In his early life, before he left the violent projects of Strasbourg, before he was acclaimed as a rapper and a poet, Abd Al Malik was a confusion of identities — “schizophrenic,” he says. A Catholic altar boy turned Muslim proselyte, he was at once thug and scholar, dealing hashish and reading philosophy, picking pockets after Sunday Mass.
As a teenager, he lost friends to heroin, murder and suicide; rattled and angry, he sought explanations in “On the Shortness of Life,” by the Greek thinker Seneca. At 16, Mr. Malik says, he renounced crime, burned everything he had bought with “dirty money” and fell in with a rigid Muslim sect. Later he gravitated to Sufism, the mystical strain of Islam.
He was born Régis Fayette-Mikano, the French son of Congolese immigrants, constantly pulled between worlds. Now, Mr. Malik maintains, he is “one.”
“I made peace with myself,” he said.
His country is another matter, he says, still coming to terms with its ethnic and religious diversity. He is deeply, proudly French, says Mr. Malik, 37, but he has made a remarkably successful career parsing French identity in verse, deploring what he calls an over-proud society and the hypocrisy with which it treats its nonwhite sons and daughters.
Many French rappers sing about racism, identity and the plight of the “banlieues,” France’s impoverished suburbs, but few with Mr. Malik’s poise and poetry.
“There’s really a lag between how France sees itself and what France really is,” he said, speaking with the same precise syllables and crisp consonants that distinguish his music. “So long as we haven’t realized that diversity is part of French identity, at a certain point we’re telling ourselves that a Frenchman, after all, is a white man, Christian, who’s between 25 and 45. And everything that doesn’t fit that description is tossed aside.”
France is “not capable of recognizing, directly, her own children…
Read more: Scott Sayare, NY Times
