For some us time stands still. They live their distress today as they did 10 years ago without the least change except a worse one. They are French people or foreigners, undocumented or with papers, and live in the streets or under a precarious shelter. Social progress passed without noticing these women, men and children who survive in an attempt to keep their dignitiy. Diane Grimonet spent 10 years being their witness in the streets, the squats, detention centers, filthy hotels billed as four stars ones. She followed them and testified of their struggles to obtain an equality that is written at the pediment of our town halls. I met Diane Grimonet in Cachan, in the school gymnasium where crammed undocumented families were living crowded thus in the utmost dignity. I was immediately stunned, so was Diane, by the cleanliness of that huge dormitory where it was difficult to take a step between two mattresses. These women and men who worked for years illegally -which was convenient for a lot of people- struggled to obtain a right to stay on that land of France that used to be, once, a country of asylum. That France in which they could talk the language because most of them had learnt it at school in their own countries. These men and women, she followed them in the holding centers, a discreet way to call jails where “delinquents” are incarcerated because their crime consists in being undocumented people. Now, children and even babies are imprisoned there. Here is the answer of someone in charge of immigration to a journalist asking about the legacy of keeping children in these centers : “They had just not to come here!”.Diane Grimonet was there, in these shabby hotels where entire families try to survive, jammed, victims of an organization that gives money to slum landlords. But, for them, time stopped too. A hotel burns, children with their parents die in the fire. Some head titles, some righteous indignation and nothing changes.
She was also with those who have nothing more : nor family, nor shelter, nor job.The ones, men and women, who stay in the margin, branded by the street, ghosts you may see under blankets, along the walkways. They have just not to be there…
That is why we have to be there, for them, in order to make themselves heard, to make their faces known, to testify they are not treated fairly and make sure it comes to an end.
Translated from Josiane Balasko
She was also with those who have nothing more : nor family, nor shelter, nor job.The ones, men and women, who stay in the margin, branded by the street, ghosts you may see under blankets, along the walkways. They have just not to be there…
That is why we have to be there, for them, in order to make themselves heard, to make their faces known, to testify they are not treated fairly and make sure it comes to an end.
Translated from Josiane Balasko