Hello from Paris!
What a week I’ve had.
Most notably, my window box radishes started getting so big that they pushed their round red bodies out of the ground, like they’d had enough of the dark and wet. As a reward, I yanked some of the poor things entirely out of the soil and gobbled them up.
They were delicious, buttery at first, but with a nice peppery finish. I considered putting their greens in a salad, but found the leaves oddly furry and instead sautéed them along some other veg, so those went down the hatch as well.
And on Saturday, making a round trip to another neighborhood to visit friends, I found two perfectly functioning Paris bikes, making the whole trek surprisingly smooth, even if I got rained on which I didn’t mind. I have that excellent raincoat of an eye-blinding green, which a pal finds less than fashionable, but I find both useful and secretly hilarious since out in public I’m usually more of a black and grey please-don’t-notice-me kind of girl.
One part of my route, though, was blocked by barricades and lined by a dozen police vans with their attendant cops in riot gear like they were getting ready for war. Maybe they are. After seeing the cops coddle the violent ultra-left during demos organized by the center and left, the extreme right has decided that it’s their turn to own the streets, and have begun to demonstrate with and without permits.
That’s not quite true. On May 6 in Paris, about six hundred people marched behind the banner of the far-right group Comité du 9 Mai (Committee of 9 May), but it’s not surprising they marched. This was actually an annual event marking the 29th anniversary of the death of ultra-nationalist Sebastien Deyzieu. In other years they may have been ignored. Not this year, though, dressed in black, and carrying black flags marked with the Celtic cross, a symbol used by white nationalists and far-right extremists in Europe. Many of them also covered their faces, several with black skeleton masks that would do Voldemort proud.
The images were frightening. They were supposed to be. It was easy to imagine them rounding up Jews and other undesirables like gays. But a couple of weeks ago I also found frightening, not the images but the acts of the ultra left which didn’t have scary flags or skeleton masks. Instead, they set actual buildings on fire with people inside them because…? I don’t really know. That’s part of why they’re scary. There was a joke job ad printed a couple years ago recruiting members. Their requirements. You like to smash things. You are athletic, capable of running and climbing. Your favorite color is black. Your favorite perfume—gasoline.
This week, the prefecture de police banned several more extreme right groups from marching over the weekend, but the courts overturned the ban to allow a monarchist group to march, ostensibly in a celebration of Joan of Arc who is irritatingly monopolized by the far-right in France even though she’s a pretty good feminist model, fleeing the family farm to become a warrior instead of a wife, rocking that short hair and trousers. She was even executed for blasphemy.
I’ve always been fascinated by her. This girl who heard voices, who fought, who refused to submit to the church. Or the English for that matter, which is why she’s revered by a certain category of French. You could also say she refused to submit to men. Because that’s who embodied power at the time, and still does, really. And most women still submit, even me.
I ran across a postcard in a friend’s workshop the other day in the green and purple colors of British suffragettes. And when I woke up around 3 a.m. last night, I started wondering what year they got the vote (1928). And then really got insomniac marveling at the construction of my own thought which erased the women who didn’t passively get the vote, weren’t awarded it like a handful of flowers and brunch on mother’s day. Women marched for it, campaigned for it. Yes, committed violence for it, going to prison, enduring hunger strikes and forced feedings for it.
And I thought about what would happen if, instead of receiving and getting things, we made women the subject of our own history, our own victory. Like, if you said, “In Britain, women finally won the battle for the vote in ’28,” wouldn’t it open a can of worms? Because then we’d have to explain why we had to fight. And against whom. And ask just what did we do to win, and at what cost. And if it will last.
In Other News
The Ukrainian president has been making the rounds of European leaders this week from Berlin to Paris getting promises of continued support.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a growing shift of momentum in Ukraine.
On A Different Note
Well, that’s it for now.
Disgruntedly yours,
xoxo K