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Adieu again

Published on September 11, 2010 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Distinctions, Peculiarities, Places

The clouds hang low over Oslo Airport. Typical nice autumn weather, the captain called it. The weather is not necessarily so nice in Paris either, so I’ll not jump to any easy comparison…
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But these last weeks, the weather has been very nice in Paris, particularly the evenings and nights. And it was even not too bad when we early, early this morning left the flat and got on our way to the airport. It’s Saturday, and at the bakery (in the upper end of Rue Oberkampf, highly recommended! Their croissants au beurre are the kind that melt in your mouth), there are more noctambules (see this post) than morning birds dropping by. I stand behind a tired young man, leaning over the counter struggling to decide between an orange or apple juice to go with his pastry. The saleswoman keeps her cool and retains all the polite phrases, but she looks a bit apprehensively up at the hooded youth.

Outside, while the bars closed some hours ago, other cafés are opening their doors, putting out chairs and tables at the pavement. Most night wanderers seemed to disappear at dawn, and we get on the bus taking us across the city, Paris is awake. Eager students hop off in the university area, and I see shoppers pull their trolleys along to the street market already burgeoning of flowers, groceries and the rest.

Paris never sleeps, I thought when I went to the bakery in this intermediate zone between nightlife and early morning. Perhaps there are streets in Oslo which gradually transforms like this as well. Oberkampf, where I lived now, can in many respects be compared to Grünerløkka (which is close to where I live in Oslo), but how often does one see old, completely ordinary people sit down on more or less trendy cafés in Grünerløkka? There are plenty of elderly inhabitants in Oberkampf, talking part in the local life, as there are plenty of children going to school there in the morning. I think it is something there, which is more than an easy comparison; this mixing of old and young, of hip and ordinary, of noctambules and parents with pushchairs, that is weaving the distinctive fabric of the Parisian street life, giving it its very particular feel. Which I don’t even have to say that I miss.

A descent into eternal Paris?

Published on June 3, 2010 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Paris, Places

Rue de Belleville, just above the metro station

What is Paris to me now, I wondered when I sat on the plane on my way south after an absence of more than two years and the experience of a couple of seminal, life-altering (no less) events. I didn’t expect to feel at home. I expected to feel a little anxiety, particularly as I was arriving late in the evening, long after dark, but that didn’t happen. Not at the metro, neither at the metro station where I changed to Line 2, my old favourite, and neither as I walked down my old street. What stuck me instead, was the bizarness of Belleville, as I’d been away for a long time. When I exit the station by the electric stairs in boulevard de la Villette, it’s dark in the street and almost deserted at this stretch of the pavement where, except for two a bit lost men playing a ghetto blaster way over the limits of the loudspeakers, nothing else than a scratching white noise coming out of them. And this morning, a screaming man walked down the street in front of the hotel. I heard his screams from far away, once every twentieth second perhaps, and then they faded away again down in the main street, like a weird human Doppler effect.
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Walking down my old street, most is the same. The mild stench reminds me immediately. France smells. And in Faubourg du Temple it first smells of the metro, as everywhere, but then it is transformed into the particular sweet stench of rotting groceries, the butchers, waste, cigarettes, pollution, the density of the population and a hot summer night. I don’t know, I just recognise it immediately and, well, yes, feel warm at heart.

The languages one can hear in this street, I’ve written about before, but they’re the same as always. Belleville Babelville.

The day after, at the café everybody hangs out in, it’s the usual mix of old men (of all backgrounds) and middle-aged and younger people. A young, blond woman engages easily in a conversation with an elegantly dressed black man (suit jacket and straw hat at the chair besides him, collarless dark shirt, leather shoes) who was reading an article in Le Monde on how Sarkozy echants Africa before she sat down and asked for a light. (She left after the coffee, cigarette and good chat.)

Why did I expect to feel anxious?

More than feeling joy of being back, or the nostalgic bitter-sweetness that I expected and that I felt walking the old streets in my neighbourhood in London a year after I moved from there, I feel a warmth recognition. The warmth of enjoying the vibrant street life around me, the sounds of carpenters and other daily activities (and perpetuate traffic), the smells, the – nothing less – humanity gathered, mingling, speaking in different languages, dressed in different styles, exposing different emotions. When I walked down Freemantle Street in London, there was nothing there but memories. I felt pain, so much did I miss my life there. Here I don’t feel any of that nostalgic pain. I wondered before I landed whether it’s true that one will always have Paris. I guessed in a way that no, because most of what made up my world here is gone, as I hadn’t, and probably would never be able again to, keep up all the relations, as in London. But I realise now that that isn’t true. Paris is there exactly – almost – as I left it.

Rue de Belleville, just above the metro station

What is Paris to me now, I wondered when I sat on the plane on my way south after an absence of more than two years and the experience of a couple of…

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).
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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.

Fieldwork fatigue …and outline from the end to the beginning

Published on June 15, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, Places

“[O]ur work cannot transcend being a human endeavor, with attendant costs as well as benefits” (Wolcott 2005: 141)

Earlier this week, I got ditched on one of my first interview rendezvous. [I later learnt that yes, he had been there, in exactly that huge, rather kitschy Indochinese colonial style bar … My incapacity to find him just proves that I’m suffering from fieldwork fatigue…]. Since it’d been a hard day after another sleepless night, I decided to neither wait longer than 25 minutes, nor phone the person, but instead walk off into the busy street at Place de Pigalle. For once, I was in a place without my bike and with nothing planned. I decided to walk back east, following a boulevard one probably cannot find anything like anywhere else in the world, through Pigalle and Anvèrs (tourists, sexshops, local Americans and ordinary inhabitants), Barbès (French Arab quarter for several generations) and La Chapelle and Stalingrad (crowded, noisy and polluted with traffic, known for its social deprivation and heroin). By quieter and gentrified Canal Saint Martin (where students and artists, tourists and homeless picnic side by side), I know a nice little bar, with three tables outside and a few more on the inside, wooden, brown and sympathetically worn down. They play mostly French music, a little bit punkish, a little bit of Mano Negra, some French Tom Waits, a little bit of Balkan-gipsy style that is so popular here… While I wouldn’t dream of drinking a glass of wine alone in public at Zorba or Les Folies 10 minutes away up in Belleville, I don’t hesitate at Café Jemmapes. After my 40 minutes stroll, I sat down quietly and listen to the chattering around me and watched the people sitting by the canal. I started on this blog post but soon realised that perhaps following an advice from The Art of Fieldwork could help me in my state of fieldwork fatigue:
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…think through your entire study in the reverse order of the way you intend to carry it out. Begin with a careful consideration of where you want to end up… Try to anticipate as specifically as you can the outcomes you want to achieve. Then back up a step to identify the kinds of data and range of experience you will need to support or illustrate those outcomes. Then back up one more step to ascertain how to get that information (Wolcott 2005: 194-5).

That morning, the first thing I did was to reschedule my return flight back home, thus shortening my stay with 16 days. I had woken up really early, after only a few hours sleep. Faubourg du Temple might be a nice street for strolling, and a perfect street for sitting down for a coffee, but it’s far from perfect to sleep five floors above. Too vibrant, too cobbled-stoned, too picturesque… In addition, I’ll have to move house again soon, since the propriétaire will move back in, after a thorough refurbishment of the worn down place. Hearsay tells that his parents bought the flat for 90 000€ in 1999, and now – even before it’s refurbished – it’s worth 270 000€. That says about it about the housing market in Paris. I’ve not had success in re-entering it for the last month of my stay, so I end up shortening my stay and spending the last ten nights in an hotel around the corner. I’m a bit tired of it all…

I’ve lived so many strange places in this city, with mice, mould, and mites, only to mention the problems starting on m. The fieldworker is his or her own worst enemy (as well as her best asset, on good days of course), as Wolcott states somewhere in his book on method. And I think he also says something about the field, with all its nuisances, getting in the way of doing fieldwork. I feel a certain fieldwork fatigue at the moment. I have realised – possibly because the end is so close – that it is “only” fieldwork. With that insight it suddenly became work more than anything else for me. Gone is the attempt to try to live it. There are many other reasons for this fatigue as well. Living conditions, the extra effort to wrap it all up and pursuing all the people and events that I haven’t come across naturally or by chance until now, my life situation, the fieldworker role (being there for everybody without anyone really being there for me… – I remember how depended I was on my flatmates back in Freemantle street in London as an outlet for this self-effacing role. Here I don’t have any such outlet, in addition my role is even more self-effacing as I’m a far better listener than a speaker when it comes to French).

At the moment, reflecting on my growing feeling of detachment, I get a sad taste of failure. Professionally, I think I’m doing fine, the failure is rather on the human side of it. I feel I’ve failed in really living here which is probably connected to my failure in improving my French as much as I hoped to. Too much of my days have disappeared at home, in front of the computer, working on the videos. I’m thinking about another quote from The Art of Fieldwork:

Every choice is also a sacrifice… Every articulation precludes not only its own alternatives but all sorts of developments they would have made viable (Susanne Langer quoted in Wolcott 2005: 257).

Whatever the reasons might be, the northern immigrant to East Paris has retreated (with a bowed head), and it’s the anthropologist that is sitting down drinking a glass of white wine at Café Jemmapes, thinking about Wolcott’s questions; where do I want to end up and what are the outcomes I want to achieve?

I started focusing on the slam poetry scene because I wanted to study a cosmopolitan milieu. (In my view, cosmopolitanism is – in contrast to the national identity craze hitting politicians in France and Britain at the moment – the future of Europe. We have no other choice.)

My preliminary main claim is that the slam soirées can be seen as an appropriation of time and space; – time through story telling (thus the creation of narratives, which is a creation of meaning) and space through being together, sharing with and listening to others, many with a very different background from your own. It is an appropriation because it is free and democratic/accessible for all. Elements of this appropriation can be termed a postcolonial re-appropriation: Spatially because the scene is uniquely cosmopolitan, and because many of the texts re-describe public space on French soil in cosmopolitan as opposed to national/monoethnic/”white”… terms. The re-appropriation is also temporal as personal history and French history are being told from various “immigrant” (or e.g. descendants of slaves’) perspectives.

The slam often seems to be a personal as well as collective response to social and personal problems. In this sense, it provides a solution to the individualising/atomising forces in our time hindering collective movements.

I will contextualise the slam phenomenon within a wider postcolonial re-appropriation or time and space that has been going on in France for a while. (What will happen now, when one of the first points in Sarkozy’s victory speech was that we will now finish with all this repentance, and a few days afterwards his Ministry of national identity and immigration was set up.) I’ll support the description of the struggles surrounding French history by the historical and theoretical framework in Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without history: European modernity and the history of Europe itself must be viewed within the context of European expansion from the 16th century onwards. For instance, the industrial development in Britain is intrinsically tied with sugar plantation in the Caribbean. Just as French post-war economic growth must be seen in relation to labour immigration from the former colonies.

What “kinds of data and range of experience” do I need “to support or illustrate those outcomes” and how will I get that information? I must describe the soirées – the people present and the interaction and their texts. I’ve been to open microphone sessions at almost 30 different bars and cafés at least once, in addition to sessions at a museum, a mental hospital, a metro station, theatres… in addition to concerts, workshops and plays, and I’ve filmed around 35 of the sessions (so I can take it easy about the 6 hours of so with film I erased by accident the evening before the fieldwork fatigue hit with force). In addition, the slammers are kind enough to provide the foreigner with written versions of their texts, which I’ll study more in depth when I get back up north, in the wintertime I can imagine when the teaching in the autumn semester is finished, sitting at my office at the sixth floor in the social sciences building at the University of Oslo, thinking about the Parisians I for a while was living among… When I’ve written a first draft and gone through all the texts, I’ll ask for a new round of interviews and conversations to verify what I’ve come up with so far. What is left for me to do, are the interviews with as many people I can. I’ll leave that part for another blog post.

I’ve met a few parents and other family members, and I’ve been in a couple of homes, but that kind of background information has been hard to get here, and it will also be practically impossible to write about, since I’ll not anonymise any of the participants….

“[O]ur work cannot transcend being a human endeavor, with attendant costs as well as benefits” (Wolcott 2005: 141)

Earlier this week, I got ditched on one of my first interview rendezvous. [I later learnt that yes, he had been…