Medical Mondays and An Artistic Analysis

7 November 2013

On Monday I had the opportunity to return back to the Champagne-Ardenne region of France.  Actually, let me rephrase that: on Monday the French government required that I return to the Champagne region of France.  No, it wasn’t for anything bad, but it was for my required medical visit.  Because I am staying in France for more than 90 days, I am required to have a medical visit to prove that I am healthy and that there is no need to worry about me infecting the French population with foreign diseases.  Of course if I was unhealthy I could stay for 90 days and do some quality infecting…  Because I am officially living in in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France, I had to go back to Reims to do my medical visit (compared to 2011 when I did it in Paris).  

In order to go to Reims I had to take a TGV (train de grande vitesse - a superfast train) at 7:58 am and I arrived in Reims about 45 minutes later.  Everyone knows I love traveling by train, though this time I didn’t bring my laptop.  Just my new book (And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris) and the paperwork I needed for my medical visit.  When I arrived in Reims it was actually surprisingly sunny, especially since the forecast showed 100% rain (I find that the French online forecasts are about 50% accurate, which makes it very hard to really plan for things).  Since I’d been to Reims once before and I had my tourist map at the ready, I was ready to conquer the world upon getting off the train.  Or at least conquer a coffee shop.  Well I don’t know what the issue was: whether it was Monday, or whether it was too early, or whether there was a strike, but every coffeeshop I passed was closed.  Talk about a surefire way to kill your moral!  It was awful!  

Since I couldn’t find an open café to save my soul, I decided to do the next best thing: go visit the Cathedral in the early morning light.  Blergh.  That was the most sickeningly sweet and emotional sounding sentence that I’ve written in a long time.  Anyway, I decided to go look things over again when there would be fewer people to interfere with my photos.  (We all know I prefer pictures of buildings to people.  And there’s nothing I hate more than people who ruin my pictures of buildings.)  

Apparently I was really lucky to have gotten such good photos of the Cathedral façade the last time I was in Reims because it is now behind scaffolding and there are men doing work.  (That would really ruin an otherwise good photo!)  Inside, however, I was one of three or four people and the light was really beautiful.  

The Marc Chagall window

I loved how the light in this chapel was blue.  It was sort of surreal.

From there I went to another church, actually a basilica, the Basilica of St. Remi, which I visited the last time I was in Reims.  Unfortunately, they were having issues with their electrical system so it was super dark inside.  This darkness was intensified by the fact that the sun from the early morning was giving way to thick clouds.  But as I left I noticed a building with lots of lights on: a coffee shop.  And better yet: it had wifi!  I went over, had a couple of coffees, read my book, used the internet on my iPhone, and before long other assistants that I’d met were coming in because, apparently, there were a fair number who had appointments at the same time as me.  

My first appointment was just a couple of buildings down from the Heaven-sent coffee shop and it was for my X-Ray.  Apparently the big illness that they look for in France is Tuberculosis and the quickest way to find it is with a chest X-Ray.  Well it only took a few minutes to do because they basically do assembly line X-Rays and all the assistants waited for one another to be finished before we left for lunch.  

We ate in the middle of town and before too long it was time for our second appointment, with a doctor, to analyze our X-Rays.  In Paris the process of getting my visa validated took forever, so one good thing about being in the countryside is that there is nobody ahead of you!  Oh, and the doctor’s office has a pretty cool view.

The giant structure with the tall poles is the Stade de Reims, a giant soccer stadium.

Anyway, before long I was called to go see the doctor and while I was waiting outside his door I started to taken notice of the posters on the walls.  One was about AIDS, a few were about France (obviously) and then there was this one about female circumcision.


I’d never seen a poster about female circumcision until that day, and the more I looked at the poster, the more I started noticing about it.  As an aside let me start by saying that France has very different expectations of newcomers than we do in America - and I understand that.  When I came in 2011 I was amazed by how racist many people seemed at first, but after four months I saw their perceived racism as being very proud of their culture and rather than being racist I started to see them as being protectionist.  Nevertheless, racial issues do still exist in France (not to say that they don’t in America as well) and with the incredible influx of immigrants into France, it will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out.  

Anyway, back to the story: I was in the OFII office waiting for the doctor.  Now what does OFII stand for, you ask?  OFII stands for the Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration (The French Office of Immigration and Integration).  Just think about that for a minute, it’s not just the immigration office, it’s also the office of integration - to help newcomers fit into the French lifestyle.  In America we simply have the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.  But the French want you to integrate, to join their lifestyle.  Already this wouldn’t fly in the US.  Imagine telling somebody that they had to accept the American culture?  And to integrate?  Somewhere somebody would get angry and say that the Americans were trying to brainwash the newcomers and make them forget their familial culture.  

So let’s go back to that poster and look at what it’s saying and take a minute to really think about the imagery and words… and whether they would fly in the US.  

So we have this poster, with words in black and in white, with a big red box, and with a handful of people.  Seems pretty straightforward, right?  Well let’s look at the big black text at the top.

In big black words it says, translated, “Let’s protect our little girls from from circumcision.”  Okay, so we know what the poster’s about: female circumcision.  But we also know that it’s everybody job to protect these girls from female circumcision.  Okay, that’s fine I guess.  There are certainly a number of non-profits in America who bring attention to female circumcision, but it’s a person’s choice to get involved or not.  This poster makes it seem as though it’s everybody’s duty.  Okay, that’s all well in good.  Next phrase:

Translated this means, “Do not impose on them this injury” but the word blessure is a bit stronger than just the word injury.  It’s sort of like a wound/scar/injury all combined.  So yeah, once again the we is used in the grammar, so we know, once again, that it’s our job to protect these girls.  Okay, so this one isn’t too different from the first one, but again remember: this is a government poster.  How would this be interpreted in the US?  Now let’s look at the other phrase in white letters:

“Help them to have confidence in themselves and in life.”  So apparently female circumcision, according to the poster, takes away their confidence.  I have to admit that I don’t know a lot about female circumcision and up until this point the poster really wasn’t standing out to be at all.  Then I looked at the the people and was a little bit startled:

Do you notice anything? There are ten people there.  Four women, three men, and three that are ambiguous because they lack definitive details.  But of those ten people, 9 are of African origins and 1 is Caucasian.  I wouldn’t exactly say that’s a representative sampling of the French population.  But, realizing that, it forces one to consider whether that group is the target audience?  But isn’t that a little blatant?  Yes, I understand that female circumcision often happens in Africa, but if it’s everybody’s job to  prevent it… you get the point.  Take a minute, too, to look at the sole Caucasian figure: a woman doctor.  You might think that’s fairly progressive to depict a woman doctor and to that I’d say sure, but then again we are in 2013 and women doctors definitely exist.  But if you took this imagery to the extreme couldn’t you also say that it depicts the Caucasian race in a position of control?  I’m not saying that I’m interpreting it as this, but this would certainly be the interpretation of some in the US- no doubt about it.  But then the poster artist did something to try to take care of this: he put a large word in the center of the poster:

Egalité.  In other words: Equality.  Part of the French motto: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.  Interesting word placement, huh?  So with that thought I’ll leave you to consider things.  What does this poster say?  What is it supposed to say?  Is this distinctly French?  Would we ever see something like this in America?  Would we ever see this in a government office?  I don’t know.  I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.