Transforming Family: Queer Kinship and Migration in Contemporary Francophone Literature by Jocelyn Frelier (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transforming Family: Queer Kinship and Migration in Contemporary Francophone Literature by Jocelyn Frelier Adrienne Angelo Frelier, Jocelyn. Transforming Family: Queer Kinship and Migration in Contemporary Francophone Literature. U of Nebraska P, 2022. Pp. 264. ISBN 978-1-4962-2509-2. $60 (paper) and 978-1-4962-3365-3. (eBook). Narratives of exile, migration, and displacement figure prominently in contemporary francophone cultural productions. What about the complexities of family dynamics and filiation in these situations of resettlement? What in fact constitutes "family"? What factors create a sense of belonging or nonbelonging? What impact does one's heritage have on the stories one tells? How might alternative compositions of family provide a sense of transformative agency? Jocelyn Frelier deftly navigates these questions among others in her carefully researched and intellectually creative work, Transforming Family: Queer Kinship and Migration in Contemporary Francophone Literature. Frelier elegantly interweaves personal narrative and literary analysis and thus performs autoethnographic praxis. She shares her story, which includes her own family's experience of migration, while making connections to the material she studies (xiii). This degree of auto-reflexivity mirrors the nuanced life-writing gestures of the six contemporary authors she analyzes in individual chapters: Nina Bouraoui, [End Page 152] Leïla Slimani, Leïla Sebbar, Azouz Begag, Fouad Laroui, and Abdellah Taïa. After providing pertinent biographical information which relates to each author's literary corpus, Frelier explains how these writers, each of whom engages with autofictional practices, offer "decolonial and queer" understandings of what she terms "trans-families" in their respective transnational narratives of migration between France and Algeria and Morocco (1). The introduction articulates the stakes of this work and unpacks several critical terms that underpin Frelier's analysis. Of note is Frelier's description of trans-family. This term sees the queer potential in family (re)compositions to move away from normative familial structures whose legal or otherwise regulated status comes at the expense of nontraditional ones (6-7). Frelier relates how the novels she has chosen for her project connect with "the becoming trans-of cultural production" (2). Accordingly, queer studies plays a vital role in Frelier's project for thinking through the transformative possibilities of family and filiation. In this work, queering relates to concepts of time and history, the context of colonialism and the postcolonial era, and the construction of self through autofictional writing practices. The first part of the work focuses on transnational motherhood and includes two chapters: one on Nina Bouraoui's Garçon manqué (2000) and another on Leïla Slimani's Chanson douce (2016). From the first-person narrator's inheritance of her mother's nonbelonging in postcolonial France and Algeria in Bouraoui's text to polymaternal models of mothering and the significance of race and class in Slimani's novel, Frelier interrogates how the queering of the migrant, maternal figure and mothering draws attention to heteropatriarchal norms and expectations. In the second section, Frelier focuses on transcultural fatherhood and analyzes Leïla Sebbar's Mon cher fils (2012) and Azouz Begag's Salam Ouessant (2012). Both works feature paternal figures whose lives and families are disoriented by cultural conflicts. Frelier considers the significance of masculinity in relation to fatherhood and emasculated migrant figures in Mon cher fils. Frelier situates this novel in the context of Sebbar's literary production and rightly notes "the relationship of migration, masculinity, and labor to familial bonds (or lack thereof) and language" (87). Frelier posits that Sebbar's queering of Marxism leads to father-son bonds that are forged through rather than severed by estrangement. Frelier reads Begag's novel through the lens of intergenerational and cultural "hauntings" that impact the protagonist (and his own sense of masculinity) and his relationship to his daughters. To reconcile with them, he must negotiate his role as father which requires a queering of the family model. The two chapters included in the third section of this work focus on the transdiaspora and consider the ways in which the individual relates to new "horizontal" family filiations that feature in Fouad Laroui's Une année chez les Français (2010) and Abdellah Taïa's Celui qui est digne d'être aimé (2017). Mehdi...