Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Before I left the States I often wondered how much culture shock I would experience upon my arrival in France. I suspect that, as friends who have studied abroad tell me, the reverse culture shock will be much more severe, if not nearly unbearable. Because I have visited France before, I figured my grasp of French culture would more or less fall into place, and that I would begin life in Paris without too much trouble.
I come from a truly Southern university saturated with Greek life and American football culture. Our stadium is one of the largest college stadiums in the nation. According to Wikipedia, it currently has a seating capacity of 92,138+, and is the seventh largest on-campus stadium in the nation and the 17th largest stadium (by seating) in the world. During the fall, the town population grows by thousands each game weekend. People from all over the South come to see the games. They cook out on the quad, and often the entire campus smells like hamburgers and hot dogs. Sometimes people set up televisions on the quad if they don't have tickets to see the game in the stadium. Hundreds of RVs park all over town. The interstate backs up for hours with bumper to bumper traffic as people go to or leave the game.
I left a campus full of res-rats, sorority girls, boys in polos and baseball caps, students wandering campus early morning in pajamas and flip-flops. I left Friday nights of beer-pong, Waffle House, bowling. I left behind "y'all" and "ROLL TIDE!" and Gordo, Alabama's yearly "Mule Day" craft fair with a parade of livestock. I left behind bluegrass house shows and Mexican grocery stores. I haven't heard the Alabama fight song or Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" since early in the summer. One of the last nights I spent in Tuscaloosa was July 4th, when I went with some friends to a giant field to watch a fireworks show. We found ourselves engulfed in stereotypical Tuscaloosa culture--all the things most people think of when they picture residents of the rural South. But also there was my South: twenty-something men in plaid shirts with full beards, tattoos, and deep Gulf Coast accents; dudes who play in folk-punk or bluegrass bands; twenty-something crafty women in vintage dresses and cowboy boots.
I think it's hard to capture the South as I know and experience it--the South that is truly my home. I find it difficult to explain things that I find uniquely Southern, but that don't fit into the stereotypical picture most outsiders have of the region. The South has given me such a rich life, and such rich experiences, and yet I find its charm and influence impossible to capture verbally. I feel closest to revealing My South when I use images, but they are images entirely informed and brought to life by my own experiences and sentimentalism that I often wonder if non-Southerners can tap into the same magic if they lack the direct experience. My South is full of childhood--catching fireflies in my neighbor's backyard, playing in the creek behind my house, riding bikes through the neighborhood for hours until dusk, baking pumpkin muffins and sleeping over every weekend at my best friend's house a short walk away. It is the heavy summer air and the cicadas singing in the backyard. It is a cookout at my uncle's. It is the pet caterpillar, Wooly, that my sister and I kept for an entire season. We kept lizards in empty strawberry containers. One summer we kept tadpoles in one of the bathtubs, and the neighbor's cat broke in for a snack. The South is driving through the same streets I played in as a child, with the windows down. It is breaking away from a party and sitting on a trampoline in the dark. I am nostalgic and sentimental about the South the same way I am about these memories, and the two are inseparable for me, if not the same thing.
So much of that South--My South--is present in Tuscaloosa, even if it's sometimes eclipsed by the more stereotypical Southern culture of football games and hounds tooth hats. When I finished summer school in July, I felt relieved to abandon that for a little while. It was the people as much as the place--an inexplicable separation from someone I loved, crumbling friendships due to busy schedules, a strange and disheartening short-lived romance. I lived alone in a dark apartment for the summer semesters. I often felt lost, hardened by my fierce independence. The things I created frustrated me further. My photography seemed totally incapable of capturing what I needed it to, yet I often retreated to the dark room to develop sheets of film late into the night, hoping to feel the same catharsis I had during my first photo class in the fall. My work moved from vibrant figure studies to vacant documentary landscapes, from 16x20 high-contrast prints to muddy 4x5 argyrotypes.
When I finished summer school in Tuscaloosa, I was anxious to leave. Just as I tie so many of my memories to their setting, I associated much of the frustration and loneliness I felt with the place I experienced it--with Tuscaloosa--and leaving in July felt liberating, like a gasp of air after a long struggle under water. Leaving the country felt even better. Life in Paris is the genesis of a new character--one that, by the time I return to the States, may eclipse the person I was when I boarded the plane in August.
Last night, I wrote to a friend I've known since kindergarten. College has separated us by five or six states, and we do well to see each other a couple of times a year. When we're able to meet, it's usually for grandiose conversation over coffee; we summarize six months of events and emotional experiences, and try to have time left over to address the philosophical questions that plague us simultaneously. Last night I wrote:Isn't it sort of strange where life has taken us? I suppose that seems
like a pretty obvious question--cliché, even. But I have so few true
friends that have known me so well through so many stages of life, and
vice versa, that it really is an odd experience to reflect on. I feel
sometimes as though we're now living the epilogue of a movie about our
lives. The scenes stopped years ago, and now we are mere sentences in
the final frame of the film. "Glynnis went on to study at the Sorbonne
in Paris." "M. and S. continued to date in college."
Things like that. I don't mean to say that a movie about our lives
would have already ended by age twenty-one, just that our lives as
we're living them today seem removed by epilogue-distance from what
they used to be. Yet we knew each other when. I think I always have that sense with you, perhaps more so than with other
friends, because we really do see each other rarely, and when we do, we
converse in big, sweeping updates about all things philosophical,
grand, and confusing about life, and sometimes lack the time for simply
"hanging out." C'est la vie.
For now, I feel that is the best summation of my experiences in Paris: I am living in the barely-conceivable sentences of the epilogue following a film about my adolescent life.
Just as Tuscaloosa overwhelmed me in the summer--rendered me nearly useless, sucked life out of me--Paris has overwhelmed me today. Though primarily I have good days, I'm beginning to see how the city can get to me. If I were keeping score, Paris would be winning. This, my friends, might be a bit of culture shock. Most of the frustration stems from French bureaucracy, and obtaining all the documents I need to apply for my temporary residency card. I will write more extensively about la carte de séjour later, but essentially I have been using what little energy and free time I have to commute to every corner of the city looking for offices and photo studios, often with very bad or wrong directions. Frequently when I finally arrive at a destination, the people I need to speak to are out to lunch, the location is closed for the day, or the usual office hours aren't being kept.
This, my friends, is France. Where nothing is open on the weekends, everything closes for lunch (sometimes at irregular hours), and the laundromat down the street locks up without warning or explanation while all your clothes sit wrinkling in the basin of a dryer. Thankfully, after several hours of returning to the same locked door, I have pants to wear tomorrow, but it may be several more days before I can wait in line at the préfecture to get my residency card. If you imagine the hassle, wait, and disgruntled workers of the United States' DMVs and multiply it by foreigners, students, twenty more documents per person, taxes, and language barriers, you might have some idea of what I have to look forward to. All this plus the water in my apartment shut off without explanation for most of the day, two repair men who mocked me because they thought I couldn't understand them, and you have a picture of my day. Oh Paris.
But I did score one against Paris today. The lady who works in the pâtisserie next door stopped me before I left with my chausson aux pommes and baguettine to say that she thought my hair was vraiment jolis, très très jolis. Red hair will always have its perks.
I hope that as my relationship with Paris blossoms and my French improves, my score will be higher than the city's. As Hemingway said, "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then
wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for all
of Paris is a moveable feast." If Paris renders me unfit for life elsewhere, I will consider my year a smashing success. But tonight, I long for the comfortable--for a snuggly couch with a friend on it, for a familiar face across from me at a café, or for a little of my father's cooking.
