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On immigrants in France
Immigrants' Dreams Mix With Fury Near Paris
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
LA COURNEUVE, France - Djamila has built her life around her sons. An Algerian-born nurse's aide who left the two husbands who abused her, she has soldiered on in the housing projects of this tough town near Paris, long confident that her four children would reap the benefits of being born French.
Yet each son found it harder to make his way in this world. And now, at 58, Djamila is caught between a determination that her youngest son will succeed and a sense of foreboding that he will not.
"I was happier than my children are," she said over tea and biscuits in her well-scrubbed, lace-curtained, two-bedroom apartment in one of France's roughest housing projects. "This is a place where gangrene has set in."
Her son, who goes by the nickname Looping, is 22 and jobless. He uses a simpler metaphor to describe his life. "The sun never shines," he said. "The buildings are gray. The people are gray. Everything is gray. It's the same people and there is nothing to do, nothing to do. You wake up every morning looking for work. But why? There isn't any."
La Courneuve, a town of 35,000 people of 80 nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, is a world away from Paris, though only a 10-minute ride on the high-speed intercity train.
It has become a symbol of France's failure to integrate millions of Arab and African immigrants - many of them Muslims - and their French-born children and grandchildren. It is also here that events helped start the riots that recently gripped poor neighborhoods throughout France.
The frustration and fury of the rioters is still visible in the two charred carcasses of delivery trucks that flank the main road into La Courneuve. They are even more apparent in conversations with the town's residents, those who, like Djamila, struggle to make do, and those who, like her son Looping, feel that every way out is blocked.
They asked that their last names not be used, fearing reprisals from the police, or even from neighbors.
Promised the ideal of a republican France, where the state is blind to race, religion and ethnicity and all citizens enjoy equal opportunity, both generations feel betrayed.
For Djamila, who is more outspoken than Looping, the overcrowded, underfinanced schools are "huge vacuums" that turn out students without trades and then blame the parents. The police are not guardians of the peace, she said, but corrupt, "beautiful bastards" who extort money or pocket the hashish they seize from neighborhood hoodlums.
The young - including Looping, she fears - easily fall victim to the cheap and plentiful hashish "that destroys their brains," she said. Those who burn cars are not evil, but understandably alienated. Her sons are never considered French, even though they were born in France, but rather "children of immigrants."
"Why do you think the young have revolted?" she asked. "There is no exit, no factories, no jobs for them. They see too much injustice, too, too, too much. Society no longer offers them anything - no values, no morality, no place."
Menace and Merriment
Outside the Balzac, the toughest public-housing apartment block in this tough town outside Paris, a young man rams a Peugeot into a parked car, piercing the afternoon ennui with the sound of crashing metal and tinkling glass. No police officers witness the act, but a band of comrades approve it with a loud whoop.
A few hundred yards away, some 50 women gather in a down-at-the-heel community center called Africa for a very different sort of neighborhood entertainment. Here it is the music that is loud.
As the crowd sings a song in Arabic about a bride on her wedding night, a woman wearing a smile of mischief arches her back, rotates her hips and starts dancing. Sensuality, not anger, fills the airless, windowless basement.
"We need to find ways to celebrate, to party," said a 71-year-old volunteer as she pulled women onto the dance floor. "We need to get our women out of the house."
La Courneuve is a town that menaces but also welcomes.
Branded by France's police intelligence agency as one of the country's 150 "no go zones," where police officers should enter only with major reinforcements, La Courneuve was caught up in the violence in which rioters torched cars, trashed businesses and ambushed the police.
It is here that a policeman was seriously injured and hospitalized one night in November when a metal ball was dropped on his head. It is also here that the police beat a young man who hurled insults at them, a moment of frustration and panic that was captured by a television crew and prompted the suspension of several officers.
Still, these projects struggle to preserve a spirit of community. Volunteers help elementary schoolchildren with their homework in a damp storage room with bare light bulbs and a concrete floor, steps away from street thugs who deal drugs, hashish mostly, but keep to themselves. Residents might refuse to tell outsiders their full names, for fear of retribution by the police or the petty gangsters, then invite them into their homes.
Even for Djamila, La Courneuve is a familiar neighborhood, a place where even the hashish dealers offer to carry her packages, where slightly older, more experienced men protect and settle scores for the younger ones, like Looping.
"The jewel of the family," she calls him, a "good boy who makes mistakes, doesn't work but has a golden heart. He has everything ahead of him. Our young are not bad. They are very loyal to each other, like a family. All is not completely lost."
Nowhere to Go
For Looping, the dream is to flee. But getting a job is hard with only a high school degree in accounting, an Arabic name and a five-digit postal address starting with "93," which identifies him as a resident of the suburbs. So he reads mystery novels and trolls the Internet every day looking for work that does not come.
"I didn't have a choice; the national education system told me what I had to study even though I wanted to know right at the beginning whether there would be a job at the end," he said over coffee with three of his friends at Le Pasteur, a cafe-restaurant. "People on the outside see us as car-burners and strange beings, when what I want at 22 is not to have to ask my mother for money."
Unemployment, which plagues three generations and averages 28 percent in the projects in La Courneuve, is much higher among young people. The average income is less than $10,000 a year here; the average Parisian makes more than twice that. Most families here receive some form of public assistance.
Looping agrees with his mother that his older brothers had an easier time finding their way a decade ago, when France's economy was healthier.
His eldest brother is married and has a 2-year-old son and a secure job as a shuttle bus driver at a Paris airport.
A second brother, who owns a small long-distance phone center, found refuge in Islam. When he was still a teenager, he grew a long beard, donned robes, began to pray five times a day and go to the neighborhood mosque. He married a woman who wears long black gloves and a black veil that covers her body and even her face.
A third brother, who had a respectable job in a cosmetics business, was recently laid off. With $4,700 due in back rent, he moved back in with his mother and sleeps on the pullout couch in the living room.
As for Looping, he is a man on the edge. He is so respectful that he won't smoke a cigarette in front of his mother, yet so desperate that he feels the pull of crime. He has no girlfriend; that would take money. "When I'm in a really bad state," he said, "I have this desire to go into Paris, grab a few handbags and come back home again."
After all, he added: "In the eyes of people or the police when I walk on the street, in front of institutions or an employer, I am considered like a thug. Women hide their purses when they go by me."
Then he thinks of the fate of Tony Montana, Al Pacino's dishwasher-turned-drug-lord character in the 1983 film "Scarface," whose aura hovers over French suburbs like La Courneuve. Scarface-like thugs are the heroes of films and rap songs about life here. "Tony dies in the end, that's the moral of the film," he said. "But the young thugs don't see it that way. They think they're smarter than Tony."
His mother has paid $400 for a training program so that Looping can get a special license to drive construction vehicles. He is grateful, despite the strict rules she imposes on him - the early curfews, the limits on his comings and goings, the careful monitoring of his friendships.
But he is disgusted by the litter in the hallways and the habits some of the new immigrants, who toss trash out the windows and allow their young children to wander the streets. "They even throw diapers out the windows," he said. "It's miserable to say this, but it's as if we live in a garbage dump, so what difference does it make if there is one more bag of trash thrown into it?"
Fertile Ground for Violence
In the early 1960's, the landscape of La Courneuve was transformed when a concrete jungle of apartment blocks was built as low-income, temporary lodging for migrant labor. The "cité of 4,000," as it was called, after its number of apartments, was considered at the time to be a model of modern urban architecture.
But the walls of the projects were thin, the elevators tiny and temperamental, the resources to support the projects meager. The Communist Party, which for decades had given the town's working-class residents a vision and an anchor of social support, lost most of its power and influence. Many of the families who could move away left.
For many of its residents, the 14-story Balzac stands as a monument to a failed urban experiment. Its elevators have a will of their own. A urine smell invades the corridors. Graffiti call the police "assassins." For a fee, middlemen have been known to break down a door and install squatters in a vacated apartment.
Yet the view from the balconies of the long, high building capture the complexity of life here: a dusty area below that once was a soccer field, the high-speed intercity train tracks that lead into Paris, the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre in the distance.
Instead of being renovated, the building is scheduled to be demolished in a few years, just like those with names like Renoir and Debussy have been in recent years. The urban renewal project is ambitious: to relocate residents into smaller, more intimate buildings. The apartments will be smaller and more expensive.
The Balzac is perhaps best known for a tragedy last Father's Day. It was in front of the building that a death last June set off a chain of events that led to the country's recent urban unrest.
An 11-year-old, Sidi-Ahmed Hammache, was accidentally shot to death in a feud between a group of ethnic Tunisians and ethnic Comorans as he washed his father's car.
Guns are rarely used to settle scores in France, and the boy's death shocked the country. The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, a possible presidential candidate for 2007, rushed to the scene, trailed by television cameras. He vowed to "clean" La Courneuve's housing projects with a "Karcher," the brand name of a high-powered hose used to wash off graffiti.
To the townspeople, the words smacked of racism. Even those who fully embraced the goal of cracking down on crime were enraged. After two youths of African origin were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from the police on Oct. 27, the waves of car-burning began.
Looping and his friends stayed on the sidelines. But one of those swept up in the violence in La Courneuve was Yacine, a pimply, Algerian-born 17-year-old high school student.
He had never been in trouble before. But when he and a friend found themselves in front of a group of anti-riot police officers, they succumbed to a temptation to throw stones at them.
"We yelled at them and called them things like 'sons of bitches,' " he said. "The police beat us. They called us 'dirty Arabs.' They said, 'Go back to your country.' We yelled back, 'Dirty French.' "
Police officers handcuffed them and charged them with incitement to riot. Yacine went to the hospital where a doctor bandaged his face and wrote him a note excusing him from school for a week. He and his parents did not protest. They would have needed a lawyer, and they would lose anyway, he says.
Interviewed days later, with his nose still swollen, his left cheek gashed and bandaged, Yacine was angry. "Before this, I would have never thought that I could get into a fight with the police," he said. "Now, if I'm asked to beat a French, I would do it. I don't feel French."
Looping knows the feeling. If he is in trouble, he says, he does not turn to the police for help, but to the "older brothers" in the neighborhood. "They can settle the problem 10 times faster than the police," he said.
The police, he added, often stop him and his friends for no reason, check their identity papers and empty their pockets looking for drugs. Three years ago he was arrested when officers mistakenly thought he was part of a group insulting them. "Sure, they hit me, that's routine for them," he said. Rather than fight the charge, his mother paid the $300 fine.
A Juvenile Revolution
Playing pool one evening at Le Pasteur, Looping and three of his friends offer their analysis of the unrest that rocked France.
"This is not an Islamic revolution, make sure you understand that," Looping said.
"It's a juvenile revolution!" declared Josselin, 22, who is half-French, half-Vietnamese and works in a marble factory.
Neighborhood Muslim leaders have campaigned hard to make it clear that the urban unrest had nothing to do with Islam, radical or otherwise, and that many of the country's rioters came from Catholic or animist backgrounds.
Soon after the violence started, for example, the powerful Union of Islamic Organizations in France, which runs the biggest mosque in the Paris area - it is on the edge of La Courneuve - issued a fatwa. It forbade "every Muslim seeking satisfaction and divine grace" to take part in any act of violence.
Police investigators are quick to point out that there is no link between the recent riots and radical Islam. Asked by Le Monde recently about such a link, Pascal Mailhos, director general of the Renseignements Généraux, the police intelligence agency, replied, "The participation of radical Islamists in the violence was nil." Still, there is a widespread recognition, both here and throughout France, that humiliation and alienation can lead young people to embrace religious extremism and even terrorism. Connections to radical individuals and groups in nearby Arab countries are strong.
Indeed, in recent years, La Courneuve and the surrounding suburbs have been the origin of some of the most serious plots of terrorism involving radical Islamists.
In 1994, in one of France's first encounters with radical Islamic terrorism, two unemployed French-born men from La Courneuve hid their faces behind masks and shot up a hotel in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. Two Spanish tourists were killed.
During their trial in 1995, they testified that during several months of indoctrination, they watched videos of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims and of Palestinian suffering in Israeli-occupied territory, then were sent to a military training camp in Pakistan. They were condemned to death. President Jacques Chirac interceded with the Moroccan government to have their sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
Their involvement in terrorism still baffles residents of the town, including Looping and his mother. "They were the 'grand ones' of the neighborhood for me," Looping said. "They were super nice and super respectful. If they saw a young girl being harassed, they'd give her a hand. If a young guy didn't have any money, they'd give him money. I was stunned by what happened."
In 2002, in what is still a continuing investigation, the police arrested three men from La Courneuve along with others from a nearby suburb on suspicion of plotting to attack the Russian Embassy and other targets in Paris with cyanide gas. Among the items discovered by the police were radical Islamic literature, more than $25,000 in cash, counterfeit passports and a protective suit used in handling toxic chemicals. One of those arrested had trained in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
In September, the police bored in on suburbs like La Courneuve as well as parts of Paris where they uncovered a group of young men planning to fight with the insurrection in Iraq. A Tunisian-born man in his mid-20's who was arrested lived in La Courneuve.
A Feeling of Frenchness
On a bone-chilling morning at the town cemetery on Veterans Day, a group of white-gloved veterans from various wars carried the French flag, the town's brass band played "La Marseillaise," and a moment of silence was observed, an annual ritual throughout all of France's cities and towns. Various political parties laid bouquets in honor of the war dead.
Even in La Courneuve, there is a determination to hold on to the rituals of the French Republic. "Long Live the Republic! Long Live France! Long Live Peace!" Alfred Jannier, the 74-year-old president of the local veterans' association, told the crowd.
Gilles Poux, the town's Communist mayor, followed with a speech criticizing the government for the riots.
"In recent years, governmental policy choices have made the situation worse," Mr. Poux said. "We need more than boastful speeches and a state of emergency." The solution, he added, was simple: "more money: money for training, for jobs, for housing, for urban renewal, for security, for prevention, for health."
Looping was not there. For him, the event celebrated the other France, a colonial, imperial France that has not yet come to terms with ethnic Arabs like him. But even as he expresses his feeling of not belonging, he talks of his Frenchness and his claim to the rights he is owed. If he wants to leave, he wants to leave the poor spaces of La Courneuve, not France.
He dreams of being a popular actor or a writer in 10 years. He will have a wife and two children and a cottage for them and a cottage for his mother, he says. Hers will have a garden where she can read books. He will travel to Japan, to Thailand, to the United States.
"But that, Madame, is only my dream," he said. "For me, it is inaccessible. The most I can ever aim for is a steady job that pays something every month."
On the Armenian alphabet
Armenians Celebrate Their Letters
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
IT'S not every day you are invited to a 1,600th birthday party, let alone one for an alphabet.
But last week, that's exactly what brought more than 200 people to a parking lot in New Milford, N.J., across the street from a CVS and a karate studio, where they huddled together in a shivering herd, clapping their mittens and whispering prayers in frosty breath to the Armenian alphabet, created in the fifth century.
The Hovnanian School, a private day school that teaches the Armenian language, held the party and celebrated the occasion by unveiling an alphabet mural. The moment the white sheet dropped from the wall, revealing the 38 freshly-painted letters, even the hooded priests in heavy Darth Vaderish cloaks let out a cheer.
"Armenians have a bit of a love affair with their language," explained Ara Araz of Wyckoff, whose three children attend the Hovnanian School. "I guess it's what keeps us together."
Linguists say the Armenian alphabet is one of the oldest in the world that is still in use. It has proved remarkably durable, surviving a carousel of empires, vast migrations and even genocide. Armenia is a small country with a big diaspora, and its language is valued as the glue that has held the community together. Today's 38 letters vary little from the original 36, which were first brushed by an Armenian monk around A.D. 405 in order to translate the Bible.
And just a few more A B C's of the alphabet, so to speak: Like every other known phonetic alphabet, the Armenian alphabet ultimately traces its roots back to the Phoenicians, who invented the first known phonetic script.
In the fourth century, Armenia was split between the Persian and the Byzantine empires, and the little country had to make a choice: East or West. Eastern letters (as in Arabic) tend to be horizontal. Western letters tend to be vertical. The Armenians chose a vertical script inspired by Greek and Syriac and thereafter cast their fate with the West.
The crowd that huddled together on the freezing cold asphalt in New Milford was actually taking part in one of many alphabet soirees held this fall by Armenians across the world, in Los Angeles, Lebanon, Germany, Russia and, of course, Armenia.
And so, as sheet cake was sliced and plastic glasses of Martini & Rossi raised, the partygoers sang, "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Ayp Pen Keem" - the Armenian A B C's - "happy birthday to you."
On how children learn by imitation, even when other primates don't.
Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't.
By CARL ZIMMER
I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees?
A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution.
His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box.
The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food.
Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.
The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.
The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.
The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.
The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on."
It was possible, however, that the results might come from a simple desire in the children just to play along. To see how deep this urge to overimitate went, Mr. Lyons came up with new experiments with the transparent box. He worked with a summer intern, Andrew Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned out a much larger study, with 100 children.
I was intrigued. I signed up Charlotte, and she participated in the study twice, first at the school and later at Mr. Lyons's lab.
Charlotte didn't feel like talking about either experience beyond saying they were fun. As usual, she was more interested in talking about atoms and princesses.
Mr. Lyons was more eager to talk. He invited me to go over Charlotte's performance at the Yale Cognition and Development Lab, led by Mr. Lyons's adviser, Frank C. Keil.
Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens.
At first, she did. Mr. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent plastic box.
He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle. "I've got it!" she shouted.
A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought.
But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting.
Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly.
"She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to.
If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that.
Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.
As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.
Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said.
We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it."
In a few years, I plan to explain this experience to Charlotte. I want her to know what I now know. That it's O.K. to lose to the chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human.
Immigrants' Dreams Mix With Fury Near Paris
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
LA COURNEUVE, France - Djamila has built her life around her sons. An Algerian-born nurse's aide who left the two husbands who abused her, she has soldiered on in the housing projects of this tough town near Paris, long confident that her four children would reap the benefits of being born French.
Yet each son found it harder to make his way in this world. And now, at 58, Djamila is caught between a determination that her youngest son will succeed and a sense of foreboding that he will not.
"I was happier than my children are," she said over tea and biscuits in her well-scrubbed, lace-curtained, two-bedroom apartment in one of France's roughest housing projects. "This is a place where gangrene has set in."
Her son, who goes by the nickname Looping, is 22 and jobless. He uses a simpler metaphor to describe his life. "The sun never shines," he said. "The buildings are gray. The people are gray. Everything is gray. It's the same people and there is nothing to do, nothing to do. You wake up every morning looking for work. But why? There isn't any."
La Courneuve, a town of 35,000 people of 80 nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, is a world away from Paris, though only a 10-minute ride on the high-speed intercity train.
It has become a symbol of France's failure to integrate millions of Arab and African immigrants - many of them Muslims - and their French-born children and grandchildren. It is also here that events helped start the riots that recently gripped poor neighborhoods throughout France.
The frustration and fury of the rioters is still visible in the two charred carcasses of delivery trucks that flank the main road into La Courneuve. They are even more apparent in conversations with the town's residents, those who, like Djamila, struggle to make do, and those who, like her son Looping, feel that every way out is blocked.
They asked that their last names not be used, fearing reprisals from the police, or even from neighbors.
Promised the ideal of a republican France, where the state is blind to race, religion and ethnicity and all citizens enjoy equal opportunity, both generations feel betrayed.
For Djamila, who is more outspoken than Looping, the overcrowded, underfinanced schools are "huge vacuums" that turn out students without trades and then blame the parents. The police are not guardians of the peace, she said, but corrupt, "beautiful bastards" who extort money or pocket the hashish they seize from neighborhood hoodlums.
The young - including Looping, she fears - easily fall victim to the cheap and plentiful hashish "that destroys their brains," she said. Those who burn cars are not evil, but understandably alienated. Her sons are never considered French, even though they were born in France, but rather "children of immigrants."
"Why do you think the young have revolted?" she asked. "There is no exit, no factories, no jobs for them. They see too much injustice, too, too, too much. Society no longer offers them anything - no values, no morality, no place."
Menace and Merriment
Outside the Balzac, the toughest public-housing apartment block in this tough town outside Paris, a young man rams a Peugeot into a parked car, piercing the afternoon ennui with the sound of crashing metal and tinkling glass. No police officers witness the act, but a band of comrades approve it with a loud whoop.
A few hundred yards away, some 50 women gather in a down-at-the-heel community center called Africa for a very different sort of neighborhood entertainment. Here it is the music that is loud.
As the crowd sings a song in Arabic about a bride on her wedding night, a woman wearing a smile of mischief arches her back, rotates her hips and starts dancing. Sensuality, not anger, fills the airless, windowless basement.
"We need to find ways to celebrate, to party," said a 71-year-old volunteer as she pulled women onto the dance floor. "We need to get our women out of the house."
La Courneuve is a town that menaces but also welcomes.
Branded by France's police intelligence agency as one of the country's 150 "no go zones," where police officers should enter only with major reinforcements, La Courneuve was caught up in the violence in which rioters torched cars, trashed businesses and ambushed the police.
It is here that a policeman was seriously injured and hospitalized one night in November when a metal ball was dropped on his head. It is also here that the police beat a young man who hurled insults at them, a moment of frustration and panic that was captured by a television crew and prompted the suspension of several officers.
Still, these projects struggle to preserve a spirit of community. Volunteers help elementary schoolchildren with their homework in a damp storage room with bare light bulbs and a concrete floor, steps away from street thugs who deal drugs, hashish mostly, but keep to themselves. Residents might refuse to tell outsiders their full names, for fear of retribution by the police or the petty gangsters, then invite them into their homes.
Even for Djamila, La Courneuve is a familiar neighborhood, a place where even the hashish dealers offer to carry her packages, where slightly older, more experienced men protect and settle scores for the younger ones, like Looping.
"The jewel of the family," she calls him, a "good boy who makes mistakes, doesn't work but has a golden heart. He has everything ahead of him. Our young are not bad. They are very loyal to each other, like a family. All is not completely lost."
Nowhere to Go
For Looping, the dream is to flee. But getting a job is hard with only a high school degree in accounting, an Arabic name and a five-digit postal address starting with "93," which identifies him as a resident of the suburbs. So he reads mystery novels and trolls the Internet every day looking for work that does not come.
"I didn't have a choice; the national education system told me what I had to study even though I wanted to know right at the beginning whether there would be a job at the end," he said over coffee with three of his friends at Le Pasteur, a cafe-restaurant. "People on the outside see us as car-burners and strange beings, when what I want at 22 is not to have to ask my mother for money."
Unemployment, which plagues three generations and averages 28 percent in the projects in La Courneuve, is much higher among young people. The average income is less than $10,000 a year here; the average Parisian makes more than twice that. Most families here receive some form of public assistance.
Looping agrees with his mother that his older brothers had an easier time finding their way a decade ago, when France's economy was healthier.
His eldest brother is married and has a 2-year-old son and a secure job as a shuttle bus driver at a Paris airport.
A second brother, who owns a small long-distance phone center, found refuge in Islam. When he was still a teenager, he grew a long beard, donned robes, began to pray five times a day and go to the neighborhood mosque. He married a woman who wears long black gloves and a black veil that covers her body and even her face.
A third brother, who had a respectable job in a cosmetics business, was recently laid off. With $4,700 due in back rent, he moved back in with his mother and sleeps on the pullout couch in the living room.
As for Looping, he is a man on the edge. He is so respectful that he won't smoke a cigarette in front of his mother, yet so desperate that he feels the pull of crime. He has no girlfriend; that would take money. "When I'm in a really bad state," he said, "I have this desire to go into Paris, grab a few handbags and come back home again."
After all, he added: "In the eyes of people or the police when I walk on the street, in front of institutions or an employer, I am considered like a thug. Women hide their purses when they go by me."
Then he thinks of the fate of Tony Montana, Al Pacino's dishwasher-turned-drug-lord character in the 1983 film "Scarface," whose aura hovers over French suburbs like La Courneuve. Scarface-like thugs are the heroes of films and rap songs about life here. "Tony dies in the end, that's the moral of the film," he said. "But the young thugs don't see it that way. They think they're smarter than Tony."
His mother has paid $400 for a training program so that Looping can get a special license to drive construction vehicles. He is grateful, despite the strict rules she imposes on him - the early curfews, the limits on his comings and goings, the careful monitoring of his friendships.
But he is disgusted by the litter in the hallways and the habits some of the new immigrants, who toss trash out the windows and allow their young children to wander the streets. "They even throw diapers out the windows," he said. "It's miserable to say this, but it's as if we live in a garbage dump, so what difference does it make if there is one more bag of trash thrown into it?"
Fertile Ground for Violence
In the early 1960's, the landscape of La Courneuve was transformed when a concrete jungle of apartment blocks was built as low-income, temporary lodging for migrant labor. The "cité of 4,000," as it was called, after its number of apartments, was considered at the time to be a model of modern urban architecture.
But the walls of the projects were thin, the elevators tiny and temperamental, the resources to support the projects meager. The Communist Party, which for decades had given the town's working-class residents a vision and an anchor of social support, lost most of its power and influence. Many of the families who could move away left.
For many of its residents, the 14-story Balzac stands as a monument to a failed urban experiment. Its elevators have a will of their own. A urine smell invades the corridors. Graffiti call the police "assassins." For a fee, middlemen have been known to break down a door and install squatters in a vacated apartment.
Yet the view from the balconies of the long, high building capture the complexity of life here: a dusty area below that once was a soccer field, the high-speed intercity train tracks that lead into Paris, the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre in the distance.
Instead of being renovated, the building is scheduled to be demolished in a few years, just like those with names like Renoir and Debussy have been in recent years. The urban renewal project is ambitious: to relocate residents into smaller, more intimate buildings. The apartments will be smaller and more expensive.
The Balzac is perhaps best known for a tragedy last Father's Day. It was in front of the building that a death last June set off a chain of events that led to the country's recent urban unrest.
An 11-year-old, Sidi-Ahmed Hammache, was accidentally shot to death in a feud between a group of ethnic Tunisians and ethnic Comorans as he washed his father's car.
Guns are rarely used to settle scores in France, and the boy's death shocked the country. The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, a possible presidential candidate for 2007, rushed to the scene, trailed by television cameras. He vowed to "clean" La Courneuve's housing projects with a "Karcher," the brand name of a high-powered hose used to wash off graffiti.
To the townspeople, the words smacked of racism. Even those who fully embraced the goal of cracking down on crime were enraged. After two youths of African origin were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from the police on Oct. 27, the waves of car-burning began.
Looping and his friends stayed on the sidelines. But one of those swept up in the violence in La Courneuve was Yacine, a pimply, Algerian-born 17-year-old high school student.
He had never been in trouble before. But when he and a friend found themselves in front of a group of anti-riot police officers, they succumbed to a temptation to throw stones at them.
"We yelled at them and called them things like 'sons of bitches,' " he said. "The police beat us. They called us 'dirty Arabs.' They said, 'Go back to your country.' We yelled back, 'Dirty French.' "
Police officers handcuffed them and charged them with incitement to riot. Yacine went to the hospital where a doctor bandaged his face and wrote him a note excusing him from school for a week. He and his parents did not protest. They would have needed a lawyer, and they would lose anyway, he says.
Interviewed days later, with his nose still swollen, his left cheek gashed and bandaged, Yacine was angry. "Before this, I would have never thought that I could get into a fight with the police," he said. "Now, if I'm asked to beat a French, I would do it. I don't feel French."
Looping knows the feeling. If he is in trouble, he says, he does not turn to the police for help, but to the "older brothers" in the neighborhood. "They can settle the problem 10 times faster than the police," he said.
The police, he added, often stop him and his friends for no reason, check their identity papers and empty their pockets looking for drugs. Three years ago he was arrested when officers mistakenly thought he was part of a group insulting them. "Sure, they hit me, that's routine for them," he said. Rather than fight the charge, his mother paid the $300 fine.
A Juvenile Revolution
Playing pool one evening at Le Pasteur, Looping and three of his friends offer their analysis of the unrest that rocked France.
"This is not an Islamic revolution, make sure you understand that," Looping said.
"It's a juvenile revolution!" declared Josselin, 22, who is half-French, half-Vietnamese and works in a marble factory.
Neighborhood Muslim leaders have campaigned hard to make it clear that the urban unrest had nothing to do with Islam, radical or otherwise, and that many of the country's rioters came from Catholic or animist backgrounds.
Soon after the violence started, for example, the powerful Union of Islamic Organizations in France, which runs the biggest mosque in the Paris area - it is on the edge of La Courneuve - issued a fatwa. It forbade "every Muslim seeking satisfaction and divine grace" to take part in any act of violence.
Police investigators are quick to point out that there is no link between the recent riots and radical Islam. Asked by Le Monde recently about such a link, Pascal Mailhos, director general of the Renseignements Généraux, the police intelligence agency, replied, "The participation of radical Islamists in the violence was nil." Still, there is a widespread recognition, both here and throughout France, that humiliation and alienation can lead young people to embrace religious extremism and even terrorism. Connections to radical individuals and groups in nearby Arab countries are strong.
Indeed, in recent years, La Courneuve and the surrounding suburbs have been the origin of some of the most serious plots of terrorism involving radical Islamists.
In 1994, in one of France's first encounters with radical Islamic terrorism, two unemployed French-born men from La Courneuve hid their faces behind masks and shot up a hotel in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. Two Spanish tourists were killed.
During their trial in 1995, they testified that during several months of indoctrination, they watched videos of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims and of Palestinian suffering in Israeli-occupied territory, then were sent to a military training camp in Pakistan. They were condemned to death. President Jacques Chirac interceded with the Moroccan government to have their sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
Their involvement in terrorism still baffles residents of the town, including Looping and his mother. "They were the 'grand ones' of the neighborhood for me," Looping said. "They were super nice and super respectful. If they saw a young girl being harassed, they'd give her a hand. If a young guy didn't have any money, they'd give him money. I was stunned by what happened."
In 2002, in what is still a continuing investigation, the police arrested three men from La Courneuve along with others from a nearby suburb on suspicion of plotting to attack the Russian Embassy and other targets in Paris with cyanide gas. Among the items discovered by the police were radical Islamic literature, more than $25,000 in cash, counterfeit passports and a protective suit used in handling toxic chemicals. One of those arrested had trained in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
In September, the police bored in on suburbs like La Courneuve as well as parts of Paris where they uncovered a group of young men planning to fight with the insurrection in Iraq. A Tunisian-born man in his mid-20's who was arrested lived in La Courneuve.
A Feeling of Frenchness
On a bone-chilling morning at the town cemetery on Veterans Day, a group of white-gloved veterans from various wars carried the French flag, the town's brass band played "La Marseillaise," and a moment of silence was observed, an annual ritual throughout all of France's cities and towns. Various political parties laid bouquets in honor of the war dead.
Even in La Courneuve, there is a determination to hold on to the rituals of the French Republic. "Long Live the Republic! Long Live France! Long Live Peace!" Alfred Jannier, the 74-year-old president of the local veterans' association, told the crowd.
Gilles Poux, the town's Communist mayor, followed with a speech criticizing the government for the riots.
"In recent years, governmental policy choices have made the situation worse," Mr. Poux said. "We need more than boastful speeches and a state of emergency." The solution, he added, was simple: "more money: money for training, for jobs, for housing, for urban renewal, for security, for prevention, for health."
Looping was not there. For him, the event celebrated the other France, a colonial, imperial France that has not yet come to terms with ethnic Arabs like him. But even as he expresses his feeling of not belonging, he talks of his Frenchness and his claim to the rights he is owed. If he wants to leave, he wants to leave the poor spaces of La Courneuve, not France.
He dreams of being a popular actor or a writer in 10 years. He will have a wife and two children and a cottage for them and a cottage for his mother, he says. Hers will have a garden where she can read books. He will travel to Japan, to Thailand, to the United States.
"But that, Madame, is only my dream," he said. "For me, it is inaccessible. The most I can ever aim for is a steady job that pays something every month."
On the Armenian alphabet
Armenians Celebrate Their Letters
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
IT'S not every day you are invited to a 1,600th birthday party, let alone one for an alphabet.
But last week, that's exactly what brought more than 200 people to a parking lot in New Milford, N.J., across the street from a CVS and a karate studio, where they huddled together in a shivering herd, clapping their mittens and whispering prayers in frosty breath to the Armenian alphabet, created in the fifth century.
The Hovnanian School, a private day school that teaches the Armenian language, held the party and celebrated the occasion by unveiling an alphabet mural. The moment the white sheet dropped from the wall, revealing the 38 freshly-painted letters, even the hooded priests in heavy Darth Vaderish cloaks let out a cheer.
"Armenians have a bit of a love affair with their language," explained Ara Araz of Wyckoff, whose three children attend the Hovnanian School. "I guess it's what keeps us together."
Linguists say the Armenian alphabet is one of the oldest in the world that is still in use. It has proved remarkably durable, surviving a carousel of empires, vast migrations and even genocide. Armenia is a small country with a big diaspora, and its language is valued as the glue that has held the community together. Today's 38 letters vary little from the original 36, which were first brushed by an Armenian monk around A.D. 405 in order to translate the Bible.
And just a few more A B C's of the alphabet, so to speak: Like every other known phonetic alphabet, the Armenian alphabet ultimately traces its roots back to the Phoenicians, who invented the first known phonetic script.
In the fourth century, Armenia was split between the Persian and the Byzantine empires, and the little country had to make a choice: East or West. Eastern letters (as in Arabic) tend to be horizontal. Western letters tend to be vertical. The Armenians chose a vertical script inspired by Greek and Syriac and thereafter cast their fate with the West.
The crowd that huddled together on the freezing cold asphalt in New Milford was actually taking part in one of many alphabet soirees held this fall by Armenians across the world, in Los Angeles, Lebanon, Germany, Russia and, of course, Armenia.
And so, as sheet cake was sliced and plastic glasses of Martini & Rossi raised, the partygoers sang, "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Ayp Pen Keem" - the Armenian A B C's - "happy birthday to you."
On how children learn by imitation, even when other primates don't.
Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't.
By CARL ZIMMER
I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees?
A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution.
His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box.
The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food.
Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.
The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.
The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.
The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.
The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on."
It was possible, however, that the results might come from a simple desire in the children just to play along. To see how deep this urge to overimitate went, Mr. Lyons came up with new experiments with the transparent box. He worked with a summer intern, Andrew Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned out a much larger study, with 100 children.
I was intrigued. I signed up Charlotte, and she participated in the study twice, first at the school and later at Mr. Lyons's lab.
Charlotte didn't feel like talking about either experience beyond saying they were fun. As usual, she was more interested in talking about atoms and princesses.
Mr. Lyons was more eager to talk. He invited me to go over Charlotte's performance at the Yale Cognition and Development Lab, led by Mr. Lyons's adviser, Frank C. Keil.
Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens.
At first, she did. Mr. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent plastic box.
He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle. "I've got it!" she shouted.
A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought.
But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting.
Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly.
"She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to.
If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that.
Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.
As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.
Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said.
We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it."
In a few years, I plan to explain this experience to Charlotte. I want her to know what I now know. That it's O.K. to lose to the chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human.
