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

Routes of Love and Paris Noir

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.

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