IMMIGRANTS IN LITERATURE
Xavier Le Clerc: A son gives his immigrant father a place in literature
By The Immigrant Times (IMT)
In Un Homme Sans Titre (A Man With No Title), Xavier Le Clerc (right) reconstructs his father's youth in Algeria, his arrival in France in 1962 to work in the Normandy steelworks, and his difficulty in coming to terms with his son's homosexuality.
November 2026: In A Man With No Title (Un Homme Sans Titre), French-Algerian writer Xavier Le Clerc reconstructs the life of his father, an immigrant factory worker who spent decades supporting his large family in Normandy. The book is both a tribute to a largely unrecognised generation of North African immigrant workers and an account of the complex relationship between a father and a son whose lives followed very different paths.
When Mohand-Saïd Aït-Taleb died in 2020, his son Xavier Le Clerc had not seen him for about 20 years. Their separation began when the young man, then known as Hamid Aït-Taleb, faced hostility and threats after his homosexuality became known to his family and neighbours.
By then, the son had built a life far removed from the working-class immigrant community where he had grown up. He had studied at university, changed his name, moved abroad and built a career in literature and the international luxury industry.
Meanwhile, his father spent much of his adult life working at Normandy steelworks, supporting his wife and nine children.
After his father’s death, Le Clerc began reconstructing a life he knew surprisingly little about. The result was Un homme sans titre, published by Gallimard in France in 2022 and subsequently translated into English as A Man With No Title.
The short autobiographical work, which combines family history, personal recollection, and literary reconstruction, was a success in France and won several literary awards. It was also translated into several foreign languages, including English, German and Spanish.
The book highlights the experiences of a generation of Algerian immigrants whose contributions to French industrial development are rarely acknowledged in literature.
From Kabylia, Algeria, to Normandy, north-western France
Mohand-Saïd Aït-Taleb was born in 1937 in Kabylia, the mountainous region of northern Algeria, then under French colonial rule. His childhood was marked by extreme poverty. The family lived without electricity or running water, and securing enough food was a daily struggle. At nine, Mohand-Saïd left home and walked hundreds of kilometres to find seasonal agricultural work, a situation shared by thousands of other young men and boys in colonial Algeria.
In 1939, French-Algerian writer Albert Camus published a series of newspaper reports, collectively known as Misère de la Kabylie, documenting the severe deprivation faced by communities in the region. Camus described malnutrition, inadequate housing, unemployment, and children struggling to survive in circumstances the French colonial administration largely ignored. Decades later, Camus' writings would give Xavier Le Clerc insight into his father’s childhood.
In 1962, at 25, Mohand-Saïd left Algeria for France, the year Algeria gained independence after a long, bloody war against French colonial rule. In Normandy, he found work as an unskilled labourer at the Société métallurgique de Normandie (SMN), a major industrial employer near Caen. The steelworks was part of an industrial economy that relied heavily on manual labour, including workers recruited from former French colonies and other European countries.
For Mohand-Saïd, employment offered the chance to support a family. But it also meant years of physically demanding work, limited financial security and little opportunity for advancement. He eventually retired early because the work had taken a considerable physical toll.
Like many immigrant workers of his generation, Mohand-Saïd contributed to the French economy without attaining the social standing or material security that would be expected today.
A childhood in a large immigrant family
Xavier Le Clerc, born Hamid Aït-Taleb in Kabylia in 1979, later joined his family in France. He grew up in Hérouville-Saint-Clair, a working-class suburb of Caen, in a large immigrant household. His father was often away for work and, when at home, was reserved and spoke little about his past.
The family faced financial difficulties, and the children grew up aware of the social divisions separating their neighbourhood from more prosperous parts of the medieval Normandy city. Yet the younger Aït-Taleb also found opportunities his father had never had.
He attended French schools, developed a passion for reading, and found in literature a world beyond his upbringing. Books became especially important, offering access to different lives, ideas, and possibilities, as well as to the language he would eventually use to describe his own experiences. He later studied sociology and comparative literature and earned two master’s degrees from the Sorbonne.
However, his educational achievements did not eliminate the difficulties stemming from his background. As a young man of Algerian origin, he faced prejudice and discrimination. He also struggled with his family's expectations and members of the community he grew up in. The most serious conflict arose over his homosexuality.
A separation that lasted forever
In interviews following the publication of Un homme sans titre (A man without title), Le Clerc has spoken openly about what led him to leave his family. When rumours about his homosexuality spread through his neighbourhood, he experienced harassment, insults and threats.
In a January 2023 interview with the French magazine Têtu, he described receiving threatening messages, experiencing intimidation, and finding a decapitated pigeon outside his door. He eventually concluded that staying in the neighbourhood was dangerous.
His father’s reaction was more complicated than outright rejection. According to Le Clerc, Mohand-Saïd asked him whether the rumours were true. When his son confirmed that he would not marry a woman, the father was visibly distressed.
But Le Clerc has emphasised that he did not interpret his father’s reaction as contemptuous. Rather, he saw a man overwhelmed by circumstances he did not know how to handle. His father embraced him, apparently unaware that they would not meet again.
Years later, Le Clerc realised that his father lacked the means and understanding to protect him from the hostility around them. The family’s conservative religious values were part of this conflict, but the author’s account of his father does not justify reducing it to a simple confrontation between Islam and homosexuality. Nor does it support portraying his father as a man who cut ties with his son.
The separation was final. For about two decades, until Mohand-Saïd's death in 2020, father and son never met again.
The book that followed was therefore not an account of a reconciliation achieved in their lifetimes. It was an attempt to understand a father after reconciliation was no longer possible.
Becoming Xavier Le Clerc
Leaving Normandy enabled Hamid Aït-Taleb to start a new life. After spending time in Paris, he moved to London in 2004 and built an international career, including work in the luxury industry. He also continued to write.
His literary ambitions had begun long before his father’s death. He published early short stories under his birth name and, in 2008, his first novel, De grâce.
In 2011, he adopted the name Xavier Le Clerc. The decision partly responded to the discrimination he had faced. In later interviews, he has discussed the practical and psychological consequences of bearing a name that immediately identified him as North African.
Changing his name helped him move beyond the expectations and prejudices linked to his background. But it also distanced him from his family's history.
His experience illustrates a dilemma familiar to many children of immigrants: the desire to escape social constraints without rejecting the people and experiences that shaped them.
Le Clerc’s subsequent writing increasingly returned to that history. In Cent vingt francs, published in 2021, he explored the life of his great-grandfather, a Kabyle soldier who died fighting for France in the First World War.
The book set his family’s experiences within the longer history of Algeria’s relationship with France. Un homme sans titre, published the following year, brought that exploration closer to home.
Giving a father his history
The death of Mohand-Saïd in 2020 persuaded Le Clerc to investigate his father’s life. Largely illiterate, his father had rarely spoken about his childhood in Algeria.. Much of his personal history remained undocumented, at least within the family’s knowledge.
Le Clerc therefore turned to historical sources, particularly Camus’s 1939 reports on Kabylia, to reconstruct the environment in which his father had grown up. The connection was striking. Camus described children competing with stray dogs for scraps of food. Le Clerc discovered the poverty his father endured and the circumstances that shaped his later life.
In A Man without Title, Le Clerc blends documented history with personal recollections and imaginative reconstruction. The work does not claim to recover every episode of Mohand-Saïd’s childhood with certainty. Instead, the author draws on the available stories to provide a fuller account of a man whose experiences might otherwise have remained largely unknown.
The book's title, A Man With No Title, captures the central idea. Mohand-Saïd's few official documents identify him as a manual worker and local man, but show no evidence of property, status, or public recognition.
For decades, the author's father worked, raised children and fulfilled parental duties, yet remained largely invisible beyond his immediate circle of family and friends. By writing about him, Le Clerc gives that life a place in the historical and literary record.
The father grew up without access to formal education and spent his working life doing physically demanding labour. His son benefited from French schooling, university education, and the chance to pursue a professional and literary career. Their different paths illustrate the opportunities migration offers immigrants' children and grandchildren.
A sympathetic portrait without sentimentali. ty
Le Clerc's portrait of his father and of the hard, uneventful life he led attracted readers beyond those interested in immigration. Prominent writers and literary critics, including Annie Ernaux and Leïla Slimani, took notice.
In an October 2024 review for The Observer, critic Lucy Popescu described it as a moving tribute to an Algerian father and an account of a marginalised community. The French newspaper Le Figaro Littéraire emphasised that the work was neither an exercise in settling scores nor an outpouring of grief, but an attempt to understand the author’s history and himself.
These assessments align with Le Clerc’s own explanations of his intentions. In a 2024 interview with students at the Lycée Vauban, he said he felt compelled to pay tribute to his father because his father was part of a generation of immigrants who had contributed so much to post-war France.
The book does not erase the difficulties between father and son, nor does it suggest that poverty and hardship necessarily make a person better. Instead, it places Mohand-Saïd’s limitations, silences and struggles within the context of his life.
His inability to protect his son remains part of that history, alongside his years of labour and his commitment to supporting his family. According to the published critical response, the result is a portrait that blends affection with an awareness of the father’s shortcomings.
Bibliographical information
Un Homme Sans Titre (A Man With No Title)
Author: Xavier Le Clerc (born Hamid Aït-Taleb, 1979)
Original French title: Un Homme Sans Titre
Original publisher: Gallimard, Paris
First publication: 1 September 2022
French paperback: Folio, Gallimard, 13 June 2024, 144 pages
English edition: A Man With No Title, translated by William Rodarmor, Saqi Books, October 2024, 128 pages. The book has also been translated into German, Dutch and Spanish.
Awards:
Prix littéraire desla Grande Mosquée de Paris, 2022; Prix littéraire de l’Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Caen, 2022; Grand Prix du Roman Métis, 2023; Prix du livre La Tribune, 2023. The English translation also received an English PEN award supporting literature in translation.
Other works by Xavier Le Clerc
De grâce (2008)
His first novel, published under his birth name, Hamid Aït-Taleb.
Cent vingt francs (2021)
A novel exploring the life of his Kabyle great-grandfather, who died fighting for France during the First World War.
Le Pain des Français (2025)
A literary investigation into French colonial violence in Algeria, combining historical research with personal reflection.
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: A young German-Jewish refugee, whose story of courage and endurance is one of many || Immigrant writers offer their stories of hardship, longing and joy || A teenager’s journey from Western Africa to France ||
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