Ahmed de Bourgogne the impossible autobiography of a Clandestine.

The article deals with the problematic reconstruction of the tragic autobiography of a clandestine. The book, Ahmed de Bourgogne is born of the collaboration between the clandestine ex-convict Ahmed Beneddif and the renowned French writer and social scientist Azouz Begag, both of whom are of Algerian origin and belong to the same beur generation in France. Begag who had already published his own, widely acclaimed autobiography, Le gone du Chaaba, renders Bennedif's fluid oral testimony into a structured literary account, thereby molding the self-representation of the subaltern subject. By adopting Beneddif's oral odyssey Begag writes his other unlived destiny--that of the anti-hero which, through personal perseverence, he was able to escape. Indeed, the encounter between Beneddif and Begag, crowned by the co-signed autobiography Ahmed de Bourgogne, provides both sides of the North African immigrant community's story in France. For Beneddif Ahmed de Bourgogne becomes the last chance for salvation, for Begag it becomes an act of redemption.

The Beur Star and the Algerian Clandestine

The parish of Saint-Michel in Lyon, France, is a well-known refuge for the down-trodden and the under-privileged of every race and ethnic group that seek its help. Father Christian Delorme, the activist priest who heads the parish, has regularly hosted hundreds of cases of desperate individuals and families in the parish residence. (1) He has frequently intervened on their behalf to rectify their situation whether with international organizations or with the French authorities. His political and social activism have also brought him into very close contact with equally militant intellectual circles working for human and political rights of various disadvantaged individuals and groups within France and elsewhere.

In 1998 Father Delorme's parish became the ground for what one may consider the meeting of opposites: a highly successful young beur writer, Azouz Begag (2) and a clandestine Algerian ex-convict in France, Ahmed Beneddif. (3) Both men are of the same beur generation, however Begag holds the French nationality while Beneddif does not. Both were born in France to Algerian immigrant workers during the late 1950s and early 1960s; both consider France, not Algeria, their home and the country of their hybrid cultural, social, and political identities. They only came to discover Algeria, their parents' country of origin, late in life and as reluctant visitors. Begag and Beneddif went to school in France but while the former became a renowned writer and social scientist, the latter spent most of his adult life in prison cells and clandestine camps all over Europe and the Mediterranean basin.

Both men sought refuge at the parish residence almost at the same time: Beneddif arrived there in 1997 to seek a solution for his illegal status in France, while Begag moved into the parish in 1998 to "paste together some pieces of [his] personal life that had fallen apart." (4) Two men in crisis, each occupying a lonely room in the parish. Their identical homelessness drew them closer as their glaring differences parenthetically receded to the background. They ate together, went jogging together, and as the days went by, Beneddif began to recount fragments of his broken life to Begag who had not dared question him about his past. Eventually, the fragments took shape and Beneddif began to reconstruct the entire nightmare of his long clandestine journey in Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Italy, and finally France. Beneddif's retelling of the nightmarish fragments was systematically accompanied by the appearance of a painful rash of red pimples on his neck that robbed him of sleep and rendered him physically immobile.

It was this highly charged encounter that produced Ahmed de Bourgogne, the unprecedented literary testimony of the as yet unspoken tragedy of a clandestine's life. In his preface to Ahmed de Bourgogne, Begag recounts the story of this collaborative project in the following terms:

      I felt bad for him. I interrupted him to make this
   proposition: "If you can record your story on a tape-recorder,
   I'll write a book."
   [...]

      Then, one day, he came to my room and
   announced, in a mysterious tone, that he had started the
   work. That day, a process of transfusion began between
   the deportee and the writer. He started to empty his heart
   into the refills of my pen.

      In a few weeks, he had recorded five two-hour
   tapes that I simultaneously transcribed into my copybook
   and then onto the memory of my computer. Ten recorded
   hours of a raw story like a block of marble that his mouth
   had painfully extracted from a mountain of memories. It
   was a very strange experience for me as well: to work on
   material that was so alive, so present.

      One morning, after my return from a week's trip to
   Germany, he greeted me with a smile at the residence,
   and announced the news: "That's it. I finished." He had
   fireworks in his eyes. Since then, the rash of red pimples
   never reappeared on his neck. The ghosts had let go.
   [...]

      For my part, I have done my best to restore, with
   words, the contours of his face, his spirit, and to present
   you an accurate image of this simple hero. I hope I prove
   to be worthy of his confidence and respectful of his reality. (5)

Begag's account of the birth of Ahmed de Bourgogne oscillates between total identification with Beneddif and a conscious unequal relationship with his "co-author." On the one hand, Begag describes their collaborative effort as a symbolic "process of transfusion" whereby the writer becomes the deportee. On the other hand, according to Begag's account, the two men had well defined roles in the project from the outset. In his initial proposition to Beneddif, Begag makes the deal clear: "If you can record your story ... I will write a book." Begag, at least, is fully aware that the book he will write is bound to be different from the oral story. For, in Begag's preface, Beneddif delivered a "raw story," "material that is so alive, so present" that Begag "works on" in order to present us with "this simple hero." Despite his oral tale, Beneddif remains faceless until Begag "restores, with words, the contours of his face, his spirit." It is through Begag's written word that Beneddif is no longer a silent phantom (revenant) in an underworld of ghostly creatures but rather a public name, on a published work, co-signed by the beur star (Begag) and the Algerian clandestine (Beneddif) on the jacket of Ahmed de Bourgogne.

Begag's choice of collaborating on Beneddif's autobiography is at once an interesting and telling one. It is noteworthy that this entire collaborative project was triggered because Begag felt "bad" for Beneddif, so bad that he decided to write a book--not just to write a book about Ahmed, but effectively to write Ahmed's very life as "worked on" by his pen. Besides being the foremost beur writer in France, whose press coverage is rivaled only by Taher Benjelloun's, (6) Begag is a distinguished social scientist who has written extensively on the Algerian immigrant community. (7) Moreover, he has easy access to the most established French national and regional press. To top it all, Begag is a political activist who is thoroughly involved in defending the rights of the immigrant community in France. (8) But rather than seek to expose Ahmed's traumatic experience through any of these channels, that may perhaps have had an even larger audience, Begag proposes to write Ahmed's anguished oral tale as a co-signed autobiography. Indeed, the act of co-signing the book is a symbolic gesture that inserts Begag into Ahmed's life. The question is why Begag sought this insertion when he himself had already written his own, highly acclaimed, autobiography, Le gone du Chaaba (The Kid from Chaaba). (9)

The gone and the Anti-gone

Begag's autobiography, as well as its reception in France, is a story of success against all odds. (10) Not only does it chronicle his own personal triumph as the outstanding school child from a highly underprivileged and predominantly illiterate Algerian immigrant community in the bidonvilles of Lyon, but it simultaneously charts a new and uncontested literary space for an emerging beur generation. However, this story of success has not been without a price for both Azouz the child (in the autobiography) and later on Azouz the adult, the successful writer, social scientist and activist. Indeed, one of the most sober and sobering aspects of Le gone is its confessional, unheroic and apologetic tone. Azouz, the child in the autobiography, recognizes that in order to emerge from his father's Chaaba (shanty town) and insert himself into the dominant French society at large he must change his skin:

   For some months now I have decided to change my skin.
   I do not like being with the poor and the weak in the class.
   I want to be among the top students, like the French. (11)

But in rising to the top, and changing his skin, little Azouz had to equally abandon his affiliations and renounce the Chaaba's tribal and racial solidarity. Hence, he refuses to help Nasser--his Chaaba neighbor and classmate--at school when approached by Nasser's mother: "We are all Arabs, right? Why don't you help each other? You help Nasser, he will help you, etc." (12) Azouz's refusal to "help" his friend and neighbor leads to Nasser's violent beating by his father, after his failing grades in French, and his eventual drop out from school. Similarly, when the Arab-Israeli war erupts in 1967, little Azouz denies his Arab identity altogether in fear of being persecuted by his Jewish classmates: "I am a Jew, I said. Because the [Jewish]Taboul brothers are two, because they know the teacher and many other students well. If I admitted I were an Arab everyone would have boycotted me [...]" (13) Azouz is ultimately ostracized by his Chaaba friends who accuse him of not being an Arab because he came out second in class--in their eyes, a success accorded only to the French (the Gaouri, in Chaaba Algerian dialect). Azouz's response to this accusation as a little boy encapsulates his total and naive assimilation of the dominant pseudo-egalitarian liberal ethics: "No. I am an Arab. I work well, that's why I have good grades. Everyone can become like me." (14)

Azouz's difference is further marked, throughout the text of the autobiography, with a developing and refined linguistic register in the French language. He starts off at school reproducing his own father's mistakes in French. But as the text progresses, Azouz's increasingly "correct" French register is constantly juxtaposed against the Chaaba's Algerian dialect and broken French. All idioms that deviate from the standard French, whether in Algerian dialect or Lyonnais slang, are explained in two separate "dictionaries" that are appended to the text of the autobiography. (15) Linguistic register and idiom are therefore among the foremost markers of difference for Azouz the child and, by consequence, his author, Azouz Begag.

The success of Azouz Begag in both the literary and professional worlds placed him in an equally sensitive position vis-a-vis his community. The remarkable rise of "socially integrated" beur profiles, the likes of Samain, the popular stand-up comedian; Zizou (Zein el din Zidan), the world renowned football player; Faudel, the young international pop singer; Yamina Benguigui, the rising documentary film maker; Sami Naceri, the well known actor; or Begag himself, all triggered numerous debates within the immigrant community and French society at large. On the one hand, these success stories are not seen as "representative" of the immigrant community's reality by many of the mainstream French population whose relationship with this community is marked by conflict and distance. (16) On the other hand, these success stories have created an irremediable fracture within the immigrant "community" itself where these young rising stars are seen as "the tree that hides the forest" (l'arbre qui cache la foret) or, in another version that exploits the pun on arbre and arabe in French, "the Arab that hides the forest" (l'arabe qui cache laforet). The success of these beur profiles is, to say the least, suspect for they are blamed by their marginalized community, for "playing the game of a system that brandishes the success of the minority to justify a pseudo-egalitarian liberalism according to which those who do not advance are those who do not want to." (17) The "beurs-geois," as these socially integrated profiles are referred to, are perceived by their community as disconnected from its realities. (18)

It is perhaps Begag's realization that not "everyone can become like [him]," as he had naively told his destitute Chaaba friends, that draws him to Ahmed Beneddif and brings him face to face with his Other. The two extremes from one community dismantle the "pseudo-egalitarian liberalism" of the dominant French society. Begag's stay at the Saint Michel parish where he had come to "paste together some pieces of [his] personal life that had fallen apart" provides a moment of rereading of his own "successful" life and a sharp understanding of the failures of "the simple hero" Beneddif. Indeed, Ahmed's long years of confinement and underworld existence suddenly become Begag's other possible story that he escaped through personal perseverance, not institutional opportunity.

By choosing to write Ahmed's oral story Begag actually chooses to write the anti-gone, his other possible life story, the heroic tragedy that was never his own. One might go so far as to say that Beneddif's torment in retelling his nightmarish story is matched only by Begag's own in writing it. The utter misery of the former produces the guilt-ridden identification of the latter. Indeed, if the telling of the oral story is an act of exorcism for Beneddif, whose pimples disappear after the account, it is equally an act of redemption for Begag through whose "words" "this simple hero" is resurrected.

Perhaps the chosen titles of both autobiographies are telling of Begag's territorial and genealogical claims for himself and for Ahmed. Le gone du Chaaba, as title, anchored the young protagonist in both his French community (le gone is the word for "kid" in Lyonnais slang) and his Algerian one (Chaaba is the word that designates his immigrant community in the Algerian dialect, derived from the Arabic Sha'b [People]). Likewise, Ahmed de Bourgogne grounds Ahmed in two official geographical and genealogical registers. (19) The use of the proper noun Ahmed resurrects him from being a phantom (un revenant) to becoming a person with an individual identity that resonates with his Arab/Islamic origins. But Ahmed, the individual, is anchored in a place: he is of Burgundy (de Bourgogne), the very heart of France and the region that provided its illustrious line of kings. Indeed, the use of the preposition de (of) not only insists on Ahmed's territorial claims but, as with its use in aristocratic French titles (Baron de Blois, Catherine de Medicis), it provides him with an established and official French genealogy despite his Arab name.

In Le gone du Chaaba, Begag used his pen to set his protagonist apart from the linguistic register that characterized the Chaaba. However, in Ahmed de Bourgogne he uses it to "doctor" this difference. He works on Ahmed's oral story and writes it into a book. There are several implications to this process that will be discussed in the course of this article. However, the end result is that Ahmed's oral linguistic register becomes readable in Begag's literary French. The restructuring of the original can be seen in the appendix attached to this article where an excerpt from the two versions, the transcribed and the published are juxtaposed. It includes among other things changing the real proper names.

How to Make a Clandestine

Both the oral/transcribed account and Begag's written/published version of it begin with Ahmed's childhood. Both announce his nightmarish life as mektoub, as an inevitable fate, and both single him out of six siblings as the only one who went astray. Whereas the oral account propels us towards Ahmed's journey to the underworld, Begag's written text pauses to contextualize the fall by retracing some of Ahmed's personal and social conditions, amassed during conversations and revisions of the transcribed oral account. Throughout, the exorcist impulse is clear in Ahmed's oral account that races towards the telling of bare chronological events. By contrast, Begag's written rendition attempts, at various moments, to contemplate them, thereby accentuating the redemptive quality of the story for both the teller and the writer.

Hence, the reader comes to understand that what Ahmed perceived as mektoub was actually shaped by circumstances, both colonial and racist. As one of two boys, out of six siblings, in an Algerian immigrant family, Ahmed always had to contend with his brother Karim's more docile and successful image. Both the father and the mother competed over the taming of the scold. The father repeatedly beat Ahmed for his report cards attesting that he "could do better" since he believed that "success at school depended only on strong will power" (Ahmed 17). The mother, for her part, tried to curb Ahmed's "rebellious nature" and his failure "to execute her orders" through frequent beatings as well. Ahmed himself dreamed only of securing a better situation than his father, who had come to France in 1953 at the age of eighteen as an immigrant worker. To realize this dream, Ahmed wanted "money, a lot, because that was the universal key that opened all doors." His response to his parents' compounded poverty and violence was more violence: "I repaid outside the blows I received inside." The result: his parents placed him in a center for juvenile delinquents where he spent two long years--"a school of violence where only the strongest was respected by others" and where the director, a karate expert, knew how to beat the strong-headed without leaving a trace (Ahmed 18).

The cycle of violence perpetrated since childhood could now only continue to take its course, aided throughout by racist attitudes towards the North African immigrant community. Once out of the center for juvenile delinquents, with a certificate in plumbing, the eighteen year-old Ahmed tried to reintegrate himself into normal life. He finds a job, meets Julia (the fictive name of the mother of his only child, Natacha) and they start a home together. But the project of normality is quickly defeated by their economic situation and Julia's fragile personality. Ahmed commits a theft and is sentenced to five months in prison: "This time I was marked with a red cross in the register of the wretched of the earth: I had a criminal record" (Ahmed 19). Thus it was not difficult to accuse Ahmed of rape later and to sentence him to eight years in prison despite his continued denial that he had committed the act:

      It is true, I knew that woman. I had had a relationship
   with her for a few months. She was a beautiful
   woman: mature, married, a mother and well established.
   A series of unbelievable coincidences had placed me in
   an unjustifiable and inexplicable position with her. For I
   was concurrently having a relationship with her daughter
   whom I had met at a cafe nearby the university without
   knowing the relationship that bound the two women. The
   mother found out and held it against me like death. My
   attempt to explain turned into a dispute. And I never saw
   her again.

      That was all I could say. It was my truth. I knew
   that I had never raped a woman. I was not a rapist. I never
   was and never will be. But no one wanted to listen to my
   story. It was too frightening. A young beur, of Algerian
   nationality, an ex-delinquent, capable of seducing a
   mother and daughter in the same honorable French family,
   this was a story that one preferred not to imagine. It's
   a nightmare for the guardians of public order.

      The police refused to listen. My appointed lawyer
   refused to listen. The judge refused to listen. I sold my car
   to pay for a real lawyer but he got scared too and preferred
   to pretend that he had not understood well. For
   eighteen months I was placed under provisional detention.
   I knocked my head against the walls of my cell to
   make my story heard. I explained. In vain. I wrote. In
   vain. I let out what I could to psychiatric experts. In vain.
   I even tried to wrest an expression from my victim's
   indifferent face during a confrontation. In vain. So I
   broke down.

      I swallowed forty sewing needles to finish ripping
   out what others had already trampled upon. They hospitalized
   me. I ran away from the hospital. They found me
   three days later. And then, I gave up.

      My trial was dealt with in a few hours. My lawyer
   advised me to plead guilty which I refused to do. And then
   the sentence descended upon me: eight years. I could only
   think of Julia and Natacha. And I collapsed. (Ahmed 22)

The eight-year verdict that Ahmed received meant that he had become an official candidate for la double peine (the double sentence) applied to condemned foreigners who, after serving their time in prison, are subject to deportation from France, at the judge's discretion. Ahmed's request for political asylum in France is rejected. His father disowns him for having smeared the family name. Julia commits suicide while he is in prison, and Natacha is taken into the custody of her maternal grandparents. After sixty-five months in prison, Ahmed finds himself totally alone in the world with only the fear of being deported:

   I begrudged my father who had maintained, for all of his
   children, the Algerian nationality in the hope of a return
   to Algeria with all the family. But my life was constructed
   here. I am a Bourguignon at heart. More than ever, I
   needed roots, landmarks. Mine existed here, on this side
   of the Mediterranean. I knew nothing about Algeria,
   except the appalling violence that reigned there and about
   which I understood nothing. Deportation terrified me.
   (Ahmed 23)

The only source of help came from a church priest, Alain Dupre, Ahmed's first introduction to a network of activist, Christian religious figures. Dupre intervened on the former convict's behalf and effectively delayed a possible decision of deportation.

However, Ahmed's mekotub soon catches up with him. He is once again arrested on suspicion of violence that he had not committed. He spends another fifteen months in prison. This time deportation was inevitable:

      Something clicked in my head. I understood that
   they were after my skin, that they wanted to eliminate me,
   to erase me from the world of the living. I also understood
   that violence has been systematically turned against me
   and that I had to fight to live and not to destroy myself.
   [...]

      When the policemen came to fetch me at the gate
   of the prison all I had was a leather jacket, a small bundle
   of money, a couple of packs of anti-depressants and a
   telephone number, scribbled on a piece of paper: it was
   Alain Dupre's. (Ahmed 26)

The Clandestine Odyssey

Ahmed, who had never left France before, finds himself embarked on a long and arduous odyssey through which he comes to master the geography that he had neglected as a schoolboy. Through his journey he traces the atlas of the clandestine and constructs a deportee's political geography of the idea of Europe. Like the classical hero, Ahmed's odyssey is, from the start, anchored in a homecoming:

   And I, Ahmed of Bourgogne, I will make the same voyage
   back. I will go home after this interlude. I will have
   gone on a nice excursion on the Mediterranean, paid for
   by France! I will have seen dolphins in the sea foam. I am
   French! Long live General De Gaulle! Long live the
   Republic! (Ahmed 31)

Again, like Odysseus, Ahmed discovers the perils of the journey back where dreams of dolphins are replaced by monstrous nightmares. In Annaba, Algeria, the customs officers confiscate his money, his personal belongings, and the only photograph of his daughter, Natacha, his Penelope, whose face he had never seen. When he tries to protest he is told:

   This is not France, asshole. You'd better shut up otherwise
   you're gonna be history. OK? It's over, Amnesty
   International and Human Rights. Here you have only one
   right: to shut your mouth, f'hemt [got it]? (Ahmed 33)

After four days of detention, Ahmed is "liberated." His race of frontiers begins: Algiers, Oran, Beni-Saf (his father's village, where he remains for almost a year). His only baggage is his leather jacket that becomes his personal safe where he hides his money, his anti-depressants and his papers. His only companion is his allergy: the blocks of painful red pimples that covered his neck in moments of crisis. His only connection to the world outside are his occasional phone-calls to Alain Dupre whose network of contacts in churches all over the Mediterranean will come to Ahmed's rescue throughout his journey, whenever possible. His only obsession is France:

   That night, seated against the trunk of a tree by the road, I
   tried to imagine the French landscape in order to find the
   courage to continue. I had to get back to my country. No, I
   didn't want to die away from home and kin. I thought
   about my daughter, whose face I didn't even know. I owed
   her the truth, to finally tell her who her father was. For that,
   I had to continue. And I started off again. (Ahmed 127)

Ahmed learns his first lesson in his clandestine odyssey from the "merchants of illusion," the frontier traffickers and smugglers who "reawakened hopes of return" with their "whirlpools of magic words" only to abandon their clients under "a bucket of ice water" (Ahmed 59). Hence, Ahmed's attempt to return to Europe with Rachid--"who had been deported several times from France, Spain, and Italy, but continued to cross the frontiers like a mole"--fails. They are discovered at the Moroccan frontier and Ahmed "ruined, but alive," with no money and a broken nose, retreats to Beni-Saf with his first lesson in political geography:

   What I learned from this experience was the certainty that
   one had to avoid passing through Morocco. This zone was
   reserved for the traffickers, the rich, and the professionals,
   not for the wretched deportees who wanted to go home.
   (Ahmed 61)

Ahmed gradually discovers that many other zones are equally dangerous and that for every step forward there are at least two backward. Consequently, his travel itinerary becomes increasingly complicated resembling more and more a snakes-and-ladders game. From Algeria he goes to Tunisia and then to Turkey, then Bulgaria. There, he is arrested and handed back to the Turks, who in turn send him to Tunisia. Back to the point of departure, he decides to go to Yugoslavia, on to Croatia, then Hungary, then Slovenia, and finally Italy. Every frontier Ahmed crosses has the potential of being the last stop, the end of the journey and the dream of return. He travels long hours on foot, in the freezing, snowy mountains, by day and by night, famished, bruised, and alone.

Even though he initially declares that "road maps held no more secrets for me. I knew all the frontier lines like the tips of my fingers" (Ahmed 81), he soon realizes that clandestine geography is not that simple. When he tries to cross the Bulgarian frontier on foot with another Moroccan he had met in Turkey, they discover--after six hours in the freezing snow--that they had been walking in a circle. Starved, cold, and dead tired, they are finally arrested by the customs officers who beat them, and then hand them over to the Turks. During Ahmed's catastrophic attempt to cross the impenetrable Austrian borders, he discovers that, after having walked for twenty kilometers by night, he had deviated eastward and was heading in the wrong direction (Ahmed 127). Once again, having taken refuge by night in a labyrinthine cornfield with a group of gypsies, Ahmed finds himself completely disoriented:

   Where did we come in from? No one could tell. The night
   had blurred our landmarks. We could see absolutely nothing
   .... Panic took hold of us. Two or three times we
   tried to retrace the way by walking some five hundred
   meters in one direction and then back. Then we came out
   onto a road with a sign indicating "Customs Check
   Point." Was it the Slovenian border? Were we still in
   Slovenia? Completely lost and terrified we sought refuge
   in the woods like stray animals. (Ahmed 177)

Ahmed's atlas of the clandestine's Europe is constituted by remote frontier towns and villages, jammed with clandestine populations from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe. Names of places and destinations count only in so far as they advance Ahmed's itinerary of return. He goes to Yugoslavia because "as an Algerian [he] did not need an entry visa, thanks to the accords between the two socialist countries" (Ahmed 108). Once in Yugoslavia, Ahmed attests: "we crossed Bosnia or Montenegro, I don't know. For me, such names only represented distances that had to be crossed, nothing more" (Ahmed 114).

Ahmed also begins to develop a comparative perspective on the detention camps, set up all along the frontier lines. Conditions in these camps are determined by the position of the host country within the larger European political economy as well as its proximity to, or distance from, a well-guarded Europe with impenetrable gates. Hence, in Turkey conditions are atrocious:

   A huge camp. Packed with clandestines, girls as well,
   many from Eastern Europe, between eighteen and twenty
   years old, pretty, often very pretty, all stuck in this rotten
   place.
   [...]
   But nobody whistled rudely at them. We just had our eyeful
   for the night, that's all. There was respect.
   [...]
   After a week in the camp, I started to understand how it
   functioned. The system was based on a simple rule: if you
   had money, you ate what you wanted, if you didn't have
   money, you did Ramadan. Brutal capitalism. Otherwise
   you had to stumble over reasonable human beings that
   were willing to share. But this was not the going currency
   in this sort of place. Each for himself and God for all.
   (Ahmed 98)

But in Slovenia, that has borders with Italy, and where Ahmed impersonated his brother Karim's spotless identity in order to be accorded new identification papers, the camp sounds more like a hotel:

   It was a huge building with no soul. They put me in a big
   hall with a shower, a wash basin, and a camera on the
   wall that followed all our movements. On a billboard
   attached to the door, I read a notice indicating that this
   center was not a prison, that they were going to keep me
   for a while, that a specialist would come to see me and
   that I would be housed on the floors upstairs. I will never
   forget this reassuring notice. Reading it made me feel
   good. (Ahmed 164)

One of the most fascinating aspects of Ahmed's account is that the reader is unable to determine a time-frame for the entire nightmarish journey. Days succeed one another without any reference to calendrical time. The text is constructed out of a succession of days. The account is always linear, focusing on the immediate present. Seldom does Ahmed refer to a past and never does he plan a future beyond crossing the next frontier. One of the leitmotifs in the text is Ahmed's constant repetition of the phrase "onward" (avancer). The very rhythm of the text places the reader in the same position so that once it ends the question remains: but how long did this nightmare last?

Morality in a Clandestine Global Economy

As the readers follow Ahmed on his journey they come to discover a highly rigorous clandestine global economy that is reflective of global relations in general. Ahmed's early understanding as a child that money is the universal key that opens all doors becomes painfully true in his long journey of frontiers. In Algeria, he makes a profit selling his anti-depressants at a high price on the street to other lost souls in exchange for French francs, for in Algeria "everyone swore by the French franc. It had become the national currency" (Ahmed 71). This continues to be true throughout his stay in the North African countries whose underworld economy, like their national one, is intrinsically dependent on France. As for Eastern Europe, Ahmed soon discovers that it is the American dollar that reigns, uncontested. All his efforts to be smuggled from the border of one Eastern European country to another are dependent on his ability to secure the scarce magic currency. Traffickers are highly specialized regional experts: there are those who deal only in drugs, others specialize in prostitution rings, and still others are known for their expertise in particular border crossings. This clandestine global traffic is entirely dependent on the complicity and collaboration of the customs officers who alone have the power to secure its existence. Ironically, such ruthless political economy means that the clandestine must survive, as his maneuvering benefits go-betweens. If clandestine activities--including drug trading--were eradicated, the entire system of profiteering would collapse. The question of how to survive is left to the clandestine alone to determine.

It is indeed this complex network of relationships that explains Ahmed's contradictory morality throughout the journey, one that is often at odds with our expectations as secure, salaried citizens. For example, Ahmed pays Titi the transvestite's way to his family's house in Algiers because he had been deported from France with no money at all. However, in Tunisia, as Ahmed plans his departure to Turkey with Rachid, they both steal their Moroccan acquaintances' sizeable treasure (thirty thousand dinars, three thousand Moroccan dirhams, and several thousand Italian liras) with no remorse. But, Ahmed subsequently lies to Rachid when the latter begins stalling on their plans to go to Turkey and he takes all the money for himself:

   I told him that I would go to France for a while to bring
   back things to sell and that I needed his money to buy them.
   It would be like an investment to boost our capital. He hesitated
   for a moment, but to my great surprise, he then
   accepted without asking further questions. I knew I was
   never going to see him again and when he handed me all the
   money I felt a little pinch in my heart.... (Ahmed 110-11)

Conversely, when Ahmed is placed in a camp in Turkey, he is "deeply distressed" by the sight of a sixty year old Moroccan woman who had been in the same camp for at least six months and whose eyes had "emptied all their tears" (Ahmed 99). In this camp, not only did the inmates have to pay for their own food but they also had to find their own means for deportation, funds that the Moroccan woman did not have. Moved by her desperate situation, Ahmed raises the funds for her return by organizing collective donations from the other clandestines in the camp, a total of fifteen million Turkish liras:

   She held the bag with the tips of her fingers, inspected it,
   and started to cry in her handkerchief like never before. I
   couldn't stop myself from shedding some tears of happiness
   as well. The guys at the camp were deeply moved as they
   followed this moment of grace. The next morning our
   mother was ready to return to Morocco. All those who had
   donated money applauded her as she left the center. (Ahmed
   100)

Clandestine solidarity is once again evident in Ahmed's encounter with the gypsies in Slovenia. After having lost their sense of orientation as they emerged from a labyrinthine cornfield, the group decides to split up before they arrive at the Italian border. However, Ahmed quickly regrets letting the gypsies go for he knew that they might be headed straight for danger:

   It was eleven o'clock at night. We went back to the heart
   of the labyrinth. But after a while, I had regrets. I told
   myself that we shouldn't have abandoned our gypsy
   friends. They were going straight for the lion's jaws. I
   told my companions to wait for me and I started running
   like a madman in search of the gypsies. I walked full
   speed for about fifteen minutes and I finally found them.
   "Igor! Igor!" Effectively, they had found themselves at
   the [Slovenian] border and were heading back. (Ahmed
   177)

The power that controls and reigns over the clandestine world can exhibit an equally contradictory morality. Despite the ruthless brutality of the border police in many of the episodes of the autobiography, there are still moments of exceptional human compassion for these very wretched of the earth. As Ahmed tries to make his way out of Hungary into Slovenia on foot, he is hunted by a motorized guard who spots him. After a long chase in the mosquito-infested marshes, the two men come face to face:

   He saw me too. He was driving in the opposite direction.
   He abruptly stopped his engine and looked at me for a
   long time. It was difficult for him to get me from where he
   was. So, he started making signs in the air with his hand
   as if saying, "It's over, man. You're free." Then he disappeared
   just as he had appeared. Evaporated. (Ahmed 154)

Likewise, at the end of Ahmed's journey, after he had succeeded in reentering France--having impersonated his brother Karim's identity--ironically, his general physical condition moves the French customs officer to offer him a sandwich: "You must be hungry, take this" (Ahmed 199).

As Ahmed's world tightens around him, the heavens expand above him. Since the basic concern is that of survival, Ahmed calls upon all possible forces for his salvation. He prays to whoever is willing to listen. His journey of frontiers is parallel to his journey of faith. His utter dependence on Christian religious figures throughout accounts for his gradual conversion to Christianity towards the end. Midway through his border crossings, Ahmed still straddles both his original Islamic faith and his adoptive Christian one: "I was not mad. I knew perfectly well that I had prayed to Jesus Christ. May Allah forgive me" (Ahmed 111). However, towards the end, Ahmed makes the following confession to the reader:

   When I heard one of my companions praying to Allah, I
   felt funny. At heart, I now felt myself a Catholic.
   Churches were my lighthouses, priests my guardian
   angels. But I did not share my thoughts with my new
   companions. They would not have understood. (Ahmed
   167)

A naive yet candid understanding of the relationship of power between "Jesus Christ" and "Allah" surfaces within this global clandestine economy. It is perhaps important to note that Ahmed's attraction to Catholicism is parallel to the increasing espousal of traditional Islamic values especially by the young men of the beur generation, within France itself. Both "conversions" attest to the failure of the beur political project of the eighties that sought to integrate the second and third generation "immigrants" into a secular French society.

Can the Clandestine Speak?

Literary history abounds with examples of subaltern autobiographies and testimonials that are brought to light and into the world of publishing through the mediation of established literary figures other than the anonymous subjects of the life accounts themselves. (20) The relationship that is generated in these instances of unequal collaboration has never been unproblematic. In her sensitive reading of the South African autobiographical narrative The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena--the result of the collaboration between Elsa Joubert, a white Afrikaans writer, and a black woman from the townships, tictively named Poppie Nongena, where Joubert transcribed and edited Nongena's oral story--Anne McClintock reflects on such unequal collaborative endeavors:

   The privilege of education can breed isolation and a sense
   of unrepresentativeness ... Speaking through the voice of
   the disempowered becomes, in part, a way of lessening
   the marginalization of privilege. (21)

However, at the same time, "speaking through the voice of the disempowered" accords the writer of the story "the interpretative and narrative power" over the teller of the oral tale. For, as McClintock rightly asserts: "The entry into autobiography, particularly, is seen to be the entry into the political authority of self-representation." (22) Much as these collaborative instances cut across relationships of race, class, gender, and political geography, they equally complicate and problematize them. For the act of "rendering" these oral histories into written form is never unmediated and immediately calls into question the very endeavor of autobiography, the very act of self-representation.

In many instances these collaborative efforts have resulted in political and/or literary scandals. (23) This is perhaps no surprise since in all such cases the written record gives voice to a silenced individual, and makes official what had been underground knowledge. The fate that awaits such works is generally as problematic as the set of circumstances that produced them. Some are legitimized and neutralized into the" apolitical" literary realm, while others are de-legitimized and outright banned as "political," not literary products. The worst fate of all is when these works do not fit either the "apolitical" or the "political" categories and thus remain unheard once more.

Like many of these subaltern autobiographies, one of the most fascinating aspects of Ahmed de Bourgogne is the history of the story itself: How has Ahmed's "raw story" become a written, published book? What are the mechanisms by which the oral testimony of a "phantom" becomes the written autobiography of Ahrned of Bourgogne? How did Azouz Begag work on this material? What are the implications of such work for the very possibility of self-representation for a clandestine? And, ultimately, how has this unique text been received within France?

Azouz Begag has graciously provided me with Ahmed's "raw story" in its entirety: approximately 200 pages of text transcribed by him from the tapes recorded by Ahmed Beneddif in the privacy of his own room at the Saint-Michel parish. Excerpts from the "raw story," referred to in the text of my article as Et maintenantje (And Now, I) followed by Begag's written rendition of it in Ahmed de Bourgogne are appended to the text of this article for comparative reference, as has been mentioned. Much of the work involved in this section of the article has been informed by an interview with Azouz Begag concerning the levels at which he has intervened in the testimony. (24)

Primarily, the text of the raw story is a run-on text that stops at the end of one tape and begins with another. It is an enactment of the very simile that Ahmed uses at the beginning of his testimony:

   Society would do well to create for us schools to empty
   our worries, a place where we could throw up our torments
   like the spittoons of the past. (25)

The recorded tapes become the spittoon where Ahmed indeed empties out a fluid text that ultimately liberates him of his torments, both psychological and physical. Begag's first intervention is to break this fluidity into doses, stages and stations. He creates chapters and makes decisions on where to start them and end them. The chapters bear the names of cities and sovereign states recognizable to the reader on any map (Dijon, Oran, Tunisia, Turkey, Sloveno-Hungarian border, Venice, etc.). In so doing, Begag superimposes our notions of geography over Ahmed's clandestine one that not only refuses to recognize these boundaries but reads them, throughout his testimony, as sheer distances that must be crossed.

Even though Begag maintains the bulk of the sequential progression of the oral testimony, there are a few instances where he intervenes to displace, delete, or replace these sequences. Most significant among these interventions is the first chapter of the book, that in many ways does not correspond to the text of Et maintenant je. The thought process and self-representation in the first pages of the oral testimony immediately immerse the reader in Ahmed's journey into inferno a beginning already burdened by a long unspoken anguish:

   Within the culture of Arab families we learn to put up a
   good show, not to display our torments, to bear the burden
   in the depth of our heart and to cope with the load on
   one's own. That's why we all have back pains, ulcers and
   psychological problems. (26)

Whereas Ahmed relegates his situation to his mektoub, Begag pauses to analyse and explain it through their common point of origin: the immigrant community's problems of integration within French society. Rather than allow the voice of Ahmed, the battered and bruised adult to dominate, Begag begins the written text with a rather humorous representation of Ahmed's performance at school:

   I always wrote the word beaucoup (a lot) with an 's' at
   the end. When the teacher asked me why I did that, I
   would answer "because there's a lot." That means many.
   That's why one has to put the word in the plural, like the
   word plusieurs (many), a synonym of beaucoup that does
   indeed take an 's' at the end. (Ahmed 17)

But this level of humor is more reminiscent of Azouz Begag's own autobiography than the grim tone of Ahmed Beneddif's oral testimony. In Le gone du Chaatba, little Azouz commits similar humorous mistakes in French. When asked by his schoolteacher what his father did for a living, Azouz the child responds: "He is a journalist on Barral's farm," confusing the French word journalier (a day worker) for the word journaliste (journalist). (27) This is one instance where Begag and Beneddif's voices are confused in Ahmed de Bourgogne. Indeed, Begag's voice subsumes that of his co-author and momentarily becomes it. Moreover, it is important to note that Begag's most obvious written intervention in the oral testimony comes at the beginning of the text, a symbolic moment of initial childhood sameness, between Begag and Beneddif, that leaves their ultimate difference in mektoub unexplainable, indeed unacceptable.

The raw story that Ahmed Beneddif "throws up" on five two-hour tapes is marked by an oral register: the lexicon is slang, the sentences bare, the figurative level almost absent. When Begag works on the material he walks a tight line between this oral register and the written French one. For his ultimate aim, as he professes in his preface, is to "prove to be worthy of [Ahmed's] confidence and respectful of his reality." At this level, Begag's interventions are studied and calculated; his ultimate goal is to preserve the "simplicity" of Ahmed's testimony while rendering it "readable" in the written medium. If Begag's own autobiography was marked by the protagonist's different linguistic register when compared to that of his Chaaba friend, in Ahmed de Bourgogne Begag collapses this difference and navigates carefully through written linguistic sameness. It is as if the "help" that little Azouz had denied Nasser, his Chaaba friend in Le gone du Chaaba becomes not only possible, but also necessary for this crucial act of redemption. (28)

Just as Begag worked on all these levels of the testimony, so too does he work on a title for the book. Et maintenant je was the original title that Begag had chosen for the manuscript. It is actually taken from Julia's unfinished sentence in her letter to Beneddif just before her suicide. (29) On the one hand, the choice seems to fit Ahmed's impulse to break loose from the constraints of traditional Arab culture that prefers silence to speech, that values the collective over the individual, as Ahmed himself expresses it. On the other, it serves the immediate purpose of unloading "the burden" off Ahmed's back. However, in negotiations with the publisher, the title was changed into Ahmed de Bourgogne, (30) as mentioned earlier--a change that places the personal in the public realm. The pronoun je (I) in the original title is given a proper name (Ahmed) and a geographic and genealogical anchor (Bourgogne). The nameless "phantom" of the raw story not only acquires a name but also subsequently acquires a representative role. The personal "spittoon" becomes a collective one. This perhaps explains Begag's choice in framing Ahmed's story with his own preface and epilogue. It further allows Begag to conclude the epilogue by stating:

   Today, in France, two to three thousand individuals are
   victims of this double sentence [imprisonment then
   deportation]. May this testimony serve to put an end to
   the suffering of all these exiles and to all other futile wanderings.
   (Ahmed 204)

Ironically, Begag's "creation" of "the simple hero" Beneddif becomes the beginning of the contest over the real hero of Ahmed de Bourgogne, the actual published book. As co-authors Begag and Beneddif signed a contract with the publisher by virtue of which 60% of the royalties went to Begag and 40% went to Beneddif. Despite the economic inequality that marks their collaborative effort, Beneddif publicly tries to reap the symbolic profit all to himself by calling Ahmed de Bourgogne "my book," a declaration of possession much resented by Begag, his "creator." (31) The politics of production and reception of Ahmed de Bourgogne further compounds the issue of "heroism." When I went to purchase my copy of the book it was nowhere to be found in the "Literature" section, even though Malika Oufkir's best-selling autobiography La Prisonniere (The Prisoner), for example, was there. The FNAC, the largest national chain bookstore in France, had shelved Ahmed de Bourgogne in the "Questions de Societe" (Questions of Society) section, thus stripping both the gone (Begag) and the anti-gone (Ahmed Beneddif) of their contested heroism! In this long journey of the raw story into a published autobiography we are left with the inevitable question: Can the clandestine speak? This question is only further complicated by my own literary critical "intervention" in both the oral and written material that constitutes Ahmed de Bourgogne. (32)

From the Immigrant to the Clandestine

In 1955 the young francophone Moroccan writer Driss Chraibi published his important novel Les Boucs (The Butts) that exposed the dehumanizing conditions of North African workers in France. (33) In 1976, he wrote a postface to a new edition of the same novel in which he succinctly summed-up the unchanging marginal situation of the immigrant community in France some twenty years after the publication of Les Boucs:

   The question has been asked me, and I have asked it of
   myself, if I am capable now twenty years later of writing
   such a book, one equally atrocious. It is hard for me to
   answer except with another question: does racism still
   exist in France twenty years later? Are the immigrants
   who continue to come to work in this "so highly civilized"
   country still penned up on the edges of society and
   humankind? (34)

The answer to Chraibi's rhetorical question is painfully clear in Tahar Benjelloun's moving work La plus haute des solitudes: misere affective et sexuelle d'emigres nord-africains (The Highest Form of Solitude: The Affective and Sexual Misery of North African Immigrants) published in 1977. (35) Benjelloun's text comprises a shocking number of live testimonies by North African immigrant workers who had confided their sexual impotence to Benjelloun in his capacity as social psychiatrist. His reaction to these inhuman testimonies that "forge an image of the immigrant as sheer labor force, without a heart, without testicles, without desire, without family, in short, as sub-human," (36) is self-incriminating:

   There is a feeling of shame, for one is awakened to one's
   complicity with a castrating reality and then one plays the
   game of placing that reality on trial.
   [...]

   A man who tells you: "I am a piece of wood, old wood,
   tired, ashamed ..." A man who surfaces in your daily life
   as a piece of wood, alone, naked.... In what language
   do you address him? What words do you use? (37)

Less than ten years later, it is the "second generation immigrants," the beur generation, born in France and educated in French schools, that becomes the vanguard in exposing the marginal reality of their community. The rise of the beur generation coincided with the active construction of the European Community, the birth of a new space and of potential uncharted territories for integration. In Ecarts d'identite, Azouz Begag, already a prominent profile in the rising beur generation, imagines the new European space as "an alternative that will soon re-position the question of integration within a French France. A European France will provide a new signification to the rise of the young generation from the immigrant community with French nationality." (38) However, Begag's optimistic outlook on the future of Europe does not materialize. The beur movement of the eighties in France is neutralized: French naturalization laws--as everywhere else in Europe--are tightened, and many find themselves once more on the margin. Even worse, those beur youths whose parents opted to give them the nationality of their home country rather than the French nationality--as in the case of Ahmed Beneddif--soon found themselves potential outcasts of both French and North African societies.

Sadly, in 2001, the same Azouz Begag who so optimistically wrote about a new and tolerant European space has had to confront the new reality of Europe: an impenetrable fortress whose potential for integration has been successively eradicated. Rather then write about immigrant workers, Begag finds himself explaining the existence of clandestine ones. Rather than historicize the struggle of the immigrant community to obtain work in France, he has to militate on behalf of clandestine individuals to obtain papers. Rather than defend the immigrant's stay in Europe as a temporary moment before an imagined, definitive return to the bled (village), Begag finds himself inscribing the clandestine's potential loss of life for a permanent stay in France. (39)

Almost every day the world is bombarded with news of the tragic fate that awaits boat people and clandestine workers all over the world--horrific news that falls on deaf ears. According to the statistics of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, it is estimated that 30 million people are smuggled across international frontiers every year, while between 400,000 and 500,000 illegal migrants annually enter the European Union. Some 3 million persons are believed to reside illegally in Europe, especially in southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain) and Germany. Thousands lose their lives while attempting to enter Europe in extremely dangerous and inhuman conditions. Little if no action has been taken by their countries of "origin" or by the European countries themselves to alleviate their conditions. No serious measures have been adopted to ease the "draconian restrictions on lawful immigration" introduced by European countries, or to combat human trafficking, despite recommendations from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to the contrary. (40) In the midst of this horrifying yet prevailing reality, not only does Ahmed de Bourgogne tell the individual story of one of these faceless, nameless creatures, but it also warns against the transformation of immigrant populations into "clandestine populations" all over Europe and elsewhere in the First World. In the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center in the Unites States on September 11, 2001 and the subsequent international "hunt against terrorism," it is perhaps time to listen to the tortured voices of the subaltern so that the world may indeed become a safer place for all.

Appendix *

The following excerpt is from Ahmed Beneddif's recorded tapes, known as Et maintenant je. It represents the beginning of the first tape, hence the beginning of Beneddif's oral testimony as transcribed by Azouz Begag.

Des six enfants de notre famille, tous nes a Dijon, quatre filles et deux garcons, je suis le seul a avoir derape dans la vie. La faute a mon mektoub, il n'y a rien a dire, c'etait ecrit dans mon ciel, au moment de ma naissance: "en bavera mechamment autour de ses vingt ans." Cela aurait pu tomber sur un autre que moi, mon frere Karim, au hasard, mais c'est moi qui ai tout recu l'orage sur la tete.

Et pourtant, j'avais une femme, Julia, on s'aimait comme peuvent s'aimer des jeunes de vingt-deux ans, une fille, Natacha, je l'aime aujourd'hui encore comme un homme qui n'a plus que cette fortune au fond de ses bagages. C'est le souvenir d'elle qui me tient encore vivant, sinon il y a belle lurette que j'aurais avale quelques comprimes pour "comprimer" ma douleur et ma vie. Chez nous, dans les families arabes, on apprend a faire bonne figure, a ne pas exhiber ses tourments, a garder le fardeau au fond du coeur et se debrouiller seul avec le paquet. Voila pourquoi on a tous des maux de dos, des ulceres a l'estomac, des troubles psychologiques. La societe ferait bien de creer pour nous des ecoles a vidanger les soucis, un endroit ou a on irait tous vomir nos tourments comme dans les crachoirs d'avant.

En apparence, j'avais tout pour etre heureux, un boulot, de l'argent, une belle voiture et un jour je me suis retrouve dans les mailles de la justice francaise, en deux temps trois mouvements. Ma vie a bascule. J'ai ete accuse de viol, avec circonstances attenuantes, mais ce detail n'a jamais convaincu les juges. J'ai pris huit ans.

Au bout de soixante-cinq mois, on m'a libere pour bonne conduite, mais on m'a confisque mes papiers. Je n'ai pas realise que j'etais devenu un individu sans identite, sans plaque d'immatriculation dans la societe une voiture sans phare dans la nuit. Et puis, par la suite, tout s'est enchaine, je suis devenu quelqu'un en "situation irreguliere" et j'ignorais que cela me rendait suspect dans toutes les circonstances. Un jour, j'etais en train de boire un verre dans un bar avec une fille quand j'ai entendu l'agitation caracteristique d'une bagarre dans la rue. Je suis sorti pour voir ce qui se passait, des gens s'agitaient dans tousles sens, des voix de panique se faisaient entendre, des femmes pleuraient. J'ai demande a un badaud ce qui se passait, il m'a dit que des voyous armes venaient de commettre un hold-up dans le quartier. Alors je me suis mis a contempler l'agitation comme au cinema. Des voitures de police sont arrivees sur les lieux en trombe. Je continuais de regarder. Soudain, deux hommes en civils se sont approches de moi par derriere et m'ont demande mes papiers. Des policiers en civil. Ils m'ont embarque. Et mon cauchemar a recommence. Comme la nuit, tousles chats sont gris, les flics m'ont charge en me collant sur le dos une complicite de hold-up. Ils ont sorti de leur botte secrete un temoin oculaire, une dame qui affirmait m'avoir formellement reconnu. Cela ne faisait aucun doute pour elle, j'etais de la bande des voyous. J'etais fait comme un rat. Viol d'abord, vol ensuite.

Dans ma tete, il y a eu plusieurs seismes de suite. J'etais fou, a tel point qu'a la fin, je ne pouvais meme pas me defendre, j'acceptais tout ce que disaient mes accusateurs. Aujourd'hui encore, quand je vois un uniforme de policier, je me gratte de partout, mon cou se couvre de boutons. Pour la seconde fois, j'ai ete juge, inculpe et incarcere. Quinze mois, parce qu'il y avait encore des circonstances attenuantes. Quinze mois a me mordre les levres jusqu'au sang, a boxer les murs, me remplir de rage. Ca m'a nique la vie. Et, comme pour une estocade, j'ai recu en prison cette lettre de ma femme:

   Bonjour Fafa,

      Je m'excuse de ce retard mais pendant toute la
   semaine je n'ai cessee de me presenter a des employeurs
   et le temps m'a beaucoup manque.

      Hier j'ai vue une lettre de toi dans la boite aux lettres
   mais je l'ai pu la relever car j'ai egaree rues cles.

      Comment vas-tu?

      Tu sais, le jour ou je t'ai eu au te1ephone j'ai ete
   malade toute la nuit fievre et nausee, j'ai vraiment passee
   des heures affreuses. J'ai meme failli appeler le medecin.

      Je t'envoi une photo que je me suis fait faire au
   mois de mai pour envoyer a un employeur, je suis plutot
   fade et triste sur cette derniere, mais je n'en ai pas
   d'autres et pour me faire photographie, il faut vraiment
   que je sois oblige.

      Cette semaine, j'ai eu la visite de Natacha, par
   moment elle m'intimide je ne sais pas si cela est dut au
   fait que je la voit rarement ou si c'est parce qu'elle est tres
   intelligente.

      Fafa, comment fait tu pour ton linge et le reste?

      Il est pres de midi et demi, cette apres midi je dois
   alle faire du menage, a Dijon il fait tres chaud, j'ai des tas
   d'idees en tote mais je suis tellement intimidee que je ne
   sais plus quoi ecrire.

      Cela va faire un an que j'habite ce nouveau quartier,
   mais je ne m'y plait absolument pas, pourtant ce
   dernier n'a que trois ans, en plus j'ai un super F2 avec terrasse
   de six metres carres, non il n'y a rien a faire je ne
   peux m'y plaire. J'ai une vue totale sur le lac. Je ne te parles
   pas des moments horribles que j'ai endures lorsque
   j'ai su que je devais quitter les lieux sans preavis de deux
   mois. Je me suis battue au maximum, en contactant divers
   syndicats de logement, finalement j'ai pu avoir un preavis
   prolonge d'un mois, car la proprietaire etait en tord dans
   les delais. Ma foi je me suis battue seule en souffrant,
   mais j'en suis fiere. Maintenant dans cette sale vie et cette
   societe mediocre, plus grand chose m'effraie, a part toujours
   cette anxiete de me trouver dans la foule, de ce cote
   je n'ai absolument pas change, je suis toujours autant
   complexee, toujours aussi mal dans ma peau, et surtout
   toujours a me sentir inferieur.

      Voila Fafa, je veux que tu sache qu'il n'y a eu
   qu'un seul amour dans ma vie et que ce dernier etait toi.
   Je sais au plus profond de moi que jamais je ne pourrai
   aimer ailleurs, mais je sais aussi que nous n'avons plus le
   droit esperer nous aimer h nouveau un jour--et seulement
   si tu savais comme j'aimerais seulement pouvoir t'aimer
   un tout petit moment.

      Pour m'aider, je me dis que l'avenir nous dicteras
   ce qui se passera plus tard. Apres tout, il n'y a que
   l'avenir pour juger. Nous nous sommes tellement aimes,
   tellement hais (est-ce cela le vrai amour. Combien de fois
   je pense aux bons moments passes ensemble, je ne parle
   pas seulement d'amour charnel). Que j'envie ces jeunes
   couples qui vivent ensemble.

      Voila mon amour (enfin je l'ai ecrit, cela est vraiment
   difficile de se l'entendre dire apres tant d'absence).

      Mais meme si je te prouve de nouveau mon amour
   pour toi, je ne veux pas non plus te laisser esperer. La vie
   seule pourra juger de ce qui pourra nous arriver.

      Sur ces dernieres phrases, je te quittes pour
   quelques jours. Tendrement. Julia.

      Je te demandes de ne pas faire attention, je sais que
   j'ai fait des tas de fautes dans mon ecrit, mais en ce
   moment je vis des jours tellement penibles a attendre une
   reponse positive pour un emploi, et en plus je suis toujours
   autant insomniaque.

      J'espere que ce courtier t'auras aide un petit peu
   moralement et surtout t'aura fait plaisir.

      Dis-moi ce quite ferais plaisir?

      Car je pense t'envoyer un petit colis, un petit car
   l'argent se fait rare.

      Maintenant je

Ainsi finit la lettre et la vie de Julia. Elle s'est suicidee un mois avant ma sortie de prison. Jamais je ne pourrai comprendre, pour le restant de mes jours, ce type d'arret brutal.

II

The following excerpt is from Azouz Begag and Ahmed Beneddif s Ahmed de Bourgogne, pp. 17-23. It represents the beginning of the published book.

Dijon

Des six enfants de notre famille, tous nes a Dijon, trois filles et trois garcons, je suis le seul a avoir mal toume, a croire que c'etait ecrit dans mon grand cahier a ma naissance. Cela aurait pu tomber sur mon frere Karim, mais lui a toujours eu de la chance, il est ne sous le signe du Verseau. L'ecole n'etait pas faite pour moi. Et vice-versa. Les maitres inscrivaient sur rues camets de correspondance "pourrait mieux faire" et mon pere me tapait dessus quand il voyait ca, parce qu'il croyait que la reussite a l'ecole, ca dependait seulement du bon vouloir des gens, mais je n'ai jamais pu mieux faire. Mieux faire quoi, d'ailleurs ? Je ne savais meme pas.

J'etais aussi un garcon borne. Par exemple, j'ecrivais toujours beaucoup avec un s et, quand un prof me demandait pourquoi, je repondais "parce qu'il yen a beaucoup'. Ca voulait dire plusieurs. Il fallait donc mettre le mot au pluriel, comme plusieurs, du reste, qui est synonyme de beaucoup et qui prend bien un s, lui! J'etais comme ca, autodidacte.

Il y a une seule chose qui comptait pour moi, c'etait d'obtenir une meilleure situation que mon pere, debarque de son bled perdu en 1953 a l'age de dix-huit ans. Et de l'argent, beaucoups, car c'etait la c1e universelle pour ouvrir toutes les portes.

Borne, j'etais aussi un revolte, et ma mere me le faisait payer cher, elle qui detestait qu'on n'execute passes ordres a la lettre. Elle me frappait souvent. Mais, par rdaction, plus elle me frappait et plus je me revoltais. Je derivais sur une mauvaise pente. J'ai commence commettre des petits de1its, des vols de mobylettes, et j'avais tendance me bagarrer un peu trop facilement. Je rendais a l'exterieur les coups que je recevais a la maison.

Un jour, j'ai du cogner un peu fort et je me suis retrouve trois jours en prison. J'avais seize ans. Mes parents n'en pouvaient plus. De bonnes ames leur ont indique un centre de redressement pour mineurs, dans la banlieue de Lyon, et j'y suis reste pendant deux longues annees. C'etait une ecole de la violence, dans laquelle celui qui avait le plus de muscles etait assure d'etre respecte par les autres. Le directeur etait lui-meme quatrieme dan de karate et savait traiter, quand il le fallait, les recalcitrants avec des coups qui ne laissaient pas de trace.

Malgre tout, mon sejour dans cet etablissement m'avait permis d'obtenir un CAP de plombier: c'etait le ticket indispensable pour une Eventuelle rEinsertion sans histoires. J'avais desormais un metier et, rapidement, j'eus un emploi. Normalement, les choses auraient du s'arreter la: un boulot, bientet une femme, un logement. Une existence ordinaire et tranquille. Malheureusement, a cette epoque, je ne savais pas encore prendre la vie autrement qu'a l'envers.

J'ai effectivement rencontre Julia quelques mois plus tard et nous nous sommes installes ensemble. Je l'aimais passionnement. Sans doute parce qu'elle avait l'air de croire en moi, de me faire confiance. C'etait une fille mal dans sa peau, qui ne se trouvait nulle part vEritablement a sa place et s'accrochait a mon amour comme a sa seule certitude. J'aurais vraiment voulu lui offrir du bonheur, du soleil et des vacances, des rires et des amis. J'aurais aime qu'elle s'epanouisse, qu'elle grandisse avec moi et qu'elle trouve dans mon amour assez d'energie pour s'accepter enfin elle-meme. Malheureusement, je n'avais que des galeres a lui proposer. L'argent manquait, on courait sans cesse derriere. Toutes les portes nous etaient fermees. Alors, un jour, j'ai fini par refaire une betise. Vol a l'arrache. Flagrant de1it. Cinq mois ferme.

J'avais dix-huit ans. Et cette fois, j'etais marque d'une croix rouge sur le registre des damnes de la terre: j'avais un casier judiciaire.

C'est en prison que j'ai appris que j'allais etre papa. Natacha avait choisi ce moment pour s'inviter dans ma vie et cela modifiait sensiblement la donne. Desormais, je n'avais plus droit a l'erreur. La societe n'avait pas reussi a me calmer mais je savais que ma fille y parviendrait sans efforts, par sa simple presence. J'allais devenir un papa, c'est-a-dire quelqu'un.

A ma sortie, c'est vrai, j'etais calme. J'ai retrouve du travail. J'ai prepare l'arrivee de Natacha. Je me tenais a carreau; pas d'histoires, pas d'embrouilles. Je me sentais pousser des ailes. J'etais bien. Les femmes devaient le lire dans mon regard, on ne sait jamais comment elles sentent ce genre de choses, car je n'ai jamais eu autant de succes que durant cette periode. J'en rencontrais beaucoup dans mon travail de plombier et j'avais tendance a me laisser un peu griser. Je multipliais les aventures et c'etait comme une revanche dont j'avais besoin, malgre l'amour profond qui me liait a Julia et a Natacha.

Un jour, je rentrais chez moi lorsque j'aperqus deux policiers qui m'attendaient sur le pas de ma porte. Impossible de savoir pour quel motif ils venaient me chercher. Je ne comprenais pas. J'ai a peine eu le temps d'embrasser ma fille, de lui dire "je reviens" avant de partir, encadre par deux uniformes.

Au commissariat, place en garde a vue, on m'a explique que j'avais viole une femme. Je ne comprenais toujours pas. Je ne voyais absolument pas de quoi on me parlait. C'etait comme un mauvais reve, mon cerveau etait empli d'une brume epaisse qui ne laissait filtrer aucune lumiere. J'ai demande le nom de la victime, et la, comme un eclair, j'ai commence a percevoir les premieres lueurs d'un debut d'explication.

C'est vrai, je connaissais cette femme. J'avais eu une liaison avec elle pendant quelques mois. C'etait une belle femme, mure, mariee, mere de famille, installee. Une serie d'invraisemblables coincidences m'avaient place vis-a-vis d'elle dans une position injustifiable et, surtout, inexplicable. Car je frequentais dans la meme periode sa fille, que j'avais connue dans un cafe pros de la fac, tout en ignorant le lien qui unissait les deux femmes. La mere l'avait decouvert et m'en avait voulu a mort. L'explication avait toume a la dispute violente. Et je ne l'avais plus revue.

Voila ce que je pouvais dire. C'etait ma verite. Je savais que je n'avais jamais viole une femme. Je n'etais pas un violeur. Je ne l'avais jamais ete et ne le serais jamais. Mais personne ne voulait entendre mon histoire. Elle faisait trop peur. Un jeune beur, de nationalite algerienne, ex-de1inquant, capable de seduire la mere et la fille dans une meme honorable famille francaise, c'est une histoire qu'on prefere ne pas imaginer. C'est un cauchemar pour gardiens de l'ordre public.

Les policiers ont refuse de l'entendre. L'avocat commis d'office a refuse de l'entendre. La juge d'instruction a refuse de l'entendre. J'ai vendu ma voiture pour me payer un veritable avocat, mais il a, lui aussi, pris peur et prefere faire semblant de n'avoir pas bien entendu. Pendant dix-huit mois de detention provisoire, je me suis fracasse le cffme contre les murs de ma cellule pour tenter de faire entendre ma parole. J'ai explique. En vain. J'ai ecrit. En vain. J'ai livre ce que je pouvais a des experts psychiatres. En vain. J'ai meme tente d'arracher une expression au visage impassible de ma victime, lors d'une confrontation. En vain. Alors j'ai craque.

J'ai avale quarante aiguilles a coudre pour finir de dechirer ce que les autres avaient commence de pietiner. On m'a hospitalise. Je me suis evade de l'hepital. J'ai ete repris trois jours plus tard. Et la, j'ai baisse les bras.

Mon proces a ete expedie en quelques heures. Mon avocat m'a conseille de plaider coupable, ce que j'ai refuse. Et le verdict est tombe: huit ans. J'ai pense tres fort a Julia et a Natacha. Et je me suis effondre.

J'ai vecu seul ces annees de prison. Je travaillais en atelier. Je ne frequentais pas les autres dEtenus, je restais dans mon coin, j'attendais. Quoi? Je ne savais meme pas. Le rEsultat d'une demande d'asile politique me permettant d'eviter l'expulsion vers l'Algerie a ma sortie? Elle etait rejetee. Un message de rues parents? Mon pere m'avait renie, il ne voulait plus jamais entendre mon nom, j'avais sali notre famille. Une bonne nouvelle, un espoir? A la place, je recus un courtier m'annoncant le deces de Julia suite a une absorption massive de medicaments. Natacha etait placee chez ses grands-parents maternels. Comment? Pourquoi? Je ne le saurai jamais. Je sais seulement que je n'etais pas la, aupres d'elle, ce jour-la, et que je ne savais plus a qui en vouloir, ni comment contenir ma souffrance et ma peine devant tant de gachis.

* Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics thanks the author for permission to publish an excerpt from the transcribed account of Ahmed Beneddif and thanks author and publisher for permission to reprint a corresponding excerpt from: Azouz Begag and Ahmed Beneddif. Ahmed de Bourgogne. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001, pp. 17-23.

Notes

(1) Christian Delorme is a Catholic priest who has been active in the immigrant community in France for the past twenty years. He is a member of the High Council for Integration and a strong believer in inter-religious dialogue and has written extensively on the subject, specifically with regard to Islam. Further, Delorme was one of the principal organizers of "la Marche des Beurs" (the first national demonstration against racism) in 1983. He has coauthored Quartiers sensibles, with Azonz Begag, (Paris: Point-Virgule, 1994), Nous avons tant de choses a nous dire with Rachid Benzine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), as well as Les banlieues de Dieu: entretiens avec Luc Balbont et Rachid Benzine (Paris: Bayard, 1998), among other works.

(2) Azouz Begag was born in France in 1957. He has a Ph.D. in Economics and since 1980 holds a research position with the CNRS where he specializes in urban socio-economics. He is also one of the most noted beur writers in France. He has published some twenty books that deal with the problems of the immigrant community in France and the young beur generation (French born youth of North African origin) in the suburbs of France. His works include: Le gone du Chaaba (Paris: Le Seuil, Coll. 'Virgule', 1986), his autobiography that won the Prix des Sorcieres award, 1987 and the Prix de la Ville de Bobigny award, 1987; Beni ou le paradis prive (Paris: Le Seuil, Coll. Virgule, 1989) awarded the Radio Beur Prize, 1989 and the Falep du D6partement du Gers Prize, 1990; L'ilet aux vents (Paris: Le Seuil, Coll. 'Virgule', 1992); Les chiens aussi (Paris: Le Seuil, Coll. 'Virgule', 1995); Zenzela (Paris: Le Seuil, 1997); Dis oualla (Pads: Fayard, Collection 'Libres', 1997); and Tranehes de vie (Stuttgart: Kleth Verlag, 1998).

(3) Ahmed Beneddif was born on March 6, 1961. In 1984 he was imprisoned for rape. In 1995, after serving his prison sentence he was deported to Algeria. On September 13, 1997 he returned illegally to France. In 1998 he met Azouz Begag in Lyon. In 2001 Ahmed de Bourgogne was published.

(4) Azouz Begag and Ahmed Beneddif, Ahmed de Bourgogne (Paris: Seuil, 2001) 9. All translations from this work are mine and page numbers in my text will refer to this edition.

(5) Begag, "Preface," Begag and Beneddif, Ahmed de Bourgogne, 12-14.

(6) See for example the number of references to Begag and his work on the Intemet that total, to date, over 1000 references.

(7) Azouz Begag's publications in this field include: L'immigre et sa ville (Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1984); "North African Immigrants in France: the Socio-Spatial Representation of 'Here' and 'There'," a pamphlet published by the European Research Center, Department of European Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, 1989; "The Beurs, Children of North African Immigrants in France: The Issue of Integration," Journal of Ethnic Studies XVIII: 1 (Spring 1990); Ecarts d'identite (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990) with Abdellatif Chaouite; La ville des autres: la famille immigree et l'e-space urbain (Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1991); "Rites sacrificiels des jeunes dans les quartiers en difficulte," Les annales de la recherche urbaine 54 (March 1992); "Voyage dans les quartiers chauds," Les temps modernes 47.545-546 (Dec. 1991-Jan. 1992), pp. 134-164; Quartiers sensibles (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994) with Christian Delorme; Espace et exclusion: mobilites dans les quartiers peripheriques d'Avignon (Pads: L'Harmattan, 1996); and Place du pont ou la medina de Lyon (Paris: Editions 'Autrement', 1997).

(8) Azouz Begag has been a candidate on more than one list in municipal and regional elections in France. His activism and success with leftist municipalities in Lyon have tempted municipalities of the right to court him as well. However, Begag, a long time leftist himself, declined their attempts at cooption. In the most recent regional elections in Lyon he proposed the slogan "LYON POUR NOUS, INCH ALLAH! "to the leftist campaign whose main program, given its declared commitment to the immigrant community, was to open up Lyon to the South, i.e. North Africa, in the most immediate sense. See Le monde, 08/01/01 and 09/01/01.

(9) Begag's autobiography, Le gone du Chaaba, 1986, has also been transformed into a film by Christophe Ruggia (1997) with the same title and has been awarded several prizes at international film festivals including Cannes.

(10) See Samia Mehrez on Le gone du Chaaba: "Azouz Begag: un di zafa di bidoufile or The Beur Writer: a Question of Territory," Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 25-42.

(11) Le gone, 60.

(12) Le gone, 77.

(13) Le gone, 189.

(14) Le gone, 106.

(15) One dictionary lists the Algero-French words of Azouz's father, Bouzid, and the other comprises Azouz's slang lexicon of Lyon.

(16) Azouz Begag and Abellatif Chaouite, Ecarts d'identite (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990) 54. Page references are to the manuscript of Ecarts d'identite before publication. I had access to the manuscript, but not the book, when writing the article.

(17) Azouz Begag, Ecarts d'identite, 54.

(18) Beau et Boubekeur, in Chroniques metissees, ed. Alain Moreau (Paris, 1987). Quoted in Azouz Begag, Ecarts d'identite, 59.

(19) Originally, the suggested title for the manuscript was Et maintenant je. But, after discussion with the publisher, the title was changed to Ahmed de Bourgogne.

(20) The inverse is also true: many celebrities have published their life histories by hiring ghost-writers. This is obviously another form of unequal collaboration. However, given the concerns of this article, we will not deal with these issues.

(21) Anne McClintock, "'The Very House of Difference': Race, Gender, and the Politics of South African Women's Narrative in Poppie Nongena," The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) 203-04.

(22) Anne McClintock, " The Very House of Difference," The Bounds of Race, 198.

(23) One example would be the text of Poppie Nongena itself and its reception in South Africa as an "apolitical" novel. See Anne McClintock for the political implications of the reading of this autobiography in "The Very House of Difference," The Bounds of Race, 198. Other obvious examples of the "political" and therefore banned works, would be the reception, in the Arab world, of Al-Khubz al-Hafi by the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri or Woman at Point Zero by the Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi, to mention only a couple of examples.

(24) My interview with Azouz Begag in Avignon, France, August 21, 2001.

(25) Et maintenant je, 28.

(26) Et maintenant je, 28.

(27) Le gone, 211.

(28) The selected excerpts appended to the text of this article provide several moments of lexical, structural and figurative additions and alterations that render the raw oral story into a published autobiography.

(29) Et maintenant je, 31.

(30) My interview with Azouz Begag in Avignon, France, August 21, 2001.

(31) My interview with Azouz Begag in Avignon, France, August 21, 2001.

(32) My discussion here is very strongly informed by Gayatri Spivak's argument in her article "Can the Suhaltem Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988) 271-313. Spivak has prohlematized the idea of the "subaltern" put forth in the work of the Subaltem Studies Group which maintained that the Indian historiography, written by the bourgeois, national elite, did not account for the participation of subaltern groups. Spivak basically argues against the Subaltern Studies Group's claim that it is possible for the subaltern to speak. She does so by saying that subaltern action is always given voice through a dominant language and discourse in order for its voice to be heard.

(33) Driss Chraibi, Les Boucs (Paris: Denoel, 1955). English translation, The Butts by Hugh Hurter (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1983).

(34) Driss Chraibi, The Butts, trans. Hugh Hatter, 124.

(35) Tahar Benjelloun, La plus haute des solitudes (Paris: Seuil, 1977). Benjelloun's text was based on his own thesis in social psychiatry at the Universite Paris VII, 1975.

(36) Benjelloun, La plus haute des solitudes, 16.

(37) Benjelloun, La plus haute des solitudes, 177.

(38) Azouz Begag and Abellatif Chaouite, Ecarts d'identite, 74. My translation.

(39) My interview with Azouz Begag in Avignon, France, August 21, 2001.

(40) See the text of Recommendation 1467 (2000) by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The text of the recommendation was drafted in the aftermath of the tragic death of 58 illegal immigrants of Chinese origin discovered in the back of a lorry during a border check at the port of Dover in England during the year 2000.