Abd al Malik au musée: Rap, Camus, and Neo-Impressionism in the Spring of 2020

In Albert Camus's 1947 novel La peste, the impact of the plague on the publishing industry is manifest in a sudden profusion of pablum: "Des imprimeurs de la ville virent très vite le parti qu'ils pouvaient tirer de cet engouement et diffusèrent à de nombreux exemplaires les textes qui circulaient" (201). In the spring of 2020, however, the pandemic produced the obverse effect: the exponential growth in sales of a literary classic by a philosopher and Nobel Laureate acclaimed for incandescent intellect and a lucid assay of human nature. In March, sales in France and Italy of La peste had increased by 300%. In the United States, Amazon had sold out of its copies, resulting in a rush to reprint. As Alice Kaplan noted on NPR, the French press exhorted readers to turn to it "almost as though this novel were a vaccine, not just a novel that can help us think about what we're experiencing but something that can help heal us." Similarly ardent articles appeared throughout American publications in which writers such as Laura Marris and Alain de Botton recommended the book to immunize us from despair.

This cultural phenomenon coincided with the pedagogical concerns that many of us confronted in the spring of 2020 as on-campus classes made a brusque transition online: How do we keep our students engaged amid the all the distraction and dislocation incurred by the pandemic? How do we maximize relevant cultural content and critical thinking to maintain a cohesive learning community? How can an introductory French course respond swiftly to students confronting an upended world, not to mention the vicissitudes of Wi-Fi?

My humble response to these challenges was to incorporate Camus into the course. Students would therefore at least be offered, to paraphrase Boethius (480–524), some consolation from philosophy. Since students were not yet grammatically equipped to read excerpts from La peste, there had to be another mode of authentic content through which students could become acquainted with Camus. Abd al Malik could provide such an introduction, as he has done for French audiences through his rap, hip-hop, poetry slams, performance art, theatrical productions and a book dedicated to his intellectual hero, Camus, l'art de la révolte (2016).

Born Régis Fayette-Mikano in Paris in 1975 to Congolese parents, Abd al Malik and his six siblings were raised by a single mother in a crime-ridden housing project in Strasbourg. By age thirteen, he had joined his brother's rap group, New African Poets, and began reading Camus voraciously. During his peripatetic youth, he left behind pickpocketing and drug-dealing to immerse himself in the study of Islam, Sufism, and Seneca. In 2007, he was awarded prizes for Best Artist and Best Album and in 2008, he was honored as a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

Abd al Malik has long espoused the notion that artistic expression is a convergence of diverse voices and origins, for example, the correlations he sees between hip hop and ancient traditions of griots and troubadours. In conjunction with the Opéra de Paris, he reimagined Verdi's Otello (1887) as a short film in a contemporary urban setting. At the Théâtre du Châtelet, his production of Camus's Les justes fused the story of a 1905 Russian aristocrat's murder with elements of twenty-first-century urban youth culture to examine ethical justifications of violence.

Our virtual classroom incorporated Abd al Malik's prismatic, multimedia approach to study works of art and their reflections on society and the self. The assignment began with students familiarizing themselves with aspects of Abd al Malik's life story through the trailer for his film Qu'Allah bénisse la France (2014). In the first moments of the trailer, the main character, based on Abd al Malik, is seen rapping and riffing on Paul Verlaine's poem "Il pleure dans mon cœur." The students listened to a recording of the poem and read along with the text to practice pronunciation...