cicilie | antropologi.info

Existence! Resistence! …eh back in Oslo

Published on September 8, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Oslo, Post-fieldwork

4th of April 2006, from one of the many demonstrations against the new labour law

It’s almost two months since I left Paris and time is overdue to get going with the second phase of this blog. One thing is certain; one will always have Paris, but for the time being it will be a long-distance relationship, slowly withering into a mythical landscape which hopefully will help me making some anthropological sense of it. (A landscape I hope will be fuller of poetry and revolt, than social organisation, cultural artefacts and postcolonial theory :-) ).
[teaserbreak]
As some squandered drops of water unfortunately landed on my thereafter defunct laptop, the unfinished blog post from my last day in Belleville is no longer accessible. I’m now unable to get back to how I felt having my last croissant beurre and coffee at Zorba, my last walk through the street market at the boulevard and the narrow, winding streets of the hill above, my extravagant last lunch (almost raw grilled tuna [never, ever complain that something is too raw in France, if you want to keep up apparences being at least partly cultivated despite some obvious traits of the noble savage from up North]) at the local Asian/fusion restaurant. Luckily, the highlights from the conversation with the Moroccan taxi-driver on the way to the airport are still safe in my little cahier. While drinking my glass of white wine at the restaurant, I remember thinking about the expression “a heavy heart”. I was feeling it physically. Not sorrow or sadness. Just a heavy feeling in my chest.

This evening I revived some of the sentiment of being in Paris, when I saw Je suis né d’une cigogne by Tony Gatlif (Eng. wikipedia) at the cinematheque. The film is from 1998, but the themes appear to be ever-present in France the last 20 or even 30 years. The first scene in the film was a demonstration, with people carrying huge banners proclaiming Existence! Résistance! while shouting tous ensemble tous ensemble (“everybody together”) just like they did during my fieldwork. In the banlieues life was drab and the flats crammed. The unemployed protagonist was selling L’Itineraire (a local version of The Big Issue, or =Oslo), an Arab immigrants felt pas chez nous (not at home), while another replaced his son’s name Ali with Michel (“because everyone here’s called that”) while eating pork with his family (the director’s real name is Michel, and he is of Algerian Andalusian Roma origin), and an old lady guarded her last Luis XVI chair from the insensitive bailiff while claiming she knew [the socialist] Jaurès, [the anarchist and communard] Louise Michel and fought for the commune and the intellectual little Ali, after having torched his father’s car, read La société du spectacle and listened to anarchists on Radio Libertaire talking about Algeria. The characters were angry and a little bit crazy and it was all recognisable and quite French to me.

This anarchic atmosphere, the anger and revolt, is the first aspect of Paris I’ll try to describe. In the four weeks, I’ll have ready a paper for a seminar with the – oh! gosh – so romantic title “Revolutionary Paris”. But before that brief return to Paris (to intellectual – and bourgeoise – rive gauche this time, except for a guided visit to Le mur de fédérés where the last communards got shot) for the seminar, I’ll get through the final stage of the local election campaign, half a ton of monographs and anthropological literature for the seminars I teach, colder autumn days (cyclists are already wearing gloves in the morning) and perhaps some more blog posts.

4th of April 2006, from one of the many demonstrations against the new labour law

It’s almost two months since I left Paris and time is overdue to get going with the second phase of this blog. One thing is certain;…

Rainy day and interviews

Published on July 3, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, Places, Politics

It’s pouring down in Paris, and there is no sign of the heat wave that struck us a year ago. I’m stranded at the local bistro, wishing I had brought my woollen jacket. If the best thing to do when it rains like this is to cuddle up at home with a cup of tea, living alone in a hotel is perhaps one of the least pleasant things. (However, seeing all the people sleeping rough in this city, sometimes right on the pavement outside this bistro, it could have been very much worse. And I’m planning a sizzling hot fish tagine for lunch – if I just could get down to the restaurant – so I’m not complaining).
[teaserbreak]
Since my last post, I’ve done four interviews: two quite good and long ones with people I know at least a little bit and who – at least as importantly, I think – has seen me around on various venues for 6 months, and two with people who have rarely if ever seen me working. The latter were of course far shorter and less good, not due to the interviewees, but not surprisingly to the interaction and dynamic between us. My mediocre French also hinders me in creating a very constructive dialogue there and then, which could have counterbalanced the lack of confidence between two strangers. In London, I conducted interviews with three people I’d only been emailing with beforehand which resulted in excellent material. They knew I would anonymize them, and also that we probably would never meet again, so they used me a little bit like a psychologist, when telling about their experiences of growing up. The slammers can in most cases of course not be anonymized, so the interviews develop completely differently, not deviating much from their public persona. And in the cases where I know people well, both sides know there are strict limits to what I can reveal about them, and obviously also to what seems relevant to my study. One of the explicit issues in London was identity formation. Here identity is relevant as well, but only implicitly. In addition, many will say that they tell about this and that – more or less poetically expressed – in their texts.

I concentrate so hard when interviewing that I feel dizzy afterwards. In order to grasp (almost) all they are saying – often in a café that appeared calm and quiet until I find myself face-to-face with a surprisingly softly spoken slammer – I’ve realised that I scrutinise people’s face, following their mouth as if reading on their lips. Sunday, I listened to people talking for almost 6 hours – at a balcony overlooking Canal d’Ourcq in the northeast, and in a café off Rue Moufftard, in the southeast – with only a 40 minutes bikeride in-between. The morning after, I woke up feeling like I’d been drinking until the early hours. Strange.

Today, I’ll go at an end-of-the season soirée at a small bar at Barbès, where I’ll meet up early to finally do the interview I ditched (unwillingly!) at Pigalle some weeks ago. – Under the counter in this bar, a slammeuse told me, there lays a Paris Match from mid October 1961 saying nothing about the hundreds of French Algerians thrown into the Seine by the police after the peaceful demonstration the 17th (see this post). The barman had shown it to the eldery slammeuse after she had performed a text on the police chief of the time, Maurice Papon (who has such a dark record that the fact that he died peacefully in a hospital bed without having been severely punished makes certain aspects of French politics utterly incomprehensible to me). The barman showing her the magazine had moved her, she said. He in return was surely moved by her performance, although it’s nothing new that White Frenchmen also were concerned about the plight of the Algerians. (For instance, all the 9 killed by the police at metro Charonne in February 1962 had traditional French names. See this post). He can’t have been old, if he was born at all, in 1961. The magazine must thus have been laying in the bar or having been kept in his family from that time, probably in order to remember that although it mentions the demonstration, it said nothing, nothing about what really happened. Knowledge I’m sure was widespread amongst the French Algerians at Barbès at the time. This knowledge, together with the more than 40 years silencing of it, continues to live on, under counters at bars in Barbès, as well as elsewhere… “Finish with the repentance…” (as Sarkozy says – see a post or two ago), well, I don’t know if the time is due yet.

Instead of moving on to the third café with wifi (after a late breakfast in the neighbourhood, I hurried through the rain for a late lunch at picturesque and rain wet Place Sainte Marthe), I think I’ll post this now and take benefit of the surely temporary stop in the downpour to move on.

Faubourg du Temple, ground floor

Published on July 1, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Places

Yesterday, moved down four floors and around the corner, to a little hotel in a side street. My coloc also moved out, and I helped him carry down some more or less dilapidated furniture to the pavement. He said he had found it all on the street and that it would disappear immediately when we left it. It was Saturday afternoon when the street is full of people. But he was right. We stood watching in the kitchen window, as the furniture he had collected the last 3 years was carefully scrutinised and then carried away by passer-bys.

Now, I’ve just had breakfast coffee at a bistro at the ground floor from where I lived before, with a croissant and pain aux raisins, bought at my usual bakery. At practically every café, bar or bistro where they don’t serve croissants or where they’ve run out, it’s just to bring your own from the bakery 45 secs away. (Neither leaving stuff on the pavement nor picking stuff from the pavement nor bringing food with you to cafés are the done thing where I come from. Surely, it happens all the time, but you don’t do it so blatantly). Most people having a peek down on the busy street from my window where I lived until yesterday suggested that I just did my fieldwork from the windowsill. (I was thinking that lovemaking and birth are about the only crucial events I haven’t seen, but then I came to remember the flats across the street). Now, when I’ve settled for a couple of hours in the bistro on ground floor, I could say the same thing. While I’ve been sitting here, loads of (male) neighbours and shopkeepers have dropped by for a coffee or drink, discussing holidays, unemployment from Giscard d’Estaing onwards, Sarkozy, the latest terrorist attacks in England (saying “that’s what we need right now, some terrorism…”)… I’ve only been here a handful of times before, once because a slameur I interviewed suggested the place.

It’s one o’clock, Sunday. The grand slam national and first international slam poetry championship finished yesterday. I’ve got nine more days left of fieldwork, a couple of soirées and an interview almost every day (two of the appointments, I made stumbling upon people by chance taking line 2 between Belleville and Stalingrad… East Paris as well as the slam scene, is quite a small world). Ok, enough for today. Time to move on.

Choices… List of (some of) what I lost out on the last one and a half week

Published on July 1, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, Music, literature, arts...

I scribbled down this text à l’arrache a day all my plans disappeared and I was still under influence of the fieldwork fatigue. Since then, I’ve not become less fatiguée, but at least I enjoy my fieldwork again. I think actually that the change came right when I took a step back and wrote this post…
[teaserbreak]
Saturday, I skipped everything else and went to Parc Floral for the first jazz concert of the year. Last year I was there almost every weekend, either with friends or with my notebook to write up my last fieldwork adventures. I had planned to get some writing done this time as well, but when I got there I just sat down on the grass and listened to jazz for a couple of hours, being puzzled over the strange sensation of feeling my muscles slowly relaxing. What an unfamiliar feeling these days…

Saturday night was the first evening of three where I tried to go and see D’ de Kabal’s play Ecorce les peines – on the (personal) history of slavery and life in the suburbs – but moved along too slowly to get there in time. [I’ve finally seen it now after two weeks of inertia in that respect. It was well worth it and I’m already quite sure that two of his texts will end up in my thesis: one commenting on the finir avec la repentance (“finish with the repentance” concerning France’s colonial past) speech of Sarkozy the night he was elected president and the text nous, on vit là (“we, we live here”) on living in the infamous suburbs. At the theatre, I got into a conversation with a Haitian poet. Such things – going to interesting events any time I want, meeting interesting people just by chance – happen all the time in this city, and I know I’m going to miss it badly in a few weeks time… ]

Sunday, I went to Aubervilliers for the monthly Slam Caravane open mic event for writing workshops in the (same infamous) 93 suburbian department, started by the same D’ – who, by the way also initiated the slam in Louvre happening with Toni Morrison I wrote about 9 months ago. Slam Caravane was great as usual, with an enormous variety in themes and performers. To get to Le Theatre de la commune in the obviously quite deprived suburb Aubervilliers, I took the 65 bus all the way from République. On the bus I caught myself thinking, again, that there aren’t many kinds of people I don’t see in this city. I’ve only come across one Inuit, and that was on a party a few years ago (were someone gave me the unforgettable chat-up line: “Can you (vous, of course) live by your poetry?” The world is a stage and every Parisian worthy of the title knows it…). The 65 bus travels through the South Asian part of Paris, up north, and from the window I saw piles of mango crates stacked up outside the shops announcing the yellow mango season, just like at Tøyengata back in Oslo.

Monday, I ditched my interview object, as I’ve already lamented, and down the drain also went an opportunity to go with him to a radio show at an independent radio station in an art collective in the 13th Arrondissement.

Tuesday, I went to the classic slam soirée by 129H at Lou Pascalou. Earlier in the day, I had spent three hours chez une slammeuse, looking at her paintings, getting a generous pile of fanzines she had edited in the early days of Parisian slam and interviewing her. She lives in the (rather chic) suburb Les Lilas, which lies in the other end of Rue de Belleville, on the other side of the hill. So, I cycled up, up, up and crossing the ring road La Perhiphèrique in an enormous roundabout, and there I was in the little village Les Lilas. I love this kind of straight streets – or bus lines – which takes you from one side of the city to another.

Wednesday I thought I had a lot lined up. Most workshops for youth and children take place on this weekday, as school only lasts half day to leave time for cultural, sportive or religious activities in the afternoon. This Wednesday I had forsaken 2-3 other workshops in favour of one particular with pensioners and youth, and then interview some of the participants afterwards. Once in a while – at completely irregular and unforeseen intervals, it seems to me, but I have a bad suspicion that it’s only me not staying up to date…. – the workshop takes place at a local home for elderly people. So also that Wednesday. Last time I was there, one of the pensioners had been very kind and shown me the way. This time I got instructions from one working at the youth house where I thought the workshop was to take place, but he knew his knowledge of the subject was limited and wished me good luck. Of course I didn’t find the place. Instead, I got the chance of doing some participant observation on a suburban bus in the rush hour. The bus to Aubervilliers had air-conditioning, this one hadn’t. As this is the daily life of very many people, it was an interesting experience, but I don’t know if it was the best way of spending this Wednesday afternoon.

– Particularly since I had erased by accident videos of two slam sessions with people from the workshop I didn’t show up for an appointment with… Methodologically, I constantly feel trapped between being too superficial in everything I do because I try to cover it all and on the other hand having serious gaps in my data material because I don’t manage to capture everything… Put differently; should I concentrate on a few or should I try to get a comprehensive overview? Whom, in that case? As this study starts to become rather comprehensive, I’m worrying about the gaps, while the depth have worried me for a long time: I starting to know everybody but do I really know anyone well enough? –

Thursday afternoon I didn’t mess up anythingk I just lost out on several other things (when I chose to go to a recording session with a 16-yearold and his teacher from the workshop. Afterwards I did an interview with the former.) in the night, I messed up getting to D’s theatre play in time again. This time it was my bourgeois looking but utterly crappy bike that did me in.

Friday finally, had no failure. I went to the most chaotic open mic event I’ve ever been to, in a narrow one-way street behind the huge market and roundabout and shopping centre at Porte de Montreuil. Thinking about it no, I certainly didn’t fell completely up to I that day either I lefte quite rapidly after la soirée bordelique and on the way home I couldn’t understand why I had been in such a hurry.

All these choices, all these challenges for doing the right hing all the time is perhaps one of the most tiring experiences of fieldwork. I know for certain that I n the long run I’ll forget about all my little regrets like this, but when I’m standing there, having to make choices like that at least once a day (should I stay or should I go, and which of the places should I go) one could get the fatigue from less.

Saturday, I had wine for lunch (at the University of Chicago Paris branche), and in addition to the unexpected downpour, all my other plans dissolved (my other plan was a workshop followed by an open mic event with Slam o Feminin up north in Porte de Montmartre. In the evening, once more, strangely, I missed out on D’s theatre play, but got a nice bicycle ride instead and could fall asleep before midninght over Steven Feld’s Sound and sentiments (on poetics in Papua New Guinea).

Sunday was a peak in this week’s feeling of insufficiency. Instead of going to Bobibny and Canal 93 for the restitution of tall the workshops there (not only slam poetry, but also music, dance…) I chose the jazz concert in Parc Floral, and ended up stuck under a tree in a neverending torrent. I cucled home in the warm but heavy summer rain and refused to considered going out again. Afterwards, several people (amongst them the 16.years old and his prof) told me it had been interesting, even great in Bobigny…

Monday, I forgot about the slam event in the campaign for legalising cannabis (which certainly not will have any success under the present presidency), and there was another alternative event I knew about but couldn’t find the address for, and lastly I ignored a concert and open mic – I later heard from several sources that it had been excellent – with a person I shortly afterwards discovered would provide me with lots of interesting material that goes straight in to my thesis. But my evening had been of the better ones, spent with people I like listening to music (and poetry) I also like.

Today, I had a really tight schedule with got fucked up partly by me, partly by external forces: I woke up before 7 from a mouse eating noisily at my bedside table. I wanted to scream for my coloc to immediately put up the mousetrap again, but he’s always asleep at this time of the day and he’s also just got a new boyfriend so I realised it wasn’t the time. Luckily, I managed to fall asleep again, but felt far from awake when the alarmclock disturbed me later to hurry me off to an appointment at a radio station in a suburb. At Chatelet, waiting for the RER local train, I realised I had miscalculated the time and I went all the way home again. Consequently, I missed out on the planned interview with the radio presenter (and slammeur, bien sûr) as well.

My busy scheduled day trickled away, I’m not-so-ashamed to admit. The workshop I was going to attend on Batofar, the concert venue on a boat at the Seine, was cancelled due to lack of interest and organisational problems. Now, I’m content to be slacking in the shade, writing blog posts by hand, looking at other summer time slackers by the canal. It’s a warm day, the hottest since the heat wave in April. It finally feels like summer. I suddenly feel a spark of absence in my constant bad conscience for not doing enough, not making the right choices, never staying long enough, talking enough to people. I fell utterly content – almost – just sitting here with my paper and pencil… And in the evening, I’ll try once more to go and see D’s play.

I scribbled down this text à l’arrache a day all my plans disappeared and I was still under influence of the fieldwork fatigue. Since then, I’ve not become less fatiguée, but at least I enjoy my fieldwork again. I think…

In praise of the French bakery

Published on June 22, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Peculiarities

Perhaps the single best thing of living in France is their local bakery. During an ordinary week, I normally go to four different bakeries – all within 5 minutes walking distance – depending on what I want to eat. Now, I’ve just had what a particular bakery calls a pizza, but what is actually more of a quiche bottom filled well-cooked, sweet and tasty tomatoes, perfect amount of melted mozzarella and loads of basil (but without eggs as in a real quiche). They’ve got it at a quite big, old and prestigious looking bakery one block away from République. For dessert, I’ll have a spectacular green pistachio macron filled with raspberries and raspberry cream. It’s actually even better than it sounds!
[teaserbreak]
This bakery makes numerous different sandwiches and pies and salads the employees nearby drop by to buy for lunch. Most of them seem to go for a dessert as well.

Another bakery a little closer to my noisy watchtower (aka home) over rue du Faubourg du Temple, has excellent sesame or cereal baguettes. Also they have macrons which taste real pistachio and with this perfect balance between crispy and mellow texture, but these are not filled with pink raspberry cream but a heavier pistachio butter cream, I think.

At the bakery closest to home, I go for my morning croissant beurre, pain bûcheron (lumberjack bread…) and their honey soaked “Tunisian” (according to the baker) almond or pistachio cakes. On Wednesdays, they’re closed and then I go 3 minutes up the road to get an even more buttery croissant, cereal bread and a feuilleté chêvre – butter dough with a large chink of melted goat cheese, tomato sauce and herbes de provence mix on and some kind of vanilla cream cake with loads of strawberries or other red berries on.

Sometimes, French bakeries are all it takes to make life worth living. But of course, there is more to life, and one can almost always find an interesting as well as beautiful spot to eat one’s little wonder-of-everyday-life artisan food. Right now, I’m sitting at a footbridge over the canal, looking at a gang of preadolescent ducks paddling around. Along this particular stretch of the canal, there are still 12 of the tents of the homeless left. They’ve put chairs and tables outside, so it looks like a campsite, of the more rugged type though, with a diverse flora of rugged campers. And more or less intermingled, other lunchers are sitting down with their lunch bags. In the evening and weekends, when the weather is nice, people come here to drink and picnic (there is so much concern about food in this country – “have you eaten?” is the second most common question I get after “how are you?” when I meet up with someone, but that’s another story).

I’ve heard that the number of bakeries in France is falling drastically, along with other small local petits commerçants. However, compared to high streets in Britain and even so more in Norway, the chain stores have still not got monopoly.