Strasbourg

 

 This evening we are in Strasbourg, staying at a relatively cheap hotel not far from the old centre of town. There is a music festival going on, and the streets are thick with people. There are so many people enjoying themselves that the main squares of the city are impenetrable. Bands run electrical cables from apartment windows and tune up forever. Crowds form around bands that we cannot see. At the doors of Strasbourg’s stupendous gothic cathedral a boy with one leg and a terrible haircut sings songs that make you think of Jacques Brel without cigarettes and his nuts twisted off.

The heat and the humidity are formidable. For the last few days there have been sudden thunderstorms that have cooled the air, but tonight the weather has not broken. The city has instead. While looking for a kebab, we heard loud power chords and screaming, and turning into a narrow medieval lane we saw a throng of metal fans crowded around a proper death metal act. Down the next lane an Irish fiddler stood uselessly in the din of a nearby d.j. A stunningly beautiful man in a cream three-piece linen suit and long black hair lurched drunkenly to hip-hop music being played by suddenly silent teenagers. Just down from our hotel the street was filled with Turkish music and dancing. Along the sidewalks the busy cafes and Turkish snackbars were busier still. Men with untucked shirts lifted their hands in the air and whirled sufi-like on the pavement.

Strasbourg seems to have everything. It has foetid canals, it has rattly bicycles (I have rented one for the week) and it has cheese and wine. It is an old city, with strange buildings that bulge and slouch irregularly with age. There are large, shuttered tenement buildings looming over the streets with peeling paint and scribbled over with chalk graffiti. There is a vast, ugly university campus and there is the magnificent cathedral that makes you dizzy when you look too hard.

Strasbourg is also home to several large European Union institutions, in addition to being the site of the European Court of Justice. But do not think that this means that Strasbourg is unimaginably wealthy or filled with Eurocrats to the exclusion of all others. The most obvious EU organ in this city turns out to be the European Parliament, and even Europe’s most ardent supporters will agree that this institution has been a dismal failure. Europe’s political gaze is focused on Brussels, where the bureaucrats hold the real power. Fortunately for Strasbourg, this has meant that the city is not nearly as tidy or as dull as you might imagine a European capital to be. Just beyond the old city centre and the upper class shopping precincts, Strasbourg is a real city, With only 200,000 or so citoyens, Strasbourg has a large immigrant community, teeming streets and failed housing projects. The city has poverty, exclusion and neglect. And it is a long way from Paris.

The recent unrest in France extended even here; cars were burned and groups of young people battled with police. A state of emergency was declared in the city. Nothing like what occurred in the banlieus outside Paris or some of the larger, more industrial cities in France. Much of the anger that was expressed during these days and nights came from young people with African and Muslim backgrounds. While I can only assume that the violence here was motivated by the same issues as in these other places – poverty, exclusion and unemployment –what I have seen reveals a presence of otherness that is quite unlike what I understand to be the case in Canada.

Compared to what we have seen in Munich, Freiburg and Basel, Strasbourg is a fundamentally diverse place. I have the feeling – and with my poor French I am certain this is just the surface of things – that Muslim and African identities constitute something fundamental to the character of this city. Despite the fact that France is vehemently anti multicultural, both of these identities in particular seem to exist inside the life of Strasbourg, and not just at the edges or pushed together in ghettoes. Of course, the ghettoes are here, around the edges and in other places. But there is something else as well, and so far I have only experienced it as a feeling and nothing more. Beyond the many relationships (friends, lovers, all kinds) that we’ve seen between Europeans, Muslims and Africans, cultural difference appears to be something shared and experienced in a way that appears to crack open what I might have thought of as “French” identity.

Much of this may have to do with the fact that so many of France’s “immigrant” communities come from her former colonies, and to my ears they speak the language beautifully. But I cannot help but feel that another reason may be because France seems to capable of dwelling outside of itself so easily. It isn’t simply an isolated place, apart from what surrounds it. What is now obvious to me is that unlike Britain and Germany, France is a part of the Mediterranean. It has real, tangible historical links with other places. You can feel the reality of this country’s relationship with Africa, with Spain, with the Middle East as a kind of radical reciprocity in a way that you cannot elsewhere in Europe. I am not suggesting that France is less racist or xenophobic than other places. What I mean is that this country’s relationship to cultural difference is totally different than that of North America or other colonial countries such as New Zealand and Australia. The riots have made it clear that there is a great deal about France that isn’t working well for many of its communities. What I have seen shows me that many of this country’s critics, particularly those in North America , do not give sufficient weight to the complexity of France’s relationship with difference.