Telling stories: narrating violence in the contemporary French banlieues (1992–2006)

Abstract

This article contributes to contemporary debates on violence and literature, suggesting that representations of the banlieues are increasingly challenged by the emergence of new writing practices. Such developments are linked in part to a current reconceptualisation of literature, and can be associated with the growing recognition of the banlieues themselves as a literary space in which innovations in writing practices can bring to light the presence of ‘amateur’ writers in the literary sphere. This article focuses on a series of suburban texts identified during an ethnographic study of La Courneuve’s much-maligned council estate known as the Cité des Quatre Mille: Khaled Amara’s poetic short story ‘Couleurs de la vie’ (1992), Thérèse Bernis’s récit Parise: souvenirs encombrants de la Guadeloupe (1997) and Maurice Bernard’s short story ‘Le Drame était prévu’ (2006). This article suggests that the analysis of these published and unpublished texts can help to deconstruct the violence that reduces the banlieues to a mere space of orality. Additionally and more importantly, it unveils the literary response of ‘ordinary’ writers in the face of complex and inter-related forms of violence, physical and symbolic, pervading French society today: (neo)-colonial, state, economic, domestic, amongst others.