“Je Suis Marocain”
Narrating Mediterraneans, Marseilles
Text and photos by Adrian Grima
As we leave
the port of Ajaccio on our way to Marseilles, the seagull reminds me of
Corsica’s Les Iles Sanguinaires and the fascinating, sometimes haunting
Maltese poetry of Marjanu Vella – it’s a solitary gull, here, scavenging
for food and riding the wind that won’t stop this ship.
The couple next to me have opened their bottle of wine too, and Sophia, who danced on the Sanguinaires, has knocked Fanny’s plastic cup of red wine onto the deck, a deck much redder than anything on the Sanguinaires, a rusty, blood red.
Ajaccio - Marseilles
Those in-between moments
Sophia’s trying to sleep. Being a dancer she can fit her body into the square space of the armchair in the spacious bar. She danced on the blood-red deck, twisting her body in the wind. Now she’s packed her body into the kitsch-coloured armchair and closed her eyes immediately, but there’s no way she’s going to sleep – she told us before the voyage started. She can’t sleep in the cabins either. She looks fragile now, that’s what the book she reading is called. On the deck she was defiant, but now she’s looking melancholic, resigned. I’m sure she lives every moment emphatically when she dances. I wish I understood what she said in her accelerated French when I asked about her job. I caught enough words here and there to realize I hadn’t understood much.
***
Sophia can’t read from her Fragile book; she can’t sleep and she can’t read. We’re in transit, now, in between ports. This is the Mediterranean. I can’t sleep either – at least, like Fanny, I manage to read.
***
The best thing about trips on ships like these is when they arrive and when they leave. The long stretch in between is the same everywhere, I suppose – it’s anonymous. It’s a bit like an overstretched start or a neverending finish.
This is a good moment to think about the Mediterranean, about Mediterranean ports. About coming and going. About people and cargo, about seagulls and waving goodbye.
***
In a book that made me more aware of the myths that make and break the Mediterranean, Lindsay Proudfoot and Bernard Smith point out that “Whether defined in terms of its catchment area or more narrowly by its coastal littoral, the ‘physical’ Mediterranean proves to be so diverse as to prompt the remark that its only unifying physical feature is the Mediterranean Sea itself.” In Maltese, “Il-Mediterran” refers both to the sea and to the region - they’re one in the same thing.
On the deck of a ship that’s heading for the moon this can’t mean what it meant before the trip began.
It’s a pity the engines of the ship drown the sound of the moon.
***
On Les Iles Sanguinaires we were warned to keep to the two beaten tracks – “mogħdijiet” in Maltese, a lovely word – “so as not to disturb the delicate ecosystem on the island”. Someone was treating tourists (and islands) seriously for a change.
We had an hour. The driver of the small ferry boat warned us that the boat would leave without us if we were late. The sad howl of the hundreds of gulls was overwhelming, “assordante” – that’s how Ornella had described it a few days before. What do the hundreds of gulls who live there feed on? Is it hunger that makes them howl?
***
2am – We’ve been on the ship since 7pm, yesterday evening. Almost everyone in the bar area is asleep. I walk out onto the deck and make my way diligently to the bows. The wind is really strong now – or so it seems – and the combination of pitch dark and the very loud engines make the place frighteningly unbearable. There’s no one around. The moon has disappeared and I don’t have the courage to wait for the stars. So-called “illegal” immigrants must have a hellish time drifting through these seas towards the unfriendly shores of the North.
***
As we approach the (relatively new) port of Marseilles, going past the entrance to the Vieux Port to our right, there is a renewed sense of purpose everywhere on the ship.
At the very
front of the ship, there’s a black head wearing a white bandanna and a
hooped earring, La Tête de Maure (Moor’s head), the proud emblem of
Corsica. Two of the politicians from Majorca who attended one of the
meetings of the Archipelagos project in Ajaccio wanted to buy a T-Shirt
with this fascinating image. Just before getting off the ship in
Marseilles, I changed into mine. When Corsica declared its (rather
short-lived) independence in 1755, the patriot Pasquale Paoli chose this
symbol of victory, that dates back to the time of the Crusades, as the
emblem of his own country. The guide book comes in handy: “According to
legend, the white bandanna originally covered the eyes of the black
head, and was raised to the forehead to symbolise the island’s glorious
liberation.”
As the ship
moves slowly past the little islands and the breakwater I can’t help
staring at everything around me and at myself, as if this were some film
I have already watched. I send frantic messages to Nathalie to tell her
I’ve arrived in Marseilles. How do you live such moments? How do you
celebrate your little, personal euphoria? How does it become euphoria?
The gulls accompany us on our way into the port, of course, in the same way that they flew alongside our ship on our way out of Ajaccio. They’re strange beings these solitary, gregarious gulls.
***
I remember something about Marseilles which I read in Thierry Fabre’s book Traversées:
Sur la grande jetée, Marseille m’apparaî dans sa vérité profonde, Marseille ville ouverte. Ville ouverte aux quatre vents du monde, d’Asie et d’Afrique, du Proche-Orient et d’Amérique, et qui pourtant ne s’y démembre pas. C’est dans la Méditerranée qu’elle retrouve son unité et qu’elle peut retrouver son essor.
And later on: “Without sharing, Marseilles loses its raison d’être.”
Marseilles
“Some people are afraid of those who are different”
In front of the café where we sit to talk about us and the Mediterranean, a few metres across the street from the Gare St. Charles, there is a vast, deep building site which is connected to the train station. I think about the in-between moments: Fanny talked about them in between other stuff on Sunday evening in Ajaccio when we were looking for a place to buy the tickets for the trip to Marseilles. “Je suis tombée amoreuse de Marseille”, says Sophia timidly, but seriously, “I have fallen in love with Marseilles.” Fanny asks Sophia about her origins – “I’m from Toulouse, but both my parents were born in Morocco. I was born in France; my parents came to France a long time ago. I haven’t been to Morocco for four years now, and I miss it. It’s time to go. Perhaps I’ll go this year. My parents have a house in Casablanca and this year they won’t be going.”
I think about what she had said about half an hour earlier when we were climbing towards the train station: “There are many Arabs living in that area,” she had said, looking towards the quartier on our left. “Is it dangerous?” I had asked, feeling immediately prejudiced and stupid. “They say that a woman shouldn’t go there alone, but I have had no problems myself. Some people are afraid of those who are different,” she had said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, but it was also indignant. She had spent three days in Marseilles for the first time on her way to Ajaccio – this was her second visit to the city.
When Fanny leaves for Paris, Sophia walks me to the Porte d’Aix, Marseilles’s Arc de Triomphe, on her way to the Vieux Port.
My hotel, I know, is somewhere in this area, near Métro Colbert. I choose a direction, arbitrarily, and start to walk, hoping to come across one of the names that I’m looking for. I walk enough to realize that I’m not heading towards my hotel – even though I don’t know the city, I sense that I’m not going to find hotels here. I ask a man, who looks relaxed in the area, for my hotel – he recognizes the landmarks I mention immediately and a few seconds later he remembers where the hotel Les Citadines is too: he explains to me how to get there – it’s really not far away – and we part. But we’re heading in the same direction so he nods in my direction (I’m a few metres behind him) to tell me that he will walk me to my hotel – I probably still look lost (because that’s how I feel). My timid French doesn’t help.
He asks me whether I’m a student – in a way I’m flattered, because this means that I look young – but on the other hand, teachers don’t want to look like students, not always, anyway – but I don’t have much time to organize my thoughts about this. He asks me where I come from – my answer doesn’t reassure him - where’s Malta? – I mention Sicily and Tunisia – I’m not sure why he’s asking me these questions. He’s probably just being nice – but I’m not sure. He explains that Marseilles’ Arc de Triomphe is really the Porte d’Aix, because it marks the beginning of the road from Marseilles to Aix-en-Provence, and that there are so many cars around because of the general strike. The first point makes a lot of sense – the second doesn’t: I can’t imagine this area without a constant heavy flow of cars… At least, despite the heat and the lack of sleep and the fact that I can’t find my hotel which should be a few metres away, I’m still lucid. By the time I turn my head to look at the world around me we’re in front of the hotel – he’s been a perfect guide, I realize. I give him a big smile and thank him heartily with my meagre French. He shakes my hand and then stops for a moment and looks at me closely: “Je suis marocain.”
***
His statement takes me completely by surprise. I instinctively see it as a revendication of his Moroccan roots, something like: (European) people may say a lot of things about Moroccans, but we Moroccans are good people. Now you know.
***
Sophia’s words about falling in love with Marseilles keep coming back. I spend the first two days in Marseilles walking about almost aimlessly, exploring the Vieux Port, La Canebiere, rue Paradis, rue St. Ferroil, and the Belsunce area. On our way from the ferry to Porte d’Aix and Gare St. Charles, the streets were dirty, the walls were grey, and there were cars everywhere. I had heard some nasty things about Marseilles, so I was prepared for worse. And yet, strangely enough, there was colour and there was language everywhere; there was North Africa all over the place, but also Congo, Senegal, Asia… Marseilles is not a city you can ignore; it’s not anonymous; I suppose you either like it or you don’t. My Lonely Planet makes a similar comment: “There really is no other city quite like it in France; you’ll either love it or hate it.” You have to take sides.
Daniel
Belli, founder and driving force behind the thriving organization
ECUME – Cultural Exchanges in the Mediterranean lives in a
delightful house which he rebuilt himself in the mostly North African
Panier Quarter, near Belsunce. When we meet in the offices of ECUME in
the heart of the Vieux Port (few NGOs, I suppose, have offices in such a
lovely place), he pours scorn on the city where he has lived and worked
almost all his life. When we ask him why he has never left, he answers
in fits and starts: it’s because he’s always travelling and therefore
rarely in Marseilles; it’s also because of the house and the fact that
ECUME works with the Mediterranean… “When I created ECUME 20 years ago,
working within the Mediterranean region was quite an innovative thing
to
do.” As he speaks, I wonder which came first, whether it was the
Mediterranean, or Marseilles, or the need for a lawyer who taught law
for three years in Algiers to venture beyond the world of law… I’m sure
there’s more than one answer – we rarely have only one reason to do
something; often our motivations are not even clear to us, and they
change over time.
In a way, I suppose, a kind and accomplished man like Monsieur Belli is hard on the city in the same way that he is hard on himself and on others. I suggested that Marseilles is the place to be if you want to work within the Mediterranean region and he agrees, but he comes down hard on the illusion that Marseilles is some kind of Mediterranean dream-come-true where people of various cultures, religions and economic means live together in peace and harmony. I explain that we never had any such illusion, but he isn’t convinced, and during our hour-long conversation he returns to this myth a couple of times: “it’s easy for those who don’t live in Marseilles to say all sorts of romantic things about it. But life is hard here.” Many people in Marseilles can’t make ends meet.
He doesn’t mince his words. The name Marseilles provokes reactions in him: the politicians, the dirt, the noise, the poverty of the immigrants with their large families, and so on. He has done a lot for this city he says he dislikes – perhaps it has been ungrateful… His words suddenly sound familiar: I think of what I myself say about Malta, about the incompetent politicians, the shabbiness, the pitiful state of the environment – but I don’t think I would want to live elsewhere...
Marseilles is an unusual city: Daniel, who was born in Marseilles but has Algerian origins, points out that it is the only city he knows where the immigrants live in the centre. Hanan Kassab-Hasan, my Syrian colleague, observed immediately on her arrival that cours Belsunce was full of Algerians… Thierry Fabre told us that there are 200,000 immigrants in Marseilles – my Lonely Planet guide puts the population of the metropolitan area of Marseilles at 1.23 million inhabitants – in the city itself, of course, there are less, so the presence of the immigrants is strong. But this is nothing new for Marseilles. In the 1930s, there were many Italians… Generally speaking, the main intra-Mediterranean migrations in the last two decades of the 20th century were from south to north. Algerians are the most numerous immigrant group in France, and they are concentrated especially in Marseilles and the south”.
Belsunce
“le quartier est une sorte de terre d’accueil à l’intérieur de la ville”
My guide is unprejudiced but clear:
“Despite its fearsome reputation for crime, Marseilles is no more dangerous than other French cities. As elsewhere, street crime is best avoided by keeping your wits about you and your valuables hard to get at. Never leave anything you value in a parked car. At night, avoid walking alone in the Belsunce area, a poor neighbourhood southwest of the train station bounded by La Canebière, cours Belsunce and rue d’Aix, rue Bernard du Bois and blvd d’Athènes.”
The hotel where I was staying was in this area - I have no ill-fated stories to tell.
At the Librairie Maupetit, on La Canebière, I found a book that I wasn’t looking for. It’s called Les Portraits des histoires: Belsunce, Marseille, by Esther Shalev-Gerz (Images en Manœuvres, 2000), and it includes a transcription of 56 stories told by inhabitants of Belsunce in a two-hour video (1999) directed by the author. Here are some of them:
“In the past, life was happy here with my husband and my children.” But “now one is afraid to go out. I would like things to be as they were in the past, when one was not afraid to go out. I know that now, in winter, especially at night time, there’s nobody outside. We don’t go out anymore. We live locked up.” But despite everything, the interviewee feels attached to Belsunce…
Someone else was rather less ecstatic about the city: “What do you expect me to do? People come here for nothing, and they stay here for nothing. The same applies to me. I don’t have any relatives here, I’m alone here, I’m Algerian, you see, if the police come here they’ll “kill” us because you are what you are, you don’t have any papers, tatata, tatata, tatata, why don’t you have any papers? Why are you staying here?
They don’t know the reason. They don’t know why you have stayed here. If you had a job down there, would you stay here, of course not! That’s exactly why I’m here…”
Someone from San Francisco in the USA talks about the “gentrification”, converting a working-class or inner-city district into an area of middle-class residence, “happening to a neighbourhood that has a lot of culture and pride. I noticed that in the neighbourhood so much construction is happening, what I see seems to me like a neighbourhood being converted from a place that has families, culture and life turning into a neighbourhood which frightens me a little bit because I’ve seen it happen before in San Francisco,” a city that “has been gentrified into what I call a money-making venture.” What will happen to the people who soon will not be able to afford to live in their community, that community which they made what it is, “which I feel is a great place to live”?
An immigrant of Algerian origin living in Belsunce is positive about the city: On the day he arrived in Marseilles, at night, he didn’t feel as if he was far from home. “It seemed like a very interesting city and, above all, it is by the sea. I have always lived on the shores of the Mediterranean which is part of us. It’s like the sun, they are two very, very strong things.”
Mediterranean Polyphony
Hanan and I met Thierry Fabre at the Café La Samaritaine in the Vieux Port, just across the road from the offices of ECUME. The Mediterranean, he said, is a polyphony not a métissage (a hybridization or melting-pot); it is therefore the simultaneous combination of a number of parts, each forming an individual melody, and harmonizing with each other. I thought of the polyphonic tradition of Corsica and the cds of A Filetta and other bands that I’ve been listening to over the past few days
From left: Adrian Grima, Thierry Fabre, Hanan Kassab-Hasan, Daniel Belli
“I like to use the metaphor of the Mediterranean as a polyphonic and mosaic place. Just like in polyphony, you have to listen and sing together, but each one in their own style. It is a mosaic. It is a combination. When you look closely at it, you only see fractures and weldings. When you look at it from a distance, it becomes a harmonious whole.” (Thierry Fabre, “The Invention of the Mediterranean.”
The polyphonic vision of the Mediterranean is more important than ever today, with the US imposing itself on other peoples in a very aggressive way. With a conviction and a drive that almost outshine his words, Thierry Fabre, a researcher at the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme and the author and editor of books and journals, like the prestigious La Pensée de Midi, that revisit the Mediterranean, spoke about the need to talk about the Mediterranean, to reappropriate the discourse about the Basin that has been taken over by those who want everyone to see it as a backyard of eternal conflict, or as some kind of kitsch melting-pot.
In their preface to Rappresentare il Mediterraneo: Lo Sguardo Francese, by the late Marseille-born author Jean-Claude Izzo and his friend Thierry Fabre, Antonino Recupero and Costanza Ferrini argue that the intellectual formation of Thierry Fabre, who was born and has grown up on the shores of the Mediterranean, has been moulded by the multiple points of view that make up the mediterranean imaginary.
I asked him
whether he agrees (with Matvejević)
that being a Mediterranean is a matter of choice rather than
inheritance. “Bien sur,” he replied, “but it is also, partially,
an inheritance,” because in this region we are all children of the
Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Arabs, and so on. I thought of Hanan’s
words about the Phoenicians, her ancestors, being the true parents of
the Mediterranean, because they were traders not invaders… To
Jean-Claude Izzo, the Mediterranean is essentially a call, “an appeal to
reconciliation”. “Nothing is more beautiful, nothing is more meaningful
for someone who loves Africa just as much as he loves the Mediterranean,
than to see them unite in this sea.”
The sense of belonging and identity are “instable phenomena”. We must give them form.
La Méditerranée, justement, est une forme qui fait sens, une appartenance ouverte dans laquelle chacun peut se reconnaître. Nous avons besoin d’un territoire commun où toutes les populations de Marseille apprenent à se parler et peuventse retrouver. L’énergie est là, qui sommeille et se disperse.”
What can keep a city together, asks Fabre, other than a shared dream? The Mediterranean is not an escape route but a place of reunions. Marseilles is just that, a place where everybody comes.
Narrating Mediterraneans
I spend my last morning in Marseilles sitting at a table at the Café La Samaritaine in the heart of the Vieux Port and sipping an expensive hot chocolate on a hot day. For the first time in six days in Marseilles, I have time to sit and watch people go by. The parking reminds me of Malta and Rome and many of the cities and towns I’ve known. The whole scene is flooded by a crisp sunlight, the same light that brightens the colours of different cultures selling their wares in cours Belsunce. La Canebìere on a Sunday morning is flat compared to the vibrancy of the lesser-known street.
I think of my first guide (the Moroccan Marseillais or the Marseilles Moroccan?), and of how we choose the anecdotes and narratives that create reality. I came to Marseilles knowing that I could never narrate the Mediterranean, or the Mediterranean city-port – that was one of the few things that were clear in my mind – and it also gave me a great deal of freedom, the freedom to listen to “Je suis marocain” or “Mon port d’attache est toujours Marseille” or even to discourse about the “gentrification” of Marseilles.
Fabre suggests that the Mediterranean lies at the junction, “the meeting point”, between “the real story”, or “real history” (it’s so revealing that in Italian, as in Maltese, “storia”, or “storja”, can mean both “story” and “history”), and the literary texts that have created the Mediterranean imaginary in the Deleuzian sense – “the imaginary is not the unreal, but rather the indecipherability of the real and the unreal. The intermediary world between factual discourse and fictional discourse.
Robert Guédiguian
At the Café La Samaritaine I asked Thierry Fabre to recommend some films that somehow deal with the Mediterranean. He thought for a few seconds and then came up with a name that was so foreign and indecipherable that he had to write it down on my notebook himself: it was “Robert Guédiguian ”. At the FNAC outlet in the Centre Bourse off cours Belsunce they had one of the two films Monsieur Fabre had recommended, and two others he hadn’t mentioned. The salespersons assured me they were “about” the Mediterranean and I decided to trust them.
Robert Guédiguian, who grew up in the Estaque district of Marseilles, makes all his films about his city. I was eager to see how he narrated (or redescribed) Marseilles, how he dealt with themes like immigration, poverty and the so-called gentrification of the city. I knew his films would introduce other Marseilles (in the plural) and I was looking forward to seeing them.
The first
film I saw when I returned to Malta was Marius and Jeannette
(1998), a contemporary comedie humaine, set in Estaque,
Marseilles's working-class district, “where poverty can still look
invitingly picturesque,” as Kevin Thomas puts it in The Los Angeles
Times. The second was La Ville Est Tranquille (“The Town
Is Quiet”) which tells the story of “an impoverished wife and mother
struggling against fate and a society filled with millennial angst.”
According to film critic Derek Malcolm writing in The Guardian,
this was Guédiguian’s best film, better than Marius and Jeannette,
and it won him the European critics award for the year. When Malcolm saw
it, “unaccountably out of competition” at the Venice Festival in 2000,
the audience gave Guédiguian and Ariane Ascaride, his wife and star of
both films, a 20-minute ovation.
In this “unsettling urban panorama,” Guédiguian “invests the French port city of Marseilles with the same epic sense of drama that infused Robert Altman's Nashville.” According to Stephen Holden in the The New York Times, ''The Town Is Quiet'' is “raw, wrenching and more starkly tragic than Mr. Altman's satire,” but it “evokes a similar vision of a city as a teeming organism in violent, spasmodic flux.”
In the opening scene, a formally dressed radiant young boy from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, “is shown soliciting donations by playing classical music on an electric piano in a field overlooking the city. By the end of the movie, when he reappears, he has become a symbol of a future that ultimately cannot be denied to the immigrants, no matter what obstacles they may face.”
Guédiguian’s Marseilles is often sad but always unforgettable: you get the feeling that what you are dealing with as an audience are real, common lives, narrated in discreetly uncommon ways. Guédiguian examines “unexceptional lives in order to identify their true value. To achieve this exposure without dramatic exaggeration,” writes Richard Williams, “is a specifically French talent, and its continued survival in the world of modern cinema is a miracle.”
With La Ville Est Tranquille, but also with Marius and Jeannette in Marseilles, my journey completes a first, full circle, or spiral: back to Malta and its city-ports and their role within the Basin; back to the theme of openness and immigration; back to narrative and its uneasy relationship with reality and creation; back to a troubled but thriving Mediterranean.
Dr. Adrian Grima, coordinator of Inizjamed and Maltese correspondent of the Babelmed.net website visited Ajaccio, Corsica to take part in a series of meetings about a multilateral Mediterranean project called “Archipelagos” and to do research about the Mediterranean port of Marseilles.
Adrian Grima’s visit to Corsica was made possible by the Corsican artistic association Art et Cetera and the Roberto Cimetta Fund. His research visit to Marseilles was financed by the European Cultural Foundation’s Mediterranean Meeting Points programme and supported by the Rome-based cultural association Babelmed.
A longer version of this article first appeared on Babelmed in June 2003.