For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from “Alone,” Nesrine Slaoui‘s intricate portrait of immigrant life in modern France, translated by Frances Egan. In these three spare, plainspoken vignettes, the lives of two women intertwine: Anissa, the child of two Moroccan immigrants in the Argenteuil banlieue, and Nora, a Maghrebi businesswoman in Clichy. Despite their various attempts to assert control over their own lives—despite Anissa’s attempt to bond with a new classmate, despite Nora’s attempts to stand up for herself and advocate for change in her workplace—their actions are continually circumscribed by greater social forces, by the historical inertia manifest in the petty cruelty and unexamined prejudice of their classmates and colleagues. What follows is a forceful examination of racism and economic inequality in modern France—and a challenging reminder that none of us is as free as we would like to believe.
3 September 2021
Cité Champagne, Argenteuil
In Marseille’s Quartiers Nord, Bricarde and Castellane, the drug dealing hotspots where a kid dies every fortnight from a Kalashnikov bullet, the windows offer a dreamy and unobstructed view of the Mediterranean Sea. A tease, an enviable and deceptive skyline, since the only place you can actually access the beach is from one small spot at L’Estaque. Here, in the much quieter cité Champagne, about twenty kilometres northwest of Paris, the balconies of the social housing block offer a panoramic view of the capital and its monuments, the Eiffel tower, sparkling at night, in prime position. The day they moved in, Karim kept this view until last, as a surprise for his wife Yamina. They had both been amazed that such luxury could penetrate this isolated spot. It made you wonder if the town planners and architects of these housing estates were trying to maximise the contrast between here and there, or if they wanted to soften the dreary dereliction of this Argenteuil ghetto. Perhaps they imagined the residents gazing into the distance and forgetting the reality at their feet: the broken lifts, the lobbies smelling of urine.
On the ninth floor of her tower, Anissa wasn’t thinking much about the skyline. Locked away in her room, she was trying to take a photo of herself on her phone. But even standing on her tiptoes, so that her legs looked longer, and arching her back, to emphasise her bum, she didn’t have one shot she could post on Instagram. And that’s despite knowing every tip there was to enhance your figure: stand slightly side-on, tuck your tummy with a hand to your waist. Expression wise, she made sure not to smile and kept her mouth slightly open to hold her delicate features in place. All those hours spent scrolling social media, day after day, meant she followed the rules without even realising it. But it didn’t matter. The reflection in the rectangle mirror in her bedroom wouldn’t do what she told it to, and she couldn’t make her body match the profiles that flitted across the screen. Without filters, without tricks, her body and her face were ordinary; her imperfections, her asymmetries were there for everyone to see. None of it looked like the calibrated social media ideal, like the apparitions, the fantasies. She couldn’t compete, she couldn’t fight. And she was tormented by the gap between what she wanted to look like and her modest and underwhelming reality. The only thing she liked was her flat teenage stomach. Everything else was too small, too skinny, not woman enough.
In her third year of high school, at collège, several of her peers had breasts: some of them more noticeable than others. Anissa looked at herself for a few moments and found nothing to show off. At least, nothing that would look good on Instagram. She was almost 170cm tall, but shapeless. No breasts, no bum, no hips; no full lips either, no perfectly defined eyebrows, no fake nails in pretty colours. And even though she took care of her long black wavy hair – applying a precise blend of castor, mustard and jojoba oils every Sunday – it did not fall as prettily as it did in the influencer tutorials. Anissa didn’t even realise how beautiful her olive complexion was – despite the little acne spots. Her parents still wouldn’t let her hide them with concealer, even though a lot of the students at her school were already refining their make-up skills every day. She wished she could practise too, perfect the art of eyeliner; you had to work at it for months, even years, before you could expect to master it. After twenty or so attempts that she deemed unsuccessful, Anissa sat down on her bed and gave up on the selfie. One day I’ll have enough money for plastic surgery. The prospect made her happy.
She felt like she was living in a prison. Her body was what stopped the boys from liking her, since they compared it to the ones on social media too. She was sure of it. At school, they stared pointedly at the girls whose breasts swelled in their jumpers. In their annual ranking of the prettiest girls, her name never appeared. Plus, Anissa had to contend with the ridiculous finds that her mother—who favoured comfort and low prices, cheap materials, over good taste and fashion—brought home from the shops. She would often wince, without daring to say anything, at the bags filled with oversized purple or yellow velour pants, or sweaters covered in childish designs, like bunches of sequined flowers. The older she got, the more embarrassed she was, obviously. For school, she nearly always wore the same tight black pants with the thin vertical white stripes, and one of the limited number of more restrained tops that she liked. In the privacy of her bedroom, Anissa could finally pull from their hiding place the short tops that she bought behind her parents’ back. Then she’d have fun trying on the colourful, low-cut crop tops piled in a shoebox under her bed. They looked like the ones she coveted on the websites of the big fast fashion brands.
Not having a presence on Insta was gradually eating into Anissa’s already low self-esteem. Every day, she felt a little uglier. The endless teasing she routinely experienced, about how tall she was, how thin, didn’t help. Sometimes she would get a text from a classmate before falling asleep, and all it would say was: ‘you’re ugly’. Sometimes, ten or more messages like this would suddenly appear in a group conversation on Snapchat, before vanishing. When she talked about it with her friends, who weren’t her friends, they’d tell her she was too sensitive. Anissa felt like she couldn’t complain. And the harassment she was experiencing was somehow more painful since it left no visible trace—nothing.
That morning, at a point when Anissa had been quietly swallowing such humiliation for months, her body objected. Piled one after another inside her, the insults were gradually forming a ball in the pit of her stomach. My tummy hurts, mum. Yamina didn’t believe her. She thought it was a ploy to get out of school. No way, don’t you start that with me, you’re going to school! How could Yamina have known that each day spent in that place was putting the life of her daughter at risk? The cleaning lady almost begrudged her the chance to sit on a chair, in the warmth, and learn this language with its never-ending conjugation and grammar rules that still escaped her. When she got married in Morocco, she was barely legal, and she moved to France to join her husband, who had arrived two years before, in the autumn of 1990. Despite the stress, the prospect of a long journey by boat, the feeling of being uprooted, she had dragged her bags, while pregnant with their first child, from Casablanca to Tanger for the departure. After first refusing to ask for help, she’d let herself be guided by another passenger. Without her bearings, she was lost, buffeted about in the crowd. After two nights of loneliness and seasickness, she had met her husband Karim, proudly waiting for her in Marseille in front of his Peugeot 205. They had whizzed off north in a silence that they only broke to talk about Morocco, Yamina already nostalgic about the country she had just left.
Here it is, our home! In this sentence spoken in Darija, the ‘our home’ sounded almost ironic, as Karim parked in the West Parisian banlieue, in the early evening. Yamina had not imagined Paris like this: a rubble of pale concrete in these huge yet underwhelming towers. You can see the Eiffel Tower from the apartment; it’s even more beautiful from a distance. Karim was already teaching her to keep her distance, like him. The immigrant was careful not to get too close to France, even if it seemed to welcome them; he was still afraid of the hostile looks, the frequently cruel reactions he received from the former colonisers.
In the years that followed their move to Argenteuil—so far from the gentle sun, the sea air and the familiar bustle of Casablanca—Yamina looked after the household. She only started working when Anissa, her youngest, who turned fourteen this year, went to kindergarten. As for Karim, he worked as a forklift driver at Dassault Aviation in the beginning, before joining a friend’s masonry business. The chemical products had taken their toll, and the repetitive movements too, in the end. Their daily life in this Val-d’Oise housing estate resembled that of millions of other immigrants.
In the seventies, at the foot of the curved building—which itself makes up the entire neighbourhood—asparagus fields still stretched over the Coteaux, before the land was gradually levelled and replaced with detached houses. At the time, this worker’s estate with the festive name, hastily built at the bottom of the Butte des Châtiaigniers in a frenzy of urbanisation, prided itself on a genuine conviviality engendered by communist values. Everything you needed was right there at the doorstep: a baker, butcher, newsagent, shoemaker, haberdasher, and two hairdressers. Twenty years ago, solidarity was still the order of the day. Life in the neighbourhood moved in time with the festivals and activities organised by the local association. Everything has stopped now, and the businesses have closed down. All that’s left is a hairdresser, a pharmacy and a pizza shop run by the local youths: the tenants association entrusted the business to them to help them out, give them something to do, and try to alleviate tensions with the police. Not long before, on the section of road separating cité Champagne from cité Roussillon, just above, a young man had crashed his motorbike into a power pole, while riding on the footpath without a helmet, according to the prosecutor’s office. A plain clothes BAC cop was on the road at the same time that night in May, around two in the morning. The next day Sabri was dead. The case was dismissed, but his family think the police had something to do with his death. There were witnesses who claimed to have seen the vehicle arrive with its lights flashing. The family are trying to get access to the police radio to find out if they had decided to stop him. But why bother? Here, like everywhere else, people in working-class neighbourhoods run from the police, afraid of losing their lives.
The atmosphere in the estate has been deteriorating for a long time. The greyish façade of the banana—the residents’ nickname for it—doesn’t reflect any light; even under a cloudless blue sky, the building, with its layer of dirt, looks like it’s in shadow. Despite the yearly promises from the landlord, nothing has been renovated since 1995. Three hundred and seventy-nine apartments on thirteen floors, and as many social outcasts. One of these is the Bentaleb’s apartment: three rooms, seventy-one square metres for 550 euros rent. Impossible, at that price, to think of living anywhere else. Too bad if the light in Anissa’s room wasn’t ideal for her impromptu photo shoots.
In any case, Yamina, Karim and Anissa rarely went out. The parents lowered their heads as soon as they stuck their noses outside. Only the neighbours in the building greeted them warmly because they shared the same fate. They would leave early in the morning, almost at the same time, for either the city centre, the factories on the outskirts, or another banlieue in the West, and come back to the anthill in the evening, sometimes after having done back-to-back shifts, one job paid off the books to make ends meet. The rest of the time, they didn’t leave the anthill, as if the powers that be had set up a checkpoint at the entrance of the estate to stop residents spending too much time on the outside.
Yamina made the best of this daily grind and compensated for the lack of social recognition with her children’s scholarly success: a vicarious reward for her own sacrifices. In Anissa’s reports, the teachers often complimented her quietness and capacity for concentration. They weren’t aware of the extent to which the quietness was a symptom either: the highschooler was making herself inconspicuous so as not to attract abuse. She was curling up in silence in the hope it would protect her. That day, the day the ball in her stomach appeared, the day she asked for a break, she was counting on being heard. Just one day in her room, on her own, watching YouTube or learning dance routines on TikTok without having to worry about anything. But her mother didn’t hear her. She thought it was an ordinary whim, she had no way of gauging or understanding what her daughter was going through. That day, she made her put on her coat, and Anissa grudgingly hurried down the stairs, without even waiting for the lift.
3 September 2021
Head Office, Clichy
Since graduating from a master’s in marketing at a prestigious business school, Nora had been working in a big French cosmetics company, leading the group’s global social media strategy. She was the only Maghrebi woman in the team, probably even in the whole building; she’d never seen anyone else like her, anyway. She was also the most qualified, the most ambitious, and the least well paid. While talking with a new woman recruited in community management, Mathieu let his salary slip: eight hundred euros more than her even though he was just out of school. Nora had five years more experience and felt like she’d been hit. At first, she wanted to make a complaint to Christelle, in human resources, but in the end she let it go: all that would happen is she would come across as a combative and ungrateful upstart from the banlieue who needed to be quickly brought into line, or else replaced. Nora was constantly aware of an invisible threat hanging over her: if she spoke a little too bluntly, she would pay the price for a lack of respect. Because people expected gratitude from her, they expected loyalty. Any stance she took that was slightly too political, or too combative, was bound to be held against her. Here, she felt trapped, watched, and she dreaded the moment when one of them would gleefully let on what he was thinking: There, you see, they’re all the same, you give them a chance, they always want more. Nora was all too familiar with these paternalistic speeches which involved self-congratulations for having dared hire her because, really, a woman, and an Arab woman too, in this highly sought-after post: do you realise what a risk that is! She knew how it went: she should be endlessly grateful without ever asking for fairer compensation for her work. Anything that seemed reasonable to her would be deemed presumptive—no exceptions.
In the beginning, when she joined the company for an internship just after her studies, Nora tried to be inconspicuous, even to the point of knowingly joining in on jokes, when people around her would casually drop references to chicha, couscous, the Marrakech souk, Eid cakes, or when a boss would respond inch’Allah when she outlined her ideas. She accepted all this because she was ambitious, and she wanted to keep her financial independence. And she tried her hardest to be irreproachable, without let up, to be fiercely hard working and never make a fuss. Maybe silence and obedience were the price she had to pay to be promoted, to succeed, to finally make it, she thought. Because she liked the work, even with its endless, pointless meetings, and even if the remarks from the other employees were at times tiresome or excruciating. This job was the outcome of long years of sacrifice, a series of student jobs and hundreds of applications sent to generic addresses, since she didn’t have any contacts, or networks.
Then one day, everything changed. She decided to be firmer in standing up for herself, with the correct language, and insert her distinctive vision into this extremely homogeneous world that, without her, was not grasping the new digital stakes. She was promoted in her fourth year at the company, after the sudden success of a campaign she had led with a hugely popular black influencer. Like many others on the topic of diversity—this catch-all term for women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ and people with a disability—her company was operating more out of concern for its image than because it really cared about inclusivity. Even so, Nora started to dream about changing things, little by little, from the inside. Especially changing the representation of non-white women, of black and Arab women like her friends, and establishing them in this industry which had so long promoted a white and anorexic beauty. She let herself believe that, as an executive in a group that had huge power to dictate what women should look like, and create hang-ups for all those who don’t fit, she could become a sort of virtuous virus, spreading, from project to project, an industry that was reflective of society, more representative and responsive. In practice, whenever she demonstrated ingenuity and creativity for a new lipstick launch, by picturing the face of the campaign in a headscarf, for example, she was told, we have to champion a more universal beauty. And how could she explain, in a majority white conference room, the racist blind spot to such a remark, without bringing on an endless debate, causing someone to burst into tears, or even receiving a warning for inappropriate language? The last thing she could afford was to be accused of activism.
Nora depended on this job—a source of great pride for her and her family—because it meant she could pay her rent. When she showed kids in her old neighbourhood her ID, the mere name of the company made their faces light up. For the older ones, she was now one of the other women, in blazers and pleated trousers, the women that flaunted their manicures because they didn’t soak their hands in bleach, the women who could take taxis, the privileged ones, who were constantly travelling all over the world. At times she even provoked resentment and envy. Some people accused her of betrayal, of sinning by pride, when her heels clacked on the concrete floor of the estate. They thought it was provocative. Here, no one wears high heels unless it’s a wedding or a festival. Despite all that, Nora was still a local figure of success; the mayor and the teachers held her up as an example. People who grow up in humble conditions have more need for cases of dazzling success, even if such exceptions are only, really, the mirror image of the determinism that oppresses everyone else. In that estate, there was no rapper, no footballer, but there was Nora.
Nora kept the truth to herself. The truth is you stay poor for life. Some social statuses shape you and shape you from the core. Like a lot of people, the residents in her working-class neighbourhood are convinced that social success is an end in itself, a definitive answer to the violence of racism, of class contempt, capable even of quelling the anger. They’ve been sold the Republican myth of equality, but an equality that’s conditional on whether they prove themselves, whether they haul themselves up to the height of the great motherland. And they’re encouraged to stay under this illusion, even though it condemns them from the outset to a position of loyalty and inferiority. Nora was doing everything right without it ever being enough. She was becoming exhausted, buffeted between two worlds; her family’s world, which she wanted to flee, protect and represent, all at the same time, and the world that would only ever see her as a survivor. Abel was the only one who understood her division, her inner struggle. He was the man she’d been sharing her life with for six years.
25 November 2021
Collège Emile-Durkheim, Argenteuil
Three months into the school year, a new student showed up in the middle of maths class, interrupting the teacher’s litanies and pulling the students out of the torpor into which they’d been plunged. Dylan’s arrival was the event of that last Thursday in November. He was white, the third white student in the class, and everyone was looking at his chestnut hair, his green eyes. The teenager did not seem at all daunted by the sniggering coming from his new classmates. In fact, he almost seemed to be savouring this moment of glory – he was making an entrance. The young man’s mother – a recently divorced public servant – had just moved in a few kilometres from the school, in the residential zone. A fierce defender of social diversity, she refused, unlike some other people, to do the bourgeois thing of moving one’s children away from the collèges that were part of the priority education network. To be honest, Dylan didn’t look like much, in his thin body, but he stood tall, with dignity, determined to make his mark. In working class and privileged schools alike, the power dynamics are the same; it’s the little-chauvinists-to-be who hand out insults or compliments, in entitled and croaky voices, according to a pecking order meted out on-the-fly in the corridor. The girls – at the bottom of the ladder but still above anyone labelled gay or trans – are the preferred target of their clumsy, and generally sexual, jokes.
While the teacher was introducing him, in front of his desk, Dylan identified the masters of the game in a single glance: the team at the back, slouched in their chairs. For now, he had to make do with the only available place: pressed against the window, in the second row on the left – next to Anissa. Dylan could tell straight away that she was ostracised. According to the hierarchy established by the boys, she was ranked at the very bottom, scorned, trampled, like the pebbles in the courtyard. As soon as he sat down beside her, there was an eruption of muffled sniggers, and after a few seconds, every student’s phone vibrated in unison. Back turned and ready to get on with his lesson, M. Duvernier pretended not to hear anything, tired of fighting these dinging parasites together with the carrying-on from boys who tried to cover them, by fake coughing at the top of their lungs. So long as the students weren’t caught red-handed, phones in their hands, he was happy to ignore the problem. Anissa looked discreetly at hers, nestled in the corner of her pencil case, and opened the notification with a swipe of her finger: ‘Flat chest is coming on to the new guy lol’. Over his neighbour’s shoulder, Dylan could make out the Snapchat app but couldn’t quite decipher the message.
‘Is that the class Snapchat group?’
Anissa went to pieces inside. Dylan had barely been there fifteen minutes and already he couldn’t miss the fact that she was routinely harassed in this group. And yet, it’s standard practice: students are added by school grade to this platform where messages, photos and videos disappear just after they’re read. They exchange details about their timetables, absent teachers, dates of tests and, more than anything, they gossip. An unsupervised schoolyard that over time leads to the formation of veritable virtual mobs. The self-proclaimed leaders, including three here, use it to circulate pornographic gifs.
‘Yes, do you want me to add you?’
Dylan gave her his username and Anissa sent him an invitation in a couple of seconds from the search bar.
‘I’ll accept tonight, my parents won’t let me bring my phone to school.’
Later that night, Dylan kept his promise. ‘Thanks for adding me, beautiful’. The compliment sparked a shy smile on Anissa’s lips as she listened to her music, earphones stuck firmly in her ears to muffle the sounds outside. It might have been just a reflex, a punctuation mark, but it had been so long, years even, since she’d received a compliment. At her place, in the apartment, there was an awkwardness that discouraged any show of emotion, and physical appearances weren’t something they cared about.
Well, actually, it was more that M Bentaleb cared too much about his daughters’ looks. He worried every time one of them was in the bathroom getting ready. Yet he was mindful not to tell them. Admitting they were beautiful might place a curse on them – that’s what he was afraid of anyway. When his daughters were late home, at night, he couldn’t help imagining menacing arms around them and would pray round-the-clock that they spot the predatory intentions behind male gallantry. That’s why he didn’t flatter his girls: he hoped that denying their charm would make it disappear in the eyes of others. Like most fathers, he instilled sexist standards in them, less out of the pleasure of ordering them around, and more out of a fear of men and the danger they represent. He kept a discreet eye on their clothing, their make-up, and gave his wife the job of passing on his instructions, or his reproaches. He didn’t like raising his voice with his daughters, didn’t like seeing the fear in their eyes that he too had felt, as a child, before his own father’s strict and cruel authoritarianism. In a roundabout way, he was policing them in the hope of helping them. Perhaps he would have been stricter still if God had given him sons. He would not have wanted to see them turn into the men that he considered a danger to his darling little girls. His honour, his salvation, depended, for him, on his daughters’ dignity.
Anissa: u like the school?
Dylan: its fine tbh theres worse. wyd?
Anissa: nmjc in my room with music, u?
Dylan: playing Callof, r u on Insta? i wanna c photos of u!
Anissa: yeah its nissou_btb but theres nm
Dylan: o y?
Anissa: im not pretty in photos
Dylan: ur better irl nbd
Anissa’s heart took a wild leap, or rather several leaps that reached her jaw and made her smile. Even this virtual intrusion from Dylan, into her listless night, was enough to soothe her loneliness. At that moment, Anissa felt good, safe. A boy was showing her interest, and she took it like a tender caress that was embracing her from within. This was what was missing from her life, shut away between the four walls of her bedroom: someone to speak to, a tiny bit of attention. Anissa was moving through life like it was an arid plain, and all of a sudden Dylan’s sweetness was quenching her thirst for attention. It felt like a miracle. And it was enough for her to become attached, to trust. Perhaps if her father, up the other end of the apartment, had been aware of the trap his baby was about to fall into, he would have risked a bit more generosity, showered her with the attention, the sweet nothings, that she was quietly calling out for, and that she needed, if she were to avoid becoming a target now.
Anissa: gonna shower c u tmrw? x
Dylan: wait send me a pic, i’ll tell u what i think!
Anissa: u want a pic of me?
Dylan: yup when u shower
Anissa: o u want a nude
Dylan: lol yeah… jus to check coz im sure u lk gd
She hesitated. Her body shrank at the thought of complying with this request but, at the same time, Anissa wanted to feel seen, desired, by a boy. And, anyway, everyone was doing it, right? A quick glance at TikTok showed hundreds of girls her age dancing in bikinis and receiving compliments or insults in the comments. In her newsfeed, a chaotic series of short, flashy videos appeared one after another, with headache-inducing soundtracks, and nothing connecting them. She was transfixed, immersed in a pleasant, indefinite hypnosis – a timeless space suffused with make-up advice, sketches, with dance routines that were jerky, stylised or rough, with unrealistic girls’ bodies, enhanced by the ring lights that bathed their faces and gave them a radiant glow. Everything’s bright, on TikTok, everything’s sexy, and within reach, everything’s telling you to jump in.
Anissa: promise u wont show anyone?
Dylan: nvr, ur crazy! its jus u & me
Nissou has taken a photo
Dyl_95 has taken a screenshot
Anissa: yd u do that? u promised not to keep it!
Dylan: chill dw trust me
Translated from the French by Frances Egan
(SEULE by Nesrine Slaoui © Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2023)
Nesrine Slaoui is a journalist, author and documentary director. A graduate of Sciences Po in Paris, she has worked as a presenter, reporter and commentator for France Télévisions. She is an expert in social media, and her documentary Kim K Theory (Arte, 2024) and second novel Seule (Fayard, 2023) explore this theme. She is also the author of Illégitimes (Fayard, 2021) and Notre dignité (Stock, 2024).
Frances Egan is a translator, researcher and lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne. She has a PhD from The University of Melbourne and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3 and has published widely on representations of gender, race, and feminism in the French and Francophone context. Frances has an English translation of Colette’s 1910 novel La Vagabonde forthcoming with Oxford University Press.