Moroccan Journalist’s Debut Book Chronicles Journey from Public Housing to Elite University

It was while accompanying her mother in luxury hotels for cleaning that Nesrine Slaoui laid the foundations of her first novel, through the publication of her first photos on Instagram. But it was the text she posted on Twitter to describe her father’s difficulties during confinement in the face of contradictory administrative injunctions and work accidents that Fayard spotted and offered her the publication of this book. "I’ve always written, but I never would have imagined being published one day," she confesses.

This first novel by the Moroccan is the story of a success against a backdrop of melancholy and trials. She recounts the difficulties she has faced. She, from a working-class background and who has climbed the steps to reach Sciences Po. It is also the moving story about the difficulty of being a woman, from a working-class background and of Moroccan origin, a "suburban from the countryside" who had "a revenge to take" after one of her teachers told her one day that Sciences Po was "not for her" and who has experienced too much discrimination, "racism and sexism", reports huffingtonpost.fr.

Throughout the pages, Nesrine Slaoui describes, with statistics to back it up, inequality of opportunity, unequal access to education, the life of people like her or her parents, who even before confinement, observed a kind of confinement to protect themselves from discrimination, racism, gratuitous violence from those who call themselves privileged. "I had to change my style of dress, erase my southern accent and learn to hold myself differently to enter Sciences Po," she reports.

She points out that "those we call class defectors are the witnesses, the privileged targets, of class violence". Throughout the book, Nesrine Slaoui reported on the discrimination, racism, "class violence" which can be summed up in three sentences that one encounters when reading the novel. While working at the checkout of a supermarket, a customer says to her son: "You absolutely have to study so as not to end up like this woman". There is also a Sciences Po Grenoble student who told her in her first year: "Nesrine, you took my sister’s place", to make her understand that she did not, in his eyes, have her place in this establishment. She also remembers another student who, learning of her admission to Sciences Po Paris, exclaimed in front of everyone: "She was admitted because she is a rebeue woman and she is pretty. Society is looking for this kind of profile".

Nesrine Slaoui was born to a mason father and a cleaning lady mother. Apart from the sacrifices made, she retains from their life the contempt of certain caregivers in the face of her father’s injured body, an Arab speaking poor French, to whom no attention is paid and the hands of her mother, "wrinkled by bleach". Through them, she speaks of "those whose life is permanently confined", specifies the same source.