‘And I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured’ (Deuteronomy 21: 17): for, when man is deprived of Divine protection he is exposed to all dangers, and becomes the butt of all fortuitous circumstances: his fortune and misfortune then depend on chance. Alas! how terrible a threat!

Maimonides, 1190

To the Interministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalisation, whose support enabled the clinical work to take place among the young people and their families, I offer thanks.

To my friends: Catherine, indefatigable guide, eternal accomplice; to Nathalie, delightful, spurring me on with indefinite, open questions; to Jean-Luc, who never misses a passing soul; to Mustapha, lighting these dark times; to Amélie, with the larger picture in mind; to Anthony, free explorer of possibilities; to Marie-Anne, ancestor in a child’s body; and to Thierry, finally, who has the carefulness of an angel … to each, my admiration.

Stranger, though a still poorer man should come here, it would not be right for me to insult him, for all strangers and beggars are from Jove.

Homer, The Odyssey, Book 14

1958. First winter in Paris. We didn’t really know what the word ‘winter’ meant. The cold chilled us to the bone, penetrated our lungs, cracked the footpaths and tingled our reddened ears. I was ten. We came from Cairo, in Egypt, and had spent some time in Rome. In countries like Italy houses are refuges from the baking heat of the streets. As soon as we arrived in France, it was the opposite! It was cold outside and sometimes hot inside. We hadn’t been introduced to scarves, woollen balaclavas, socks inside boots or two pairs of gloves. The delight in blowing out clouds of steam, like bison breath, the happy squeaking of shoes on fresh powdery snow, or even better, jumping with both feet into the frozen gutters. Gennevilliers! We approached the town with circumspection, like frightened animals whose cages had been taken away.

Our first port of call, before Gennevilliers, had been the 9th arrondissement in Paris, Faubourg-Montmartre; greyness, maids’ rooms and seedy hotels. We had arrived in a Paris that was cold and wet, where classrooms, canteens and clinics were overheated. The result quickly followed. Infection. Mycobacterium tuberculosis must have been xenophobic, preferring immigrant kids; the awful smell of antibiotic sprays, forever imprinted in the nostrils! But at least Paris was anonymous. For me, the indifference of people in the street was a sign of freedom. If I am ‘nobody’, then nobody will recognise me. I enjoyed slipping between the passers-by with the mad hope of becoming an everyman, being ‘integrated’. One day, I thought without conviction, we’ll be hitting the streets just like them, invisible and satisfied, content as fish in a bowl.

So, these were the happy suburbs with their housing estates. At least there the adults didn’t pay much attention to the children’s lives! Our adolescent Sundays were spent roaming around Paris. But, coming back down the Avenue de Clichy with my mates, crossing those little streets that snaked off somewhere or other, among stray dogs, dubious shops, old ladies on the prowl, we felt the weight of those glances and the inevitable insults were thrown. Once we got to the periphery, Porte de Clichy, we boarded the 139, a bus with the rear platform – the good old TN6 model, the very ones that were requisitioned for the Vél d’Hiv round-up¹ – in an atmosphere that was oozing sweat. Bouncing around on the hard wooden benches, we recognised the conductor, the workers from the Chausson or Hispano factories, the drunk from the Brazza café. They certainly recognised us. Everyone in Gennevilliers knew us! We were the children from the Claude-Debussy Estate. The Jews, the refugees.

At that time there were not many refugees. Afterwards, many more came, and from everywhere. Millions of them! Before the war there were Italians, of course, Poles and Spaniards, then Jews from the East, Germany and Poland; and even earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Russians. They were not forgotten, but they were no longer the immediate focus of abuse and hatred, having been replaced by ‘Arabs’, who were most often Kabyles. At that time, Algerians were not refugees – Algeria was supposed to be French – but ‘relocated workers’. In 1958, we Egyptian Jews were among the first refugees since the war.

As one would expect, the language of the immigrants generated local slang, especially when it came to what to call them. They were called ‘bicots’ because many had ‘Larbi’, meaning ‘the Arab’ as a first name. ‘Larbi’ became ‘Larbicot’, after ‘l’abricot’ [apricot] because of their sometimes coppery skin-colour. Larbicot … bicot. It was an insult, yet it was simple derivation from the word for Arab. They were belittled by being called ‘crouillats’, which sounded a bit like ‘couille’ [testicle] or ‘couillon’ [dickhead], but it was in fact a deformation of the Arab akhouya, ‘my brother’, an affectionate greeting often used by Algerian immigrants. As for us kids, these ‘Arabs’ certainly weren’t our ‘brothers’, but co-pupils at the local school, and often our friends.

We got our share. They called us ‘youpin’, ‘youde’ or ‘youtre’, insults also deriving from the way Jews designated themselves. Yehoudi, in Hebrew, simply meant ‘Jew’, that is, ‘of the Judah tribe’. Just like bicot or crouillat, these insults are a label. It is easy to decode the meaning: ‘No use trying to hide or melt into the population at large. I know all about you, even the way you talk about yourself in your own language: “crouillat”, “youde”, “polack” … I know you so well that I can twist your own words into mockery.’ As the Latin proverb has it, ‘if you know his name, you capture the person’.

These were the insults of future slave-drivers! At the time, no one cared how the labelled reacted to their labelling. Would it occur to anti-Semites that sometimes Jews might end up believing a little in the image reflected back to them? Up until they extricate themselves from that image, always a violent process.

The Claude-Debussy Estate where we had landed was surrounded by the dead. When I exited the ground floor of Building G, there were dead on my left, real ones, in the large cemetery of rue du Puits-Guyon. On the right, the slum, the social death sentence for North African immigrants. And opposite was an automobile cemetery, a gigantic car junkyard that we called ‘the scrap’. It was owned by Gypsies and was guarded by two big black hounds and a German Shepherd. And when we dreamt, eyes closed, at the wheel of an old rusty Cadillac, they would come and drive us out, their fangs bared. Especially the big male; we called him Baskerville …

The housing estate was still bogged down in the mud of the construction sites and had scarcely emerged from the ground. It just happened that the construction of this set of buildings with its whiff of Le Corbusier (splashes of primary colours; cobalt blue, lemon yellow, and carmen red on brutalist cement), coincided with our inopportune arrival in France, expelled from Egypt after the Suez crisis, and dumped there, blown by the wind, in Claude-Debussy city estate, a ‘radiant’ city.² We were the ‘glorious’ ones, not because this decrepit architecture might have inspired us, but because we rode the waves of friendly competition. Of the hundred and fifty families who lived there for a time, the Egyptian Jews made up a good third, maybe more. In our little ghetto, we could speak the old languages, keep our customs going for a while, and we could laugh about them, and about those of the others, whom we simply thought of as ‘French’. We could evoke our lost land as we made fun of our parents’ and grand-parents’ accents. We were carefree, fun-loving, high-spirited. We spread out from there before too long; left home to blend into society, in one place or another, high or low. I often think that those years spent in our little community, due to the haphazard siting of the buildings, allowed us a soft landing, a less traumatic arrival than that of many others whom I rubbed shoulders with later. These were the benefits of a communal airlock, so far from the caricatures with which ‘communitarianism’ (said with a grimace, of course) is dressed up.

2015. Winters are milder than in the old days. Housecall to rue Chandon, a street that intersects with the one I lived in as a child. I know that in the Claude-Debussy Estate that I’m looking at today, one last Jewish family is left, abandoned there because of setbacks and bad luck. The grandparents and parents live each day in fear. The letterbox is covered with anti-Semitic abuse. Today the death-threats come not from the whims of some blueeyed field marshal,³ but from the followers of a gloomy Mesopotamian caliph. I scarcely recognise the place. Where the cemetery was, is a glorious new Estate, and where the scrapyard was, yet another glorious Estate. As for the slum, on its soil fertilised by tears and sweat, any number of other glorious Estates have grown, infinite expanses of cement under a stone sky. In the rue Claude-Debussy, nearly empty in the early afternoon, a completely veiled woman battles against the wind as she drags a little girl along by the hand. It brings me to a standstill. The scene reminds me of a photo of De Gaulle and his wife in 1969, after the referendum, battling the wind on an Irish beach. The end of a world. I have a strange feeling, a mixture of anxiety and vertigo. A feeling of déjà-vu, no doubt. I see this Estate so often in my dreams. It is true I lived in it. Here, my soul pulsed with feelings. I experienced my first transports of knowledge. I covered every nook and cranny, then I forgot it. And I began to see it in my dreams. It courses in my veins, and yet it resists my conscious mind. The uneasiness I feel in coming here again after fifty-odd years is evidence (I’m not fooling myself) of a visceral attachment to the place. But doubt is stronger. I know that once I turn my gaze away, I will forget again. The certainty of the world falters, as if the intensity of my memories had made the real seem strange.

When we got to Gennevilliers, Claude-Debussy Estate, we came from a long way away, from a Middle East that had started to go up in flames; from a torpid land of gods where mythology was entwined with everyday life. Over there Moses was a relative and the Pharaoh a neighbour. Another mythology governed France. We were surprised (enchanted!) by a phrase that we kept hearing, even in the mouths of babes, to lay claim to their freedom of speech: ‘We are in a Republic!’ Before long we were claiming it in turn, and even more often, intoxicated just by the promise of this freedom. We kids were very quick to adapt, straddling thousands of kilometres and historical millennia with our giant strides. We were ignorant of the fact that the emptiness we thought we had overcome in a matter of months would never disappear; it would remain in us, as both a void of unresolved anxieties, and an energy for future passions. The problem for migrant children is not, as they used to think, the difficulty of adapting, but is in their excessive impressionability. At the time, nothing is visible, but the abyss deepens secretly, and erupts a dozen years later as a bundle of negativities. If a rule had to be made about this, I would put it like this:

If migrants are particularly susceptible to emergent ideologies, it is because these ideologies come to fill a void left in them by feelings with no material basis.

There are words from far away, coming from the languages of my childhood, that impact on words here, inflating their meaning. Canif [penknife], for example, which means ‘latrines’ in Egyptian Arabic. I avoid using this word in French, no doubt out of a worry of slipping into another language without noticing. Or worse, the word kassar that totally coincidentally means ‘casser’ [break], linking synonymy and homonymy. I avoid that one too. Instead, ‘when I need to say break’, I use ‘briser’ or ‘rompre’ or whatever. There are words that make the borders between worlds uncertain. I am not alone in fearing certain words and avoiding them like the plague. First and second generation migrant children in France have the experience, deep within them, of a fundamental lack of fit between the word and the thing. What they retain is a fount of rage. They want to pick a fight both with their past (their origins) and with their future (the world that is promised them). They are eager for a new world, a world that is waiting for them, a world that will resolve opposites and harmonise disparities. They will join the first revolution that comes along. They will be proselytisers for the latest ideas, thinking that in one fell swoop they can wipe out their distant allegiances and the gap that separates them from their neighbours. That was me! On the barricades in May ’68, screaming out a communard song, I was no longer Jewish, or Egyptian, or foreign, I was part of that growing ferment, that breaking wave; I was at the avant-garde of a unified humanity. That, too, was Gennevilliers, a city of communists and workers, one of the gateways of France, interspersed with the rejects and overflow of societies that were breaking down, a gateway in France, like Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers or Belleville and so many others across the country.

Since then these gateways have become blocked, or sometimes occupied, and no longer allow free passage to a society that carries on regardless. The Luth quarter of Gennevilliers no longer has buses going into it for fear of stoning; its main mosque used to be attended by the Kouachi brothers, responsible for the 7 January 2015 attacks, a mosque they left because they found it too moderate; Gennevilliers with its sleeper cells hatching plots for simultaneous attacks planned for the four corners of francophone Europe; Marseilles, Paris, Lyon and Brussels. My beloved Gennevilliers!

I wanted to approach these ‘radicalised’ young people, these children from the same streets who came after me, from the concrete stoops of the same buildings, and who I feel resemble me. Migrants, like me; estate kids, just like me … Radicalised? Why not say ‘radicals’? ‘To be a radical’, wrote Marx, ‘is to grasp things by the root.’⁴ If there is any dominant characteristic that they have, then it is their willingness to overturn what is taken for granted, turn questions around by refusing our premises, to no longer accept the principles or forms of knowledge with which they grew up. No doubt they are radical, but not in Marx’s way, who added, ‘But for man the root is man himself.’ Because for them, the root is not man, but God, and not just any god, but Allah! I’m taken aback: how can they think like that? But I immediately reconsider: thinking is not ‘thinking the same thing as me’!

I certainly wanted to touch the hearts of these kids, today’s ‘radicals’, but mostly I wanted to appeal to their minds, through thinking. I wanted to come up with ideas and concepts that make their issues less impenetrable to our minds.

I have been working for decades with migrant populations. Time and again I have tried to draw attention to the madness of considering them in their nakedness, as if they came from nowhere, as if they didn’t belong to anyone, treating them like orphans without gods or myths.⁵ This is why I put together clinical arrangements where their languages are respected, as well as those of their parents and ancestors; arrangements that make use of the resources of their own worlds.⁶ While the concepts that I present here come, for the most part, from this type of clinical work, I want to extend the discussion beyond that to introduce a way of coming to terms with a social phenomenon that is also a political movement with international ramifications. It is no longer a matter of isolated phenomena, cases seen as clinical or social. I am not talking about data, but about masses, weighty issues, strange kinds of attraction.

The problem of radical Islamic youth has not only invaded the media, but it has anaesthetised our brains, obsessed us all day long and trashed our ideals. Right now might be a good time to reassess how much we need to change our thinking, our theories and our modes of action. The things that have happened have unhinged and maddened us – the attacks of course, but also the way alterity is obviously very close, brushing past us, shouting at us every day. And we are still driven mad by what’s happened, or in shock, still invaded by alterity.

⁷

This movement can only be rendered in sequences. Each chapter is a pause, with enough time for reflection. We can take our breath and then start off again trying not to lose anything of a subject which, we sense, eludes each word and each sigh. I needed these stationary moments spent in conceptual analysis in order to reconstruct the flow of these actual destinies. At the end of the journey, I hope that the patient reader will be rewarded by some kind of form emerging from the fog.

This text is based on clinical material gleaned in the context of a preventive setting aimed, by intervening early on, at avoiding any slippage towards violent action. The young people who have benefited, for the most part, were not ‘sick’ and were never seeking help. Their thoughts and behaviour are no doubt extreme enough without having to deal with real violence (at the front line in battle, the horror of the massacre of innocents, decapitations, rapes). I am certain that some people whom I didn’t meet, returning from Syria, or people who committed attacks here in France, even if they were driven by the same ideology, were massively changed by what they did. It is true that in every single case, whether it is that of an ideologue or an activist, we should never give up trying to understand things, events and people, but assassins should still be subject to uncompromising judicial treatment.

Understanding is a prayer addressed to reality. It should be broad enough to accommodate the expanse of our perception. But understanding in no way means excusing. The victims, the victims’ families, the environment – in short, ‘society’ – remain in the grip of events. They demand reparation. The intelligence that one brings to bear to understand the facts is part and parcel of the reparation. And justice even more so.

I have called this book Wandering Souls. As a guide for the authorities and for humanists, it is meant to calm emotions and to help see them more clearly at meetings with these children who imagine they are ancestors or prophets. But it is also a guide for these same wandering children, with captured souls, in thrall to harmful forces, to maybe help them find a way home one day.