‘En règle et rejeté’: Homelessness and Recognition in Driss Chraïbi’s Les boucs

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the figuration of homelessness in post-war France across national and racial lines in and around Driss Chraïbi’s Les Boucs (1955). After situating Les Boucs within the broader discursive field concerning homelessness in the mid-1950s in France, first it considers Chraïbi’s critique of the character Mac O’Mac, a Christian philanthropist whose expertise on the ‘North African Question’ grants him the power to determine what forms of suffering are deemed morally legible for the French public, and those which are not. Second, it turns to the work that Les Boucs does to secure visibility for North African immigrant workers through its realist treatment of Yalaan Waldik’s descent through the bureaucratic machinery of the French labour market and the spaces of precarious housing. These sections, in dialogue with contemporary discourses surrounding the crisis of the French ‘sans-abris’, illuminate a marked contrast between what this article names epidemic and endemic forms of ‘homelessness’. That is, while the ‘sans-abris’ are portrayed as a population in crisis, the precarious housing of North African workers is naturalized into an essential component of national reconstruction.