IDC Internal Assessment (French)

Azouz Begag’s Shantytown Kid (Le Gone du Chaaba) captures a period of transition in the
author’s life from childhood to adolescence. The chronological duration of the novel
prohibits it from attaining the status of a ‘complete’ autobiography as it spans only the
formative years of his life in the 1960s. The novel was published in 1986 at a crucial time in
French political debates that held the Arab community to be a ‘national threat’. Algeria was a
French colony since 1830s and thereby had suffered under the foreign yoke only to gain
independence after a fierce war in 1962. France was witness to the multiple waves of
migration from North African countries, especially Algeria, during the opening decades of
the twentieth century. At the beginning, the migrant workers went back to the country of
origin to send back male relatives to get employment abroad. France felt an urgent need to
address the labour shortages in the post-war period due to a sudden leap in economic
ventures. Although the nature of the migration was not permanent initially as the indigent
Algerian workers had only travelled to take up unskilled jobs there, the scenario changed
gradually. A diverse practice was noticed among the Algerian and North African workers on
temporary stay in France as they started to bring their families into the country of
employment to respond to the financial conditions prevailing in France. The contemporary
political landscape in France was marked by popular perception of the arrival of exiles in a
time of widespread unemployment and economic uncertainties. The conservatives in French
politics decided to capitalize on the adverse climate to put the blame on ‘immigration’.The
novel is poignantly articulate in speaking of the perplexing events that made him question his
ethno-national identity. A rich linguistic variety is entrenched in the vocabulary of the young
Begag with a profusion of Algerian Arabic in a Berber accent (typical of his community of
indigenous minority unlike the people of Arab descent), Lyonnais slang and varied forms of
non-formal French. He was born in France and had no experience of his parents’ life in
Algeria.

Begag’s family lived in unspeakable circumstances in a shantytown (‘bidonville’) like other

immigrants from Algeria who were unable to afford basic accommodation and deprived of
the most essential amenities like water and electricity and had a deplorable existence due to
poor sanitary conditions. The novel narrows down on the period of his life, following two
years after he starts attending school till the relocation of the family to a suburb in Lyon in a
governmental move to rehouse the emigrants. The narrator-protagonist lays bare his
childhood experiences that challenge the dominant political assumption of the French against
the ‘Maghrebis’ (North Africans). The novel qualifies as a Bildungsroman in the innumerable
incidents present through the text. It is a literary genre that dwells on the psychological and
subtle cognitive developments that a child undergoes in his impressionable years.
Bildungsroman in its essence emerged in the western literary tradition but has since had
postcolonial writers arrogate to themselves the power to portray their experiences about
identity. The European-born children of the North African migrants with a strong cultural
connection to their native country came to be known as Beurs in an apparent attempt by the
second generation to lessen the derogatory usage of the word Arabes in common French
parlance of the word Arabes since the colonial era. The author’s younger self in the narrative
grows from one experience to another and his naivety often critiques the hostile Franco-
Algerian relations. Early on in the novel Begag writes about his experience at Leo-Lagrange
where he attends a class on ‘correct behaviour’ and notes reflectively that he and the other
Arab students knew nothing about it in class:

“In class the discussion was getting livelier. Pupils were saying words I had never heard
before. I felt ashamed.”

‘Shame’ is an element of primal importance for a sensitive protagonist trying to come to

terms with his sense of self and identity in a Bildungsroman. He confesses to having used
words from the ‘Chaaba’ vocabulary that made the whole class erupt in laughter. Language
serves to underscore the dominance of some cultures in a nation while the minority’s native
tongue is held up to ridicule. The young narrator feels himself to be a ‘disgrace’ in matters of
conduct unlike the French. The child puts forth his consciousness about poverty when he
compares his ‘shantytown of shacks’ to a friend’s home that was as big as the bidonville
itself. He vows to excel in lessons taught at school and be the best he can:

“I wanted to prove that I was capable of being like them, indeed, better than them. Even
though I lived in Le Chaaba.”

There are ample instances throughout the novel that expressly deal with an internalized
hatred for the conditions and the community he was part of:

“I was ashamed of my ignorance...I did not like being with the poor and the weak pupils in
class. I wanted to be among the top of the class alongside the French children. “

His desperation to please the teacher by sitting in the front row was motivated by the
following idea:

“Starting from today I was not going to be the Arab boy in the class anymore.”

He was driven by a need for achievement that for him could be satisfied by being successful
like the French. His shame is often reinforced through the ideal image he constitutes of
himself and aims to achieve through education. Another incident that made him agitated
while grappling with a steady identity was when he was accused of being a non-Arab by
other Arab classmates like Moussaoui and Nasser. When a French teacher asks the students
to put their socks on the desk for an inspection of cleanliness, Moussaoui rebels and calls him
a ‘racist’. But Monsieur Grand refutes his claims by proclaiming Azouz a good student
despite being an Arab himself. The young narrator was clearly embarrassed by the
announcement. On an earlier occasion he had refused Nasser’s mother’s request to ‘help’ her
son in school lessons as he thought her proposal was in violation of ‘correct behaviour’. But
the accusation nevertheless shook him completely:

“A terrible feeling of emptiness came over me...For a moment I felt like crying, then like
smiling, resisting, breaking down, begging, or throwing insults.”
In an attempt to establish his identity as an Arab, quite in contrast to his earlier stance, he
recalls the time when he underwent the painful procedure of circumcision:

“I was an Arab, and I could prove it: I had been circumcised just like them...It wasn’t easy
becoming an Arab, and there they were now, suspecting me of being an infidel.”

The young Begag traversed a hyphenated existence as an Algerian-French-Muslim. He would

often emphasize his French identity when asked about his origins. There are moments in the
novel when the young Begag resorts to self-mockery to shatter the negative ideas the French
had about the Arabs. At Ecole Sergent-Blandan his teacher Madame Valard did not come
across as friendly and the narrator concluded it might have been due to the fact that he was an
Arab or maybe she did not take a liking to his face. Around the same time he met two Jewish
brothers from his class who asked him whether he was a Jew or an Arab. The ‘hesitation’ of
the young Azouz gave him enough time to ponder on the ongoing Arab-Israel war and that he
was outnumbered by them. He declared himself a Jew but felt ‘humiliated’ at the insults they
threw at his community. The most blatant display of the young protagonist’s internalized
racism occurs when he feels terrified to see his mother at school with the two Taboul brothers
beside him. He desperately attempts to hide his ethnic identity by refusing to recognize his
mother. But after the ‘terrible vision’ was over, a ‘feeling of humiliation’ gnawed away at his
hunger.

A Bildungsroman attains consummation with significant advancement of the protagonist’s

moral ideas and intellect. They develop the skills to evaluate their actions and arrive at a
more reasonable conclusion about the events that occur in their lives. The later pages of the
novel dwell at length on the relationship between Monsieur Loubon and the young Begag.
French rule in Algeria ended with a deep sense of resentment on the part of the French
settlers popularly known as pied-noirs (white settlers) in the North African country. But the
teacher at Lycee Saint-Exupery was an exception as he poured out his nostalgia for Algeria in
the conversations he had with his Algerian student. The cultural and linguistic exchange
between them contributes to a rare celebration of ethnic diversity. The young narrator learns
of his home country through the recollections of the teacher and the latter expresses the idea
playfully:

“I am French, but I was born in Algeria, and you were born in Lyon, but you’re Algerian.”

Azouz rejoices at his Arab identity when he learns of his grades in class:

“I, Azouz Begag, the only Arab in the class, had got the best grade in the class, ahead of all
the French pupils!”

The complexities of a stable identity are realised through the epiphany of his inability to be
either like his Arab kins or the white French. Education for the young narrator was the only
assurance that would provide him with a good life as believed by his father.

The novel’s action takes place mainly at the narrator’s home and school but the two
institutions stand as an emblem of different sociocultural spheres. The author’s younger self
learnt to straddle diverse moral codes at the same time, one of his Muslim parents and
another as practised by the dominant ethnic French. The childhood experiences for author
Azouz Begag in retrospect have been confusing and startling but they contributed to his
maturation. The sincerity with which the kid recounts the events drives the narrative through
larger issues of race and ethnicity.

Works cited

Begag, Azouz, Alec G. Hargreaves, and Naima Wolf. Shantytown Kid =: Le Gone Du
Chaâba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Print.

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dissertations/AAI3232187/

Arunima Das

MA English

Sem- IV

29/03/19