Sylvia's Journal

We drove into Germany, to Essen’s Folkwang Museum to see an exhibit about Paris reinventing itself in the late 1800s as seen through the eyes of impressionists and early photographers. It is then I realized that we have Kabul in deep in our cells.

There was so much that reminded me of Kabul, a city in transition, trying to modernize itself, just like Paris of the 1880s. That city that was a construction site for decades; Kabul has been for a decade now and more to come. There are wide avenues now that used to be potholed streets, sidewalks where none existed, trees and rose bushes where there used to be mud and garbage.

The Paris of 1860 went through a similar transformation. There were the photos of demolition works, the new sidewalks and sewers installed that allowed people to stroll in the rain, the planted trees but also the traffic chaos in Pisarros’s streetscenes, carts and other traffic going in every direction from every side of the street, not unlike Kabul now.

There were scenes of women, covered from head to toe, with glimpses of lace-edged pantaloons that are no different from those worn by Afghan women today. A picture of the 1878 World Fair showed a pavilion with dark skinned turbaned men – Arabs, Turks or Persians, exotic and mysterious men from our part of the world.

Renoir’s famous Bal au Moulin de la Galette reminded me of Shindagha at midnight, along Dubai’s Creek, where families hang out (no dancing, no hugging in public and no alcohol) but otherwise a similar atmosphere of joyful social gathering.

I took in the Impressionist street scenes in Paris of fruit and vegetable sellers, not that different from Kabul, except that the sellers are male rather than female, but everything is just as colorful. I looked for a long time at Signac’s painting of modernity: smoke stacks bellowing God-knows-what into the atmosphere, polluting the city air – that too is very familiar to us.

And when we got to the section about the Paris Commune the parallels between the old Paris and the world we live in became even more pronounced. We saw pictures of a burned out City Hall – it could have been Darulaman palace; the barricades with the sandbags, the artillery, the cardboard coffins with the dead. In the midst of Paris’ transition, all was not well and something was brewing and about to boil over.

Throughout this extraordinary exhibit we could see the tensions between those who wanted Paris to grow up and become a sleek modern city (Baron de Haussman) and those who wanted things to stay the way they were or even pull France back into something long gone. It is a familiar tension that we see and feel everyday in Kabul.

The audio tour provided some context and snippets of writings that illustrated how the birth of the new Paris was not an easy one: the artists who scorned Engineer Eiffel with his silly tower, the upsets about the tearing down of tenements lining narrow alleyways where fresh air never entered, in the name of public health (where did all these people go we wondered?). The new spaces allowed breathing room for new and old architectural treasures and the majestic avenues lined with stately mansard-roofed apartment buildings. That is old Paris for us now, but once it was newfangled and modern.

Today, on our first (non travel) day of vacation we did not manage to shake Kabul out of our system. Maybe tomorrow? Maybe never?