Olympics Opening Ceremony Singer Redefines What It Means to Be French

by Pelican Press
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Olympics Opening Ceremony Singer Redefines What It Means to Be French

A new France was consecrated Friday evening during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. When Aya Nakamura, a French Malian singer, came sashaying in a short fringed golden dress out of the august Académie Française, she redefined Frenchness.

Adieu the stern edicts of the Académie, whose role has been to protect the French language from what one of its members once called “brainless Globish.” Bonjour to a France whose language is increasingly infused with expressions from its former African colonies that form the lyrical texture of Ms. Nakamura’s many blockbuster hits.

France’s most popular singer at home and abroad gyrated as she strode forth over the Pont des Arts in her laced golden gladiator sandals. A Republican Guard band accompanied her slang-spiced lyrics. Her confidence bordered on insolence, as if to say, “This, too, is France.”

Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, had said that Ms. Nakamura sings in “who knows what” language. But her denunciation of the performance on the grounds that it would “humiliate” the French people failed to stop it.

The backdrop to the ceremony was a political and cultural crisis in France broadly pitting tradition against modernity and an open view of society against a closed one. The country is politically deadlocked and culturally fractured, unable to form a new government or agree on what precisely Frenchness should be.

In this context, the thrust of the ceremony, as conceived by its artistic director, Thomas Jolly, was to push the boundaries of what it means to be French in an attempt to bolster a more inclusive France and a less divided world. It was a political act wrapped in a pulsating show.

Ms. Nakamura uses slang like verlan that reverses the order of syllables, and West African dialects like Nouchi. She mixes languages, including English, and R&B and Afropop.

In the France imagined and embraced by Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally party there are white people of ancestral lineage who are somehow more French than brown or Black citizens of immigrant lineage, like Ms. Nakamura, who was born in Mali.

It has long seemed like these visions, inclusive and nationalist, were irreconcilable. But Ms. Nakamura’s performance was a blending, not a confrontation. The uniformed band, a bastion of French tradition, played the music of a Mali-born artist with millions of followers on social media. Uniformed trumpeters and trombonists jammed to “Djadja,” Ms. Nakamura’s breakout 2018 hit and now an anthem of female empowerment.

Here was the reciprocal openness to the “other” that was Mr. Jolly’s core theme in a ceremony that mixed kitsch and solemnity, the camp and the classical, literary culture and a queen’s severed head, a heavy metal band and a metal horse galloping in silvery splendor on the waters of the Seine.

All this, for a moment, portrayed a tolerant and vibrant France to the world, with the exception of President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, which snubbed the show having had its athletes largely excluded from the Games. Mr. Putin has long been convinced of the “decadence” of the West, and will no doubt have interpreted the show as reinforcing his belief.

Other than to declare the Games open, President Emmanuel Macron was silent. For a man given to long speeches, this was startling. He let the ceremony speak for itself; his joy and relief at the end were evident. He has always been a gambler, a tightrope walker, and in recent weeks, two huge wagers have followed each other: a snap parliamentary election that left France in a near ungovernable state, and this audacious ceremony that somehow worked even in a downpour.

Where exactly he has stood in France’s political and cultural confrontation has not always been clear. If his opposition to Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally has been constant, his temptation to steal some of its thunder by veering right has also been apparent. This year he spoke often of “the rearmament of the Republic.” He seemed tempted by tougher, more intrusive forms of governance.

Mr. Macron called for reinstating school uniforms, a larger police force, and forbidding the use of smartphones to children under 11. He spoke of denying access to, and use of, social media to anyone under 15. He tried to dampen anger at growing illegal immigration with a bill that satisfied neither the left, which denounced it, nor the right, which condemned it for not going far enough. He dissolved the lower house of Parliament, seemingly on a personal whim, and plunged the country into an election on the eve of the Olympics, to the dismay of the organizers and the sponsors of the Games.

Yet, in the end, Mr. Macron backed and approved an Olympics ceremony that screamed France is free and multiple. It embraced the diverse, the sexually provocative, the risqué, and the disruptive — to the point that the organizers had to apologize, somewhat halfheartedly, to Christians offended by a bawdy scene. It involved drag queens and a mostly naked figure painted blue, in what some saw as a depiction of “The Last Supper.”

Mr. Macron interviewed Ms. Nakamura on Feb. 19 before her presence was decided. Once again, he rolled the dice.

His message seemed to be: Wake up to all that you are, France, and move forward. Mr. Macron tried to set down a marker, as was evident in his comment on the social media platform X that a century from now the ceremony would be remembered.

“Magic!” proclaimed Le Monde on its front page. Certainly, it was Mr. Macron’s happiest moment in several months, whatever the enormous political difficulties, many of his own creation, that lie ahead.

Not all were satisfied. Edwige Diaz, a lawmaker and member of the National Rally, listed what she found wrong with the ceremony on the CNews television channel on Monday. This included “L.G.B.T. lobbying,” an “ode to drugs,” a Republican Guard that was “ridiculed,” a glorification of “revolutionaries and anarchists,” a “parody of Christianity” and “woke propaganda.”

To others the spectacle offered stark reminders of the distance France has traveled. The country celebrated diversity and gender equality against the backdrop of the palaces, art collections and male equestrian statues of its imperial past.

That past was vividly recalled when athletes from the Algerian delegation scattered red roses in the Seine after they passed the Notre-Dame bridge. In 1961, more than 100 of their compatriots drowned in the Seine or were otherwise killed when a demonstration for the independence and freedom of Algeria was ferociously repressed by the French police.

“It is time to bring together those who wish to be together, who want to love one another, who see in the other and in diversity a richness, a fulfillment, a force, rather than a threat,” Mr. Jolly told The New York Times in an interview.

Of course, that will not be easy. But France has changed and opened. Reversing its transformation, as Ms. Le Pen sometimes seems to want, would be a quixotic undertaking.

A globalized world has already altered the French language. This was a moment of “le sharing” and “le soft power” and le “take-your-time tourism,” in which “le scope” of a France that has been “relooké” (or refashioned) was evident. It is not only in the mixing of French, Malian and Arabic languages used by Ms. Nakamura that a changing French lexicon is evident.

The Académie Française long ago gave up trying to insist on “le courrier électronique,” rather than the now universal “le mail.” It has ceded to the inevitable in a world where the United States still looms large.

At the end of Ms. Nakamura’s performance, she offered a military salute. Adaptation and enrichment, she seemed to say, go both ways.



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