WILL DETROIT TECH SAVE THE FRENCH SUBURBS?

In a first novel that explodes the literary return of his impeccable style, Diaty Diallo imports techno from Detroit, and sa philosophie du « Do It Yourself », in the districts of the Paris region. It goes “boom, boom” and it can also go “Boom!” “. Explanations.

Detroit has grown from 1.3 million people in 1970 to 700,000 in 2010. The city of Motown and the White Stripes has seen the auto industry slowly leave it, followed by the white middle class, leaving behind a post-apocalyptic landscape of deserted streets and bricked-up buildings. A bankruptcy of the city of which the Michigan Theater, a cinema transformed into a parking lot, is the sad emblem.

It was in the ruins of this Motorcity, populated by more than 80% black people now, that Jeff Mills, Derrick May or Juan Atkins invented techno in the mid-1980s. A post-industrial music that made “Do It Yourself” his philosophy. Today, Detroit is reborn thanks to the development of urban agriculture which makes it possible to offer healthier food to the inhabitants, but also improvised community gardens, collaborative mutual aid and resourcefulness.

PARTIES IN THE PARKING LOTS

In his first novel Two seconds of burning air (Fiction & Cie, Le Seuil), Diaty Diallo evokes this reappropriation of space by the inhabitants in the context of the French suburbs. It is about parties in parking lots and young people who organize a barbecue at the foot of a building, a police blunder and a form of symbolic revenge. ” Since Metoo, we talk a lot about gender distribution in the public space, but young racialized men can also be victims of this distribution. Stagnating in the public space, smoking a cigarette or drinking a can, it’s not the same thing for a black guy as for anyone else. He exposes himself to harassment “, she explains to us on a terrace in the North-East of Paris, a glass of rosé in hand.

In his novel, Diaty Diallo stages the mutual aid between the inhabitants and a reappropriation of black American electronic music…” The cliché is that black people in France don’t listen to techno. But who said that? The idea is to take back what is ours, the different elements of our diaspora culture. We are scattered around the globe, but we have common references. And there is no hierarchy between techno, house and rap. Techno music is black music. »

MAKE THE REVOLUTION

She acknowledges having discovered the history of this movement in Eden, the film by Mia Hansen-Løve, where it is about young white people communing around the beats of Detroit, Chicago or New York. But then she unwrapped the thread of that story going back to the Black Panthers of the 1960s: “ We defend our neighborhoods, we arm ourselves, we train: we make breakfasts, we create dispensaries… We must leave nothing to chance, regain power, and even take it, because here we don’t have it. never had “. When she describes a party for which mothers cook while sons take care of the sound system, it is also a way of advocating by example ” neighborhood autonomy and the creation of suburban ZADs. We know how to do a lot of things, beware, she continues more martially. The riot that arises from who knows where is an exterior reading. People who participate in a riot know very well when it starts and why. The white leftists who rub shoulders with the rioters in working-class neighborhoods are maddeningly paternalistic. We don’t need to be told how to make a revolution! »

At the center of the novel, and of the city in which its characters evolve, a pyramid is doomed to destruction. This pyramid is inspired by the one that Diaty Diallo saw from her home when she lived in Place des Fêtes, this end of the suburbs in the heart of Paris. As a result, she did research on town planning, uses, consultations. ” French studies were unanimous: “The pyramid is not liked by the locals.“But who are these inhabitants? We really have the impression that they are a people apart. Me, I was a resident, and I really liked this pyramid, improbable that I was the only one. I searched and I came across a study by an English firm which said that the pyramid was in poor condition, but that it was really a symbol, a landmark, a meeting point, for people in the neighborhood , their Eiffel Tower. She was not followed: we break things and then we say that people didn’t like her… »

As the X-Men, rappers from Ménilmontant, wrote in 1997 in “Return to the pyramids”, which she quotes as an epigraph to her novel: ” We have to get organized, we have to create our own stuff, before everything explodes, we have to arm ourselves. »

Par Jacques Braunstein

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