A Novelist Of the Banlieues

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

When 21-year-old Faïza Guène’s first novel, “Kiffe Kiffe Demain” (essentially “More of the Same Tomorrow”) came out in France two years ago, she was hailed as the genius of the troubled Paris suburbs. As often happens, Ms. Guène’s own story received as much attention as the story she wrote, and the two became easily confused.

So Ms. Guène chafes a little when asked how similar her own adolescence was to that of her 15-year-old protagonist, Doria. She bridles slightly when asked about her political views and whether she sees any solution to the problems of poverty and racial integration in France. “I’m 21, I write stories,” she says. “If I had the solution, I wouldn’t be talking to you on the phone. I’d be out there applying it!”

In fact, though, Ms. Guène — who will be in New York for a reading tomorrow night at Barnes & Noble, Union Square, and a panel discussion on the state of the banlieues, or suburbs, at New York University on Friday — has many smart insights into French culture and politics. For instance, she shares with Doria a deeply critical attitude toward the French journalists who report on the social problems in the suburbs –– problems that became highly visible a year ago, when the deaths of two young men, who were electrocuted while being chased by the police, set off riots that reached into the center of Paris.

“They don’t realize how much of an impact they have on people,” she said of the reporters. “There’ll be a young man in a stairwell with a lot of graffiti,” she said about the TV coverage. “The face is always blurred or mosaiced out. … The implication is of guilt: It means that he doesn’t want to be seen because he has something to be ashamed of.” She added, “You can turn the sound off and still be scared, just by the images.”

Ms. Guène’s novel provides a much more human, often comic view of life in the banlieues. Elle magazine called Doria a “Bridget Jones of the suburbs” –– although a better comparison might be Holden Caulfield. Doria describes her mother coming home from her awful job as a maid at the Formula 1 hotel and crying, or staring at the turnedoff television. Doria struggles in school, and one teacher writes on her report card: “Exasperating, hopeless, the kind of student who makes you want to resign or commit suicide.” At another point, Doria remembers having to read out loud from the Book of Job. She mispronounces “Job,” and her teacher accuses her of sullying the French language.

“There are old teachers who feel like killing themselves when they hear young people from these neighborhoods talking,” Ms. Guène said. In her book, she employs a lot of the language of the banlieues. “It’s a language of identity, a rich and creative language,” she said.

Ms. Guène, who has published a second novel in France, said she was happy not to be in France for the oneyear anniversary of the riots, and she criticized the French tendency to frame the problems of the suburbs as one of ethnicity, rather than poverty and lack of power. She mentioned a study that linked teenage delinquency to bilingual homes. “They try to explain things with this totally twisted reasoning.”

Ms. Guène, who lives with her parents in Pantin, the suburb where she grew up, clearly has the passion and the material to write many more books. But she insists her writing is fiction: “There are lots of autobiographical novels right now in France –– it’s sort of in style. Authors recount their own experience, but put in two or three fake names and change a few locations. It’s all true, but you give the semblance of fiction. With me, it’s the opposite. It’s fiction that appears like reality. I don’t find it at all as interesting to describe my life as to create situations and invent characters. It’s inventing stories that makes me happy.”


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