One day, when Kaoutar Harchi was a student at a private Catholic high school in her native France, a teacher gave her a book inscribed with a dedication: “To my little Arab girl who should know her history.”
Harchi, who was born in Strasbourg in 1987 to Moroccan immigrant parents, was instructed to read the book (“It’s the history of your people”) and give a presentation on it to her fellow students. During her talk, the teacher asked her to tell the class — a predominantly white group — about her origins, her culture and her religion, and to say a few words in her mother tongue.
Harchi describes this “unequal encounter” in her insightful and engrossing coming-of-age memoir, As We Exist. “I felt, for a brief moment, that I was the odd one out, an isolated, reduced body,” she reveals. “And I felt this: that I was being exposed, that I was being exorcised.”
This wasn’t the only time Harchi felt alienated while growing up in eastern France. Her book — her English language debut — recounts how a young woman became increasingly aware of her differences on her journey to adulthood, and how her outsider status informed her identity and paved the way to a career as a writer and sociologist.
“After the publication of three novels and a sociology book, I wanted to go back in time and discover the elements that had determined my social, intellectual and political trajectory,” Harchi tells The National.
As We Exist is also an affectionate portrait of Harchi’s parents, Mohamed and Hania. Harchi traces their family histories and their move to France, and shares happy memories of life with them in her childhood home.
But along with good times are accounts of their everyday struggles. Harchi says that her father was plagued by the impression that “we weren’t really in our place” and were “lacking that legitimacy that allowed a person to feel at home.”
Both her parents worked long hours cleaning office buildings. “They are from the postcolonial working class,” Harchi says. “They, like many others, were confronted with a French society that valued them as workers and not as people.”
Another hardship they faced was the constant threat of violence in their community, either from youths loitering in the street or brutal clampdowns by racist, heavy-handed police officers. When Ahmed, a young man from their neighbourhood, died in police custody, Harchi learnt a hard lesson. “I came to understand that some people have the right to live and others to die,” she says. “This kind of injustice, we never forget it.”
Harchi’s privileged Catholic school in Strasbourg shielded her from certain dangers. However, she and her friend Khadija frequently experienced bullying and racism at the hands of both classmates and teachers. At one point, Harchi’s mother, “a little conqueror in pursuit of my fears”, put a miniature Quran in her daughter’s pencil case to “protect” her.
“I loved school and hated school,” Harchi says. “I overcame these symbolic hardships because I thought that one day I would go to university and that would be a form of emancipation.”
Then during the last months of Harchi’s senior year, she came across a book in a public library. The Suffering of the Immigrant by Abdelmalek Sayad helped alleviate the torment she was subjected to at school and transformed her outlook.
“Sayad is an Algerian sociologist of immigration,” Harchi explains. “His work is fundamental for me, and for my whole generation. Indeed, through his books he managed to show the political construction of the ‘Muslim problem’. We were able to understand that we were not the problem, the problem was state racism.”
Inspired and emboldened by Sayad’s book, Harchi went on to study social science at university in Paris. She applied herself and was especially interested in the sociology of immigration, school and family.
“Sociology was an eye-opener,” she says. “It helped me to forge a political awareness of the world. Through sociology I was able to understand social domination and the importance of resistance.”
Resistance came into play in 2004 when a French law was passed banning religious symbols from public schools. Harchi read news articles about the law with mounting anger, believing they “exuded the racism that always loomed like a shadow over colonised peoples in their own countries and immigrants in the former coloniser’s country”.
One night in Paris, a man accosted Harchi and her friends in the street and demanded that they remove their veils. When they didn’t comply, he hit one of them. Harchi realised that racism was rife, even in the supposedly more cosmopolitan capital city.
“Small problems in the provinces become big problems in Paris,” she says. “The multicultural character of Paris is a myth.”
Does she feel the situation is better today? Has French society become more tolerant of French North African immigrants?
“The historical foundations of French society are sexist and racist,” she says. “More specifically, the figure of the Muslim embodies the myth of the enemy within. I would say that nothing has improved. Everything has become worse. Muslim women who wear the veil are marginalised and suffer a lot of discrimination in the workplace.”
Those keen to see change should read Harchi’s book, a memoir about growing up and finding out, but also a chronicle of hope, resilience and defiance.
