In search of a “we”: Recuperating the postcolonial margins with Anas Daif

“We” does not mean “my people,” everybody who’s like me, but everybody with a potential stake in this “we.”

— Alice Diop, Nous

For most people around the world, France is almost naturally associated with romance and sophistication — a conflation that largely originates from viewing its capital, Paris, as the city of light and love. The Eiffel Tower, in particular, operates as the ultimate French icon: to evoke it is to conjure the image of two lovers walking along the Seine to the tune of an accordion.

But underneath this rose-tinted veneer lies a darker, lesser-known aspect: that of imperialism. Indeed, the construction of the now unmistakable steel structure dates back to the 1889 Universal Exhibition, where national and international visitors could marvel at both the advancements of industry and the “curiosities” (including humans exposed in zoos) of the growing French empire — a true spectacle of might, technology, progress, and patriotism designed to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the French Revolution.

But why does the iconic monument stand in as the epitome of Frenchness, and not as a reminder of France’s colonial past? If this question is perhaps too broad and complex to answer satisfyingly within the scope of this article, it does point to a problem that has been hotly debated for the past two decades: What might it mean to be French in light of this history?

Race, Universalism, and French identity

France is an interesting case study. Despite its diverse population, the nation’s relationship to race, immigration, and the colonial history that necessarily binds them together is fraught, to say the least. One of the main contributors to this issue is its ideological core, “Republican universalism,” namely, the idea that Frenchness should be the only legitimate marker of citizenship and identification, if the Republic is to remain unified. No one, for example, can officially be recognized as Black and French or Arab and French, for to do so would signify a desire to break the national community.

While, on paper at least, universalism can seem like a noble ideal, in reality, it makes the country unable to account for, and therefore address, the racial discriminations that French people of color endure. More subtly even, universalism delegitimizes and erases multicultural identities, narrowing, as such, the limits and thresholds of what Frenchness might mean — or, perhaps more dangerously, of who can claim it. For citizens whose trajectory intersects with postcolonial migrations, this is especially jarring as their presence in the metropole is the direct result of a long history of violence, displacement, and racial exclusion engineered by the French colonial empire and its subsequent fall.

Indeed, at its height in the 1930s, France was the second largest empire in the world, with colonies on all six continents and hundreds of millions of colonial subjects at their disposal. After the end of the Second World War, however, the vast majority of these territories became independent nations, sometimes at the close of a bloody war, as was the case for Algeria in 1962. The decolonial era of the 1960s also coincided with a period of rapid economic boom and cultural shifts in France called the Trente Glorieuses (“Thirty Glorious Years”) — a heyday that was made possible by thousands of immigrant families, a sizeable portion of which originated from North African colonies, whose labor was essential in rebuilding the economy and infrastructures of France.

These newcomers were overwhelmingly resettled in the outskirts of large cities (primarily Paris, Lyon, and Marseille), where dozens of concrete buildings were built, forming large architectural ensembles we call banlieues. This decision, as French sociologist Mathieu Rigouste has shown, was deliberately made by the French government: the point was to not only ensure the geographical isolation of immigrant families from city centers, but also facilitate police surveillance and control over a population that was (and continues to be) deemed unassimilable at best, dangerous at worst (pp. 29-34). In other words, if structural colonialism (which rests upon racial differentiation and geographical segregation) was externally dismantled during the decolonial era, its logic was inwardly reproduced in metropolitan France.

Overgrown field with scattered white wildflowers and green shrubs; in the background, several tall residential buildings rise above a line of trees. — Still from the documentary *Nous* (2021), by Alice Diop, representing the *cité* of Blanc-Mesnil, located North-East of Paris.

Those who come from, and often continue to live in, banlieues have thus had to continually suffer from social, cultural, and even racial ostracization by being treated as citizens of a second class who unsettle, rather than enrich, the national community. Since the 1990s at least, as Mame-Fatou Niang further argues, urban policies have in fact “cemented the perception of banlieues as foreign, dangerous bodies whose control has to equalize and assimilate residents,” particularly those who are Black and Arab.

In this context, there is a need to not only shift how banlieues and their inhabitants are represented, but also to interrupt the process of national identity-making, which heavily relies on the oppositional logic of a “we” versus “them.” After all, as Alice Diop eloquently reminds us in her award-winning documentary Nous (2021), “‘We’ is what happens when ‘I’ opens up. When ‘I’ swells, builds up outward, expands” (revised translation). How, then, might “we” open up to “the Other”? What kind of “we” might we achieve and build together if exclusion and prejudice are refused, and difference, instead, is incorporated?

“Reclaiming their narratives”: The work of Anas Daif

Person with short curly hair, a thin mustache, and small earrings wears a black t-shirt against a gray background.

These questions lie at the heart of French-Moroccan journalist Anas Daif’s work (pictured left). For the recently published author of Et un jour je suis devenu arabe (“And one day, I became Arab”), death, negative stereotypes, and racism form the daily experience of French Arabs — a reality that worsened in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in 2015. “Here [in France],” he writes, “I am seen as a bomb that must prove it has never been primed. A presumed culprit whose life is a never-ending series of public trials” (p. 8, my translation).

Born in a banlieue of Paris to Moroccan immigrant parents and raised in a working-class, multiracial neighborhood of the capital, this experience has felt, for Daif, like being torn between two places and cultures: too Arab to be perceived as French in his birth country, and too French to be seen as fully Moroccan in Morocco. His queerness, too, was something that has had an important impact on his self-perception as well as how he was perceived by others. “The fact is that, with my non-imbricating identities, I didn’t really fit anywhere” Daif recalls:

“In France, men that look like me are perceived as potential criminals and terrorists; but when my homosexuality is uncovered, I become more acceptable in some spaces. In my own ethno-religious community, I’m the stronger sex, the man of the house . . . But as soon as I reveal this homosexuality, I expose myself to potentially being cast away” (p. 29, my translation).

Portrayals of people of color in France have positively evolved in the media landscape over the last three decades, thanks in part to the development of “Banlieue cinema,” globally shifting conversations about race and racism, as well as the boom of the Internet. Yet, in spite of these changes, Black and Arab people in particular continue to disproportionately face policing, unemployment, and other forms of discrimination compared to their white counterparts, all the while their struggles continue to be largely unacknowledged. During his talk at Notre Dame in May, Daif discussed his sense of urgency in rehabilitating the image of working-class racialized French people from within: his desire to not only archive and preserve the creative resistance of, for, and by communities of color; but also create and share the diversity of lives and identities that thrive within them.

Using his training as a journalist, Daif was first able to achieve this through the creation of the podcast “À l’intersection” (“At the intersection”) in 2019. Across two seasons and 31 episodes, the program has explored a broad large range of issues pertaining to race, from international adoption and environmentalism, to growing up Black in Europe. Podcasts are not, at this point, entirely new forms of media — most, if not all of us, listen to them at least once a year. “À l’intersection” was also not the first podcast to discuss issues pertaining to race (“Kiffe ta race,” by Rokhaya Diallo and Grace Ly, is perhaps the oldest and most famous one). What most distinguishes Daif’s, however, is its centering of/on everyday voices, as well as its search to expand what other media might not consider to be worth recording.

“If I want to write a piece on the banlieues that isn’t about the same old story of police violence,” Daif explains in his memoir, “someone will object” (p. 75, my translation). Knowledge about “the periphery,” particularly when it comes to topics that would typically be perceived as unconventional, is therefore of the utmost importance to him. In a special episode titled “Nos lettres à la France” (“Our Letters to France”) for example, recorded a few days before the 2022 Presidential election opposing the incumbent Emmanuel Macron to the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, 20 people of color from all walks of life read poems and letter detailing their personal stories, struggles, and wishes for the future, revealing as such the complex tapestry that is France. In the second episode, likewise, the podcast explored the little-known phenomenon of “cybers,” or “influencers before influencers,” as he put it in his talk: extremely active (though also harmful) online blogging communities that, between 2009 and 2012, revolved around the popularity, fashion, and dancing skills of ordinary people from the Parisian banlieues.

What, though, could be the relevance of learning about a movement that, to many, might appear ridiculous and trivial? For Daif, “cyber culture” is revelatory of a system built on social, economic, and geographical exclusion: “For most [cybers], this is all they could do,” he insists at the close of the episode. “When it’s not the building elevator that broke down, it’s the social elevator.” To document it, therefore, is not only to shed light on a form of cultural creation that marked an entire generation of people, but also to provide further visibility into the inner workings of racism in France. At Daif’s microphone and under his pen, then, a different image of France takes shape: one that is more intersectional — one in which the heirs of postcolonial migrations are incorporated, visible, and heard.

Race, Universalism, and French identity

“Reclaiming their narratives”: The work of Anas Daif

Recommended viewings and readings to go further: