Jean Valjean takes a swim: stepping into the shoes of a man trapped in sewage and courage

Paris has always had a certain charm for the millions of Americans that visit each year. For instance, It’s the city of romance, home of the Eiffel Tower. A place of deep history, of baguettes and croissants. A city of mean people, nice people. Cafes, existentialism.

How boring. I mean, Las Vegas literally has an Eiffel Tower too, and also the most convenient places to destroy your marriage. To find the real attraction of Paris, you have to dig a little deeper—below ground.

Not in the catacombs either, but in the sewers. The sewers of Paris proved to be one of the most unique, repulsive, and utterly fascinating experiences of my Bookpacking trip. For a first-time reader of Les Miserables, our excursion through the underground gave the book a profoundly cinematic feel. It became a novel I could more personally connect to, and I achieved Victor Hugo’s vision of a text that engages with the social by connecting with the individual.

The way Hugo kicks off this section of the book is already intense. In one simple sentence, he writes that “Paris pours twenty-five million a year down the drain.” Quite a lot of money even just in the abstract. But I wondered what it exactly meant to “pour” that much money down the drain—even as the section continued on, I don’t think I fully appreciated that number.

In comes my lover and my muse, Bookpackers™. When you walk through the literal pipes that Hugo talks about, the loss of money starts to make more sense. The idea that manure could be worth so much seems a bit questionable at first, but when you see the sheer depth and expansiveness of the sewer system, you suddenly understand the potential benefits that are being lost down under. You become as passionate about excrement as Hugo is.

Money is only the first lesson of this experience. Walking into the sewers, I had a frame of reference for what a good sewer should be, at least according to Hugo. He argues that “it almost realizes the ideal of what is meant in England by the word ‘respectable.’” In fact, he makes a bold claim: “It is decent and drab; well laid out.”

I’m not sure that I would use these words in 2023, but I get the premise. These sewers were logically designed, and honestly, not as gross as you’d think. It’s respectable in its efficiency, in its tangled pipework, and in its appropriate number of rats and roaches. When Hugo describes the sewers this way, it’s not that the sewers are pleasant by any means, but that they work in the way they need to, and that they are not desanitizing the outside world.

So I pretended I was Jean Valjean for a moment. I have Marius on my shoulders, and I need to wade my way through these dark, but organized tunnels. Jean Valjean’s thinking of going downstream and his paying attention to incline feels genuinely genius. It is a maze, but it is a maze with order. And that’s what makes the sewers such a great plot point.

Wall art of Jean Valjean carrying Marius on his back that I found in a corner of the sewers.

Even Hugo says it himself, “the sludge observes a decorum.” As I watched the water rush under the grating, I saw the delicate balance. Any misdirected flow could ruin entire water supplies and contaminate our very society as a whole.

It only got more dramatic from here. Putting myself behind Jean Valjean’s eyes, I tried to imagine the panic and stoicism and distraught and success he was bombarded with. Here is a passage in particular I found especially poignant:

“His first sensation was blindness. Suddenly, he could no longer see anything. He also felt that within a moment he had become depth. He could no longer hear anything … He slipped, and realized the flagged surface was wet … A whiff of foulness signaled to him what place he was in.: (1143)

This is close to what it felt like to a modern explorer of this museum curated experience. I could see most things, fortunately, but it was dark enough to be uncomfortable. I heard the voices and groans of my classmates, but not much from above. I stepped on wet surfaces, and yes, it smelled terrible.

It smelled so terrible that I gagged a few times. Even taking a sip of water (from my water bottle!) tasted gross. And then I thought about how Jean Valjean ate Marius’ bread down there, covered in the sludge. Something about these physical sensations humbled me—Jean Valjean was really in quite the pickle. To do all of this while being submerged in the sewage with absolutely no one else is just harrowing.

It was like I was performing his character, actually. We’ve seen Les Miserables as a musical and also as a movie musical, but what about a simple dramatic film? In this sequence of events, I can imagine an actor conveying such a powerful story of resilience and justice—here in the sewers, Jean Valjean is being guided by such a strong love for his adopted daughter that he’s doing whatever it takes to make it out alive. This is arguably the most physically descriptive description of Jean Valjean we’ve gotten: a man in survival mode.

There really is something so personally touching about this. Father issues, am I right? In the claustrophobia of the sewers, you can’t not empathize with Jean Valjean. The sewer sequence became something so humanizing for me after going down there myself. It was a small fraction of what occurred in the fiction, but it’s enough to capture the grandeur of the story.

Truly, Hugo poses an important question. What are the things we hide below the surface, tucked away and unobtrusive to our daily lives? That kind of sanitation is something we take for granted, and one we count all our blessings for among going down there ourselves. In a more poetic sense, I like to think that this section of the book leaves us with an important message. Social change doesn’t just happen on the barricades or in the streets, but underground. It happens in the dark corners of the world and the uncomfortable spaces, the ones few have the bravery to enter. We can pick the easier battle, or we can pick the one that really counts—can I say that I would always choose the latter? We take our comforts in life as givens, but perhaps we need to approach the boundaries of human experience to uplift the people we love in a way that is truly everlasting.

Paris at arms: the Battle of Waterloo as seen through its uniforms, courtesy of Musée de l’armée

As I stepped foot into the Musée de l’armée, I expected a bit of a snoozefest. I’m not the biggest fan of military history at least as it relates to weaponry and battle tactics. I love talking about the consequences of war and the daily lives of people under war, certainly. To dig deep into the culture and economy of a society during war can reveal key insights into what went wrong and what we can do differently moving forward. When it comes to which artillery was used or who shot who with what rifle, I guess I find it hard to care if I’m being honest.

So taking this mindset, the Battle of Waterloo portion of Les Miserables did not initially capture my attention. There I was, in Los Angeles, over a hundred-and-fifty years out from the events of the book, secretly wondering why I should care. My bedroom was comfier than any Waterloo, and naturally, I would only get a few shreds of what Victor Hugo was trying to tell me.

In this dark moment, https://bookpackers.com (trademarked) whispered in my ear. “You think you don’t care about Part 2, Book 1 of Les Miserables?”

“No, not really.”

Bookpackers hissed. “Dear child, you know nothing of this world.”

This is a true story. In all seriousness, my naivete was in for a rude awakening, and this particular portion of the book ended up being one of the most transformative examples of bookpacking. By visiting the Musée de l’armée, I not only gained a newfound appreciation for Victor Hugo’s description of the Battle of Waterloo, but I understood his purpose and his rhetoric on a deeper level.

For example, the most immediate portion of this section that initially went over my head was Hugo’s description of how the battle progressed. In “Hougomont,” Hugo writes that “the English barricaded themselves here,” being the courtyard. “The French got in but could not hold their position,” Hugo declares.

While I admired Hugo’s analysis of the battlefield, I didn’t grasp his description on several levels. First of all, what did the French actually look like in this courtyard, and who were the real people involved? This is where the museum served especially helpful. On the simplest level, the museum gave me a way to picture the French army through their uniforms.

A detail like this might seem simple, but to me, this is exactly what Bookpacking (don’t forget the trademark) is about. By walking through the museum and seeing the sheer detail on this uniforms, from the perfectly aligned buttons to the weight of the fabric, I was able to recontextualize the French war effort. As I went back to the Waterloo section and reexamined the parts that confused me, I could suddenly picture what the battle might have looked like and how the French, no matter how regal in their attire, failed in holding “their position” in the courtyard against the English.

This renewed reading continued with Victor Hugo’s discussion of French honor. Once again, this was a topic that, although I could appreciate its importance, was not something I could really parse through. In two simple sentences, Hugo summarizes the results of the battle: “The end of a dictatorship. A whole European system collapsed.” For a reader like me, this is something taken at face value, assumed to be true by virtue of Hugo’s authority. But when I saw firsthand how these soldiers really fought and the legacy they were defending, I got a sense of the actual gravity of this moment, and how heavy of a decline it was for an army that presented itself in such a dignified way.

The uniforms I observed were not just useful for me to visualize the battle and the soldiers who fought it, but it helped me grasp the downfall of the French. Here stood these incredibly decorated, fear-inducing uniforms. These outfits exuded military excellence with a distinct stylishness. Yet, such arrogance could only go so far, and these uniforms that seemed so imposing became needlessly opulent upon a reread of the Waterloo chapter.

To me, this is what Bookpacking—trademarked, by the way—is about. It’s about uncovering literary beauty that is not immediately comprehensible to an American reader in 2023. To experience a plot at such an intimate level is something I’m sure I won’t take for granted as this class wraps up.

Is it the best of times or the worst of times? I don’t know because I don’t speak French

The last few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities are not exactly meant to be funny, but I found myself giggling just a bit as all the events unfolded into an utterly chaotic finale. While Sydney Carton’s end was certainly notable—perhaps a little predictable, to unleash my inner critic—the death that really stuck with me was Madame Defarge.

Who is Madame Defarge? Is she the brutal commander of the Reign of Terror, or is she a victim of monarchy and elitism? Well it’s not a great question because the answer is both, and that’s what makes her death so interesting to me. She faces off against the headstrong Miss Pross, personal assistant to the somewhat hollow Lucie Manette. Madame Defarge rampages through Lucie’s former residence while Miss Pross attempts to block her, and after getting into a scuffle, Defarge dies by the bullet of her own misfired gun. Dramatic to say the least, but what really elevates this scene is the dialogue.

Across the span of these several pages, the two speak to each other in different languages. Insults, rages, snarkiness hurled in French by Defarge, responded to in English by Pross.

It’s a very extreme example of a language barrier, but it’s honestly the part of the book that I relate to the most. In Paris, I’ve been in countless boulangeries, chocolatiers, and cafes sparring with my butchered French. Sometimes I win, getting through a massive, two-sentence interaction in French without bursting into tears. Other times, the cashier gives me a sympathetic look, and I cave in.

“Parlez-vous Anglais?”

Sometimes it’s a oui. A lot of the time, it’s a non. And it’s the latter type of incident that reminds me of the bubble I grew up in, the kind that makes me appreciate what it’s like living in a country where you don’t speak the lingua franca. What I’ve even further discovered, however, is that a bit of humility can go a long way. I have often found a sense of camaraderie when the other person and I stumble upon some middle ground of Franglish and hand gestures. Coming from a country that is severely monolingual and often prejudiced towards others on that notion, there is a real beauty in such a connection.

Maybe I’m biased considering that neither of my parents are native English speakers living in America. My entire life, I have spoken both Urdu and English, helping to translate street signs and bank tellers for them. It is deeply painful to me that so many Americans have looked at my mom like she’s unintelligent because she doesn’t speak English fluently, when those same people can hardly communicate with the majority of the world.

The stereotype is that American tourists expect Parisians to speak English consistently and fluently. It is certainly true, but especially in a subtle way. I have noticed that as Americans, we tend to jump right into English without attempting any French. Not to get on a high horse because I’m sure I’ve slipped into this habit myself, but it truly is a bit disrespectful. Certainly, a lot of the Americans I know would be a bit peeved if my mom instantly started talking to them in Urdu.

My point isn’t to berate anyone because nobody is perfect. Rather, I would encourage failure. Someone switching right into English after you talk to them in French isn’t rude—it’s them appreciating the gesture and respecting everyone’s time. It’s okay if that happens. Really, it is. At a boulangerie I went to, for instance, I was stuck in a crisis of knowing how to order a flan. In shaky words, I asked the woman behind the counter, “Je voudrais un flan?”

She said something I couldn’t quite understand. And then she smiled.

“Would you like anything else?” I laughed and told her no. We finished up the transaction, and for a good twenty minutes, enjoyed my dessert in the bakery. As I got up to leave, she motioned at me.

“Did you like it?” She beamed.

“Yes, it was very delicious, thank you.”

She nodded and bid me farewell—a thank you and au revoir. I’m a sentimental person, but I found this little part of my day extraordinary because it was just one more example of the hospitality I have found in France, a country that is known for its terseness at times. I could also talk about the shawarma place I went to, where the cashier sat me down and immediately pulled a chair for me, even though he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak French nor Arabic. Or, I could go back to the chocolatier, where I asked the woman if she spoke French or Spanish, and though knowing neither, understood my request for hot chocolate in seconds.

The point is that there are imprudent people everywhere, but the vast majority of Parisians—and pertinent to mention, people from non-European countries—are more than happy to share a piece of their culture with a person who tries their best to understand them instead of demand something, be it an experience or a product. To have a Defarge-Pross conversation is really not that terrible so long as there aren’t any guns involved.

I’m trying to keep these principles in mind ws we visit the different sites this class entails to understand our literature. In museums and cultural sites like the Bastille, I try to first engage with the French I see as much as I can, recognizing familiar words and piecing together a conjecture of what I’m being told. From there, I switch into English by translating on my phone and find out if I’m somewhat correct or totally off the mark. In any case, the effort I put into it proves rewarding because I get a more intimate experience with the place. I like to think of it as a French-first mindset, stepping into a place as a visitor and observer rather than someone entitled to be there.

Of course, such situations also remind me that I have a privilege in carrying an American passport. It allows me to delve deep into societies around me while retaining my membership in the West. The reputation Americans have abroad is fair because it’s true. We are exercising a certain kind of power when we take the availability of English as a given. Never mind just France—many of us avoid places outside of Europe because of language barriers and stick to the domains we know. Once again, so long as the other person isn’t Madame Defarge, a language barrier is not an impediment to a journey—actually, it’s an enrichment.

One of the many croissants I’ve eaten, a beautiful byproduct of the language barriers I’ve encountered.

London, Empire, and Identity: What does diaspora really mean?

My parents love telling me about their honeymoon in London. It was the 1980s, and as two Pakistanis aspiring towards social mobility in the West, my parents were enamored with the world that stretched around them and the people they could become. Their trip took them on a carousel around all of London’s most prominent attractions. They saw Buckingham Palace, strolled through Westminster Abbey, and took shopping sprees through the city’s iconic markets.

Fast forward some thirty years or so and there I was on the phone telling them about a month-long study abroad program I was interested in that would take me through London and Paris.

“What does Bookpacking mean?” my mom inquired in Urdu. I explained to her the premise—that we were going to read a couple books by some authors in the places they were written in hopes of better understanding the French revolution and the theories around social progress. How Victor Hugo wrote this massive story about a young man being chased down by a tunnel-visioned cop. The love triangle Charles Dickens depicted that takes place amidst revolution on the horizon. The power of empathy in alleviating social suffering and creating lasting change.

After orating all of this, we sat in silence for a few moments before my mom spoke.

“Okay. So which day are you going to Buckingham Palace?”

For my parents, the real value of such a trip was not the literary experience, but the act of simply immersing oneself in a different culture. My parents—and my mother in particular—were working class their whole lives. Such texts and academic circles were not accessible to them when much of their lives were spent caring for siblings and working in factories. My dad managed to get his degree in engineering, and subsequently a job in the U.S. a couple of years after their honeymoon. And so like millions of others from South Asia, they migrated across the sea to start a new life in America.

London, however, always had a special place in their hearts. Though they were never able to return to London, the U.K. remained their biggest impression of the English-speaking world. In my parents’ eyes, going to the very same place was an opportunity for me to not just deepen my understanding of the humanities, but to learn more about their history and the world in which they became adults.

Unfortunately, their histories were rocky ones. My mom became a refugee of war at just eight years old, when Bangladesh declared its independence in 1971. Her life from there was marked with poverty, sustaining on cheap meals of lentils and rice as she hopped from place to place. My dad’s life was a bit more stable, growing up on a farm in Pakistani Punjab. Even for him, though, several barriers existed in his path as the first person in his family to try and attain higher education. By their twenties, both my mom and dad settled in Karachi, where they met at the office they worked at.

My mom standing in front of the Queen Victoria Memorial right in front of Buckingham Palace.

Among all of this, the British legacy seeped its way into their daily lives. Between British standards of education and British division of the subcontinent, their lives were shaped so significantly by London that my parents today find this fact almost redundant to mention.

Perhaps this is what made the palace so significant for them. My plan was to make the trip down to Buckingham Palace within the first few days of being in London as it was the place that had started to stick with me, too. However, this version of the palace turned out to be far different from the one my parents observed. Queen Elizabeth passed away a few months before writing this, and the monarchy has slowly transformed from a steadfast, stoic cultural force into something more sensational and celebrity-like. The crown no longer has the same prestige as it did with my parents.

Still, its remnants reveal the power England once had. This massive building, enclosed with gilded gates and staffed by red-suited guards pacing the front, still captures the essence of the commonwealth. The majestic architecture and the countless tourists wanting to see it memorialized the bloody conflicts and English subjugation my parents and their parents endured, more so than the stunning grace of the United Kingdom.

It is thus the story of class struggle and empire that I wanted to learn more about. Their lives continued to be impacted by difficulty and inequality well after moving to America, as my mom had to learn the ropes of speaking English while her mental health suffered—merely immigrating could not erase her trauma, a sad realization for someone who was told that riches lay right across the ocean.

This is the heritage I stand upon, but it’s one I hardly understand in spite of its lifelong impact. As a college student, I have been granted access to circles that my parents could only dream of. I’m able to attend an elite university thanks to a need-based grant that covers my entire tuition and then some. I have the chance to learn about subjects like linguistics and political science which in spite of fascinating my parents endlessly, were never available for exploration in the same manner.

Even simpler though, as the child of Faiziah and Khaliq Rahman, what does it mean for me to live in the country which they always looked up to? How can I possibly understand the sheer depth of their lives when I’m so divorced from the context they grew up in? Rather than being an outsider looking in, I’m a native-born citizen in the Western bubble they aspired towards. So, when my mom was asking me about when I would go to Buckingham palace, she wasn’t dismissing what I was studying. She was actually directing my attention towards something with immense gravity: the opportunity for me to empathize with her.

The British Museum was therefore second on my list of places to see, both to expand my own historical knowledge, but to further develop my understanding of the enormous empire my parents experienced. Though I cannot relive my mom’s life—and nor would that be the solution—by visiting the British Museum, I could get a glance into the world power that watched over them for much of their lives. I only had one hour to go through the museum, but I had a solid goal. I wanted to see the South Asian exhibits and take a closer look at some of the artifacts that extend for generations beyond my parents.

Unexpectedly, the journey to those exhibits itself spoke volumes. The Great Hall lived up to its name with its massive plaza and glass sky, letting in the most calming blue light I could have ever imagined. The marble floors and white walls both sterilized and framed my experience to come. The raw size of the building and the extent of its collection made a haughty statement: to learn about the world, and to learn about yourself, this is the museum.

No wonder, then, that Britain has always been so influential on my parents’ ideals, culture, and goals. The world they grew up in told them that it was the West which housed their success, that the West held the keys to their best selves which could not be found at home.

A shot of the Great Hall ceiling I took. A very fortunate sunny day in London.

The Partition portion of the South Asia exhibit, occupying a small portion of that gigantic room 33, was the most pertinent one for me. With artwork of Gandhi standing tall and clips of the first Indian film to be nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film, it crafted a neat, but perhaps too simple narrative of the subcontinent: the end of the British project was spearheaded by a handful of leaders. Yet if the museum claims to be “for the world, by the world,” what seemed to be missing were the artifacts of more ordinary lives and the victims of the violence that followed Partition. Instead of learning more about the time period itself per se, I found a better grasp of the framework that encases the stories my parents and grandparents have told me. There exists a certain kind of reverence for London after all this time, and now in 2023, it’s clear why my parents were so in love with the place: it represented an upper echelon of society, and the only one which actively invited them in.

And for what it’s worth, I’m also entranced by London. Even I myself have always had a special adoration for the British and the West as a whole, which is as a place of fine culture and elite education that I unknowingly hoped could offer me a chance up the ladder as well. At the same time, though, I have uncovered a disconnect between myself, my parents, and the structures of power above us. In order for this system to work, we need to continue believing that it is the West that contains ultimate enlightenment, and it is the West that can provide us with meaningful ways to live our lives.

How much I play into this remains unanswered. Much like my parents, I gleed with childlike joy walking around London—I simply felt so undeniably refined. I can’t say that I fully grasp what Buckingham Palace represents or what it was like for my parents to leave Asia and step foot in the West for the first time. But maybe, I can experience some of the same emotions they had. London is the city of honeymoons and a gruesome empire, of international cuisine and enriching museums. And though I’m still as lost as I was before when it comes to my sense of self and where I come from, I do know what lies in front of me and the places I can go from here. Some of these places will continue the violence experienced by my parents, and their parents, etc. But maybe some of these places can be ones that inspire social good, places that acknowledge our individual histories and actively restore the pain of those before me.