“Hath not an Arab eyes?”: Paul Smail and the Conformist Inferno

On October 26^th, 1998, the audience at New York University’s Maison Française was treated to a rare spectacle: Tahar Ben Jelloun reading extracts from Paul Smaïl’s novels. ¹ It was an especially appropriate moment on a number of levels. First, Ben Jelloun is a capable actor who knows how to bring a text to life. Second, this sort of rendition is probably what Paul Smaïl himself would have wanted, for he well understands the importance of theatricality in the construction of identity today, at this millennial moment in the république black blanc beur. Smaïl’s oeuvre negotiates his identity as a French citizen of Moroccan ancestry in French society of the 1990s. (The term “citizen” is especially appropriate; his grandfather died fighting for France in World War I; his father was a lifetime employee of the SNCF.) In the following essay, I would like to trace Smaïl’s preoccupation through the autobiographical novels that he has written so far, with a view to exploring the construction of identity as represented in French fiction at the end of the twentieth century. I use the term “French” advisedly, since part of my point is that Paul Smaïl, like several other writers often placed under the beur label, is in fact French, not Arab–historic connections to the Middle East and North Africa notwithstanding.