Mame-Fatou Niang

As a non-white person, you grow up and live in France, literally hounded by the question "d'où viens-tu?" (where are you from?). Something in your physical appearance seems to loudly yell "alien" while the Republic religiously professes equality of all citizens regardless of their ethnic background. 

You grow up in a country where history (as molded by patriarchs such as Ernest Renan or Jules Michelet) intimately ties pride and inclusion in the national group to a shared history. But when you look back at the way we weaved and created that history, that national narrative, there is little that explains why people who look like me are part of the group, how long they've been part of the group, or even what they contributed to the group. 

You grow up in a country that claims to be blind to color, but a country that asks you to go back "where you came from," the minute you are deemed ungrateful or unruly because you are asking too many questions. Questions like "If we are all equal before the law, and if race 'does not exist' in France, what is it in us that makes us 'probationary citizens,' people whose citizenship must be checked over and over, people whose Frenchness could be taken away, as proposed by former presidents Sarkozy and Hollande?"

So, growing up with these questions, I figured that the only way for me to find answers was to go back where these questions had been molded: back to History and its manufactured silences.

In my work, I reflect on French identity, on its many components, on its history and (because it is my specialty), I focus on the place that race and ethnicity occupy in the articulation of a set of questions such as: Who is French? How was our national memory constructed? What is the impact of this historical shaping of the "national narrative" and on very contemporary processes of integration or exclusion from the national community? How do we acquire, process, and spread the words that say inclusion or exclusion?

I am often accused of belonging to the camp of those who fan a "race war." This is interesting because people who look like me did not come up with the concept of race in Europe, a concept that was actually used for centuries to wage a war on us. We are often accused of being "intellectual terrorists" who want to destroy pages of the national narrative. It is actually quite the opposite. In my work, I have come to realize that the pages addressing my family's trajectory in France were not missing, they had just been glued off. Our work today is to patiently reattach these pages. This effort does not take away from the history of this Nation. It just makes it more complete. We are bringing forgotten and silences stories to the forefront. 

I want to come back to the opening lines of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's "Unsilencing the Past":

"History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots."

Back in grad school that sentence blew my mind, and in the course of working on my dissertation on race and the banlieues in France, I started to understand how the ultimate mark of power (its invisibility) was also its biggest flaw. Now that activists, scholars, artists and people of all walks of life are defining or redefining historical erasures and silences, exposing their mechanisms, the emperor's nakedness means that he is naked. Period! We do not believe in the cloth's mythical properties anymore. In France for example, that is what's happening with the unraveling of the universalist Kool-Aid. The good crowd is still expressing admiration at the emperor's clothes, but a little boy yells, "But the Emperor has no clothes!" In the Africana context, it's not one little boy, but an entire choir that is calling the Emperor on his naked nonsense. To me, this choir was slowly pieced together, established when I finally allowed myself to hyphenate a Frenchness from which I felt alienated at first, with the Wolofness of my parents, the African-Americaness that permeated the cultures of my teenage years in the 1990s in France, the Jamaicaness and Antilleaness of my music and food etc... Operating in Blackness in all its vastness.

This little metaphor highlights the importance of building global networks and transnational collaborations. This is something that I often discuss with my students, my cousins, nieces and nephews: travel as much as you can; observe anti-Blackness at work outside of the boundaries of your own country; what are the mechanisms of anti-Blackness in those localities? What is the quality of the silences and noises around Blackness? 

I cannot stress enough how pivotal my travelling to the US and Brazil have been for my understanding of negrophobia in France, and I do this while also stressing that anti-Blackness is a global disease that will not go away with a local remedy. Operating in a transnational space allows me to escape the limits and smothering grip of my country, but it also helps me create spirals of knowledge and archives that are made possible by the languages and "art de faire" that I borrow or adopt as I move around.

Sometimes, I feel like working as a scholar-activist was something that I had to do. I love this work that brings together my passion for words, images, people, life and joy. But it is also a very draining place. Having to reiterate over and over and over again that we should come together as one to face, as humans, the grand challenges that are already hovering over us: migrations and wars, the worrisome takeover of A. I, the future of our interactions with machines, ecological collapse etc. And instead of facing these issues, we are still tearing each other over our physical appearances. Entire economic systems exist solely because they have reduced people to fuel for a capitalist system that is "suiciding" humanity.

One of the pillars of my practice is hope. I hope that these crises will be the dawn for a new era. I hope that the gloomy moments we are going through will help us remember what joy and laughter looked like. I hope that we can remember how bright-eyed we were as babies discovering the world. I have hope and refuse to give it up.