Discretion

Faïza Guene

Trans Sarah Ardizzone

Saqi, £12.99

Review: Rosemary Goring

NEXT month marks the 60th anniversary of Algeria’s independence. It was a hard-fought liberty, and to this day tensions remain with France, its former coloniser. After the Algerian war (1954-62), a referendum returned an overwhelming 99.72% in favour of independence. Despite this victory, there was a wave of emigration to France, because after the long-running conflict, the country lay in ruins.

As one of the central characters in Discretion reflects, when her family tries to pick up their old life, “The land is parched. The countrymen have lost everything… The return to their country has come as a shock. Freedom has cost them dear.”

Hence the mass exodus to the place of which they had been so eager to be shot. As a result, a high proportion of French citizens today were either born in Algeria or are of Algerian descent. As one of this community, Faïza Guene’s work illustrates that theirs is not an easy lot. Often, their adopted country can feel less like home than a hostile state.

Guene is one of France’s literary superstars. She was 19 when she published her debut novel, Kiffe Kiffe Demain (Just Like Tomorrow) in 2004, which became an international best-seller. Since then she has written several more novels, along with directing films and creating a Disney series. The liveliness of her writing is perhaps a reflection of the energy and passion that propels her.

One of Guene’s great strengths is to write from her own background, having been raised in Seine-Saint-Denis, one of the city’s most infamous banlieues. Another priceless asset is her humour. However unhappy or difficult the situations she depicts, they are leavened with a bubbling wit. She mines all but the bleakest scenes for a spark of comedy. The result is fiction that glitters and beguiles even when dealing with disturbing truths.

In the years since the War of Independence, Algerians in France have been the butt of derision and dread. Jean Le Pen campaigned for election with the slogan “Two million immigrants. Two million unemployed.” Even before the National Front made life for all the country’s ethnic minorities dangerous as well as tough, there were humiliating proscriptions on African Muslims. Considered a source of disease, they were stereotyped as violent and thieving, becoming a scapegoat for society’s fears. For every Zinedine Zidane there are a thousand viewed with fear and dislike. So much for liberté, egalité, fraternitié.

It is against this painful background that Discretion unfolds. At its heart is Yamina Taleb, who as a child witnessed the trauma done to her homeland by war. Now living in Seine-Saint-Denis with her aged husband and three grown-up children – the fourth has made a bid for freedom and is living at exorbitant cost in “Paris proper” where she works in a shop – she is a natural peace-maker. “Yamina never complains. It is as if that option was excised at birth.”

In any case, she feels forever grateful to France for the life it has allowed her and her family, after the deprivation they faced in Algeria. As she approaches 70, she worries more for her children than herself.

The thread on which this understated but haunting novel hangs is the idea that, even if one generation smothers its rage, it will re-emerge in the next. It is prefaced by a quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: “It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an ever greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.”

With what follows, Guene demonstrates that despite their best intentions, and all the sacrifices they’ve made, Yamina and her husband Brahim have “ended up raising overburdened children”.

Guene tells her story in bite-sized scenes, giving the location of each with sat-nav precision, as if her characters are butterflies, pinned in a bureaucratic album: “Commune of Aubervilliers, Department of Seine-Saint-Denis (93300), France, 2018”. Yamina and Brahim’s only son Omar is an Uber driver, waiting for real life to begin; his story takes place mainly in a “Renault Talisman Business, DCI 1.5 Eco2 Energy (Leather Interior)…”. He particularly dislikes young American passengers, who ooh and aah at everything Paris has on offer, but yearn for “a hamburger dripping with cheese and ketchup”.

Also still living at home – though less pampered than her brother – is Hannah. It is she who sees most clearly how her family is treated, and she frequently rails against the intolerance and ignorance they endure: “Them and us, I’m telling you, it’s like an organ transplant that won’t take.”

An older sister, Malika, whose divorce brought shame on the family, remains a more shadowy figure. It’s as if her failed marriage has rendered her less visible, or she prefers to keep herself out of sight. Invisibility, Guene suggests, is a female survival tactic.

Weaving fragments about each of her characters, Guene anchors Discretion in Yamina’s childhood in Algeria, where French soldiers misbehaved like an occupying army. In vivid flashbacks those years of terror and hardship unfold.

Despite its lightness of tone, Discretion is suffused in sorrow and confusion as well as enduring love. Clear-eyed but tender, every page is filled with insight. A searching portrait of the desire for identity and acceptance, its recognition of bone-deep discrimination and injustice is biting.

When Hannah hears a doctor patronising her mother, she squirms: “Come on, let’s take off our little burka, shall we, to show our little ears?” Yamina, in contrast, is not offended. Yet perhaps her response is not as passive as it appears. Since her father was a resistance fighter, Guene writes, “what if… refusing to give in to resentment were, in itself a form of resistance?”

Thus the legacy of colonisation corkscrews down the generations. It might take different shapes, but it will never be erased or forgiven. Only with difficulty can it be overcome, but in an age when to be Arab in Europe is automatically to rouse suspicion, Guene offers little hope. As Yamina reflects: “today we can no longer really say who we are. Who we are has become too risky.”