France: Walking where no one walks

Paris is a small city. At least in comparison to other major European cities. Because only what is within the Périphérique, the city highway, is considered Paris. Around 2.1 million people live here, all of them more or less privileged, because rents in Paris are high. The rest of the city, which actually has 12.5 million inhabitants, lies outside the Périphérique, in the so-called banlieue. Those who cannot afford the “City of Love” live here because of the lovelessness of capitalism.

Anne Weber, the German author and book prize winner, has lived in Paris for a long time. However, she rarely traveled to the banlieues. “I had traveled to distant continents, explored cities and hiked islands,” she writes in her new book “Bannmeilen,” which is how banlieue could be translated, “but I had remained blind to the foreign and other things in close proximity.”

When she asks Thierry, a documentary filmmaker friend, if she would like to accompany him in the research he wants to make into a film about the changes caused by the Olympic buildings in the banlieue, Weber immediately says yes. »Walk where no one goes. Where no one goes because there are only cars driving, or where no one goes because there is nothing to see or get. In lost corners, on expressways without sidewalks.” But people, illegal migrants, live there too. “Can you imagine,” asks Thierry, “going through this whole journey – I understand that he wants to say: from Africa to Europe – going through this whole journey and then here to arrive?”

Thierry himself has an Algerian father who worked his way up with a small electrical company. He came to France at seventeen to work at Renault and married a French woman – Thierry’s mother. Thierry grew up in the “neuf trois,” the area named after the zip code 93 in the northeast of the Paris region. His father, he says, should have stayed in Algeria. At least he would have been happy there. Instead, he tried to make himself French as quickly as possible. »To his chagrin, he was officially unable to get rid of his own last name, but no one ever knew him by his real first name, Ahmed. He always pretended to be Marcel to all his friends. Most people wouldn’t have known that he was Algerian.” When Anne Weber tries to understand Thierry’s father, the fun stops for Thierry. »The fun stops, which means he keeps laughing. Or talks in a joking tone. Only the tone is harder, more mocking.”

The laughter, the irony, the teasing is part of Weber and her friend’s forays. Thierry takes on the role of the traditional Arab, “which he is not,” and Anne Weber takes on the role of the Bobo, the “Bourgeois Bohémien,” which she is more or less. When Weber desperately looks for a café with a toilet, she can’t find one that she dares to go into because all the cafés only have men. »How do your women do it when they are out of the house and have to go to the toilet? I ask Thierry (…) Our women are not out of the house, and when they are, they don’t have to go to the toilet. Going to the toilet outside is haram, he says with some irony in his voice. These are conversations in which reflection and self-reflection are deepened philosophically and everyday contradictions come to light that would otherwise remain unspoken.

»Bannmeilen« is a book about Anne Weber and her boyfriend, about origins and migration. It sparks interest in areas of society, right in the neighborhood, that no one wants to see. It is a rescue of the honor of the people who have no choice but to live where others move away, next to highways in the trash or in the inhumane concrete silos of satellite cities, cut off from a functioning social environment. This is often sad and depressing.

But then the two hikers come across the café “Le Montjoie” in Saint Denise. Three guests are sitting at the bar, “two of whom – TWO – are women… Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonne année – Happy New Year! is what we hear. The owner comes from an Algerian family, but as it later turns out after many visits by the two of them, his guests are a diverse bunch: Algerian-French, Moroccan, French and even a former one Soldier who fought against Algerian independence. And of course there is also a Le Pen voter.

Anne Weber: Ban miles. A novel in rambles. Matthes & Seitz, 301 pages, hardcover, €25

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