Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow

A neighbor describes how Samra’s father found her wedding announcement in the paper and had a stroke, leaving him half-paralyzed. Doria thinks that he’ll be paralyzed on the other side the day he finds his grandchild’s birth announcement. 

Yasmina’s new friend, Jacqueline, the teacher from her literacy class, now comes over regularly to knit with Yasmina. Doria likes Jaqueline, who is eager to learn more about their culture and religion. After Yasmina mentions needing a tablecloth, Jaqueline brings them one. Doria appreciates the gesture, even though the tablecloth is covered in hunting scenes showing “lots of Bambis getting shot at” (114). She contrasts Jaqueline’s attitude with that of a teacher who accused Doria of sullying the French language and contributing to the decline of French culture when Doria mispronounced the name “Job” in a Bible story.

Hamoudi has taken a job at the local minimarket and is planning on getting out of drug dealing for good, thanks to Lila. Doria reflects that he’s found his “emergency exit” in Lila and that love is “another way to get out of this mess” (115).

Doria prepares anxiously for her first day at her new vocational school, the Lycée Louis-Blanc, even looking up Louis Blanc in a biographical dictionary. Yasmina, filled with pride, irons Doria’s clothes and dresses her hair with olive oil, as she did before Doria’s school photos, and puts liner around Doria’s eyes. On the bus to her new school Doria encounters Nabil, who barely responds. She makes a point of ignoring him, but seethes when Nabil gets off the bus without even saying a good-bye.

At her new school, Doria finds herself surrounded by “bleached blond bitches” dressed and made up in the latest fashion (34). The principal is a young blonde woman who dresses like her students. She speaks with a lisp, which Doria says is the only original thing about her. Doria is so depressed that she breaks down sobbing once she’s home alone.

Doria also stops babysitting Sarah.  She claims she’s become too busy, then admits that it’s because Hamoudi stays with Sarah now. Doria and Hamoudi no longer talk much. He leaves a letter in her mailbox, saying she knows where he is if she needs him, and includes a twenty-euro note. He signs the letter “Moudi,” the name Lila uses for him. Doria feels abandoned and betrayed.

Shérif, the local man who plays the horses because a fortune teller once told him he would come into wealth, wins the lottery. Doria wonders what he will do now that he can afford to do anything. She continues to ask her mother about remarrying and learns that Yasmina has a had crush on the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, since seeing him on TV dedicating a memorial to Algerian demonstrators drowned by police during protests in October 1961. Doria knows the story of these events because she’s checked out library books on the topic. Doria runs into Hamoudi by the recycling bins, and they have an awkward conversation about how his life is with Lila.

Doria is reminded of a girl from her neighborhood who acted with a local theater group and dreamed of making a career of it. Her parents were happy to let her act, even allowing her to travel with her company, until they found an anonymous letter in their mailbox saying that their daughter has strayed from “the right path” and is “tempting Satan.” The letter writer says her family’s reputation will be ruined unless her father forces her to adopt a more devout way of life. 

The letter was published, along with the girl’s account of events, in a local newspaper. When her parents tried to stop her acting and began to talk of marriage, she simply left home. She is now but estranged from her parents but performs with the Comédie Francaise, the national theatre of France. “She won after all,” thinks Doria (127).

Doria turns sixteen, but nobody remembers her birthday, not even Yasmina.  She reflects that she is “no one special,” and thinks of all the ways her life would have been different if she had been a boy. She says of being a girl that she’ll “get used to it eventually” (129).