Quoting Chinese-Canadian writer Fred Wah, Roger Bromley writes: ‘“When you're not ‘pure’ you just make it up” [...] “Making it up”, faking it even, is precisely what so much cultural hybridity is about; the inventions and innovations of those “living in the borderlands”.’ As we have seen in previous chapters, much of Beyala's fiction debunks the myth of authenticity by playing a strategic game of rejection and recuperation. If, as we have concluded, ‘authenticity’ is an empty signifier, than the concept of ‘faking it’ might also be problematic in the context of migration, since it implies some kind of authentic identity that is either aspired to by the faker, or is hidden behind the disguise: a fake is always defined in relation to the version presumed ‘authentic’ or ‘real’. However, if we interpret faking it as posing as a socially acceptable version of oneself, then faking it and making it up are useful metaphors for migrant subjectivities. Indeed, they both describe a reaction to two different sets of cultural anxieties. First, the experience of being ‘out of sync’ generates a need to constantly reinvent oneself in response to the majority ethnic population's attempts to prescribe migrant identity. This leads to an improvisation or performance of identity, often according to an unknown set of rules or expectations. One way of responding to rules that are unfamiliar is precisely to ‘make it up’. This chapter will argue that the concept of improvisation or ‘making it up’ is central to an understanding of both Beyala's fictional staging of the migrant condition and the way in which she performs her own identity.

The second source of anxiety for the migrant individual is the pressure to reassure friends and family back ‘home’ that migration has indeed led to the anticipated social improvement and economic gain. Attempts to provide evidence to friends and relatives of an individual's successful migration can often quite legitimately be described as ‘faking it’, as Beyala's fiction reveals. In Amours sauvages Eve-Marie left Africa, she tells the reader, because God appeared to be more generous in Europe, but she soon discovers that this generosity does not extend to immigrants.