Preliminary Fieldwork - First thoughts & Crisis 2/3
There I was, sitting and waiting in the overcrowded terminal B of Newark Liberty airport, realizing that I was not ready at all to go back to France.
Paris 19e, station Jaurès.
I am truly grateful my PhD journey enables me to combine family time and research. But I had not measured the emotional journey it would represent. They say an anthropologist should not go study lands and people they have no relations with. But we do not discuss enough the difficulty of studying a land and a people our life is forever tied to.
I lost my grandmother on Christmas day last year. It was totally unexpected and her passing has left a huge hole in me. Coming back to France forces me to face a reality I have been pushing aside for months. She is not anymore. I want to be present for my family who has been dealing with the very concrete aftermath of her death, but I also need to find some quality time to carry out my summer research and move my doctoral project forward. Sharing my mother’s studio apartment in the North of Paris is a substantial, additional challenge. My mother raised me by herself, a single-mom, traveling back and forth between Quebec and France, always doing only whatever she wanted. As much as we love each other, we have not lived together in almost fifteen years, and our relationship is electric—to say the least.
I arrived in France early June, the day before my first scheduled event. I had asked some of my friends to distribute ahead of time posters and flyers in the neighborhood of the cultural center where the events would take place (11th and 20th arrondissement). So I showed up on Saturday June 4th, excited and nervous all at once, as the dark grey clouds were gathering in the sky and a rainstorm threatening to break. And I waited there, watching the rain falling by the window. No one showed up.
It is something I had prepared myself for but it still felt disappointing and frustrating. I thought that a partnership with an established institution would give me the “researcher’s authority” needed to attract people to this kind of event but the main issue with the approach I chose for this summer project was not my “authority.” The main issue, I think, is the format of such a planned event: it is not because people (generally speaking) show interest in “colonial debt” and “reparations” that they will take of their time on a Saturday afternoon to come and talk with people they don’t know about such topics at a specific time and place, even if it is close to where they live. Presented this way, I wonder how I could have ever thought this approach would work out.
My next step was then to position myself at a nearby subway exit, distributing flyers with a gigantic, warm smile, ready to discuss the issue to anyone who would be curious/skeptical about it. I had forgotten how random social interactions are difficult in Paris, compared with the casual friendliness of street encounters in New York City. Fearful, passerby avoid eye contact and accelerate the pace, forming wide, awkward arches around me in order to avoid my cheerful though threatening presence. It is particularly difficult with women, probably because they are so used to be the target of harassment and other unsolicited solicitations. It is a bit easier with men, even if half of them refuse the flyer with a sharp hand gesture. I can see the other half walking away with the flyer in their hand, reading carefully the information, while others refuse the flyer before reading “dette coloniale et réparations” and eventually taking it from my hand. What do they think? Do they have the same understanding of these concepts as I do? Do they find foolish or irrelevant to talk about these subjects? Do they feel concerned by these issues? Does the political sensitivity of these issues make them uncomfortable? So many answers without questions.
A week after my landing in Paris, my mental health is not at its best. I feel very tiny and insignificant. The (professional) confidence that I built in NYC has not followed me to the other side of the ocean. When I left Paris five years ago, the city had sucked all the forces I had in me. From 2008 to 2017, I spent my young adult life struggling to care a cosy little spot for myself in a place that kept making me feel unwanted. And now that I am settling in the sticky heat of the Parisian summer, I cannot help but feel unwelcome, once again.