Summer, scholar's butt, and mon cher Serge

Warning: this is not going to be a particularly exciting post. It is exam season, so you're going to get a lot of paper and red ink and scholar's butt.

Okay, if that hasn't scared you off, then read on, brave souls.

First of all: Brussels weather has gone from absolutely dreadful, horrible, no-good, and awful to balmy and stunning and summery in the past weeks. I love watching this city flourisse as the sun comes out and bakes the ponds and the cobblestones and the terrasses; Bruxellois get out of their cozy apartments and their rain-resistant parkas and instead show off their (often blindingly white) appendages beside ponds and in city squares and on park benches. Bars and pubs empty out; terrasses become overcrowded with people drinking white beers with lemons, or fresh-squeezed orange juice, or cold sparkling wine. Music goes outside, too: we happened upon a klezmer jam session whose wailing clarinet echoed through Abbaye de la Cambre last week; I've passed by countless guitar-types strumming lazily by the Etangs d'Ixelles during my runs/study breaks; entire neighborhoods buzzed with straw-fedora-sporting, sundress-swirling jazz fans this weekend during the mostly outdoor Jazz Marathon (Brussels, for those who (like myself) didn't really know, is one of Europe's greatest jazz meccas; Adolf Sax invented the saxophone not far from here, and Django Reinhardt, one of the great jazz banjo players (apparently this is a thing?) got his start at l'Archiduc downtown).

It's fun to watch the lines for the ice cream stands lengthen; to see the Sunday markets double in size and attendance (and quality of produce); to finally get rid of the fleeces on my bed and instead fling all the windows open to welcome the warm Brussels breeze. It's actually pretty surreal to write the phrase "warm Brussels breeze", considering how frigid Brussels was being in February. Everyone changes, I guess, even this quirky, manic-depressive city.

It is, of course, one of the great ironies of life that ULB (and actually all the Brussels unifs) have exams during this heart-breakingly beautiful weather. I have to admit that these lovely glimpses of Bruxellois profiting from le beau temps have mostly come as I've worked in cafes and bars with a lait russe or a Hoegaarden for company. My classmates have all told me not to get used to the pretty weather, or to expect it to last until exams are over (I have been eagerly planning to take Leo and one lucky person to Ostende when exams are over; I was told not to count on Belgian weather behaving. Fingers crossed.) They all laugh that their spring semester grades are much worse than their fall ones, a phenomenon which I can attest is pretty universal (you Davidsonians remember how hard it is to lock yourself up in Chambers or the libes when the lawn beckons you to sunbathe and frolic, and probably also remember the effect that that temptation had on final grades :)

To be honest, though, I have enjoyed this re-defining of the idea of "public intellectual." I don't really fancy myself an intellectual these days- more like an Anglophone naufragée (a shipwrecked sailor) trying to keep her head above the waters of French-laced philosophy and economic theory and jurisprudence- but I am enjoying the ritual of shyly ordering my drink, staking out my table near a window, and reading and writing and thinking and sometimes watching the terrasse-dwellers and ever so often blogging out in public. I'm enjoying the laughing informal bonds I've formed with a few cafe workers; the brief conversations with fellow internet hopefuls stalking wifi desperately; the funny conversations with philosophers-errant marveling at the stocky Aristotle on my table, or maybe just the fact that I type "mais vraiment hyper vite, ma belle!"

I can't make a lot of direct links between the linguistics of judicial oaths and my conversation with a bored Italian about the best gelato flavor at Capoue; but I can say that something about the ritual of writing and thinking in cafes and bars that are fast becoming my haunts fits with my hopes of living as a student in Europe. No, the past few weeks haven't produced Erasmus-style photos of eight nationalities crowded around a camera, glowing with dancing sweat and Belgian draughts; no, they haven't added a ton of ticket stubs and printed programs to my scrapbook-wall; no, I haven't discovered a lot of deep insights into the Belgian mind, or the European outlook, or the Belgo-Congolese relationship. That said, I am learning, I think to begin seeing the neighborhood where I live as mon quartier; to accept my (sometimes maddening) editing job and its memorable boss as a pretty funny learning experience; to finally face up to my academic fears and write new thesis work, new lengthy French papers; to grin, and sometimes love, the work, or at least the fun places where I get to do work.

Final thought, before I return to typing notes: when I study for exams in French or write papers in French, I like to listen to French music. For some reason, half-hearing francophone lyrics makes it much easier to think, write, copy, and argue in French than listening to anglophone lyrics or even classical music (and no, silence is not an option; I am miserable without music). I've gone through most of my friends' recommendations for good Francophone pop artists (and am actively seeking new suggestions, if you have them!) and have returned to the classics: Brel, Piaf, and Gainsbourg. I just realized that Gainsbourg wrote an album called "Rock Around the Bunker" about the Nazi era, Hitler, Eva Braun (yes, there's a song called "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" about her which, like the rest of the album, is in pretty dubious taste), yellow stars, and what happens when an SS officer escapes to Uruguay (he wears a flat straw hat and drinks papaya juice, duh). I don't exactly know what to think of this little album- it's very different from the rest of Serge's stuff, which is mostly nouvelle-vague, full of breathy jazz and suave innuendos and impossible coolness. This album, instead, has music that seems plucked from either the King or the Beach Boys' cutting floor, complete with singing backup bimbos; the lyrics are sparse and full of silly puns that at first seem innocuous. But Gainsbourg sings his soda shop melodies with intensities; he spits his satiric jeux de mots with anger at the injustice and the wrong and the horror. This album came out in 1975, a little before Shoah and then Schindler's List made Holocaust memorial both mainstream and serious. Gainsbourg, who was a kid during World War II and wore a yellow star in Paris, remembers his own experience and that of his country and his continent with angry humor: this is not the goofy, pretzel-and-iron-cross-sporting chorus girls and effeminate Adolf of "Springtime for Hitler", nor the jerky, silly Little Dictator, nor the wide range of lightening-bolt-sporting absurdity in "Allo Allo"; but neither is this the unequivocally sad, sometimes moralizing gaze one finds in the two films I just mentioned (as well as Au revoir, les enfants, and even The Sound of Music). This is infuriated laughter. It's interesting to see this kind of goofy, deadly serious satire, especially from the French singer most noted for his cool detachment (he was perhaps the only man who could let Brigitte Bardot go at the height of her beauty with very little ruffling of his feathers). We don't do memory like this much any more.

(Actually, it would be interesting to see if Congolese rappers do. I wouldn't be surprised. Music is a funny, furious medium.)

Okay, well anyway. Gainsbourg's songs about the SS have little to do with ice cream and sunshine, nor with the ethics of economic theory. Back to work, and laissant le beau temps rouler (sans et avec moi). 

La vie expatique

I just had a beautiful walk near Flagey, which is both home and not-home now. Tonight is exceptionally balmy and almost warm; it was one of the first nights you could walk around the Etangs d'Ixelles and through the pretty windy streets around here without dashing through the rain or running for warmth and shelter because it's bitter cold. The one good thing about Brussels weather- a schizophrenic mix of drizzle, downpour, and fits of teasing sunshine-and-cloud before drizzle or downpour- is that it makes you (and most Bruxellois) appreciate the days-or parts of days-or half-hours-or fifteen minutes- of good weather that exist on rare occasions. Tonight, for example, all the spindly metal chairs were out on the terraces; people were talking, swigging beer, laughing, tipsily saluting the trench-coated American with the "beau sourire," milling about on the streets and on the terraces and (currently) heatedly discussing something about music choice under my window (the last of these is less charming, admittedly). I walked past an apartment out of whose window wafted chamber music that might have been played live; I was simultaneously jealous and charmed. Nights like these, full of soft spring breeze and snatches of music and the strange-but-familiar smells of evaporating rain, deep-fried pomme frites, moldering tulips, blossoming trees, and dissipating cigarette smoke, make me happy, very happy, to be twenty-three and alive and in Brussels and able to call this place home for two years.

If you've talked to me in the past few weeks, the preceding paragraph might surprise you. I've been morose and sometimes even angry about three successive weeks of terrible weather here (which has, more often than not, caught me while riding Leo. Fun fact: if you ride a scooter in a trench coat in the rain, and if you forget your scarf while doing so, the rain feels like little hail-bullets when it hits your throat. Ouch.) Hail Bullet Rain has combined with three papers that have been hanging over my head and keeping me in to read Levinas and Arendt and Kant when I'd rather be doing Artsy Fun European things. Rain and work have in turn encouraged a bout of homesickness  deep enough that no amount of gaufres, biere, priceless art, ancient architecture, glorious music, alternative culture, Francophone poetry, or even complicated history could greatly improve.  The banality of expat life hit in full force: I've found myself loathing laundry at the laundromat (uphill both ways, by a psychiatric ward), two-hour lectures in monotone French, page 178 of 190 of a book on ECJ law I'm editing (the page on trademark cases), the temperamental oven in the apartment which won't keep both top and bottom burners lit, the weird, confusing, super-strict three-bag system for taking out trash, and the constant squishy feeling of smelly, wet sock-and-shoe that slips on the cheap linoleum at ULB and makes me fear for my bag and my back. Hours and days and months spent in French and in Brussels can make one ache for American English, Southern English, for strawberry shortcake and real iced tea and grilled Vidalia onions on the back deck, for the wafting smell of citronella, not cigarette, for home in the "Oh, Auntie Em!" sense of the word.

Tonight I went to the Brussels premiere of "Bon baisers de la colonie", a docu-film about Suzanne, une métisse (her father was a Belgian colonial official, her mother a Rwandan noblewoman) whose father removed her from Rwanda as a child and who spent most of her life in Brussels, on the outskirts and then on the outs with her Belgian family while at the same time hesitant to contact or return to her Rwandan one. The filmwas funny and moving and profound but also somewhat unoriginally "white girl discovers complicated family history and saves the part-African members of said family from their ignorance." It focuses on Suzanne's (white, Belgian) niece, who interviews most of her extended family about the mystery of her black aunt. Said niece then goes to Rwanda to track down Suzanne's brother, a Rwandan named Jacques who looks startingly like their Belgian father and still uses his last name. Suzanne and Jacques are reunited via the magic of phone conversations and Skype; their chats are poignant and funny and awkward, as chats should be after almost seventy years out of touch. But the most interesting scene comes at the end, as the niece-director asks Suzanne if she feels Belgian. "Oui, euh, non" she responds. "I'm really not from anywhere." She adds, laughing, "I know my Rwandan family is much cooler (plus chouette) than my Belgian one (she hated her Belgian mother-in-law)." But that said, despite her Rwandan family's superior chouette-ness, she made and has to date expressed little desire to return to her homeland.

Suzanne's story is full of bitterness and heartache and complicated, often secret, histories that someone like myself can feel sad about but can't pretend to understand. The head of a cultural group focusing on métissage in Belgium said, "Métissage has always been the most difficult cultural phenomenon for societies, especially colonial societies, to understand and explain and categorize. By definition, someone who is half black and half white (and thus in colonial-speak half superior, half inferior, half developed, half backwards, half ruling class, half ruled class) challenges the entire logic (or lack thereof) of the power structure, the social rules, the economic hierarchy. Métissage makes people uncomfortable. It's the clearest example of the fact that cultural and geographic boundaries- and the assumptions that come with them- aren't as static as we'd like to think."

I haven't considered the role of métissage in talking about colonial history much yet, so it was cool to think about that more (in addition to well-established tire tracks about the white narrator filtering all these great métissage stories so that her marshmallowy audience could ingest them). I also have very little idea what métissage feels like, looks like, the social dynamics that make it complicated and complicating. But the idea of home being far-off, distant, of wondering how much of it you made up in your head and how much of it really happened and continues to happen- that, I am beginning to understand. I am starting to feel the warm wonderful weariness of being able to call some place in Europe home- the wonder at its pretty, strange familiarity, the frustration at its soaked habitual-ness. At the same time, I am starting to question how much of the country I represent I actually really remember. I check myself sometimes as I talk about the South, realizing that I'm not really describing the traffic-choked, Starbucks-guzzling, "Mexican" food-eating, screen-on-the-greening suburb I come from but instead a silly cocktail which is equal parts Tara and the Southern Baptist Convention and the World of Coke. It's hard not to reduce something as complex as "home" to stereotypes, especially when "home" is becoming two places, or really multiple places, scattered across the Western hemisphere like Orange-Monster-visited specks. It's harder still when "home", the original "home", becomes something that's equal parts freshly-lived and distantly-remembered experience; when memories meld with old sentiments, old frustrations, old delights; when you catch the slippage of the language you're using but can't stop it slipping. Maybe Suzanne had a point when she refused to talk about Rwanda and kept saying she "couldn't remember." Maybe part of the point was: you can never really talk about home. Home is complicated, often frustrating and wonderful and painful and missed and moved-out-of. Representing it means talking in broad brushstrokes and leaving a lot out. Feeling your words about your origins slip on the cheapness of small talk is unnerving, frustrating, demoralizing.

And yet Suzanne eventually did talk, did give what she would and could remember about a past a lot of people had tried to have her forget. She said negative things about her dubious step-family but spoke fondly of the country which she'd adopted as her own, where she'd grown up, survived a world war, met and married her husband and had three kids of her own. For her, as for many many other expats who've either strived or struggled to come to Brussels, this city has been a frustrating but familiar second home. Its complicated, absurd, temperamental culture and politics (only rivaled by its weather) create a rumpus where it's maybe easier to slide in and be yourself and someone new. It's a special, soggy place, this city and this country, often disorganized or over-organized but often quite (and sometimes too) forgiving as well.

Bon, ça suffit. The music-debaters have quieted down and I've got a heap of laundry on my bed to fold. Vive la vie expatique :)