Douce France

´Pourquoi les Français ne nous aiment-ils pas?´

Everyone has two countries, his own and France, they say. I believe it, although sometimes I dreamed that I only have one country. France, obviously. I idealized France and sometimes I still do. France was my safe space where the Republic of Letters governs and where the public intellectual was born. 

Karine Tuil, originary from a North African Jewish family, went beyond the stereotypes about France shared by people like me, not actually living in France but insisting to idealize it. Douce France is an account of an unnamed woman, a writer, who accepts to be arrested during a police raid among the illegal immigrants. 

She declare herself being Romanian, the name of the woman who took care of her late grandmother. Thus, she is spending a couple of days in an immigration center and as her father is late to rescue, she is deported to - and later brought by her family from - Romania. The weakness of the story is that she was not revealed as a fake while being taken to the Romanian consulate as she was not able to say any word in Romanian and her French was native level. But this is a technicality which does not change too much the story.

While in detention, she falls for a man, Yuri, allegedly a political refugee from Belarus, but who was in fact either a Moldavian illegal migrant or a Romanian with the same status. A couple of weeks after being freed from the volutary internment, she will find him, only from afar, in the middle of another deportation procedure at the local court. 

The book was written during a very vocal anti-migrant time in France, where news about deportation of illegal citizens - particularly from Eastern Europe - were on the front page of media and the most frequent topic of political/populist debates. As the daughter of Jewish immigrants, Tuil is often reminded of the obligation of not forgetting that we were also once slaves in Egypt. Helping the stranger by giving him a home, offering support to those on the run, to the oppressed, is hard to be done on your own.

France can be sweet like honey, but bitter like bile. Explaining this paradox is the antidote for naives like me, who chose to stay away from it, afraid of breaking the myth into small little toxic pieces. 

Rating: 3 stars