ABSTRACT
Mehdi Charef was the first beur to write a successful semi-autobiographical novel about the problems facing ‘second-generation’ Maghrebin immigrants in the shanty towns and housing estates of metropolitan France. Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (1983), centring on streetwise, unemployed Madjid, ‘paumé entre deux cultures’ (stranded between two cultures), became a successful beur film, enabling Charef to direct other features, including Miss Mona (1987), charting the doomed friendship between an illegal immigrant and a lonely French transvestite. His second novel, Le Harki de Mériem (Mériem’s Harki), published in 1989, addresses the painful effects of internal divisions between Algerians and harkis.
