“When we start, we are not ten around the table. Nobody wants to go there, there are only us, the suicide bombers. » Loubna Méliane, 44, goes back in time from a huge break room at the consulting company Onepoint, where she works as an equality and plurality leader. Twenty years ago, on March 8, 2003, she was one of that handful of girls who gathered 30,000 people in the streets of Paris, after a march of neighborhood women against the ghettos and for equality. across France. “ How long has there been no demonstration on March 8 ? Too long »rejoices the daily Humanity. A success unthinkable a few months earlier.
The debates of feminists then essentially focused on the question of parity in politics, introduced by a law passed in 2000, under the socialist government of Lionel Jospin. Then president of the National Federation of Houses of Friends, an offshoot of the SOS Racisme association, Fadela Amara often repeats that parity, seen from the neighborhoods, “ it’s like the sales at Hermès: inaccessible “. For her, feminism has “ forgot the ghetto girls “. She praises the values of the Republic, of secularism, and thinks, like Malek Boutih, the president of SOS Racisme, that the problem of the suburbs will be solved by girls.
With the latter, she undertakes to bring together a small group of people from the anti-racist association, high school student unions, the Socialist Party, which will “ rekindle the flame of feminism », says Loubna Meliane. The watchword, found by Malek Boutih: “Neither whores nor submissives”. Fadela Amara, born in 1964, is a “ older sister »or even “ mother », according to activists. Today they see themselves as “ orphans », all have cut ties with her. But, among the ten “ suicide bombers » beginnings, many continue to see each other and reflect on this movement which leaves them all with a feeling of unfinished business. Their revolt, they believe, should have resulted in a mass movement.
The weight of “reputation” in neighborhoods
In 2003, they are in their twenties, but have already come up against all the evils that their group intends to denounce. A figure in the 1998 high school movement, Loubna Méliane grew up in the Fontaine d’Ouche district of Dijon. She knows the weight of the “reputation” to hold, the one that muzzles freedom and prevents going out at night. When she was 18, her family arranged her marriage. Her childhood friend Nadia, who wishes to remain anonymous, leaves, at the time, devastated by a union with a violent husband. Safia Lebdi grew up “ in the same slum » of Clermont-Ferrand as Fadela Amara, a transit city for immigrant families.
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