Fatima Oussak, the French mother speaking out against the colonial ‘extreme centre’

Paris. Faced with images of the looting and devastation that took place on 17 October in Paris, on the fringes of the protests against the high cost of living, Fatima Ouassak called on those who wish to overthrow “the capitalist and colonial order” in France to avoid the trap set by the “extreme centre” – namely, the division between “polite, harmless protesters” and the “casseurs” – because “we are all part of the same camp”. Environmentalist, feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist: this is how Fatima Ouassak describes herself, the new leading intellectual of the French far left, the ‘Pasionaria’ of the multi-ethnic banlieues against the ‘dominant’, ‘white’ and ‘racist’ system that she claims governs France. “When the dominant system looks at our children, it does not see children, but threats to its own survival: millions of poor people, Muslims, Black people and Arabs swarming in the schools and colleges of working-class neighbourhoods,” she wrote in 2020 in her essay La Puissance des mères. Her motto is “one foot in the neighbourhood, one foot in the establishment”, and if arson and destruction are needed to gain entry, it is because there is no other solution; therefore, these actions are “legitimate”: the same rhetoric used by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France insoumise (LFI), the radical left-wing party with which she shares most of her causes.

On 4 October, as a guest on Radio Nova – the station run by Matthieu Pigasse, who dreams of becoming Mélenchon’s future Minister for the Economy – Ouassak reiterated her beliefs. “It seems you have a very relaxed relationship with fire,” asked Radio Nova journalist Guillaume Meurice. “Very serene,” confirmed Ouassak. Her rebellious streak, she tells everyone, stems from her origins. Ouassak was born in 1976 in the Rif, a region with a long history of resistance and uprisings against the former colonial powers, before emigrating to Lille when she was just one year old, thanks to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s family reunification law (her father worked in France as a labourer). In Lille, she attended Sciences Po, France’s premier institution of higher education, but these were “the worst years” of her life, she recounted, because “few students wanted to work with the Arab girl in the class”. She began to move in decolonial left-wing circles, reading and rereading Frantz Fanon, the theorist of Third Worldism, and became close to the pro-Palestinian sociologist Saïd Bouamama, one of the co-authors of the ‘Appeal of the Indigenous People of the Republic’, which states: ‘France remains a colonial state!’. From 2005 to 2011, she was an activist in the Party of the Indigenous People of the Republic, founded by the anti-Semite Houria Bouteldja, who had her photograph taken next to a chair bearing the inscription “Zionists in the gulags!”, after stating that “Jews are the shields, the sharpshooters of French imperialist policy and its Islamophobic policy”.

In 2016, Ouassak founded the Mothers’ Front, the first parents’ union in France’s suburbs, whose manifesto states that the French school system prepares black, Arab and Muslim children “to resign themselves to taking on the most precarious roles”. LFI, with which her partner Youcef Brakni – spokesperson for the Adama Committee – is allied, offers hope ahead of the 2027 presidential elections. And Mélenchon, should he win, must immediately repeal the 2004 law banning the veil in state schools, as well as grant citizenship to all undocumented migrants, according to Ouassak. Together with the radical feminist Alice Coffin, she has just published Le Camp du bien, a handbook on the fight against the “far right” and the “far centre”. In 2027, the two authors promise, “we will not merely put up resistance; we will sweep everything aside”. Thanks to Mélenchon.