France’s Invisible Africa

What does a thirtyish, white French intellectual know about Africa? The question is hardly the stuff of drama, yet playwright Ronan Chéneau and director David Bobee make of Chéneau’s struggle to answer it an intriguing performance. Chéneau and Bobee manage to satisfy a commission to write a text for dancers about the African presence in France, while essentially skirting it, Chéneau’s search leading him to the France of the banlieue riots of 2005 and of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Ministry of National Identity in 2008, and to his own position within that same society.

In Chéneau’s own account, he was living and writing in a medium-size French city, his major preoccupations art and love, when the commission arrived. If Africa was still only a dark continent on the edges of his imagination, a brief trip to Brazzaville, organized by the Centre Culturel Français there, helped him contextualize what he had only heretofore glimpsed via the media, as well as put him in touch with a Congolese choreographer, DeLaVallet Bidiefono. Read by Chéneau, this autobiographical narration serves as the mildly satirical preface to a performance that attempts through dance, video and acrobatics to poeticize a radically (for French theater) politicized discourse on the exclusive and draconian policies on integration and immigration of Sarkozy’s government, as well as a generalized racism and prevailing cultural chauvinism.

In the second, the health preoccupations and wide-eyed impressions of the French tourist thrown out of his Gallic fishbowl give over to self-loathing at being French and a wholesale rejection of France, at least such as Sarkozy has imagined it. “I hate France” is declaimed under a faded French flag; another point-blank statement, “I died the day I learned of the creation of the Ministry of National Identity”, is the prologue to a machine gun massacre of innocents to the tune of the Marseillaise.

Chéneau and Bobee never nuance their sentiments, and yet they fail to identify a focus of their resistance, hesitating between the related, yet different issues of social and economic integration of French citizens of immigrant descent, national immigration policy and race relations. While powerful, particularly in the acrobatic sequences and the revolutionary energy of the finale, the performances of the talented Franco-Congolese cast never entirely shake off a feeling of undirected displacement, mirrored by the airport boarding hall in which the piece is set, nor of self-conscious posturing, in the figure of Chéneau’s narrator and in the accumulation of politically-aimed punches.

But if the last word belongs to Chéneau, his conclusion to his struggle to find the “invisible” Africa in France, both provides hope and indicates with lucidity the road left to travel: “I dream of a day when Congolese and French will speak about the same world, with emotion, in peace and serenity. We will be Congolese and French; we will speak of the same world.” A world where, even in France, color and ethnicity will no longer mark division, but create community.

“Nos enfants nous font peur quand on les croise dans la rue”, to Feb. 14, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, 41 avenue des Grésillons, Gennevilliers (92), Mº Gabriel Péri, 5 euros-22 euros, tel: 01.41.32.26.26.
March 4-11, 8:30 pm, Maison des arts de Créteil, Place Salvador Allende, Créteil, Métro Créteil-Préfecture (shuttle bus return to Place de la Bastille following show), 4-20 euros, tel : 01 45 13 19 19 or www.maccreteil.com.

Photo credit: Tristan Jeanne-Valès