Urbana.org All Things New Blog - france

Playing the Douzaines

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

In an otherwise pedantic article on French street dialects, Marc Hatzfield, writing in Eurozine here, relates that African American verbal games are big in the slums of France, among the mostly foreign lower classes.

Only a philosopher could write the following paragraph, but do try to read it—he’s getting at something fascinating:

Slam, like the dig and verbal sparring, legitimizes verbal artistry in an environment that keeps exponents of the written word at a distance: slam is the acrobatics of the spoken word raised to the level of a fine art. In this sense, it may well be reconnecting with certain cultural phenomena that predate the written word, a furious, destructive archaism that relocates the present moment – the now – at the centre of the world by rejecting the arguments and expertise of organized memory and capital. In this way it restores pleasure in the instantaneous and the volatile to both authors and listeners, qualities that are tending to disappear from creative possibilities.

The important idea here, for me at least, is that the shift to oral culture is also a shift to the valuing of the "instantaneous", in other words, performance. What is said becomes less important than how it is said.

This is neither good nor bad, but carries challenges and opportunities for believers wishing to follow Jesus. For instance, when performance directs the message, the messenger gains in importance, relative to the content of the message. Which means less room (if there ever was any) for hypocrisy.

Jesus, after all, tells us that we will be witnesses (noun), not that we will do witnessing (verb). We are to be the good news: they will know by our love. To tell the good news, while being bad news in our lives is an insult.

Anyway, back to the point: playing the dozens is an African-American performance art. (Over the many years I’ve been enmeshed in black culture, I’ve never developed much verbal dexterity.) But our global and print cultures are changing in the direction of performance, those who’ve learned how to speak from early childhood will increasingly be at an advantage as messengers.

I Knew This Girl

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:01:00 -0600

I knew this girl. Or at least people just like her. Or maybe that’s just a sign of a good story. Marjane Satrapi is the Iranian—now French—author of Persepolis, a series of delightful autobiographical graphic novels, that had me trying to remember and relate.

Satrapi lived through the fall of the Iranian monarchy, the rise of the ayatollahs, and the Iran-Iraq war—before her middle class parents sent her to a boarding school in Austria. After returning to Iran for college and a little beyond, she leaves for Europe, this time for good.

Her four comics, published in English translation as two volumes, were minor sensations a few years back, and have been recently adapted to film, now out on DVD. I am looking at the books today and the film tomorrow, because there is an important subjective difference between the two—worth a whole discussion of its own.

As to the books:

Satrapi’s story is cute and moving and quite smart, as she discusses global events though the eyes of a little girl: the revolution is initially interpreted for her by her liberal, Europe-vacationing, wine-drinking parents (see below).

As the years proceed, she gains more independent insight into the violent changes in society—witnessing Iraqi bombs; being scolded for immodesty by older women, and so on.

Eventually her big mouth gets her in trouble at school, and her parents decide to send her overseas for high school—for her own safety’s sake. At this point her story becomes part of my story.

Marjane Satrapi is six years older than me, and moved to Austria at just about the same year I moved to Switzerland: different stage of life, similar moment. My parents were working with the Swiss IFES movement, helping develop international student ministry. Especially in the early years, we met quite a few Iranians. By and large, the seemed a lot like Satrapi’s family: modern, far more stylish than my missionary family, polyglot and not at all like the mobs we saw on the evening news.

Satrapi struggles through years of high school in an Austria not inclined to view her as part of the modern world. She’s an exotic creature, even as she slowly adapts many Austrian ways of living.
When she returns, after reaching a crisis point, she has become a “third-culture kid,” belonging nowhere, with a unique culture of her own.

While Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s story, and a singular one at that, Satrapi tells the story in terms intensely familiar to anyone who has grown up between worlds. The search for home is probably the central unifying theme in the lives of thousands of such people, torn between cosmopolitan, child-of-all-nations tendencies, and a deep longing to have somewhere to fit in.

French Élites Propose You Listen To Them

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:06:00 -0600

The print news are in trouble, we all know that. But is it a good idea for the government to prop them up by buying their product?

I just saw in Le Monde that the French President is proposing giving a one-year newspaper subscription to each 18 year old citizen. It's being talked about on two fronts: fostering citizenship and as a bailout for struggling old-media.

Le Monde, of course, is highly in favor. But certainly not because of the hordes of money they'd amass, as one of the biggest dailies in the country. No--and here they sound as self-important as the mainstream papers in the US--their pleasure is entirely altruistic. They wish for greater societal glue, by which they mean greater integration of the young into the worldview of the French elites.

The French media are notorious for groupthink with the entire intellectual establishment, what the left call Pensée unique or single-thought. As an example, the Le Monde editorial approvingly quotes Bernard Spitz, an economist and secretary general of a think tank, former presidential cabinet member, media mogul, government researcher, and so on--an example of revolving doors between various elite establishments.

He Died for France

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:54:00 -0600

There’s been some tumult in France lately over desecrated Muslim graves in a WWI cemetery.

In staunchly secular (“laïque”) France, these graves—maintained by the government—are one of very few public concessions to religious identity. To vandalize the headstones is to attack Muslim presence and difference.

The trouble is that the logic of French secular republican thought inevitably eliminates any religious, racial, or other “communal” identities from the discussion, leaving us with bizarre answers. So an MP and author of a newly-minted report of grave vandalism, tells Le Monde that only one out of every eight of these incidents per year is racial in character, stemming rather from “stupidity, alcohol and drugs,” and a society-wide disrespect for the dead. Ignoring racial attacks, his solution, of course, is to have a unit on death in the high schools. And so on as we talk past each other.

Since this situation isn’t going to clear up anytime soon, a more interesting question to me is: who were these soldiers? North African colonials, most likely. But who were they? This one above, from the same cemetery, simply reads “Boungab Douadi Ben Amor” (sounds like an Algerian name), “Soldier, 1st RT,” and “Died for France, the 25th May 1915”. If we had access to all the records, we could find out lots, I suppose.

[photo credit: flickr user Laurent LAMACZ]