Potty talk

As human society moves relentlessly forward, things that some of us experienced as luxuries have easily become normative expectations in contemporary society.  For example, my spouse and children were aghast to discover that our rental house (in which we have been biding time as our own home becomes vacant) had a big, old, fat television with only a handful of channels.  Quelle horreur! (How awful!)  The situation had to be fixed immediately, so now our own flat screen television sits atop the antiquated monstrosity. (Or, which is the monstrosity?)

Having an up-to-date television is one thing, but probably the greater hardship for my family in our U.S. rental has been sharing a single bathroom with one toilet.  Our sweet little rental home was built in 1936 and for the time in which it was built, that indoor toilet was probably quite the luxury.  In some parts of the world, indoor toilets still are a luxury and the focus of philanthropic work (see Gates Foundation work on this: "What we do: Water Sanitation Hygiene strategy overview"). Today though indoor plumbing is ubiquitous in the West; the OECD indicates that 97.8% of OECD countries have at at least one indoor toilet (see OECD better life index.). We've gotten to the point where a single toilet has become the minimal standard in private homes.  Most everyone we know in Seattle has at least two bathrooms with a toilet each, and during our sojourn in France, we lived in two different apartments with two toilets in one and four(!) in the other, arranged variously as full bathrooms or water closets (or wc's), with just toilets and sinks.  Occasionally, in France, we'd come across a bidet (not to be confused with a toilet), but these luxurious items seem to be much less common today.

Luxury in toiletry does seem to be reserved primarily for the private home.  Public toilets continue to be much more minimal, even in the West, although here there are variations.  In France, we attended quite a few all-day soccer tournaments with hundreds of attendees at public stadiums where that minimal standard of a single, barely clean toilet was considered sufficient to meet the needs of all the players and their families.  The conditions often required the provision of one's own toilet paper and the same kind of dexterity as the standing Turkish-style toilets at the French aires de repos (rest stops).  Talk about antiquated models! These toilets off the toll highways were really old school (or barbaric, according to one expat friend.)  In our beloved and bourgeois Aix-en-Provence, public money was finally coughed up in our last year there for the installation of several fancy public toilettes (these are always referred to in the plural in French, even when there is only one!).  I had to laugh at the installation of one which was right next to the location of a very popular children's bungee-jumping attraction, making it difficult for tourists to stand in line or to enter the 'facilities' without being jostled.

French tourist offices don't typically offer access to toilets (not in Aix, not in Nice, not in Lyon), but the staff do direct people to private toilet facilities where you can pee for a fee, but these facilities were often a bit scruffy too.  It seems that the French do not put a lot of money or effort into the provision of public facilities, while providing ample access seems to be much more important in the U.S., even if the toilets aren't always flushing models.  I'm thinking of the outhouse style port-a-potties such as the one I noticed two weekends ago, prominently stationed adjacent to a soccer field at my son's tournament in Beaverton, Oregon. Permanent facilities were also available at the sports complex, but since one particular field was a bit farther away, someone had thoughtfully installed a temporary toilet.  I've even been to tournaments where a dozen such port-a-potties were set up, all in a row.  When you gotta go, that's nice to know.
 

A fish out of water

One of the most indelible images from our first few months in France was of the asylum-seekers I saw storming the door at the prefecture in Marseille one morning.  The foreigners were mostly men, and the speed and aggression with which they approached the doors at opening time revealed so clearly and painfully their desperation and their need.  They were grabbing as hard as they could for the chance to find a safe place for their families to re-build a home and a life.  My family was in the longer, more sedate line, of legal immigrants, of people with residency permits in process, all of us with far greater prospects for staying in France.  The road to residency was still not an easy one, even for us as temporary seekers (see Les documents Sept. 2011, for a small example of the monumental pile of documents we needed), but we did not have the added pressures of a lost home or the painful memories of a lost life.

I've been thinking a lot about those asylum-seekers as well as of the thousands of refugees that were passing very close to France's southern shores in the months before we left, those Eritrean and Somalian refugees arriving by the boatload to Italy's islands (see for example, Italian coastguard rescues 700 refugees, Oct. 25, 2013, France24news)  Then there were, and are, the enormous waves of Syrian war refugees fleeing their villages and country to re-start their lives in Europe, adding to the pressures of those tasked with helping refugees.  And finally, in November, a natural disaster on the other side of the globe created more refugees, by uprooting the homes and lives of thousands of Filipinos.  Meanwhile, my family prepared to leave our temporary home in France, and we arrived fairly calmly and to open arms to our 'home' in the U.S.  Yet, because our physical home, our house, is currently occupied by renters, we have since had a very small taste of what life must feel like for those forced to move from shelter to shelter, bed to bed.  We've slept in 7 different beds since we moved out of our French apartment a little over a month ago, carrying our winter clothes in two suitcases each, and bags of books, electronics, and food.  Certainly, our welcome has been significantly warmer (after all, we have returned to what we call 'home'), and our shelters have been much more comfortable than the government-issue tents or makeshift lean-tos of scrap wood and metal used by the Eritrean, Syrian, and Filipino refugess.  But we understand a little of what it must feel like to lead a nomadic existence all the while trying to work, to attend school, and to manage the mundane tasks that every family needs done, day in and day out.  It's very different from moving about say as tourists, because being a tourist is such a temporary, and more luxurious and artificial experience of daily life.  Not having a real place to call home in the long-term, in which to settle in, to rest, to recharge is debilitating, on both a personal and social level.   I've discovered how rootless one feels living out of unpacked bags and suitcases for weeks on end, and how disorienting it is to wake up in so many unfamiliar beds.  It's like being a fish out of water, not a good situation in the long term.  My family's status is quite temporary and far from being detrimental, but imagine if we had to figure out how to get water, cooking supplies, and food, and access to toilets and showers, on a daily basis for months to come, as many thousands of families all over the world are right now, or if we had to deal also with the lingering personal and other traumas related to forced and dangerous departures, such as those resulting from political unrest or war in one's country, or a natural disaster in one's town, or even abusive relations in one's home.  Without stable, safe, permanent places in which to catch one's breath, in which to lick one's wounds, in which to prepare for one's social roles, children can't do well in school, and adults can't be effective employees and contributors to society.  Homelessness hurts on so many levels.

Cobain et Cézanne

Last week, a flurry of news stories reported the real estate listing of a childhood home of Kurt Cobain, the singer of Nirvana (see "Kurt Cobain's Childhood Home...." Sept. 25, 2013, The Guardian.).  He grew up in the town adjacent to my childhood hometown, and I recognized the house for sale as one like many other working class homes in the area, small and modest.  The asking price however significantly exceeds the property and building value, so some people are obviously attaching more value to this little house because someone lived there who later became famous.  This is another excellent reflection of how we construct and re-construct the social meaning of things, places and people (for other examples, see De l'eau Jan. 2012, or Les âmes des vivants et des morts Oct. 2012).  The passage of time especially influences how we come to understand and re-imagine certain people's contributions and even the places they passed through.

It's a little like this in Aix en Provence, where native son Paul Cézanne was long unappreciated for his art, and his family didn't really fit in as they were seen as interlopers in old Aix society.  Cézanne himself was known as a difficult person so that may also have contributed to the lack of enthusiasm for him or his art. Even the early director of the local art museum refused to acquire any of Cézanne's oeuvres for its collections. Today though, Cézanne's image has been significantly rehabilitated.  He is often portrayed as the godfather among the artists who came to the south of France or who were inspired by his use of color and landscape themes (see my post Un été en Provence, August 2013 ).  His studio, artworks, the sites where he painted, his family's estate, all are cherished parts of this town and renowned tourist attractions. Plaques on walls tell where Cézanne was born, where he went to school, where he died, we know where he was baptised, we can see the signage from his father's hat shop, and his statue on the Rotonde is a good meeting spot.  Cézanne fans can even follow his footsteps through town guided by golden plaques embedded in the sidewalks and farther afield, one can walk on trails to his favorite painting spots.

The plaques on the sidewalks go right past the building in which my family has lived for nearly two years. For many months after moving here, I wondered what exactly the tourists were gazing at on our relatively plain and modest building.  I figured they were misreading their guidebooks or maps as there are two former private mansions with ornately carved doors and elaborate window trims just to the west of us, and the famous French revolutionary Mirabeau's mother-in-law's mansion with its grand gate is situated across the street at the next corner in the other direction.  It turns out that we are living in a former residence of the Cézanne family, a detail that is very briefly mentioned on some tourist office information, but not on any signs on the building or street.  Even our flat's owner did not know the historical provenance of the building. Apparently, Cézanne's mother owned the building from 1878 and lived here briefly and then gave it to her daughter Rose as part of her dowry in her marriage to a local lawyer, Maxime Conil.  The Conils had four children while living in this private residence, so it is very possible that Oncle Paul himself passed some time in the house.  Now the mansion has been carved up into multiple apartments and there is no clear evidence that a great artist may have visited or even that a successful Aixois family raised its children here, just like Cobain's childhood home has very few traces of him.  Yet, for those of us with broad imaginations, reconstructing what might have happened in a home where someone famous passed through is fun, (it's what museums do for us sometimes too).  That the famous person may not have been well-understood or appreciated in his time does not preclude us from imagining that he, on some level, was just like us: he probably looked out these same tall windows in this Aixois mansion, or through the front window of that drafty little Aberdeen house.  As a sociologist, this is often enough for me, to imagine the common experiences among people of different times and places.  For others, the excitement lies in the further possibility that maybe, by association, some of the creative genius of past inhabitants might rub off on them. After all, where did Cézanne and Cobain get their artistic inspiration if not from what they saw when they looked out those windows--that luminous Provençal light for one, and the gray Pacific NW drizzle for the other?