Material #37: Assis sur un banc

The superpowers of the simple park bench

Back in the day my high school French teacher taught us mainly through songs and films. (A great way to teach language by the way). One artist we listened to a lot was the rapper MC Solaar. I was listening to some of those songs recently. One of them, “Caroline”, starts: 

“J'étais cool, assis sur un banc, c'était au printemps…”
“I was cool, sitting on a bench, it was Spring…

Other bench references I have come across recently came immediately to mind. 

In July I read La plus secrète mémoire des hommes by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. The narrator, Diégane, first meets one of his two lovers in the novel, the photojournalist Aida, on a bench in a park in Paris.

“Je l’ai rencontrée dans un cliché de décor parisien : sur le banc public d’un square…”
“I met her in a clichéd Parisian setting, on a public bench in a square…”

He has already seen her a few times in that square before addressing her for the first time - telling her that feeding the pigeons, as she’s doing with sandwich crumbs, is prohibited. Three days later she’s the one who speaks first. After a few more encounters which are obviously no longer coincidental, they go out for a meal, and so on from there.

In August, I began (and am still reading) Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories. She wrote the stories in Italian, and then co-translated them into English - in this case I’ve had to stick to my mother tongue!

In the story “A well lit house”’, a refugee (from an unnamed country) moves with his family into an apartment on the outskirts of Rome. A couple of times the family walks around the grounds of a nearby hospital.

“We even sat on a bench to admire the brilliant oleanders, the scented magnolias, and I smoked a cigarette while the children played hide-and-seek.” 

The man revisited that part of town one time after bigoted neighbors had driven the family away from their home. The memory of being in the hospital grounds with his wife and children comes flooding back. 

“I thought I’d relax on a bench, but they were nearly all taken - just one was free, but it was missing the wooden slats where you sit, only the backrest remained. So I went on walking…”

A bench is a simple example of the material world facilitating our emotional and spiritual worlds. 

I invite you to take yourself back, in your mind, to a time when you were sitting on a bench, and spend a moment there.

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Through 2024, It’s Material is sharing one use of the word “material” each week, on Tuesdays.