Steve, Remy, Mohammed… and Louis Vuitton

Steve, Remy, Mohammed… and Louis Vuitton
by David Benjamin

“In a country that views ‘the seduction of women’ as an important aspect of its national identity, it is easy to understand why hijabi women can attract criticism. In France, men who ‘seduce’ are adored and admired as ‘Don Juans.’ In such a context, one can imagine that women who voluntarily decide to withdraw parts of their bodies from public view can be perceived as subversive.”
— Rokhaya Diallo

PARIS — There’s an unwritten law that governs neighbors occupying adjacent tables in one of this city’s cafés and bistros. With the possible exception of the chain-link cages inside America’s burgeoning network of “Trumpville” concentration camps, there are few venues in the civilized world where people are arranged in elbow-to-elbow proximity as tightly as they are in a Paris café.

However, except for the tersest of nods and a fleeting half-smile, we disregard one another fiercely. Café etiquette requires that we eschew eavesdropping on conversations barely twelve inches away. We fight the urge to size up patrons both right and left, nor ought we speak of them, except furtively and briefly.

Wednesday night, for example, at the genial Café de la Nouvelle Mairie, I whispered to Hotlips that the guy on her left “talks a lot with his hands.” Properly, she was slightly miffed that I broached the issue. I was breaking the Code.

One hitch in any unwritten law, however, is that — not being written down — it’s malleable. So, when our waiter sat down unexpectedly at the table beside ours, Hotlips’ culinary curiosity triggered an etiquette-shattering moment.

We had both ordered the tuna steak on a piqant bed of minced reddish stuff. Hotlips wanted to know what was in the reddish stuff and she felt no compunction about buttonholing the waiter (who turned out also to be the joint’s chef).

As he listed the ingredients — fennel, barley, radishes, beets and onions stirred into a few drops of olive oil and a generous dose of rice vinegar — he also introduced us to Steve and Remy, the guys at the next table, whom we had been cordially ignoring for an hour. The invisible wall thus crumbled.

Also contributing to the break in protocol was that Remy (who’d lived four years in the U.S.) and Steve understood our every word. Steve: “Everybody in Paris speaks English.”

Our chef left, but we kept up with Steve and Remy for the better part of two hours, learning about one another, comparing our societies, lamenting the slippage of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Hotlips and I, of course, had to try to explain the appalling Trump thing in America. This wasn’t so hard because Remy and Steve had the embarrassing Le Pen thing in France.

As we talked, Hotlips and I once again encountered an attitude — moreso from Steve — that seems to pervade the entire French political spectrum, from far right to raving Communism. We’ve long noted a visceral aversion here for the outward trappings, especially head scarves (even the face-revealing hijab), of Islam. I’ve come to think of it as a sort of Mohammed Derangement Syndrome.

The roots of this reaction might lie the rabid anti-secularism that animated, so violently, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. There is no state, even today, as hostile to any intrusion of religious influence as is the French Republic.

But among the usually tolerant French people whom I’ve heard, often, describing their clash with the Muslim underclass, I hear no precept as lofty and thoughtful as the separation of church and state. In every case, the issue comes down to a matter of distaste at the way those people look, and the way they act.

Your liberal Frenchman expresses this attitude quite openly, but he speaks not with the raw passion of bigotry. It’s not a matter of hatred. It’s more a withholding of acceptance, a sort of despair that those people can ever be leashed and housebroken.

Of course, I grew up with this sort of subliminal prejudice in America, where race and ethnicity tend to be more a barrier to acceptance than religion. In America, where the first immigrants were oddball sectarians, we’re accustomed to religious splinters that don’t ever quite fit in, from Puritans to Amish to Adventists and Mormons — even Muslims, who were simmering comfortably in the melting pot ’til Trump came along and declared them e. coli.

As we listened to Steve and Remy on this Muslim thing, I began to discern aspects of subliminal prejudice I had heard from perfectly nice Americans referring, with a certain disappointment, to minority groups that range from black people to Navajos to Trump voters.

This feeling is both personal, for the individual complaining about the disfavored group, and universal. It always applies to the entire disfavored group.

One of the soothing self-deceptions among the subliminally prejudiced is their willingness to make personal exceptions, exempting one or more acquaintances (from work, or maybe the bowling team) from an otherwise blanket judgment. This dispensation also applies to stars and celebrities. Picture Richard Nixon hugging Sammy Davis, Jr., or Trump re-tweeting Kanye West.

Because it’s personal, proof of the disfavored group’s iniquity emerges in a story. Once upon a time, there was an ugly incident with one of those people. A bump in the subway, an argument over the price of a pushcart bracelet, a woman in a hijab stocking produce, with her bare hands — Merde alors! — at Franprix. One devastating anecdote is sufficient nourishment for a decade of prejudice. It outweighs a thousand benign or positive interactions with the disfavored.

The disfavoreds — Muslims in France, Hondurans in Texas — are helpless to alter the status quo. Their very presence — how hey talk, gesture and act, the way they flock together because nobody else will go near them — is their curse. Their appearance — how foreign, how not-white — is their original, unforgivable sin.

Every immigrant group changes immensely from one generation to the next. But prejudice is immutable.

In America once, virtually every African was a slave. Since then, there have been black statesmen and giants, from Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to Dr. King and Barack Obama, each of whom contradicts the prejudice against an immigrant people more truly — if forcibly — American than the forebears of Donald Trump. Still today, a vast underswath of Americans still spot a black face in the supermarket and can only see Bigger Thomas or Bonzo the Chimp.

In France, I smile at passing Muslim girls whose hijabs are bright, irreverent knockoffs of Hermes and Louis Vuitton. They’re wearing costume jewelry from Claire’s, skinny jeans and flowered flip-flops. They’re as French as our new friends, Steve and Remy. Send these girls to Iran or Saudi and they would either go mad or end up in jail.

Of course, there are Muslim women, from an earlier generation, still covered from head to toe in dark, heavy habits in the July heat. For them, I feel both sympathy and dismay. Steve captures my dismay, saying that in a nation whose first principle is liberty, these women’s choice — to be not free from the tyrannies of dress and diet, to be not free from household isolation and joblessness, to be not free from male domination, genital mutilation and denial of education — is an abomination. The very appearance of these women in public tramples the tricolor and mocks the spirit of La Belle France.

All I can offer in response is that one of the strange blessings of a free nation is the choice not to be free, or at least not as uniquely free as the next person over in the little café where — it turns out — we talked ’til the staff started stacking the chairs and hinting we should all shut up and go home.