QUESTIONNEMENT IDENTITAIRE, LANGUE(S) ET ÉCRITURE CHEZ DES ÉCRIVAIN-E-S MAGHRÉBIN-E-S D’EXPRESSION FRANÇAISE ET ARABE

Azza Yasmine Benyoussef: Questionnement Identitaire, Langue(S) Et Écriture Chez Des Écrivain-E-S Maghrébin-E-S D’expression Française Et Arabe(Under the direction of Hassan Melehy)Identity and language are the two pivotal themes around which my project revolves. I show how the very fact of writing in French constitutes, for Maghrebian authors of French expression, one of the most recurrent and painful variations of the identity quest. In my research, I demonstrate that questions about identity arise in a more sustained way among postcolonial or immigrant writers due, among other things, to the geographical and linguistic displacement they have experienced. I argue that the notion of identity becomes operational to apprehend this space of "in-between", between two countries, two continents, two cultures, two languages in which their writing evolves. I analyze the linguistic, narrative, and poetic mechanisms that each author implements in order to make her/his mother tongue(s) resonate, revealing the complex, though intimate, relationship that the Francophone writers have with their mother tongue (Spoken Arabic, Berber) as well as with the French language. Works in classical Arabic allow me to go beyond the duality between the language of the former colonized and the former colonizing power, by addressing, on the one hand, the diglossia of the Arabic language and by studying, on the other hand, the linguistic and narrative specificities of the identity quest in Ahlem Mosteghanemi and Leila Abuzeid’s works that engage with Gender Studies and Feminism in the Arab-Muslim world.