Love and Suspense in Paris Noir : Navigating the Seamy World of Jake Lamar's Rendezvous Eighteenth

Departing from Traditional Routes: Racism and Women

This love affair between Ricky and Fatima is a demonstration of how the novel departs from earlier expatriate fiction. Unlike expatriate fiction by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Gardner that features two sides of Paris—one side portraying interracial relationships that are set on the Left Bank and the other depicting the relationships with North Africans on the Right Bank—Rendezvous Eighteenth integrates interracial romance and Algerian Paris. Collectively, I map two departures from this two-sided Paris in Rendezvous Eighteenth. The first departure is that Ricky’s interracial and intercultural romantic relationships are in the Eighteenth Arrondissement (North Paris); whereas interracial Paris and Algerian Paris are a duality and complicate the lives of the protagonists in Richard Wright’s “Island of Hallucination,” Baldwin’s “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” and Smith’s The Stone Face, Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth does not bifurcate Paris.

Unlike in these predecessor African American expatriate texts, in Rendezvous Eighteenth Ricky’s arrival in Paris is not predicated on the trauma of US racism and the desire to escape into temporary or permanent exile (many times as an act of self-preservation), which is a common experience that led to the proliferation of a colorblind Paris. As Amine notes, the freedom of Paris was measured symbolically and actually by an acceptance of and access to heterosexual-interracial romance. She explains that Baldwin's "This Morning" "offers a heterosexual narrative that highlights the equality of black and white men through the symbolic interracial romance" (Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light 76). However, in Rendezvous Eighteenth, Ricky continues his “expatriation” in Paris because he does not have pressure to achieve and obtain material success by US standards, which is connected to his access to women. The text states:
 

Ricky would cheerfully explain that he was a pretty mediocre piano player and that he harbored no aspirations of greatness. He could see the shock in the faces of his fellow Americans when he spoke of his mediocrity and lack of ambition. In America, Ricky Jenks would be considered a loser. In France, he was simply himself. (7–8)

So in this way, Paris is still set up in opposition to the US. Paris is a place where Ricky can be involved with women sexually without having the ambition and money that he thinks are necessary to attract women in the US. The text states:
 

It didn’t take long for Ricky to realize that this was the life he should be leading. Not the life of American professional propriety or alienated outsiderness. His life in Paris defied the categorizations he was accustomed to. Questions of acceptance or rejection were beside the point. And, perhaps best of all, Ricky was getting laid. A lot. With women from all over the world. (74)

 In Paris, to be desirable to women, Ricky does not have to measure up to the financial success of his cousin, who stole Ricky’s fiancée in the US and is fittingly nicknamed Cash. By moving to Paris, Ricky levels the “playing field.” Certainly the motivation to escape American racism is not the same as escaping American competition (though there are many intersections at work with American capitalism and racism). In each fictional work, Paris is a place where the African American male protagonist has access to at least one woman whom he believes would have been denied him in the US.
 

This page has paths:

This page references: