybridity-theory to be applicable to those North African migrants whose difference is still seen as the source of phobia in France.

In a nutshell, the heroine becomes conscious that racism is provoked on the basis of one’s ethnic, cultural or skin-color “difference;” this is reminiscent of R. Radhakrishnan’s argument in Diasporic Meditations: Between Home and Locations that “critical theory of diaspora as a celebration of “difference” is completely at odds with the actual experience of difference as undergone by diasporic peoples in their countries of residence” (1996, 174). Due to the incident of Djellali, Fathma narrates that La Goutte-d’Or lives a state of anxiety, worry and fear. As a result, her family was urged to look for another secure place away from this disappointing neighbourhood, as she tells in the following quote:

We left Paris – more precisely, Goutte-d’Or (Paris was not Goutte-d’Or) – and settled in Yvelines. For me, that was the end of the earth, more remote than the village, more bizarre than the mountain.

Ben Jelloun 1993, 95

Nous quittâmes Paris, plus exactement la Goutte-d’Or – Paris n’était pas la Goutte-d’Or – , pour nous installer dans les Yvelines. Pour moi, c’était déjà le bout du monde, plus loin que le village, plus étrange que la montagne.

Ben Jelloun 1991, 117

Moving to Yvelines, Fathma’s family undergoes a second compelling displacement after the first one from Morocco to La Goutte-d’Or. This signifies that migration is a matter of unsettlement and of continuous shuttling between places and cultures. Having settled down in Yvelines, also, does not seem the right choice that would bring security and safety to the family’s life. Fathma describes the place in comparative terms to the remote village and the bizarre mountain situated at the end of the earth, maybe as a metaphor of isolation and marginalization. Her language of expression echoes feelings of desperation and disappointment. Yet, the family’s second displacement is an urgent necessity to escape from the enormous troubles La Goutte-d’Or is plagued with and which they have to grapple with everyday. Fathma’s feeling of anxiety and turbulence reformulates and reshapes her prior imagination of migration as a strategy of hope, of escaping the impoverished life of the village. The protagonist deconstructs now the binary opposition between her host country as a positively imagined space and the village as a negatively imagined space. Therefore, the delirium reality in La Goutte-d’Or makes Fathma realize that displacement is not all about potentials for her and her family, but it is also one of ongoing anxieties and trials.

As such, the text is a good witness to the reality in diaspora as “delirium,” as the author perceives his literary exploration of real situations brought about by postcolonial displacement and its long-ranging effect of migrancy. Fathma’s experience of migrancy carries relentless, indelible marks of disappointment, frustration and marginalization. The female protagonist represents the dark side of La Goutte-d’Or, as a contact zone embracing diverse migrant communities, which involves confrontations between the native French and the alien migrants. In charting this conflict from within the neighbourhood, Fathma narrates “delirium” anxieties of intolerance, exclusion and racism provoked on the basis of the politics of demonization in which migrants and their children are perceived. The heroine lays emphasis on the point that this politics stems from the ideology of cultural difference and belonging, of Frenchness versus Otherness. It is a mode of representation which is based on the rhetoric of the Self and the Other, the native French and the migrant, of inclusion and exclusion. Fathma discovers, then, traps of disappointment and disillusionment in positively judging migration and the host society in retrospect, and in imagining a harmonious hybrid cultural space upon her arrival. This psychological confusion which Ben Jelloun’s protagonist suffers from seems to be a characteristic of francophone postcolonial literature.

Ben Jelloun’s text tackles the turbulence of postcolonial displacement and its long-standing effects of migrancy through the protagonist’s unease psychological state facing hostility, exclusion and racism in contemporary French society. Blurring up fiction and history as a strategy for his literary production, the author is given the chance to speak out for racist violence against Maghrebians, spotting light on the dark side of a liberal society at odds with its North African minority. Even though fiction is considered, according to J.L. Austin’s controversial term as “non-serious” discourse (1976, 104) and hence not a serious witness to history, the reading horizon situates the text as realist/factual narrative recording racist murders during 1970s in France. In his “serious,” non-fiction book Hospitalité Française (French Hospitality), Ben Jelloun accumulated a list of racist aggressions of North-African migrants and their children occurred between 1970 and 1979 (1984, 27–32). His study doubts the fidelity of France’s liberal ethics and democratic principles. The same theme is explored aesthetically in his “non-serious” text which, from a narratological perspective, renders the novel a sort of factual narrative characterized by referential truthfulness.

The displaced postcolonial protagonist serves as the author’s allegorical device through which he addresses a critique of the French’s inhospitality. For as Carmen Husti-Laboye states, in his book La Diaspora Postcolonial in France (The Postcolonial Diaspora in France), “[n]ot having the ability to act directly, the writer revolts in writing” (“N’ayant pas la possibilité d’agir directement, l’ecrivain se révolte en écrivant” [2009, 66]). The author’s revolt is a resistant strategy that spots light on the complexities of displacement, exclusion and racism migrants have to endure. His revolting perspective constitutes the possibility of his novel’s resisting or subversive character as counter-discourse, speaking up to the French nation’s limits of hospitality with regards to Maghrebian migrants and their children. As resistant narrative, Les Yeux Baissés intervenes critically in negotiating its context and in reshaping it otherwise. As such, I adopt Petra Fachinger’s term “oppositional aesthetics” or resistant aesthetics as narratives writing back to the nation from a position of marginalization (2001, 112). Ben Jelloun’s resistant aesthetics appeals for a plural cultural identity in the diaspora that reconciles the migrant’s double-consciousness, his ethnic roots as well as his new cultural belonging.

4 Conclusion

To conclude, Ben Jelloun’s Les Yeux Baissés narrates Fathma’s experience of postcolonial displacement, as well as of migrancy which carries relentless, indelible marks of cultural hybridity. The author’s migratory narrative offers a labor of imagination, negotiating cultural displacement as a way of thinking about identity and belonging beyond national, geographical and cultural borders. But in practical terms, the narrative explores cultural hybridity, as an offspring of migrants’ displacement, as one which imposes feeling of “being out of place”, isolation and confinement, instead of cultural exchange and interaction. The female protagonist-narrator spotlights the dark side of La Goutte-d’Or as a contact zone embracing diverse ethnic and cultural migrant communities; but it is a zone which involves confrontations between the native French and the migrants, who are perceived as alien, strange and different. In charting this conflict from within the neighbourhood, Fathma narrates anxieties of intolerance and racism provoked on the basis of the politics of demonization in which migrants and their children are perceived. The novel lays emphasis on the politics of inclusion versus exclusion, which stems from the ideology of cultural difference and belonging, of Frenchness versus Otherness.

Rethinking her different identity, Fathma discloses the French mode of representation based on the rhetoric of the Self and the Other, of the native French and the migrant, of the Westerner and the Orient brought into contact by the twin process of globalization and migration. This divisive rhetoric makes Fathma discover traps of disappointment and disillusionment in positively judging migration and the host society in retrospect, and in imagining a harmonious hybrid space upon her arrival. Finally, she becomes conscious that migration is a matter of unsettlement, continuous displacements and of shuttling between cultures, places and times. Drawing upon this delirious reality, the text conveys what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature a “collective enunciation” through investing a collective voice in the female narrator, as a migrant subject, to speak against the politics of demonization in order to “forge the means for another consciousness,” (1986, 17) for tolerance, co-existence and harmony. Through the protagonist, Ben Jelloun’s text narrates poetics of postcolonial displacement and migrancy as a historical archive and a narrative memory of the nation.

Les Yeux Baissés questions French politics of identity, as well as the liberating prospect of cultural hybridity as creolization beyond borders, by depicting the diaspora as a challenging and contesting zone of uneasy confrontations. Such narrative sheds light on the tolerance limits of the host liberal society, its hospitality and its humanist ethics vis-a-vis Maghrebian migrant communities. The novel’s “delirium” representation of Otherness aims to elucidate the racial divisions that plague contemporary French society. Through this novel, Ben Jelloun confronts his own Otherness in France and analyzes the formerly colonized-colonizer relationship, as well as the status of Maghrebian minority in this country. In a modern France where openly racist leaders such as National Front spokesman Jean-Marie Le Pen have made clear opposition towards Muslim immigrants, Ben Jelloun’s novel came as a compelling appeal for tolerance, harmony and co-existence. Les Yeux Baissés squares, then, with the author’s non-fiction book French Hospitality in contesting and denouncing the inhospitality of the French and their hostile attitudes towards Maghrebian immigrants. The author makes a passionate yet reasoned argument that exclusion and racism do not make sense in the multicultural world of today. Therefore, Les Yeux Baissés is a quest to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of the liberal states’ ethics and hospitality towards displaced migrants, but of a hospitality that is less focused on guest versus host and is aligned more closely with conviviality.