The lower reaches of the Rue Courreau in Monptllier act as an inter-tide zone between immigrant France and centre-ville France. A vinyl record shop, tattoo shop and an artists’ gallery all vie for attention, like the people outside them, who have square hipster beards and a forced confidence. Between these shops, dingy internet cafes are full of people sending money back home. Young African men line up outside to make photocopies of their papers which they clutch like precious manuscripts hidden in cardboard folders.
Nearby, groups of old men in djalaba sit at plastic tables on the pavement. The waiter from the cafe speeds around to them holding a silver platter with steaming mint teas and dark intense espresso coffee. There is never food on the tables. The old men talk with intensity and watch the drug dealers on the other side of the street.
The men are chibani, which means ‘white hair’ in Arab. They are some of the 300 000- 800 000 North African immigrants who came to France during les Trentes Glorieuses. After fourty years here, some still don’t speak French. Two thirds of them never went to school. France didn’t want people who could speak- they wanted silent arms and backs to rebuild France after the war. The men wanted freedom and a better life. They worked for Citroen, the SNCF, in the mines and built France’s housing. They live in a man’s world; here at the cafes there are no women. Their wives stayed on the other side of the Mediterranean, they never came to join them and the men never went home.
During the day Plan Cabanes is their place. You get the feeling that everybody knows each other. They call out to other men who walk past. ‘As-salaam ‘alykum O Sofiane labas?! How are you?!’ and each time it is with a delight as if they have bumped into a long-lost friend.
Here, they are seen, but otherwise they are known as France’s ‘invisibles’. Many of them don’t have French nationality, so they never got a real pension. As the sun starts to go down, you will see the men don’t live here in the centre. They take the tram away, back to where they live in rooms of 10m2 in the delapidated HLMs on the outskirts of the city.