Caution: You are about to mark the following comment as spam:

Are you sure you want to do that?

Yesterday I wrote about Africa Paradis, a Béninois film that depicts the migration en masse of down-on-their-luck Europeans to richer African pastures. This morning, the Europe edition of the Wall Street Journal ran a cover story with a similar plotline. First- and Second-Generation Françaises are “returning” to their parents’ homelands, the article says, in search of better job opportunities — and, interestingly, to escape systemic discrimination.

As France’s economy slowed in subsequent decades, however, unemployment rose, and hasn’t dipped below 7% for the past quarter of a century. In recent years, the jobless rate for immigrants has been around twice that of non-immigrants. Now that France is in recession, the first jobs to go are often those filled by minorities.

…. [In Morocco] Life can be better than in France. Surveys show that in France, applicants for a job have around a third the chance of getting a reply if their name sounds Arab or African as they do with a more traditional French name.

France is not alone in wanting to ignore race and ethnicity as markers. “You are all French now,” the state says. “And Frenchness transcends race.” But when your skin, your name, and the way others treat you tell you otherwise, what are you to believe? The (neo-)colonizer / (ex-)colony tango makes navigation particularly tricky.

I’ve had a few 1st and 2nd Gen friends move “back” over the years. It started happening when I was still in grade school — Marisa was 12 when she left her parents in Canada to go live in Portugal — and I have conversations with friends, now in their 20s and 30s, who want to live closer to their roots. There are new opportunities for them in China, in India, in Italy, in Morocco, and at one time, in Zimbabwe.

I can’t say this is a recent trend, but I do know that the tug to go “back home” pops up at one time or another. Goodness knows it’s crossed my mind.

The year is 2033, and the story goes like this:

Europe has become underdeveloped due to acute economic and political crisis while Africa has experienced thriving development.

Olivier, an unemployed engineer, and Pauline, an unemployed teacher, are struggling to scrape by in France. They decide to migrate to the United States of Africa but are denied entry visas, and so try to sneak in by way of a smuggler.

Their lives are turned upside down as they face the grim realities of illegal immigration — arrest, detention, threat of deportation, economic exploitation, etc.

I don’t need to tell you how badly I want to see this film. It seems like fairly straight-forward satire, part of a table-turning “what if?” tradition of storytelling, but I’m still fascinated. Has anyone out there watched it?

One YouTube commenter points out that this scenario is already becoming reality, as many Portuguese wait overnight at the Angolan embassy for papers — but somehow I doubt my olive-toned bredren are being roughed up by Luandan police on arrival.

It’s been quiet here in recent weeks. I’ve been putting thoughts to paper, watching, listening, traveling.

Your hotel is in a very bad area. The worst in Athens, our cabbie warned. “A lot of Pakistani,” he said. “It’s like Chinatown.” This was the first lesson in insider/outsider politics. Vathi Square was the outside — full of foreigners and all the ills that came along with them. Drugs. Prostitution. Violence.

First up was a week-long exploration of Greece, bouncing from Samos to Patras before finally settling in Athens for a few days. I met Iranians, Somalis, Palestinians, Afghans, and others who were living in immigrant detention centers, in port-side camps, and in overcrowded urban slums. Most of them had paid a fortune to smugglers and traveled for months for the chance to cross Turkey into Europe. For the chance to get roughed up by Greek police, to live in squalor, to risk their lives sneaking aboard freight carriers and ferries bound for other countries where they would again be roughed up, live in squalor, risk their lives, etc.

That was early April. Later that month, I was on another plane, south-bound via Dubai.

As I write this, I’m snug in a plane seat, flying right over the neutral zone. If I cup my hands around my head and press my face close up to the window, I can see stars. A carpet of stars I’ve never seen from these skies. Gaza is to my right, somewhere in the unseeable distance. Soon, we’ll fly over the horn. Then over Mozambique. Hours from now I’ll walk the streets in Johannesburg.

In Jozi, the details were different, but the story was the same — the unwanted masses, come to escape tyranny and torture, to escape poverty and disease, searching for that better life that so many of us are promised exists out there for us. But as foreigners, they’re classified as makwerekwere, not to be trusted, and subject to intense systemic and personal discrimination. They have settled into makeshift township slums and taken over entire sections of downtown Johannesburg, en masse, because there’s less danger of getting attacked if you’re in a group. Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Swazis, different faces for the same makwerekwere.

Of course, the xenophobic attacks of last year were not entirely about xenophobia, but that element cannot be denied.

When you mix xenophobia with the desperation of locals suffering under joblessness and economic crises — particularly, in the case of South Africans, a long-time lack of access to basic services and housing — you get a recipe for disaster. And by no means is this restricted to Europe and Africa. This piece in the Wall Street Journal, about Immigrant VS Local job-hunting tensions in Tennessee, gave me chills when I read it today.

I’ve been writing about my experiences in both Greece and South Africa, and can’t stop thinking about the wider implications, the parallels, the patterns. I also can’t help thinking of the kids I grew up with and their families. Had they stayed behind a little longer in Zimbabwe, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, this might have been their fate. Had their luck been a little off, they could have found themselves in the arms of the Greek Coast Guard, or on the receiving end of a frustrated township mob.

But of course, there’s still time for all that. All we need is one spark — and right now there is no spark more potent than that of economic hardship and the competition for work.

(Boom.)

Un monde étrange avec son langage, ses musiques, son goût pour la violence, où l’on brûle les voitures après les avoir volées et où les centres commerciaux forment le décor et la cible les émeutes urbaines.

There’s something about assimilation that has always struck me as violent. It’s a colonization of self, isn’t it? No one is invading your territory, but as they welcome you onto theirs (reluctantly), a list of prerequisites comes attached. Speak our language. Adopt our dress. Bend your cuisine. Adhere to our norms.

I couldn’t tell you what it feels like to have one particular way of life or culture imposed, because it didn’t quite happen that way for me. Maybe if someone had told me how to behave, which flag to carry, which team to root for, I wouldn’t be so patchwork. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt adopted by so many peoples.

Le rejet par la société des enfants de la seconde génération immigrée peut conduire à l’apparition d’une nouvelle forme de communautarisme. Celle-ci est le fait de sujets socialisés par l’ecole qui ont adopté le genre de vie des jeunes de leur milieu social et de leur generation. Malgré cette intégration culturelle, se manifeste le sentiment d’une identité distincte, construite en réaction à l’expérience de la xenophobie. Le retournement du stigmate en revendication identitaire, le fait de s’affirmer avant tout Arabe ou “Black,” quand on est Français, et qu’on a établi tous ses repères dans la société française, s’apparente moins au retour à la difficulté de vivre simultanément la réalité de l’intégration culturelle et la ségrégation sociale.

The quotes are from “La peur des banlieues” by Henri Rey. It was one of the first books I read when I moved to France in September, and was a harsh and ugly introduction to the mentality behind segregation, laïcité (state-enforced secularism), class divides, and racism. I hated it, but I read the whole thing. It is about insiders and outsiders in the most literal sense — if you are a true and well-to-do Parisian, you live within the city’s borders; if you do not belong, you are banished to the outskirts. Ban-lieue, the lieue de ban, place of exile.

La peur des banlieues, c’est encore la peur de l’etranger et, pour être plus précis, de l’Africain, Arabe d’abord, Noire ensuite, même quand il est Français depuis quelques générations ou quant il vient des départements français d’outre-mer. Refoulés d’une histoire coloniale ponctuée d’épisodes tragiques, la crainte et le rejet de l’étranger marquent de leur empreinte une tradition, peur revendiquée mais coriace, de notre culture nationale.

I had never heard of the principle of laïcité before I moved to France. In a part of the world formerly dominated by the Church, it makes perfect sense — a separation of politics and public life from religion. But holidays still revolve around Christian feast days and saints, and on Sundays, the Lord’s day, you’d be hard-pressed to find too many points of commerce open beyond the most tourist-heavy districts. Pesky details! Under this principle of secularism, the people of France are protected from discrimination and religious oppression. Unless, of course, you’re Muslim. In which case, you, your scarf, your skin, your body are enemy number one.

One arm beckons in a show of welcome. The other holds a stick, in waiting, lest you forget where you belong. The borders framed by flesh and bone are the most complex of all.

Yesterday I saw a woman crouch between two parked motorcycles on my street, lift up her skirts, and pee.

This afternoon it was a little boy at a bus stop across the way. As his mother fussed with his baby sister, fastening the pink straps of her stroller, he unzipped the front of his pint-sized pants and peed onto the sidewalk. His four-year-old urine mixed with the rain.

City as toilet. Even with so many free public potties dotted throughout Paris, I’ve still seen more street peeing in my time here than anywhere else I’ve been in the western world.

Public peeing knows no race, no age, no class. It knows only desire.

The town’s hygiene workers have to clean an average 56,000 sq metres of urine-splashed surfaces per month — a figure that rises to 65,000 in summer.

The highest penalty for urinating in public was dealt to Pierre Pinoncelli, a Frenchman who was fined 45,122 euros (£31,400) in 1998 for relieving himself into artist Marcel Duchamp’s modern art urinal, called Fountain — said to be worth £1.9 million.

He described his “attack” as a surrealist act.
[Source]

Parisians have battled the public pipi for years. First, there were the pissoirs — open-air urinals, geared mainly toward male offenders. Next came the Sanisette — a multi-purpose, self-cleaning WC, mostly free and happily open for use by men, women, children, bums and tourists alike.

Yet despite their ubiquity, these public loos have not deterred even the most casual of urinaters. Paris is their turf, and it is there to be marked. They may not own their homes, have gardens or access to green spaces, but the sloped streets — yellow trickling downhill — are theirs.

Between the hours of 4 and 10 pm, the traffic below my window is especially bustling. Buses, low to the ground and packed, labouring up the Clignancourt hill. Scooters slipping between cars and sidewalk, cyclists, soundsystems, children, drunkards, hoods, shoppers, baguette-chompers, chicken-roasters, crepe-makers. People making dinner, no curtains to protect my neighbours’ spacious, classy apartments from view as they flit about from room to room. Home. Arms dangling from balcony railings, smoke breaks, watching the scurrying or slowed-down bodies below in between drags.

Something like 15 years ago I read a scrap of a poem on the front cover of eye magazine. I have not come across it since, but the first stanza has echoed and flashed in my memory — brightly, sharply, and especially on evenings like this. The poem is called The Brave Never Write Poetry, and the poet was Daniel Jones.

The brave ride streetcars to jobs
early in the morning, have traffic accidents
rob banks. The brave have children, relationships,
mortgages. The brave never write these things
down in notebooks. The brave die & they are
dead.

I’ve been off the grid and lost in time.

All of my photos are overexposed. One week of climbing mountainsides in double-digit temperatures, and my eyes could not adjust to the brightness. Spring colours popping. Air sweet with eucalyptus. Conversations heavy.

This time, it wasn’t my accent that made me feel foreign.

There is something about wandering, lost in the rain, that is still the greatest way to get to know a place. Not so great for curly hair or suede boots, but sacrifices must be made. A slow, steady stroll. Bridge over the vast, grand cemetery. Hills must be climbed. Nooks uncovered. And at the top, where the view stretches beyond the the towers and arches to the city’s southern walls, there’s space to breathe it in.

.

I was having trouble writing. The beginning of my plot was buried deep in my chest, and I was too scared to dig it out. Troubled by an elastic deadline, a patient editor, and a paralyzing inability to press fingertips to keypad when anything I really care about is on the line. (It’s been like this for years; have not yet learned how to out-run it.) The loose topic was homeland, the specific was self, and I don’t think I got more than a few hundred (painful) words out over the course of weeks.

This entire blog started as an exercise in home-finding. That word, nowarian, the closest I’ve come.

So, CL-H suggested I write about that senator from Chicago. That guy just might be president some day, he said, and he’s a nowarian.

On June 4th, the day after Obama clinched enough delegates to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, he spoke at a session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, with the intention of assuring American Jews of his allegiances. Once more, he invoked his own story and told of how, when he was eleven, he first learned about Jewish traditions, history, and the “dreams of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds”:The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black; he was from Kenya, he had left when I was two. My mother was white and she was from Kansas, and I’d moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways I didn’t know where I didn’t know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional, and cultural identity. And I understood the Zionist idea — that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.

From here.

Part of the obsession with home and roots is tied tight with the idea of person value. Without a home, in essence, you ain’t shit.

This plays out on a streets-level; the homeless, reviled, ignored, punished, shunned and lesser. Their smells the soundtrack to an internal amongst-us exile.

And then there are the stateless. Millions of them, uprooted and kicked out through centuries. Without a home of your own, you necessarily occupy the space of another. At their mercy, at their whim. Not woven in their fabric, excluded from their power definitions.

There is this tugging question: is home to be discovered or created?

&

Are there a finite number of home-spaces in this world?

Because unless those lands are limited, I can’t see how displacing one people from their physical home to create one for yourself can ever be justified. But no, wait, that’s even worse…

Those uprooted by war, hatred, expressway construction and condo developers know you can sustain home in your head. You can carry it in your chest for generations, draw comfort from it, and point to your center, your belly, when you need a reminder. But without a home for your body, how long before that home in your heart just starts feeling heavy?

.

« That’s my house, that’s my house ! »

Moussa, 6-years-old, hopped from side to side— right foot, left foot, green shoelaces untied and muddied – pointing out the crumpling building to anyone who’d listen. But no one was listening to him, their eyes and camera lenses already stuck, enraptured, to the spectacle.

His «house» – apartment 13D, building 5 –  was folding before them.  The towers that had stood so straight and tall for decades , strong as the leanest athlete’s back, now slouched, now crumpled, boneless, toneless. The concrete, pulverized and cracking, jumped up startled from the explosions, and the towers fell sideways to the ground with a great crash! Building 4 and building 6 swayed to the same sounds. First a low boom, almost a growl, on the ground. The heavy bass shook the towers, quivering like the dashboard of a souped-up hatchback, out on the prowl on a Saturday night with the volume cranked. There was a moment of hesitation, the buildings jolted from the boom!, and bowed in unison, as though pushed. They had no other choice.

Great, dense, grey clouds of dust puffed out with a whoosh! through shattered and shattering windowpanes, a symphony of exploding, sparkling glass. Moussa swore he could smell the dust that used to be his bedroom. It smelled older than him, dank, dry. There were chemical smells he did not understand and could not place. He swore he could feel it in his hair, coating his curls, grainy and unpleasant to touch. This one use to be his wall. This one, his kitchen. This one, his balcony, once sun-soaked, now cracked, creased, buried under concrete folds so heavy they would never again be smoothed into home.

.

… just messing around. I wanted to save it, somehow. Destruction as distraction.