ESSAYS
The BigotsIOWA CITY, IOWA 09 September 2009 |
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Once, I watched an interview with James Baldwin.
He was sitting in his garden in St. Paul de Vence. It was spring and all around him were bright flowers. I remember him being charismatic and charming. He spoke about his life in France and how living here had changed him, given him liberty as both an African-American and as a homosexual.
Years later I watched an interview with Quincy Jones, who lived here in the 1950s; he spoke of France with similar reverence.
Before I lived here, I imagined France, Paris really, to be an oasis of inclusion and freedom where bigotry was unheard of. Paris was a cultural wonderland where people behaved as they liked regardless of color or belief, a place where any injustice was met with violent protest in the street.
The truth didn’t interest me. Paris was a dream; the images I had of the city were those of Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson, Ronis and Lartigue. It was a better place than wherever I was and that was all I wanted to know.
I ignored what I knew about France’s colonial past, the adventures in Asia and Africa, slavery, Dreyfus, Vichy, collaboration and the German occupation. Ten years before I moved here I watched Matthew Kassovitz’s La Haine and was moved by it, yet when I imagined France I saw Hemingway, Baldwin, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Quincy Jones and Richard Wright all sitting around a table while Alice B. Toklas served absinthe from a silver tray.
I’ve lived in Paris now for over four years and have encountered more explicit prejudice here than anywhere else I’ve lived.
The corner store is freely called l’Arabe. And there you can purchase Banania, a popular breakfast drink, which comes in a box decorated with an exaggerated minstrel image of an African man, enormous pink lips, wide eyes and a giant smile, on a yellow background.
Banania plates and mugs dating as far back as the 1920s are sold throughout Paris. I’ve seen them in store windows and in the cupboards of Parisian apartments.
The dry-cleaner down the street displays a black lawn jockey with a similar face in their window.
African and Arab people are routinely hassled by the police. I’ve seen swastikas painted on walls.
This one on a mosque.
Since I’ve lived here Jewish cemeteries and storefronts have been routinely vandalized.
Jean-Marie Le Pen complains that there are too many “dark-skinned immigrants” playing for the French national soccer team; Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s Minister of the Interior (who, as I write, is touring the United States in hopes of increasing his popularity with the French right), recently argued that the suburbs need to be “cleaned out with Kärcher (an industrial solvent used to remove mud from tractors).” He also called those involved in the recent suburban riots “vermin” and “scum.”
I was once at a dinner party and seated across from a woman who argued emphatically that the Holocaust was a gross exaggeration and may very well not have happened at all. People have told me that les Arabes
are destroying France, that at least les noirs understand their place.
A friend of mine, whose parents are Pieds-Noirs, is incapable of understanding why the Algerian people would have revolted against the French.
As the United States invaded Iraq I marched in an anti-war rally where a group of Jewish students holding banners identifying themselves as Juifs contre la guerre, were beaten by thugs using iron pipes.
And then there are the various prejudices against “The Americans,” “The English,” “The Algerians,” “The Italians,” “The Belgians,” “The French,” “The Germans,” “The Poles,” and “The Portuguese.” All subjects
of discussions I’ve either overheard or been involved in. Not to mention the comments people often make about “The Gypsies,” “The Homeless” and “The Homos.”
My Brazilian friend insists that all Mexicans are lazy. I’ve argued, in my best liberal American voice, that perhaps not all Mexicans are lazy. But she disagrees. "All of them," she tells me and sees absolutely no problem with the argument. Of course, the notion that all Brazilians are sex-crazed samba dancers infuriates her. She finds it a demeaning and offensive stereotype.
Part of this is cultural difference. In the United States, among educated, sophisticated people, it is simply not as acceptable as it is in Europe (or, for that matter, anywhere else in the known world) to casually make sweeping statements about entire groups of people. Europeans are less concerned with what is and what is not politically correct.
Despite all of the prejudice, I’m still in love with Paris. It is an expanding love, one that has evolved from an adolescent, idealism to something all encompassing. The novelty of her darling, cobbled streets and perfect curving river is waning but then there is so much more to discover beneath that mythical skin.
Over the course of my day I encounter people who are of every color, race, religion and sexual persuasion. Despite the bigotry that persists in France, Paris remains a multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan city. Most
important, it is a city that compels me to interact with people from a variety of backgrounds.
My friends are Chinese, French, Italian, Swedish, Moroccan, Iranian, Norwegian, American, Brazilian, Greek and Lebanese. I’ve taught literature to students from nearly every continent in the world, students who represent every major religion. And despite Paris’ ugliness (bigotry is but one of many) my love for the city grows and I continue to be grateful for what it offers me.
Each year when I return to the United States people ask me similar questions about what it is like living in France. Some people ask because they believe that the French are rude, bitter, cowardly hypocrites who at once despise America and enjoy its protection, cigarettes, jeans, television and films. These are the Generalists.
There are the Romantics (a group whose expired card I still carry) who believe that France is Paris and Paris is a city of endless romance, which exists entirely in black and white, where beautiful women ride past on black bicycles winking at men smoking Gitanes and writing important philosophical treatises at the Flore.
There are the Right Wingers masquerading as leftist pseudo-sophisticates who believe the old cliché that France is wasted on the French and always have the same question: What’s it like living with all those Arabs?
Which is precisely the question I was asked by a woman who I happened to be sitting next to at a party last year in the United States. The conversation went like this:
“So, I hear you live in Paris.”
“Yes.”
“Do you like it?”
“I love it. It’s wonderful.”
“Do you encounter a lot of anti-American sentiment?”
“Well, they make fun of Canadians when they speak French, but mostly they seem to get along.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m just kidding. No, I don’t encounter a lot of anti-American sentiment.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What’s it like living with all those Arabs?”
“I don’t know how to answer that question.”
“Well, you’re Jewish.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t find it dangerous to live in a country where ten percent of the population is Arab?”
“No.”
“You don’t spend much time with the Arabs I take it.”
“Well, not all of them, no. I have friends who are Arab, if that’s what you mean.”
“They know you’re Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“And that doesn’t worry you?”
It was here that I extricated myself and went to find a beer.
Somehow, I’m less tolerant of American idiocy than I am of French idiocy. I guess that makes me a bigot too; I still suffer from that old inferiority complex – Europeans are always more sophisticated and interesting than Americans
This summer a good friend of mine from Paris came to visit me in Ketchum, Idaho. Anne was born in the United States to Korean parents and before moving to Paris she’d lived in, among other places New York,
Boston, and Seoul. She’s one of the most intelligent and sophisticated people I know.
She’s also tremendously sensitive when it comes to issues of bigotry. Racist comments affect her deeply. I often believe that she takes these things too seriously, or at least, that she lets them affect her too easily.
Here in France strangers, uninvited, frequently speak to her in various Asian or mock-Asian languages.
“Konichiwa” is popular.
As is, “You like sucky sucky?”
When, at parties, polite, ostensibly well-educated people ask her where she’s from and she answers, California, they frequently respond by saying, “But where are you really from?”
Which is to say, “But where’d you get those funny eyes.”
A few nights after she arrived, my parents took us to a party at a large house outside of Ketchum. The two of us stood with our drinks on a deck looking onto a lawn and some pretty woods beyond.
Soon the woman who was hosting the party came to say hello. I introduced Anne and the woman said, “You just arrived today?”
“Yes, I can’t believe I couldn’t even bring a bottle of water on the plane.”
“It’s awful,” the woman said. “It is enough to make you really hate them.”
“Them?” I asked.
“The towelheads. They all want to blow us up. God, it makes me furious. They’re just insane.”
Anne looked at me with wide eyes, quite a feat considering her ethnicity.
“Towelheads?” I said.
“The Arabs, the fucking towelheads.”
“You blame Arab people, all Arab people for your inability to bring a water bottle on an airplane?” I asked.
“Who else are you going to blame?”
“How many Arab people do you know?” I asked.
None.
“How many Arab people have you had a conversation with in your life?” I asked.
“I’ve been to Turkey,” she said.
This is an educated woman, an established and successful professional who has lived in one of the biggest cities in the world, who has traveled, at least, to Turkey. And here she was, standing at a cocktail party, professing her unabashed bigotry to someone she had just met.
I often had similar conversations when I was teaching tenth grade English. A student would make a sweeping generalization and I’d ask the obligatory question: All of them?
Whatever it was – Mexicans, Arabs, Jews, Canadians, African-Americans, dwarves, homosexuals. Why, I’d ask, is it acceptable to freely use the word “fag” but not other slurs? Usually we’d have interesting and productive discussions.
But what do you say to a middle-aged wealthy white woman?
In French the expression, esprit d’escalier, wit of the staircase, is used to describe that perfect remark thought of too late. What I wished I’d asked her was whether or not she would be as comfortable using the word, “nigger” as she was using the word, “towelhead.”
But I knew the answer, this wasn’t a tenth grade classroom and she wasn’t my student.
A few days later we went to hear a man speak about his experiences teaching English in rural China. At the end of his speech a woman turned to my friend and asked, “Do you know him?”
“No,” Anne said. “Do you?”
“I just thought you might be his wife. He’s married to a Chinese girl,” the woman said.
The woman saw that Anne was irritated and said, “No, don’t worry, it’s ok. I like him.”
After the presentation there was a luncheon and we found ourselves at a table with a group of wealthy white women (the dominant species it seemed) who were discussing the possibility of downsizing from a seven
million dollar house to a two million dollar condominium.
We made small talk while we ate and then, when my friend got up to go to the bathroom, one of the women turned to me and asked, “Where is she from?”
“Paris,” I told her.
“But where is she really from?” she asked.
* * *
The world is far more appealing and safer when we strip it of subtlety and ambiguity. It only takes reading the newspaper each morning to understand this. We lust for a world where our villains are evil and our heroes good.
George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are cut from the same cloth. Sarkozy, forgetting his own immigrant roots, demonizes suburban “vermin,” George Bush the sharp-fanged hordes of the axis of evil, Ahmadinejad the Jews, Le Pen immigrants, Jews, Arabs, Muslims and homosexuals, and so on and so on.
Bigotry, like social customs, religion and law (all of which, of course, essentially the same thing) provides the illusion of order in a chaotic world and in an apparently meaningless life. How much easier it is to get through a day when you have someone to blame for your frustrations, how much simpler it is when homosexuals or Arabs or Jews or women are the root cause of all your suffering.
Perhaps in the end it will be bigotry – not love, nor the desire for peace, nor a passion for beauty – that binds us and will bind us forever. Perhaps it is simple bigotry, our constant and intense need to separate into tribes, which will join us.
Certainly, the uneducated, those who have never had a chance to see other worlds, to study culture, those who’ve never had the opportunity to travel, those who can barely afford to feed their families, might be
forgiven their prejudices. The uneducated are, after all, forever under the thumb of the educated.
But those of us who have the luxury and privilege of education, we should know better. Better the world make no sense, better accept its infinite chaos, better live a godless lifetime, than stand on the deck of your million dollar home and blame the Arabs for all your problems.
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