That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
"You can’t hold on to the past," Elif once told me. "You don’t know how. You don’t know what to keep, what to throw away. So you keep it all. And you can’t do that. No one can."
Meline Toumani discusses her debut, There Was and There Was Not, the rewards and risks of writing a political memoir, and what it means to approach a divided past and future.