Here Rests the Connection between France and Louisiana

The Connection between Louisiana and France is uninspiring and frayed.

Merde.

            I tried so hard to find it today. I returned to the derelict offices of L’Association France Louisiane in search of a remedy to the truth that is coming clearer- I am dealing with the overlap of two very different places. If the L’association France Louisiane symbolizes the connection between France and Louisiana, I am weaving with vintage thread

            The office is on Rue Reille in Paris’ 14^th arrondisement, waiting for the clutch of decomposition to finish it. Its windows are full of paraphernalia symbolizing the New Orleans I lived in and the bayous nearby. A riverboat model, a strand of off-white mardi gras beads, a dusty bottle of Tabasco sauce at the stoop of a wooden house modeled after the homes of Cajun ancestors loose their coloring in the sun. I am often tickled by the end of things, as they lean towards the grave, but since I am so determind to find living entrails of heritage, the window displays and dark offices behind them disgust me.

L'Association's Louisiana Window Display (Creepy!!!)

The idea of going to American Universities to find other students to speak French with is appaling. I didn’t know what to say when the woman inside of the Association’s office began to write down the locations on a piece of paper. Her fountain pen etched the names of departments and buildings of scholarly merit with American accreditation. She spoke the English of a childhood in New York, much to my anxiety. I don’t want to hear English. I tried my hardest to respond to her English inquiries in French.  The theme of my first week in Paris is avoiding the use of my habitual speech. I am dodging bullets of Anglophonic phrases as my accent detonates the truth of my position- I am foreign.

In the museums and gentrified cafes, English spouts from the mouths of tourists and service people. I am in a constant state of linguistic refusal. I ride my detraction to the places where no one expects me. I prefer the peripheries of Paris where the opportunity to speak in French occurs out of necessity. At the office of L’association, the woman writing the names of University establishments in Paris for Americans on paper makes a remark:

These days it is harder for students to integrate with French families. So it will be easier for you to learn French with other American students learning French.

That. That is the least interesting incarnation of French to me. Textbook French.  Bleached, young, rolling off educated tongues, the French of private minds! I like the way drunk people talk, belligerent and shirtless in the subways, with globs of words hurled in beer breath. I like the way old Muslim women banter with their bags of fabric and coins. I like the voices of market vendors offering deals to the throngs. I like the North African slanguage employed by a stranger to get me to go out with him. I liked the awkward improvising of my French as I refused his request.

“Je voudrais être touet seule!” I say as he leans in close. I walk away. My body is the clearest form of communication. I AM LEAVING NOW.

That’s why I knew the woman at the Office was insane. Or under a spell. I think the black dust on the rose wallpaper clouded the minds of the old women who worked “out of benevolence”. They breathe over files and old books on explorers, answering phones next to antique computers, taking in the fantasy of a “France for all people” and a past of plantation photographs. I accept that the youth today in Louisiana are going to learn French in school if anything. French in Louisiana is not passed down from Grandparents to their grandchildren on the bayou in 2013.

What I don’t accept is that school French is the better French. And that is what the office woman said to me. And she said it in French, “meillieur”, so I knew it was not a rough English translation of something preferred. The French of the educated is better than the Cajun and Quebecois of yore.

The reason it is better, to further my inner conflict, is because these French students can have “careers in tourisme” after their education. The woman seemed nervous as she spoke.

           

            Sometimes I feel pressure, as if I alone have to stich together the frays of history by entering old Parisian offices run by old ladies volunteering and find the truth. I found almost nothing I believed in there. There was a young man in the bibliothèque at the back of the office who accompanied the ancient female behind a desk. She wore a golden chain with a crucifix, a floral patterned shirt, and the physique of decades gone by. The boy was a little older than me, researching under a mop of dark hair. How many people in the world will bear the mystique of attraction but will be heading in the other direction?

            I enjoy making deep and intense eye contact with strangers on the subway platforms as I speed away in the train. I like to see how long it lasts, knowing that we are parting for eternity. The idea of being remembered, recognized or known here is such an incomprehension, that I make no effort not to stare.

            I want to belong everywhere. I am infatuated with the verb reposer, to rest. “Je me repose,” I can say when I put myself to sleep for the night. There I gain a renewed state for the French morning. I repose myself. I loved the verb as I took it to sleep. At La Cimètaire Père Lachaise, I was more enthralled by “reposer” than the tombs of dead celebrities. For in each sèpulture there echoed the motif- Ici Reposent, Here Rests. No matter how many books they wrote, how many streets they widened, how many fires they lit, the dead were all reposenting. The word carries the magic of life beyond the grave, as if the morning will find those who rest all the more ready for life.

Ici Reposent

Pere Lachaise

No Filter beeyaothhhththchhchch

            I belong in the places I find renewal. In the café where I am known by first name, on the street playing music and receiving coins, in the home were I eat and sleep and bathe, I belong because I repose there. Where I belong, where I have found reposure, I learn the most French. Sometimes I imagine other places where I can come into a fuller contact and comprehension of the French language. I imagine a country house warmed by fire, an afternoon laughing with the ladies of the L’Association France Louisiane over croissants in the office, a poetry reading involving cigarettes and Rimbaud- but I am met instead with the physical environs that appall and repose me. And I would rather it this way, encountering beauty I didn’t expect in places I relax at the end of a day of bewilderment.

Viola! I reposent myself here. 

            “And after returning home alone, at that hour when Wisdom’s advice is no longer stifled by the buzzings of the exterior life, he said to himself, “Today in dream, I had three domiciles where I found equal pleasure. Why force my body to change location, when my soul travels so nimbly? And what good is it to carry out plans, since planning in itself is a sufficient delight?” (page 56, Baudelaire)