Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow

Guène suggests that Doria’s lack of self-worth lies in her father’s rejecting her because she was a girl. Doria’s sense of herself is intimately tied to her need to see possibilities beyond traditional gender roles, and to defy her father’s belief that women are inherently weak and useless. For Guène, the view that women’s value lies in their willingness to submit themselves to the demands of the men in their lives–first their fathers, then their husbands–prevents them from developing or even seeing their own strengths. Yasmina initially struggles to survive without her husband but eventually blossoms, as her fight for independence leads her to develop strengths she never knew she possessed. The stories of Samra and the girl who became an actor also illustrate how constricting and brutal traditional gender expectations, legitimized by religion, can be.

On the other hand, Guène shows men to be damaged by traditional gender roles as well. The exaggerated value placed on masculine authority encourages men like Doria’s father, Zohra’s husband, and Samra’s father to become self-centered and authoritarian, expecting everything to go their way and exploding into violence when it doesn’t. Meanwhile, younger men like Hamoudi and Youssef find themselves adrift in a society that marginalizes them. While Youssef copes by embracing an extreme form of traditional authority, Hamoudi finds an outlet in drugs and poetry, and finally in a more egalitarian model of love. The healthiest example of masculinity seems to be Nabil, who has a strong mother and a gentle father.

As a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants, Doria is intensely aware that French society is inclined to view her as an intruder and a social problem, an existential threat to an established culture she cannot appreciate. In fact, Doria is familiar with traditional French culture, as her frequent references to figures such as Voltaire, Molière, and Rimbaud indicate. Hamoudi and Nabil also value French poetry and literature as a means of self-expression. As a member of the second generation, Doria does not identify strongly with her parents’ culture and critiques it as freely as she critiques French culture, especially in regard to gender roles.

Guène suggests that the most powerful influence on Doria is contemporary popular culture, much of it American. While she may read Voltaire and celebrate Eid, Doria’s fears a life spent serving up fries, in a world where she will forever be compared to a Barbie doll and judged for coming up short. Yet she also uses the materials of pop culture to make sense of her life and create visions of alternate possibilities, as when she imagines Samra’s father responding according to “American TV morality” and valuing his daughter’s happiness more than her obedience. Doria asserts that television plays the role in her life that stained-glass windows played in the life of illiterate medieval peasants, providing access to worlds beyond one’s own.

This metaphor is itself an example of Doria’s ability to move between cultures and use comparisons between them to gain insight, as she uses the French history she learned in school to examine the role popular culture plays in her own attempts to negotiate the world beyond her parents’ community. Ultimately, Guène implies that knowledge of multiple cultures and the ability to move between them is a source of strength and creativity, rather than a liability.