05-07-2025
Mohamed El Khatib, playwright: 'When Arabic rings out, a sinister music accompanies it. That of contempt.'
My father did not come to see my retrospective at the Grand Palais [which was held at the Paris museum from June 13 to 29]. In fact, he never visits any museums. One day, he told me, "Why do you want me to look at museums, when they don't look at me?" Fundamentally, he is right, and I would be wrong to confine him to an immigration history museum. I remember that one day, he, who speaks French only haltingly, said something surprising to me: "Why do we say mother tongue, and not father tongue?" I didn't know what to say in response.
He does not know much about my work. One day, the book I wrote about my mother's death, Finir en beauté [ A Beautiful Ending ], arrived at home, and when he saw the dedication, "To Yamna," he closed the book and said: "Anyway, everything is about your mother in this house." He was not wrong.
Yet, when I think of our old Renault 12, it is him I think of. The car, the only thing he owned, that was him. In the car, he felt like he was someone, and that he had regained a bit of the dignity that was taken from him when he arrived in France in the 1970s. Then, tirelessly, every summer, we would hit the road and go back to the bled ["homeland," in North-African Arabic]. It was a powerful ritual, one of the rare moments when we felt we were living in a collective adventure. Some people saw us as hordes of barbarians crowding the length and breadth of the highways, while we felt free and happy, and that was priceless.
Ultimately, those cars were, for decades, the link between the Mediterranean's two coasts, between two cultures, two languages. My father is now over 70 years old. His generation will disappear, and all that will remain of it are those cars, whose chassis constitute a moving industrial heritage.
The second most spoken language in France
I will inherit his Renault 12 and a few smatterings of Arabic. I am a bit ashamed of not knowing how to speak it, just as I was a bit ashamed when my father used to speak to us in Arabic in public. Who knows why, in playgrounds, when you hear parents speaking English or German to their children, it is seen as refined. Yet, when Arabic rings out, an entirely different, sinister music accompanies it: That of contempt for our language, and for those who are its bearers, we Arabs.
