This Translation Tuesday, Mehdi Charef recounts his father’s teenage experiences in a newly-built Parisian banlieue. Social housing holds undreamed of comforts for his migrant family, and apprehension quickly turns to delight. Comfort! Safety! Privacy! Hot water! A new, fuller life beckons in the projects, and it involves quantities of rock ‘n’ roll, girlfriends and Carson McCullers.
It’s the Chinese building manager who told us that we had to move. The immigrant families who had lived in shacks—think shipping containers turned ruins with wear and tear over the past eight years—in the cité de transit, or transitional social housing, on Rue de Valenciennes in Nanterre would now need to pack their bags. Two feelings arise with the announcement of the news: anxiety and melancholy. This move represents a separation. We know where we came from but not where they are taking us. They didn’t ask us about anything, and they aren’t telling us about anything. We are leaving our most recent safe place.
In the bidonville, I had learned that there were Algerians outside of the ones in the village where I was born. In the cité de transit, I had learned Berber and African expressions as well as all the Portuguese curse words.
It isn’t the shacks that I liked but the people who lived in them. In front of them, I kept my head held high because I was like them. It’s only in front of my French classmates that I was ashamed…
Our housing project is going to be demolished. The construction of a large industrial park is set to take its place: la Défense.
Our new apartment is in Cité Rouge. The neighborhood is named that because of the brick façades of the buildings. It’s in the city Gennevilliers surrounded by small, old houses. We are no longer the isolated immigrant population. People walk down our alleys, underneath our windows. We are no longer the shame of those who were kind to us. We became visible before we were heard…
I counted sixteen windows on each floor of the length of the building and then eight more widthwise. The building is very high: I get vertigo even when looking up from the ground. There are eight floors in total.
Seeing how we are surrounded by vacant lots, it’s clear they don’t make social housing like this because there’s not enough space… Whatever the reason is, it suits people to live like this. They don’t have to take out the trash or sweep in front of their doors. The building manager takes care of everything, even mopping the floors.
We walk around in the city center. The sidewalks are large and clean, and the stores are typical of France. All the products and items on this Earth are arranged behind the shop windows. We don’t even know the names of any of the merchandise.
Buildings sprout up everywhere in our banlieue, this Parisian suburb. I remember that one time, a fire started in an area of our bidonville and that the shacks went up in flames like big matchboxes; all of the tenants of the surrounding buildings were on their balconies, distracting themselves with the spectacle and taking photos. As a child of the shacks, I was ashamed under the camera flashes. But now, we also have a bird’s eye view of the road.
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This move has affected and transformed me. Amongst our new neighbors, there are a dozen French families, three of which are well-to-do. I tell myself that it’s a good initiative and that integration won’t happen in one direction—us integrating into a new society—but that the French will also take a step towards us, to take us by the hand… I was moved when I saw these blonde-headed families placing their suitcases on the same floor as us, the immigrants.
For that matter, I only had eyes for Annie, a young girl my age who moved with her parents to the fourth floor. She was pretty with long, light-brown hair. We looked at each other when we crossed paths in the hall… I was already quite the flirt! But I didn’t have a chance to speak a single word to her; I am too shy, and I need time to work up the courage. The beautiful Annie moved after about eight weeks.
More and more French families preferred to leave us when they saw a new wave of immigrants arrive. I was hurt. They left us behind to go and live far from us. They preferred paying higher prices over being mixed up with foreigners. They couldn’t handle finding themselves at the same level as us, the formerly colonized people. We brag about the colonist spirit and conserve it; it makes you someone. We don’t want to lose it.
Only three families stayed in the entire eight-story building. We nicknamed them “the communists”…
I observe the people from this country. I can’t ignore them. Are they aware that in their everyday actions and gestures, the thought of being spied on doesn’t even cross their minds? Me, on the other hand, I keep a low profile. The discomfort is just another burden to bear… I feel out of place, but I also don’t feel like fitting into the mold. These are the words that I could’ve said to my mother. She would’ve responded while holding back laughter as to not upset me:
“Never a day without you talking about yourself…”
I would’ve sulked and she would’ve asked:
“Are you sick?”
Even in Maghnia, my birthplace, I was always feeling like I was a stranger. That’s how strong the French presence was there.
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Now. Finally. Finally, now. I write these two words as if I’ve relieved myself of a burden that I’ve carried for a long time. I breathe slowly to experience the pleasure of emptying my stomach and my lungs of this place of lacking, of frustration, of this anxious feeling that has weighed down my body and my head. Finally, now, we’re living in a home fit for people. We can walk barefoot on a floor that isn’t made of stones and dirt but of linoleum. We have heat thanks to pipes placed in the floor. A beautiful kitchen. A bathroom. A bathtub, a shower, water that flows endlessly. We even have hot water, as much of it as we want in the bathroom, the kitchen, and in a small bathroom where our dad shaves in front of a small mirror that I hung up in there.
I sit on the side of the tub, and I turn on the tap. I turn the knob to red. The water is boiling. I don’t care. I welcome it into my hands. It burns a bit, and then I rub my face with my palms. I have tears in my eyes.
My mom, my sister, my brother, and I have waited in France for ten years to get this privilege. My dad, he has waited almost twenty.
We’re going to honor our bodies, the first of the virtues. We won’t have to heat the iron water basin on the gas stove any longer to then carry it to the bathroom or behind a curtain hung up to make a toilet like we did in our shack in the bidonville and in the cité de transit.
In the evening, I pour milk into a pot that I put on the gas burner. I turn a knob, I strike a match, and a blue circle spreads around the saucepan. What a great feeling to no longer have to worry about opening or closing the gas tank before the whole family goes to bed! To no longer be afraid of an accident or of a fire. Nor having to stock up on large propane tanks and, especially, not having to monitor the one that we’re using before it ultimately runs out and we figure out that we don’t have a replacement. The acrid smell of the chimneys. All of that is behind us. In the apartment, gas comes to us through the gas line.
I put the milk back in the fridge. There, standing on the linoleum of our beautiful apartment, the fridge is not lopsided. It’s a sturdy block. Everything is straight and square from the kitchen to the living room, from the bathroom to the bedrooms. We don’t hear the neighbors like we had behind the sheets of wood in the shacks. And during our mother’s insomnia, she no longer listens to the rats in the muddy alleys of the bidonville that were trying to get into our shack…
I have a room, one that is all mine. Ten years I waited to have my own refuge, my hideaway, my island. I’m going to be able to put away things that were stuffed into boxes, bags, and a large suitcase. I’m going to buy myself a stool and a table to write and draw on. I’m going to listen to music, my own records… François Béranger, Pia Colombo, Neil Young, all of Henri Tachan, Janis Joplin, Rory Gallagher, Pink Floyd, Francesca Solleville, the Beatles’ White Album, Jimi Hendrix…Wherever I look, this room is mine. Hanging off the window handle is a scarf stolen from the Chile stand during the Festival of Humanity. Written on its red background is “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (“When united, people will never be defeated”). There are vinyls everywhere in the carpeted room. Film posters adorn the walls: The Swindle, the Fellini film; Sica’s The Bicycle Thief; Chahine’s Cairo Station; and, most importantly, darker than Anna Magnani’s eyes, The Young and the Damned. I would have hung up a picture of naked actresses on my door, but I didn’t because of my mom.
At Saint-Ouen’s flea market, a shady guy sells black-and-white images of rock stars. There’s a poster with Tina Turner’s face in the spotlight as she’s singing in a tight, black, super miniskirt with the microphone pulled toward her. That image caused me trouble. I was ready to buy it for myself and stick it to the wall. But then I wondered how many days it would last there in front of me before my mother ripped it down.
I slid three thongs from my past lovers in one of the pockets of Otis Redding’s double album. It was my private stash.
Dostoevsky, Léautaud, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Gorki, Chester Himes, and all of Carson McCullers… Why her? She’s the only woman who doesn’t scare me in life. Then, between the story of Grand Meaulnes and the one about Meursault, there are Chraïbi’s books with missing pages that I ripped out on the bus or on the metro because I wanted to reread them without having to carry around the whole book in my pocket. In this room, my first pied-à-terre, I am going to cultivate myself, grow, and, with closed eyes, figure out what I would like to do to be useful.
Translated from the French by Clayton McKee
Mehdi Charef, born in Algeria, moved to Nanterre, France when he was ten years old. He is considered the father of beur literature as he was the first writer of Algerian origins to publish a novel (Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed, 1983). Shortly after the start of his literary career, he began directing films, including one based on his first novel. His work engages with immigration and Arab identity. In 2005, he wrote a play entitled 1962 – Le dernier voyage about the Algerian War of Independence. La cité de mon père (2021) is his most recent novel and it centers around his family’s journey from Algeria to live in the bidonvilles of Paris before being placed into social housing. This novel was nominated for the Grand Prix des Lecteurs in 2023.
Clayton McKee is a translator of Arabic, French, and Spanish. He is completing his doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation is focused on how the 2011 Tunisian Revolution is memorialized in Francophone literature. He has translated one full-length novel, The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan by Tanguy Viel (Dalkey Archive Press, 2021), and many excerpt translations have appeared in the literary journal Trafika Europe. In addition to his translations, he has worked as an Editor with Trafika Europe since 2015, and he is now the director of the project. He has also translated and conducted various literary interviews for Trafika Europe Radio.
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