Algerian documentary-maker Samia Chala settled in France in 1994, since when she has produced numerous films about both her native country and issues surrounding the often troubled history of integration into French society of its large population of North African origin.
She left Algeria aged 30, at the height of the civil war waged by Islamist groups. She was, in her own words, “feminist, secular, and a mauler of Islamists”. Her exile in Paris began with “curiosity” to discover what the older generation of North African immigrants called ‘Madame la France’.
“But with the incessant debates about the veil, secularism, Islam, Muslims, the story of my love affair with Madame la France became singularly complicated,” she says in the presentation of her latest documentary, Madame la France, ma mère et moi, to be premiered in Paris on November 27th (see details bottom of page 2) and which examines what she calls “the stereotypes that are stuck to Arab women” in France. “This film, for which I returned to the tracks of my mother and aunt in Algeria, will allow, I hope, to understand my anger which is that, I believe, of many Arabs in France,” she adds.
“In Algeria, I fought in order that girls, like me, should not be forced to wear the veil. In France, I began defending the right for girls to wear it, if they wish,” says Chala, referring to a French law that bans the wearing of face-concealing headgear in public. “Does that astonish you? For me, it’s the same combat.” She explains why in this lively interview with Rachida El Azzouzi and Antoine Perraud.
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MEDIAPART: You have come to a position of demanding the right to wear the veil if that’s what one wishes.
SAMIA CHALA: “That seems to me to be among the very rudiments of freedom. I fight for people to be able to wear what they want. For as much, it [the veil] is not a model for me. I don’t wish it for my daughter. But there already exist so many examples regarding clothing which are not my cup of tea. I wouldn’t want my daughter to dress up in these ultra-tight clothes that transform young teenage schoolgirls into caricatures, or even into sexual objects. But for as much, I don’t call for a law banning Lolitas from secondary schools.”
MEDIAPART: Commerce treats girls as unwrapped objects, while patriarchal Islam regards them as wrapped objects.
S.C.: “In Algeria, I campaigned for the right to [freely decide about] one’s body, which remains for me a value of the feminist movement. I was against the forced wearing of the veil. But here in France I was shocked by the pressure targeting girls who are veiled in the name of that same right to one’s body. For me, there’s no contradiction, it’s the same battle.”
MEDIAPART: Tolerance infers more than a simple freedom to dress as one likes.
S.C.: “I’ve met women who have heaps of diplomas. In the name of what should I prohibit these brilliant beings from choosing what their faith urges them to do? By what manner could I deny them anything on the grounds that they are alienated? Maghrebi societies have evolved, we’re no longer in the 1970s. These women are not, for the most part, forced to wear the veil. It is their decision, even if family influence plays a role as in every country where each one passes on values to their children.”
MEDIAPART: Do you believe that this relative freedom might be generalised, that the requirement to wear the veil has disappeared?
S.C.: “For a long time, on both sides of the Mediterranean, women have lived in a locked-down patriarchal system. They were treated in much the same manner in Algeria as in Spain, in Morocco as in France. In the second half of the 20th century there were comparable evolutions. In the Maghreb during the 1970s, there was a tiny minority of women who were largely liberated, living in tune with the West, [attending] university, cinema clubs and [making] revolution.
Before the emergence of political Islam, the condition of women was not necessarily better than it is today. They lived, for the majority, in a state of submission, at the heart of societies frozen by colonization. So much so that there is a difference of at least two centuries between what my mother experienced and what I was able to live. We are well beyond a simple clash of generations.
In face of economic misery and the humiliation of colonization, Muslim women buttressed themselves, draped, hidden, to escape the violence of conquerors ready to strip them bare, to prostitute them, to reduce them. This search for a protection of course led to a form of immobilization, or a sclerosis – perfectly analyzed by Frantz Fanon - which prevented any significant advances in the feminine condition.”
MEDIAPART: You agree on this archaism, which has turned the veil into an alienation.
S.C.: “That is the argument of white feminists. Algerian women, even if in their majority they wear the veil, are more emancipated than they were 30 years ago. Quite simply because they have had access to schooling and university education. The step-up appears obvious to me, even if certain signs, which are judged as regressive, don’t please a small minority of learned, Westernised, middle-classes. On the beaches in Algeria today, women bathe while wearing the veil.
We can focus on a piece of cloth. As for me, I find it a happy thing that women are outdoors, at ease in public places, instead of being massively confined as in the past. I recognise, however, that a combat must be led so that those women who wish to bathe in a swimming costume can do so in all freedom. That’s far from being won.”
MEDIAPART: So you are against the notion of enforcement, whether that be the requirement to wear the veil in Algeria or that of not wearing it in France. Here in France the veil is the object of a prohibition that is a secular requirement of the State. But you cannot underestimate the constraints that exist in favour of the veil, which are archaic and more disseminated. The debate is therefore about these two forms of coercion, neither one less important than the other.
S.C.: “I repeat again, the veil is not a model I recommend. But to prohibit its wearing seems to me to be ineffective, confused and revealing. The manner in which this question has been mediatised in a France that is undergoing an identity crisis has served only to give even more women the will to wear the veil. You humiliate us under cover of eradicating our so-called alienation. How can you not feel an injustice? I left Algeria choking from the lack of freedom. I dreamt of a France where the liberty of free thinking existed like that of freedom of dress. We would say between ourselves ‘In Paris you can even walk around naked, no-one looks at you!’ But then you invented, over the years, dress-code orders that you made us suffer. What is this abscess that is the fixation about the veil?”
MEDIAPART: But why become so attached to the veil to the point of making it a sign of rebellion?
S.C.: “When you are in France, when you are made to understand from morning until night that you are not at home here, what’s left? Your country of origin? You’re no more at home there than in France. So, you invent, or reinvent, an identity. You hold on to what you have left - religion, your religion, whatever the cost, [and] with more and more strength after each time people take issue with you over it. And the ever-greater number of French girls – because they are French – who decide to wear the veil illustrates above all the failure of ‘French-style integration’. The state and society should question themselves over this national disappointment, instead of prophesising about bearded, barbarian integrism [hardline Islamism] supposedly at work.
Look at the march called that of ‘the Beurs’ in 1983 [see also bottom of page 2]. There was not one veil, nor scarf, in the neighbourhoods [of populations of North African origin]. What was missing? Equality! That’s why there’s this finger lifted high, which signals the failure of the French Left and which you refuse to see as such.
While we have to live together today, I claim [my right] to finding that it is criminal the manner in which the debate over the veil has been, in France, blown out of all proportion by the political class and major communication outlets. They pit ‘Muslims’ against those of ‘French extraction’. Personally, I feel I’m French since 1830, and my ancestors were sent into two world wars - so let them stop working me up with all that, even if I’ve been an Algerian immigrant for the past 20 years. We have a need for respect and equality. Now, I’ve never seen anything other than this debate about the veil, to the degree of feeling insulted and to the point of crying. That’s what pushed me to make this film.”
MEDIAPART: Even if all this is set out in caricatured quote marks, you’ve just made the separation between Muslims and ‘people of French extraction’, and not between Muslims and Christians, or Muslims and Jews.
S.C.: “The debate has in effect been Islamised. That’s why I want to ask the question like this: when a woman like me, for whom Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex was bedtime reading, when a woman who is intellectually and politically armed, profoundly secular, begins to claim a Muslim identity, it means that the house is on fire. I have felt Islamophobia to be like a stabbing, a wound received every night via the television.”
MEDIAPART: Political vexation is never, however justified, a recommendable path. To establish a political view from a proclaimed wound results in ‘I haven’t been integrated so an integrist I will become’.
S.C.: “But I am doing nothing other than sounding an alarm. If we don’t stop this escalation, there will be a clash. And what a clash! The Muslim problem has been constructed, identities have been turned into tensions. The [wearing of the] veil will diminish as soon as a true equality is present. Contempt must give way to recognition. For that, you just need to convince yourself that there exist French Muslims. Or rather, French people who are Muslim.
One example among others: my daughter goes to the Hélène-Boucher secondary school, a good school in eastern Paris, where her friends have been able to learn German, English, Italian, Russian. That sometimes comes from a desire to connect again with the language of a mother, a father, or grandparents. That’s perfect, that opening onto the world, which can help France right itself. But Arabic? Makach walou [A Maghrebi phrase meaning ‘nothing at all’]! Unless you go to a mosque. I live in a working-class arrondissement [district of Paris] with a large population interested in the teaching of Arabic. Isn’t it for the state to take charge of that, instead of abandoning the issue to the religious sector, or the Qatari embassy?
When France will have discovered that Arabs are a source of richness, things will be so much better. Without that, we’re becoming a country of the old, dried up, along the lines of Venice or Bruges, towns that are only there for having been.”
MEDIAPART: How does one untangle what is Arab from what is Islam?
S.C.: “But who Islamised the debate? One should look back at the reaction of Pierre Mauroy [socialist Prime Minister from 1981-1984] during a strike of manual workers, of poor, first-generation Algerian and Moroccan immigrant workers, at Renault at the beginning of the 1980s. What did the socialist Prime Minister say, chasing the shadow cast by the revolution in Iran in 1979? ‘A strike by Shiites’! For sure, a prayer room was among their demands, but these were mostly about working conditions.
Since then, the debate has never ceased being Islamised, with a backdraught from the war in Algeria.”
MEDIAPART: In response to that is a visible Islamisation, one that is real and not only imagined, with veils longer than the Maghrebi scarf, with niqabs worn with ever greater ostentation in France and Europe.
S.C.: “It is indeed, in the case of the niqab, staking a claim in what might be a militant manner, extremely minor and for which no purpose is served by demonizing it. Muslims have no monopoly on machoism or patriarchy. Arab boys have been caged in three [descriptions] that have come to haunt the French collective subconscious: robbers, rapists and veil-ists. When will people stop barbarizing the Arab in order to let themselves off the hook?”
MEDIAPART: Why, in order to hit back at ostracism, should there be an attack on secularism, the incontestable - albeit fragile, unique and complex - heritage of the French state? Already, we see crucifixes reappearing in response to the veil.
S.C.: “Secularism exists firstly to protect ourselves, one and the other, and also some from others. It is in the interest of Muslims, a minority in French society, to be secular, because secularism guarantees freedom of conscience. If I put on a veil, in what manner am I not secular? I find it scandalous to throw a child-minder out of a creche in the names of both feminism and secular values. To free women is to urge them to take up a job, to study, to impregnate themselves with the values of the [French] Republic whatever their style of clothing, often a heritage of conservative working class circles. The ideas, the contacts, the diversity of people that circulate in public spaces will open up horizons to the ones and the others. But, on the opposite, we push veiled Muslim women towards sectarianism by shutting our doors on them.”
MEDIAPART: Does the freedom to wear the veil seem to you to be the best response?
S.C.: “Yes, it’s the best way to avoid this community from become sectarian. The state school makes you and will inevitably make you French. Why organize this hunt against a veiled minority? Is the great [French] Republic incapable of bringing forward a will, the means and compromises to settle this? Is it bound to rejoin the path of discrimination, to run up against this past that doesn’t work? Why add tension to tension? Why look for confrontation, while pretending to be concerned about it?
Ethnocentrism must stop – stop looking at the world from only one’s Western point of view. To try to understand the other, not to reduce them to a caricature that mixes contempt of social classes and the fear of differences, which is the underlying opinion I hear expressed by the elite: ‘The poor veiled bastards in the rundown neighbourhoods!’
France must resist the temptations that flow through it of anti-Muslim crusades. Let’s think first about the responsibilities of states, which should bring economic, political and even symbolic solutions, instead of handing over scapegoats for public condemnation at a time of crisis.”
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- Samia Chara's documentary 'Madame la France, ma mère et moi' is to be screened in Paris on November 27th, starting at 9p.m., at the cinema 'La Clef', 34 rue Daubenton in the 5th arrondissement. Nearest metro station: Censier-Daubenton.
- Another documentary by Samia Chara, 'Les marcheurs, chronique des années beurs', on the history of a march organised in 1983 when a group of young French people of North African origin crossed France to raise awareness for their call for equal treatment in French society, and which culminated by drawing a crowd of 100,000 in Paris, is currently being broadcast by French television channel Public Sénat. The documentary, marking the 30th anniversary of this significant political event, can be viewed in repeated broadcasts on November 23rd at 10 p.m., on November 24th at 6 p.m. and November 25th at 5.15 p.m. More details can be found here.
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English version by Graham Tearse