French Riots 3 -- with a feminist twist

1. Form Le Nouvel Observateur, 03.11.2005:

Historian Pascal Blanchard investigates "La fracture coloniale" in his book of the same name that is now creating waves in France. In it, Blanchard complains of a massive repression of French colonial history, of which today only an insignificant part remains in the public consciousness. Perhaps this is a reason for the youth riots? In an interview , Blanchard admits: "This question concerns seven generations and 700 million individuals. If a country makes no material available and sets up no centres providing information on such a question, what should history teachers do when confronted where 70% of the students are descendants of former colonies? What should they say? Such pupils have the feeling they are seen as 'enemies of the Republic' or as having no place in the country's long history."


2. Neither whores nor submissive -- a feminist angle

Young Muslim women in the working class suburbs of France have two choices: slut or servant. Fadela Amara is trying to offer them a third option: respect. By Rebecca Hillauer

Fadela Amara has a mission. One sees it in the intensity of her eyes and feels it in the passion of her speech. A good two years ago, the daughter of an Algerian immigrant family in Paris, she founded the organisation "Ni putes ni soumises". This is also the title of her book, which won the "Prix du Livre Politique" of the French national assembly last year. In the book, Fadela Amara tells in a simple and direct style the story of her fight against the growing violence and social disintegration in France's suburbs.

Reading Amara's book, one understands quickly the gravity of the situation. On October 4, 2002 in Vitry-sur-Seine, a satellite town of Paris, 18 year old Sohane Benziane, the daughter of Kabyle immigrants, was burned alive. The perpetrators were two men her age of North African descent. They lured the girl, who refused to submit to the "norms of the neighbourhood", into a cellar. While one kept watch outside, the other poured gas over Sohane and set her on fire with a lighter.

This horrible deed was a catalyst for Fadela Amara. A few days later, she along with 2000 other men and women took part in a silent march. Then she organised gatherings at which girls and women could speak openly about violence in their districts. In February 2003 she initiated a "March of Women from the Suburbs". It went through a total of 23 cities and drew the nation's attention to the particular repression of the "girls of the city". Today "Ni putes ni soumises" has more than 6000 members and 60 local committees. The organisation encourages young women and men in the suburbs to act against ghettoisation and the suppression of women, and to support equal opportunity and rights. Fadela Amara wants to break the law of silence which has masked the violence of the suburbs, mafia-style.

The petite woman with the narrow face and the little pig-tail grew up in a suburban housing development in Clermont-Ferrand, a working class city in the South. "We thought at the time that the French republic was going to give us immigrant children a chance as well." Freedom, equality, fraternity – France's founding principles – are still seminal terms for the 40 year old. Like many daughters of immigrant parents, she didn't enjoy equal rights as she grew up in the 1980s either, but the common commitment to anti-racism movement brought the sexes closer together. The number of forced marriages decreased and the number of female Muslim students increased. Since the economic crisis of the 1990s, however, the clocks have started ticking backwards again.

Fathers in immigrant families don't only lose their jobs when they're unemployed. They lose their authority in the family. This position is then occupied by their eldest sons who, although they may not be able to find legal employment, can provide for the family through their work in "parallel economies": car theft and drug dealing. With the authority they inherit, they are able to impose their conservative notions of religion and morality onto their social surroundings. Their spiritual nourishment comes from the Islamic fundamentalists, whose influence in the suburbs continues to rise.

For girls in the neighbourhood the message is: take on traditional female roles, dress chastely, don't go out and most importantly, remain a virgin until you marry. This unwritten law doesn't only apply to Muslim girls. The north African young men, although they constitute a minority, command the non-Islamic populations in the suburbs as well: African immigrants and lower class French.

In her book, Fadela Amara describes precisely what effect this moral pressure has on the girls. And how much courage they need to stand up to their moral guard dogs by wearing make-up, for example, or a skirt. In the suburbs, both represent an act of rebellion. Many girls dress intentionally unattractively or wear a veil, for fear of reprisals.

"The veil symbolises submission to male dominance," Fadela Amara explains. For this reason, she supports Chirac's hard line of banning the veil in schools. The veil says "I am not available" and should, in principle, buy the women some peace. But what results is a confirmation of the fatal alternative presented in the provocative name "Ni putes ni soumises"; either a woman gives in to her traditional role, or she is considered a whore and fair game.

A common punishment for girls who rebel, in the worst case, is the so-called "tournante" – gang rape. Samira Bellil was the first to describe this phenomena in her book "Dans l'enfer des tournantes" (in gang-rape hell). She had been the victim of three gang rapes before she found the courage, after psychotherapeutic treatment, to tell her story. Samira Bellil was also patron of "Ni putes ni soumises" until she died last year at 31 of stomach cancer.

Bellil's book and Amara's activites have woken up politicians. In various cities, emergency hotlines and hostels have been set up for women and girls forced to flee their neighbourhoods. In police stations, specialised workers are being trained to deal with "migrants problems". But Fadela Amara believes that these measures address only the symptoms of the grievances; to eliminate the roots of the problem, steps have to be taken against mass unemployment and the ghettoising of the suburbs . But the author does not hold political forces responsible. In her book, she is very critical of the way many immigrants bring up their children.

"In Muslim immigrant families, the sons are treated like kings. They are not just preferred over the girls, they are spoilt and coddled." The crux is that when these young men encounter resistance beyond the family for the first time - when they don't get into university or college, for example - they react helplessly and destructively. They compensate for their fury and inferiority complexes with machismo and violence against those who are socially and physically weaker – girls in particular.

"In the suburbs, sexual education takes place through porn videos – how can these boys not have a twisted image of women?" Amara asks. She demands better sexual education in schools. The boys should learn values: how to deal with the opposite sex respectfully. To this purpose, Amara published a "How to respect" guide that's designed to fit into a trouser pocket. Her colleagues take these into the schools and discuss with students their notions of marriage, virginity, forced marriage, circumcision, tenderness and love.

Amara emphasises that this is the difference between those who talk about cultural relativism and her organisation, which is aimed at achieving universal human rights. "An exaggerated tolerance of supposed cultural differences which results in the maintenance of archaic traditions - that's just not acceptable."

(Rebecca Hillauer is a freelance radio and print journalist resident in Germany. She has published an Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers.)


3. The price of disdain

French author Francois Bon writes on life in the French suburban "villes nouvelles", and his feelings of helplessness at the recent violence there.

The first act of violence took place long ago - it has been continuous and deep-seated. The people were parked in one block of flats or another, one suburban housing estate or another. Entire districts were left to steep in their own misery: businesses settled only in communities that had said no to housing estates. The gap widened. And what's worse, now young people from the suburbs are expected to go to suburban universities at Nanterre, Créteil or Villetaneuse. They literally need hand-contour biometric identification to enrol at Jussieu or the Sorbonne in downtown Paris.

This sort of societal disdain pushes people to resist, to fight. In fact Seine Saint-Denis, "nine-three", or "nine cubed", as they call France's department with the number 93, is a magnificent laboratory of the hyper-city, mixing music, urban transformation and youth literature. I think it's the only department in France where philosophy teachers are sent to teach 14-year-old adolescents who're destined to become underpaid tradesmen and apprentices. But such experiments are a drop in a very dirty bucket.

For years I've been hearing about the permanent identity checks and frisks. It's impossible to get a job or find an apartment, if you're from Aulnay Sous Bois or la Courneuve. And yet people don't give up trying to make the borders between city and suburb more porous: the " concrete slab " of Argenteuil is no richer for having wanted to call itself Val d'Argenteuil, and now even Val d'Argent. But several prefab housing estates were demolished, and a pedestrian walkway now connects the suburban enclave to the outside world via the suburban rail station. In the centre of the Parisian suburb Saint-Denis, and in many other French cities, ten years of work have brought about some needed changes: the high-rise housing estates have been connected to the city centres by tram, social housing has changed its image and attracts students as well as families.

Things could change. Fifteen years ago, I lived in Bobigny in the Paris suburbs. The old working populations had settled in a belt of "villes nouvelles" around Paris. And younger people came to work in the modern factories, just a metro ride from the capital. But the high schools didn't follow suit. Young teachers are sent to these locations on their first assignments, and are rotated fast. Despite all attempts to the contrary, these areas are becoming ghettos, and the situation is getting worse. Take Villepinte . It's a protected city comprised of family homes. All of Aulnay's middle class moved there, and now Aulnay is going to the dumps.

Clichy-sous-Bois, where the most recent violence flared up, is a city without a centre. I worked in the high school there for a year (in the Lycée Alfred-Nobel, with an an excellent, committed staff). Between the lycée and the high rises there's a MacDonald's, a field for training dogs and a four-lane highway. It's one of the poorest cities in one of France's poorest departments, and the state is increasingly washing its hands of the problem.

But people keep trying to improve things, because there's no alternative, because it's vital. The massive influx of families in the 1970s, entire villages even, from Morocco and Algeria who came to work at the Citroen factory in Aulnay and the Renault factory in Flins can't be reversed. Disdain is widespread. For years people have been struggling against it, but the going is slow. I'm now giving writing workshops in the suburb of Pantin. There's a community youth centre there where a dozen people, often locals, help out.

But in the end you come up against a wall. The disdain is omnipresent. And when you come up against a dead end, all that remains is fear. I've been working in these departments for years, as a writer and giving writing workshops. Last June, when I was doing a series of portraits for the tv channel arte with two adolescents attending trade school, a gang of 10- and 11-year-olds forced us to turn around in our tracks. And three weeks ago in Pantin, I was about to start a workshop in the library for 20 or so young hairdressing students. At first five, then ten youths physically prevented me from teaching literature to their sisters and girlfriends. Suddenly the sweat shirts and hoods were there. They showed me, the 'white' guy, what disdain was like from the other side. The whole situation is appalling.

Last year when the lycée students in Seine Saint-Denis were demonstrating for better conditions, several dozen youths who go to school in even worse conditions confronted the demonstrators, smashed windows and extorted their mobile telephones. It's this totalitarian, erratic side to the violence that's so frightening. It's the chaos. The cars they're burning belong to their own parents, friends and neighbours. These youths are taking out their frustration on the schools, the day-cares, the fire department. There's a hint of religious despotism to it all that gets worse with each new proof of disdain. The warning bells have been going off for years. For years people have known there was another way, for the city, for the schools. But for all that, the inequalities and the permanent social gap have only worsened. We've crossed the symbolic border: the Republic is asserting itself through the mouth of a minister full of personal ambition, who's trying to steal votes away from the extreme right.

What gives me and all of my acquaintances - educators, urbanists and musicians - even more cause for chagrin is that no tactics are left open to us to resist, influence and change things. We've given our best and it no longer counts. We're like the fire trucks under the protesters' stones. We daren't think of all the harm that's been done, and what it would take to undo it. It's not just burned cars. The contacts we'd established, the social net we'd woven, have burned as well. I'm afraid.

(The article originally appeared in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on November 8, 2005. Francois Bon, born in 1953, has given numerous writing workshops with youths in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis. His last publication is "Daewoo", published in French by Fayard in 2004.)


4. Here’s a sort of musing mood piece from a France-watcher in Montreal, Canada (from CTheory):

France Is Burning -- by Thierry Bardini

How does it feel to see the country of your birth burning on television? Today it makes me feel like a migrant worker, watching the kids of other migrant workers rioting in the streets of cities you've probably have never heard of -- but that they have been cleaning for two generations.

Today I am reminded of the same scenes I once witnessed first-hand in the streets of Caracas and Los Angeles.

Today I am reminded by all these comparisons I read in the papers, Paris-Baghdad, Ile-de-France-Tchetchnia, that bring back images and feelings to my mind. Flashes of light, Carnival, riot. My neighbor, this insignificant dog-walking-little-man, breaking a window, shoplifting. Black uniforms on motorcycles with very long sticks and machine guns. Fires. Dionysian parties, tomorrow tears. Hepa chamo why did you burn our car, and your school? Flashes of Curfew (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 1988, Caracas, Venezuela, 1989). Toque de queda , my poor Thomas. What to do but keep on partying when I can't get back home in time? Avoid the crowd, stay in well lit areas, talk to the cops only if you have to, only if they ask you a question or if you fear something worse. Be ready to run. Don't stay too close to the windows. Watch the same General over and over again on TV, lying through his teeth, back to order.

That was then, in the Third World, homeland of the migrant workers before migration. There riot rhymes with coup, as in "coup d'État " or "coup sur la gueule." There the troops take three days to deploy in streets on fire, and the troops are eighteen years old, wearing helmets too big and carrying ten ammos apiece. Needless to say, they are scared shitless. And so are you and so it seems is everybody -- past this third day. A week later, the streets are cleaned, a thousand people are dead. Order is restored, until the next coup.
There, in Caracas, the poor and the desperate came down to the heart of the city and burned it. Their targets of choice were the abastos, the dammed little capitalists on each street corner who were shelving coffee, rice and pampers, waiting for the prices to come up, or the caritos, the damned little capitalists who doubled the price of the ride, just a few days before they burned. Just a step above them on the starvation ladder, barely out of the barrios.

In Los Angeles (1992) I was working for the University of Spoiled Children, thanks to a Japanese endowment at the famous Annenberg School. The building was rumored to have been a Republican think tank, unless it was an intelligence think tank I don't remember; a massive eagle was covering the entrance hall. The first strange thing that I noticed that day was a guy armed at the gates of the University. He was not yet eighteen years old and wore no helmet. I bet that he had plenty of rounds on his belt. I jumped into my car and saw the rest on TV -- from my rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica. Downtown and Watts seemed very far away, until I noticed the smoky skies from the window. It felt like I was watching images of Caracas on CNN -- It can't be here. Sounds concrete suddenly, pockets of the Third World in the First World. They too started in a party-like atmosphere, burning their own neighborhood. Starting with the liquor stores. I bet I could have seen my neighbor from Caracas, Residence Sans Soucis, Avenida Libertador, Chacaito, stepping out of the broken window of this licoreria , carrying a full case of Red Bull. The troops, the National Guard that is, took two days to deploy, and prevented any damage from reaching North Hollywood.

In the meantime, the small-business owners from little Seoul made use of their own NRA licensed machine guns. There, in a so-called civilized country, they only burned their own neighborhood. A week later, one house out of two was left to ashes on Normandy Street, but order was back in the city (or so they said on CNN). Who knows how many died, in a democratic country and land of hope we do not keep stats like this. Some of them did not officially exist anyway; they were just some migrant Chicano workers.

I thought about my own abuelo, Nicolas from Pontremoli, who migrated in 1921 from his native Tuscany because of too many black shirts and no jobs. I thought about him, the rital, reconstructing the war destroyed north-east of France, near Le Chemin des Dames , quite a charming name for one of the worst WWI battlegrounds. Hell if you're a poor bastard out of fascist Italy in 1921, you'd better be a mason. Back to the street compadre, wait for the next job pickup.

Today I am a émigré in well-kept Canada, a legal alien, still a French National; aside from my name, I am French to the bone, as my fellow compatriots often remind me here. I am no more the grandson of a rital but quite simply put a maudit français (and so might my son, if the trend goes on).

There, there are no Muslims (as they said on Fox) nor blacks (as they wrote in the Teheran Times), but quite simply second generation African descent born in France -- and being French I know of at least ten derogatory words to call them, my fellow compatriots, fils de l'émigration.

Sons and grandsons of migrant workers for whom the law of the State of Emergency was first designed, back in 1955. Before ruling the projects of even the smallest towns of the country, it was used thrice, twice in Algeria (1955, 1961) and once in New Caledonia (in 1984). Bringing the colonies back to order before it brings the métropole, back to the same order. Before bringing the colonies into the Métropole. Pockets of colonies in the métropole, patches of periphery in the old center.

There the troops did not deploy yet. They would have no crowd to face, only pockets of sons and grandsons practicing urban guerrilla, patches of little gangs striking at random, hidden behind the hoods of their latest fashion terrorist jacket, you know your basic hoody, but with a zipper at the front and just two holes for your eyes. You know, like in Baghdad, or better yet, like in Jerusalem or Beyrouth. You know, young people of their time, mobile and networked, flash mobs if you will. Kids of the viral marketing age, junkware.

Except this time their rap shoots at firemen and nurses, and kills a poor guy in charge of the street lights -- they say he was taking pictures in Epinay. What a Sunday for a family trip, for this only casualty of a riot with no crowds, no protest, and no end. A bus burns... It feels like I am watching pictures of Caracas on CNN, back in Santa Monica, but I am watching Paris on CBC, unless it is Watts on France 2. How does it feel, to see the country of your birth burning on TV? Estranged. At home, if you call yourself a migrant worker.

(Thierry Bardini, a sociologist, is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism (with Brian Massumi). In 2000, he published Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, at Stanford University Press. He is currently finishing his second manuscript, entitled Junkware: The Subject without Affect.)