A taste of French stale political debate

2012 won’t only be an important political year in the U.S, but in France as well, since a new presidential election will take place. And, because the system of primaries has been adopted by the main parties, the French political elite is starting to sharpen its knives.

For the right, things will be relatively simple, since Nicolas Sarkozy will run for president again[1] and shouldn’t face any opposition within the ranks of his party, the UMP.

But for the left, things are much more complicated; as usual, the Socialist caciques are fighting each other and their primaries will probably turn out to be pretty bloody. Unless they stop quibbling for a moment and start listening to the current polls that give a good advantage to a still undeclared candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, current boss of the IMF.

Strauss-Kahn is a veteran Socialist, a Professor of Economics and a lawyer, a former minister, a former deputy mayor of Sarcelles and a former candidate to the Socialist primaries for the 2007 presidential election[2]. Since he took the IMF presidency in 2007, he has stayed away from the French political spotlight, even though he has kept well informed of its internal game.  He is not a charismatic figure neither a very popular one in the way Chirac is, for instance; you don’t picture DSK well at ease at the Salon of Agriculture, shaking hands with French peasants, patting the croup of the cows or happily toasting with Creole dancers. Last year, his image was even tarnished by some accusations of sexual harassment against IMF employees. For months, he was the dreamed target of many stand-up comedians who kept joking about his unquenchable sexual thirst… And yet, he is currently the most preferred political figure from the Left, and so far, according to some recent polls, the only candidate who could beat Nicolas Sarkozy. His IMF mandate will expire at the end of the year, and his wife, a famous French political journalist[3], has recently hinted that he wouldn’t run for a second mandate but rather go back home and maybe get one more shot at the Socialist primaries…

So the Right has taken notice and this week-end, Christian Jacob, head of the UMP deputies at the National Assembly[4], during a radio interview, was the first one to open fire when he declared that to him, [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] 

“is not the image of France, the image of the rural France, the image of the France of terroirs[5] and territories, the one we love, the one to which I’m attached to.[6]”

His words were backed up a few hours later by the current Prime minister, Francois Fillon.Listening to Christian Jacob, you would think that France still has an important rural population, and that agriculture still makes up for a large portion of the GDP.  The truth is, only 25% of the French still live in the country and agriculture only represents 1.8% of the GDP.

So, why all this fuss about DSK not picturing well a small and dwindling part of the French population?

Here’s the thing, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a Jew and, as a Jew, sociologically speaking, he doesn’t represent the rural France[7]. Does it mean that a French living in the country wouldn’t vote for him or feel that DSK wouldn’t be able to pay attention to his problems?!

That’s not Christian Jacob’s point, anyway. His point is very clear. In 2011, there are still people in France for whom the possibility of having a president who would happen to be Jewish is so upsetting that they can’t keep their mouth shut. That they spontaneously-and in itself, it is extremely depressing- use the same rhetoric as the one abundantly used under the Vichy regime and before. Here is Xavier Vallat’s declaration after Leon Blum’s election in 1936 as President du Conseil[8]:

“For the first time, this ancient Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew (…) To govern this nation of peasants that France is, it is better to have someone whose origins, even very modest, root themselves in the bowels of our soil rather than having a subtle Talmudist.”[9]

Who was Xavier Vallat? Xavier Vallat was an extreme right politician who became the first Head of the General Commissary of the Jewish Affairs, created in March 1941. He actively participated in the development of the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime.

So, here we are, more than 60 years after Vichy, after the Vel d’Hiv, after Drancy, after the 77.320 French Jews murdered by the Nazis, 4 years after Ilan Halimi[1] and yet we can still smell it. That putrid, sickening, nauseating odor.

 And don’t tell me you can’t smell it.

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[1] A 23 year old vendor  abducted,tortured during three weeks in Paris' suburbs and finally killed because he was Jewish.

[1] He will have to make with two rivals from the right, Dominique de Villepin, former Prime Minister under Chirac’s rule who has created last winter his own party and is openly at war with Sarkozy, his longtime rival; Francois Bayrou, president of the Modem, a centrist party is also at war with Sarkozy.

[2] Segolene Royale won the primaries and was then defeated by Sarkozy.

[3] Anne Sinclair. She hosted for years a well-established political TV show, 7/7.

[4] The French John Brenner, then..

[5] Terroir: a vey loaded word, meaning the countryside, the conservative, Catholic France, traditionally referred to in opposition to a  modern, multicultural image of France.

[6] I translated ;  here it is in French: DSK “n’est pas l’image de la France, l’image de la France rurale, l’image de la France des terroirs et des territoires, celle que l’on aime bien, celle à laquelle je suis attaché”.

[7] Rural France as in : Catholic, conservative, the “true and only France” for the extreme –right, the France of the Crusades, of Jeanne d’Arc and of the Monarchy…

[8] The equivalent of the prime minister position under the third republic.

[9] Laurent Joly (2007), « Antisémites et antisémitisme à la Chambre des députés sous la III^e République », Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 3/2007 (n° 54-3), p. 63-90. Here it is in French : « Pour la premiere fois, ce vieux pays gallo-romain sera gouverne par un juif (…) Pour gouverner cette nation paysanne qu’est la France, il vaut mieux avoir quelqu’un dont les origines, si modestes soient-elles, se perdent dans les entrailles de notre sol, qu’un talmudiste subtil »

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Cheerleading, or the praise of the empty brain.

Yesterday afternoon, as every Wednesday, I took my daughter to her gymnastics class. Most of the time, I don’t stay, I go run some errands but yesterday I didn’t have anything to do but wait. So I sat there and read a novel for awhile. But after the warm-up exercises were done, some girls on the main mat started making so much noise that I couldn’t concentrate on my reading anymore.

They were part of the new cheerleading class. Girls from about 6 to 10 years old were learning to clap their hands at the same time and to scream in sync “Go, Team, go!” and “Win, Team, win!” Some of them already had that kind of ridiculously glittery and shinny skirt on.

To me, it looked pathetic and repulsive.  A “cheerleading class,” how odd and oxymoronic this expression is!  Why in the world would you teach someone to “cheer” upon command??  Apart from America, the only other nations where indeed you had/have to learn to cheer on command were/are the ones that experience(d) dictatorial regimes: Germany, former USSR, East Germany, China , Iran, North Korea, the Gaza strip were/are great places for organized cheerleading. But why on earth would someone in a free country pay $75 a month to have his daughter coerced into learning to repeat meaningless mantras, like that one: “Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-u-mah, Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Varsity! Varsity, Minn-e-So-Tah!”[1] ??

I had always assumed that cheering was a spontaneous, natural demonstration of approval. If  you start “teaching” it, it turns into something pretty ugly, into brainwashing, into propaganda, and to my twisted mind come immediately black and white images from the Nuremberg demonstrations and the crowd waving, cheering in sync the Nazis legions; I see North Koreans schoolchildren in their old-fashioned sports uniforms chanting and clapping for their national beloved leader. I see Palestinians kids wearing green Islamic headbands cheering the names of their “martyred”. Cheerleading is the exact opposite of critical thinking, of developing one’s unique personality.

Cheerleading is also all about learning to support a team because it is YOUR team. Why do you have to support the GREEN team rather than the RED team? Because the GREEN team is YOUR team. Don’t you get it? The players in green go to the same school as you so you have to support them. Not the red ones. This is exactly how you teach kids to develop parochial, gregarious spirit. You don’t teach them to love a sport or to respect any player and to cheer any player for a good move he just did, no, you teach them to LOVE the GREEN ones and to HATE the RED ones. You teach kids to love similar people, kids who go to the same school, to the same church, who speak the same language, who eat the same thing, who think the same way, who live in the same country. You teach them to hate people who are different. Because they wear RED jerseys instead of GREEN jerseys, because they go to a different church or they don’t go to church at all; because they speak a different language and live in a different country. And so on…

I also wonder why the feminists groups of the seventies didn’t put an end to that chauvinistic activity. Do you know a more gender discriminatory activity than cheerleading: the guys are the ones who play; they are the champions, the new heroes; the girls only get to cheer them on, to say the praise of the strong warriors before they go to war…and to comfort them when they come back, at the end of the game. On and outside the football field.  

And that is not all: cheerleading, as a respected and valued activity, comforts and perpetuates a very outdated, offensive and humiliating image of the “perfect” woman: a brainless Barbie doll[2]. The message is: better use your time learning to jump in the air, spread your legs, comb your hair, move your hips and boobs, display that stupid smile and vacant look at all times rather than using your time taking additional advance classes in whatever academic or artistic subject available in your school. It is such a wrong message to send to a young girl. It is the same old “Use your butt not your brain” again and again. 

I’m appalled by the thought that schools (by definition, places of learning) can not only waste money on cheerleading programs but also consider cheerleaders as role models, as leaders. Any female monkey would certainly be able to become an awesome cheerleader. But to teach a monkey to become a leader, even with all the chicks from the Dallas Cowboys cheering on her/him that would be almost[3] impossible.

Yes, cheerleading is such a medievalist activity.

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[1] According to Wikipedia, this is the first mantra of the cheerleading “history” : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheerleading

[2] The original one: the blond with the long legs, big boobs and that stupid cheerful smile…

[3] Hum, wasn’t Sarah Palin a cheerleader?

Color blinding Mark Twain and a few others.

Some English literature professor from Alabama just had a wonderful idea: deleting all the “Nigger” words (more than 200) from Huckleberry Finn and replacing them by “Slaves.[1]

Why didn’t we think of that before? Yeah, every time a word bothers you in a literary work just delete it and replace it by something more placating, less intrusive.

You don’t want people, the “general readers” as this “professor” calls us (by the way, who is a general reader?), to try to understand why Twain, although furiously fighting racism and bigotry in his book, used this derogative word.

You don’t want people to try to understand how White people for example, viewed others in the 1880s.

You don’t want people, when reading, to make the effort to really read. That is to say, to replace the book in its historical context, to distinguish between what the author thought and what the society in which he lived generally thought and so forth…and if the writer shared his time’s prejudices, what it tells us about that time.

No, no real (English) literature professor would want his students to do so. Please, no complications. Just delete that annoying word. Just pretend that slavery, discrimination, racism, the KKK and so forth didn’t exist. That racism today doesn't exist. That we live in such a wonderful world that we don’t need to care about how our ancestors thought and viewed the world.

In order to help that genial English literature professor, I came up with a list and a few examples of literary works that would also need a bit of trimming:

The Merchant of Venice, of course, would need a great deal of trimming: all the Jewish characters, and especially Shylock, reflect Shakespeare’s Christian society view on Jews, which is not flattering, to say the least (all the “usual” anti-Semitic stereotypes are there: greed, ruthlessness, cruelty, a taste for revenge, cunningness, hate of the Christians…). So, let’s not hesitate, let’s delete them from the drama! And let’s pretend that anti-Semitism never existed in Shakespeare’s time or in any other time. Remember, the ground rule is: Don’t force your “general readers” and “young readers” to REALLY READ.

Tintin in Congo. Yes, this one also needs a huge amount of cleaning: published in the 1930s, the “comic” book offers all the racist and ethnocentric stereotypes that were common at that time (and Hergé shared them all, without any doubt[2]): Africans are showed as idiotic (they speak “petit nègre”, a very bad French), lazy, coward, gullible and their physical traits are, of course, very caricatural (see picture).  Actually, there was a debate not so long ago about whether the original version of the book should still be published, or if it should be published but with a foreword for the readers to make them aware of the stereotypes[3] or if only the expunged version (that Hergé published way later, in the 70s) should be published. To that, I would say, let’s apply that Alabama’s professor wise rule: let’s redraw and rewrite the comic book! Let’s forget about the first version! Colonialism didn’t exist!

Madame Bovary. Yes, Flaubert’s masterpiece also needs some rewriting, as well as most of the 19^th century French literature. Look at the way women are pictured through the novel main character: selfish, ignorant, stupid, concupiscent, heretic (she commits suicide), amoral and so forth…yes, Flaubert’s portrait of a contemporary bourgeoise woman is quite offensive for the sexe faible[4]. Let’s erase that character from the book and rename it Monsieur Bovary. After all, who cares about sexism?!

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. One of Balzac’s most intriguing characters is Vautrin, aka Jacques Collin, one of the first gay characters of the “great” literature. His homosexuality is one facets of his complex personality: Vautrin is a dark character, manipulative, very intelligent, extremely strong and persistent, a débauché, and a pederast, as gays used to be called. Not really your typical next-door overfriendly gay neighbor. Because this character could trouble and make young gay readers feel guilty about their sexual orientation, I suggest erasing the character from all Balzac’s novels.  Enough with the gay stereotypes! They have enough on their plates already!

Le Chat Botté[5].  Enough with the Ogre bashing! How come the Ogre community is always represented by dumb, stupid, vicious characters? Look at what happens to that Ogre in Perrault’s tale: although he is a powerful magician (he can change himself in any kind of animal), he gets fooled by a cat! Remember, the cat dares him to change himself into a mouse and that idiotic of an ogre does it and gets eaten by the cat! I believe it is not really mindful of the Ogre’s community feelings and that this tale is not appropriate anymore for our “young readers” and “general readers”.  They could feel really bad for the ogre and not perceive the irony and subversion of Perrault’s tale.

You see, instead of attacking that remarkable Alabama professor of English literature, we should thank him for opening a new avenue in literary studies: the rewriting of all the unpolitically correct literary works. So the “general reader” could read as he watches T.V: without thinking.

[1]  See the NYT article if you haven’t heard of it yet: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/books/05huck.html

[2] His activities and relations during the Occupation are very telling, see for example : http://www.resistances.be/tintin.html (in French)

[3] Yes, a great deal of Hergé’s readers completely miss his racism and anti-Semitism. That’s why some scholars think a kind of “warning before reading” would be useful.

[4] In English: “weak gender”…

[5] The Master Cat, by Charles Perrault.

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About Haiti: L' énigme du retour, by Dany Laferriere

These days –but hasn’t it always been like that? [1]-, when you get news about Haiti, it is always bad news: political unrest, hunger riots, gang violence... Then the earthquake, then the international help so disorganized that almost a year after the earthquake most of the population of Port-au Prince is still living into one of these tent slums…then the cholera and again, political instability. A doomed place, a living hell, that’s what Haiti looks like these days from the outside.

And yet, what a great nation: Maroons [2]Haitians led riots and battles against French soldiers and finally won their independence in 1804; the first independant Black-led country; then, they fought again against the French and Spanish that tried to submit the young nation. Its first Haitians rulers like Dessalines tried to build a democratic and egalitarian society.

Haiti has also a rich literary history, both in poetry and fiction; authors like Jacques Roumain in his Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944) have given voice to the people of Haiti, exposing the injustices and cruelties of their society. And because of the long reign[3] of the Duvaliers father and son, many Haitians intellectuals were forced to leave the country and build a new life in France, Quebec, or in the U.S, creating a literature of the diaspora.

Dany Laferriere is one of these intellectuals forced to live in exile (since 1976). Laferriere lives in Montreal and shares his time between writing articles for local newspapers, writing books and now directing movies. He became famous in the literary world in 1985 with his first provocative novel entitled Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (how to make love with a nigger without getting tired) in which he was exploring the relationships between Whites and Blacks in Montreal and the way they dealt with sexuality. After this one he published more novels, some as provocative as his first one, some reflecting on the questions of identity and exile (themes also present in its first novel). 

For some reason, I wasn’t really attracted to his writing (I had this image of a show-off kind of writer, the kind that would exploit trendy topics and styles to become famous) until he published in 2009 L’énigme du retour[4]. Here, I have to say that I certainly behaved as the snobbish French I tend to be more than often since it is the fact that this particular book received the prix Medicis[5] that made me change my mind about its writing. If it had received the Medicis, it certainly had something more interesting in it than des parties de jambes en l’air [6]between Blacks and Whites[7]!

And indeed, it has. The novel is rooted in the Haitian experience of exile, loss of one’s self, guilt of having left, of not doing enough for those still living there…As a kind of exilée, I was particularly moved by some of Laferriere’s reflections on exile, like the following passage, where the ancient opposition between nomads and sedentary people appear to be still very alive and true:

                “En fait, la veritable opposition n’est pas

                entre les pays, si differents soient-ils,

                mais entre ceux qui ont l’habitude

                de vivre sous d’autres latitudes

                (meme dans une condition d’infériorité)

                Et ceux qui n’ont jamais fait face

                à une culture autre que la leur.

               

Seul le voyage sans billet de retour

peut nous sauver de la famille, du sang

et de l’esprit de clocher. »[8]

As you can see from  this excerpt, Laferriere has used a poetical prose to tell about his loss ; for those of you familiar with the French Martiniquais writer Aime Césaire, it certainly reminds you of his masterpiece Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1943), entirely written in a poetical prose very influenced by  Surrealism[9].  The topic is also similar, since Césaire was describing the conflicting feelings of a Martiniquais young man going back to his island after having studied in Paris. In Césaire’s poetry, the topics of alienation and anger against the White oppressor were mixed with an ode to his own Creole culture, as if the exile had made him aware of the beauty and richness of his island and its people.

So, Laferriere’s style is not unique but it is still a powerful device to move his readers and tell his story.

Because a story it is: the narration is mostly linear, with some reminiscences from childhood or other past times.  The narrator- the author’s literary twin- is awaken in his sleep by a phone call from a hospital in the Bronx letting him know that his estranged father has just died. Then the literal and psychological journey of the narrator begins; first, he drives to a remote place in Quebec, to try to see one of his friends; then he takes the train to New-York to see to his father’s funerals and then, finally, he feels the urge to go back to Haiti and to his father’s native village. En route, he meets with some of his father’s old friends, then his mother, sister and young nephew still living in Port-au Prince and also with some Voodoo powerful spirits.

One of the main strings of the novel is the son’s attempt to reconcile with the figure of his estranged father: we don’t learn much about him, only bits and pieces that give us the portrait of an intellectual who fled Duvalier’s dictatorship, living behind him a wife and children who barely knew him. Then, living in New-York, he seems to have turned into a kind of hermit, even refusing to meet his adult son. And yet his friends speak highly of him, making it even more difficult for the narrator to come into terms with his grief and loss.

The first part of the novel is mostly self-centered, the narrator being absorbed in his anger and grief and reflections on exile; while in the second part, he opens up to the Haitian reality, reconnecting with his native land. Here Laferriere’s poetical prose beautifully and painfully describes the Haitian’s hardships , like in the pages where Laferriere sees every morning, from the window of his hotel room, in the slum perched on the hill facing his room, a very young girl, always the first awaken, setting up the fire for the first meal of the day. This young girl, modern Sisyphus condemned to a life of poverty and violence with not much of a prospect, where is she now? Did she survive the earthquake?

Here is one of Laferriere’s talents in this book: making his characters very alive but without the heaviness of social realism. On the contrary, his poetical prose enables him to draw his characters and the places he visits, in a kind of Impressionist way: with small strokes of ink, of words:

                “La nuque fragile

                des jeunes femmes

                contraste avec

                leurs mains calleuses.

                C’est toujours la main

    qui révèle nos origines sociales »[10]

Or this, when he is in the Haitian countryside:

« La démarche indolente

d’une vache

à  sa promenade du soir.

La nuit devient

chagallienne. »[11]

Day after day, the narrator seems to “reroot” himself to his country, its pace and traditions. To the point that he finally reaches the end of his physical and spiritual journey.

L’enigme du retour  is an essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Haitian people whether in Diaspora or in Haiti. That is the splendor of literature: it drags you into someone else’s existence as no non-fiction book or documentary will ever be able to do.

[1] Since its independance bravely fought for by Maroons slaves, it seems that Haiti has rarely had the chance to rest from either natural disaster or man-made disasters (dictatures, repressions, corruption, poverty…)

[2] Escaped slaves.

[3] From 1957 to 1986. Papa Doc and Baby Doc ruled as dictators, having their militia (les tontons macoutes) killing about 30.000 people.

[4] “The return: an enigma.”

[5] One of the most important French literary prizes.

[6] Saying for: having sex, literally: legs up games…

[7] And having  experienced  them myself during my student life, I didn't feel the need to read about it, there wasn’t anything “exotic” about it anymore…

[8] “In fact, the true opposition is not

       between countries, as different as they can be,

       but between those who are used

       to live under other latitudes

       (even in an inferior [social] condition)

       and those who have never have to face

       a culture other than theirs.

       Only a journey without a return ticket

       can save us from family, blood

       and  parochialism”.

[9] It is Andre Breton himself, while waiting in Martinique for a ship to take him to New-York –where he lived until the end of WII- that “discovered” Aime Cesaire’s work and helped him get published later in Paris.

[10] “The fragile nape

          of young women

          contrasts with

          their callous hands.

           It is always the hand

          that reveals our social origin”

[11] The indolent gait

          of a cow

          during her evening stroll.

           The night is becoming

           Chagall-like”

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La Vie devant soi (Life before us) by Romain Gary.

Here is the incipit of the novel:

"La première chose que je peux vous dire c'est qu'on habitait au sixième à pied et que pour Madame Rosa, avec tous ces kilos qu'elle portait sur elle et seulement deux jambes, c'était une vraie source de vie quotidienne, avec tous les soucis et les peines. Elle nous le rappelait chaque fois qu'elle ne se plaignait pas d'autre part, car elle était également juive. Sa santé n'était pas bonne non plus et je peux vous dire aussi dès le début que c'était une femme qui aurait mérité un ascenseur."

The first thing I can tell you is that we lived on the sixth floor and that, for Madame Rosa, with all the pounds she was carrying around and only two legs, it was a real source of daily life, with all its worries and sorrows. She would remind us of that each time she wasn't complaining otherwise, because she was also Jewish. Her health wasn't good either and I can also tell you right away that she was a woman who would have deserved an elevator.

As you may have already guessed, Romain Gary (and under his aka name of Emile Ajar) is one of my favorite writers. Romain Gary deeply moves me as few other writers do: chez Gary, you encounter a fragile blend of ever burning indignation against injustice, ignorance, racism, stupidity; a ferocious irony against himself and most of the humanity, an explosive combination of hope and despair that give us some of the most beautiful pages of French literature.  

Gary liked to tell the story of a chameleon: you put it on a red blanket, he turns red; on a green blanket, he turns green; on a blue blanket, he turns blue; on a plaid, he explodes. Romain Gary is a lot like the chameleon of his story. Born to a Jewish single mom in Vilnius, he already had experienced several lives before arriving to Nice in 1928 (he is then 14): his real one, the one of a Jewish little boy raised by a single mom in a very anti-Semitic environment (Russia then Poland); and the many ones his mother was dreaming aloud for him: that he would become famous, as a French ambassador, or a French painter, or, even better (and safer[1]) as a French writer… His adult life would be no different: a Resistance fighter during the war (as a pilot in the RAF), a French consul in several countries (and more notably, in America, in Los Angeles), a film director and of course, at the same time, a very popular French writer. And, to this day, the only one to have won twice the Prix Goncourt; under his “true” name, first (for Les Racines du Ciel, in 1957) and then, under his alias, Emile Ajar, in 1975, for La Vie devant Soi. Five years later, he would end his chameleonic life by committing suicide.

A few nights ago, I finished reading La Vie devant Soi; I hadn’t read it again since I was in high school. For a long time, I favored La Promesse de l’Aube  and some other purely Gary pieces but La Vie devant soi is undeniably worth rereading and keeping on your bedside table. 

It is the story of two unforgettable characters, one at the beginning of his life, Momo (Mohammed), a young Arab kid, a son of a bitch (literally), that is being raised by an old Jewish lady, Madame Rosa, a former prostitute  and Auschwitz survivor, that now takes care of the children of  the Belleville neighborhood’s whores. Momo is the only narrator and you have to wait until the last page to understand to whom he is telling his story, aside from the reader. He is a street smart kid, who does his best to help Madame Rosa end her life up with dignity. But the most remarkable thing about Momo is the style Gary uses to make him talk: a very elaborate kind of literary spoken French that conveys the best of Gary/Ajar’s irony and humor and the kind of improbable French that could be spoken by an uneducated but smart and sensible kid. Momo wants to be a writer, like Victor Hugo, whom he has heard of by his old friend monsieur Hamil, a retired rug seller who tries to teach him a bit of religion but very often confuses the Koran with Les Miserables! And, most of all, he is in need of affection, of love. In this, he is typical of Ajar's/Gary's characters who all are desperately in need of affection, tenderness; like the main character of the novel Gros-Calin, Michel Cousin, who rescued a python and keeps it in his Parisian flat as his pet, for he needs some "human contact"...

As for Madame Rosa, she is probably one of the most touching and beautiful characters of the French literature. If the novel is a kind of coming of age for Momo, it is also a novel about elderliness, decrepitude, loneliness, death. And Gary depicts it all in both an intimate and crude way: Gary doesn't spare his readers with the physical decrepitude (we see Momo and Madame Lola cleaning Madame Rosa, dressing her up, changing her sheets...), but at the same time, because we see it all through the eyes of Momo - for whom the elderly lady is certainly an adoptive mother-, Madame Rosa, in her already lost battle against death, always manages to keep her dignity and her actions, which, otherwise, could be seen as pathetic, show on the contrary a sort of grandeur d'ame, retain some of this resistance spirit that was so important to Gary: like in the scene in which she gets dressed in her whore's clothes that do not fit her anymore (she has become obese), puts make-up, takes her purse and starts pacing up and down in her room as if she was still on the sidewalk (2).
The only desire that Madame Rosa has left is to die with dignity, thus not being sent to an hospital where she would be at the mercy of doctors who would force her to live a life of a "vegetable".Therefore, she asks Momo to help her die in what she calls her "trou juif" ("Jewish hole"), as she calls her cellar that she has transformed into a hiding place, because, as she puts it at the beginning of the novel, "depuis que je suis sortie d'Auschwitz, il ne m'est arrive que des malheurs" (since I left Auschwitz, I only had bad luck")... She goes down to her refuge from time to time, when she loses her mind and thinks that the French police can still show up at her door and take her to the Vel d'Hiv to send her to the German "foyers".
Here is another aspect of La Vie devant Soi worth noticing: Gary, through Momo's voice, gives a crude and caustic version of History. Here is how Momo tries to sum up the Shoah:

Madame Rosa, quand elle avait toute sa tete, m'avait souvent parle comment monsieur Hitler avait fait un Israel juif en Allemagne pour leur donner un foyer et comment ils ont tous ete accueillis dans ce foyer sauf les dents, les os, les vetements et les souliers en bon etat a cause du gaspillage"

"madame Rosa, when she has all her mind, would often tell me how mister Hitler had made a Jewish Israel in Germany to give them a "foyer" ["foyer" in French means both "home" and "fireplace"...] and how they all had been welcome in this foyer except for the teeth, bones, clothes and shoes in good shape for fear of wasting"

We also find in this novel Gary's love for the outsiders, people broken or so different that they can't fit anywhere but in the neighborhood of Belleville, mostly populated by Arabs, Africans, Jews. Colorful characters inhabit the novel, like Madame Lola, a former Senegalese wrestler turned into a drag queen with a big heart; or Monsieur N'da Amedee, an illiterate pimp who asks madame Rosa to write his letters to his family back in Cameroon; letters in which he says he is studying civil engineering... The Belleville neighborhood created by Gary is hardly realistic, it is more a contemporary and Parisian version of the shtetl from the yiddish folkstales. The other Parisians,  the "French", only appear later on in the novel and I won't say anything about it since I don't want to spoil the end for those who haven't read it yet.


When the novel was published in 1975, almost nobody had a clue that Gary was its true author. Most of the critics believed the fable that Gary had imagined: that Emile Ajar was his nephew's pseudonym and that yes, the young writer was indeed very talented. The very few among the critics that felt something was wrong were tempted to attribute the novel to Raymond Queneau, but nobody thought of Romain Gary as the true writer. Even when the novel was awarded the prix Goncourt, he continued the farce and his nephew, although reluctantly, kept pretending to be Emile Ajar. It is only after his suicide that the fraud was revealed in a posthumous text: Vie et mort d'Emile Ajar (life and death of emile Ajar), in which Gary tells the whole story.
It seems hard, now, when looking back, to not be stricken by the similitude in the style and topics between the novels signed Gary and those signed Ajar (4 novels: Gros-calin, La vie devant soi, l'angoisse du roi Salomon, Pseudo); of course there are differences but the soul is the same; it is the same disillusioned irony, the same love for the humanity and the same rage, anger at her endurable ability to self-destruction. 
 Through the mask of Emile Ajar, Gary reinvents himself one last time as a young and promising writer (he is 61 when La Vie devant soi is published); may be as an attempt to escape his own dibbuks.

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[1] Gary writes in his romanced autobiography La Promesse de l’Aube that, although he seemed to be a gifted young painter, her mother had him quit completely this art when she learnt about Van Gogh…
(2) "Je vous jure que Madame Rosa a poil, avec des bottes de cuir et des culottes noires en dentelle autour du cou, parce qu'elle s'etait trompee de cote [...]je vous jure que c'est quelque chose qu'on peut pas voir ailleurs [...]." (I swear that seeing Mrs Rosa naked, with her leather boots and some black underwear around the neck because she got confused, I swear it is something you can't see anywhere else)

Happy Thanskgiving, Sitting Bull!

Ok, I get the whole picture, Thanksgiving is about reuniting as a family, sharing a good meal with parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, watching football...and finding great deals on Black Friday.
And yes, I know, it is also about being thankful for something. Like the Pilgrims, who, because they were grateful for not having been slaughtered by their savage neighbors, and for having been fed a whole winter by them,  actually invited and treated them to a free meal - one thing very close to total bliss in contemporary America-!!
Yes, Sitting Bull, I know, it sounds unbelievable and yet, it happened. In 1621, in Plymouth, very far from where you lived and before your time, anyway. So, here they are, the lucky "Indians", arriving in the colonists' hamlet, not sure that they would eat anything edible -I don't blame them- but too polite anyway to say anything like that. They seat -on benches or on the ground?-. Do they mingle with the colonists? Do men and women eat together? Do they toast? Does the colonist-in-chief make a speech for them? In Wampanoag or is it translated by a native American who would understand some English? Do they really eat Turkey with cranberry sauce? And some pumpkin pie for dessert?
And after, well, after, I guess they all went back to their cabins and huts and did it...

 I meant AFTER?

After, that's the part I still don't understand. How can you be thankful one day to your neighbor for having fed you and the next day, just decide that you had had enough with his peace calumet and savage dances and ugly face-painting and praise of nature and all that crap and just go on your little business and "kill them all"?!

How come during Thanksgiving people always remember to be thankful to a bunch of do-good Indians that saved the first colonists from starvation but are completely oblivious to the fate of thousands of other Native Americans Indians who were slaughtered, raped, deported, parked, whose children were taken from them, forced to become good Americans by living far away from their parents in prison-type boarding schools, forced to cut their hair, wear White-man clothes, speak English, pray to Christ and so forth?
How come at Thanksgiving nobody ever seems to remember to apologize for all the crimes committed by the colonists and pioneers after the first Thanksgiving meal?  

I wonder if tomorrow, in their reservations, Lakotas, Navajos, Nez-perces, Apaches, Hopis, Comanches, Blackfeet, will celebrate Thanksgiving as well. If their kids would have had to dress up at school in Pilgrims' clothes with black hats and white Henri-the-fourth kind of collars like my daughter did last year.


P.S: In fact, I just learned that each year, some Native Americans from different tribes gather in Alcatraz Island to celebrate an Unthanksgiving Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unthanksgiving_Day) in remembrance of all their sufferings and of their occupation of this island between 1969 and 1971, when they fought for more civil rights and a fairer place in the American society.

Between here and there: mourning Britannicus.

Every émigré has to face, from time to time, moments of forlornness, of irremediable loss. To me, it usually comes by surprise, when I’m seemingly drifting smoothly in my American life; like the other night, when I was flicking through channels, trying to catch something more interesting than cops chasing bad guys, bad cooks pretending to be French chefs, arrogant TV anchors trying to convince me of their smartness and grandeur, pet behaviorists willing to teach me how to tame my dog, carpet cleaner experts eager to sell me their awesome new product…After a while, I finally grew tired of my fruitless search and retreated to the French TV5 channel, and it hit me. My “world of yesterday”, as Stephan Zweig called it, was right there on the screen, almost unchanged. The movie was called “Evil friendships” and took place in 2006 in Paris, mostly in the Quartier Latin and at La Sorbonne. The main characters were a gang of Sorbonnards, all students of French and comparative literature, all smart, beautiful and witty people, all passionate about literature and writing, all willing to become either writers or comedians. One of them, though, was a fraud: a very talented guy but too lazy to commit himself to any serious academic writing. Instead, he enjoyed manipulating other students, baffling them with his culture, trying to convince them not to write anything since it would never be worth publishing.

But it is not the plot that riveted me on my couch but the setting of this small movie: suddenly I was there again, in La Sorbonne’s old classrooms, being lectured on Montaigne, on La Fontaine, on Abelard and Heloise, on Chretien de Troyes…I was there again, in my own high school classes, later, this time my turn to lecture teenagers on the role of the writer in society, trying to instill in them the very same passion I had for literature; or I was back in the teachers’ lounge, defending Racine’s poetic against Corneille’s; vilifying Beigbeder’s latest opus or arguing with a colleague about Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Yes, my “world of yesterday” was there, on the screen, very alive: in the movie, the students were having heated discussions about literature, and one particular discussion was about the Act II, sc. 2 of Britannicus, one of the most beautiful of Racine’s tragedies. One of the characters was accusing Racine of being “cheesy” and “thick” while the other was trying to explain why he liked that tragedy and that scene in particular, so much. In this scene, Nero makes is first stage appearance; Narcisse, the traitor (since he is supposed to be Britannicus’[1] aide-de-camp but in reality serves Nero’s interests) is also there and Nero confides in him his love for his captive, Junie (Britannicus’ lover), and all his fears about his future: how to get Junie to truly love him? How to free himself from his mother’s powerful influence? How to have Rome’s citizens love him? What to do with his brother? Will he be up to this gigantic task? In fact, this scene is one my favorite among French classical theater: here we have a historical character, well-known for his later cruelties and acts of pure and simple folie (craziness)[2] but in Racine’s tragedy, he is an adolescent, conscious of his destiny but still unsure of the path to choose; he is not yet a monster but a “monster-in-progress”; a monster who loves, who doubts and, above all, wants to be loved, not yet feared. And Racine’s Alexandrines perfectly convey to the reader/spectator all this range of emotions.

Here, listen to Nero’s narration on falling in love for Junie: (the translations that follow are from myself and render only the gross idea, not Racine's poetry)

                    «  Excité d'un désir curieux,
Cette nuit je l'ai vue arriver en ces lieux,
Triste, levant au ciel ses yeux mouillés de larmes,
Qui brillaient au travers des flambeaux et des armes,
Belle, sans ornement, dans le simple appareil
D'une beauté qu'on vient d'arracher au sommeil.
[…] Quoi qu'il en soit, ravi d'une si belle vue,
J'ai voulu lui parler, et ma voix s'est perdue :
Immobile, saisi d'un long étonnement,
Je l'ai laissé passer dans son appartement.
J'ai passé dans le mien. C'est là que, solitaire,
De son image en vain j'ai voulu me distraire.
Trop présente à mes yeux je croyais lui parler ;
J'aimais jusqu'à ses pleurs que je faisais couler.
Quelquefois, mais trop tard, je lui demandais grâce :
J'employais les soupirs, et même la menace.[…] »

Excited by a curious desire,

Tonight I saw her coming into this place,

Sad, raising to the sky her eyes wet from tears,

[her eyes] that shined through the torches and the weapons,

Beautiful, without any ornament, in the simple apparel

Of a beauty that one has just snatched off sleep.

[…] Anyway, pleased by such a beautiful sight,

I wanted to talk to her, and my voice got lost:

Still, seized by a deep astonishment,

I let her go to her apartment.

I went to mine. It is there that, lonely,

From her image I wanted to distract myself [from].

Too present to my eyes I thought I was talking to her,

I loved to her tears that I made run [I’m responsible for]

Sometimes, but too late, I asked for her forgiveness;

I would use sighs, and even threats […]

It is indeed a monster’s love since he seems to love his prey’s defenseless and despair.

Or here, when he confides his powerlessness in the face of his mother’s authority:

« Eloigné de ses yeux, j'ordonne, je menace,
J'écoute vos conseils, j'ose les approuver ;
Je m'excite contre elle, et tâche à la braver :
Mais, je t'expose ici mon âme toute nue,
Sitôt que mon malheur me ramène à sa vue,
Soit que je n'ose encor démentir le pouvoir
De ces yeux où j'ai lu si longtemps mon devoir ;
Soit qu'à tant de bienfaits ma mémoire fidèle
Lui soumette en secret tout ce que je tiens d'elle.
Mais enfin mes efforts ne me servent de rien :
Mon génie étonné tremble devant le sien.
Et c'est pour m'affranchir de cette dépendance,
Que je la fuis partout, que même je l'offense,
Et que, de temps en temps, j'irrite ses ennuis,
Afin qu'elle m'évite autant que je la fuis. »

Far from her eyes, I give orders, I threaten,

I listen to your advices; I dare to approve them;

I get excited against her and try to defy her:

But, I show you here, my whole bare soul,

As soon as my misfortune bring me back to her sight,

Either that I do not yet dare to deny the power

Of those eyes where for so long I read my duty;

Either that for so many kindnesses my faithful memory

Submits her secretly all that I owe to her.

But in fact my efforts are useless,

My astonished power trembles in front of hers.

And it is to free myself from this dependence,

That I’m running away from her everywhere, that I even offend her,

And that, from time to time, I worsen her troubles,

So she would avoid me as much as I’m running away from her.

 

Many teenagers would recognize their own attempts at freeing themselves from their parents’ love in Nero’s words. It is probably one of Racine’s great talent to infuse life and realism in his Antique’s characters, so that, far from being dusty classics, his tragedies are on the contrary “larger than life”; his Nero, his Bérénice, his Phèdre, his Andromaque are not haughty characters, but sensible, complex human beings, just like us[3]. But with the inestimable advantage of talking like gods, in Alexandrines.

So, that night, alone in my couch, somewhere in the “beautiful California” of Steinbeck and London, I mourned my “world of yesterday”. Because of course, almost nobody that I know care about Britannicus (but I’m not blaming anybody here; the contrary would be astonishing) and because, more importantly to me, I realized that my kids will probably never experience, never feel the physical joy that you can feel listening to Racine’s poetry. Even if I do my best to build a bridge between them and the realm of French literature, they will most likely always be some kind of foreigners in their native language.

That was one of those moments where living here but being from there can be painful.

[1] Britannicus is Nero’s half-brother and is rival on two counts: for being their father’s real heir since Britannicus was supposed to become the emperor but Nero’s formidable mother, Agrippine, opposed the decision and put her son on the throne; and for being in loved and loved by Junie, the woman Nero wants to conquer.

[2] Remember, he kills his brother and his mother and later set Rome on fire; he also liked to race himself in the arena and to recite his own poetry in public.

[3] It is interesting, indeed, to remember that one of the constant critics Racine had to face in his time was this very one that we now consider as one of his most remarkable qualities: putting on a tragedy stage characters who, although they would still speak like the powerful and VIP people they were, would show their weaknesses and doubts. (one of the rule of the  French classical tragedy being that only noble characters should be showed: emperors, princes, kings who would all behave with grandeur. Hence it excluded the expression of personal feelings)

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