Culture and Identity: "The Last One" by Fatima Daas

Although there is considerable controversy about this, the ancient Greek rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 bce) is credited with advancing the idea that culture can trump other markers of identity.

This was at the time when Philip II of Macedon, not a Greek but a person with Greek leanings partially as a result of three years of early education in Thebes, was about to embark on conquests that, under his son, Alexander the Great, would "Hellenize" much of the then-known world.

"Our city has so far surpassed other men in thought and speech that students of Athens have become the teachers of others, and the city has made the name "Greek" seem to be not that of a people but of a way of thinking, and people are called Greeks because they share in our education rather than in our birth," Isocrates said in one of his writings. 

I mention this because it is an important idea for many modern nation states, in particular -- in this instance -- France, which much like Isocrates in ancient Athens, came to believe French culture superior to most if not all others.

A few years back, for instance, the man then serving as France's Minister of Education, denounced "intersectionality," an outgrowth of the feminist movement, as in conflict with French republican values.

While Kimberley Williams Crenshaw, a Black American feminist, is credited with originating the term in the late 1980s to explain different layers of oppression experienced by women of color, intersectionality has since come to be a way of parsing out what, in the current era, are all-important questions of personal or social identity. According to Wikipedia, this includes such things as race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, ability, nationality, citizenship, religion, and body type.  

One other thing worth noting before continuing: a person's perceived intersectionality can be viewed either in positive or negative terms.

That's a very lengthy introduction to a few comments on a book called "The Last One," which, according to the New York Times, created quite a sensation in France where it was originally published. Written under an assumed name by a young lesbian Muslim woman living in a Paris suburb, the protagonist attempts to sort through her multiple and sometimes conflicting strands of identity both to find her true self and to reconcile those strands of identity with what it means to be French.

"Representation and identity are fraught topics in France, a country that prides itself on a universalist tradition that unites all citizens under a single French identify, regardless of their ethnicity or faith," Julia Webster Ayuso, reviewing the book in The Times, said. That's at least in part because too much focus on individual identity can be seen as a threat to social cohesion, the NYT review noted.

In other words, collective culture trumps individual notions of identity if you are French, more or less along the lines of the notions but forward by Isocrates.

"If you want to be French today, a fully French citizen, you have to give up one of the fragments of your identity," the author of "The Last One," called Fatima Daas, told the NYT.  Perhaps more than one, it might seem.

"The Last One" is apparently divided into a number of chapters, each of which considers one strand of the protagonist's identity. Some, such as her sexual orientation and her Islamic religion, are in conflict with each other as well as, perhaps, with a general cultural overlay. There's arguably nothing particularly new about that, but overall, the book, available in English, is perhaps an illuminating read in our current identify-focused culture.