“A Man Among Men” in Algerian Paris: Modeling Motivation and Movement in Jake Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth

“Algerian Paris” Revisited

Rendezvous Eighteenth shows that because he is of African descent in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, Ricky experiences harassment from police in Paris, which is comparable to his experiences in the U.S.A. Comparing law enforcement in France and the U.S.A. is not new in African-American expatriate fiction literature, and this portrayal is evident in The Stone Face. However, it is worth noting that though Rendezvous Eighteenth is not set during the Civil Rights Movement nor Algerian War of Independence (as the earlier fiction is), the tensions with police officers in the U.S.A. are juxtaposed with law enforcement in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. To demonstrate, Ricky experiences harassment and witnesses brutality by police in the U.S.A., and this continues in Paris. The narrator states, “Cops were never the good guys—not to Ricky Jenks” (43). Then the narrator describes four incidences that shape Ricky’s perspective of the police in the U.S.A. The first is the image on television of “white cops in helmets beating people who looked like Ricky and his family” (43); the second is Ricky’s use of the term “pigs” for cops because of police harassment and brutality he witnesses; the third is Ricky’s harassment as a teen by officers in his upper middle class neighborhood of Benson, New Jersey because the officers did not think he belonged there; and the fourth is Ricky’s “protest against the racist brutality of the NYPD blue” as an adult (43). Rendezvous Eighteenth demonstrates that Ricky’s harassment by police officers are not limited to the four type of incidences in the U.S.A.

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