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Philippe Artières |
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« Un ouvrier algérien, Mr Mohamed Diab, 40 ans, a été tué d’une rafale de pistolet mitrailleur le 29 novembre 1972, au cours d’une bagarre avec des gardiens de la paix, dans le commissariat de la caserne de Noailles, à Versailles (Yvelines). »
Agence de Presse Libération
Bulletin n°61, décembre 1972
Fin novembre 1972, nous habitons en famille à Versailles ; j’ai quatre ans et demi. Jusqu’à l’automne 2022, je n’avais jamais entendu parler de cette affaire. Interroger ce silence, c’est mettre à jour « mon racisme » et son histoire.
Philippe Artières puts into perspective a chapter of his personal history with archives relating to the “murder” of Mohamed Diab, an Algerian driver who was shot dead in a Versailles police station in November 1972. The Artières family lived in Versailles at the time, and if the author, then aged four, has no memory of the event, neither had he heard of the ensuing show of solidarity, which he would only discover fifty years later.
Interweaving the story of his sheltered, middle-class childhood with articles documenting the destitution of the surrounding foreign workers, the author attempts to gradually unravel the circumstances of this “racist crime” and the wave of solidarity to which it gave rise. Artières sheds a harsh light on the indifference of his own “community” to the tragedies which unfolded a few miles away, in a series of segregated spaces, be they psychological, architectural or topographical. At the end of this clinical and harrowingly honest confession, he questions the racist reflexes that he has been maintaining for decades in his daily interactions. Without sparing or overburdening himself, he intends to decipher how these ways of thinking have taken root in the minds of these entrenched families and how they still permeate his own feelings. |
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