Do they hate me?

You can't imagine how excited I was when I was coming back to France. When I was waiting in the Boston international airport, I was thinking about my new experiences in the US. One of the new things that I discovered when I was in the US was my feeling about France. Beforehand there was just one place that I knew and I had a feeling of belong to. That was my homeland, Iran. When I went to the US, I came to feel  that there is another part of world that I know, another place where I know the language, another land where I have many friends, another soil that is full of memory. My positive feelings about France were growing while I was in the US, until I eventually truly felt that there is another place in the world other than Iran that I could belong to and think of as my home. It was great for me because I’m really tired of living as a stranger. I hope you can imagine how exciting and meaningful it would have been for me to discover this new feeling about France.

When i was on the bus that took me from the Frankfurt airport to Strasbourg I was counting the moments until I would arrive in my hometown of Strasbourg, but this feeling didn't last long. Just after I arrived i read the news. The first story was that the FN party had won in the elections to the European Parliament. A central element of the FN party’s discourse is hatred of foreigners: people who come from other countries or have a different culture or race--people like me! You’ll agree with me that it is stupid to have a feeling of belonging to a society in which the majority of the people vote for a party whose discourse is obviously full of hate against people like you. It was a horrible moment. I decided to read something else and take my mind off it. The next story was a Washington Post report that mapped racism across the world. The report was about a map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries. It used the color red for more racist countries and blue for more tolerant countries. The map of Europe showed a red stain. It was France.

How naive I had been. How unrealistically I’d thought about the place I thought I could belong to. How stupid had I been? I don't know. I just know that I am still a wanderer.