Lettre à la République [English translation]

Letter to the Republic

To all these racists with their hypocritical tolerance

Who built their nation on blood

Now set themselves up as the givers of lessons

Plunderers of wealth, killers of Africans

Colonisers, torturers of Algerians

This colonial past, it's yours

It's you who've chosen to link your story to ours

Now, you must assume

The odour of blood follows you, even if you perfume yourselves

We, the Arabs and Blacks

We're not here by chance

Everything arrives back at where it started!

You've wished for immigration

Thanks to it, you're full up, to the point of indigestion

I believe that France has never done charity

The immigrants are just the tools of cheap labour

Keep to yourselves your Republican illusion

Of the sweet France, harmed by African immigration

Ask the Senegalese Tirailleurs and the harkis

Who's profited from who?

The Republic is only innocent in your dreams

And you don't have the clean hands that you lie about

We, the Arabs and Blacks

We're not here by chance

Everything arrives back at where it started!

But do you think that with time

The Negros will mutate, end up becoming whites?

But human nature has swept aside your projects

We don't integrate into the reject pile

We don't integrate into the French ghettos, penned in

Between immigrants, it's necessary to be expected

How to point the finger at the community withdrawal

That you've initiated since the slums of Nanterre

Arsonist and fireman, your memory is selective

You didn't come in peace, you're history is aggressive

Here, it's better than there, we know it

Because to decolonise, for you, is to destabilise

And the more I observe history the less I feel indebted

I know what it is to be Black from the time of the schoolbag

Although I'm not an ingrate, I don't want to thank you

Because basically what I have here, I conquered

I grew up in Orly in the favelas of France

I flourished in the bush, I was at war since childhood

Drug dealing, robbery, violence. . .Crimes!

Which my brothers are doing, if this isn't money like in the Clearstream affair

Who can give them the lesson? You?

Abusers of corporate assets, embezzlers in the background

Real thugs in suits, bunch of hypocrites!

Do the French have the leaders they deserve?

At the heart of the debates, the heartless debates

It's always the same people the finger gets pointed at, in your rancorous France

In economic crisis, a culprit is needed

And it's in the direction of Muslims in which all your shots fire

I'm not afraid to write it: France is Islamophobic

Besides, no-one hides xenophobes in France anymore

You treat us like less than nothing on your public networks

And you expect us to write "Long Live the Republic!"

My respect is violated in the country talking about human rights

It's hard to feel French without Stockholm Syndrome

Because me, I'm Black, Muslim, suburban and proud of it

When you see me, you put a face to what the other France hates

These are the same hypocrites who talk to us about diversity

Who express racism under the guise of secularism

Dreaming of a singular France, with just one identity

Bent on discriminating, the same minorities

Faced with the same voters, the same fears are agitated

The communities are opposed, to hide the precariousness

That no-one would be surprised if tomorrow it ends up blowing up

How to love a country which refuses to respect us?

Far from transparent artists, I write this text like a mirror

That France can look at if she wants to see it

She will see the illusion that she's made of herself flying away

I'm not in need of affection

Understand that I'm no longer waiting for her to love me!

• Artist:Kery James
• Album:92.2012 (2012)