The Algerian wife or “I'amour n'a pas d'age”

Young male immigrants from North Africa come to France as much to defy a sense of globally structured exclusion as to escape the effects of other geo-political stresses. While most anthropological work on Islam and North African youth in France documents a return to conservative Islam, this letter dis-cusses another response to this same experience by illegal North African im-migrants living in France. The response described here is one of humour, ro-mance, and a continued desire to join the West rather than a rejection or chal-lenge to French society. This letter provides ethnographic data on the phe-nomenon described above and so gives a view from the street of how ro-mance may be one of the most important preoccupations of the clandestine male.