People Like Them is loosely inspired by a mass homicide committed in 2003 in a village in France’s Haute-Savoie region. At the time it made headlines, no news articles or radio or television shows mentioned any racist motives. Or at least I can’t remember any that did. Why such an omission? I still can’t figure it out. The refusal to take into consideration one of the essential keys to understanding that tragedy is incomprehensible. I’m not saying that racism is the only factor that drove the murderer to kill a family of five (it’s infinitely more complex than that) but it quickly became clear in my mind that the father’s skin colour must have played a decisive role.
Oftentimes, in these villages protected from foreign invasion, people end up fighting invisible enemies and defending themselves from abstractions. The casual racism at play here is invisible and insidious. It’s not outright, it doesn’t look you straight in the eyes; this racism only reveals itself obliquely (e.g., stereotypes, inappropriate remarks, clumsy comments).
When you dive into the murky waters of a true story, some self-searching is also involved. Class relations have always fascinated me. I come from a family of very modest means and was forced to deal with social injustice from an early age. Later in adulthood, on the heels of a rich career, I was compelled by financial reasons to clean people’s homes. I was 44 years old and I hadn’t planned on going backward. I was never ashamed of having grown up in the milieu I come from, but like everyone, I wanted to move onward and upward.
I cleaned houses for three years. What sticks in my mind about that strange and painful experience is a certain look. A look that doesn’t register your presence. As if person doesn’t see you or your outlines are blurry. A look that makes you invisible and that, from the start defines you as worthless. That look was different in every way from how I had always been regarded in my career as an actress. You abruptly go from everything to nothing, from visible to invisible, for the simple reason that you no longer hold the same job.
That experience – a drop in social standing, humiliation, distrust (often involuntary) from employers – helped shape the characters of Anna and Constant. Everything has been set up to grind them down.
I don’t judge my characters, nor do I intend to condemn them. Criminals (even murders) serve as mirror images; that reflect our own fallibility. Viewing them as monstrous aberrations prevents us from understanding human nature. There’s no such thing as monsters. Only humans.
A bientôt!
Samira Sedira
Leave a Reply