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This article argues that the public space of theatre in an immigrant language can contribute to making immigrants and their offspring feel at home in the host country. In France, however, there is little public support for theatre in immigrant languages, since it is perceived as segregating immigrants from French cultural spaces and encouraging communautarisme, or the fragmentation of society along ethnic or religious lines, thus violating the spirit of equality inscribed in the constitution. Through interviews with the Turkish-French theatre group Kebab Show and analysis of their plays, this article argues that what anti-communautaristes see as theatre intended to segregate immigrant communities may instead contribute to making them at home in France. For older members of the community, native-language theatre provides a bridge between the country of origin and France. For their children and grandchildren born in France, this native-language theatre publicly acknowledges a part of themselves that is usually relegated to private home spaces. Filled with word play and humorous situations that require knowledge of both Turkish and French cultures, such theatre suggests the important role that native and bilingual theatre can play in the process of helping all the generations of an immigrant community feel at home.

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This essay examines autobiographical writing by two women who grew up in colonial Algeria; it considers how the relationship between fathers and daughters is marked by linguistic conflict. For each of these writers, language is not a simple tool, but instead a problematic inheritance that shapes her world and her relationship with her father. Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar, who were children in colonial Algeria of the late 1940s and early 1950s, examine their relationships to Arabic and French in terms of their relationships with their families and in particular with their schoolteacher fathers. The fathers, who benefitted from French colonial education, fail to understand the different risks inherent for their daughters in transgressing conservative community and linguistic boundaries. Each writer, even as she acknowledges the benefits of the colonizer’s language, also describes the language as a scene of violent trauma for which she holds her father responsible. With language and paternal love so tightly entwined, this essay argues that even in highly politicized colonial contexts, the national value of a language can only be understood if the familial and personal value of the language is also taken into account.

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