Places

I’m not yet tired of Parisian street-life. That’s good, because it’s only four floors separating my bedroom-cum-office from a very noisy, or let’s rather say lively, street indeed.

Rue du Faubourg du Temple, view from my window.

Rue du Faubourg du Temple runs, as I’ve already mentioned, between the significant places Place de la République – where an enormous bronze Marianne La République resides with the three strong marble ladies La Liberté, L’Égalité and La Fraternité – and Belleville. Most demonstrations of whatever size start at Place de la République. When I lived next to the square for a fortnight in December, I stumbled upon a substantial number of police cars right outside my gate every third day or so. One day it was no less than 16 vans from the CRS, another day just 10 or so from La Gendarmerie, and yet another it was the Police Nationale. Only at one of the occasions did I see the demonstrators. The same happened actually a couple of days ago. I had read at Paris.Indymedia that the college students and the sans-papiers would demonstrate against the immigrations policies, so I went over to see what was happening. Maybe I was too late, because at the time I arrived there was very few lycéens to see. On the other hand, the forces of order were heavily represented; the CRS with at least 15 vans, a bus and some other equipment were creating a noisy traffic jam driving south-east down Avenue de la République (direction Père Lachaise and perhaps Place de la Nation). The demonstrations of national importance usually go between Place de la République to Place de la Nation, via Bastille – thus it’s not only the police who can stage a political struggle symbolically (however, with their Robocop uniforms they’re hard to beat when it comes to costumes).
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A few demonstrations start other places than at République. According to my flatmate, there is one passing down Faubourg du Temple about every second week. Judging from the slogans he mimicked, it usually concerns les sans-papiers, which is reasonable since it’s coming from Belleville/the East and going to Place de la République. I actually joined one of these demonstrations (described here), just a few weeks after arriving in Paris the previous autumn. Funnily, I took a photo of the building I’m now living in, because of the nice flowerpots and the Chinese restaurant at the ground floor. And that makes the transition to the next point in this post.

The restaurant in this building seems almost to be an outpost for the higher concentration of Chinese restaurants and shops a little up the street in Belleville. Down here, Pakistani shops are at least as numerous. For some strange reason, many Pakistanis in Paris run these cheap, thrashy plastic utensil etc. shops (I have no idea what to call this genre of shops in English). I’ve seen them everywhere in East working-class Paris, and most of them seem to be Pakistani owned. One can probably find some neat Fredrik Barthian explanation for why the Pakistanis have ended up in this particular ethnic niche in this city. Neither in London, nor in Oslo is that the case. Interestingly, it was in neither British hip-hop nor Norwegian, but French, that I was to hear the first sample of a Bollywood song (Rohff (Rohff on last.fm here): Bollywood style.)

The highest presence of Pakistanis is at the other side of Place de la République, in the direction of Gare de Nord. While I’ve just seen one not very conspicuous Bollywood video sale and rental around here, on the other side of République there are more, until you get some street which are almost exclusively Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan. (According to Le Monde à Paris – in the nicely titled guide series Paris est à nous (“Paris is ours”) – from 2004, there are 50 000 from the subcontinent in Paris. – One guesses that there is equally many Chinese clandestines here, in addition to the 450 000 who are registrered).

As usual when I start writing a post, I quickly lose focus of the initial idea and the post end up wandering about. I had no intention at all to write about the police again, for instance. This blog post was in fact inspired by a quick walk up the road and the no less than overwhelming amount of impressions it inspired – including the initial thought that opened this post; the Paris street life never stops intriguing me…. I’ve discussed the bad winter mood of the Parisians with a couple of people lately. – They rarely smile, many are arrogant or aloof and the level of aggression and nervousness is high. (For instance, often when I approach a young woman on the street to ask for a direction, she first looks visibly anxious before she notices that I’m just another young woman). – When a friend of mine explained this mood by referring to sheer dense materiality of this city – “packed as sardines on the metro, the person next to you just wished you weren’t there” – it echoed Dag Østerberg’s “socio-material interpretation of Oslo”, which I’d just been reading. Paris is far denser than Oslo, and people behave very differently on the street here. Whether it comes down to a material explanation, I don’t know. It can also have something to do with sexism and different gender relations, with revolutions and education for revolts, with a continuous construction of “living together” through talking to each other (a bit à la Cicero’s republic perhaps) etc… all of which I’ve touched upon here before and which I’ll undoubtedly return to. However not now, as this post has become long enough.

Under me, Europe spreads, slightly convexly, out. The cities look like illuminated versions of ancient town maps. It’s such a nice weather to fly in. I don’t feel like doing what I usually do on this 2 hours and 20 minutes flight between Paris and Oslo, (which is to go through the generous little pile of newspapers Air France is providing – Le Monde (centre-left, a bit intellectual), Le Figaro (right), Libération (left, 68-ish) and once in a while L’Humanité (communiste) or the economist paper L’Echo. There are always a number of issues very relevant to my thesis. Instead, I’ll flash around with my chic (loaned) white MacBook and get some writing done.
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This time in Paris, I tried living at Place de la République. It wasn’t extremely successful as I at least once a day found myself following the same trajectories eastwards or north. Purely geographically, Place de la République is situated in East Paris, but socio-geographically it constitutes an interesting border phenomenon. At the corner of the huge Hausmannian square I was unfortunate to live – westwards in the direction of Les Grandes Boulevardes with Gallerie Lafayette and the likes – there are loads of tourists and shoppers and quite fancy looking people. Just a little north of this, up Boulevard de Magenta in the direction of Gare de Nord, one passes one ethnic community after the other, particularly various South Asians and West Africans. I cycled up Major Delanoë’s nice new bicycle lane along the boulevard several times – to visit a friend in the 18th district just behind the shimmering white Sacre Coeure, and to attend a couple of events (slam poetry, of course and a discussion of art and migration with Edouard Glissant…) at the festival in relation to the international day of migrants in the strongly African Goutte d’Or neighbourhood. The direction I went even more often, however, was straight east, across the Canal where Amelie went to throw her little stones (in order to relax :-) ) and into Belleville. In January, I’ll be moving 10-15 minutes by foot from Place de la République, just in this direction! And I’m looking so much forward to it!

Of all the 6-7 places I’ve been living in Paris, there is none I’ve looked so much forward to move to as this flat in Rue du Faubourg du Temple (faubourg means in fact inner suburb, and when a street is called faubourg something it means that it’s sort of the suburb of the street with the same name – thus there exists a Rue du Temple). Rue du Faubourg du Temple goes from Place de la République, a space even more significantly on the border than I’ve described until now, and Place de Belleville. Place de Belleville is a symbol of immigrant Paris, of course, with Jews and Muslims and East Asians (and the anarchic regionally migrated artisans during the Paris Commune…).

(For some reason, it’s such a convivial atmosphere on this Air France flight. The purser and captain are once in a while proclaiming that they’re so sorry for the delay, and the crew comes around checking if we’ve got enough water of French wine, and now the shaven headed North African French steward is doing magic tricks for the little girl sitting on my row – which she afterwards retells to her father, who has been sleeping. I prefer Air France so much to the other companies flying to Paris. – He’s really an entertainer; now he makes a little Christmas bonhomme stand up in his hand, to the enjoyment of more passengers than the little girl –. Not just because of all their newspapers, French wine and the fact that they’re the only company flying to terminal 2 (making the arrival at Charles de Gaulle very much easier). I think perhaps I like flying Air France because the continental experience lasts longer. When you enter an SAS plane you’re already home, sort of.)

Well, east-west Rue du Faubourg du Temple runs between mainstream republican Paris (Place de la République) and the epitome of Belleville. South-north it separates sort of a classical Parisian neighbourhoodesque (according to my soon-to-be flatmate) area, where, as I mentioned, Amelie Poulain trew the small stones in the canal to calm down, and a more “ethnic Paris” (again according to this flatmate).

– Wops, there Oslo is coming up, small and brightly shining… I see the stadium Valle Hovin very brightly lit, so my home shouldn’t be so far from that. I hear the good-humoured stewards practice some Norwegian (“Garrrderrrmoen”… “tusen takk…”), and talk about laisser les gens detendre…. – When they pronounce the “thank you very much” in Norwegian, some people start clapping so obviously they don’t mind the little delay and is relaxing all right…). Now, I should wrap up this post, before we land. I hear the girl retells what the great magician did to some of the friends of the family.