We hop off the metro at Strasbourg–St. Denis and call on google to steer us to Tribal, a bar-cum-café frequented as much for what’s on tap as for its complimentary couscous and moules-frites. From the main boulevard into the rues, activity picks up. Clusters by open kebab shops and bars. Busy night especially for a weekday. 

Weaving our way through bodies and catcalls, S hastens her pace as I slow my own. This part of Paris is replicated across many a metropolis: a hub of minorities and cheap eats; a counterculture to the city’s open-air opulence. Allegedly dodgy, scruffy, and unsafe.   

After a near-miss or two, we make our destination. The venue is packed with chill people, suited people, pretty ladies, and men w mean man buns. If Tribal was an African eatery once, it is something else now; little alludes to its ‘Africanness’ save for a curious, mounted mask.

The drinks, on par with the price, are watered down and the couscous is to be chanced upon on a different occasion. Still, the atmosphere is charged. Laughter and murmurs compete with whatever’s on the speakers. The crowd spills onto the sidewalk. 

Cutting through the revelry, a grey-haired, pale-skinned, and yeah-ok-scruffy-looking man leans in to ask for change. My group of four springs back from the surprise intrusion in what I consider an exaggerated act of self-preservation, hard to separate from the assumed criminality of a place like this, peopled by lower-middle-class Black and Arab folk.

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Months later, M is robbed by teenagers at an ATM in St. Denis. On a different day, I am physically accosted by one thousand middlemen hoping to sell me a haircut or manicure or n’importe quoi hein. The rules of metropolitan anonymity do not apply here. Everything is exposed—the body, the senses, the wallet.

I go back many times. To the salon where Nigerian accents and those I learn to be Conakrian subdue all street noise in busy silence. On one occasion, I count eight countries in the room—a mere fraction of the whole — and just then Africa is a five-by-four room with off-white walls and hip gospel music. I try and fail to not make more of the haircut than the snippety snap of Touré’s scissors. It feels desperate to weave bonds of community around myself and the people in that room but leaning back, I blend seamlessly with the zigzag of the room’s wallpaper.