Tomboy

How do you live in Algeria when you grow up speaking French, with a French mother? How do you live in France when you’ve spent your childhood in Algeria with an Algerian father? Tomboy is the story of a girl whose father calls her Brio, whose alter ego is Amine, and whose mother is a blue-eyed blond. But who is she? Born five years after Algerian independence in 1967, she navigates the cultural, emotional, and linguistic boundaries of identity living in a world that doesn’t seem to recognize her. In this semiautobiographical novel, the young French Algerian author Nina Bouraoui introduces us to a girl who feels that Algeria is the country of men. Her childhood years spent in Algeria lead her to explore the borderland between genders as she tries to find her balance between nations, races, and identities. With prose modeling the rhythm of the seasons and the sea, Tomboy enters the innermost reality of a life lived on the edge of several cultures.

Nina Bouraoui was born in Rennes, France, to an Algerian father and a French mother. Shortly thereafter, she moved with her family to Algiers, where she lived until the age of thirteen. Bouraoui received the literary prize Prix du Livre Inter in 1991 and the Prix Renaudot in 2005. Marjorie Attignol Salvodon is an assistant professor of French at Suffolk University. Jehanne-Marie Gavarini is an associate professor of art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and a visiting scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.