might be taken for granted as a matter of fact dream of Africa. Both the terms “Black” and “diaspora” yield to possibility, or, at the very least, bear the potential for a different grammar of futurity,10 a questioning of given narratives of origin and belonging, a detour from national citizenship and territorially bounded community.
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name is a memoir of intellectual formation as much as it is a work of criticism and theory. Its subtitle might easily be: “the crisis of the Black intellectual inside the French university,” given the obstacles and impediments intended to thwart questions of race and racism in France and redirect Soumahoro’s course of study. How can one think critically about blackness in a context in which such analysis is interdicted? In order to engage in the project of Black study, Soumahoro was forced to cross the Atlantic. While enrolled at Columbia University and the City University of New York, she studied with Maryse Condé and Edouard Glissant and, for the first time, read Black thinkers and writers from around the world in her university courses. This journey across the Atlantic and a decade of dwelling in New York cultivated the embrace of a transatlantic Black identity, a diasporic identity, which she encountered on the pages of critical and literary texts and in the streets of the global city. This transatlantic roaming and dwelling was a productive detour. This decade of study challenged and expanded her conception of blackness and diaspora and provided much needed critical tools to think the specificity of her condition as a Black citizen of France, a task that was difficult if not impossible inside France. As a result of this education in Black Studies, Soumahoro was able to disenchant the discourse of universalism and read the Black presence in France in a radically different register.
This knowledge of diaspora informs Soumahoro’s refusal of the prevailing terms and the imposed language of color-blindness and its abstract yet exclusive Frenchness. Exclusion and anti-blackness are hidden behind the mask of the “universal.” Rather than cling to the promise of disembodied citizenship, or enshrine it as an aspiration, Soumahoro takes for granted the fact that Black people are French citizens. It is not an esteemed gift for which the Black population of the metropole must prove worthy. As she writes: “This belonging to the French nation is not a diploma, not even a reward or a point of pride: it is simply a matter of fact” (p. 89).
There is the fact of French citizenship and there is the choice of blackness. The claim to blackness entails a politics of affiliation, a “conscious entry into a transnational community defined by its literary and artistic production, its spiritual practices, and its firm anchoring in intellectual traditions” (p. 90). While the racialization of population in the context of capitalism and colonial slavery has divided life into categories of the human, the not quite human, and the not human,11 blackness transcends this hierarchy. It is more than fungible life and dispossession; rather, it entails relentless acts of resistance, refusals of the given, and conjures other visions of the world. It provides a guidepost for those in search of a language capable of illuminating the condition of the marginal and the wretched, the stranger in the house, those bereft of a mother tongue.
French is my mother tongue, though it is not my mother’s tongue. Might France be my mother? … This linguistic gulf, result of a displacement, a migration, themselves echoes of a far longer history of displacements and migrations – might it reveal something about a vision of the world and of global history that are somehow incarnated in my Black body, moving through a society that claims to be blind to race? (p. 16)
This autobiography of reading is also an account of linguistic estrangement. The question of a mother tongue is as pressing for Soumahoro as any other Black writer in the diaspora, and she is as intent on finding an idiom, a tongue that might liberate her from the colonial script, from alienation and estrangement, from being a foreigner in her natal land. Unlike her parents, Soumahoro doesn’t speak Jula or any other African language. Her first language is French, yet the language in which is she is most proficient feels foreign on the tongue. It is the constant reminder of her displacement in diaspora; it is the linguistic register of her dispossession and anguish.12
Perhaps the great surprise of the text is that English proves to be the language that makes it possible for Soumahoro to write blackness into being and to feel comfortable inside her skin. From the space of exile, or in the movement of the detour, Soumahoro writes diaspora by reimagining Africa, not as a given or as an origin, but as a territory of loss and longing for Black Europeans separated by only one generation from the continent. Imagination creates the shared sentiment of diaspora and remains its common language, not a mother tongue or its comforts. This observation is made plain in an itinerary of reading that includes writers from across the diaspora, all of whom are struggling to find an idiom to write Black becoming, Black existence across time.
How does one write as a “dominated person in a dominant country”? How does one create dangerously in an imposed language, in a mother tongue that is alien? How does one write in a state of dispossession? Does the “burden of race” differ, or is it intensified, when the instrumental language of universalism thwarts any and every attempt to speak to racism and antiblackness? Can the matter of blackness ever become indigenous to French soil, ever part of the national accounting? Is the status of the Black as perpetual foreigner and eternal alien ever to be eradicated?
After a decade of residing in New York City, Soumahoro returns to France. The journey back is difficult, yet she is able to find home in the soundscape of the Black city-within-the-city, in rap music and the contemporary hip-hop scene, perhaps the only space in the public sphere willing to engage the ugly history of the republic and avow the racialized order. It is the sole discourse available for representing the lives of those residing in the banlieue and at the margins of the nation. Only hip-hop artists seem capable of “conjur[ing] up the existence or the presence of Black French people within the space of the Hexagon” and without a detour through Africa or the Americas being required. Elsewhere, the fact of one’s Frenchness is challenged and contested on every front. Black French are represented as outsiders to France. “No rootedness in Europe seems to be imaginable” (p. 81).
State violence and police brutality hone this sense of blackness and chosen affiliation; this enhanced vulnerability to violence and premature death is a condition distributed across the Atlantic. In 2005, the riots in the banlieues of Paris and other French cities and escalating police violence prompt Soumahoro to write her first article about France. “It became no longer possible for me to hide behind Black Americans to understand the functioning and consequences of racial categorization. It had become necessary for me to confront – to face up to – my own experience in my native land. Turning a blind eye had become impossible” (p. 69). It was the year the “race question” became a matter of public debate.
The burden of always having to explain the Black French presence by way of analogy or through the detour of the US or the Caribbean or Africa is no longer productive and quite damaging to the discussion of racism in France. The “exhausting task of explaining, translating and rendering intelligible situations that are violent, discriminatory or racist” is a task identified by Soumahoro as “the last detour” (p. 83). It goes without saying that the effort to explain has changed little despite the centuries of explanation and demonstration. “What is there left to understand? What remains so difficult to grasp?” (p. 83). Why the need to restate and explain the obvious: racism exists and it determines social, political, and economic relations. The violence of racism is “magnified tenfold by the denial of the very existence of racism.” As Soumahoro writes:
We are dealing with a powerful form of denial or with disavowal. If it is simply a matter of denial, one wonders what kind of pathological irresponsibility has prevented a coming to consciousness … we are talking about a conscious rejection of reality. The essential question is, then, to know what is hidden behind the relentless and determined denial and rejection of the reality of race. What, that is, is the point of refusing race? This relentless denial and rejection of reality is what exposes the very stakes of that reality (p. 84).
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name is necessary reading, now more than ever,
