The City Announces Itself
Before I arrived ysrerday, I only knew Marseille from text and image. The works of Pagnol and William Friedkin; research on the Corsican Mafia, Mad Jacky, Black Maddonas and a certain class of Russian émigré for my own books. Interviews with policemen, fixers and sanctioned historians of the Catholic Church are not always the best way to form an opinion of the place. Even Rick Stein might prove a more reliable source, managing as he does to be both wonderfully correct and disastrously misleading about the city.
Even Marseille’s own official brochures call it turbulent. The city is raw. Untidy. An unedited anthology. Turn a page and you move from the poverty of Africa in Europe to glitterati enclaves and Mafiya holiday homes. Sporadic patches of regeneration and gentrification rub shoulders with slums. Old French money bunkered in the hills is surrounded by places drowning in years of municipal neglect. Parts of Marseille display the embedded deprivation you found in Sicily or Sardinia, parts are Lichtenstein-on-Sea.
Driving to Marseille through the type of fierce limestone hills the English would exaggerate into mountains, the city announces itself miles out. Before you to to the dissonant border where shattered housing towers and bewildered post-industrial estates clash with Provençal countryside, the graffiti starts. Motorway signs are retooled with Arabic hip-hop tags. Speeding down a calligraphic battlefield, your 20km from Marseille and on the patch of someone called D’arbo. Territorial pissing rituals converted into spray paint politics.
It seems as if every wave of immigration in the last 2,600 years of Marseille’s history is fighting for a bridge over the road or a wall to announce itself. Every likely location surrounding and even on the motorway is burnt and bombed with block and bubble writing or a fill-in. Trying to even guess at the translations for the procession of French, Spanish, Kreyòl Ayisyen, Arabic, Yoruban and Italian names and phrases makes my head spin.
It is no surprise to discover later in the evening I am adrift in a city so rich in symbols even the tourist gift shops push the Tarot de Marseille.
Even Marseille’s own official brochures call it turbulent. The city is raw. Untidy. An unedited anthology. Turn a page and you move from the poverty of Africa in Europe to glitterati enclaves and Mafiya holiday homes. Sporadic patches of regeneration and gentrification rub shoulders with slums. Old French money bunkered in the hills is surrounded by places drowning in years of municipal neglect. Parts of Marseille display the embedded deprivation you found in Sicily or Sardinia, parts are Lichtenstein-on-Sea.
Driving to Marseille through the type of fierce limestone hills the English would exaggerate into mountains, the city announces itself miles out. Before you to to the dissonant border where shattered housing towers and bewildered post-industrial estates clash with Provençal countryside, the graffiti starts. Motorway signs are retooled with Arabic hip-hop tags. Speeding down a calligraphic battlefield, your 20km from Marseille and on the patch of someone called D’arbo. Territorial pissing rituals converted into spray paint politics.
It seems as if every wave of immigration in the last 2,600 years of Marseille’s history is fighting for a bridge over the road or a wall to announce itself. Every likely location surrounding and even on the motorway is burnt and bombed with block and bubble writing or a fill-in. Trying to even guess at the translations for the procession of French, Spanish, Kreyòl Ayisyen, Arabic, Yoruban and Italian names and phrases makes my head spin.
It is no surprise to discover later in the evening I am adrift in a city so rich in symbols even the tourist gift shops push the Tarot de Marseille.
Labels: Black Madonna, Mafiya, Marseille
posted by David at 6:20 AM
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