Abstract
In 2014, philosopher Chantal Jaquet coined the term transclasse to describe a person who is in the process of changing their social class. In opposition to the perhaps more widely-known expression ‘transfuge de classe’ – popularised by writers such as Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis – transclasse allows for a comprehension of the necessarily transient nature of social migration, encapsulating a vital element of flux. Importantly, Jaquet's term allows for an understanding that the transclasse is not a rigidly definable identity category, and instead reflects individual experiences of liminality. In this article, I demonstrate the continuing relevance of Jaquet's theorisations by analysing the ways in which Kaoutar Harchi's memoir Comme nous existons explores the unique position of double absence that she occupies as a transclasse who must also navigate her identity as the child of postcolonial immigrants in France, using Abdelmalek Sayad's work La double absence in dialogue with Jaquet and Harchi.
Introduction
In 2014, philosopher Chantal Jaquet coined the term transclasse; an alternative to the perhaps more popularly used ‘transfuge de classe’ the word transclasse stresses, according to Jaquet, the necessarily transitive nature of the concept. Transfuge – which evokes the pejorative association to the concept of ‘traitor’, a term used in a military context to refer to someone who has deserted or switched sides – invites an understanding of a person's trajectory as a completed change: one deserts their original team completely in order to join the new one. However, as Jaquet underlines, ‘le passage d’un état à un autre n’a rien d'une progression linéaire, il s’accompagne de flux et de reflux’ (2014: 139). The military metaphor is not adequate when describing a social trajectory and a changing social class, as this kind of metamorphosis is not one that ever truly reaches completion. As Jaquet puts it, ‘le transclasse se définit donc par une transidentité et obéit à une logique de l’entre-deux’ (136). Belonging to both classes, and yet, simultaneously, neither at the same time – too working-class for the upper classes, but marked enough by upper-class codes to alienate themselves just enough from their class of origin – the transclasse exists somewhere in the middle, being pushed and pulled between each end of the spectrum over the course of their life.
This state of flux is further compounded by Jaquet's exigence that we must not attempt to reduce the concept of the transclasse to something easily or rigidly definable: La trajectoire des transclasses reste inintelligible sans une pensée de la complexion qui ressaisit l’ensemble des déterminations communes et singulières qui se nouent dans un individu, à travers son existence vécue, ses rencontres, à la croisée de son histoire intime et de l’histoire collective (219–20)
In this article, I will attempt to demonstrate the ways in which a recent publication – Kaoutar Harchi's Comme nous existons – maintains and upholds these theorisations on the nature of the transclasse identity in flux, in relation to an issue for which few texts existed at the time of publication of Jaquet's work, namely, the experience of postcolonial immigration and its impact on immigrant families in France as well as on the individual herself as she navigates her own social migration. It seems important to think through Jaquet's ideas on transclasse identity with this text in particular, because Harchi herself has been vocally critical of the term transfuge, arguing that it is a ‘concept blanc’ (Andras and Harchi, 2023: para. 3) which ‘nie les rapports sociaux de race’ (para. 5). Indeed, Harchi has gone as far as to say that ‘les personnes racisées engagées dans un travail intellectuel ne doivent pas perdre leur temps à compléter les concepts blancs, ethnocentrés’ (para. 6) and instead should recognise that ‘ces concepts sont incomplets, donc inintéressants’ (para. 6). She is particularly wary of a kind of hierarchy being established between social class and race, urging that ‘la race n’est pas ce supplément à apporter à la classe’ (para. 6). Whilst it is true that, owing to its linguistic specificity, Chantal Jaquet's concept of the transclasse might seem as though it heralds social class as the central ‘facet’ of identity upon which to attach other, less important ‘facets’, in reality the opposite is true. The concept of the transclasse is refreshing specifically because it does not attempt to apply any kind of restriction or categorisation to its subjects, and that it recognises the multiplicity of experiences that can be associated with any kind of change in social class. It describes a kind of process of passage or transition, rather than the kind of person who experiences that process.
Indeed, social class is only taken as the theoretical focal point for the concept of the transclasse because it is borne out of Jaquet's study of the exceptions to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of reproduction, which is interested primarily in the ways that dominant systems are maintained through social practice, and sits itself firmly within the study of social class owing to Bourdieu's focus on class habitus. Despite its morphology, the transclasse concept assumes no hierarchy between the social forces and institutions that are enacted upon and experienced by the subject in question, for instance – and this is a crucially non-exhaustive selection – social class, race, immigration status, gender, and sexuality. Jaquet's concept recognises that we ought to be more aware of how our conceptual vocabulary might be better adapted to the multiplicity of writers now publishing récits which are being categorised together with earlier works by authors like Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon, and Édouard Louis. I believe that Kaoutar Harchi's text can be seen as an excellent example of the kind of distinctive and individual experience – marked by interweaving, complex sociological phenomena – that Jaquet evokes with her concept of the transclasse, especially when read in dialogue with other thinkers that can provide a further dimension to our understanding of liminal identities in France.
To this end, in order to support my argument, I make use of sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad's posthumous work La double absence. Des illusions de l'émigré aux souffrances de l'immigré. Evidently, some theorisation on the nature and experience of immigration will be necessary for this investigation, but Sayad's work is also key because of its understanding of and emphasis on immigration and emigration as two separate yet symbiotic forces – ‘les deux faces indissociables d'une même réalité’ (1999: 15) which push and pull on the emigrant-immigrant in the same way that a class of origin and a class of destination do to a transclasse. Jaquet describes the transclasse as being characterised by a ‘double appartenance’ (2014: 137); Sayad's work stresses the “double absence” of the emigrant-immigrant which transforms migration into an experience of suffering. Pierre Bourdieu, in the preface of the work, describes the emigrant-immigrant as ‘Ni citoyen, ni étranger, ni vraiment du côté du Même, ni totalement du côté de l’Autre, il se situe […] [à] la frontière de l’être et du non-être social’ (1999: 12). One can see clearly how this theorisation of the emigrant-immigrant complements Jaquet's understanding of the transclasse: both evoke the paradoxical experience of a double belonging that is also simultaneously a double absence, an experience which forces the transclasse or emigrant-immigrant into an in-between space which brings with it alienation and suffering. Sayad's work will bring important light to the issues specific to immigration in Harchi's text whilst allowing for a smooth and parallel understanding of the issues relating to social migration in her text, as they both take a similar shape. Significantly, too, as transclasse autobiography tends to blur the lines between theory and lived experience in their theorisations of their own identities, it is compelling to note that Sayad's book plays an important role in Harchi's life and narrative, as the discovery of his research constitutes a turning point in her life which leads her towards the future in which she becomes a writer. It seems fitting to engage with Sayad's thought, then, alongside a text which was so clearly influenced by it.
Family
Comme nous existons differs from many other récits written by transfuges de classe, because it is not, as they are, ‘contre-familiaux’ (Mechaï, 2021: para. 5). These récits usually reflect on the shame or guilt that a writer feels for having separated themselves from their families – sometimes quite violently, as with Édouard Louis in En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, or Annie Ernaux in Les armoires vides. Harchi's narrative marks an important break away from some of the more established tropes of transclasse writing where, often, the writing takes place ‘after’ or ‘against’ the family. The death of the parent is a common theme: Annie Ernaux's La place, Didier Eribon's Retour à Reims, and David Belliard's Et soudain tout s’éteint are all examples of transclasse narratives written in the wake of the parent's death. Despite the fact that these texts are marked by a retrospective sense of genuine love, which is written, undoubtedly, in the wake of grief for a close relative, they also emphasise the anteriority of their parent figure, a person about whom they can write objectively and sociologically, as well as emotionally, following their departure from the world. As Tara K. Menon writes in an article about Édouard Louis specifically, these texts display a ‘readiness to depict ugly behaviour, but to do so in a way that always provides context for it’ (2023: para. 34). The sociological perspectives of these writers outline the ways in which their parents were flawed people, while their narratives offer either contextualising or, in some cases, forgiving social backdrops and explanations for those flaws.
Whatever the significance behind a transclasse's decision to write ‘after’ their parents, it is fair to say that in doing so they narrate their childhoods retrospectively, with reference to the relationships that they had with their families, which, though unquestionably characterised by love in some sense, were also often marked by shame, embarrassment, anger, alienation, and an acute desire to get away, to flee, to leave behind. Despite Harchi's position as a sociologist, which might lead her to write about her family objectively and clinically (as one might write a sociological study), she goes in a different direction and endeavours to bring her parents with her into her text, indeed bookending the narrative with demonstrations of the familial and romantic love that she experiences and witnesses as their daughter. According to Harchi, this text was an opportunity for her to ‘inventer une autre manière de parler de [s]a famille et des familles fragilisées plus généralement’ (Mechaï, 2021: para. 5). Instead of being marked by anger or negative affect, the text is saturated with a palpable sense of connection and love.
The text creates a structure within which the reader follows along and learns, with Harchi, how to handle the immense weight of her parents’ sacrifice. In Harchi's own words, the ‘dimension sacrificielle’ of her parents’ story ‘a demandé réparation’ (Mechaï, 2021: para. 6): at the beginning of the text, we are introduced to the profundity of their selflessness without an understanding of how to reckon with it, much like Harchi herself as a young girl. We learn that Harchi's parents moved away from their home, Morocco, to secure a better future for their daughter; there lingers a concrete impression of fracture as we understand that Harchi's experiences of her identity, her French nationality, and her home, are predicated upon her parents losing those things for themselves. A ‘retour chez soi’ (Harchi, 2021, henceforth CNE: 70) for Harchi's parents is contrasted with Harchi's own frustrated ‘allez, ça suffit, je rentre chez moi’ (70): Morocco is home for her parents, but not for Harchi. Her departure from writing ‘after’ or ‘against’ the family becomes understandable as we realise that her position as a transclasse is literally only possible because her parents brought her to France to live in Strasbourg: it is not framed as a negative or a hardship that she grew up poor, but rather a gift, something for which she feels indebted. Importantly, the debt is not actually enforced by Harchi's parents in any authoritarian way – which might engender or reproduce a kind of colonial logic – but is felt by Harchi who witnesses the near-desperate wishes of her parents for her to succeed which leads them to exhaust themselves in order to support her: ‘Qui les contraignait à travailler tant, dans l’épuisement de ce qu’il leur restait de santé, si ce n’était moi ?’ (52). Harchi seems cognisant, from an early age, that the driving force behind her parents’ exhaustion is a desire for their daughter's success, and, by extension, that it is her existence in the world which has forced this life of overwork upon them.
Indeed, from the very outset of the text the anteriority of her parents’ happiness is narrated to us in a melancholic tone as a young Harchi watches the video of her parents’ wedding which took place in Morocco before she was born: ‘Cette fraicheur, cette beauté, avaient des airs lointains. Elles appartenaient à une autre époque, un autre lieu, une autre vie. C’était avant moi, je me dis, cela m’a précédée […] Mes parents, une fois, furent jeunes, insouciants’ (10). The passé simple here points to an unreachable and unfamiliar nostalgia, a place to which her parents cannot return. Harchi, in a later section of the text, even describes her parents’ love using the image of an ‘île enchantée’ (CNE: 72); we see here a further strengthening of the metaphor of distance that is extended throughout the text, not only temporal but also spatial, an island, surrounded on all sides by water – impenetrable. The fact that she is disconnected from it does not take away from its beauty, its enchantment, but she is conscious of the fact that she is not there. This evokes, in some sense, the former half of Sayad's emigrant-immigrant figure. He stresses that Toute étude des phénomènes migratoires qui négligent les conditions d'origine des émigrés se condamnent à nous donner du phénomène migratoire qu'une vue à la fois partielle et ethnocentrique: […] comme si son existence commençait au moment où il arrive en France, c'est l'immigrant – et lui seul – et non l’émigré qui est pris en considération (1999: 56)
Intent
At this stage, it seems important to point out briefly that, alongside this tender attention paid to the family within her writing, the specific narrative structure of Harchi's récit plays an important role in defining itself as a political text. We might say that there are two “Harchi” figures at play: the young narrated Harchi, and the older narrator Harchi. If we borrow the terminology of Jens Brockmeier's work on narrative, we can rephrase to say that we are presented with a Harchi in the ‘narrated event’ (2001: 251) – the young girl – and the adult Harchi in the ‘narrative event’ (251), the woman who is writing the text that we are reading. This much, of course, is true for any autobiographical text. However, the social transformation at the centre of Harchi's narrative sets up an important dynamic between Harchi as a young girl and Harchi as a writer; the latter is an adult with a formal education in sociology, whilst the former is a child who is thrown into the world with the weight and pressure of her parents’ sacrifice on her shoulders and no instructions on how to manage or understand it. Without wishing to pull apart Harchi's intimate narrative, it seems important at least to recall Brockmeier's point that ‘one's life, once shaped and sequentially ordered as a narrative event, appears as a kind of development towards a certain goal’ (251). In light of this idea, I want to focus on this question before moving into any further analysis: what does Kaoutar Harchi's text achieve?
Throughout the following sections we will trace the experiences that Harchi has as a child, during which time she is subjected to racist discrimination, and navigates scenarios which make her deeply uncomfortable, but which, significantly, she experiences as moments of personal humiliation rather than as examples of systemic racism in France. Harchi in the narrative event provides a kind of commentary on the narrated event, which was not available to her until, as briefly mentioned in the introduction, she reads Sayad's book about double absence and discovers sociology.
There appear to be reasons why Harchi collects together these memories and experiences and writes them into a narrative which ends with a reflection on the symbolic power of publication and literature. First and foremost, the text highlights injustices and illuminates the violence experienced by herself and her family in a way that condemns it and condemns those who enacted it upon them. It also, however, provides an opportunity for recognition with readers who might relate to the experiences explored within the text. In this sense, the narrative addresses a split audience and attempts to write persuasively to both with the same message: look at what we have had to experience, look at what we did not deserve, look at how we can reclaim this space and this identity in France that is rightfully ours. Importantly, the interaction between Harchi's narrative and narrated events reflects her posture as a transclasse, as someone whose violent experiences of marginality, periphery, and a kind of double belonging and absence have shaped an identity which seeks, primarily, justice that would manifest itself in the cessation of the confusing and humiliating experiences that someone like herself has to experience as a child in order to propel them towards something ‘else’.
For Harchi, as we shall see in the sections that follow, the rejection of the violence that she experiences as a child brings with it undesired consequences which demonstrate the unequal organisation of society in France, which constantly reminds the individual that ‘nos existences sont organisées selon un haut très haut et un bas très bas’ (Andras and Harchi, 2023: para. 10); her narrative can be seen as an attempt to criticise this inequality whilst also providing and creating a literary space within which those affected by this inequality can feel recognised and assured of their legitimacy. As Colin Davis writes in his work on trauma, which explores how, as readers, we can (and should) give agency to authors who engage with personal experiences in their writing, ‘events are […] presented as a function of the meanings we are invited to find in them’ (2017: 232). Harchi guides the reader through her narrative, constructed of milestones, defining moments, and a significant turning point – all presented through this careful interaction between the narrated and narrative event – to bring them to these conclusions that she designed for them, which are informed by the experiences which we will now move to consider.
Education
As we move away from the history of her parents and family and into the part of the narrative which opens out into Harchi's childhood, we accompany her as she comes to understand that school is the only available evident strategy that she can use to try to face up to the pressure of her parents’ sacrifice. Harchi describes how ‘Dès mon plus jeune âge, mes parents s’acharnèrent à me placer. Je dis placer. C’est l’image qui, instinctivement, me vient à l’esprit […] l’image du placement d’une enfant en institution’ (CNE, 23–4). However, as one can gather from the language here – sterile, scientific, and cold, an image of a parent placing their child somewhere as one might place an item on a shelf – the dream of Harchi's parents is not shared by Harchi herself. Indeed, her attendance at school is framed as a sacrifice that she herself must undergo if she wishes to try to render their sacrifice worthwhile; the educational institution is described as a source of symbolic violence and racism from the very outset, and yet is held in high esteem by her mother and father: ‘ce que disaient les enseignants n’était jamais perçu autrement que comme parole d’évangile’ (75). The use of the term évangile here is incisive when we understand that Harchi's parents deliberately labour to ensure that she gains a place at a private Catholic school that is a little further out of town. In an interview with France24, Harchi relays how, for her parents, ‘il était important de m’associer à un univers qu’ils ont considéré comme un univers favorable, qui est l’univers catholique, l’univers des écoles privées’ (France24, 2021). Indeed, Sayad describes how there is a ‘profonde homologie’ (1999: 348) between the way in which school and naturalisation function; importantly, he argues that les parents immigrés attendent, à la fois, de l’école […] ou, plus exactement, de la « métamorphose » que la scolarisation est censée opérer sur leurs enfants […] [qu’il] leur autorisent ce qu’ils ne peuvent s’autoriser eux-mêmes et ce que ne peut leur autoriser aucune autre instance […] pour s’enraciner eux-mêmes, pour se donner à leurs propres yeux et aux yeux des autres une autre légitimité’. (348)
This section of her text, then, is marked by its illustration that the entire foundation of her schooling experience was rooted in French racism and class discrimination which she detested at the time, but understands as an adult to be the consequence of her parents’ lack of legitimising power. She describes how her mother's choice to place her in a Catholic school was informed by neighbours whose opinions Hania valued due to their membership to one of these ‘univers favorables’ – white Frenchness – but accuses those neighbours of an eagerness to ‘m’éloigner de mon monde et des miens’ (28). This eagerness betrayed, according to Harchi, ‘leur haine’ (28); the fact that they would much rather have the young maghrébine girl educated away from their homes in the quartier populaire and towards the centre of Strasbourg exposes not a genuine impulse to protect her during a time when the French media was amplifying news about violent Arab men in their communities, but a racist impulse to keep her away from their neighbourhood. The narrative underlines young Harchi's frustration with the fact that she had to pursue school, which ripped her away from her home and subjected her to discrimination, because of her parents’ conviction that it was the best way for Harchi to earn her place in French society. It appears to implicitly accuse her parents of a kind of bad faith – suggesting that her mother ‘savait’ (28) that the neighbours were hateful, but followed their advice anyway – but the older narrating voice acknowledges that this mauvaise foi came only as a result of Hania and Mohamed's aspirations for their daughter, which carried with them their own hopes for legitimacy. Indeed, if her parents’ decision to have her schooled at a Catholic institution that did her so much harm reminds the reader of anything – and it would seem that Harchi deliberately tries to remind them as such – it is the imperative that she felt to contribute to their effort, to render her parents’ decisions and hard work justifiable, and to make these experiences “worth it”. Unfortunately, as Sayad underlines, ‘tout immigré de la colonie […] émigrant vers la métropole ne peut oublier qu’il est d’abord et avant tout un colonisé’ (1999: 136), and Harchi's descriptions of her experiences at school in Strasbourg do much to suggest that colonial values have been distilled into, perhaps even preserved in, the French education system evoked in Harchi's narrative. She is exposed to the paradox that, despite her parents’ venture to immigrate and vie for a superior future for their daughter in France, it is the French school – specifically the Catholic private school in Strasbourg – that exposes her the most to a colonial logic.
Harchi experiences exoticisation disguised as benevolence: a teacher gifts her a book that she dedicates to ‘ma petite arabe’ (CNE, 75). From this dedication alone, a palpable dramatic irony is provoked, as the reader and the older, narrating Harchi see the possessive ownership of these words, camouflaged as endearment, evade young Harchi's awareness. What is initially an intriguing opportunity for extra credit – giving a presentation of the book to some other students – gets spoiled when the teacher in question interrupts Harchi to ask her to ‘dire aux élèves quelques mots de [s]es origines, de [s]a culture, de [s]a religion, de prononcer, aussi, quelques mots en [s]a langue maternelle’ (78), Harchi realises that she has been used as a pedagogical tool, contrived to illuminate French students about Moroccan culture, against her will. Sarah Mazouz, in her essay on race, uses the term term ‘assignation racialisante’ (2020: 50) to describe this kind of discrimination; the teacher's behaviour ‘consiste à essentialiser une origine réelle ou supposée, à en radicaliser l’altérité et à la minoriser, c’est-à-dire à la soumettre à un rapport de pouvoir’ (50). As a result of the combination of her physical appearance and Arabic name, this teacher infers the details of Harchi's background incorrectly, essentialising her as a stand-in for Moroccan culture despite her French nationality and identity; worse still, she exploits her student as a kind of resource from which other, ‘more French’ students may profit and be educated. The school is seen to deliberately fracture Harchi's identity between French and not-French, educating her in French and prioritising French intellectual values, but insisting that her Moroccan heritage remain at the forefront in instances where it might be wielded as an asset for them.
This scene evokes another one of Sayad's reflections on immigration: one can recall Mame-Fatou Niang and Julien Suaudeau's definition of pseudo-universalism – ‘[pas] projet pour l’humanité, mais une idéologie de l’universel au service de la supériorité européenne’ (2022: 18) – in his contention that ‘l'ethnocentrisme est, d’abord, le fait des dominants, et fait partie de la culture des dominants (culture qui se veut universelle, absolue, la seule culture qui soit culture)’ (1999: 137). The emigrant-immigrant, or their children, must attempt to assimilate or naturalise themselves in order to ‘fit in’ with the dominant culture, but importantly, because this culture is indeed so dominant, there is no impulse, desire, or necessity to make the same gesture in return. When we learn about immigration it is always the case that emigrant-immigrants must learn, understand, and embody the culture of the country to which they are arriving – and indeed they are often shunned, socially and legally, if they do not succeed in doing so – but the country of immigration, or its people, are never held to the same standard concerning the cultures of the people they are welcoming. Sayad further states that ‘quand, par exception, ils se donnent les moyens de comprendre ces « autres », qui leur sont culturellement étrangers, les dominés, cela reste de l’ordre de l’intellection, de la réflexion théorique’ (138). We can certainly see the evidence of this claim in Harchi's experience: the teacher uses her (assumed) identity as a springboard for intellectual reflection instead of making an effort to educate herself on Moroccan and Arabic culture in any engaged and respectful way. Harchi's suffering is twofold: she is reminded of her ‘double absence’, as this experience recalls the distance between her and her parents’ île enchantée – she is not ‘Moroccan’ because they left Morocco to give her the opportunity for ‘Frenchness’ – but also foregrounds her difference from the ‘majorité blanche’ (CNE, 78) of her private Catholic school, decidedly less French, as far as they are concerned, because of the colour of her skin and her Arabic name.
In spite of this violence, however, Harchi is still a young girl who feels a tremendous debt towards her parents for their selflessness; she understands that they pay her way through school ‘sans plainte ni regret’ (30), yet still feels a sense of obligation in the face of their ‘lutte menée en [s]on nom’ (30). We see how uncomfortably she sits with the fact that school continues to be ‘le grand malheur de [s]a vie’ (50) and yet ‘le grand bonheur de celle de Hania et de Mohamed’ (50), putting into distinct contrast her wishes for herself and the wishes that her parents have for her. The pressure on young Harchi's shoulders to succeed and to ‘[donner] sens à leur sacrifice’ (96) brings with it her own kind of sacrifice, giving up her desires to satisfy theirs, finding no other strategy fit enough to stand up to the pressure of the responsibility inherited by the postcolonial child: thus, she perseveres with school.
Evidently, though, as readers of a text written by a novelist and professor of sociology, we are conscious of the fact that a distinct shift, or turning point, must have taken place in Harchi's experience of school as a teenager which brought her closer to this narrative that she writes as an adult. The critical moment comes when she finds Abdelmalek Sayad's book whilst looking in the municipal library. The shape of the narrative thus far, which has essentially been a story of a young girl who wishes to protect and please her parents, has been designed to bring us to this climax point where a teenage Harchi finds this text which reframes her understanding of her family's experience – not in the sense that her understanding is changed or altered, but in the sense that it is illuminated and exemplified – in a way that she has never encountered before. This kind of ‘lightbulb moment’ is common among transclasse récits; a moment comes when something or someone enlightens the writer to the sociological phenomena that have been affecting their lives since they were born but, up until this point, of which they only had experiential evidence. Harchi describes being ‘prise’ (92) by the argumentation and ideas of Sayad which soothe the violence of her experiences by demonstrating that the discrimination she experiences is systemic and that her experiences are shared, collective. She discovers the discipline of sociology, and from this moment on Harchi states that her life ‘avait pris une direction singulière’ (94): school no longer exists as a torturous ordeal but rather a path towards sociology, a path away from the violence that she has experienced for years as a child.
Naturally, though, the path towards university and away from school is also necessarily the path away from her parents. Harchi narrates that towards the end of her time at the lycée she was ‘habitée […] par ce sentiment qu’une nouvelle vie commençant, c’est une ancienne vie qui irait en s’achevant’ (94) and that this notion simultaneously ‘[la] réjouissait et […] [l]’attristait’ (94). These two opposing feelings demonstrate how Harchi continues to exist between two seemingly mutually exclusive spaces, at first in a metaphorical sense – frequenting the ‘autre monde’ (96) which slowly but surely separates her from the fabric of her home – but then later in a literal sense as she leaves Strasbourg to study for her doctorate in Paris. In a scene which reflects on the violence of having had to take the bus away from the family home to school as a child – ‘je suis montée dans ce bus […] [pour] découvrir l’existence d’autres espaces. Des espaces où Hania et Mohamed n’étaient pas’ (31) – Harchi gets onto the bus as an adult and it ‘redémarra alors, s’éloigna’ (121). Harchi's use of public transport is exceedingly effective in highlighting the persistent sense of leaving, moving away, coming back – the necessity of travelling in and out of socially demarcated worlds – that marks the life of a transclasse. Harchi's referral to different numbered buses masterfully integrates – in the way that Jaquet and Sayad's theories fuse, taking the same shape – the ways in which her identity as the child of immigrant parents affects her entry into these worlds as well as her class. The number 38 bus marks her entry into the univers favorable of the symbolically violent Catholic school and her departure from the Moroccan family home; the number 42 bus, which her parents take to work, is one that Harchi pines after as a child, hoping and wishing that she could join them on this commute instead of taking the school bus, where she is subjected to racial discrimination from the very outset (a group of white schoolgirls complain that her hair smells like oil). The 54 bus out of Strasbourg, however, emblematises a more optimistic departure – a move which will help Harchi to define herself, to follow her own desires which are founded on a wish to bring representation to people like herself and her family – but it is a departure, nonetheless. We see, again, the guilt that Harchi felt as a child rear its ugly head in the face of her parents’ sacrifice: il ne me suffisait plus d’être la gentille fille, devenue la bonne élève puis l’étudiante studieuse pour donner sens au sacrifice de Hania et de Mohamed. Il faillait davantage, maintenant. C’est là, n’est-ce pas, le propre du sacrifice. (124)
Harchi's sense of obligation, though, is not in response to any kind of balance that is overdue, but rather an anxious demand to make sure that the original sacrifice was not made fruitlessly, and, importantly, that she is not perceived to have taken their sacrifice in vain. This self-imposed exigence finds its climax in the moment of her departure for Paris, where, as discussed, Harchi's guilt at leaving to pursue her own projects is compounded by her desire not to be separate from home again, even by choice: Je dus, pour assumer le fait de partir, pour parvenir à dire je pars, pour partir réellement, inscrire mon départ dans un projet plus vaste, plus grand que moi, qui serait aussi le projet de Hania et de Mohamed, comme si, moi partant, ils partaient avec moi. (CNE: 125)
Literature
Harchi's sense of obligation begins to take on a more optimistic potential when reframed under the possibilities of a narrative that might fulfil the self-prescribed duty to her parents whilst also fulfilling her own personal goals to become a writer. Indeed, we know from an extratextual standpoint that Harchi published a number of fictional texts before the publication of Comme nous existons. The power of publication soothes some of the concerns that she has about the ever-persisting obligation she feels towards her parents. On the threshold of leaving them behind – if not metaphorically, then certainly physically and geographically – necessity continues to bear down on her: ‘il faut leur donner, leur rendre, les rembourser, laisser quelque chose à ma place, compenser, il faut me replacer. Il faut justifier’ (124). The repeated modal verb faut is evocative of the imperative to do something; this list of infinitives is a reminder of the constant pressure that Harchi feels to give back to her parents in some way. In fact, the imperatives used here are all distinctly financial in nature – to give, reimburse, to compensate; if postcolonial debt and sacrifice can never be paid back, as we have discussed, Harchi can at least aim to reimburse the money that her parents worked so hard to earn. And so, despite the fact that she acknowledges that writing for writing's sake ‘n’était pas de l’argent’ (125), Harchi sees writing for publication as a different thing altogether: it would create ‘un objet, un livre, que nous pouvions toucher de nos mains. Un objet réel, tangible, une merchandise déterminée par un prix fixe’ (125). Writing could be financially productive and provide a sense of relief to Harchi's obligation: money is tactile, real, and is something that she can give back to her parents to prove that their choice to move to France was the right one.
The symbolic reverberations of Harchi's decision to publish a text in France cannot be omitted here either. As Harchi herself puts it. La France a une forte tradition nominaliste. Il suffirait de taire, de ne pas nommer, pour que les choses cessent d’exister […] je suis doublement portée à croire – voire portée à plaider – pour l’acte de nomination, d’énonciation […] Si nous ne nommons pas, si nous ne définissons pas, si nous n’attribuons pas aux mécanismes du pouvoir la vérité qui est la sienne, nous contribuons au silence et à l’ensevelissement du réel. (Harchi and Kaouès, 2021: 126)
Having considered these ideas, at this juncture it is also helpful to make reference to the extensive work that Harchi herself has written on the legitimacy accorded to writers through literary production, and indeed the struggle to obtain this legitimacy that writers – specifically those which are ‘cordoned off’ into categories like francophone or banlieue – often experience in attempting to publish in France. In 2018, Harchi wrote the following: Some would say that a writer is someone who writes regularly. Others might say that a writer is someone whose work is published by a major publishing house. Yet others would define a writer as someone whose work is read widely. These few responses reveal the social, constructed and relational nature of literary identity and identification, and show that to be a writer means, first and foremost, being identified as such by a social community. (2018: 44)
However, once again, the flexibility of Jaquet's concept and the ways in which Harchi's text evokes this flexibility propose a solution to the apparent bind that Harchi describes. Any writer who comes from a marginalised position, in this situation, cannot ‘win’: they can either give into the system or attempt to criticise it in a way that only reinforces its dominance. I would suggest, though, that the reinforcement of these ‘groups’ into which writers have been historically categorised should indeed be co-opted as the practice of a kind of covert legitimation, and I believe that Harchi does this with her text specifically in her posture as a transclasse. Borrowing from the terminology of sociolinguistics, where ‘covert prestige’ is taken to mean the deliberate use of non-standard forms specifically because of their indexation of belonging to a community of speakers who take pride in their non-standard linguistic practice (Labov, 2006[1966]; Trudgill, 1972), I would argue that Harchi's text demonstrates an example of a kind of covert legitimacy that founds itself upon appropriating the ‘overt’ legitimacy of the French literary field within which it is published, and refashioning it to unsettle the dominance of the French literary field as it exists now. We can see this movement towards a new definition of legitimacy in other transclasse texts, such as Nesrine Slaoui's aptly named Illégitimes published in 2021. Kaoutar Harchi's identity as a transclasse allows her to interrogate this sense of legitimacy from multiple vantage points – she explores questions of race, immigration status, gender, class, and nationality in her text – and indeed she seems to conclude that the publication of her text provides ample legitimation for her and her parents based upon the reflections that we have considered here.
Conclusion
Harchi's works have been described as ‘ni simplement descriptifs, ni seulement romancés, ni totalement sociologiques’, where ‘ils oscillent entre ces trois champs d’écriture’ (Mechaï, 2021: para. 4). Such a description encapsulates, in my view, the way in which Harchi's writing provides another example to support Jaquet's claim that each transclasse finds a suitable strategy to manage and interrogate their oscillating, fluid, and flexible identities. Comme nous existons navigates an identity wrought through with the ‘ethos de la distance’ (Jaquet, 2014: 140) that Jaquet describes in her work; at every stage in the life narrated in her récit, Harchi demonstrates the ways in which she is pulled between different social worlds, perceived identities, and possible futures. Importantly, her text does so in ways which are unique and distinct from her own experiences. The circular movement of the work – a written memoir about the steps in Harchi's life which made her a writer, cut through with the reciprocal perspectives of Harchi as a child and as an adult – provides an excellent framework to relay the specificity of her life to the reader. It provides a sense of tumult which recalls the uncomfortable experience of being in-between worlds, and an attempt to make the transition between worlds less dizzying – no sooner are we at the end of the text than we realise that we are right back where we started, at a description of the wedding video, in the domain of the family home despite all of the development that Harchi has made as a character in her own narrative since the first page of the book. The culmination of this circular movement reminds us of what is most important to our narrator: her parents. The text is framed like a gift to Hania and Mohamed; though she may never be able to repay the postcolonial debt that their sacrifice compels her to owe, she gives them legitimacy in as many ways as she can by writing and publishing this narrative. Distance and transience, or ‘double absence’, have always marked and will always mark their lives, for Hania and Mohamed because of their double identities as emigrant-immigrants, and for Harchi because she inherits this double absence and experiences its multiplication as she enters new social worlds. This double absence is somewhat soothed, though, by Harchi's narrative which seeks to offer validation to the people whom she believes deserve it the most. Abdelmalek Sayad contended that the children of immigrants provide their parents the legitimacy to ‘exister pleinement’ (1999: 348), to have the chance to feel at home, to have their place in the world, to occupy a space which is theirs. Harchi's narrative creates a space for her family to occupy their own place in France, regardless of their experiences of transience or double absence: it simply offers a space for their story to exist.
Footnotes
Author biography
Maddison Sumner is a PhD candidate in the French Section of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focuses on the figure of the transfuge de classe or transclasse in contemporary French autobiography. Having grown up and gone to school in Scunthorpe and its surrounding areas, the subject of this research is of both academic and personal significance to her, and she welcomes anyone who would like to discuss the project, social migration, or general outreach, to contact her should they wish.