African immigration and postcolonial France, Iowa City, Iowa, April 26, 2006

-[Sandra Barkan] Today's program has been made possible through the cooperation of International Programs at the University of Iowa, with additional support from River Products and New Pioneer Co-op. Today's speaker is going to address a topic that's particularly timely, as we've been reading the newspaper and looking at television and seeing all sorts of revolts and rebellions in France, the streets crowded, the students burning cars. The question is what's the context for all of this activity. Professor Michel Laronde will be talking about African immigration and post-colonial France and addressing just that question of the context. Michel Laronde is Associate Professor of French at the University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 20th-century literature and now works in several areas of Francophone studies, and Francophone studies would include the literatures of Quebec, of the Caribbean, and most significantly to today's lecture, Professor Laronde has worked on the literatures of both sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and African immigrants in France. In 1993, Professor Laronde published a seminal book on beur fiction of the 1980s, Autour du roman beur: Immigration et identité, The Beur Novel: Immigration and Identity. The term beur designates a generation of young French men and French women who emerged in the 80s, the children of North African immigrants who were either born in France or lived most of their life in France. Professor Laronde has also published L'Ecriture décentrée, Decentered Writing, a collection of essays which follow the evolution of Arabo-French fiction and the critical thought that frames this work. Another edited volume, Leïla Sebbar, published in 2003, is a collection of studies on the creative works by this very important Algerian-French woman writer. Doctor Laronde has just completed a manuscript on the ideological impact on French culture of the practices that are fictionalized in what those of us in literature call post-colonial literature and cinema from the 1980s and 90s. I am delighted to introduce Professor Michel Laronde. Michel? -[Michel Laronde] Thank you, Sandra, and thank you to everyone for being here. Can you hear me? Yes? To give you a fair presentation of the subject of immigration in France, we necessarily have to go back to history. Any kind of immigration is steeped in historical context. So that's really the only way to understand something about it, get away from the present and look in the past. That's what I will do at first, and then, if I have some time after that, I will raise the question of the post-colonial, what does that mean, how can it be understood, how does it apply to France today, and maybe through that, you will have a window to somewhat understand, I hope, a little better what has been going on in Paris. Sandy was talking about the burning of cars and all that, so it's all related to the veil in France, for example, the question of the veil which is grossly misunderstood most of the time. So, we'll try and do that. When we talk about immigration in France, we tend to understand, and rightly so today, immigration as immigrants coming from North Africa mainly, that is to say Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Morocco and Algeria are more pregnant in that context because Tunisia got its independence in the 50s and is kind of out of the picture. So what I'm gonna do is zero in on Morocco and Algeria first and then we'll start from there. This is not new at all. Immigration from North Africa started in the end of the 19th century. But it got more important in the early 20th century and especially after the Second World War for the reconstruction of the economy of France. So that's when it started being, it didn't start being busy during that time, but that's where it was smaller in some ways, okay? So there were recruiters who went to Morocco and Algeria and they were recruiting for the car business, for example, for the coal mines in the north of France, doing all those jobs that most French people would have maybe not wanted to do so well. At the time, they were really not visible at all, they were just employed on a temporary basis by Peugeot and Renault, the big car companies, for example. And they had temporary visas that lasted, at most, three years so this was an immigration of males only and workers only. No families were allowed to come to France because that was, the end being that they would not get settled in French society, just come there as guest workers only, for a short period of time. In the 50s, that went on. That went on through the war in Algeria from '56 to '62 and it even went on to the early 1980s, very early 1980s. So this immigration, temporary immigration, was not something that lasted a very short time. It started way back in the 1910s and lasted until the 60s, which is a fairly long time They were never called immigrants They were never called immigrants until the 1960s. Until then, they were just not counted in any kind of way Now, in the 1960s, they started staying in France without it being known, actually, officially recognized or even known and progressively, they werehoused in you know, dilapidated areas of Paris and the large cities of France. And then, progressively, they kept, the French government tried to keep the number at a fairly minimum level. It varied depending on the government, but they were always trying to curb it somewhat. In the 1960s, suddenly France realized that they had been living in slum areas on the outskirts of large cities, mainly Paris but not only, and they had been there for 10, 15, 20 years and living in very poor conditions. And then in '74, there was a law, and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the President at the time, called loi Stoléru or Stoléru law, that decided, officially, that they could have their wives and children come live in France with them. So that was the first time that the state acknowledged the presence of these men who were not supposed to, who were just supposed to be males and visiting for short period of time. That's the first time they recognized they were here to stay, most of them, and finally, the idea of including them within the society started coming up in their mind. So thatallowed their wives and children who were all living in Algeria, mostly Kabylia, it was a... Very depressed, you know, mountainous area at the time. So that was called the whole group morfamilia, family regrouping, if you want. So from that generation on, we can talk about permanent immigration in France. That's when it started, I mean permanent immigration of North Africans. And then the first generation that was born in those slum areas in the 60s, early 60s, even sometime, late 60s, plus the ones who came from Algeria with their mothers in '74 and up to the 80s, started forming what was called the second generation immigrants. So the first generation were the fathers living alone in the slums, and then the second generation were the kids born when the mothers came or even before that. So that second generation, you know, after there had been like six, seven generations of invisible immigrants, suddenly became not only visible, but very fast, it became too visible. And that's a typical process with immigration when there's a fair number of immigrants. So that's very typical of any kind of development of that situation As a parenthesis, for example, in the 1910s, there were a lot, a lot of Italian immigrants coming to France because Italy was very depressed also. And France had camps in the Alps where they would round up the immigrants and try to send them back, not let them in, and a lot of them just died in the snow in winter, for example. So that's just a parenthesis, I'm going to close it here. so we are at the second generation immigration in France. Now, in France, any kid, and that's a law, any kid living on the territory has to be schooled in the French system, whether they are legal immigrants, illegals, any kind of situation. School is free and is for everyone and everyone who goes through the exact same schooling, this is very important to what comes next as the post-colonial situation. But for the time being, what happened in the early 80s and on after that was that the appearance of a literature that came specifically from that group of people born from immigrant parents from North Africa. This had never happened before in French society where a group of distinct or different or ethnically different or culturally different people would create, have their own culture reproduced in literature which would make it visible. Until then, the notion of assimilation, or cultural assimilation, basically, had been so pregnant that no one would have ever dreamed of saying I'm not part of that. You can just think of bigot as the most common example, but this is not the same situation. That question always comes up and that's why I'm mentioning it. Here we don't have to deal with a group with a different culture that forms a group. It's just an individual. So one individual is never a threat to any culture, okay, only a group can be. So that 1980s, second generation called beur, B-E-U-R, which comes from Arab reversed a couple times. Not just the process, you know, typical process with immigrant community is to try and hide the code behind their language. That's already a sign that the culture was being challenged somewhere just through that term. So the beur generation, as we call it, started producing a fair amount of novels. In about 10 years, there were 60 to 80 novels, so that was really important. And those novels are significant for me, in my work anyway, because they usually pick on stereotypes, cultural stereotypes that have been taught in schools that use the exact same text all over the French territory. For example, you would have, maybe you know La Fontaine's fables, so the stereotype that those fables carry is usually something about morality, you know. So it's trying to teach the kids the same way of reacting to moral situations, moral context and that sort of thing. Just an example, but there's a whole lot of stereotypes that are taught in school. They all come from literature. This is very important. That's what I call high culture. So high culture in France for me is the culture that is taught through those stereotypes, literary stereotypes that are turned into cultural stereotypes, and then from anon, they can be reappropriating and turn to signify, to mean, in a political manner. So this becomes really interesting. And from there, that's what the notion of post-coloniality, not post-colonialism, which is different thing for me, post-coloniality as a mentality is being created within France through that second generation beur immigrants. Now, of course, it's no longer the second generation. It's the third, fourth, maybe the fifth, because for me, a generation in what I'm talking about, is six years. That's the time it takes to go through elementary school, and that makes a generation, really. And when we don't understand how kids react, you know, every five, six years, 10 years, you don't understand why they are reacting that way, it's because it's a new generation. It's not the same as the generation before. But although you have all those differences in generation, they all go on learning the same stereotypes in school. And it's really interesting, fascinating even, to look at the novels from the early 80s and the ones from the end of the 80s and the ones from the 1990s and to see how they are reappropriated slightly differently in order to have them mean differently. For example, the first novel or at some part in the novel, that was a description but also a reinterpretation of their experience in school. Almost all novels have that in it when it was not the main subject of it because a lot of those novels were autobiographical novels, that's typical of the first type novel, first novel. And so they were recounting their experience within the French system in the context of school, which was the context where they would, maybe for the first time, some of them meet the Franco-French population, the kids coming from Franco-French parents. So that was a very meaningful entry into a new culture 'cause, see, the parents were in the slums. The parents didn't know how to read or write, they came from poor areas in North Africa. They were never schooled at all in France. So the kids were at the forefront of that entry into the culture of the others. And they were also the bridge between French culture and their parents' culture at the same time. So this generation is really crucial to the understanding of what post-colonializing culture is all about. That's a barbaric term, and that's my invention, post-colonializing a culture in France. Not post-colonizing, because that's quite different. But post-colonializing, I can't say it more than three times in a row. So most of the novels used school as one of the main subject of their novels. Later on, it changed somewhat. I mean quite a few writers, after a first or even a second novel sometimes, where the subject was really present, the subject of school, they veered off and started writing something else. One of them said, "What am I gonna co after I am done "talking about my parents and school? "I'm going to have to go on the moon "and write another kind of story," and that's what they did. But something else happened in the 1990s. That was the realization there was another kind of immigration coming from Africa. It was immigration from sub-Saharan Africa, mainly from the French-speaking countries of sub-Saharan Africa. So that opened up the immigration to another kind of literary creativity and it was very easy to see that the novels coming from the first or second generation Africans from sub-Saharan Africa had almost nothing to do with the novels coming from the beur generation. The writing was somewhat different, but that was not the important part. The content was entirely different, is entirely different. The content does not, for example, insist on the ethno-cultural origins the way Algerians do, for example. I mean there's a lot of things that show very clearly that it differs from the beur writing, from beur writing This is just to give a perspective on immigration in general today. There are two main immigrations, the one from the 60s that only started being seen as athird generation at the end of the 60s, although you remember it had been there for a long time, and another one that is more recent, which is from sub-Saharan Africa, from about 15 years ago, about. And of course, since I'm working in literature more than culture, although everything I do in literature is to explain the culture and try to understand it myself, those two literatures have to be kept apart in many ways. Now, to backtrack somewhat, you might ask why immigration from Africa, mainly. It's very simple, I mean, it comes from former colonized counties. And when we, when we as a culture, the French culture, colonized Africa, along side with Germany and England and most of the countries of Europe, what we were really adamant about importing there was the culture through the language and eventually, through the literature. So you see the circle. It's pretty much an irony that who is, with the beur novel, who is questioning the culture now. It's the descendants of the people we had forced into adopting that culture and mimicking it, using it as a reference for their own culture that was just adopted, but not their own culture. So that's a pretty interesting twist there. A couple more minutes? So I won't read anything then, just that one. So for me, what I call post-coloniality, is different from post-colonialism. Post-colonialism, the -ism, gives it a political-historical meaning. So to me, a post dash colonial situation is a situation that takes as a base, the history that has been existing between the two countries and it cannot be ignored. It cannot be displaced or even forgotten at all. It has to be part of the post-colonial understanding or situation. If you don't have the post dash colonialism situation, what has been happening between the two countries in politics and history, then you are missing half of it, at least, 'cause it's all in there that you can find explanations. For example, why do immigrants between 1910 and the 1960s, why were they entirely invisible? Because they were former colonized people, so the colonized, by definition, during colonial times, you didn't see them, they didn't exist. And of course, when they became immigrants, they became too visible because they were intruding into different levels of the culture, sometimes the economic level, which is the recent situation, right, because we don't need them anymore to reconstruct the economy, so they became too visible on that ground. See what's happening in other places. And without the, once again, and that's the last time I say it, without the historical and political background, it's really hard to not distort our perception of what is happening today. So I think we have to be very careful of including that past in the reading of the present. It cannot really be left out at all. Now, post-coloniality, for me, is something that is not only linked to the past, but it goes way beyond that. Post-coloniality is a mentality. It's not a political act. So the fact that the novels are changing the culture very slowly, that's what I call post-colonializing it. And this is, in a way, it could be phrased as just a contemporary evolution of the country, and that's what happens all over Europe as a consequence of the colonization of Africa and those developments, a hundred years later, that are still linked to the past, but that are really moving the countries forward. So this is happening in England, this is happening with Indians and people from former colonies. This has been happening in Germany, mainly with Turks who have been on the same hot coals as the immigrants from North Africa in France, and on and on. I mean, the colonial is always present there, but the notion of post-colonializing it is where the evolution goes on. And I think I'll stop right there. -[Sandra Barkan] Before the independence of Algeria, they were considered French citizens. What happened to their status post-independence? -[Michel Laronde] Actually, this is a very good question that I could have expanded on somewhat. Yes, before the independence of Algeria, Algerians were French citizens. Isn't that amazing? Starting in 1870, with the decree that was called the décret Crémieux, from the name of the guy who just decreed that, decreed that all the Jews from Algeria were full-fledged French citizens, 1870, seven oh. So that's pretty interesting because that's where Algeria became something else, something different from a standard colony in Africa. So from that moment on, there were different, it's a long story, but slowly, eventually, Algeria ended up being like a département in France, you know, like a, let's say, a county or something like that. There's 98 département, I think it's 98 in France that nowadays, 98 nowadays. Corsica is one, which is an island off in the Mediterranean. I know you know that. But it also includes former colonies that have become départements francaise d'outre-mer, or overseas French departments, Martinique, Guadaloupe, French Guyana, and a few other territories, as we say. So those were former colonies, now they have a different status. They are both, you know, in an ambiguous situation which I call a situation of post-contact and not a situation of post-colonial situation. So that's a different take on it for me. To go back to Algeria on that ground, of course, after the war, they lost their citizenship. So that's why, at that stage, they became illegals, immigrants, all those bad words we use all the time, because they are meant to be bad in some way. And so it's very interesting also, it was, of course, the war of Algeria was the most traumatic war for the French Empire at the time because that was the last colony to become independent after a fierce number of years of a real war that was never called a war until 2001. It was never recognized officially as a war, just as events, like the 1968 events mal, events in France. Of course, if I mention 1968, you might bring it to, you know, what happened recently in France. Is that enough to answer the question? Is it? -[Sandra Barkan] Are the riots, protests caused by cultural or economic problems, and in conjunction with that, another question, doesn't France still need guest workers given the low native birth rate? -[Michel Laronde] I find the first one easier to answer than the second one. The experience of the riots in France, that's the question, right? The riots in France, riots, yes, yes. That happens regularly. This is not just the only instance of it we've seen. I'm even kind of surprised that it was so visible here and, of course, slightly misunderstood, but that's always the case when something happens somewhere else, it's likely to be somewhat misunderstood. Now the riots are not, I'm gonna start with the negative part, the no part. They are not caused by religious problems. The religious problems are usually from extremists, Muslims who are extremist and they are very few in numbers. But they make sure they make themselves very visible so it stigmatizes the population. Most of the immigrants are not into Islam at all. Immigrants, you know, they came from Kabylia, where already Islam is not something that is very popular, the way Islam is done, is practiced, for example, in Morocco, is quite different. And so those people in Kabylia were not religious at all. They came to France to survive. You know, they were illiterate, they didn't know how to read or write, and what was important for them was to survive. So religion was the last of their worries. Now, after living in France for a generation or two, most of the kids were not religious at all either. So what we see is kind of an Islamization of a very small number of people and where it links and might answer your question there, where it links to the social situation is that it is true that many sons and daughters of immigrants have many more difficulties finding jobs than Franco-French people do. And it has been like that for a long time because there is a lot of stigmas including racism and that's certainly not the least of them. So when someone wants to hire five people, they try to get five people who are not from those areas, those depressed areas, those visible areas that the banlieue, you know, the outskirts of Paris are. So if we saw burning of cars there, it's to protest the fact that they can't find a job with the same diplomas that most French people have. By the way, the more recent protest on the level of high schools, don't forget them, and universities also links into that because the other people from France, not only from immigrant origins, have a hard time finding jobs, too, and this is pretty much all over Western Europe. Is that, does that cut it? And the next one was doesn't France still need guest workers given the... -[Sandra Barkan] Given the low birth rate. -[Michel Laronde] Oh, the low birth rate, okay, yeah, yeah. This is a twisted one. How am I gonna take that? The notion of guest workers, I think, you put it in quote and that's really the way to put it. We don't have the notion of guest workers anymore, meaning that stopped when, in the 50s, when we started to acknowledge that we had immigrants coming in and they were causing a threat to the country. The guest workers were before, remember, they were hired for short period, only males, only people who would actually produce work, and then they would go back to their families, their culture, their homes and their kids. So we haven't had guest workers since then. Germany has with the Turks, for example, about 10 years ago. But we never used that word of guest workers. What we want is to stop immigration from North Africa, basically. That's really, basically, what it is. And, of course, the notion of low birth rate, actually France has the highest birth rate in Europe. Isn't that amazing? From, you know, between Germany and Spain and Italy and England, it's France. It's like almost two and point some Did that answer the question or not, yeah? -[Sandra Barkan] One more question, Michel. How does the issue of the veil tie in, especially if many immigrants and beur generation people are not Muslim or not religious? -[Michel Laronde] I have been hearing that question a lot of times and also trying to think about it. And to me, once again, it's what I said earlier. It's a very small number of girls in high schools, young women and girls because I'm talking of girls who are eight, 10 years old and young women in high school, too, who are adamantly requesting to be able to wear the veil in school. For the same reasons as we have the burning of cars, I think, it's the same reason. They want to protest against the fact that they are not really accepted in society, that they had difficulties, they have difficulties finding jobs when they get out of school because their older sisters and brothers had difficulties finding jobs, maybe their parents, sometime, already from the 1980s. So this is a story that has been there for a while, that marginalization through the economy, because, in some ways, the economy that marginalizes people more than anything else. So their reaction is to protest with a symbol. The best symbol is something that is against the main culture, what I call the majority culture. So a minority culture is gonna make itself visible through symbols, signs, and what a better sign than the veil. Wearing something that, obviously, puts you in a different culture when you go to school. And that was a good symbol to use, I believe, by the extremists, because this is also the extremist, the result of extremism by a few recruiters in the banlieue, you know, people who come and just talk about Islam and talk about the hijab, that sort of thing. And that was a good symbol to use because it goes right at the heart of laïcité, the fact that school has been separated from church, it took a long time to do, but now it's very clearly different. The church cannot get into state affairs at all and especially school. School has to be for everyone, everyone has to be taught in the same way and any belonging to a church does not have to be taken into account at all. It cannot be. So that was the separation of church and state. Very adamant about that because political freedom, freedom of expression, the press, the freedom of the press, all that, really depend on that separation. And we saw that recently with the caricatures of the Prophet and that was kind of trying to be twisted by the extremists into a, you know, signifying a racist way of acting against Islam and all that. This is not the way it works. It's putting things together that have nothing to do together. So we have to be really careful, and that's why the French finally decided after many, after a long time, they decided that the veil had to be adamantly pushed away from school. That's the history behind it. But just a little anecdote to finish it. When I was a kid, which goes some time back, but not a hundred years. I remember very well if you would walk into the classroom with something on your head, you were punished pretty bad. It's a matter of politeness. You take whatever you wear off when you walk in front of the instituteur or the teacher or the prof and so on. So, you know, the veil was also hitting right there, on that level which has really nothing to do at all with religion at all. But I went through that a few times. -[Sandra Barkan] We've reached the time to conclude today's program. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, I want to thank Professor Michel Laronde for sharing with us and with our radio and cable TV audiences his observations on African immigration in post-colonial France. I also wish to very much thank our sponsors, International Programs at the University of Iowa and New Pioneer Co-op and River Products. As a modest token of our appreciation, Michel, or Professor Laronde, here, I wish to present you with an Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug suitable for both mint tea and cafe au lait. -[Michel Laronde] Thank you very much. -[Sandra Barkan] If you have any questions about joining the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, please call the Council's office at 335-0351, that's 335-0351. And if you enjoy listening to this program on the radio or via cable TV, please consider supporting the Council's work by a contribution to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council in our new headquarters home, 1111 University Capitol Centre, Iowa City, Iowa, 52242. When we all turn in our name tags, thanks, all of us and thanks particularly to Professor Laronde.