e Name of Shame) has made her a figurehead in the struggle that is being waged by Macron’s government to perpetuate the French model of integration.
Koc, who grew up on poor council estates in Brittany and Strasbourg, recounts the animosity of her relatives when she obtained French citizenship in 2008 and announced that she was changing her name from Cigdem to Claire. “I wanted to espouse my country, and not that which my parents had left,” she says.
“Claire? Are you serious? What a disgrace!” her brother said when she told him, she writes.
In the work, which has attracted widespread media interest in France, she explains that as a child she was sent to a Turkish school, where she had to repeat every morning: “Let my existence be a gift to Turkey”, despite the fact that she felt French; where she was forced to learn Turkish songs when she really wanted to sing Au clair de la lune; and where Turkish classmates hit her regularly because of her refusal to go to mosque.
Koc, who has become a journalist at TF1, the private television channel, criticises her father for having failed to learn French, for continuing to live in his new home as he had done in Turkey and for claiming to be the victim of racism when he was turned down for a job.
“How is it possible to live for 40 years in a country without mastering the language and to think . . . that a boss will take you on if you have made no effort to integrate?” she writes.
Koc argues that it is not entirely the fault of her parents but that left-wing antiracist associations were to blame for encouraging them to think that they could live off benefits and to believe that anyone who failed to give them a job was racist….
She argues that when her parents arrived in France in 1984 they made some initial attempts to adopt French customs. That changed with the installation of a satellite dish in the family home in the 1990s, after which her parents watched Turkish football, followed Turkish politics and spoke to her “all day long about marriage, honour and the dignity of my crotch”.
Koc says such attitudes are common among Turkish immigrants in France. “[They] don’t mix, or rarely. They marry compatriots, often from their own village. If it’s a cousin, it’s even better.”
She says associations and mosques financed by President Erdogan’s regime encourage Turkish immigrants to keep a distance from mainstream society while still considering Turkey as their true home.
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