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. Translating the stories
of men and women who come from her country of birth, into the language
of her country of citizenship, Sinha's narrator finds herself caught up
in a tangle of lies and truths, propaganda and lived experience, laying
bare prejudices on all sides.
Down with the Poor! which borrows its title from a poem by Baudelaire
peers into a harsh reality and reveals with an acerbic sense of humour
the dislocated responses to poverty and desperation. Sinha's queasy view
of European asylum systems offers a deeply emotional account and morally
complex critique of the bureaucracies and mindsets upholding the status
quo. This is the story of a woman who, little by little, is contaminated
by the violence of the world.
