Paris

About Loneliness in Paris

It rained for most of the month I spent in Paris. Summer 2012. Soft-lipped rain, grey skies, a sneaky wind. I hadn’t anticipated this, so I didn’t pack enough pants and sweaters. The contents of my suitcase was made up of feminine blouses without sleeves, patterned skirts, sundresses, all of which I envisioned wearing on jaunts through a sunny Avenue Saint Germain. The only sweater I brought with me was a blue Calvin Klein cardigan that belonged to the boy I was sleeping with at the time, who I thought was mostly boring, but grew attached to over time for reasons I didn’t understand. I was nineteen. What did I know? I cringe now when I see photos of me in Paris wearing that sweater, everywhere from the top of the Arc de Triomphe to the Rodin Gardens.

I had chopped most of my hair off before coming and I ate a crepe almost every day from the crepe stand next to my apartment building. I still found Paris beautiful in the rain, which I considered a marker of a great city—if you love it in the rain, then it must be truly magical. Sometimes I longed for warm afternoons reading outside at the sidewalk café I frequented near my student housing, but I was also content on the occasional blue noon, inside said coffee shop in the 11th, reading James Baldwin for our class as the slowness of the city enveloped me.

I was elated to use my French for the first time in a couple of years, and my heart swelled when Parisians asked me if I was a Spaniard—surely an American would never speak such perfect French, they exclaimed.  (But I do, I thought quietly.)

I also took note of the fact that when my classmates and I traveled together, I, along with the Asian and African American women, received the most unwanted attention from passersby, usually accompanied with racialized dénouements. I awkwardly translated “delicious Chinawoman” to my Korean classmate and “chocolate queen” to my African-American ones.

“Wow, you guys are so popular here!” exclaimed my classmate.

Yes, popular, I thought cautiously.

We went to so many museums—from the famed Louvre and Orangerie to the lesser known slave ship installation in Nancy and the Museum of Eastern Art. We spent the entire time in the Louvre in the “Oriental Art” wing, to discuss depictions of Orientalism and the exotic within these gilded frames.

I was so excited to go see the Odalisque by Jean-Dominique Ingres, in person, because I had decided my senior year of high school, in AP Art History class, that it was my favorite painting of all time. She was no less stunning in person, but she made me sad. She was in the Romanticism and Oriental wing of the Louvre, and the painting was famous because it was a depiction of an anatomically incorrect Moroccan concubine. Not only is her skin lily-white and her features unmistakably European, but her back was super-human in its length—he had painted her with three extra vertebrae. She was not a woman but a phantom of exoticism, of lust for the foreign. Napoleon’s trip to Egypt had spawned the Romanticism movement in Western art, but it didn’t escape me how all the depictions of Middle Eastern women featured them with porcelain skin, and almost always as prostitutes.

The boy I was sleeping with and thinking about constantly was in Turkey for part of the time I was in Paris. “Send me a picture of Turkey,” I texted him one night. He sent back a picture of a half-nude dancer spinning in a circle. “Frisky,” he commented. I found this exchange funny and intimate at the time.  Truly, it was neither.

That was the first summer that I was really smoking. I would smoke Marlboro Golds or if I could find them, American Spirits. I had a balcony in my little apartment that overlooked the courtyard and I would ash my cigarettes on the bed of roses below me. French cigarette boxes were very aggressive. They featured pictures of deformed fetuses, black lungs, black livers. FUMER TUE, each box would say. “Smoking Kills.” Oh well, I thought. I’m made of rubber and magic for a bit longer. It turned into a four-year long habit.

During the middle of the summer semester a friend from high school came to visit me for a week, as a stopover before his internship in London. One night, as we lay awake talking in the dark, he asked me, “Was NYU everything you thought it would be?” I thought to myself, no…but I’m not sure if that’s entirely a bad thing.  I’m plagued by the ebb and flow of a gnawing emptiness I can’t explain, and despite being surrounded by a constant frenetic energy of possibility, it doesn’t feel accessible to me.

“Definitely,” I responded.

The class I was taking was called “Black in the City of Light.” It was an exploration of the African-American artist exodus to Paris that had occurred around the same time as the storied Lost Generation—your Hemingway, your Stein, your Fitzgerald. Facing barriers of both systemic racism and codified racism in the States, artists received a degree of freedom and reverence in Paris that they did not in America.

We read Baldwin, we studied Josephine Baker and her banana dance, we visited her chateau in the South of France and the loneliness and vastness of it made me want to cry. We visited the slave ship memorial in Nancy. We discussed ad nauseum the dichotomy between appreciation and appropriation, of the violence of exotifying even if it was accompanied by acceptance. Was Baker’s banana dance a power play or was it giving in to the objectification of the black female body? Was she monkey-fying herself? A girl in my class said that she was “playing the sexy minstrel.” How do we contend with the Parisian elite opening their arms for African-American celebrés with France’s active role in imperialism and the maltreatment of African and Middle Eastern immigrants in modern day?

This class was the first time I heard the song, “Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child,” which still haunts me with its beautiful plea for patriation. I wrote in my notebook, “A woman with no nation is a child without a mother.”

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home, a long way from home

My month in Paris eventually came to a draw—I exchanged contact information with my new friends, none of whom I would ever see again. I anticipated my return to the boy who didn’t care about me, and woefully noted the new roundness of my midsection brought about by the crepe stand next to my apartment. The class went out to dinner to celebrate the end of the semester and I wore a red polka-dotted dress to hide my belly.  A girl in my class was pick-pocketed our last night there and I lent her money for the airport and the trip home. “I’ll send you a check,” she assured me. She never did, but it was okay.

Contributor

Anita Carroll

Anita Carroll is a writer, lawyer, and activist living in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in Feministing, Medium, Catapult, Potluck, the New York City Poetry Festival, and the Renegade Reading Series.