Diary from Paris

"We shouldn't always expect a riot to mean something. There's been a carnival air about some of the destruction in France, and as anthropologists know, the meaning of carnival is to be found in the ordinary days of the calendar. The crudest question seemed simply to be whether there was anybody out there. Would anyone who wasn't the descendant of a Maghrebi or sub-Saharan migrant living in abject conditions be willing to acknowledge the existence of these conditions and the people afflicted by them? But with that came a threatening message about mistaken or ill-assigned identity that briefly clarified the cities like a flare over an earthworks: "we will become the people you imagine we are, just watch." It is the defensive-aggressive strategy that Sartre discerned in Genet's ostentatious criminality."


(photo--merci I.P.)