Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. From 2005 to 2017, she lived in Lyon. She holds a doctorate in literature from the University of Montreal and has published numerous articles and short stories, as well as several novels and essayswhose disasters (2013) and Twelve years in France (2018). She was an editor at Groupe Ville-Marie literature. Baldwin, Styron and me was published by Mémoire d’encrier this winter. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal Quebec letters.
hit bottom
Lyon, July 2022. I’m back for a few days in the city where I lived for years. My heart sinks, it’s so beautiful, I have so many memories here. It’s so good to find my bearings there, and old friends.
I feel so at home that it defies reason.
It defies reason because there was a time when all I wanted was to get out of here. First without admitting it to myself. Without letting the thing formulate itself in me. The words bubbled beneath the surface but failed to emerge and form in my mind.
But little by little they made their way and appeared to me in all their dazzling truth. They didn’t want me to hide them again after that. They turned in a loop, I carried them inside me and they lived in me all the time, until I was dazed.
I don’t think I want to live here anymore. I am too unhappy here. They don’t want me here.
Leave. Find my native land. Put an end to this feeling that I would never really be welcome here, never really belong, at least never by remaining me. The condition for it to work, for it to no longer hurt, was on repeat on TV, on the radio, in the newspapers and on the Internet, in the mouths and under the pen of certain columnists, certain politicians. She was unbearable to me.
“France, you love it or you leave it”
I remember the first time I heard these words on TV, from the mouth of a president who was himself the son of an immigrant. I remember the violence I found in those words.
There was this injunction. This peremptory tone which showed all the national feeling of superiority in the face of people from elsewhere. But that, even after only a few months in France, could not surprise me. The president who had said these words – and who was also going to create a ministry “of Immigration and National Identity” – judged above all that there was an erosion to be avoided. And this erosion came from people like me, those who nevertheless wanted to make their life in France, convinced of being able to find a better future there (in my case, I who was a qualified and fairly privileged immigrant) or a future quite simply (for those who came there simply to survive or to escape a destiny of misery).
We all came to France precisely because we believed in its promises of openness, welcome, justice, freedom, equality, fraternity. However, it seemed that this was not the type of love that was expected of us. We were expected to love France even when it betrayed precisely what we thought we wanted to live there and love.
The France we were asked to love was precisely the one that did not love us.
rebellious woman
Why am I telling you all of this ?
Because I would like Quebecers who read me to try to imagine what it is like to be in the place of someone who is welcomed in this way. To imagine what this can cause not only in this human being, but also in the social fabric, when a country which proclaims loud and clear its openness and generosity tells those who ask it to live up to these claims that he will accept them, but only if they stop asking him to practice what he preaches.
After trying for twelve years to get used to the degrading speeches of columnists, politicians, aspirants to power, which were looping on TV, on the radio, everywhere, I gave up. Even though I had put down roots there, even though I had forged unbreakable ties with wonderful people there, I left France.
Like the rebellious man of Albert Camus, after a period of depressive paralysis, I recognized in myself, and affirmed, a limit and a requirement: that one respects the part of me that I have in common with all other humans, including those who spoke against people like me.
And like the rebellious man of Camus, who also rises up when he sees denied in others the part of humanity that he now demands that we recognize him, I am unable to bear that my compatriots subject immigrants to this they did to me, their fellow citizen, when I myself was an immigrant.
Therefore, even though I know that I will reap insults of a violence that those who utter them would never tolerate being subjected to them, I write texts like this.
I write texts like this, which will get me in trouble, because I know something else: I am not alone. In Quebec as in France, many of us want to live differently, far from these “you love me or you leave me” which in reality means “you accept to love that I reject you, or you leave me”.
And I’m not alone in thinking that, as James Baldwin said, “those who say something is impossible are usually interrupted by others who are doing it”.