Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow

A Novel

Faïza Guène

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547541181
• Print ISBN:
  9780156030489
• Subtopic: Literature General

A "touching, furious, sharp, and very funny" novel of an immigrant teenage girl finding her own identity in France ( Booklist).
 
The Paradise projects are only a few metro stops from Paris, but it feels like a different world. Doria's father, aka the Beard, has headed back to their hometown in Morocco, leaving her and her mom to cope with their mektoub, their destiny, alone. They have a little help—from a social worker sent by the city, a psychiatrist sent by the school, and a thug friend who recites Rimbaud.
 
It seems like fate has dealt them an impossible hand, but Doria might still make a new life—"with bravado, humor, and a healthy dose of rage" ( St. Petersburg Times).
 
"[A] sassy, spunky tale . . . Doria has what it takes to storm any barricade." — The Hartford Courant
 
"[Doria is] as likable as Holden Caulfield or Prep's Lee Fiora. Readers will cheer. Highly recommended." — Library Journal, starred review
 
"A promising addition to the world's literary voices." — The Miami Herald
 
"Moving and irreverent, sad and funny, full of rage and intelligence. Her voice is fresh, and her book a delight." —Laila Lalami, bestselling author of The Moor's Account

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Front
• It's Monday and, like every Monday, I went over to Madame Burlaud's. Mme Burlaud is old, she's ugly, and she stinks like RID antilice shampoo. She's harmless, but sometimes she worries me. Today she took a whole bunch of weird pictures out of her bottom drawer. They were these huge blobs that looked like dried vomit. She asked me what they made me think about. When I told her she stared at me with her eyes all bugged out, shaking her head like those little toy dogs in the backs of cars.
• Ramadan started a little over a week ago. I made Mom sign a form saying why I wouldn't be eating in the cafeteria. When I gave it to the principal, he asked if I was trying to put one over on him. His name is Monsieur Loiseau. He's fat, he's stupid, he smokes a pipe, and when he opens his mouth it reeks of cheap wine. At the end of the day, his big sister picks him up out front of school in a red hatchback. So when he wants to play the big boss, he's got a real credibility problem.
• Since the old man split we've had a whole parade of social workers coming to the apartment. Can't remember the new one's name, but it's something like Dubois or Dupont or Dupré, a name that tells you she's from somewhere, from a real family line or something. I think she's stupid, and she smiles all the time for no good reason. Even when it's clearly not the right time. It's like the crazy woman feels the need to be happy for other people because they aren't happy for themselves. Once, she asked if I wanted us to be friends. Like a little brat I told her I didn't see that happening. But I guess I messed up, because the look my mother gave me cut me in half. She was probably scared social services would cut off our benefits if I didn't make nice with their stupid social worker.
• My mom always dreamed France was like in those black-and-white films from the sixties. The ones where the handsome actor's always telling his woman so many pretty lies, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Back in Morocco, my mom and her cousin Bouchra found a way to pick up French channels with this antenna they rigged up from a stainless-steel couscous maker. So when she and my dad arrived in Livry-Gargan, just north of Paris, in February 1984, she thought they must have taken the wrong boat and ended up in the wrong country. She told me that when she walked into this tiny two-room apartment the first thing she did was throw up. I'm not sure if it was seasickness or a sixth sense warning her about her future in this bled.
• Our welfare stamps finally came. Just in time—now I won't have to go to the big charity store in the middle of town. That place is too much to bear. Once, me and my mom ran into Nacéra the witch near the main entrance. She's this woman we've known since forever. Mom borrows money from her when we're full out broke. I hate her. She only remembers we owe her cash when there are tons of people around, always just to fuck with my mom's image. So we run into Nacéra at the main entrance. Mom's squirming, but this other woman, she's just over the moon.
• I was feeling kind of bored, so I decided to hop a ride on the metro. I didn't know where I was going, but the metro takes my mind off stuff. You see so many different kinds of people, it's kind of a riot. I did the whole of Line 5, end to end.
• Friday. Mom and me, we're invited over to Aunt Zohra's to eat some couscous. We took the earliest possible train so we could spend the whole day at her place. It's been forever since anyone invited us somewhere.
• Mme Burlaud just suggested something crazy weird: a skiing trip organized by the city. She went on and on about how it'd be really good for me, how I'd meet some people, get away from the neighborhood. She said it might help me open up.
• On the school front, the trimester ended as badly as it started. It's a good thing my mom can't read. Well, you know, I mean as far as my report card goes ... If there's one thing that bugs me, it's teachers who get all competitive about who writes the most original report-card comments. End result: They're all as screwed up and stupid as the others ... The worst I ever saw was Nadine Benbarchiche, our physics and chemistry teacher, who wrote: "Exasperating, hopeless, the kind of student who makes you want to resign or commit suicide." She must have thought she was being funny or something. I'll give her that. It's true that I'm useless, but, really, there's no need to cross that line. Whatever, I don't give a shit. She wears thongs. So, anyway, the kind of comments I keep getting, the ones I call skip-repeat comments, are stuff like: "seems lost" or "seems somewhere else," or, worse, really pathetic lines like: "Get your head out of the clouds! Earth to Doria!" The only one who wrote anything nice about me was Madame Lemoine, the drawing teacher, oops, sorry, make that Plastic Arts. She put: "Malleable skills." Yeah, OK, it doesn't really mean anything, but it was nice of her anyway.
• Every year people start preparing way in advance for the Livry-Gargan summer fair. Parents, kids, and especially the neighborhood gossips, because at the street fair, you can get your gossip fix for sure.
• The Hamoudi story has got me sad. I'd been all worried because it had been a long time since I'd seen him. I'd even talked about it with Mme Burlaud. And then he goes and turns up at the fair with a girl named Karim on his arm, some trashy blond perched on fifteen-inch heels. When I went to bed, my head was full of all this sad music, like in those life insurance ads. And you know, Hamoudi had shaved so smooth, he smelled like lavender air freshener, and his eyes weren't even bloodshot. He didn't look like himself at all. This chick Karim's totally transformed him. Who knows, maybe she's worked black magic on him. I get a weird feeling about her. She even looks shady, if you ask me, with all that off-tone pancake foundation smeared on her face.
• Yesterday, when I went to pay the rent for Mom, the super's wife—the one who's still sporting the perm she got at the hairdresser's in 1974—told me about a new tenant in the neighborhood who's looking for someone to babysit her daughter. She said if I was interested, I should go see her and offer my services.
• Right now at the Formula 1 Motel in Bagnolet, everything's gone to shit. Lots of Mom's coworkers are on strike. They've managed to work something out with the unions so their demands get heard.
• Last week, Mme DuThingy, the social worker from city hall, came back to the house. This woman, she's really a shit-stirrer. Mom had hardly opened the door when she flashed her perfect white teeth and started up:
• For the past several nights I've had the same dream, one of those crazy heavy dreams you remember perfectly when you wake up and that you can describe to someone down to the last detail.
• Coming out of school, I ran into Hamoudi. He offered me a ride, said he'd drop me off in our neighborhood. I was so proud I kind of flaunted it, so all those jerks could see me leaving with Antonio Banderas's double from Zorro, except a bit more scarred. But nobody saw it. No big deal.
• Mom's finally split from that skank stinky motel where she flushed the toilet after rich folks, all to be paid three times zero. M. Winner didn't even give her the back pay she was owed, made out like it was because of the strike, and all that ... It's illegal, I just know it. Anyway, without Mom, M. Winner's motel's heading straight for bankruptcy. She's really got a way with making beds, kind of gentle but strong at the same time, in the end there isn't a single wrinkle on the sheet, better than the army. Me, personally, I'm very happy she's not working at the Formula i in Bagnolet anymore. Nothing there to miss. Not the hours, not the pay, and not that rat-head of a boss, M. Winner.
• Aziz is nice and all, but in his store you've got a one-in-three chance of getting spoiled goods, so sometimes I go to Malistar, a tiny minimarket that's been around for ages even if it's changed its name tons of times. At least ten different incarnations since I've lived here: World Provisions, Better Price, Toutipri ... It's confusing, because everyone calls this place something different, depending on which name stuck with them.
• He's getting sent up. They gave him a year. Aunt Zohra's disgusted with life. She's mostly scared of her crazy old husband, who gets back next month. Réda and Hamza, her two other sons, are in a freefall at school and they're always busting up with other guys their age from the neighborhood because they keep getting called bastards seeing as their dad's practically never there. For Youssef, it's the big house, and even if he was always making fun of me, he really didn't deserve to lose a year of his life in such a stupid way.
• In my building, there's a girl being held prisoner on the tenth floor. Her name is Samra and she's nineteen. Her brother follows her everywhere. He stops her from going out and when she gets back from school a bit later than normal, he grabs her by the hair, then the dad finishes the job. Once, I even heard Samra screaming because they'd locked her in the apartment. In their family, the men are kings. They do serious close surveillance on Samra, and her mom can't say anything, can't do anything. So it's truly bad luck to be a girl.
• The other evening, that fat loser Nabil came over to help me with my civics homework. The subject sounded like one of those special reports on TV: "Why Don't People Vote?"
• Monday, at Mme Burlaud's, we did something new, like a game. She was showing me these large-format photos, flipping through them pretty fast, and I had to say "like it" or "don't like it."
• It's already summer vacation. This afternoon I saw the Alis leave for Morocco. They've got this big red van and every year they cross France and Spain to get back to the bled and spend two months there. I was watching them from my window. They took at least an hour to load up. The kids were all dressed sharp. You could see from their faces how happy and excited they were to be leaving. I envied them. They were taking tons of luggage. Three quarters of those bags must have been full of presents for family, friends, and neighbors. It's always like that. The Mom Ali was even taking a vacuum cleaner. Rowenta's latest model. She'll get major respect over there with that thing.
• Sunday morning, Mom and me, we went to a rummage sale. She was hoping to find some shoes because in her left shoe there's a small hole up by her toe and when it rains or she walks on the grass in the morning her toes get soaked.
• Monday, at Mme Burlaud's, it wasn't at all like normal. Right away when I got there, she told me to make myself comfortable and then she went out of the office saying: "I'll be right back!" like for the commercial breaks of variety shows. She didn't come back until twenty minutes later ... and I noticed she smelled like alcohol. Real strong. Well, that really was nothing ... During the session, I didn't have much to say so at one point she crossed her short little legs and went: "Maybe you've got a funny story to tell me?" At that moment I noticed she was wearing garters. I looked back and forth between her face and her garters and thought that this wasn't bad for a joke. Then she asked me thousands of questions about Mom, nosy stuff about her love life and everything ... I told her she didn't have one anymore since he left. Mme Burlaud, she wanted to know if I could see Mom making a new life with another man. Yeah, I can see that. To tell you the truth, I'm planning it...
• Hamoudi was really liking that job. And he was beginning to like living by the law. But they fired him because things were disappearing from the warehouse. At least six thousand euros worth of material and it was Hamoudi who got the blame. Not even his parents believed him when he denied it. They're convinced he's a good-for-nothing and keep telling him so.
• Since Mom's still on vacation until next week, we decided to hang around Paris together. It was actually the first time she'd seen the Eiffel Tower even though she's been living half an hour from it for almost twenty years. Before now, she only saw it on TV, on the one o'clock news on New Year's Day, when it's all lit up from top to bottom and people are partying, dancing, kissing, and getting wasted. Anyway, she was seriously impressed.
• The news about Samra has flooded the neighborhood. Samra's the prisoner who used to live in my building and whose brother and father pushed her to the edge until she had to get out. Somebody saw her a few days ago, not too far away. Or else very far away, I don't know anymore. Anyway, they're saying she ran away from home for a boy. I'm thinking she must have had an excellent reason to dare to escape from prison. It looks like she's doing fine and that she met this guy at that toy store La Grande Récré last December. She worked there over vacation, wrapping Christmas presents. She must have had some excellent technique and maybe that's what attracted her guy—he was working there too. According to what everyone's saying, he's a toubab, as in a whitey, a Camembert, an aspirin ... So Samra's brother, who has a boxing glove for a brain, he wants this guy's skin when the only crime he's committed is giving a little love to his poor sister. I think they should have moved away and settled down farther out so people would leave them in peace. In a hideout, like runaways, totally guilty of doing something normal. Sometimes I think there are some people who have to fight for everything. It's a struggle even to love.
• This one, I have to say I wasn't expecting it at all. Sarah's the one who told me everything. If she weren't four years old, I'd never have believed it. So while I was reading one of Lila's magazines, she plopped in front of me, looked at me in her "I-know-something-you-don't-know" way and said:
• Mme Burlaud's got a point: With time, lots of things change. Sometimes I think she should have gone into Chinese proverbs for a career. She was saying this about Mom, who found a new job thanks to her training. When she told me, she had this happy look on her face and it's been forever since that happened. She's a cafeteria lady for the city. She serves the kids at the Jean-Moulin elementary school. She even has her name written in pink on her shirt: Yasmina.
• The other evening, I saw Hamoudi and he told me about his deal with Lila. At first I wanted to have a serious grown-up conversation with him about the fact that he didn't tell me anything ... But in the end, I didn't dare say a word. He looked so in love. I didn't want to break him out of the spell. He talked about nothing but her for two hours. Lila's replaced Rimbaud. He's shown the poet the door. Go on, out, skip it ... He's even planning to take her on a weekend trip with his drug money.
• Our neighbor Rachida, the biggest gossip in the projects, came to the house the other night. She brought us thirty euros and some groceries for the week. From time to time, people from the area give us donations and it kind of helps us out. But what's good about big Rachida is that as well as giving us charity, she gives us "Celebrity Gossip," the Paradise Estate remix. She's the one who brings us the latest news and when she's got an especially juicy piece of gossip, she's as proud of it as if it were her firstborn son.
• The first day back at school is one of the worst days of the year along with Christmas. I had diarrhea for three days beforehand. The idea of going to a new school you don't know, with lots of people you don't know and, worse, who don't know you either, well, it gives me the shits. Sorry, upset stomach. That sounds less disgusting.
• I got to the Lycée Louis–Blanc, man of the proper-name dictionary, and found myself in the middle of thirty bleach-blond bitches with big perms. It was all liberty, equality, fraternity. It didn't look like the first day of school. It felt more like a casting call. They were all so decked out, sporting "the look," as they say on TV. And there's me with my kohl eyeliner and fake jeans. I didn't exactly feel with it.
• Walking past the bar in the center of town, I noticed a piece of paper stuck up in the window. It said: "lotto winner here: 65,000 euros." They always write "winner here," but they never put who it is. The guys who work at the bar-tabac are good people. They aren't snitches. They'd never name names. Except this time, I know who it is, the lucky bastard to hit the jackpot. It's our very own international Shérif. He's definitely going to have to go on TV and become famous. That way, he'll get around the identity checks. Yeah, if he's a big shot, no one will need to ask for his name or I.D. anymore. Still, he deserved it. He's been gambling for so long. I'm kind of curious to know what he'll do with the money. Change his baseball cap? Jeans? Apartment? Neighborhood? Country? Maybe he'll buy a villa in Tunisia, settle down over there and find himself a wife who's a genius with couscous...
• There you have it. I'm sixteen. Sixteen springs, as they say in the movies. Nobody remembered. Not even Mom. No one wished me a happy birthday this year. Same thing happened last year ... Oh wait. Last year I got a gift certificate from Agnès B. with a special free gift if I sent back the "Agnès B. wishes you a happy birthday" voucher within ten days. But this year I got nothing. Even Agnès B. hates me. She's got a grudge because I didn't send her crappy voucher back last time. Fool. I don't give a shit. Anyway, their gifts are always bigger in the photo than in real life.
• The other day Mom and me, we went to the Taxiphone in the square to call Aunt Zohra. More and more of these Taxiphones are popping up everywhere. With their wooden booths, glass doors, and phone numbers on the handsets, they remind me of Morocco. Basically, the whole Taxiphone idea is made in the bled. The one in the square is like having a little bit of Oujda in Livry-Gargan.
• Mme Burlaud told me my therapy was finished. I asked if she was sure. She laughed. That means I'm doing well. Or else she's had enough of my stories. She must be flipping her lid with all the stuff I tell her.
• Yesterday, I got an unexpected visit. Nabil the loser came over to my place while Mom was out. I opened the door. He was there, leaning against the wall, recently shaved and smelling good. He took off his baseball cap, smiled at me, and said:
• I also ran into Hamoudi, Lila, and Sarah again this weekend. I was going to the shopping center for Mom when they honked their horn at me. It took me a minute to turn around and realize it was meant for me. Normally I never turn around when I hear a horn or someone whistling because it's always for the fat tramp behind me in her short candy pink top and tight jeans. Except, this time, there wasn't any other fool there. So I got in and went to the shopping center with them.
• While Lila was trying on shoes in André, that cheesy shoe store where everything's fake leather, I gave Hamoudi the lowdown on Nabil. He looked really happy for me, like something amazing had happened. I was hoping he'd react that way. I know him super well, and Hamoudi's not the type to jump to conclusions and think if a girl's seeing a boy, it makes her a Well, you know what I want to say...