Of the Paris attacks, whose five years we commemorated last week, there remains a burning memory.
We paid tribute to the victims, praised the courage of the survivors, the police and the emergency services.
There are also the neighbors, the Bataclan, the "terraces", who from the evening of November 13, 2015 to weeks and months after, have infused their fears in neighborhoods bruised by terrorist infamy.
And there are their children, the neighborhood children.
Fernando Bayro-Corrochano is a psychoanalyst and art therapist at the Specialized Medical Center for Children and Adolescents (CMSEA), rue Froment (XIe).
He received in consultation more than 25 children of the district, very affected by the events which took place there, when the parents, the school or the psychological cells did not manage to alleviate their suffering.
He gathered the drawings of 18 of them in a large book (*) in a liberating gesture.
Draw war, exile, children have always done.
"But let's stop thinking that they bear witness by their drawings, insists Fernando Bayro.
When the child begins to draw the conflicts of society, he does not have to worry about leaving a trace, he above all figures his own distress, how he has been affected by events.
He himself does not always know it ”.
Through drawing, the child does not testify to anything except his distress
Fernando Bayro's office shows a strange world.
Above a sofa covered with velvet, shelves display earthen volcanoes, terrible or grotesque monsters, more or less affable faces too.
There is especially this long yellow and red flash.
It marks half of the road that Lucy has taken to face the shock of the attacks.
On the Friday of the attacks, Lucy had her first epileptic seizure, which then escalated, without neurological explanation.
It is fear that dictates these crises, her parents sense it: the evening of the attacks, while the little 9-year-old girl was waiting with her dad in front of the TV, a special edition was invited on the screen.
Explosions at the Stade de France.
Assault terraces.
Hostage-taking at the Bataclan.
Lucy's mom, who works near the concert hall, hasn't come home yet.
She must cross this theater of war to reach the family apartment.
Lucy will open the door to a mother unharmed, but livid.
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Lucy, standing in front of a large drawing sheet, first represented an army of Daesh killers, wondering about "what they had in their heads".
Then she drew her face, the flash of epileptic lightning preventing her from calling her parents.
The core, blood red, the discharge, yellow, which paralyzes his eyes and his words when the crisis arises.
This lightning, she then modeled it in the earth, to give it an even more concrete form.
The fear was nourished by a buried anger, that the little girl could not express, a terrible fear that her mother would die during her business trips, and that the night crossing of the boulevard, that terrible evening, had reactivated .
"Like throwing a stone into a calm lake, the shock waves spread in concentric circles", summarizes the art therapist.
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G. lives in the neighborhood but he only arrived at the office in 2019. It was the attack at the Paris police headquarters that revealed his inner ills.
How could a policeman, one of those who fiercely protected France since the 2015 attacks, become an Islamist terrorist?
The 12-year-old preteen draws the city and a burning apartment.
While the firefighters control the fire, he goes to the right of the sheet and suddenly crunches two armed characters, two menacing men who face the police, arrived by the ground and the air.
It is "a fire that we cannot extinguish".
“According to what the child shows, the real flames do not extend to the neighborhood, since contained by the firefighters.
On the other hand, on the side of the terrorists, he doubts, he is not sure that we can extinguish what is brewing.
And this feeling of vulnerability generates very strong anxieties, ”says the practitioner.
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The most incredible case is undoubtedly that of this little boy who arrived at 4 years old at the cabinet, in February 2019. GE was the youngest of the direct victims of the attacks: his aunt was shot dead in the car he was in, rue Bichat, before the commando des terrasses opened fire on the “Petit Cambodge” and the “Carillon”.
He was then 1 year old and had no memory of it, never spoke of it.
But at school, the little one suffers "from an extraordinary agitation".
Facing the white sheet, he takes big brushes, black and red, "the colors of war," he says, and swiftly smears large puddles of blood that spread out.
After this first session, he will ask his mother to buy him weapons, then will come back to draw the war, until he does it with his bare hands, without a weapon.
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These unthinkable images that lie dormant in the hollow of children, all it takes is a violent episode, at school, at home, a moment of opposition, an image on TV, to reactivate them.
Terrorists continue to haunt the children of the neighborhood, and many others.
Freezing them on a sheet makes it possible to project them outside oneself, to no longer maintain the internal combat.
GE no longer talks about going to war, he was able to go back to school.
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(*) "The children of the Bataclan district, analysis and reproduction of their drawings: a challenge to terrorist attacks", Fernando Bayro-Corrochano, preface by Charles Melman, Ed. Langage. Part of the proceeds goes to the 13onze15 association.
