In 1981, I was five years old when my mother and I immigrated to Paris. I stayed there until I was 15. During these ten years, I became a perfect little Parisian. I spoke Verlan and loved drinking mint diabolos, Place de Clichy. I knew the city by heart and walked there candidly every Wednesday afternoon because there was no school that day. On the other hand, there was one on Saturday morning, which seemed completely heretical to my Quebec cousins.
So, I lived in Paris and I had the carefreeness of youth except when a bomb came to shake my daily life and my feeling of security. Between 1985 and 1986, there were 14. I remember quite precisely the media coverage of the bomb attack on Rue de Rennes. The explosive device had been placed in a trash can in front of a busy Tati franchise store. There were seven deaths.
These attacks were claimed by the Committee of Solidarity with Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners. This terrorist group was associated with Hezbollah. What I understood at the time was that the Lebanon war and the Iran-Iraq war, although so far from the 6e district where I lived, came to turn my life upside down. Walks in the Luxembourg Gardens and open-air Guignol performances have never again had the same lightness.
If I’m telling you all this, it’s because I’m in Paris at the moment. I come back from time to time to see my family who have stayed here, or for work. This time, it’s for a tour of shows across France with the LNI theater. I knew full well, in the current context, with the deadly conflict in Israel and Gaza, that the tension would be palpable here. I suspected that I would see more CRS (Republican Security Companies, a specialized body of the National Police in France), more soldiers and more security checks.
What is surprising about this omnipresence of the police is that instead of reassuring me, it generates in me a strange feeling of insecurity. Seeing so many semi-automatic weapons in the subway, on trains or around very touristy places is a brutal reminder of the instability of our time, and it upsets me.
It must also be said that I survived a terrorist attack on March 22, 2016 at Zaventem airport in Brussels. I told my story in detail in a text published in the Solo section on the Radio-Canada website. I was a few meters from the second bomb, which exploded in the departure hall. I suffered no physical injury, aside from partial hearing loss, but I saw the horror. I felt a fear that cannot be described because it is so deep. “I was scared to my bones” are the only fairly accurate words I have managed to put to what I experienced.
If I do not suffer from post-traumatic shock syndrome strictly speaking, I will not hide from you that traveling in a country in a state of “attack alert” brings back all kinds of memories and sensations in me. I’m a little hypervigilant. I try to identify emergency exits in closed public places. I try to stay away from crowds, I walk quickly and my heart rate is faster than usual whenever I’m in a train station concourse.
I know full well that what I am experiencing is not comparable to what people are experiencing in the midst of these conflicts. I’ve heard two bombshells in my entire life. For local populations in the midst of war, it is the equivalent of a weekday morning while they are simply trying to find something to feed their children. There is therefore no question of pity, when I have the most beautiful job in the world, when I meet wonderful people in lots of cities steeped in history, when the rooms are full and when the applause rings out every evening. .
Rather, it is about remembering that peace is fragile. We who live in a country at peace, it is precisely our moral duty to nourish and protect it. It is imperative to become aware of our luck and to value openness to others and respect for our neighbors.
As a child, I could not grasp all the ins and outs of armed conflict. Even if today I am better informed, I still have a hard time understanding all the contours of the geopolitical issues that lead to wars. The only thing I know is that hatred destroys lives, that people’s daily lives are marked by fear, suffering, and surely by deafening anger.
Will humans one day learn to live in peace? How many more centuries will it take before terror and destruction are never again options?
Until then, there remains the performing arts to unite pacifist crowds under one roof, to tell the beauty of the world and to cultivate hope. The show must go onone would say in the language of Shakespeare.
Salomé Corbo is an actress, improviser, author and citizen as best she can.