part0009

Someone had just turned the television station to France 12 in the too small apartment for its number of occupants. The pockmarked and graffitied concrete exterior was a preview into the apartment’s tattered interior, with fraying rugs and thinning sofa covers. The Habitations à Loyer Moderés, or HLMs, was the high-rise housing in the outer-cities of Paris occupied by mostly the poor, working class, and immigrants. With one concrete layer atop another, the buildings resembled dingy, crumbling Legolands. That’s what Didier Gilbert was thinking when the silly twenty-four-year old man-child Rachid began dancing lewdly in front of the television, talking about what he’d do to the woman talking head.

He yelled at him to sit down. “This is why they think all we want to do in the 93 is violer and voiler women,” he continued in French.

Ninety-three was the postal code of the outer-city. A poor place with even poorer people crowded in substandard housing, a place where most of France’s citizenry thought the men and boys only wanted to rape and veil women and destroy French culture. It was not what he wanted. Not at all, his mind hissed.

Didier Gilbert had been educated in French schools and learned English from watching American television shows and movies online, reading the American expatriate writer Chester Himes’s crime fiction, and listening to hip hop music. He’d gone to the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in the heart of the Latin Quarter and in the shadows of the historical Sorbonne building and Panthéon, the hallowed resting place of France’s greatest minds. The high school had educated the likes of French philosophers René Descartes and Jean-Paul Sartre. And on its faculty was a future French head of state, Georges Pompidou. The commute into Paris, though, was an agonizing three hours until he moved into relatively cheaper Saint-Denis where more transportation directly into the city was available. From the Lycée Henri IV, he continued on to one of the prestigious universities, or Grandes Écoles, before attending the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) for a year as a scholarship student. The ENA had been established by the late French president Charles de Gaulle to groom the country’s future leaders.

But Didier noticed how the cohorts of outer-city and salt-of-the-earth, rural scholarship students were tracked differently. He had tried to ignore the tightness in his chest when as early as high school he was steered into different preparatory courses than the richer students. His mother told him he was too thin-skinned, that he needed to ignore the slights, the petty and grand insults, stares that saw him without seeing him. He was constantly reminded of his cultural deficiencies primarily because of his economic disadvantage though he suspected his West African heritage was a secondary source of his marginalization. He was always addressed in the informal “Tu” versus the polite “Vous.” If these slights had been all he encountered, he might have survived. He was poor, to be sure, but also, from their perspective, not quite French, thus requiring more polish, more outings to the Louvre, the Opéra, the Comédie Française, as if he were a barbarian at the gates of French culture.

And then he’d met Réda Halimi, an Algerian student, at ENA. They began to organize the students, which led to their being bounced out of ENA as radicals, subversives. He had then tried to secure employment in Paris. Once the employers realized his common French name didn’t match up to his tall, deep-mocha-skinned person, he was always promptly turned away. He was constantly reminded that he was not French French— even if he had been born in France, as had been his mother and father.

His grandparents had emigrated from the former French colonies of Chad and Senegal. His grandfather had been a houseboy to a high-ranking colonial administrator. He left for France with that officer and his family, where he continued in their service in Paris. His severance, like his wages, had been a mere pittance. He began to hang around the Paris-Sorbonne University, clandestinely attending lectures to better educate himself and lose his African-accented French. In the Latin Quarter, he met students from all over France’s colonial empire. Here he met Didier’s grandmother, a foreign exchange student from Senegal. They fell in love. As an African woman, she had not been able to secure employment suiting her education and he had been reduced to street cleaning. All the mid-level bureaucratic jobs were reserved for the French Antilleans, those from the old colonies in the Americas— French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. With that, the French successfully divided the Africans from the West Indians. And the West Indians increasingly came to see Africans through French eyes as less evolved and barbaric.

All those railing on and on about immigrants from Africa conveniently forgot the debt France owed to those formerly under her colonial yoke. The many who had ably served in her numerous wars, those who were underpaid or never paid, and whose countries’ natural resources and lands had been richly plundered to enhance the grandness of the mother country. Didier Gilbert’s sulking and anger began anew.

He threw a shoe at Rachid, who promptly told him to “va-te-faire enculer” and called him a “busta ass,” something the man-child had picked up from an American film. Rachid left the apartment with a loud slam of the rickety door that fronted his safe house for the next few evenings. He wanted to charge after the numbskull and shake him silly for unceremoniously telling him to screw himself. The boy spoke excellent English, French, and Arabic, was a tech whizz, surgical with weapons from training in Syria, full of himself, willful, and ruthless; in their business these were admirable qualities. But it was too risky for Didier to move about freely outside during the day, let alone walk too close to a window, and Rachid knew this. He and the others moved every two to three nights throughout the HLMs in the outer-cities like Saint Denis and Clichy and in the popular quarters in Paris where they could easily blend.

Didier listened intently to the talking heads. He hated the men, particularly the one who seemed to have the world as his oyster. He was a liar and a fraud. The other he had no use for. He simply parroted the headlines with a shrill zeal. And he was as small as the pompous man upon whom he’d built his career.

As for the women, the journalist’s voice was smoky, gravelly. She wasn’t as appalling as the men. She was more center-left than center-right, except when it came to Islam and terrorism. Still the murder of that crowing Lemieux had rattled Elle Lefèvre, he could see. It was as if she finally understood that none of them were safe, were free to say what they wanted. Did she not understand that words had consequences ? He was not even religious, let alone a Muslim. He had been raised Catholic. But none of that mattered. The Blacks, the Beurs , they looked different. Some worshipped differently, dressed differently, and maintained different social and cultural practices, and were therefore treated differently.

Didier stood up to his full height of 6’3” and paced, compounding the wear on the threadbare rug’s already worn-out weave. Between the wailing of a child from the apartment across the corridor, bass heavy booming music, and dribbling basketballs from the courtyard below, it was difficult to concentrate. It was too hot to close the windows. The HLMs didn’t have air conditioning. The whirring fans barely cut through the noise. He turned the volume knob all the way up on the CRT television, trying to drown out the bawling and ball-bouncing back chatter. He stopped when he heard the woman speak. He now recognized her from the scraggy, lying dead man’s show last week. She was thoughtful, quick-witted but cautious. She talked about social exclusion, poverty, and the Clichy riots of 2005. She mentioned policing and how the persistent hunt for sans-papiers , those without identity papers, is its own form of terrorism in poor and working class communities with law-abiding French citizens. She followed up with some kumbaya claptrap about progressive community policing, restorative justice, and French republican ideals that got the audience clapping.

Didier was struck by the woman’s controlled passion. She was fierce but was clearly restraining herself. He had heard something practical and strategic in her words. He looked across the room through the tops of the streaked glass windowpanes. He saw a reflection of the flashing lights from the parade of police cars whose authoritarian occupants where here to roust HLM residents. He understood what community policing meant in the 93. But she had given him a different perspective. Nique les Schmitts , their version of N.W. A.’s F*ck tha police , was ineffective, childish, and offensive. It rallied angry young men and women, offended the elders, and still did not capture their experiences with the police, the French state, or their desire for liberté , égalité , fraternité — the bedrock ideals of French civilization. They desperately needed empathy, not fear. He was going to, as he’d learned from a Hollywood film, “flip the script.”

Fleeep le screept, he repeated in accented English, replacing the difficult to pronounce “the” with its French equivalent “le ”. Still the Beur-Black Brotherhood had been made an offer in the wee hours of the morning that went expressly counter to his newfound strategy. Glancing again through the dirt and fingerprint-smudged window panes, he wasn’t sure if the offer’s benefits outweighed the immediate costs. They needed leverage to guarantee the bargain. Didier picked up his cellphone and scrolled through the contact list until he found her.