Covering French Universalism

Readings of the CD liner notes of Idir’s Identités (1999) and the lyrics to his song ‘La France des couleurs’ [‘The France of Colors’] (2007) as well as the memoir The Veil of Silence by feminist singer-songwriter Djura (1991), demonstrate how these musicians of Algerian-Kabyle origin have created an alter-globalist culture within French world music. Kabyle music in French is often introduced to the public with a ‘split consciousness,’ with one address to a French-speaking audience and another to a Kabyle audience. While this split consciousness in framing can be seen as a conscious act of promotion, it also creates the rhetorical problem that Abdelkebir Khatibi might call dédoublement, a splitting and fragmentation of public identity. Nonetheless, I argue, Idir and Djura play ably on universalist representations of North African immigrants in France—the men as violent toward and oppressive of women, the women as either victims or complicit aggressors toward other women—in order to call these representations into question. These artists offer an alternative vision of French universalism—an act of ‘covering,’ or reinterpreting French universalism, much like one interprets a song in a cover version. The alter-globalist ‘cover’ expands the definition of French to include a range of languages and cultural practices.