In “Ajar-Paris”, Fanta Dramé narrates the modest and heroic destiny of an immigrant father
To not miss any African news, Subscribe to the newsletter from “World Africa” from this link. Every Saturday at 6 a.m., find a week of news and debates covered by the editorial staff of the “World Africa”.
Ajar-Paris, the first novel by the writer Fanta Dramé, opens with an event: the disappearance of the beloved grandmother of an entire family tribe. The death in Paris, but it is in Ajar, in Mauritania, that the grandmother is buried. Under the influence of emotion, the author decides to go to the funeral, thus making her first trip to her father’s native land.
“Ajar. I had heard that name forever. Located in the Mauritanian desert, we talked about it as a distant land, so distant that we had the impression that it did not exist, that it came straight from the imagination of my parents, as drawn by the verb of an ancestral fable. […] Then over time, this village had become a subject of mockery. It was said of certain people: It is normal that he is not civilized, he comes from Ajar. »
We are in 2013, but in the eyes of the young woman, the locality looks like what the family legend reports. Time seems to have stopped there, any connection to the Internet is impossible and boredom quickly sets in despite the encounters and activities related to mourning ceremonies. This brief trip will however be the detonator of a writing project: Fanta Dramé intends to retrace the journey of his father, from this cradle of origins, left forty years earlier, to France, where he became the patriarch of a vast family constellation.
“I’m going to tell your life story in a book.
– But why ?
– Because I don’t understand how you could start your life in Ajar, decide one day to leave everything, cross Mauritania then the Mediterranean, arrive in France and finally reach Paris, when I don’t even go to 77 . »
Fill in the blanks
Until then, Fanta Dramé had never asked the question. It is by discovering the village that she suddenly grasps the true scope of her father’s itinerary, in particular the courage and determination he must have shown throughout his life. Trained at the Koranic school, the latter could decipher Arabic but neither read nor speak French when he dropped off, in the mid-1970s, on a freighter bound for Europe, driven by the intuition that he had to take your chance elsewhere.
Fanta Dramé begins by filling in the blanks and putting the different episodes of this journey in order, starting with the starting point: the very idea that the future emigrant had of this journey. An idea maintained by the fantasy story of the pairs living abroad or returning:
“We had talked to him so much about the Grand Départ. He had spent hours watching in the evening, listening to the final advice of those whose cousin, friend or acquaintance had already been there. He was told the ease of life in France, this magical country, this land deemed promised where everything succeeded once you set foot on its soil. You will see, from the day of your arrival, you will find a job. »
It’s a whole life that is finally being built and, for the narrator, a family tree that is solidifying
Left innocently without papers – he simply does not have any -, Yely Dramé will discover the complexity and the importance of the administrative procedures which will weigh durably on the course of his existence. He did not manage to get hired as an airport handler and then as a garbage collector for the City of Paris, and to lead a life as an honest worker, then as a husband and father. From marriage to family reunification, from false papers to residence permits, from Trappes (Yvelines) to the Belleville district (Paris), it’s a whole life that has finally been integrated and, for the narrator, a family tree that solidifies.
Simplicity and greatness
Born in 1987 in France to this Mauritanian father and a Senegalese mother, Fanta Dramé is now a literature teacher in the Paris region. He is probably not indifferent, because precisely his work consists in transmitting through books, that, of all his siblings, she is the one who gets down to transcribe the paternal trajectory. She thus gives to this destiny, imbued with ambition as well as modesty, a heroic dimension.
A successful life, in short, despite an undervalued professional status: the destiny of a very simple immigrant, to whom the book allows him to restore all his greatness. “I knew full well while writing this novel that my father would never read it, she discovered. But this is my father’s book, and that is the most important thing. »
Ajar-Paris, by Fanta Drame, ed. Plon, 208 pages, 19 euros.