“Book Descriptions: Over the course of a night in police custody, a young woman tries to understand the rage that led her to assault a refugee on the Paris metro. She too is a foreigner, now earning a living as an interpreter for asylum seekers in the outskirts of the city. Down with the poor! which borrows its title from a poem by Baudelaire is the story of a woman who, little by little, is contaminated by the violence of the world.
‘Sinha lays bare so much of the nuance and the violence imposed on individuals by the systems in the world meant to keep certain people down – and how immigrants distance themselves or alienate themselves from others who represent their former selves, who seem to pose a threat to what they have made of themselves in their new home and life. She also shows how easily roles are reversed, how easily comfortable walls against the other can crumble and we can find ourselves confronted with the truth – that we are no different from this figure we have turned into a monster or an other, that we can no longer keep up the distancing, the éloignement, the lie that we have constructed, our own world that is untouchable and protected. The violence of becoming strangers to our former selves, even to our true present selves, keeps propelling ourselves forward. And when we feel the identities we've managed to build are under attack, we strike.’ – Emma Ramadan, translator of Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras” DRIVE
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