on the margins: france and australia

Yesterday the NYT had an excellent story about the Parisian banlieue La Courneuve, one of the impoverished immigrant neighbourhoods beset by unrest last month. Focusing on Djamila, a French-Algerian nurse, and her struggle to provide her sons with a better life in a place where she says "gangrene has set in," it gives a sense of both the deprivation and hopelessness, but also the oppositional sense of community among many of the immigrants in the town. The piece also firmly emphasizes that the unrest is about political and economic marginalization, not Islamist extremism. Djamila's twenty-two-year-old son, Looping, voices the disjuncture between the dreams he has, and the future available to him, as an unemployed French-Algerian shunted into a limited vocational education:

But even as he expresses his feeling of not belonging, he talks of his Frenchness and his claim to the rights he is owed. If he wants to leave, he wants to leave the poor spaces of La Courneuve, not France.

He dreams of being a popular actor or a writer in 10 years. He will have a wife and two children and a cottage for them and a cottage for his mother, he says. Hers will have a garden where she can read books. He will travel to Japan, to Thailand, to the United States.

"But that, Madame, is only my dream," he said. "For me, it is inaccessible. The most I can ever aim for is a steady job that pays something every month."

The peripheral La Courneuve stands in such contrast to the striking Institut du Monde Arabe on the Seine in the center of Paris, an intended symbol of cultural links between France and the Arab world, as well as a research centre and art museum (and, incidentally, one of my favourite buildings anywhere in the world). The IMA is planning a public discussion later this week on the situation of youth from North African immigrant backgrounds in France today.

Today I'm also reading the awful reports of riots against Middle Eastern immigrants in Sydney--products of a tension that seems to have been building for some time, but also clearly organized by racist/nationalist groups who have used Islamophobia, fear, and anger in the aftermath of the Bali bombings to promote their vicious aims.