Ever since its first version, a duo created in Paris in 2018, Carte noire nommée désir has gone through several forms. What’s the place of this show in your career?
In 2014, I took part in Ouvrir la Voix / Speak Up, a documentary directed by Amandine Gay. The film is based on interviews with twenty-four Afrodescendant women. They talk about their condition as black women, and their stories highlight systemic discriminations like racism and sexism. I became sharply aware of my situation as a black Frenchwoman from Martinique. Of the racism I’ve experienced in my life. Of the many tensions and paradoxes I’ve been exposed to when it came to thinking about love, desire, how others see me. That was the beginning for me of an intense period of alternative education through antiracism activism, Afro-feminism, and queer activism. In 2017, the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation asked me to work on the principle of disidentification as passage during an editorial marathon whose goal was to write articles for Wikipedia. The idea behind the project was to make the collaborative encyclopedia blacker and queerer, to which end I created a performance I called Whitewashing, which examined the phenomenon of skin whitening as practiced by black women. The following year, the Théâtre de la Loge in Paris invited me for a carte blanche. I’d just spent the summer attending decolonial camps, it was an intense period of conscientisation and Afro-feminist activism. As a joke, I said maybe we should call it a “carte noire”… At first, it was a duo created with Aurore Déon, born of our complicity but also of a shared reflection about how the desire of black women was built, in large part by advertising. Those infamous injunctions that can lead to double binds. That show already contained the great principles of what was to become Carte noire nommée désir. Every night, a few accomplices joined the show to create with us plastic images. It made us want to have more people onstage with us. Aurore and I have the same skin tone, we’re both from Martinique, we have similar backgrounds in terms of education and career. We therefore decided to enrich the show by adding personalities from various social backgrounds and ethnic origins.
Who are these women whose stories allow us to apprehend this (very political) desire for the bodies of black women? A relationship built on stereotypes, as suggested by this advertising slogan for a coffee brand from the 90s that became the title of the show.
For this project, the make-up of the group was fundamental. Those women are all creatives, but they have different artistic backgrounds. They come from the world of performance, of theatre, of fine arts, of the circus, of lyric art. They’re multifaceted. Some of them are isolated in their field, because there are very few black women in the world of Art. We form a heterogenous ensemble, each with her own individuality, in her strength like in her vulnerability. This diversity is absolutely essential to me. Alongside me, you’ll find my accomplice, director, author and actress Aurore Déon, but also Fatou Siby, who’s a cook, radio host, and social centre director who, for over twenty years now, has taken part in the Ceméa, a movement for popular education. With her, for instance, we looked into emancipation through play. She’s also an author and just created a one-woman show motivated by the desire to express herself via the tools of theatre. Her social class, her first name, forced marriages, genital mutilation, polygamy: many clichés about dark-skinned African women can be attached to her… Maëva Husband is an actress. She’s multiracial, rather light-skinned, and she’d never wanted to really tackle the question of skin tone in her career, yet today she’s wondering about how people look at her. Estelle Borel is a Swiss circus artist. She was adopted, and there are things she needs to name, to say, to try to understand when it comes to her skin colour, to her origins. She creates strong images, a balance between her physical power and the fragility of the tightrope on which she moves through the air. Makeda Monnet is a classically-trained singer and harpist, but her repertoire isn’t limited to classical music, her culture is wider. We met on a music video shoot for a song by rapper Casey. Ophélie Mac is an Afro-feminist artist and activist who calls herself a ceramicist-performer. She lives in Belgium and her work is very surprising, she directs the Fatsabbats collective, which organises events halfway between care sessions, parties, and popular art for the Afro-queer community. All those women embody fantasies, even characters, I couldn’t take the liberty of representing myself because they don’t fit my history. They’re all artists and, like me, they want to rid their field of stereotypes. It’s therefore very important that those performers, who worked on their lived experiences, be the authors of their own stories. Our words have been taken away from us for much too long. That’s why showing this intimate side of me is an artistic gesture as human as it is political. The title isn’t just a reference to an ad. It evokes the richness of the food metaphors (both sweet and savory) used to describe non-white skins. By comparing them systematically to chocolate or coffee, we’ve forgotten that those products were once the result of colonisation and of the enslavement of black populations, and today of the economic exploitation of black and non-white workers. Using this slogan allows me to denounce head-on a socio-cultural phenomenon one could almost call anthropophagous!
From the point of view of dramaturgy, how do you tackle those subjects, still rarely represented in theatre and in culture at large?
I try to tell the story of the desire for black women in the French context by asking myself what the references and models behind it are. The conclusion’s pretty sad. Most of the time, the bodies of black women have been hypersexualised, objectified, and animalised, when it’s still difficult, even impossible, to talk about white bodies and the privileges they confer. The essentially male point of view on our experiences as black women shaped a large part of our collective imagination and ensured the omnipresence of that kind of discourse. And at the same time, those women are waitresses, nannies, cleaning women; they’re service workers. They’re so much “in service” that it’s almost impossible for them to take care of themselves, of their skin, their hair, their mental health… Even though my theatre uses real discourse, because my work is based on a principle of truth and transparency, I don’t do documentary theatre: my work consists in asking myself how to handle performance in a show. How to weave together two kinds of narrative to tell a larger story? There is therefore an important writing phase, because I wanted something akin to a fairy tale. Inspired by Aimé Césaire and Audre Lorde, among others, I try to give rise to a poetic discourse, with echoes of Afrofantasy and Afrofuturism. It’s a rather long story we drop on the audience. But once our story’s been told, what can we dream of? How can we transform and transport ourselves into the future? The plastic images we build onstage are so many metaphors taken from the very pop culture that shaped us. But we want to overcome them. It’s a show that empowers black women…
Interview conducted by Francis Cossu and translated to english by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach