In Defence of Barbarism

A provocative, beautiful and defiant essay highlighting the pitfalls of integration in France by a talented young writer with North African roots

Is social integration all it’s cracked up to be? Not in the defiant view of first-time French author Louisa Yousfi, who herself has North African roots. Taking its inspiration from the leading Algerian writer Kateb Yacine (‘I’m better off not being too cultivated. I have to retain a certain barbarianism’), this provocative essay explores ways of resisting the cultural and moral hegemony of the French ‘Empire’. Citing a wide range of cultural references, from the characters of Chester Himes and Toni Morrison to the in-your-face rap lyrics of the ‘street prophets’ Booba and PNL, she extolls the virtues of her inner barbarian and champions those brave souls who refuse to be ‘domesticated’.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that posits integration as an unalloyed good, she shows how assimilation can equate to the loss of traditions, religion, language, and culture. And, whether discussing 9/11, the Algerian colonial era, the media treatment of celebrities of Arab origin, or the second-class status of French citizens from an immigrant background, she holds an uncompromising mirror up to the West and its moral shortcomings, as if to say: a barbarian I may be, but who is the real monster? Yousfi - a young, charismatic and dynamic author who uses a refreshingly wide range of cultural reference points, including rap music, to construct her argument - opens up the path of a decolonial cultural politics and an aesthetics of resistance.

Reviews

A feeling of illegitimacy is shared by almost all class defectors. Whereas so many people who come from the dominant classes never ask themselves whether they are legitimate or not. They ‘naturally’ are. I've just read In Defence of Barbarism by Louisa Yousfi, a fairly short text. She is a journalist, the daughter of Algerian immigrants. She takes as her starting point a phrase by Kateb Yacine, who says: “I must retain a kind of barbarism, I must remain barbaric.” Basically, she's opposed to total integration, using the rapper Booba as an example, his way of resisting assimilation. Staying barbaric echoes in me what I experience in the literary and media fields. It seems to me that the dominant classes are in no hurry to assimilate those who speak for the world they come from, to neutralise them in short. People would like me to forget everything that made my books exist, the social violence on which La Place and La Honte, for example, were written. - Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

Louisa Yousfi, “a model pupil of the Republic” as she describes herself, has written a magnificent, stimulating and elegantly written essay “in defense of barbarism.” She explains why refusing domestication, pious and hypocritical niceties, the offer to be brought in the fold of assimilation, is the only way to produce pure creative acts and poetry. Compelling. A gem. -- Françoise Vergès, author of A Decolonial Feminism

In her brilliant and hard-hitting essay Rester barbare, the journalist references the writer Kateb Yacine as well as the rappers Booba and PNL to lay the foundations of a literary manifesto for a new decolonial mode of thinking in France. -- Bruno Deruisseau, Les Inrockuptibles