Among the literary cafes and the chic boutiques of the St.-Germain-des-Prés quartier of Paris, an impish man with a wad of newspapers makes the rounds, his trademark cry of “Ça y est!” or “That’s it!” echoing down narrow cobblestone streets.
Ali Akbar of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, is a man with a ready smile who has been hawking newspapers for a half-century. Sometimes he spices his offerings with made-up stories. “Ça y est! The war is over, Putin asks forgiveness!” was one recent pitch that caused grim hilarity.
From the Café de Flore to the Brasserie Lipp, two famed establishments where food and culture are intertwined, Mr. Akbar plies a dying trade in a dwindling commodity. He is considered to be the last newspaper hawker in France.
The profession may have reached its zenith in Paris in 1960, when Jean Seberg was immortalized on film with several newspapers under her arm crying “New York Herald Tribune!” as she strolled on the Champs-Élysées pursued by Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Nobody in Jean-Luc Godard’s classic movie “Breathless” is buying The Trib except Belmondo, who is unhappy the paper has no horoscope but unhappier still to discover that his charm makes little impression on the beauty and faux American innocence of Seberg, yet another foreigner smitten by Paris and angling to make a buck.
Mr. Akbar is one of them, too. “Sah-Yay!” is roughly how his cry to buy sounds. Through persistence and good humor he has become “part of the cultural fabric of Paris,” said David-Hervé Boutin, an entrepreneur active in the arts.
Such is Mr. Akbar’s renown that President Emmanuel Macron recently awarded him a Légion d’Honneur, the Republic’s highest order of merit. It will be conferred at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace in the fall.
“Perhaps it will help me get my French passport!” said Mr. Akbar, who sometimes has a withering take on life, having seen much of its underside. He has a residence permit, but his application for French nationality is mired in Gallic bureaucracy.
Mr. Akbar himself moves at startling speed. A sinewy bundle of energy at 72, he clocks several miles a day, selling Le Monde, Les Echos and other daily newspapers from around noon until midnight. Dismissive of the digital, he has become a human networker of a district once dear to Sartre and Hemingway, now overrun by brand-hungry tourists.
“How are you, dear Ali?” says Véronique Voss, a psychotherapist, as he enters the Café Fleurus near the Jardin du Luxembourg. “I worried about you yesterday because it was so hot.”
Heat does not deter Mr. Akbar, who has known worse. He thanks Ms. Voss with a big smile and takes off his dark blue Le Monde cap. “When you have nothing, you take whatever you can get,” he tells me. “I had nothing.”
At his next stop, an Italian cafe, Jean-Philippe Bouyer, a stylist who has worked for Dior, greets Mr. Akbar warmly. “Ali is indispensable,” Mr. Bouyer says. “Something very positive and rare in our times emanates from him. He kept the soul of a child.”
Born in 1953 into a family of 10 children, two of whom died young, Mr. Akbar grew up in Rawalpindi amid rampant poverty and open sewers, eating leftovers, sleeping five to a room, leaving school when he was 12, working odd jobs and eventually teaching himself to read.
“I did not want to wear clothes that reeked of misery,” he said. “I always dreamed of giving my mother a house with a garden.”
To advance he had to leave. He procured a passport at 18. All he knew of Europe was the Eiffel Tower and Dutch tulips. A winding road took him by bus to Kabul, Afghanistan, where Western hippies, most of them high, abounded in 1970 — but that was not Mr. Akbar’s thing. He went on by road to Iran where, he said, “the shah was an omnipresent God.”
Eventually, he reached Athens and wandered the streets looking for work. A businessman took pity and, noting his eagerness, offered him a job on a ship. Mr. Akbar cleaned the kitchen floor. He washed dishes. He was faced by aggressive mockery from bawdy shipmates for his refusal, as a Muslim, to drink.
In Shanghai, Mr. Akbar abandoned ship rather than face further taunting. The world is round and around he went, back to Rawalpindi, and then on the westward road again to Europe. His mother deserved better; that conviction drove him through every humiliation.
Visa issues in Greece and eventual expulsion landed him back in Pakistan a second time. His family thought he was mad but, undaunted, he tried again. This time he washed up in Rouen, France. It had taken only two years. After working there in a restaurant, he moved on to Paris in 1973.
“By the time I got to Paris I had an overwhelming desire to anchor myself,” Mr. Akbar said. “Since I began circling the planet, I hadn’t met many people who didn’t disappoint me. But if you have no hope, you’re dead.”
He slept under bridges and in cellars. He encountered racism. He lost his virginity and in so doing, he says, encountered the phrase “Ça y est!” that became his moniker. He spent a couple of months in Burgundy harvesting cucumbers. There, he ceded to wine and pork, forbidden by Islam.
“That was a turning point in my life,” Mr. Akbar wrote in a memoir published over a decade ago. “I still believed in God but I had concluded that eaters of sausages were often better people than Muslims with the strictest practices.”
At last, in 1974, Mr. Akbar found his calling when he ran into an Argentine student hawking newspapers. He inquired how he could do likewise and was soon in the streets of Paris with copies of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and Hara-Kiri, now defunct. He liked to walk, enjoyed contact with people and, even if margins were small, could eke out a living.
Fast-forward 51 years and Mr. Akbar is still at it. Because St.-Germain is the home of intellectuals, actors and politicians, he has rubbed shoulders with the influential. From François Mitterrand to Bill Clinton (who told him Pakistan was “dangerous”), and from the actress and singer Jane Birkin to the author Bernard-Henri Lévy, he has met them all.
None of this has gone to his head. He remains a modest guy with a winning manner. His main newspaper is now Le Monde, which he acquires at a kiosk for about $2 a copy and sells for almost double that. He makes around $70 on an average day; he rarely takes a day off. Newspaper reading remains ingrained in France. Friends may buy two or three copies and slip him 10 euros or invite him to lunch. He has no pension but he gets by — and his mother got a Rawalpindi garden.
From an arranged marriage with a Pakistani woman in 1980, Mr. Akbar has five sons, one of them autistic, one suffering from various physical ailments. A sixth child died at birth. Life has not been easy, one reason “I have made it my business to make people laugh.”
He is deeply grateful to France, which he calls a land of asylum, not least for the education it gave his children. But he believes that as a brown-skinned foreigner he “will never be completely accepted,” as he put it in his book, “I Make People Laugh, the World Makes Me Cry.”
I asked what other papers Mr. Akbar had sold over the years. “Paris Metro in English!” he said. I was incredulous — I started in journalism in 1976 with a piece for The Paris Metro. Much loved, much lamented, the publication went under in 1978.
Some 50 years later, Mr. Akbar remains on the move. Lose sight of him for a second, and he’s gone. But then comes the cry: “Ça y est! Marine is marrying Jordan!” — a reference to the far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her young protégé Jordan Bardella. His jokes are a sales pitch; they also reflect a yearning for a happier, simpler world.
A half-century after my own start in journalism in the pages of Paris Metro, I never imagined I would find myself in St.-Germain-des-Prés with a newspaper hawker from Rawalpindi who had once sold it and since dedicated his life to lifting the spirits of a corner of Paris.
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
The post Extra! Extra! Read All About Last Newspaper Hawker in Paris appeared first on New York Times.
