Avuncular American

Candles, Candlemas, and Saint Blaise

If on Candlemas day it be shower and rain
Winter's gone and will not come again.

English traditional proverb

The above is from Wilson's Almanac, which appears to be a zany Australian's way of pulling together minutiae about every feast, commemoration, or anniversary on any given day.  There's a whole lot more there on Candlemas and Ground Hog Day.

Last year on February 2nd I wrote a post on the same subject, and the links are probably still good.

In Brussels on this Candlemas Day (known as Chandeleur in French-speaking countries), it be snow and cold, so I'm not sure what that means for winter.  But we did have the traditional crepes, so I'm not complaining.

My "clip art" file on this computer's Word suite only has a drawing of a Kinara for candles, but that's close enough.  I had to look up Kinara on Wikipedia - now I know.

Since we're on matters of religion and the calendar, you might want to know that tomorrow 3 February is Saint Blaise Day.  As a little Catholic in the States attending parochial school, the nuns were always sure to have our throats blessed to prevent choking from fish bones.  As good little Catholics, we were certain to ingest fish every Friday, since eating meat was forbidden.

Happy Candlemas, and be sure to chew your fish well if you haven't gotten Saint Blaise's blessing with candles crossed on your throat.  And don't light the candles.

When Egypt Was Also Mediterranean & Levantine

I haven't - yet - seen Nadia Kamel's Salata Baladi (House Salad), her documentary about her multi-national, multi-confessional extended family in Egypt.  But today's BBC World Service program "Heart and Soul" (available here in podcast) provides a delightful introduction her film.

The notion of Egypt as a "land of opportunity" for Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, Armenians and others might strike readers as surprising - isn't Egypt a poor country, suffering high unemployment, a major aid recipient?  Ah, but it was not always so.

And it wasn't just related to the construction and maintenance of the Suez Canal.  The preponderance of French and Italian car mechanics made a lasting linguistic impression; names for car parts are Arabized versions of terms left behind by Jean-le-mecano.

When we lived in Alexandria in the early eighties, there were still remnants of these communities.  The Greek had been the largest - several hundred thousand - though by 1983 they had dwindled to a couple of thousand.  The others were even smaller.  There was still a lingering sense of what Lawrence Durrell might have observed while gathering material for the Alexandria Quartet.

The BBC program features interviews with filmmaker Nadia Kamel (who was a longtime assistant to the late Youssef Chahine) and Professor Khaled Fahmy of New York University. They trace the often complicated family histories that resulted from this influx of foreigners into 19th and 20th century Egypt.  For anyone who knows Egypt or Egyptians, the radio program's combination of music, excerpts from the film, and conversation succeeds in evoking the gentle warmth of Egyptians.

Egypt is not only Mediterranean and Levantine - but today it is easy to forget that it also has this rich multicultural heritage.  Probably the best place to get a feel for this side of Egypt is Alexandria, the metropolis on the Mediterranean so dear to the heart of Youssef Chahine.  Listen to the BBC podcast, and hear why Egypt does not always equate to Arab, Arab does not always connote Muslim, and Islam is not the only religion in the Middle East's most populous country.

Public Diplomacy Press & Blog Review: John Brown's Return

The following is sheer non-commercialism in the cause of spreading the word on behalf of a valued institution.  John Brown, fellow former FSO and refugee from the Bush Administration, who used to publish the highly-respected "Public Diplomacy Press And Blog Review" for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, is back after a hiatus of several months.  New location, same title ("Version 2.0"):

http://publicdiplomacypressandblogreview.blogspot.com/

It's spare, but no wonder: September 1 (American Labor Day, as it happens) was the site's launch.  Be among the first to read it!  John, welcome back to the blogosphere.

Française - Can You Ever Go Home Again?

Ireland, which until it became a Celtic tiger and had to import workers, used to have one export: people.  Many, including your correspondent's parents, wound up in America.  When they returned to Ireland - sometimes only after a brief stay in the US to earn some money - they were known as "Yanks," even if they remained in Ireland for the rest of their lives.

With millions of maghrebins and their descendants in France, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe, the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have plenty of cross-Med visitors all year round, but especially in the summer, as families fill up their cars with goodies and hop on car ferries in Marseille and elsewhere for Algiers, Tunis, Oran, and Tangier. As in Souad El Bouhati's latest film, entitled simply Française, some of these families decide to stay "home."  But are they simply transplanted immigres, French, or what?  And haven't they heard Thomas Wolfe's admonition, "You Can't Go Home Again?"

For Sofia, played by French revelation Hafsia Herzi (La Graine et le Mulet), "home" is France.  We see a glimpse of her life in France as an eight year old, and all the elements that cause problems in later life - coldly traditional mother, loving but uncommunicative father, "feminine" but slightly airhead sister - are sketched in the film's first ten minutes.  After the family's station wagon heads off for the port in the dead of the morning, the film fades to the teenage Sofia under a bright Moroccan sky.

She's a sort of tomboy helping out on her parents' farm when she's not excelling at school, her favorite shoes are what the Brits call "wellies," and she's desperate to return to France.  That's the story.

So if you think that all films by the growing stable of francophone directors of North African origin are coming-of-age, finding-yourself, cultural identity vehicles, and that there is nothing more to be gained by seeing yet another one after L'Esquive or La Graine et le Mulet, then maybe Française is not for you.  But if you like to glean cultural tidbits (like the girls-only boarding house for students away from the farm), or if you might enjoy another stunning performance by Cannes winner of the Meilleur espoir féminin in 2008, then I recommend Française.

Hafsia Herzi, in an interview with Frédéric Bouchaud in Cityvox.fr, said that she had found the script Sofia a bit "annoying," but was asked by the director to make her character "touching."  Stick with Herzi 'til the film's ending, where I defy any actor to find a wordless depiction of "touching" to top hers. 

How does Herzi deal with her cultural identity?  "Above all, I am French," she tells Bouchaud.  In addition to breaking into the directorial world with a short film in the making, she's been looking at scripts where the characters are called, as she says, "Juliette, Charlotte, and Magalie," all non-beur French names.  If any "beurette" can pull off such a crossover, it is this feisty twenty-one year old from Marseille.

Posthumous Blogging: The Orwell Diaries Start Saturday 9 August

This post is in the realm of a public service announcement: the good people of the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly, and the Media Standards Trust will start publishing George Orwell's diary, 70 years day for day, starting tomorrow. Check it out here. This is their concept:

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

I'm so enjoying Graham Greene's "Collected Essays" from the same period that I think I'm going to be a regular reader of Orwell's "blog."

Update 10 August: the first entry on 9 August did not disappoint, though Orwell's entry was on snakes, not civil wars.  According to a very nice article in The Telegraph, "George Orwell Would Have Blogged," Allan Massie shows that Orwell's eye for detail included an infinite array of subjects:

He delighted in trivia: "C, of my section of the Home Guard, a poulterer by trade but at present dealing in meat of all kinds, yesterday bought 20 zebras which are being sold off by the zoo. Only for dog-meat, presumably, not human consumption. It seems rather a waste" (April 24, 1941)

Glad to see that even during the Blitz the stiff upper lip allowed such niceties for doggies.  Massie reminds us that "the diaries have already been published in the 20-volume Complete Works, edited by Peter Davison, while excerpts from his wartime diary were included in the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, first published by Secker & Warburg in 1968, and then by Penguin two years later."  For those who like to read in bed or along a gurgling stream, this might be a better bet.

Chaotic Cairo: Egypt Loses Its Image-Maker, Youssef Chahine

(Image source: Tadrart.com)

The newspapers of the world are full of Youssef Chahine obituaries and testimonials (Ali Dilem's drawing in Algeria's Liberte is very touching), so I won't add to the confusion... or should I say "Fawda" (Chaos), the title of Chahine's last film.  I have seen a couple of his films, though I cannot count myself a fan.  Chahine's films tend to be unsubtle, a bit obvious, and not even the best that Egyptian cinema can offer - I much preferred Marwan Hamed's 2007 The Yacoubian Building, for its grasp of contemporary Egyptian society.

But Youssef Chahine is/was for much of the world Mr. Egyptian Cinema.  And his Egypt - secular, outward-looking, cosmopolitan, multicultural - is under threat.  The "Chaos" of his last film (I do want to see it, if only for that reason) reflects the transition from the usual chaotic, shambolic, overcrowded country at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Africa - but one legendary for its friendly, tolerant people, who have a special word for "contentment" - to a more deadly chaos born of religious intolerance and rule by a stultifying, corrupt government that hasn't changed in decades.

Thanks to an old friend who was my boss at the American Consulate in Alexandria (Chahine's home town, of which he was so proud he made several films in its honor) in the early eighties, I read a recent report in Bloomberg by Daniel Williams on Muslim-Christian strife, which conjured up worrying parallels with Lebanon.

Increasing violence between Egypt's Muslims and Coptic Christians is raising alarms that the sectarian hostility besetting Lebanon and Iraq may take root in the Middle East's most populous country.  Egypt's reputation for a live-and-let-live ethos is under assault following recent murders of Copts in Cairo, street fighting in cities including Alexandria and a pitched battle between Muslims and Coptic monks at an ancient desert monastery.  "The divisions are deepening,'' Hala Mustafa, editor of the political journal Democracy Review, said in a telephone interview.  "There's a growing Islamization of Egypt, and the Copts respond by turning inward in a defensive stance.  ''Muslims and Copts -- who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's 78 million citizens and are the country's most-populous minority -- increasingly identify themselves primarily by religion," Mustafa said.

Youssef Chahine, in his own preachy way, dedicated many of his films to fighting this kind of intolerance.  Son of a Christian Lebanese father and a Greek mother, he incarnated Alexandria's melting pot of Mediterranean peoples.

So if there is mourning over Youssef Chahine, it is in part over the kind of Egypt he represented, where Cairo was the Hollywood of the Middle East, and secular Arab nationalism - though its founder Gamal Adbel Nasser could sometimes be a thorn in the side of the West - is a matter of wistful nostalgia, compared to the contemporary dangers of obscurantism.  Chahine's cinema, with touches of Bollywood, was closer to the Italian realism of the fifties and sixties, when the raw images of Italy's postwar urban reconstruction provided the backdrop for social-themed melodrama.  Chahine's oeuvre (click the link to LeMonde's selection of film clips) covered contemporary themes, Arab history, and cinema itself.  He matters, for all those reasons, and Egyptian and Arab film makers have big shoes to fill.

Obama Overseas: One Man Public Diplomacy Triumph

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

Frank Rich, New York Times, Sunday July 27, 2008

(Image: BarackObama.com)

As usual, Frank Rich says in 43 words what others devote entire books trying to convey: the power of images.  Yes, the “Barack Obama Trip to the Middle East and Europe” was a campaign event, and yes, as such the US Embassy in Berlin prevented its diplomats from attending (see Foreign Service blogger LifeAfterJerusalem’s thoughtful explanation of the Hatch Act and its limitations for political activity by career government employees).

But if the embassy had “covered” the event, like it might for any gathering of 200,000 American flag-waving Germans, it might have caught a sense of the international importance of Barack Obama and his quest for the US presidency.  As Frank Rich points out, we haven’t seen this in a very long time.

On the night of September 11, 2001, after a long day “role playing” at an embassy emergency action security scenario – cut short by news of the real life emergency happening in the US – I was at home staying in touch with a large embassy nearby (Washington was shut down).  My phone rang, and it was the duty communications officer telling me of a gathering outside the embassy’s gate.  At first, in the heightened security posture and the tension of the day’s events, it appeared that it was a demonstration.  But no, it was simply a spontaneous flow of local citizens, placing flowers, candles, handwritten messages of condolence and solidarity with the United States in the hour of its tragedy.

You know the rest of the story.  The days, weeks, and months following September 11 saw a continuous flow of the same sentiment, at a personal and a governmental level, from Iceland to Iran.  The world was with us.  Afghanistan, the Taliban, al Qaeda – all the early American actions were supported in word and deed.  Then “you’re with us or you’re against us” and Iraq happened.  The magic was gone, and we are where we are.

Now there is another moment, and whatever Senator Barack Obama said in his speech in Berlin, or the content of his meetings with leaders from Afghanistan’s Karzai to Great Britain’s Brown, matters less than the popular public reaction to the person and the idea of Barack Obama.  Whether you are a Republican McCainiac or Democratic Hillraiser, I challenge you to deny the power that an Obama presidency could bring to America’s engagement with the world.

Public Diplomacy is more than Presidential (candidate) speeches abroad, and deeds must accompany the fine words.  But I have no doubt that an Obama Administration, following an act as unilaterally unpopular as the Bush White House, would begin with a massive reservoir of international good will.  Something that a McWhat’s His Name (sorry, but most people abroad cannot even identify by name the Republican candidate) Administration would struggle to earn, identified as Senator McCain is with the ignominious incumbent.

And while a President McCain might give a morale boost to the over-70 crowd who want to maintain their relevance, there is no question that a President Barack Hussein Obama has already sparked the hopes of millions of young minority political wannabees, from Harlem to Hamburg.  With a head start like this, the "combat-booted" (in Matt Armstrong's words) State Department’s public diplomacy establishment (enthralled by the "war metaphor" according to Pat Kushlis) had better prepare itself for a major overhaul to deal with the flowering of the kind of human-to-human cultural exchange that can build on the Obama Good Will "Bridge" Effect.

Cultural Diplomacy’s Finest Hour

Practicing Public Diplomacy:  A Cold War Odyssey
Yale Richmond, Berghahn Books, 2008, $29.95, hardback, 175 pages.

Yale Richmond’s latest book, Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey - part of the ongoing “Diplomats and Diplomacy” series jointly published by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired - is a lively and important study in memoir form.

Richmond skillfully provides both the background and “flash forward” context to his career in Eastern Europe during the decades following World War II.  There he took part in early cultural exchange efforts with the Soviet bloc, which he updates throughout his lifelong study of the region.

Readers will see parallels with today’s transformational diplomacy in Richmond’s years as a civilian “Resident Officer” in American-occupied Germany, from which he segued into the Foreign Service.  As ROs, precursors to today’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams, he and his military colleagues administered, with imagination and initiative, the post-Nazi “Reorientation Program.”  Richmond recalls asking himself, “How would Germans react to me as a Jew?”  His answer shows the strength of character and magnanimity toward his “hosts” that he displayed throughout his seven years in Germany.

The heart of this memoir is the time Richmond spends in Warsaw, Vienna and Moscow as a cultural and press officer.  (His “out-of-area” assignment in Laos provides a rare look at Indochina between the French and American wars there.) Warsaw, the “best post of my career,” gives Richmond free rein to build cultural programs, including the first Polish-U.S. Fulbright academic exchanges — precedent-setting given Cold War tensions.

The author generously credits his success there to a colleague’s counsel: “If you can show officials that you really like Poland, you can do almost everything you want here.”  And so he did for the next three years.

Serving diplomats might envy Richmond’s freedom of action during the heyday of showcasing American culture, before security and media placement priorities trumped libraries, and “strategic communication” and “information operations” came to vie with civilian public diplomacy. Entry-level officers, in particular, should see his story as confirmation of the importance of the “basics”: learning languages (in his case, at least four), and developing regional and functional expertise.  And for PD officers, the book will affirm their profession’s key role in opening Iron Curtain countries to Western influence, a vital step on the way to winning the Cold War.

The chapter “Shafted by Shakespeare” should be excerpted for AFSA’s dissent collection.*  Richmond’s finest hour, as a professional defending longterm American interests, was his run-in with Nixon political appointee Frank Shakespeare.  The new head of the U.S. Information Agency visited Moscow in 1969, bent on regime change. After years of carefully implementing the bilateral cultural agreement, Richmond was floored when Shakespeare blurted out, to American staff in a (presumably) bugged room, that USIA’s mission was to overthrow the Soviet government.

Richmond’s response took some boldness: “Mr. Shakespeare, that has never been the policy of the State Department ... our aim is to live with these people in peace.”  Though Shakespeare subsequently blocked Richmond’s promotion, the McCarthy era was over.  The Nixon administration’s embrace of detente vindicated Richmond, and he became a respected Washington expert in the burgeoning exchange program with the Soviet Union.

After leaving the Foreign Service, Richmond’s skills continued to be in demand in the waning years of the Soviet Union.  Richmond contributed to the Helsinki process and later joined the National Endowment for Democracy.

I entered the Foreign Service as Yale Richmond was retiring, but while reading Practicing Public Diplomacy I felt I’d gotten to know him.  His straightforward writing makes his humanity, humility and sense of humor almost tangible.  If I ever write a memoir, I would like it to be as instructive and enjoyable as Yale Richmond’s.

*This was first published in the July-August issue of the Foreign Service Journal, the monthly magazine of the American Foreign Service Association.

Wild Blood - Sanguepazzo: Familiar Fascists

Marco Tullio Giordana, director of what we saw in France as "Une Histoire Italienne," can do no wrong.  Maybe I'm too easy to please, but I found his six and a half hour (it was shown on European TV as a mini-series) La Meglio Gioventu (The Best of Youth, 2003) addictive.  Now that he has so accurately portrayed Italian youth in the Sixties and beyond, he has trained his eye for period detail on the 30s and 40s, the heyday and then precipitous fall of Mussolini's Fascist state.

The settings are properly sumptuous when depicting the film world of Cinecitta, and appropriately squalid when showing the depths of fascist depravity as their world collapses during the Allied liberation of Italy.  Casting Monica Bellucci as Luisa Ferida and Luca Zingaretti as Osvaldo Valenti is inspired - I have no idea whether they resemble the real actors murdered (executed?) in the confused bloodletting at war's end, but Bellucci is credible as a no-nonsense actress, and Zingaretti looks like current Italian prime minister Berlusconi, who looks like il Duce Mussolini...

Director Giordana plays with such historical flashbacks both on screen and off.  In a two page interview in France's Liberation when "Sanguepazzo" was released, he draws parallels between the fascism of Italy's inter war period and the "fascism" of Berlusconi's "control of the Italian imagination" through his omnipresence in both politics and the TV industry, much of which he owns.  Giordana spends much time disparaging Italian TV (if our two weeks there recently can serve as corroboration, we would agree: almost no documentaries, almost exclusively 50s style variety shows with a maximum of buxom dancing girls).  Awful as it is, Giordano asserts that most Italians spend hours glued to it every evening.  Bread and circuses... it all started in Rome.

I guess "Wild Blood" will not be for everyone.  Jay Weissberg, writing in Variety after Wild Blood was screened at Cannes, says that "Giordana's surprisingly wet treatment adds nothing incisive or complex to the debates" about the behavior of Italian partisans during the war, or the current rise of the far right in Italian politics.  Too bad that Weissberg's is one of the few mainstream reviews in English currently available, so we'll have to await release in the English speaking world to get divergent opinions.

In the meantime, Wild Blood offers, in my opinion, a credible, nuanced, and dramatic picture of an era that is not all that far away.  Giordana knows his fellow citizens' foibles, and his depiction of Italians is probably timeless, though set in the 1940s.  And fascism, while it may no longer wear black or brown shirts, is still with us.  Here the fascists are not all monolithic monsters, and those who collaborate with them sometimes do so for less than ideological motivations.  Anyway, go see it, if for no other reason than to see Monica la Bellissima.

(Photo credit: Ocean Films, distributor in France)

Two Shores, One Dream: Idir & El Gusto Bridge the Mediterranean

I’m still catching up after weeks in the mountains and on the road, so I’m only now writing about a concert we attended in Lyon on July 6, on our way back from Italy.  Our son treated us to tickets to “Nuit de l’Algérie,” a double bill concert at the city’s open air Roman theater.  And what a treat it was: legendary (it’s overused, but a term that suits) Kabyle (Berber) musician Idir (check out his website - he looks like an Avuncular Algerian), followed by the 40-member chaabi orchestra El Gusto.

The world has just finished paying brief attention to the Mediterranean and its peoples thanks to President Sarkozy’s weekend summit meeting in Paris, but the multicultural crowd in Lyon a week earlier personified a Mediterranean unified with a passion that politicians can only dream of.  On stage and in the audience, Muslim, Jew, Christian, whether Algerian, French, or a stray American – the atmosphere was joyous (El Gusto = “joy,” reflecting the Spanish/Sephardic element in Algeria’s melting pot).

Idir set the stage, and his following is intensely loyal.  Several showed up wrapped in Kabyle and Algerian flags, and it didn’t take long until they were dancing (mostly solo, in the demure folk style of North Africa that has vulgar belly dancing beat by a mile) in the Roman stone aisles.  Idir, who has been a Kabyle Algerian institution for more than thirty years, is a voice for moderation, for inter-religious fraternity, and respect for women.  Indeed, it appeared to us that of the largely Maghrebi-origin audience, women accounted for a hefty majority of Idir’s fans - though very few head scarves were in evidence.

Following the rousing folk-rock-fusion Idir group intro, it was a little odd to shift to the suited and decidedly graying “El Gusto,” which some European writers have nicknamed “the Algerian Buena Vista Social Club.”  Last year Robin Denselow of The Guardian attended an El Gusto concert in Marseille:

Behind the rabbi and the imam was a 42-piece orchestra, composed of Algerian Muslim and Jewish musicians. Some of them had lived together in the country before 1962 - the year of Algerian independence - when some 130,000 Algerian Jews, the vast majority of the community, fled for France, fearing for their future in what was now a Muslim state. It was the end of an era in which Muslim, Jewish, and European musicians had lived and played together in the narrow streets of the Casbah in Algiers, developing a rousing, wildly varied hybrid style - chaabi [literally, "popular"] - that the El Gusto project set out to rediscover.

No rabbi or imam on stage in Lyon, but otherwise an excellent resume of the band’s origins.  Just how "popular" is chaabi?  The concert flyer and website has a picture of three of the musicians practicing in what looks like an Algiers barber shop.

As in “Buena Vista” the Ry Cooder of El Gusto, responsible for bringing these respectable gents together, is a young Irish-Algerian film-maker, Safinez Bousbia.  According to Denselow, Bousbia

was determined to track down surviving musicians from the heyday of chaabi, the 1940s and 50s. Chaabi is a mix of Arabic and north African berber styles, blended with modern French chanson, American boogie and Latin American styles, brought by the American troops stationed in Algeria during the second world war. It's a lively, versatile music suitable for weddings, bars and concert halls alike, and played exclusively by men.

American boogie... that explains the banjos.  I can testify to the influence of American GIs, who landed in Vichy-held Algeria in November 1942: our plumber in Oran, an impressionable boy at the time, years later still remembered chewing bubble gum and repeating '40s pickup lines like “What’s cookin’ chicken?” for the soldiers’ amusement.  For francophone readers, it’s worth watching the video excerpt of Bousbia explaining her first contacts with the elderly musicians, whom she feared tiring out with the first hour and a half long session.  Not to worry: the music went on for close to four hours!  For anglophones, Quidam Productions has a wonderful series of clips from Bousbia's documentary film "El Gusto: The Good Mood."

Actually, we pooped out before the end of the Lyon concert, since the next day was a working day for our son and his girlfriend.  As we climbed down and left the amphitheater, the music followed us as we walked towards the car.  That night in Lyon was a gift, for us of course, but mainly for the young “beur” (French slang for the sons and daughters of Algerian, and also Moroccan and Tunisian, immigrants) fans celebrating these ambassadors of normality from the oft troubled country of their parents or grandparents.  I suspect that the audience, like some of the chaabi old timers, included a certain number of pieds noirs and their descendants, from the community of Europeans who left Algeria in 1962.  Algeria has a way of going to your head, and staying there, as Alistair Horne noted in his everlasting work on the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace - "l’Algérie, ça monte à la tête."

“Deux Rives, Un Rêve” (Two Shores, One Dream) is the title of Idir’s album that we picked up before the concert.  That’s exactly what was happening last week in Lyon.