N’importe nawak

Some random memories from my recent visit to Paris:

• The high, fluty voice of a waitress. It’s a voice you often hear in France and never in the US. It sounds a bit like the one Monty Python used when they dressed up as housewives.
• A young woman dressed in black, full-body hijab at a Metro station. She is crouched on the side of the steps. Her wrist rests upon her knee, her palm is cupped open. Her dress and posture suggest a religious act: is she begging or is she asking for alms? I see several identically dressed women on the steps of different stations. Who are they? I imagine them the female arm of a terrorist group. To hold out your hand while hundreds hurry by, hour after hour, to suffer so much indifference might turn anyone into a terrorist. I recall the anger and contempt I sometimes felt hitchhiking, when I couldn’t get a ride.
• The indescribable aroma of the stairwell leading to the apartment I rented. A mixture of who knows what. Garbage, turpentine, mold, dust, old cheese. The stairs are painted with an ancient glossy black lacquer, long since worn down to bare wood and hollowed out in the center.
• The andouillette I ordered. Somehow, I thought I was ordering eel (anguille). The waitress looked at me sharply. “Vous avez déjà mangé andouillette ?” she asked. [Have you already eaten andouillette?] Sure, I said, but not recently. I thought that was a pretty good hedge. Who remembers every dish they’ve ever had? It was entirely possible I was telling the truth. Even when the bloated sausage arrived, swimming in lentils and smelling like manure, I still thought I might be looking at anguille. I cut into the sausage tube and unfolded whatever it was that was inside. Pig tripe, I later learned. Not bad really. But why that smell?
• A black radish the size of a potato. My mother’s neighbor pulled it out of his garden for me. He pulled out another one and cut it open to show me how to peel it: not just the skin, but the whole outer layer, a few centimeters thick. The white flesh tastes just like any other radish. (OK, so this actually took place in Normandy, not Paris, but it was part of the same trip.)
• The waiter who mocked me at the Jardin du Luxembourg. I ordered a bottle of mineral water and wanted to know how big it was. “Quelle taille?” I ask. “What size?” the waiter instantly and sarcastically translates into English. And then in French he says, “Oh, 42, peut-être 43,” gesturing with his hand as if to measure his torso. I get it. I have used the wrong word. “Taille” can be translated as “size” in lots of contexts, notably for clothing, but doesn’t apply to bottles. He doesn’t tell me the right word, and I don’t leave a tip.
• The taxi-driver of North African origin who harangued me about the CIA’s obvious responsibility for the 9/11 attacks as well as JFK’s assassination. It turns out a lot of people in France believe this. Earlier this year when Marian Cotillard won an Oscar for playing Edith Piaf in La Môme, there was some embarrassment when it was discovered she had proposed the same theory on a late-night radio program. Just a couple of weeks ago, the comedian Jean-Marie Bigard, a good friend of Nicholas Sarkozy, made the news when he made the same claim. They were talking about it on the radio when I got in the cab, making fun of Bigard’s ignorance, but the taxi-driver didn’t seem to hear that.
• The small group of sans-papiers standing outside a building they are occupying, a union hall near Place de la République (sans-papiers: literally, without papers; I think they would be called undocumented aliens in the US). Some 600 of them have been occupying the building since May 2. According to an article in Libération (here), “Living conditions are severe. One meal a day, no shower, and only a few toilets.” (“Les conditions de vie sont drastiques, un repas par jour, pas de douche et seulement quelques toilettes.”) . They are right on the edge of the Marais district, one of the most fashionable areas of Paris, on the same street and about 100 meters away from the apartment I rented two years ago.

The Nouvel Obs has a story this week about the popularity of “le langage des cités” among young people. The article’s angle is that it’s not just ordinary youths who are talking this way but even those from the most privileged segments of society. The article asks, “Le parler ‘caillera’, ce ‘langage des exclus’ longtemps vu comme une contre-culture ‘voyou’, voire une sous-culture, serait-il devenu tendance chez les jeunes nantis ?” (“Has ‘caillera’(hoodlum) talk, the ‘language of the excluded,’ long seen as a criminal counter-culture, even an underculture, become trendy among the young well-to-do?”)

Although the article isn’t alarmist in the French-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket style of many (most?) articles about changes to the language, it does suggest that the trendiness of slang from tough neighborhoods is a new phenomenon. It isn’t. Although “le langage des cités” is constantly changing, the spread of banlieue slang into the broader youth culture dates back at least to the 1970s. The singer Renaud often gets credited with popularizing it. His song “Laisse Béton” (= “laisse tomber”) was a big hit in 1977 and is full of banlieue slang that was current at the time.

As for rich kids talking like they’re from the ghetto, this too is nothing new. American linguist Natalie J. Lefkowitz, teaching in the mid-1980s at the Lycée Henri IV, one of the most prestigious lycées in France, found her students were fluent speakers of verlan (a type of slang that in recent times at least originated in the banlieue). As she put it “As a Fulbright teaching assistant in Paris, I was alarmed to discover that I often didn’t understand the language that my students were speaking around me.” Her article “Verlan: Speaking Backward in French” (The French Review 63.2) can be accessed here.

More broadly, the tendency of privileged youth to co-op lower-class slang is not limited to France, as anyone who’s driven by a frat house blasting gangsta rap can attest. In his study, Nineteenth-Century English, linguist Richard Bailey notes that in the early years of the nineteenth-century “fashionable young men [in England] were increasingly attracted to the jargon” of criminals. Plus ça change.

Camille Paglia, writing in Salon, contrasts the “empty, mechanical attitudinizing” of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models with Charlotte Gainsbourg singing in a “deliciously relaxed duet” with Etienne Daho:

“Here’s natural, invigorating French womanliness on display again in the supply expressive Gainsbourg. And despite the intermittent corniness of French pop, what an affectingly simple and evocative performance — a mature man and a sophisticated young woman exchanging meaningful glances and exploring a palette of authentic emotions.”  

And here’s the video–you can judge for yourself. (This post is partly just an excuse to try posting a video.)

This week’s New Yorker (7/23/07) also has a puff piece on billionaire real estate developer and media tycoon, Mort Zuckerman. Zuckerman apparently loves to tell stories, and here is one that appears in the article:

He lived for a time in Paris, to study law at the Sorbonne, but found the French as inhospitable as the Québecois. (French students would come to an apartment he shared with some McGill friends, and drink his wine and eat his bread and cheese. “ ‘Volontiers,’ they’d always say. ‘Volontiers’ — ‘gladly,’” Zuckerman recalled. “But they never returned the favor. We never once were invited anywhere. We all ended up hating the French.”)

It’s safe to say that Zuckerman was not the first or last exchange student to be baffled, irritated or offended by the natives’ behavior. Twenty or 30 years ago, before it became an attitudinal cliché to “hate the French,” the punch line to this anecdote might have been funny. Instead, it illustrates why Zuckerman, however brilliant a financier he might be, is not a very interesting columnist: his columns tend to serve up things that have already been expressed more vividly elsewhere.

(Please note that I’m not aware of ever having read one of Zuckerman’s columns. My evaluation of them is based on what I believe they are like, given my recollection from several years back of Zuckerman’s generally uninteresting remarks on the PBS show The McLaughlin Group. More generally, my gripe with Zuckerman is that he purchased his way into journalism. It is a classic example of money extending its influence into an area, opinion journalism, that should remain sovereign. Of course there is a long tradition of this, but it’s wrong; it is the very definition of corruption.)

Clichés have a long life. From this week’s New Yorker (7/23/07):

What strikes me as particularly good about this cartoon and its caption is that it manages to very efficiently combine two clichés: the French have lower standards of personal hygiene and are more at ease with the dirtiness, both literal and figurative, of sex.

The lower standard of hygiene cliché dates from the post-war period, I believe, when the French simply had much less indoor plumbing than, say, the Americans, and therefore (presumably) tended to wash less. (See Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies)

As for the reference to sex, the cartoon seems to suggest that the couple have just had a sexual encounter and are now dressing to go to the movies (without showering). I don’t know how far back the Anglo-American notion that the French are more at ease with their bodies and with sex goes. It complements the “no sex please, we’re British” stereotype. It also fits into (Protestant) notions of Protestant austerity and Catholic debauchery. And one can go back to the 19th century, when Paris was a notably less prudish capital than London.

 An intriguing linguistic clue to French and British attitudes to each others’ sexuality is contained in their respective terms for condoms. The British used to call condoms ”French letters”; the French still sometimes refer to them as “capotes anglaises.” In both cases what was until recently considered a dirty, shameful item is associated with the other country!

 – C’est quoi les plats bourgeois ?

 – Ça veut dire des plats où il ne reste plus de place ni pour le rêve ni pour la contestation.

 François Simon, chroniqueur gastronomique sur l’émission “La  bande à Bonnaud” sur Radio France Inter (21.03.07)