Within the group, as in their bodies and words, circulates the salutary, joyful and brazen energy of women who are liberating themselves, exorcising the persistent colonial gaze and paving the way for a queer and vibrant Afro-future.

Powerful women
Carte Noire nommée Désir begins with a joke in the form of a question mark about hot drinks, colourism and colonialism. It becomes the making of a community on stage, whose members embark on a poetic journey of reappropriation of their history as black women in a country that has not decolonised its mental landscape. Together, the eight performers, multiple yet unified, transform themselves continuously; they are Alices, too often maladjusted to the world, sliding through a long tunnel, their awful past at one end and their Afro-future at the other. Time is distorted, endless and elusive.

They question the hypersexualisation and exoticization of their bodies, they question their alienation from whiteness and colonial history, they question their visibility and invisibility in France and its surroundings, they question the models they grow up with, they question their black community on the need for respectability and the family secrets that blur all perspectives of projection. This is an attempt at a performative work of empowerment that spares neither the ears nor the eyes.

Speak Up
In 2014, I took part in the documentary Ouvrir la Voix (Speak Up) by Amandine Gay. This interview film gives voice to twenty-four Afro-descendant women from France and Belgium, who talk about their particular situation of being female and black, highlighting systemic discrimination, mainly sexism and racism. Participating in this project made me aware of my négritude, my situation as a black French woman from Martinique, the racism I had experienced and the multiple tensions and paradoxes I was exposed to when it came to thinking about love, desire and the gaze of others. I started an alternative education through anti-racist activism, Afro-feminism and queer activism. All this led me to think about this project for a show called Carte Noire nommée Désir. 

I shared this period of doubt and questioning with my long-time friend, the actress Aurore Déon. Together we initiated a period of research, improvisations and devising performances that would translate all our questions about the way our desire had been constructed in relation to sometimes paradoxical injunctions. We were objects of fantasy: at once animal, wild and sexual, yet unwanted and undesirable. We were pillars of our community yet submissive, angry yet not taken seriously. We were “mamas”, yet infantilised. We had to be respectable, respectful of traditions yet integrated into a society that did not recognise our history as part of its own. 

We had the feeling that it was possible to survive by camouflaging ourselves within the dominant culture. We were Alices, too small to reach the table, too big to get through the door, belonging to the wrong species; a strange, monstrous and fascinating species. 

“First, one had to be like everyone else. One had to be white. Theatrically white. And male. Composing from a male perspective.”
Rébecca Chaillon in Décolonisons les arts, L’Arche, 2018

Note of intent by Rébecca Chaillon