Fidela Amara (with Sylvia Zappi). Breaking the Silence: French Women's Voices from the Ghetto.

• Author: Jackson, Pamela Irving
• Position: Book review

Fidela Amara (with Sylvia Zappi). Breaking the Silence: French Women's Voices from the Ghetto. (Translated with an Introduction by Helen Harden Chenut). Originally published in France as Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whore Nor Submissive). University of California Press, 2006. 179 pages. Paper $16.95.

Giving voice to those French citizens of North African descent living in the subsidized housing of France's suburban fringe banlieus, Fidela Amara powerfully demonstrates the disintegration of public, private and parochial relationship networks (cf. Bursik, 2000) resulting from the post-1973 disappearance of low-skilled, industrial work (cf. Wilson, 1996).

Finances and prejudice, as well as public transportation routes, largely isolate banlieu youth from the conventional normative structures that socialize native French--cafes, restaurants, movie theaters, religious institutions, high quality schools and child care. Amidst resource deprived neighborhoods that once linked their parents geographically to the factories of industrial era France, the youths and young adults of the housing projects manifest palpable anomie and marginality. Amara describes them as having been, "abandoned by the state (84)." For the most part born in France, they do not have their parents' certitude that life is better in France than in Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia. They are not only separated from their parents by the location of their birth, but also by disillusionment about their prospects in France, and the belief that they are doomed to remain separate from mainstream France.

For the young men "rejected by French society" (87), the powerlessness of marginal status has fostered a "hypermasculinity" resulting increasingly in patriarchal control over women during the last twenty years. The "submissive woman" as a normative standard emerged when work disappeared, Amara stresses, not as a reflection of religious standards, but rather, as a manifestation of the need for power and control on the part of male youths who could no longer follow their fathers in heading a family as provider. Both the men and women of the second generation turned to "Islam for their identity" (73). Amara starkly reveals the complexity of the headscarf's place in identity creation by "distinguish[ing] different categories of young women who wear" it. There are those seeking a "legitimate existence" through religious practice, for whom it is a "banner;" those who wear it "above all as armor...