Where Are You From? - on the impossibility of being both Black and French in France
Where Are Your From? is my third project of short documentary, and the first time I dare mixing my academic interests with my personal reflection on transnational identity building. After all, racism in postcolonial France and the struggle for belonging are deeply intertwined, in all ways possible.
Amina Mamaty in Where Are You From?
Through conversations with three young women of West African origins who have chosen to leave France to settle in New York City, the film builds a case against the French fantasy of universalism. By enforcing colorblindness at all cost within its multiracial society (among other examples, French law forbids the creation of ethnic statistics and has erased the word “race” from the Constitution in 2012), the nation that likes to call itself “Pays des Lumières” (or Country of Enlightenment) denies its non-white citizens the conceptual and material apparatus necessary to build rich and multiple identities. For many of them, leaving is the only salvation.
Racism as a Colonial Continuum
Historian Pap Ndiaye explains in La condition noire that, in the French colonial empire, what would separate and differentiate French citizens from French subjects was skin color, “Being French was being white.” In other words, who is not white cannot be French, and is, necessarily, from elsewhere. This idea is embodied in the linguistics commonly used to refer to children and grand-children of immigrants: they are not “first generation” French, but “second” and “third generation immigrants.” Non-white French citizens are doomed to be forever regarded as immigrants, as Africans, as foreigners. In a volume titled Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness published in 2012 and compiling articles presented in 2008 at a Paris conference, professor of comparative literature Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi dives deep into the French linguistics of Blackness and notices the “lexical uncertainty between the terms “Africans” and “Blacks,” with the “black” becoming more directly linked to Africa, savagery, and slavery. […] Marked by negative connotations, the word “black” is oftentimes banished from the language and replaced by “African” for reasons of political correctness.” It is this colonial continuum that I want to underline, especially at a time when those who raise their voices against systemic racism are methodically gaslighted, dismissed and crushed by French universalism.
Non-white French citizens are doomed to be forever regarded as immigrants, as Africans, as foreigners.
The short documentary Where Are You From? discusses the impossibility to be both French and Black in France. As Ndiaye puts it, “we want to be French and Black without it being suspect or strange.”. In the second portrait of the film, Takoba candidly declares, “being Black in France was difficult. And we were not completely Black because we had to put ourselves down, we had to remember it is not our country and we have to adapt.” This feeling of having to “play white” to blend into French society is echoed by political scientist Fred Constant in his participation to Black France/France Noire. Recounting his discussions with Black French individuals, he concludes, “Emphasis is placed on the need for Blacks of a younger generation to fundamentally change their comportment and how they live so that they resemble French mainstream society.”
All the women I have interviewed during the preparation and shooting of the film —all of them born and/or raised in France— declared feeling foreign in their own country, being “too Black to be French” (Boni-Claverie 2015) when they most often have no relationship with their parents’ African country of origin. In this context, my research clearly touches questions of (national) identity-building and belonging. As one of Fred Constant’s interlocutors puts it, “In this country, it is still hard for many of our fellow citizens to believe that you can be both French and Black. Sometimes, I have the strange feeling that I am asked to choose, that I can’t be both.”
Takoba Oulare in Where Are You From?
La vie en couleurs
When researching Blackness in postcolonial France, I quickly noticed that the vast majority of Black French writers and scholars today at the forefront of critical race theory and intersectional analysis have studied or traveled to the United States in their early career. Some, like professor of African-American studies Maboula Soumahoro whose powerful words are quoted at the opening and closing of the film, came back to France with the desire to develop the field of Black Studies in French academia —an endeavor that encounters extremely strong resistance. Others, like professor of Francophone Studies Mame-Fatou Niang or professor of literature Alain Mabanckou, stayed in the US. In an article published by The New York Times last July, journalist Norimitsu Onishi points out how these intellectuals have reckoned with their own blackness during their journey in the US —though I wouldn’t get as far as calling this phenomenon a “racial awakening.” Pap Ndiaye, featured in the article, summarizes, “It’s an experience that all Black French go through when they go to the United States. […] It’s the experience of a country where skin color is reflected upon and where it is not hidden behind a colorblind discourse.” Of course no one is arguing that racism doesn’t exist in the US, simply that it is acknowledged here as a major societal matter and is the subject of public discussions.
In 2013, French journalist Rokhaya Diallo, also featured in Onishi’s article, directed Les Marches de la Liberté (Steps to Liberty), a documentary film that builds a parallel between the 1963 March on Washington and the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism in France. The film follows a small group of young American leaders in a trip to Paris to meet with French Black and Brown anti-racist thinkers and activists. Their first shock comes early on when, meeting Toumi Djaidja, organizer of the 1983 march, they realize he has been completely forgotten by French history and society. Later in the film, Maboula Soumahoro regrets, “We lack historical models in France. People of African descent have to turn to the US to find models like the civil rights movement: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers.” This reflection is echoed in Where Are You From? by Amina who explains, “There’s so much history here that there’s always something to unravel, always something to learn about when it comes to Black History. This is the land where I want to make it because they’ve fought for me so hard, you know, for us to be great and to do amazing things.”
On the subject of belonging, Soumahoro goes on, “When people ask you where you’re from, they want to be reassured. They want to hear you say you’re from elsewhere. […] In the US people would constantly ask me where I was from and had no problem with that: I was foreign. But what about this feeling of being foreign in a place where we’re supposed to be home?”
“There’s so much history here that there’s always something to unravel, always something to learn about when it comes to Black History. This is the land where I want to make it because they’ve fought for me so hard, you know, for us to be great and to do amazing things.”
I have wanted to take advantage of my currently living in New York City to meet with individuals who decided to make a similar move and have found here the environment and tools that enabled them to fully exist as Black French individuals. It was especially interesting for me to investigate the notion of “becoming French while abroad” that Soumahoro highlights in her recently published essay Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, “It is in the US that I defined myself as French, and that they believed me.” Thanks to my own local network and a “call for informants” that circulated on social media, I got to speak with a dozen women —indeed, only women aged between 20 and 45 answered my call. Inspired by afrofeminist films like the excellent Mariannes Noires (Niang 2015) and Ouvrir La Voix (Gay 2017) that both feature a choir of Black French women, I decided to embrace the female-specific relationship I was enjoying with my interviewees for the benefit of the film. Their being comfortable with me to share painful memories, deep personal reflections, and life expectations was key.
But I also consciously chose to focus my film on “regular people” who haven’t constructed and rehearsed their discourse like public figures do. It was important not to fall into the “expert trap” in order to keep alive the ethnographic quality of the short documentary, and to make the content as accessible as possible, intelligible for a wider audience than academia. Finally, I put emphasis on the subjects’ “pursuit of happiness” (Williams 2018), and not on their experience of violence and trauma which has for too long been a research pattern in social sciences. I want my practice of anthropology to depart from the “suffering slot” theorized by anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot and to focus on the strategies deployed by individuals and communities towards growth and happiness.
Iman Diarra in Where Are You From?
White responsibility
During the pre-production phase of the film, I have more than once been asked, “Why are you doing this? You’re white!” I understand where this interrogation comes from since for decades —and still today— white scholars have been studying Black people and Blackness as the paramount of otherness. Along with a new international generation of social scientists, I find bizarre and sometimes even despicable that so many of our peers and predecessors dedicate their career to studying communities and individuals they have no relation to, aligning with a colonial tradition of extraction in the name of western expertise. In making this film on female Blackness in postcolonial France, I recognize my political and academic responsibility as a white French anthropologist to participate in the transformative change currently operating within the society that made me. It is not about guilt, it is about responsibility. Secondly, as a binational wary of borders and nation-state hegemony, I am committed to thinking through the difficulty of fully existing as transnational subjects in a time marked by international migrations and rising nationalism.
Tweets by Professor Tao Leigh Goffe, May 2021.
It is when I met Amina on a plane trip to Paris and that we bonded over cheese and olives that I realized how moving to the US had been liberating for her who, at the age of 17, couldn’t see any desirable future in France. In the same way, Iman, whom I met in a “Political Theory of Decolonization” class at The New School, left France right upon graduating high school and never looked back. Takoba has been studying criminal justice in NYC for two years and is still marveling at finding Black role models in her field. She recalls with emotion not being smirked at when stating her professional ambition on her first day of school.
Aware that filming interviews adds a layer of extraction to the endeavor—their image as well as their discourse being captured at once— I made sure to share the footage with the girls as I was shooting, and tried to relieve them from the pressure of the “third eye” by regularly turning the camera off and keeping the microphone on. My main goal was not to make them say what I was hoping to hear but to listen to their individual journeys in their own terms. We talked for hours, we talked about our families, about life in France, life in NYC, allowing their thoughts to unfold and to get clearer, for them as much as for me. The short documentary is theirs in many aspects, I only produced the medium enabling their discourse to reach out to whomever needs to hear it. I hope that the film will raise questions and spark conversations, while showing the possibility of solace and healing.
Watch Where Are You From? on Vimeo
References
Boni-Claverie, Isabelle. 2015. Too Black to be French? Quark Productions.
Constant, Fred. 2012. “‘Black France’ and the National Identity Debate: How Best to Be Black and French?” In Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, edited by Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall. Durham: Duke University Press.
Diallo, Rokhaya. 2013. Les Marches de la Liberté. De l'autre côté du périph.
Gay, Amandine. 2017. Ouvrir La Voix. Bras de Fer Production.
Mudimbe-Boyi, Elisabeth. 2012. “Black France: Myth or Reality? Problems of Identity and Identification.” In Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, edited by Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ndiaye, Pap. 2008. La condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
Niang, Mame-Fatou, and Kaytie Nielsen. 2016. Mariannes Noires. Round Room Image.
Onishi, Norimitsu. 2020. A Racial Awakening in France, Where Race Is a Taboo Topic. The New York Times, July 14, 2020.
Soumahoro, Maboula. 2020. Le Triangle et l’Hexagone. Paris: La Découverte.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Williams, Bianca C. 2018. The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press.