The Arab novel: aesthetic and ideological issues

The "beur" novel is a literary genre that forms part of immigration literature-also known as "beure" literature-which highlights the lives of the children of immigrants, who experience an identity and cultural crisis in their host countries; their inner conflict and existential unease serve as the raw material for Beur literature. Beurs turn their lives-torn between their own identity and that of the host countries where they grew up- into fiction in which they explore their own tribulations as well as those of their parents, who are unable to fully integrate into these so-called host countries-whose culture is entirely different from that of their countries of origin. This intensifies and exacerbates their feelings of estrangement, alienation, and otherness; it is what drives these Beurs to forge their own identity-particularly a linguistic one-as a reaction to the hardships they endure in the suburbs. It is, in fact, a quest for identity within a Western society, particularly for the children of immigrants from Maghreb countries.