“There’s your Bamboula,” coworkers at a factory in Dunkirk in the 1950s would say to Audrey Célestine’s grandmother when her boyfriend, Marcel, would come around. The comment was a French racial term for a black person. People would refer to Célestine’s mother, Chantel, as négresse à plateau—another racial slur. And a child once told Célestine that she is black because “she washes with black soap.”
These phrases represent the generational impact of racism, just one of the themes that appears in Célestine’s book, A French Family: from the Caribbean to Dunkirk by way of Algeria. In a series of vignettes, she traces her own and her partner’s lineages back three generations. Their stories spanned continents, their journeys driven and defined by undercurrents of colonialism, war, racism, migration and exile. These are the elements, said Célestine, that make up the “ordinary French family.”
Her book has appeared at a time when many people, particularly second and third-generation immigrants from France’s former colonies, are criticizing France’s nationalistic attitude toward race and racism. In a country that has long considered itself “colorblind,” parliamentarians voted last year to remove the word “race” from the French constitution, and the French government does not collect information about people’s race or religion. Yet episodes of police brutality and discrimination in the housing market, as well as recent controversies over a blackface performance at the Sorbonne and women’s right to wear the hijab suggest that racial tension remains in French society.
At a talk at Columbia University, Célestine explained that the editors at the French publishing house Textuel originally asked her to write “the French counterpart to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ ‘Between the World and Me.’” Then, in 2016, Célestine lost two of her grandparents and gave birth to her second daughter. The generational shifting made her feel a sense of urgency about passing down the family stories that she was raised with; it disturbed her to think that some of them might be lost.
Like Coates, who writes to his son, Célestine wrote the book for her daughters, now 11 and 2 years old, who in the book are given the names Laura and Clara. Their lineage became the book’s thread. Célestine wanted to demonstrate to her daughters, through their family’s history, the many different forms that French identity can take.
“I need to tell them that they belong to this country, they don’t have to justify their presence,” she said.
She traveled through four generations of people, to her daughters’ great-grandparents. Her partner Julien’s family had roots in the South of France, Spain and Algeria. On her side, there were connections to Dunkirk, Northern France, and the French Caribbean island of Martinique and archipelago of Guadeloupe.
At the start of the book, Célestine includes an explanation of how each of her family members became French citizens, citing sections of the French Civil Code. Citizenship, Célestine said, was extremely important to her family members—it meant rights and education that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to access.
In order to anchor her ancestor’s stories, she tried to use experiences that were common to all of them, regardless of location. She begins with the Second World War, when her grandparents were children. Both her maternal grandmother, Ginette, and her partner’s grandmother came from poor families: her maternal grandmother in the northern French town of Dunkirk, Julien’s in the South of France.
One particular piece of family lore held that Celestine’s maternal grandmother had been transported to Denmark as a child during the war. The story appeared unlikely; Denmark was occupied, and Célestine discovered that most children from Dunkirk were sent to entirely different places.
Yet when she tried to present the story as a fable, her mother was offended. “You’re saying that your grandmother is a liar!” she scolded Célestine. Célestine went back and did more research. She discovered that the story was unlikely, but not impossible, and she decided to accept her grandmother’s word.
Her partner’s family experienced a different type of uprooting. The ancestors on his father’s side were originally from Spain; for political and economic reasons, they moved to French Algeria in the 1920s and 30s. In the late 1960s, after Algeria declared its independence, they moved to the South of France.
The second common thread of the book occurs in the 1960s, when France began to build large numbers of apartment buildings for the many people who were living in slum-like conditions after the end of the Second World War. These housing projects also became home for immigrants from former French colonies, many of whom migrated to France during the same period.
Several members of Célestine’s family were able to obtain public housing, and for them, as for many people, it represented an improvement in the quality of life. For the first time, there was running water in the house, and the girls were able to enjoy the privacy of having their own bedrooms.
She describes her mother, Chantel, as “permanently searching for her identity.” The daughter of a white woman from Northern France and a black man from the French island of Guadeloupe, Chantel grew up a target of racial slurs.
In a section of the book entitled, “What was the weather like in Dunkirk?” Célestine recounts the story of her mother, a little girl whose appearance “would have guaranteed her a form of privilege” had she grown up in the Caribbean. But, Célestine writes, the little girl is not in the Caribbean; she’s in Dunkirk. Instead, her teacher looks at her hands in disgust and tells her to go wash them. In the book, Célestine imagines being able to go back in time and tell her mother that she has “the most beautiful hands in the world.”
Chantel eventually decided to move to Martinique, a Caribbean island that the French colonized in the 1600s. It was a decision that Célestine believes was best for her and her siblings, but hard on her mother, who didn’t speak Creole.
At the same time, Célestine said she didn’t have illusions about Martinique. “You have to move 8,000 km away to succeed,” she said. Yet she always has the feeling that, should anything happen, she could always return.
The impact of racism in France is a central theme of the book. Célestine said that in France, black and mixed-race people often experience microaggressions that “are really pretty macro” when it comes to developing your own sense of identity.
“I really wanted to deal with this emotional dimension, what it feels like to experience racism as a little kid,” said Célestine. It’s an experience, she said, that “follows you for the rest of your life.”
In Célestine’s book, racism takes on another dimension: it goes from being an individual experience to a collective, familial one. It affects mothers, daughters, aunts, cousins, nephews, grandparents—different words, but the same sentiment.
“It’s really a book telling people, ‘no, your not crazy’,” she said.
Célestine ends with vignettes about the up-and-coming generation, that of her oldest daughter, and her nephew and niece, who Celestine refers to as Enfant 1, Enfant 2, and Enfant 3, and their experiences. Her nephew: a tall 17-year-old black Muslim who likes to wear hoodies, and is a constant stress for Célestine’s sister. Her niece: half-Martinique and half-Senegalese, a “girly-girl” whose happiness and self-confidence are the result of “the active work of three generations of women.”
Then there is Célestine’s oldest daughter, now 11, who at the age of eight had a run-in with a man in the park. He told her, “Get out of here, you dirty black girl!” Her usually talkative daughter hid the story; Célestine found out through other parents at the school. The reader sees her daughter’s confusion, but it is Célestine’s voice that comes through most strongly: taking her daughter into her arms, wondering why she has remained in a country like this.
“How can I be satisfied,” she writes in her book, “with a story of a ‘white’ France, in which the presence of dark-skinned people would be a novelty? Everything in this French family shouts the opposite.”
The book is currently available only in French, but Célestine hopes to have it translated into English.
Emily Rose Ogland helped with translation for this article.
Photo Credit: Emilia Otte
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