Soon I found myself installed in a rented apartment in Montmartre, spare in its furnishings but crammed with books (French and English) in floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined a long corridor. There was an upright piano in the small front room, which inspired me to revive a few short Bach and Chopin pieces I had learned in childhood. I wandered about Paris a lot on my own, lonely at times but also enjoying the freedom of anonymity as I observed the life around me. And twice a week I took the metro to St. Denis to teach my two courses.
Paris VIII had been founded in the 1970s by Hélène Cixous and other French intellectuals as an experimental, more democratic option within a hierarchal university system. But by 2007 it was in serious difficulties—underfunded, chaotically administered, and beset by internal feuds than absorbed much of the energy of my colleagues. My own six-person department of English and Anglophone literature was in danger of a takeover by the larger department of English language and engaged in ongoing efforts to ward this off. I was surprised to learn that our department was not permitted to teach American literature—that was the purview of the language department. This seemed silly to me (what turf wars don’t?), but I devised my syllabi accordingly, content to remain a marginal figure, lunching sometimes with two of my colleagues (one from littérature the other from langue—our own mini détente) at the neighborhood kebab place and otherwise going my own way. I also found myself drawing closer to my students.
My undergraduate course on Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction had only six of them: a young man from Senagal, a young woman from Poland, three young women who were French, and another woman, a Berber from Algeria, who as a graduate student was auditing the class for the help it might be to her English writing. I assigned the students some exercises in creative writing and was surprised at how constrained they were, especially at first, by a certain French pudeur about revealing anything personal. We need to know more, I would respond to the hint of some childhood mishap or disappointment. Oh non, Madame, c’est trop personel, came the answer. I realized that in English we say “I” without shame, but the first person in French is habitually buried beneath the impersonal “on.” On est allé, not I. By the end of the semester, though, the class did some wonderful work, and the student from Senegal had us all on our feet teaching us “dance kuku.”
In the MA-level class in Indian English fiction, the major challenge was getting students the texts they needed for the course. You can get anything copied, I was told, but warned at the same time that asking the students to buy books was problematic. English books were hard to find; the students didn’t have the money to buy them; and, in any case, you couldn’t expect them to read more than one book or two since English was for many of them a third language. With these warnings in mind, I tried to steer an intermediate course. I had the students buy A Passage to India and Midnight’s Children, readily available at W. H. Smith and other English-language bookstores. But for R. K. Narayan’s The Guide, I just stepped into the department Xerox room, made a master copy of its 219 pages, and delivered this to Reproduction Services. No questions asked.
I taught in English, taking pains to speak clearly and slowly, beset by a heightened awareness of the nuanced vocabulary, syntax and contexts of our English-language texts. Midnight’s Children posed the most extreme challenge. I assigned only the book’s first section with the hope that at least some of the students would be motivated to read on after the semester. Rushdie’s tumbling, eclectic language and layers of allusion made this book daunting for most of them, but I could feel how much its energy and iconoclasm engaged the class.
I have said that no one in the class was Indian or had ever been to India, but coming as many of them did from former French colonies in North Africa, they understood the colonial experience in an acutely personal way. Unlike the immigrant students I taught in New York, who by and large had come to the United States as children as part of their families’ search for a better life, the Paris students had left families behind in Algeria or Tunisia or Morocco. I was surprised to learn that in France they had to submit letters from their professors every semester to the prefecture of police saying they were students in good standing in order to have their student visas renewed, and, ultimately, most of them would have to leave and go back to their poor countries. They encountered reserve, suspicion, and even contempt from the French, of whom they, in turn, were highly critical. Yet above all else, they wanted to stay in the country that, despite its drawbacks, offered them far greater opportunity. They responded to Rushdie’s arrogance and bravado and hoped to make it their own. It’s our turn now. The empire writes back.
I, too, was a foreigner in Paris, and despite all the times I’d been there, despite the ties to my son and his family, I
