Nadia Daam.

In The child (1), an intimate travel story grafted with huge social issues, Nadia Daam mixes humor with wit, irony and melancholy to recount her life with her daughter. He tells the story of this child who grows up without a father, his own insecurities, his relationship with the body and perfection, sexist and sometimes racist stereotypes, the childhood and adolescence of his upbringing, which reminds him of himself. And how relationships of care, protection and education can be transformed into a form of companionship… Interview.

Madame Figaro: Do ​​you have a wish, back? The child shed light on single parenthood?

Nadia Daam: Yes, because it is underrepresented. When you’re a single mom, and when you’re a kid in a single parent home, you can’t see yourself anywhere else. My daughter is the only one in her class in this situation, and neither television nor books offer many stories about single parenthood. I wanted to make it more readable and visible to others, to tell about the challenges we face. Today, the routine is simpler because my daughter is in her senior year of high school and is more independent than she was when she was seven or twelve. The fact remains that we are the only ones responsible for the balance of our family, that it is enough for me to lose my job to cause chaos, and that I am also the only one who makes decisions about his education. The good thing is that we generally agree with ourselves. But when I put my daughter to bed at night, I constantly looked back and wondered if I did the right thing in scolding her for this or that, did I make the right decisions, did I miss any problems. he hadn’t told me about it. It’s exhausting, if only physically, because you’re working without someone to pick up the baby, plan the meals, take care of the house. We are asked everywhere, and we spend our time making excuses: to school because we are missing a parent-teacher conference, or to our employer because we have to stay home with a sick child.

Did you also want to talk about the education of girls, particularly in relation to the body?

A whole section of feminist thought is interested in the female body and how it is perceived and shaped by social norms, and I had big plans for my daughter. I wanted to raise him the way I was raised. As a child, I was brought back a lot to my daughter’s condition, I had brothers and I always heard adults say: Don’t do that, it’s a girl’s business.” I grew up thinking that being a girl was less cool than being a boy. So I was determined to correct all these gender biases. But these great principles collided with reality, and I saw my daughter subject to this intangible part of women’s lives that I call “The Rule.” too many breasts, they are too big, too small etc. I couldn’t stop my daughter from looking in the mirror and always not loving herself. Young women continue to face unattainable standards, and while I grew up with women’s magazines and television, social media now pushes young people and adults to constantly compare themselves to others and feel sorry for themselves.

You also talk about the “muddy fantasy of a woman who is naughty but still somewhat preserved in her childhood”. What do you mean?

Enter Snow Sinno Sad tiger reminds us that the Lolita stereotype was born out of a complete misinterpretation that somehow legitimized rape and child abuse. Nabokov never stopped declaring that Lolita was not a little depraved, but a prodigal child, a victim, he never stopped destroying the idea of ​​the forbidden fruit; However, this confusion has left its mark and continues to contribute to the aestheticization and legitimization of the eroticization of the young body today. If we review the clip of Lio’s “Banana Split” song or the clip of Alize’s “Moi, Lolita”, we will understand that the phenomenon continues. Except that when people began to question it, they criticized them, not realizing that they were too young to understand the message they were conveying.

Your journey also allows us to think about what class-breaking…

From a sociological point of view, I am one in that I have really changed the class. There are many of us in this situation. But today we are witnessing a phenomenon of appropriation of this identity. sometimes I hear that the sons of teachers claim this, when being a dropout also means not benefiting from cultural capital. Furthermore, my problem with this story is that, like all categories, it essentializes identities. Not only do I come from a humble home, but I am also a wife, a mother, a single parent, a child of immigrants… And then living in a poor family is not violence at all. Finally, the romanticization of the dropout worries me. I didn’t see this moment coming when we could hope to benefit from a difficult or unsatisfactory childhood, and I didn’t get it. The same with the artificial valorization of foreign origin… When I was growing up, we didn’t see North African immigrant families on TV or in movies, and rarely did we see them on Garbit couscous and Berber rugs; This ad to me is the epitome of what we now call cultural appropriation, just as Vincent Lagaffe’s Zubida was too harsh for me, especially since I had to pretend it was funny. I spent endless amounts of time lying about my mother’s profession or hiding where I came from and now I see people monopolizing or fabricating humble and/or foreign origins…

(1) The child, Nadia Daam, ed. Grasset, 176 p., €17.