It is the Summer of 2002. Mehdi is 18 years old. He is an only child, unemployed, angry. His head is mixed up with images of the poverty in his area, an extreme-right candidate through to the second round of the presidential elections, the explosion of the Twin Towers being shown live on TV, his friends protesting against job cuts... Everything is getting mixed up, especially on the night of 14 July, when Parisians seem to forget their problems and celebrate regardless. But the party in Paris is off-limits for Mehdi. Everything around him is too serious, too weighty. He gives himself two-and-a-half days before ending it all. Before he does so, “it´s time for life in the suburbs to be described by those living it, not the way others imagine it”.
Mehdi is highly-strung, and the other youths have nicknamed him “Killer Pit”. “Pit” after Pitbull, and “killer” because he can kill, as he´s already proven by killing his own father. Beaten for as long as he can remember, one day – without premeditation – Mehdi ends up beating his father to death. He then has to go to court and spend eight months in custody. Above all he has to hear the witness statements of his neighbours, who knew everything he endured and did nothing to stop it, he has to see the photos of his bruised and battered body as a child, he has to hear his mother asking forgiveness, through her tears, for not having the strength to leave.
Mehdi has tried to channel his violence. He took up boxing, which helped for a while. But “the truth is that in Thai boxing, like in other kinds, destitution is in the ring for the amusement of others. It allows them to pour out their pent-up aggression to the beat of their frustration”. One angry evening, Mehdi misdirects his anger and punches his coach. After that he never goes back to train.
Mehdi suffers from being too perceptive. All he can hear in his block of flats are couples screaming and hitting one another. He asks himself why his neighbours continue to live together when they cause each other so much suffering: “They call me violent, but what would they call this piece of shit society we live in?” Only 37-year-old sociology teacher Marie manages to gain the trust of this young man. Their relationship is one of intimacy, perhaps even love. It is through Marie that Mehdi discovers Racine – his words, his tenderness – but is it too late?
Short sentences, words hurled like “fists and legs in the ring”. The book is traversed by this directionless energy, this nervousness, this urgent desire to live which society has no answers for, this violence that no-one can put a stop to. Mehdi finds himself in a race against time and against his own end: “My story is that of a kid stuffed full of bitterness without realising that one day his body will have the uncontrollable urge to spit it all back at the world.”
|
|
