Paris

Photo © Michael Deibert

2015: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

This past year was one in which I struggled with the financial realities of doing serious, independent journalism as much as I ever have in my life, but I was still afforded the chance to visit Cuba for the first-time, return to still-beloved and still-tumultuous Haiti, draw attention to an extraordinary and much-maligned Hudson Valley city and try to reach out to extend aquele abraço to Paris in its moment of great need. Next year, I will be bringing out a new book on Haiti looking at the country's 2004 to 2015 era, and hope to make some progress on getting my fiction before the public, as well. In the meantime, I move forward keeping in mind the words of Federico García Lorca's Cielo Vivo:

Yo no podré quejarme
si no encontré lo que buscaba;
pero me iré al primer paisaje de humedades y latidos
para entender que lo que busco tendrá su blanco de alegría
cuando yo vuele mezclado con el amor y las arenas.

(I won't be able to complain
though I never found what I was looking for;
but I'll go to the first fluid landscape of heartbeats
so I'll know that my search has a joyful target
when I'm flying, jumbled with loved and sandstorms) 

 
Has Guatemala's Long-Awaited Spring Finally Arrived? for InSight Crime (9 December 2015) 

Paris, je t'aime for the Huffington Post (20 November 2015)

Interview on the attempt by the Republic of Congo's Denis Sassou Nguesso to cling to power in Brazzaville for France 24 (20 October 2015)

Conversation with Juliana Barbassa about her book Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink and the state of modern Brazil here at Books & Book in Miami (7 August 2015)

In Mexico’s Veracruz, violence stalks journalists and students for Fusion (4 August 2015)

 

Could the gangs of Port-au-Prince form a pact to revitalise Haiti's capital? for the Guardian (14 July 2015) 

Making sense of Miami: what America's strangest city says about the US's future for the Guardian (2 July 2015)

Letter from Havana for the Guardian (17 June 2015)

In from the cold: the implications of the US's thawing on Cuba for Foreign Direct Investment (12 June 2015)

 

Resurrecting Newburgh for the Guardian (8 April 2015) 

The Dominican Republic's decade of diversification for Foreign Direct Investment (12 February 2015)

Paris, je t'aime

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.

Paris encore debout

Photo © Chantal Regnault.

Ce soir derrière le Bataclan Paris 11ème. Paris is still standing.

Thoughts on the Paris attacks

Back when I lived in Château Rouge, in the northeastern corner of Paris in the 18eme arrondissement, one of my favourite things to do on a Saturday morning - a morning much like this one - was to descend from my flat and walk south.

I would walk through the Marché Dejean, where vendors from places like Côte d’Ivoire,  Sénégal, Congo and elsewhere would sell their wares in front of Algerian-owned bars, and, strolling down the Boulevard Barbès or through the Goutte d'Or, I would eventually cross the Boulevard de Rochechouart, under the elevated métro lines. Walking south, past the Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est which link Paris with so much of the rest of the world either directly or through connections to its airports, I would veer east and, heading towards the Canal Saint-Martin and to the Quai de Jemmapes, arrive at what is possibly my favourite few blocks of the city.

On a mild day anytime of the year, spots like L'Atmosphère, the Hôtel du Nord and Chez Prune would be crowded with people of every background and nationality, eating, drinking, flirting. Couples would be reclining in one another's arms, and some young person would be playing a guitar. Sunlight would filter down through the leaves of the trees around the canal, and the branches would move in a surprisingly delicate ballet from even the faintest breeze. For those moments you sat there, no matter who you were or where you were from, you could feel a measure of peace, and feel embraced by a city whose history was larger than yourself.

For those of you who don't understand or are asking why those who know it and love it are so wrenched by an attack like this on the La Ville Lumière, which occurred only minutes' walk from the place I am describing this is the reason. Despite all its problems, Paris represents so much to love in the world for so many people; liberté, laïcité, sexual liberation, multiculturalism. It represents so much to be aspired to when elsewhere, even within Europe and France itself, there seems to be only darkness.

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure 
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

World crisis spurs protest from French workers

Monday, May 11, 2009

World crisis spurs protest from French workers

By Michael Deibert

The Washington Times

PARIS | France's workers, never known to shrink from the barricades, are meeting the global economic crisis with strikes and protests.

Dockworkers at the English channel port of Le Havre, which processes nearly two-thirds of French cargo, recently cut the number of vessels loading and unloading there by half. A one-day strike earlier last month at Electricite de France SA, Europe's biggest electricity generator, plunged parts of the City of Light into darkness as production cuts occurred at two of the provider's nuclear reactors.

But these instances are more or less par for the course in France, a nation where union members heed the call to strike as a useful negotiating tool. In the past month, however, as France's jobless rate climbed to 8.6 percent, the country's penchant for mass action has taken on an undercurrent that some see as worrying and potentially explosive.

Please read the full article here.

“Bring me my bow of burning gold...”

As Paris fully entered exuberant springtime the other day, the novia and I found ourselves strolling down the Champs-Élysées. Losing ourselves in the crowds of tourists, we walked following an hour spent perusing a retrospective of the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake at the Musée des Beaux-Arts of the Petit Palais that was most impressive indeed.

Blake has been among my favorite poets ever since my midteens, when I read two volumes of his poetry, Songs of Innocence and of Experience and the prophetic/mystic book-length poem Jerusalem, in a volume of his collected works. Subject to auditory and visual visions (some would say hallucinations) since his youth, Blake’s poetry was intensely mystical in its yearning for a melding of the corporeal and incorporeal worlds, perhaps somewhat akin to the poetry of the great Persian mystic bard Rumi in its search for the divine among the everyday. Though the work of John Milton, particularly given its context in the midst of England’s civil war, perhaps had a greater emotional impact on me over the years, the intensity of Blake’s religious/mystical vision has always stuck with me. Blake’s vision was powerful enough through the years to inspire the poet Allen Ginsberg, who had a 1948 auditory hallucination of Blake reading his poem "Ah, Sunflower" in a Harlem apartment, to a new dedication to his own writing.

Seeing for the first-time the exquisitely wrought illuminated manuscripts that Blake etched to illustrate his own books of poetry (which he could barely give away during his lifetime) was a powerful lesson in staying true to one’s vision, no matter how incongruous or unpopular it might seem to one’s contemporaries. Likewise, such Blake illustrations as that of a heroically put-upon Job and a series of extraordinary illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy make for a moving and more than a little disturbing experience in a Paris museum on a blazing spring day. But one well worth the time to meditate over its impact.

The Blake retrospective runs at the Petit Palais until June 28th.

Bienvenue à la ceinture rouge

Paris in the springtime, and it’s very sweet to be back, I must say.

Returning to the heart of Europe from four months in Australia, probably the most unpleasant country I have ever visited, France, with its glittering intellectual tradition, culinary excellence, potpourri of cultures and proximity to so many areas of the world that hold my interest, has proved a very easy transition.

Continuing my tradition of living in largely immigrant areas of the city (as befits my immigrant status), I have swapped my pied-à-terre in the 18eme’s Château-Rouge quarter for a charming and light-filled flat just across the périphérie along the frontier of two neighborhoods, Les Lilas and Bagnolet, in the neuf trois department of Seine-Saint-Denis. A historically working-class area that is now one of the most fertile grounds for French hip-hop, the area of northeastern Paris that I now call home has such a strong tradition of militant labour activism that it once gained the sobriquet la ceinture rouge (“the red belt”), a name that still holds largely true today. Far from the overpriced tourist destinations and grand boulevards of western Paris, the neuf trois is France’s immigrant experience at its most authentic and, as such, one of the most vibrant places to experience the real culture and development of the language that France has to offer.

Much has happened during my travels, including the declassification of documents that prove that the United States government knew that Guatemalan political actors it supported with arms and cash during that country’s 36-year civil war were behind the disappearance of thousands of people. The disclosure, largely due to the important work of the Nation Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, DC, sheds fresh light on the development of a deeply corrupt political culture that continues to bedevil Guatemala today (as I found out during a recent trip there) and my own country’s role in it.

In terms of America’s current history, I can’t speak highly enough of the deep satisfaction I have felt to watch Barack Obama on his first visit to Europe as president. I can’t remember the last time I heard a US president rhapsodize about the sublime please of sipping wine in a European cafe as the sun goes down, all while giving an eloquent defense of public service, but I am glad that I was able to be alive at the time Obama was president. He makes one as inspired and hopeful about the possibilities of politics and America’s role in the world as the previous president made one hopeless and cynical.

I should have some much bigger news coming in the next few days. In the meantime, on y va.

Things I will miss about Paris

As I prepare to depart for an eight month assignment in Kinshasa this evening, I wanted to take a moment and pause to remember some of the good things about the Paris, the place I am leaving, a place I have often had something of a love-hate relationship with and which has served as my home since March 2007. So, in no particular order, having stepped off the metro and strolled down Avenue Barbès to my flat in Château Rouge for the last time, here are a few of the city’s most redeeming qualities.

Canal Saint-Martin

The lovely waterway that ambles through the 10ème, with its bridges and homeless encampments and trendy restaurants such as L'atmosphère and Chez Prune somehow, in its juxtaposition of elegance and squalor, its impassive gray building facades (sometimes relieved by a dash of color) and its lively summer street life, will always remind me of my time in Paris.

Bassin de la Villette

Just north of the Canal Saint-Martin in the 19ème, this waterside amalgam of restaurants and two movie theaters serves as a nice farewell to Paris before, beyond the Parc de la Villette, it begins its long stagger into suburbs of the neuf trois, as the department of Seine-Saint-Denis is known.

Getting lost in the Abbesses

Emerging from a métro station 100 feet below ground, one could be forgiven for forgetting the proximity to the fleshpots of the Pigalle red light district and Algerian transvestite sex workers plying their trade are only steps away. This area of Montmartre feels in many ways like a mountain village, with narrow, twisting streets climbing up the western side of the hill that form’s the neighborhood’s main geographic feature. The children’s merry-go-round and the wintertime decorations on the Square Jehan-Rictus are quite charming, as is, in more grown-up way, the neighborhood’s penchant for staying up late. As pleasant to stroll through at a meditative 7 in the morning as it is on a busy Friday night.

L'Harmattan

Pricey but worth every penny, as I have mentioned on this blog before, L'Harmattan bookstore is simply the most impressive repository of books of Africa and Africana in any language that I have yet found. The section on the Democratic Republic of Congo alone that goes on for a dozen shelves, more than many bookstores entire Africa sections A hint of Africa in the 6e arrondissement.

Ave Maria

A delightful, bustling Franco-Latin fusion restaurant tucked away on a remarkably little-visited corner of the busy Oberkampf neighborhood, Specializing in caipirinhas, mojitos and suggestively-named dishes such as the Woman on Top (chicken, in case you were wondering), Ave Maria is a spicy alternative when you tire of steak frites, bœuf bourguignon, carpaccio or, heaven forbid, the ubiquitous sandwich grec.

Calvados

A particularly exquisite kind of apple brandy from Normandy, I was first introduced to calvados by a Norman neighbor, and then came to appreciate its full majesty on a trip to Bayeux with my friend Claire in September. Marinating in oak barrels housed inside dusty storehouses on obscure country roads, I became a fan of Aux Vergers de Romilly brand of calvados in particular. One of the world’s great digestifs.

Going to the cinema

There is something about going to see a film in the French capital that seems at once more conspiratorial and more of an event than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Maybe it’s that the custom is to buy tickets substantially before the film starts, or the queues that form outside of a theater in advance of a screening that give it an added feeling of ceremony, but, whatever it is, I very much like the effect.

Pain au chocolat

There is no finer breakfast .

Château-Rouge

My down-at-the-heels though getting-more-trendy immigrant neighborhood in northeastern Paris has been a warmer and more welcoming place to call home than any other part of the city. I will always remember the twilight skies, alternatively subtle pink and moody gray, that could be seen from between the buildings, the African vendors who clogged the are around the Marché Dejean most days and the little restos where I would buy couscous, poulet yassa and the occasional pizza.

Adieu, for now, Paris.

FRANCE: Troubled Suburbs Erupt Again

FRANCE: Troubled Suburbs Erupt Again

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

VILLIERS-LE-BEL, France, Nov 29, 2007 (IPS) - The police station is a smouldering abandoned ruin, its roof gone, its walls charred black, and tiles scattered about its courtyard. From behind its locked gates the pungent stench of burned wood and plastic is carried on the wind into the street.

The commissariat of this town 10 miles north of Paris was ransacked and burned Sunday by rioters enraged by the deaths of two teenagers -- killed when the motorbike they were driving collided with a police cruiser.

Police say that they aided the two youths -- neither of whom was said to be wearing a crash helmet -- while some local residents maintain that police are at fault for leaving the scene before treating the boys. The boys have been identified as Laramy, 16, and Moushim, 15.

Pitched battles between police firing rubber bullets and tear gas, and masked and hooded rioters attacking with Molotov cocktails, bottles, and -- in a potentially lethal escalation of force -- firearms, continued Monday night.

According to police officials, by Tuesday morning over 80 officers had been injured -- some seriously -- and at least 63 vehicles in Villiers-le-Bel and neighbouring communities had been set aflame.

Residents have been left wondering whether there would be a repeat of the riots that shook the nation for weeks almost exactly two years ago.

"The commissariat was burned on the first night of the disturbances," Chanay Mahalinsnam, a Sri Lankan immigrant who runs the small Ocean Tropical supermarket just up the street from the destroyed building, told IPS.

Read the full article here.

Update on Riots in France

Update on Riots in France

The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC

After two nights of deadly rioting in Paris’s suburbs earlier this week, the situation seems to have calmed down for now. Michael Deibert, Paris correspondent for the Inter Press Service, tells us more about what caused the riots, and whether we can expect more.

Listen to the full interview here.

A hint of Africa in the 6e arrondissement

Ascending from the Odéon metro yesterday and taking a leisurely stroll down the Rue des écoles in the ever-more-wintry Paris weather, I was pleased, given what it appears sometimes to be the French aversion to work, to find one of my favorite bookstores still open in the early afternoon.

L'Harmattan, an official outlet of the Editions Harmattan imprint, has perhaps the most impressive repository of books of Africa, Africana and Latin America-related subjects that I have yet found. Shelf after shelf of book in various languages on all aspects of political and economic history on Africa, written by both Africans and non-Africans, and a section on the Democratic Republic of Congo alone that goes on for a dozen shelves, more than many bookstores entire Africa sections. If the Haiti section veers a bit towards the obvious. a friend a mine, the Cuban-American translator Pedro Rodríguez, declared the store to have the best Cuba section that he had ever seen outside of Miami and it's hard to argue that point.

After some enjoyable browsing, I opted to purchase a copy of Côte d'Ivoire: L'année terrible 1999-2000, edited by Marc Le Pape and Claudine Vidal, which I have breezed halfway through and which thus far provides a very interesting and thorough examination of the Robert Guéï coup in that West African country and the rise of Laurent Gbagbo, Côte d'Ivoire’s current president. With bookstores under increasing pressure due to ever-climbing rents in cities in both North America and Europe, it is good to see a store such as L'Harmattan, despite their occasionally steep prices, still going strong, providing the resources for the deep study of a region that for too long has been ignored by the media at large.

Now, if only I could find that discount copy of the The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State that I’ve been looking for…

Back in Paris, and on the passing of Lucky Dube

After nearly two weeks in Côte d’Ivoire that gave me the opportunity to interview presidential candidates, women’s advocates, cocoa workers, business executives and Force Nouvelles rebels (and go to one of the best reggae clubs I‘ve ever been to), I am now back in Paris and back online on a regular basis.

The much-heralded transit strike of recent days proved to be no more than a minor annoyance as my friend Gerry Hadden and I strolled around the city, checking out the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) march and interviewing protesters.

Some sad news reached me from South Africa today that the reggae star Lucky Dube was killed in an apparent carjacking attempt in Johannesburg last evening. Dube’s music was very popular among the young in some of the poorest quarters of Port-au-Prince, Haiti when I was living there for several years, and I often heard in pumping out of the boom box that my friend James Petit-Frere had during my visits to his home in Cité Soleil.

I had the opportunity to tell Dube this when I met him briefly at the Hotel Montana a few years back, when he was in Haiti to play a concert as the same time I was in the country reporting. He was very gracious in his response, as one could only expect from such a thoughtful advocate of conscious reggae, a genre that sometimes seems to be threatened with extinction by the onslaught of slackness and bling and the always hard road trod by the genuinely righteous.

“We've got to come together as one,” Dube sang in one of his most famous song. “The cats and the dogs have forgiven each other/What is wrong with us?”

Adieu, Lucky Dube. You were a shining star and you will be missed.

Les nuits de Paris: Black, blanc, beur

It is the evening of the Nuits Blanches here in Paris, the “white nights” of all-night cultural events that were inaugurated by Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë's in 2002.

As I prepare to go see a pair of African bands set to play a free concert at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, the fierce debate regarding immigration in France continues. In recent months, as I alluded to in an article some time ago, France has witnessed the creation of the (often justly) maligned Ministère de l'immigration, de l'intégration, de l'identité nationale et du codéveloppement and the implementation of policies that have chased middle-aged Chinese workers and schoolboys out of windows in nighttime immigration raids and bundled screaming Malians onto planes taking them "home" to Bamako. As a resident of an immigrant community and, indeed, an immigrant myself, I can only say that I hope some kind of humanity to one’s fellow man prevails in this discussion. As I would similarly criticize the current government in the United States, one can control one’s borders without victimizing the most defenseless in society.

Also note that this blog may be silent for a bit as I depart tomorrow for a two week reporting trip to Côte d'Ivoire, which promises many, many interesting things but among them perhaps not regular internet access.

Two Years After Riots, Little Has Changed

FRANCE:

Two Years After Riots, Little Has Changed

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, Sep 24 (IPS) - The community in this Paris suburb is waiting keenly for transformation promised by France's new government.

Clichy-sous-Bois gained an unwelcome iconic significance two years ago following the deaths of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, two youths from immigrant families who were electrocuted while trying to hide from the police.

The deaths, a particularly grim chapter in a long history of simmering tension between local youths and the police, set off rioting and civil unrest around France. Almost 9,000 cars were burnt, and dozens of buildings were set on fire. Close to 130 police and firefighter staff were injured, and nearly 2,900 people were arrested.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of interior, promised to rid the banlieues, as the impoverished suburbs that ring many French cities are known, of racaille (rabble), and clean them out with a kärcher (a high-pressure hose). Residents now ask if he will be equally vehement about addressing the chronic unemployment and prejudice that they say were at the root of the upheaval.

Read the full article here.

FRANCE: New Employment Law Sets Stage for Showdown

FRANCE: New Employment Law Sets Stage for Showdown

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Sep 3, 2007 (IPS) - On a rainy day in an eastern Paris suburb, members of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), one of France's two largest labour unions, told the assembled press corps at their union hall that the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to "disarm" French workers with a new law aimed at curbing transportation strikes.

Following Sarkozy's strenuous lobbying for the measure, the National Assembly passed a law last month, known in French as the loi sur le service minimum, seeking to ensure a minimum level of service during public transit strikes.

The law, the realisation of a long-held promise by the political right, requires notification by unions of a strike action 48 hours before any walkout, obligates transit providers to notify which trains and buses will be affected, and obliges them to reimburse passengers for any deviation from the announced schedule.

The law produced predictable uproar among employee syndicates.

Read the full article here.

For Jazz Musicians, a Paris Tradition Continues

FRANCE: For Jazz Musicians, a Paris Tradition Continues

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Jul 25, 2007 (IPS) - On a quiet side street in the Paris suburb of Louise Michel, jazz musician Bobby Few from the United States sits at his 120-year-old Gabriel Gaveau piano and reminisces about what he has seen come to pass in his nearly 40 years in France.

"After struggling in New York City for so many years, we wanted to find a new territory," Few says when visited at his home on a drizzly, unseasonably cool July day, speaking of his jazz group's decision to move to Paris in 1969. "We landed as total strangers, not knowing anybody, not knowing the language, not knowing where to go. But the music seemed to be everywhere."

Thus Few, who had moved to New York from his native Cleveland, Ohio in the early 1960s on the advice of the legendary jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, headed to Paris in search of artistic renewal, following an established pattern of African-American musicians who have crossed the Atlantic in search of something they couldn't find in their native United States.

Read the full article here.

A Haitian world champion and le jogging

Though I am no fan of boxing, I feel that some kudos are in order for Joachim Alcine who defeated Travis Simms for the World Boxing Association Super-Welterweight championship over the weekend. Alcine is the first Haitian-born boxer ever to win a world title.

On an unrelated note, there was a highly amusing article in the Washington Post this weekend about the cultural significance of the proclivity for jogging of France’s new president Nicolas Sarkozy, and whether it is, in the Post’s words, some sort of stealth “un-French, right-wing conspiracy.” Though I used to jog fairly regularly in New York, I generally opt for the treadmill and the gym here in Paris. But I must say I do notice that ,of the joggers I do see, many of them are inevitably conversing with one another (if running in a pair) in a language other than French.

FRANCE: Diaspora Trade Strengthens Communities

FRANCE: Diaspora Trade Strengthens Communities

By Michael Deibert

PARIS, Jun 29 (IPS) - In the northern Paris neighbourhood of Chateau Rouge, a casual visitor could be forgiven for a moment for feeling that one had gotten off the city's storied metro and ended up in Dakar or Abidjan.

Here, percolating soukous tunes from the Congo pump out of storefronts such as that of Rythmes & Musiques while women attired in weaved damask robes and men in West Africa's traditionally colourful dashiki vest go about their business in one of the city's most vibrant open-air markets.

But, say observers, "foreign" as they may seem to some French, it is also, empathically, as much the face of modern France as any of the postcard images of the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe that tourists usually associate with the country.

Read more here.

Golem à Paris

My old friend Aaron Diskin’s band Golem performed at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme last night as part of the Fête de la musique, the highly enjoyable all-day-and-all-night bout of free music that occurs here every June 21st. It was the first show in the City of Lights for the band, who describe themselves as “a 6-piece Eastern European folk-punk band” and sing in a mixture on English, Yiddish and, on this evening, French.

The music is quite a wild mixture of frenetic drumming, driving accordion riffs, trilling viola runs and Diskin’s vocals with seem to race back and forth between the singing traditions of the Lower East Side at the turn of two centuries, the largely Eastern European Jewish former and the rock music filled latter. The setting was quite a beautiful old building along the Rue du Temple and the crowds of several thousand seemed to highly enjoy themselves as the band ended up playing for nearly two hours.

While walking through the streets of Paris after the show with a retinue of friends, hearing music pouring from every street corner, we were amused to remember the floor we shared way back in our college days, which not only included myself, a journalist and author and Diskin, now the singer for this unique sounding band named after a towering Jewish Frankenstein who defended the Jews of 17th Century Prague, but also Enayatullah Qasimi, who did a stint as Afghanistan’s Minister of Transportation in the government of President Hamid Karzai. Now here, many years later, we meet in the streets of a foreign city, thousands of miles away.

Life certainly takes you to some interesting places.