Taking advantage of the relationships and interaction, which actually exist between what happens / to her and her desire, she creates some metaphors both obvious and opaque, as screens of rays / crisscrossing
- Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, ‘Forms of Politeness’
What does Paris feel like these days? A friend will always ask.
I tend to answer with some vague particularity: the parks are filled with people sprinting or lying amongst tall grass corners as if in hiding, and there seems to be little in between— scooters lie contorted on pavements and so do the cigarette buds that fall minutely and so have not yet been stamped into the road like gum— and amidst the boxed terraces that line the streets, glasses clink, a garbage truck rolls on by, and everyone takes a sip to brush off the whiff. Signs of life, so I guess— alive?
As with all things made a romance of, this isn’t what they want to hear. I realise that what people want from me is often a level of in-crowd knowledge that I am not actually privy to. The city exists all at once, for so many of us. There is no singular account that could really say quite enough in my opinion. I think what they want me to say is that love is in the air. They want to hear it from someone there. Because if there’s no love here, what hope is there for the rest of the world. Paris is rather like a scale through which we determine whether to feel the heart is yet possible in today’s world. I do wonder whether the city does in fact have a heart of its own, separate from the people who inhabit its areas— that between every account there ever has been of its passages and perimeters, there is a crux. Paris is an incredibly private and personal (and truthfully, rather lonely) place to me and whatever it is I tell of its vibrations, won’t really make it all the more familiar to folks. I find it somewhat impossible to draw up familiarity for others— just as I cannot imagine another city very fully right now because I am not there with it. I find it an odd task. It isn’t that I don’t want to share more, but that it is difficult to pin down that which does not wish to be pinned down.
Do you love Paris? I’ve asked myself this question a hundred times over in the last eleven years— and I do, as I think that is why I defend its lived realities so much. But the question does stir up conflicted emotions. I often feel this love to be deeply unrequited. I have felt so unsafe here. The side to Paris that most people would like to dismiss is its elusive, volatile, and taut interior. It hides these parts of itself well. Sometimes I delude myself into believing the assumption that Paris loves all— that as a city with a heart/is the heart of all hearts, then it must love me. We always have Paris assumes an ever-present. But this city has a way of being evasive of the individual— it gives you the impressions of better, more liberated things than can be realistically or reliably offered on street-level. I think I speak with/for many individuals of colour who find themselves a so-called “minority” in a given space, that feeling truly a part of any place is an endlessly and indescribably difficult thing.
The periphery can be found at the centre of the thing itself. I think this is a plausible theory. In my head, I can visualise it, I feel it. For that which is often unacknowledged and overlooked, the city provides a strangely private space. Arguably this privacy is accompanied by invisibility. Sometimes the city is so nauseated by your existence you feel it spits you out. In such moments, you recognise your own hyper-visibility deeply. Nonetheless, the crowds come and go, they move at whatever speed they move in, and its flux does not pull me in. The metropolitan landscape lets you mind your own business— for the most part. It also insists you confront a lot. The city makes sure you get both. When I take the streets with family, it feels possible to create our own clearance, walk our own walk to any beat of our choosing. Mum and I have made patterns for ourselves in unassuming streets and it does sometimes feel like our own woven marvel. But the feeling of our Otherness is unshakeable. We are reminded of it every step of the way. I become a periphery and it is a constant attempt at crossing over. The constant reminder of where you are spatially and societally in relation to others— it’s exhausting. To carve out something for myself here feels like an urgency sometimes.
Belonging has little to do with patriotism for me. It has more to do with familiarity. Belonging has never and cannot really mean something to be taken for granted, because it was never given to me in the first place. Belonging has always taken the shape of hollow shells. It is always like a long drive around the outline of something that could be. In my books, belonging has to be fought for, sought for, created just as much as curated. All that I know is mine. Telling it to others can sometimes feel like betrayal. And keeping to vague particularities can feel like dishonesty. I am protective of the Paris that I know. I wonder at the relationship between patriotism and those of us who have lived displaced, uprooted in some shape or form. A writer I follow on Instagram recently quoted a passage from Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s upcoming work, Names for Light (which I am beyond excited to purchase a copy of asap):
This place repeated enough times begins to sound like displaced.
Displaced is where we moved to, displaced is where I grew up, displaced is where I am from.
Displaced is also where, I realise, I am moving towards, perhaps infinitely. Is displaced the closest kind of belonging I can reach for/back into? The realistic majority of me reckons so. Displaced is indeed my reality. A frustratingly persistent part of me wants all of my places to merge into one or that one of them will hammer through enough to take first prize for home. Paris is close, excruciatingly close especially after this nearly full year’s return. But perhaps the kind of belonging I want but do not wholly or sincerely desire— that somehow, someplace, it is possible to not only simply exist, but totally and wholeheartedly believe in oneself as part of something more— is naively utopian, an abstraction at most, a non-solution to what was never really what I would say is a problem to begin with.
I dream of nestling but I don’t know that I believe in it.
I ask myself why I want any form of fixed belonging when I have this disparate hot mess that I can keep on loving over and over again in whatever form I want to. Yes, I want Paris to be more profoundly mine, but more in the sense that I want to believe in it more. Anyway, a city isn’t to be a possessed so this has little to do with ownership and more with the kind of belonging that allows me to be more fully myself within its heart— taking up more of its centre without having to feel like a periphery. But all this being said, I wonder if not everyone is just a passersby to their own familiar streets. What do people truly know of their cities beyond what they claim is theirs to know?
The Paris I feel I have gotten to know this past year is one which I had not really come across before. I think part of me has gone looking for variants of my own grown self— a sort of nestling perhaps, but I think also a genuine realisation that there are many things meant for me here. The more I linger, the more I wonder who belongs to who in the first place. If, as I have long debated with myself, I am coming from a position of irrevocable displacement, then is it not more that Paris draws itself nearer to me than I to Paris? A chicken or egg question and I am tempted to say it is I who draws nearer. I’m the one who has to work harder for it after all. I recognise that I don’t necessarily need any place to believe in me though. Belonging has so often to do with acceptance, but I’m done with waiting for that kind of thing. I don’t want that kind of love. I don’t need a permission slip to love. The idea of a simultaneous collision that has long been in waiting, is a bizarrely pleasant thought— that the closer I get to the heart of a Paris I can truly recognise, Paris reaches closer to me, also? Maybe I’m going for what is abstract for abstraction sake. Solitude does silly things. I don’t know that its people are as forgiving and accepting, but in what I am curating for myself, I feel home. It’s important to grant myself what I desire and deserve.
A city is a friendship, I think. It needs to be worked towards rather than claimed. The timing needs to be right and the proximity is a learned, changing thing.
Photos from July, taken by me.
Next month is looking to include a small change of scene as I head to Köln for a short while. I intend to use my hours there to read and write more, to gather up some courage for later this Autumn. It all feels very much like a departure and an entry point at once. A lot remains uncertain, but I am holding onto the few things I am certain of. I hope you’re all doing well.
Thank you for reading, as always.