“I had the opportunity to adore my children, I had managed to please them to death, always answering yes,” says Salim, main character of Magyd Cherfi’s latest book, My mother’s life! (Actes Sud, 272 pages, 21.50 euros). The 61-year-old singer-songwriter may have written a novel, but he is a lot like him, this father, also the son of an Algerian Kabyle mother, and older brothers. This fictional father who, like him, has two children to whom he would like to say: “I’m glad that, at your age, you don’t want to leave me like I was dying to leave my parents. » In real life, the two children that the former Zebda leader had with his wife, Zoulie, are 27 and 30 years old. And they still have one foot in the nest.
The first time you felt like a father?
Long before birth. I said to myself, “This is going to have to make sense. » I understood before they were born that I had to be a good father. Although I liked music and rock, I didn’t want to be the artist father, the traveling father, the unusual father… I wanted to be a present father, not a father who talks nonsense.
Have you ever cried in front of your children?
I don’t think so. No doubt due to a part of virility, of representation of the protective father who does not cry because he is strong, I held back tears.
Worst thing you’ve said to your children?
When they suffered their first racist verbal attacks at school, when they were children, they said to me: “Dad, are we French? » By not responding immediately, by telling them that, with their skin color, we ran the risk of returning them to their origins, I raised doubts and it hurt me.
In “My Mother’s Life!” », the children reproach their father for having separated them from their history, from their roots. They tell him: “You were not born in a cabbage!” »…
Yes, this is also what some parents do, thinking that by choosing truly French names for their children they will avoid problems.
When I was 17, my oldest son told me he wanted to celebrate Ramadan. The mother of my children and I are rather atheists, eaters of imams, priests and rabbis. But we try to raise them without showing this hostility towards religion: when we are in a head-on battle, sometimes children adopt contrary positions at all costs. We prefer to tell you that each one is free to believe or not believe, to place ourselves on open ground to offer them a more flexible state of mind. So, when the eldest wanted to do Ramadan, we followed him, accompanied. I did the shopping, mom cooked… We did a ton to keep her from leaning towards the opposite position. For him it was an experience – that of his friends and cousins who practiced – more than a membership. He didn’t ask to do it again the following year.
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