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Dangereuse trilingue
jottings, gribouillages, marginalia
Chirac's glasses.
Right. The French president delivers a TV address, and what is the main information everyone reports ? Be it the blogs or several major newspapers ? On their front pages, no less, for Libération (frontpage pdf full size—link valid until tomorrow) or Le Parisien ? That M. Chirac wore glasses, just as he used to before he abandoned the practice in the 80s or so.
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The unrest here in France.
I’ve been finding it hard to write or even talk much what is going on in the housing estates around the periphery of the cities of France at the moment, the nocturnal violence and rioting that has spread from the Paris area elsewhere and even to other European countries. Most of the French bloggers I read seem to be afflicted with a similar difficulty. They tend to refer to the unrest in an elliptical style, and their opinions, if any, can only be indirectly inferred from the press quotes they post.
The reason I feel I should say something is that this is not the time for punditry, but punditry is what the news are full of: the French papers to a certain degree, but those in English overwhelmingly. The blogs are even worse, in particular the comments, varying between spite, glee, unbridled anti-French feelings, and racism.
The unrest is described as “Muslim violence”, “Intifada” (a term used in the French weekly Marianne and daily Libération as well), “civil war” and “race riots”. The last label is problematic, the second and third wrong-headed and the first abominable. This has nothing to do with religion. Yes, probably a majority of the youths who are currently wreaking havoc come from a Muslim background, and the tear-gas canister that belonged to the riot police and was thrown into a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, the place where it all started, during evening service was one of the factors that triggered the spread of the rioting. That’s the full extent of the events’ religious dimension.
Seeing burning cars on the news for what now comes close to two weeks isn’t conductive to rational analysis. I don’t watch much TV, so maybe that’s why I’m not shocked. Sad and worried, of course, but not surprised. I wonder how anyone in France with friends from an immigrant background or any kind of real-life link to the suburban housing estates can be surprised.
Jérome à Paris provides a bit of the necessary background and a fuller picture:
Just watched the evening news here. The events of last night, naturally enough, took most of the air time. Chirac spoke, saying that restoring order is the only priority right now. There was a lot of coverage in various places. Most of it showed shocked and uncomprehending populations in these cités, half “white” and half “dark”. They showed how the whole cité and the teachers came to clean up the school that was burnt overnight, and which will thus be open again tomorrow. They showed groups of citizens that occupy their local infrastructure (unarmed) simply to create a presence and show that it is valued. They showed some youth saying that they were sick to death of not finding jobs because the don’t have the right name, and expressing their anger at Sarkozy’s words; there was an interview of inhabitants (again, half white and half brown) of one cité complaining about the racism and provocation of the police.
In 20 minutes, there was not a single mention of religion. Again, these events are not motivated by religion, they are motivated by economics, and by the (correct) feeling of these youth that they are excluded from “normal” society. all they want is a job, a car and decent housing, to live their lives normally. Now a significant proportion of this underclass is indeed of Arab or African origins, and thus Muslim, but they are all French by nationality.
“Sarkozy” is of course the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy. He’s politically at the right-wing edge of Chirac’s UMP party, a tough-talking zero-tolerance guy and economically a free-market supporter; incidentally, he’s Chirac’s greatest rival. The news may have focussed on his declarations, and left aside the scenes during which he actually took the time to talk with a bunch of young people from Clichy, but still, he couldn’t have done much more to fan the flames if he had planned to. So I’ll assume this was his goal—I’m convinced he’ll benefit politically from it in the long run: small-town white France is receptive to law-and-order talk laced with racism.
Benefit from what? For this we have to step back from the question of why there was a social powder-keg ready to explode at all and go back to what sparked this mess. Because the initial events are more than just a little emblematic of the situation as a whole.
At first we have about a dozen boys aged 14 to 21 walking home from playing football, through a park that separates the richer suburb of Livry-Gargan, which has better sports fields, to their neighbourhood in Clichy. Despite high unemployment, Clichy is by no means a particularly bad place. It isn’t a lawless zone, it’s pretty quiet, and most inhabitants lead perfectly average lives. I’ve taught in a similar place, with pupils like these.
At the same time, the police receives a call about an alleged burglary on a construction site. It may have been that this break-in happened somewhere entirely different, or that some of the group did play around with bits of sheet metal that were left next to where they were walking and that a “concerned citizen” made the call, but in no practical sense was this group up to anything criminal. Lacking even the slightest grounds on which to object to the kids’ presence, the officers then decide to check their IDs. Some of them hide or run away.
Now, see, I didn’t even have any ID papers when I was 15, and I want to see the kid who takes them along when kicking a ball around. And even if one of the boys had been in the country illegally: if he was underage—and most of them were—the police couldn’t have done anything. Underage illegal aliens can’t be deported under French law. Indeed, those the police did catch were taken to the police station and let go without charges after an hour. I don’t know about you, but trips to the police station after an afternoon playing outside were definitely not part of my adolescence. Heavy-handed ID controls, the treatment of everyone as a potential criminal, are one of the major issues that separate the inhabitants of the “banlieues” from French society at large.
But back to our story. Three of those who ran away, Bouna Traoré, 15, Ziad Benna, 17, and Metin Altun, 21—the names vary quite a bit between news reports—climb over a wall and hide in a power sub-station. An electric arc develops and kills the two younger boys. The third sustains third-degree burns, but manages to climb back out and alert emergency services, families and friends. People congregate, want to know what happened. The horrific truth comes out, and rumours start flying. Did the emergency services react slowly? (It seems that no—they had to wait for the utility company to secure the power station.) Did the police “hound” the kids into their death? The mayor meets the families, the situation is tense and a few young boys take out their grief on parked cars. But all in all this is still nothing more than a tragic accident that raises some questions, old and oft-repeated questions, about policing and the relations between the authorities and the suburban youth.
Only, the next days, the news are full of reports that the two dead adolescents were fleeing the police after a burglary—young criminals who got what they deserved. The burning cars, just a handful as of yet, are already eclipsing the fact that two teenagers have died a horrible death. The prime minister and the interior minister make statements to the same effect—that there was a break-in and the police just did their job. Confusingly, in the same breath investigations into police conduct are announced. The situation remains tense, despite attempts by the city council, youth liaison staff and community leaders to calm down the enraged teens. Over the next few days, there’s also a whole lot of riot police, strip searches, tear gas, and the incident with the mosque. And the interior minister being shown on TV replying to an off-screen inhabitant of Clichy, “yes, Madame, we will clean out this scum for you”. He is fond of the imagery of cleaning out the suburban estates; he has used these terms before. If you happen to live there, you’re dirt by association.
If the politicians wanted to calm down the situation, this was the wrong approach to take. But in the beginning, I guess, they were more concerned with jockeying for position, political credit to be cashed in during the 2024 presidential election. By now, though, the rioting is spreading to the rest of the region, in particular to the neighbourhoods that are quite a bit tougher than Clichy. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people live in the housing estates around Paris: you don’t actually need that many of them to burn down a few hundred cars in a night.
Mobs on a rampage are frightening, and some have done more than wreak material damage. Stopping a bus, spraying the travellers with gasoline and setting fire to it all, for example. There were also two reports of firearms being used, bird-shot once and a high-calibre weapon another time. When I open the news, I scan it for the first report that someone died in the unrest—a rioter shot by the police, an officer or, most likely, a bystander.
Finally, a word about punditry. I’m unconvinced that this is about the “failure of the French model of integration” at all. Oh, not that I don’t find fault with it. It’s just that as intellectual exercises go, criticising a national ideology, any national ideology, is one of the easier ones. The UK, which is always held up as the opposite model, the path that France doesn’t want to go down, has rioting, too, sometimes even between communities of immigrant origin (something that is extremely rare in France); despite lower unemployment, disaffected youth isn’t unknown over there either, and as some harsh “white” UK housing estates show, skin colour and ethnic origin have nothing to do with it. No, the failures are much more tightly related to perfectly rational policies and measures. Like providing affordable, subsidised housing in all towns and not only in those that are already among the poorest in the country; reducing the rampant segregation between white and non-white, which also would help reduce the educational gap; giving more than peanuts of additional help to education in low-income areas; going tough on racism—racist employers, landlords and police above all; actively improving the representation of non-white French people in political parties, trade unions, the police (again), the school system… Admittedly, part of the last point is related to ideological mindsets, but much comes down to recruitment decisions and the creation of training facilities where they are needed.
I do hope that things calm down soon. But I also understand those who feel somewhat helpless in their attempts to dissuade the young men who are rioting, because they understand the underlying causes all too well, having themselves felt the rejection and suspicion from mainstream society. Well, and then “foutre le bordel” (“creating a disruptive mess” or “fucking up everything”, take your pick for a translation) is in a way a rather French response to social dissatisfaction. However deplorable, however inexcusable, this is not the first time in history this sort of thing has happened.
[Some editing after the initial publication.]
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Oops, Gender Nazi?
You are a Gender Nazi. Your boundary-crossing lifestyle inspires awe in your friends and
colleagues. Or maybe they’re just scared you will kick their asses for using gender-specific language. Either way, the wife-beater helps.
What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla
Via Lauren the Theory Slut at Feministe.
(But I’m really not butch at all, though I truly love ‘em. But tattoos do kindof turn me off, at least on my own body. And I had no idea who would be the best governor in some state in a foreign country, or what or who “Burning Man” is. And I prefer being no Nazi at all, thankyouverymuch.)
Je suis une femme fatale.
Oh, wow, my little Apples fantasy got picked up by Natalie Bennett on Philobiblion
in her “Friday Femmes Fatales” feature of last week. I’m extremely flattered.
As my first girlfriend once said, “D. T.,” she said—or rather, she didn’t: she used my real first name—“du bist eine Frau von Welt”.
Carnival of Feminists.
An excellent idea: There’s now a Carnival of feminist blog entries, the very first edition. A whole barrage of interesting articles. And not all from the US.
No Jeannie this weekend. (Well, for me.)
So the grand plan to send a Paris contingent to London on the occasion of Jeannie’s visit this side of the pond has failed. Michel-le-Corse-photogénique and I had been plotting on the backbenches, but circumstances conspired against us. The Eurostar offer of 100€ for a round trip for two—now that’s cheap—is only valid starting on the 11th. And to get tickets for the upcoming weekend we’d have had to shell out three times that; and only get non-reimbursable tickets for a train that leaves in the middle of Sunday afternoon.
We tried. Even contemplated passing the night under a London bridge. And, just to illustrate to what lengths the Paris denizens are ready to go, I even suffered my first real asthma attack in years on the quest for train tickets today.
So, no real Jeannie-snogs, the virtual kind will have to do. Oh, well, it’s not as if she didn’t have fun without us.
Apples.
[In: Semi-fictional prose.]
Not all nightmares are alike.
There are the regular ones, those that come to me during the night. They are crowded with faceless people or tangled masses of dead branches and feelings of physical or emotional oppression. Well, there are exceptions. This morning I woke up from a nightmare about how to spell Mississippi. Missisippi? Anyway.
Daytime nightmares are different. It’s not rare for me to get very sleepy in the middle of the day. To actually fall asleep. Maybe there’s something wrong and I ought to see my doctor about it. But she’ll just say I’m stressed or something.
So there are these unplanned naps. Ten minutes, half an hour. If you’re behaving inconspicuously no one even needs to realize you’ve nodded off.
The lost minutes are sometimes filled with another type of nightmare: loud and colourful and sensual. That’s what I want to talk about. Apples.
It happened a few days ago, in a café during the afternoon lull. I was writing, or reading a book, or maybe the place had a wi-fi hookup and I was checking out the usual web sites, when one of those sleep attacks hit. It’s really quite like a blow with a club. I start seeing double, my neck muscles turn to jelly and all noises become muffled. I was ensconced in a soft settee, in an under-lit corner of that quiet café—well, quiet except for the constant bustle and honking from the street, a big city kind of quiet—so letting myself drift off wasn’t a problem. Not that I had much choice.
I dreamt. Of women. Two former lovers; several I’ve only talked with on the Internet and don’t know in the flesh. Eight or ten of them, maybe. And they were all eating apples, large orange-yellow apples, messily, with little bits of pulp raining down on me and droplets of apple juice flying into my face.
Their apples were shiny and smooth-skinned like Granny Smiths, but reddish instead of green, resembling those new-fangled Fuji apples my greengrocer sells.
They were talking among themselves, and to me, too, and laughing and gesticulating, fingers clenched around their moist booty. I knew their names, knew who each of them was, but was reduced to being the passive target for the morsels of white apple flesh their teeth had chipped out of the curved fruit. It was sticky, wet and physical. And utterly disconcerting.
I don’t even like apples, even though I force myself to eat one once in a while. They are supposed to be good for you after all.
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