Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 36

Le Batailon Perdu

Desolée. Je suis trés occupé cet semaine par un grand histoire (J'éspére!) pour le magazine de papier. En fait, je suis trés triste parce-que, je n'assiste pas mon classe français. Le sigh. Jusqu'a je suis libre, c'est le tien. (Les gens qui sont français. Corrigez-moi, s'il vous plaît. Je vais le changer bientôt.)Gardez mon maison, mes vieux. Pour le barbares. 

       

'Tolstoy Is the Tolstoy of the Zulus'

I got the following letter in response to this post on being black and loving European history. I wish Ralph Wiley was with us. I am pretty sure I owe him more than I can even know. My father (Charles Powers) was a highly respected writer--a Pulitzer finalist more than once--and a foreign correspondent for the Los Angles Times for almost two decades. He was a very handsome lout, and cut a romantic figure. A journalist in the Christopher Hitchens mold; I think they even knew one another in the Middle East. Anyway, his first foreign post was in Nairobi. This was a man who grew up desperately poor in Missouri, in a family that epitomized "white trash." I can remember visiting my grandparents at the trailer park they managed in exchange for a rent-free bungalow. I have memories of eating biscuits and sausage at their kitchen table, washing it down with Tang (my grandmother added a heaping cup of sugar to the pitcher because Tang wasn't sweet enough), and listening to my aunts and uncles discuss OJ Simpson (there was a lot of "they should just hang the nigger.") My grandfather chuckled as he described how "the boys" (*his* boys, perhaps my father) used to drive into "Niggertown" with two-by-fours, lean out of the car windows, and hit whoever came close enough. And out of this family came my father, the only one to go to college. And he was writing about Africa. I could talk to you for hours about the time that I spent with him in Kenya, and all of the stories that he told me (He witnessed the executions, on a beach in Liberia, of a dozen government ministers during Samuel Doe's coup. And he was arrested, jailed for days, and tortured on the orders of Idi Amin, along with another journalist from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Robert Rosenthal). I could tell you about how he still carried a lot of family residue (don't we all), and even more about the attitudes--latent and otherwise--that complicated the extraordinary work that he did in East Africa. He lived in a huge house near all of the embassies, at the outer edge of Nairobi. There was a veranda that looked out onto acres of farmland, really just a collection of small plots managed by individual families. My father was a hi-fi fanatic, and after obsessing for hours over the placement of the subwoofer he would unwind by turning the stereo up as high as it could go and relaxing on the veranda with a cigar. I have surreal memories of resting my chin on the railing and taking in a panoramic view of all the people squatting at their cookfires, each one outside of a shack with a corrugated tin roof, while Steve Winwood's voice rolled down the hillside, past the bougainvillea hedge and into the valley. During one of my summer visits we drove out to the house that had served as Karen Blixen's home in the movie Out of Africa. Just to see if there was a story there. We sat down to tea with the owner, a beefy red-faced man who chuckled about a recent police action in South Africa, quipping that "the bullets just bounced off of their thick black skulls." I remember my father becoming silent as a stone, just sitting and staring at the man, allowing the situation to become as uncomfortable as possible. My father liked fish and had always wanted to keep koi, so he hired a man to build a small pond in his enormous backyard. The pond was to be built on a slope, so the operation was just a bit more complicated than it might have been, and the builder had brought in another man who had more engineering experience. Dad and I sat in the grass above the pond site and watched the two men confer. The builder wore a polyester leisure suit that didn't quite reach his ankles, and held a notepad. The other man was very tall, wore a long white tunic and a white prayer cap, and carried a plumb bob. I was mulling over the man who'd joked about the bouncing bullets--I was 8, and was not used to hearing things like that, and it had upset me. I was also recovering from having seen my father fly into one of his rages. That was earlier in the day, and the recipient had been a Kenyan auto mechanic who had failed to fix something, or hadn't done something fast enough for my father, or...who knows? But there had been streams of oaths and colorful language regarding the stupidity, the eternal density, of Africans. All of this had been shouted to the man's face, and I was horrified at the meanness and burst into tears on the spot. Which made Dad angrier. It was almost dusk, hours later, and I was still trying to process all of it. I turned to my father and whispered, "Daddy, are Africans really stupid?" He said, "No, sweetheart." Then he sat in silence, just smoking his Camel cigarette. After a long time he leaned over and nudged my shoulder with his arm. He didn't take his eyes off of the workers, he just pointed his cigarette at them. "Do you see the man with the notebook? He's Kikuyu. So he speaks Kikuyu, and he also speaks English. That's why he and I are able to talk to each other. The man with that thing in his hand--it's called a plumb bob--is a Muslim. He's from Northern Africa. He doesn't speak any English, but he does speak Arabic. And I'll bet he also speaks French. Yep, I'll bet you a hundred dollars: he speaks French. But the man who is Kikuyu doesn't speak Arabic or French. So how are they talking to each other?" "I don't know." "They both know Swahili. They are speaking to each other in Swahili. They speak five languages between them. Probably others. How many do you speak?" "Just one. English." "That's right. You remember that the next time someone says that Africans are stupid." It's one of a handful of pristine memories that I have of him, things that I've never forgotten because at that moment he was being very kind and very patient. I learned at a very early age that the best way to placate a grumpy or difficult man was to ask him to teach me something. Later I majored in English. In my third year of college I read the first five pages of Anna Karenina and was thunderstruck. It was so gorgeous, and I found it so thrilling, that I had to put the book down and go back to it a few hours later. I started taking Russian. I became obsessed with Tolstoy and stopped writing fiction because I knew that I could never *be* Tolstoy. Which enraged my father, who wanted me to be a writer. I entered a Ph.D program in literature, and Dad and I went on to have lots of good arguments about literature. And politics. He died in 1996, at 53. I have a framed photo of Tolstoy in my bedroom. Tolstoy and Chekhov, together at a table. It's just a plate torn out of a book that I pilfered from the undergraduate library. But I am realizing, just now as I write this, that the picture shows Tolstoy--who was irascible, absolutely impossible, a judgmental crank and also a wonderful, monumental pain in the ass--lecturing Chekhov about something. Chekhov is wearing a very sweet, indulgent smile, with those wonderful crinkly eyes and an elegant slouch, just taking it all in. Because the best way to placate a difficult man is to ask him to teach you something. UPDATE: A correction to this piece. Rachel's Dad, Charles Powers, and Robert Rosenthal were actually tortured after Idi Amin had left Uganda. The country was then under Milton Obote. You can read Rosenthal's rather account here. My apologies for the error.

       

'Tolstoy Is The Tolstoy Of The Zulus'

I got the following letter in response to this post on being black and loving European history. I wish Ralph Wiley was with us. I am pretty sure I owe him more than I can even know. My father (Charles Powers) was a highly respected writer--a Pulitzer finalist more than once--and a foreign correspondent for the Los Angles Times for almost two decades. He was a very handsome lout, and cut a romantic figure. A journalist in the Christopher Hitchens mold; I think they even knew one another in the middle east. Anyway, his first foreign post was in Nairobi. This was a man who grew up desperately poor in Missouri, in a family that epitomized "white trash." I can remember visiting my grandparents at the trailer park they managed in exchange for a rent-free bungalow. I have memories of eating biscuits and sausage at their kitchen table, washing it down with Tang (my grandmother added a heaping cup of sugar to the pitcher because Tang wasn't sweet enough), and listening to my aunts and uncles discuss OJ Simpson (there was a lot of "they should just hang the nigger.") My grandfather chuckled as he described how "the boys" (*his* boys, perhaps my father) used to drive into "Niggertown" with two-by-fours, lean out of the car windows, and hit whoever came close enough. And out of this family came my father, the only one to go to college. And he was writing about Africa. I could talk to you for hours about the time that I spent with him in Kenya, and all of the stories that he told me (He witnessed the executions, on a beach in Liberia, of a dozen government ministers during Samuel Doe's coup. And he was arrested, jailed for days, and tortured on the orders of Idi Amin, along with another journalist from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Robert Rosenthal). I could tell you about how he still carried a lot of family residue (don't we all), and even more about the attitudes--latent and otherwise--that complicated the extraordinary work that he did in East Africa. He lived in a huge house near all of the embassies, at the outer edge of Nairobi. There was a veranda that looked out onto acres of farmland, really just a collection of small plots managed by individual families. My father was a hi-fi fanatic, and after obsessing for hours over the placement of the sub woofer he would unwind by turning the stereo up as high as it could go and relaxing on the veranda with a cigar. I have surreal memories of resting my chin on the railing and taking in a panoramic view of all the people squatting at their cookfires, each one outside of a shack with a corrugated tin roof, while Steve Winwood's voice rolled down the hillside, past the bougainvillea hedge and into the valley. During one of my summer visits we drove out to the house that had served as Karen Blixen's home in the movie "Out of Africa." Just to see if there was a story there. We sat down to tea with the owner, a beefy red-faced man who chuckled about a recent police action in South Africa, quipping that "the bullets just bounced off of their thick black skulls." I remember my father becoming silent as a stone, just sitting and staring at the man, allowing the situation to become as uncomfortable as possible. My father liked fish and had always wanted to keep koi, so he hired a man to build a small pond in his enormous backyard. The pond was to be built on a slope, so the operation was just a bit more complicated than it might have been, and the builder had brought in another man who had more engineering experience. Dad and I sat in the grass above the pond site and watched the two men confer. The builder wore a polyester leisure suit that didn't quite reach his ankles, and held a notepad. The other man was very tall, wore a long white tunic and a white prayer cap, and carried a plumb bob. I was mulling over the man who'd joked about the bouncing bullets--I was 8, and was not used to hearing things like that, and it had upset me. I was also recovering from having seen my father fly into one of his rages. That was earlier in the day, and the recipient had been a Kenyan auto mechanic who had failed to fix something, or hadn't done something fast enough for my father, or...who knows? But there had been streams of oaths and colorful language regarding the stupidity, the eternal density, of Africans. All of this had been shouted to the man's face, and I was horrified at the meanness and burst into tears on the spot. Which made Dad angrier. It was almost dusk, hours later, and I was still trying to process all of it. I turned to my father and whispered, "Daddy, are Africans really stupid?" He said, "No, sweetheart." Then he sat in silence, just smoking his camel cigarette. After a long time he leaned over and nudged my shoulder with his arm. He didn't take his eyes off of the workers, he just pointed his cigarette at them. "Do you see the man with the notebook? He's Kikuyu. So he speaks Kikuyu, and he also speaks English. That's why he and I are able to talk to each other. The man with that thing in his hand--it's called a plumb bob--is a Muslim. He's from Northern Africa. He doesn't speak any English, but he does speak Arabic. And I'll bet he also speaks French. Yep, I'll bet you a hundred dollars: he speaks French. But the man who is Kikuyu doesn't speak Arabic or French. So how are they talking to each other?" "I don't know." "They both know Swahili. They are speaking to each other in Swahili. They speak five language between them. Probably others. How many do you speak?" "Just one. English." "That's right. You remember that the next time someone says that Africans are stupid." It's one of a handful of pristine memories that I have of him, things that I've never forgotten because at that moment he was being very kind and very patient. I learned at a very early age that the best way to placate a grumpy or difficult man was to ask him to teach me something. Later I majored in English. In my 3rd year of college I read the first five pages of Anna Karenina and was thunderstruck. It was so gorgeous, and I found it so thrilling, that I had to put the book down and go back to it a few hours later. I started taking Russian. I became obsessed with Tolstoy and stopped writing fiction because I knew that I could never *be* Tolstoy. Which enraged my father, who wanted me to be a writer. I entered a Ph.D program in literature, and Dad and I went on to have lots of good arguments about literature. And politics. He died in 1996, at 53. I have a framed photo of Tolstoy in my bedroom. Tolstoy and Chekhov, together at a table. It's just a plate torn out of a book that I pilfered from the undergraduate library. But I am realizing, just now as I write this, that the picture shows Tolstoy--who was irascible, absolutely impossible, a judgmental crank and also a wonderful, monumental pain in the ass--lecturing Chekhov about something. Chekhov is wearing a very sweet, indulgent smile, with those wonderful crinkly eyes and an elegant slouch, just taking it all in. Because the best way to placate a difficult man is to ask him to teach you something.

       

Or Perhaps You Are Too Stupid to Learn French

I'm entering into my last two weeks of French education here in Paris. I started taking classes two days after I arrived. I will be in class until the day before I leave. I spend four hours every day drilling grammar and then an hour or two outside, studying. This has meant me seeing the city differently than most people who come here. Paris has basically been another work-site for me. To be absolutely clear, it is a privilege to work here, but it is not the same as, say, taking a vacation.

The best way to think about this is to say I've more lived here than I've visited here. I have not visited most of the things I would like--the Louvre, the Museé D'Orsay, and especially St. Denis (Clovis!!!) I spent time up at near Nation (I would live up there if I could), I walked La Coulée Verte (Awesome-sauce. Totally sons The High-Line.) I drank some great wine. Ate some incredible bread. But I make no pretensions on having "seen" Paris.

I came here to study the language. That was the job, and thus my life. I understand why people see places without knowing any language--indeed if you waited on fluency, most of us would never see anything. But knowing even the rudiments of language is so transformative, it makes the city four dimensional. And, for me, struggling with the language is part of the act of seeing the place. They go together. C'est moi.

I would go further and say that people cannot solely be known through their buildings, no matter their magnificence. The woman at the café who is sure to tell me that it is "une baguette" not "un baguette" is telling me something about herself, her people and her nation. A buddy of mine was insulted by a French woman the other day. She basically said to him "Go take a shit." Hmm. That's different. Different and as important as as any glass boat floating down the Seine.

But what if you never learn the language? I don't mean what if you never decide to learn, but what if expend a great amount of effort and learn nothing. This seems doubtful--but when learning something the fear of learning nothing is one of the greatest obstacles. This is magnified in French because in any class worth it's salt because the instruction is almost entirely in French. What this means is not only is your subject obscured from you, but the method of accessing the subject is obscured too. It is dreadful cycle. You can only barely understand the instructor--because you can't speak French. But in order to speak French you need to get the instruction, which you don't wholly understand because you don't speak French. So mostly you muddle your way through. And if you have a good teacher he will make sure you understand the instructions before moving on.

Still there's no getting away from the basic feeling of complete idiocy. You are aware of being spoken to as though you were a three-year old, even though you have all the pride of an adult. Worse, if you are like me--a monolingual American in a class where virtually everyone speaks a second language and is now working on their third or fourth--you will be the slowest person. When it comes to comprehension. the Spanish and the Italians are going to just destroy you. They simply have an easier time learning to hear the language than you. This is a gift and curse. Many of the Spanish-speaking students have a much harder time learning the accent. It's as if the closeness of the two languages makes it harder--"parce que" must be be "par-ser-kay" and they will have it no other way.

Whatever. I'd take their curse over mine. Yesterday I started B1 French. Hooray. It was like someone putting me on a boat, sailing out into the middle of the Pacific, tossing me overboard and telling me to swim back home. We had to read some text about Sartre and a mirror. Then we had to compare it to the evil queen's "Mirror, Mirror" monologue in Snow White. I pride myself on being stupid in front of people, on holding up the class with the questions that I really should know. I paid my money. I will get the knowledge. But yesterday I reached one of those points where I had to let it go. The humiliation of not knowing--and not knowing how to know--was too much. I say that knowing that it is never shameful to know, so much as it is shameful to sit in class an act like you know.

Public school teachers, listen up: I had flashbacks of West Baltimore, because that was surely the point where, were it 12-year-old me, I would have started prepping the spitballs and jokes. I strongly believe kids act up in class for three reasons--1.) They aren't being challenged. 2.) They don't understand the value of the instruction 3.) They don't believe they can ever really know. I had a lot of those last two when I was in school. I was not the smartest kid in my class, and I was never quite clear on why I should want to be.

As an adult whose chosen to be instructed, you understand the value--indeed you see it all around you, here--but the doubt, the belief that you might just be an idiot, does not go away. Halfway through yesterday's lesson I kept waiting for my instructor to just drop her book and say, "Est-ce que tu es stupide?!?!" Yup. "Vous avez raison." But she was patient. She kept going. We powered through. I walked out of class in a total daze. In my head there was a jumble of French words and grammar rules. I "knew" them. But applying them in real time, actually ordering them to make sense is another skill. I've had to keep myself from being lazy, because the French are too forgiving. You can mumble out some nouns and unconjugated verbs and they will figure out what you mean. But you won't get any better. It's not enough to simply pat yourself on the back for trying out your French. You have to force yourself to try and apply the rules.

Before I came here everyone told me that the enemy was the French. It would be their rudeness, their retreat into English that would defeat me. But I am here now and it is clear that--as with attempting to learn anything--the only real enemy is me. My confidence comes and goes. I have no innate intelligence here--intelligence is overrated. What matters is toughness, a willingness to believe against what is apparent. Learning is invisible act. And what I see is disturbing. In class my brain scatters, just as it did when I was in second grade. I have to tell myself every five minutes to concentrate.

The hardest thing about learning a language is that, at its core, it is black magic. No one can tell you when, where or how you will crossover--some people will even tell you that no such crossover exists. The only answer is to put one foot in front of the other, to keep walking, to understand that the way is up. The only answer is a resource which many of us have long ago discarded. C'est à dire, faith.

       

Kendrick Lamar's Seven MCs

Here's Vibe assessing the responses to Kendrick Lamar's recent battlecry, while Buzzfeed helps you decide whether you should speak up or just keep K-Dot's name out your mouth. I'm mildly impressed with the responses, though I mostly think MCs are simply making Kendrick's point.I should say from the jump that I think beef rap is overrated and mostly stands out on gossip points. I found "No Vaseline" amusing, but it was never transformative in the way "Bird In Hand" "Summer Vacation" or "Colorblind" (My God, "Colorblind") was. Likewise I think I don't think "Ether" makes my top ten of Nas' greatest, and I would take "Feelin' It," "You Must Love Me," "Dead Presidents II," "Neva Change," "Threat" and an assortment of other Jay-Z tracks before I got to "The Takeover." The only really dis song I truly love is the one that everyone else loves--"The Bridge Is Over."So there's that. You are talking to man with significant bias. Nevertheless, I view Kendrick's verse as an epilogue for Good Kid, and (if he's lucky) a prologue for everything next. Even the idea of taking disrespect feels beside the point. In what creative field do artists not feel as though they are trying to end all competition, even the artists they are friendly with? Were the MCs of Wu not competing with each other? Did Busta not feel pressure to be the best when he ran the anchor leg of "Scenario?" Did he not basically obliterate everyone else on the track? I must think that Viola Davis was trying to blow Meryl Streep away. ("Sister you ain't going against no man in a robe and win.") I think Fitzgerald, Ellison and Hemingway were all trying kill every author in their vicinity. It's certainly the case in business. Only in hip-hop (where whole magazines are dedicated to who doesn't like who) is this disrespect.My hope is that there are young artists out there who are inspired, not simply to hop in the booth and hop out, but to do something big and grand. A lot of folks are excited about this new era of competition. I'm not sure we have one yet.

       

How I Met Your Mother

I was out on The Yard with another girl. Homecoming. 1996. That was the year I finally found myself and knew that there must be a world beyond The Mecca. That was the year when I finally accepted that I was a cliché, that I liked Seinfeld and Pretty Woman, believed in Nubian Queens and thought the suburbs were cool. 

I was walking across the Yard with another girl when I fell instantly in love. I am not ashamed to tell you this. I stopped and spoke to some friends. She was standing with your Aunt Kamilah, who was down with the Rythym and Poetry Cipher, and yes, that is what we called things back then. 

I am not ashamed to tell you that I knew nothing about her, beyond how she looked. I am not ashamed to tell you that I was ignorant and dumb, in search of some Umoja mythology or all that Malcolm meant when he urged us toward self-love. I am not ashamed because I now know that everyone is urged toward everyone because of myth, and the only difference is the quantity and vintage of our guns.

But I was 21 years old, and I knew nothing beyond the fact that I was so young that I could only be a walking cliché. I think of Ethelbert throning from the top of Founders, looking over my bad poetry and telling me that I more needed to write than live. What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction. 

I can now say that I what I immediately felt that day was thin. I shall speak responsibly and say that love is built on years of struggle, on business, on the tight-spots from which you brawl your way out. And I shall speak honestly and tell you that the my whole adult life has been built on something else--on thin feeling, on myth, on instinct, on the irrevocable desire to do the sort of filthy things that makes respectable people shriek, "Think of the children."

Fuck the children. I was out on The Yard--Sadé in the tape-deck, while I'm moving in slow-motion. I was talking to Kamilah and my man René and I wasn't hearing a word being said. That thin feeling was everywhere around me and no one else could speak.

So we partnered, parented, and married in precisely that order, and we would have left the last one off it were in our responsible power. We would have left that one off so that we always remembered that our mutual roots were not in churches where angels sing, not in high holiness, nor registry nor showers, but in chaos and lust for blood. We have held ourselves together with good reasons. But we have always known that love is not made by respectable people but by the freaks who come out at night. May you soon strive to rank among them. 

I tell you this because I have fallen before, and it generally ended badly. So it goes. You will end badly too. So it goes. When I was 16 a boy smashed me over the head with a steel-trash can, then raised his arms like he was champion of the world. I haven't had the blues since.

I am thinking of Langston Hughes:

Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean-
so get yourself
a little loving
in between."

I am thinking of Black Thought:

We knew from the start
That things fall apart
And tend to shatter

But mostly I am thinking of you. I want to tell you that I have fallen for Paris. I think you know. I think you know because I am stupid and I am cliché. A serious man should should fall for some village in Moldova, for brandies made from magic apples, or ham taken from a rare and endangered hogs. A serious man should claim to have discover Nashville, should live in Austin before it is Austin, then leave with tales of the edgy old days. I have been told that serious men are buying homes in Detroit. But I love chicken fingers. And I have never been to Foxwoods or Vegas. And I love New York against my better wishes. And I love Paris with that same familiar feeling--aching, everywhere and thin.

What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through--that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it. You must want to own all of it. We will try to ward you away. We will try to explain to you that we have already walked that path. We will try to tell you that we have made your mistakes. We will claim that we are trying to spare you. But you will see our greed and self-service hiding behind our words. You will see us ward you away with one hand, while the other still shakes at the memories. Here is the thing--you have the right to every end of your exploration and no motherfucker anywhere can tell you otherwise.

The culture of our world, right now, is crafted by little boys who only recall being stood up on their first date, and nothing they got after. They don't remember the sand they kicked in other people's eyes, only their own injuries. Our art is cynical and bad-ass and made by people who will not be happy until you join them in the church of "everything is fucked up, so throw up your hands." This is art as anesthesia.

Our art is made in cities like New York by people who are running from other places. They feel themselves as misfits who were trapped in dead-end suburbs. They hated high school. Their parents did not understand. They are seeking a better world. And when they realize that the world is wholly a problem, that the whole problem is in them, they make television for other people who are also running, who take voyage in search of a perfect world, then rage at the price of the ticket.

I am not immune. But when I think of Baltimore, I think of Ma and Dad. I think of their new lives. I think of my sisters and brothers and all of mothers. I think of youngest niece, like a daughter who I will never have. I think of nephews who are like sons to me. I think of high school friends who would have leaped in front of car for me.

I thought I would return to Baltimore. But I was out on the Yard. I was struck--then struck again by you. So it goes.

       

Paris Disappointed Me—and I Am Glad For It

I think it's worth introducing another perspective from an American in Paris. What you get from me will necessarily be limited by my own eyes. Here are a different set of eyes.

Dear TNC,

I visited France and Paris during the first few weeks of July and deeply appreciated doing Paris alongside your dispatches (and have been following your reflections since). While I grew up in many ways very far from you in Baltimore, your wonderings on how power and privilege work, how it perpetuates itself, and on education have kept me thinking. In a ninth grade French class in small town Indiana, I too found myself repeating "il fait chaud" and "il fait froid" without any real connection to what this faraway place and people may be like. But now I realize, at age 30, having been in Paris and having read your reflections on language and travel, that what I'm acting out now was begun many years ago in that high school French class when my world was little more than farm, cows, and high school basketball games. I learned the world was bigger, and I wanted to see some of it. Luckily, and with a bit of my own work, I'm able to start living into that curiosity that education first fostered.

I'm realizing Paris has always sort of been an impressionist painting for me - a big, colorful, beautiful blur without much detail. All water lilies and wine and torrid love affairs and Midnight in Paris. And while I absolutely loved the city, I also - like your food poisoning, and I suppose like every time my knowledge is confined to what I get from movies and textbooks and media - found that the dirty detail of the city isn't as pretty as my faraway impressions. In daylight the Eiffel Tower looks sort of rusty-tin-can, the café smoke smells wonderful until it chokes me, the feted Metro is hot and crammed at every hour, and Monet's gardens were swarming with bugs. And further out from the postcard-ready city center, packed and poorly maintained apartment complexes house Parisians who somehow didn't get access to the gold-plated legacy of Versailles.

But, staying out in the 19th, I gained a much greater love for the city seeing its many parts rather than just the postcard scenes. Like Dorchester where I live in Boston, the 19th gets talked down to visitors and even a walk-through by a novice like me brings out some of the cracks of injustice and segregation and poverty in Paris' rich and romantic façade. The 19th reminds me that Paris and being Parisian is a much wider and more colorful picture than any American rendering had given me, that Parisians are people of Europe and Africa and Asia and with various native born and immigrant stories. Also in a city where Richard Wright and James Baldwin and others came to in some sense distance themselves from American racism, the 19th reminds me that this is also an old capital of empire, a place that with all its stunning lights and cultural achievements would like to push its colonial history to the margins, out of view. It seems just as stunning a burden of history to bear as any, smoldering in its extravagant abandoned palaces and oppressed and depressed banlieues.

Sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens on my last day I saw a beautiful palace, but it was no doubt built while peasants starved. I walked down the Champs Elysees and saw the stunning Arc de Triomphe, glorifying an emperor's conquest. I picniced in the Buttes Chaumont park with the lovers kissing and friends toasting and families filling the Indian and Tibetan and Senegalese restaurants nearby, but also walked home through hot, packed, and dilapidated apartment complexes reflecting inequality and oppression that the city's monuments and postcards would like me to believe are of a different era. I'm struck by how many sought an escape from American racism here yet ugly and other forms of racism were stewing here, too. How the problems of conquest and empire and inequality and racism of the past are also our problems now. How, like Baldwin said, history isn't just past but present, too.

In short, Paris disappointed me, and I guess I'm glad for that in some perverse way because I was afraid it was perfect. Maybe now I can start to really love it. And thanks for your dispatches. Keep them coming.

       

Paris Disappointed Me--And I Am Glad For It

I think it's worth introducing another perspective from an American in Paris. What you get from me will necessarily be limited by my own eyes. Here are a different set of eyes.Dear TNC, I visited France and Paris during the first few weeks of July and deeply appreciated doing Paris alongside your dispatches (and have been following your reflections since). While I grew up in many ways very far from you in Baltimore, your wonderings on how power and privilege work, how it perpetuates itself, and on education have kept me thinking. In a ninth grade French class in small town Indiana, I too found myself repeating "il fait chaud" and "il fait froid" without any real connection to what this faraway place and people may be like. But now I realize, at age 30, having been in Paris and having read your reflections on language and travel, that what I'm acting out now was begun many years ago in that high school French class when my world was little more than farm, cows, and high school basketball games. I learned the world was bigger, and I wanted to see some of it. Luckily, and with a bit of my own work, I'm able to start living into that curiosity that education first fostered. I'm realizing Paris has always sort of been an impressionist painting for me - a big, colorful, beautiful blur without much detail. All water lilies and wine and torrid love affairs and Midnight in Paris. And while I absolutely loved the city, I also - like your food poisoning, and I suppose like every time my knowledge is confined to what I get from movies and textbooks and media - found that the dirty detail of the city isn't as pretty as my faraway impressions. In daylight the Eiffel Tower looks sort of rusty-tin-can, the café smoke smells wonderful until it chokes me, the feted Metro is hot and crammed at every hour, and Monet's gardens were swarming with bugs. And further out from the postcard-ready city center, packed and poorly maintained apartment complexes house Parisians who somehow didn't get access to the gold-plated legacy of Versailles. But, staying out in the 19th, I gained a much greater love for the city seeing its many parts rather than just the postcard scenes. Like Dorchester where I live in Boston, the 19th gets talked down to visitors and even a walk-through by a novice like me brings out some of the cracks of injustice and segregation and poverty in Paris' rich and romantic façade. The 19th reminds me that Paris and being Parisian is a much wider and more colorful picture than any American rendering had given me, that Parisians are people of Europe and Africa and Asia and with various native born and immigrant stories. Also in a city where Richard Wright and James Baldwin and others came to in some sense distance themselves from American racism, the 19th reminds me that this is also an old capital of empire, a place that with all its stunning lights and cultural achievements would like to push its colonial history to the margins, out of view. It seems just as stunning a burden of history to bear as any, smoldering in its extravagant abandoned palaces and oppressed and depressed banlieues. Sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens on my last day I saw a beautiful palace, but it was no doubt built while peasants starved. I walked down the Champs Elysees and saw the stunning Arc de Triomphe, glorifying an emperor's conquest. I picniced in the Buttes Chaumont park with the lovers kissing and friends toasting and families filling the Indian and Tibetan and Senegalese restaurants nearby, but also walked home through hot, packed, and dilapidated apartment complexes reflecting inequality and oppression that the city's monuments and postcards would like me to believe are of a different era. I'm struck by how many sought an escape from American racism here yet ugly and other forms of racism were stewing here, too. How the problems of conquest and empire and inequality and racism of the past are also our problems now. How, like Baldwin said, history isn't just past but present, too. In short, Paris disappointed me, and I guess I'm glad for that in some perverse way because I was afraid it was perfect. Maybe now I can start to really love it. And thanks for your dispatches. Keep them coming.

       

The White Man's Continent

Shout-out to whoever it was that told me to check out Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution. I am really digging it. For people like me--black dudes who like European history--one of the really unfortunate things is the inability to consider Europe on its own human terms. European history was always presented to us in the manner of a victorious football team spiking the ball in your face. If you accept the logic of racism--that skin color really does correspond to something deep and meaningful--and you are black and care about history, you wind up spending much of your time searching for reasons why white people are savages and you are not. This is especially true if you don't actually know much about African history. In that way, Europe becomes "white people's property." You only look at the continent and its history in the hopes of mining ammo to lob at your enemy. You don't really find World War II interesting for the story, so much as you find the Nazis the logical apex of the White Man's Civilization. You can't really think about, say, Garibaldi or Descartes or Hobbes or Marx. Basically all you want to know is did they hate black people, or not. This is why (again) Ralph Wiley's "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus" meant so much to me and my intellectual development. It was the liberation of humanism. (It's so interesting to me that the Russians themselves have long only barely qualified as civilized and "European.") It's not so much that culture doesn't exist or that Newton's country is irrelevant to understanding him. It's that culture is not mystical. Culture is not a euphemism for "I am innately more awesome than you." Hobsbawm's two main subjects are the Industrial Revolution and The French Revolution. He makes the case, very early in the book, that where these two revolutions happened mattered and that it's very difficult to imagine them happening anywhere else. But Hobsbawm--like any good historian--isn't writing nationalist triumphalism. One of the most freeing experiences for me over the past few years has been the freedom to dig into this stuff simply because I think it's cool.

       

Egypt, America, and the Democratic Pact

I'm going to be wholly unoriginal here and suggest that you check out Juan Cole as you absorb the dire events overseas. Cole gives a brief and nuanced snapshot of what went wrong over the past two years, of how a desire for one-party rule undermined the dream. Money quote:

In my view Morsi and the Brotherhood leadership bear a good deal of the blame for derailing the transition, since a democratic transition is a pact among various political forces, and he broke the pact. If Morsi was what democracy looked like, many Egyptians did not want it. Gallup polls trace this disillusionment.

But the Egyptian military bears the other part of the blame for the failed transition. Ambitious officers such as Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Morsi's Minister of Defense, were secretly determined to undo Morsi's victory at the polls. They said they wanted him to compromise with his political rivals, but it seems to me they wanted more, they wanted him neutered. When the revolutionary youth and the workers and even many peasants staged the June 30 demonstrations, al-Sisi took advantage of them to stage a coup. Ominously, he then asked for public acclamation to permit him to wage a war on terror, by which he means the Brotherhood. I tweeted at the time: "Dear General al-Sisi: when activists call for demonstrations, that is activism. When generals do, that is Peronism."

There's a lesson here for us--and the lesson is more than "How could the United States have prevented this?" About a year and half ago I debated with my colleague Jim Fallows about the fate of American democracy. Jim argued that American democracy has to be more than the naked pursuit of interest--that using every legalism at your disposal to make sure your side, in the short-term, wins is ultimately suicidal. I countered that in America it always has been about pursuing your own short-term interests. I'm less sure about that now.

When I was a child, West Baltimore ran on a democratic pact. We used to play basketball. But we had no refs. If you got fouled you yelled "Ball," and the other team respected that. Or sometimes they didn't and you argued about it. But the ideal of calling your own fouls was generally respected--even as it relied on each team sacrificing the short-term interest. If we had started calling Ball every time we went to the hoop, or if we had decided to not respect any such calls, the entire game would have collapsed--and then West Baltimore would have collapsed taking that particular form of democracy which governs the ghettoes and gyms of America along with it.

Please forgive that America-centric highjack. I don't want it to bind the conversation below. On the contrary, as always, I'm depending on The Horde to bring more links, and more information about Egypt. My hope is that the commenter who wrote this a few months back (@jshilad is the handle) will return.