Part 1
Jamel
A thick fog had settled into the Paris suburban dawn and the atmosphere outside became subdued and diaphanous. Jamel cut through the voluptuousness of the charged wintry air and released forward the fumes of his cigarette, combined with his own condensed breath as he walked. As he crossed the road he looked up; the grayness of the tall concrete HLM towers, these apartment blocks for the poor, had dissolved into the grayness of the sky and vanished altogether. When reaching his block, Jamel fished for his keys in the side pockets of his tracksuit pant and let himself inside. He finished his cigarette on the stairs of the entrance hall and sat there for a while, watching through the doors for some familiar sight, which the thickening fog had momentarily blurred.
He dived into his bed with his clothes on and lay flat on his stomach, face dug deep into his pillow. He was fast asleep, when a knock on his room door drew him awake.
‘Jamel, son…are you there?’ He mumbled some answer through the pillow fabric and the voice became more pressing.
‘What, mum?’
‘Jamel, son, get up!’
A bowl of milked cereals and a glass of juice awaited him on the kitchen table. In a haze, Jamel sat and plunged a listless spoon into the bowl. Jamel’s mother drew a chair and sat herself opposite to him. She was a bulky rounded type of woman, and by contrast, her son was all skinny and angular. He kept his face down and chewed silently on the food, waiting for his mother’s reprimands, which did not come. Her mother remained silent instead and this annoyed him. He did not know what to do of her silence, so when she finally spoke, he felt almost relieved.
‘Jamel, son.’
He knew immediately something was wrong from the sound of her voice, normally so secure, that same voice that had sustained and kept their family from falling apart after their father left them; so that it felt ugly to hear his mother’s voice, that pillar of the earth, now shaken with the tremors of an unknown catastrophe.
‘Where were you last night, I was dead worried! Have you not heard the news?’
‘I was at the warehouse rehearsing,’ he replied, although he knew his mother disapproved of this abandoned entrepôt that he and his friends had rehabilitated into a squat. Then he remembered his mother mentioning the news and quickly added, hoping she would not delve any further on the subject and leave him go back to his bed, ‘What news, mum?’; so that when she rejoined straightaway and with emphasis - ‘What news, what news? Two kids from the neighborhood were killed last night and you’re asking me what news?’ - the words reached him from a distance, as in a dream.
‘How?’ was all he said.
‘They were chased down by the police and died of electrocution hiding in a power plant. It’s all over the news. I heard it on the radio this morning but they haven’t disclosed the identity of the two kids yet. I thought it might have been you!’
‘Mum…’
‘I was dead worried, so when midday struck I knocked to see if you were there. Thank god you’re here with me now. Where were you?’
‘Mum…’
‘You know it’s your birthday today, Jamel, and you’re out all night doing god knows what with your drug dealer friends. Now I don’t want you to behave stupid by raising any more hell, like going on a crusade against the police. Don’t you bring any shame to this family! The police must have had good reasons!’
Jamel had completely forgotten about his birthday and felt displeased to be reminded of it, as it conveyed to his mind the picture of a happy family, when his father was still around and birthdays still mattered; a picture that now did not quite match. He drank from his juice and drew a misshaped cigarette from the middle pocket of his hoodie. He then reached for a lighter on the table. Volutes of bluish smoke now stood between him and his mother.
‘You know you’re not allowed to smoke inside.’
‘Mum… I know the two kids.’
Outside the fog had dissipated. Through the kitchen window, Jamel saw more windows, more cramped apartments like theirs, impersonal and ugly, and felt trapped. From very far he heard his mother crying -what have you done, son? - and saw himself get up abruptly, quite another person altogether, as if the confession he had just made about his affiliation with the two kids had released in him some weight and irrevocably changed him. He felt himself floating past his mother and the TV which was on, sitting adjacent to the main door, where a journalist was presently reporting on the events that had occurred the night before: … it is likely that more violence will arouse in the course of the following days…
‘Please, Jamel, son, stay… I’ve made a cake…’
‘Must go, mum. Keep it for later,’ and the door slammed shut in his wake.
Aziyah
Jamel’s father, like Aziyah’s, is best to be described by his absence. While the first went back to Algeria and left three children and a wife behind, the other spent eight years of his life in jail, only to be released under parole that he would never be involved again in any activity that might challenge the government’s authority in some way. This meant, among other things, the resigning of his position as a lecturer at the University of Tehran. Aziyah’s father was a ruined man in a ruined country, but there was one last thing he must do. His daughter and only child should leave Iran for France and Paris, where his brother and family lived, and pursue her studies there. Her father had suffered the worst atrocities and Aziyah did not wish to argue with him, although she rather would have stayed. Her friends thought that she was lucky, but she saw her father’s ghostly shape and felt the burden of his sacrifice for her, his family, the nation, and wanted to sacrifice herself too. But the old man would not let her.
‘A young woman like you must go on with her life. There is nothing left to fight for here.’
So she went, to Paris, to please her father, and pleased him again with false reports of her life there, for she did not want to harm him any further. Her uncle was a brutal man who could not speak a word of French but knew the Koran by heart and would preach her relentlessly about the sins of the West. He and his family lived a recluse existence in the outskirts of Paris, and had little or no contact with the outside world.
‘You’ve come home late again. Answer. Where have you been?’
‘I had to stay at the library to study.’
‘Can’t you study here? Is this place not worthy of you? We harbor you and this is how you treat us in return. You are like your father. All these ideas, all these books. You think you’re better, but see where this led your father… There is only one book, one, you hear me, and this is the Koran. Allah watches over all of us,’ and he made a step forward and stretched his arm towards her. Aziyah startled, and one of the books she was carrying fell flat on the floor. It had opened on a detailed picture of the female and male anatomies. A penis protruded from the page accusingly at her.
‘Whore! Is this what they teach you in these universities? Is this why you spend so much time there, and not here, with us?'
In the letters she wrote to her father, Aziyah described places she’d never been, people she’d never met but whose path had crossed hers. Her life was a recluse one, too.
Dad, you would be proud of me. I made the acquaintance of some of the most wonderful people here at uni. They study medicine too and are in my class, and they’ve introduced me to the Paris of culture and cafés. They all come from respectable, well-off families but they talk of changing the world. And Uncle Rachid is being real nice with me. It is hard for him to take me under his shelter, he who already has so many mouths to feed. Uncle Rachid lives in one of these modern concrete towers in the Paris periphery, all equipped and with giant supermarkets and fitness centers lying underground. I wish you could see me now, you would probably cry…
On the TV later that night, after she’d fallen asleep, reports were made that two kids from the neighborhood had died of electrocution in a power plant. That night, Aziyah dreamt that her uncle was peering at her in her sleep. She left early to uni the next morning.
Part 2
The Riots
On CNN, images of the Eiffel Tower burning flashed through the TV screen, along with the tantalizing headlines: French Riots, France at war with itself. The propensity by the media to distort the reality of the banlieues, these Paris suburbs that had become ghettoes in the face of poverty, angered Jamel. It made him feel hopeless, forever misunderstood. France was not at war with itself -or else there would have been no upheaval- but with a youth that had been kept at bay and excluded from the nation’s building; with people just like him, the sons and daughters of first-generation immigrants from the ex-French colonies of Africa. His parents had been called upon by the French government after the war to rebuild the nation. When the job was done, they did not go back to Algeria, hoping to make a life of their own in the new country, and had children. Jamel thought this would have been better for everyone if they did not. Better if his father had never stepped a foot in this rotten country in the first place. Jamel would always feel responsible for his father’s return to Algeria. The old man never understood his son’s generation, so unlike his - all the violence and exclusion. A few months away, before he had packed all his stuff on the roof of the old R5 and drove off, Jamel had told him of his wish to become a rap singer. As far as he could remember, this had been the last discussion he had had with his father.
‘Can’t you be something else? Study hard and get a proper job? Is this what it all comes down to, after I’ve used my hands for you to be able to use your brain? Son, you shame me.’
‘Can’t study, Pa, there is no way for me out of school. So I’ve chosen to sing instead, me and my friends we’ve put up that band. At least I’m not dealing in the streets.’
‘You shame me, son. Why can’t you do like anyone else in this country and get a normal job? You want to end up like one of these token clownish Arabs on TV, is this what you want to be? Jamel, son, you’re better than this.’
‘I’m no better than the rest. Can’t you see? At least when I sing I feel good. At least I’m not dealing,’ he repeated. Jamel thought he would buy his father’s approval that way. Some of his friends had made a living out of dealing; they drove at high speed in Mercedes across the neighborhood and wore big shiny Rolex on their dangling wrists to show off their wealth to the miserable outside on the pavements. He knew his father despised them, not because they did drugs, but because they made easy money when he had toiled so hard all of his life.
‘At least you’re not dealing? Jamel, son, you pity me. Isn’t there more for you out there than dealing or singing, or vandalizing, like what we are seeing now?’
He remembered the anger on his father’s face, and how powerless he, Jamel, had felt then. He turned the TV off; more reports of burning cars and buses all throughout the Paris suburbs, and even further, in other French cities: Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Marseille, Le Havre… And it all started because of the two kids. He wasn’t there when it actually happened, but one of the kids was his friend’s brother, and others had run off from the police and found Jamel and his friends down at the warehouse. Jamel went to his room and put on a rap CD on to cover up the sudden silence.
Faut niquer le système
Ils auront le feu car ils ont semé la haine
Qu’on les brule, qu’on les pende ou qu’on les jette dans la Seine
La jeunesse du ghetto a d’la rage qui coule dans les veines
Faut briser les chaines
The band, Sniper, was singing its call-to-arms against Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far right-wing leader who’d almost won the presidential elections a few years past and was well known for its outspoken racist views. He turned the volume up. There was a loud explosion outside in the streets and people yelling but he did not hear them.
The Demonstrations
A few months later only, France was at war with itself again, and the youth were in the streets demonstrating against a new job law that had been passed and which would make the precariousness of their condition in the face of future employers even greater than it already was. Universities had been blocked, so Aziyah spent her time with her uncle and his family at home. Images of students, some of them she knew by sight, appeared on TV, building barricades with chairs and tables at the entrance of La Sorbonne, determined to sleep within the precincts of the university every night if needed, till the Prime Minister resigned; still more images of impressive numbers of students demonstrating in the streets of Paris and the Champs Elysees, chanting in unison: non, non non, à cette réforme bidon/ oui, oui oui, à son annulation. Aziyah did not know what to think of the current events, although they reminded her of the Iranian Revolution. But she hadn’t been born yet back in 1979, wasn’t there to experience its denouement first-hand, and she wasn’t there either now, shouting for the cause, whatever cause, with her classmates. That was the thing. She wasn’t there, and almost wished she had been. Her father was always grand and eloquent, although disillusioned with the Revolution, and full of anecdotes.
‘Tell us about the bassidji, dad.’ The bassidji, the Iranian secret State’s militia, always fascinated her as a kid for all its evilness. The bassidji were the monster figure her dad would use to scare his daughter with at night.
‘One day, we all gathered on the main Tehran Square, now called Freedom Square, to defend our rights against the oppressive government of the time. A friend of mine, my best friend, had come along with me, but when the riots and confrontation with the army started, the bassidji must have caught him for he was not by my side any longer. You see, the bassidji were dressed in plain like us. They must have taken him away and beat him up to death, because I never saw or heard of him again. A lot of students died that very day.’ On a happy note, her father would conclude: ‘but the bassidji never caught me!’ which was only half-true. Aziyah never questioned her liking for war stories, despite the fact it was not very ladylike, but what did it mean to be ladylike for a woman in Iran?
She turned away from the TV and faced her relatives -her uncle and his three sons, all big enough to take her side when their father was behaving menacingly to Aziyah, the only woman in the home, but none of them ever did. They respected his authority and denied her any right to protest, as they would have done in Iran. Their mother was dead and their father had never remarried. He was ageing badly and looked at Aziyah as if he had ideas of raping her. She was slim and attractive. If such a thing happened, she thought, no one would come to rescue her.
Part 3
A War Cry
That night, after she had cooked for and fed all the family, Aziyah stood by the window of her room, which overlooked other windows like hers, other impersonal entries into a person’s private life. Lights were on in some of them, while outside the streets of her suburb were now dead and dark. Further beyond, which she could not see but only imagine, lied Paris, the City of Lights, and the students, demonstrating, feasting on their own revolution to overthrow the Prime Minister. And she saw, opposite her in the next apartment block, only fifteen meters away or so, the back of someone standing by a window. The shape turned and faced her. They watched each other in silence for a while, and the man opened his window. She opened hers. The sky was clear and the air brisk. The man shouted through the distance. ‘Je m’appelle Jamel!’
She shouted back: ‘Aziyah!’
That night, the rest of the world could go to hell for a time: two souls had met. His own riot. Her own revolution.
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