Memories of Integration

All this talk about the failure of the French model of integration makes me want to say something about the long, failed "integration day" I spent in the company of other foreigners happy to gain access to our living and working papers in France.

This "integration day" happened sometime last November, I think. After sweating big drops putting together a huge file of documents, testimonies, bank statements, and other things that proved useless for the French administration, I had, in the company of Titi de Paris and thanks to our pacs (a kind of civil union), been accorded the possibility of getting my living and working papers. I would get them on the conditions that I get a medical examination and a "ministerial attestation of linguistic compentence" (the sweet social worker who gave it to me said she felt silly given that I had a doctorate in French), and that I spend a day of "civil formation" at whose conclusion (exactly one year ago today, I note with some surprise) I was granted an "attestation of civil formation."

The day was long and mostly hugely boring. A group of about ten people, largely people of color, we were welcomed by a social worker who was there to tell us about how French institutions work. There was another group, perhaps a bit larger, whose day would take place in English. I was the only white person in my French-speaking group. Somebody asked me after we had said who we were and where we were from, why, if I was American, I hadn't done the day in English. She was a really sweet woman from Senegal, with whom I chatted after lunch. Turns out that in Senegal, she had put a lot of effort into training as a nurse. Of course, even though France is short on nurses, her credentials aren't good enough for her to get work as a nurse here. With almost no bitterness, she told me that she had been working in hotels, cleaning rooms, since she had arrived in France.

Several moments continue to strike me as worth noting. First, the social worker who led us through the PowerPoint presentation on being French knew that much of what he was saying was a lie. At the moments of greatest ideological concentration (ie. "The French Revolution was born of the French language") he had this irritating habit of tapping his finger on the board two or three times, as if he were trying to drive the point home. At another point, when "France, country of welcome" flashed up on the board, he just paused, smiled, and asked us: "Does everyone agree? Speak up if not."

He didn't, however, seem to know that some of what he said was out and out false. At some point, he asked us when the French Revolution was. (I had decided not to participate outloud, but more as a participant-observer, much, no doubt, as many of the people around me.) After what seemed like several minutes of silence, the man behind me said that there had been so many revolutions in French history, he didn't know which one the social worker was referring to. "Ah, non!" he was told. "You're thinking of May 68! That wasn't a real revolution [which is, of course, not entirely false]. There are no revolutions after 1789 [which is patently false]." At another moment, brushing Rabelais and some of the best poetry to be written in French into the dustbin of false history, he claimed that there was no French language before François I. At another point, he claimed that pornography and prostitution were "interdit" in France. This was the only point at which I had to break my participant-observer veneer, to ask "you mean if I leave now and go buy a pornographic magazine right now, I run the risk of being arrested?" As an answer, I was told that some of these laws were obviously a little hypocritical. In the context of laïcité, we were also told that the then recent debate on the presence of the veil in French classrooms was a false debate, mounted by the media.

But no doubt the most scandalous moment, and one that enters into the fray of the recent "events" here around France, was when he was explaining the principles of the Republic. After telling us that "the republican regime's goal is the general interest, the common public good," each and every one of the examples he gave concerned criminal justice. It would seem that the only way to articulate general interest is to explain why certain people are punished and just how just that punishment is. In a moment of sweeping assumption, he looked at the group and said that this punishment is "not like in your countries, where power is despotic." No doubt also symptomatic, if much less scandalous and even, I hope, helpful to the people in the room, was the amount of time spent explaining unemployment benefits to us, where we go to get them, how long the different ones last...

Of all the topics addressed over the course of the day, what seemed most to awaken the interest of the people sitting around me were the moments  when the social worker began to address the intersections of the law and the body. He spoke in particular about excision, and made it clear to everyone in the room, many of whom were women, that if their child was excised "dans le pays," they needed to make sure that they got a certificate to certify that it wasn't they themselves who had done the excision in France. Because it is a crime. This inspired a flurry of questions that I no longer remember, but one of which had to do with the practice of holding a baby upside-down and shaking it, probably as a response to its coughing. Could this be considered abuse in France? The Senegalese nurse sitting next to me had to intervene to explain the practice to the social worker, who replied that everyone should ask a doctor, "who'll know more about it than I, or you, do."

Besides empowering me to gain access to unemployment benefits and giving me a privileged perspective on the ideological overdetermination of many of the things that might, still, make France a nice place to live, this day did nothing to "integrate" me. I did learn from the experience of sharing a room with other foreigners, and I'm sure could learn a lot more still from their paths to a journée d'intégration that was, no doubt, one of the less boring and least troublesome stops on their way to living legally in France.

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