There are 25 passages in Paris. They’re easy to miss if you don’t know where to look: narrow corridors tucked between buildings, occasionally sealed by glass roofs, often glowing with a kind of diffused light. Some are elegant, lined with antique shops and glazed moldings. Others are so worn they seem to belong to an earlier century. Despite their appearance, they all play the same quiet trick: they move you from one street to another without fully returning you to the city outside.
Since moving to Paris, I’ve started to see my relocation as a passage: a place you pass through, that also briefly holds you. Perhaps, it’s because I live in one – Passage Geffroy-Didelot, in the 17th arrondissement – a small stretch of cobblestones that feels more like a courtyard than a neighborhood street. Just beyond its mouth, traffic roars, and people hurriedly bike and walk to their destinations. But inside the passage, the sound softens, as if flattened by the walls. Artists leave their studio doors cracked open, students practice scales on their clarinets, and tourists roll suitcases over the uneven stones. Someone is always smoking, playing soft music, or speaking quietly to a neighbor. The air within the passage feels suspended, like it belongs to a slower layer of the city.
To step outside my apartment each morning is to cross a threshold itself – not quite public, not quite private. A contained world that opens onto a wider and louder one. A pause between two distinct realities. I didn’t know, when I first moved to Paris, how much that sensation would come to define not just where I live, but who I am.
The Architecture of Transition
A passage is more complex than French architecture. It is a structure that literalizes transition: not a destination, not a dwelling, but a crossing. And it’s difficult not to see oneself in it when living between continents.
Every time I fly from the United States to France, I enter the most literal passage of all – an airplane suspended over the Atlantic, the lights dimmed, the cabin a quiet hum of blanket rustles and whispered conversations. That space between takeoff and landing has become my most honest geography. In the air, I belong to neither shore, language, or set of expectations. My phone is off, the world recedes, and my thoughts sharpen into the kind of clarity that only comes when your life is briefly unobservable. In those hours, the idea of in-betweenness feels like a point of view rather than a problem – an altitude from which the complexities of identity look almost orderly. But landing always reintroduces the complications.
My initial interest in moving to Paris was highly inspired by the well-documented lineage of Black American writers – from James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates – who arrived in this city and found, if not freedom, then at least a break. I was seeking a reprieve from the weight of being seen mostly as a Black person in America – a chance to be read by my personality and character rather than as part of a racial category. To some extent, that experience has held. In Paris, I often feel anonymous. No one follows me with their eyes in luxury boutiques. No one clenches their bag or changes seats when I sit beside them on the metro. My existence does not automatically generate suspicion. Here, the neutrality of strangers feels like a form of safety I had not realized I’d been craving.
However, for this form of neutrality to exist, difference, otherness, and diversity in manner and appearance must weaken. My body, which in Brooklyn vibrated in harmony with the city’s excess and urgency, now moves through a quieter, more contained terrain. Paris asks for less outward expression, and I comply, even though part of me misses the sensory fullness of where I came from.
Before Paris, my home was Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn’s Prospect Lefferts Gardens. If my Paris passage is a whisper, Nostrand was a shout – a street vibrating with multiple worlds at once. Dancehall spilled from car windows; church bells chimed at unpredictable intervals; the B44 bus always blew its horn and screeched its brakes. The smell of fried chicken, weed, and the sweetness of Caribbean bakeries infiltrated the air, all at once. The energy was vibrant at any hour of the day. Simultaneously, the neighborhood was always balancing on an unstable threshold. New cafés and gift shops with minimalist interiors appeared every month. Longtime tenants disappeared. Brownstones were gutted into high-rise condominiums. Every block bore evidence of a slow and relentless rearranging.
Still, I recognized myself on Nostrand Avenue. Not only in the demographic or even the specific cultural references, but in the fullness, loudness, and friction of the neighborhood. In Brooklyn, identity felt like something that could permeate everything. In Paris, it often feels like something I’m carrying carefully, trying not to disturb the calm.
Paris, Preserved, Brooklyn, Becoming
When I first visited Passage Véro-Dodat – a pristine, 19th-century corridor with mosaic floors and charming shopfronts – it was hard not to feel the contrast. The passage looked as though it had been frozen at the moment of its birth. Brooklyn, by contrast, was constantly remaking itself; its history was recorded not in preservation but in the stories residents told about what used to stand where. In Paris, preservation is not merely aesthetic – it is ideological. Passages are scrubbed, restored, and preserved with near religious attention. Their elegance is not neutral, but rather the architectural afterglow of extraction, and their preservation signals whose histories are valued enough to restore.
Paris’s passages were built during a gilded era made possible by colonial extraction. Sugar and cotton from the Caribbean and Africa – and the enslaved labor behind them – fed the wealth that financed these glittering interiors. Nostrand Avenue tells another version of the same global story: a descendant neighborhood shaped by communities whose labor produced that European wealth. It is a living archive of cultures forged in the aftermath of rupture – African braiding salons, Caribbean meat shops, and cheap convenience stores run by families who crossed oceans in search of safety and possibility. The neighborhood’s buildings crumble not because its people lack beauty or legacy, but because their histories are rarely granted the dignity of preservation.
The Doubleness of Being Seen
Since moving to Paris, I didn’t expect the transatlantic passage between my two homes to sharpen the duality of how I am seen. In the United States, my Blackness precedes me into most rooms. It’s a fact that has shaped the reflexes of my adulthood: the vigilance, code-switching, and preparedness for misunderstanding or danger. Baldwin once wrote that to be a Black person in America and to be conscious “is to be in a rage almost all of the time.” Even when rage is not my dominant emotion, the awareness he describes is familiar – a constant hum beneath the day.
However, in France, my Americanness often arrives before my Blackness, and in a country that mythologizes the United States as a cultural empire, this distinction carries weight. Taxi drivers ask about New York, shopkeepers inquire about my studies, strangers compliment my style, and bartenders praise my French even when I stumble. The fascination is sometimes flattering, but other times unsettling. I am not free of being stereotyped – just subject to a different one.
To be glamorized is not to be understood, but rather to be considered interesting. The irony does not escape me. In one world, I am the marginalized; in another, I am the exoticized. Both are distortions.
My Internal Passage
I’ve begun to realize that the most significant passage I inhabit isn’t geographic at all. It’s internal – a state of in-betweenness that has become less a crisis and more a companion. Movement between countries has taught me how fluid identity can be. One version of me rises easily to the surface in Brooklyn: expressive, expansive, in sync with the noise and improvisation of the city. Another arrives in Paris: observant, quiet, attuned to subtlety. Neither is the truer self. Both are situational, contextual, and real.
The work now is not choosing between these selves but tending to the space where they meet. Living in a Parisian passage offers an unexpected metaphor for this work. When I step outside, I am still partially inside, and when I return home, I carry the city with me. I am learning to see the passage not as a temporary space but as a form of grounding – a reminder that movement is not the opposite of stability. Sometimes the passage itself is the place you are meant to be.
Paris is not a detour, and Brooklyn is not merely the origin story I left behind. They are two ends of a corridor I continue to walk – two atmospheres shaping one body, two cultures shaping one consciousness. Just like the passage where I live – two entrances, two exits, two ways of understanding where you are – the overlap between my worlds has become its own kind of home. In that overlap, I am both the woman who grew up learning to brace for misinterpretation and the woman who now slips anonymously through Parisian streets.
I am the person who thrives amid Brooklyn’s unruly rhythms and the person who feels strangely steadied by Paris’s quiet. And so I embrace this corridor of a life – moving, observing, crossing thresholds – learning that in-betweenness is not a problem to be solved but a space to be inhabited. The passage, rather than the destination, has become home.
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