I wrote this short piece a few years ago about my teaching experience in Paris. I might try and dig up some photos to share.
Lessons
from la banlieue.
By
Suzannah Rowley.
Lesson
1: “Hello! What’s your name?”
“Hello! My name is Suzannah. I am your English teacher
– Vous comprenez?” I peered out to the
sea of cheeky faces watching me intently.
They sat in crooked rows with two children crammed
to a bright blue desk. Books and papers littered the ground and bags were strewn
across the classroom floor. Posters sagged from the walls, revealing bare cream
panels dotted with blobs of blue tack.
The floorboards were chipped and scratched from children
dragging their rickety desks across the surface. I felt awkward standing above
the class on a skinny, wooden stage that screeched beneath my feet. A clock dangled above me ticking loudly and in
sync with the pounding in my head.
The class fell silent and I took a step closer.
“I come from Australia!” I pointed to the lumpy yellow
continent hovering by the edge of the map. It looked small and lonely floating
far away from the rest of the world. Their little eyes kept staring: I too
began to drift.
“Ah! Les kangourous!” cried a stocky little boy
breaking the silence.
“Yes!” I shrieked and whipped out a toy kangaroo.
The children giggled.
“My name is Skippy!” I grunted shaking the animal. I
began winding through a maze of tables and chairs; the kangaroo sniffed and
stared at the children wriggling in excitement.
“What!” I
bellowed, stopping in front of the boy. “Is YOUR
name?”
His dark eyes flashed and a huge smile crept over
his face. He grabbed the kangaroo and ran his fingers through its coat.
“Allo Skippeeeee,” he slurred. “My name is Ricardo.”
The class roared with laughter. Their young teacher grinned
and nodded a quick good-bye from the back of the room.
I stepped out of the classroom shaking. I could
barely hear the teacher trying to contain the chaos behind me. My supervisor
Christian didn’t know whether to smile or grimace. He walked straight to the
car and ushered me in.
My cheeks burned and my stomach knotted as we headed
further north of Paris. The year as a language assistant loomed before me: I
was the English teacher in all my
schools and I had no experience.
“We are very
lucky to have you.” Christian said as the car hurtled through the backstreets. “You
are teaching eight classes. The children are bright but many have repeated the
same year several times.”
He didn’t mention the violence and discipline
problems plaguing the schools in Arnouvilles-les-Gonnesse. I learned this from
the worried grimaces and “ooh la las” whenever I talked about my placement. On
my observation day the previous week, a principal politely told me:
“Arnouvilles even scares us in the teaching world!”
I sat stunned as we whizzed past dozens of high-rise
government housing blocks–grey concrete slaps jutting out of the ground and
towering over the Seine. They were riddled with black holes, tangled antennas
and smothered in graffiti.
They were built in the outer suburbs (la banlieue) during the post-war period
to alleviate squatting in derelict Shantytowns crowding the inner-city pockets
of Paris.[i]
In the economic downturn of the 1970s, French working class families departed
and these housing compounds became a trap for immigrant workers.[ii]
La banlieue is
synonymous with urban crime, juvenile delinquency and violence [iii]
and is often compared to the ghettos of New York.[iv] It is a dark, depressing contrast to the
splendid boulevards and cobble-stone streets of Paris. Their immigrant populations are stigmatized
and physically segregated by the périphérique
– a motorway encircling Paris like a shield from the poverty and harsh reality
of the outer suburbs.
“Many of your students share flats with several
families who barely speak French,” said Christian pulling up outside an old
brick school still bearing inscriptions relegating garcons to the right and filles
to the left. “What pleasure for them to discover English with une vraie Australienne!”
Lesson
2: Where do you come from?
“My name is
Suzannah. I come from Australia. What does this mean?” I asked throwing my
hands in the air.
Frustrated sighs followed a long silence as the
children started scribbling, reading or whispering to each other. I was losing
them and the class had just begun.
Paper flowers hemmed the windows and cellophane
rainbows drooped from the glass. A violent wind ripped the leaves from the old
oaks outside, they fluttered and swirled frantically in the air. The weather
was bitter and freezing but inside I felt sweaty as I tried to spark their
interest.
Skippy appeared. A wave of giggles rippled through
the class room and Asterix joined him on stage.
“Hello, my name is Asterix. I come from France. What
is your name?” Asked Skippy’s new acquaintance.
A little boy with bottle glasses and squinty eyes,
cocked his head to the side, pursed his lips and waved his hand.
“Allo, my
name is Julien. I come from France.” He murmured.
“Excellent Julien! Now close your eyes everyone.” I
said.
The children squeezed their eyes shut. I finally had
their attention and outside the wind stopped blowing. A ray of the sun light
pierced the window casting colourful rainbow patterns that danced across the
floorboards. The leaves glistened with spots of rain and made a wet matted
covering across the playground. The air looked crisp and cool but inside it
grew muggy as the children fidgeted and squirmed excitedly in their seats.
I shuffled a pack of cards with pictures of Skippy
and Asterix, and placed one gently next to each child.
“Okay,” I said as they opened their eyes and snapped
up their cards, “everyone find a partner from another country!”
I watched proudly as they wondered through the
classroom, cobbling together simple English phrases to describe their
nationality.
Many of their parents were les travailleurs immigrès – temporary guest workers mostly from
North Africa who rebuilt France during its post-war recovery.[v] An economic role granted these workers basic
liberties and a better life but they were permanently excluded from French politics.[vi]
This kind of racism casts a long shadow over French
Republican values. During the Third Republic (1870-1940), French culture was
instilled in “less civilized” inhabitants of the colonies through a Mission Civilatrice.[vii]
Today, this attitude is reflected in French immigration policies as immigrants
are expected to shed cultural ties by assuming a unique French identity.[viii]
The younger generation are victims of this post-colonial
syndrome and suffer from an acute identity crisis – their ethnicity engenders
racism, segregation and a loss of cultural identity.[ix]
They are French citizens generally distanced from their families’ ethnic
culture but constantly separated from society due to a consistent reminder that
they are different.[x]
At the end my lesson each student received a passport d’anglais in which they answered questions about their name, age,
and nationality. Some wrote ferociously and proudly handed back their work.
Others frowned and stared at the blank spaces confused about what to write.
“Madame! I
come from Portugal, how do you say that in English?” Ricardo shouted slapping
his desk and tilting his head back with a proud smile.
He was a troubled boy with a jumbled identity typical
of the younger generation who develop emotional yet distanced ties to their
origin.[xi]
He lived in la banlieue with his father,
an abusive step mother and spent many nights roaming the streets with youth
gangs. Ricardo dreamed of his family home in Portugal where in reality his
mother work in a fish market and could not afford to raise him.
I had no other choice but to allow the students to
answer one question in French:
“This is the one time you will ever be able to write
in French in your passports d’anglais,”
I announced in French to their delight. “You may write down your nationality
and I will certify an official translation of your passports tonight!”
Lesson
3: Mistaken Identities:
A damp mist shrouded the station and I could hear
the rain pelting from inside my train. It was a miserable October and as my
train rushed south through the city, I felt a guilty sense of relief to leave
the troubled northern suburbs behind. With a backpack bursting with brightly
coloured passports, I barely noticed the grimy windows fogging up quickly as more
bodies crammed into my carriage.
Lucky to have a seat, I squeezed into a corner and
began to decipher my students’ wonky handwriting. I flicked frantically through
the passports; I could not believe there were so many children of foreign
descent: Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia, The Ivory Coast, Algeria and Vietnam just
in one class! I sat stunned; I had naively assumed that they “came from
France.”
In la banlieue,
teenagers were discriminated on the basis of names, descent, residence and
appearance which showed in high unemployment hovering between 35 to 85% in some
of the poorest areas.[xii]
They were furious at their constant repression and harassment by police conducting
hundreds of random identity checks every day.[xiii]
On the night of October 27th, three
terrified teenagers fled from police in the northern suburb of
Clichy-sous-Bois.[xiv]
They hid in an electric power station, desperate to escape police questioning.[xv]
Two were electrocuted, another seriously injured and their deaths sparked
violent youth riots throughout France.
For weeks, images of burning cars and teenagers
screaming wildly at police flashed across news headlines. From my home in the
south, I watched in disbelief as buses and cars were torched, schools were
firebombed, a woman was doused in gasoline and set alight and teenagers dropped
concrete slabs on police from the top of government housing blocks.[xvi]
The French government acted quickly by deploying
thousands of police across the suburbs, imposing curfews and Prime Minister
Dominique de Villepin declared a state of emergency – a law promulgated in 1958
to suppress violent uprisings during the Algerian war.
The outrage intensified however, when Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, publically vowed to rid the suburbs of its racaille (scum) by cleaning the streets
of France with a karcher (a high
pressured water jet). I was shocked by such racist comments and appalled at his
promise to expel foreign born rioters the majority of which were actually
French citizens.[xvii]
Ironically, I arrived in Arnouvilles each morning
oblivious to the violence erupting at night. I walked to school and people milled
about the markets as usual, teenagers lurked around the station smoking and
chatting, their hats pulled to the side, jeans sagging to their ankles as they
gestured wildly to each other.
When the violence ceased just before the Christmas
holidays, I entered a classroom full of grinning students:
“Good Morning Suzannah!” They yelled with the
slightest Australian tinge to their accents!
I felt frustrated at a system that would fail many
of these children who were so quick, bright and eager to learn about Australia.
With their passports full and officially translated, my students had quickly
grasped a sense of their identity in a foreign language and felt confident
introducing themselves in clear and simple English. I hoped this new form of
expression could spark a useful interest and the joy of discovering a new
language.
“Allo Skippy!” they yelled as the kangaroo hopped out
for the beginning of a brand new lesson: Noël
en Australie – Christmas in Australia!
[i] Silverstein, P.
A. & Tetreault, C. (2006, June 11). Postcolonial urban apartheid. Retrieved
October 1, 2008 from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Silverstein_Tetreault/
[ii] Cesari, J. (2005,
November 30). Ethnicity, Islam and the banlieues: Confusing the issues.
Retrieved September 20, 2008 from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Cesari/
[iii] Grewal, K. (2005/2006).
Chapter 3: ‘The threat from within.’ Representations of the Banlieue in French popular discourse. In
Europe: New voices, new perspectives.
Proceedings from the Contemporary Research Centre Postgraduate Conference,
2005/2006, pp. 41-44. Retrieved September 30, 2008 from http://www.cerc.unimelb.edu.au/publications/Europe%20new%20voices%20ch3.pdf
[iv] Wieviorka, M.
(November 18, 2005). Violence in France.
Retrieved September 30, 2008 from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Wieviorka/
[v] Ireland, R., P.
(1994). France before 1974. In The policy
challenge of ethnic diversity. London: England: Harvard University Press.
P.37.
[vi] Ibid. Pp. 36-37.
[vii] Haddad, Y., Y.
& Balz, M., J. (2006). The October riots in France: A failed immigration
policy? Or the empire strikes back? International
Migration. 44(2), 25.
[viii] Ibid. p25.
[ix] Cesari, J.
(November 30, 2005). Ethnicity, Islam and the banlieues: Confusing the issues.
Retrieved September 20, 2008 from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Cesari/
[x] Ibid.
[xii] Haddad, Y., Y.
& Balz, M., J. (2006). The October riots in France: A failed immigration
policy? Or the empire strikes back? International
Migration. 44(2), 27.
[xiii] Silverstein, P.
A. & Tetreault, C. (June 11, 2006). Postcolonial urban apartheid. Retrieved
October 1, 2008 from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Silverstein_Tetreault/
[xiv] Valls-Russel,
J. (November/December, 2005). Lessons of the riots: France’s identity crisis. The New Leader, 88(6), 11-14, p.11.
[xv] Haddad, Y., Y.
& Balz, M., J. (2006). The October riots in France: A failed immigration
policy? Or the empire strikes back? International
Migration. 44(2), 24.
[xvi] Valls-Russel, J.
(November/December, 2005). Lessons of the riots: France’s identity crisis. The New Leader, 88(6), 11-14. p.11.
[xvii] Wihtol de
Wenden, C. (November 8, 2005). Reflections “A Chaud” on the French suburban
crisis. Retrieved October 1, 2008 from http://www.riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Wihtol_de_Wenden/printable.html
