As a child, Mohamed Rafai never really understood that he was living in a camp. Admittedly, there were the prefabricated walls, the absence of toilets and the icy wind, which, at night, came to his bed. Until one day a classmate, a farmer's son named Bosq, invited him to his home.
“At lunch we went to the restaurant. Her father took out the checkbook to pay. I saw his beautiful thin hands, his pen… And I understood. I understood that we were outcasts, ”he
says today, 48 years old. His mother never talks to him about his father, who died in Algeria during the war. The little Algerians of the city of Mazet, in Arles, insult him as a traitor: he does not understand why. He gleans information in snatches, leaving ears hanging out on the table of the grown-ups.
“I was not Algerian, I had never lived in Algeria.
But I didn't feel like I was totally French.
At school, we were plagued,
”he recalls.
Read alsoHarkis of the Algerian war: the story of a still open wound
A long
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