Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow

“Seems he moved to the countryside. Remade himself into a cheesemaker, for all I know. He drives around the little villages of dear old la belle France in his sky blue van on Sunday mornings after Mass, selling rye bread, old-fashioned Roquefort cheese, and saucisson sec.”

Doria recalls an earlier social worker who seemed to view her and Yasmina as alien and exotic, and whose attempts to fit in came off as awkward. She imagines him leaving Paris and its suburbs for traditional rural life, including Catholic Mass and Sunday markets, reinventing himself as part of an unchanging French society. Tellingly, this vision includes selling pork sausages. The passage reflects Doria’s sense of herself and her community as outsiders in France.

“Over there, it’s enough that you have even the smallest little bumps for breasts, you know to shut up when you’re told to, you know how to bake decent bread, and bam, you’re all ready for marriage.”

Doria recalls how, on her and Yasmina’s last visit to Morocco, the local women were already suggesting possible husbands for her. Doria, however, is disturbed by the restrictive nature of traditional North African gender roles. Specifically, she dislikes being seen merely as a future wife and mother, and as someone whose value depends on her being submissive and serving others.

“One night I was at my own funeral. Hardly anyone there. Just my mom; Mme. Burlaud; Carla, the Portuguese lady who cleans the elevators in our tower; Leonardo DiCaprio from Titanic, and my friend Sarah, who moved to that suburb Trappes, south of Paris, when I was twelve.”

Doria’s description of her sparsely-attended dream funeral shows how isolated she feels, and the important role that popular culture plays in helping her deal with that isolation. Beyond her mother, the only ones who show up are her therapist, her building’s cleaner, and a friend who’s moved away. Her father is missing, but Leonardo DiCaprio is there, indicating how Doria uses fantasies based on TV and films to compensate for what’s missing in her life.

“At sixteen, he’ll be selling potatoes and turnips at the market. And on his trip home every day, riding his black mule, he’ll tell himself: ‘I am one glamorous guy.’”

Doria imagines the life awaiting her father’s new son back in rural Morocco. Since he has given satisfaction just by being born male, he enjoys an inflated self-image while not feeling the need to do more than meet basic expectations. This forms a sharp contrast to Doria’s experience as a girl.

“They just stick on a random grade, rearrange the papers, and go back to sitting on their leather couches between their two kids–Pamela, ten, who’s playing with Dishwasher Barbie, and Brandon, twelve, who’s busy eating his own snot.”

Doria, who feels the teachers at her school do not respect or value their non-native French students, imagines them returning to their middle-class lives and simply forgetting the community in which they spend their days. Doria’s vision of the middle-class ideal is heavily influenced by American culture, as indicated by the use of American names for the children and the presence of a themed Barbie doll. Doria’s sarcasm indicates the bitterness she feels.

“So when I see the police patting down Hamoudi near our lobby, when I hear them calling him stuff like ‘little bastard,’ or ‘piece of trash,’ I tell myself that these guys, they don’t know shit about poetry.”

Doria, talking about how Hamoudi loves the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and can recite it from memory, indicates that she and Hamoudi are aware and appreciative of French art and literature. However, this does not affect the way they are judged by French society. Hamoudi is seen merely as a criminal even though he is likely better educated than the police hassling him.

“Even Aunt Zohra’s sons tease her. They say she does remixes of Molière’s language. They’ve tagged her ‘DJ Zozo.’’’

Zohra’s sons make fun of her heavy Algerian accent and her mangling of French words. They are aware of important French literary figures such as Molière but compare Aunt Zohra to a DJ, showing how, as children of working-class immigrants, they move between different cultures and between “high” and “low” culture almost daily. In comparing Aunt Zohra to someone who creates something new out of existing material, they also present her adaptation as creative, giving the joke a positive spin.

“When I was little, I used to cut the hair off Barbie dolls because they were blond, and I chopped off their boobs too because I didn’t have any. And they weren’t even real Barbie dolls. They were like poor people’s dolls, the kind my mom bought me at that cheapo discount store Giga. Crappy dolls. You played with them for two days and they looked like land-mine victims.”

Doria recounts these memories as evidence that she is aware of the role that jealousy and resentment play in her life. The blond Barbie dolls represent a Western feminine ideal she knows excludes her, and a lifestyle that she can only experience secondhand, through cheap imitations.

“And it was a real thank you, the kind you say when you really mean it, when you’re happy and you practically have tears stinging at the corner of your eyes.”

When Lila offers Doria the job as Sarah’s babysitter, Doria is surprised by the intensity of her gratitude, a shift from how she usually reacts to helpful overtures. The sense that she is helping Lila as much as Lila is helping her may account for this difference. Yet Doria still describes her response in the second person, suggesting she has trouble owning this feeling of gratitude.

“Turns out, she gave me a reading coupon so I can get free books. I feel like I’m going backward with these people who treat me like a welfare junkie. Go to hell all of you.”

In contrast to her warm response to Lila’s job offer, Doria takes Mme. Du’s gift of a book coupon as an insult, that the social worker sees Doria as an object of pity, and not as evidence that Mme. Du has observed Doria’s interests and feels warmly towards her.

“All things considered, it suits him, wearing cologne and being clean-shaven. You get to see the scar on his chin better. Gives him that tormented-soul look, rebel with a heart of gold, that kind of thing […] Like the heroes in the movies. The day I asked him how he got it, he said he couldn’t remember. Basically, he didn’t want to tell me.”

Doria’s description of Hamoudi after he starts dating Karine suggests how complicated her feelings about him are. She sees him as a romantic figure and finds him attractive. Hamoudi protects her from the unsavory aspects of his life, suggesting he maintains clear boundaries in his friendship with Doria. The dramatic change in his appearance even during a fleeting relationship suggests how much Hamoudi wants an adult relationship and a stable life.

“Once, they were all making a circle and no one would hold my hand because it was the day after Eid, the festival of the sheep, and Mom had put some henna on the palm of my right hand. Those morons thought I was dirty.”

Yasmina took the young Doria to the playground in the middle-class Rousseau development, hoping she would make new friends, but Doria recalls feeling rejected and prejudged by the “native” French children. This underlines Doria’s sense of alienation from French society and shows she is less willing to cross boundaries in pursuit of friendship, compared to Yasmina.

“I don’t have a single photo of me before I was three. After that, there are school photos […] It makes me sad to think about it, it makes me feel kind of like I don’t completely exist. Bet if I’d had a dick, I’d have a big fat pile of photo albums.”

Doria sees how many photographs Lila keeps on display of Lila’s daughter, Sarah, and feels neglected by comparison. Lila, in contrast to Doria’s father, does not see her daughter as having less value than a son.

“Things got violent between them when he found out and the old loon hit Aunt Zohra. He stopped after a minute because he’d had enough, his arms hurt too much, and he had heart palpitations. So he sat down and asked her for a glass of water to calm him.”

Aunt Zohra’s husband blames her for Youssef’s going to prison, even though Zohra’s husband is the one who spends six months of the year in North Africa with a new, younger wife. Doria depicts older, traditional North African men like her father as selfish, entitled, and potentially violent, but also as ineffectual.

“When he gets back from vacation, I’m going to talk to him for real. Not play the autistic kid like I do with everyone else to protect myself.”

Though Doria reacts negatively to Nabil’s impulsive kiss, his absence encourages her to rethink the situation. In doing so, she admits that she refuses to engage with others as a defense strategy. This reflects her increasing emotional maturity and self-awareness, and suggests that Nabil is helping to bring her out of herself.

“But I never cried. At least not in front of him, because my dad was like Hamoudi’s: he thought girls were weak, that they were made for crying and doing the dishes.”

Remembering an incident in which her father beat her, Doria reveals how violent he could be and how she coped by shutting down emotionally. She is also determined to reject his view of her as useless, along with the narrowly-defined gender roles that support his view.

“If he could put his pride aside, he’d see that the most important thing is his daughter’s happiness. (I’m using American TV series morality, but I don’t care, I’m cool with that.)”

Doria describes Samra’s father’s shock and rage at the news that his daughter has married her French boyfriend. Doria imagines a different, more loving, response, though she describes it using what she knows are television clichés. This suggests a more constructive and self-aware use of pop culture than her earlier escapist fantasies that employed media.

“When we did the Middle Ages with M. Werbert, my geography teacher from last year, he told us the church used stained-glass windows as the poor person’s Bible, for people who couldn’t read. For me, TV today is like the poor person’s Koran.”

Doria shows an increasing awareness of how her fantasy life borrows and builds on pop culture. She remembers the lessons M. Werbert gave on French history, and applies them to her own experience, even if she has now flunked out of school. She draws connections between the experience of illiterate medieval peasants using pictures to understand the mysteries of organized religion and the way Muslims like herself use pop culture to understand the West.

“She shouted at me because when it was my turn to read, instead of pronouncing it Job-rhymes-with-globe, I said ‘Jahb.’ Like what they call you work in America or the name of that fat guy in Star Wars. And that crazy old bag of a Mme. Jacques accused me of ‘sullying our beautiful language’ and other stuff just as stupid.”

Doria describes how a teacher used Doria’s ignorance of the correct pronunciation of Job as evidence that immigrants are destroying a language and culture they cannot comprehend—yet another experience of French prejudice. In fact, as Doria’s defense of her pronunciation indicates, both she and the native French live in a society where Star Wars is more familiar than the Bible.

“He’s found his emergency exit, now. He talks seriously about making a life with Lila. That means there isn’t just rap and soccer. Love’s another way to get out of this mess.”

Doria, seeing what a positive influence Lila has been on Hamoudi, reflects how it’s possible for people to escape the “mess” of their lives by changing how they feel about things, rather than by running away. The escape routes she mentions, fame as a rapper or soccer player, suggest the limited options of young men in her community, as well as her own unrealistic fantasies of escape through wealth and stardom.

“These days, he talks about grave sins and divine punishments. Before, he didn’t really give a shit about that. He even bought bacon-flavored potato chips on the sly just to find out what they tasted like.”

Youssef has apparently become an Islamic extremist during his time in jail. Doria regards Youssef’s newfound extremism as unsettling and a radical departure for the young man who once filled the role of a brother for her.

“Seeing her getting better every day, fighting for both of us to live, has started me thinking it’ll all work out and maybe I’ll be lucky and be likeher.”

Doria’s description of the ways that she’s seen Yasmina change and grow reveals how Doria herself has become more open and optimistic. Doria has become less angry and defensive, and she no longer sees Yasmina as vulnerable and in need of protection.

“Once, Youssef lent me his bike. He’d told me he’d push me while I was pedaling, and then at one point, when I wasn’t expecting it, he said: ‘I let go!’ His voice was far away. He’d let go a while back.”

When Mme. Burlaud says Doria no longer needs to be in therapy, Doria compares the feeling to learning to ride a bike without training wheels. Mme. Burlaud, like Youssef, has shown Doria that she’s more capable than she realizes. Doria’s memory of Youssef, coming after the news of his radicalization in prison, also has a bittersweet quality, recalling the role that he played in her childhood and suggesting that Doria may be more successful than he was in negotiating the “adolescent crisis” and making her way in the world.