Success as survival

[eva_rajzman]

I remember going to my best friend’s house as a kid, and her dad, who had come from Morocco in his twenties, would always ask about my grades and then push her to do better than me. It felt like we were constantly competing, putting a lot of pressure on her. Reading Martin's interviews made me think of this differently, as interlinked with his personal history with France. Many interviewees, tracing their origins in former colonies, have declared suffering from feelings of inferiority and fear of rejection. Jean said that throughout his childhood, he wanted to “succeed like the whites “succeed”” and Vincent stated that as a foreigner, he must prove that he is capable, more than others have to(Martin 160). I now see how these feelings are tied to an internalized colonial legacy that is still being passed down, where immigrants and their children had to constantly prove themselves to be accepted.

There is also this long-held idea, that the French still uphold, that being educated makes a person superior to another. As Baldwin was told that he was different from the Arabs because he was more civilized (4), the classification of races has often been made through perceptions of civilization and education of certain groups of people. We have seen how whiteness has been associated with the highest form of civilization, leading some communities and groups of immigrants to “negotiate” their whiteness to gain privileges.
In parallel, in the French cultural representations of Maghrebi immigrants, stories of exceptional trajectories are often reserved to excellent students. These narratives suggest that academic success and intelligence can be a means to overcome barriers created by racism.

As Mc Solaar says, “Le savoir sera mon seul alliée,” education becomes the way to gain respect and integrate into French society. And thus, as one of the interviewees says, a means of survival, “Integration lets me survive” (Martin 161). For second-generation Maghrebi women, this pressure to excel academically often comes from both their families and French society, where they need to prove their worth against the stereotypes.