Narrating Cultural Displacement and (Dis)Locating Beur Identity in Fouad Laroui’s De Quel Amour Blessé

Abstract

In this article, I analyse the prominent Moroccan-French author, Fouad Laroui’s novella De quel amour blessé (What Wounded Love, 1998) which narrates a story of an intercultural love affair in the diaspora, shaped in-between France and Morocco. This tragicomedy romance story, maps migrants’ cultural displacement and identity (re)construction. I look into how Maghrebian migrants’ French-born youths, known as the Beur generation, plot transcendent cultural and national routes of belonging. Through the protagonist’s case, the son of Moroccan migrants, the novella unfolds how postcolonial Maghrebian migration in France has engendered an intercultural and relational identity that belongs to different cultural subjectivities. It suggests a deconstruction of the idea that migrants’ identity are inextricably linked to a fixed culture, time and place, and instead, stresses identity as a process of becoming. Laroui’s narrative is a productive literary form of self-representation, of contesting homeland roots, (re)deconstructing identity and mapping intercultural attachments of belongings.