TOW #10 - Paris’s Longest Night

     I’d like to apologize in advance for picking two TOW’s in a row on the same topic. I’ll try to justify it by saying that I’d like my TOW’s to reflect on what’s happening in the real world, and the ISIS attacks, especially the one on Paris, have been all over the news. This article from The New Yorker, written by Alexandra Schwartz, cleverly uses impactful imagery and quotes from people who actually were at the site of the attacks in order to show the reader what it really is like to be in France and French at this moment.
     It is immediately apparent that Schwartz is telling stories almost as soon as you start reading the article. Her imagery and descriptive language immerses the reader into the story, making him or her feel like he or she is really there. In her second paragraph, Schwartz describes Matthieu’s experience on that fateful night. “A car screeched to a stop a few feet from where Matthieu was sitting and a man jumped out, firing a Kalashnikov. For a moment, Matthieu thought he was watching a private settling of scores. Then the man fired a second burst; there was a tremendous shattering of windows and bottles. Matthieu leapt over the table and started running. At the top of the street, he stopped and listened. It was only then that he realized that a bullet had lodged in his left hand. His pinkie and ring fingers hung at a crooked angle.” Upon reading this, one can almost feel the surrealness of the situation and the adrenaline pumping through Matthieu’s veins, helping him ignore the pain and just keep moving. Fortunately uninjured enough to be mobile, Matthieu, and the reader in his shoes, watches the chaos around him as if he were just a spectator on the outside, not comprehending that this was actually happening. The ability of Schwartz to make the reader feel like he or she is in Matthieu’s place helps him or her to better understand how French people are feeling.
     Schwartz then quotes Matthieu directly. “‘I saw a lot of women dead on the ground,’ he said, his voice catching on the ‘f’ of ‘femmes.’ ‘It was mostly women that I saw’” (para. 5) This quotes, paired with a description of Matthieu’s delivery, further shows the fear and trauma that many victims and bystanders experienced. Schwartz also uses quotes to show another point of view: one of a Muslim in France who feels antagonized after the attacks. “‘Now [she is] désespéré’—despairing at the prospect of more terror.” Sonia Ferhani, the person who spoke this quote, grew up in the banlieues, the suburbs, but these suburbs are very different from American ones. “There is furious debate in France about the ways that the cultural separation of the banlieues may leave the young men who grow up there susceptible to recruitment by terrorist networks.” This other point of view, strengthened by quotes from people who know the isolation of the banlieues allows people from other countries to understand the existing tensions that existed with France before and leading up to the attacks, providing a better understanding of the social situation in France right now.
     Schwartz’s use of descriptive imagery and direct quotes immerse the reader in the terror that the French are feeling and expose the existing underlying tensions in France that will bubble over because of the attacks in order to create sympathy in the reader by showing him or her what it’s really like for the French people now. Even though it seems like France’s pre-existing factions will only become more divided, the ultimate outcome of the attacks is solidarity, which is just what we need.