Postcard from Paris: Justice and Rachida Dati

It sure has been a long while since I last wrote, my master’s defense and then structurally adjusting to a demanding Euro have really zapped my energy. But today I emerged so fresh and so clean from the wonderful Hammam (de la Grande Mosquée de Paris), I can tell you a little about the cultural zeitgeist here. A note about the Hammam first… it’s part of the Great Mosque of Paris, one of the last religious edifices built with state funds, way back in 1920. French architects came up with the design, but Maghrebian artisans did the intricate ornamental work. For someone accustomed to militant secularism in France, it is both surprising and reassuring to see the nightmare of “Eurabia” embodied in a towering minaret, 26 meters tall, competing with church towers for the Parisian skyline.

Moving on to Item Number 1… the electro group Justice set the french blogosphere afire with the music video for their song “Stress”. You may already know of Justice (seen here at left), part of the resurrection wave of French dance music instigated by Daft Punk, from their hit song D.A.N.C.E, which has been featured in many commercials.

Directed by Romain Costa-Gavras (son of the renowned Greek political film-maker), the video follows a group of rampaging youth from the “banlieue” (the french suburban projects that are akin to the American inner-city) as they venture into Paris to terrorize tourists and other helpless victims. Incidentally, all the young men featured are either Black or Arab, each sporting matching black jackets emblazoned with the Justice Logo, a black cross with white back-lighting. Anti-racism groups and journalists alike condemned the gratuitous violence and reinforcement of stereotypes, while conservative groups saluted the group for bringing to light the unacceptable behaviour of France’s Black and Arab urban ‘delinquents’.

Justice, who usually never speak to the press, broke from their code and addressed the issue on a music blog. The band members claim to have released the video in the hopes of instigating debate about an ignored social phenomenon, wanting to confront a certain generation of well-to-do French people with images that are both invisible and omnipresent in that they dominate the national psyche. Rarely as fleshed out as in this video, however. Yes, it’s ironic and caricatural, but not everyone can see that nuance when the images themselves are so powerful. It’s true that the camera works to make evident the subjectivity of these youngsters, with close-ups that dwell on their fresh-faced youth and sweeping shots of the dilapidated housing projects/prisons that would make anyone go crazy. Everyone has a different opinion on the video, depending on whether they like Justice’s previous work or not. The group tried unsuccessfully to retrieve all copies of the video and asked any sites or blogs hosting it to take it down. Yet here it is again on Youtube:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsmzNB_eXek]
Here it is in another location in case the first should be removed.

This video, in my opinion, belongs to the recent trend of electro artists attempting to address France’s festering social problems. As a genre, Electro brings in a huge cross-section of listeners because it is so spare and culturally unspecific. Also, it recalls the 1980′s and everyone loves that, right?

Dj Mehdi, an artist who has collaborated with Chromeo, the electro-soul band that has every collegiate panty in a tizzy. [Made up of a Jewish Columbia grad-student (in the French department) and an Arab accountant, they bill themselves as a Jewish-Arab milestone in music] Anyway, DJ Mehdi released a very artful music video, for his song Signatune, exploring the white banlieue this time around. Composed of images culled from a bleak Belgian or Northern French town, the video chronicles a souped-up sportscar battle of the decibels. The video stylizes the mundane and featureless into an epic saga, perhaps signaling that the cultural moment resides not in Paris but in the neglected nooks and crannies of the Republic. Here it is:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYz5Iull_zU]

Zeitgeist news item number two is the controversy surrounding the judicial cancellation of a marriage in Lille, on the grounds that the wife ‘lied’ about her virginity. Although it is obvious that the subjects are Muslim, no newscast I’ve seen mentions this fact. Part of French universalism I guess. Rachida Dati, the female Maghrebian justice minister whom President Sarkozy appointed as part of his ‘colorful’ campaign, initially said she approved of the decision. In the Assembly, she had to then vigorously defend herself before the indignant Socialist ministers shouting her down. She proclaimed that the decision had “liberated” the woman from a kind of social imprisonment, and furthermore blamed the French politics of “Les Grands Frères” (the Big Brothers), dominant in France for a long while, for not taking a pro-active approach to women’s problems.

As with any elegant female politician, much more attention seems to be paid to the way she does things rather than to the substance of her actions. Her personal style has been endlessly analyzed by ‘experts’ in the nation’s tabloids, which promise every week that this is the time she’s really done it! Dati is a symbol of bizarre integration: the political Right stepping up to the plate before the disoriented, aging Left. At a time when the term “visible minorities” is just starting to infiltrate the political vocabulary, Dati offers a striking dose of visibility, albeit one that also makes visible how much she stands out as a person of color, with her own issues and grievances, in a sea of white faces.

Tags: france, justice, Mehammed Abou Mack, music

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.