“Il est temps que la banlieue se raconte par ceux qui la vivent,
sans attendre que d’autres la fantasment.”
“It’s time for those who live in the projects to write about life there,
rather than waiting for others to make up stories about it.”
—Mohamed Razane, Dit Violent

In the decades that followed World War II, tens of thousands of North Africans migrated to France, taking up jobs as miners, construction workers and factory employees. Their wives later followed; families were started on French soil.
    Today, France counts at least 3 million people of North African origin. Yet in literary circles, they are barely visible, and their stories seldom told. There are no accounts of their journey to the promised land, no logs of their early days at the factories or in suburban housing projects.
    For most of the past five decades, written tales by first- or second-generation North African immigrants have been scarce. Virtually the only Maghrebian names in print have been those of middle- or upper-middle-class writers from Algeria, Morocco or Tunisia who were born and raised there, not in France. The best known among them is Tahar Ben Jelloun, who won the Goncourt literary prize in 1987 for La nuit sacrée. France’s indigenous Arabs have, for all intents and purposes, remained mute.
    Yet the sands are slowly shifting. A half-dozen beur (second-generation Arab immigrant) authors are now being published by such prestigious houses as Gallimard, Seuil, Hachette Littératures, Jean-Claude Lattès and Stock. The riots of October and November 2005 have persuaded publishers that tales of la banlieue—the generic term for the big-city suburbs with their notorious housing projects—are worth telling. Another major catalyst: Faïza Guène, who published a global bestseller in 2004, while still in her teens.
    This new breed of beur writers shows a softer, kinder face of the very suburbs that are demonized daily by the media and in the collective imagination. The characters in these novels invite pity, not reprimand, and commit crimes in spite of themselves. They are suburban martyrs, struggling to break free of their cement infernos.

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