Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > Down with the Poor!

I listened to their stories composed of choppy, cut-off, expectorated sentences. They memorized them and regurgitated them in front of the computer screen. Human rights do not mean the right to escape poverty. In any case, you didn't have the right to utter the word poverty. You needed a more noble reason, one that would justify political asylum. Neither poverty nor avenging nature that had devastated their land could justify their exile, their mad hope for survival. No law allowed them to enter here in this European country if they didn't have political, or even religious reasons, if they didn't demonstrate the serious consequences of persecution. So they had to hide, forget, unlearn the truth and invent another one: the tales of migrating peoples; with broken wings, filthy, stinking feathers; with dreams as sad as the rags on their backs.

This book was originally published in 2011 by Shimona Sinha, born in West Bengal but naturalised in France having moved there in 2001 (aged 28) and who writes in French (with which she says she has a better literary relationship). In France she worked as first a teacher and then an interpreter within the asylum system and it is that experience on which she draws to write the novel (with a Bengali born first person narrator doing the same job) – with the novel ultimately costing her that job as OFPRA (the French immigration authority) not appreciating her critique of all aspects of the system (including the asylum seekers and those who aid them).

It is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and was published by the ever excellent Les Fugitives in 2022.

The original book shared a title with Baudelaire’s provocative 1869 prose poem “Assommons les pauvres” (http://baudelairepoems.blogspot.com/2...) which as in the link provided is commonly translated as “Let’s beat up the poor” – and which features the poet beating a beggar seemingly to provoke a reaction. An LRB article by Christopher Prendergast says of the poem (which others have seen as related to Marx’s class struggle)

In many ways, the poem is deeply resistant to interpretation, and is meant to be. The surface of demonic hysteria and sadomasochism is a pokerfaced mask, concealing a range of provocative ironies. Against the background of the spectacular collapse of ideologies of well-meaning benevolence in the insurrections of 1848, Baudelaire’s poem probes all the weak points of the philanthropic: the egoism in altruism (‘I am such a nice person’); the bad faith of charitable giving as alibi, letting people off the hook of finding real solutions to inequality; the malicious thought that a relation of equality established through the exchange of violence is preferable to the humiliating servitude of supplicant beggardom, the smile, the deference, the politeness, without which the needy rarely accede to the status of deserving.

And a similar idea informs the book – which is effectively told by the narrator looking back on her time sitting in on asylum interviews and court cases (typically with Bangladeshis) as she herself faces an interview and potential charge having struck an asylum seeker (who follows her on the Metro while she is on the way to a potential date with a female colleague) with a wine bottle.

Life is a monologue. Even when you think you're making conversation, only a stroke of luck allows two monologues to intersect; perhaps taken by sur-prise, they halt in front of each other. In the offices questions and answers intersected but remained isolated. The men stuck to their monologues. The women officers shot question arrows almost automatically, lethargically and without a target. A few rudimentary questions later, the tension would rise among us. The tension sometimes rose so high that, long after having completed an interview, everything trembled deep inside me, throbbed like the engine of an idling car

The same rage that drove this response drives the book as she despairs at (among other things): the North/South divide in climate change – particularly how the excesses of the West have exacerbated catastrophic flooding in Bangladesh – something made worse by the history of colonialism; the unfeeling nature of the asylum system and particularly the way in which it forces those seeking asylum (and the lawyers who help them) to distort or even invent stories of persecutions which tick the right boxes (for example religious or political persecution); her often tricky relationship with those parties as they rail at her both for translating to them the questions of the immigration officers and for, in their eyes, failing to translate their responses in a convincing enough fashion or not correcting their errors; the people traffickers and the way in which they exploit the asylum seekers both before and after transporting them; the way in which the seekers (used to a patriarchal society) reject her superior status in France.

I found this overall a powerfully effective book.

It is at times unbearably intense and of course deliberately ambiguous and provocative like the eponymous poem. However it is also one struck through with imagery and particularly strong when describing the contrast between the different areas of Paris for example (With I have to say the RER description functioning in an almost Proustian way for me to convey the outkirts of the City)

The offices where the raggedy petitioners came to plead their cases, dragging their feet, holding babies, but usually alone, were located in barren areas, beyond the city limits. Where the wind picked up. The wind picked up and died down and picked up again. Dust flew and spun around. The battlefield flared up. The sound of the RER, its corroded screeching, steel against steel, its crisscrossing rails stretching into the horizon, to even more barren zones, the sun bursting onto the tracks, factories rising up against the white sky.

Or this clever contrast

Coming out of the metro, at an intersection, I was lost. No landmark. Around the square there were shabby reproductions of the same cheap and hideous merchandise. …… . The entire neighborhood was an open-air bazaar, an open garbage bin …. The merchants had spread out their wares everywhere, overflowing onto the sidewalks, into the middle of the street, as if the many shops around the square weren't enough. Clothing, bags, suitcases, shoes, and a pile of shapeless objects ….. It was a ghetto. Another country. The one I had managed to leave behind. It was impossible to believe there was still a luminous city not very far from here. The metro had brought me to the end of the tunnel at the edge of the world into this land of rubbish overrun by outcast jellyfish ………………… . If I could have, I would have turned around, taken the first metro and returned to my own neighborhood, where the smell of good baguettes blended with that of yellowed books placed in boxes in front of shop windows. There on the streets dogs walk with their owners, the café owner jokes with the couple of daily customers, brown-and-green cast-iron tables and chairs lean on the slope of the sidewalk, red-and-white checkered tablecloths flutter in the breeze. I simply wanted to erase my character from this ghetto cartoon.

Highly recommended.