Louisiana; Ramadan; my cousins, the refugees

I have been unhealthily obsessed with the hurricanes, I know. It was the big strike today, so I stayed home and the computer guy came and the carpenter and my friend Laurence. All day  I have been listening to New Orleans music, from "Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?" to "They all ask for  you down at the zoo." The saddest song is Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927: "Louisiana, Louiiiiisiana-- they're trying to wash us away-- they're trying to wash us away!"

I stumbled across this moving blog last night, after E left to go back to her youth hostel. She is 22, but in such a different place from the cheerful kids there, on their gap years or post-college sprees-- she and her family have lost almost  everything and everyone she knows is suffering. The stories E had told me were so universal and troubling that I was already primed, and I started crying reading about Siege's good-time-loving, loyal Cajun mother, who sounds like so many women I used to know in Louisiana, from my landlady on Lowerline Street in New Orleans ,with her little poodles Peanut and Monique, to my cousin's tap-dancing 60-year-old redheaded babysitter, Miss Virgin Mary Thibodeaux, to the mother of Ignatius in Confederacy of Dunces, modeled on the writer's own mother to a heartbreaking extent.

Another Katrina tragedy that brushed our life: A few years ago we stayed in a nice bed-and-breakfast in Pass Christian, Mississippi. Pass Christian (which is pronounced ChrisTYANN) is an old resort on the Gulf Coast that catered to rich New Orleanians and plantation owners in the long sauna-like summers before air-conditioning arrived. Even the few feet in altitude and the ocean breezes made Pass Christian and the other Gulf Coast towns much pleasanter in the summer, and even nowadays there is was a yacht club and nice restaurants up there where the New Orleanians went on summer weekends. The old road along the ocean passed mile after mile of perfect clean white sand beaches, shallow for a mile out to sea. On the other side of the road, beautiful old Southern houses sat far back among enormous shady trees, usually on a rise or raised off the ground. Most of them had weathered many hurricanes.

The  hotel where we stayed still has its website up, so you can see what many of the old Pass Christian houses looked like. It was a pretty old Victorian house that had been lovingly renovated. It stood on a rise and was solidly built, and the owners thought they could ride out the hurricane. They were wrong. All that shows there was ever a building there is the concrete slab where the front porch used to be.

Here is a website that shows what beautiful Pass Christian looks like now. And these are the rich people.

I've been feeling very sad and far away from America these last few weeks. Even though this terrible disaster has happened to a place I loved more than I knew, the French and the Europeans in general haven't been very sympathetic. I  think for a lot of them it was a shock, and at once frightening and repulsive, to see that America had so many desperately poor, normally invisible people and couldn't take care of its own. None of the positive things about the disaster-- the thousands and thousands of people who went out of their way to help; the hundreds of thousands who are putting up homeless friends and family; the orderly and safe evacuation of millions of people; have been reported in Europe. Instead it is just the racial divide and pernicious, soulless American  capitalism. The reaction has been that America is a sort of Christian Saudi Arabia while George Bush is in charge, off on its own planet.  Anyway, aren't Americans all gun-toting, obese anti-smoking fanatics? Placide about sums it up with this cartoon.

Someone I thought I liked said to me that he could never go to the States as a tourist. "Je n'aime pas les raciiistes," he hissed. I was furious. I've never in my life heard an American say the blatantly racist things that are normal currency in BCBG France. And who put Jean-Marie LePen ahead of an incumbent Prime Minister in the last big election?

When George W. Bush won in November of last year, Le Parisien ran a big headline that said, "Bush (largement) réélu, les Français déçus" (Bush easily reelected, the French disappointed). Now the French are pinning their hopes on Hillary Clinton, but my heart sinks at the idea of her as the Democratic Presidential candidate. As a Southerner, I know she cannot win the middle of the country. 

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Ramadan started today. When I first arrived in Paris, you didn't really  notice Ramadan. A few years ago, the local Muslims began to observe the fast more and more. They don't expect French people to be considerate, but you see them playfully scolding a fellow Muslim if he drinks coffee or walks in with a cigarette-- it's considered rude to the people who are fasting. I have the vague impression that last year Ramadan let up a little. I am very curious to see if people in our neighborhood follow it as much as last year. Most of the men who run the shops are from North Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia--although I have discovered there's a big ethnic cleavage between North African Berbers and Arabs. They heartily despise each other and call each other racists. The Berbers think of themselves as the original, civilized peoples who were Roman, and occupied Spain in the Moorish Golden Age; the Arabs were uncouth desert tribesmen who converted North Africa by the sword. (There's a Berber heroine Kahina who led her people against the Islamizing Arabs of the Dark Ages.) The Arabs think of themselves as the civilizing influence and point out that the Berbers have almost no literature.

In Paris, the Muslims you meet do not seem any more alien than I imagine the Irish Catholics must have seemed to WASP Americans of the late 1800s. They are mostly nice normal people and have a respectful but rather secular, ethnic-pride attitude to their religion. Of course, someone like me is not likely to meet a strict religious Muslims. I have learned to recognize them. The women, of course, are easy to spot with their head-to-toe, scary-spooky black look. Some even wear gloves on their hands and dark glasses over the slit for their eyes. The arch-conservative men have long, unkempt, pubic-hair-looking beards (it's against their religion to trim it) and short, wide white tunics over their trousers. You often see them driving around Paris in large vans, men and boys in the front, cowed-looking women, girls and children in the back; but these people look foreign, like Saudis or Pakistanis, not at all like the Frenchified North Africans.

My neighborhood also has a conservative Jewish school, synagogue and kosher store. The women who come to pick up their kids mostly wear wigs or scarves, and all the little boys wear baseball caps-- I suppose that's cooler than a yarmulka. It surprised me at first to hear English there, but there seem to be a number of orthodox American Jews at the school. One of my friends in Venice says that very conservative American Jews are resettling the ancient Ghetto in Venice, and that the tolerant, very Italian local Jews are not at all happy about the isolationist newcomers.

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More on my cousins, the refugees. J, whose kitchen ceiling collapsed on her last week in Lake Charles, is back in Baton Rouge staying with D.  Calcasieu Parish (Louisiana has parishes, not counties) still has no electricity and it looks as if it will be a month before people can go home.

D writes,

Uncle L. went home to Lake Charles and spent one night alone in their house. He called several times to tell people to come get him. When they got there, they said he looked like the Unabomber, standing in his front yard, shirtless and sweaty. According to D K, he was yelling at the FEMA people who were clearing the streets to put the debris in Mrs S’s yard, since her house will probably have to be demolished anyway. Not his! Uncle L said it’s really creepy to sleep in complete darkness. Their fences are gone and he had the windows opened. I teasingly asked if he slept with a knife under his pillow and he said, “No. A shotgun.”

I’m sure you knew that Aunt G is still fighting infections from the dog bites [pre-hurricane emergency]. The night before they evacuated, her doctor told her he was going to prescribe another antibiotic because the wound was not responding to the one she was taking. It took her a few days to get that straight once she got to Baton Rouge. I heard her tell mom that it’s till painful. She still wears some sort of bandage (that looks like a stocking). But she no longer seems to limp when she walks.

Mom and Dad are doing o.k. Their house wasn’t too damaged, but the garage flooded with about four feet of water and a limb flew through Dad’s car window. Mom seems to be holding up well during this crisis. I can tell when she gets exhausted because her shoulders droop and she sits down. (!) I know it frustrates her to have to rest. It goes against her nature. Dad has said a number of times that the little countdown campaign has really lifted her spirits.  He said the side affects of the medication were starting to wear on her. The example he uses is that Aunt B asked her to go shopping and she declined. (!) A true sign that she was at an all-time low. I cannot tell you how brave she is. She never complains. She had a house full of dad’s relatives from New Orleans for almost a month before Rita, and she handled it all so beautifully. C and I went in one weekend (the weekend they did the rescue convoy to St. Bernard Parish). When we were leaving I hugged her and told I was worried that this might be too much for her. She told me she is so blessed and so glad to give shelter to our cousins and aunts who need it.

Love, D