SOURCE: Mehta, Brinda. “Alienation, Dispossession, and the Immigrant Experience in Tahar Ben Jelloun's Les Yeux baissés.” French Review 68, no. 1 (October 1994): 79-91.

In the following essay, Mehta explores how Ben Jelloun relates the immigrant experience through the eyes of his female protagonist in Les Yeux baissés.

Immigration and its psycho social ramifications constitute a recurrent theme in contemporary Maghrebian fiction written in French. The literary esthetics of Boudjedra (Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée), Charïbi (Les Boucs), Feraoun (La Terre et le sang), and Ben Jelloun (La Réclusion solitaire), among others, have focused on the annihilating effects of immigration on the individual's search for selfhood in an alien country. Systematically marginalized, dispossessed, and devitalized by the constraining politics of the host country with respect to its immigrant populations, the immigrant is soon found to be a prisoner of alterity, trapped in the...