Fatima Daas's debut novel, The Last One, is an autofictional delve into the inner life and growing pains of a young lesbian of Algerian descent. Clichy-sous-Bois is her omphalos, the beleaguered French suburb where riots erupted in 2005 following the deaths of two teenagers named Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted as they fled from the police. Unrest rippled nationwide, triggering the first declaration of a state of emergency since the end of the Algerian War and cementing banlieues like Clichy-sous-Bois in the public imagination as poverty-stricken, crime-infested hinterlands. How does one write from such a place? As Daas puts it, how do you sit with your ass between two chairs? For Bidoun, she speaks to the writer Momtaza Mehri about her influences, being the only “beurette” in her family, diaspora, failure, rap, religion, the disappeared women of the banlieue, and working-class writers’ relationships to the literary establishments that anoint them. Momtaza Mehri was esteemed respondent to DAI's AEROPONIC ACTS in 2021 and 2022. Find the link to the article in Bidoun here.