French Like Me (Part 1)

1.

I walked across the expansive grassy field of the Parc de la Villette on a starry Sunday night in the private afterglow of a fantastic pompier, French slang for a certain sex act. Trapped accidentally in a parking garage staircase for ten minutes, Christine and I called for help on her portable, and one thing led to another while we waited on our rescue. Christine’s friends—Nadia and Patoche with her boyfriend, Paco—arrived well after clothes were rearranged and lipstick reapplied, and the five of us followed the thunderous music in the distance leading to Le Trabendo.

The rust-red building with the deafening beats was host to an open-mic talent showcase. An audience of over six hundred crowded inside the concert hall blowing cigarette smoke and nursing drinks amid modern cast-iron barriers and fresco murals by American graf artist Futura 2000. Reaching the banister of an elevated second level overlooking the stage, Christine and I rested directly in the center just as another singer took to the microphone. A slight young woman with thick dredlocks flowing past her shoulders stood fronting a small band covering rock songs, lyrics from Nirvana and N.E.R.D. speaking of teen angst and nonconformity. Certain subjects translate well all over the world.

Sunday School night at Le Trabendo was my first visit to a Paris nightclub; it also marked the first time I hung out with Christine’s closest friends. She’d met Nadia, with wavy black hair and a fetish for stylish handbags and high heels, as a teenager at lycée. They hadn’t seen one another since Nadia returned from her brother’s traditional Algerian wedding in Morocco weeks ago. Patricia (nicknamed Patoche), a brunette who stood even shorter than Christine, was teasingly known for her bountiful ass, sizable for a provincial French girl. She’d been living with Louis-Phillipe (nicknamed Paco), her onetime salsa partner from Martinique, for a year. Friendly and bilingual, Paco talked up the maintenance of my dredlocks with an interest in regrowing his own.

“There’s too much métissage,” I quipped, commenting on the preferred hairstyle worn by most of the African and Caribbean women around us. The clichéd idea of bohemian poetry slams with sisters in dredlocks, Afros and various natural braided styles actually holds true at venues like the Nuyorican Poets Café back in New York City. If Parisians were trying to copy that scene, then these ladies flaunting synthetic hair extensions were overlooking an important black boho rule: hair is political. But Patoche’s blue eyes stared wide as saucers at my faux pas, her pale fingers intertwining with the darker digits of her boyfriend. Christine hurriedly explained that I meant tissages (hair weaves) and not métissage (black and white couples), which were as plentiful everywhere around us as the weaves. Everyone laughed.

“Thoughts about mixed couples are different in the U.S.,” I explained once the performances finished. Christine and I drank Monacos alone at the side of the dance floor, avoiding cigarette fumes and the elbows of dancers getting down to French R&B. “Black women look at black guys choosing white girls and think they have a problem with blackness, or they’re scared of black women, or they think they’re too good for sisters.”

“So you never had a white girlfriend?” she asked, nodding to singer Corneille’s “Sans Rancunes.”

“Just once,” I admitted. A close friend sings with his own band, and at one of his gigs on the Lower East Side four years ago, I hit it off with his backup singer’s roommate. A poet from California studying for her master’s degree, she and I had a brief affair before an aspiring writer at an Ivy League school—a black girl—caught my attention and things faded between us. But the poet’s mom was Asian, and so I never completely felt like I was actually dating a white girl.

“I think we’re growing up more together here,” Christine said. “You told me before that you grew up in the Bronx with all kinds of races. But in New York, this is not what I experienced.” She’d lived there eight years ago, staying about fifteen months before returning to France. “I remember taking the train to the Bronx, and after 116th Street there’s no more white people on the train. I’m not saying we’re going to see black people in the sixteenth arrondissement, not really. But in the average neighborhood here, you’re going to have une mixité. What makes the real difference is that we’re growing up together, so we’re going to learn the other person’s culture, and maybe enjoy the person for who they are.”

“But that’s not the only issue,” I countered. “In America it was illegal for black and white people to marry each other for a long, long time. They would hang brothers from trees for even looking at white women. France doesn’t have that history. Still, I know for a fact that when some sisters talk to each other about relationships, they feel like a large number of brothers are either in jail, on drugs, gay, or picking white girls. I don’t picture your friends having those kind of conversations.” Having drained our glasses, we paced through the crowded dance floor heading to the bar.

“At the same time,” she began with a smile, “there’s love as well. When I see, par example, Patoche and Paco, to me they were meant for each other. Paco, he dated African women in the past, and Patoche dated white and black before. But I saw when they met. They were meant to be, besides race.”

“Do you think it’s easier to look beyond race in France?” Most Americans assume this is true, but even from my few days in the country so far, I’d seen evidence to the contrary. Christine’s favorite leftist newspaper Le Canard Enchâiné regularly satirized controversial Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and his hard-line approach to dealing with immigrants of color.

“Maybe,” she answered. “You’re less ‘not supposed to do something’ than in America. I think the pressure is stronger over there because society is not going to want you to mix in that way. Even inside your family the pressure is going to be stronger. And not every mixed couple lives in Manhattan either. Imagine if you live in Arkansas; your life can be hell! In France it can be the same thing if you live in a small village. Mais, the less you are together, the less they are going to expect you to be together, and in France we are not as apart from each other. You don’t have a separate black school here where they’re teaching you how wonderful it is to be black and what black people did to make humanity grow.”

Feverish debate is the French national pastime, so Christine would gladly lean on the bar with me discussing métissage for the whole rest of the night. Her last point was a reference to my all-black, all-male alma mater, and our talk of blacks and whites took me back to similar conversations I had in college. As undergrads under the influence of nationalist thinkers and our own civil-rights-era parents, we felt a responsibility to marry only African-American women, to make our culture stronger and reverse trends in our community that weaken the black family, like absent fathers.

Some of us matured away from the idea of a black culture that thinks with only one point of view about things like interracial marriage, and others never would. My opinions now are a lot different than they were before I graduated, but I tried explaining to Christine—the product of a supposedly colorblind society—my younger attitude about preserving and protecting the black community from being watered down. She laughed.

“To me there’s no real black community here like you have,” she explained. I noticed the DJ switch from French to American music for the first time: “Yeah!” by Usher. “Living in France, I think what we lack is a real community. I come from Martinique, but Martinique is far. The cuisine, the music, these are my only links.

“The fight that you had in the United States became the fight of black people around the world. For your parents and grandparents, I understand they feel responsible to keep fighting. But here, there was no such fight. Slavery ended aux Antilles in the nineteenth century, and then people came to France from Martinique and Guadalupe to work. There’s no fight that happened here on the territory. La France, the Republic, is no race! There’s no statistics of how many black people are here. We have an idea but not really. That was shocking to me when I was in New York, to fill out stuff and see race questions. C’est incroyable.”

Most people only come to Sunday School night for the singing and spoken-word. After the open-mic closed, barely half the crowd stayed to dance, flirt and hang out. A lot of the clubheads had already left for the last métro of the night at nearby Porte de Pantin. I realized that I had turned the night into another dialogue on race, something I managed to do fairly often since I arrived in Paris a week ago. Christine didn’t seem to mind, but I knew that she was more intrigued by the idea of racial identity than the average French black person. Maybe she craved discussions like this after a lifetime spent in a society turning a blind eye to the matter.

As Patoche, Paco and Nadia approached us at the bar, I quickly reviewed in my head the friends and family of Christine I’d met so far. At least seven couples were interracial. Back in New York I knew of only one mixed couple even peripherally, an old classmate from high school I hardly spoke to anymore who’d married a white guy. No one in my own family had gone there, while several of Christine’s cousins and aunts had. This made me even more curious about the reality behind France’s colorblind reputation, and the truth of black Parisian life beyond all the good publicity.