Letter from France #1
My dear Nsenga,
I just spent two weeks in Aix-en-Provence. I’ll paint you a picture of this part of the world—the faces and landscapes—in my next letters. And just like that, I’m in a blessed country: France. As we agreed, you’ll continue to send your letters to 2 rue Hugo de Senger. I notified the concierge. All of your letters, together with any mail from my other friends, will be forwarded to me. I’ve already gone over your application, and Annick told me that everything looks good. I even saw your internship schedule: you’ll be spending a few months in Cyprus and Morocco.
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Letter from France #2
My dear Nsenga,
You’ve sent me an impressive amount of mail. It took me a long time to sort through it all, but it was very interesting. Your curiosity is… irrepressible! I’ve said it before: France is a big country for European standards. The size of Europe is rather unimpressive when compared to other continents! But when you look at a map of Europe, France stands out like a giant tree in the savannah. It’s the largest country in Europe by area, and yet it’s only about a fifth as large as Zaire! Around it are a bunch of small nations, stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains. A favorite topic of Mitterrand’s… I’ll tell you about François Mitterrand another time… Well, from the moment I arrived here, you wanted to know how France compares to the “micronations” that surround it. In my next letter, I’ll try to explain the tribal affiliations here. But just in France, because other European cultures don’t lend themselves to participant observation. I don’t mean to imply that these are obscure or, shall we say, primitive societies.
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Letter from France #3
My dear Nsenga,
During my stay in Switzerland, I had the opportunity, while studying, to earn money without resorting to the tactic of “travail noir, mariage blanc.” That is, black money, sham marriage. I’ll explain what I did when I return home, even though you continue to dissuade me from doing so… With the money I earned, I went on several trips, before, during, and after my Bukunzi beauty’s visit. You know that, whatever happens, our country—the most beautiful in the world—will retain its place in the firmament. But to get back to the tribal affiliations in France.
My dear friend, the way society is organized here is along a spectrum. Indeed, if you draw a line and place a few reference points on it, you’ll have an image of French society from one extreme to the other. To the populace, these extremes are extreme in every sense of the word. And the tribes of the center, the left, and the right—and even the extremists themselves!—all agree on what is considered extreme, or extremist. Unlike the way things are back home, French society is organized according to a magical left-right schema. Left-right: like the march of soldiers, or schoolchildren. This schema generates a forward movement that is not punctuated by stoppages or backward movements, but instead has an alternating rhythm… I hope I’ve answered some of your questions, even though I always fail in my attempts to document the customs and habits of Europeans…
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Letter from France #4
My dear friend,
Here in France there are two main tribes: the tribe of the left, which they call socialist, and the tribe of the right, which they call liberal. They are both republican. There are a myriad of other tribes on the spectrum, including the communists on the left and the Front National on the right, or rather extreme right. I’m not sure that these other tribes know how to count, or use the alphabet… You ask how they distinguish between men and women from different tribes. Are these so-called socialists stocky? Do they have frizzy hair? Do they have noses so broad and flat that it’s almost impossible to feel sorry for them? As for these so-called liberals, do they have prominent bellies? Are they fat? Do they have skin so tanned that you think they might be from Africa? I don’t know how to answer all of these questions, which can be filed under “received ideas…” But I can tell you how the two main tribes distinguish themselves, broadly speaking: by their rhetoric, which is taken from books that set out their respective ideologies, and by their way of governing. I can explain all this in more detail when I return home.
Translated by Louis Greenwood Lüthi
