Review of PEOPLE LIKE THEM by Samira Sedira

 4 Stars

This novella by a French-Algerian writer was inspired by a 2003 murder case in France.          

The narrator is Anna Guillot whose husband Constant is on trial for brutally killing Bakary and Sylvia Langlois and their three children.  There is no doubt of this guilt because he describes the murders in gory detail.  What is not clear is his motivation.  Why would a man whom everyone describes as normal kill five people?  Throughout the story, Anna addresses her husband directly.

The setting is Carmac, a small, isolated, seemingly idyllic village.  The order of the village is disrupted when the Langlois family moves in because Bakary is Black when “we’d never had any Black people in Carmac.”  He is also wealthy and sophisticated and this confuses some inhabitants:  “In their minds . . . a Black man couldn’t be the head of a company.  The Black man worked for the white man, not the reverse.”  The townspeople have difficulty accepting differences.  German tourists, for example, are mocked.  Anna explains, “Here, we laughed openly at Germans, because it was allowed – the war gave us that right.  Same for the Dutch and the Belgians.  We basically viewed them as an extension of the Germans.”  This theme of difference, as suggested by the title, is central.  Even though the Langlois family welcomes villagers into their home, there is always an undercurrent of jealousy and mistrust. 

Constant is developed as a round character with hopes and dreams, and strengths and weaknesses.  Anna describes his early years when he is a promising pole-vaulter.  An accident ends his dreams:  “you had never pictured your life without sports, which made reframing your future more complicated than you had imagined.”  Constant is able to begin anew but Anna realizes “something inside you had broken.  Something that you had eventually put back together but whose delicate equilibrium risked giving way at any moment.”    He and Bakary become friends but their friendship sours for a number of reasons, and Constant feels angry and humiliated.  His pride is injured by what he sees as acts of condescension.

Is Constant motivated by his injured pride and his feeling that he has lost everything?  Would he have reacted differently if Bakary were White?  Though he claims “It’s got nothing to do with racism, they’re words, they’re just words,” Constant did call Bakary “’the Darkie,’ ‘the African upstart,’ and even ‘the ape swimming in cash.’”  He admits, “I couldn’t stand to be scammed by someone not from this country.”  And to wash off the blood of the victims from his hands, he goes to a frozen river because “’My blood mixed with their blood.  I couldn’t handle it.’”

Providing the perspective of the murderer’s partner is useful.  Anna describes her situation:  “A murderer’s wife is reproached for everything:  her composure when she should show more compassion; her hysteria when she should demonstrate restraint; her presence when she should disappear; her absence when she should have the decency to be here; and so on.  The woman who one day becomes ‘the murderer’s wife’ shoulders a responsibility almost more damning than that of the murderer himself, because she wasn’t able to detect in time the vile beast slumbering inside her spouse.  She lacked perceptiveness.  And that’s what will bring about her fall from grace – her despicable lack of perceptiveness.”

The author’s message, as stated in the “Author’s Note” is that “There’s no such thing as monsters.  Only humans.”  Anna comments that, though she doesn’t understand how her husband came to murder five people, she does understand that “no one around you was innocent.  We stood back and let it happen.  Like a chain reaction, each of us contributed to an outcome.  A horrific act.  A tragedy.  Our tragedy.” Bakary contributes to the sequence of events through his shady financial scheme.  And Anna, for example, doesn’t react when she hears Constant call Bakary a “Fucking ape.” 

In fact, the word silence appears 28 times in the novel.  To me, that repetition suggests that when we do not speak up, we acquiesce; what we walk past is what we tolerate.  Constant doesn’t object to his parents’ disapproval of Anna:  “The unfairness with which I was treated was doubly painful since you never objected in the slightest to the unspoken threats your parents allowed to linger in the air between one silence and the next.”   No one objects to the foul language of the young men in the bar so the silence allows their conversation to continue “naturally.” 

This is a short, quick read but it is very thought-provoking.  Did racism play an insidious role in the murders?  Are we all capable of murder?  If “’One can be more criminal than one knows,’” are there lessons that we all need to learn about acceptance, forgiveness, and not remaining silent?