Azouz Begag: an exemplary path
In June 2005, 48-year-old Azouz Begag was appointed Minister for Equal Opportunities in Dominique de Villepin’s cabinet. A longtime defender of “equal opportunities”, Azouz Begag has personally demonstrated the concept’s viability. This sociologist and writer of Algerian immigrant origin is now a politician who intends to offer the same opportunities to all French citizens - regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, place of residence or life style.
Once upon a time... a kid from a shanty town outside of Lyon, in eastern France, the son of Algerian immigrants, became a sociologist and a best-selling author: the “French dream”, in other words. This is the plot of a novel written by Azouz Begag, Le Gone du Chaâba, and published in 1986 (1).
Azouz Begag has a PhD in Economy, is a teacher and sociologist at Ecole Centrale and the Maison des Sciences Sociales et Humaines (Department of Social and Human Sciences) of Lyon, and heads urban social/economic research at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research). In his novel, he describes the first ten years in the life of a child of Algerian immigrants who arrived in France in 1949: an Arab father, a mother from Kabylia, seven siblings, and a wooden shack for a house on the banks of the Rhône, next to other shantytowns. Such was the fate shared by the many families who immigrated to France in the hopes of finding work. Next came the move to an apartment block in the Cité de la Duchère, in the suburbs of Lyon - the social ladder (or “elevator” has it’s known in France) was still functioning at the time - followed by an education in French schools: the year is 1968, the kid is barely nine years old and already he’s top of his class, much to the joy of his parents (who were never to learn the language of the country that once colonized them).
The novelist-cum-sociologist vividly narrates, with humor, tenderness and tolerance, how the children of these villagers from El-Ouricia, in Algeria, become the “French instructors” of their parents, helping them with everything from social security to retirement benefits, filling out the paperwork for the doctor, etc. “What an opportunity and an extraordinary benefit for all those who come from the other side - from beyond the périph (ring road), the sea or the social barrier - to be able to cross over and find themselves in someone else’s home - provided they know where they come from and never renounce their origins”. As you may have guessed, the Gône du Chaâba (a play on words meaning the “lad of the shanty town”) is the author himself, Azouz Begag, appointed Minister for Equal Opportunities in the government of Dominique de Villepin in June 2005. Quite an achievement!
But beyond each individual’s personal journey, the focus is on embracing all the “children” of the French Republic, whether or not the children of immigrants, and giving everybody the opportunity to become “integrated”. Azouz Begag himself dislikes the term “integration”. While he openly rejoices at having achieved so much, he feels that he was “integrated” all along the way: in his family first, then in the shantytown, the Cité, the French secular state school system, at university, and so forth - hence his preference for the term “promotion of equal opportunities” rather than “integration”.
His appointment as Minister for Equal Opportunities is thus hardly a coincidence - all the more since immigration issues and the problems facing second and even third-generation children are the themes that the “little Arab boy”, the kid from the shantytown, the sociologist/professor/writer and member of France’s Economic and Social Council feels most strongly about.
In fact, in 2004, these were the very issues he was asked to report on by Dominique de Villepin, then Minister of the Interior. On 14 December 2004, the year before the riots that shook France’s suburbs, Azouz Begag submitted a report unequivocally named “An Open French Republic” in which he provided an overall negative assessment of the integration policies carried out in France over the past twenty years, setting forth pragmatic solutions for putting ethnic diversity back on the agenda and re-launching the “promotion of equal opportunities”.
Social diversity, of course, is something Azouz Begag is very familiar with, having experienced it throughout his life and career. He has been a spokesperson for this concept in his essays, novels, lectures and observations as a political commentator, and actually embodied it when he became the first French person of North African origin to hold a teaching position in the United States, as a Visiting Professor at New York’s Cornell University - this at a time when the notion of “positive discrimination” (affirmative action) commonly practiced in North America had not yet become a heated topic of debate and dissent in the inner sanctums of France’s Council of Ministers and National Assembly.
Regardless of the expression, whether “integration” or “promotion of equal opportunities”, French society has placed high hopes in the new Minister’s initiatives for fixing the “social elevator” (which has gotten a bit rusty over the past few years) - a population whose ranks are swelled by five million French men and women of foreign origin yearning to believe in the French Republic’s motto of Freedom, Equality, Fraternity.
Mélina Gazsi
(1) Selected bibliography (youth and adult):
Béni ou le Paradis privé, Le Seuil, Coll. "Virgule", 1989.
Les Voleurs d’écriture, Le Seuil, Coll. ’Petit Point’, 1990.
La Force du berger, La Joie de Lire. (Ill. de Catherine Louis), 1991.
Jordi et le rayon perdu : énergie (Ill. de Allan Drummond), La Joie de Lire, 1992.
L’Ilet aux vents, Le Seuil, Coll. ’Virgule’, 1992.
Les Tireurs d’étoiles, Le Seuil, Coll. ’Petits Points’, 1993.
Le Temps des villages. (Ill. de Catherine Louis), La Joie de Lire, 1993.
Une semaine de vacances à Cap maudit, Le Seuil. Coll. ’Petits Points’, 1993.
Mona ou le bateau-livre, Chardon Bleu, 1994.
Les Chiens aussi, Le Seuil, Coll. ’Virgule’, 1995.
Quand on est mort, c’est pour toute la vie, Gallimard, 1995.
Ma maman est devenue une étoile (Ill. de C. Louis), La Joie de Lire, 1996.
Zenzela, Éditions du Seuil, 1997.
Dis Oualla, Fayard, Collection "Libres", 1997.
Tranches de vie, Kleth Verlag, Stuttgart, 1998.
Un train pour chez nous, ill. de Catherine Louis, Thierry Magnier, 2001.
Le théorème de Mamadou, Le Seuil, 2002.
Les Dérouilleurs, Français de banlieue. Mille et une nuits, 2002.
Le marteau pique cœur, Le Seuil, 2004.