AS WE EXIST

The daughter of Moroccan immigrants comes of age.

Novelist and sociologist Harchi makes her English-language debut with a simultaneously tender and powerful memoir of growing up in eastern France as the only child of Moroccan immigrants. They worked as cleaners, arduous labor for which they felt exploited. Living in a community rife with violence, she was sensitive to her mother’s overwhelming fears, “and I began to fear, too.” Her parents refused to send her to the local elementary school with other immigrants’ children—the Arab boys were “thugs,” her mother thought, who ruined girls’ reputations. Instead, they got special permission to enroll her in what they believed was a better school in a different part of the city. When she was 10, they sent her to a private Catholic school, where Harchi was subjected to bullying and racist behavior from classmates and teachers. Intent on protecting her parents, she never told them. “School,” she writes, “was simultaneously the great unhappiness of my life and the great happiness” of her parents’ lives. The oppression she felt at school and the hostility she experienced from French society were mitigated when she was 17 and read The Suffering of the Immigrant, by French Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad. That book, she writes, gave “meaning, a miraculous meaning, for so long unattainable,” to her family’s life. Social theory, she came to believe, “had the same power as kisses, as plants and prayers, I mean the power to heal and transform.” Encouraged by a professor, Harchi decided to study social science at university. Realizing that education threatened to pull her on a path away from her parents, she felt burdened by a sense of betrayal. Harchi recounts a painful struggle “to morally justify” her decision to pursue graduate studies in Paris and, finally, to be able to move forward, without guilt or sadness, “working only to make a future for us.”

A graceful, revelatory remembrance.