Émancipation identitaire : une analyse de La discrétion de Faïza Guène

Abstract

Faïza Guène’s sixth novel La discrétion focuses on a Maghreb Muslim woman who, having migrated to France, is trying to reconstruct her personal and family history. It is a memoir whose aim is to make the experiences of first-generation migrants an integral part of cultural memory. This search for identity concerns the children of those migrants who try to relate to a fragmented, often suppressed family history they did not experience themselves, but whose burden they nonetheless inherited. The aim of this article will be to prove that what allows both the protagonist of the story and who tells it to free themselves from this overwhelming past is in fact the narrative itself, a process of identity construction with which each author is confronted.