Traces of Violence: Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France

Traces of Violence

Traces of Violence

WRITINGS ON THE DISASTER IN PARIS, FRANCE

Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by Robert R. Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-520-38245-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-38246-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-38247-3 (ebook)

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to reprint quotations from these works: University of Nebraska Press, The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot, © 1986; Éditions Gallimard, L’Écriture du désastre, by Maurice Blanchot, © 1980; State University of New York Press, The Step not Beyond, by Maurice Blanchot, © 1992; Éditions Gallimard, Le pas au-delà, by Maurice Blanchot, © 1973; University of Chicago Press, Writing and Difference, by Jacques Derrida, © 1978; University of Virginia Press, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, by Édouard Glissant, © 1989; Librairie François Maspero/Éditions la Découverte, Paris, Les Damnés de la terre, by Frantz Fanon, © 1961, 2002. Grove/Atlantic, The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, English translation © 1963 by Présence Africaine. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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. . . write in the thrall of the impossible real, that share of disaster wherein every reality, safe and sound, sinks.

MAURICE BLANCHOT,

The Writing of the Disaster

Would it be ridiculous to consider our lived history as a steadily advancing neurosis?

ÉDOUARD GLISSANT,

Caribbean Discourse

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

Note on transcription of Arabic terms

Avant-propos: A guide to reading Traces of Violence

Preface: Blue flight terminal

Counter-preface: Blues, flights, beginnings . . .

1   •    Névralgique

Interruption: Neuralgia in the Goutte d’Or

2   •    Graffs

Interruption: Graffiti, traces, and disappearance

3   •    Operation vigilance

Interruption: Vigilance is double-edged, to say the least

4   •    Learning with the body

Interruption: Give me your FAMAS

5   •    Archive sorrow

Interruption: Listen to the passing of time

6   •    A trace is the mark of something not there

Interruption: 3alesh? Why?

7   •    Where wounds are barely scarred over one is cut anew

Interruption: Paris is an apparition, sharing visions

8   •    The histories of these wounds

Interruption: Nervous activity

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. Île-de-France region.

2. North Paris.

3. Urban dérive , July 2017.

FIGURES

1. Le Carillon, rue Bichat, and rue Alibert.

2. Notebook from June 2016.

3. Rue Alibert.

4. Informal memorial at place de la République.

5. Quai de Valmy.

6. View of the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur.

7. Terrain vague (wasteland), rue Ordener.

8. Looking north onto the Gare du Nord train tracks.

9. Photograph of the Cinéma Debussy in Algiers, boulevard de la Chapelle.

10. CRS (Antiriot Police) vans parked near place de la République.

11. A police car parked under a metro viaduct.

12. Map of daytime police activity in the Goutte d’Or.

13. Rue Alibert.

14. Words inscribed on building surfaces near Le Carillon, rue Bichat.

15. Place Fréhel.

16. Words inscribed near Le Carillon, on rue Bichat.

17. Paris High Court, avenue de la Porte de Clichy.

18. Building set for demolition, boulevard de la Chapelle.

19. Ephemeral renaming of rue de Tanger as avenue Lalla Fadma N’Soumer.

20. Construction site on rue Étex.

21. Graffiti piece in the square Léon.

22. French soldiers on patrol, Basilique du Sacré-Cœur.

23. Tags on rue de Maubeuge, near boulevard de la Chapelle.

24. Gendarmerie helicopter patrol above the 18th arrondissement.

25. Stop-and-frisk in Paris.

26. Gendarmerie Surveillance and Intervention Platoons, place de la République.

27. Minors handcuffed and lined up during an arrest, Mantes-la-Jolie.

28. Commemorative plaque, rue Alibert.

29. Memorial in park across the street from the Bataclan, boulevard Voltaire.

30. De la rue aux Archives exhibit, the Archives of Paris.

31. Controlled entrance near train platforms, Gare du Nord.

32. Former site of a camp for migrants and refugees, boulevard de la Chapelle.

33. French police forces responding to a collective demonstration.

34. Cité Curial-Cambrai.

35. Police station, rue de la Goutte d’Or.

36. Police Station, rue de la Goutte d’Or.

37. Commemorative plaque, pont Saint-Michel.

38. Antiriot police, rue des Trois Bornes.

39. Demonstration in support of Adama Traoré’s family.

40. List of persons killed or seriously injured by the French police.

41. Young men and women protesting police misconduct, Bobigny High Court.

42. Gathering at place de la République.

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION OF ARABIC TERMS

We use the Latin script commonly used by Darija-speaking communities (in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and diasporic spaces in Western Europe and North America). With this script, certain sounds—notably the guttural letters—are replaced with Arabic numerals. For instance, the number 3 replaces the letter ‘ayn ( ), which does not have a phonetic equivalent in English.

AVANT-PROPOS

A guide to reading Traces of Violence

We must be several in order to write, and even to perceive.

JACQUES DERRIDA,

Writing and Difference

Violence is expansive. It sneaks up on people, hits them hard, shears like shrapnel into bodies, mind, and matter. It sears through the world through vehicles of force, sight, and sound, and burrows into the memories of a life or a people. Remnant traces of violence can so easily get embedded in a landscape or urban terrain. Violent harm leaves marks, wounds, scars, absences, silences, potentialities. Violence is reiterative in time and space; it’s often generative of further violence. Its very possibility is difficult at times to comprehend. At the same time, any history of violence is caught up in other histories of violence—genealogies of colonial conquest, imperial domination, genocide; chronicles of the tortured and disappeared, of saturation bombing and drone strikes, border surveillance, expulsions, internment camps; annals of military brutality, police harassment—a knotted tangle of violent histories that shadow a city mired in life, death, and wounding. In the midst of such harsh tracts of violence, where there are no easy answers or explanations, it’s important to find ways to live generatively and co-constructively in relation to others.

On the night of 13 November 2015, a commando acting on behalf of the organization then known as the Islamic State perpetrated a string of attacks throughout the greater Paris area. Starting at 9:16pm, three explosions occurred outside the Stade de France, a national sports stadium just north of Paris, resulting in four deaths, including three suicide bombers. In that same hour, armed gunmen approached several bars and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements and shot into the crowds gathered there, killing a number of people and wounding others. Three gunmen raided the Bataclan, a music venue on boulevard Voltaire, where they took hostages and shot at those attending a concert that night; hours later, police forces entered the Bataclan and fought with the hostage-takers. Ninety people were killed at the Bataclan and over two hundred were wounded. In all, the attacks that night resulted in 130 deaths. Some 413 people were injured, one hundred of whom were wounded seriously. Seven of the attackers also died when French police and security forces searched for the agents of the attacks and for accomplices. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or Daesh, in line with its Arabic-language acronym, claimed responsibility for the attacks, stating they were in retaliation for the French airstrikes on ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq. The attacks, commonly known as les attentats in French, were reportedly planned in Syria and organized in Belgium.

The attacks caused concern and alarm throughout the world. Television and newspaper reports spoke in dramatic, mournful terms to shocked, distressed audiences. Much like with the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015, the events took on a political and symbolic significance far beyond the specific lives and deaths involved.¹

It was as if the space and values of the nation had been attacked, and the Republic responded with national acts of mourning and commemoration, combined with intensive security measures that sought to identify terroristic threats while shoring up the country’s borders to protect its citizens. François Hollande, then president of France, called the attacks an aggression against our . . . way of life and an act of war by ISIL. On 14 November 2015 the French government declared a national state of emergency, a legal mandate that banned public demonstrations and allowed the police to carry out searches without a warrant and put anyone under house arrest without trial. With these sovereign powers in place, the government mobilized fifty thousand police officers, fifty thousand military police (gendarmerie), and seven thousand soldiers in order to find those responsible for the attacks. On 15 November France launched airstrikes against ISIL targets in Syria. Around dawn on 18 November a joint-police operation of the RAID and the BRI approached a building in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, where one of the alleged organizers of the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was hiding. He was killed in the assault, along with two accomplices. By then, 296 home raids (perquisitions) had taken place and 114 people had been placed under house arrest (assignation a résidence). By July 2016 these figures had risen to over 3,500 home raids and four hundred house arrests.² These various operations are part of the broader ongoing Vigipirate program, in which security measures are undertaken to encourage vigilance at both the collective and individual level.

Many residents of Paris and its neighboring communities were deeply affected by the 13 November attacks, even if they did not experience them firsthand. More than a few would say that they were traumatized by the violence that occurred. The violent events affected different peoples in disparate ways, from those who directly mourned lives lost to the nervous residents of neighborhoods in north Paris and the banlieue suburbs, where French security forces were concentrated. In the weeks that followed, the focus of political violence moved from the site of the massacres to the stigmatization of particular urban spaces and the social groups that compose them, chiefly immigrant and French Muslim communities. France became a society supposedly at war in Syria and Iraq, at war within its own borders. Relying on existing legal, police, and military protocols, these operations have worked alongside broader discursive and affective constructions. They have allowed for a retracing of national borders, as lines of demarcation between the civilized and the barbarian, between the French nation and the lurking internal enemy, come to be signified anew. Out of the sequence of events of 13 November 2015—in the wake of previous attacks and foreboding future acts of violence—thus emerged a landscape of phantasms: a phantasmagoria of terrorist threats and enmity and governmental responses.

This book is concerned with the aftermath of the attacks. The writing tracks how certain trace elements of the violent events of 13 November 2015 have come to exist, recur, erode, or vanish altogether in the streets, bodies, inscriptions, archives, memorials, and collective memories within the cityscape of Paris. It gives thought to the ways in which certain marks of violence come to be effaced or denied, often for complicated political reasons. These considerations lead, in time, to a broader reflection on the ways in which certain histories of violence, from the French colonial era on into the contemporary moment, shape the contours of life and death in Paris.

Several key themes guide this inquiry, including: the disastrous effects and charged potentialities of violence in people’s lives; forms of militarized vigilance and state security in contemporary life; the politics of traces, archives, and collective memorialization; demeaning and oppressive police strategies of harassment and forceful control of marginalized residents of north Paris; dynamics of haunting, phantasms, and spectrality; and the lingering wounds of (post)coloniality. These themes recur throughout the text, either implicitly within the narratives and images at hand, or in more overt conceptual statements. The book entails an integrative, interdisciplinary reflection on processes and effects of collective violence in Paris, France, and elsewhere, with the book’s motifs conveyed through a historically complex terrain of traces, marks and inscriptions, spectral hauntings, wounds and scars.

It’s worth noting several themes and methods integral to this work, so that readers have a clearer understanding of the book’s organization.

1. Collaborative anthropology. The work is a collaborative effort in anthropological-sociological inquiry, in which we, the two authors, draw from our respective research engagements in Paris to reflect on forms and histories of violence in France and elsewhere. While such a collaborative anthropology has often been called for, there are surprisingly few examples of published works in which two or more authors write in an integrative way on a particular subject of ethnographic inquiry—especially when the authors come from different sociocultural backgrounds and political circumstances.³ More specifically, few works attest to collaboration as a work of coauthorship, wherein reflexivity and dialogue work toward a constant questioning of the way the authors construe their object of study. In these pages, the co-construction of the object of study is articulated through an exchange in methods and in concepts. This book is the product of this process of contrasting and using each other’s tools to sharpen one another’s gaze.

Significantly, the approach undertaken here is a decidedly dialogical one, in which the two authors write in response to each other, making for a work of interlacing voices and displacements. Specifically, the main text of each chapter is followed by an interruption that works in relation to, or against the grain of, the main body of that chapter. Each text and interruption is written by one of the two authors, as indicated by the initials found at the end of each text (i.e., K. H. or R. D.). The authors bring to this dialogue distinct but nonetheless interlinked perspectives, academic traditions, sociopolitical and cultural worlds, and universes of meaning.

Khalil Habrih was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1995 and was raised between Villejuif (south of Paris), Toronto, and Ottawa. His father is the son of Algerian emigrants who progressively settled in France starting in the early 1950s; his mother, the eldest daughter of Romanian socialist lawyers, immigrated to France shortly after the December 1989 Revolution. Habrih was educated in the French national education system, in a French lycée in Canada, and later at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. A visiting student at Oberlin College in 2014, he arrived in Paris in 2015. Between 2015 and 2017 he engaged in ethnographic research on policing in Paris and began a master’s program at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). His current research engages with the fields of surveillance, racialization, and gender, with a focus on ethnographic methods and sociohistory. As of this writing, Habrih is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Ottawa.

Robert Desjarlais, in turn, hails from a secular Catholic, culturally American, middle-class family of Quebecois-Polish heritage in western Massachusetts. A student of state universities in Massachusetts and California, and once a research fellow at Harvard University, he has taught for some twenty-five years at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. An anthropologist by training, Desjarlais has conducted ethnographic research in Nepal, the United States, and now in France. Over time he has become increasingly ambivalent about the ethics and politics of ethnographic research, and he has sought out alternative modes of anthropological thought, writing, and image-making.

The two authors first met after Desjarlais had already written draft versions of several of the chapters that now appear in this book (in greatly revised form).⁴ This was in March 2017, at a time when Habrih was conducting ethnographic research on police practices and strategies in the Barbès–Goutte d’Or areas of Paris and Desjarlais was conducting research of his own on the aftermath of the violence of November 2015. We met at the EHESS, where Desjarlais was presenting on his research during one session of a year-long academic seminar.⁵ We met again several weeks later. While taking a long, drifting walk together through parts of north Paris we began to exchange thoughts on life and violence in France and elsewhere. A few weeks later, in the summer of 2017, Habrih wrote a paper for the year-long seminar, which he was taking for academic credit. This reflective essay narrated aspects of that conversation-in-movement and its conceptual implications. He then forwarded a copy to Desjarlais in New York. (A trace record of this seminar paper, translated into English, can be found at the start of chapter 7). Finding that Habrih’s ongoing research and thought opened up significant realms of generative perspectives of pressing relevance to his own efforts, Desjarlais invited him to join the writing of the book-in-progress. In the months that followed we began to work together on the manuscript, with Habrih adding texts of his own and Desjarlais writing further on the themes in question. From the preface and counter-preface on, the book’s composition reflects the contrapuntal movement of this dialogic process.

The book thus entails an uncommon writing strategy, in which the two authors draw from their distinct but interrelated research inquiries in Paris—as well as their respective intellectual heritages and subject positions—in writing on life and violence in the metropole. The writing proceeds in interwoven ways, with distinct texts essayed by Habrih and Desjarlais working in dialogue with one another—and with some passages serving as interruptions to the main texts found in each chapter. What emerges from this joint effort is an intensive inquiry into processes and reverberations of violence, phenomena of importance to so many in today’s world.

2. A critical phenomenology of traces. Central to the inquiry of this work is a critical phenomenology of traces, in which traces of violence are situated within complex vectors of time, space, history, and cultural and political formations. We also consider ways in which certain violent events are not preserved in lasting traces of such events. We write of inscriptions in Paris, a city engrained within a long, complicated history of inscriptions, be they the graff marks of graffiti, monuments and memorials, historical events and acts of violence sited in particular urban spaces, or, more viscerally, and metaphorically, wounds and scars of violence, from colonial times on to the contemporary moment. We do not take traces as being natural phenomena in the world, but rather the product of complex processes of materiality, inscription, semiosis, and perception. In consideration here are the ways in which fear and vigilance become inscribed in people’s lives and fissures of the city; the archival, commemorative work of the French state; scriptive acts of police and military soldiers; acts of counterinscription; and the tracework of violence, cruelty, disaster, and creativity that runs through it all. Through this urban ichnology we write, in effect, of the politics of traces.

This focus on traces helps to explain the methods and motives of Desjarlais’s research in Paris. From the start of his inquiry into the aftereffects of the violent attacks in November 2015, he was interested in tracking and retracing traces of violence perceived or grasped. In relation to this, and for complex reasons, he did not undertake any formal interviews with residents of Paris in regard to any violence perceived or experienced. Instead, he attended primarily to what he encountered through quiet, low-key engagements while residing in Paris—conversations overhead, incidental encounters, perspectives voiced in everyday conversations, newspaper entries, films and photographs, remnant marks of graffiti and street art, the eerie presence of armed soldiers in Parisian streets, and myriad other trace effects. In many respects, this ethnographic method is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s writings on European cities (Paris and Berlin, most notably), in which Benjamin drew from numerous forms of historical artifacts and sensate perceptions to convey a sense of the cultural and political forms of life in these cities. Benjamin’s archival impulse and historical materialist method was one of ragpicking, as with the chiffonnier (ragpicker) that Charles Baudelaire wrote of in his portraits of figures of nineteenth-century Paris.

Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s rubbage in the capital. He collects and catalogues everything that the great city has cast off, everything it has lost, and discarded, and broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery, and the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding treasure, he collects the garbage that will become objects of utility or pleasure when refurbished by Industrial magic.⁶

The ragpicker is like an urban archaeologist, concerned with excavation and memory and the phantasmagoria of modern life, gathering up so many shards of urban detritus, the ruins of modernity, recycling that which holds the potential for further use.⁷ Benjamin invoked such themes in his description of German writer Siegfried Kracauer: A ragpicker at daybreak, lancing with his stick scraps of language and tatters of speech in order to throw them into his cart, grumblingly, stubbornly, somewhat the worse for drink, and not without now and again letting one or other of these fading calicoes—‘humanity,’ ‘inner nature,’ ‘enrichment’—flutter ironically in the dawn breeze. ⁸ Such inclinations could readily apply when refashioned to Desjarlais’s method of perusing the streets of Paris, looking for scraps of speech, remnant images and affective intensities, discarded fliers—liberty, security, vigilance—and specters of death and life.

We realize this is an unorthodox method of anthropological research, in which formal interviews play no part. But once Desjarlais got going with this practice he wanted to stay with it, to see how far it could go as a mode of ethnographic comprehension. He therefore relied on the same ragpicker’s method during stays in Paris from 2017 through 2020. An objection might be raised that the style Desjarlais adopts as an ethnographer in the early chapters of this book—the shifting perceptions of a spectral anthropologist, of sorts—leads to a focus on his processes of thinking through the afterlives of violence as opposed to the experiences of those who live in the city or experienced the violence firsthand. Yet our sense is that Desjarlais’s observations, which work in relation to Habrih’s research, are consistent with how many have experienced the aftermath of the violence of November 2015. In contrast, Habrih’s ethnographic research in the Goutte d’Or (uninterrupted from 2015 to 2017, and again more sporadically in 2018 and 2019) draws from a number of formal and informal interviews, participant observation and less collective methods of observations such as urban drifting (dérive urbaine), as well as other forms of autoethnographic writing that describe his relationship to policed and surveilled urban space. This form of ethnography relies on living in situ and is largely drawn from the work of reflexive sociology and organic ethnology undertaken by French-Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad. Through dialogue, extensive interviews often cited at length without interpretive interruptions, Sayad centered the experiences and universes of meaning of Algerian (post)colonial immigrants to France. In so doing, he worked to make sense of the sociopolitical and affective reverberations of categories of (non)citizenship, from the sensibility of the stigmatized, rather than the sense-making of state discourses.⁹ Habrih’s engagement with field research was in that sense committed to participants’ testimonies and analyses and to formulating a critique of French Republican institutions. The authors’ differing methods and their underlying normative commitments are part of the collaborative work and dialogue involved.

3. Emergence of understanding. The book reflects a process of research and writing in which there is an emergence of understanding of the conditions and histories of violence in contemporary Paris. This emergence, at once epistemic, affective, ethical, political, and intersubjective in scope, relates in part to changes in perspective that Desjarlais underwent through his research and writing efforts, in large part through his engagements with Habrih. In effect, there is a narrative structure implicit in Desjarlais’s writings in this book, in which his initial encounters with traces of violence associated with November 2015 lead to a greater understanding of the complexities of violence, particularly the ways in which histories of state-supported violence in the contemporary world relate to violent events so often deemed acts of terrorism. Habrih, meanwhile, progressively incorporated Desjarlais’s phenomenological approach and vocabulary into his sociological method. Habrih began by systematically exploring concepts, such as immigrant centrality, spatialities, urban rhythms, collective memory, historicities of displacement, race-making, and the like. The constant rubbing of shoulders with phenomenology allowed Habrih to turn to the body in order to document, in a sociological and ethnographic way, what Frantz Fanon dubbed the historico-racial schema of phenomena and embodiment.¹⁰ Desjarlais’s critical phenomenology provided an analytic for Habrih to study his own corporeal and affective experiences with policing in Paris. Conversely, critical phenomenology and sociology allowed for an interesting experiment in historicization, as Habrih moved from the intersubjective into the historical and back again.

While this narrative structure is distinct from the structure of most scholarly works—in which a main thesis or argument is advanced from the start, and the rest of the text supports that thesis—the narrative stays true to the spirit of the thought involved. In some ways, the structure is more like that found in many novels, in which certain situations and understandings emerge through the narrative-temporal flow of the writing and reading involved. Imagine, if you will, an intertextual, polyphonic ethnography penned by the likes of Assia Djebar and Abdelkebir Khatibi, or Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, and one starts to get close to the patterns of language involved.

4. Specters, phantasms, hauntings. A key feature of the book’s subject matter are the ways in which sundry events, memories, images, traces, and nontraces appear in spectral, phantasmal ways in the places, temporalities, histories, and trace-work in Paris. These themes relate to a growing interest in hauntology in the social sciences and the humanities—the study of ghostly hauntings, spectral resonances, phantasms, and phantoms. Resounding the work of Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon, and others, we consider the hauntological dimensions of violence, ghostly hauntings, and specters in life and death, as much as any clear-cut ontologies of being, identity, and state formation.¹¹ We also consider the phantasms invested in certain discourses and sensibilities of everyday life, governmental practices, state or terroristic violence, and violent deaths.¹² Fredric Jameson once wrote that Spectrality is not difficult to circumscribe, as what makes the present waver: like the vibrations of a heat wave through the massiveness of the object world—indeed of matter itself—now shimmers like a mirage.¹³ A reader would not be mistaken to find that many of the images and materialities noted in these pages shimmer like mirages within the fissures of Paris, a place where present, past, and future waver.

5. Palimpsest of violence. In attending to various forms of violence that shape the lives of so many living in Paris and elsewhere, the book is in quiet conversation with important reflections on violence, from Frantz Fanon’s and Hannah Arendt’s writings on violence to more recent works by anthropologists on the causes and effects of violence in a number of sociocultural worlds.¹⁴ Here, we pay particular attention to the ways in which forms of state, police, and terroristic violence affect the bodies, memories, spaces, temporalities, sensorial and affective sensibilities, and lives and deaths of residents of Paris and its banlieues. The City of Light holds a palimpsest of violence, in which myriad histories, marks, scars, wounds, and erasures of violence are caught up in complicated, cross-cutting trajectories within multiple temporalities and spatialities.¹⁵ Each chapter of this book is palimpsestic in form, for the language, reflections, marks, images, and interruptions imply a plurality of intersecting inscriptions, erasures, reinscriptions and reerasures, graphed and ungraphed by the hands of many.

Such are some of the concerns, methods, and tracework of the pages that follow. This book is far from comprehensive, especially when it comes to considerations of violence and its aftereffects in France or elsewhere. Its pages are marked by gaps, lacunae, fleeting traces, partial knowings, and obscure neuralgic indications as much as they are by tangible perceptions and clear statements. Then again, much of life today proceeds in wavering, uncertain terms. With this palimpsest of a heterogeneous text we write in a spirit of relation and co-composition. We would like to think that the book is in accord with emergent possibilities of reciprocity and mutuality in life, as encouraged by Achille Mbembe and others—and Frantz Fanon, before us—in anticipating an open-ended potentiality that can mark a spirit of transfiguration, one that promises a return to life, against the powers of death.¹⁶ This would entail an ethics and politics of amity, in contrast to the politics of enmity that plagues so much of the world today.

R. D. and K. H.

New York, Ottawa, Paris

December 2020

PREFACE

Blue flight terminal

Tuesday, 22 January 2019

I didn’t know that I would come to study violence. I didn’t know I would walk the streets of Paris like an itinerant ghost, looking for traces of harm and loss. I didn’t know I would write incessantly in the pages of notebooks, trying to comprehend it all while never really comprehending much at all. I didn’t know of the archive of traces that I would cobble together out of words and images, a ragpicker’s collection motivated not so much by any logical, well-defined inquiry but, rather, by a circuit of bafflement, sympathetic concern, and obsessive interest, stuck in the need to know something that could not be known. This unofficial archive, half-formed and nearly irrational, contained the strands of a historically complex set of encounters, perceptions, remnant traces. Photographs, drawings. Scraps of paper. Newspaper clippings. Letters left on a sidewalk, later scanned into an archive. Memorials chiseled into stone. And writings on the disaster: military soldiers on the lookout for acts of terror; walks through the security zones of north Paris; remnant images from 17 October 1961. At first, like others, I did not grasp the significance of that date within the aphasic history of Paris. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know that encountering one scene of violence would lead me to go back in time to other scenes of violence. I did not know that I would retrace scars and wounds recurrent to postcolonial subjection and so come to taste fear, hatred, and the sad, miserable forces of violence and counterviolence. In tracking a trail of violence I would end up haunting places and be haunted in turn.

MAP 1. Île-de-France region (Map by Pease Press).

MAP 2. North Paris (Map by Pease Press).

I knew none of this as one night in March 2016 I drove beneath an Albuquerque sky that was shifting from magenta to a deep, blackening blue. By the time I reached the airport, the desert sun had vanished into the west and the empty roadways were lit by the yellowish glow of streetlamps. I had been traveling through New Mexico, enjoying a meandering road trip through desert lands and mining towns. Now I was heading home. Soon I was in an airport terminal, waiting for my midnight flight. Welcome to JetBlue airways. Flight number sixty-six to JFK is now boarding. Painless takeoff into dark clouds and then we were gliding through the continental night. The central cabin was illuminated with the subdued radiance of a deep blue tone seeping through narrow tubes of light. Each seat came equipped with a video console fixed to the back of the seat before it. The channels included live cable news programs. Around the turn of an hour one of the CNN newscasters said they had just received reports of explosions outside the airport in Brussels. It was unclear what had happened. No video feeds, yet. A gap in knowing in the dark shifting night. Within minutes reports came in of explosions at one of the departure halls at the airport in Zaventem. This is how it starts: the first words of something wrong and a mind braces for the brutality of a vision.

Streaming images appeared on the small screen set inches from my eyes, a few shaky videos taken with handheld phones inside the departure hall moments after the blasts. As the newscasters chatted nervously one video looped continuously on the television screen: white grey dust coating everything within the airport hall, baggage carts splayed on the ground, bodies walking past, the repeated cries of an unseen woman, one voice saying over and over, It’s okay. It’s okay. The setting was familiar but marked by devastation; metal stands and check-in counters, travelers draped in winter coats trying to stand upright. As the JetBlue flight sped past Missouri and Indiana the disaster videos recurred, loop after loop of filmed white dust. I tried to catch patches of sleep with a blanket pulled over my face as violent images blurred into vague omens in dreams. I woke to televised dispatches of an explosion at a metro station in Brussels. By the time we reached the eastern seaboard a fiery red orb was rising from the ocean and a few things had become clearer in Belgium. At 07:58 two suicide bombers set off explosives packed into large suitcases in a departure hall at the airport in Zaventem. Another bomb was detonated at the Maalbeek metro station, around 09:10. A number of people had been killed, including the suicide bombers, and many others were injured.

The plane circled above the wetlands south of the city, waiting for a signal to land. I wondered if there would be more intensive security and armed police patrols stationed in the halls of JFK. The plane paced the sky in wide arcs and I thought of that November night in Paris when a series