It’s Tuesday afternoon and I’m off to Radio la Bobine, my weekly dose of fleshly reality, external routine in an otherwise borderless Covid life of writing-at-home in the French countryside.
Last fall, I started volunteering at a Maison de Quartier—a social center that runs after-school programs, workshops, soup kitchens—in my nearby town of Romans-sur-Isère.
Romans—pop. 40k—until very recently was the shoe manufacturing capital of France. Now it’s a rundown town that only makes the news when a Sudanese refugee goes around the bend and stabs five people queueing on a Sunday morning outside our favorite bakery.
One of the Maison de Quartier’s chief prides is Radio la Bobine, an hour-a-week program that gives locals’ interests an airing. It’s run by a team including Faïka, Réhan, and Agnès. In January, I joined up. Every two weeks, I deliver “La Chronique de Fernanda.” I’m beginning with a four-part series of interviews with my childhood friend Martine, who lives in Los Angeles and runs the Children’s Institute out of Watts, a population the size of Romans and even more beleaguered. The idea is to compare these two communities, explore the differences of being low income, undocumented, or brown-skinned in the US.
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Since December, France has been on a nation-wide 6 pm curfew.
Radio la Bobine broadcasts Thursdays from 6 to 7 pm—a prize slot when normally people are driving home from work, picking up their kids from after-school. Under curfew, we’re forced to pre-record so we can all get home without risking a fine (135 euros for first offenders, up to 6000 for recidivists.) Fake live, we call it. Faux direct.
Radio of course is the perfect medium for Covid Days, warm voluble voices from the outside world, reminding us of the juicier reality we’re craving. After my first couple of broadcasts, I’m amazed by how many people I know are listening, and by how funny listeners find my American accent, my bad French.
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This February Tuesday, I drive through the nagging rain and fog past the hospital complex, the Hyper U shopping mall. It’s been raining, fogging for weeks now, keeping us in the murk of winter’s long convalescence. What’s rain in the valley is deep snow in the surrounding Vercors mountains—un-trafficked, un-monetized snow, since French ski-slopes unlike their Swiss neighbors are closed.
Outside the Maison de Quartier de l’Ors, there’s a semi-permanent encampment of teens parked on the playground equipment. The same kids maybe who break into the place at night--sometimes just to party, sometimes to make off with our electronics. Today they’re setting off firecrackers and Faïka, the director, tall, slender, reserved, tells them to quiet down. The radio station is at the back of the building, up an outdoor staircase of brutalist cement piles. Inside, it’s icy, flooded from the latest rains. Faïka mops up.
Agnès has brought a guest, Jean-Luc. Réhan has brought his friend Mickaël, who’s going to be alternating with me on once-every-two-week chronicles. There’s Ilhan, a skinny fourteen-year-old intern with a mop of curly dark hair, who sits very still watching.
We are all masked, the outside door’s wide open although it’s freezing because there’s more of us jammed into the space than is strictly legal.
I’ve only known my La Bobine colleagues since lockdown—ie, masked--and occasionally when we’re all suffocating, we slip off our masks, and I experience anew this joyous startlement, it feels an almost bacchanalian freedom to see Agnès’ chin, Faïka’s nose, Réhan’s mouth, our bare faces seem sensual and savage, compared to the sanitized Emergency Room impersonality of our Covid protocol.
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This week’s program starts with two mothers from La Monnaie. Like lots of mothers these days, they are pissed off, and because this is France, these mamans en colère have taken to the airwaves.
La Monnaie is a Romans public housing project where unemployment is notoriously high, and Covid restrictions have hit hard—in the last couple of weeks, there’ve been garages burnt down, homemade missiles lobbed at firetrucks, clashes between cops and residents, the CRS—France’s militarized riot police--camping out overnight to enforce the curfew.
Today’s mothers are Tita and Nawel. Nawel is young, glossy-haired, hip; Tita is older—45—and head-scarfed. (Covered heads are an extra-sensitive subject right now, with Macron passing a massive law against religious “separatism” in response to the assassination of Samuel Paty, a middle-school teacher beheaded last October for teaching his students about the “Charlie Hebdo” cartoons of Mohammed.)
Tita and Nawel are up in arms because next week is the beginning of the two-week February school-break, and the mayor has just announced that Romans’ Centres de Loisirs--after-school and vacation centers for primary schoolchildren--will be closed because of Covid restrictions.
“You have no idea what the Centre de Loisirs means to us,” Tita says, her voice rich and throaty. “I was born in La Monnaie. My brothers and I all went to the Centre de Loisirs as kids--it’s a place of pure happiness. It was where we first encountered people from other backgrounds, other worlds, how we first got out of the hood. They took us skating, up into the mountains to ski; I made friendships that have lasted a lifetime. My children and grandchildren too—they’re deeply attached to this little territory that’s theirs, where they can get away from their parents, live their own dreams.”
“Lots of us mothers work,” Nawel adds, “and even for the stay-at-homes, we don’t want to have to choose between keeping our kids locked up in the apartment all day or letting them hang out in the streets getting in trouble.”
The town hall’s proposing alternatives but they are fake alternatives--smaller more expensive programs in other neighborhoods or outlying villages, programs that don’t have room for their regular customers, let alone 50 new kids from La Monnaie. The mayor is a right-of-center woman whom I’ve been told is more sympathetic to rugby clubs and business groups than to social centers in the quartiers.
After their session, Tita invites me to La Monnaie. “We’ll feed you, take you home with us, once you’re in, you’re in,” she says, sounding like a grandmotherly Artful Dodger.
The two women are excited by their venture, later when I listen to the broadcast, as the next segment unfolds you can hear them still laughing and chatting in Arabic in the background.
Réhan wants a picture of us all. Nowadays when observant Muslims are stigmatized, verbally, physically harassed, he says, it’s especially important to show that a “veiled” woman can be smart, articulate, civic-minded, fighting for the common good.
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Mickaël, a wiry, curly-haired dancer, launches his ABC of the French Revolution. His interest is brand-new, he says: in the winter lockdown, he checked out Eric Hazon’s History of the French Revolution from the local library and got hooked.
A is for Actualité (topical news). Mickaël explains how Revolutionary ideas about representation, secularism, sectarianism, even price controls, still play out today. For his next session, he’s undecided about whether to choose Bastille or Boulangeries. The rest of us vote for bread over prison.
Cedric barrels in with this week’s Recipe. Hard to tell his age, he’s hollow-eyed, cavernous, with a stubbly white beard and a sweet melancholic smile. A single dad, he’s a cafeteria cook. His recipes are dishes an exhausted single parent can make quick for hungry kids. Last week it was crepes with Nutella, today it’s Surf n Turf—turkey filet steamed with smoked fish.
The day’s final guest is Jean-Luc, the local president of a national association for people with intellectual disabilities. When the group was founded by parents 60 years ago, he says, kids with special needs were hidden at home. The group started by advocating for specialized schools, then job training and placement, then housing.
He’s here today to announce the opening of a new cafe staffed by his members. Organic and locally sourced, of course.
Jean-Luc, who has the faintly military-evangelical air of a prison chaplain or Scout Leader, is immensely persuasive. “It’s the honor of a society, how it looks after the fragile,” he says. “We’re all concerned by handicap, it could happen to any of us any day.”
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Back home, I check the news, we’re constantly waiting for these televised edicts from Macron and his ministers that—depending on the curve of new infections--will determine your fate for the next few weeks, whether your children will be going back to school, or your bar, cinema, martial arts club, yoga class reopening, or whether—as many suspect—the whole country’s going to be put into a full weekend lockdown.
It’s centralized power, but a Power that’s scared of the People, desperate to avoid a replay of the Gilets Jaunes protests--you can see it in the government’s vaccination slow-walk where, in deference to a massive anti-vax sentiment, patients can only get a jab from their own GP after a pre-consultation and their explicit consent.
Watching Macron--this earnest boy-toy in his slim-cut blue suit, posed against the Elysée’s gilded moldings—I’m struck by the chasm between his Republic and the Other Republic I’ve just come from, the freezing flooded prefab radio room on the outskirts of Romans, where headscarfed grandmothers and cafeteria chefs meet, and Mickaël’s passionate re-reading of French Revolutionary ideas about representation, about who speaks for whom and how voices get heard, feels more urgent than ever.
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