Popular term denoting a young person brought up in France by North African immigrant parents. A modified inversion of Arabe, the word was first adopted by youths of immigrant origin in working-class areas of Paris. It gained general currency in France during the 1980s, when large numbers of children born to North African immigrants, particularly Algerians, began reaching adulthood. A growing number of creative writers have emerged from among their ranks. These include Mehdi Charef, Azouz Begag, Ahmed Kalouaz, Farida Belghoul, and Arriz Tamza. In Belgium, authors of North African descent such as Leïla Houari may also be classed as Beurs, for their experiences closely parallel those of the immigrant community in France.
The writings produced by Beur writers resemble in some ways those of francophone writers in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Most share a preoccupation with questions of personal and cultural identity, conditioned by the tensions between Arab-Islamic traditions on the one hand and secular French influences on the other. Even during colonial times, however, Europeans never constituted more than a minority of the population in the Maghreb, where Arabs and Berbers remained in the majority, albeit alongside powerful francophone influences. By contrast, the formative experiences of the Beurs have been those of a post-colonial ethnic minority situated in the margins of French society.
Beur poets and theatre groups became active during the mid-1970s, but it was not until the early 1980s that the first commercially published works by Beur authors appeared in print. The great majority of those published to date are works of narrative prose. Typically, they are heavily autobiographical. The material deprivations suffered by the immigrant community are often glossed over in a humorous way, and a colloquial tone in the mode of narration frequently serves to emphasize the familiarity of these authors with French society and culture at a grass-roots level, thereby undermining stereotyped ideas of ethnic minorities as fundamentally alien to the majority of the population.
[Alec Hargreaves]
