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Calais. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

‘That thing gnawing away at all of us’: Calais and the shantytown on its doorstep

This article is more than 7 years old
Calais. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Once a centre of industry as well as a prosperous port, the city is now synonymous with the misery of migrants, and its residents are not enjoying their notoriety

The Hotel Meurice in Calais is rather decrepit these days but, with its reasonable rates, it has long appealed to English tourists. The problem is that English tourists – as anyone trying to make a living in Calais will tell you – have fled, fearful of migrants and the general chaos that has taken hold of the city. Monsieur Cossard, owner of the Hotel Meurice, would very much like to sell his business, but alas, nothing’s selling in Calais. He would also like to take bookings from the ranks of the riot police, 1,800 of whose officers are deployed around the tunnel and the port; welcome custom for the managers of chain hotels such as Ibis, Novotel, and Formule 1. But the people who make decisions about this kind of thing at the Ministry of the Interior must have viewed the genteel decrepitude of the Meurice – its faded toiles, rickety day beds, and dusty frills and flounces – ill-suited to the rugged image of the forces of law and order.

A few months ago, however, a new clientele started turning up: journalists, filmmakers and artists from all over Europe, who came to bear witness to the migrants’ misfortune. At times, you might think you were at the legendary Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, where all the war correspondents stayed at the height of the siege. After breakfast, they pull warm puffer jackets over multi-pocketed vests, grab their cameras, and get into the cars they’ve rented from Avis on Place d’Armes to head into the “Jungle”. It’s just like going to the front. Since January, the Jungle has been partially evacuated, but there are still pockets of migrants encamped about the place – enough for the press to find a story.


I did not head into the Jungle straight away. I stayed in town. And one morning, just before I stepped out, the front desk handed me a letter. It began:

No, not you, too! This afternoon, it was [the director] Laurent Cantet, last week, Michael Haneke; we also spotted [the singer] Charlie Winston – oh, Mr Carrère, not you, too! We’re fed up with the glitterati – pardon the term – coming to feed off Calais’ misfortunes and treating the people stuck within its walls like lab rats.
Mr Carrère, did you know that in the three years I’ve spent in this hole I’ve had at least one inquiry a week from people like you, people from outside who want to come and write, film, blab into a microphone about what they’ve seen, maybe thinking they can describe it better than everyone else, satisfying the need to add their personal commentary? I wonder: which traps will you fall into? What story are you looking for? One thing I know for sure: your venture will be a failure.

It went on like that for eight pages, more rueful than mean, very well written, and signed with what was almost certainly a pseudonym: Marguerite Bonnefille.

After reading it, deep in thought, I set out for the Minck cafe on foot, and headed up Rue Royale, the main thoroughfare of Calais-Nord, a part of the city which is almost its own island. Rue Royale is called “thirsty street” because of its many bars. Saturday nights see some serious punch-ups. In the mornings, the bars are shut and some of the shops, too – but unlike the bars, the shops have no hope of opening again, first because there’s hardly anyone left in Calais to buy anything, and second because shopping, and films – and any other kind of leisure outing – all happen at Cité Europe, the massive mall by the entrance to the Channel tunnel, in the neighbouring village of Coquelles.

Cité Europe, the Channel tunnel: everything conspires to make Calais itself redundant. There’s still the port, of course; one comes upon it after crossing the Place d’Armes. The seafront, rebuilt after the second world war, like the rest of the town, by an architect who, having made his name in Toulon and Casablanca, gave Calais a Mediterranean touch rather ill-matched to the climate, is a vast windy esplanade adorned with two statues representing General de Gaulle and his wife Yvonne – who was, I learned, a Calaisian. A few days after I left, these statues were tagged “Fuk France”, graffiti attributed to the mysterious No Border activists who have no nationality, hierarchy, or organisation, but a notable presence in the Jungle. They are idealistic and single-minded in their own way, but are generally seen around here as evil trolls, always on the lookout for a chance to stir shit up.

Calais. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Calais is the largest port for passenger transport in France, and the second-largest in Europe, after Dover. Along with its lacemaking factories, passenger transport has long been the city’s biggest employer. The port still has some life in it: an ambitious project christened Calais 2015 (still not very far along, it has to be said, in early 2016) plans to double its size. But competition from the Channel tunnel, and daily incidents with migrants, have caused serious delays.

These are the topics of conversation that come up repeatedly among regulars at the Minck cafe. My local guides were Bruno Mallet, a reporter for La Voix du Nord, and his wife Marie-France Humbert, herself on the payroll of the Nord-littoral – which amounts to working for the Capulets and the Montagues, so fiercely are these two daily newspapers locked in combat, even though they’re owned by the same company. But everyone makes up over a glass of muscadet at the Minck, one of the most convivial cafes in Calais and, I think, the world. The clientele is older, for the most part: retirees from the navy, the fishing industry, the Chamber of Commerce, dockworkers’ unions.

But the most remarkable thing about the bar isn’t the extraordinary concentration of rugged workers’ faces – hoary, ruddy-cheeked, honest – or the fact that some of these faces, I don’t know how many exactly, are Front National voters. It’s the tradition owners Laurent and Mimi founded 15 years ago, that everyone who comes through the door of the Minck – accompanied by a great gust of wind off the sea – has to make the rounds of bar and tables, shaking hands with every single customer present, stranger or no, before ordering. Though rather reserved by nature, I myself fell into the habit of shaking a good 20 or 30 mitts, and delighted in it until one woman made me aware that in so doing I was acting like a tourist in Paris who takes the bateau-mouche everywhere and spends his nights at the Moulin Rouge.


I took my morning coffee at the Minck and at the end of every day, I enjoyed a few beers at the Betterave, which for Calais-Nord is a hip bar. I can attest to the truth in the cliché that people in the north of France are as warm and welcoming as their climate is gloomy. Like Russians, they’re sentimental drunks, given to extremes. After getting that letter, however, I started looking at every face, wondering if it belonged to my mysterious correspondent, lying in wait, listening with bitter irony as I rattled off my canned spiel about why I’d come. The letter went on: “The angle you’ve chosen is original, I’ll give you that. Talking about Calais without its migrants, talking about the rest of it – if I’ve got you right – now that’s a bit of a change. A different drum: congrats!”

Well Marguerite Bonnefille, you’re being unfair. I never told anyone I wanted to talk about Calais without its migrants – how could you talk about 1942 Warsaw without its ghetto? – just that I wanted to turn my gaze toward the city and its residents. Everyone I spoke to heartily approved of this plan. “It’s true,” I was told time and again, “we can’t stand the way whenever anyone talks about us, it’s all they talk about. And we can’t stand that whenever we talk, it’s all we talk about too.” Whereupon we’d start talking about it.

For some the issue is clear-cut, but for others, the worst part is not being able to get away from it, being forced at every turn to define themselves as “pro” or “anti-migrant”. It’s the Dreyfus affair all over again. In 1898 there was a Caran d’Ache cartoon of a family at dinner: in the first panel, the patriarch says, “Please, let’s not talk about it”; in the second, the table has been laid waste, the guests are at each other’s throats, and the caption reads, “They talked about it.”

The Hotel Meurice. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Pro and anti-migrant are peculiar expressions. Pro-migrant doesn’t really exist, in the sense that no one is in favour of having 7,000 wretched homeless people huddling in tents in the mud and cold at the gates of a city of 70,000. As for anti-migrant, in the extreme sense of people who scream, “Drown them!” or “Send them back!” – which often amounts to the same thing – well, they do exist. I’ve come across a few, but not that often.

In Calais, many people will say that the influx of migrants was fine in the 1990s, when it was just the “Kosovars” coming over after the wars in the Balkans, and now “Kosovars” is what people, especially the elderly, call all illegal foreigners. There were only a few hundred of them back then, so they could be accommodated. But now, what with all the “Siberians”, it’s just too much. It took me a while to figure out that “Siberians” was what locals called Syrians, along with the Kurds, Afghans, Eritreans, Sudanese, and everyone else now showing up by the thousands from the Middle East or East Africa, places shown daily on TV ripped apart by war.The general feeling is, “Really, we get why these poor people are fleeing, but maybe they could go somewhere else? Yes of course, someone’s got to take them in, but why us? Why Calais, which is having such a tough time already?”

No one is happy about the migrants’ presence, and the migrants themselves don’t want to be here. The anti-migrants are the only ones laying into them directly – and, let’s face it, that’s just racism – whereas the pro-migrants blame the government, the whole of Europe, and especially Britain, where all the migrants want to go, but which wants nothing to do with them. Britain pulled a fast one by planting its border on French soil and putting France in charge of guarding it. This switcheroo has a name – the Treaty of Le Touquet – familiar even to people who call Syrians “Siberians”.


The tangible results of the Treaty of Le Touquet can be seen when you exit Autoroute 16 and take the road that leads towards the ferry terminals east of town. You are suddenly in a war movie, or a post-apocalyptic video game. Dozens of riot police vans are parked on the hard shoulder overlooking the largest shantytown in Europe. At night, young men in black parkas and knitted caps mount an assault on the road, using whatever they can to create a diversion – tree branches, shopping trolleys – to distract the riot police and slow traffic in the hope of climbing onto a truck. There are frequent accidents, many of them fatal, and even for those who manage to make it onto a vehicle, the chances of them getting through the port are negligible, security has become so sophisticated, with infrared sweeps, thermal imaging, heartbeat detectors. It’s a nightmare for everyone concerned: migrants, riot police, lorry drivers, car drivers – scared either of being attacked by a migrant or running one over – another basic version of the conflict between anti and pro.

Driving on, you pass between two 12ft walls of white wire fencing topped with concertina wire. This fencing cost the British government €15m – their contribution, while France supplies the human resources – and stretches west of town, near the Channel tunnel, the alternative route to England. In that direction, the entire landscape, once wooded, rolling and green, has been transformed into a vast moat. Last autumn, Eurotunnel razed 250 acres of trees, to remove any cover for the migrants and facilitate video surveillance: now there’s nowhere even a rabbit could hide. A few months later, for good measure, the company had the area flooded. As Bruno Mallet says: if they could bring in crocodiles, they would.

Above, helicopters crisscross the skies. There are flashing lights, wailing sirens, men running, chased by security guards. I’m not blaming Eurotunnel, the company is just protecting its traffic; I wouldn’t know where to start dishing out blame in this situation: the French government, which is failing to do what needs to be done; Britain, which takes what it wants from Europe and leaves us to sort out the mess; or President George W Bush, who by invading Iraq set the Middle East ablaze. I haven’t forgotten that my subject is the people of Calais, not the migrants – Marguerite Bonnefille would surely remind me of my duty here – but I had to set the scene to show why in Calais, it’s hard to think of anything else.

Cafe du Minck. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

There’s a wonderful bookshop in Calais, belonging to the publisher Actes-Sud and run by Marie-Claire Pleros. At the beginning of my stay Marie-Claire helped me a lot, introducing me to people, some of whom invited me into their homes in the neighbourhood of Saint-Pierre – the former village of Saint-Pierre-lès-Calais, which was established in the 19th century. As the lace industry grew, the factories and workers’ housing were built there because the local bourgeoisie didn’t want to be disturbed by the constant noise from the looms, which operated 24 hours a day. People of my hosts’ age (late 50s, like me), can still recall in their very bones that wearying sound, for which they are oddly nostalgic.

The looms have fallen silent. Lacemaking, which before the second world war employed 20,000 people, and as many as 5,000 just 20 years ago, now employs no more than 400. Of the hundred-odd factories, only four remain. The rest are massive brick carcasses, gutted and blackened, courtyards overrun with rust and weeds, ideal for squatting: migrants lived in them until the town council drove them out last year, packing them into the Jungle, where it was believed they would be less of a trouble to the locals. To dissuade them from returning, the factory doors and windows were bricked up.

In the streets of this once lively industrial neighbourhood, two out of three houses are for sale. The rest have been carved up into tiny apartments and rented out, via social services, to people on benefits, while the owners have moved to more peaceful villages nearby. No light escapes from behind closed shutters and metal blinds. One walks down deserted, sooty streets, in what feels like the grey area between an enforced curfew and a state of siege.

When the door of a friendly home opens, its warmth and comfort is all the more welcome. These houses, where I’d certainly hang my hat if I lived in Calais, are like cabins on the Titanic: full of books and records, with gleaming kitchens and, in the bathrooms, framed quotations by thinkers such as Edgar Morin and Pierre Rabhi.

Rabhi’s hummingbird theory was explained to me over a platter of sumptuously stinky cheeses. It goes like this: there’s a forest fire, all the animals are fleeing, but the hummingbird alone flies to the river, fills its tiny beak, and hurries back to pour out its contents on the blaze. It goes on toing and froing all day long, and when a hippopotamus remarks that a few drops on such a raging inferno are not going to make a difference, the hummingbird replies, Maybe, but I’m doing my bit. For my Calais friends, the hummingbird’s bit consisted of bringing food, blankets, clothes, and conversation to the migrants when they were still squatting in the town centre, and now that they’ve been moved out, doing more or less the same thing, just less often. They feel bad, they fret about how brave they’d have been during the Occupation, they’d like to do more, just like me – I have all the Kurds and Afghans I could wish for on my doorstep in Paris, if I wanted to be a better hummingbird.


Do you know, Mr Carrère, the hardest part of living here? Inertia. You soon fall off your high horse. You come crashing to the ground when you realise this city just isn’t working. That everyone’s stuck: the bourgeois in their bubble, the morons in their towers, the politicians striking their poses, the razorwire professionals along the port road and the Channel tunnel. I think the place is making me depressed, Mr Carrère. At night, we hurry home in 60mph winds to get warm while … Oh, right, we agreed not to talk about it.

Marguerite, I did what I could. I met people, lots of people, not just the bourgeois in their bubble, as you put it – even if I found it reassuring that they still exist in Calais. If I may quote from your letter:

When my friend and I realised what your angle was, we had to laugh. We figured you’d have plenty of time to talk about the unemployed, alcoholics and inbred families who populate the city. About firemen who vote for the Front National, and couples who end up in court because they’re initiating their teenage children to incest, when they’re not busy fellating their German shepherd dogs. About fights that break out at the beginning of the month because the benefit payments arrive and people are lining up at cash machines, jumping in a cab to go shopping at the superstore, getting pissed and getting into fights in Calais-Nord’s bars.

Now there, Marguerite, you’re talking about troubled neighbourhoods, scary places, where the violence is much more frightening to people like my friend Marie-Claire than petty crimes committed by migrants. These are what we call “priority” areas, except that now, as Kader Haddouche said with a weary smile, the whole city’s a priority area.

Kader is 39, the grandson of an Algerian soldier who fought for the French during the war of independence. His parents were illiterate – his father is now on an invalid’s pension as a result of asbestos exposure, his mother is a janitor. His background is unusual in a city where in the past there was hardly any immigration. There was no need for more labourers: Calais had enough people for lacemaking right here at home. Ironically, this turned out to be lucky for Kader: since the lacemaking industry hired only what he calls “true-bred Calaisians”, as an Arab he was forced to pursue an education while his childhood friends, counting on jobs in local factories, did not.

The Saint-Pierre area of Calais. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Kader went on to teach biology at a vocational high school while his pals became extras in the tableau you very kindly sketched for me, dear Marguerite: unemployment, alcoholism, racism, and despair. Two wards where more than 50% of voters backed the Front National at the last regional elections are in Beau Marais, where migrants are spat on – though few are ever seen there because they have no reason to visit.

In 2014, Kader stood as a candidate for the opposition, which was led by the socialist representative of Pas-de-Calais. They got 20%, a decent showing. Kader took me for a walk through Beau Marais, where he grew up, where he still lives and feels at home. Under a fine, chilly rain, we wandered past flaking high-rises and grim flyovers, spoke to a few teenage dropouts freezing their arses off smoking pot in a derelict building (“What are we supposed to do? There’s nothing to do”), and visited the social centre, where the director told us, “Here, we’re working on living together and feeling good about ourselves and others.” As soon as she said these words a small apologetic smile crossed her lips; she knew it was pure spin.

And yet, Kader told me, this social centre was where he’d read his first Tintin comics as a boy, this is where his mother comes for her aerobics class every week – it’s not nothing, and what’s more, it’s all there is. The last stores in this part of town have closed. The only thing to move in has been the unemployment agency, where the jobless sign on once a week: that way, no one needs to move, not even to go into town, and as a result, no one does, except when they’re looking for a fight on Saturday night. It’s a nice detail but not much to go on, and I’ve got to say, Marguerite, I never saw anyone fellating a German shepherd.


I procrastinated, circled the Jungle, postponed the moment of going in. In your letter, you speak of it as “that thing constantly gnawing away at all of us here”. I can feel it gnawing away at you, obsessing you, dividing you, and this division is not only between generosity and selfishness, openness and closed-mindedness, the educated classes and the lumpenproletariat who have found someone worse off than they are to hate. It’s also between people who’ve gone into the Jungle, possibly more than once, and those who’ve never set foot there.

I’m not casting aspersions on the latter. If I lived in Calais, I might be one of them, and I have more respect for Marie-Claire from the bookshop, who until now has stayed away for fear of being overwhelmed by emotion and the sense of her own powerlessness, than I do for the many tourists hardened to people’s suffering.

We finally went in together, Marie-Claire and I, with a young woman named Clémentine who knew the encampment well and often escorted visitors. I won’t recount that visit here. I’ve tried; I get tangled up. It takes too long. It can’t be condensed into a few paragraphs. I’d just like to say this much about the Calais residents who, like the valiant Clémentine, head into the encampment in gumboots and a backpack to help, heal, and inform. They say what all volunteers of all nationalities say, words that initially struck me as do-gooding romanticism, but which I actually believe to be true: the Jungle is a nightmare of poverty and disease, terrible things happen there, like rape and revenge, its inhabitants aren’t all peace-loving professionals, diligent students, and virtuous victims of political persecution – far from it. But something extraordinarily inspiring can also be witnessed there: the energy, the appetite for life that has driven these men and women on a long, perilous and heroic journey, on which Calais, despite its appearance as a dead end, is only a staging post.

The Banksy mural on a concrete wall at the entrance to the Jungle expresses as much. The town hall considered cleaning it off before realising it was a work by the most famous and highly valued street artist in the world, and it is now part of the city’s heritage, on a par with Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. The mural depicts Steve Jobs carrying a hobo sack and a vintage computer, reminding us that the founder of Apple was a child whose father came to America from Homs, in Syria. Admittedly, Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco and adopted, but that doesn’t matter: some migrants will die trying to get to Britain, and others will linger on the margins of Europe, enduring humiliation and poverty. But perhaps one Syrian or Afghan who braves a thousand dangers, makes it to Calais, and goes through hell in the Jungle, will eventually think of this as part of his life, a brief period of hardship in the journey towards fulfilling his dreams. A white boy who has always lived off welfare in Beau Marais – his situation is less precarious but, in a way, more deeply mired, more irredeemable, and (whether it’s conscious or not) I wonder if that hasn’t got something to do with his resentment.

The Banksy mural on a concrete wall at the entrance to the ‘Jungle’. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

It’s hard to tell how unsafe Calais really is. It depends on who you ask, but even people like my friends who are, for ideological reasons, apt to downplay the dangers, acknowledge that a climate of menace hangs over the town. The pro-migrants fear it, the anti-migrants hope for it, but everyone awaits the catastrophe that will become the tipping point: a Calaisian murders a migrant (that must have happened already, someone points out), or a migrant kills a Calaisian (that hasn’t, not yet: we would know).

A group calling themselves the “Angry Calaisians” are convinced that the local press runs indignant headlines whenever a migrant stubs his little toe, and following orders from on high, takes care to hide the atrocities where the victims are French. They believe the government is pro-migrant and anti-native, that the Nord-littoral paper has been infiltrated by No Border activists (not the impression I get from reading it every morning), and that their mission is to fight against disinformation by doing the work journalists won’t: testifying to what’s really going on in Calais, which if anyone knew about it, would start a civil war. Their website is typical of what we call the far-right fachosphère, and even if I’d wanted to portray Angry Calaisians who weren’t massive yobs, I have to admit the ones I did meet were a lot like that.

Did Angry Calaisians go around beating people up before resorting to guerrilla journalism, using their phones to film scenes of people throwing stones at riot police or trucks on the ring road? Were their night-time patrols (before they were dispersed by the police) good old-fashioned lynch mobs – as a video posted by their sworn enemies, No Border, attests? Or were the Angry Calaisians outflanked, as they claim, by disorderly elements, who – unlike them – were racist and violent?

I returned to the fringes of the Jungle, in the company of two Angry Calaisians: a strapping young man who works as a security guard, and a greying, nervous little lady. Both declined to give their names. They had good reason to be wary of journalists, and I fear, if they read this, it will hardly improve matters. The aim of our excursion was to “support a fellow resident”.

The Angry Calaisians seemed neither very forthcoming nor very charming, but I must also admit that, honestly, the fellow resident in question had good reason to complain: living on the Route de Gravelines must be absolute hell. A hell where everything converges: endless migrant traffic down the muddy, potholed road, hordes of haggard, hot-blooded young men no doubt in an advanced state of sexual deprivation, and on the other hand, the reassuring but quite oppressive presence of riot police vans, parking right in front of her house then roaring off.

Calais sea front. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

And then there was the fact that this house, with a mortgage she’d sweated blood to pay off, was now worth nothing. Support was definitely due, and I couldn’t bring myself to lecture the resident on France, land of asylum, or quote Matthew 25:35: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.” Still, I asked if all her neighbours shared her views. The nervous, greying Angry Calaisian answered for her, pointing at a neighbouring house and whispering, as if we might be overheard: “That one over there. She’s against us.”


So, naturally, I went over and rang the bell. There was no answer at first, but I persisted. I suspected the woman I had just spoken to was watching me from her window. At last the door opened. There stood a young woman with a baby in her arms. Arab, thirtysomething, attractive. I gave her my spiel, explained that I’d come with a pair of Angry Calaisians, but that she had been pointed out to me as being on the other side. She confirmed this with a smile, and asked me in.

She told me her full name, and gave me permission to print it: Ghizlane Mahtab. She welcomed me without suspicion, and told her story with evident delight. She and her husband had been living in Calais for a year. He was a delivery driver, and she a qualified lab technician. While waiting to find something better, she worked at McDonald’s (the nervous, greying Angry Calaisian’s daughter worked at Quick, a Belgian fast food chain popular in France). They had four children, aged between two and eight. Their house was called “the Wi-Fi house” because, before fences were put up around the estate, there were always around 30 migrants in their front yard. The neighbours thought she had given them the password, but it was just that they could pick up the signal from out front, and their being there didn’t bother her.

She did not say there were no concerns at all, certainly her neighbour had some, maybe a bit out of proportion but still – all Ghizlane could say was that she never did. No one had ever tried to peep in their windows, stolen a pair of socks from the washing line or so much as a baguette sticking out of the open car boot while she unloaded groceries. She just liked people, smiled at them, was interested in their stories. Children from the Jungle came to play with her own, her youngest called them “the neighbours”, and her oldest “the poor things”. Though he was more reserved than Ghizlane, her husband thought much the same way, and gave shoes – his wedding shoes, actually – to a guy who was walking around barefoot. And it didn’t bother him that Ghizlane went to have tea in the Jungle with the children.

Of course, the neighbours didn’t like this, they called the police to chase off the migrants hanging around in front of her house. There were also members of her family who no longer kissed her hello because they were convinced she was contagious: mange, or worse. People thought she had a lover in the Jungle, but she didn’t care. She knew there were thefts, rapes, terrible things going on, she blamed 200 arseholes for ruining the reputation of 6,000 good people – but weren’t things just the same in Calais, weren’t there arseholes the world over? And the Angry Calasians who pulled on ski masks and threw rocks at the migrants – they must have had nothing better to do. The two ladies who were always over there, whose house I’d come from: didn’t they have any children, any housework to do?

I listened to Ghizlane as she gave her little daughter some McNuggets, and her words reassured me. I told her so, and she gave me the nice smile of a girl who finds this utterly natural: we’re all human beings, right? Two months ago, people from Paris-Match interviewed her, took her photo, she didn’t know if it ever came out, she’d have to check. At any rate, she excels in the role of a positive-thinking heroine, all openness and spontaneity: just as nice as the lady who has been filmed so many times at her house plugging in dozens of adaptors so migrants can charge their mobile phones.

A road leading off Route de Gravelines in Calais, that borders the ‘Jungle’ migrant camp. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

I took my leave and went back to Ghizlane’s neighbour, who I had spoken to earlier and was still being reassured by the greying, nervous Angry Calaisian. I told them what they already knew: that I’d come from the neighbour who was “against them” and she said she has no worries. Then the Angry Calaisian looked me up and down, and scored a point: “Well, if she’s so laid back, why does she live with her shutters down all the time?” It’s true; I’d noticed this without really taking it in: noon on a fair day, clear skies and sunshine, and yet the metal shutters were closed. Our conversation had taken place in the light from a ceiling lamp, and the fact is Ghizlane’s house was shut up tighter than the house where the last humans on Earth hole up in a zombie movie. Embarrassed, I said, “That’s true.” Triumphant, the Angry Calaisian repeated at least three times, “Then why does she live with her shutters closed all the time? Why? Eh? Why does she live in the dark?”


You were right, Marguerite, a fortnight is so short, I’ve seen nothing of Calais – or very little. And, of what I’ve seen, there are so many things that I haven’t managed to get into this account ... I must thank you, Marguerite Bonnefille: for giving me this challenge, for setting me on the right track.

It bothered me, that thing about Ghizlane Mahtab’s shutters. I called her up to see what it was about. She took it well, as if I were questioning not her trust in humanity, but her housekeeping: “Really? The shutters were closed? It must’ve been because I hadn’t done the cleaning yet. But if you pop over right now, you’ll see; they’re all open.” I thought that, with this detail as a starting point, you could tell two completely different stories. On the one hand, there’s the version that leaves a little glimmer of hope, that by being open and smiling you receive openness and smiles in return. On the other, there’s the version that says, not only is the Jungle a hell on Earth, but that glimmer of hope is a lie, and that young woman tells reporters her fairy tale because it’s nicer, because it offers such a gratifying version of herself, while in reality she lives behind closed blinds. I wondered, were I writing fiction, which version I would choose.

But I’m not writing fiction, so on my last day in Calais, I went back to the Route de Gravelines. I know this has no statistical value, that what’s true at a particular moment may not be the case at another, but still, Marguerite, it gave me pleasure to see that on Friday 22 January 2016 at 11am, Ghizlane Mahtab’s shutters were open.

Translation by Edward Gauvin

Main photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

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