BOOK SA – Magazine

You asked for it – well, Helen did – and we’ve brought it to you: an excerpt from Eric Miyeni’s new book, A Letter from Paris: Essays and Photographs. Here’s a tantalizing taste of both:

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Today being the evening of Monday, I am joined at Les Deux Magots by Serge, a much younger man than Yves who has confused me tremendously by being introduced as a Mauritian, only to tell me he is part Russian and, I think, part West African. I gave up on trying to understand. He is dressed like a real young corporate executive with the tie off. He has on a wonderfully cut suit with a shirt that you know would fetch about R2 500 in South Africa. He has brought his white Parisian girlfriend. She has on a beautiful gold watch with a leather strap. The watch seems to have come down at least one generation before reaching her. The two of them look like a couple on the rise, with her looking and sounding like she might even have a trust fund waiting already.

Perhaps it is fitting that I should have this debate with this couple here. We are in Les Deux Magots and across the road is Brasserie Lipp, after all.

She is arguing that there is something very wrong in what Sarkozy is doing with regard to foreigners in France. He is listening to both of us and hedging his bets a little. After all he is not a French native from what I gather and I seem to agree with what Sarkozy is doing.

The discussion started with me talking about all the lovely places I had seen and how I think Paris is so beautiful and wondering if many Parisians even care about the historical places I have seen.

She said that I should move more to the outskirts of Paris, then I would see a different side of the city that is not so nice. I would see the ‘real’ Paris, she said. What’s ‘unreal’ about central Paris I wondered in my head? Out loud I asked why I should do that, go to the ‘real’ Paris. She said only a short while ago there were some foreigners living in France sleeping in tents, protesting their lack of French citizenship. I asked if these people did not have their own countries. She said these protests were by people who had lived in Paris for over five years and had children here in France. I asked her if she knew what had brought them to France in the first place.

She said it’s partly because of the heavy French taxes. People here in France, she added, were trying to avoid the heavy taxes by hiring illegal immigrants. I added that it must also be because the countries where these people come from are not functioning properly, which is\ why they want to escape in the first place to come here.

She says that’s true.

He says that Sarkozy is also trying to pass a law that says if you claim to be a naturalised French person and want to bring your family over to France you and that family member must undergo DNA testing to check if you are truly related. I say that’s good. He says but a lot of French people don’t like this because it reminds them of that German fascist thing that they fought so hard against.

He tells me that about a week ago there was an anti-racism concert and some socialist French politician stepped on to the podium and condemned this Sarkozy DNA move. I say everybody must relax here in France because DNA testing is very advanced, it doesn’t lie and it is the best way to establish family ties. I say to him that it seems to me that history is blinding those against this Sarkozy move to what could prove to be a very good system to stop the fraudulent importation of illegal immigrants into France, or any country with similar problems for that matter.

I think I have shocked this lovely couple. Surely this kind of talk from a thoroughbred French woman should get praise, not opposition, from a black African.

I argue that fighting to be allowed into a country that is not yours does not change the fact that your country is a mess. I say that France and all the other ‘western’ countries cannot absorb every one of the poor of the world and that immigration squabbles are at the superficial level of solving the real problem. France, I say, should concentrate on helping the countries where these people flock from to get back on their economic feet so that they can support their own citizens. France, I say, together with all the other ex-colonisers that can afford to do this, if they really want to correct their immigration problems, should follow South Africa’s lead of refusing to be a rich nation floating in a sea of poverty.

I don’t want to come to Paris, I say to this lovely couple, and not want to leave because I have nothing to go to back in my country. I want to visit this place or any other place on the planet and be happy to be going home thereafter. I want a world where we can all visit each other and only move because we are needed wherever we are moving to and are glad to go and help, not because where we are is so bad that we have no option but to run. Making the rest of the world better or as functional and rich as France or wherever poor people are sneaking into is a deeper way of solving the problem of immigration, I say. Not this plaster cast of DNA laws to screen people and whatever other strict laws to limit the number of illegal immigrants. Make immigration and the need for these laws disappear by truly engaging in helping the whole world to function better.

The English have their pubs. South Africans have their shebeens. The French have restaurants they call cafés or brasseries. I like Parisian cafés. My overall impression of these is of history and good food. But it is also of women clutching their bags and moving them to the other side whenever I sit at a table nearby. This first happened when I went into Salon de The, a little corner café opposite Le Lutetia, a hotel that the Germans once used as their headquarters during the Second World War, up the road from my hotel on Boulevard Raspail. This French woman grabbed her bag from the chair between us as I sat down in the chair next to it. I quickly put my own bag in the very space vacated by hers as a subtle up yours, and acted like nothing had happened. Then it happened again at Les Deux Magots when another French woman grabbed her umbrella as I slid into a chair at the table next to where she sat. What the hell does she think I’ll do, I wondered – grab the umbrella and eat it?

The French, like most other whites I know, are still scared of black people, even when relaxing in their French cafés. This is a bit sad. I am sure it is partly because the only blacks they see are in need of one thing or the other and never just travelling. After all, aren’t they the ones who triggered the tent-sleeping protests? But then again, the woman could be grabbing her umbrella simply out of politeness, just making room for me, which would mean I have brought my prejudice here. Who knows? I choose to go with my prejudice for now. I’m alone at Les Deux Magots today, sitting in the exact spot where Simone de Beauvoir sat when Robert Doisneau took that famous picture of her. It took some time, but I have finally worked out how to set the time delay on my camera to take a self-portrait sitting in this exact spot, next to which is where Jean-Paul Sartre liked to sit as the plaque says on the wall. I like that I’m finishing the writing of this letter from Paris sitting right here. I think about my argument here the evening before over French immigration laws and wonder if having more and more Africans travelling for fun as opposed to the hunt-for-greener-pastures wouldn’t help change what now appears, at least on the surface, to be pure racism borne of fear. The bag-grabbing habit that I seem to provoke in French women here really disturbs me.

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• A Letter from Paris is published by Pan Macmillan
• Pan Macmillan home
• Pan Macmillan @ BOOK SA

Book details

• A Letter from Paris: Essays and Photographs by Eric Miyeni
  EAN: 9781770101722
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

All text and photographs copyright Eric Miyeni. Photos may not be reproduced without permission.

BOOK SA’s normal magazine excerpt service will resume next week. Meantime, we present five excerpts unearthed elsewhere on the web for your reading pleasure.

You’re permitted to cast a slightly dubious look at the first one, which comes from The Scramble for Africa: Darfur-Intervention and the USA, whose authors are Kevin Funk and Steven Fake. It’s no joke:
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Far be it from Your Correspondent to use BOOK SA as a platform for self-promotion – but seeing Sukasha Singh’s review of Ramola Parbhoo’s Traditional Indian Cookery in South Africa has switched on my alimentary gland (otherwise known as my stomach, and yes, I’m aware of the poor grammar involved in the joke), and once that happens, thoughts of books and literature are scattered to the four winds like a flock of sparrows borne down upon by a charging herd of wild horses.
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As editor Dianne Stewart points out in her introduction, Durban in a Word is the fourth in a series of city-portrait books published by Penguin, following on from From Jo’burg to Jozi, Soweto Inside Out and A City Imagined.

Though I’m not a Durbanite – it’s the city I’ve spent the least time in, among the “big three” (and sorry, Pretoria/Tshwane, you don’t place, only show) – the book, when it arrived, has proved very tenacious in holding its spot on my dipping desk. That’s the desk, you might guess, on which I keep books to dip into regularly.

It’s a fresh, diverting read, as a good collection of miscellany should be, with several contributions that rise from the status of “noteworthy” to much higher planes, including “uproarious-touching-on-scandalous”, as with novelist (and once-and-future Durbanite) Imraan Coovadia’s piece:

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NINE NOTES FOR AN UNWRITTEN STORY
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BOOK SA presents 12 Days of Xcerpts, featuring the work of BOOK SA writers. Watch out for one a day until Xmas!

If there is such a thing as blogger royalty in South Africa, then Sarah Britten is our queen. She keeps no less than three blogs – one at BOOK SA (afore-linked), one at The Times, and one at iblog.co.za – and, what’s more, she keeps them intelligent.

Despite the requirements of such prodigous blogging (how does she do it?), there are books to be written, and write them she does, also intelligently. Two, in fact: her second, McBride of Frankenmanto: the Return of the South African Insult, has just been published by 30 Degrees South.

Britten’s books are rightly classed as “Humour”, but there’s much more to them than guffaws. She has a gift for picking out the kernels of truth in the words and deeds that trigger South African laughter (or tears, as the case may be), and then force-feeding them to us until, like the kid who’s made to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in one go, we learn our lesson, shrink in horror at our brutish inclinations and behaviour, and then, invigorated with self-knowledge, go out to sin again.
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BOOK SA bloggers are growing up so quickly it brings a tear to the eye. Margie Orford has just published her second novel, Sarah Britten is coming out with another Insult, and now Stephen Simm has broken the “sophomore’s curse” by publishing his second book, Miss Kwa Kwa II: The Dark Side of the Braai.

The last title follows on, of course, from the very popular Miss Kwa Kwa: Traditional Weapon, which followed on, in turn, from the play of the same name that Simm created for the stage five years ago. Simm’s output, taken as a whole – including the videos and newsletters he regularly posts via his blog – can be summarised with great restraint as “zany”. Here’s a taste:

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Sly firebrand author Eric Miyeni’s new book, O’Mandingo! Before Mandela was Mandela was written in the years prior to Mandela’s release from jail, and follows the exceptional success of his previous book, O’Mandingo! The Only Black at a Dinner Party.

The latest O’Mandingo! contains opinion pieces, pieces on love and Miyeni’s family, short fiction and satire. Here’s an excerpt from the last category, called “twisteD anD vile”, in which Miyeni conjures many phrases to make one chuckle – including “South Africa is a great country … for masochists” – and uses language that will doubtless cause more delicate ears to burn.

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BOOK SA is extremely excited to be involved with what may well turn out to be the publishing event of the year – not just in South Africa, but across the English-speaking world.

At 12am on Thursday, 5 April 2007, a BOOK SA publisher’s blog will be the first publication – anywhere – to reveal that a South African author has solved a mystery which has been embedded in the popular imagination of the West for over 100 years.

The news will be accompanied by an excerpt from the book in question, plus a new photograph of the author and his monumental achievement.

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The SAfm Literature programme, hosted by Victor Dlamini on Sundays, played a radio adaptation of Athol Fugard’s Boesman en Lena over the past few weekends, which spurred me to search for other audio or video samples of the playwright’s work.

John Kani and others in tribute to Athol Fugard:

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