The Spanish Boy: A Life of Albert Camus

There was a little fatherless Spanish boy

in Algeria under the French rule

whose French father had died for France

and in French soil decomposed,

son raised by illiterate Spaniards

in colonial poverty.

There was nothing more he wanted

than stop being an outsider, to be

a Frenchman among the French in France.

To become was to deny, to exclude,

to embrace the Blackfoots as his people,

to make Algeria into France, into Europe.

Those who did not fit, those could not

fit in an European France in Algeria

he muted, marginalized,

to push himself among the French

to become French in France

the price was to silence, to deny -

with word to conquer the land again,

with sentences to make it anew,

with paragraphs to make the native

the alien in their land, in his land;

the land he pushed away without noticing

in his new identity he embraced

to the end; like his father in his coloured

colonial uniform before him,

he in the uniform of a thinker for France

he too, died in Europe,

away from the land that bursted off the mould

and pushed away the Blackfoots

who knew no compromise,

for they, like the Italian boy,

could only accept being Frenchmen in France.

And there he decomposed,

there his grave lies,

a Frenchman in France in his French grave.

09.05.2015