Battle story

The battlefield is the hearts of the people

By Pierre Chopinaud

(Previously…)

Last time, one of these important figures, faced with the intransigence of the leaders of the mothers’ collective who were demanding the immediate enrollment of a child in school, left the room crying with helplessness: “How can you do this to us? How can you do this to Mr. Mayor who is such a good person?” The “it” in question was simply the power to enforce the right to school of a Roma child and to impose that his life has the same value as the lives of the children of the important woman who was crying. Fear had changed sides.

“the foundation: it is all this underground and invisible work that is the prerequisite for the development of a radical political organization.”

It was now the beginning of spring, six months ago Alisa, Mirela, Lucile and Emmanuelle had sown the first seeds of the adventure of the mothers’ collective and already the first flowers under the sun had opened, the first little joys, the first joys smiles came to the faces of the children and their mothers. But what had taken place during those six months had remained in the shadows. The twelve mothers who formed the collective had been transformed into women of action by the words of two of them, Alisa and Mirela, who had assumed the role of leaders, that is, the responsibility of enabling others to commit themselves to the pursuit of a common goal.

By the verb, they had in the hearts of these women replaced fear with courage. Each had become a soldier, a militant determined to fight because of the value she attaches to the lives of her children. With Alisa and Mirela, Lucile and Emmanuelle formed the driving team: the locomotive that drove each wagon of the collective into action, giving it its meaning: that is, both its strategic direction and its meaning (its motive and its justification). The leadership team had therefore conceived the battle plan, the path by which they were all going to pass together to reach their destination. like David, and the wicked Goliath, the rector of the Academy, they had even already achieved small victories, as if to sharpen their weapons, but all this was still kept secret: the film of which they were the heroines had not yet begun in the eyes of the general public.

During these six months, what the leadership team had successfully worked on is what is called in radical political organization the foundation: it is all this underground and invisible work that engages both the head (conceiving the strategy, the battle plan, recruiting it, recruiting it) encourage) as well as the hand (train, forge its weapons) which is the indispensable preliminary to the triggering of a strategic campaign during which a power organization will develop and grow. It is the time of pregnancy, if I may say so, of maturation in utero, without which on the big day only a powerless aborton, a straw fire, or a sword-stroke in the water would emerge.

Now it was time to enter the stage, into the light, to raise the curtain.

“Roxana sees the portrait of the mayor, she blushes at his audacity, and with a mixture of shame and pride, she asks her lawyer “is it really against him that we won? David had defeated Goliath.”

But before that allow me to return one last time to moment of emotional light that dazzled during these six months our foundation work because if I don’t do it now it will forever remain in the shadows. It is a simple moment: but the pure joy that is expressed is precisely the manifestation of the sense I spoke to you above, which indicates both the direction and the motive, but also and above all that gives, despite the context of uncertainty that characterizes all political action, confidence, close to certainty, that is, the faith, that victory is at last.

During the last phase of the foundation, the collective of mothers had launched a first tactic that consisted of a testing campaign whose purpose was to constitute the evidence that would serve during the first big public launch action that I will tell you soon. And one of the results of this first tactic was the rebirth of courage and pride, of dignity on the face of one of the militant mothers in particular: whose name is Roxana. Precisely when she entered a communist town hall in Seine-Saint-Denis with her lawyer, Master Anina Ciuciu. For nine months Roxana had been prevented from enrolling her five-year-old daughter in the city school by the administration. All the services had conspired to trap her, from the wicketkeeper to the elected in-charge of the school. She had tried everything. Nothing had worked: for nine months, she was desperate. She had not had the simple power to enroll her five-year-old daughter in school. She was humiliated. All the municipal bureaucracy had prevented her because she and her daughter lived in a slum that the mayor and his team had decided, by all means of their power, to make disappear. But that day, nine months later: Roxana entered the town hall as if she owned it, she was even angry that the employees opened the doors for her one after another with so much obsequiousness, until the door of the elected education officer who had humiliated her for a month. The instruction had been given by the mayor himself to receive Roxana with the utmost respect and hand over to her the paper she had come for: her daughter’s school enrollment. The judge had ordered it. The mayor had been sentenced to pay and in order to avoid the campaign of public shame that the collective of mothers made weigh on his head like a sword of Damocles he had decided to execute quickly what Roxana demanded. Indeed what bad publicity for an anti-racist far-left personality to be shown blatantly committing racial discrimination. When Roxana, in the office of the elected official, sees the frame hanging on the wall of a portrait of the town hall, she blushes at his audacity, and with a mixture of shame and pride, she asks her lawyer: “is it really against him that we won? David had defeated Goliath.

“This first scene had a lot of exposition: it was for the collective of mothers to expose the drama they were going to play for a year, its characters, the heroines, the villain, and give an idea of ​​the desired outcome”

But let us now return to our curtain raising: the time of the foundation was over: the organization was deeply rooted in the hearts, minds and hands of the women who constituted it. It was so now that the show begins!

This first scene had a lot of exposition: it was for the collective of mothers to expose the drama they were going to play for a year, its characters, the heroines, the villain, and give an idea of ​​the desired outcome. The drama was that Alisa, Mirela, Ana Maria, Roxana and the others faced a terrible injustice when enrolling like any mother their little girl or their little boy in school, they faced a discriminatory refusal because they lived in a city, and they were perceived as Roma women. The characters, the heroines, it was they: it was to them that during the big premiere the audience would be led to identify with emotion. The villain, the infamous culprit of this ignoble mistake, the wicked, the hateful, the powerful, would be the rector of the Academy, and in this story, in the background, he would have lieutenants, just as hateful: the mayors of the department. The desirable outcome would be that the heroines of history by courage and their commitment to action, scene after scene, pay the price of their fault so badly to the powerful, both financially and politically that it would be forced, to no longer have to pay, to put an end to discrimination: power, and depended only on his decision. But as in all good stories, you can never be certain of the outcome from the start.

Alisa and Mirela, the two mothers, then gathered several times all the members of the collective to imagine together this first scene: what would be this first big public action of launch? They already knew that they would stage and dramatize the complaint that some mothers were going to file collectively that day against the rector and the mayors of the department. The problem was that in the 21st century, to seize justice, it was enough for the lawyer to send a paper by e-mail. Nothing too thrilling. It was therefore necessary to make the act spectacular. They decided that they would address a letter to the rector asking for an appointment and this letter, they placed it in the middle of a large frame that they could show. They decided that the action would take place the day after the return of classes before the court: they would install a classroom for their children who were prevented by the criminals from going to school: what a striking contrast, while all over France watching television every year their return from classes, a group of mothers would say “all the children? No… not ours…”

Then they imagined slogans that they would hang on the small posters of their children who were going to class in front of the court, they prepared a large banner where the name of their group would be written: “collective of mothers, the school for our children” and gave the class a name: “Action refused from school”.

During this phase of the imagination of the staging, Emmanuelle and Lucile prepared the coffees and took notes, the other employees of the Askola team who were men, had offered to participate in the flourishing of this collective whose victories they were proud of their daily work as social mediators: they found their place as allies during this action by offering to take care of the children’s J-day while the members of the collective devised the follow-up of their plan.

“The art of radical political organizing is much like the work of a stage director: it involves dramatizing, writing dialogue, arranging actors, and finding those who will make the images”

Here, the staging was ready … But for the show to begin it still lacked the light, the lights of the ramp: it lacked the press, and if I may say, the dialogues. In order for the audience to be moved by the drama, and to empathize with the heroines who were to become the militant mothers, the cameras had to be turned. The art of the radical political organizer is also very similar to the work of a stage director: it is about dramatizing, writing dialogue, arranging actors, and finding those who will make the images while ensuring that the images tell the story of the drama. collectively with the heroines of the story who are interested, for their real lives, in the end of the story being the victory of David over Goliath, because people’s lives depend on it.

Earlier and already during the foundation, we had brought on board, after having rallied, Faiza Zerouala, of Mediapart. She would not only be present on the day of the action but she had already accompanied incognito, during the foundation, in the shadows, some of the mothers during their dueling fights at the town hall to witness discrimination firsthand. Then following an angle that we thought collective and that resumed the general drama of history: mothers want to make the powerful mayors and rectors pay the price of the dignity of their children -Lucile wrote and diffused (with the help of an ally, Fatima Hamilton) press, then cast it like the thread of a fishing rod into the pond. And journalists bit the cheek. It was every time, for Lucile, when one of them expressed an interest in making sure that he would be faithful to the angle that we had imagined, that he was sincerely sensitive and respectful of the struggle, and that in the end he would not tell us a story that he wished when telling.

Then it was asked for the mothers of the collective to designate their spokesperson, those who would be the main actresses. There were Mirela, Alisa and Alina as well as among the lawyers, Anina Ciuciu. It was then to conceive with each of them the text that they would say during the action. Then two weeks before J-day began rehearsals led by Lucile and Emmanuelle: each actress rehearsed as if it were the day of her first big role.

“The villain of the story was also to, on this occasion, make his grand entrance on stage. It was indeed to make him come out of the wood like a wolf. That was one of the goals of the operation. We had to push him into the light because every good story needs your voice.” Wolf “.

And the day after the return, they were in court. As there were people: they came, following my advice, with their husbands, children, brothers, sisters, friends, and mothers-in-law. It was the carnival, there were the children, with posters on which were hung the slogans, the banner where their mothers had written: “school for our children” In front of the cameras, Anina, Mirela, Alisa, Alina told their story, the story of their children, the injustice that was done to them and the one she held responsible: the great evil rector and his lieutenants: the mayors of the department. The villain of history was also to make his grand entrance on stage. It was really about making him come out of the wood like a wolf. That was one of the goals of the operation. We must push it into the light because every good story needs to see the face of a villain. That’s why in front of the cameras Mirela held out a framed letter addressed to her name publicly inviting him to grant them an appointment.

In the evening and the next day, France had heard of these brave women and was moved by their story. Faiza Zerouala published her report in mediapart There was a topic for an hour of great listening in the show C à vous, another report in Kombini, an article in 20 minutes and others more …

“At the end of the action, of the campaign, whether victorious or not, the hero enters the shadow because the light is no longer of any use to the cause, and that as an actor, he enters the real, after the end of the game.”

It should be noted that making oneself known, drawing light on oneself is never an end in itself in radical political organization, it is a means, a tactic or a strategy among others. It’s a game.

Moreover, strictly speaking, the word “media” means “medium”. A great many causes shipwreck, because their hero confuses the means with the end, and the cause with the means. In a good radical political organization, that is, an organization that builds power and through this power really changes the world, at the end of the action, the campaign, whether it is victorious or not, the hero goes into the shadows because the light is no longer useful, but as a cause actor, he enters the real, after the end of the game. Besides, there’s no better indication that a cause is lost than seeing its spokesperson no longer leave the ramp lights.

After the joy of having accomplished all together a feat, a great action, where each had played his part to the best, where each had given the best of himself, overcome his fear, for all others; after receiving many messages of support, encouragement and congratulations from all over France, the members of the collective, after a few days, a few weeks, had to realize that on at least one point they had failed: they had not seen the wolf out of the wood. The press had barely mentioned his name. The beginning of the film was missing a character, and not just any: the villain.

It is indirectly and without showing that he reacted a few weeks later to the great public launch action of the collective of mothers, skillfully, and not at all in the way we expect.

(More in the next episode….)

Battle story

The battlefield is the hearts of the people

By Pierre Chopinaud

(Previously…)

The target wouldn’t be all the mayors, nor the minister, it would be in the middle, at the right height: it would be the academy rector. There, the machine comes to life. The problem is that there is no Godzilla, there is no Joker, the person is in the presence of the speaker of Him, all of this is not fair to the person. Mirela, Alisa, Emmanuelle and Lucie printed a photo of him, investigated his career, guessed his values: they portrayed his character. That’s it, the casting was complete: the collective of mothers was going to be able to train for combat and go on the attack…

“The first tactical challenge consisted of inventing a stratagem by which we would make the invisible visible: to constitute the proof”

Alisa, Mirella, Lucile, and Emmanuelle were ready for the first major episode of the film, in which the mothers’ collective would be the heroines, for the implementation of their first tactic, the first battle, the first action. And just like actors who are about to play a scene or soldiers who are about to go into combat, they began, with my help, with training, rehearsals, and simulations.

The first tactic was to seek out evidence of discriminatory refusals of school enrollment. However, if public structures know how to discriminate methodically, they also know how to structurally make discrimination invisible. The first tactical challenge consisted of inventing a stratagem by which we would make the invisible visible: to constitute the proof. We therefore developed a protocol that consisted of everything that a mother-soldier-actress should say—and in what order—when she went to the town hall to register her child for school. Not only what she should do and say, but also what to have her interlocutor do and say. So we wrote a scene with dialogue that varied depending on the attitude of the municipal employee: each mother had to know her role by heart and above all: each mother had to start the recorder on her phone upon entering in order to capture the violation of the law of which the institution through its agents was guilty, but also the discriminatory, racist and insulting words which constitute, in the world as it is, the way in which society addresses these mothers and their children on a daily basis.

“It was therefore a question of pushing one’s own vulnerability, one’s own weakness, to the extreme, to the point of caricature, in order to transform it into strength and, by this subterfuge, to push the adversary into error”

Once the plan was established, they practiced in Askola’s small training vans, converted into training rooms, by role-playing: one played the mother, the other the municipal employee, until each had mastered their lines, their role, and the attitude to adopt depending on the opponent’s reactions, enough to confidently go into “battle”: the hunt for evidence. We knew that if the leading members, namely Mirela and Alisa, went into a duel against the municipal officials, we had a good chance of losing. Of course, they had more experience, self-confidence, and self-belief. But since they worked as school mediators on a daily basis, they were easily identified by the municipal officials. The latter would be wary and not be fooled by the plan. They all decided together that the new members would be the ones to go to the front. When a woman calls the Askola association to enroll her child in school, it’s an “anonymous” member of the mothers’ collective who accompanies her to register. But beneath her anonymity, she hides her mastery as an actress, a soldier, and an activist.

“It was victory after victory, throughout the autumn: each time the offensive refusal was transformed into a weapon which was turned, not only against the municipal agent, but against all his superiors, up to the mayor of the city, who was ultimately the culprit”

And it was victory after victory throughout the fall: each time, the offensive refusal was transformed into a weapon that was used, not only against the municipal official, but against all his superiors, all the way up to the mayor, who was ultimately the culprit. Each time, the duel turned in favor of the mother, who obtained a speedy enrollment in school, thanks to the sword of Damocles that the collective held over the entire municipal service. Far from the front lines, “in the rear,” behind the keyboard of her computer or the micro-phone, Lucile played her part, issuing the threat: “We have proof of your violation of the law. You illegally refused to enroll a child in school for racist reasons. We will take this to court and notify the press if you don’t comply!”

The mothers, gathered together in an organized collective, had, from this first action, forged the sword which would make the Caesars of the department tremble, and which would soon, as we shall see, make even the office of the Minister of Education tremble.

But back to the present: if the sword of Damocles weren’t enough, the mothers’ collective carried out the threat, and Maîtres Ciuciu, Crusoe, and Stoffaneller, the allied lawyers, took action. The law was on the mothers’ side. The bad guys were losing every time. It was checkmate on all sides. Beyond these first duels won, these small victories that were strung together like pearls on the organization’s necklace of glory, each time it was just as much evidence that fell into the bag in preparation for the first major public action, the launch of the great drama in which the mothers would publicly ask the big bad rector to pay the price for the offense done to their children.

“the spectacle of pride and courage that replace fear and resignation in hearts. That is, the birth of shared faith that unites the offended into a single choir”

“How can you do this to the mayor, who is such a good person? The “this” in question was simply the power to enforce a Roma child’s right to school and to impose that his life has the same value as the lives of the children of the important lady who is crying. Fear had changed sides ”

(More in the next episode….)

Battle story

The battlefield is the hearts of the people

By Pierre Chopinaud

(Previously…)

After joy replaced fear in the hearts of these women, Alisa and Mirela asked them if they were ready to fight together for the lives of their children. They replied: “We are.” We had created the “Mom’ Collective.”

“Faith is the intangible element that connects people to form a radical political organization.”

Mirela, Alisa, Lucile and Emmanuelle formed what we call a “leadership team”: it is the small, highly structured group of people who will be the locomotive of the train that sets off, who will lead and train the others. Each had their role: Mirela and Alisa used their newfound power to gather and encourage, through words, the other women to take action; Emmanuelle and Lucile contributed all the knowledge they already had mastered (writing, fundraising, etc.), and I, the organizer, helped them to think, design, implement, and evaluate each step of the battle plan and the plan for building the organization. We spent at least two hours together twice a month and each time it was two hours of joy. From the beginning, we felt that a great force was blowing at our backs: for some it was faith in God, for others the thirst for justice: we were right and we had faith in what we were going to accomplish.

Faith is the intangible element that connects people who come together to form a radical political organization. It is also the element that gives each person the courage to take the risk of taking action. Faith, that is, confidence: in oneself, in “us,” in what we are going to accomplish. It often falls to an “organizer” to be like a prime mover, the one who will ignite faith, give confidence (in themselves, in each other) to the members of the leadership team who in turn will give confidence to each member of the organization. This confidence is what Pastor Martin Luther King (who is to “radical political organizing” what Bruce Lee is to Kung Fu) called “love.” It is this “love” that indicates, according to him, the meaning of the action, and the high probability of its success: because the change it calls for is in the order of true justice.

“If we needed faith in justice, we did not have time to wait for the end of time.”

To return to the “Collective of Mothers,” and more specifically to the leading team; the task before Alisa, Mirela, Emmanuelle, and Lucile was to write their battle plan, to devise their strategy. It was a bit like writing the script for the adventure they were going to lead the members of the organization into. They had to imagine the successive scenes—that is, the tactics—following a movement that would build to a crescendo. They had to write the film in which the women of the collective would be the heroines. And above all, they had to find a name and face for the person who would play the role of the villain: it’s always the same drama that plays out in radical political organizing: for every David there must be a Goliath. Not because it’s a matter of imitating a fiction, but because at the heart of all the stories that have been told since the dawn of time, there is the drama of injustice, and the power relations, the struggle, through which its resolution passes.

The first question the members of the leadership team asked themselves in designing their strategy was: what change do we want? The change the mothers of the collective needed was immense, as vast as an ocean, so immense that to accomplish it, a revolution was needed… or the coming of the messiah. But if they needed faith in justice, their children didn’t have time to wait for the end of time. They needed to accomplish real change now. This immanence is a necessary condition for radical political organizing: we must transform reality here and now so that the coming together of people creates power through love. And conversely: power is needed to create radical change in reality.

“How can we escape despair when we see the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it actually is?”

They had already put faces to this ocean: the faces of their children. The change they needed was for the lives of their children to have the same value as the lives of the children of powerful people. But faced with this ocean, what could be done? How could they escape the feeling of helplessness that exhausts the “weak” and discourages them when they realize the gap between the ideal and the harsh reality that crushes them, between the world as it should be (the lives of all children are equal) and the world as it really is (the life of a poor child is worthless to the powerful)? To prevent Mirela, Alisa, Lucile, and Emmanuelle from drowning in the despair caused by the immensity of the ocean, they had to start by isolating a small inland sea: for them, this sea was school! And in this small sea: a small island that they were going to be able to conquer, because there is a shore that can be seen on the horizon and that can be reached by a navigable route. This small island is what is called in the “radical political organization” a strategic objective. And this small island in the small inland sea that was the school, it was the discriminatory refusals of school registration in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis.

Now that they had their little island in sight, the second question Alisa, Mirela, Lucile, and Emmanuelle asked themselves was: What is our path, our waterway? Where will we go to reach our goal? After hours of looking through the telescope, the path appeared: the collective of mothers would pay the powerful the cost of a refusal so high financially and politically that it would dissuade them from disrespecting the lives of their children in the future.

“It will be a matter of forging the weapons, the sword, with which the mothers will begin to make the powerful pay the price of their children’s dignity.”

This path is what we call a theory of change. It’s the great movement of the drama that will be experienced and played out during the campaign of actions.

Now it remained to imagine the scenes that would make this movement concrete, the tactics through which the strategy would be realized.

Thanks to the action of another collective created, developed and organized by Conatus, (the #EcolePourTous collective) discriminatory refusals of school registration had become illegal several months ago.  So, for this adventure, we had the law on our side.

The lead team decided that Alisa and Mirela would have to convince the other women in the collective to engage in a “testing” campaign. It would involve going to the counters of town halls that practice covert discrimination in school registration, to find the evidence that would allow them to be convicted. It would be a matter of forging the weapons, the sword, with which the mothers would begin to make the powerful pay the price for their children’s dignity. Not only would they demand that the justice system condemn the mayors to pay in money, but they would also expose their misdeeds as widely as possible to shame them. Who can publicly assume the methodical and intentional practice of preventing a poor, racialized child from accessing school? Stigmatization would now be the price to pay for those who fail to recognize in their actions the equal value of the lives of all children.

“Our Goliath had no face or name… He was neither Godzilla nor the Joker, no one had heard of him yet, so we had to make him a character.”

Since the tactics included legal and public actions, the leadership team needed to bring journalists and lawyers on board. It turns out that one of the spokespeople for the #EcolePourTous collective that had made school enrollment refusals illegal had since become a lawyer. She was Anina Ciuciu. And she herself had been a victim of this discrimination as a child. Alisa and Mirela couldn’t have found a better ally. She was one of them. She valued the dignity of these children as much as her own. In turn, Anina brought with her one of her colleagues, Anna Stoeffeneller, in whom she had great confidence, as well as Lionel Crusoé, who had recently convicted a mayor in a similar situation in Essonne. It was Lucile who was given the challenge of reporting the story to the general public and, above all, shedding light on the villains’ infamous misdeeds. They dreamed of a great battle, so the audience had to be strong: a major newspaper was needed, and their ally was a journalist from Mediapart, Faiza Zerouala. Lucile revealed elements of the plan to her. Her values ​​were consistent with theirs: the lives of all children are equal. Their victory would be hers. She was in the boat.

ela

Was everything ready for action? Everything? No! The villain of the story was missing. Our Goliath had neither a face nor a name. There were candidates for the role: most of the mayors of the 93. But if there are too many characters in a story, we no longer understand the drama. In a strategic campaign, there only needs to be one villain. It’s a target. It must be unique and fixed. If it is multiple and moving, you have a good chance of missing it. It was the needs of the legal proceedings that helped decide: the target would not be all the mayors, nor the minister, it would be in the middle, at the right height: it would be the head of the academy. There you go, the villain would be him. The problem was that it was neither Godzilla nor the Joker, no one had yet heard of him, so it would be necessary to make him a character. Mirela, Alisa, Emmanuelle, and Lucie printed a photo of him, investigated his career, and guessed his values: they had cast their own character. The casting was complete: the group of mothers was about to begin combat training and take on the challenge…

(More in the next episode….)

Battle story

The battlefield is the hearts of the people

By Pierre Chopinaud

(Previously…)

When the Askola team told us about the injustice that was overwhelming the parents and children they were accompanying on their way to school, we said: let’s drop morality, let’s drop the rules of the administration: we will try to forge together “the sword”, that is to say the strength and power that we need to give back their dignity to these children…

“Alisa and Mirela would be the two rotating forces that through their movement would draw other women into action”

We saw right away that one of Askola’s strengths was the people who were part of the team. Among the employees, there were Mirela and Alisa, two young women, mothers themselves, who had had, in the past, the misfortune of living for a long time in shanty towns or on the streets, with their children, and who had found in themselves and around them, the power to emancipate themselves. Thus, they had in the past experienced themselves the injustice encountered by the mothers and children that they now accompanied as school mediators.

If they were willing, Alisa and Mirela would be the two pillars on which we would base our new organization, or more precisely: the two rotating forces that through their movement would draw other women who resemble them, but who are intimidated and paralyzed by powerlessness, into action. We would have to train Mirela and Alisa to leadership.

“In the state of subalternity, powerlessness is such that it deprives one of the time required to strive to regain one’s dignity.”

It was therefore a stroke of luck to have Mirela and Alisa in the initial team. Because their presence allowed us to immediately overcome a first major obstacle that we encounter in this type of situation. In the state of subalternity that people who live in shanty towns in France find themselves in, the helplessness is such that it deprives them of the time required to try to regain their dignity. All the time available is completely absorbed by the imperative of material and biological survival. The state of emancipation that Alisa and Mirela had achieved thanks to their employment situation gave them the time, and therefore the power, to act to encourage other women to take action. It was also essential that the call to action come to them from people who shared or had shared their condition.

In addition, for us to start building an organization together, Mirela and Alisa’s employers, who were none other than the second part of the team, Emmanuelle and Lucile, had to decide that part of the employees’ time previously devoted to the school mediation service would now be dedicated to political action. Among these four women there was great confidence, and great power to play with their relationships, their identities, and their stories. It was this confidence, this power, this game that allowed such a force to be unleashed from this small initial group.

““This is the whole meaning of “radical non-mixity” which is a tactic delimited in time and space of organization”

The first thing we did together was to organize discussion groups. Since Mirela and Alisa had agreed to be the pillars around which a larger number of people would gather, their first task was to invite other women whose children they usually enroll in school: “I would like to meet up, but this time not as a school mediator, but as a mother who cares about my children’s lives. I invite you to have a coffee with other women to discuss our experiences as mothers.”

Why only women? Why not men? First, because Mirela and Alisa are women. Second, because the goal of this tactic—the discussion group—is to connect the people who participate in it through heart and mind so that they form, through words, a community of experience, values, and emotion. But after reflection we made the hypothesis that the presence of one or more men – like the presence of any person who did not share the same condition – could be an obstacle to this operation of relating hearts. This is the whole meaning of “radical non-mixity” which is a tactic delimited in time and space of organization

One of Askola’s work tools: it is the school truck; a small truck in the dumpster is transformed into a classroom. They have two. That day to organize the discussion groups, Mirela Alisa Lucile and Emmanuelle transformed the school trucks into small living rooms. Because of the radical non-mixity of the operation decided collectively, Lucile and Emmanuelle, who are usually the hierarchical superiors of the other two, considered that their role that day would be to be at the service of others: they decorated the living room, held the door, looked after the children, served coffee, and picked flowers.

“At the heart of these mothers’ stories were their children and their right not to suffer the suffering that had been theirs.”

Mirela and Alisa each welcomed four young women one afternoon in a van-salon. They each first told their story, following a framework that we had prepared together: what was the experience they had as a little girl in their country of birth, since even there – in Romania – they belong to a minority – Roma -, what reason, what drama, what hope led them to emigrate; what they suffered when they arrived in France, the experience of exile, of the unknown, of poverty, and finally the reason for their effort to use the means of school to offer their children a better life than theirs, and especially the difficulties they encountered. At the heart of these mothers’ life stories were their young children and the right they have not to suffer the suffering that had been theirs, but especially the anger they have in the face of all those who want to deprive them of this simple happiness. In addition to holding the door, serving coffee and cakes that day, Emmanuelle and Lucile had the days before had Alisa and Mirela rehearse, like actresses, their stories that together we had written down. The goal of the tactic was to touch the women’s hearts with emotion in order to encourage them to take action together. After they had each opened their hearts to each other in the 2 small vans, they were all connected together by emotion and formed a community of value and experience, a community of suffering and humiliation, but above all a community of love for their children.

“These ten women were ready together to take action because it was about the value they give to what is most precious in the world: the dignity of their children”

Mirela and Alisa had mastered the tactic, exercising leadership, leading through their movement, their power to speak, others around them and with them: these ten women were ready together to take action because it was about the value they give to what is most precious in the world; the dignity of their children.

So after, through the power of speech, courage, solidarity, joy, had replaced fear, isolation, and sadness in the hearts of each of them; Alisa and Mirela asked them if they were ready to fight together against the discriminatory refusals of school registration of which the mayors of the department were guilty. They said: “we are” and they chose their name. We had created the “collective of mothers – school for our children”. And since it was International Women’s Day, to end the day, Emmanuelle and Lucile came to offer bouquets of roses to each of us.

Now we had to take action and for that, design our battle plan….

(More in the next episode….)

BAttle Story

The battlefield is the hearts of the people

By Pierre Chopinaud

The Askola association which helps parents who live in slums and squats in the 93 to enroll their children in school was facing insurmountable blockages from the mayors of the municipalities. Laws, morality, the rector, associations, nothing helps. Because it is not a question of rights but a situation of oppression, that is to say a relationship of power.

In France, in 2025, there are slums, and there are people who have the misfortune of living in them. A widely shared prejudice among activists and social workers is that the people who live there are resigned, apathetic, incapable of defending their dignity.

The Askola organization practices school mediation in Seine-Saint-Denis. Mirela, Lucile, Emmanuelle, Alisa and the others go to the slums to help parents enroll their children in school and help them feel good there.

What father, what mother has not been heartbroken by the suffering of their child whom they have just abandoned for the first time, at the start of the school year, in the middle of twenty-five little strangers and adults of whom they know nothing? So imagine that in the morning you woke him up in a wooden cabin, without water, after spending the night protecting him from rats, that you don’t know the language or any of the common customs and that in the evening it’s the police that you find with him at home who order you to go far away?  

“The path to school, for parents and children who live in a slum, is arduous and perilous.”

The path to school, for parents and children who live in a slum, is arduous and perilous. This is why Mirela, Lucile, Emmanuelle, Alisa and the others are there: they are a bit like the sherpas who help these parents and their children to climb the mountain that is their way to school.

But what if there was only the mountain to climb? The world would still be too beautiful! This is without counting on the powerful people who drop rocks on you from the summit to make the effort even more difficult. And among these people, up on the mountain, is the mayor of the city.

Many mayors of Seine-Saint-Denis prevent children from squats and slums from accessing their city’s schools. For what ? Because they want these slums to disappear; and welcoming these children into schools, into the school community, as the law and the principles of the republic oblige them, is to recognize that they exist, that they have dignity, rights, like all the others. Once you know the children who live there, it is more difficult to destroy their house. You know that you are not only destroying wood and cardboard but also the lives inside. Despite all possible cynicism, it can hurt the heart and the conscience. Especially when you are a socialist, a communist, a rebel, a Catholic, a Muslim, an “anti-racist”… It can be shameful.

“Refusing the child to school is to make him and his family invisible, it is to throw them in the garbage bag of lives that do not count, of deaths that we do not mourn.”  

Refusing the child to school is to make him and his family invisible, it is to throw them in the garbage bag of lives that do not count, of deaths that we do not mourn. It is to put oneself, as an elected official, at the service of the builder who wants to make money by building a large building in place of people’s small cabins, an Amazon warehouse, a cement factory, it is above all to place oneself in the most cynical way at the service of the intense racism of those who have a little more than nothing, whose parents or grandparents who arrived from Brittany, Algeria, Portugal, Mali, lived in their time in these same slums, in order to to flatter their baser feelings, and win the elections.

And believe me, there are no small profits in politics: whatever the color of the skin or the shirt, when the goal is to keep one’s position of power: all means are good: even racism. And when power is at stake, principles, values, laws generally remain on the sidelines.  

“the feeling of helplessness and indignation had swallowed up their rage and their anger.”

Mirela, Emmanuelle, Lucile, Alisa and the others were at the end of their rope : the feeling of helplessness and indignation had swallowed up their rage and anger: how can we live in such an immoral world? Nothing helped: the letters, the arrests, the appeals to the administration… Are we not in the country of human rights? How can a mayor who has the reputation of being an anti-racist activist so despise the lives of these children? This world is without faith or law…

One of the fundamental precepts of radical political organizing is as old as the dawn of time. He says: there is no justice without power. Jesus Christ would not have made any Caesar tremble if he had not come with the “sword” of God.

When the Askola team spoke to us about the situation of injustice which overwhelmed the parents and the children they accompanied on the way to school, we said: drop morality, drop administrative rules: together we will try to forge “the sword”, that is to say the strength and power that we need to restore dignity to these children…

(Continued in the next episode….)