"Soleil amer" by Lilia Hassaine: From Utopia to Exclusion
Abstract
In Soleil amer, Lilia Hassaine revisits Algerian immigration in the post-colonial period. We will see in this article that the author chooses to make her characters evolve over three decades, each of which illustrates a stage in the urban planning during that period. The sixties were those of utopia with the birth of social housing, the seventies those of abandonment with the change in social policies, and the eighties those of decadence, condemning these large suburban estates to progressive ghettoisation. We understand that Saïd and Naja's family, dragged down by this same decadence, is also a victim of the consequences of these social policies and of the end of the mirage of integration that the HLM housing estates represented in the 1960s. The writer points to the political responsibility for the exclusion of these suburban areas, but also to the Franco-Algerian wound that is still open today.
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