Book Review: Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faiza Guene
Growing Up Immigrant in the Paris Projects
Kif-kif in Arabic means same old, same old or “same shit, different day” as Doria, the novel’s teenage heroine puts it. Every new day just seems to bring some new obstacle. Though only a few metro stops away, the shiny world that is Paris seems light years away from her housing project in the suburbs.
Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow: The People in Doria’s Life
Doria’s world is small: There’s her mother Yasmina, forced to make a living as a cleaner in a motel because of her illiteracy. Her father, simply called “the Beard,” left them recently and still looms like shadow in the background. Doria’s friend Hamoudi is a lost but likable small-time dealer and crook who treats her like an adult.
Then there’s Madame Burlaud, the school-appointed aging psychologist who Doria likes despite her idiosyncrasies. Aunt Zohra is her mother’s cheerful best friend who shares her husband with his second wife “back home.” Nabil, her mother’s friend’s son, turns from an acne-plagued nuisance who helps with her homework into a friend and more.
Immigrant Life in the Paris Projects
Doria brings her world closer through astute observations of school and home life and her truthful descriptions of project characters and a host of social workers. Frequent references to popular TV shows (and books and movies) at the time like Little House on the Prairie, Mac Gyver (her hero), The Price is Right and The Young and the Restless (her mother’s favorite) and Titanic and Zorro transport the reader right back to the ‘90s.
Doria is protective of her mother and values her for who she is, admiring that she puts her heart and soul even in the most menial of tasks: “Anyway, without Mom, M. Winner’s motel’s heading straight for bankruptcy. She’s really got a way with making beds, kind of gentle but strong at the same time” (p. 71).
The Immigrant Experience - Bridging Two Worlds
This quote also sums up the novel: an entertaining and quick read, it is also gentle yet strong. Unlike Doria’s self-presentation to the outside world (shut off, not quite there, slow), she is smart, witty, observant and possesses an insight of the world that goes beyond her years. With her thrift shop clothes and oiled hair, she is like an unpolished diamond who’s worth she and the those around her have yet to discover.
Though it still hurts Doria that her father left – as it would any abandoned daughter – she has no illusions about her father’s reason: To produce the desired son with a woman much younger than her mother somewhere in the Moroccan countryside. Without sentimentality, she’s worked out her father’s mental makeup as a traditional patriarch with a drinking habit, whose exit freed her and her mother from his many restrictions.
The Main Themes of Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow
Poverty, growing up pains, the microcosm of the immigrant world and other themes are presented matter-of-factly and without a trace of self pity. Though Doria never loses sight of the funny side of events, her accounts are always moving. She shows that project life is not all about violence and religious tension but multiculturalism, taking part in each other’s lives and helping each other out.
In the end, there’s reason for hope: Doria has joined a vocational school, her mother has taken part in a training program and found a new job, and Hamoudi is about to get married. There might even be a welfare-sponsored trip to the seaside on the horizon that would mean leaving the projects behind for a while instead of forever watching others do so. Doria’s kif-kif changes to the French kiffer (to be crazy about something) to her new motto – kiffe kiffe tomorrow.
About Faiza Guene
First published in France in 2004 when the author was just 19 years old, Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (Harcourt, 2006) is Faiza Guene’s first novel and has been translated into 22 languages. Her second novel, Dreams from the Endz (Chatto & Windus, 2008) has come out in English this year and her third one, Les Gens du Balto (Hachette, 2008) was just published in France.
Born to Algerian immigrants, Guene grew up in the public housing projects of Pantin, a northeastern suburb of Paris. She gave up her sociology studies to pursue writing and filmmaking full-time.
Faiza Guene Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow
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Faiza Guene's Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow
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