2. Bahjat

Bahjat, what a bitch, she has everything! She’s beautiful, she’s loved, she’s free – she could be rich if she minded – she used to be, or at least she used to live with some kind of unlimited credit for what matters: trendy clothes and restaurants. Again I have to root her story in the roaring 90s (maybe one day in the future someone will remember the 00s as not complete 00?). Number seven and the first girl in a Moroccan family of eight in some northern French suburb, like other immigrant girls she fought against her destiny by studying hard in high-school – she was a real no fun and no fantasy girl then, nothing else mattered but school, basket-ball and American literature (the chance to find a passionate and contagious teacher in the post-industrial quasi-war zone were she grew up!) With a father who was brought from Morocco at seventeen to work in a factory with all the other guys of his village before being dumped after thirty years of dedicated and unskilled work, a mother who didn’t speak French since she hardly ever left the block where all the women of he same village had come later to get married with the guys, two brothers in jail and as only perspective a queue in front of the unemployment office, - she knew she’d run away at the first break.

It came with an opportunity of an au-pair job in London in another Moroccan family, some kind of far away relatives. Bahjat convinced her father with the promise of coming back speaking English fluently, then initiate brilliant studies ending up with a teaching diploma that would allow her to be a life-long state employee. Wasn’t so hard, her father had a soft spot for his first born daughter and knew she couldn’t get better if she’d stay home (he would still miss his Sunday shaving ritual). The brothers had more difficulties to accept her departure – a mix of misunderstanding, jealousy and macho stubbornness (a couple of them would afterward happily benefit from her new life). The all thing resolved when one of the brothers who just started to grow a beard invoked the Holy Qur’an to keep the woman in his place (that was when Muslim fundamentalism started to reach Europe), that resulted in a serious beating by an infuriated mother who hadn’t say anything so far. She screamed to the baffled family that she would have no bearded in the family as long as she’d be alive, and that Bahjat would go. Bahjat’s mother knew that her daughter would never come back of course.

(to be continued...)

1. Queen of Cool

I'm supposed to be the Queen of Cool, y'know? I mean, since I fit all the trendy clichés, I thought for a long time that my life would be easy like in a magazine. Felt sorry for the others though, but can't fight who I am. Where should I start? Pretty face, yeah, that's a good start. And the hippest gene pool, allowing me be the perfect object of phantasm of globalized advertisement culture - fitting in the pages of a Benetton catalogue as well as in the arty-fartiest fantasy of upper-class connoisseurs of what the world should be. At my age – even before I guess -, my mother was the Japanese mascot (she’s hate me if she’d read this) of some New York experimental cinema higher circle where she inspired those who would become the greatest icons of the movement – often long after they gave up in front of the general indifference. These grand men of course never gave any credit to her own cinema work, since she was so sexy and exotic… She was half surprised, after all she left Japan because being a woman forbid her any kind of recognition in an art field fuelled by technology, so in the US it was still better.

But in the international language school where she was absently teaching Japanese to wannabe golden boys, she met the most alien guy – the European equivalent of Japanese without the dominant culture: a Finn – quite younger and seemingly foreign to anything, even her own seductiveness. So of course she fell for him (she’d hate my guts even more for this, but first it’s all true, and I have to make my background a little bit exciting, isn’t it?). He was a young computer freak who would later largely contribute to the current general alienation of mobile phone industry. They were at the dawn of a long chaotic impassionate relationship of which I’m a by-product (oh, my mother she’d hate me soooo much after sacrificing her life for her ingrate parasite of a daughter – well the little bit of her life we spent together!). At some point she managed to put hands on prehistoric video equipment and made herself a name as an early pioneer of the new media – or more accurately an early female pioneer, far behind her male colleagues. That was enough to get her some visibility, not in NYC though, but in Germany and France where she relocated – breaking up for the fifth time with her young lover - that would give them the opportunity to reconcile and finally move together in a 25 m2 flat in Paris.

(to be continued...)