JUST LIKE TOMORROW
by Faiza Guene
translated by Sarah Adams
Chatto and Windus ₤5.99, 192 pages

Translators are the great unsung heroes and heroines of the modern diaspora, working not only with linguistic structures but with cultural frames, building houses of language into which we can enter, travelling from all directions, to meet and question one another.

Tackling Faiza Guene’s energetic vernacular, Sarah Adams has done a magnificent job, acting as a kind of ambassador between French and English, old and young, black and white. Her source material is the adolescent slang from the banlieue and Adams has wrestled it into a convincing English version of how young black French citizens talk and think. The narrator of Just Like Tomorrow is Doria, streetwise, sassy, would-be cool and tough. So Adams invents a corroborating voice: “I didn’t even turn around to eat them alive, those two slags behind us. I didn’t rip out their nostrils or anything. I just made like nothing had happened... “

Doria needs to seem tough in order to survive. Her life brims with difficulties. She lives on an estate in suburban Paris surrounded by swathes of white people who consider second-generation black residents second-class citizens. Her teachers consider her intellectually inept; she sneers at them for not realising she reads literature. Her social worker drops by at whim, checking up and criticising. Doria retaliates by mocking her clothes and accent. Nor are things good on the family front: Doria’s father has gone back to Morocco, to find a woman who will give him a son, and her mother is depressed, illiterate and poverty-stricken. Some of Doria’s male friends turn to criminality and end up in prison.

This being a novel for adolescents rather than adults (though it is cannily marketed at both) its narrative offers an upbeat message. Charming and funny, Doria wins through because of her intelligence, humour and determination. She admits to her love of fantasy solutions, daydreaming about soap-opera heroes and sometimes inventing a new life: “Sometimes, I try imagining what I’d be like if I was Polish or Russian origin instead of Moroccan... Maybe an ice-dancing champion... Trouble is, those outfits mean you can always see the girls’ knickers. So my mum wouldn’t be too happy if I was ice-dancing on telly. And another thing, if I was Russian, my name would be this unpronounceable and chances are I’d be blonde. Shitty prejudices, I know.” She struggles to concentrate on her education, seeing it as a way out, even though she’s put into a college to study hairdressing without being at all sure that’s what she wants to do. She encourages her mother to learn to read. She gets a part-time job babysitting. She makes friends with a boy, Nabil, a frog in the process of turning into a prince, who gives her her first kiss.

Doria is a charming, witty, ferocious heroine. I did wonder to whom she is addressing her story: her diary? An imaginary friend? She explains details of Moroccan culture, which you would expect her to take for granted: generously she reaches out and invites us into her world.

Michele Roberts is author of “Reader, I Married Him” (Time Warner Books).