FAUSTO GIUDICE50 years later, the rebirth of Malika, killed at 8 years old by a French gendarme: a gut-punching book

Fausto Giudice, April 7, 2023
Edited by John Catalinotto

I.                Prelude

Let's face it: my generation, the baby boomers of ‘68, has a general tendency to look down with condescension on the generation of millenials, the one of their grandchildren,. Or at least that's how they often perceive our veteran attitudes.

As for me, I never judge anyone, and it has, in the end, cost me dearly. Betrayal and slander are the common lot of human beings as soon as they are in society. And I understand perfectly those of my young friends who choose the path of a de-technologized hermitage in the mountains. I started thinking about it and dreaming of creating rural communities where any electronic or even electrical object would be left under guard at the entrance.

In the meantime, I spend, to my increasing despair, too much of the time I have left to live in front of my screens and on my keyboards. Twenty-five years ago, my insides revolted against this and started to bleed. I got out of it, by an unexplained miracle.

The surgeon who operated on me the second time told me that when I was on the table and my blood pressure had dropped to zero, he said to the team, "I'm going to take a break, I think when I come back he will have passed. And then to  his surprise, when he came back from the canteen he found  that the wop was still breathing. He explained to me the medical hypothesis that my digestive bleeding was Mallory-Weiss syndrome. That meant nothing to me.

I told him that I thought I had been the victim of virtual revolution syndrome on the Macintosh. The blow that had finished me off had been a totally messed up project by a bunch of idiots from Marseille, Avignon and the surrounding area to organize a “caravan to Palestine”. I quickly discovered that they were not only abysmally ignorant, but - usually it goes hand in hand - horribly pretentious. In short, no caravan, not to Palestine, not to anywhere else but the hospital.

Back for 12 years now in the country where I grew up then without television, without computer (it didn't exist), without cell phone (my parents' landline, which was in my room, almost never rang), I have a shock, a burst of shocks: in the Medina, entire streets of artisans had disappeared; in Malta Sghira street, all the wrought iron artisans had been replaced by merchants of shoddy furniture made of low-quality wood and plastic (the deckchairs I bought didn't last a year), and in the central market, the beautiful red tomatoes had given way to tasteless orange tomatoes, grown from hybrid seeds made in the EU, and destined for export to the EU. And eight of the twelve million inhabitants of the country had a facebook  account. As telephone subscriptions are often coupled with a FB account, many users (or used?) only know fessebouc, wadzapp, youtube, telegram or, from now on, tiktok.

And it is the same everywhere, from Medellin to Nablus, from Soweto to Jebel Lahmar. During the election campaigns I attended in my “country of return”, I did not see any poster stuck on a wall. None of the hundreds of people under 45 that I have known in these 12 years has ever written and prepared a leaflet in their life, to distribute it at 5 a.m. at a factory gate, or at 8 a.m. at a high school gate or at noon in a market, or at 6 p.m. at a department store exit. In short, in a few words, we went from the collé-serré {tight pasted, a sort of “dirty dancing” of Afriocan origine]/) of my youth to the copié-collé-posté-liké-buzzé (copied-pasted-posted-liked-buzzed) of today. And the 3 dozen bastards who try to rule our imploding planet are working hard (or rather making their high-tech slaves work) to make sure they don't need us anymore, thus annihilating us, while preparing their escape, on the moon or Mars or elsewhere.

A few years ago, a genius con man managed to sell titles to plots of land on the moon to Israelis who felt that the Zionist project was definitely failing and that they had no choice but to go and colonize the moon. There, at least, they were sure that they would be in guaranteed araberrein (clean of Arabs) territory.

II. Malika and Malika

On June 5, 2021, I received a notification from Yezid Malika Jennifer: “Good evening sir. Thank you for the tribute to my aunt malika yezid killed in 1973 by the gendarmes [emoji] good evening.”

June 7, second message:

“The little one downstairs was Malika.

I read your book and when I saw the name Yezid, which is also my name it touched my heart. Because this story destroyed my family. My grandmother told me this story. All these (police) blunders, these families torn apart, it's horrible.  All these names of these victims: we must never forget. Have a good day.”

Here is what she was referring to:

“On Sunday, June 24, gendarmes in Fresnes [outside Paris] looking for a fourteen year old Algerian boy, who got away , attacked his little sister. Malika Yazid was playing in the courtyard of the Groux transit housing estate where she lived in Fresnes. She went up to the apartment to warn her brother. The gendarmes burst into the apartment.

One of them, after having given a slap to Malika, locked himself with her in a room for an “interrogation”". A quarter of an hour later, Malika left the room and collapsed on the floor. She died four days later at the Salpétrière Hospital without coming out of her coma.”

These are the 11 lines I devoted to little Malika, slapped to death at the age of eight by a gendarme, in that terrible summer of 1973, the hardest sequence of the two decades of Arabicides that I reconstructed in my book bearing that name and published in 1992. This book had been an obvious choice, made during the work on the previous one, Têtes de Turcs en France, published in 1989, which had been quite successful (more than 25,000 copies sold, at that time people still read books printed on paper).

It was painfully obvious: it was impossible to devote a single chapter of Têtes de Turcs (each chapter of which described an example of French-style apartheid in work, health, school, housing, etc.) to what were then called “racist crimes”. There had been too many of them. So I decided to devote a separate book to it.

For two years, the living room of my slum in Ménilmontant was blocked by a long board on two chairs, on which yellow folders were piled up by case and by year. In short, a material prelude (wood, ink, paper) to the Excel tables of the near future.

In the end, I had 350 over 21 years, or 16.6 per year, 1.3 per month. A trifle compared to the Negricides in the USA. But for God's sake, we were not in yankeelandia, we  were in the cradle of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, all men are born free and equal in rights etc. etc., which we had just celebrated with great pomp on the Champs-Élysées with Jean-Paul Goude's parade for the Bicentennial of the Great Revolution!

I confess that during these two years of intense investigative work, I was more than once threatened/overcome? by depression and the wish to take flight, perhaps not to the moon, but in any case far from Madame la France, as the Maghrebians used to say (in reference to the 100 franc bill bearing the effigy of the half-undressed Liberty Guiding the People).

The most trying moments were the trials, where poor Arab families experienced a second death, inflicted by the brows of the rotters : judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers and defendants mano en mano , and jurors - when it was in assizes (criminal courts) - totally dumbfounded and mute. I never heard a single juror say a single word during a three-day trial. It makes you wonder what these “people” juries are for.

 Malika's family didn't have to go through that: the case was closed quickly. But they were spared nothing else. Jennifer Malika Fatima is one of the only two survivors of the family, decimated by hogra [despisal], drugs, delinquency, and behind it all, transit. The transit estate of The Groux, in Fresnes, a stone's throw from the prison (“convenient”, says her uncle Nacer, the only other survivor, who had a taste of it), a temporary situation that lasted forever.

Abandoned to her fate with her grandmother after her mother's suicide, Jennifer Malika Fatima was placed in a pure Gallic foster family at 18 months. She would stay there for 30 years and eventually escape her fate after having come close to all the usual dangers that await the children of racized  dangerous classes.

And now, on April 7, her book is coming out! A real event! I don't want to spoil it, but just to say this: this book is the best realization I know of to date of the wish I had formulated for myself when my own book Arabicides came out.

I was not satisfied with the final result of my work, I was dreaming of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, who had worked on and with two young murderers on death row for years and produced a masterpiece. And I would have liked to dig  up some arabicides and their relatives, but I couldn't find any.

Face it, I wasn't Truman Capote, La Découverte wasn't a big New York publisher that could pay detectives; I was just an obscure Italian “islamoleftist” journalist before the term was invented (“Ah! You speak French very well” – “You said it, bastard, French is our war loot ”), published by a publishing house with a glorious past (François Maspero) but with a critical present (it was later bought by a multinational company). In short, I told myself that my work was a minimum service to render to the future generations who would wonder about this history and would want to dig up into.

Thirty to fifty years later, this is exactly what is happening. It is always the third generation that digs the past out of oblivion: this is true for the Armenians, the Jews of Europe, and all the others. It is the generation of grandchildren of the victims of massive state crimes, concentrated or diluted, who bring collective traumatic experiences to life and pass them on to the next one.

Jennifer Malika Fatima's book is, to my knowledge, the first of its kind, built on the memories, conversations, and incredible archives carefully preserved and classified by her grandmother, an (allegedly) illiterate Kabyle.

Her’s is not an academically formatted doctoral dissertation that is generally unreadable to the average person, if it is even accessible to them at all. It's a punch you take in the gut. As soon as I got it, I swallowed it whole and finished it in two hours. Then I groggily retreated into a rumination for a few weeks. Time to digest. This is the result of my digestion as I promised myself to publish this unconventional review for the book's release on April 7.

The book, for which Jennifer Malika Fatima was supported in a sororal/fraternal and respectful way by the writer Asya Djoulaït for the formatting of the manuscript and by the historian Sami Ouchane for the presentation of the documents drawn from the archives - who did not try to impose an academic formatting on her -, has beautiful afterwordby dear Rachida Brahim, another little shining star of the generations to come to whom I had said to myself that my book would find its way. The book has benefited from a careful, exemplary edition by a young feminist publishing house in Marseille, Hors d'atteinte [Out of reach], which I discovered with delight, and whose catalogue has upset my salivary glands, to the point that, tomorrow, I have an appointment with my dentist for the removal of an oral mucocele (explanations on the web).

Bravo, ladies, you have cured me of any temptation to condescend. I believe that we are part of the same species: that of humans who do not know what they are talking about when they say: pensions. I will end with this sentence from Nietzsche that concluded my book: “The man of long memory is the man of the future". Man, of course, in the sense of Mensch, human, in German, Yiddish, and New Yorkish.

So don't hesitate and rush to your local bookstore (forget Amazonzon*, please!) and order the book if you can read French  (it is distributed by Harmonia Mundi). If not, you will have to wait for an English version. We work on it. Any publisher interested can write to tlaxint[at]gmail.com.

Paper 15€ - E-book 11,99

Note
*Zonzon is an old French word meaning buzzing, but in French slang it means jail (by apheresis of prison) as a substantive, and crazy as an adjective. And indeed Jeff Bezos’ empire is a buzzing prison.