Home Sweet...France?

The United States has long been criticized for being a kind of super-culture, a dominant force which is melding societies into one around the world. I remember being stunned years ago when a young boy in a remote village in Senegal asked me about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls! It is not surprising then, I guess, that in France we are reminded of home almost daily, largely because of the omnipresence of American music. Television and radio programs alike include a preponderance of songs from outre-Atlantique. Each week La Nouvelle Star, a copy of American Idol (which was itself copied from a British TV program), features young people competing for the title of “The New Star.” Very often, they choose to sing in English. In restaurants, on buses, even at the marché in Bédoin, we hear American music from across the decades—the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Mariah Carey. Other Anglophone artists figure prominently on the music scene as well, like the highly popular British singer Amy Winehouse. A few weeks ago it was kind of fitting to hear Louis Armstrong singing “April in Paris” as we walked through our town's outdoor market!

But it is not only music that makes us think of home. Many French people now dress in a way that hardly distinguishes “them” from “us.” One Saturday afternoon in a restaurant in Carpentras I am pretty sure I was the only person not wearing blue jeans! At a park in Lyon last week Bermudas and other types of shorts, baseball caps, sneakers, and flip-flops, as well as jeans, seemed to be the apparel of choice. T-shirts everywhere herald American designers and manufacturers such as Calvin Klein, Gap, and Abercrombie & Fitch—or at least have fairly random English words like “Halloween” printed on them. In fact, for years now, finding t-shirts written in French has been practically an impossible task. Too bad we weren’t interested in buying souvenirs announcing “I [heart] New York” or “I [heart] Lyon”!

Larger cities and towns also have their fair share of businesses with English-sounding names. In Avignon a few weeks ago, we saw two clothing stores directly across from each other, one called Getaway and the other The Next Door. Restaurants, too, sometimes have names like Backstage Café or perhaps Smoking Dog. On their menus you might even find des brownies or some kind of crumble--à la rhubarbe, for example. Sometimes it’s nice to have a little touch of home when you’re far away.