What is Paris doing in the South Pacific?
Tales of incongruity
Dear Friend,
Please excuse the slightly offbeat – let’s say experimental-jazz-like – rhythm of my letters in recent weeks. I have been working a lot, travelling, welcoming beloved family members in Paris and on top of that I’ve also been grappling with various kinds of fiddly admin.
To lighten the administrative and mental load, I have recently taken the unusual move of hiring a boss for myself. Even more unusual, I am not paying this boss, and she is my own mother. I have two key goals for this year and both are bold: the first is submitting my application for French nationality (!) and the second is getting a driving licence. While these are my overarching priorities, the tasks involved often get shunted down to the bottom of my to-do list and I need help un-shunting them.
A few weeks ago, Mum and I set up an initial briefing call where we went through each of my administrative priorities and since then we have been following up with weekly check-in calls. I keep notes on a Google Doc and my mother keeps notes on a paper notepad.
As part of goal advancement, I recently had my first driving lesson in many years. I started learning when I was 18 and hoped it would be done in a few months, but at the end of my first lesson, my teacher looked at me with genuine pity in her eyes and said: “you’re not a natural driver Hannah, it’s going to be a long struggle for you.” It was, admittedly, not a great way to encourage a new student – but unfortunately she was right. I never built up momentum with driving, I failed two tests and some fifteen years on, I am still sans permis.
Having always lived in cities, I haven’t had a huge need to drive. What’s more, Paris is becoming increasingly car-unfriendly with restrictive speed limits, increasing pedestrianisation and miles of new cycle path. Recently statistics were released showing cycling has taken over the car as the third most used kind of transport in the French capital, behind walking and public transport.
My motivations are in some way more spiritual than practical. I have achieved things in my life, such as getting a degree or being published as a journalist, but I have never achieved something that’s so outside my natural skill range. I don’t have an innate capacity for spatial orientation. This caused some issues – mostly for myself – when I worked as a tour guide. I was fine offering advice about things to do, the history of the Ancien Regime etc., but if someone asked me the best way to get to Notre-Dame: panic!
Sometimes when other people describe the physical position of something (“it’s just perpendicular to this street, isn’t it?”), I nod along, marvelling at their supernatural skill. My brain-type makes driving particularly complicated, so it’s a kind of perverse personal challenge that brings me back behind the wheel.
When I turned up for my tester lesson the other day, I was nervous but – dare I say it – even a little excited. I had met the teacher once before and she seemed nice, relaxed, confident – maybe it was all going to be different this time!
“Here are the keys”, she said as I arrived, “the car is around the corner, go find it, get set up in the driver’s seat”. I found the car, opened it and climbed into the driver’s seat. I adjusted the chair and mirrors, put my hands on the wheel…I felt good, capable, like a driver! Perhaps in the interim years I had become not only older but an entirely new person, the kind of person who can just drive.
All I needed now was my teacher to show me the way, so I waited. And waited. About ten minutes later she bundled into the car. “I have a very busy day”, she said. “You won’t mind if I make a call while we drive?”. Before I could answer she was instructing me to start the engine and head off round the narrow Paris streets.
What followed was confusing. The whole forty-minute session, in which the teacher dictated firm and unpredictable instructions to me, was interspersed with intense phone conversations where she seemed to be doing the same with her mother, to the point where it was sometimes unclear whether she wanted me to turn right or pick up a bottle of peach juice, or maybe both.
Between phone calls she commented: “You’re really gripping the wheel, can’t you be more zen?”.
It wasn’t the most relaxing environment for the re-commencement of the Most Challenging Journey of my Life.
When the class ended, she turned to me and said, “now you know how I am, I’m direct! it’s up to you if you like my style”. We got out of the car and she walked off, “I need a coffee”, she said.
I discussed the experience with my manager and we decided perhaps she wasn’t the best teacher for me. I’m currently looking for another one.
What are the French doing in the South Pacific?
I first remember learning about les DOM-TOM , France’s overseas departments and territories, while studying French at school. I don’t recall learning much about the history of these regions that are ruled from Paris, but located across the world, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific.
These departments and territories, many of them islands, are the last vestiges of what was the French colonial empire.
The départements are are actually part of France and follow the exact same centralised rules as any place in ‘metropolitan’ France. They include the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean and La Réunion off the east coast of Africa. These are all considered to be within the European Union.
The territoires (TOM), as they were known, are now referred to as the Collectivité d'outre-mer (COM) and have a more autonomous relationship with Paris, but are still quite significantly tied by some combination of French subsidies, military, policing, education and language.
This week, one of the COM, Nouvelle Calédonie (New Caledonia), which has had several independence referendums in the last few years, has been all over the news following widespread political protest, blockades and rioting.
The archipelago, situated between Australia and Fiji is a collectivité outre-mer sui generis, a special status that means citizens can hold both Caledonian and French citizenship. The territory has its own legislative assemblies and its own government but also a Paris-appointed high commissioner and sends two representatives to the National Assembly and Senate.
The territory has exceptionally high levels of biodiversity thanks in part to the mountain range that runs down the largest island, Grande Terre — but it also has one of the world’s highest rates of carbon emissions per capita because of its globally significant nickel-mining industry. Elon Musk made a deal to get first dibs on nickel from one of the island’s major mines, which is used for the production of Tesla’s electric batteries.
The uprising on the archipelago is concentrated around the capital city of Nouméa and comes after the passing of a constitutional reform that would grant the right to vote to more recently arrived ‘metropolitan’ French people. For the independence movement, the move is seen as a way to further marginalise the voices of the Indigenous Kanak people, who represent about 40 percent of the total population.
Across the archipelago, the 270,000 Kanak people generally have less access to wealth and opportunity than the white French population — this includes those longer established from the 1800s, known as the “Caldoches”, and France-born new arrivals. The electoral rights of this latter group of newly arrived metropolitan French was the catalyst for the explosion of unrest that began a week ago. There has been rioting and a blockade of the road between the airport and the capital and several people have died, including two French police officers.
The interior minister Gérald Darmanin has responded with characteristic heavy-handedness. A state of emergency was rapidly imposed, 1000 additional police officers were sent from mainland France, a curfew was put in place and TikTok – where some of the organising of the uprising was taking place – was banned.
Representatives of French overseas departments including Réunion, Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as other French politicians, have called for the voting reform to be withdrawn immediately.
The name New Caledonia comes from British explorer James Cook, the first European to have seen the archipelago, because the mountains of Grande Terre reminded him of Scotland. In the 1850s under Napoleon III, France colonised the islands and forcibly contained the indigenous Kanak people onto reservations. As European settlers came to the region, many indigenous people died of smallpox and measles.
Later, French convicts were sent there, including a number of political prisoners from the 1870 Paris Commune uprising. Famous feminist revolutionary Louise Michel was among those sent to Nouvelle Calédonie. She befriended some Kanak people during her time there and took the side of the indigenous people during an uprising in 1878.
Nickel was found by the French quite soon after colonisation and was mined for profit by La société Le Nickel, a company founded by a British businessman and French engineers. Workers were brought over from neighbouring islands, as well as Japan and China. A version of the company still exists today, owned in majority by French mining multinational Eramet.
In contrast to mainland France, the island was on the side of the Free French Army during World War Two, and from 1942 became an Allied base from 1942. At one time, 50,000 American troops were stationed there. After the War, Nouvelle Calédonie was granted the status of territory.
In the 1980s, during a period known as ‘the events’, there were high and continued levels of unrest and rebellion against the post-colonial settlement. In 1988, the Matignon Accords laid out a path for reconciliation and respect. Ten years later, the Nouméa Accord laid out a path towards self-determination, with the promise of a series of three referendums on independence twenty years after that, in 2018.
The ‘no’ vote won twice, but by a smaller margin the second time. The independence movement objected to the timing of the third and final promised referendum in 2021, as they asked for it to be postponed until after the Covid crisis. When the government decided to go ahead, much of the Kanak community boycotted it. The ‘no’ vote won a resounding but hollow victory, given that most of the indigenous population did not participate.
This move to essentially further reduce the electoral clout of Kanak people was seen as the last straw.
Thirty-second book club
I have been reading a book that was first published in 1946 under the title How to be an Alien. It’s by George Mikes, a Hungarian immigrant to the UK and contains his witty and still mostly spot-on outsider’s observations about British life, in particular the foibles of the English. The edition I’m reading, which I found in a charity shop in London, is titled ‘How to be a Brit’, to make the theme even clearer. I have added a sticky note on every page where I find a funny or accurate quote and now the book is more sticky-note than anything else. It is also illustrated with top-notch cartoons by Nicolas Bentley, a celebrated British writer and artist who died in 1978.
Chapter titles and ensuing quotes include:
The Weather – “This is the most important topic in the land”
Soul and Understatement – “On the Continent you find any amount of people who sigh deeply for no conspicuous reason, yearn, suffer and look in the air extremely sadly. This is soul… The English have no soul; they have the understatement instead.”
How Not to be Clever – “In England it is bad manners to be clever, to assert something confidently. It may be your own personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state it in a self-assured way.”
How to be Rude – “It is easy to be rude on the Continent. You just shout and call people names of a zoological character… In England rudeness has quite a different technique. If somebody tells you an obviously untrue story, on the Continent you would remark ‘You are a liar, Sir, and a rather dirty one at that.’ In England you just say ‘Oh, is that so?’ Or ‘That’s rather an unusual story, isn’t it?’.”
The National Passion – “Queuing is the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race.”
Still on the subject of reading, this week I caught up with my wonderful friend Myriam, who is one of three sisters behind the life-affirming and beautiful Substack
(motto: “eat well, laugh loudly and love a lot”). Their latest newsletter features a short interview with me and photos of some of my favourite books. You can read it here.
Thank you for reading! I appreciated having the opportunity to learn more about New Caledonia while researching this letter, and DOM-TOMs more generally.
If you found the letter interesting, please consider sponsoring it, sharing it, tapping the little heart below or writing a letter back.
I will keep you updated on my driving travails.
I’ll write soon. Until then, have a lovely week!
Yours,
Hannah
It was a pleasure to read your letter as usual, but this week particularly as you explain the situation in New Caledonia to non French people. It’s quite alarming to see that the French government has caused the situation while knowing that the Kanak in the end, had always wanted their independence. Maybe it’s because the government see the Dom Tom has their colony. Ex: Guadeloupe and the chlordecone crisis that poison the entire population ( chlordecone is a pesticide which was forbidden in mainland France since the 80s but allow in Guadeloupe for economic reason). These territories are still being patronised…to say the least.
Also, yeah please change the instructor ! She is not direct , more rude lol.
I remember having one class in Reunion where I made a mistake , being too close from a motorcycle. As a reaction the instructor give me a tap in the hands… lol 😂
I still not have my permit.
I stopped my blabling. Excited to know what’s next !
Really enjoyed reading this! Very funny and relatable but also so instructive in bits! Thanks for this!