France’s wounded psyche is the invisible character of all Sabri Louatah’s novels and the TV series he wrote. The writer talks about his “visceral, sensual love” for the French language and the connection to his hometown. And it closely monitors the campaign for the upcoming presidential elections.
But he does all this in Philadelphia, a city in the United States that he came to consider his home after the 2015 attacks in France by Islamic extremists, which killed dozens of people and deeply traumatized the country. As feelings hardened against Muslims, he no longer felt safe. One day he was spat on and called a “dirty Arab”.
“I understood that they would not forgive us,” says Louatah, 38, a grandson of immigrants from Algeria. “When you live in a big democratic city on the east coast [dos EUA]is more at peace than in Paris, where he is immersed in the cauldron.”
President Emmanuel Macron’s three main rivals — who are expected to win nearly 50% of the vote, according to polls — in April’s elections are conducting anti-immigrant campaigns that underscore fears for a country facing the civilizational threat from non-European invaders. The issue is at the top of his agenda, despite the fact that immigration in France is now lower than in most European countries.
The poorly discussed problem is emigration. For years, France lost highly educated professionals who sought dynamism and opportunity elsewhere. But among them, according to researchers, are a growing number of Muslims who say discrimination was a strong factor: They felt forced out by a shower of prejudice, nagging questions about their safety and a sense of not belonging.
The flow has gone unnoticed by politicians and the media, and academics say the brain drain demonstrates the country’s failure to provide a path of progress for even the most successful of its largest minority group — people who would have served as role models. integration.
“Today, they contribute to the economy of Canada or Britain,” says Olivier Esteves, a professor at the University of Lille’s political science center who has researched the migration of 900 French Muslims and conducted in-depth interviews with 130 of them.
This group, estimated at 10% of the country’s population, occupies a strangely disproportionate place in the presidential campaign — even if their real voices are rarely heard. This is not just an indication of the lingering wounds inflicted by the 2015 and 2016 bombings, but also of France’s long struggle over identity issues and its unresolved relationship with former colonies.
They are being linked to crime and other social problems through ulterior motives such as “non-France zones” used by Valérie Pécresse, a center-right candidate who is vying with far-right leader Marine Le Pen for second place. behind Macron. The polemicist Eric Zemmour, following them in the polls, has already said that employers have the right to deny service to black and Arab people.
Louatah and others who have departed speak with a mixture of anger and resignation about their home country, where they still have relatives and ties. The places where he and others have settled are not discrimination-free havens, but respondents say they felt greater opportunity and acceptance there anyway. Some say that it was outside France that, for the first time, they did not question the simple fact of being French.
“I’m French, I’m married to a Frenchwoman, I speak French, I live as a Frenchman, I love French food and culture. But in my own country I’m not French,” says Amar Mekrous, 46, who grew up in a Paris suburb. by immigrant parents.
Finding the distrust of French Muslims oppressive after the 2015 attacks, Mekrous settled with his wife and three children in Leicester, England. In 2016, he created a Facebook group to bring together people like him in Britain, which today has 2,500 members. Newcomers increased before Brexit, he said, mostly young families and single mothers who found it difficult to find work in France because they wore the Muslim headscarf.
Only recently have researchers — like those at the University of Lille but also at the National Center for Scientific Research, the government’s main research institution — begun to form a portrait of departed French Muslims.
Elyes Saafi, 37, a marketing executive at American finance firm StoneX in London, grew up in Remiremont, eastern France, where the family settled after arriving from Tunisia in the 1970s. Like his parents, he ended up making a new life in a new country. In England, he met his wife, Mathilde, who is French, and found a relaxed diversity he could not have imagined.
“At company dinners there may be a vegetarian or halal buffet, but everyone mixes,” he says. “The CEO appears, wearing a turban, and fraternizes with the employees.” The Saafis miss France but have decided not to return — in part because of concerns about their two-year-old son.
“In Britain I’m not afraid to raise an Arab child,” says Mathilde.
In 2020, anti-Muslim acts in France increased by 52% compared to the previous year, according to official complaints gathered by the National Human Rights Commission. Incidents have increased over the past decade, with a sharp rise in 2015, and an official investigation in 2017 found that young men perceived as Arab or black were 20 times more likely to have their identity checked by the police.
Job seekers with Arabic names are 32% less likely to be called for an interview, according to a government report released in November.
Louatah, married to a French economist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, says he hopes to one day return to the country that fills his novels. When the TV series based on his work “The Savages” [os selvagens] was broadcast in 2019, it became an immediate hit for Canal Plus — the work imagines France for the first time led by a president of North African origin.
But two years later, Louatah came to see the series as “an anomaly.” He began writing the second season, with a plot focused on police violence, one of the most sensitive topics in France, but the show was not renewed for reasons that, according to the author, were never clarified. A spokesperson for Canal Plus said the series was planned for a single season.
In Philadelphia, the writer is working on a novel about exile from an unnamed country.
