Kamel Daoud – Monologue of the French pro

We listen to the head of a community broker to become a leader or an intellectual of contrition in France: “Why am I for the mullahs and against American attacks in Iran, even though I live in France, in a free country, democratic – until you can slap a president without being dissolved in acid by his secret police?” My answer: because it’s complicated when you make a living trading exotic fruits.

If I support the mullahs against the Iranians who are dying, rising up, continuing to protest against their dictatorship, it’s because there is a link between my political career here in France and the mullah. What is it, four thousand two hundred kilometers away? History. Here’s how: the mullah is the Islamist. It’s the Muslim. It’s false, isn’t it, according to what they say? But that’s not a reason for it not to be true. You just have to make people believe it. That’s my job. I owe it to them, to my readers in France.

Because if I support Trump’s strikes, it’s because I am pro-American, pro-Israeli, and pro-Jewish, otherwise a Jew. Since the mullah is Muslim, condemning him is condemning my Muslims. How does that concern me, here in my head-under Paris that confuses keffiyeh and revolution? Because the Muslim is my reader in France. My only army of underprivileged, excluded people who have nowhere to go, no one to return to – except the past. So I help them live in their past.

Defending the mullah is defending the Muslims and getting help from Islamists to succeed in France. It’s my committee, my army, my “people of service,” my exotic fruits. I am instinctive. When you don’t know how to do much with your hands, you have to follow your intuition, and mine leads me to this: delve into the history of the country, find traces, unhappy people, forgotten neighborhoods, and make them work for me, working on their imaginations.

Plantation of Votes

You see, it’s a bit like running a plantation: I use the community workforce of the country to grow my electoral crops. But this time, the workforce believes in it. I no longer give the whip or the law, I give stories to my “boy”: I cultivate his beliefs, his intimate Allah, his imaginary Gaza, his skins, his flags, his fears, his debts to his ancestors.

It’s as simple as pie: we go from sugar plantations of the past to electoral plantations. And it will work for free when it comes to voting. I am clever, because that’s exactly what the colonists didn’t understand: people work for free when you make them believe they are working for paradise.

I don’t take away people’s salaries, but their hopes. I don’t promise them a future, I tell them their past, where they feel best, secure against time, where they are proud even though they are not. I tell them that it’s their chance coming with me, when it’s only mine. I tell them I’m Algerian, Moroccan, or Tunisian, or Arab, Malagasy, and they are happy. White skin, black mask. That’s what no one understood before me, or so few.

The colonists of the past didn’t understand it. Explaining that one plus one equals two is tiresome. It exhausts. It condemns the world to reason, to balance, to the desire to sleep, to work. But supporting, against all odds, that one plus one equals ten, makes people dream, absolves, authorizes to lie down on their backs counting the stars, to wait for revolution and chaos to enrich themselves, to dream of overturning order and accounting, allows to believe anything.

Keeping My Clientele

So yes, I support the mullahs while living in France and the mullahs are killing. And the Iranians who are dying? You might ask. So I answer you, since we are among ourselves: why does it concern me? It’s not my war. It’s not enough to die to interest me.

And if one questions me about Gaza? Well, then, I am honest: Palestine is the dreamland of my clientele in France. It’s a bit of the stolen country’s history, of settlers arriving, of lands exchanged through war, of Muslim people losing and dreaming of winning. So I adapt the cinema.

I adapt to the clientele. Ideological plantations need to add dreams, splendid past, future – as in the past we added rum in the morning and songs in the evening; it rests the workforce, even if it damages the brain’s health.

That’s what you don’t understand: I can’t let go of the mullahs in Iran. It’s my work, my fortune, my clientele at stake in France. The mullahs, the caliphate, the flying carpets, the revolts against masters, the plotting Jews, the turbans, colonization: all intertwined, connected. You can’t sell one without buying the other.

Do you see? I can’t say that Algeria is a dictatorship, for example, and tally the daily arrests and the terror in the stomach of the people living there. And I can’t remain silent when a mullah is killed. And I can’t be concerned with Somalia or Kabul, because it’s bad for keeping my clientele. It’s connected, I tell you. For me, the exotic and the political are the same thing. It’s tropical fruit.

And, for example, if I write in a newspaper in France that Algeria imprisons, that’s from my “favorite victims.” Then I keep quiet, I don’t write anything, I look the other way. And then – and above all, of course – I’m clever, I’ve thought a lot: you can’t make these people work for your sugar cane, safaris, or farms anymore. So I make them work for my votes, my career, my party.