Daniella is currently finalising a book What makes your heart sing?
When Daniella passes a gruelling interview to join a shared flat with young alternative French in the south of France it takes her on a journey through France’s revolutionary legacy and many facets of complex modern day French society.
The book follows Daniella over the next eight years as she learns to take part with its passionate idealists. She joins an anarchist choir, works at a centre for undocumented migrants, she teaches French youth at an arts university and works as an anthropologist in Deepest France. She becomes a wedding prospect and travelling psychologists to lonely farmers who are struggling to cope with a changing world.
Her story is woven with the stories of the people she meets: refugees and immigrants, students, young professionals,the rural poor, rebel farmers and protestors.
The book portrays how ordinary people carry out small acts of resistance: including an epileptic, deaf woman’s story of walking alone to Santiago de Compostela, a bourgeois lawyer helping Nigerian prostitutes, a midwife designing strange underwear for alternative contraception ideas and a funeral home director risking his company against cold administrative rules.
It is the story and voice of a young woman learning what it is to keep ideals and exploring the themes of resistance, national and personal myths, the power of art and reconstructing community.
PROLOGUE
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!”
William Wordsworth referring to the French Revolution.
We are knights, troubadour knights and song is our weapon. We ride along on waves of wind and sound and revolution and we know that this is the perfect time to be alive and that the air itself is full of ideas as if all of history has breathed it in and out before us.
We are heading north and the dark green forest that covers the bare limestone hills of the south has given way to yellowing grape leaves which have soaked up all of the summer sun and now suddenly there are vast fields of wheat which swirl in yellow waves with flocks of wood pigeons swooping through the bluest of skies. To reach our destination we must cross nearly the whole length of France. It’s 800 km, from Montpellier to Nantes in the green of Brittany, but it feels like the world goes on for ever.
France, at the end of summer is hazy with dust and wine as we travel with the early morning sun on our shoulders. We snatch all we can of this golden light knowing summer is coming to an end. We can’t delay. We have a mission. Our Anarchist Choir has been invited to sing at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France’s biggest and longest lived protest site.
“Its a separate state,” Vince says. “Its got borders and guards.”
Vince, my flatmate, is driving with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other. Travelling in his ancient Peugeot is like being in the womb of a family that stretches back through generations of migrants. We are under a tattered sky of blue and yellow African print cloth that came from the Ivory Coast in battered suitcases, and we sit on hand-sewn seat covers made from flannel with green and orange flowers that came from the Lebanon, made by his grandmother.
Vince lovingly smooths out the seat covers and adjusts the Lebanese flag, the Jewish hand of luck, and a tribute to a beer festival competing for space below the rearview mirror. All the time he keeps up a stream of spoken-aloud consciousness and radical ideology above the music that blazes from the car speakers. It’s as if he’s rehearsing lines in a play. But we know he is rehearsing his lines to impress any women who cross his path at Notre-Dame-des-Landes.