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"She is a living lesson of hope": Elina Dumont, the actress who survived the street and crack

2021-10-16T09:33:40.481Z


This former homeless person - a child of the Ddass - spent fifteen years in the street, four of which took crack. Now actress, activist as


She pulls out a frozen smile.

His teeth white and well aligned like a standard.

And throws a "You have to show them those" to the photographer of the "Parisian".

With his hoarse smoker's banter, his impossible address and his unfiltered words.

Then Elina Dumont bursts out laughing.

As we ignore the past.

Fifteen years of anguished wanderings in the hell of the street hide behind this clown energy and this perfect dentition.

Four of whom took crack and four others painfully erased traces of it on a dentist's chair.

"It was all black," she says, showing her ivory enamel.

Today is my pride.

My teeth, I paid for them myself.

"

Read alsoCrack: manufacture, price, effects ... four questions on a flourishing traffic

Around his sneakers and his denim outfit, the metallic roar of the skytrain sets the scene for this asphalt kingdom.

Here in Stalingrad, Elina Dumont is at home.

Since 2016, her few bags have found their place in a studio a stone's throw from here.

But between her and “Stalincrack” - as some people still call this district in the north-east of Paris - it's a much older story, made up of addictions, flashes and resilience.

Thirty years ago, this actress damaged her young woman's smile, already darkened by her childhood as a child placed and abused.

We are at the end of the 1980s. This derivative of cocaine, coming from the United States, lands in the bowels of the capital.

And ravages souls and bodies.

Elina and her past half-century have since come off the streets like crackpot.

It is for those who are still immersed in these abyss that Elina now fights.

She who continues "to talk to everyone in the street".

After a first report on women in the street published last year, Valérie Pécresse (Libres!) Has just ordered a second from her, this time on crack.

By December, neuropsychology professor Laurence Vaivre-Douret and Elina Dumont must propose concrete measures to the Ile-de-France region.

“We don't treat people in the street!

"

Elina Dumont

In recent weeks, the pebble and his addicts are remaking the headlines.

At the option of evacuations from one corner of poverty to another, demonstrations by distraught residents and debates around consumption rooms at lower risk.

As if the same merry-go-round repeated itself at regular intervals.

The photo shoot is over. On Stalingrad Square, police officers and some barriers replaced the "crackers" evacuated a little further. Elina is installed on the terrace of a brasserie on the corner. "I warned Valérie, for crack, there are not 36 solutions, immediately announces this" friend of Ian Brossat ", who had presented herself to the last Europeans on the list of this deputy (PCF) d 'Anne Hidalgo. What saved me from crack? It is to have a roof. We don't treat people in the street. No need for big speeches or long studies. Elina's bumpy course and leisurely pace are her best weapons in the fight against all forms of exclusion.

In associations, on stage or on the airwaves, she lends her hoarse voice to those whom one never hears: children of social assistance to children, homeless women, drug addicts ... Since soon ten years, she is also one of the "big mouths" of RMC's flagship show. It was on this set that she challenged Valérie Pécresse in 2018. Then the president of the region went to see “From the quays to the stage”, a one-woman-show that Elina has been playing for a decade on different stages, and from January at the Funambule Montmartre in the 18th arrondissement. She tells about her winding path towards the light. Always in his own way, with a good dose of laughter to send tears and pathos.

Elina Dumont tells her story on the stage in "From Quays to the Stage", a one-woman-show that she has been playing for ten years throughout France.

"Some will undoubtedly deem it uncontrollable, but it is this freedom and this humanity that touches me," comments the presidential candidate.

Elina has this indignation and this freedom that pushes us to always question ourselves.

She knows what fragility is, she also knows what the rage to get out of it is.

"" It is a big mouth of life, someone who does not cheat, abounds Olivier Truchot, the journalist who co-hosts the program on RMC.

We very rarely hear people who have experienced this reality of crack and the street in the media.

Her voice is precious.

"

Since her birth in Draveil (Essonne), Elina has had to build herself on an impossible equation. A mother victim of incest who has "big psychiatric problems". A father "unknown to the battalion". And a childhood confiscated by men who abuse her little girl's body in the village where she is placed. Everyone knows, no one is talking. We must save appearances. “Even if we were poor, we always had to be well dressed,” recalls Elina. I have always remained flirtatious. Even when I didn't wash for a fortnight, I still found a way to put on makeup. "

Auburn hair pulled up, her almond eyes outlined and her mouth slightly raised in red, she glances in the mirror that frames the terrace.

Impossible to give an age to this face which knew how to erase the traces of the past.

The interested party laughs: “I give a different year of birth each time, it seems that Dalida did that too.

"

"For fifteen minutes, you are no longer afraid of anything.

Then you only think of one thing: to take more »

Elina Dumont

The teenager, who has become a ward of the State, accumulates the pounds to protect herself from the criminal hands of men.

In vain.

She dreams of being a teacher.

But the school refuses him this fate.

For her, it will be BEP accounting.

Elina skips class, starts drinking and begins "her descent into hell".

At 18, she landed in Paris.

And spend his first nights outside.

With unspeakable fear in the pit of his stomach.

Then she learns to survive between odd jobs, nights in building halls, the discomforts that allow "to be fed, housed and laundered" in the hospital or evenings at a club.

“The only goal was to be warm.

I slept with men to have a place to stay.

"

The crack will come a little later.

Elina begins by being a "mail carrier" for "a good bourgeois, drug addict to death" who employs her in a recording studio.

She delivers crack pebbles to the beautiful neighborhoods.

"Do not believe that this is just a poor thing," she warns.

The others are just less visible.

They can go green to win.

Elina finally tasted.

Little by little, she falls into an implacable gear.

"For fifteen minutes, you are no longer afraid of anything.

Then you only think of one thing: take more.

"

To read also Crack in Paris: in Seine-Saint-Denis, on the other side of the "wall of shame", the residents did not take off

Until a hand reaches out.

Elina is fired from her job at the reception of "Liberation", after having given up her post in broad daylight.

One of the daily journalists puts her in touch with a friend who is looking for a babysitter for her two children, in exchange for a maid's room.

A certain Marie Desplechin, a former editor who has since become a recognized novelist.

Elina shows up at her house with her only plastic bag.

The current passes immediately between them.

But certain signs are not mistaken, such as the aluminum foil which is disappearing at high speed from the kitchen.

Marie Desplechin quickly realizes that her protégé is taking crack.

The two women make a deal: if she picks up, Elina can stay.

"He's the funniest person in the world"

Marie Desplechin, writer

The young woman goes to see a psychiatrist three times a week, swallows anxiolytics and antidepressants morning noon and evening and fights against her body.

“All my infections have woken up,” she grimaces.

I had abscesses all over my teeth.

And the stomach completely loose.

The only thing that kept me going was the trust Marie had placed in me.

"

This strange cohabitation - where two solitudes are comforted - will become a novel, "Without me".

“What I wrote is nothing compared to Elina's life,” assures the writer.

Normally this is someone who shouldn't be living.

She was conscientiously destroyed from early childhood.

But she has an incredible vitality.

He's the funniest person in the world.

She has an ability to create mind-boggling joy and fun.

"

Elina pays for her first clown internship.

In 2011, she ended up telling her story on the stage.

Didier Arnaud, a journalist from “Libé”, paints his portrait.

It is also with him that she will write a little later "Long, I lived outside", a book that traces her journey.

"With crack, she came close to death but also the abyss of absolute degradation"

Aimé Charles-Nicolas, psychiatrist

One morning, Aimé Charles-Nicolas, his former psychiatrist, who has since left for Martinique, arrives in Paris, opens the newspaper and recognizes his patient from twenty years ago.

“I rushed to the theater,” says this professor emeritus of addictology at the Antilles medical school.

With her top hat, cane and presence, Elina had that star side.

Far from the curvy young woman who came to his consultations at the time.

"With crack, she came close to death but also the abyss of absolute degradation, abounds this specialist, who witnessed" the explosion "that was the arrival of crack in Paris. But she had this strength in her that she knew how to reveal. Despite this harsh, abused childhood and all its bruises, she kept a deep enthusiasm in all circumstances. It is a living lesson of hope. "

Elina shrugs, pulling her coat back onto her back.

“We say we are doing it but nothing is ever taken for granted.

In his pocket, a few tablets of Lexomil are ready to intervene in the event of a sudden panic attack.

And recurring nightmares still haunt her.

A stone's throw from the cafe, she takes us home.

Digicodes and locks protect his refuge.

But Elina continues to sleep in front of the front door.

Like a survival reflex.

In her memory box, she brings out some photos.

A bright little girl's face appears in one of the shots.

"Did you see how pretty I was?"

Half a century later, her smile is still the same.

Like a nice snub to life.

Source: leparis

All life articles on 2021-10-16

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