Jacqueline Feldman: ‘It’s salutary to spend time around people who have arranged their lives in radical ways.’
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Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease: The Paris Document – out from Fitzcarraldo Editions on 30 January – delivers captivating literary reportage on Parisian squats of the early 2010s. Feldman introduces us to people who transformed abandoned buildings into homes, shelters and hubs for artistic creation. With echoes of Agnès Varda’s work, Feldman’s prose is compassionate and honest, acknowledging her own role as an observer. She answered these questions by email about her fifteen-years-long project, begun in 2009.
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What intrigued you about the squats in Paris? What questions drove your work?
I was intrigued by their evocation, and with it their manipulation, of the layers of the city, and particularly that of the written city, of its myths – by the rewriting of the city of Paris. I also wanted to find something out in the world that would be shaped like a book – having been taken, in my then-recent experience as a college student, by the paradox contained in the idea, from literary history, of the nonfiction novel. The squat, with its strong dramatic unities of time, action and place, offered not only a fascinating set of characters and questions, but also a readymade form.
What surprised you most while you learned about the squats and the people who lived, worked and spent time there?
The emphasis within the community of the squat Le Bloc on learning from one another was so potent that I struggle to handle the question abstractly, and I hesitate to consider if this is an appropriate occasion to pass on any practical knowledge; at last the only possible answer, even if it seems uninformative, is that I was constantly surprised as well as humbled by the hospitality that I, and my project, received. I wish I could say something as exciting as, you can live really well on nothing, but the context of these squatters’ situation in France – where many of them, in contrast to being in debt in the way of the average American, could live on the RSA, an allocation of about five hundred euros monthly that functions almost as a universal basic income – means that certain lessons just aren’t portable; people did age out of the scene, which could also be hard on the body, suffering from addictions, other stressors.
You must have had hundreds of pages of notes and hours of tape recordings. How did you decide what to include?
Thousands of pages, actually, across forty notebooks. I decided what to include based on what seemed strongest or most interesting as material – you could say that much of the book is told in scene, though there are also expository passages where I lay out various other dimensions of the story or setting. It was in the last year of my project, much of it devoted to fact-checking, that, going back through everything, I tried to test if I’d been representative in what I had included.
How did you feel moving about Le Bloc? What was it like navigating this space socially?
I was afraid of moving into Le Bloc, probably not as much as I should have been, but it seemed obvious that there was going to be something missing from the reporting if I didn’t do so. But it went really well. I often loved to live there. There was a buoying energy, there were friends to encounter in the hallway, there was always something going on. And while everyone knew me as a journalist or reporter, my practice of note-taking, different to the feeling of getting in and out with one’s story in other kinds of journalism, was harmonious with other practices carried out there; in this squat a great diversity of artistic practices were engaged in in ways that were daily, unfussy though sometimes dramatic, and personal, idiosyncratic and yet rhythmic, focusing the attention.
Art is highly valued, broadly speaking, in French culture. That said, it is still surprising that artist squats were threatened by eviction at a lower rate than emergency ones. What do you make of this discrepancy?
The political scientist Thomas Aguilera was the one to make that discovery in 2010. Today, ever since the passing of the so-called ‘Anti-Squat Law’ of July 2023, which criminalised squatting in new ways in France, no such reprieve can obtain. So that unusual state of affairs in city politics – whereby being able to show that you had artists in your squat, or being able to show that you were an artist if you were a squatter, had the potential to allow you to make your home in your squat for a little longer than you might have otherwise – frames the investigation of my story historically, temporally. For a few years there, art saved lives, and not just in the usual way it has of doing so.
The squatters’ power as a collective is striking. Could you attribute this collective spirit, in part, to French culture, with the frequency of grèves, manifestations and ‘blocking’ schools in mind? Or is it unfair to tie the idea to French culture given that many squatters were international?
Certainly the squatters’ resistance in France is formed by, as well as being a part of, French culture; interestingly Babar of Droit Au Logement – who, making an appearance at a climactic moment, helps the Bloc squatters organise a march – was born to a stereotypical Left-Bank family (a hair too young to be a soixante-huitard, he did participate in the occupation of the Larzac), even if the typical profile of Bloc squatters – who were very diverse – wasn’t that of the university student you evoke. But coalitions of workers and students have always been important to French protest, too.
At the same time, I was struck by the influence, around Le Bloc, of a vision of sociality and mutual aid that appeared to have been both inspired and corrupted by much experience with the ins and outs of socialism’s bureaucratic state. They of course get it together to form an association or organisation; squatters called themselves, somewhat proudly, SDF (sans domicile fixe, a bureaucratic/social-sciences term for an unhoused person) – reclaiming the term – or insulted each other by using the term cas social, abbreviated to casso: someone who is just there being taken care of by the group. There were international influences – during meetings, conventions from direct-action or anarchist traditions that are international prevailed – and I often felt as if I was encountering not only shadows of Paris’s past (bohemian or revolutionary spectres) but, in our globalised day, an idea circulating as distorted myth about some elsewhere or other, a lot of paranoia, much of it healthy, about America. My book makes an argument for the squat’s precedent, another way in terms other than those of property rights of thinking about a right to a space, in its neighbourhood of Belleville, which used to be a larger town with an important history of popular uprisings. But opening a squat isn’t a very highly collective activity, even if it’s better done as a team or small group – it was living together as two hundred people within the squat that made the greatest demands, at Le Bloc, on squatters’ ingenuity of spirit and collective imagination.
You wrote that you told one filmmaker at Le Bloc you ‘didn’t think either of your projects had changed any squatter’s situation really, materially’. At that point, were you facing doubt about the purpose of your project? Now having completed this book, what do you hope people get out of reading it?
The filmmaker is describing a feeling of power he was able to enjoy, even retrospectively, by imagining that the filming had had actual, in-the-moment effects on the squatters – causing shifts in their relationship dynamics, for example. Squatters, including at Le Bloc, often courted media attention in the hope of getting their squat to stay open a little longer. I didn’t really ever deeply suffer from a feeling of guilt that the film or the book hadn’t helped keep Le Bloc open a little longer, this kind of an ambition never seemed realistic to me especially when I would be writing in English for some far-off publication date, but today I do hope that people reading this book are able to find something beautiful or interesting in it, also in the real-world situations that it archives, that they might not have thought of as beautiful. Nonfiction writing is a procedural, but also social method for turning up language and form. And of course it would be great if news of these squatters’ experiments helped inspire other collective undertakings… Their decisions, their own procedures of bricolage as they made lives in the ruins of the storied city, seem, even today, prescient, at a time when many new ideas about ways to live and coexist are needed.
Did your time at the squats change your perspective on yourself as a writer?
I cut out of an early gushing draft of my Acknowledgements, and so would like to use this opportunity to acknowledge, that the example of integrity in work that artists in squats set helped me persevere in working on-and-off for fifteen years on this project that required many sacrifices. It’s salutary, as a young person, to spend time around people (if you haven’t already!) who have arranged their lives in radical ways, who sacrificed to do so; it can at least feel like it helps you achieve a greater degree of honesty – honesty with yourself – about what is possible. So I try to apply what they taught me in conceiving of and working on my writing projects. And the line between life and art, living and art-making, was at Le Bloc fine, setting up another aspirational ideal.
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Image credits: Amelia Golden.
Jacqueline Feldman was the recipient of a Fulbright grant for her reporting in Paris, where she lived for many years. An Albertine Translation Laureate for her previous book, On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, which features her translation of a story by Nathalie Quintane, and a graduate of the EHESS-Paris, she teaches expository writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her essays have appeared in Triple Canopy, The White Review and the Paris Review.
Julia Steiner is a journalist who writes about literature, science, and culture. Originally from Omaha, Nebraska and now based in Paris, she works as an English Content Creator for the online magazine 3Dnatives. A recent graduate of Tufts University, she earned her degree in international literary and visual studies with a concentration in French. Julia is also a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society and contributes articles to their Key Reporter magazine.
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