Is Paris Burning?

I watched the first half of the France-Togo game at a birthday party for the French graffiti artist L’Atlas. The geographical moniker is descriptive of his m.o.: he’s known for the labyrinthine compasses he pastes at the mouth of metro stops in a style inspired by the Kufi calligraphy he studied in Cairo. The birthday party was in the large courtyard of La Forge, a former key factory that was rescued from demolition by artist squatters and has recently been granted quasi-official status as a center for “socio-cultural activities” in Belleville. Belleville is a honeycombed hill in North-East Paris, a multi-ethnic bastion of the working class since the days when those kicked out of the city by Haussmann’s works took refuge there. Artists’ studios and hipster bars shoulder Sephardic pastry shops and Chinese restaurants.

Against the backdrop of enormous graffiti pieces, L’Atlas set up a television on a carved iron pedestal while his friends made under-breath remarks to downplay their commitment to such unsavory things: television and, for goodness’ sake, football. Jean explained to me that one doesn’t really root for the team before they play - “besides, we’re not that into winners.” Another guy in one of an endless series of hipster T-shirts, most of them graffiti-themed, sidled up to me to tell me that he found soccer fans distasteful. Still, the Black-Blanc-Beur (Black-White-Arab) theme that emerged in ‘98 wasn’t bad. Meanwhile, African kids from the neighborhood ran wild in the courtyard and one beanpole of a girl (apparently of Togolese origin) attempted a meager “Ouais, les Togolais!”

Despite the prevailing too-cool-to-care attitude, I noticed the dudes (the females of the lot were mostly off parading their outfits, starting a bonfire) itched as the French had one near-goal after another in the first half. They betrayed a curious mixture of pessimism (“eh oui,” said the blasé TV commentator as a goal was discounted, the French off-sides again) and guilt, linked no doubt to the fact that so much of their cache is bound to the diversity of their hood.

At halftime, I took off south and settled in a small café near the Square M. Gardette, in the middle of the 11th arrondissement, between two poles of branché (trendy, literally “plugged in”) Paris, the Bastille, and Oberkampf/Belleville. I ordered a Perrier at a sidewalk table with a view of the television. The café was mostly filled with beurs (a slang word for Arab, used for French people of North African extraction), although there were a couple of white guys, one wearing a Frank Ribéry jersey. This crowd was more unabashedly enthusiastic, exploding with shouts as Vieira and then Henry scored the goals that delivered France to the second round.

Even here, though, there were signs of ambivalence. One drunken beur, clearly embarrassing his compatriots, observed at one point that there were “gens colorés” (colored people) on both teams, so what difference did it really make who won? The support for France seemed continually on the verge of crumbling into more sinister emotions.


In other news, NYU professor Assia Djebar, the first Algerian to be elected to the Académie Française, pronounced her acceptance speech on Thursday, and President Jacques Chirac inaugurated his most recent pet project, a museum dedicated to the “first arts,” indigenous works from all over the world (except the “Occident”), which has sent the price of African masks sky-rocketing. To say that France is struggling with its colonial past, in football and beyond, would be putting it kindly.
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This post comes to us from our Parisian correspondent, Nicole Asquith. Nicole has taught courses on French hip-hop at Johns Hopkins and given lectures on French rap and graffiti, both on the university circuit, and to me, over coffee. Her dissertation was all about Rimbaud, and yet was also about graffiti, which should tell you something about Nicole. She smart, but she down. Not to mention, she likes her football, this lass. In the fall, she begins a position as Assistant Professor of French at UC Davis. We're lucky to have her on the No Mas side.