THE FIRST TO FALL

Salomé Berlemont-Gilles

(Grasset, 288 pages, 2020)

***AWARDED THE PRIX RÉGINE DEFORGES 2020***

Born just before Guinea’s independence from France, Hamadi is the eldest son of an upper-class Peul family. As a boy, he lived in a beautiful villa along the Conakry coast together with his father, a highly respected man known as The Surgeon; his loving mother, Marie, a woman of great beauty; three siblings; and a retinue of maids. The rise of president Ahmed Sékou Touré and his anti-Peul discourse forced the family into exile in France. Forty years later, Hamadi is a broken man, a drunk screaming from a stretcher in a Parisian hospital. What happened to him, the favorite son destined to be the head the family? Unable to deflect Hamadi from his self-destructive path, his siblings, as a last resort, decide to have him hospitalized.

The tragedy begins soon after the family’s arrival in France, where their father’s “French dream” is quickly buried under the harsh realities of exile. Their money dwindling, the family settles down in a grim apartment in the unsightly northern banlieue of Paris. Their father’s surgery diploma is useless, and he ends up as a nurse’s aide in an old folks’ home, while the even-tempered and amiable Marie takes on a job as a cashier in a supermarket. In spite of their loss of social position, they continue to love each other and raise their children as best as they can.

Hamadi, the cherished and pampered eldest son, who tasted his family’s past privilege more than his younger siblings, is ill prepared for this difficult new life. Once a hero for saving his little sister Aïssa from drowning in their mansion’s swimming pool, he becomes a bullied teenager who soon drops out of public school. Feeling lost, he begins to hang out in dingy staircases with The Fraternity, a multi-ethnic bunch of newly found friends who quickly initiate him into petty crime. They introduce Hamadi to Serge, a pimp, who tasks him with watching over his girls at night in the Bois de Boulogne, a lucrative but risky job that further alienates Hamadi from his family. He falls madly in love with one of the prostitutes, Khadija, but, while dreaming of a new life elsewhere, ends up endangering the life of one of his brothers. Alcohol is all that is left to soothe his pain and guilt.

In this powerful first novel, Salomé Berlemont-Gilles depicts the humanity of contemporary urban France with fierce intelligence, tackling urgent social themes head-on while eschewing clichés. The strength of her narrative and the originality of her language bring us into raw proximity with the sounds and smells of the multicultural world that surrounds the City of Light. She attends to the story of Hamadi—his fears, weaknesses, delusions, and hopes—with a maturity of insight rare in so young a writer. Without sentimentality, she also illuminates the resilience of African family values that resist the dislocation brought on by exile and poverty, and the solidarity woven into the rough fabric of disenfranchised neighborhoods.

A graduate of Sciences-Po in Paris, Salomé Berlemont-Gilles is twenty-six years old. At the age of twenty, she won a short story competition and published a short text, Argentique (Lattès, 2013). The First to Fall is her debut novel, the winner of the Régine-Deforges 2020.