PARIS LETTER:A cultural cafe in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis reflects the area's heritage as a melting pot of cultures and civilisations, writes Lara Marlowe
ASK YOUR average Parisian about Saint-Denis, the immigrant suburb and university town at the end of the number 13 metro line, and likely as not, he'll tell you it's full of muggers and rebellious youths. But residents of Saint-Denis blame the negative image on media hype, and note that Parisians throng to the thrice weekly open-air market - a true melting pot, boasting food and clothing from every continent.
Brahim Lahreche is the son of Algerian immigrants and the co-founder and manager of Café Culturel, which faces the side of Saint-Denis's medieval basilica. His collection of postcards from local customers, sent from Tokyo, Dubai, Tehran, Algeria, Brazil, Martinique, shows how cosmopolitan Saint-Denis is, and how fond its inhabitants are of their cafe. "I tell them, 'Each one of you is a grain of sand, and now I have a magnificent beach!' " says Lahreche.
Lahreche founded the cafe 10 years ago with his then girlfriend, Cristina Lopes. He looks after the daily business, and she organises art exhibitions on the upstairs landing, and the Friday and Saturday night concerts, which include rock, folk, Portuguese Fado, but especially the contemporary poetry recitals known as slam.
Parisians attend the cafe's concerts in growing numbers. "When we started, we'd get three or four people for a slam performance. Now it's up to 300," says Lahreche.
Imported from the US, slam is in-your-face poetry, with recitals resembling a competition sport. "We were the first to do slam in Saint-Denis. We were the launching pad," Lahreche boasts. Grand Corps Malade, a slammer who has become famous in France, was "discovered" at Café Culturel. He and Ami Karim, another well known slammer who's on tour in Québec at the moment, are still regular performers.
"I've watched slam evolve," says Lahreche. "These days, they all write it down. In the beginning, it was real slam, which is improvised. Now some of them recite over background music."
I was brought to the Café Culturel by Scott Haine, adjunct professor of history at the University of Maryland, and probably the world's foremost expert on the sociology of French cafes. When I interviewed Haine five years ago, he was despondent over their decline.
It started in the first World War, when cafes were considered a source of shame, because they were so numerous, so much alcohol was consumed, and cafe-goers should have been fighting at the front, Haine explains. During the second World War, Marshal Pétain told the French to stay at home with their families, and began a policy of zoning and licences that drastically reduced the number of cafes. The busy lives of the contemporary French have further eroded the cafe's role as a place of social intercourse. Their number has fallen, from an all-time high of 508,000 in 1938 to about 45,000 today.
France has halved its wine consumption since 1960, and cafes are now places one occasionally drops into, rarely an integral part of the daily routine. Yet Haine feels confident they won't disappear: "As we become ever more tied to electronic communication, to sit down beside a real person, in the flesh, will become more exotic," he says.
"That's why the cafe will never die. People will always want human contact.
"Just as electronic sex will never replace the real thing, nothing can replace face to face conversation."
And Haine is heartened by what he's discovered at Café Culturel, where customers are more likely to drink mint tea than espresso.
"It has breathed new life into an old institution, created a new clientele and a new cultural force," he says. "Sixty or 70 years ago, people went to hear Piaf in Montmartre. Now they go to Saint-Denis to listen to slam."
Haine sees other historical precedents: the way middle class Parisians flocked to the cafés-concerts in working class eastern Paris in the 1920s and 30s; the advent of swing and jazz in the night clubs of Harlem.
Now young people in immigrant suburbs seek fame as rappers and slammers, following the tradition of Édith Piaf, the homeless waif from Belleville, Maurice Chevalier, poor boy from Ménilmontant, or Yves Montand, an Italian metal worker from Marseilles.
The Café Culturel receives subsidies from the Seine-Saint-Denis department, and were it not for the audience it draws from Paris, one might cynically assume it was a stratagem to keep the immigrants in the ghetto. France still has a long way to go in the fight against racism.
"The economic crisis doesn't help," sighs Lahreche. "There's great potential in the banlieues. A lot of young people start their own businesses, like me. One of our customers has launched his own brand of clothing, and he flies to New York all the time."
President Nicolas Sarkozy changed attitudes by appointing three ministers from ethnic minorities, even if it was "mostly bla-bla", says Lahreche.
But the election of Barack Obama made a bigger impact: "Now that's real change," says the cafe owner.