Lettre à la République [English translation]

A letter to the Republic

To all those racists with hypocritical tolerance

Who built their nation on blood

Who now portray themselves as preachers

Whealth looters, murderers of africans

Colonialists, torturers of algerians

This colonial past is yours

It's you who chose to interwine our stories

Now you have to assume it

The smell of blood keeps following you even if you put on perfume

Us, arabs and blacks

We're not here by accidents

Every arrival has its departure !

You wanted immigration

Thanks to that you gorged yourself until indigestion

I think France never was charitable

Immigrants are just a cheap workforce

Keep your republican illusions to yourselves,

Of sweet France violated by the african immigration

Ask the senegalese sharpshooters and the "harkis"

Who took advantage of who ?

The republic is innocent only in your dreams

And your hands are clean only in your lies

Us, arabs and blacks

We're not here by accidents

Every arrival has its departure !

Do you really think that with some time

Niggers would mutate, and would end up becoming white ?

Human nature swiped away your plans

There's no integration possible when rejected

There's no integration in french ghettos, immigrants parked together

You have to be realistic

How can you point your finger at communities always turning in on themselves ?

You initiated this since the shantytowns/ghettos of Nanterre

Arsonists and firemen, your memory is selective

You didn't come in peace, your history is agressive

Here, we have it better than back there, and we know it

Because to you, decolonialization is destabilization

And the more I look at history, the less I feel beholden

I know what it's like to be black since preschool

Even though I'm not ungrateful I don't want to thank you

Because in the end what I have here I earned it

I grew up in Orly in the favelas of France

I "flourished" in the maquis, I'm at war since childhood

Drug-trafficking, robbery, violence ... Crimes !

What are my brothers doing ? They're making money like in Clearstream

Who could scold them about it ? You ?

Fraudsters, embezzlers

Thugs dressed in suits, hypocrites !

Do french people have the leaders they deserve ?

In the heart of the debate, without a heart

Always the same ones are stigmatized in the France full of bitterness

In the middle of economic crisis, there meeds to be a scapegoat

And it's towards muslims that all your hits go

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

Nobody even cares to hide it anymore in this France full of xenophobes

Your treat us like we're nothing, on public television

And you're waiting for us to scand "Long live the Republic" ?

My respect is being violated in the country of human rights

It's hard to feel French without the Stockholm syndrome

Because I'm black, a muslim, from the ghetto and proud to be

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

It's those same hypocrites who speak about diversity

Who express racism under the name of secularism

They dream about a single French person with one single identity

They strive to discriminate the same minorities

In front of the same voters, the same fears are agitated

We oppose communities to hide precarity

Must nobody be surprised if tomorrow everything blows up

How can we love a country that refuses to respect us ?

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

Must France look at it if it wants to see itself

It will see the illusion it's making of itself evaporating

I'm not in need of affection

Understand I'm not waiting for her to love me anymore !

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