Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
Oct 18-24 2007

Imagining immigration

France’s new National Museum of Immigration opened last week amid
what looked like official indifference. But it may have a real role
to play if it can assert its independence, writes David Tresilian in
Paris

The arrival of the Liberty Ferry from Algiers, 1988, Jacques
Windenberger (top); les voitures cathédrales, 2004, Thomas Mailaender
(left)
Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris

Immigration, both legal and illegal, has been near the top of the
political agenda in France at least since the election of Nicolas
Sarkozy as French president earlier this year. And while the
government has expressed its desire to bring more qualified
immigrants to France in the manner already being carried out by other
western countries, it has also taken measures to crack down on
illegal immigration and announced that there are more such measures
to come.

Quotas have been issued for the expulsion of illegal immigrants, the
so-called sans papiers, back to their countries of origin in mostly
North or sub- Saharan Africa, and DNA testing is planned for people
wishing to join their families legally in France. According to the
French minister of immigration, integration and national identity,
between 30 and 80 per cent of identity documents issued in some sub-
Saharan African countries are false. DNA testing is a way of finding
out whether an individual is who he says he is and whether he is in
fact related to others already in France.

These measures and others like them have led to much ill-feeling, and
there have been a number of tragic stories: one woman, in France
illegally, recently jumped to her death from the window of a Paris
apartment building to escape police she thought had come to deport
her. There have been rumours of "round-ups" of illegal immigrants by
police patrols checking identity papers, and in some Paris districts
schools have been carrying banners protesting against the expulsion
of non-French pupils.

The inauguration of the new Cité nationale de l’histoire de
l’immigration on 10 October could therefore hardly have come at a
more sensitive time. And, as if in recognition of this fact, the new
museum, planned from 1989 but only opened this year after a series of
delays, was ignored by senior members of the French government, with
neither the president nor the prime minister making it to the
opening. The hapless minister of culture was sent along to do the
honours instead, a sign, if one were needed, that the new institution
would be seen as playing a strictly second-order role, at least in
official circles, and that it would likely be neither invited to get
involved in present controversies nor noticed by politicians.

However, if the new institution is to have a role to play in national
life then it will have to be prepared to enter the conversation on
matters of public policy. Indeed, Jacques Toubon, a former minister
and now president of the museum, has said as much, commenting in a
piece that appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde that the museum
aims to "change the way people think about immigration and make it
into a question that can be looked at rationally and not in terms of
fantasy."

France is a country of immigrants to a degree unusual in Europe,
Toubon wrote in material circulated at the museum’s opening. While
the present political discourse has tended to obscure the fact, "the
history of France and the construction of its identity and
civilisation is largely that of the millions of men and women who
left their countries of origin in order to settle in France and
become French," from the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants
that came to France in the first half of the last century to the
Arab, Vietnamese and African immigrants that arrived in the second.

It would be a pity if this new museum for the history of immigration,
promisingly situated opposite the Parc de Vincennes at Porte Dorée in
south-east Paris and apparently enjoying a substantial public budget,
were to be marginalised from public debate and turned into yet
another "place of memory" — with which the French capital is already
littered — without any real relation to present political choices
and controversies.

The building housing the museum was built for the 1931 colonial
exhibition, one of the last in a series of pre-war exhibitions
designed to show off the benefits that Europe’s colonies in Africa,
Asia and Oceania were bringing to metropolitan societies, among them
France.

While the discourse of the time chose to stress the allegedly mutual
benefits of this relationship, Europe exporting "civilisation" and
"development" to its colonies in exchange for their raw materials and
manpower, all such notions received a body blow after the Second
World War, when France’s colonies first in South-East Asia and then
in North and sub-Saharan Africa demanded and eventually received
their independence. The French "mandate" territories of Syria and
Lebanon had already broken free of French rule at the end of the
Second World War.

The magnificent reliefs showing the benefits of the relationship with
Europe that still adorn the building seem rather quaint as a result,
and visitors to the new museum are unlikely to dwell on French
sculptor Alfred Janniot’s elaborate visions emblazoned across the
building’s main façade. Advancing along the building in massive
progression, these show French colonies laying their produce in front
of an allegorical figure of France perched above the building’s main
entrance.

For the architects charged with converting this listed colonial-era
building to its new function as a museum of immigration, the task has
involved allowing the building "to speak for itself" while at the
same time breaking up its original meaning. The building’s monumental
entrance hall has been domesticated by the construction of a
bookstore and a café, for example, while the central salle des fêtes,
a vast space decorated with colonial-period frescos and surrounded by
galleries, has been converted into a public forum. This was being
used for radio broadcasts during the museum’s opening week. While
access to the permanent exhibition is still by way of the original
stairs, an external access way is planned. Designed by Japanese
installation artist Tadashi Kawamata, this can only help to refashion
the building further.

On reaching the exhibition spaces at the top of the building visitors
are greeted by charts showing patterns of human migration over the
past century or so, including into and out of Europe. In the
exhibition itself emphasis is placed on the human aspects of
immigration, video projections, biographical texts, photographs and
objects from the everyday lives of successive waves of immigrants
being used to drive home the idea that immigration into France has
meant a kind of double challenge for those involved: first, an
uprooting from their societies of origin, and second, the challenge
of integration into France.

Immigrants typically bring their cultures, languages and other items
of mental and physical baggage with them, and the exhibition makes
great play with the physical aspects of relocation. Immigrants have
come to France in boats, cars, planes, rafts and on foot, bringing
all manner of bags and cases with them, as well as various souvenirs
of home. Films and photographs are used to visualise these successive
arrivals, while display cases contain some of the different objects,
many of the meanest kind, that immigrants have brought with them to
begin new lives in France.

This material, evidence of the trauma of migration, is complemented
by material bearing witness to a second trauma upon arrival in
France. Even during the glory years of post-war immigration, roughly
from the mid 1950s to mid 1970s, life could be difficult for
immigrants coming to work in France’s expanding industry, with long
hours in physically tiring jobs and solitary rooms in workers’
hostels or welfare hotels being the lot of many. However, when the
post-war boom ended the lives of these new immigrants became even
harder: growth slowed, unemployment began its inexorable rise, and
immigrants were blamed for the economic crisis, being seen either as
taking "French jobs" or as being a "burden" on a state that was
falling ever more deeply into debt.

This situation has not substantially changed since the 1980s, and
politicians on the right have not hesitated to blame immigration for
the country’s economic and social woes. The struggle of France’s
immigrant communities for rights and recognition is highlighted in
the exhibition, as is their contribution to wider French society and
culture.

The exhibition repeats some rather tired clichés here, for example
regarding the contributions of men of immigrant origin to France’s
1998 World Cup football team, including that of the captain, Zinedine
Zidane, as well as the contributions of second and third-generation
immigrants to French cultural life and particularly to the country’s
youth culture. However, on the whole the exhibition resists the
temptation to talk up the achievements of a handful of celebrities,
instead focusing on ordinary lives and the experience of more
representative individuals.

According to the museum’s director, the collection aims to "blend
different ways of looking" at the experience of immigration, mixing
historical, ethnographic, anthropological and art historical
approaches. Thus, she says, the displays mix materials of very
different kinds, with historical and educational material being
placed cheek-by-jowl with personal reminiscences and works by artists
concerned with migration or immigration. Among these are Hamid
Debarrah’s Chronique du foyer de la rue Très Clo"tre, which records
the lives of men living in one of the French capital’s workers’
hostels, and an installation by artist Barthélémy Toguo entitled
Climbing Down.

Judging from the crowds at last week’s opening, the new museum has
been enthusiastically welcomed by the French public, if apparently
not by the country’s officialdom. The building itself is not
finished, and an auditorium is planned for 2008 and a research centre
for 2009, as well as further changes to the physical fabric. While
the permanent collection anchors the institution and provides a
summary of its concerns, it seems that the main function of the new
Cité will be to serve as a venue for talks, meetings and debate.

An ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions is planned, beginning
with a season on Armenian immigration to France, together with a
series of colloquiums and art installations. Anyone not speaking
French is likely to be at a disadvantage at these events, with all
the material available during opening week being in French including
the essential audioguide to the permanent collection.

Last week’s opening augers well for the future of this intriguing
institution. But whether it will really play the role assigned to it
depends upon how far it is able to assert its independence from
France’s all- enveloping cultural bureaucracy. If it can do this,
then it has a chance of attracting new audiences to learn about
issues of great contemporary interest. If it cannot, then it runs the
risk of becoming another promising initiative lost to the forces of
creeping bureaucratisation.

Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, Palais de la Porte
Dorée, avenue Daumesnil, Paris