20 November 2015
Paris, je t'aime
By Michael Deibert
Huffington Post
(Read the original article
here)
Eight months after the terrorist attacks in Paris in January of this
year -- attacks during which the Kouachi brothers killed 12 people at
the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly
murdered an unarmed police woman and four patrons at a Jewish
supermarket -- something strange happened.
When the literary
group PEN announced that it would be honoring Charlie Hebdo, who had
attracted the ire of religious fanatics for its drawings of the Muslim
prophet Muhammad, with its Courage Award, a group of writers sent a
letter
to the body to protest this distinction. The letter had been
spearheaded by the authors Teju Cole and Francine Prose, who both teach
at my former alma mater of Bard College, a place which, at least when I
went there, adhered to the rather more open dictum of Walt Whitman which
called on artists to
unscrew the locks from the doors, unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs.
While
adding the rather ludicrous caveat that "the murder of a dozen
people...is sickening and tragic" the letter attacked Charlie Hebdo for
engaging in "expression that violates the acceptable" and accused the
publication of "being intended to cause further humiliation and
suffering" to "the section of the French population that is already
marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by
the legacy of France's various colonial enterprises." The letter also
said that, by bestowing the award, PEN was awarding a publication "that
intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already
prevalent in the Western world." So, to put it more succinctly, the
journalists at Charlie Hebdo had been imperial valets who had brought it
on themselves.
(Cole had written an earlier
piece
for the New Yorker that rather speciously claimed that Charlie Hebdo
had "gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations.")
In
addition to Cole and Prose, among the largely Anglophone signatories
were Russell Banks, Eric Bogosian, Peter Carey, Junot Díaz, Francisco
Goldman, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Luc Sante,
Charles Simic and, strangely, the New York Times opinion page editor,
Clay Risen.
I don't think I had ever been ashamed to be a writer
until that moment. It was a scandalous display born out of ignorance of
the role of Charlie Hebdo, the function of satire, and the history of
modern France as a whole. It was obvious from the nature of the letter
that few, if any, of the signatories had probably ever read Charlie
Hebdo before the attacks, and had instead formed their opinion on a
handful of out-of-context cartoons culled from the publication's 40 plus
year history.
The authors seemed oblivious to the fact that
satire's function is to sting, not cause guffaws, and that by far the
most frequent targets of the publication's cartoonists -- artists such
as Jean Cabu, Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier and Georges Wolinski (all
slain in the attack) -- were France's rancid political elite and,
especially, the right-wing Front National founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen
and now run by his daughter, Marine. One of the cartoons most often used
to demonstrate Charlie Hebdo's supposed racism, that of French Justice
Minister Christiane Taubira, a women of Afro-Guyanese descent, as a
monkey, was in fact mocking far-right attacks against her, not Taubira
herself. [For her part, Taubira gave a moving
eulogy
at the funeral of Hebdo cartoonist Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac.] The
signatories simply threw to one side the publication's long history of
attacking Catholicism, Judaism and, indeed, organized religion of any
sort. They seemed unaware of the series of articles Charlie Hebdo's
slain economist, Bernard Maris, had written on the effects of austerity
on Europe's most vulnerable, especially in Greece, or that the magazine
had spoken out in furious dissent against the 2008-2009 and 2014 Israeli
assaults on Gaza.
As the French academic Olivier Tonneau
wrote
shortly after the attacks in response to the venomous social media
slander against the paper's slain staff, "if you belong to the radical
left, you have lost precious friends and allies."
(Nor were the PEN signatories alone in libeling the dead. The U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald
wrote
that Charlie Hebdo was "not just offensive but bigoted" and engaged in
"a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally" and "the vast bulk of
their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims.")
Now, 11 months after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in La Ville Lumière 129 more lay dead. They were black, white, brown (
black, blanc, beur
in the French phrase), men, women, Christian, Muslim, atheist,
straight, gay. They were committing no other crime than sitting out to
have a drink on a warm autumn night, going to see a football match or
going to see a rock band play. That scurrilous display of those writers
can't help but return to my mind.
Today, it is the false
narrative, advanced by both left and right, that last week's attacks
were the result of France's so-called "Muslim" problem, with a focus on
the supposed radicalization taking place in the
banlieues, as
the poor, heavily-immigrant suburbs which ring many French cities are
known, and a blow struck against the "white" city of Paris.
Having
come to France through a somewhat roundabout route of years working in
Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and having only lived in
heavily-immigrant neighborhoods (Château Rouge in the 18th
arrondissement and Bagnolet, just beyond the
périphérique
ring-road from Paris proper), I have perhaps a different perspective on
this than some foreigners. I've spent a fair amount of time in the
banlieues of Paris, and
covered
the November 2007 riots in the suburb of Villiers-le-Bel from the
ground. Though they have plenty of problems -- unemployment hovers
around double the national average, with that for 21- to 29-year-olds
ever higher -- a propensity for radical Islam is not one of them.
The so-called "problem youth" I met in places like Villiers-le-Bel and
Clichy-sous-Bois
(itself the site of riots a decade ago), were about as far away from
Islamist as one can get, drinking alcohol, smoking hash, racing up and
down the boulevards on their scooters to a soundtrack of French and
American hip-hop music.
The pool of these people who would
gravitate towards radical Islam was -- and is -- very small, and those
who become jihadis are the same ones who would go shoot up a school or
movie theater in the United States without the religious trappings,
alienated losers with no life and few opportunities, scorned by many,
often including their own families, not because of their ethnicity or
religion, but because they are viewed as dangerous malcontents. Somehow
a burqa-clad Marianne, the female national symbol of France, does not
seem a realistic fear to me.
That isn't to say religion plays no
role in France's current anguished self-examination, but to see this
series of attacks on Paris -- which ISIS in its "communiqué"
referred
to as "the capital of prostitution and vice" with all the venom of a
nerd being left alone at the school dance -- as a political statement by
an oppressed minority is thoroughly absurd. Among the Muslims who have
emigrated to Europe and their offspring, there are good people and bad
people, strong and weak, secular and fundamentalist.
They are, in
short, like people everywhere else. The image, somewhat massaged by
both apologists of the left and blowhards of the right, that France's
Muslims are bearded salafists heading to the mosque to listen to some
deranged imam's calls for jihad, scorned by society, is so far off the
mark as to enter the realms of science fiction, as is demonstrated by
how many
Muslims caught the terrorists' bullets while out at the bars last Friday night.
The
immigrant and Muslim communities of France and especially Paris are an
integral part of the city and help give it much of its pizzazz and joie
de vivre. In my heavily-immigrant neighborhood of Château Rouge,
virtually all the bars were owned by Algerians and Tunisians, who were
quite happy to quaff a pint at the end of the day. And though France's
anti-freedom of expression "hate speech" laws can often be selectively
enforced (witness the case of the anti-semitic comedian Dieudonné,
which I wrote about
here),
none of that exculpates such an attack, nor does it excuse discourse on
France by a clutch of writers who barely know the country at all.
There
has been a bizarre grief contest on social media suggesting,
alternately, that if one mourns the dead in Paris and the attacks
against the city, one could somehow not mourn recent terrorist attacks
in Lebanon and Turkey, those dying in the civil war in Syria, or those
being killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and that the media had "ignored"
such stories, even though they all have received -- and continue to
receive -- extensive coverage in every major paper in Europe and North
America. Perhaps if people spent less time circulating fake Buddha and
Bob Marley quotes they would have noticed.
A Brazilian friend of
mine currently based in India (a country that knows a little something
about religious-inspired terror) introduced me to the perfect term for
both the critics of Charlie Hebdo and those whose mockery and critiques
of the genuine pain of so many after the Paris attacks appeared to
reveal nothing if not a collection of curdled souls: Catastrophe
sommeliers.
After any major example of man's inhumanity,
religious fanaticism or simple tragedy, they would appear portentously
at the world's side, napkin draped over their arm to decide who, what,
where and for how long it was proper to mourn, or whether one was
allowed to mourn at all.
And as for me? It would be nice to move
back to Paris someday, if I can ever get the money together. In terms of
the letter-signers, Michael Ondaatje used to be one of my favorite
writers, and I rather liked Francisco Goldman but I'll never buy another
book by either man again, and am thinking of getting rid of the ones I
have. Most of the rest always struck me as wildly overpraised, so no
great loss there.
Though Paris is in deep mourning and will
likely remain so for some time, a nation that survived the horrors of a
Nazi occupation, World War II and the slaughter of the Paris Commune
will certainly wash off the blood, shake off the broken glass, kick the
shell casings into the sewer where they belong and get back to doing
what it does best, acting as a crossroads for men and women of all
faiths and all backgrounds to sample its various charms.
Behind
the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 died, an image has already been
posted up of five people raising a glass of wine in mute salute under
the words
Paris encore debout (Paris is still standing).
Charlie Hebdo's cover after the attacks was a beret-wearing French
caricature guzzling bubbly, which then pours out of copious bullet holes
in the figure's body, along with the words
ils ont les armes, on les emmerde, on a le champagne (They've got the weapons, fuck 'em, we've got the champagne).
The
spirit of Paris, of Charlie Hebdo and the spirit of those lives -- so
many of them so young -- snatched away last week can never fully leave
us. They will be with us as people drink and eat and laugh and flirt on
the cafes along the Canal Saint Martin, the sunlight filtering down
through the leaves of the trees as their branches move in a delicate
ballet from even the faintest breeze.
They will be with us as
people from dozens of countries gather at the Marché Dejean in my old
neighborhood to sell their wares and to seek new opportunity in their
adopted land. They will be with us in the crowded basement clubs in
Oberkampf where people know what it is to be young and full of
possibility.
They will be with us as one looks down from the
Basilique du Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre at dusk and sees a magnificent,
multicultural city spread out beneath them, a thousand possibilities
therein yet to be discovered. And they will be with us wherever people
feel their hearts are free, and full of love for their fellow human
beings.
It is a love that those who attack this beloved city and
its culture, whether with kalashnikovs or keyboards, would be fortunate
to one day know.
