La mort du Môme

“Bury me where I’ve lived.” These are the Father’s last wishes. A single sentence in his will. One night to solve the mystery of this stranger. One night to examine the traces left by the landscape and the dilemma of the land—the homeland versus the host country. A night of inheritance that will tear apart the family, society, and the Môme’s very being. Upon his father’s death, in Paris at an emergency shelter, he is told to renounce the inheritance because of the debts. In Annaba, Algeria, where his father rests, he’s told that a dead man takes his debts to the grave. These words haunt him. He has always refused to remember the date. He remembers the night, the orange his father was peeling, the television left on, constantly. A Sunday in May. Perhaps. He has forgotten the exact date.

Sébastien Kheroufi writes because his father died. Because he found him lying on the floor in an emergency shelter. Writing about the dead comes more easily to him than talking about the living. For him, it’s a way to respond to the legacy his father left behind and to tell society what it took from them. A child who remains silent becomes an adult who screams. Today, Sébastien Kheroufi writes for the kids—for those shaped by shame, silence, and rage. This text adds to what are known as “the missing stories” the voice and story of one of these invisible people—this man, an immigrant worker who left Algeria for France, an anonymous