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December 03, 2005
Becoming-Minoritarian in the Banlieues
Council estate of mind..."A demand for recognition, fuelled by ressentiment" (Zizek)...really? (photo by Jean-Michel Turpin)
Becoming-Minoritarian...It's not only the irresistible Mille-Plateaux-refuting(?) killer line that makes this article from Le Monde Dossiers & Documents very interesting . It gives a portrait of "Christine C., a 28-year-old from Corneuve" and shows how right (despite the strange misinterpretation he gives it – see above) Zizek was to point out that the problem is not one of justice for those in desperate poverty: it's something more interesting than this, perhaps (as Badiou says) an 'ontological' issue, or indeed even a 'crise du sens'. The article is interesting on the hybrid culture of the young people in the banlieues (but this will sound familiar enough to any of us who use London buses) and the rise of Islam since 9/11 (giving pause for thought on that other 'philosophe's' call for 'more religion' as the solution). This is actually the first thing I've read that gives a convincing account of all the complexities involved (needless to say, this complex picture painted is not special to Paris). The general situation is the singular result of the meeting of various social tendencies, and thus must be addressed in very specific terms – specificity of the desiring-machines of consumer capitalism and the tangled lines of youth culture, specificity of the desiring-machines of Islam in their encounter with social (national, community) disintegrations (a task Reza has embarked upon in admirable fashion), and the reactions and counter-reactions consequent on liberal quasi-interventionism.
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Portrait of Christine C., twenty-eight years old, Courneuve.
In twenty-eight years in Courneuve, Christine has learnt a lot. "To look more carefully at people, to like some, and to hate others." In Paris, her father sent her into the factory at sixteen, so as to help the family survive to the end of each month. She was left to her own devices, met her ex-husband, and found herself pregnant.
Their relations led them to Courneuve. "My biggest mistake. Once you set foot in this place, you never leave." She's been a cashier, a cleaner, a nanny, delivered leaflets, done ironing. She's brought up her five children, two girls and three boys, now aged between 19 and 28. Who she rules with an iron hand.
"The banlieues explode and no-one asks the real question: 'Where are the parents?' The kids who start loitering out in the streets when they're six years old, already that must be sanctioned by someone. It's easy to accuse society, unemployment, teachers: first of all the parents have to be re-educated."
Christine doesn't vote any more. She doesn't like the right, isn't "at all a capitalist", but might find herself a place on the extreme right. Because she's had enough, she says, of not being able to talk to anyone, of coming across veiled women, of having to accept that women should stay in their place and not mix, of not being able to find a suitable piece of meat, of hearing the Koran from cassettes below her apartment, of being looked at askance if she smokes during Ramadan. "It's a whole load of little things that just drive you mad."
Before, she used to go to drink tea with her Algerian neighbour, the other neighbour was French, everyone knew her well. "Now, I feel completely isolated, I'm a tiny minority. It's difficult, becoming a minority in your own home, you know."
Christine believes in socialism, she didn't like the Mitterand years, which left her enclosed in an unjust city[?]. She blames it on SOS-Racisme, which contributed to creating, she says, a victim status for minorities, provoking a relapse into closed communities which she never knew before. "My male friends were always called Mohammed or Toufic. My girlfriends were Algerian or Senegalese. I went out of my way to help sans-papiers friends who really deserved to live here. I'm Catholic, my partner is Jewish, my kids' friends Muslim. What's new, though, is that French people of foreign origin are turning back to those origins, not feeling that they're French any longer. And me, a French woman, I feel terrible."
Another worry has appeared in Christine's life. Despite the authority she wields over her children, her 25 year old son has converted to Islam. A rapper well-known in the city, he had been searching for a spiritual path, and, all of a sudden, on the 24 December 2004, he announced it to his family. "I took it very badly, it really makes me sick. There are so many women who died for their liberty and here he is scolding me for not being veiled, moralising to his brothers because they drink, he told me I was the devil, he's got it into his head to convert me. It's really violent."
The neighborhood imam had tried to reassure her: "That's not Islam, it's a possession!" He didn't manage to reassure her much, for all that. "Since 11 September, I've had the impression that conversions to Islam are spreading like a trail of gunpowder." At least, he is "so into his religion" that he doesn't burn cars.
In this story of the burning suburbs, there is something Christine doesn't understand: that people find excuses for the vandals. "There are people who have been thrown out from here, sans-papiers who sleep outdoors, who really deserve to complain. But not those from the estates who've got a heated apartment, schools, all they need, us. You don't throw rubbish bins out of the window and destroy everything just because of unemployment."
The solution, she repeats, is not to "powerhose them" but to "re-mix the people". Remix? "Make people come from Paris, let us come out of our ghetto. Even my sons are from a different culture to me. For them, being French means nothing. They don't have a nationality any more, they identify in a vague way with a religion, the one that's in the majority. They observe all the gestures of Islam, a muslim way of talking and of being, they're proud to belong to the majority. They don't want to be French, they don't want to integrate into society, they'd rather be blacks and beurs like everyone else, but they don't conduct themselves like muslims. So many incoherent things."
The other day, Christine went to a wedding, at Massy and at Paris. "What a trial. It's a whole different thing to Corneuve. You walk the same walk every day to the mall. It makes you shrivel up. You're scared to leave here, but at the same time dying to; and then as soon as you cross the périphérique you only want one thing: to come home."
Posted by robin at December 3, 2005 09:01 AM