Rethinking Identity In The Context And Writing Of Migration

Abstract

This article aims to read Robert Solé's migrant francophone work through the issues of identity, interculturality, and multilingualism; in short, an aesthetic of hybridity is always open to the other, going far beyond the drawing of borders and the confusion of religion-language-identity. Otherness and transculturation animate the Franco-Egyptian author's fictional, autobiographical, and historical narratives, where intergeneracy comes into play through the poetics of migration in a perpetual quest for critical destruction and nostalgic reconstruction.
Any gaze focused on migrant literature is confronted with undoubtedly complex but fascinating realities that never cease to animate specific questions related to the identity, multiple origins, and as many existential experiences (linguistic, spatial, intercultural, geopolitical, etc.) of the authors. As a result, reflections, studies, and critiques have been pouring in since the 1980s in Canada, then in Europe, and all over the world to the point of becoming increasingly sensitive to the acuity and importance of migration phenomena and migratory expressions addressing many questions on influences, crossbreeding, acculturation, cultural contiguities, the in-between, transculturation to situate it, legitimize it and find its place and justification.
Francophone literature from the Arab world, whose writing oscillates between a questioning of identity and an aspiration to the universal through an essential mediation between the East and the West, could not, however, be conceived outside of this problematic of the in-between.
Francophone literature, world literature, literature of exiles, stateless people, that of smugglers-mediators, writers from "beyond France" or from elsewhere and the "periphery," migrant literature... what then is the reality of all this in the era of postmodernism and today? Daughter of a "Cultural Imperialism," the Submissive Oriental or the Feminized Orient, "A Kind of Ghetto"? Or a space for exchange, intercultural dialogue, freedom, or diversity? All these questions are still asked, and although the problem of its definition in terms of identity still exists, the fact remains that migrant fiction has become a high place where these questions are formulated and where a collective awareness of cultural diversity is developed. Consequently, the humanities, as well as sociological, historical, and literary studies, are submerged in notions of a remarkable terminological profusion and of defining and operational concepts: ethnic, multi-ethnic, immigrant, migrant, minority, minor, transcultural, mixed literature; writings of cultural communities, that of drifting and of the out-of-place. However, beyond and beyond any attempt at theorization whatsoever, it is the migrant texts with their styles, representations, self-representations, and modalities of enunciation analyzed that could rightly provide keys to possible interpretation.
From both a thematic and poetic point of view, Robert Solé's work is immersed in the intercultural, the in-between, and hybridity, all in all, a singular and relevant form for characterizing otherness and grasping the interactions between cultures that shape the gaze in the postcolonial field through fictions and biographies nourished by fantasies and realities to which is added a robust historiographical tendency that is part of current currents of thought such as post-memory.
Indeed, the work of Robert Solé is entirely in line with this orientation or path in the world being a migrant literature, a literature which still causes much ink to flow, characterized essentially by the experience of exile as is the case for example of Andrée Chédid or Tobie Nathan, but in other registers, another vision and poetics.