which get periodically torn down. Several people have died trying to get to the United Kingdom via the underground tunnel built for the Paris-London Eurostar train.15
The Gare du Nord has become part of these border zones and the violence they enact. Despite being thousands of kilometers from the Mediterranean, and three hundred kilometers from France’s northern border, the station operates the Eurostar rail line that takes passengers through the Channel tunnel to London. As a result, there is a legal border within the Gare du Nord that passengers to the United Kingdom must pass through before they board. In May 2017, an unidentified refugee was electrocuted and died at the station while trying to jump onto a London-bound train. He was not the first to die this way. The trappings of the border and those who enforce it are everywhere in the rail hub, including military patrols and customs agents, British immigration officers, two types of the French national police, railway police, and private security.
Like many railway stations across the world, the Gare du Nord has also been a magnet for those who exist on society’s margins, often excluded from full participation in urban citizenship. More than any other Parisian railway station, the area is known as a site where homeless people, sex workers, teenage runaways, petty criminals, and drug users congregate alongside the throngs of passengers taking international trains. Since 2009, the Gare tended to be in the news for one of two reasons (based on tracking Google alerts): a police action following “gang fights,” drug trafficking, or youth delinquency; or the arrival of an international celebrity on the Eurostar train. French literature and filmmaking represent it as a site of encounter, danger, and/or criminality.16 The neighborhood around it has been formed by successive waves of migrants, from rural French to southern Europeans to North and sub-Saharan Africans to South Asians, leading tourist brochures to describe it as “exotic” and “colorful.”17
The station has been used as an example of France’s urban ills, a dangerous and seedy locale where African immigrants and their descendants were accused of taking over Parisian public space. “You arrive at the Gare du Nord, it’s Africa! It’s no longer France!” exclaimed Nadine Morano, former French government minister and congresswoman, while being interviewed on French television. In a similar vein, I heard several white French people refer to it as “la Gare des Noirs” (the Noir/Black Station) instead of the Gare du Nord (the North Station). I will return later in the book to both of these racialized representations, which are interpreted differently in the station’s social world. According to the head of John Lewis, one of the biggest English department store chains, the station is “the squalor pit of Europe.” In the popular imaginary of many commuters from the Paris region I spoke to, the Gare is an unavoidable nuisance that they must pass through to get where they are going.
But the violence of the border and the presence of society’s excluded does not define the station. In the social imaginary of many migrant communities, it has taken on other meanings. For example, for the Algerian-French novelist Abdelkader Djemaï and the chibanis (Algerian retirees) in his novella Gare du Nord, the station is a symbol of warmth and connection holding the promise of distant lands: “As soon as they approached the Gare du Nord,” Djemaï writes of the chibanis, “They felt attracted by its warm atmosphere, its feminine forms, and by the soft light that had the color of a good beer. It was the port where they debarked depending on their mood and their imagination.” Although the station also reminds them of their precariousness, their “fear of ending up homeless like all of those on the sidewalks of the Gare du Nord,” it remains a mobile home-away-from-home, fitting to lives woven in the interstices of urban life in France.18 Or as writer Suketu Mehta speculates, “Maybe what keeps the immigrants in the area, is the knowledge that the first door to home is just there, in the station, two blocks away. The energy of travelers is comforting, for it makes us feel that the whole world, like us, is transient.”19 These narratives anchor the station to the immigrant history of northeast Paris where it is located. They evoke the aesthetic of movement as one of the factors that draws so many to the station.
Lassana and his adventuring peers often used the word “crossroads” to describe what they appreciated at the station; unlike segregated spaces of the Paris capital region so often studied in the scholarship on migration, it brings together people from all backgrounds.
“We all started out in the immigrant dormitory,” Lassana used to say, referring to the foyers built in the 1950s in France to house foreign workers. “But we didn’t stay there very long, we didn’t want to put ourselves on the sidelines.”
His friend Mahmoud, an older Pakistani man who had been in France for decades, agreed. “You don’t want to be on the sidelines, so you come to the Gare du Nord,” he said.
Many migrants saw the station as a site of convergence and social potential. Lassana and his peers also said that it helped them to understand and live in the “real France”: the one hidden by media representations and invisible from the “sidelines” of suburban housing projects and immigrant dormitories.
BEYOND BORDERS
By examining the intersection of West African adventures with the Gare du Nord, we can disrupt the “story we already know” about migration and integration, and offer other stories too often obscured by the focus on border violence, detention, and deportation in the media and in scholarship.20 Even when intended as critique, the media spectacle of migrant death and the emphasis on the repressive tactics of policing and security often end up enhancing the visual impression of states’ power to exclude undesirable populations. The focus on borders, camps, and the security apparatus enacting dramatic forms of exclusion at entry points and in transit zones tends to neglect the way that migrant experience is also defined by the more banal functioning of a capitalist market system in which migrants are included but as subordinate members of a social, economic, and political system that offers them few rights and privileges while requiring their labor, a process anthropologist Nicholas De Genova calls “inclusion though exclusion.”21 The focus on repression also tends to ignore the failures and gaps in state-made exclusionary measures and the ways that migrants have contributed to the making of Europe and its urban spaces.
Lassana and other West African adventurers use the station to challenge “inclusion through exclusion” and build an alternative form of meaningful integration via urban public space. I have chosen to use the controversial word integration not as an analytical concept but as a provocation and to displace some of the commonsense ways of thinking about what integration means and what it could look like, especially since rural migrants from West Africa are often presented as refusing to integrate. The term is used in French state immigration policy (including the now defunct “High Council of Immigration”) and political speech, usually to imply that certain communities—most often Muslims and people of color—have failed to “integrate” in an acceptable way.22
At the Gare du Nord, migrants develop new strategies to work around the restrictions placed on their mobility by French policies and migration restrictions put into place since the 1970s, policies that created the category of the “clandestine” migrant.23 The 2008 economic crisis and the 2015 “migration crisis” have created further obstacles to migrant livelihoods by fueling nationalist political movements and making it more difficult for migrants to find jobs and secure legal status.24 When their sojourns abroad started to extend to over a decade and the signifiers of status and success escaped their reach, migrants began to seek new ways to attain their goals in France.
It was in this quest that West African adventurers have developed what they call the “Gare du Nord method,” a set of practices and an overall moral orientation through which they seek to create new channels to produce value abroad. This approach is based on combining the lessons of courage and discipline taught in their village upbringing with the strategies they learned on the road across West and Central Africa, and the knowledge they gain in France. Through it, they seek to create value through social relations and systems of exchange
