Reconstruction 10.4 (2010)
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The Migrant Homemaker: Historicizing Gender between Nations in Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah dimanche / Olivia Donaldson
Abstract: This article examines Yamina Benguigui’s film Inch’Allah dimanche (2001) to probe questions of gender and nation in the context of transnational migration. An analysis of the historical drama, which recounts an Algerian family’s reunion in France during the 1970s, reveals how the migrant homemaker must negotiate her symbolic role as “bearer of the nation” in relationship to not one but two nations: the homeland left behind and the new homeland. This filmic study of “gender between nations” proposes the benefits of transnational studies that literally “move beyond the borders of the nation” to consider the frontiers of the body. A close reading of Benguigui’s intimate and multifaceted visualization of hijab—the controversial practice of Islamic veiling foregrounded in her early work—unveils the migrant homemaker’s complicated relationships to Algeria and France. This historical study offers a lens for comprehending the policing of Maghrebi women, and other women of Muslim and immigrant origins, in contemporary France, referencing legislation from 1989 to 2010 that regulates Islamic veiling in public.
woman as nation, nation as woman
-Wanda Balzano
If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight.
-Frantz Fanon (1959)
The burqa is not welcome.
-Nicolas Sarkozy (2010)
<1> As visually represented in the palindrome “woman as nation, nation as woman,” women’s bodies, essential to the framework of the nation, reinforce the centrality of the nation. Historically associated with the home, women are expected to positively uphold the homeland through the maintenance of collective values and traditions. Though “typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation,” women are often “denied any direct relation to national agency” (McClintock 354). On the contrary, women frequently face “rules, regulations and policies which are specific to them” (Yuval-Davis 24). This article contributes to questions of gender and nation through the study of transnational migration. I center my study on the 1970s era of regroupement familial, or "family reunions," when thousands of Maghrebi women reunited with male migrant laborers in France. This transnational study exposes and challenges the national manipulation of Muslim women’s bodies by reinterpreting the concept transnational. The word transnational invites me not only to examine the movement of Maghrebi women across national boundaries, but also to literally “move beyond the borders of the nation” to consider the frontiers of the female body. My attention to “gender between nations” exposes how the transnational migration of Maghrebi women threatens the Republic, resulting in the national policing of Muslim women’s bodies from the 1970s to today.
<2> In developing my arguments, I examine the work of French-Algerian writer and filmmaker Yamina Benguigui, focusing on Inch’Allah dimanche. The historical film and novel, both produced in 2001, recount the 1974 reunion of an Algerian family in France. The narrative is part autobiographical, taking place in the northern town of Saint-Quentin, where Benguigui’s family migrated during her childhood in the 1950s. The protagonist Zouina, modeled in part after Benguigui’s mother, leaves Algeria with her three young children and mother-in-law in order to join her husband Ahmed, a migrant worker more or less absent from her life for a decade. Centered on Zouina’s experiences as a migrant homemaker, the transnational narrative primarily unfolds within the space of the family home. In Inch’Allah dimanche the migrant home is a lens for understanding how migrant women must navigate their allegorical functions in relationship to not one but two nations.
<3> The apparition of hijab, in material and architectural forms, guides my analysis of the film.[1] Since the late 1980s, various material forms of hijab, including but not limited to headscarves, chadors and burquas, have been fabricated into le voile or ‘the veil’—a symbolic marker of an Islamic invasion in France. Outwardly marking religion, ethnicity, culture, and other identity components key to the construction of nationhood, the twin-skin of the veil outlines how the Muslim woman transgresses the borders of the Republic through her embodiment of an “other” homeland. In 1989, a fear of “Islamization” manifested in public debate regarding headscarves in schools and ultimately restrictive legislation. In the early 90s, the Ministry of Education condemned veiling, and in 2004, the state passed legislation prohibiting headscarves in schools (Scott 26-27). More recently, in October 2010, the French government passed a law that bans face veils in all public spaces other than mosques (“French Veil Ban”).
<4> The controversy of the 1989 headscarf affair, and the subsequent policing of the veil, prompted Benguigui’s foray into film work as a means of better understanding her experiences as a Maghrebi woman of immigrant origin in France. In the early 1990s, she produced her first documentary (and non-fiction book) Femmes d’Islam. The three-part, made-for-television series contains interviews with veiled and non-veiled Muslim women in seven different countries, with the entire first segment focusing on the veil in France. Throughout both text and film, it is clear that Benguigui, like many feminists, is critical of the practice of veiling. Despite her personal reservations, however, Benguigui opens up her aesthetic forums to the conflicting impressions and convictions of numerous women, thereby troubling a black and white approach to the veil. For example, while some veiled women consider themselves victims of men’s interpretations of the Qur’an, many women choose to veil. In juxtaposition to the common Qur’anic interpretation of hijab as intended to conceal and protect women, some women veil to draw public attention to themselves in order to expose their dis/location as Muslim women (of immigrant families) in France. This particular example points to how the veil, much like Benguigui’s film making, may challenge a limited definition of French national identity.
<5> Benguigui’s subsequent work, the documentary and text Mémoires d’immigrés, uses the 1989 headscarf affair as a lancing point for a familial study of transnational migration to France. The film’s triptych structure allows fathers, mothers, and children to recount their individual yet overlapping experiences of living in the Republic. These first and second-generation immigrant voices are paired with interviews with French politicians, who attest to their duty of defining immigration policy that monitored the integration of Maghrebis. The interwoven testimonies offer an intergenerational, multi-ethnic, gendered understanding of the political and problematic prominence of Maghrebis in France, and thus afford insights into the politics of “the veil.” Whereas first-generation migrants were initially kept at a distance and then pressured to assimilate into French society, the children of these families often grew to question assimilation that included Maghrebis through processes of exclusion.
<6> Benguigui’s third work, Inch’Allah dimanche, reprises in melodramatic form questions of gender, family, nation, and migration. However, unlike the social documentaries, Inch’Allah dimanche does not forefront “the veil.” The political issue is never directly mentioned in the film despite Benguigui’s obvious preoccupation with this issue and the fact that the film appeared in 2001, amid renewed debates on Muslims and the veil. The historical context of familial migration lends Benguigui to film hijab in an intimate and multifaceted manner. I argue that in Inch’Allah dimanche, Benguigui’s visualization of hijab, represented in material and architectural forms, does two specific things. First, I demonstrate how it draws attention to the migrant homemaker’s allegorical relationship to not one but two nations—her homeland of origin and new homeland—thereby exposing the threat transnational migration poses to the boundaries of these two nation states. Second, I contend that this attention to the symbolic role of the migrant homemaker in the past offers us key insights into the emergence and production of the politics of “the veil” in the French homeland of today.
Homemaker between Homelands
<7> Amina Wadud, along with Merryl Wyn Davies, has dubbed hijab the “sixth pillar” of Islam since an overwhelming number of Muslims and non-Muslims alike regard hijab as a religious requirement despite “its triviality to the principles of Islam” (Gender Jihad 219, 277). As fellow Islamic scholar Asma Barlas indicates, “the words veil and hijab do not occur in the Qur’an,” and yet “the veil has become so overinvested with meaning that one can no longer speak of it in any simple way” (53-57). Both Wadud and Barlas reread the Qur’an from a “woman’s perspective,” demonstrating how misreadings of the sacred text, like any textual reading, are closely linked to broader cultural practices that span time and place. Thus while hijab is associated with Islam, it is necessary to consider how affirmation and contestation of the practice have developed in relation and response to other factors. In Inch’Allah dimanche, Benguigui invests the headscarf with multiple meanings, engaging with questions of geo-historical positioning in addition to religious interpretation.
<8> The opening of Inch’Allah dimanche vividly engages the foulard or ‘headscarf’ to expose the migrant woman’s transnational dis/location during the family reunion era of the 1970s. The protagonist Zouina, her mother-in-law and three young children begin to board a stark white boat destined for France; the old city of Algiers looms like an antiquated print in the distance. Against this monochromatic cityscape, Zouina’s graphic red-floral headscarf draws the viewer’s vision. The scarf begins to slowly slip and the sepia silence breaks into vivid cries as the women shout in Arabic: Zouina’s mother shrills “my daughter,” her mother-in-law menaces “keep her, I’m leaving with the children,” and family members mediate with reason “let her go to her children, let her go to her husband.” In the crescendo of screams, the young mother ascends and descends the boarding ramp, teetering between boat and shore, vacillating between two families, both her own. Zouina ultimately makes her way aboard the boat, the red-leaf scarf metaphorically marking her leaving; she must unearth her Algerian roots and break loose from one family tree so that the branches of her immediate family may flourish in France.
<9> Benguigui’s attention to the headscarf raises the complicated relationship between the home and the homeland, underscoring the role of the migrant homemaker. The family reunion era placed significant expectations on Maghrebi women to move between homelands for the purpose of maintaining home. In 1974, the French government temporarily banned worker immigration—a policy that became law in 1975—and simultaneously allocated “regroupement familial” (Hargreaves 16-17). Newly elected President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing declared that being with one’s family was a “droit essentiel” (qtd. in Benguigui, MI 22). Befittingly, the word droit connotes both "right" and "law," the dual definitions reflecting the duality of female migration: family women were not purely permitted to migrate, they were obliged to do so. Benguigui addresses the correlation between permission and obligation in a customs scene. We first come face-to-face with Zouina, her headscarf taut beneath her chin, her lips motionless as a police officer inquires about her identity. Passport stamps are granted when the mother in-law identifies the family members as “my son’s wife” and “my son’s children.” The exchange between the Algerian officer and the mother-in-law emphasizes Zouina’s silent position within a hierarchical family system that exists within a hierarchical transnational structure. By paralleling cultural customs and national customs procedures, the scene delineates the “home and homeland as overlapping sites of violence against the female body,” to borrow Susan Stanford Friedman’s phrasing in “Bodies on the Move” (200). If Zouina fails to assume her duties as a wife and mother, the mother-in-law will depart with “the children,” no longer “her children” (my emphasis). In addition to relinquishing her parental rights according to national laws in both countries, Zouina’s refusal to follow Ahmed would result in social condemnation from his family, potentially her own family, and Algerian society more generally. The scene then serves as summary: the authorized family reunion era required that many Maghrebi women migrate.
<10> While some scholars, such as Bonvicini, separate male and female Maghrebi migrants of the era as respectively active and passive, Inch’Allah dimanche affords a more nuanced portrait: Zouina and her husband are jointly entangled within a familial web that struggles to exist in a transnational framework. Ahmed’s reasons for leaving Algeria ten years prior, though different from Zouina’s motivations as a wife and mother, were also rooted in his familial obligations. During his decade abroad, Ahmed worked to financially maintain the family home in his homeland of origin. After the imposition of the worker migration ban resulted in men’s limited transnational mobility—meaning they could no longer work abroad to support their families and still regularly visit their families—the locus of the family home had to shift. In the family reunion era, home moved with the women migrant homemakers. The husband’s and wife’s lack of national agency is conveyed in Ahmed’s silence as he spies Zouina removing her headscarf to use as a handkerchief on the day of her arrival. Sylvie Durmelat states that by paralleling the migrant stories of men and women in Mémoires d’immigrés, Benguigui “avoids reproducing the stereotype of the silenced, oppressed Arab woman and shows how men are also silenced” (176). I suggest that in Inch’Allah dimanche, silence marks a male/female intersection in addition to a gender parallel. Ahmed recognizes his wife’s pain comes from a move that hinges on her tie to him, and yet this same bond keeps him from approaching and comforting her. The silence in this headscarf-as-handkerchief scene underscores how both Ahmed and Zouina share the same silent duty: they are bound by the responsibility of maintaining home by moving homelands.
<11> Benguigui’s familial account foretells how the French government manipulated the power of the home as a means of limiting Maghrebi integration. In the aforementioned scene, she strategically uses silence to give voice to this overlooked moment in French history. The French government invited large numbers of male laborers to rebuild the nation following World War II; then immigration soared after the French-Algerian War. However, the government generally refused entrance to their families. François Ceyrac, a former head of Peugeot, explains that the French government specifically colluded with Maghrebi governments for men to migrate alone; they were “‘célibataires, c’est-à-dire des hommes mariés ou non mariés’” / “‘single men, that is to say married men or unmarried men’” (qtd. in Benguigui, MI 17). Single male migration ensured that Maghrebis remained on the fringes of French society, where they toiled long hours in factories and often lived in guesthouses with other laborers. Special laws permitted migrant workers to visit their families in their homelands of origin and to rotate the responsibility of working abroad with other family men (Hargreaves 15). Such immigration policies promoted familial ties in order to decrease the chances of men forming roots in France.
<12> Similarly, the era of regroupement familial, despite its valorous sound of inclusion, was conceived to exclude. Inherent to the expression regroupement familial are the concepts of “group” and “family,” or spaces of belonging. The prefix “re-” alludes that what should be a cohesive familial unit is fractured. D’Estaing claimed to connect estranged families by bestowing regroupement familial, and yet this “essential right” was ultimately intended to protect the framework of the French nation from the extended infiltration of strangers. It was projected that the family reunions would hinder the national integration of individual migrants and ultimately lead families to return to homelands of origin. In short, French national policies from the late 1940s to the early 1970s specifically aimed to rebuild the war-ravished nation while keeping the migrant home elsewhere; and migrants struggled to keep home somewhere, moving between nations as necessary.
<13> Benguigui’s nuanced portrait of familial migration troubles gendered concepts of what it means “to leave home.” In the context of transnational migration, the expression “to leave home” references one’s distance from the familial space of the domestic home as well as one’s departure from the homeland of origin. Doreen Massey notes that historically men leave home, whereas women, specifically mothers, stay at home and are charged with the personification of home (167). Inch’Allah dimanche simultaneously contradicts and confirms this claim. Zouina and her mother-in-law depart the Algerian home and homeland, but their mobility does little more than to literally confine them to the home and figuratively bind them to the homeland of origin. As Benguigui laments in Mémoires d’immigrés, migrant women lived lives of confinement within their homes, where they served to guard the traditions and religious values of the homeland left behind (10-11). In Inch’Allah dimanche, the migrant home becomes a transplanted root of Algeria: the women wear silky scarves and cotton djellabas as they tend to chores; culinary customs, such as locked sugar cabinets, steaming pots of couscous and coffee cooked outdoors, offer familiar tastes and aromas of home. The migrant women of the family reunion era not only imported home with sensory infusions, they embodied the possibility of returning to the homeland of origin. In Mémoires d’immigrés, Benguigui’s repeated use of the expression “aller-retour,” meaning "roundtrip" or literally translated as ‘to go-to return,’ appropriately points to how the women kept the mirage of return on the horizon. As the roundabout term suggests, “aller-retour” women like Zouina were trapped by their role as homemakers—maintainers of the family home as well as symbolic bearers of the nation left behind—in spite of and because of their mobility.
<14> Thus, as Zouina installs herself in the family home in Saint-Quentin, the red-leaf scarf reappears, and so arrival echoes departure. In the industrial town known for its textile industry and a locus of migrant labor, Zouina uses the fabric of the imported Algerian scarf to wipe her tears. The headscarf-as-handkerchief draws attention to Zouina’s transnational dis/location, and as noted previously, it also confirms her familial positioning. In addition to delineating her relation to her husband, the repeated apparition of the scarf draws attention to Zouina’s maternal relations. After lamenting her distant mother, Zouina unfolds the red leaves to cover and comfort her daughter. Angelica Finner’s analysis of the film’s opening links three generations of women through their cries and the film’s musical score. I would like to add that the transmutation of the scarf from handkerchief to blanket interweaves multiple generations of women, stressing how Zouina leaves her mother in order to mother. Overall, the film’s opening engages the scarf to unveil a complex triangle of gender, family, and nation within the framework of transnational migration.
Homebound in a New Homeland
<15> Befittingly, the majority of the homemaker’s narrative unfolds within the space of the family’s row house. This familial setting permits Benguigui to use architectural forms of hijab—represented in images of doors, curtains, and walls—as a means of engaging with complex questions of gender and space as they relate to interpretations of Islam. One issue the film addresses is the confinement of Muslim women to the home, a practice analyzed in Fatima Mernissi’s “The Meaning of Spatial Boundaries.” Upon arrival, Zouina lingers in front of the new home, eyeing a stopped bus whose conductor is mutually intrigued. Ahmed quickly ushers his wife behind closed doors away from the driver’s curious gaze, enforcing the separation of the sexes. This entryway shot foreshadows how Zouina’s authorized outings will be few and far between from this day forward. Zouina’s confinement to the domestic confirms her function as a guardian of traditions who adheres to the separation of men and women and respects the gendering of private and public spheres.
<16> Sociologist Mozzo-Counil locates Maghrebi migrant women’s domestic confinement in juxtaposition to men’s public mobility: “la cuisine pour les femmes, la salle de séjour pour les hommes” / “the kitchen for women, the living room for men” (72). The “salle de séjour,” meaning "living room" or literally translated as "the room of voyage," implies men’s ability to move freely within the domestic and cross into the public. On the contrary, the kitchen, as the hearth of the home, regulates how the maternal figure is to tend to others, to nourish them. The film attests to this separation of the sexes according to gendered duties through the motif of a curtain. The same day of arrival, the children gather around Ahmed in the living room as he attempts to play the chords of a song. Zouina stands separate in the kitchen, half-hidden by a curtain that divides the open first floor, which consists of the kitchen and the living room. The edge of the curtain delineates Zouina’s homemaker status in relationship to her family, and it also unveils how this familial framework isolates her from the “living room” of the private in addition to the public.
<17> While Mernissi, Mozzo-Counil and Bonvicini, among others, point to a dichotomous division of the sexes in their studies of Muslim women’s experiences, Wadud’s “re-reading” of the Qur’an considers the “male/female pair” in terms of “dualism.” The Qur’an defines man and woman as contingent one upon the other and therefore as “equally essential.” However, as Wadud acknowledges, this “contingent pair,” like the practice of hijab, is contingent upon social interpretations of the Qur’an that influence cultural practices (Qur’an and Women 20-23). Wadud’s attention to the interpretation and adaptation of the sacred text across time and space pushes us to consider that reasons in addition to the separation of the sexes prompt Zouina’s confinement to the migrant home. After all, as Massey notes: “social relations always have a spatial form and spatial content. They exist, necessarily, both in space (i.e., in a locational relation to other social phenomena) and across space.” Therefore, we must consider that Zouina’s experiences in the migrant home are not only defined by imported social relations and expectations—whether religious, familial, etc.—but the social sphere of the home “derives, in large part, precisely from the specificity of its interactions with ‘the outside’” (168-169).
<18> Benguigui addresses how events across geo-historical space impact what happens in the space of the family home and vice versa by couching the migrant home between two other homes. The row house is visually walled and fenced between conflicting French personalities. On one side lives Nicole, a divorced French feminist, who makes offhand references to Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe, works in a cosmetics factory, and talks of dancing and other “sins” when she spies Zouina in the backyard or invites herself into the home. Single Nicole represents the burgeoning feminist movement of 1970s France and a desire to unite along lines of gender for the purpose of women’s empowerment. In contrast, Madame Donze’s xenophobic and racist outlook negates the possibility of gender coalition in favor of nationalism, prompting questions of transnational feminism to which I will later return. Madame Donze’s not-in-my-backyard mentality is portrayed in her attempts to enforce the frontier between her flower garden, representative of France’s beauty, and the home space of her “heathen” neighbors. A comical tribute to Voltaire, she cultivates her garden, whispering to her flowers and adorning her lawn with ornaments.
<19> Both Nicole and Madame Donze threaten the sanctity and stability of the migrant family’s home. The mother-in-law ironically defines the precarious position of the migrant home when she leans out of a second-story window and yells: “C’est le Casbah et la maison de mon fils!” / “This is the Casbah and the home of my son.” This allegorical declaration unearths the historically turbulent rapport between Algeria and France that carries over to influence familial and neighborly dynamics during the family reunion era. Though directed at Madame Donze, the statement also addresses Nicole’s (unwelcome) feminist presence. The mother-in-law’s reference to her son hints at how the household defers to the patriarch. While the proclamation is indicative of the migrant home’s location across time and space, it is also a performance of how the migrant woman is situated in and across place. Perched at her window, the mother-in-law attests to how the migrant woman must symbolically guard the “Casbah,” representative of the distant Algerian homeland, and she must keep this Algerian home/land separate from the French homeland in which it is precariously situated.
<20> Mernissi discusses the confinement of Maghrebi Muslim women to “harems,” which is “a slight variation of the word haram, the forbidden.” She explains that this “private space and the rules regulating it” are carried with women, “a law tattooed in the mind” that forms invisible walls around them wherever they may venture, concealing the private from the public even in the case of exterior positioning (Dreams 61-62). This responsibility to conceal the private is dually important when the public space poses a threat to the homeland. Fanon tells us that this separation of public and private was crucial in Algeria during the colonial era and at the start of the revolution. He uses the Casbah as an example: “The colonizers have not settled in the midst of the natives. They have surrounded the native city; they have laid siege to it.” According to Fanon, women of the colonial era were rarely allowed to leave the fortress of the Casbah (Dying Colonialism 51-52). And according to Benguigui’s characterization, women of the family reunion era were similarly confined to the “Casbah” of the migrant home.
<21> Though Zouina and her mother-in-law are both charged with the same symbolic roles in relationship to the homeland and hostland, they assume different places within the structure of the family home. In the “Casbah” scene as in the customs scene, the mother-in-law is the speaker. In Dislocating Cultures, Uma Narayan attests that women often serve to monitor other women. They use speech to enforce silence, thereby creating an illusion of “innocence” that protects the honor of the family and home (7). In her introduction to Femmes d’Islam, Benguigui confirms that speech was strictly forbidden in her own family: “A la maison, la petite fille ne devait jamais poser de questions [...]. A l’extérieur, elle ne devait jamais parler de ce qui se passait à la maison. Parler aux étrangers était une honte pour elle, une trahison et un déshonneur pour sa famille, à laquelle elle devait le respect” / “At home, the little girl was never to ask questions [...]. In public, she was never to speak of what happened at home. Speaking to strangers was shameful for her, a betrayal and a dishonor for her family, to whom she owed respect” (9). In Inch’Allah dimanche, the mother-in-law uses speech in order to enforce Zouina’s silent fulfillment of tradition. Her surveillance is clearly noted in scenes where she leans out the second-story window to command and critique her daughter-in-law’s every move. From her window perch, the mother-in-law orders Zouina to cook, make coffee, hang laundry and, above all, not to speak to the neighbors.
Unbound at Home
<22> Though Ahmed and his mother collude to confine Zouina in the home for the purpose of maintaining boundaries, they are not necessarily successful in keeping Zouina homebound. Benguigui employs the same architectural forms of veiling to demonstrate how Zouina defiantly moves across space, continually challenging the imposition of fixed frontiers. For example, the camera regularly zooms on her at the front window, parting the curtain and peering out. The window scenes at once reinforce Zouina’s confinement and contest it; the boundary between the private and public is as permeable as the lace curtain. At one point, the sound of the bus prompts her to leave behind the domestic chore of making sweets for the religious holiday Eid al Fitr in order to run to the living room window. In this particular scene, the curtain as a veiling device does not separate Zouina from the public space as her husband and mother-in-law intend, but it rather connects her, through sight, to the driver, the bus, and the street—all of which personify public mobility and encapsulate Zouina’s potential to move across space. By paralleling Zouina’s flour dusted face with the white lace of the curtain, Benguigui visualizes how the body, like the curtain, forms a fluid frontier.
<23> The theme of the boundary as passageway repeats itself in the film, broadening the gendered reading of private and public to encompass social customs, religious practices and so forth that mark the precarious relationship between the French hostland and the migrant home. In several scenes, the fortress of the “Casbah” is threatened as Zouina engages in acts of trespass. For example, she allows a pushy vacuum salesman to enter the living room after first speaking to him through the door. She is duped into signing a purchasing contract for a vacuum the family can ill afford. The introduction of the vacuum into the home literally and metaphorically points to the fact that Zouina does not live in a vacuum, a state of isolation from outside influences. In yet another scene, she is charged with buying essentials at the local market when Ahmed’s schedule prohibits him from doing this errand himself. She is forced into the public space in order to carry out the domestic duty of cooking. Unfamiliar with the currency and food costs, she begins to run up an exorbitant tab, indebting the family to the local market. In each of these instances, Zouina opens the confines of the house up to the “chaos” of the outside world.[2] In short, her acts of opening and shutting the home’s curtains and doors (forms of unveiling) point to the porous nature of the public/private divide and her position at the seuil or "thresh hold."
<24> At two key points in the story, Zouina’s full body breeches the boundaries of the domestic sphere, exposing the migrant home to the authority and influences of the French homeland. In the first, she jumps over a fence to attack Madame Donze, who has menacingly destroyed the children’s wayward ball. Zouina tackles the older woman and in the process removes her djellaba, a traditional and modest garment often worn in the home. In the second scene, Zouina accepts samples of cosmetics from her neighbor Nicole. Within the domestic space of the kitchen, she applies lipstick, pulling back her headscarf and allowing a lock of hair to caress her cheek and kiss her red lips. Mernissi suggests why these acts of play would fall under the category of trespass. If a woman crosses over into the public—as Zouina does by entering Madame Donze’s yard and by allowing Nicole to enter the family home—she transgresses the male’s space (public and private) and commits an act of aggression. If the woman is unveiled, her transgression is all the more threatening. The word aryana, or "without a veil," holds the meaning of nude, suggesting how a woman’s unveiled presence in public reflects exhibitionism (“Meaning” 493-94). By publicly removing her djellaba, Zouina not only exposes her body, but she exposes the “Casbah” to public and national scrutiny when the police come to settle the dispute. The lipstick likewise blurs boundaries—public/private as well as French/Algerian. Cosmetics, colors applied to the skin to alter its appearance most often for public appearance, threaten the traditional image of the home Zouina is supposed to embody. In the mirror she eyes a red-lipped woman who belongs elsewhere.
Home/land Violence
<25> Benguigui follows these scenes of child’s play (peek-a-boo, soccer, and dress-up) with scenes of domestic violence. In doing so, she draws attention to how Zouina’s perceived trespasses result in Ahmed’s more serious trespass: he verbally, physically and emotionally assaults his wife. Though some evoke the Qur’an to justify domestic violence as a necessary response to a wife’s disobedience, Wadud points out that the sacred text is willfully misinterpreted in such instances. Much as the Qur’an does not prescribe a specific mode of veiling, neither does it command “‘a woman to obey her husband’”(verses 66:5 and 60:12). Verses 4:34 and 4:128 more generally promote harmony as opposed to harm between husbands and wives (Qur’an and Woman 75-78). Domestic violence, like other forms of violence, is not located in the Qur’an per se but occurs across cultures and historical contexts and therefore cuts across many forms of religion and impacts individuals regardless of national affiliation.
<26> Wadud’s explanation affirms that domestic violence is inexcusable in any context while suggesting a need to examine the broader contexts in which it occurs, not for the purpose of justifying violent acts but as a means of better understanding the conditions that provoke and permit wrongful justifications. The violence in Zouina’s family home speaks to violence that propagated across France in the 1970s. French historian Gérard Noiriel’s Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France notes a rise in racially motivated hate crimes in the early 70s, paired with an increase in negative media attention to immigrants (565-570). The family reunion period intended to keep immigrants separate from mainstream society had the opposite effect. Historian Alec Hargreaves specifies that Algerian families settled into French neighborhoods and schools, dramatically altering the French landscape. Unlike immigrants of European descent, Maghrebis were visually identified as different due to “their skin color and other somatic features” (19). This dehumanizing perception—reminiscent of an Orientalist gaze—coincided with an economic downshift and propagated xenophobic and racist attitudes, as reflected in Madame Donze’s speculations and slurs. A sense of disorientation within the nation led to policies intent on dislocating immigrants. Noiriel confirms that in 1977 the government began offering 10,000 francs to immigrants willing to return to their homelands of origin. Then, in 1978, lawmakers instigated forced returns with the aim of reducing the immigrant population by 200,000 people per year, before terminating the family reunion process all together (580). These policies point to the government’s attempts to orient the nation through the controlled disorientation of Maghrebi immigrants.
<27> The most violent scene in Inch’Allah dimanche exposes how Ahmed responds to the threat of national displacement by domestically dominating his wife. Upon discovering Zouina’s hidden cosmetics, Ahmed also uncovers another gifted object: a book a widowed French woman has given Zouina.[3] Ahmed hits Zouina, smashes the cosmetics and rips apart the book as he mockingly accuses in Arabic: “You know how to read now?” His response to the book reveals his underlying fear of national disorientation. Literacy, especially in French, is an essential key to Zouina’s ability to freely traverse the public/private divide and alter the traditional boundaries of the home through the acquisition of knowledge. The fact that the text is a French book about Algeria, suggests the danger of Zouina potentially learning about her own homeland’s traditions and history from a French perspective. In this scenario, the migrant home could potentially transform into a reflection of the French homeland not just through the imitation of French practices but through the imposition of a detrimental French perspective. As Fanon’s canonical Peau noire, masques blancs has long demonstrated, an awareness and assumption of French prejudices could lead to a sense of inferiority. Both the recognition of the French “other” and the perception of self as “other” could precipitate efforts to integrate, which would denigrate the divide between the migrant home and the hostland.
<28> In Inch’Allah dimanche, Ahmed’s brutal treatment of Zouina behind closed doors leads viewers not only to condemn his actions but also to recognize and question patterns of violence within the French homeland. As Linda McDowell asserts, “a focus on the social relations within a domestic space crosses the boundary between the private and the public, between the particular and the general, and is not, as is often incorrectly asserted, a focus on the ‘merely’ domestic or the private sphere” (72-73). I suggest that the historical narrative not only elucidates our understanding of violence against Maghrebis in the 1970s, but it also offers a lens for contextualizing the progressive monitoring of Muslim women within the Republic. Debates and laws regarding hijab point to the violent policing of the Muslim female body as a means of orienting the Republic in the face of global disorientation. In Mémoires d’immigrés, Benguigui recounts: “Un foulard islamique [...] en septembre 1989, a vite semé l’inquiétude. D’où viennent ces musulmanes? [...] L’opinion prenait soudain conscience de la culture de cet autre, qu’elle côtoie depuis plus de trente ans sans le voir” / “An Islamic headscarf [...] in September 1989, spurred uncertainty. From where have these Muslims come? The public was suddenly aware of the culture of this other whom it had blindly housed for more than 30 years” (7). Benguigui uses irony to reveal how the sudden political contestation of the veil marked an abrupt awakening for non-Islamic citizens of the presence of Muslims in France.
<29> This transition on the national level was greatly influenced by what was happening on a transnational or global scale, stressing again the need to examine in and across space. Near the end of the 1980s, more and more political leaders outside of France turned to Islam, and increasing numbers of second-generation Muslims in France began to publicly embrace their Islamic identities. Consequentially, the veil became emblematic of “ethnic or community problems” (Dayan-Herzbrun 80). The day after the headscarf incident, Le Quotidien de Paris quoted Jean-Marie Le Pen declaring: “‘C’est la civilisation islamique qui arrive. [...] elle s’implante maintenant de façon symbolique par le port du chador à l’école’” / “‘The Islamic civilization has arrived [...]. it is now symbolically implanting itself through the wearing of the tchador in schools’” (qtd. in Noiriel 636). The media went wild, mixing images of headscarves in France with tchadors in Iran, intertwining the national with the transnational.[4] Debate ensued and finally in 1994, amidst heightened fears of “Islamization” and the violence of the Algerian Civil War (1991-2002), the Ministry of Education officially condemned the veil as an ostentatious sign of religion that was disruptive in school settings and therefore cause for non-admission (Scott 26-27). Essentially, a growing transnational apprehension of Islam manifested into (and through) the national issue of “the veil.” This opposition to veiling in the transnational political climate of the 1980s and 1990s suggests why the burqa, commonly worn in the war-torn Middle East and strategically used by the Front de Libération Nationale during the French-Algerian War, would be so problematic in France today.[5] In September 2010, the French Senate passed a bill intended to ban veils that cover the face, including burqas and niqabs. Weeks later, France’s constitutional court approved the law against full veiling in public. The new law will go into effect after a “six-month period of ‘education’ to explain to women already wearing a face veil” the consequences: “a fine of 150 euros and/or a citizenship course” (“French Veil Ban”).
<30> Curiously, one of the most prominent justifications for the national monitoring of “the veil” in France, is that hijab is a form of domestic violence.[6] Since the headscarf affair of 1989, conservative politicians and liberal feminists alike have defined “the veil” as a marker of women’s subordination within patriarchal Islamic social systems, proclaiming a desire to defend “young women against the authoritarianism of their fathers or their brothers” (Dayan-Herzbrun 73). President Nicolas Sarkozy’s anti-burqa proclamation, in June 2009, is a recent example of how the French nation professes to protect women from “imported” patriarchal practices: “‘Nous ne pouvons pas accepter dans notre pays des femmes prisonnières derrière un grillage, coupées de toute vie sociale, privées de toute identité’” / “‘We can not accept in our country women imprisoned by a cage of mesh, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity’” (qtd. in Gabizon). Sarkozy draws on the material nature of the burqa, a garment that veils nearly all of a woman’s body, to assert that veiled women are faceless and imprisoned. Drawing on images of veiled women as excluded and separate, he fashions a politics of inclusion that aims to welcome women into the collective of “our country” and “we.” However, similar to former President D’Estaing’s rhetoric of regroupement familial, President Sarkozy’s speech masks a hidden agenda. Abstract conceptualizations of strangers as different allows for “making the common”—a community building process that serves to exclude (Ahmed 29). Sarkozy’s group speech essentially connects non-veiled French citizens in opposition to the burqa, solidifying the myth of a homogenous French society. His rhetoric estranges veiled women from the cohesive nation space under the guise of a collective movement for freedom, equality and integration—foundational elements of the national motto “libérté, égalité, fraternité.” Unfortunately, these altruistic and patriotic efforts are as superficial as Sarkozy’s reading of the burqa, doing little more than unveiling limited choices, inequalities and estrangement inherent to a national ideology that demands Muslim women visually blend into a mythical Christian French norm or disappear to the hijab of the home, the likely consequence of them refusing to, or being unable to, unveil in public.
<31> Drawing a parallel between the complicated dance of freedom/control inherent to Zouina and Ahmed’s relationship and the contemporary Muslim woman’s relationship to the Republic confirms that both familial and national spaces are sites of violence for the migrant woman’s body. Examining the public through the private and vice versa, as well as the present through the lens of the past, affords a broader geo-historical understanding of how the threat of transnational migration (physical and ideological) violently impacts migrant women and women perceived as immigrant “others.” A variety of public discourses, whether religious, feminist or nationalist, police the bodies of migrant women for the purpose of maintaining private/public boundaries as well as private/public agendas. Inch’Allah dimanche presents the complicated dialogue between the private and public, and how it develops across time, promoting more productive and inclusive conversations about women’s locations within the family and nation as opposed to using the migrant woman’s body to pit these two spheres one against the other.
Beyond Transnational
<32> The film’s attention to private/public dynamics over time underscores the significance of examining the location of the female body. While the film is attuned to woman’s relationship to the nation, it also reveals complicated quotidian relationships among women that traverse national boundaries. For example, Madame Donze and the mother-in-law are frequently filmed pacing the small spaces of their backyards; and side-by-side shots show the two women peeking from the curtains of upstairs’ windows, suggesting how they both stand watchful over their separate turfs. Madame Donze surveys her flower garden in anticipation of a community competition for the most beautiful garden in Saint-Quentin, and Zouina’s mother-in-law stands watch over her “Casbah.” Each woman aims to secure the sanctity of her home and homeland by monitoring Zouina’s movements. While the mother-in-law tattles to Ahmed as a means of ensuring Zouina does not traverse the frontier of the home, Madame Donze calls upon the police. The mother-in-law and Madame Donze’s common commands and curiosity, indoors and out, connect them (albeit in conflict) to destabilize a uniquely national reading of woman’s body.
<33> We find similar connections in terms of contradiction between Zouina and the female neighbors. Another series of shots moves back and forth between Madame Donze’s and Zouina’s homes as they each tune in attentively to the local radio station. They both delight in responding to game show questions and sharing the intimate love stories of public callers—listening as a form of trespass. The viewers see just how thin the wall is between the two home spaces (representative of the porous border between the migrant home and France) and their occupants, but the characters themselves are blind to their similarities. Zouina’s relationship to her other neighbor, Nicole, also raises the fineness of the wall between them. As revealed in the lipstick scenario, Nicole infringes on Zouina’s space and perceptions, fulfilling a common curiosity and sparking friendship. However, a difference in beliefs and differing positionalities limit the extent to which the two women may bond, this boundary of separation clearly defined as Zouina tosses the smashed cosmetics outside her window at the feet of Nicole. Zouina exists within a web of women and yet is isolated and alone.
<34> This is particularly evident when Zouina attempts to connect to another Algerian woman in Saint-Quentin. Zouina escapes her homebound existence on three occasions, secretly taking the children on adventures through town in search of an Algerian family. Each of the escapades occurs on a Sunday, just one explanation for the title Inch’Allah dimanche or God Willing Sunday. On these rare occasions, the mother-in-law and husband both leave to tend to the selection, purchase, and acquisition of a goat for the upcoming celebration of Eid al Fitr. As the mother-in-law and Ahmed leave the home in search of a sacrificial animal for the purpose of maintaining tradition, Zouina goes against tradition by leaving the home without permission—a trespass that, if successful, would enable the family to appropriately fête Eid al Fitr (by celebrating the feast with Muslim neighbors) and increase the expanse of the “Casbah” (through the establishment of community connections). Befittingly, the Bouira clan resides on the rue Alouette, announcing the allegory of Zouina’s adventure and thereby paralleling Zouina’s role with that of the sacrificial goat. On her first outing, Zouina looks skyward, taking in her surroundings with her bright skirt billowing in flight. She flees the boundaries of her home; the vivid pink of her skirt echoes the rich red of the lipstick that briefly liberated her from her domestic confinement. It is not until her third effort that Zouina at last finds the Bouira family, but the gruesome chorus of “Alouette” rings clear and resonates with the fate of the sacrificial goat: the bird is plucked and eaten; the goat’s throat slit for supper. Upon learning that Zouina has left the home without her husband’s permission, Madame Bouira, much like Zouina’s mother-in-law, feels obliged to uphold cultural codes of conduct and does so through her policing of Zouina. In a dramatic scene, she throws her out of the home, directing her to return to her husband. This incident reveals the difficulties, and at times impossibilities, of coalition along lines of common nation and gender due to woman’s symbolic relationship to the nation and her social adaptation to and enforcement of constructed gender norms.
<35> While Zouina’s penultimate transgression confirms the omnipresence of boundaries, this scene, as with the other moments of trespass, undermines any notion of fixed frontiers. Madame Bouira clips Zouina’s wings, closes the door in her face, and yet Zouina physically and verbally asserts her body’s ability and intent to move freely. Outside of the Bouira home, Zouina’s headscarf slips as she kicks, screams and cries, demanding reentry: “Please don’t abandon me.... Open the door,” she beckons in Arabic. She ultimately punches her fist through the front window, literally employing her body to break the public/private frontier that secludes and severs the migrant Maghrebi women. She then uses the headscarf to wrap her bloodied hand before getting on the bus—the public space from which Ahmed had sternly distanced her upon arrival at the new home. Zouina moves freely through the city, her body teetering back and forth beside the driver, her blood stained scarf a symbol of hard-fought freedom.
<36> In contrast to the film’s opening, Zouina’s speech concludes the film. She verbally confronts Madame Bouira and then continues to speak up in the subsequent scene. When she arrives in front of the family home, she gets off the bus, looks her husband in the eyes and in front of family and neighbors declares: “Demain, c’est moi, je les ammène à l’école” / “Tomorrow, I’m the one who will take [the children] to school.” One of Benguigui’s self-proclaimed objectives as a filmmaker is to break codes that serve to silence women in the home and homeland. Her own positionality as the daughter of Algerian immigrants has driven her narratives.[7] In Femmes d’Islam, she states that she became a filmmaker to unfold pages to a new story rather than turn ones assigned to her; at the age of 18, she chose to “changer le récit” (“change the story”) of her destiny. Zouina’s transition from silence to speech speaks to the semi-autobiographical nature of Inch’Allah dimanche, announcing how migrant women, especially of Benguigui’s generation, would grow to contest familial traditions.
<37> Zouina’s affirmation does not simply demonstrate her intent to traverse the private/public boundary, gaining freedom through transgression from the home and her husband and mother-in-law’s orders. More so, her intent to accompany her children to school names the transmutable nature of boundaries that are open to crossings. The film’s conclusion announces a shift from an era of temporary worker and familial migration to a period of transnational migration. In other words, the Maghrebi home became a permanent fixture of the French homeland. As we know, the invitation of “aller-retour” women during the family reunion era—intended to impede integration—ultimately resulted in migrant families putting down roots in the new homeland. In 1977, the French government instigated what was hoped to be the great return, but as Benguigui notes in her personalized introduction to Mémoires d’immigrés, this return was generally put off until the point of no return. In the words of her own mother: “L’année prochaine, peut-être” / “Next year, maybe” (9). By concluding with Zouina’s intent to take her children to school, the film alludes to how the long-term presence of Maghrebis would provoke a politics of assimilation. Schools have been foundational to Republicanism, teaching a shared history and theoretically constructing shared values (Bowen 11-12); we may easily liken schools to the French history book about Algeria that Ahmed destroyed, for “integration” is more about immigrant adaptation to French codes and customs than about “cultural cross-fertilization” (Dayan-Herzbrun 71). In the 1980s, many Maghrebis began to publicly contest assimilation in France, leading to the legislation that would prohibit headscarves in schools.[8]
Returning Home
<38> While the film’s conclusion elucidates once again how transnational migration has provoked contemporary politics of “the veil” in France, it also beckons us to rethink home and processes of community building. The circular structure of the film underscores the centrality of home for Zouina. As with the first two scenes, the finale marks her departure from and return to the familial space. The film leaves us wondering if the domestic abuse will continue to enter and exit the family home following this second “regroupement familial.” Though Zouina stands her ground outdoors, knowledge of domestic violence patterns, as well as an awareness of increasing violence in the Republic, leave the lingering thought that Ahmed may raise his hand and the mother-in-law her voice the minute the door closes. And yet while the film’s ambiguous ending continues to engage with questions of violence in the home and homeland, it also announces a redefinition of Zouina’s homemaker status. As Zouina declares her intent to border cross, she is a bit less bound by her duty to guard the traditions of the old homeland. She continues to act as an “aller-retour” agent, but one who has gained greater agency through her Bouira-bus-trip detour. Zouina “leaves home” to make a new home, a home more inhabitable, a “home sweet home” that better reflects the contingent pair prescribed in the Qur’an. This centrality of home in the film suggests that perhaps harmony exists in community, in the ties that bind people to other people, provided these ties are as negotiable as the private/public frontier is permeable.
<39> In reflecting on Zouina’s renegotiation of home, it becomes clear, especially in Sarkozy’s affirmation “‘la burqa n’est pas la bienvenue’” / “‘the burqa is not welcome’” (qtd. in Gabizon), that the French homeland denies many Muslim women the possibility of making themselves “at home.” As I have done throughout this analysis, I evoke “the veil” one last time, not to contribute to debates regarding whether or not women should practice hijab, but rather, to call for a renegotiation of women’s symbolic relationship to the nation. The policing of “the veil” denies Muslim women the right to fully assert themselves as members of the French national community. Despite seemingly altruistic aims of national inclusion and gender equity, national laws and debates regarding veiling regulate and reinforce Muslim women’s symbolic relationship to the nation. Reflecting on the theories of gender and nation that introduced this essay, we see how legislation like the 2010 “burqa ban,” specific to women, excludes women through processes of inclusion, reinforcing the paradigm “woman as nation, nation as woman.”
<40> The forced unveiling of Muslim women in France today, much like the unveiling of Muslim women in the colonial era, marks the continuation of a long imperialist tradition of policing the bodies of Muslim women for the purpose of framing the façade of the French nation.[9] What has changed is the physical location of Muslim women’s bodies from some place other than France to the Hexagon. Thus, in examining the politics of transnational migration, it is essential to “move beyond the borders of the nation” and consider the frontier of the body. Specifically, studying “gender between nations” offers us a means of challenging how contemporary politics of “the veil” use concepts of nation as well as gender to estrange Muslim women. It is by analyzing the intimate and relational nature of migration narratives, as does Benguigui, that we may effectively begin to move away from using the space of the public to criticize and control private practices. And in doing so, we would likely find the two spheres deeply implicated in one another, so much that they cannot be effectively parsed. After all, they are skin deep.
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