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ShareParis is burning. And, how. Such flames would be painful, anywhere. But in France it is, for me, particularly so. And not just because of all the rhetoric of 'Liberte', 'Egalite' and 'Fraternite' in our history books and the romanticised idea of France gleaned from French literature and cinema. Nor is it just because I happened to be a student in Paris in 1968, when a chapter in French history had just ended, and a new one, no matter how amorphous or temporary was beginning. Those clumsy, uprooted pavement stones being thrown at the symbols of authority seemed as important then as did later the bricks from the crumbling wall of Berlin. It was one of those rare being-there moments, whose importance you only realise much later. Formal hierarchies scrambled: the borders between classes became porous. Any and everything seemed possible in those heady, hedonist days.
It has to do with the contrary French mind -- a Gallic ability to move forward without leaving the past behind as left luggage. But more than anything it is about the ease with which alien people and their cultures could carve a niche for themselves in Paris. The city allowed me as an Indian -- and that, too, an Indian-in-a-sari -- to shed the l'etranger label. No longer was I an exotic species as I had been in my nine-growing-up years in an America yet to be inhabited by burgeoning numbers of Indians. Everybody was exotic in Paris; and everybody was ordinary. Paris, unlike London, did not have a lingering colonial hangover for me. It wasn't quite a melting pot. A more apt metaphor is a salad with a French dressing: all ingredients retain their form and colour yet have an ineffable French buzz about them. In people terms you could call it a hyphenated identity. African-American, British-Asian, Punjabi-French, whatever.
The hyphenated identity has over the years become alarmingly double-edged. Those seemingly 'porous borders' between migrants and indigenous inhabitants, between different ethnicities, and between different classes have got thicker and more impermeable in France. The 'Us' and 'Them' is now more sharply defined with (in the West and no less in India) the underclasses and the poor becoming increasingly invisible, pushed out further and further into the suburbs. Today we no longer have revolutions, we have riots.
The question of hyphenated beings came sharply into focus early this week when a friend's young daughter was visiting from Paris. She is in fact multi-hyphenated: half Indian, a quarter French and a quarter Iranian. With her was a French girl, equally young, 'fully' white, and who lives very near the Parisian suburb that sparked what the two girls feared would snowball into, if not stopped soon, a civil war in France. And as we sat watching the images of the Parisian suburbs in flames and the took in the words of the French interior minister used for the largely North African and African youth burning the cars as 'vermin' and 'scum' a dark shadow of fear and sadness passed over their faces. They were returning home, but home now looked like another place: the word home itself had become tricky, uncertain.
For our multi-hyphenated French guest being French was something you wore more on the inside than on the outside: it was an attitude, a language, a way of being. "Look at us, we all look different. We are from everywhere but we are French. But look at the authorities, those in power taking all the decisions, they don't look like us, they don't reflect us." The disconnect between the suited bureaucracy -- largely white -- and those they administer, who are more rainbow-hued, is not only a French malaise. Not too long ago the Speaker of the Italian Senate used the word "mongrel" to describe some of the hyphenated humanity.
And today I still shiver when I think of the experience I had at Frankfurt airport last year. I was just changing planes, on my way to Paris from Delhi on Lufthansa. Since this was the point of entry of a 'united' Europe, I had to clear immigration, and naively slipped my ticket into my passport.
Once on the other side I realised my ticket was missing and returned to the young man behind the counter who refused to look for it. What chilled me to the bone was the look of utter contempt on his face. The result: I had to pay over 500 euros for a business class ticket to Paris -- as much as my Delhi-Paris fare. And this despite my luggage being sent onto the Lufthana plane to Paris.
Once in Paris I switched to Air India, and began to understand what 'home' really meant.
Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com
