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• 1 media/18th .jpg media/LaGouttedOr Community.jpg 2018-12-03T11:08:39+00:00 La Goutte d'Or 79 An African and Arab neighborhood in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. image_header 2607 2019-06-28T11:12:46+00:00 48.8911337, 2.3460763 Lastly, Lamar’s portrayal of La Goutte d’Or, an African and Arab neighborhood in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, is similar to William Gardner Smith’s portrayal of the neighborhood in The Stone Face, yet Lamar rewrites Smith’s two-sided Paris in Rendezvous Eighteenth. To illustrate, in The Stone Face, the African-American protagonist Simeon Brown enters La Goutte d’Or with his friend Ahmed. La Goutte d’Or reminds Simeon of Harlem. The narrator states:

  Like Harlem and like all the ghettos of the world. The men he saw through the window of the bus had whiter skins and less frizzly hair, but they were in other ways like Negroes in the United States. They adopted the same poses: “stashing” on corners, ready for and scared of the ever-possible “trouble,” eyes sullen and distrusting, dressed in pegged pants, flashy shirts and narrow pointed shoes. He could almost hear them saying: “Whatchu putting down, man?” “Jus’ playin it cool, jus’ playin it cool, man, trying to keep ole Charlie off my back.” Ole Charlie paced the street waving his submachine gun. (86–87)

  In this passage, Smith compares the North African men in La Goutte d’Or to African-American men in Harlem and other urban, segregated areas in the USA. Smith says that the men “stash” on the street corner, which suggest that they are visible and withdrawn. Their presence on the street and their conspicuous clothing increase their visibility, but the position of their bodies and their eyes divert attention to them through displaying sullenness and distrust. Their hiding is due to the threat of “trouble” from each other and/or threat by “ol’ Charlie”—French police. These men, with the exception of their “whiter skins and less frizzly hair,” remind Simeon so much of home that he can imagine them speaking “Black English.” Nearly forty years later, Rendezvous Eighteenth parallels the portrayal of La Goutte d’Or and the USA.
  
  Like Simeon, when Ricky enters La Goutte d’Or, he compares the Arab population there to the African-American population in the USA, for “No other part of Paris reminded Ricky so much of America” (260). When Ricky exits Marva’s car in La Goutte d’Or, he encounters four young men who are likely French Algerian. The narrator states:

  As soon as he stepped out of the car, Ricky checked out the crew of tan-complexioned teenagers who were checking him out. There were four of them. Ricky figured they were Beurs—the French-born children of North African immigrants. They stood on the walkway leading to the building that, when compared with most of Paris's architecture, looked like a prison. They each sported a shiny warm-up suit, immaculate basketball shoes and a fashionable banlieue homeboy haircut: straight and greasy on the top, totally shaved on the sides and the back of the head. (261)

  Here, Lamar discusses the visibility of the North African young men because of their presence on the sidewalk and their urban-styled clothes. The young men are standing in front of an apartment building that looks like a prison. The image of the prison suggests two things: one, the “threat of trouble” from law enforcement and two the desolation of the area. The desolation is due to the residual effect of the Algerian War. The narrator explains that “during the late 1950s and early ’60s, while the war for independence raged in Algeria, la Goutte d’Or became the main Parisian battleground for the conflict. […]. Decades later, the area still had a war-ravaged feeling about it” (260). This suggests that in Rendezvous Eighteenth La Goutte d’Or is on a continuum with Smith’s depiction. This continuum includes the more recent violence in the area that the narrator mentions, such as the incident at “blessed Saint Bernard de la Chapelle, which gave refuge to illegal African immigrants until the police violently raided the church in 1996” (260). The teenage Beurs are also a part of this continuum; they are a younger generation of North Africans. They are born in Paris and live in their community that was perhaps their parents’ “Parisian battleground.” The parallels between Rendezvous Eighteenth and The Stone Face, such as: the comparison of La Goutte d’Or to inner cities in the USA and the effects of the Algerian War, show how Rendezvous Eighteenth maps new routes of Paris Noir in its depiction of the Eighteenth Arrondissement.
• 1 media/nightparis.jpg 2018-12-06T11:46:31+00:00 Routes of Love and Paris Noir 70 Conclusion of Dr. Thompson's analysis of Rendezvous Eighteenth. plain 2019-06-16T19:24:22+00:00 Lamar’s portrayal of the Eighteenth Arrondissement is a part of the continuum of earlier African-American expatriate fiction. However, Lamar accomplishes three things with his publication of Rendezvous Eighteenth that distinguishes the Paris he depicts from Paris in the earlier tradition: he centers the novel on a lesser known part of Paris; he privileges the interfaith romance among people of African descent; and he shows that discrimination in Paris is not limited to the period of the Algerian War. Because Lamar depicts “two sides of Paris” within the Eighteenth Arrondissement—North Paris—his novel is a direct challenge to black migration narratives of inclusion. He privileges the marginal space as a microcosm of Paris and highlights the complexities of race, sexuality, gender, and nationality in Paris by using an “everyman” African-American protagonist. Algerian Paris is not “over there”—a place that the African-American journeys to see the struggle; Algerian Paris is where Ricky lives. It is Paris Noir. 
  
  Also, whereas racism causes other African-American protagonists to leave the U.S. to be “a man among men” in Paris, Lamar portrays finances and ambition as the limiting factors that cause expatriation from the U.S. Lamar introduces Fatima, a Muslim woman, as the romantic interest of the African-American expatriate and highlights the complexities of religious difference. Here Lamar shows that differential treatment in Paris is more complex than race, and he parallels the U.S. interracial romance paradigm for a Parisian interreligious romantic paradigm. 
  
  Black American migration narratives of inclusion in Paris highlight narratives of Paris that fit the colorblind myth. Keaton writes, “The interpellation of Black American migration narratives of inclusion that seduce and compel us to acquiesce to and/or consume the ideas that they advance wind up legitimizing a universal color-blind, race-free image of France that simply has never been true” (105). However, in Rendezvous Eighteenth, Lamar revisits a site portrayed in Smith’s The Stone Face and situates it in a twenty-first-century context. Lamar parallels Smith’s correlation of African-American urban ghettos in the U.S. to La Goutte d’Or, but , Lamar’s detailed mapping of the Eighteenth emphasizes the flows of immigrants into Paris post Algerian War, and he depicts a city altered by larger populations of French citizens of African descent. He makes it clear that the racial problems of the U.S. are different from those in France, and the narrow representations of African Americans in Paris do not represent the experiences of many French citizens and immigrants of color. Algerian Paris is the Paris that Lamar says, “American writers and American writers that are his friends don’t know.”
   

  Rendezvous Eighteenth is available to borrow online.