ABSTRACT
Fawzia Zouari's Ce pays dont je meurs, focuses on the fortunes of an Algerian immigrant family in France. Ce pays dont je meurs was inspired by a fait divers that made the headlines in the French press in 1998, when a twenty-six-year-old woman of Algerian immigrant origin was found to have starved herself to death in a flat she shared with her sister. Zouari's fictional narrator does not lay her experience open to the readers' scrutiny nor does she esteem and fear their vrai regard. Instead, she draws attention to the readers' implicit voyeurism and, rather than investing the reader with the power to approve or reject her story, the reader is invoked as an intrusive and unwelcome presence. Ce pays dont je meurs suggests that one's investment in matters of 'identity' depends greatly upon whether one is positioned as a 'host' or as a 'guest' in a given society.
