Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [122]
Viewed from the pyramids outward, through the eyes of Moussa and Mafoud, the Malian village and the Parisian metropolis both appear as distant vanishing points. But we should turn our attention to the original perspective, the view from the village inward: How does the banlieue look coming in? What are all these villagers doing here? How did the European arrival city become short-circuited? How did France, and Europe in general, end up with such a large number of villagers in its midst?
Alima, Moussa’s mother, came here in 1984, 10 years after France officially ended immigration. She was not the first person in her village to leave for the city; that honor went to the man she married, who had come over as a worker during the period of legal immigration. Alima’s family, desperate for income, had engaged their daughter, age 20, to a man she had seen only during brief visits; they married in France. Like most women of her generation from African villages, she had never been to school; she was fluent in Bambara but spoke little French. Her husband died in 1991, shortly before her fourth son was born (making her part of a large population of single mothers, almost a quarter of all families in Les Pyramides),11 and she soon began working as an all-night office cleaner in another corner of Evry. A third of her income goes back to the village, the rest to food and school supplies—there isn’t anything left for savings. Her job left her children unattended for much of their after-school time; her older children soon took charge of raising the younger ones. In effect, the children were raised on the streets and concrete squares of Les Pyramides, by a community of other African and Arab children and teenagers in similar circumstances, a parentless world that pulled many of them into delinquency, others simply into bitterness and anomie.
“The thing that it takes a long time to realize, after you come here, is that a village is not at all like a big city,” Alima told me one Sunday in her tidy living room, which is dominated by the obligatory large couch and big-screen satellite TV, tuned to Malian shows when she’s around and American programs when she’s not. “In the village, when you’re raising your children, even if you have to work, you’re surrounded by extended family members who can help you. When you get into trouble, there are people who know and who help you out. Here, you’re really on your own. You end up with your children on the street, you know it’s wrong, and you worry. Every day, every second, I worry. All the time.”
Many in France see this as a case of villagers transplanting their cultures and folkways directly into the urban sphere without realizing that these practices are inappropriate, if not dangerous, in the context of the housing project, where there is no immediate community to watch the children. But the villagers themselves know otherwise. They fall back on these traditional ways only out of desperation, as Alima Sambakesse’s story indicates, when nothing else is available.
In the winter of 2007, I arranged a meeting with a dozen ex-rural women at Generation Femmes, a women’s center in Evry. They had come from a dozen countries, including India, Egypt, and all parts of Africa, and most spoke little French. But all of them expressed a strong desire not to live like villagers and to raise their children off the streets, and they shared a sense that their surroundings, both architecturally and economically, were denying them the connections and opportunities they needed to cast off the old ways. Desperation was forcing them back out of urban life.
“There are definitely a lot of problems with discrimination here, but people don’t realize that the bigger trouble is that a lot of the people who come from the places I do, from the banlieues, don’t have a social network that connects them to French society,” said Isna Hocini, 30, the grandchild of Algerian immigrants who runs the center. “And in France,