On Charlie

I haven’t been here in a long time – my 2015 plans included living less in the now; leaving Twitter (you noticed, didn’t you? No? Thought so), writing fewer blog posts, not checking the news compulsively, and burying myself in good books and in work even more than usual.

But the Charlie Hebdo attack happened, and living less in the now sounds like a hollow decision. It was a huge shock for me and for the community of French and Belgian writers and illustrators who make up most of my Facebook feed. We did a strange kind of online mourning, talking, swearing, joking, breaking down, reading news articles communally, sharing good and also less good cartoons about the terrible news, ridiculing the cartoonists who clearly hadn’t understood a thing about Charlie and were drawing twee little children, nice gods, French flags and cutesy pencils, all of which would have been relentlessly mocked by the departed. But whatever, people express their sympathy as they see fit and their hearts are in the right place.

On the British side, it was quite hard for me and my fellow expats to read reactions on the walls of Facebook friends and articles in the press. Everyone condemned the attack, but there were many buts. I adore Britain, I chose to live here and I wouldn’t live anywhere else, but the cultural clash between Britain and France is much greater than most people who haven’t actually lived in both countries would imagine. In particular, ‘being left-wing’ is a very different thing here. ‘Being feminist’ is a very different thing. Even ‘secularism’ isn’t the same as ‘laïcité’, so technically I’m not a secularist, because even the National Secular Society is a bit too mild for my taste. I’m a laïcarde by default here.

The Charlie events exacerbated those differences. Many of the comments reflected what I already knew about incompatible beliefs and attitudes between the two countries. But there was also a lot of laziness in those reactions, with cartoons taken entirely out of context and read literally – idiotically – with no respect for the webs of visual and verbal references which would have been instantly recognisable to any French person. Us French lefties in the UK who liked Charlie Hebdo felt, all of a sudden, like we’d been outed as Daily Mail readers, which is pretty ironic.

Anyway, I thought I’d post here a few articles in English which reflect my feelings more or less accurately:

- My friend and colleague Olivier Tonneau’s hugely successful Comment Is Free column, and the original (and longer) version on Mediapart.

- Kenan Malik’s ‘Je Suis Charlie? It’s a Bit Late’ blog post

- Leigh Philips’s very developed argument, with comments on specific cartoons.

- Along the same lines, Lliana Bird’s article.

- Finally, it’s worth having a look at The Charlie Hebdo Cartoons No One Is Showing You. 

I’ll be back here soon enough to talk about The Book, and about Other Things, I’m sure.