Disorientation and Accompaniment Paris, the Metro and the Migrant

In his 1975 novel, Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée [Ideal Topography for an Aggravated Assault], Algerian novelist Rachid Boudjedra reminds us that disorientation is a fascinating but life-threatening experience. His main protagonist, a Berber migrant newly arrived from his village, is lost in the Parisian metro. Boudjedra's attempt at writing from the perspective of the disoriented traveller disrupts generic conventions and confronts his readers with an unreadable textual labyrinth that exhausts and confuses us. Disorientation in and by a novel forces us to find answers to such questions as: How do we know we have arrived somewhere or that we belong? What does the representation of a disoriented subject teach us about the (reading) skills we need to integrate into a foreign place/culture? Is integration a form of violent reorientation? Boudjedra tempts us, dares us, to give up and abandon the book and the migrant to his fate (in the book, he is murdered) but also encourages us to think about an alternative practice of ‘accompaniment’. He invites us to consider what happens to the idea of integration if we cannot conceptualise arrival. His book exposes the invisible violence experienced by the migrant who is expected to reorient him or herself, and suggests that we might see accompaniment as a two-way integration that requires a permanent, mutual and disorienting process of differed arrival.