Quebec author Anya Nousri mixes languages in a hard-hitting, raw and funny text entitled “On m’ai a l’oeil”, which interweaves testimony, autofiction, essay, novel, sound poetry and rap. Or how to reinvent the initiation story.
Anya Nousri, whose first novel shook up the French literary season, is from Quebec. We know that she is from Montreal and comes from Algerian immigration, but we will not know more. And for good reason: Anya Nousri is a pseudonym and the author never shows her face, which she hides behind a veil of pearls.
This choice is not trivial. It is an assumed artistic and political act. Anya Nousri explains in an interview her desire to perform an identity as an author and to escape the stereotypes too often associated with descendants of immigrants.
I wanted to convey the language as it is experienced in a Montreal context, where we are truly multilingual and multicultural. In everyday life, that’s how we talk, I wanted to promote it in literature.
“I was looked at”, her first novel tells the turbulent life of a young Montrealer from Algerian immigration. This fragmentary, ultra-contemporary, raw, funny text, carried by crazy energy, is located at the crossroads of several literary genres between testimony, autofiction, essay, novel, sound poetry, rap. Above all, Anya Nousri has made multilingualism a writing principle. His sentence is woven from words and sentences in English, Arabic, Kabyle, verlan, Quebec slang, but also non-gendered terms like they, making multiculturalism a sign of modernity.
All these djinniyat that we invoke during trances, Lalla Malika, Lalla Mira, Aïcha Kandicha. My sisters, my friends, they cross the lines of my hand, all my horrors. They would like to erase us, the khamdjat, the outcasts. We will always exist through our languages.
That said, “I was looked at” is also and above all a book about sorority. The title refers to the incredible rituals that the women around the narrator – her mother, her aunts, her grandmother – use to ward off bad luck and try to protect her.
Here again, the author escapes clichés and presents a heroine who does not reject her family culture, but is inspired by it. Anya Nousri thus constructs a beautiful text about a chain of women who help each other, take care of each other, without necessarily being able to find the words to express their love for each other.
Sylvie Tanette/mh
Anya Nousri, “They looked at me”, editions Le Castor Astral, August 2025.
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