One street over, just behind my house, police discovered an apartment full of guns, ammunition and rocket launchers that one of the Charlie Hebdo terrorists rented a month before. Someone any one of us could have seen in the street, said a passing hello to, ( we say hello here ! ) even had a morning coffee with at our local cafe across from the train station.
The sense of our broken community here in Gentilly in the days and months following "les attentats" was saddening. Everyone seemed to have retreated to their own group, whether that be Parisian, Portuguese, American , Italian, Algerian, Roumaine, Columbian, Auvergnat...the barriers were up again. The doors closed. Mother tongue once again separates us.
The majority of my neighbors in the building in front of my house are Algerian. I am known as "the American cook" . Everyone knows my business. They see me trundling off to work with a caddy full of vegetables and whatnot. We say in passing that we'll be sharing recipes come summer for our local get together at the school down the street. That was last year.
This year on my return from the States this past January, all the shutters,"les volets" were firmly shut. And now only quick hellos where eyes don't meet.
How did we get here ? I asked myself. And how do we start our conversation again ?
Well my thing has always been food. Food conversation. Food sharing. It is mv point of departure when diving into the map of a person.
The first time I encountered this here in Europe was on one of my train trips from Rome to Bologna, many, many years ago. The train cars in those days had individual compartments and sat eight, four abreast.
Conversation began somewhat vaguely about the weather, the trip. Somehow the subject became Mortadella (giant sausage from...Bologna). And we were off. I didn't know anything about mortadella but two hours later not only did I know something about mortadella, making mortadella (wow! the idea that someone made such a beast at home ? Thrilling! ) , heard the mother's mortadella recipe with pistachios but when I got off the train at Bologna Centrale; I had an invitation to lunch !
So there do occur opportunities here and there to repair this sense of distance and lack of understanding. Sharing a meal is definitely one way of opening a door. The language of cooking and eating? Something we all have in common !
We watch one another at a market while waiting in line, enter into conversation with the person buying 8 kilos of some green that you've never seen before ...what are you going to make with all that ? I ask...and so it grows. Positive connections and life experiences built around food, eating, cooking and sharing.
This weekend, our group here on the plateau of Gentilly will be getting together in the parc near the exit of the RER.We have asked a Roumanian chef from Montreuil to come and make several Roumanian dishes with us : Gulas and Sarmalé. In addition to the eats, we have a Balkan group of dancers and musicians coming.
So begins the possibility of conversation and discovery. New sense of connection and hope. And dancing! yes there will be dancing!
Pix from our last fete, a bring your own, pot luck kind of affair; this past March.
