Paris bulletin 4 2015

Tuesday 26 May, 8 pm. Concert in homage to Pierre Brossolette, Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, Jean Zay.

The evening before the  ‘panthéonisation’ (the placing in the Pantheon) of these four figures of the Résistance, there was a concert in the quadrangle of the Sorbonne. At the front were seats for those most closely associated with the people being honoured. The rest of us stood or sat on the paving stones. The setting sun touched the dome of the Sorbonne, the soldiers stood smartly to attention behind the flag-draped coffins, the singing and the readings lifted your heart. This was a rare and precious opportunity to reflect on virtue, that word which the dictionary defines as ‘moral excellence’, whose roots are to be found in the Latin virtus, one meaning of which is ‘courage.

Saturday 6 June 10.30 am, Carrefour de la Chapelle: I am on my way to the gare du Nord, to book train tickets. The sun is high in a pure blue sky and the temperature is rising fast.

There are police everywhere, at the crossroads of la Chapelle, at the metro entrance, in the little parks beside the boulevards. I remember that this is the week the Mairie and Police have chosen to clear the tent village under the metro on the boulevard. The clean-out is evidently well underway.  

I am stuck in a queue at the station for nearly an hour. By the time I am on my way back there are more police than ever, as well as seven of those dark blue Gendarmerie vans, one behind the other at the traffic-lights.  In piles by the railings, there are also heaps of possessions: clothes, shoes, unidentified boxes and rolled-up sleeping bags. I walk up to where the camp was. The tents have gone. The lives of 360 people have been packed up and carted off and where they were has been hosed down, wiped clean. Order is restored. The area is now encased in a shroud of white netting, completely impenetrable unless you equip yourself with a pair of shears and slice your way through.

                                              the emptied space behind the gauze

                                         Life goes on, impromptu barber's shop under the trees             

The police with their truncheons and their guns aren’t actually doing anything. They don’t need to. Just by being there they are doing what’s needed: ‘keeping the lid on what might get explosive’ some might say, or from a different perspective, ‘intimidating by sheer force of numbers’. I ask one of them what’s happened to the people who were in the camp.

“Ils ont été relogés, madame.”

“Où ça? A Paris ou ailleurs?”

“A Paris, et ailleurs.”

Same day, 5.35 pm, Esplanade Nathalie Sarraute. Bob’s Bake Shop has acquired deck-chairs for its clientele. Most of them are in use. All the tables at les Petites Gouttes cafe are full. There’s a crowd round both of the table football games they’ve installed and music pumping out from indoors. There’s a happy, summer party atmosphere, helped along by more music from further down the street where one of the local associations is holding an afternoon fiesta of some kind.

This time I am on my way to the marché. As in the morning, there are clusters of police stationed up and down the esplanade, chatting, watching, waiting. I go up to a policewoman who happens to be standing on her own.

“Bonjour, Madame,” I say (because courtesy demands that you start with a bonjour), “Est-ce que vous pouvez me dire pourquoi la police est ici en si grand nombre?” 

She barely looks at me and moves away with her walky-talky going. I wait, assuming (in my naivety), that she will answer my question once she’s finished her call. But I am not in England where it would be unthinkable for a policeman asked a polite question by a member of the public, not to give you at least a semblance of a civil reply. It doesn’t work like that in France. In France the police are trained not to answer irritating people like me. So she doesn’t.

I go over to another group of policemen and I ask my question again, having first said that I have tried to get an answer from their colleague who has chosen not to reply. They look at me as if I’m something the dog’s brought in and eventually one of them says.

“Mais madame, vous savez très bien pourquoi nous sommes ici. La raison est là, derrière vous, sur le trottoir Les migrants. Ceux qui étaient à la Chapelle.”

And then I realise that the crowd he’s pointing to, lying and sitting on the pavement in the sunshine, or queuing up for sandwiches and drinks, isn’t just more people like those I’d passed enjoying a quiet Saturday afternoon with friends over a beer at Bob’s Bake Shop or les Petites Gouttes. These are the homeless being fed sandwiches by kindly volunteers before the vans arrive to take them off to the centres de détention, to the airports and other exit points.

Where next?

I saw them in the end, and I spoke to some of them too. But what I took home with me - along with my shopping bag full of fresh fish, farm-reared, free-range chicken, cherries, artichokes and a botte de radis - was their invisibility.

So perhaps it is, when a cruise ship sails grandly on in the Mediterranean, passing a rubber dinghy full of Franz Fanon’s Damnés de la terre.

Sunday 7 June, 9.30 pm, rue Marx Dormoy. The street erupts in a frenzy of tooting cars and flag-waving. The lights change and more cars belt past, their bonnets plastered with the posters of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, HDP. They're coming in from the suburbs to the north of Paris, Turkish Kurds shouting their triumph, their joy, up and down the street: parliamentary representation for the first time ever (about 80 seats out of 550 is the tentative projection).

Live here in the north of Paris and you feel in your very bones, the porosity of the city, the restless searching for 'something better'.

 

Paris bulletin 3 2015

Since I left here in early April spring has sprung and the blackbirds are now rushing about feeding their babies in the bushes on the roof garden to the left of my kitchen window. I’m sure ‘rush’ is the right verb to use: buds to blossom, babies to fledglings, warmth to heat (the meteo predicts temperatures of 32 degrees down south today). But what hit me hardest on my return three days ago was a different kind of rush: the brutal, don’t-look-you-in-the-eye kind, and the noise and dirt that both bring with them. I am dismayed.  Has it got worse in the month I’ve been away? Is it because I’ve come from the peace of the countryside - not entirely litter-free it has to be said, but pristine compared to what stirs round my feet here when I go out?

There is a new poster on the billboards: ‘350 tonnes de mégots (cigarette butts) ramassées chaque année dans les rues de Paris’. It’s true that smokers treat the pavements like a giant ashtray but they aren’t the only culprits. I watched a group of young people waiting for a bus out at the Bois yesterday. They were passing a large bottle of Coca-Cola between them. When the bus came they tossed the empty bottle on the ground and got on. I said nothing to them and neither did anyone else. What should one do in such a situation?

The encampment of tents under the overhead metro line, mentioned in a previous bulletin, has got bigger. The numbers of men selling shoes and belts and ear phones and fresh, but wilting, coriander and mint, and ‘Marlborough, Marlborough, Marlborough’ cigarettes has spread like a rash down the street from the crossroads. Yesterday on my way back from the shops I saw a man sweep the litter carefully through the railings surrounding the metro-line encampment. The wind caught it and lifted it across to add to the heap against the railings on the far side of the street.

The city fathers would probably be outraged at this image of Paris as hardly better than a litter-strewn bidonville. After all they spend huge amounts every year clearing camps like the one on the boulevard, sending people back across the border to where they’ve come from (or anywhere as long as they’re ‘not here’), encouraging everyone to use the bins and the public toilets, and deploying a fleet of trucks to clear up the stuff we throw out.

Fortunately the Paris I am describing is not the image most tourists will take away from their stay, although they probably will remember the queues outside the main ‘attractions’ (Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Invalides, Musée d’Orsay...) and the press of people in front of the iconic statues and paintings. But would be dishonest not to talk about what it’s like to live in one of the most impoverished, densely populated arrondissements. That’s why this is not a ‘where to buy the best baguette/croissant/olive oil... in Paris’ kind of blog. There are plenty like that on the web, most of them written by visiting Americans for whom Paris seems to figure largely as a shopping destination.

Thinking that I needed to retrouver mon équilibre, I decided to take the 43 bus across to Bagatelle yesterday afternoon. The bus takes you from the Gare du Nord via the Porte Maillot to Neuilly, ‘ville fleurie’ on the outskirts of the city. One metro-bus ticket, price approximately £1 at current exchange rates, gets you all the way. Public transport remains one of Paris’s great success stories, and is set to get even better with the new tramways.

The swathes of spring bulbs are long gone but the flowering shrubs are at their peak and the famous allée des pivoines (peonies) will be at its best in a fortnight I’d say. It’s worth a visit just to see that incredible border, every clump a different variety. Entry is free until early June.

 

My attachment to Bagatelle goes back to my earliest times in Paris, with my guide and mentor Madeleine Mezeix, English teacher at the time at the lycée Condorcet. Strange to think that had she been alive now she might have taught my grandson who was a student there until last year. Madeleine lived in a rented flat on the rue de Castellane, very close to the Printemps department store. While I was living here in the winter of my nineteenth year, I went every Tuesday evening to work on my French in that sixth-floor flat, with its gently sloping floors, its art-deco sofas and chairs. The evening started with a meal – always the same: endives au jambon, followed by pommes au four. Afterwards I laboured over a prose translation under the dim light of the reading lamp on her desk.

Autres temps, autres moeurs, you could say.

Spring is here but nothing nice is growing in the English political garden, or the French one for that matter. Parisians have been out on the streets once more while I was away, marching against ‘la loi sur le renseignement’, the French equivalent of what the newly unshackled Theresa May is going to introduce in the UK: the aptly-named Snooper’s Charter, which will bring about a massive increase in the state’s surveillance of our private lives.

On the suggestion of a dear friend I am re-reading Orwell’s 1984. It never felt more real, more relevant, than it does now.

 

Paris bulletin 2 2015

Tuesday 15 March: I am sitting on someone's gravestone in the heart of the Père Lachaise cemetery. The sun is beating down through a thin film of Paris pollution. It is very warm. There is no one else about, only the chirrup of birds getting on with life among the dead and decaying, the distant roar of a plane, the even duller hum of the city.

Somewhere not so far below me there must be coffins or the remnants of coffins, mouldering away to dust. Why I wonder would anyone want to be buried inside one of these vaults, under one of these weighty sépultures? Is it a comfort to know that even dead, you will still have a roof over your head? I scrape off the moss on the lettering and see I've been sitting on la Famille Plessil.

Elsewhere, but still intra muros, a different kind of gathering-in is in place. Where once there were mattresses, pushed out of sight during the day under the métro aérien on the boulevard de la Chapelle, now there is a village of tents. I am out with my camera in my bag one morning. I cross the road to speak to one of the ‘residents’.

 

“Vous parlez français?” he shakes his head. “anglais?” he shakes his head again and points to the camera. “No photos,” he says. I have already taken a couple of pictures from the other side of the road but I put the camera away and ask him who is providing the tents. “No, no,” he repeats, politely but firmly. A woman shouts across to me, pointing to herself. “Sri Lanka,” I hear her say. She is nursing a tiny baby.

No quiet alleyways here, no lasting testaments to long lives and prosperity. The traffic flows in fits and starts on either side of the encampment, the  metro rumbles overhead.

Friday 20 March. What we’ve learned to call a ‘spike in pollution’ (un pic en français) has thrown a grey film over us since the middle of the week. Anne Hidalgo, maire de Paris, has asked the government to instruct the police to enforce ‘la circulation alternée’ and to let people travel for nothing on public transport for the duration of this particular episode. She doesn’t have the power to make this happen herself. So far central government, in the person of the Minister, Ségolène Royale, has refused her demands. Despite the fact that Hidalgo is responsible for overseeing the living conditions of the citizens of Paris, there is nothing she can do except put in place an hour of free autolibre, a day of free vélibre and free parking for residents. Just one more example of the deadening effect of France’s over-centralised, unresponsive state.

Saturday 21 March: Radio France is on strike for the third day. Yesterday 800 Radio France employees confronted their PDG, Mathieu Gallet, in the main hall of the newly renovated Radio France building. By all accounts it was a tense and disputatious meeting. Gallet threatened to walk out several times.

The salon du Livre is on at the Porte de Versailles. The Orsay reports huge numbers attending the Bonnard exhibition, the same goes for the recently re-opened musée Picasso, the David Bowie at the Philharmonie and les Bas-Fonds du Baroque at the Petit Palais. Spring is coming and Paris, Ville Lumière, Ville de la Révolution, is doing what it’s done for centuries – taking on (taking down?) the powerful while simultaneously flaunting its beauty, its wealth, its creativity and culture.  

Why then does it feel this time so precarious, so aléatoire? As if the polluting haze is not only physical but civilisational? When I’m out in the late afternoon the sun is ‘a wound, a boiling tropical eye’, as Hilary Mantel puts it in her novel, ‘A Place of Greater Safety’, that novel which charts the beginning of the French Revolution but reads like a commentary on our current times. We are on the brink of the departmental elections. The spectre of Front National intolerance and crypto-fascism stalks the land.

 

Paris bulletin 1 2015

A bright morning in mid-February and I set out, up the hill from the flat to my branch of the Société Générale on the boulevard Barbès. I am hopeful that today I will manage to close my account there. Like the act itself, the verb I need is nothing so simple as fermer. I learn from the dark-suited, unsmiling  conseillère behind the desk that what I want to do is either  clôturer mon compte ou – mieux encore - le résilier. So there you have it. It’s taken me two visits so far. Third time lucky or, j’espère que la troisième fois sera la bonne, which is nothing like as neat a phrase in French as it is in English.

I’ve been back in Paris a matter of a few weeks since my long annual trip to California. And in between I’ve been in the air again, the second time to Andalucia where the vegetation and the architecture is so strongly reminiscent of southern California it’s positively disorientating. Except that you don’t have men shepherding flocks of goats over the hills in So Cal – or not that I’ve seen – and, like so much else in that rich state, the orange trees are privately owned, not planted by the municipality to shade the streets.

Now here I am on my own turf again, more than a month after the hideous, nation-shaking events of 7^th January. What has changed? In some ways superficially not much. There are many more armed soldiers patrolling the stations and standing outside ‘sensitive venues’ but the gare du Nord which is the station I go through most often, has always had its quota of camouflage-clad men carrying sub-machine guns.

Today I pass a posse of police at the square Léon. They’ve erupted from a car and are patting down a couple of black guys, arms raised against the wall. By the time I’ve got to the far end of the garden they’re back in their cars and the boys are free to go, though where to when you’ve got nothing to do and no money to do it with is another question altogether.

I see that the police station in the Goutte d’Or is now barricaded off, so pedestrians like me have to step out into the street to go by. The two women officers standing guard outside are armed with more than their customary pistols. So much for building closer links with the community – from the other side of a metal fence is all.

On the radio it’s a different matter. There the ‘issues’ raised by Charlie - la laïcité, l’exclusion sociale, l’antisémitisme, l’Islam intégriste – all those and more are constant and recurring points of debate and conversation. And when I go into the 19^th arrondissement where there is a sizeable Haredi Jewish community, I see pairs of soldiers, outside the kosher shops, some of the primary schools and, signalling by their presence, the unmarked entrances to synagogues.

There’s no one guarding the mosques round here though and not a sign of a uniform or a gun outside the Institut des Cultures d’Islam on the rue Stephenson. The door swings open freely to anyone who cares to enter. Once I’ve successfully closed my account that’s where I’m headed.

I want to have a look at the exhibition, ‘Cherchez l’Erreur’, a series of photographs by six women artists: Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Gohar Dashti, Shadi Ghadirian, Tanya Habjouqa, Nermine Hammam, Raeda Saedeh - and a torrent of a poem, ‘We Teach Life, Sir’ by Rafeef Ziadah, shown on a small video screen on the second floor.

I am not disappointed and neither, I think, would you be if you could go. The exhibition is on until 19th April so try to see it if you are in Paris. Why? Because the photos are good in their own right, and because they tell a different story from the dominant one of the present. They tell a story women in the Middle East are perhaps best placed of all to tell: of the way in which war and displacement have wormed their way into the fabric of everyday life in that region of the world, of the distortions of the media accounts of these wars – because for now there are many, even though they may all merge into one, and show more and more signs of doing so.

There is irony, dark humour and a dogged determination to survive, to hold on, in the images. All the complexity of that region’s cultural, political, civilisational challenges is contained in a few frames: the situation of women, how one lives a meaningful  life in the desperate confinement of the ruins of Gaza,  the disastrous interventions of the US and its western allies, the failure of the so-called Arab springs and underpinning it all, and doing very nicely thank you, the death-delivering global arms industry.

Occupied Pleasures Tanya Habjouqa 

 

 

 

Penelope - Raeda Saadah

 

Nil Nil - Shadi Ghadrian (and below)

 

 

So where does 'Je suis Charlie' fit in all of this? In the fact of the exhibition itself - that these women can show their work in a publicly-funded building with no fear of the consequences for themselves or their families. A priceless asset in the times we live in. 



 

Paris bulletin 8 2014

Le onze novembre, a bright, clear day. I picture all those hundreds of uniformed men and women milling around Westminster, and the old men in wheelchairs, the gnarled old men their chests heavy with medals, their legs useless. Saluted and saluting.

Living where I do in Paris, I have no sense of how the remembrance of ‘the Great War’ - the war that was supposed to end all wars but only set the scene for all the others since - is marked officially. I’d have to go down to the Champs Elysees, not far as the crow flies, but as I feel today, a world away.

Until the end of this month there is an exhibition of Great War photographs at the Gare de l’Est - portraits of the last living poilus (squaddies), images of landscapes and objects, taken by Didier Pazery. It’s both inside the station itself and on the railings outside that station which, more than any other Parisian station was the bridging point between the fronts to the north and east and ‘back home’.



Among the photos is one of an old Senegalese man. He’s standing outside his home, a tin- roofed hut with grass walls.

Abdoulaye N'Diaye outside his home

 

There is text alongside each of the photos. Here is an extract from what his says:

Abdoulaye N’Diaye, born 1894, conscripted into the French Army in 1914. Wounded in Belgium but continued to serve in both the Dardanelles and the Somme.

“I was woken at dawn. “Soukoundou, the son of your uncle has been forced to join the French army. I didn’t hesitate. The next day before sunrise I saddled my horse and I went to find Soukoundou. I got him released in exchange for signing up myself. My uncle and his family had always been very good to me. I was strong and fit.

“When we got to Thiaroye, near Dakar they put us into uniform and then we were taken by boat to Morocco where we carried out a number of missions. One day they told us that we were to go to the white man’s country (le pays des blancs) where a war had broken out. I never saw a white man, until I was in my teens.

“The white man’s country was deserted. The Germans had blown up a bridge so we had to cut our way through the undergrowth like we would do in the bush. That’s when I found the body of a woman. She was dead but her little baby was still at her breast. The horror of that sight has stayed with me to this day. It was my first corpse but I saw many more after that.

“France forgot us once we weren’t needed any more. France had promised that we would be recognised, that our efforts would be rewarded, our losses would be recompensed, but she didn’t keep her promise for years after and when she did, the pension we were paid was very small.”

At the end of last month I went to see ‘Of Men and  War’ (directed by Laurent Becue-Renard), in le cinema du Pantheon at the top rue Victor Cousin in the Quartier Latin.

                                                               

 It’s a little over two hours long and documents a series of therapeutic sessions with a group of American veterans (from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam), and some interviews with their partners/families. Mostly you’re with these angry, depressed, incoherent men. Big strong men, sheltering behind dark glasses, talking, shouting, weeping, cursing the horrors that they can’t dislodge from their minds – the dismembered comrades, the eviscerated babies, the body parts to bag up, the explosion that rips apart the armoured car ahead of yours ...

The Sarajevo wind

leafs through newspapers

that are glued by blood to the street;

I pass with a loaf of bread under my arm.

The river carries the corpse of a woman.

As I run across the bridge

with my canisters of water,

I notice her wristwatch still in place.

Someone lobs a child’s shoe

into the furnace. Family photographs spill

from the back of a garbage truck;

they carry inscriptions:

Love from... love from... love...

There’s no way of describing these things,

not really. Each night I wake

and stand by the window to watch my neighbour

who stands by the window to watch the dark.

Goran Simić  

(English translation David Harseni)

.. if in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest,

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Dulce et Decorum, final verse

Wilfred Owen

Paris bulletin 7 2014

This September bulletin brings a new contributor to the site: Pamela Shandel.

In her own words, Pamela is  a “portrait, events, art, nature, and everything else photographer.  Her photos have been published in magazines and books and on book covers. She has had photo shows.  Her shooting style has been published in a lively history of Las Vegas.  She belongs in different ways  to New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Paris.”

Welcome, Pamela and more about her in the next bulletin

It’s not a bad idea, after a long absence, to start with what is close at hand, familiar. So I’ve been just round the corner, to the esplanade Natalie Sarraute, the newest playground of the young families in this part of the 18th arrondissement. The esplanade is where the eco-friendly youth hostel I’ve mentioned in a previous bulletin, is located, and the Vaclav Havel public library. It is also where we now have Bob’s Bake Shop selling diner kind of food and ‘artisanal coffee and cold-pressed organic juice’. The Bake Shop is right next door to a self-proclaimed ‘concept store’ selling ‘streetwear’, although for the life of me, I can’t see what kind of street those sort of clothes belong in. Not one I’ve ever been on but then I don’t know what a concept store is either, any more than I really know what ‘artisanal coffee’ is.

 

 

What is much more remarkable about the esplanade Natalie Sarraute than the kinds of shops and eateries that have opened up, is the speed with which it has been colonised by its local families. In the space of a few, mostly sunny months, the outdoor serving area of les Petites Gouttes café has spread across the esplanade like an algae bloom over clear water. At present there are more tables outside than in, although doubtless as the evenings get cooler that will change again. It isn’t cheap by local standards (14 euros for a burger and frites) but there’s lots of space for children with trottinettes and skate-boards. In the way it’s used it has become another striking example of the merging together of private and public space/life that is such a feature of big cities nowadays.

A little further afield now. I was in Allen’s Market (33 rue du Chateau d’Eau , one of the Joe Allen group, the original at 326 W 46th St, New York City), at the end of the week. A wedding party had taken over the mezzanine and the staff were kept busy filling glasses and popping corks. That gave me time to study the condiments and bottles on the bar, among which, one from the Groovy Food Company, ‘premium agave nectar low GI organic sweetener from the finest blue webber agarve plant. Helps you kick your ‘bad sugar’ cravings’. GI = glycemic index in case you didn’t know (I didn’t).

US culture has fascinated and seduced Parisians for far longer than I’ve been coming to Paris or living here. There are various well-established American-style cafes, a few of them actually calling themselves ‘diners’ and one of the oldest of them, Harry’s New York bar, off the avenue de l’Opera, with a strongly nostalgic pre-WW2 feel to it. There are Subway outlets all over the city and even a couple of Californian-style food trucks doing the rounds: le Camion qui fume and Cantine California.  None of these sets out to break new culinary ground, except perhaps in the matter of low GI sweeteners. They give their clients what their clients expect from a US take-away: burgers, ribs, tacos, cornbread, cheesecake, cupcakes and brownies (scarcely a lettuce leaf in sight).

 

The all-American sandwich  (image Pamela Shandel)

 

What’s new - to me at least - is the trend in French cafés towards providing those kinds of food, quite often ‘instead of’ rather than ‘as well as’, a native French alternative, for example, an assiette de crudités or a croque monsieur. The American star may be setting in the west but the taste for barbecued beef slathered in ketchup and mayo is still as strong as ever.

So finally, back to l’esplanade Nathalie Sarraute where employees of the still publicly-owned Eau de Paris were out in force last Saturday, to convince the 18^th arrondissement of the health benefits and ecological bon sens of drinking water straight from the tap. You might think we all know that by now, like we all know about that terrifying mass of microscopic plastic particles, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirling round in the North Pacific Ocean, being ingested by animals and birds, killing them and their off-spring in vast numbers. Apparently not.  Parisians are still responsible for in excess of 500 kilos of déchets per person per year, two-thirds of it made up of plastic bottles and other packaging.

The Big Climate March is about to happen in New York (21^st September) and in other cities around the world. Time’s running out for all of us. Assez de paroles – il faut passer à l’acte!

 

Paris Bulletin 6 2014

To start the next round of bulletins, a few photos taken on a warm September Sunday in my neighbourhood. Température: 25 degres, ciel doucement voilé, ambiance de détente, trottinettes à go-go, jeux de boules, de quilles, pique-niques au bord du canal. Le pré fleuri du jardin d’éole étend ses couleurs.

I keep the windows wide open all night and the full moon rides high.