This International Booker 2023 shortlisted novel foreshadowed the violent protests in France

On June 27, 2023, a French police officer fatally shot 17-year-old Nahel M, sparking protests in the country. (2018 File photo by Laurent Bourrelly via Wikimedia Commons 2.0)

Earlier this month, France’s cycle of violence became the world’s favourite spectator sport. For some, it was the grim sight of riots in a pedigreed European nation. For others, it created a satisfying sense of schadenfreude. For yet others, it became a way of scoring domestic political points.

Either way, it’s clear that the reasons for the riots are structural. In Jacobin magazine, Tomek Skomski and Marion Beauvalet write that they are popular revolts fuelled by years of police abuse. They cite an earlier survey which shows that if you were perceived as an Arab or black male, you were 20 times more likely to be subject to a police check than the rest of the population.

Standing Heavy by Patrick Armand-Gbaka Brede (GauZ')

Considering the country’s current state of affairs, it felt appropriate to finally pick up a work that had earlier made it to the shortlist for the 2023 International Booker Prize. Standing Heavy is a debut novel by Patrick Armand-Gbaka Brede, writing under the pen name GauZ’, and translated into English by Frank Wynne.

It is a sharp, satirical portrayal of a deeply divided society, seen through the eyes of the underprivileged. In doing this, it sheds light on what has been called a “colonial continuum,” drawing connections between France’s former colonial rule and its treatment of different ethnic groups today.

The novel is based on the author’s own experiences as an undocumented student in Paris. It outlines the plight of generations of immigrants from Côte d’Ivoire, a French colony till 1960, and deals with their Bronze Age, Golden Age, and Age of Lead, as the section titles put it. GauZ’ takes on imperial legacies and the dominance of consumerism in a pithy style, with an eye for the ludicrous.

Standing Heavy is not for those expecting a neat fictional plot; in any case, there are many other such novels on the shelves. Instead, it contains events from the lives of immigrants struggling to get by, interspersed with vignettes about the behaviour of those with plenty of disposable income.

The title refers to a term used to describe professions “that require the employee to remain standing in order to earn a pittance”. Most of the book’s characters start their lives in France as security guards at shopping centres and flour mills, jobs that demand some key skills: “knowing how to empty your mind of every thought higher than instinct and spinal reflex or having a very engrossing inner life”.

The short observations and witticisms from the security guards are the most entertaining part of the book. In the fitting rooms of fashion stores, “girls try on outfits and use their iPhones to photograph each other from every angle…The pixel has gained ascendency over the retina”. For the guards described as the “men in black”, piped music is a torture: a succession of neo-soul crooners shrieking “mediocre lyrics over soupy melodies” in a diluted version of “the genuinely extraordinary Amy Winehouse”. And if it occurred today, “storming the Bastille, with its serried ranks of luxury shops, would liberate thousands of prisoners to conspicuous consumption”.

These passages are underpinned by the relative seriousness of other sections, which deal with the ups and downs of immigrant lives. The oil shock of the '70s and the events of 9/11 contribute to a rightward lurch, with the common sentiment being that outsiders were “stealing jobs from true-born Frenchmen, snatching the bed from the pure or the bread from the poor”.

In other sections, there are broadsides at colonialism and its after-effects. An immigrant’s mother warns: “Get this into your heads, children: colonisation’s greatest success was education.” The propaganda of the powerful, she explains, finds an echo in the compliance of the weak. The result is an underclass exploited by a system that “kept them just about alive enough so they could work and consume without complaint”.

In an interview after the International Booker Prize shortlist was announced, GauZ referred to the nomination as “a tribute to all the invisible people in society, those who pedal down in the hold so that the upper decks may peacefully enjoy their champagne and their caviar”. As the recent events in France and elsewhere show, the invisible people are tired of pedalling.