“If you want something, give it away.”—unknown

I kicked off the Furthermuckin Expat Q two months ago, talking to seven different Americans (so far) living here in Paris. I got at least seven more on tap. But since November, something else started happening.

After making a conscious effort to look up from my navel and spotlight others and what they get up to in France, people started asking me for interviews. Richard Nahem’s Eye Prefer Paris blog featured me as Parisian of the Month (!); I had a great talk with Felicia Pride at BackList about my début novel, Irrésistible; the kind folks at Parisien Salon republished the Nahem interview outta nowhere; and days ago, Monique Y. Wells of Entrée to Black Paris went live with her patented Black Paris Profile on MML.

Please, check ‘em out if you haven’t already.

Heart & Soul magazine just hit me up, too. But the moral of the story is, what you give away to others rockets right back to you. Whatever you want, that is what you give.

Happy new you.

When my coworker showed up to work in leather pants and a Rolling Stones T-shirt, I knew she wouldn’t stick around long, and indeed she didn’t. (Neither did I, for that matter.) Working together last year at a “leisure newswire” that shall remain nameless, Marie-Noelle was an energetic light in the office with bigger fish to fry… thus pretty instantly familiar. She had a friend I just had to meet, she kept saying, who she knew I’d hit it off with. Which is where Raina came in.

On a two-hour lunch break at Fuxia, an Italian spot near the Canal Saint-Martin, Raina Lampkins-Fielder and I broke bread last summer, sipping wine and rapping all about art, Brooklyn and parenthood. A former associate director at the Whitney Museum’s education department—with stints at both the Andy Warhol Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art—Raina had just given birth to twins, and devoured our adult conversation time like a crispy baguette doused in extra-virgin olive oil.

Hope you do too.

We recently connected in the pouring rain at Odette et Aimé café to discuss more about her editorial spot at the new Paris-based, English-language some/things (pronounced “some slash things”) magazine, and other furthermuckin topics of choice.

No one I speak to for the Expat Q has moved here for “political reasons,” like Americans used to once upon a time. Care to speak on that?

We certainly didn’t leave for political reasons at all. It’s not as if I didn’t kind of think about that. But then when you really think about what you do for political reasons, no, you stay and you fight the good fight. That’s what you do. You don’t flee: you stay. Also, if I would’ve left the US for political reasons…France? Is this the place to choose? [laughter] I don’t necessarily think so. Not for some remarkable French, all-embracing, democratic whatever. I mean, this isn’t that place. It’s not the place to go to.

It did have that kind of veneer, but now that is, like, gone. Fully gone. It’s gone so much that you have those parts where you’re like, “Hmm, I’m raising my little kids here?” I’m kinda glad London is close, so they can see some black folks in suits. Black people on television outside of the month of August. In commercials, maybe with, like, natural hair. [laughter] Those forced bangs, very straightened, it’s not working on little black girls’ hair, man. [laughter] Hopefully there’ll be some sort of change, but you don’t even see many black folks here with dredlocks who are not American.

What are your thoughts on blackness in Paris?

It’s really complicated, because my blackness in Paris is not a black French person’s blackness in Paris. I’ve traveled places where it would be physically impossible for me to kind of assimilate in a certain way. But you try to assimilate in some ways. You try to take on the posture of a country. And I realized, maybe because of living here, and also raising children here, that it is important to me to not take on the posture and attributes of this country. Because it is beneficial to me, being of African origin, to be American.

What I feel, and maybe I’m wrong, but this principle of, “Regardless what color you are, what your religion is, you’re French” is really such a fictional thing. It doesn’t manifest itself in a way that is actually egalitarian. What it does is, it excuses them from having a conversation about difference. And the differences that are here should be this amazing intellectual and cultural currency; they completely deny to take advantage of [it].

I realized that the kind of horrible legacy of saying “everyone is French” is that it makes it difficult for someone who is French but doesn’t look like what a French person imagines themselves to look like to have even developed the language through which to express it. Because they have been raised French.

I tend to know many more black folks in Paris who have come from somewhere else. And it’s not like everyone is going towards this black expatriate community. Those things happen, but it’s not like it’s a black American expatriate community. It’s friends from all parts of the world, they’re pan-African, who kind of find themselves together. We realized that we didn’t really have the type of really close relationships with black French women, and it was curious.

There’s another divide even within that kind of “being black in Paris.” I’ve had people say, “Well, it’s obvious you’re American before you open your mouth.” Well, what is that? “It’s the way that you move.” And so that’s going to define you in a certain way to both white people and black people. You know, I don’t choose to necessarily believe everything that somebody tells me. [laughter] Those are some of the thoughts that are out there. I think it is hard to be black in France.

How do you feel about raising your kids here, in terms of their identity?

What’s interesting is not only teaching them about blackness, but also kind of the definition of what that is, and whose blackness it is. Because my context would be kind of an African-American idea of blackness. Part of what is imbedded in that is insuring a kind of Americanness about them as well. And so it makes it a little bit complicated. Plus, my husband’s British. So there’s kind of that Britishy stuff to bring in. And we’re a multicultural family who have children who look like the spectrum of the races.

At the supermarket, an old woman was trying to get some change and she couldn’t find it, so I started to get her some change. She pointed out my babies, and I’m sure she assumed I was the nanny. I could be nothing but the nanny. [laughter] Which I certainly get a lot, particularly when they were much younger, ’cause some people [tend to] not think I’m their mother because of the way that they look. This woman, I could barely understand all that she was saying, but what she had said that I did get was that she was not into my one child because she was darker, and said something to the effect of, not knowing that they were mine anyway, she could kind of accept that the white child was okay.

I know that I’m probably considered American first to a French person than a black person. So that’s quite a difference. There is something about that that’s quite liberating. Not that I ever felt a burden in the States. I’ve never not wanted to be black or to be different. Sometimes I have felt like I needed to be more of something, but I’m okay with who I am, and have been for quite a while. The American thing here trumps everything. You’re just like any other American.

White children in France can play with black dolls. It’s just a doll. It’s a doll first. It’s not a statement that a person is making. Whereas in the States, if it’s a white family and they gave their child a black doll, they’ve had conversations. [laughter] Whereas here, people just do it.

What’s so amazing is that they’re not necessarily helpful to their own folks, who don’t have the flexibility to straddle the lines of being a French person here and being part of a viable international community. A Senegalese community is considered an immigrant. I can’t really speak to certain things, because I know I’ve been given a very different entrée to things.

How did some/things magazine come about?

I’d never done a magazine before at all. And funnily enough, I was at a party and met someone who was doing another magazine called UOVO. She said, “Oh, would you like to do something for this magazine?” What I discovered now that I’ve worked on two magazines is that I work on magazines that call themselves magazines but are in fact books. You know, they function as sort of curated books. So I did a couple of things for UOVO, which is super, and then they disbanded because of this crisis.

But at a launch party for UOVO, I met this woman, Monika Bielskyte, the creative director who actually founded some/things. This is before that was anything. She just started talking to me, and I liked her. She said, “Let’s stay in touch.” I knew she was a photographer, and I liked her spirit. She was unusual. Finding that person in Paris who a) comes up to you—

Is she French?

No, she’s Lithuanian.

There you go.

[laughter] But somebody who comes up to you and says, “You look kind of interesting to me. What’s your story?” That’s her approach. I didn’t really follow up. I had her card, she had my card, she would send me things like, “Look at my work.” I never followed up. And then finally, like two years ago, I looked at her work on her site, and I really liked it. I liked her aesthetic, I like her eye, what she focused on. So I said, “Let’s talk, I’d love to do something.” “I’ve started this magazine, don’t you want to do something, da da da da?” And I’m like, “Well, I have no time.” I just had the twins.

But then she’s like, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” So then we started doing this magazine.

The launch party was great; I liked the space too. What’s the point of some/things?

There are three of us who do the content. I oversee all of the contemporary art. And now that we have a creative agency that’s come from the book, I’m the deputy art director. And at the gallery, I’m the deputy art director for the art budget of the gallery.

The whole point of some/things is, we really wanted to create something that was unique, that tells some sort of story—whether we’re dealing with an artist or a fashion designer or politics or what have you—that we’re kind of taking on something that’s, it’s a different view to it. We want to spend the time in interviews, we want to create portraits of people, portraits of ideas. In some ways, the book itself becomes a portrait of who we are, who the team is, as people. Because we don’t say, “a third of it has to be fashion, a third has to be art, a third has to be politics.” Every book starts from something that’s just random, that excites us.

Everything has a primal theme and a title. The last one was called Farewell My Concubine. That was based on the film. Not that we wanted to reënvision that story, or not as if it would be even overtly communicated to the audience. But we liked some of the color palette that came out of the film, a certain type of red. Ideas of transformation. Certain ideas of sexuality, of a changeability. That’s what drove the artists, the personalities, the musicians, all the people that we selected. And it certainly provided the direction for how we would interact with them.

The types of interviews that we had were exhaustive interviews. Some of the people in that issue, they could start their memoirs from the interview that we had with them. [laughter] But it was really getting into the person, portraits of that person. There are many more shots of people’s faces; we really wanted to have the actual portrait of the artist.

I think of it as this tone poem: this idea that you can go from the beginning to the end of this book and that it is literally about a journey. We don’t have any ads, because that would sort of interrupt the flow. It also places it in a time, it assumes something. We’ll draw from anywhere. If there’s someone who did something in 1920 that we think visually works, whatever. It’s quite a personal thing that we hope has sort of visual and intellectual resonance for others.

The issue that we’re working on now, it’s called The Wings of a Locust, dealing with ideas of architecture, ghostly presence, loss, memory, transparency. A color palette that came out of just looking at images of oil spills [laughter] and the way that an oil spill—just a certain type of shimmer, a certain palette that came out of that—wanting to find ways of replicating it.

These are the things that drive the sensibility of it. And the sensibility of the magazine also is a little bit dark. It’s not like this happy dance through these images. It’s a little dark. But we also want it to be revelatory in a way. It’s a little bit vague. But when you see the book, it’s actually quite concrete for the reader.

That’s what some/things is about.

And what’s going on at the some/things secret space?

Well, we had our first exhibition in November. And I’ll let you know: it is hard to do a magazine when our staff is this small. That’s over 320 pages of just pure content, no filler, no ads, while also opening a space that needs to be completely gutted and remade. While also then deciding that we were going to have an exhibition. It’s a bit crazy. We’re also having another exhibition, January 23.

The first exhibition was kind of an extension of the work in issue 3. I think we’ll continue to do that. But then we also want to have other activities that this space can accommodate, whether it’s people who want to do readings, or something that makes sense within what we do.

Our next show in January is going to be looking at fashion, but in the way that we look at fashion. ’Cause I don’t think art is fashion, and I don’t think fashion is necessarily art. I think both of them can be in some ways. But there’s an aspect of me that is a purist for art. I don’t want to put everything into a commercial market. But we do look at fashion in a very particular way.

Even when we did the piece on Yohji Yamamoto, the works that we chose from the archives to show, we wanted it to be something that for me looking at it as somebody coming from the art world, it would work for me. And it can be such a subtle thing. Like the part of the back that is shown that is clothed in some Yohji Yamamoto piece, a slight kind of turn in image can function as a photograph itself, as opposed to something that is a photograph of [the clothes]. We want to have an exhibition that expresses that kind of sensibility.

Let’s talk about your apperances on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service radio show on BBC 6.

He’s a great friend. Our children are extremely good friends. We met through our kids, and we became kind of fast friends ourselves.

I only know Jarvis from bum-rushing Michael Jackson at the ’96 Brit Awards. I don’t know any Pulp songs. Did you know him from the English rock band, Pulp?

Yeah, but you know, I didn’t really recognize him. He and I just totally clicked. It was at a time when I was really new in Paris, and he’d been here a few years. We needed to talk to someone. We would have coffee every single morning, kind of without fail, for a couple of years. We’d talk about life, stupid stuff, we would do the crossword together. He’s the godfather of my girls, so we’re really good friends. That’s the real reason why I’m on the show, if the truth be told. [laughter]

It’s an awesome show. It’s something that’s coming from his mind, the various types of music, the various types of references; politicians or artists or whomever that he’s got coming to interview. I mean, it’s just really fun. It’s almost old-fashioned, where you can go to a radio show and listen to it for two hours and you’re gonna hear music that you never heard before and you’re gonna hear [director] Ken Loach talking about something or… it’s fun.

He often would have readings, and so he asked me to read some stories for the show, which is good fun. It’s something that I enjoy doing. When I put on my more performative voice, it’s something that I can do pretty well.

Will you be on again soon?

The show is on every Sunday. If everyone writes in, I will be a regular. [laughter] He curates each of the shows, so it sort of depends. The last story that I read was for his holiday special, kind of about Christmas and the holidays. The story worked for that show. And the song that came after worked with that story, so it really depends on that.

Was your grad work at the University of Cambridge your only experience living abroad?

I spent a semester abroad in London before, when I was in undergrad. I got into it, and got a lot of friends. It was through the Yale program, and we studied at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. I just really loved being on my own.

And then Derek, my husband, when I was in London—he’s British, so his family lives there—he had gotten a job with Reuters. Well, eventually with Reuters, but he first got a job being editor-in-chief of a Russian business magazine called Kak Dela. It was actually in Russian and English, in St. Petersburg, in Russia. So we went to Russia and I was in England.

You visited?

Often. Then he moved to Moscow to be a producer with Reuters, which was amazing. So I was back and forth between England and Russia. I’d have eight weeks in England and then I’d spend like a month or six weeks in Russia over those two years. He was there full-time, for three years totally.

We moved back to the States, we were in New York… Pittsburgh first, and then New York. He’d lived abroad. He grew up in Hong Kong. When we were in New York, I became this sort of New Yorker. I never thought at all about leaving New York.

Where are you from?

Pennsylvania and Indiana.

You were born in…?

Ohio. I’m totally midwestern. It’s, like, not cool. [laughter] But I think it’s super cool. Who’s from Indiana in Paris now? So it’s kind of interesting. [laughter]

Chester Himes wrote his first detective novel, The Five-Cornered Square, at the Hôtel Rachou (the so-called Beat Hotel where Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs also took up residence); Richard Wright used to live at 14 rue Monsieur-le-Prince and lounge at the nearby Café Tournon, Moleskine journal in hand; James Baldwin scammed Marlon Brando out of enough bread to return to the States once up in the Hôtel des Beaux-Arts, right near the café where me and writer Karen R. Good had drinks a few months back. I don’t just know all this shit. I read it all years ago in Paris Reflections: Walks Through African-American Paris.

I’ve owed author Monique Y. Wells a solid for quite a while now then. It was my pleasure to introduce her to my beloved Queen Ann café and their heavenly soupy hot chocolate last Friday. I’d never before written an Expat Q on someone I hadn’t met personally before, but her Entrée to Black Paris gave me an edge into her aesthetic via Facebook. I won’t be here trampin through Paris forever—I’ve got a foot back in NYC already—but Monique’s been here since 1992, and she’ll likely be here long after I’m gone. Please, get to know her. She’s wise beyond my years.

Tell me the origin story of Discover Paris.

My husband and I created Discover Paris. It was his idea. His name is Tom Reeves. He actually came to Paris with me; we were not married at the time, we got married here. He was unable to find work in his field. He was a civilian, but he worked for the Navy. He was a cost-control analyst. When we moved here, unemployment was like 13%, and he didn’t have the right to work. So he was already way behind the eight-ball. If you’re over 35 here and you need a job, you’re in bad shape. That’s even if you’re French. Looked for work a long time, then decided, “Okay, let’s forget trying to get back into the corporate anything—do something entrepreneurial.”

We took a trip to Italy with a service called Insiders Italy. I don’t know if it exists anymore. But it was the first time we had ever heard of the self-guided itinerary. And we went on this trip, it was fabulous. Eleven days, we did Venice, Florence and Rome. We did nothing that we did not want to do. It was not any of this, “You’re in Florence, go to the Duomo” or whatever.

Later, the woman who put the trip together invited us to her place and we had dinner. She was living in London at that time. We were having a conversation and she said, “You know, I think you guys would be good to do an Insiders France.” And my husband said, “Well, you know, I’ve been thinking about this a long time”—this is new to me. [laughter] “I think we should do an Insiders Paris. France is too big, we don’t know it. And Paris is infinite anyway.” That’s really how it started.

It really was to discover Paris from any and all aspects people wanted to discover it from. My husband is white American, so it wasn’t conceived to do black Paris. That only came a couple of years later. We started out just wanting to do what we had done in Italy: ask people, “What is it that you want to discover in Paris? What do you like? Are you into photography? Are you into food and wine? Are you into history? Are you into architecture?” And we’ll write up an itinerary based on those interests. This was in 1999.

When I moved here, I didn’t even realize there was a black Paris or anything like that. With the exception of Josephine Baker, I didn’t know anything about this. So I learned about it. Eventually, I said, “We’re doing this Discover Paris. Obviously, it will be interesting to include an African-American component in what we’re offering.” So that’s how what we used to call Discover African-American History in Paris Tours began. That was the emphasis for writing Paris Reflections. It was partly a way to promote the fact that we also had expertise—

So the tour came first then?

Yes.

And Discover Paris morphed into Entrée to Black Paris?

Entrée to Black Paris is sort of a rechristening of our Discover African-American History in Paris Tours. We’re rechristening because, one, we want to let people know that there is a contemporary African-American Paris and there is a contemporary black Paris that encompasses so much more than our little part of it. And also, well, I guess those are the two components. One, that it’s more than African-American. And two, it is contemporary as well as historic. So we just thought, in order to promote the fact that we’ve expanded our scope, we wanna give it a new name.

How did you come to collaborate with Paris Reflections co-author, Christiann Anderson?

If I remember correctly, we met through Sisters. [Sisters is] an organization—it actually still exists, but is not functioning anymore—the official name is Sisters: An Association of African-American Women in France. It started a couple of years after I got here. I met a woman named Pamela Grant; she was married to a French man, she had a small child. She was starving for company. She was suffering from culture shock and she needed some Americans, you know, some reinforcements. She would go around and any woman who she saw on the street who she thought might be African-American, she would just walk up to them. She was starved for it. And she eventually founded this organization, and I was on the first board of directors. That’s how I met Christiann.

Christiann’s an artist, a writer and an editor. She was doing all that kind of stuff freelance when I met her. We hit it off and decided to work on this project. Actually, she was the illustrator of my cookbook, which is called Food for the Soul. That was our first book project together, and it was at that time that we were talking about doing something about black Paris. We toyed with the idea of doing a calendar and this and that. I said, “I’ve already done all of these walks. I can just do some abridged versions of them and we can put together a book.” And she would do the illustrations. It was her idea actually to do the book. But the walks are abridged versions of walks that Discover Paris supplies to clients, and the illustrations in the book are hers.

Expat Ricki Stevenson invited me to take her Black Paris Tour this year, and Julia Browne launched her Walking the Spirit Tours in Paris long ago. I know there are a million tours of “white Paris,” so so what? But tell me how you three differ.

Julia had the first tours. Julia was part of Sisters, she did her first two Walking the Spirit tours for Sisters. And that was my sort of eye-opening… “Oh! I’ve been walking by all of these places!” and, “Oh, that’s what happened there.” So Julia is sort of the grandmother if you will, or the pioneer or whatever you want to call it. Ricki came, and Discover Paris was not doing black Paris tours or anything. Discover Paris didn’t exist when Ricki came. She put together her tour. And we actually took her first, we were one of her guinea pigs and went out with her. This was many, many years ago, like 10, 11 years ago. My husband and I went with her. She put together something entirely different than what Julia was doing. Then when we decided to start our tours, we weren’t doing any guided tours at all. Ours were self-guided, so we were not really in competition. Same subject matter perhaps, but the format was different.

So nowadays, Julia isn’t living here anymore. She has someone here doing tours for her. Ricki, of course, is here on the ground doing her stuff. And we—I can’t remember if it was after 9/11 or after the second Gulf War—we stopped getting so many inquiries for self-guided stuff and started getting more for guided walks. So we started our own guided walks. Now all three companies do guided walks.

Still, I think the approach is fairly different. Our walks are always private, as compared to the Black Paris Tours, which are public—you can go on any day of the week. We work a lot more with universities and groups that are coming over. That’s not to say that the other two don’t, but for example, we’ve been working with Syracuse University’s Paris Noir since the inception of that summer program: 2001. My approach has always been with regard to all of Discover Paris’s offerings, tours, activities: we’re very rigorous and almost academic. I don’t want to scare people away with that. Our approach is very personal and personable. But we are not just skimming the surface. We are researching in depth everything that we do. So the information that you get is going to be… profound sounds almost pompous. [laughter] But we’ve dug, really. We’ve spent a lot of time in French libraries as well as ordering books. We’ve got so many stacks of books we could start our own library at this point. So we’re very rigorous.

Tell me about Les Amis de Beauford Delaney, the organization that raised funds for painter Beauford Delaney’s tombstone in France.

I had never met Beauford Delaney, I’ve never met any of his family. I became involved with his story because last summer, I was doing an article on African-American gravesites in and around Paris, and I knew that he was buried somewhere near. I knew he wasn’t in Paris, he was somewhere outside. I contacted a personal friend of his who also couldn’t remember exactly. He contacted some other people who he had visited the tomb with. And he came back with the information, the exact location in the cemetary, etc. And the question, Is Beauford still buried?

The question “Is Beauford still buried?” is relevant because in France, you only have your grave for a limited amount of time. You have to renew your space or else you’re dug up. It depends on the cemetary and it depends on the era. When Beauford was first buired, his grave was for six years. Nobody paid at the six-year mark. Americans don’t know this, and I knew this would be a shocker for people. And so it is very rare to see a grave that will say “in perpetuity.” That’s extremely rare.

Beauford died in 1979. In 2009, that would have been 30 years, nobody had ever paid his renewal. And these friends of his were really afraid that he was gonna be exhumed. So they asked me to go to the cemetary and find out how much it would cost to keep him in the ground. They raised the money and I went out there and I paid it.

Bless you.

They were just so overwhelmed. Because they had wanted to move Beauford back to the United States, but none of them was family, so none of them had the right to touch the body. And I don’t know, all kinds of conniptions, I really don’t know the whole story. They were so relieved that I paid this. They said, “Okay, he’s there. We wanna place a marker on his grave.” By then, this is no longer just a story. Now I’m talking to these people. And so I said, well, I can at least go out there and find out how much it would cost to get a tombstone. I don’t want anything expensive. Beauford was a simple man. He doesn’t need anything expensive, but something that’s gonna last. ’Cause I had seen Henry Ossawa Tanner’s grave and it’s in deplorable shape. And he died in 1937. His grave is in deplorable shape, and he has family here.

I went to a place, one of these funeral parlors, and got an estimate. It was gonna cost several thousand dollars. I said, “Money has to be raised to do this. And in order to raise money, we need an organization.” Because these people had just given me the money to pay for the renewal of the concession. But no one’s gonna be giving me—and I didn’t want the responsibility of collecting thousands of dollars or euros. So I started Les Amis de Beauford Delaney. I started it last November. And we commemorated the tombstone on October 14th of this year. It was fantastic. He’s in Thiais Cemetary, which is south of Paris. He’s in Division 86, and it’s the only new tombstone in there.

Saul Williams once trailed the Atlanta campuses of Morehouse and Spelman, flyers in hand promoting his performances with collegiate hiphop act K.I.N. (peace to CX Kidtronik!), or his starring role in an off-campus play of author Pearle Cleage…always something. Same thing post-graduation—Saul stalking Brooklyn’s Fulton Street casually inviting heads to see him do his thing at the Nuyorican Poets Café (he’s the 1996 Grand Slam champ), or Brooklyn Moon Café, or performing with Greg Tate’s old Medusa Oblongata…doin it. I know, ’cause I was there.

Saul and I met first in college during, yes, “the golden age of hiphop”; he dated a Nikki, I dated an Angie. I met painter Marcia Jones—the eventual mom of Saul’s amazing 14-year-old, Saturn—a year before he arrived in Georgia. We’ve bumped heads at Wetlands’ old $5 Soul Kitchen parties in the late 80s, seen a few shows together (Common, the Beatnuts, Gil Scott-Heron). The latest was Bilal, this past summer at La Bellevilloise in Paris. As of 2009, Saul’s boundless creativity has been erupting in the City of Light.

Speaking of eruptions, Volcanic Sunlight—Saul’s fourth studio album, recorded in Paris—will start bubbling over in spring 2011. I stopped by his penthouse space in the [undisclosed location] arrondissement to talk about the new record, his move here, his directorial début starring as Miles Davis and much more. Poet Aja Monet was hanging out from America, visiting, assisting. And yes, the City of Love’s big enough for the both of us. (Lenny Kravitz, I’m not too sure.) In many ways, we’re each other’s ideal audience; glad to have him around.

This conversation was conducted over Miles Davis’s Get Up with It.

Tell me about your living outside of the US for the first time in high school.

Living outside of the country for the first time happened when I was 16. I lived in Brazil, in the state of Paraná, which is in the south, in a small city called Goioerê. And it was a small town where absolutely no one spoke English. Someone in my host family spoke a little bit, and other exchange students.

They spoke Portuguese?

They spoke Portuguese. And although for the majority of the time I lived there, I lived with a Japanese family who spoke Japanese in the house—the largest conglomeration of Japanese outside of Japan are in Brazil. The father was a Buddhist priest who owned sugar plantations, which creates the alcohol that the cars run on there. So he was essentially oil rich. They had their own plane; it was crazy. There was an intercom system throughout the house with birds living in the walls with microphones there, and speakers in all of the rooms. You could hear the birds in the walls.

Big house.

Big tropical paradise with a greenhouse in the middle of the house between the living and the dining room. Crazy.

The thing is, in Brazil there was no middle class really at the time. And inflation went up 1,000% when I lived there. The money system changed over three times while I was there, as if we went from dollars to some other shit to some other shit.

You were there four months?

I was there for one year. There was so much that I learned from. One, I didn’t go to school while I was there ’cause school was on strike for the first four or five months of my trip. I was there to study, I was there to go to high school, to do 11th grade. But school was on strike, and I ended up learning English and meeting a lot of people before school even started. By the time school started, I was really close with the English teacher at that school. And so I would go occasionally to help her teach her English class.

I tried going to school for like two weeks but it was too much of an interruption. Because it was like, to have an American in their high school was too crazy for them. Even the teachers would stop what they were doing and just stare, or stand in a circle around me and ask questions. So it would be like I’d be holding court with the whole school. Like, “Is it true that Americans are more free?” “What it’s like to get sprayed by a firehose?” [laughter] Just like crazy, crazy questions.

The school was really mixed, actually. It was a poor school. In fact in my city, their high school, they didn’t have school during the day. They only had night school if you were in high school, because you were expected to work in the fields during the day.

Was it a third-eye opening experience living outside American culture for the first time?

I came from New York. And so I wasn’t exposed to any of that shit. Even when they asked me what it was like to be sprayed with a firehose, I was like, “I don’t know, ask my parents.” I had no idea. I was on some Cosby, Different World, Yo! MTV Raps shit. I was 16. I was trying to find out where I could find someone that could cut my high-top fade. [laughter] Drawing high-top fades for barbers like, “Just do it like this. I know it seems strange, but do it like this.” [laughter] Their clippers would be the mouths of clippers, but with scissors attached to it, so it was manual clippers.

I broke my wrists my first month that I was there playing soccer. I thought I was about to do this incredible feat after I had stole the ball, and got slide-tackled from behind, fell back and broke both of my wrists at the same time. My left one was the worst. I had to go to a hospital on a Sunday. The hospital was closed. And so we went to this doctor’s house. He took us to his office, which was across the street, like the YMCA type of place. And I watched them put weights on a pulley system as they had strings attached to my fingertips to try and pop the bone back into place. Like, “Add two more pounds.”

How long did that take to heal?

Six weeks.

So, all of those things, plus the fact that I couldn’t find hiphop on the radio. All of these things added up to the fact that I was in my head and relooking at everything I once knew in a new way. In particular America. And the black experience. Because people in Brazil didn’t really know how to deal with me. They were like, “You’re American: that means you’re rich.” But at that time in Brazil, to be black pretty much meant you were poor. Like here, I see how they treat gypsies here in Paris. You can see a gypsy or someone like a beggar walking into a store and they go sss-sss-ssst. You know, that little sound to like, “shoo, shoo, get out.” I would walk in the store and they would make that sound. I would purposely say in English like, “What? Excuse me?” And they’d be like, “Ohhh! Welcome! Ohhh!”

This is in 1989 in Brazil. I’ve been back, but I couldn’t tell you the difference. I know that things have changed tremendously there.

In Europe, you’ve been taking part in symphony performances composed around your books?

Yeah, there’s two. There was a symphony for ,said the shotgun to the head., there was a symphony for The Dead Emcee Scrolls. They’re both done by Thomas Kessler, a Swiss composer who is about 78, 80. I met him in 2003 when he was commissioned by the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland to compose a new piece for their orchestra. He was going to record stores telling people that he wanted to do something that was with someone like a hiphop artist but different. And people kept suggesting me. And so he eventually reached out to me. And I was living in L.A. and he flew there.

My father had passed a few months earlier, and this old man showed up at my house who had flown over from Switzerland to talk to me about something I could barely make sense of. And then he was just like, “Just play this CD.” He had sampled my first album, the song “Our Father” where I had sampled my father? He had taken that loop of my dad speaking and composed a whooole orchestra, a whole piece, surrounding that, this 75-year-old man. So my father’s voice comes through the speakers and then all these strings and oboes and brass, and I’m just, “What the fuck is this?” “This is what I do. And I am here because…” [laughter] And I’m like, Whoa!

So we’ve been performing that all over the place. In the past two months, we’ve performed it in Oslo, Norway, with the Royal Philharmonic in Oslo. And then we just performed it last week with the Hamburg Philharmonic in Hamburg, Germany. We’ve also done it with Berlin at the concert house there, with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra; we’ve done it in Basel; we’ve done it in Stuttgart.

Then there’s the other symphony, The Dead Emcee Scrolls, which is written for a string quartet. We’ve recorded that with the Arditti Quartet, which is from London. We’ve performed that I think in Vienna, in Austria, and even at… Was it Duke University or something? We did it at some festival down south as well.

I’ve asked Amiri Baraka, “You critique America so much; why don’t you just leave?” He told me, “It’s my home.” Complaining about the US for years with friends, I’ve felt like an abused lover who keeps bitching and doesn’t leave the relationship. But I moved here mainly for the French woman I eventually married, not politics. What was your motivation?

Like you, I don’t feel like my action moving here was in any way politically based. I moved here after Obama was elected, which to me means it’s kind of an exciting time to be in America. And so there’s a part of me that would even miss what that could feel like. But on the other hand, I’m kinda just riding the wave. Because I do know to value this perspective that’s gained from living abroad, and everything that I learned when I lived in Brazil, and did eventually look at America and myself and the idea of power and all of these things, and influence and culture and new ways… I saw how much that affected me through time as I began to work creatively in writing and doing music and everything. All those influences from Brazil are huge to me, and very much a part of who I am. And thus, I value what comes from living abroad.

An opportunity came for me to move over here just through an old friend who offered me a place right when I was looking for a place in L.A. And it dawned on me that I could do it. I could actually go there and creatively and work-wise as far as what I was working on with an album and all that, I really felt like this could be a great place to do that from. I automatically started imagining this idea of reinvention, which I like that idea. I’m constantly playing around with that idea. It’s been a year and a half, and it’s been a really cool experience in every way.

How has dealing with Sony France for Volcanic Sunlight been different from your major label experience with Amethyst Rock Star?

Let’s just be clear. Just in the idea of a standard contract, because in America, the system was set up with a majority black entertainers, black musicians, and white contractors. These contracts were set up, because of the racism institutionalized and what have you, these contracts were set up to take advantage of the artist. So the standard contract assumes more, hides more, in the US than it does in France, where a standard contract was set up for French men for other French men, where they have this sense of loyalty to each other and this sense of, “I would never try to harm you, I’m an honest man.” And so just in what you get in a standard contract is shit that you’d have to fight the hell out of and would be impossible for you to get in the United States.

So that’s just on the level of standard. Now bring in lawyers and a little bit of expertise and some experience that tells you, “Well, I want even more than that; I want this, that and the other.” So I didn’t get a standard contract. I was able to determine and to declare what type of contract I would take and what type of contract I would like. Because of previous works and all that stuff, and positioning, they were willing to sit and talk with me.

I chose Sony France because when my first album that I did with Rick Rubin came out—I was on Sony before, that’s the first label I signed to—my experience was at its most positive in France. When Sony America at the time 10 years ago heard my album, they said, “That’s not hiphop. We don’t know what to do with it. We’re not sure we wanna put it out,” Sony France heard the same album and was like, “Are you crazy? We’re putting this out now.” And there was a year-and-a-half difference between when my album came out in Europe, started by France, and then in the US. A year and a half time. The US did it a year and a half later, after they saw what was happening in Europe.

All that was sparked by Sony France. Those people that did that then, where everybody else has been fired, those people have just moved up. Those are my friends for the past… Even when I was working albums on different labels, those same people would help out, make calls, do all this stuff, even though I wasn’t on their label anymore. So these are decade-old friends now that I was like, “Ahh, this would be…”

So my experience and the executive office and all that has shifted tremendously. Not only because I’m working with friends—because I’ve been working with friends, when I put stuff through The Fader afterwards, [Fader founders] Jon Cohen and Rob Stone are friends of mine too. And that was also a cool experience for me.

But it also has a lot to do with the kind of album I’ve made. When I moved here, I had all my demos for the album already done. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I knew that it was a dance album, that it was a pop album. So I believed that it belonged to the infrastructure that already existed, and it was a matter of how to best do that. When the opportunity came to move here, I also thought, “Wow, I bet you if I did through there…” I started imagining what I could work out, and I was able to work that out exactly.

Erykah Badu talks about being an analog girl in a digital world—

That’s great. I forgot about that. Because I have this phrase on my album: something, “analog spacegirl, digital Pompeii,” something.

How do you balance your roots-shaman style with cyberspace social networking? I know you’re @saulwilliams on Twitter, you’re on Facebook, there’s a Tumblr blog coming. Do you feel you have to unplug periodically?

To me, the Internet is kind of like a club or a party at the mall a lot of times. You can make a library of it, but it needs to be a conscious decision. And I really feel like I have no business interacting with… I don’t hang out at the mall. [laughter] There was a point where I did; I don’t do that anymore. And so like the only reason why I really would want to go out and be seen is if I had something interesting to share. And so that’s pretty much how I interact. Which means I’m not anti. I have accounts at different social interaction networks and I like those accounts. I speak when I feel like I have something to share. And I don’t mean simply something to sell. ’Cause to me that gets on my nerves too, when it’s just, “Yo, buy this!” No, but when I have something to share, then I’m really appreciative of the fact that those networks are set up, because it makes sharing easier.

What’s your social life like here? How do you find the French socially different?

Regardless of what your job is, the workday really stops at a certain time, like six or seven, and then it’s like, “Okay, put that shit away.” It’s time to have a drink, to eat, to sit around and talk and [it’s] like, “You need this just as much as you need to work.” It’s really impressed upon you here, like, “Dude, what are you doing? It’s Saturday. No, come to this museum with me.” It’s impressed upon you a bit more, like, take advantage of the other half of your existance.

Like France’s five weeks of vacation.

Regardless of what you do. Yeah, it’s crazy. Even with school. There’s something like 185 days in the school year in America, and there’s 135 days in the school year here? Which means that [Saul’s 14-year-old daughter] Saturn has so many days off and half days and all of this stuff. She’s in school right now.

My social life is different in those regards. But on the other hand, I’m still pretty much a… You know, Italo Calvino has that book, Hermit in Paris? I’m indoors a lot. I spent the first year here in the studio doing this album. So I was indoors then, and now I’m doing a lot of writing. Either way, I’m indoors quite a bit.

Do you have any favorite haunts here?

Yeah, there are places that I’ve grown to appreciate, some really nice places. I’m not givin em out! I’ll tell em to you! [laughter]

Explain a little more about what brought you here in 2009.

The thing that brought me here was that I was going through a divorce. So I wasn’t just moving in L.A., I was having to find a new place which was gonna be the beginning of my new life. So it was a bit deeper than that. When that opportunity arose—the dude was like, “Yo, you should take my place” and it was the same price as what I was looking for in L.A.—it felt like a miracle. It was like, “Oh my god… Yo, that would make me feel better.”

And why? Primarily, I had been in L.A. for 10 years. And I like L.A., you know, I don’t have any of the bad stuff to say that people wanna say. Like, I’m from New York, I like New York and I like L.A., and I embrace the contradiction. But 10 years is a long time, and I’ve realized that for someone like myself whose life seemed to be fixated somewhere between love and ambition, that I was also finding myself interacting… Actually, I still can’t even call it. But it had something to do with love and ambition. And L.A. is an ambitious town, and this is more like a city of love. And I’ve realized that I needed to kind of feed myself.

I missed city living, but I didn’t really miss living in New York. And so the idea of moving to a city was really exciting to me, and taking the métro, all that. I missed all those things in L.A. Walking! And so when I first got here, that’s what my social life consisted of. Just getting lost, and then getting a bike and getting more lost. That’s what I’ve been doing. Now it’s cold, so now I’m indoors.

A more hard-hitting question: Would you go on the record saying Evian tastes like farts?

[laughter] It does. I’ve realized what that is, it’s the sulfur in the water. I can taste too much sulfur in Evian, and so I’ve never appreciated it.

You’ve said you’re living your life as a poem. We’re in accord on that. I feel like, if you call yourself an artist, then what kind of work of art is your life? When you read the biographies of different artists, to me they read like the lives of famous people…even if they weren’t famous already, you know? Do you have encouraging words for Americans who want to live out loud a little more, or maybe leave their comfort zones in the US?

There’s this, I think it’s an Oscar Wilde quote, and I know I’m gonna misquote it so I’ll paraphrase. He says something like, “If you aren’t living above your means, then you ain’t livin.” [laughter] The decisions I make are not really based on money. They’re based on how I would like to experience and navigate through this life. And I kind of put that and love and honesty first, and trust that everything else will follow.

I lent you Miles: The Autobiography this summer for your Miles Davis project. You’re planning to star as Miles Davis in a film you’re co-directing. Can you speak on it a little bit?

One of the things I’m working on while I’m here is, I’ve connected with an amazing screenwriter named Olivia Basset, and she and I are conceptualizing a film on the love story that was between Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis. So, I came here thinking about that and Miles. There was this wonderful Miles exhibit. I’d met Miles’s son in L.A. before I moved out here, and I spoke to him about all this stuff. Then came out here and met Juliette Gréco, who’s such an amazing French icon for what she represents for the merging of politics and art, poetry and art, poets and philosophers speaking through a muse, of the whole movement of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and her relationship with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Boris Vian and this whole circle. And how Miles and Charlie Parker came on May 8, 1949, and how they met. It’s documented, the concert, their meeting, and the love affair that followed, and the depression that followed with Miles when he went back to the States that led to the first time he ever took heroin. But I’m just focusing on those three weeks in Paris in 1949.

So we’ve been meeting with Miss Gréco and just talking to her and beginning the process of developing her story.

And it’s something you’re gonna direct?

Yeah, Olivia and I together.

It’s a furthermuckin guest blog!

Welcome to the Like It Iz series (peace to Gil Noble!), where once a month we’ll be featuring someone else’s voice besides yours truly on whatever tickles their fancy. As long as it’s Paris, hiphop, the arts, fiction, expatriatism or other furthermucker interests, that is.

Endtroducing… Emeli Pontén, 28-year-old Scandinavian hiphop journalist du jour. She cut her teeth as a rap promoter and publicist in Stockholm in the aughties, evolving into a beatmaker and rap writer in her own right. She’s a pistol, so enjoy: the history of French hiphop, according to Emeli Pontén!

Urban Hiphop—Paris
By Emeli Pontén

“Le rap francais, c’était mieux avant?”

As the second largest hiphop producing country in the world, there are definitely more intriguing questions to discuss than whether the French rap scene was or wasn’t better before. For instance, the question of originality. Although tasting a chunky piece of American influence, can we find productions from the French scene that don’t translate?

“We make instrumentals with the same material as our beatmaking neighbor. It’s just a question of taste and artistic choices, inspiration and trends.”—DJ Sek

France had a modest sense of hiphop already in 1979. A few hiphop radio stations emerged, but the culture was more like a members’ club. Back then there were very few dedicated enthusiasts—in Paris, it hardly engaged more than 100 individuals. Unemployment was a huge problem, especially for the young, so people gathered in nightclubs during the daytime to hold impromptu mixing sessions. Hiphop block parties were set up in the areas of La Chapelle and Stalingrad, and in 1989 the first compilation album of young French rappers was released: Rapattitude (produced by Jimmy Jay).

Public Enemy went on a European tour in 1990, right after their release of Fear of a Black Planet. Their concert in Paris at Le Zénith turned into a bloodbath, attracting violent gangs who simply took the lyrics to the streets. This was unwrapped candy for the French press, inevitably raising curiosity and awareness. Hiphop was hereafter an established notion in France. The aggressive sound and political lyrics were picked up by disaffected French youth, and a strong movement in France was soon spawned, with rap acts like NTM, Assassin, Lunatic and Ministère A.M.E.R.

Simultaneously, a more boom-bap, laid-back scene had developed, initially propagated by Dee Nasty—the Kool Herc of France. He was the first producer to release a French rap album, Panam’ City Rappin’ (1984), the first French DJ to compete in the prestigious DMC World DJ Championship, and the first real figure to represent French hiphop culture. Some even claim he created French hiphop. He organized block parties, hosted a show on Radio Nova, and had almost every rap artist in the country come through his studio. Though more humble than his American counterparts, he was at that time already a legend. The supergroup IAM’s first demos were discovered by Dee Nasty; IAM eventually sold over a million copies of their first album, …De la Planète Mars (1991). Cut Killer was another pioneer DJ, the first to import the concept of mixtapes to France with his Hiphop Soul Party cassettes.

MC Solaar also released his first album in 1991, with a digestible pop sound. While the average French rapper was struggling to get his name known just in his own province, MC Solaar mastered the limelight with instant international recognition. No rapper had become recognizable on television in France before him. No other rapper had hit the charts. No other rapper had ventured outside of France. In 1991 he opened for De La Soul in Paris, and was soon featured on the late Guru’s Jazzmatazz (1993). It was a remarkable success for a poor banlieue-raised kid born in Dakar, who used to spend most of his teens tagging trains and walls with SOAR or SOLAAR.

“I didn’t want to speak like the people in the suburbs, but use good French, even if I’m a black man. I needed to do something so they don’t look at the color, but the art.”—MC Solaar

The hiphop scene was domestically more political and provocative than anyone abroad could ever imagine. Gritty voices from the projects spitting out their frustration over the unaddressed problems of racism and discrimination; rugged beats; all black everything. It wasn’t just music, it was a movement of resistance led primarily by young blacks and Arabs. The culture grew strong and independent in the Parisian suburbs (poorer areas, in contrast to bucolic American suburbs). The youth had found their own platform for expression in a medium that didn’t exist before. Eventually everyone was a rapper, but true lyricists were sparse: Oxmo Puccino, Casey, Sheryo, Afro Jazz, La Rumeur, Rocé, X-Men, Fabe, Keny Arkana, Pit Baccardi, Le 3ème Oeil and Koma, to name a few.

The French hiphop scene has had its golden years and depressions, but it would never fade like other music trends. Why? Because it’s not all about the music, it’s a four-dimensional culture, a style of expression. Graf and B-boying are two hiphop elements that France has earned an undisputed leading position in; sadly, the elements aren’t much integrated with each other anymore. While B-boying and graf are self-sufficient scenes, elevating in ambition and geographical spread, MCs are going in the opposite direction: introversion and nostalgia. There are nevertheless exceptions, mutations in the hiphop chromosome with the potential of exerting unexpected features (check out TTC, Vicelow, Milk Coffee & Sugar, Philémon, Khondo, Clone.X, Daz-Ini, etc.). As no one knew what was to come in 1979, we don’t know today what lies in the future. Soyez courageux.