Diasporic Community of the Berber in France: Recreating Home and Harem from Exile in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du chaâba and Ben Jelloun’s Les Yeux baissés
The exodus of Maghrebian citizens towards France was premised mainly on the high demand for unskilled labour for the reconstruction of postwar France. With a flexible French immigration policy that facilitated integration of immigrants‟ families, the growth of Maghrebian Diaspora became evident in peripheral settlements or French cities‟ suburbs. Azouz Begag‟s Le Gone du chaâba and Ben Jelloun‟s Les Yeux baissés chronicle the life of Maghrebian Berbers in Diasporic communities where cultural dispossession and unhomeliness stimulate the re-creation and transplantation of home and harem. This work adopts Homi Bhabha‟s concept of “hybrid identity” and “third space”. In reading both narratives as a migrant text that depicts the role of memory and nostalgia in constructing exilic identities and consciousness, this work underscores the fluidity of Diasporic communities. These communities deconstruct exilic identities that they seek to construct, being an “imagined community” whose foundations are laid with bricks of nationalistic sentiments and whose socialization is defeatist, however producing cultural occupants of third space
