With each tribute, minute of silence, commemoration, my throat tightens, my heart is at half mast. The terrorist massacres of soldiers in Toulouse, the Ozar Hatorah school, Charlie Hebdo, Hyper Kosher, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, the Stade de France, the Parisian terraces, the Bataclan, the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Every year, the same memories, the same faces, the same names, the “where were you?” and the shock again, as on the same day, the shock of violent death in the heart of the city, in places of life, of sociability.
And then Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard. Perhaps because we know their features, the literature they loved, the educational ambition which animated them, their families, their passions, the last days which preceded their assassinations, perhaps because they were teachers, we all felt a feeling of closeness, an unbearable attack on our intimacies, on our school pasts, on our school memories. Every year, something that comes from the collective unconscious of a people who have in common having attended the same republican, free and secular establishments makes us shed an extra tear, a tear perhaps even selfish, on a time that, as age accumulates, we value.
The time of learning, of discovery, the time when a word from the teacher, an encouragement, a congratulations upset, accompanied, carried our destinies as kids who were not yet finished, who did not yet know what tomorrow would bring. But none of us could have suspected that it would be made of the blood of our teachers, of decapitation in broad daylight, of the courage of men who did their job and transmitted the only weapon available against darkness: liberating knowledge.
“Writing talents”
To the question of what secularism is called, it is the pediment of a school of the Republic that first arises. The place where the future citizen is born, the place where we learn something else – different from what was first acquired in the family unit, which does not compete with it but makes it more complex and enriches it, opening the royal road of choice. Even if secularism affects all strata of society, all representatives of the State and creates common conditions, it is school that we think of first when the beautiful word secularism arises. It is in a classroom that the citizen of tomorrow takes shape, on faces that still have the curves of childhood, that is where the seed of critical thinking is planted. But not only that. It is also the intimate personality which begins its slow transformation towards self-affirmation. Everything that Islamists hate and want to destroy, with their totalitarianism which abhors the individual, wanting to drown them in an ideology which imprisons, which breaks the “I”, which kills freedom, which fights emancipation.
“Writing talents”. A few words written as a comment on a report from the first quarter of the fourth grade class by Ms. Marty, French teacher at the Anne Frank college in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. I kept this school report, it was my first victory, the first step in a destiny, a smile, finally, confident towards the future. “Writing talents”, for a 13-year-old girl, who arrived in France five years previously, who did not know how to speak, read or write French, but who already wanted to be a “French writer”. These few words not only gave me self-confidence, they validated hours of study, relentlessness, and curiosity. They are proof that anything is possible as long as you roll up your sleeves and live up to your ambitions.
I don’t know if Mrs. Marty appreciated the gift she gave me at the same time as she obliged me. At 13, when an adult who is not your parent, an adult who represents authority, validates your desire to be, he authorizes something immense which never leaves you: I can. I published my first book twenty-four years later, and it was Ms. Marty that I thought of, these few words which outlined the outline of the writer I so wanted to become. To thank Ms. Marty is to thank all the teachers in the world who, with a look, with a word, can offer the most beautiful thing in the world: the possibility of a future.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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