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Introduction

Leïla Sebbar was bom in Algeria in 1941 in Aflou, a remote village on the High Plateaux, and grew up during the Algerian War of Independence in a rural area near Tlemcen where her parents – a French mother and Algerian father – were schoolteachers, like the parents of Julien Desrosiers in her novel, Sherazade. There are clearly autobiographical echoes of the author's family in the story told by one of the colleagues of Julien's father (cf. pp. 17–19).

Besides many novels and short stories, Sebbar also wrote for the newspaper Sans Frontière, which caters for the Third World immigrant population of France, and which also features in this work.

Sherazade is set in Paris, where the author has lived for the past twenty years, but it is not the conventional Paris known to tourists, and the English reader may have difficulty recognizing the topography where her protagonists act out their marginalized or clandestine existence: the squats and flea markets, the working-class districts of Barbès, Jaurès, Crimée, around the Metro stations and boulevards of those names, where many immigrant families have congregated; the outer suburbs of Vanves and Le Kremlin-Bicêtre to the south and Bobigny to the north-west – with their bleak high-rise housing estates – and the Fleury-Mérogis Prison to the south of the capital . . . However, if tourists are not familiar with the Horloge (Clocktower) area in the Halles – the site of the old food markets -where Julien lives, they will easily recognize the Pompidou Centre for Art and Culture (Beaubourg) and the Forum des Halles with its many fashion boutiques, the haunt of Sherazade, Zouzou and France.

Except for Julien Desrosiers, the cast consists of drop-outs, delinquents, drug-addicts, runaways, revolutionaries, and the porn-merchants and yuppies who attempt to exploit them and usually end by being ripped off in their turn. The former are all children of the immigrant proletariat: from Guadaloupe and Martinique, from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Poland – mechanics, car-assembly workers for Renault or Citroën, dustmen, mineworkers. These youngsters – their ages range from seventeen to twenty-seven – are part of the youthful sub-culture of Paris: independent, unassimilated, unscrupulous, often intelligent, sometimes violent, very much as Julien's film-director friend envisages the heroine of his projected film: '... a gang-leader, rebel, poet, unruly, adept with a knife, expert at karate, fearless, a fugitive from ZUPs, hanging around housing estates, basements, underground carparks, wandering the streets, as illusive and frightening as a war-leader . . .' It could be London, New York, any large city with an ethnic mix and rootless, alienated youth. But these are, for the most part, Beurs, the untranslatable name given to the second generàtion North Africans, bom or growing up in France, with their own independent radio station, Radio Beurs, and catered for by the newspaper Sans Frontière.

There are no gratuitous descriptions, but Leïla Sebbar catches their individual voices, especially in the long unpunctuated passages in Flaubertian style indirect libre, the spoken or unspoken 'stream of consciousness' which she transcribes with faultless accuracy and through which her characters reveal the essentials of their backgrounds and experiences.

The eponymous heroine shares many of the characteristics of her streetwise companions and squat-mates; she is wayward, insolent, impulsive, exploitative, fearless and totally amoral. She works peripatetically in fashion boutiques in the Halles district, but supplies her basic needs by shoplifting. She takes part in burglaries and armed hold-ups. Yet she seems to retain a certain intransigent innocence, purity even. She is never tempted by drugs nor the easy opportunities of casual prostitution, like her compatriot Djamila. But what distinguishes her above all is the poetry she writes in secret, showing to no one, and her passion for reading, especially about her native Algeria, which she left as a child and yearns to revisit. Before running away from home she spent all her leisure in the local municipal library, where the friendly librarian ordered shelvesful of books by Algerian writers. It is in the library of the Pompidou Centre at Beaubourg, where she continues her reading, that she attracts the attention of Julien, himself a dedicated Arabist. He introduces Shérazade to more works about Algeria and also Orientalist paintings, of which he is a collector. In the final resort it is the strange attraction of Matisse's Odalisque in Red Trousers which decides her to leave Julien and her mates and set out for Algeria.

Many of the characters in this work are obsessive: Krim, with his passion for motorbikes (particularly the powerful Japanese models which his English counterparts affectionately call 'Yammies' and 'Kwakkers'); Pierrot, the hardline militant, with his revolutionary fervour; Sherazade, fascinated by everything Algerian; Julien, with his twin passions for Orientalist paintings and the cinema. It is no gratuitous detail that one of Julien's favourite films is Jean-Luc Godard's illusive, unclassifiable Pierrot le fou, made in 1965, from the novel Obsession by Lionel White, two years after Godard had actually appeared himself in Gaspard-Huit's film Shéhérazade! The fragmented narrative with its sense of immediacy, the early Parisian scenes, the cinéma vérité technique, some of the episodes and the frequent references to paintings in Godard's Pierrot le fou (Renoir, Velasquez) are mirrored in Sebbar's novel. In the film, a respectable young writer, living a sheltered uneventful life, is fascinated by an enigmatic girl and flees with her from Paris. Godard's Pierrot is paralleled by the two men in love with Shérazade: the writer and scholar Julien, and the revolutionary Pierrot. Godard's Pierrot amuses himself driving his car into the sea, and finally kills himself by tying dynamite round his head, lighting the fuse and blowing his head off; Sebbar's Pierrot takes up Shérazade's challenge to drive the car into the Loire. Unbeknown to her it is loaded with smuggled arms. He crashes it and dies in the explosion. Shérazade is unharmed and disappears before the police arrive on the scene. Sebbar takes up her story in Les Carnets de Shérazade (Shérazade's Notebooks, 1985) and La Fou de Shérazade, 1990. Neither is as yet translated into English.

Dorothy S. Blair