Fables et contes en sabir : avatars, réussites, échecs d'un genre paradoxal

Maghreb, from the end of the 19th century, saw the birth of a cultural production deeply rooted in its historical-geographical context. This production is characterised by a style and sometimes by contents that are essentially comic and mostly illustrate the colonial world of French Pieds-Noirs. It is sometimes written in Pataouète, the Patois of the Algerian French, or in colourful variants of it; sometimes its language is a kind of creative and literary unilateral sabir, supposed to be the language of the colonial Other, which is mainly Arabic. This idiom is very different from French but derives from it and it is, in essence, a French badly understood and badly spoken by less-educated Arabic-speakers in their interactions with French-speakers. Besides being a telltale investigation on the identity of the person that signed the first and most important text in sabir as Kaddour (1898), this paper aims to give a contrastive analysis of essential features in different sabir texts, as well as to show the textual relationship between the roles of Author/Narrator and Hero, in order to allow their colonial nature and functions emerge.