IMMIGRANTS, SOURCE OF NEW ENERGIES

THEY DO MUCH OF THE PHYSICAL WORK...

Energize neighborhood markets and found small businesses that bring in money which is locally spent, produce tax revenues and create jobs...

 

Have immensely contributed to the culture of modern France. Arbitrary examples: 

• 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 African neighborhood of La Goutte d'Or 

• 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, soccer celebrity, is of Cameroonian and Algerian origin, and the names of most members of the rest of the team are not those of Gauls.

At an intersection of lines at the Châtelet métro stop

"Made in the Paris Region"

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

# # #

The stars emerge from a vast pool of talent:

• In sports...

Square Léon in La Goutte d'Or, 18th

• In the arts. Among the performers I met by organizing events: 

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

The photos in this section are by Claude Abron

• 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...

 

They add to the pleasure of everyday life... 

 

And innovate in ways that "Gauls" cannot imagine:

• The Chinese and Vietnamese New Year parade draws crowds to "Chinatown..."

• Asian color that in that area animates the Parisian gray...

Avenue de Choisy

• Aspects of Black culture — sneakers, hip hop, slam, rap — and hairstyles for youth that have become universal... 

Barbershop poster in the partly African neighborhood of La Goutte d'Or.

# # #

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

Poster in conservative Versailles.

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 have already enriched 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
 An unexpected city