I predict a riot.

Watching the people get lairy
Is not very pretty I tell thee
Walking through town is quite scary
And not very sensible either
A friend of a friend he got beaten
He looked the wrong way at a policeman
- The Kaiser Chiefs

Shut up. I know. This song is about Leeds. I'm not the only music snob. But I'm still going to talk about France because I think the lyrics are pretty apropos. In reality, I don't have that much to say that hasn't already been said before. North African immigrants reacting to racism. Pretty straight forward to me.

Marietta was one of my English students during my three months in Senegal. She was a little bit older than I was and had a 2 year old son, I never met him, he lived in the village with her mother. She didn't get a chance to see him all that much, she worked 7 days a week and used to come for help with her English homework after she was finished her day job. Marietta was a housemaid, and on the side she used to sell beaded necklaces which the expat community would snap up readily and greedily.

One thing that I particularly liked about Marietta other than her friendliness was that she spoke French with a perfect Parisian accent. Something that was really uncommon to find amongst the native Senegalaise. She was always a really welcome sight to me during my first few weeks in Dakar especially on Sundays at church where the usual suspects were a touch too snooty to speak to me. It took me awhile to get used to the Wolof accent which was inflected on the every day common French. In the beginning I wasn't all that curious as to why the Bowlers' house maid had such an impeccable Parisian accent.

Her father had a few wives, polygamy just like in Utah, is still practiced in many parts of North Africa. Marietta's dad left her along with her mother and took off for France with his latest wife. Some how or another she ended up joining her father in a suburb of Paris. She was about 13 and her new life in France consisted of 5 years of horrible physical abuse at the hands of her father and stepmother.

In the hot dusty afternoons, we used to sit outside to do our English classes. I'd lug out the massive copy of LaRousse which Mrs. Penney used when she was doing her MA in Quebec, and while trying to translate my lesson for her Marietta used to tell me bits and pieces about her life. She credits her social worker in France with saving her. When I met her she had been back in Senegal for just over 2 years (slightly enough time to get knocked up and have a kid). It was her social worker who suggested that she return to Dakar, realising that if she stayed on in France she'd most likely get beaten to death. Instead of just bundling her off on a Dakar bound plane she really went beyond her call of duty. She provided Marietta with all of the necessary correspondence booklets to finish off her French high school education. The social worker paid for it all out of her own pocket. (I was only useful for her English lessons, Mrs. Penney used to help her out with everything else, because I was hopeless and still am.) Marietta has the option of returning to France after she graduates from high school and no longer is a dependent on her father.

Mehdi was a first generation Frenchmen, his family was originally from Morocco. It's because of him that I'm dying to see Marrakesh with my own eyes. He only arrived towards the latter half of my stay, and we had to collaborate on a bunch of projects together. Although I found him mildly irritating we did have some really eye opening conversations. Mehdi was unwilling to pay any attention at all to his Moroccan heritage. Granted this is not uncommon, I know a bunch of Sri Lankans who'd sooner than later forget that they come for a hot, tropical, third world country and not the snowy wilderness of Ontario. But the way he used to vehemently deny that he was Moroccan, it smacked of 'the lady doth protest too much.'

What does this all mean? I'm not really sure and I don't think I'm some sort of a cultural authority on Franco-North African relations just because I spent a fair chunk of time in Senegal and am studying post-colonial history. (If I lived in America, I think I'd have enough credentials and bull shit in me to be a pundit on Fox News though.) It's much more complicated than that, and as the recent events in various different suburbs in Paris proves, it's also very unpredictable.

I wonder though, could what the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s did for America be likened to the riots that are currently rocking France?