Silences des Pères Chez Faïza Guène et Alice Zeniter

Resumo

Born in the mid-1980s, Faïza Guène and Alice Zeniter are two writers with very different backgrounds. One was born in the Paris suburb of Pantin and became an early public darling thanks to her writings in the language of the streets, while the other, the granddaughter of a Harki, is the heiress of an unspeakable H/history. Mental illness (Du rêve pour les oufs) or resignation from the role of father and head of the family (Un homme, ça ne pleure pas and Kiffe kiffe demain), these are two situations in which Guène's patriarchal characters are rendered mute. In Zeniter's novel L'art de perdre, a painful secret past, impossible to unravel and pass on is the trigger for mutism among the father-characters. In our contribution, we propose to analyze these declensions of silence in the novels of the corpus, their – always damaging – impact on family relationships and the “collision” of non-communication on the identity development of the characters’ descendants.