Equality Headquarters Like Share Comment Tag Many second-generation immigrants adopted new names to improve their prospects of getting jobs and renting housing. Oussekine, who is now fifty-five, started using her current name when she was eighteen, in place of her given name, Nassera, which she was told sounded “too Arab.” The change still rankles. “I am French,” she said, “but why should I have to sever myself from my personal history to aspire to some pre-fixed notion of French-ness? I’m not a practicing Muslim, but should that even matter? In France, integration means forced assimilation.” ...Humour sometimes helps diffuse the tensions surrounding Muslims’ place in French society. Some of the country’s funniest and best-known stand-up comedians are of immigrant origin. One of them, Sophia Aram, was born to Moroccan migrants, and spent her first twenty years in the banlieue of Trappes, west of Paris. We met at a bistro near her home in Paris, in mid October. Aram has no qualms about being an unwed mother and an atheist, even though her father is a devout Muslim “whose religion has never come in the way of French values.” She co-hosts a live radio show, where she recently joked about the young women who “met god on Facebook last week” and set out to wage jihad. On the show, Aram often pokes fun at people invited onto a preceding news programme, while sitting right across from them. In March 2011, she launched into Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party and daughter of the party’s infamously racist founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Speaking about Marine’s autobiography, released in 2006, Aram laced her monologue with rich irony. “When I read your book, I realised you were insulted, mocked, rejected all your life because of your name,” she said, drawing a parallel to Muslims facing discrimination because of theirs. Then she turned the rhetoric of integration on one of its most high-profile practitioners. “When I told your story to my aunty Fatiha, she started crying,” Aram said, before switching to a heavily Arabic-accented voice and deliberately distorting Marine’s name. “‘Ah la la! Poor Marylene Li Pen. Everyone rejected her. That’s why she joined the National Front ... Marylene Li Pen has a problem of integration. She should try harder to understand French values. In our country, we can liberate ourselves from the imperiousness of our fathers.’
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 19:58:52 +0000
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