Memories flash through the head of this 47-year-old woman. The reader is hooked. This time, Kaddour is not going to make a triumphant return to the country – as was the case, every other year, during the summer holidays, as she tells it, filled with sweet nostalgia. There were five of them to board a Peugeot 505 where every little space was used so that everyone in Algeria received a gift drawn from the treasure chest that represented France. “You are the embodiment of success, she writes about her parents. The fairy tale is too beautiful, why break the magic? Why reveal the dark side of your condition as immigrants? What’s the point of stirring up the mud to bring to the surface the hardship, the bullying, the humiliation?”
“Girl from Tunis” by Olivia Elkaïm
In his last wishes, Kaddour Brakni asked to rest in his native country, in Tipiza. Despite the administrative difficulties (pandemic requires), everything will be done to respond to their request.
Kaddour and all the others
Kaddour never wanted French nationality – too strong was the memory of October 17, 1961. That day, in Paris, a peaceful demonstration by Algerians demanding the independence of their country in which he had participated was repressed. in the blood.
By painting the portrait of Kaddour, Rachida Brakni captures a whole section of the life of these immigrants who arrived, some from Algeria, some from Morocco, some from Tunisia, in France to work. Kaddour arrived in 1955. He was 18 years old. He is illiterate. He will find a job in a factory where he will lose the index and middle fingers of his right hand before becoming a truck driver. He married, had three children, lived first in a town in Athis-Mons before moving to a house in Morangis.
Interview with Leïla Slimani
At the end of the book, Rachida Brakni insists: she does not want to reduce her father to his condition of immigrant worker prisoner of a collective narrative, by removing all his singularity. Begining with “Is that like you”she then lists a whole series of personality traits of this darling father.
What we will remember above all when closing this story of rare emotion where the love and pride of a daughter for her father ooze, is this beautiful lesson that Kaddour transmitted to Rachida: one day, a somewhat intrusive neighbor wants to inform the father of his daughter’s bad company. Rachida is 13 years old and would have spoken with boys. “I don’t know which girl you’re talking about, I only have boys”, he answers. We are grateful to Rachida Brakni for having shared her father, a man who proves that there are still some people with great values. And which allows us to understand where she comes from and where she has managed to go.
⇒ Kaddour | Story | Rachida Brakni | Stock, 197 pp., €19.50, digital €14
EXTRACT
“Your knowledge is empirical, sculpted by trials, shaped by your experience of the street. You were keen to embody your role as a father seriously. To do this, you groped, searched, experimented. As the eldest , I suffered a few blows, and when you went astray, I did not fail to confront you, I respected you but did not fear you And you, as a good farmer, you knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff. and clean up the crossed out drafts. You also knew how to surprise me like that day when you gave me the greatest freedom.
