Paris is a remarkable city. I broke away from the group here more than I did in London, and I think I had an entirely different experience than everyone else because I strayed from the touristy areas for the most part. Instead, I found myself in some really unique neighborhoods at the recommendation of my friend Jake Bogart, a Buckeye alum who’s one of the smartest humans I’ve ever met. I am so, so glad that I asked for his advice. After I hit the top of the Arc de Triomphe with Peter, Keith, and Tommy on Saturday, we parted ways and I took off to Oberkampf, an artsy district with plenty of dive bars and other incredible, crazy little shops. When I exited the metro, I could hear drums down the street, so I made my way over towards the sound and walked straight into a festival called Limyè Ba Yo by the République metro stop. République seems to be a hub for cultural activists from what I can tell — in the center of the square where the festival was set up, there was a huge statue that said “a la gloire de la République Francaise” with other words like “equality” and “universal suffrage” inscribed in the stone in French, but stickers and graffiti (a great deal of which surrounded the Charlie Hebdo incident) covered the monument.
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Limyè Ba Yo turned out to be the 17th annual commemoration for victims of colonial slavery. This festival was amazing. There was excellent live music, little tables with clothing and other small trinkets for sale, street food you could smell a block away (yum), and, at the heart of the exhibit, a wall of names that stretched down the whole square. Its purpose wasn’t just remembrance — it also served a genealogical function. A nearby sign explained that when colonial slavery ended in Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1848, the Emancipation Committee assigned last names to the freed persons. Because the enslaved were only identified by a first name and a number during French rule, the officials picked words at random and just inverted the letters to ascribe a different identity to each person. These individuals, eager to enter society and hide their status as former slaves, never spoke about their past or how these names were given to them — which ultimately meant that a lot of people lost their ancestry and a defining part of their heritage. CM98, the organization that put on the festival, went through a ton of archives to put the names of these people on display so that their descendants could find the founders of their families. The 50,000 randomized names on this wall served as a reminder of the massive dehumanization of the people in the colonial French Caribbean, and it was really impactful.
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I happened upon another place with a similar theme while I was by Canal Saint-Martin. As I waked down the canal, I made two lefts into an alley to find Le Comptoir Général… I think “the coolest place I’ve ever been” changed every hour in Paris. This place was a café-bar-museum-performance hall with a focus on art, history, music, and politics of Françafrique, and it was definitely a hole in the wall: super discreet from the outside, with a plain, plaster and brick façade marked only by a small sign with the name and a red, lighted arrow pointing toward the door. But when I walked in, I found myself in a hallway with these grand chandeliers hanging from the roof, and there were so many colors and signs. It was a sensory overload in the best possible way.
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I checked out the politics exhibit, which was marked by a cluster of portraits — the top row displayed French leaders from de Gaulle to François Mitterand, and beneath them was a line of African leaders from the corresponding time periods. There was a small historical exhibition about the disaster that the French have been in Africa, including several assassinations ordered by government officials in Cameroon, Togo, and Burkina Faso and comments like Mitterand’s “in Africa, genocide isn’t really big news.” I headed upstairs to the fashion exhibit called the Marché Noir, and I met the man who supplied it — his name is Amah, and he’s originally from Togo, but he’s lived in Paris for the last thirty years. What a great guy. He bought me an espresso and we talked for a while, and then he gave me a couple of café recommendations (and drew me a map on a napkin to help find them). I’m not sure where the snobby Parisians are, but I certainly didn’t find them. The people I met were wonderful, and I have no idea how I got this lucky. Looks like taking the road (or, in my case, the alley) less traveled really can pay off.