IMMIGRANTS, SOURCE OF NEW ENERGIES

THE AGING SOCIETY NEEDS YOUTHFUL IMMIGRANTS, WHO
BESIDES THEIR HARD WORK, ENERGIZING OF LOCAL MARKETS AND CREATION OF SMALL BUSINESSES,* MAKE FRENCH CULTURE INFINITELY MORE INVENTIVE 

*Which means creating jobs, bringing in money that is locally spent and producing tax revenues. 

Some who influenced the recent past

Sipa Press

Léopold Senghor (1906-2001), President of Senegal (1960-1980) and poet elected to the Académie française

Martinique's Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), whose poetry is basic to the Négritude movement and modern French literature. For an extract, please click.

The slammer JYB reads Césaire at the Paris 360 Music Factory in the largely African neighborhood of La Goutte d'Or

France Fanon (1925-1961), Martinican psychiatrist, was a psychiatrist who wrote about racism and anti-colonialism. Black Skin, White Mask (1952) explains the effects of believing oneself inferior. The Wretched of the Earth (1961) states that colonizers will never concede voluntarily and that the nationalist parties are corrupt and collaborate with them. Violent struggle is the only solution for the oppressed.

    Frantz Fanon, The Philosopher of the Barricades by Sara Salem, 2017 / zoom

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Famous heirs

• Senegal's Ousmane Sow evoked the fight against colonialism with Combat at Little Big Horn, an installation that took over the pont de Arts in spring, 1999. 

* The American army's defeat by Plains Indians in Montana in 1876, an event that is extremely well known in the United States.  

Good pictures (French narration) / zoom 

Le Figaro / zoom

• Senegal's Mohammed Mbougur Sarr, whose novel The Most Secret Memory of Man about African writers in exile won the extremely prestigious Goncourt Prize (in 2022).   

Bookstore, rue de Tolbiac, 13th

• Kylian Mbappé, star of the French soccer team, is of Cameroonian and Algerian origin, and the names of most members of the rest of the team are not Gaule.

"Made in the Paris Region

"How Paris and its outskirts have become the world most important producers of soccer players."

A crossroad at the Châtelet métro station, oldest in France and one of the most important in Europe.

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They emerge from a vast pool of talent, in sports as everyone  knows...

Square Léon in the African neighborhood of La Goutte d'Or, 18th

...and in the arts as a whole. Among the performers I met through event organizing were... 

•  Asta, queen of the Bassa in Cameroon, though a cleaning woman in Paris:

The photos in this section are by Claude Abron

A wedding dance: The bride must drink all the liquid as she dances.

• Moussa Lebkiri, whose sketches and writings evoke his childhood in a North African outskirt:

   

• Pastor Marcel Boungo, from Brazzaville, with Texas gospel singer Jo Ann Pickens at the Sainte-Chapelle...

...and Jo Ann for me:

-- 

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Immigrants innovate...

• For how their hairstyles that have become universel, please click here and continue... 

Ahmed, front of a Barbès barber shop

• Black and Asian art and Asian color animate the sober 13th:

Rue du docteur Mangin

Avenue de Choisy

• They make life more fun

 The Chinese and Vietnamese New Year in the 13th's "Chinatown"

Left, a North African merchant sells dates, figs and olive oil from the Maghreb (and organic eggs at half the price of stores); right, a Black pianist enlivens a Monoprix chain store.

Cheering up the métro

"If you'd come earlier there would not be the empty space!" said the vendor at this market in the 13th.

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Immigrants frighten traditionalists, who look back to the old belief: "What LUCK to have encountered FRANCE!"...

Poster in conservative Versailles. The ruins in the background evoke World War 1, in which figures like that in the foreground were slaughtered as soldiers fighting for France. So they were fortunate? 

...while a Tunisian who left school at age seven says the same with an energy and humor they cannot even imagine:

The late Jaber Al Mahjoub was well known to amateurs of art brut. For more about him, please click.

# # #

Those who fear that immigrants 

will submerge the venerable culture

ignore how much they enrich it.

*     *     *

To understand why France is different, think of the...

• Kings, women of the court, Church and rebels. 

• Small farms due to the Revolution.

• Exiles and foreign artists, writers, musicians... .

• Imperialists who imposed the French language. 

• Immigrant energies.

End of Part I.

*     *     *

Part II
Beyond the expected city