F-Rancid



The year is 1989, two centuries after the revolution and the Nation of France still proudly presents itself under three words: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
I am a thirteen year old immigrant with no knowledge of the language or culture. My parents send me to a private Catholic school that had been recommended to them by some local farmers. Overlooking the fact that I was brought up in the Protestant faith. This proved to be a problem with some of the other pupils at the school. Thus making my first memory of France being surrounded by boys twice my size shouting at me in a tongue I didn't understand. Or teachers leaving me on my own in a room with a couple of books and telling me to learn the language. My parents were too busy living some sort of second honeymoon to be bothered with my problems so I spent every day with a dictionary and copied out everyday words. I did this for a few months until I could muster up enough of the language to communicate and thus began my true discovery of French mentality.
For this first year we were living in a small agricultural village from which I got the bus everyday to school. Every morning I would face a selection of derogatory comments while boarding the bus and have a variation on the theme when returning home. At the end of the school day all pupils had to wait at the gate until their transport arrived, a procedure that was upheld by a wicked looking woman employed as playground surveyor. I remember this once however, coming out of the classroom that lead directly on to the exterior fire escape stairs and seeing everyone the other side of the gate looking at the wall connected to it. I fleeted down the three flights to find out what they were all staring at. Spray painted in red letters was the sentence: 'Let's not play with Le Pen'. While I was reading this a boy was using a green leaf to stain the letters: i s, on to the end of it. I asked another boy next to me what Le Pen meant and he made a Nazi salute while holding his index finger under his nose then said that Le Pen is a bad man. He added quietly while peeking at the school that they liked him but he didn't.

***

Jean Marie Le Pen is the leader of a political party known as the National Front. This party took its roots from a terrorist organization known as La Cagoule which contained members such as Charles De Gaulle. It's main idea is that France belongs to the french, that the frontiers of France should be reinforced and immigration should be stamped out. In televised interviews Le Pen has made remarks along the lines of: there is lack of evidence that Jews were gassed to death during the Nazi Holocaust. The lack of evidence being that no one actually saw this happen as there were no windows on the gas chambers. The worrying factor however is not so much what this man has said over the decades but that he got over 15 percent of the presidential votes during the 1995 and 2002 elections. In fact in 2002 he was approaching a fifth of the overall votes. Now many french people will tell you that this figure is so high because of the low turn out of voters and that those that are for the National Front will make sure they vote. However they forget to mention that people such as myself, who are French citizens are not allowed to vote. Yet if you are a french national and live in another country you are allowed to vote without even setting foot in the country. Welcome to the land of Equality.

***

For the next few years we lived in a bigger town slightly further south. Here is where I had to put up with remarks such as: 'What are you doing in this school! Why don't you go back to your own country?', 'are you not wearing your skirt today?' and of course the obligatory mocking of my Scottish accent. Many of these remarks resulted in a boxing demonstration which was most definitely in my favour as I had been trained as a boxer from the age of 6 and was taught: When pushed hit hard. I didn't get in to many fights before people left me alone but that was just me. Over the period of a week a small Arabian boy started going to the canteen for lunch. He sat at the table where I was seated with 8 others. He was obviously shy and a intimidated by the large amount of people in the canteen and the fact that he was younger and smaller than the rest of us didn't help. On his first day nobody left him any food which I noticed by his clean plate when lunch was finished. On the second I told him to sit next to me as we walked in which he did and he got his share of lunch. For the rest of the week the young lad followed me to whatever table I sat at but still was getting abuse of one form or another from the other children at the table. Most of it was name calling that I didn't understand at the time. He lasted a week then he didn't have school dinners anymore. The thing is the children that were picking on that little boy were afraid of the other big boys who happened to be of Arabian decent. These big boys did tend to behave like pack animals which I learned first hand when ten of them were waiting for me outside the school gates. They were there for revenge as I had taken on two of them the day before and beaten one of them up. The result was ten waited for me to come out from school, hovered around me for a few minutes, none of them daring to touch me and that was the end of it. It is this sort of behaviour that many so called French natives try to use as a reason for voting for the National Front. The irony is these Arabian boys were French and had been since the day they were born, so even if the National Front did get in to power and applied it's magic French saving formula it wouldn't change a thing for these lads. On the other hand all the people just getting on with their lives would be told to pack up and get out because they weren't born on French soil.

***

In many, maybe even most French households it is agreed that there is a problem with Arabs in France. This is perceived because of a small group of undesirables who turn to crime and violence and of course are of Arabian decent. What is not spoken about is that France occupied Algeria for years and did not have a particularly good record in human rights while there. During the Algerian war(1954-62) the French systematically tortured and mutilated native Algerians, this brutality was tentatively covered up then tried to be excused by saying they were doing that to. At the end of this conflict Algerians who had fought with the French and not against them had to leave their native land or risk their lives. So they emigrated to France where they were treated with disdain and given very little opportunity to make a good new life often finding themselves working in factories under poor conditions with equally poor pay.

***

I worked in an internationally known industrial bakery during holiday time to get some cash together for my studies. I worked along side Africans and Eastern Europeans packing and stacking frozen bread. Yet every time I went to the main office to get the missing pay I was due all I could see were Caucasian French people. This is quite a theme throughout France, you really do notice the black man with the good job because it's such a novelty. To succeed in France as a foreigner is not impossible but it will not be easy. You will be put down constantly and in many ways and no matter what you do or say they will find a way to slow you down. I sat and passed a Bachelor of Literature in 1997. During two two years preparing for the final exams I had a french teacher who failed every paper I handed in. I got these papers verified by other French teachers and they informed me that I would pass without any problems which I subsequently did. In another school in the same town a teacher pushed a pupil down the stairs. The boy died from the fall and the teacher was punished by being transferred to another school, it was an accident after all. A few years before this a young woman was serial raped by the local rugby team but as the most of the rapists were the sons of Doctors and lawyers no charges were pressed. A couple of these same lads went round pensioners homes putting cigarettes out on the old folks feet until they said where they hid their savings. Again no charges were pressed. A young man of Arabian decent, suspected of car theft was shot dead by a police officer for running away. I got arrested and a gun held to my head as a teenager for walking down a street at three in the morning. The same officer who arrested me shot a woman in the leg while on duty drunk one night and the only reason he is no longer a police officer is because he shot himself in the head. This is the France I know because this is the France I lived in. It has no brotherly spirit, it's equality depends on what family you were born in to and the only real freedom it gives you is the one to leave.

Dreams And Other Visions


I set up a Deviant Art account some time back but it is only recently that I have been spending any time there. Being an image orientated network (Though writing goes on there to) I've uploaded a bit of a mix of visual work done over time. The more recent images from Delusional Reflections are not up yet as I have not finished the series and want to go back over all of them and clean them up here and there.
There is also a journal that comes with the glorious Deviant package, where most folk keep an update of what ever they are up to. Well I do that here as best I can so I thought I'd use the journal on Deviant for something else and so you have a journal of dreams. Any that stick out or that quite simply I remember go in to the journal. I write them as a narrative and do drop a lot of details as I just want want them to be threads, something to interpret, give you all a chance to be Doc Freud for five minutes. The frequency will vary as I don't dream a lot and when I do they are not always that intriguing but I think it will make for an interesting read in a year or so.

Setting The Scenes



The journey begins in France sometime around 2005. How I got there is vague and confused but I did and there I stayed with my parents and little brother for the best part of a year. My mental and physical health had seen better days and having to live with two people whose egocentricity's have no boundaries made life particularly difficult. The other down side to my situation was the country itself. Having lived there for just over a decade beforehand, I had grown to particularly dislike it. I shall go more in depth on this subject with an essay at some other point.
The next stop is Scotland, the land of my birth. It was my intention to spend no more than three months there during which I was going to help my Grandmother sell her old house and move in to more suitable accommodation. Part of this was achieved but the rest really did not go according to plan. It was during this period that plans were made for my next move.
Hong Kong is now where I call home and will stay as thus until the aliens abduct me for more experiments.
These are the three scenes for Mirrors And Black Magic. The first five tracks are for France, the next five for Scotland and the final three for Hong Kong. I have been gathering more material and ideas for another project meanwhile that will be fully focused on my new abode. Ground work sets the roots to stability.

Pawns And Principles


With life experience we build our defences. We base our principles on knowledge gathered over time. Then there is a point in time for many where the gathering of knowledge stops and life is followed by the set principles in mind. When all new knowledge ceases to be accepted. This is when we have tested the shield and now want to wave a sword. How fiercely we wave that sword depends on the confidence we have in our convictions.
We all hide insecurities and fears behind a form of apparent strength. Whether it be the school bully wielding a stick or the aggressive priest wielding a bible. What they beset on others is fundamentally what they are feeling deep down inside themselves. They both need a recognisable symbol to stem strong emotions in onlookers. Make others feel what they are feeling through the means of a story or a threat. In short: our principles are derived from base instinct. The will to survive, the will to be top of the food chain. The thing is though, you can dress a dog in gowns of silk and lay a golden crown upon its head it is still a dog.