Nono’s Paris

Felix Nono. David Frey photo.

Hemingway’s Paris is for sale on the banks of the Seine, where the boukanistes sell vintage-looking Cinzano advertisements and Josephine Baker posters alongside Eiffel Tower postcards and used Dennis Lahane novels.

“The new Paris is different,” says Felix Nono. He is selling old Paris. Cafes in Montparnasse and Montmartre come alive on painted tiles he sells at an impromtu stand he sets up in front of the Musee d’Orsay, the former train station that now houses the great Impressionist paintings Hemingway used to relish in the Tuilleries.

“This is only souvenir,” says Nono, gesturing to his work, “but a lot of people like that from anywhere in the world. USA. Africa, too. People from Cameroon buy this here.”

Nono himself came from Cameroon to Paris 30 years ago, first to study then to work. “But there was no job for me, here or in Cameroon. You know the problem in Africa, people who come to study here, when they go back, they don’t find a job. Only French have job in Cameroon.”

So Nono studied art in order to sell souvenirs along the Seine. When I meet him, he’s wearing a plaid shirt, jeans and soccer shoes. I look at his images of the Eiffel Tower, the Café de Flore, the Ponte Neuf, Notre Dame.

“What is your favorite part of Paris?” I ask.

“Behind the Gare de Est,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because I live there,” he says. The Goutte D’Or. The Chateaux Rouge. The sections of Paris that have become African enclaves. Those are his favorite parts of Paris.

“Do you feel welcome here?” I ask him.

“That depends,” he says. “For somebody, I feel welcome. But for others, I’m a stranger.”

In a way, Nono’s Paris has more in common with Hemingway’s Paris than Montparnasse. No struggling writer could afford to live there now. Good luck finding a cold-water flat in St. Germaine now (not that you’d want to). If the foreigners of Paris in Hemingway’s day were, like him, expatriate writers ad artists, today they are more likely people like Nono, immigrants who came from French colonies to the belly of the old empire for a chance at a lifestyle they’d never reach back home. They come legally or illegally, crossing Africa, Spain and most of France to come to Paris in hope of finding work the native French won’t take.

You’ll still find these people in the cafes of Montparnasse, only they’re working in the kitchens. To understand how Hemingway’s Paris has changed, I realize, I need to understand Nono’s Paris.

This entry was posted on August 4, 2010 at 8:04 am and is filed under France, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.