GIL Z. HOCHBERG

                THE "PROBLEM OF IMMIGRATION" FROM A CHILD'S POINT OF VIEW:  THE POETICS
                OF ABJECTION IN ALBERT SWISSA'S AQUD AND FARIDA BELGHOUL'S GEORGETTE!                                                

LOST CHILDREN: ROAMING THE STREETS aimlessly, escaping home and school, straying through unfamiliar places, haunted by appalling images of being contaminated, mutilated, chopped, and devoured, or of themselves polluting, torturing, humiliating, and devouring, fill the pages of both Albert Swissa’s Aqud (Israel, 1990) and Farida Belghoul’s Georgette! (France, 1986).

Georgette! belongs to a body of texts known as “beur literature,” a term coined at the beginning of the 1980s in reference to writings of second generation North African immigrants living in Paris and its suburbs.  Aqud joins a much smaller group of literary works written in Hebrew that focus on the “immigration problem” from the point of view of Arab Jews (Mizrachim), and it is also the first published Israeli novel to concentrate on North African Jews, referred to within the text as both “Arab” and “African.”  Both novels focus on children of North African immigrants (Moroccan and Algerian), and both are told from the perspective of these young protagonists: Belghoul’s novel is the first-person narrative of a seven-year-old girl who calls herself Georgette and whose given name is unknown to us. She lives with her poor Muslim parents and her older brother in a Paris suburb populated mainly by Maghrebian immigrants. Aqud (literally translated as “bound”)  features a third-person narrator whose point of view is filtered almost entirely through the minds of three young boys: Yochai, Beber, and Ayush. The novel is divided accordingly into three separate narratives, each of which centers on one protagonist. In the following I will focus mainly on the third and longest of the three sections: “A Futile Attempt to Hold to a Fading Memory.” The protagonist of this narrative is Ayush, a young boy approaching his bar-mitzvah, who, like all characters in the novel, lives in a Jerusalem slum built especially to accommodate North African Jewish immigrants and named, as if mockingly, Ir-ganim, “The City of Gardens.”

But both novels, as my opening paragraph implies, are far less coherent or lucid than any such schematic presentation of their plot might suggest. Telling the story of immigration and failed integration from the perspective of young children who seem unable to decode their social, linguistic, cultural, and political networks, Swissa and Belghoul present us less with “narratives” than with “failed narratives,” that is to say, with narratives that mimic the fragmented, incoherent, and terrified state of mind of their young protagonists who, in Lacanian terms, fail to transition successfully from the imaginary state into the symbolic order.  Accordingly, these “narratives” are hallucinatory, catastrophic, and abject: they draw us, in Kristeva’s words, to “the place where meaning collapses,” and it is from this erratic place, located “outside, beyond [the laws of the symbolic] and with disagreement to the latter’s rules of the game,” that these failed narratives “beseech a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out.” If both novels tell a story of immigration and failed integration, they simultaneously allude to the inability of any coherent, lucid, sensible, decodable, linear, or fully readable narrative—that is to say, of any narrative as such—to convey faithfully the horrid effects of what Lisa Lowe has called “the processes of racialization that the immigration process instantiates.” Similarly, no narrative, they suggest, can effectively expose the continual process of signification through which hierarchical differences (between self and other, subject and object, one culture and another, the legitimate national subject and the “problematic immigrant”) are produced, only later to appear as natural and pre-given. Before exploring further the nature and implications of Swissa’s and Belghoul’s failed narratives, however, I wish briefly to explain my motivation for reading the two novels comparatively.

By bringing into dialogue an Israeli novel written in Hebrew by a second generation Moroccan Jewish immigrant and a French novel by a second generation Algerian Muslim immigrant living in France, I hope first of all to broaden the linguistic and social context through which Maghrebian literature is studied beyond the usual focus on the relationship among North Africa, France, and the French language. My comparative reading thus attempts to rescue some other diasporic locations (such as Israel), ethno-religious communities (such as Jews), and languages (such as Hebrew) from their marginal status, so as to promote a transnational, multilingual and cross-ethnic study of Maghrebian literature. But my comparative reading of the novels is also aimed at broadening the context within which Modern Hebrew literature is commonly studied. Although a great deal has been written about the lingering effects of France’s Orientalist and colonial attitudes toward North Africa and Maghrebian immigrants, the possibility that Israel’s discriminatory attitudes toward its Arab-Jewish population (not to mention its Palestinian citizens) might be examined similarly has for the most part been simply ignored. Furthermore, even when the presence of an Orientalist attitude within Israel is acknowledged, its origins are attributed almost exclusively to the influence of German Orientalism on the founders of Zionism. While this line of research is certainly valid, it must not draw attention away from other European influences that have directly shaped Israel’s politics of ethnic/racial discrimination. This, then, brings me to my main point: in drawing attention to the similarities between the racial construction of Jewish North African immigrants in Israel and that of Muslim North Africans in France, I aim to expose a mostly unattended trajectory of prejudice handed down to Israel directly from the French. It was after all a French diplomat who is quoted as an authority on “the problem of African immigration” in the leading Israeli paper, Ha-aretz, following the first wave of Moroccan Jewish immigrants to Israel. The diplomat advises Israelto “learn from France’s vast experience with similar immigrants and to tighten its immigration laws” to prevent the immigration of “a certain human material [that] is liable to bring the Jewish nation down.”