The blossoming magnolias on the Columbia University campus in New York signaled that spring had arrived. The graduation ceremony was approaching and my American dream was on the verge of two months away. It was in March. In less than a week, the epidemic overshadowed everything. Students and teachers have deserted the neighborhood. Since then, only the ambulances have left, hitting the avenues of Broadway and Amsterdam at a terrifying rate.
This Wednesday, May 20, it was expected that more than thirty thousand students would meet on campus. To receive my diploma, a professional master's degree in journalism known as the most prestigious in the world, I was ready to put on my sky blue toga. That same one carried, before me and my co-religionists, by former President Barack Obama, the Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the writer Jerome David Salinger… With the light breeze of this month of May, the plunge into the azure tide of students would have been pleasant. With my straightened hair and my sky blue cap on my head, I would have kept my tears behind my sunglasses until the first notes of the national anthem.
American dream
Euphoric, I would have kissed the friends of my class. Triumphant, I would have shaken hands with the Dean of Journalism School, Steve Coll, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Nostalgic, too. In my head, images of my childhood in the Beaujolais region would have paraded through the mid-1990s. The grape harvests, in summer, to buy me a brand agenda, beautiful Oxford paper. The cries of the winemakers: "At the top, at the soup!" "
America came to me when Columbia reached out to me with a scholarship
My father, a former Aurès shepherd who became a worker repairing washing machines. Sadness in exile. My mother’s hands thickened by cleaning hours in corporate offices. The pain, always, in his right arm. The hard work to offer us some private lessons in mathematics and for the six children to become journalists, doctors, lawyers. From America we wouldn’t have dared to dream.
She came to me when Columbia reached out to me with a scholarship. A graduate of Sciences Po Lyon, I had already been a journalist in Paris for seven years, but I had interrupted my career when a first child arrived, then a second. I tried my luck, without much hope and despite the exorbitant cost of studies, ignoring that American universities can be very generous with their students with attractive profiles.
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