Book Review
'Down with the Poor!' By Shumona Sinha, 2022 by Les Fugitives

Book Review

Down with the Poor! By Shumona Sinha, 2022 by Les Fugitives

Assommons les pauvres!, originally published in French in 2011, has been published in English in Teresa Lavender Fagan’s exceptional translation that preserves the poetry of Shumona Sinha’s language. The author borrowed the title from one of Charles Baudelaire’s short prose poems from Le spleen de Paris, to which the novel has direct links to. This intertextual reference not only pays homage to Baudelaire but also situates Sinha’s contemporary narrative within the context of the French literary tradition. Like Baudelaire’s poem, Sinha’s novel invites readers to reflect on the complexities of power dynamics and the human implications of individual actions in the grey zones that many people inhabit.

Shumona Sinha is a Bengali author who has lived in France since her early twenties. Since then, she has accumulated awards and accolades for her novels in which she explores the themes of identity, racism, and migration in both her adopted and native country.

The story takes place in Paris, albeit a distant Paris, demarcated by the borders not only of a foreign territory but of another reality. The novel quickly introduces us to the world of the narrator, an Indian woman who, years earlier, migrated with her parents to France. Residing in Paris, she, whose name we never get to know, works at Ofpra, the French Office of the Protection of Refugees and Stateless People. She is an interpreter whose job is to be the communication link between people seeking political asylum, their lawyers and the officials who have the power to decide who stays and who does not. The novel, however, revolves around one fact: the narrator is detained because she struck another immigrant on the head. Monsieur K, an official, interrogates her. The echo of Kafka’s The Trial is unmistakable. Spaces that never end, doors that open and close set the tone of the story.

Throughout the narrative, the protagonist grapples with her actions, attempting to rationalize and understand the motives behind her outburst to both herself and Monsieur K. Besides that, she also recapitulates scenes from her labour life: numerous men and women whose stories she had to translate. Her work, as she makes it clear, is translating, and only translating literally, without interpreting, without getting in the way, without clarifying, without explaining, and especially without taking sides. “[I]n the People’s Theatre I didn’t exist. My role was to erase myself. My entire effort consisted in not existing” (115). This marginalisation delineates the space that she is allowed to occupy as a woman, and as an immigrant.

The world which the narrator inhabits exists outside the city of lights, beyond the RER (Regional Express Network) train line, behind other borders. The migrants she encounters through her work left their homelands and underwent crusades to reach France, only to realise that arriving is only the beginning of another journey: a crossing that involves other forms of violence, of erasing oneself, inventing, lying, becoming someone else. That other is the subject who will receive political asylum.

Down with the Poor! highlights how the process of applying for asylum brings the veracity of the truth to a critical point. When crossing borders and arriving in another place, the truth of what earlier happened ceases to exist. “Crossing the border has something irreversible about it that resembles mourning, a secret crime, a loss of self, a loss of reference, a loss of life” (124). Through the immigration cases she recalls the narrator points out that what happened on the before or during the journey has little or nothing to do with what the immigrants need to say to gain asylum. The reasons why they fled must, in cases, be set aside and a story that meets the legal criteria for state protection must be told. “Here, everything was in the language, in the words, between the lines. The name of a river erroneously placed next to the name of a village, a vague adjective describing an incident, planted like a knife in flesh, bits of sentences uttered under one’s breath, a voice extinguished, out of fear, expectations, despair” (80). The narrator outlines the different manifestations of this necessity to reinvent the truth. She explains the challenge of translating the information given by the interlocutors. In some cases, the narrator says, it is enough to paraphrase what they said happened. In others, the inability to understand what facts are necessary within their stories, makes them fall into an abyss of lies and meaningless phrases from which no one can rescue them. As a translator, she is a witness to the full scope of human imagination.

The novel does not portray human beings in terms of a simple good-versus-evil binary. Its coherence and critique lie precisely in showing that such a division does not reflect how the system works. It captures people’s desperation and reveals the thin line between those who receive asylum and those who do not. Down with the Poor! shows that it is not always the good, the innocent, or the most at risk who are granted asylum. Often, it comes down to who can tell their story most effectively.

Sinha writes from an thought-provoking position in contemporary French literature. She is an outsider who has been in France for a long time and knows European literature very well, both as a great reader and as a scholar. Through the novel’s references to Kafka and Baudelaire she initiates a dialogue with canonical European literature. The exploration of alienation, bureaucracy, and existential angst as well as the dark and complex aspects of human experience, explored by Kafka and Baudelaire, serve Sinha to speak from the core of European culture and thus construct a scenario that, although still conceived as on the outskirts of Europe, is very much a part of its reality.

Sinha is magnificent in the way she weaves the story. Her way of constructing the places where migrants and refugees live is reminiscent of the non-places described by Marc Augé, with the gravity that, in these cases, these places of transit are places from which it is difficult for the refugees to escape. The peripheral and temporary places are, in the end, the definitive places for them. In this profoundly human novel, the narrator leaves us with the unpleasantness that obtaining asylum, obtaining a ‘safe’ place, repeatedly implies suppressing oneself, living in non-places, trying to stay as far away as possible, arriving without ever arriving, without ever being able to be anywhere definitively, that is, today, the utopia of migration.