* * *
By Janet Hulstrand

For thirteen years, starting in the summer of 2000, the students in my American literature class, “Paris: A Literary Adventure,” had the extraordinary opportunity of having James A. Emanuel, one of our nation’s great poets, read to them.

I had never met James Emanuel before the summer of 2000. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of him until a year before when I had asked Odile Hellier, owner of Village Voice, a major English-language bookshop in Paris at the time, if she knew of any expatriate American writers in Paris to whom I might introduce my students. I explained that I wanted to show them that great American literature was still being produced in Paris. James was among the writers she recommended to me.

When I returned home to Brooklyn, I went to the library and found a copy of his Whole Grain, Collected Poems 1958-1989.  I sat down and began reading. It wasn’t long before I knew I was reading the work of a great poet, and I thought it would be wonderful if I could give my students the chance to meet him.

I wrote to James to ask if he would be interested in reading to my students. In particular I asked him if he would read “Racism in France” and “Daniel in Paris.” “I won’t read those poems,” he said when I followed up my letter with a phone call.  “But there are others I would read if you like.”

That was a good introduction to James. He was very generous about sharing his time and talent, and he loved being back in a classroom again, among young people; I think it was something he missed. But he also did things his way, always. He had his reasons for not wanting to read the poems I had asked him to read. I didn’t ask what they were, and he didn’t offer a reason. I just promised him that if he would agree to come and meet with my students, he could read anything he wanted.

The first time he read to my class he was 79 years old, though he looked much younger. To my students, most in their late teens and early twenties, it was a revelation first of all to see just how full of energy and passion someone that age could be, and also how funny. It was also a revelation to most of them how interesting and fun poetry could be. Through the years, many of them approached the poetry reading with an opinion perhaps best summed up by one student who had said, doubtfully, the day before it, “Poetry and I don’t get along too well.”

James always won them over. Without aiming to prove anything, he proved to them that old age was not as boring or as fossilized as it seemed, and neither was poetry. When he introduced a poem in which a man in the street sees a wheel of cheese come at him, falling through the sky, by explaining to them that the poem (“It Was Me Did These Things”) had its start when he saw a friend’s young child push a cheese out of an open window, he taught them something important about how the events of everyday life can inspire poetry. Perhaps even more importantly, he showed them that poetry, even serious poetry, can make us laugh as well as cry.

The first few times he read to us, he stayed away from any poems that dealt directly with racism.  I would eventually learn, though not from him, that his own personal tragedy in the loss of his only son was what had driven him from the U.S., the reason he decided in 1984 to leave there and never return.  That was something he never talked about, and the one poem he wrote about that tragedy (“Deadly James”) he never read aloud at all, to my class, or to anyone else. But after the first few years of reading to us, he did read “Emmett Till,” a poem he’d written about the 1955 lynching of a 14-year-old boy who was murdered by white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. “It took me seven years to write that poem,” he always said.

In the video below, filmed during his appearance in my class in 2011, James speaks about his struggles with the poem and reads “Emmett Till.”

James loved, understood, and deeply appreciated children, and some of his most beautiful poems are written about or addressed to them. After a period in the 1970s when he couldn’t write, it was interaction with a child that helped him get back to work, as he explains as a preface to his reading of “Wishes, for Alix.”

Over the course of the years we met in various places, sometimes at Paris III, sometimes in residence halls at the Cité Universitaire. He would always start by reading a selection of his poems, usually for about an hour. Several times he invited Godelieve Simons, the Belgian printmaker with whom he had a close artistic collaboration, to join him. (Their collaboration had begun when she created prints in response to his poetry: later, he wrote poems in response to her prints.) Her presentations, in addition to being a wonderful introduction for my students to another not-very-well known art, engraving, also exposed them to the way in which artists from different media can inspire each other, and respond artistically to each other’s work.

After he had read, James would invite questions from my students. Sometimes the questions were a little slow to come. One year, wanting to make sure there would be no awkward lull, I made it very clear the day before that they were expected to be ready with good questions. “They asked some really good questions this time,” he said to me afterward. “That’s because I threatened them,” I confessed.

The last time I was in Paris, in July of this year, James wasn’t feeling up to traveling to our classroom, so we met at the home of his friend Marie-France Plassard, who kindly offered her apartment as a venue for our poetry reading.

He read “The Treehouse” and “The Young Ones, Flip Side” and “A Negro Author,” and “Emmett Till.” He read “Daniel is Six” and “For France,” and “To Martin, To Luther, To King” and “Jazz Anatomy.”

Here, from 2011, is James’s reading of “The Negro”, “The Treehouse” and “A View from the White Helmet.”

During the last time he met with my class, he read for a long time, longer than he, or Marie-France, or I thought he would, and then for a while he answered questions from my students. I don’t remember specifically much of what he said that day, except that he made sure to tell the students that the most important thing they could do in their lives was to be true to themselves. (He always said something along those lines, every year.)

I do remember the light in the room, the sound of his voice, the way Marie-France’s face was aglow with pride and love as she watched him. I remember how the warmth of his humanity and his sense of humor once again filled the room. I remember the rapt attention my students paid him as they were caught up in a very special moment of their lives, and the hush that fell when he began reading, everyone listening intently.

None of us knew that this would be the last event of its kind. But we knew that it was a very special gift, to spend more than an hour with this man, to have him read his poems to us and talk to us about his poetry, about his life, about life.

By now, there must be more than 100 of my students who have had the experience of meeting James Emanuel and hearing him read. He moved them, taught them very important things, and inspired them, not only through his poetry, but through his extraordinary grace and humanity as well.  For me the knowledge that they have gone back to their families and friends with a newfound appreciation for poetry in general, and in particular an enthusiasm for James’s work gives me a feeling of deep satisfaction. I know this was important to him as well.

From various corners of the world they have written to me upon hearing of his death. They tell me how well they remember James and his poetry. How they still love reading it. How they treasure the books he signed for them. They tell me how meeting him was one of the most special things they experienced while they were in Paris.

Mr. Emanuel will be sorely missed. But he has left behind a magnificent body of work. That work has the power to inspire and enrich the lives of anyone who takes the time to read it—and to all who open their hearts and minds to what it has to say.

Text © 2013, Janet Hulstrand
Videos of James Emanuel by Gary Lee Kraut © 2011, 2013. All rights reserved.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She teaches Paris: A Literary Adventure each summer in Paris for the Education Abroad program at Queens College, CUNY, and literature classes at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. A 2009 interview she conducted with James A. Emanuel appears on her blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.  She also wrote this 2011 profile of James Emanuel for France Revisited on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Also read James A. Emanuel’s Sense of Place as a companion piece to this article.

James A. Emanuel’s ashes are in the columbarium at Pere Lachaise Cemetery (niche 16412).

The post Remembering James A. Emanuel, Poet, Teacher, Humanitarian appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

The two bridges in the heart of Paris that have been most defaced decorated with love locks are the Pont des Arts, the footbridge and fine-weather picnicking bridge that goes between the Louvre and the French Institute, and the Pont de l’Archevêché, the short bridge behind Notre-Dame that connects the City Island with the Left Bank.

They are presented here in a beautiful audio-slideshow featuring photographs by Joe Wilkins and music and text written, played and read by LaRae Raine Garretson. A France Revisited Production.

(c) 2011, All rights reserved.

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By Elizabeth Esris

If you buy a calendar for a Francophile around the holidays, the kind in which each month is a spectacular scene from a different region in France, chances are that July or August will feature a view of long, arching rows of lavender running to a gray stone abbey that evokes romantic visions of Provence.

I drove into that very scene on a summer day as I approached the Abbey of Sénanque. The view of the mass of vibrant lavender against the stark eloquence of the 12th century Romanesque monastery took my breath way.

I wasn’t alone. The spectacular scene is shared by many visitors drawn to this rural valley just north of the chic and stunning perched village of Gordes. Walking the dusty path from the parking lot amid the quiet conversation of others, I knew that I needed to move beyond the photo op in order to make my visit a lasting and intimate experience.  When I approached the old stone walls, I wanted to engage my imagination as I learned about their history.

The Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque  was established when local lords donated land to build a Cistercian monastery in 1148, 50 years after the founding of the mother of Cistercian abbeys at Citeaux in Burgundy. At Sénanque, twelve monks were brought to live in huts while construction of the abbey was begun.

The church of the monastery was consecrated in 1178, though it wasn’t until 1250 that other essential buildings such as residences and the refectory (dining hall) were complete. Over time additional structures of a self-sustaining medieval religious community were added, including a cloister, a chapter house for meetings, a scriptorium for writing of manuscripts, and barns and other outbuildings that were part of a series of granges for food production.  Four mills completed a productive agricultural community that enabled the diligent and entrepreneurial Cistercians to lord over a prosperous center of influence in Provence well into the 15th century.

In addition to being an industrious order that worked hard to create efficient agricultural techniques, the Cistercians also established a core group of lay members at the Abbey of Sénanque who toiled at the most arduous manual tasks in the granges and at the mills. These men lived within the monastery, but slept and ate in separate quarters.

Perhaps it was inevitable that with prosperity came exploitation of the Cistercian’s original religious mission. The riches of the agricultural operations afforded temptations that gave way to worldly pleasures and diversion from the precepts of simplicity and service. Profiteers within the order eventually took control of the monastery in the 1400s, and it fell into decline because of mismanagement and corruption.

The Cistercian mission for a life of austerity and manual labor was reinforced once more at Sénanque in 1475 when a new abbot, John Casaletti from Avignon, was appointed to oversee the monastery and return focus to the values of the Cistercians. The abbey prospered again and became an agent for ministering to the poor, including caring for victims of the plague early in the 16th century.

In 1544 the abbey became a victim of the Wars of Religion when it was attacked by the Vaudois whose oppression and slaughter in the region had been sanctioned by the Catholic Church since the 12th century. The Vaudois pillaged the abbey and destroyed the lay quarters. The Abbey of Sénanque never recovered its prosperity and influence, and during the French Revolution the property was nationalized.

In ensuing years the monastery changed hands a number of times until monastic life was again established in 1988 by the small Cistercian order that lives there today. The community is for the most part financially self-sufficient through income from tours of the monastery, production of lavender and honey, sales of related items in the gift shop, and hosting of overnight visitors, though on occasion the French state and the department of Vaucluse have provided financial assistance to keep this historic setting alive and in good condition.

Learning some of the history of the Abbey of Sénanque in guidebooks, in pamphlets, and during a tour led me to ruminate about monastic and rural life in medieval Provence.  I imagined the narrow mountain road (now D177), which leads to the valley from Gordes, as a dusty mountain path upon which novices came by foot, or perhaps on saddle, to begin a life of silence, simplicity, and long hours of labor in the fields.  I asked myself who they were and what drew them to such an austere life. I envisioned them nearing the rugged stone walls that would become their refuge—perhaps their prison—and I tried to sense their last images of home and the anticipation of what awaited them.

The Abbey of Sénanque was built without a main door to the primary façade; this emphasized the aestheticism of the Cistercians and their desire that the monastery be unadorned.  It also reinforced the insular quality of the community and its purpose in sustaining a simple and silent life away from distractions that a grand portal might communicate to those outside the order.

It was in late June, amid the brilliance of the early blossoming of lavender, when I stepped inside the monastery.

When the voice of the tour guide echoed through the severe but beautiful vaulted dormitory where at night the monks once slept fully clothed in marked sections on the hard floor, I asked myself if they slept peacefully, fatigued by the day’s labor or if they were stalked by dreams of life outside their cloister.

In the scriptorium, the chamber where monks in medieval times worked copying manuscripts, I imagined faces bearing down on parchment and the meticulous lines of letters that inched slowly across the page, formed by hands that ached by day’s end and eyes that wearied with the dimming of natural light.  It is the only room with a fireplace—heated so that the monks could perform their delicate work.

The abbey church was and is still a place of prayer and contemplation. (It’s possible for visitors to attend mass here.) Even though it is stark, the symmetry of the nave speaks of artistry—restrained artistry, an aesthetic that denies excess but is unable to deny beauty. The aim might have been austerity, but when the eye follows the arches to the line in the vaulted ceiling, the radiance of sunlight on stone feels like adornment.

The most memorable part of the abbey is outside, where the eye collides with an impossibly beautiful vision: thousands of lavender flowers, growing in even rows, sway with abandon in the valley breeze against the gray walls of the monastery. It’s at once simple and sublime. Large slate tiles top roof lines. Low sections of the abbey emphasize the rustic nature of the setting, while the rounded lines of the apse and the angles leading to the bell tower suggest the divine. How many stories played out in the heat of the Provençal sun and behind the secretive windows of the monastery? The eye returns to the lavender and back again to the monastery.

On a warm summer day, arriving very early or late in the afternoon, one can avoid seeing buses and hordes of tourists with cameras taking the inevitable shots of lavender against the gray stone. It is possible then, to indulge in fantasy of how it was in medieval times—or how it is today among the robed inhabitants. I visited twice, both times in late June before the height of the tourist season but just in time for the lavender. Both times I stooped low to watch large black bees hover over blossoms , and I looked through the lavender to the abbey wondering how villagers viewed this monastery and it inhabitants so long ago. I imagined an alter ego sitting atop the roof in summer, ruminating about the insular monks who lived within.

Those reflections evolved into the poem, “Musing at the Abbey.”

Musing at the Abbey

In a tide of lavender
arms dappled by sun and stem
vie with black bees for nectar.
The stone wall of the abbey
is weary of the artist’s brush and
bleach of lenses.
It breathes them away
with memory of silent skies and
novices on dusty roads.

Women appear on the tiled roof
with gauze skirts draped
between their thighs.
They bathe in the June sun,
listen to the steps of monks
inching toward prayer,
and whisper to them
with attar from the blooms.

I join them in their hopeless vigil,
my arms hungry
for the heat of summer prayer.
They know me from a dozen other churches.
We have stalked robed ghosts before,
seducing ourselves with chants
of hooded profiles
who share lavender
with black bees
in a quiet coupling
of earth and the divine.

© Elizabeth Esris

Poem first published as “At the Abbey” in Women Writers, June, 2009.
Accompanying text first published in France Revisited, Dec. 2011

Also read Elizabeth’s explorations of and poem about the massacre of the Vadois at Mérindol in the Luberon area of Provence.

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On June 15, 2011, one of America’s greatest living poets celebrates his 90th birthday quietly in the company of a few close friends, in Paris, where he has lived since 1984. Admired, respected and acknowledged as a master poet by many writers, literary critics, and scholars, wider recognition has eluded him. France Revisited is therefore pleased to introduce James A. Emanuel to our savvy readers and experienced travelers through this exclusive article by Janet Hulstrand, with photographs by Sophia Pagan, followed by Mr. Emanuel’s poem Christmas at the Quaker Center (Paris, 1981).

James A. Emanuel, a Great American Poet, Turns 90 in Paris

By Janet Hulstrand

Author of more than 400 published poems and 13 volumes of poetry, winner of numerous prestigious literary and scholarly awards, a well-respected critic and teacher, James A. Emanuel was referred to in a 2000 American Book Review article as “the Dean of Black Paris.” The same reviewer also noted that Emanuel has been “curiously overlooked…when one considers…the sheer power of his work.”

Who is James A. Emanuel and why is his work not more widely known?

“I represent almost everything that has happened to African-Americans in and beyond the USA, from the beastly things to the heart-warming things,” Emanuel says.

Indeed his life story is quintessentially American, for both better and worse. Born (1921) and raised in the small town of Alliance, Nebraska, Emanuel left home at the age of 17 and never turned back. In his youth he held a variety of jobs: cowboy, junkyard worker, elevator operator, professional basketball player, Confidential Secretary to Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. at the War Department in Washington, D.C., and foot soldier in the Philippines during World War II.

After the war he earned degrees at Howard and Northwestern Universities before continuing with graduate study at Columbia University, choosing to focus on the work of Langston Hughes for his doctoral research. Hughes, who responded promptly to Emanuel’s request for access to his papers, gave the young scholar free reign in his home.

Emanuel describes his life during that time as “a dream fulfilled…finding in his basement forgotten literary treasures; recording his answers to first-time questions; and, during his absence in Europe or elsewhere, whirling in his swivel chair at his desk, tapping my toes against his file cabinets.”When the work was done Hughes told Emanuel, “You know more about my stories than I do.” He saw promise in Emanuel’s poetry, and offered him editorial suggestions. (Always an independent thinker, Emanuel accepted some of the suggestions, and rejected others.)

In the 1960s, as a member of the faculty at City College of the City University of New York, Emanuel introduced the school’s first course in Black Poetry and championed the inclusion of African-American literature in the curriculum. His dissertation, published in 1967, was the first full-length critical study of the work of Langston Hughes by an American author.

“It broke the barrier of silence imposed upon African-American writers by the establishment,” Emanuel says, noting that there hadn’t been anything like it published since The Negro Caravan in 1941.

The following year Emanuel published, with Theodore L. Gross, a groundbreaking anthology, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, referred to by many scholars to this day as a “bible.”

In the 1970s he began spending significant amounts of time in Europe, first teaching at the University of Grenoble on an invitational Fulbright, and later at the Universities of Toulouse and Warsaw.

“I don’t know what my rather long years in France, my year in Poland, and my travels in China, India, Thailand, Turkey and less exotic trips in Europe have meant to me beyond the clichés we all know,” Emanuel says. “Generally, my life as an American professor in Europe taught me what I already knew, or guessed: that all French people, all European and African people are not the same.”

Then, in 1983, he suffered a loss he has described as “the wound from which I never recovered” when his only child, James Jr., committed suicide after being beaten by “three cowardly cops” in California. His comment about the effect of this life-shattering event in his autobiography, The Force and the Reckoning (2001, Lotus Press, Detroit), is terse. “My life, turning a corner in 1983, has not followed old paths since then,” he wrote, with characteristic restraint and stoicism.

He left the United States in 1984. Since then he has lived in Paris, devoting himself to writing poetry.

In 1999 he introduced through the publication of JAZZ from the Haiku King a unique new genre, jazz-and-blues haiku. He has read his haiku with musical accompaniment in Europe, Africa, and Australia, and he recorded a CD of the poems, with saxophonist Chansse Evanns. He has also done innovative collaborative work with Godelieve Simons, a Belgian printmaker who was moved to illustrate some of his poems: over time they developed a close artistic collaboration, and he has also written poems in response to her prints. Occasionally he participates in readings, literary conferences, and other cultural events. He has been a regular participant in Jacques Rancourt’s Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie since the late 1980s. In 2008 he was invited to participate in the Centennial Richard Wright Conference held in Paris.

American novelist Jake Lamar met Emanuel shortly after he arrived in Paris in 1993, through the poet Ted Joans. Lamar recalls that Joans invited him to join him at the Café Le Rouquet one “gray drizzly Wednesday afternoon” where Joans “held court” three times a week for a couple of hours in the afternoon with fellow poets Emanuel and Hart Leroy Bibbs.  During the course of the conversation, Joans quoted a brief passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Without missing a beat, Emanuel picked up where Joans had left off, quoting the rest of the passage from memory.

“I was thirty-two years old and had felt, up until then, very isolated in my situation as an African-American author,” Lamar recalls. “Suddenly, listening to James recite Ellison, I felt that I had somehow found my true place, my real community, right there at that café table.”

Of Emanuel’s work, Lamar says, “I could go on and on about his writing, the brilliance and profound depth of feeling…But one particular set of poems, the jazz haiku…there’s nothing like them that I know of in world literature. They’re imbued with the combination of discipline and play, improvisation and exactitude, inspiration and perspiration that defines the music he so beautifully describes. This is the work of a master artist. It has been one of the great privileges of my life to know him.”

Emanuel’s work is indeed powerful as well as prolific. His poem “A Negro Author” is an artist’s defiant declaration of independence from any “ism” that might confine him. “Emmett Till” is an American masterpiece: a spare, tender, and profoundly sad tribute to the innocent boy victimized by the incomprehensible brutality and violence of racial hatred. “After the Accident” is the poem that literally jolted me into realizing that I was reading the work of a great poet, and led me to seek him out, to see if I could convince him to read to my students. (He graciously agreed to do so, and nearly every year since 2000 he has read to them, answered their questions, and even—in one particularly memorable session—created poetry with them.)

Like his poetry, Emanuel’s personality is powerful, though his quiet, understated manner does not instantly reveal this. Almost inevitably it is the most skeptical of my students who are the most moved by Emanuel and his work when they meet him. One remembers his “very beautiful, kind, old-school type of voice…so different than what we hear most of the time.” Yet the gentleman and scholar is also a fighter, of which his poetry supplies abundant evidence, such as this small sample from “For Racists Remembered”:

We said “Sir” sometimes
“Sir Charles,” “Sir Honkie,” and then
the big lie: “the Man.”

Asked what he most appreciates about living in France, what it has given him, he replies, “Nothing visible or tactile, ugly or beautiful, can do more for me than leaving me alone, free to recreate my environment in ways that I can understand. France has been silent when I had no questions; and it has been wise and ultimately generous, even poetic, when I needed counsel to walk on, or surf to carry me toward some shore.”

Whatever the reasons for Emanuel’s work being overlooked, the fact of is a shame. It is a shame that, as he approaches his 90th birthday, one of the world’s great poets is not receiving the recognition and honor he deserves. It is an even bigger shame that his exquisite poetry, which ranges from the comic to the rageful to the elegiac—all of it masterfully well crafted, all of it infused with extraordinary grace and humanity—has not reached a wider audience.

In its condemnation of human oppression in all its forms, as well as its illumination of the best in humanity, especially the innocent genius of children, the poetry of James A. Emanuel is work that should be lifted up to its proper place in the pantheon of world poetry. More important, we should be reading it—carefully, for it reveals both our best and our worst selves, offering help in knowing ourselves better, and the chance to choose a better path.

Article (c) 2011, Janet Hulstrand.
Photographs (c) 2011, Sophia Pagan.

Article and photographs created for first publication on France Revisited.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She teaches Paris: Literary Adventure each summer in Paris for the Education Abroad program at Queens College, CUNY, and twice a year she offers Writing from the Heart workshops in a village in the Champagne region of France. Her 2009 interview with James A. Emanuel appears on her blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.

Sophia Pagan is a Paris-based photographer. She grew up in the inner city streets of New York, where she witnessed and lived through the difficulties of urban culture. Through her upbringing she developed an appreciation for things considered to be “outside her reach” and seeks to use that appreciation in her photography as she sets out to capture the fine balance between the modern metropolis and the old world charms of Paris. Examples of her work can be seen on her website.

Christmas at the Quaker Center (Paris, 1981)

By James A. Emanuel

Once upon a Christmastime
sleighbells snowed the sky
and when I slid the covers back
to slip a wonder-why
through windowfrost I wiped away
I couldn’t see a thing
except the hushed Nebraska night
and the little flaky ring
a sparrow dug into the snow
to spring himself to flight.

Once upon a Christmastime
I sneaked a sandwich where
old Santa couldn’t miss it:
that table was so bare
his bag of toys and reindeer food
would leave him room to spare,
to sit on while he ate and thought
“This boy is really nice.
I’ll search among the toys I’ve brought
And fill his stocking twice.”

Years grew long, and years grew hard,
but I can clear my sight
by twisting certain memories
to make it come out right
that I still hope to see again
a lovely-featured time
that stirs beneath my pillow
and wakes my heart to climb
into the sky on Christmas Eve
and listen to those bells
that ring because I do believe
a snowflake sound that tells
about a sleigh that’s coming,
that’s driving through the air,
with gifts for everyone who’s good,
who struggles to be fair.

And now when I see Santa
I grip him with my eyes,
with all my how-about-its,
with all my tell-me-whys;
and if he takes them standing
and if he shakes my hand
I bag another year of them
and try to understand
this load that makes us human,
those gifts on Santa’s back,
our bells for one another
that chime our starry track.

From Whole Grain: Collected Poems 1958-89 (Lotus Press: Detroit, 1991)
© 1983 James A. Emanuel

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Sergio Cervetti is a native of Uruguay, but his mother was born in France of Waldensian ancestry.  Persecuted for centuries in both France and Italy, the Waldensians–les Vaudois–were a sect founded in the 12th century by Pierre Valdès (or Valdo), a Catholic merchant from Lyon who relinquished his property and riches to preach an ideal life of devotion to Biblical teachings of poverty, simplicity, and non-violence.

Originally identifying themselves as Catholics, the “poor men of Lyon,” as Valdès and his followers came to be known, were declared heretics by the church for beliefs that are remarkably contemporary—such as a penchant for equality, disdain for clerical hierarchy, and acceptance of female preachers as early as the 15th century.

Because of the threat their radical ideas posed to the Church and Church-sponsored thrones, the Vaudois were chased and slaughtered throughout France and rural areas of Italy, where many fled in hopes of finding refuge.  So great was public outcry in Europe in the 17th century that Oliver Cromwell made official appeals for an end to the slaughter, and poet John Milton wrote a sonnet, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” to protest and memorialize the horrific murder of hundreds of Vaudois in the Italian Alps in 1655.

The Waldensians eventually found tolerance and survival, at times, in ghetto-like pockets established in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Today, their descendents maintain their religious identity, and the largest contemporary community of the Vaudois is in Italy, where they were granted religious freedom in 1848. Some of the Vaudois eventually joined the legions of Europeans who immigrated to the Americas in search of religious tolerance and economic opportunity.  Small, active communities exist today in Argentina, Uruguay, and in North America, particularly in Valdese, North Carolina, which takes its name from the Vaudois who settled there.

Mérindol, in the Vaucluse, is the site of a hilltop village whose inhabitants were massacred over a period of five days in 1545 in a crusade ordered by the French King Francois I and orchestrated locally by Jean Maynier d’Oppède, president of the parliament of Provence. The population was virtually exterminated, but it is said that some of the Vaudois of Mérindol survived by hiding in the dense mountains of the Luberon.

When my husband and I turned off the D973 road and drove through the modest, contemporary town at the base of the mountain, we had no idea how we would be touched by the hike up to the ancient village of the Vaudois. We found ourselves challenged by the climb, the sad ruins, and a view from the summit that must have been beloved by those who called the mountain home.

It was mid-afternoon when we began our ascent, and we were alone on the path until our return in the late and lingering dusk of Provence. “At Mérindol” describes our journey to the summit and to a spiritual connection with an intangible presence that we felt amidst the ruins.  It is dedicated to the friend who led us there.

At Merindol
(for Sergio Cervetti)

The sun clings to the summit,
and blinks through dark trees
that spiral the hill.
We falter in stone and
growth of four hundred years.
Ahead is a ruin,
looking with shrouded eyes
for its generations.
Our feet pound in ascent.
Our companions are the wind
and punch of breath.
The shadowed twist of tree and earth
blinds us to all but tree and earth.

Remnants of parapets and corners
press into the acclivity–
carcass of village
blanched by sun and crusade.
We think we see the top, but there is more:

more fragments of wall and window
ghostly stairs, flesh-hewn for
rush of man and child to
the smell of bread on stone
a woman’s hand upon a door,
conversation across a sill,
fatigue of night,
the brace of morning.

Sorrows of path and village
yield to the summit and
ochre mountains, the bend
of the Durance through purple fields,
Alpilles to the south, and the sea.
Joy reaches beyond ghosts and martyrs
to hearts on a summer evening
and this sunset: assurance of
the divine in valley, sky, the walls of home.

Light bleeds through a crater in the last ruin.
Shadows sink at its base like souls
returning to the grave.
We read the timeline of Les Vaudois en Provence.
1545    mort pour leur foi

leur descendants affirms
flight to purple fields and the Durance,
ochre mountains, Alpilles to the south,
the sea, searching for the divine,
for home.

Winds of dusk calm to a breeze
and darkness looms.
Our feet move cautiously in descent,
spiraling the dirt path and stone wall
past life and loss, our
eyes on twist of tree and earth
guided by ghostly hands that
know the way.

© Elizabeth Esris

Elizabeth Esris is a teacher and writer. Her poetry has appeared in Wild River Review, Bucks County Writer, and Women Writers. She wrote the libretto for Elegy For A Prince with composer Sergio Cervetti, which premiered in excerpts at New York City Opera’s VOX Opera Showcase in 2007. She and Cervetti also collaborated on a one-act chamber opera, YUM!,  a celebration of wine, food, and friendship. She teaches English and creative writing at Central Bucks High School South (Pennsylvania).

The post Les Vaudois: Reflections on a Religious Massacre in Provence appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

The honor of being selected by the highest levels of the state to enter the Pantheon is a rare event, occurring every few years at the most. The entrance of poet, writer and statesman Aimé Césaire to the Pantheon can be seen as a symbolic recognition of diversity in France.

Introduction into the Pantheon of great men (and recently women) of France typically involves the transferal of the honoree’s remains into the tomb of the building. Césaire’s remains, however, will stay in Fort-de-France in the Caribbean French island of Martinique, while it’s a plaque bearing his name, unveiled today by President Nicolas Sarkozy, that consecrates the importance of Césaire’s influence in French letters and, to a lesser degree, politics.

Though Césaire served as mayor for the town of Fort-de-France for 56 and as a national representative from Martinique for 48 years (it’s possible to hold both positions at once), his national reputation derives especially from his poetry and other writings, particularly concerning the literary (and political) movement called “negritude” of which he was a founder.

The movement developed after WWII at a time when the four old French colonies of Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique and Reunion were in the process of becoming full-fledged departments (something like counties) of France.

In preparing today’s event at the Pantheon, the French Culture Minister said that in addition to recognizing one of the great voices of French departments overseas, it also “pays homage to the vitality of cultures from overseas that have long influenced French culture overall.”

Among the “great men” who preceded Césaire in the Pantheon is Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893), who was instrumental in abolishing slavery in French colonies in 1848. Schoelcher’s remains were moved to the Pantheon on the centennial of his death. In the preface to a collection of Schoelcher’s works published that year, 1948, Césaire called him “a rare breath of fresh air that blows on a history of murder, of pillage, of atrocities.”

Translation of works by Aimé Césaire in English include “Discourse on Colonialism,” “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” and “A Season in the Congo.”

– Photo and text by GLK.

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By H. T. Wald

When will you come
visit me in hills
where Paleolithic hands painted
where Cathars became Perfect
where men still speak of the earth

When will you come
sip the wine
feast together
sit in the garden by the old stone wall
remembering how you laughed so hard the chair broke
and you said “If I could live here”

When will you pack your bags lightly
for your cousin to drive you to the airport
for the plane to Paris or Toulouse or Bordeaux
for a train to the station where I’ll pick you up
just thirty minutes away

When will you come to the hills
Where you dreamt that you cloaked yourself
in a landscape of fertile green and felt
so secure and free
at home “If I could live here”

When will you come
stay in the village
rejoice in the seasons
explore the known and unknown of ourselves
each other and the world at this wooden table

When will you come
as you said you would come
some day soon
if you could
live here

© 2010

H. T. Wald is a writer and poet.

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The Gates of Enfer

By Andrea Bates

 “The gates of enfer. That’s the gates of hell, right?”
-overheard in the garden at the Rodin Museum, Paris

They say it’s other people’s children,
not wanting what you’ve got, blood
on a white shirt, lost chances you were
too scared to take. And in France?
those who do not speak the language
languish for days in an enfer
of their own making—tongue studded
with syllables it cannot pronounce,
chest heavy as Rodin’s gate, heaving
in its attempt  to ask for a spoon
to savor the sorbet sold at the garden’s
stall. Yes, to try to curl the tongue
around cuiller brings tourists
to their knees, is to abandon all hope,
ye who enter here, is to watch
sorbet melt into a pool of sweet
bitterness in its cup, is to leave it
as an offering, what the dead can
drink, thirst bronzed by the heat
of Rodin’s ironworks, love’s
unrequited vowels of ici, here,
Paolo reaching for Francesca’s hand,
only to grasp the parched air.

Roulé d’aubergine au chèvre

By Andrea Bates

Lettuce dine with fork and thyme, pears flambé
on a plate appear to satisfy the palate, but only if
we first salut the salad. When dining a la carte in Paris,
the entrée is the appetizer, so the appetite
should be as crisp as frisee that chevres the spine.
Chaqun a son gout, a phrase planted on the purple-
egged tongues of aubergines. On top, olive oil drizzled
as gentle as pluie sweetening the cheeks on a stroll
down the Champs-Elysees. A glass of merlot and voila—
the miel is complete—like honey at the table, baked eggplant
stuffed with warm, warm goat cheese on a bed of greens.

MADAME’S CAFÉ OF THE GOURMET HAND

By Andrea Bates

“All the pigeons of Paris are dead. Some have been eaten, which is natural,
but most of them have been condemned to death because they carry messages.”
 –Monday, Jan. 19, 1942, TIME magazine

She is old enough to remember the Occupation,
backyard butchering of pigeon, twist of the neck,
a stuffed pie to feed eight people, tablespoon of meat,
dressing of parsley, and carrots smuggled in
from the countryside. Her mother didn’t tell her
it was pigeon–she would have cried and ruined
the dinner, but decades after the war ended
and her mother was dead, she discovered the recipe alive,
written in her mother’s shaky hand, cached inside
an envelope at the back of a kitchen drawer. A clipping
also of Notre Dame, stained glass rosette removed,
preserved in a secret cellar where prayer would protect
from the MP40, submachine gun, trigger finger of the Nazis.

The bombs these days are laid by pigeons, eighty thousand
strong, waggling throng of grey as if pieces of the Parisian
sky have fallen. She greets them with a plastic bag of seed
and crumbs she’s wiped from dinner tables and abraded
from day old loaves, seasoned with dried parsley
and thyme. Some believe there is no rhyme or reason
to this mission, others do not forgive the blast and drop,
residue of feather, purge of seed consumed. Every bird
is a victory, every bird she tends is one less she must
remember eating. Now, her outstretched palm beckons,
Café of the Gourmet Hand feeding the flock near Notre
Dame, each pigeon perched on the iron rail, awaiting
its turn to receive what she cannot bear to throw away.

Andrea Bates’s first chapbook, Origami Heart, was published in Toadlily Press’s 2010 volume Sightline.

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* * *

Paris has historical bridges, elegant bridges, workaday bridges, metro bridges, and pedestrian bridges; it has stone bridges, iron bridges, and 2-, 3-, and 5-span bridges. And it has one most evocative bridge in its Mirabeau Bridge, le Pont Mirabeau, famous not for its beauty or for its view but for a poem that it inspired.

Construction of the Mirabeau Bridge near the southwestern edge of Paris, 1893-1896, immediately preceded that of the far more photogentic Alexandre III Bridge, 1897-1900, and the two are structurally similar. Though unable to compete with the situation, cherubs, gilt, and Belle Epoque elegance the Alexandre III, the Mirabeau nevertheless enjoys the more evocative name since it is the title of Guillaume Apollinaire’s much memorized melancholic poem “Le Pont Mirabeau.”

In that poem of 1912 the bridge reminds the poet of lost love and the passage of time. The text of the poem and more information about the bridge are found further down, but before reading on you can watch this France Revisited® audio slideshow to see images of the Pont Mirabeau and hear a reading of Apollinaire’s poem by Va-nu-pieds.

History: The vast urban overhaul of Paris of the second half of the 19th century, from Napoleon III’s appointment of Baron Haussmann as prefect of Paris in 1853 to the opening of the first two lines of the metro in 1900, involved the construction or reconstruction of more than half of the bridges over the Seine.

Engineering: Connecting the Grenelle quarter of the 15th arrondissement (Left Bank) with the Auteuil quarter of the 16th arrondissement (Right Bank), the Mirabeau Bridge was designed by Paul Rabel, assisted by engineers Jean Résal and Amédée Alby, and executed by the company Daydé & Pillé. The same assisting engineers were responsible for the Alexandre III Bridge, which is based on the same principle of two metal structures buttressing each other to create the balance of the span. The Mirabeau has a central arch of 305 feet with one arch to either side of 106 feet connecting with the riverbank. The Alexandre III primarily consists of a single 350-foot arch.

Allegory: On the Mirabeau, four bronze allegorical sculptures by Jean-Antoine Injalbert decorate the pillars like figureheads on the bow and stern of two boats, one on the Left Bank side facing upstream, one on the Right Bank side facing downstream. On the Left Bank side, Navigation holds a harpoon at the stern while Commerce blows a golden trumpet at the bow. On the Right Bank side the City of Paris sits facing those approaching the capital at the bow while Abundance holds a flame at the stern. The arms of the City of Paris decorate the inner railing above the statues.

Abundance’s flame is an odd echo of the 1889 quarter-size replica of the Statue of Liberty raising her own flame just upstream at the tip of the Alley of Swans (Allée des Cygnes), in front of the Grenelle Bridge.

Who is Mirabeau?: Count de Mirabeau (1749-1791), more often simply called Mirabeau, gained prominence as a revolutionary nobleman. He opposed the absolute monarchy in the decade prior to events of 1789 then favored a constitutional monarchy as the tide turned against Louis XVI.

Poetry: However, it isn’t the revolutionary history of Mirabeau that rings in the name “Le Pont Mirabeau” but the poem of that title by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), written in 1912 and published in his collection “Alcools” in 1913.

Le Pont Mirabeau

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Apollonaire himself can be heard reading “Le Pont Mirabeau” in a 1914 recording in which he instills his work with the full weight and rhythm of a dirge. On the Wheaton College website click on “dit par l’auteur” (i.e. spoken by the author).

The words of “Le Pont Mirabeau” have been made into several notable songs, including this 1952 song by Léo Ferré with its vie-en-rosy wistfulness:

and this 2001 song by Marc Lavoine with its melodic drama:

© 2010, Gary Lee Kraut

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I rarely go out for lunch in winter,
but today I joined a television weatherman
at a neighborhood restaurant that prides itself
in serving only the freshest of fresh food,
though it seemed a stretch for the waiter to call the scorpion fish fruity.

He recognized him, and I think the women at the next table did, too.
And afterwards someone stopped to say hello as we crossed the bridge.
What a beautiful day to be walking by the canal, she said.
It’s going to get cold again, he warned, maybe even snow next week.

I don’t have a TV to see him wave his hands before the map of France.
But I saw buds on the bush on my balcony today,
and the cat, too, noticed the morning sun on the kitchen table
finally reaching over the grey mansard across the street,
where the neighbors close their curtains a little later every day.

(c) Gary Lee Kraut

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