Zahia Rahmani - France, Story of a Childhood

The fictional characters who crossed the Atlantic are many. They reduced the ocean separating me from them to the surface area of this narrow hideaway. Like a decompression chamber, it made me forget, for a brief moment, the tumult of my life in France.

American literature taught me, and not gently, about a people. It described them without shame, showing me their humiliations, cruelty, and debasements. These trials in adversity, which I witnessed through my books, sparked a desire in me. I wanted to learn everything about the American people and the violence that brought them into the world. If I had never discovered their tragic fate—that of their black children and of all the women and men torn from their homes, fighting among themselves—I would have made a singular, constant mess of my life.

Algeria is behind us and war has displaced my family. It’s brought them to an airport tarmac, where they await the arrival of the white bird that will lead them to their chosen destination. But I see myself flying toward America to join that nation’s sons whose voices have miraculously reached me. My brother is the one who buys those first American authors, on his English teacher’s advice. When I see him reading all the time, even during meals, a new curiosity awakens inside me. Can you remain silent for so long under the mere influence of a book? I pretend to walk around him, to take an interest in his reading, while I’m really dying to ask what’s happening to him.

It’s possible that my brother’s childhood experience was different from my own. He could have lost hope, but he doesn’t. Children should like school. My brother is wild about it. Arriving in France at age eight, he slips into life like an eel. He overcomes every obstacle. My mother told me once that my brother, a watchful companion during all my tribulations, was touched by an angel. He’ll be the first in the village to pass the baccalaureate exam. When the results are announced, my father pulls away, instead of congratulating him. So be it, Hocine learns his lesson. He confounds our father’s expectations and develops a delicate way of dealing with others. He wants to be good. He learns everything he can. At fifteen, he teaches himself martial arts and recruits disciples. He trains with surprising willpower, sending bits of tethered wood, chopped broomsticks, and salvaged hoops into flight around his body, testing their resistance on himself. This is the era of Bruce Lee, whose karate we study through a variety of books, movies, and instruments. My brother sets out to make and showcase the latter in a confined area of the house where he receives his students. He will attend the conservative University of Assas, telling me it’s in the belly of your enemy that you can gauge the strength of his ribs. For us, he is the source of serene joy. He will become the king of speed on ice skates, on roller skates, on a toboggan, on a bike, in a car, as well as a marathoner, an emcee, an English translator, a pirate radio commentator, an illustrator, and a painter. He takes an interest in the life of Emperor Haile Selassie, faithfully adhering to his philosophy all the while remaining democratic and liberal. He will become a news photographer, a jet and ultralight pilot—frightening me every time he waves at us with a dipped wing above the house—the director of a haute-couture label, a music producer, a game inventor, practicing them all ardently in order to better understand people, he says. He studies chemistry and fancies himself a discoverer and a specialist in plastic waste and water filtration, then an environmental engineer, a community organizer, an advocate for reading to children, and the father of a joyful family. He’s scared of nothing and blessed with a unique and striking manner of speaking. His sense of fair play diffuses all violence and fear. One day, he introduces Mandy to us. His English girlfriend. So English that she doesn’t sense, not even a little, our shock when we see her. Tall, slender, almost ginger, with jeans molded to very thin legs and a reed of a voice captured in a language that could make a bird cry. We had never heard such softness. Mandy sleeps in the small room. She stays two weeks and quickly returns. For every holiday and then for a long time. I want her as my sister. Her brother, a bass player in London, supplies us with vinyl records by the dozen. And our collection grows like a record dealer’s. I’m twelve, she has me listen to her passion. Rock music. I don’t understand English, she teaches me the words. I love the Doors. She translates “Strange Days” for me. I love and I listen. Without end, I listen. And I find my idol. Patti Smith. I want to know everything about her. I learn. I learn about this tough woman with the unusual voice. Our room becomes a music lounge where one culture sings me promises of a man torn from the rough. My brother marries this melody. Gentle, attentive, and beautiful.

The attic fills up with this culture and writers will reign here. I’m pulled in as well. I don’t think I wanted to imitate anything, it’s the era that found my brother and me. I don’t read French literature. I’m uninterested in that history and I know nothing of the failure of its bourgeois cycle. I seek the displaced man and his hopes. I seek to understand the pathetic origins of shame and dishonor, as well as my own neighbors’ cycle of poverty, their convictions, and the authority behind their certitudes and words.

I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Melville, Faulkner, and Williams. “Of course all life is a process of breaking down,” wrote the author of The Crack-Up . At this time I’m in search of a refuge, somewhere I can hide from the disgrace to which I’m doomed by a society that stigmatizes me, and a father awaiting my downfall. I meet no peers. I want a new home.

Richard Wright. That’s the first book I pick. I take it. Except for Hansel and Gretel and a few thick encyclopedias, I’ve never read any books and don’t know how to choose them. At school, I prove myself. My grades are as good as my brother’s. I’m like him in every way. Both of us, blessed with great curiosity and a genuine facility for learning, are going to terminate the social contract that aims to make subjects out of us. We will refuse to wear the binding garments we’re offered. As early as childhood, I break away. Such an act marks you as a traitor for life.

I see Corneille’s The Cid , Stendhal’s The Red and the Black , and other books on my brother’s desk. Molière and Rabelais. Pantagruel has me hearing nothing but frightening pig burps and squeals. I don’t understand exactly what I’m running from. An edifying patrimony that I reduce to the simple view from my narrow universe. I read Black Boy first. Everything about this boy resembles me. I know today that I had a strong predisposition to seek out similarities in American literature. But how does it arouse such empathy in me? This literature that says, “Here you go, this person is a stranger in his own country.” It speaks to me of the acculturated white man and his religion and lies, of the cursed Negro, his poverty, his voice, and his invisible footsteps. It speaks to me of the half-wit and the man made dumb by alcohol, who become criminals or rapists. It speaks of the pornographer, the expropriator, the white woman. And none of them have a way out.

“I knew,” wrote Richard Wright, “that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive. I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure I would never feel.”