Staff writer Amelia Foster attended “Sounds as Archives and Monuments: Centering the quotidian of a French Banlieue” at Columbia’s Maison Francaise on Tuesday, September 17, from 6 to 7:30 pm. The event was an exploration of Mame-Fatou Niang’s book, Néoblaste. 

Over two dozen people sat in the East Gallery of the Maison Française, listening to recordings of children playing, water bubbling, clinking jewelry, and an ice cream truck passing by on a quiet street. The stark white walls of the East Gallery, paired with the plain chairs and lack of decoration, created a dearth of sensory input—the attendees had no choice but to pay attention to the noises playing from the speakers. A tiny room in Columbia’s campus momentarily mimicked the reality of life in Paris’ banlieues, some 3,600 miles away.

The event, hosted by visiting professor Mame-Fatou Niang, detailed the creation of Niang’s book Néoblaste, a book which stemmed from her 2023-2024 artist residency in Clichy-Sous-Bois, a town outside of Paris. During this residency, she worked with a team of artists she had selected to examine the sounds of the banlieue. Niang began by describing stereotypes of the banlieue and contrasting them to the reality of life there, leading us into a discussion of what it means to memorialize sound in an era where the news often leaves us speechless. 

For those who may be unfamiliar with the banlieues, on paper, they are the suburbs of Paris, being part of the Paris metropolitan area. The term banlieue, however, carries a very different connotation from the American ideal of the suburb. Where American suburbs are defined by picket fences, ideals of whiteness, and an overall sense of affluence, the banlieue has the opposite connotation, which is why Niang (and I) relied on the French term rather than its direct translation. 

While there are select affluent suburbs around Paris, most are largely populated by middle or lower class, Maghrebi, black, immigrant, and/or Muslim people. Mainstream depictions of the banlieues characterize them as ghettos, sites of riots, and filled with gangs that roam the streets and terrorize innocent French citizens. Niang’s work seeks to subvert this depiction of the banlieue by focusing on the sounds of daily life, taking a fleeting sensory experience and setting it in metaphorical stone in Néoblaste. 

Niang showed the audience pages from the book on her presentation. It pairs short poems reflecting on aspects of life in the banlieue with images you can scan with an app that plays a sound to correspond with the poem. Niang first read the poems in their original French, and occasionally translated one into English for the Anglophones in the audience. 

The language and content of “Sounds as Archives” was clearly geared towards those who already had a grasp of the politics of the banlieue. The event balanced nicher Francophone topics (references to the theory of French Caribbean politician and philosopher Aimé Césaire, the right-wing family Le Pen, calling France l’Héxagone) with efforts to translate into English, and descriptions of stereotypes of the banlieue for those who may have been unaware.  

The tone was largely informal, with Niang alternating between reading off of a prepared paper, and speaking impassionately towards the crowd. She read her own work, presented the poetry of those she worked with, played videos of elderly artists she knew, and revealed in a gossipy tone that two of the artists had started dating while making art with her. Towards the end, Niang confessed that the June 2023 murder of a young North African boy by the French police tore both her and her art apart, coming almost to tears while doing so. The crowd was reactive, nodding in sympathy and laughing at all her jokes. By the end, I felt that I not only understood the subject better, but that I had formed my own relationship with Niang–she was just that charming. The effect was intimate, as if the presentation of her work was part of a dinner party and the host had just happened to create a slideshow for fun.

The intimacy of the event was only strengthened by the Q&A at the end, with questions that were often simply long, rambling confessions of their love and interest in Niang’s work. Artists she knew in France attended the event to see her present. One man from Senegal said that her presentations of West African culture in the banlieues made him feel deeply nostalgic for his childhood in Africa. Though Niang finished her presentation at 7 pm, leaving 30 minutes of the scheduled time for questions, the in-depth Q&A section ran 15 minutes over and would have continued had the Maison Française not announced the end of the event. 

Niang’s passion for her work sparked the most in her answer to the final question of the night. Speaking quickly, her voice rising, she asked: “What must we do about the past that is not allowed to become the past?” What happens when progress is stymied by the racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia that clouds mainstream depictions of the banlieue? Niang answered that sound produces a public memory. When the news only shows police sirens and riots, she counters with family scenes and West African music. 

During the event, I couldn’t help but remember my own time in a banlieue. Seine-Saint-Denis, the department (similar to a US county) that contains Niang’s Clichy-Sous-Bois, is my home to my close friend, and I was able to visit him there in 2022 when I was in Paris for a summer abroad program. Niang’s art evoked memories of how beautiful the parks were, the sunset from his window, and the noisy bus back to Paris in the morning. By the end, the audience, Niang, and I were all in two places at once: at Columbia, and in the banlieue. 

Niang presenting via Amelia Foster