Paris three times

Let me savour the lives I have lived in the city that can't be learnt

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I’m so excited to share that this community has grown to 400+ subscribers since our last meeting in the Musings on Black nomadism (pt 2) letter. Love and thanks to Tiffany for being our 400th subscriber. I’m so grateful to have you all here and I can’t wait to share in nourishing conversation in the comments and notes.

This week I’m writing from my desk in Belize, my new home for a while. It’s been just under a month of settling and reintegrating into Belizean life. In case you haven’t seen, Belize as a country has been a teacher for me, like, the favourite one who sets homework, never checks it and then surprises me with a quiz to check if I’m learning anything while out here. It’s been beautiful and exactly what I asked for and not without challenges.

I forgot what it takes to live in the Caribbean: burning red 5:30 am sunrises blended with bird song, someone mowing the lawn minutes to 6 am and dogs, a chorus of them. I have had to sit down so many times these last few weeks and accept the pace that I now live on. I must learn how to live here, my people keep telling me. Ants nearly made me cry at least three times in the last week (they are also in love with me, they wait for me in any uncovered thing that I momentarily forget and in my towel once I step out of my shower :)). Something Belizeans call a ‘doctor fly’ stung me and in all the years I’ve spent avoiding being stung without actually knowing what pain I was in for… I salute myself for the apprehension. My washing machine flooded the washroom (three times) and I started to wonder if it was me and my Westernised ways who actually cannot use the machine or if it was faulty (it was faulty, but all is well now). I also found jackfruit and have been going for 6 am swims and that balances the score completely. So that’s been me.

I like meeting you here before the letter begins, it’s like a tea prep intro before we sink into the words together. I’ll do this more. I hope you enjoy today’s letter, it’s about Paris, a city that I have tried to fall in love with three times, where my attention has been diverted each time, where I try again and again and still forget what I walked into the room for.

Enjoy x

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Paris, June 2016. Afropunk Paris.

My second time travelling internationally was to Paris. It had to be Paris because Paris was always a good idea and because it was about to be summer break and as my second year of undergrad was coming to an end, I wanted deeply to defer the 4-month boredom of trying and failing to get a summer job. I decided to trigger a kind of European summer that spoke to me: Afrocentricity, radical celebration of Black beauty, and lots of septum piercings. Afropunk Paris was the place to be in Summer 2016.

I spoke with a few friends and a handful of us were down. 20-year-old Amara wanted more though, and so I typed out a post and shared it to Facebook: “Afropunk Paris 2016 anyone??? I want an army of us to just go and be black outloud. There are a few people who I shall be dragging with me, lemme know if you'd like to be amongst us”.

And so the army of us bought our tickets and made our way to Paris.

I found an £11, 10-hour overnight bus from London to Paris and decided immediately that this would add to the adventure of travelling to the Paris (has anyone ever been so young?). Off I went, with my £11 and my pending neck cramp and my taste of solo journeying. (When my uncle dropped me at the station I almost leapt out of the car with excitement, hugging him goodbye, almost leaving my entire suitcase in the trunk if not for his reminder. He said with his eyes that this was not a good idea but just uttered “be safe” with a kiss and probably a prayer).

We, around 8 of us, arrived and met at the designated metro station, squeal-hugging, introducing ourselves and our plus ones and making our way to the AirBnb. It was three days of coordinated outfits and adjusting afros and bantu knots while weaving through Montmartre and dipping in and out of metro stations with and without the authorised tickets. Every day was a declaration of how free we felt, the way you do when you visit a place and engage in the designated space and vibe. Half of London’s Black creative scene had the same idea though, and so the trip developed a routine of being pulled out of a crowd and into a hug by someone from that other place that we were all skanking away and forgetting about with our sleepless 3 days of Parisian bliss.

The entire festival was a whirl of animated conversations about race in Paris held in French and English - much of it untranslatable, after-parties, relying on the one allocated french-speaker to order us food at 2am; mosh pits and afrobeats dance battles and neo-soul sessions in lounges where everyone was flirting in two languages. Everyone was taking a picture of you, you were taking a picture of everyone and the vibes were like one big family reunion where the cool cousins snuck out to the garage to share playlists, roll up, speak too fast and too loud. And we were so loud. Intentionally loud in our Blackness and seemingly safe, unchallenged. This was my introduction to Paris.

Paris, August 2016. Black Paris.

I decided to finally join Instagram in summer 2016. I was using it as my portfolio, I said, and quickly uploaded my images from my Afropunk chronicling. As part of my prep for Afropunk, I bought a DSLR camera, one of the biggest purchases of my adult life so far. This was so that I could practice a newly surfaced hobby: street photography around the world. I knew that I had an eye and so I used Paris, the most beautiful city in the world, to test it out. You can only imagine my laughter when my SD card was exclusively filled with Black Parisians and people from across the diaspora having a good Black time and looking like the ancient future while doing so.

After a few days of uploading and tagging #afropunkparis to everything, I started to connect with more creatives, one of whom was a creative director for an independent Afro-Parisian collective. After some conversation, I realised we had met briefly at the festival. They had seen my blog attached to my Instagram and wanted to collaborate. “When can you get to Paris?” And so came my second trip to Paris.

Less than two months later, I was heading back to Paris, this time, opting for the Eurostar rather than the bus. Maturing. Arriving at Paris Gare du Nord, I zipped through the crowds since I had memorised the rhythm of this city (a second habit for a long-term traveller hoping always to fit in). Instead of a summer job, I was exploring what it meant to be an internationally-minded creative (a writer, more specifically) visiting a place not only for the go-to attractions, but instead to visit people, to get a sense of their culture and what makes their world theirs. It was an invitation that probably shaped a lot of me today, as I bob and weave my way around cities to find quiet corners that feel like they can hold me and that I can listen to. I settled into my hotel and took the metro to meet and reconnect with the crew where we spent the night recapping Afropunk Paris, discussing the brief for tomorrow’s collab, and initiating me into Parisian culture, leaving all of the stiff stereotypes behind, ushering in the food, language and style that Black Parisians lived by.

This trip was my look into the other side of Paris, the Black Paris, where most of the creatives travelled in from the suburbs. I got to know them by the shared stories of living here, where their parents were, are from (the Ivory Coast, Congo, Benin, Senegal), and the Black-owned fashion stores that they loved to shop in (descriptions were not enough and so we’d sometimes detour so I could see for myself).

I walked around with the creative crew and hoped no one from outside of this circle would speak to me and reveal that I am not from here. The invisibility was sweet. It was a relief to see this version of Paris that was giving a new side to the version I expected while coming here. I could be here too. If Afropunk was about being loud, this trip was about being quiet, being unnoticeably here.

The poetry video was filmed on abandoned train tracks and the day was filled with models, dancers, stylists, makeup artists and videographers putting together the concept of ‘liberation through the generations’, as crafted around my poem. Everything came in threes. Three dance styles, three eras of Black fashion, and three poems for me to recite.

The project was super fun, exciting to witness culturally and never released lol. After a few months of asking, and talks of recording issues, I realised that the sound quality was likely not good enough because I don’t remember being given a mic and so large chunks of the poems recited at a distance, were completely missed. I received some shorter clips of what was captured and edited though and they did look incredible.

On the plus side, I discovered what keeps Black Parisians alive in a city so incredibly fraught with discrimination. I learnt how and when to shrug it off and also, dance it off. To celebrate a long filming day, my creative friends insisted I join them at a Black movie festival happening on the following afternoon, the day of my departure.

“Amara, you made it!” My name pronounced softer and accompanied by big white smiles, especially splintering the face of my Senegalese brother who would take time to answer my questions about his country. They would switch to English and make space for me as I soaked up their community down to the last hour of my time in Paris. As suspected, there was even more art and even more proof that Black Paris thrives on community joy and memory-making. I wondered how a community as colourful as this was ever kept from the mainstream depictions of Paris.

The trip ended with me running through the train station whose etiquette I learned so well after having too much fun discovering Calypso Afrobeats, forgetting that I don’t live here, ignoring that in 2 short hours I’d be back to normality in London. I missed my train, had to buy another ticket home, decided to learn French for what I imagined could be a chapter spent in Paris, and invited one of the creatives to the UK a few months later because romance.

Paris, February 2018. Birthday Paris.

My third and final trip to Paris, was in honour of my mother and I as we celebrated our birthdays together, which falls on the 11th for us both. With my younger sister joining us, it was a family city break. This time we’d fly and I’d stay close enough to see the Eiffel tower from our window if I leaned forward quite dangerously over the balcony. Even still my favourite captures from the trips were the candid ones of my mum and sister strolling ahead of me, centered in the afternoon sun as I cut out the romantic architecture to focus on what I love.

Turning 22 in Paris felt like a dream, more so because I was at the start of my travels and learning how to move around the world. So far I had visited Brussels and Lisbon and had Marrakech booked in for March. The travel bug had truly settled in but this time, I was leisurely wandering a new place with my family, Google-translating menu items, pissing each other off like we do at home, warming up my feet at the end of the day after trying to walk the icy streets of Paris in Converses. I was not alone or showing translatable parts of myself to strangers, I was with the ones who know me most.

Unfortunately, Paris in the winter is not the same as Paris in the summer or spring. We became aware that Paris has a huge pick-pocket issue on the metro, and it is not discrete. After having to watch each other’s bags, drag hands out of pockets and bags (in big europe), and even retrieve a phone that was sneakily snatched out of a coat pocket under the glittering Eiffel tower, the sense of romance was slightly dampened. Thankfully we kept going, venturing to some of the tourist attractions I had never thought to check out, but we were not in the ‘restful mode’ we anticipated, nor that I had previously experienced.

It was time to learn Paris again.

We had fun, savoured the time we had, my mum and I left a year older than we arrived in Paris, and we smiled as we said goodbye from the skies. It was a quiet weekend of not getting robbed, not letting snow dampen our joy and stubbornly enjoying where we have never been before, with lots of intentional moving.

Even if I had visited Paris before, I had never done it with my family and so it was a different Paris. I had never before been into one of those quintessentially Parisian pharmacies that make you feel importantly sick until I was persuaded to buy something to soothe my period pain and save our birthday mood. I had never before strolled down backroads to a boulangerie and ordered a stick of baguette and baked treats for my family on my birthday. I had never felt the giddiness you sometimes do when it is your birthday and noone knows, and everyone smiles at you with their still preserved morning joy as you revel in the little French you retained. I had never giggled at the sight of my sister delighting at the discovery of a McDonalds, my mum taking selfies in the Louvre and sending them to family at home. The Paris of February 2018 was of observation, relief, and accepting that this third corner of my Parisian experience was true too.

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With each trip to Paris, I met something that I couldn’t had anticipated. This is normal, journeying, I know. But going to Paris as a student during a long and idle summer, and then going as a writer collaborating with other professionals all because I bought a camera (and trusted my intuition that I would be safe (I am always safe, protected and listening Amen)), and then going for a birthday break with my family, offered me several different lenses into Paris.

There are so many other versions of the city; some I could one day know, some I will never, mostly I do not know what Paris actually is anymore. And that is good. Honestly, I feel satisfied in my Parisian trips and don’t feel the need to travel there anytime soon. There is so much more world to see, but I give thanks that Paris, the city seemingly fixed in reputation, ruptured enough for me to see an alternative that I can share and promise you exists.