NICE, France, 12 February 2005 — Perhaps I am a little bit perverse, but I love winter in Nice; gone are the crowds that litter the beaches like confetti, gone is the baking heat that leaves you gasping for breath. Now the beaches are empty save for a handful of die-hard locals who take a dip every day, same time, same place, no matter the weather.
Eight minutes, a vigorous old lady told me, you have eight minutes before hyperthermia begins to set in. But she could go for a full ten minutes and had done so every day for forty odd years. She had never suffered a day of illness, not a cold, not a sore throat, nothing. You should do it, she advised me, it’ll make you as fit as a bomb.
Not wanting to be a bomb, I passed. Besides, it is seriously cold, the Cote d’Azur, just like the rest of France and much of Western Europe, is experiencing an unseasonably cold spell. When I arrived, there was snow on the surrounding hills and the contrast with the intense blue of the sea was startling. It was dazzlingly bright, the kind of sunshine you only get when it is icy cold. Maybe it was arriving from London where it had been gray and wet with a whipping wind to boot, but it took my breath away.
And on the famous Promenade des Anglais, — Nice’s equivalent to Jeddah’s Corniche — middle-aged couples walked hand in hand, whilst young mothers in rollerblades zoomed passed pushing babies in the latest running strollers.
Unlike some of the resort towns of the Riviera, Nice is not a ghost town in the winter. The only time I have seen it deserted was in the aftermath of Sept.11. For long weeks people stayed away, not just the high-spending Americans who had been the lifeblood of the luxury hotel industry, but the language students and the conference delegates, the European tourists and the Parisian weekenders. They all stopped coming; flags ran at half-staff and the locals looked at each other with somber expressions, would it ever be the same again?
By summer, the crowds had returned, minus the Americans; now sunbathing on the beach by the Negresco Hotel you heard Russian and Italian. The Russians are the new nouveaux-riches on the block; they have a long history here and have come back in force, and they spend cash, literally, just like the Gulf Arabs once did. As I sat in an expensive shoe shop one day, I watched a big-bellied Russian man buy fourteen pairs of shoes. He paid for them in cash, in crisp 500-euro notes, from a case full of notes, which his associate conveniently carried for him.
As for our own big-spenders, I rarely see them in Nice. When I first bought my flat in Nice, some of my Saudi friends were puzzled by my choice of location. Why not Cannes or Monte-Carlo they asked, why did I want to buy a place in Nice? To them, Nice was little more than an airport, the place they landed in before going on to the more glamorous resorts of the French Riviera. But that was exactly it, I liked Nice because it is a town, not a resort, you get the best of both worlds, you have beach and sea, but you also have vibrant city life. Moreover, I wanted to be a resident, not a tourist.
Now that I have a home here, I have become one of five million instead of one of five hundred thousand, an altogether different kind of minority, and with it a marked shift in perception.
In pre-Sept.11 London, before 16 hijackers created a global brand of “terrorist” for Arab and Muslim, if I presented myself as an Arab, I got a hazy “ah, you’re from the Middle East” - a vast region that could mean anything from Iran and Turkey to Saudi Arabia and Palestine; if I said I was Saudi, I would get a surprised “oh really?” followed by a bombardment of questions. We were a stereotype: Rich, veiled and subjugated, mystical creatures who lived beneath black veils and behind closed doors, not forgetting the oil well in the back garden of course. But in France, say you are an Arab and you immediately hit a nerve.
The big issue last summer was the proposed ban, now law, on religious symbols in schools. The hijab provokes strong passions here. I remember walking into my local Tunisian grocer one hot summer evening to find the small space ringing with the voices of the owner’s wife and a silver-haired Frenchmen having an animated debate about the issue. It was one of those debates I think of as typically French - heated and intense, voices rising, lots of emphatic hand gestures, but with little interspersions of warmth to show that this is a debate between friends, that there is disagreement not hostility.
The man argued that it was offensive for girls to wear the hijab to school. The woman asked him if she should ask her mother, just arrived from Tunis that morning, to remove her hijab. “Of course not”, he replied, “your mother was born in Tunisia, it is her national costume, it is natural for her to wear it, but a girl born in France is now French and should act accordingly”.
“So being French means I cannot be a Muslim”, the woman replied. “You can practice your religion, but you cannot force your daughters to carry on with medieval customs”. And it went on. Then the man stopped. He turned to me and asked me what I thought. I replied that I support freedom, if a girl believes it is right that she should wear the hijab, and then she should be free to do so. “Ah”, he said, “and what are you, Protestant or Catholic?”
“Muslim”, I said. His face! It was straight out of the worst Egyptian soap opera. He stood silent for an instant, and then he whispered: “You don’t look it”. And in those words so much was carried.
(Iman Kurdi holds a doctorate in psychology. She is based in London.)