Dreaming in French by Alice Kaplan

Author:Alice Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

18. Angela Davis (right), on her Hamilton College Junior Year in France, during orientation in Biarritz (fall 1963). Left: Diana Sumner; center: Howard Bloch. Photograph courtesy Jane Jordan.

. . .

That September, Biarritz was experiencing a massive invasion of fleas. The souvenir shops were empty, abandoned by the departed tourists, and the students scratched day and night, until their skin was sore. The young Brandeis existentialist must have been reminded of Sartre’s Les mouches, in which the gods send an invasion of flies, not fleas, to the city of Argos, to punish the people for the murder of Agamemnon. The fleas, her philosophical imagination, and the tragic news from home that was about to reach her there all meant she could never think of the coastal town in a happy or innocent way.

Reading the Newspaper in Biarritz

Reconstructing the lives of young women in France has been in part an exercise in mapping their specific French spaces and habits—the halls of the Sorbonne, the Latin Quarter cafés, the “graph-paper cahiers” for class notes that Jacqueline Kennedy remembered with nostalgia. One habit, so obvious as to be almost invisible, may be the most important key of all to the revolution in perspective that a year aboad in France offered, and still offers, to Americans: the simple act of reading the newspaper.

It’s a cliché transmitted regularly to American students in their French civilization courses that the French press is characterized by a politically committed and often passionate editorial tone (“advocacy journalism”), in contrast to the American press with its purported standards of balanced objectivity. The discovery that awaits American students abroad is that objectivity is always someone’s objectivity—that behind the neutrality of a descriptive news report lies a point of view: the presence or absence of facts and figures, the salient detail placed just so, the order in the telling.

On September 16, 1963, in Biarritz, Angela Davis picked up a copy of the Herald Tribune. Susan Sontag’s companion Harriet Sohmers had worked there; Jean Seberg, in the role of Patricia Franchini, had hawked its pages in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. The Herald Tribune was as American an institution in France as was the American Express office or the English-language Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. Reading the Trib was a way of going home without being home. What Angela Davis read that day, in the headlines and the wire service story that followed, was branded on her consciousness forever. Four fourteen-year-old Birmingham girls, friends and neighbors, died instantly in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Of the four—Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Robertson—Carole was Fania’s close friend, and Cynthia lived in the house just behind the Davises.60

The first Herald Tribune article, a United Press wire service article dated September 16, 1963, begins with the fact of the bombing and the death of four girls and continues, in a second paragraph:

Thousands of enraged Negroes poured from their homes into the area around the shattered 16th Street Baptist Church. Police fought for two hours, firing rifles into the air, to control them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.