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Theatre: “In our full conscience and honesty”

Published on October 10, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Music, literature, arts..., Peculiarities

Sunday I went to see a poetry performance at a theatre: AC! En nos âmes et consciences (“In our full conscience/honesty”) – Since the audience don’t participate and perform their own texts, it’s not slam, as the two poet performers explicitly told us yesterday. The distinction between slam sessions (democratic and interactive) and poetry shows is important and stressed by many artists. However, many of the recent newspaper articles on slam don’t seem to get this distinction for some reason. –
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Except from this important point, a lot of the show reminded of slamming: the personal – not intimate, but somehow authentic…–expressions, texts about politics, love, the importance of sharing the spoken word and particularly the enthusiastic and somehow anarchic vibe. I find a strong element of popular resistance in the slam sessions; there is an urge to express oneself, to create a space, to fight back… I don’t know exactly how to describe it in words yet. We discussed yesterday if the play was optimistic, and we concluded I think that it wasn’t (the political situation at the moment is not really optimistic…), but it is however full of willpower and joie de vivre.

A couple of weeks ago I saw theatre play in Norway, at the fringe theatre Black Box: God hates Scandinavia by the group Sons of Norway (English on myspace here). The two plays have nothing in common, except that they were written and preformed by two young people: two young men in Paris, two young women in Oslo (despite the masculine ring of the group name), and that both echoed important aspects of the socio-political atmosphere in the two countries. I had a hard time yesterday trying to explain how two whores in hell discussing various grotesque ways to die could be a metaphor of the feeling one sometimes can get in the petroleum bubble that is my native country. I did not succeed in my explanation; perhaps it’s a question of sentiments not easily verbalised. The same is of course the case with the anarchic and enthusiastic sentiments one can be part of at the better of the slam soirées: I’ll have a hard time putting this atmosphere into words on a piece of paper.

Sunday I went to see a poetry performance at a theatre: AC! En nos âmes et consciences (“In our full conscience/honesty”) – Since the audience don’t participate and perform their own texts, it’s not slam, as the two poet performers…

Indigènes

Published on October 7, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, History, Music, literature, arts..., Places

I’ve just been to see the film Indigènes. I don’t cry very often at the cinema, but I must admit that I had problems stopping weeping during the last part. I, and probably the rest of the audience, knew just too well how the film would end and how the story it self would go on for decades afterwards. I saw it on a cinema nearby, with pensioners (white) and local lycéens (of all colours). It shows on 31 cinemas in Paris, with 4-8 screenings each + two in the weekends.
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Indigene is the shameful juridical assignation used for Muslims in French North Africa. Muslims, being indigenes and not citizens like the Christians and Jews, didn’t enjoy equal rights until 1945. It’s incredible, isn’t it, in the country priding itself with the slogan libérté, égalité, fraternité? The entire story of the combatants from the colonies is an incredible account of the failure of this beautiful idea… – Just for instance, this example of France in a nutshell: the soldiers get to view a classical ballet show at the casern, while teaching them to read and write, however, is not a concern.

The film starts with recruitment of soldiers in North Africa. A mother doesn’t want her son to go, as his father had died in the First World War, – for France, probably, and we later learn that the family has been left in misery). But he leaves to fight for La mère Patrie, together with fellow villagers as they shout Vive la France. (I probably got a tear in my eye already at this point, as one is to understand the disappointments that are to come…).

All the four protagonists represent various versions of the failure of France the idea: the petty criminal recollects with his brother how the village was killed by the French, to “pacify” them.

The handsome one falling in love with a white girl at the liberation of Marseille never gets her letters – nor she his – as they are being “censured”. As she is about to unbutton his shirt someone enters the room and he jumps up, in North Africa they’re not allowed to have anything to do with French women. But it’s different here in the mother country, at least for the men coming to liberate her…?

The last disappointment – or treason – is the saddest of them all, and it echoes somehow the disillusionment of all the non-whites with “non-French” surnames in the banlieues who have taken an education as the French dream says, but still see very little of the égalité they’ve been promised: The intelligent, but hèlas so naïve colonel decides to continue on an impossible mission into Alsace, because then, finally, “we will get what we merit” – as they over and over of course not has got until then. His troop gets killed. Another French regiment who enters when the German battalion has been beaten gets all the glory (except from a few of the villagers who thank the only surviving Tunisian), and then we jump 60 years in time and the film ends with the never-more-than-a-colonel sitting on the bed in his little, sparsely furnished room; living-conditions which most French probably recognise from TV reportages on the ancient combatants and migrant workers…

The captain also represents an interesting angle: He passes as a pied noir (a French born in Algeria), but we learn that he is in fact an Arab. That’s an aspect of his identity he keeps close to heart – literally, as a photo of his North African mother he keeps in his breast pocket, and as a secret, that would have kept him from advancing in the army hierarchy had it been known.

Last week, when the film opened, President Chirac decided that the pensions of the ancient combatants finally should be equal to that of the French veterans. Since 1959 their pensions have been “frozen”, as some kind of revenge for the independence…

The four protagonists, Sami Bouajila, Roschdy Zem, Samy Naceri and Jamel Debbouze are all French descendants of North Africans. At Cannes this year the four of them won the prize for the best male protagonist.

The film is not only important it is also very good, and as it concerns the liberation of the whole of Europe from Nazism, I suppose it will be screened in Norway as well. I wasn’t really aware of the important contribution of the soldiers form the colonies before I saw The English Patient, which perhaps not coincidentally, is written by a Sri Lankan author.

The film has created a discussion of course (read some of it in English in The Guardian) – for instance with L’Express devoting their frontpage to the headlines “Should we be ashamed of being French?”

I’ve just been to see the film Indigènes. I don’t cry very often at the cinema, but I must admit that I had problems stopping weeping during the last part. I, and probably the rest of the audience, knew just…

Back in Belleville! (and le monde writes about the slam scene)

Published on October 4, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Music, literature, arts..., Spaces

I’m back in Paris for 9 days, and this time I’ve settled right in the heart of Belleville, in the Tunisian Jewish neighbourhood (where they’re just about to celebrate Yom Kippur, I think…). A few blocks from the hotel, I’ve found a café with wifi – a café where they also arrange slam sessions, which of course fits perfectly with my intention to get some intensive fieldworking done while I’m here. So, now I sit blogging right at my favourite boulevard :) (Café Cheri(e) is undoubtedly quite trendy now, and it has in fact it’s own blog…).

And talking about intensive fieldworking; while I’m here I can keep myself occupied every night with going to various slam sessions, and these 9 days of intensive focus on slamming started really well as I opened Le Monde (1-2/10/06) on the plane and found that they had dedicated a whole page to the French slam scene!
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The article focused on very much the same things as I’ve noticed myself or read elsewhere: “Rare are the places where so many different ages and ethnic and social origins are gathered”. They also trace the genealogy of slam to poets in the Antiquity, Occitan troubadours, West African griots (story-tellers), the American beat generation, and rap as well as to some other references.

These are some of the things the slammers said:

“I want to be a writer, a poet at the same time as I’m with the people. Slam allows this utopia” (Frédéric Nevchehirlian, organiser of slam sessions in Marseille).

“Slam to me is a citizen/socially aware (citoyenne) way of approaching life and the issues the newspapers don’t talk about” (Katel, 20 years, student in journalism and of Cameroonians origin).

The organiser Tsunami talks about the pedagogic aspect of the slam seen and tells that local townhalls in the suburbs ask slammers to rebuild the social ties in the community: “I explain to the kids that I’m a poet, not a cop, vigilante or shrink. I’m not there to tell them that they shouldn’t break things, but to make them understand that they can express what’s bothering them through a text, a poem.”

Digiz, who calls himself troubadour poet citizen, says: “It’s my way of shouting out my freedom. (…). I love that it’s free (la gratuité, the exchange of listening, it’s a poetry of proximity”.

I’d like to translate the rest as well, but I think that would do for today.

My three first hours in Paris has been cold and warm, sunny and rainy. And just now the rain stopped and the sun returned…! I watch people on bikes pass on the cycle lane and I miss my funny little green vélo. Except from that (and perhaps the conditions in the quite dusty hotel I’ll stay in, we’ll see) I think it’s very nice to be back. It’s nice that people greet you with de rien (“you’re welcome”, au revoir (“good bye”), bonne journée (have a nice day!) just because you’ve asked them about the way or because you’ve bought a newspaper. And it’s a lot of other things that are very nice as well, but I’m sure I’ll have the chance to get back to that…

Some French slam poetry web sites

Published on September 8, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, Music, literature, arts...

Oh, no not one of those days… Here I sit, it’s Friday evening, people I know get together to drink beer not far from here right at this moment, I could be there, or I could go to see Resistance(s), a screening of short films from North Africa and the Middle East at the Cinemathèque, but no, what am I doing, yes, I sit at my office, looking out of the window at the excellent weather… – well, now the full moon is up… – doing some kind of silly quasi-academic work… And it will take me ages to get all these links right…

Time is overripe for finding out more about slam poetry, the phenomenon by way of which I’ll try to understand and describe La France Métissée. I bumped into the Parisian slam scene with almost no prior knowledge, and for two months I hung around at various slam soirées in eastern Paris and her hot suburbs, just experiencing what was going on.
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As I’ve returned to university office life for a couple of months, hoping to start turning my field experiences into science, it’s high time I start finding out what this poetry scene is about. Tuesday I’ll present my fieldwork for my colleagues in the anthropology department, and in addition to telling them what I have experienced, I thought I’d better explain them a little what slam is about as well. I’ve not found much printed literature on the subject, but Internet is of course full of information, as is fitting for this so-called post-modern literary phenomenon. (I’ll return to what’s post-modern about it, as soon as I get a clue). In fact, when I started searching for information on slammeurs and slammeuses today, I discovered the Internet social networking phenomenon MySpace, of which Wikipedia has this to say:

MySpace is also home to various independent musicians, independent filmmakers, and up and coming comedians who upload songs, short films, and other work directly onto their profile. These songs and films can also be embedded in other profiles, an interconnectedness which adds to MySpace’s appeal for musicians, filmmakers, and comedians alike.

Hence, obviously a perfect post-modern place for post-modern poetry…

From the languages presenting articles on slam poetry on the online encyclopaedia wikipedia, I understand that the genre is most vibrant in the USA, where it was created, and in Sweden, Germany and France where it was initiated in the mid- to late 1990s. (In Norway slam exist, but it’s not very big – however as a form of spoken word tradition it has existed in various shapes since time immemorial, at least since the Viking skald or bard. Apropos that époque, slam is apparently also an old Norse word, meaning hitting hard, like in slam the door (slamre med døren, in contemporary Norwegian).

Now to the websites I’ve come across on French slam poetry – only in French, unfortunately… (when I get hold of my usually so present Webmaster, I’ll include some of them in a blog roll):

Grand corps malade made it to the bestseller lists with his album released this spring, thus making slam poetry known to a large public. He has even got an entry on French wikipedia. I strongly recommend his poem on his native banlieue nord, Saint-Denis (sound) and Enfant de la ville(text).

The collective 129H Production (with a new and an older website, apparently with the same content): “Supportive structure for artistic production in France and West Africa”. Hear some of their texts on their sites on myspace.com: Néobled (listen, blog with agenda, bio etc, Rouda (listen to a text on slam sauvage, blog with agenda, bio etc) and Lyor (listen, blog with agenda, bio etc). (The three of them also have blogs on the website Haut et fort, but my iBook refuses to link to them for some reason…)

Le meilleur ami des mots (Myspace with Qui est le meilleur ami des mots ?, France Fiction or two other texts): Souleymane Diamanka (listen) and John Banzai (listen).

Some general information pages on the French slam scene: Planète Slam (a very instructive site if one gets past the initial annoying pop-up ads… ;) ), Fédération français de slam poésie and Keep it green. UPDATE: Le-slam.org Universlam
And some more sites on Myspace with soundtracks, videos, bios etc: Rahman, site de l’homme-soleil, Rahman on My Space, Le Robert on Myspace (Le petit prince listen and read the poem), Rara Fonpanié on Myspace

And finally, I found a site on My space with the usAmerican slammer, Soul Williams – for those who don’t understand French ☺

(I’ve probably overlooked loads of important sites, and then there is one more question; where are the ladies?!)

Afterword: I’ll probably very soon have to make a revised version of this post, as I get to know the slam scene at the web, until then I just have to mention that I’ve found at least some of the slammeuses – on Slam ô feminin, of course…

Oh, no not one of those days… Here I sit, it’s Friday evening, people I know get together to drink beer not far from here right at this moment, I could be there, or I could go to see Resistance(s),…

– my research project so far (part 2): Parisian slam poetry vs British Asian ethnogenesis

Published on August 31, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, Music, literature, arts..., Philosophies of integration

In the second part of my presentation, I moved on to the particular field where I hung around and conducted anthropological fieldwork proper; thus participated as I observed or vice versa. As some will already know, that field is a slam poetry scene in Paris. I’ve written about it here already, and I’ll surely return to it, so I’ve not found it worth translating that part of my presentation here. Instead, I’ll reflect a little around the comparison I’m intending to make between the slam poetry phenomenon in Paris and the cultural expressions which constituted a core element in my study in London. In the third and final part of this post, I’ll try to recall the questions I got after my presentation.
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In my MA/MPhil thesis I looked at the creation (i.e. the ethnogenesis) of a home-grown British Asian identity – thus a new way of being British –, where cultural expressions, particularly music, with influences from south Asia played an important part. Without cutting corners in my future analysis, these two artistic phenomena – the wave of British Asian music, London 1999, and the slam poetry scene, Paris 2006 – show interesting similarities and differences.

In both phenomena, people create a space where they can express themselves. I’d say that it can be described as a, more or less, free space, and it reminds me of my favourite (anarcho-)philosophical quote:

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover who we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual form the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries (Foucault 1982, “The subject and power”).

I’ve already sketched the outline of an analysis of to what degree some British Asian cosmopolitans in my study, represented attempts at such new forms of subjectivities. I think Foucault’s perspective can be a constructive approach to my Parisian field as well.

Another similarity between the two phenomena is that they were in vogue (when I did my research), seemingly just about to reach the top before they get commercialised, get too big and turn stale, with too many jump the bandwagon… The knowledge of how trends, commercial forces and bourgeoisation work probably worry participants in all such artistic waves.

On the other hand, the differences are also interesting: The slam poetry scene in Paris seems to have little to do with identity politics, and its cosmopolitan and heterogeneous (thus non ethnic/communitarian) nature is striking. All this, I find characteristic of the French society, and in contrast to the British.

I know this overview of the two fields is extremely sketchy, but this theme is not at all what I will be working on at the moment. The point has just been to justify my choice of the slam scene as suitable for a comparison with my London ethnography.