Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [118]
On this particular Tuesday evening, Aziz locked his shop and walked across the darkened square, offering nods of greeting to the uneasy clusters of young men, most of them kids of his customers, who hung out here until their parents got home each night. He walked along the vacant pedestrian pathways toward his apartment, which sits midway up one of several hulking pyramids of dull-coloured cubes, on the edge of a stagnant concrete pond.
His screams could be heard across the Pyramides complex. Ahead of him, he saw a vertical black column rising into the purple sky from a familiar spot. He ran and shouted in anguish. Bathed in orange light on the side of the street was his hard-won Renault Safrane four-door, the product of a decade of saving, its hood propped open, flames leaping from its engine and passenger compartment, a dense black cloud of toxic smoke rising hundreds of meters into the air, merging with scores of similar mushroom-cloud plumes that stretched around the Paris outskirts. It looked as if the entire city was ringed with fire that Tuesday night, as a thousand cars and a dozen government buildings burned in the poor high-rise suburbs, known popularly as banlieues difficiles or cités. During a three-month period in 2005, almost 10,000 cars were set alight by mobs of angry young men, a hundred buildings were burned, the French government declared a state of emergency, almost 3,000 were arrested, and a crisis of national identity threw the government of President Jacques Chirac into terminal disarray and launched the presidential career of Nicolas Sarkozy. Aziz was well aware of the emergency: out here in Les Pyramides, almost every night that season had felt like a military attack, with swooping platoons of police battling youths and clouds of smoke filling the air. Aziz knew this, but he never believed it would touch him.
The circle of young men scattered as Aziz tried to put out the flames. They disappeared into the shadowy spaces beneath the pyramids, but he knew who they were. As he slunk back to his building’s urine-scented elevator, Aziz began cursing them. The destruction of a car may not figure highly in the taxonomy of suffering, but what lay behind that act was a sense, felt strongly by Aziz and others like him, that this was no longer a community, that he and his neighbors were no longer moving in the same direction.
When I caught up with him after the attacks, in his large, bright living room dominated by a big-screen TV and an overstuffed couch, he expressed his anger in peculiar terms. He cursed France, the country he fought to join—“Every day I stay in France, it is as if I am living in a big hole with a cover over it.” He cursed his neighborhood and its buildings. And he cursed the “immigrants,” as he called the young men. “These immigrants do not know how to live here,” he said. “They cannot find a way to raise their children properly here, so they turn violent. Their situation infuriates me.”
To an outsider, this language seems odd. After all, Aziz himself is an immigrant. A Gambian who had grown up in the center of the capital, Banjul, he arrived here in the outskirts of Paris in the 1990s, after his job in the security department of Gambia’s national airline gave him an opportunity to come to France. He was attracted to the towers