Lilia Hussein: “They accuse these young men of not feeling French, but they wanted to expel their parents.”

The name and face of Lilia Hussein are known in France. TV journalist and author of two novels, Lowell de Paone And Soleil am – bitter suntranslated last year by and/or, discussed in He appears This March 8th – which has sold more than 35,000 copies across the Alps, belongs to the “third generation” of French Algerians and grew up on the outskirts of Paris.

I was born in Corbeil-Issonne, where the last days, especially in the residential area of ​​Tarteretes, have seen clashes and violence after Nael was killed by the police. How do you feel about what is happening?
Feeling that things are getting worse. Communication between the police and suburban youth is getting more and more difficult. In these areas, the clients become increasingly tense and the boys are forced to undergo examinations every day based on the color of their faces. And so the situation is always on the verge of flaring up. The death of a 17-year-old is unprovoked, and in the ensuing riots, a fire takes the life of a 24-year-old firefighter in recent days. I wonder how – in a country like France – this could have happened, and why nothing has changed since the 2005 clashes.

One gets the impression that people in France speak of suburbs (a definition that has many different things) only in terms of components: but what does it mean to grow up in an area like the one in which you were born, about 30 kilometers from the center of Paris?
Indeed, it is true that to say “panleo” is to speak of many different realities. For example, unlike my parents who grew up in a social housing area in the 1970s, I lived in the suburbs, but in a residential suburb. I used to live in a quiet neighborhood, in a house with a garden, and I can’t say that this is not an additional opportunity. But when I arrived in Paris, I realized the gap between “my world” and “Parisian life.” My friends there didn’t want to come to the suburbs because of the preconceived notions they had about violence in those areas.

The victims of the so-called “fans” of the regime’s forces are largely young Frenchmen whose families emigrated from the Maghreb as well as from Africa. In the early 1990s, journalist Fausto Giudice published an investigation (“La Découverte arabides”) in which he recounted the fate of these young men. Your family is from Algeria, how do you live in this climate?
It is no coincidence that in my novel Sole amaro I return to an event that took place in October 1961 when Algerians in Paris who were peacefully demonstrating for independence were thrown into the Seine. This is an episode long hidden by institutions (Holland was the first to break the silence in 2012, Mr. Dr) deeply affected the Algerians in France. As I belonged to the “third generation”, I was born in France to parents born in France, I think I was sufficiently insulated from all this, but for my parents the rule was still “discretionary”: first of all, one must not notice .

In Bitter Sun, it tells the story of an Algerian who was chosen in his home village by Renault recruiters to take part in the Boulogne-Billancourt workshops and then joined in Paris by his family. When did the immigrants who helped build France become “enemies” and their children a “danger” to society?
I wrote this book just to understand how it all began. In the 1970s, with high unemployment and the oil crisis, the country began to regard immigrants as an “excess” in French society. They went so far as to offer up to 10,000 francs of “return assistance” to encourage immigrants who wanted to return to their “home”. For many children of immigrants born in France, this was evidence that they did not fully consider themselves French. And to think that they are now being criticized for not feeling French enough…

As has already happened in other similar tragedies, again after Nahl’s death, a vicious cycle of oppression, abuse and violence seems to arise around Dahiyeh. However, these neighborhoods have a strong associative life, and again in 2018 Macron tasked himself with Jean-Louis Borloo to come up with a plan to address the problems, but then chose not to implement it. Where do you begin to change things?
Macron never considered Borloo’s plan. After all, many politicians only care about the suburbs during the election period.. And this is the real problem: the suburbs are not taken into account. We have concentrated all the difficulties in the same places. A greater social and ethnic mix would be – as happened in the 1960s – a really good starting point for improving the situation.