the African diaspora” 2004 seminar; Jean Muteba Rahier (Florida International University); Trica D. Keaton, Shatema Threadcraft (Dartmouth College); Janis A. Mayes (Syracuse University); Mame-Fatou Niang (Carnegie Mellon University); The Association for the Worldwide History of the African Diaspora (ASWAD); The Black Women’s Intellectual History Project; Practicing Refusal: The Sojourner Project; The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (Martha Jones, Tiya Miles, and Marisa Fuentes); Samir Meghelli (Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum); Arthur Jafa; Zadie Smith; Léonora Miano; Jean-Éric Boulin; Kaoutar Harchi; Laurent Dubois (Duke University); Aaron Kamugisha, Jahlani Niaah (University of the West Indies); Stéphane Robolin (Rutgers University); Christine Chivallon (CNRS); Françoise Vergès; Elsa Dorlin (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis); Omar Berrada (The Cooper Union); Alice Diop; Josza Anjembe; Nora Philippe; Penda Diouf; Bintou Dembele; Eva Doumbia; Rokhaya Diallo; Fabrice Taraud; Alexis Peskine; Rocé; Jon Soulclap; Cases Rebelles.
I particularly thank Bennington College and its extraordinary students; the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS, Columbia University), the Africana Studies department at Barnard College; Madeleine George and the students at Bard College Prison Initiative Program; my students at the University of Tours and at Sciences Po (Paris and Reims campuses), as well as all the prison residents with whom I have had the pleasure of working and from whom I have been able to learn so much.
My blood: my family (Soumahoro and Binaté), vertical, horizontal, extended (Mungani, Cottrell, Monnier, Hall, Moderne, Églantine), continental and diasporic, constitute the bedrock by which I have had the good fortune and happiness of being supported. I thank each member of our three generations engaged in this French experience. You are everything to me: the ground and the source. Massiami, Mahbintou, Monmian, Namisata, and Myriam, there are no more precious sisters than you. Naomi, Ismaël, Iman, Soheïla, Lana, Diane, Rémi, Kayla, Lola, and those to come: over to you!
Finally, I have been fortunate enough to be able to dive at will into an ocean of friendships that accompany me, soothe me, and support me in every endeavor. A huge thank you to the following people: the Fellowship of KB (Véro; Yoyo; KK, my Grande Caille); la Tana de Soumangourou; Schnavel; Joce et Malia; Ibrahima “Ibou” Traoré; Karima Boussalem, Cynthia Tocny (twelve years too late!); Hadja; Pika; Otuawan; Jimmy; Jennifer “Shakita”; Chida; Samia; Max; Nono and our Boonies: Craig, Louloute, Mamao and even Smootchax!; Patricia and Elie; Magalita, Maï Lan and Naïs; Houaria Righi; Aïcha; Angela and Jahia; Diadia (“the Miami Pact” has been respected!); Mame (so much love …); Negroblaster; Dr. Jovonne Bickerstaff (“the right to write”; right?); Dr Caterina Pierre; the fantastic Dr Gay Wilgus (since 2002 …); Dr Ella Ben Hagaï; Aïda Sarr; Aurélie Hannoun; Sébastien Salbayre; Alain “Al” Mazars, Maryline, and Jaë; Anne-Laure Feron; Raaf Matière Première, Rim, Yasmine, and Nesrine; Rachid Djaïdani; the ever caring Aline Tacite, Zaharia Ahamada; Jean-Christophe Folly and Michaëla Danjé (“the Pedra Alta Pact” will remain in vigor until the new order, literally). To my favorite Idos: Cédric, Jacky, Yacine, Raphaele, as well as to their descendants. To Suzette Tanis-Plant and Emmanuelle Andrès, my “thesis sisters.” To Rosie Gankey and Marius, Cavé Okou, and Fania Nöel. To Christian Eboule; Yassine Belattar; Chloé Juhel, Raphaël Yem, Stella Magliani-Belkacem; Randianina Peccoud (thank you for your support and continual faith in me); Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kenyatta Matthews. To the Palenne, Libar, Jean-Baptiste and Peraste families. And to the N’Dour-Sow-Bary, Kompaoré, Ouedraogo, and Martin families.
To Émilie Barret-Chevrel. To F.B.: “We make a decision and we stick to it,” right? I’m trying. Still and always. Thank you to her.
Translator’s Note
I have been in conversation with Maboula Soumahoro for more than 20 years. We met during our graduate studies at Columbia University, both of us then students of Guadeloupean novelist and intellectual Maryse Condé, both of us going on to become scholars and educators in our own right. I do not recall whether Maryse made any sort of concerted effort back then to bring us together beyond that first encounter, but a connection was made and it endured. It would be the point of origin for conversations and collaborations that have stretched over two decades and back-and-forth across the Atlantic, into classrooms and cafés, with students and with various publics, and now here in the pages of Maboula’s extraordinary book.
That Maboula entrusted me with translating her francophone journey into the space of the English-speaking world was an honor and a responsibility I did not take lightly. The invitation to translate her words into new places has felt, in a way, like a call to inhabit her voice from the inside out – an invitation to say “I” in her name. Because as much as the two of us have been in dialogue over the past decades, Black is the Journey, Africana the Name remains very much an individual’s story; it is the story of an “I” that has risked telling itself openly, that has risked the vulnerability of visibility. As such, this project has required a constant navigation of the space between Maboula’s experiences (as a Black French woman of sub-Saharan African heritage) and my own (as a Black American woman of Caribbean heritage). This process of navigation itself expresses what I understand to be the very project of translating this book – that is, to facilitate Maboula’s generous relating of her story as a means to relate across nation-language and other cultural borders.
If the original French text of Le Triangle et L’Hexagone boldly insists on the presence – and the right to presence – of a Black woman, her body, and her deep history within the French republican community, this translated work insists on the presence of Black France in broader diasporic understandings of blackness within the global community. It insists that US-blackness cannot stand in for the experiences of the wider Black world. It brings us fully into the frame of a diasporic context that is geo-culturally idiosyncratic and deeply familiar, in equal measure. It offers readers in the Anglophone world an opportunity to see the workings and the consequences of racialization through a different lens and, in doing so, to understand both Frenchness and blackness in new ways. As the deliberately rare footnotes reveal (and then only in part), there are specific cultural codes and layers of reference that speak directly into the Francosphere but require the mediating work of translation in order to be legible to non-French readers. To be a Black woman in France is a particular valence of being a Black woman in the world, Maboula affirms; it implicates a particular history and is laden with a particular set of struggles. At the same time, the experience of Black womanhood we discover in Black is the Journey, Africana the Name is capacious. Maboula’s intellectual engagements with racialized communities in France, the United States, and the Caribbean, as well as her own facility with the English language, ground the diasporic resonance at the heart of her work.
“This question of language,” as it is posed in the book’s first pages, is troublesome. “This French language is not my mother tongue,” Maboula flatly notes. “French is my mother tongue, though it is not my mother’s tongue.” Indeed, French is deeply fraught; Jula is painfully inaccessible; and English somehow resembles freedom in this particular story. If Frantz Fanon is right – if it is true that “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture”1 – then where does that leave Maboula Soumahoro, a Black French woman, born in Paris, raised by a Jula-speaking Ivoirian mother, most at home and most herself in New York City, speaking English? How does this “Black, transnational, diasporic identity” line up with her phenotype, her possibilities, her passport? What is the truest language of her story?
These questions are posed in ways both myriad and direct throughout Black is the Journey, Africana the Name, and they necessarily undergird my translation of this book from French into English. Rendering the eloquence and the adamance of the work’s original prose, its provocative querying and insistent calls for reckoning and recognition, has required a uniquely intimate mode of engagement as a translator. It has offered me the privilege and the pleasure of dwelling deeply with and learning from Maboula’s rigorously intellectual and insightful chronicle. It has meant journeying, admiringly, alongside her while
