On the morning of June 27, 2023, 17 year old Algerian French boy Nahel M. was murdered by a French police officer in his hometown of Nanterre (western Paris banlieue). The last words he heard were those of his murderer: “If you don’t stop I’m gonna put a bullet in your head,” and of his colleague “Shoot him!” The next few days have seen many nights of revolt for Nahel and others who have died from police killings, in numerous banlieues in France, but also in Guiana and Martinique in the Caribbean, and Reunion in the Indian Ocean. In the following days, the judiciary apparatus took over police operations and started judging the 3,600 people (mostly young men) arrested (often arbitrarily on very weak evidence if any), to flex that Justice is a fundamental, if not the most important part of the police state. Those of us who are not solely attuned to spectacular police violence, but also to the more institutional forms of violence by the penal system, witnessed then prosecutors and judges’ humiliation of young people, their infantilization and ultimately, cruel sentencing to prison time or other forms of judiciary brutality—“to set an example” as some judges had no problem stating. These immediate trials allow for practically no defense, in particular when lawyers are “commis d’office” (court appointed) and lack political commitment. Learning from lessons of the 2005 massive revolts that had followed the death of teenagers Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré in Clichy-sous-Bois (eastern Paris banlieue), an anti-racist legal team was created to facilitate access to politicized lawyers who also agreed to drastically reduce their fees, in order to not overburden families already in situation of economic precariousness.
I write this text with difficulties—emotions making themselves felt—but also with an acute sense of urgency. This sense of urgency partially emerges from the reading of several articles about these recent events, written with haste from afar (often from the United States). Let’s be clear though: I have not read anything plainly wrong from these texts, written by comrades who, despite living elsewhere, are very familiar with the French political context. I’ve also noticed the absence of texts and commentary by friends who may have refused to act as urgent experts for mainstream media, which are usually less inclined to publish something when public outrage is lower. The problems of remoteness, as often, have less to do with accuracy reporting on the situation, and more with questions pertaining to the analytical framework—or, more simply, the vision through which we think and act. One particular dimension of these texts that hit me as troubling, is the separation of an entity named “France” and communities depicted as racialized immigrants, thus involuntarily consolidating a racist vision that there has been such as thing as France, white and Christian, which is now refusing to come to terms with fifty years of immigration. This small time scale along with the fantasized homogeneity of pre-1970 France appears to me as a central problem in the rupture it implies, between entities that have been co-constitutive for hundreds of years.
With this problem in mind, the term central to the framework I’d like to push for is that of “continuum,” and more particularly of the “colonial continuum.” Thinking of Nahel’s murder as part of a continuum would not enclose us within a time that makes the sentence “nothing has changed” (uttered countless times these past weeks), an inescapable reality. It simply means that the spatial, temporal, administrative, economic, and relational political order that constructed French colonialism through dispossession, racialization, and subjugation has evolved, but is still operative and structures present society.
This does not solely mean that racism is embedded within the structures of French society but rather, that nothing that makes France what it is today can be interpreted “outside” of this colonial continuum.
No wealth accumulation from the massive contribution of France to the transatlantic slave trade, nor the past or present extractivism of resources in colonial-administred countries, no labor in construction, farming, healthcare industries etc., no relation between state institutions and people (but also culture, language, and political struggles) should be read in some sort of postcolonial vacuum. From the iron of the Eiffel Tower extracted from the Algerian ground to French people’s fridges made with Kanaky’s nickel, to France’s nuclear plants’ electricity produced by Niger’s uranium. All is tainted, if not structured by, the colonial continuum. Stuart Hall says it better than anyone when it comes to the analog reality embodied by the British colonial continuum: “People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries […]. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth.” (“Old and New Identities,” 1991).
This omnipresence of what we clumsily call “the past” is also to be found in the spaces where we live in the present. There is no need to go too deep into the ‘geological’ stratas of the ground, to find the colonial matter that fertilizes today’s earth. What does it mean to understand that Nahel was murdered a few dozens of meters from where the largest Algerian shantytown of Nanterre used to stand in the 1960s? What does it mean that his grandparents or their neighbors may have contributed to the Algerian Revolution in the 7th Wilaya (the 7th region of the Revolution, i.e. France)—a few dozens of meters from the place where the child of their yet unborn descendant would be murdered by the same racist police six decades later? What does it mean for the thousands of us who marched in Nahel’s memory two days after his murder, to get tear-gassed next to the only trace of the shantytown’s former presence, a sign next to an office building commemorating the colonial massacre of October 17, 1961, when the police murdered over 200 Algerians—many of whom lived in Nanterre—in the streets of Paris? What does it mean to see the fight put up by the young residents of the Cité Pablo Picasso, where Nahel used to live, aiming fireworks at the police surrounding their neighborhood reproduced the conditions of many anti-colonial struggles, where indigenous militants compensate for the asymmetrical balance of weaponry with a perfect empirical knowledge of the battlefield? What does it mean when graffiti calling for “Justice for Nahel” or promising “We’ll burn everything” are painted on the very walls of social housing that have witnessed the local celebrations of Algerian independence sixty-one years ago, to the day?
Do those questions help to grasp a reality in which lazy concepts such as “France’s anti-Africanness”—something I’ve read a couple of times these past few days—appear for what they are: a convenient (because easier to understand) simplification of a much more complex, yet equally harrowing, reality. That reality is to be understood in what Martiniquean philosopher Édouard Glissant conceptualized as “the relation,” which is, I believe, akin to this idea of continuum. The relation is not another vision of the universal, one where all things on earth would harmoniously coexist according to a certain order: it is one that fundamentally takes into account the violence that created the relation between the slave owner and the enslaved, between the colonizer and the colonized. It contends that each is co-constituted by the other.
What the concepts of relation and continuum suggest is that the idea of rupture is only a construction of our minds; one that we find in history books, separating space-time and labeling the fragments on both sides of this artificial rupture with terms such as “colonial” and “post-colonial” or “colonized” and “immigrant.”
In other words, France’s structural racism should not be analyzed in terms of xenophobia (the fear of what is foreign) but rather, as a fundamental modality of the colonial continuum that forms the relation between people and the state, as well as between each other.
These considerations may appear abstract and perhaps even inappropriate in a time when we are mourning another little brother taken away from us. I would like to argue however that this framework is meant to serve a political vision. One of the main issues with a political movement such as the anti-racist struggle in France, is that our political goal is rather abstract—in this realization, I am indebted to Guadeloupean writer and activist Joao Gabriel. To say this in another way, saying abstractly that our fight is against racism might mean there won’t be an actual moment when we’ll be able to say that we have vanquished. If I allow myself (for once!) to make a comparison to the struggle for Black liberation in the United States, one thing that made the 2020 massive uprisings so remarkable was also the surge of the ideas articulated by abolitionist thinkers and activists to the mainstream. For weeks, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets were imposing a very practical agenda while, over here in France, our calls for justice are not necessarily accompanied with a clear political vision.
What we call “abolition” here (which could take another name) entails a fundamentally different vision in the context of France from that of the U.S. But it would necessarily involve the removal of state means of enacting colonial violence: the police, the penal courts, the prison, the border regime and its daily forms of enforcement (visas, precariousness, detention, deportation, etc.). Yet, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore regularly reminds us, abolition is not the mere dismantling of these state-sanctioned means of violence: “abolition is about presence.” To construct this “presence,” the geological layers that we can build on top of those that have been scorched with colonial erasure and denial, are for us to imagine and create. In practical terms, what would that mean for French society, free of its colonial nation state, to consider the Haitian and Algerian Revolutions (among many others) as their own? What would this materialize for people in Haiti and in Algeria, as well as Black and Arab people in France? How can we stop thinking in terms of “here” and “there,” and instead in terms of interconnected “heres?” In other words, how does Glissant’s relation inform transnational responsibilities and solidarities, between people in France and people in Viet Nam, Mali, Comoros, Kanaky, or Guadeloupe? What kind of revolutionary reparative measures need to be taken, so that the co-constitutionality of each other will no longer be predicated on unidirectional violence? How would these measures materialize, not just in our imaginaries, but in the places we live? What would a place such as Nanterre then look like? The only reason these questions are vertiginous is because we too rarely dare ask them to ourselves. ■
