Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Late-Colonial Collage

By the fifth line of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, the author has already invoked advertisements for three different products. The “ZIG-ZAG” cigarette papers, “LION NOIR” shoe polish, and “CACAO BLOOKER” hot chocolate posters she mentions—presumably glued to the walls of the “NORD-SUD” metro line she names beforehand—are united not only by their commodity status, but also by the particular kind of imagery mobilized to promote their sale. The head of the “Zig-Zag man” that appeared on posters at the time references a class of French-Algerian soldiers known as “Zouaves”; the “black lions,” and—on occasion—Black figures, filling the advertisements for the other two products are still more direct allusions to Europe’s colonization of the African continent. Indeed, representations of Africa and empire permeated Paris the city’s visual culture during the late colonial period, just as individuals from the colonies, including former soldiers who had fought for the Allies, inhabited its streets.

Mirrlees named these advertisements, pieces of paper pasted to metro walls, shortly after a different form of pasted paper (in French, papier collé) had entered modern art. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s Cubist papiers collés—collages specifically featuring paper introduced around 1912—broke with centuries of painting and drawing in the Euro-American tradition by refusing to imitate life, instead pursuing an interrogation of the limits of visual signification. Affinities between Mirrlees’s poem and the Cubist visual watershed have been noted in the past. Julia Briggs writes in her introduction to the annotated poem that “[Mina] Loy’s emphasis on the democratization of art sprang from the same artistic and intellectual milieu that inspired Mirrlees’s poem—from contemporary French debate on the relationship of life and art, words and pictures, Cubism and ‘Simultaneism.’”[1] In this essay, I would like to be explicit about a key attribute of this milieu: the greatest innovations of Cubism, the character of the interwar French capital, and Mirrlees’s eponymous poem all sit in uneasy dependence on the exploitation of Africa. A byproduct of colonialism’s horrors was the introduction of a range of themes and formal strategies that came to define modernism.

Cubism and Empire

The first of Picasso’s works to show the impact of African sculpture was the 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in which the artist replaced the faces of two figures with African masks. Art historian Suzanne Blier’s volume on the African sources of this direct precedent to Cubism highlights Picasso’s experiences with the collection at the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography (MET) and books such as Leo Frobenius’s Die Masken und Geheimbünde Afrikas (African Masks and Secret Societies, 1898).[2] According to Yves-Alain Bois, however, the impact of African objects on the Demoiselles and the works that directly followed it was a cursory one. In what remains one of the most important interpretations of Cubism within art history, Bois has argued that Picasso’s acquisition of a mask from the West African “Grebo,” or “Kru,” culture in 1912 thoroughly restructured his artistic practice by introducing him to the “principle of semiological arbitrariness and, in consequence, the nonsubstantial character of the sign.”[3] The shapes that stood in for eyes and nose could be read as such not due to their physical resemblance to their referents but rather thanks to their relationship to a constellation of other signs within the mask. In other words, the Grebo/Kru mask demonstrated to Picasso that visual representation need not be naturalistic, that it could communicate in a mode more linguistic than mimetic. It is important to note here that the mask itself was likely created specifically to be sold to Europeans, as Jonathan Hay has argued. Hay’s point is that the peoples the French saw as “primitive” were in fact “paramodern,” adapting, creating, and consciously influencing the European cultures they encountered, rather than remaining stagnant and unchanging.[4]  From here, the papiers collés of the following year or so; from there, eventually, abstraction (Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” 79).

If we take Bois at his word, the most radical moves of modernism in the visual arts are indebted to the presence of African objects in Paris, a situation intimately bound to colonial relations at the turn of the nineteenth century. The MET was constructed in 1878 on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle, or World’s Fair. The 1878 exposition, as was the case with so many world’s fairs between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, aimed to showcase the power of the empire; the MET’s “Moorish” architecture, placed at the entrance of the exposition, alluded to the cultural riches contained inside it, which France had claimed through conquest.[5] As the twentieth century progressed, the colonial objects that had entered the French capital were accompanied by former residents of the colonies who had either moved to Paris for work or stayed there after fighting for the allies during World War I (Junk, “Face of the Nation,” 103).

Y’a Bon

Mirrlees’s “’Ya bon” in line 206 references an advertisement exploiting the figure of a West African soldier who fought for the French Empire.[6] Among the groups of Africans who fought under the French banner were West African tirailleurs, part of the force noir conceived by General Charles Mangin to support what he saw as a flailing France.[7] Though these soldiers are often termed “Senegalese,” “Sénégalais” had in fact become a catch-all designation for inhabitants of the eight federations that constituted the colony of French West Africa.[8] Promoting a banana-based breakfast drink known as “Banania” (still in production today), the poster showed a laughing tirailleur in tasseled fez seated under a tree with raised spoon. Above his head appears the word “BANANIA,” beside his feet, “y’a bon.” Despite the signs’ tying of the product to French West Africa, Banania’s origins lay in Nicaragua, where Frenchman Pierre-François Lardet had sampled a similar beverage in 1909. The original brand mascot (1912) had been a French Antillaise woman enjoying a cup of the drink; it was not until 1915 that Giacomo de Andreis manifested the “Bonhomme Banania,” who would become a ubiquitous feature of the city (Berliner, Ambivalent Desires, 10‒11). The rise of the Bonhomme Banania, as with other colonial imagery and slogans, was an indirect effect of the French government’s efforts to convince citizens of the empire’s utility via international expositions and other persuasive ventures. According to Anne Donadey, the state’s propagandizing strategies “trickled down to popular culture and media (cinema, postcards, cartoons, comic books and advertisements).”[9] The Bonhomme Banania invites comparison, for example, with the subjects of posters for France’s colonial expositions, in which a single figure presumed to be from one of the colonies appears in the foreground to “sell” the event. In the realm of wider popular culture, we might also compare Banania adverts to posters for performances featuring the American-born, Black performer Josephine Baker, which also capitalized on pernicious stereotypes of people of African descent. Thus, the same impulse that led to France’s international expositions and the establishment of the MET in turn gave rise to the Bonhomme Banania and contributed to the Parisian enthusiasm for commodified versions of Black imagery (Berliner, “Ambivalent Desires,” 17).

The exaggerated smile Andreis gives to the Bonhomme Banania causes him to appear almost simple, while his association with bananas evokes the simian (Berliner, “Ambivalent Desires,” 14). The racist and dehumanizing effects of such an advertisement are indisputable—the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor avowed in his Poème Liminaire à L.-G. Damas of 1940, “But I’ll tear up the banania laughter on all of France’s walls.”[10] The 1915 poster, however, also evidences the cultural innovation and influence of Africans on the French imagination. “[Y]’a bon” is perhaps the element of the sign most emblematic of this ingenuity. The phrase roughly translates to “It’s good” in “Français tirailleur” (FT), also called “Petit nègre” at the time. The language borrows “bon” (good) from standard French, making the message intelligible to French speakers as an affirmation of quality. One wonders whether Andreis intended the statement to suggest the virtues of the colonial project alongside breakfast drinks, and whether Mirrlees’s evocation of it is in part an ironic comment on empire.  

FT was a pidgin language that developed from interactions between French officers and West African soldiers from various mutually unintelligible linguistic groups during the nineteenth century. Some of its constituent languages may have included (it is impossible to know for certain) Wolof, Fula, Mende, and Hausa, among others (Skirgård, “Français Tirailleur Pidgin,” 18). Faced with regiments they could not understand and who could not understand them, French officers had no choice but to learn FT. In 1916 an anonymous book appeared titled Le Français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs sénégalais (The French Spoken by Our Senegalese Riflemen). The preface to this linguistic manual begins:

Just as in North Africa the contact of the Arabs with the French, Italians, and Spaniards gave rise to a special language, Sabir, whose humorous literature lacks no flavor, so our black riflemen in contact with their European instructors have created a language that we have called « petit nègre », and which, while it is spoken by indigenous peoples of different origins and dialects (Bambaras, Ouoloffs, Dahomians, etc.), seems to have obeyed in its formation some fixed rules.[11]

The idea animating the guide is that officers must be able to communicate with their soldiers. It thus proceeds to take the reader through the grammar and vocabulary of FT (including the “y a” stand-in for the French verb être (to be) from the Banania poster) (Le Français tel que le parlent, 13). The development of a pidgin is an instance of a recalibration, however modest, of power between colonizer and colonized: as linguistic anthropologist Christine Jourdain has written, “By virtue of having a new language at their disposal that was in continuity with the vernaculars and made use of significant elements of the superstrate, pidgin makers set themselves on a course of linguistic independence that changed their relationships to the world and shaped their own identity.”[12] Yet the tirailleurs shaped not only their own identity, but also French knowledge and understanding of the world.

The French organizers of the 1931 Colonial Exposition—at least outwardly—resisted this reality. At the “École française pour indigènes” on view at the Bois de Vincennes where the exposition took place, visitors could observe tirailleurs and others from France’s colonized lands at work learning to read and write French. A photograph from L’Illustration shows a small classroom of tirailleurs before a blackboard with Arabic and French words. According to the article’s author, after the exposition closes, the students will bring back to their homes “the written and spoken knowledge of our language, which is to say, for us the surest mode of penetration that there is, and for them, the way no less certain to understand us and love us each day more.”[13] Such an optimistic forecasting of events at once acknowledges the power of linguistic influence and belies the fact that the tirailleurs also compelled the French to learn FT.  Le Français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs sénégalais credits West Africans with developing FT and places the onus on French commanders to learn how to use it. FT in turn appeared on metro walls, where it exerted daily impact on the material world of the French. We should think about the truncated words and verbal play that defined Cubist collage in the context of the appearance not only of the African objects, but also the colonial languages that, as Mirrlees shows us, became integral to French life.

Signifying Jazz

The linguistic modification enacted by FT might also be understood through what literary scholar Henry Louis Gates has pivotally called “signifying.” The term applies to the Black vernacular tradition of reversing, repeating, reprising, or otherwise re-presenting in a mode that is generally subversive. The Signifying Monkey that acts as a point of departure for Gates’s ideas is a character that appears across African diasporic and literary traditions, an “ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike.”[14] What I want to highlight here is the extent to which Africans and members of the diaspora provided the French with new ways of generating meaning—new modes of “signifying”—through vernacular modes of creative production.

One of the arenas of signifying explored by Gates is that of jazz, a diasporic artform he highlights for its instances of parody: “Repeating a form and then inverting it through a process of variation” (Gates, “Blackness,” 693‒694). Jazz was wildly popular in Paris during the early twentieth century. It appears in Paris in lines 423 and 424, which compare “Crochets and quavers” (quarter and half notes) to Black individuals, claiming that they “writhe in obscene syncopation.” This phenomenon of emphasizing what are traditionally weak beats in Western music constitutes a distinguishing property of jazz and other diasporic styles.[15] As Briggs notes, Black American servicemen brought jazz to Paris as World War I ended and it was particularly common in Montmartre (Briggs, “Hope Mirrlees,” 302). Yet in addition to this explicit evocation of jazz, elements of the poem mimic the style formally. Sean Pryor has argued that Paris “shuttles unpredictably between free verse and prose paragraphs,” achieving Clive Bell’s contemporary understanding of poetic syncopation.[16] The poem’s repetition and variation, too, connect it to jazz. A salient example is the repeated yet varied references to Algeria and tobacco throughout Paris. After the original mention of “ZIG-ZAG,” we have “Bocks, tobacco,” “Algerian Tobacco,” “Monsieur Jourdain in the blue and red of the Zouaves,” and, finally, “Algerian tobacco” again near the very end of the poem (303, 156, 203, 204, 434). Mirrlees emphasizes the parodic quality of these references in particular by naming comedic French playwright Molière’s “Monsieur Jourdain” from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). Monsieur Jourdain believes he has been made a “Mamamouchi” by a man masquerading as Turkish nobility who wishes to marry his daughter (203). “Mamamouchi” is a fictional title, an Orientalist parody of Turkish language and culture packaging a parody of the French bourgeoisie.[17] Mirrlees layers yet another parody onto the allusion by costuming Monsieur Jourdain in the “blue and red of the Zouaves,” a group that did not yet exist in the seventeenth century when the play was written. Mirrlees signifies a satirical mood through the troping of the colonial theme of Algeria, rather than creating meaning through European-style description or narrative. The poem itself, in other words, follows the logic of jazz. 

Mirrlees’s repeated citations of North Africa-cum-tobacco call to mind a series of paintings by the American Cubist artist Stuart Davis. The paintings, executed in 1921, are near exact contemporaries of Mirrlees’s poem. Although Davis did not travel to Paris until 1928, he was deeply familiar with the work of Picasso and Braque and began working in a Cubist style in the early 1920s. The four paintings in question draw on Cubist collage by overlaying text and shapes, though they are entirely painted rather than physically collaged. Titled Sweet Caporal, Lucky Strike, Cigarette Papers, and Bull Durham, the works center on boxes of cigarettes, tobacco, and rolling papers. Both Cigarette Papers and Bull Durham make direct reference to Zig-Zag: the former contains a stamp-like representation of the Zouave Zig-Zag Man on its right side, while the latter shows a “Zig-Zag” and vegetal design from the cigarette paper’s packaging in its top left corner. Davis’s tobacco paintings might read as a series of parodic variations on works such as Picasso’s collage Bottle of Bass and Calling Card (1914). As art historian Barbara Zabel has noted, Picasso and Braque included “references to cafe still lifes—wine glasses, guitars, checkerboards, tables, and so on” in their collages. When Picasso features tobacco packaging in Bottle of Bass and Calling Card, for example, he does so as an element of a broader café or studio setting. Instead, by making the tobacco brands the main event, Davis vernacularizes his work to a greater degree than even the original Cubists had done.[18]  The line separating his work from a Zig-Zag poster in the metro becomes tantalizingly thin. Jazz emerged at a moment when unprecedented levels of mechanical reproduction of visual media made the advertisements on which Davis drew ubiquitous. Davis, for his part, was an avid follower of jazz, once claiming, “For me—I had jazz all my life—I almost breathed it like air” and that his work bore the influence of the “anonymous giants of jazz” that he had encountered in bars.[19] Jazz, and its parodic sensibility, was as inescapable in Paris as in New York—as fundamental to poetic as to visual modernism.

Beyond the Trocadéro

What I have tried to show is that the attributes of Mirrlees’s poem that are readily identifiable with Cubism—its relationship to everyday life, its fragmentation, its semiotic play—are all qualities inseparable from (both North and West) African and diasporic appearance in Paris during the interwar period. This is not to say that each of these Cubist “facets” originated in Africa, but rather that they emerged simultaneously with African physical and cultural presence in this location and at this moment. The monumental popular entertainment of the World’s Fair occasioned the establishment of a massive repository of objects from the continent. The capacity for extensive public advertising brought about in part by the advent of offset lithographic printing around the turn of the century coincided with an enthusiasm for colonial imagery and the development of pidgins. The enormous popularity of jazz revolutionized the way people understood music, culture, and language. I mean these observations to intervene not only in our understanding of Paris, but also in our understanding of Paris—that is, the Paris of the interwar period and the visual arts, literature, and music that made it the electric and generative destination it was. The masks at the MET were not merely souvenirs of faraway culture, but the first evidence of people who would alter European notions of signification and thus completely change the character of French life and art. If papier collé—whether in the studio, on the walls of the metro, or on the page—is among the key accomplishments of modernism, then that accomplishment belongs in large part to Africa and its diaspora.