Our little house in the French countryside sits somewhere between Paris and Chartres. Barely visible from the road, it hides in the middle of several tall pine trees where squirrels, pheasants and frogs bounce around doing things that busy animals do. Upstairs, in the attic of our house and in my husband Olivier’s home office are several tall stacks of newspapers.
Newspapers that look like this:
When I moved to Paris in 2006, Olivier had these papers stacked all around our tiny apartment in Montmarte. “What’s up with these?” I’d wondered. He told me they were a satirical newspaper, which didn’t surprise me at all because he and I met through our mutual love of The Onion. One of the reasons we ended up as a married couple in the first place was due to our love of mockery and funny shit.
As time went on, I realized he wasn’t just a fan of the newspaper. He was fucking bonkers about it. He showed me several books of cartoon collections by various Hebdo contributors that sat on our bookshelves, two colossal volumes of vintage covers from Hara-Kiri, the magazine that would later become Charlie Hebdo. When I was first learning to read in French, he handed me a couple of children’s books and a book of cartoons by Charb, Charlie Hebdo’s editor and said, “If you’re going to be reading French, this is an excellent place to start.”
He even showed me a couple of books written by another Hebdo contributor, Bernard Maris, and told me, “He’s one of my favorite economists.” Since I do not have a favorite economist and have a defect in my brain that makes anyone who talks about economics sound like a teacher in a Peanuts cartoon, I just smiled and nodded, figuring that if Maris was on team Hebdo, good enough for me.
Both of us love comedy and satire. Since we grew up in two different cultures, we’ve spent a lot of time educating one another about various comedians, writers and artists — the humorists who help us to make sense of things and stay sane in a fucking insane world. We watch stand up comedy, The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver regularly. We’ll occasionally watch Bill Maher and I’ve made sure that my French husband knows who Bill Hicks and George Carlin are. We like to spend vast amounts of time thinking and laughing together. For me, it’s because comedy is one of the main ways that I cope with being alive. When being a human hurts too much, I turn to laughter. When I feel awkward and uncomfortable, I go all Chandler Bing and make stupid jokes.
For Olivier (like many of us), those satirists had a profound effect on his attitude and opinions regarding politics and society. Like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Charlie Hebdo and the voices behind it have been a part of our little house nestled here in the pine trees.
Since I’ve been here for a while, I was here when the Charlie Hebdo office was firebombed and they had to relocate. It seemed that nothing could bring them down, they were determined to say their thing and would not be stopped. When the next issue came out, when they had their new offices, it was a sort of triumph. I’d never heard of any of these people or their newspaper before 2006, but I’d developed a strong admiration for them rather quickly.
Then the unthinkable happened.
My mind was twirling and spazzing around like the goddamn Tasmanian Devil after a Tabasco enema. My husband was at work in Paris and while his office isn’t in the area of the Charlie Hebdo offices, I had no idea if he was wandering through the city on an errand, on his way to or from a meeting somewhere else in the city, or what. I don’t LoJack my husband to keep track of his coordinates during the day. He could be eating tacos with carnie folk at the Eiffel Tower for all I know — I don’t usually hear about his daily adventures until he’s back home in the evening.
So, I freaked out because I was unable to get a hold of him until the end of the day. I freaked out because a dozen people were killed for wielding pencils and pens. I freaked out because I was one of those Americans who fucked up their own head in September, 2001 by watching too much goddamn media coverage from Ground Zero.
I freaked out because on so many levels, it hit way too close to home. As a writer, a lover of comedy, satire, France and liberty, I felt broken and stunned. As someone who loathes religion and detests guns, I felt furious and frustrated. I still do.
Since Charlie Hebdo doesn’t have an exact American equivalent, let’s just imagine if someone walked into The Daily Show’s offices and murdered a dozen people.
Imagine that, only imagine that The Daily Show had been around since the 60s instead of the 90s, didn’t have all the fun words bleeped out and was actually free to mock religion. Any religion.
I’m a writer, though I haven’t written anything truly incendiary and if I did, it would mostly go unnoticed by the world. However, I have always operated under the belief that whatever I write –whatever any artist creates– owes no apologies and should not be hindered by fear or catering to someone else’s belief system. Art, any art, should never be concerned with offending. Art should be focused on making people think and feel while conveying the artist’s truth.
Whatever your art, art like a motherfucker. Speak your truth. Make the music. Write the stories. Draw the cartoons. Make your art and make it fucking loud. Even if it’s just making someone laugh. Because your truth is necessary. The world needs you.
My husband and I have next week off. We won’t be traveling, but we made plans to do some stuff nearby. Visit Chartres for a day. Go to Rambouillet to get some things done. And of course, we planned to spend a day in Paris.
When he came home from work last night, I was a bit on edge with all that’s been going on here. We had dinner, watched Jon Stewart and I asked him about our plans to take the train into Paris next week.
“Well, we’re still going,” he said.
“Oh. Okay. You sure?”
“We can’t be afraid. No matter what, we can’t be afraid. We’re gonna go. And we’re going to have fun.”
My brain took a quick trip back to 9/11. To the fear. The paranoia. Then I looked at my husband, saw that he had no fear and that all of those people at Place de la République on the night of January 7th had no fear and I knew that he was right. “Yeah. Okay,” I said.
And sitting there on the couch in our little house in the French countryside, we turned back toward the TV, back to the laughter that helps us to make sense of things while we fight to stay sane in an insane world.
