I invent nothing, I repeat and insist: cultivating an archive of oneâs own
Note no. 2, February 2024. Series of texts and interviews from the 'Distant Islands, Spectral Cities' programme led by Olivier Marboeuf, as part of the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship.
Version française ci-dessous.
This text is a revised version of an introductory lecture given on Monday 4 March 2024 on the occasion of the opening of the first public session of the programme âDistant Islands, Spectral Citiesâ, entitled âWeaving a spiral of archives in àËĆöÊÓÆ”â, presented at Senate House (àËĆöÊÓÆ”), as part of the 2023/24 Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship. It was followed by interventions from Eve Hayes de Kalaf, Adom Philogene Heron, Natalie Hyacinth, Carole Wright and Julian Henriques, accompanied by the music and poetry of the artist Annotate (Aka Liam Spencer).[1]
Olivier Marboeuf
History comes back to us in confusion, in gruesome film cuts and repetitions. There are no great writers but there is a DJ who massacres old refrains.[2]
To begin this day, I thought it was necessary to say a few words to explain what motivated my research for the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship, âDistant Islands, Spectral Citiesâ, which extends over this academic year, and what led me to imagine a series of gatherings and conversations in Paris, and also in àËĆöÊÓÆ”, as is the case today, in search of traces of expressions and forms of life within the Caribbean diaspora. I truly asked myself the question. Why are you doing this instead of writing poetry or drawing? What are you still looking for after all this time? I tried to trace back the thread of events to answer to this question. It is fastidious and disturbing work. But it can become a bit more joyous once you accept to look with indulgence at the many attempts and reformulations of this very same thing that you have produced in different contexts,[3] this little thing that sticks in the throat, that haunts us but at the same time is something we care about. Un lieu Ă soi (a place of oneâs own). A place which, by virtue of repetition, becomes larger. And it then becomes possible to share it, to interpret it, to practice it collectively. De lâentre-tenir: to hold it, support it, care for it.[4] Trying to name what youâre seeking means trying to say from where you are seeking it, but also why and towards where you are seeking it. So I could begin by presenting myself â which in itself is an incomplete exercise that will always require new repetitions â and in this manner begin todayâs work, open up a few of the paths into this research and institute a first place for the words of my guests and for your words. Iâll get back to this in the course of this research; presenting oneself in a time of absolutely ferocious storytelling and self-marketing already constitutes a statement of a relational politics, of a habitable place. And so I hope to populate this introduction with the presences and matters to which I feel I am indebted and which constitute the recalcitrant archive of my voice.
I was born a little over fifty years ago in the outskirts of Paris, where I spent a large part of my life. I pursued studies in science before becoming a self-taught editor, then a self-taught director of a cultural centre for visual arts and living literatures, a self-taught art curator, a self-taught film producer, poet and decolonial writer, etc. I could have begun by relating my history in another way, from another place. Much earlier. For example, by explaining that my father was born in Guadeloupe, a small island in the French Caribbean, a little less than fifty years before my birth and that his father was one of the many children born of a Black man and an Indigenous Caribbean woman, whose face I discovered for the first time only a few years ago. It was a small photo that one of my cousins had removed from an album to show me the incredible resemblance between the face of this female ancestor from another time and my Aunt Claire, who had just passed away. Aunt Claire had always been a soft, gentle and kindly presence. You had to listen attentively to hear the thin thread of her voice. She was the last living representative of an entire generation of my family, my fatherâs generation. That particular day, we had just finished eating the Easter calalou on the terrace of the family house in Gosier, a town in Grande-Terre, Guadeloupe. The house was built on a slope and on the terrace side it was suspended over a void. At the end of an untamed path that was barely distinguishable, with thick vegetation extending its green tangle on both sides, you could discern the clear line of the sea on the horizon. I remember that Aunt Claire always said that what was important to her was always being able to see the water. âThe sea is historyâ, wrote the great poet Derek Walcott from the neighbouring island of Saint Lucia.[5] The meal was coming to an end. There were still many untouched dishes and not enough combatants to tackle all the love, since it was in this discreet way that we showed affection for each other there, with no grand demonstrations and no grandiloquent words, but rather with full plates. Everyone had left the terrace for the other, shady, side of the house to play dominoes. I had remained for a moment, telling myself that with the death of Aunt Claire, I had suddenly become an elder, an archive, even if I was actually younger than my cousins. Like many Guadeloupeans, most of them had returned to pĂ©yi gwadloup after having spent their entire working lives in France. The island had slowly turned into a retirement home. The young left to find work and returned when they were old â if they returned. The inhabitants of this paradisiacal island were often ill. Many of them had high cholesterol, high blood pressure and often diabetes, which was probably the most ironic of all inheritances for the inhabitants of an island that for so long had enriched France through the commerce of sugar cane. The cancer rate was high, but it was a national taboo to suggest that this was perhaps due to the agricultural pesticides weâd absorbed into our blood. The violence of the plantation was recorded in the archives of the islandâs landscape. Monoculture had won out over a large part of the forests that had once covered the volcanic island. Or at least here, in Grande-Terre, a land of plains. Added to this marvellous history was the turbulence characteristic of a hurricane-prone region â as Adom Philogene Heron will perhaps tell us about later. Hurricanes occupied a special place in the memorial calendar. Hurricanes and plantations shared the same ability to reset Caribbean history to zero. For in the French plantation system, when a slave died, s/he was replaced by another slave arriving directly from Africa, who thus necessarily knew little about the history of the place s/he had arrived at and would soon disappear too.
After each hurricane, one had to evacuate flood water, repair the roof, the windows, and sometimes even rebuild the entire house. Life was scattered in all directions. The wounded had to be counted and sometimes the dead. What could be learned from such destruction, how could you transmit anything other than despair when confronted with bad luck? That question, ever lurking behind the colourful image of the island of Paradise, was difficult to answer.
I think there was something about this resetting to zero that I wanted to resist because these recurrent iterations always arrived in new forms. I wanted to invent other repetitions in which whatever had preceded would not disappear, but rather would be amplified, the way a DJ persists with the same segment of music, repeating it until it penetrates into our spinal cord. An archive.
My father had left the island to become a soldier, long before BUMIDOM,[6] a programme created by the French state, which between 1963 and 1981 trained the massive arrival in metropolitan France of Guadeloupeans, Martiniquans, Reunionese and French Guyanese, thereby largely contributing to the emptying from these French âoverseas territoriesâ of their most vital forces, at the precise moment when the desire for independence was at its peak. Eve Hayes de Kalaf will tell us about the voices of the Windrush Scandal,[7] another bitter tale of Caribbean uprooting. I never met my paternal grandparents, nor the parents of my mother, who was born in Paris. Both my parents fled from their families and met in the capital of the French empire and then started a large family of their own. All of this could partly explain why I decided to imagine the possibility of situating places for Afro-Caribbean diasporic archives somewhere in the Paris region. But it would be a bit too literal and not really the truth. Even if it is true that strictly speaking there are no places for Afro-Caribbean archives as such in France. This absence is probably one of the consequences of the pugnacity with which the French state has imprinted on all areas of life â in the bodies and even in the intimacy of each individual â the ideas of a universalism, the central figure of which would be a race-less, classless, non-gendered citizen. And, in the end, without any other history apart from the great national myth in which every French person is supposed to be steeped. Bitterness is history (âLâamer est histoireâ).[8] My father was as much a soldier in the French army as he was a guardian of that French spirit and its strategy of effacement. But luckily, he carried within himself the irrepressible need to cultivate a garden. I admit that it made my brothers, sisters and I angry to have to spend every Sunday with our hands in the dirt, whatever the season. And when there was no more work to be done on our plot of land, my father would always find hedges to prune and flower beds to be weeded for all the elderly ladies in the neighbourhood, in the name of a mysterious Christian charity which never offered us even a glimpse of any reciprocity. I ended up believing that there was something we needed to be pardoned for vis-Ă -vis the one called Jesus. Wherever we were, my father would make the most of the smallest parcel of land to cultivate something. Later, I understood that the idea of the garden and its age-old rituals of subsistence were imprinted in his body, like the remains of a resistant archive, the ungovernable traces of the Creole garden â a place of survival, ruse and re-composition of a humanity that had become lost on the plantation. Despite the Republican pact, despite France having penetrated into his conscience, something had survived in him, somewhere. And I know that Carole Wright, who is with us today, will have things to say about this way of archiving through the subterfuge of gardens.
At any rate, whether we want it to or not, colonial history returns by way of unexpected paths; sometimes it emerges violently, as the great Martiniquan poet and political figure AimĂ© CĂ©saire predicted in his time.[9] For my part, it wasnât the history of distant islands that led me to understand and even feel the reflux of the colonial poison, the persistence of its stagnant water in which we all had to bathe. It was rather my childhood, my adolescence and then my adult life in the banlieues of Paris. Without telling us, our bodies had archived the maps of the racial contract. Our skins sensed beforehand where we had the right to be. We breathed in from afar the sharp perfumes of the forbidden places. Our sweat knew too much and tempted the devil for thighs that had been electrified by the shouts of James Brown. Our lips dreamt aloud, wanting to produce other fluids, through the magic of an improvised and collective alchemy. Our tongues knew the taste of the dividing line between our desires and the crudest of realities that shattered inside us at dawn on the first train. You had to supply muscle and keep silent. But our angry bodies had decided otherwise, architectures of spectral cities, designed using all the techniques theyâd invented to produce space, to speak loudly, to laugh and breathe, to not remain in place, to not disappear either. It was from this place, the Parisian banlieue, and from this period, the beating heart of the 1980s, that Iâve always begun to recount, and even to repeat, the vast history that brings us together today, on each new occasion, at each new twist in the spiral of time, adding in other protagonists, other places, other voices. Iâve come to accept that perhaps I wasnât so much searching for places for archives, but rather that I was turning the archive into a technique for the construction of particular places, places that spread out through words and rumours, images, hallucinations, through sounds and music, places that are always more vast, nation-less ±èĂ©Č⟱Čő, gaseous ±èĂ©Č⟱Čő.
Obviously I have slews of good reasons to come to the United Kingdom and to àËĆöÊÓÆ”, in particular to try to produce this new loop of thought, to slide with you into the interior of certain trajectories of the British Caribbean diaspora, its fights and its dramas, its life force and alliances. I am highly conscious that here, as in France, times are difficult and that behind the celebrations for a few dark-skinned kings and queens, behind the economy of tokens and the extractions of Black elites, behind the varnish of institutions, racism is writing a new chapter in its long history. Because despite the toppling of certain statues that suddenly became embarrassing, Black lives still arenât worth enough to last as long as others, to escape from violent deaths, psychological suffering or disease.
Before coming back to àËĆöÊÓÆ”, but also to the port city of Bristol, over the course of the day, Iâd like to say a bit more about this rather strange desire to institute places in Paris, where the archives of a diaspora that did everything possible to limit its visibility and even became the national champion in the art of producing model French citizens, could reappear. Amen! In fact, the times are not conducive to imagining places capable of welcoming such stories and to placing them on the turntable of the future â weâll speak again with Julian Henriques this afternoon about this need to play the archive: how, why, for whom? Because our monuments lie at the bottom of the ocean, but they can also be found in a street in New Cross in South àËĆöÊÓÆ”, or a community hall in Nanterre, CrĂ©teil or Corbeil, in the working-class banlieue of Paris, anywhere where music defeats reason from the obscure mouth of a sound-system-storyteller.
2024 is thus an Olympic year. In Athens, Rio and also àËĆöÊÓÆ”, we now know that the organisation of the Olympic games is an endeavour that isnât limited to planetary and festive sports, but that it is also an efficient means of cleansing a city of some of its old stories and undesirable presences. We are not duped. Our bodies are bits of mobile and sensitive cities. And this persistent desire for an archive probably has something to do with the terraforming[10] of the Parisian Northeast, which is tranquilly putting the finishing touches on the creation of a new planet, âle Grand Parisâ, an immense star that would seem to have digested the strange and resistant zone that only a short while ago was known as âla banlieueâ. It wasnât the right moment to be clever with archives that might bring up bad memories, faces too dirty to be kept anywhere except at the edges of the national photograph. Already in Paris, weâd lost ground over the last few years and a few of our strongholds too. It wasnât the âthird placesâ [tiers-lieux] that had flourished on the sites of squats and factories shut down with the help of the organic products and cool concerts that would replace them. The beautiful machinery of gentrification had cleaned up what remained of the working-class neighbourhoods of the capital, any desires for autonomy and lives built on no model. Now, the time had come to settle accounts with the banlieue, formerly disreputable, formerly unpopular, always too loud, too dirty, too communist, too Arab, too African. Formerly, because now everything was different. As had happened elsewhere, the magic of the Olympic Games served as a smokescreen and an armed force for this delicious hunt for the poor. Everything became beautiful and marvellous. Paris would always be Paris, but much more vast. The most amusing part of it all, the most extraordinary too, was that our lives (which had never had much value) had suddenly become marvellous images, black minerals that compelled ecstasy on condition that other hands than ours seized them, on condition that other mouths than ours pronounced our twisted words, for a better presentation, with the correct accent. All of this was so exciting, so moving! And it was the same for what we had thought were our archives, in a rather confusing and hardly scientific manner. They too were gentrified. Veritable little kittens! Meow! The docile little creatures were celebrated, once the thick layer of filth had been cleaned off what we called skin, flesh, what we called the heart of the archives â their flow, their heartbeat, their inner conflicts. The way you clean a stolen mask, scraping off the cloth and secretions that covered and filled it so you could contemplate its empty and silent form in a glass case in a museum. The time of the Black archive had finally come! Accompanied by the reset to zero of the history that we knew so well, it was finally going to appear, shrouded with mystery, for a new first time. A new hurricane was going to scatter our lives. Maybe it was our fault too. We hadnât known how to create an archive in the correct manner, or rather the correct manner didnât correspond to what weâd wanted to do to preserve the vitality of certain gestures, certain voices, certain stories and images that were dear to us and whose insistent presences we felt within ourselves. Stuart Hall says about diasporic cultures: âthink of how these cultures have used the body â as if it was, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had. We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation.â[11] Hall speaks of the âcanvasâ rather than âsubjectâ of representation as if to signify that itâs not just a question of working with the (in)famous visibility of minority bodies, on the image of the self â what was going to become the great affair of the politics of diversity in art, fashion, advertising and all those who had finally amalgamated these three worlds into a single entity â but rather working from the self. That is how I understood it, in any case, as the necessary self-production of an archive that is terribly â perhaps even fatally â indissociable from the body, which is simultaneously the motif, tool and site of enunciation. The loom and the code of forms of presence. Working in the depth of self, beneath images. That was our only chance to avoid ending up completely emptied of the last thing that we had left. And it was a rather slim chance. At any rate, I didnât see what else I could think from the heart of a large family from the poor Caribbean diaspora, dragged about from place to place all over France. It seems to me that we never had even the beginnings of the privilege to sit down for a moment and catch our breath, to be at enough of a remove to be able to reflect on what sort of trace our lives would leave behind us; in other words to imagine an archive, however small it might be. We were too busy with the urgency of finding a place to live and making ourselves invisible in the peacefully racist landscape of a France that was unrolling the red carpet for our amnesia. The ability to forget is the key to becoming French, voluntary ignorance a national sport. We werenât from here and we didnât come from anywhere. But where were we going? As Stuart Hallâs words remind us, the diasporic Caribbean archive begins to invent itself from a continued history of dispossession that transforms the body into the site of a cultural capital that is mobile and fragile. An archive of oneâs own. This is perhaps the only reason that could explain why, decades later, I found myself thinking about the future of a Caribbean archive â me, someone who had never dedicated much interest in my professional life to practices of preservation and had even willingly often held myself at a remove from all those archival stories, judging them (perhaps incorrectly) to be a bit too dusty and fetishistic. In truth, I simply felt more interest in stories than in archives. The word âarchiveâ sounded a bit too administrative and related to the police for my tastes. It immediately reminded me of that state that had always judged us responsible based precisely on archives over which it alone had sole powers of production and conservation â and also the power of dissimulating anything that could help with the idea of counter-narratives. Much earlier I had read with a certain enthusiasm the remarkable work of the French historian Arlette Farge, impressed by the manner by which she had been able to reconstruct the history of the people of 18th-century Paris by using police records.[12] It was thus possible to turn an overly voluble archive of state violence against itself or simply to recognise in the negative imprint of a state-controlled machine the traces that remained of the minuscule lives that had resisted it. An elusive history of the street, of cunning. But it wasnât enough and even if there wasnât much interest in emergent forms of Black heroism, we were entitled to seek out traces of our existences beyond what could be found in police stations and the private diaries of colonists.
Later, I appreciated Monika Wittigâs famous phrase: âMake an effort to remember; or, failing that, invent.â[13] It says everything you need to know about the method of minority archiving. Even if obviously the challenge is not to invent âin generalâ, but rather to organise a space for imagination from a âparticularâ body, from lived moments and gaps, from presences and ghostly images that inhabit it. And also from certain needs to avoid traumatic repetitions. The invention in question here is an act of reparation. Our archive requires a bit of imagination, itâs as simple as that, in order to weave together again disparate threads of dispersed stories, interrupted by a thousand economic, administrative, political and law-enforcing hurricanes â and even perhaps by the benevolent powers of dispersion, the academic hurricanes and artistic hurricanes that progressively began to use us as available resources. âInventingâ our archives was thus not at all a peaceful or trivial activity, for it was those archives that came to us, knocking violently on the door, on the roof and the shutters of our double consciousness, over the course of long nights of anguish. Our imagination had always emerged from tightly gripped stomachs. It was the stories that invented themselves within us, laying siege to our bodies. On this confused path to finding reasons to envisage an archive, I also try to keep in mind my reading of the works of Sam Bourcier, an emblematic figure of queer studies in France and member of a collective that itself aims to create an LGBTIQ+ archive in Paris. Bourcierâs lively and uncompromising interventions confirmed my feeling that imagining archives, or even imagining a place for archives, could emerge from a desire for living practices, or as they write, âarchi-livingâ [archivivante] practices.[14]
On the path to implementing this living archive, the way in which Saidiya Hartman used documents for her book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route,[15] has also long been a precious compass, with the strength of its imagination situated in the necessity of always (re)producing possibilities for life, practising them and resuming interrupted trajectories. To imagine is to return by way of a detour. In another book, which weâll hear some excerpts from today â Jay Bernardâs collection of poems, Surge[16] â I discovered yet other ways of reinvigorating traces of life from a place of mourning. From details of tragic reminiscences, from bodies that have paid the price of exile and injustice, from the dignity of the dead who died badly, from the imperceptible actions of ravaged families â a hand gesture signals something that we donât fully understand, but it means âthatâs enoughâ and perhaps a motherâs gaze doesnât want to see and turns toward a corner of the room â from discrete fragments of stories without witness a voice calls out. It calls for presence, for a return to the places of the archive, to the scenes of crime but also of joy, as will be the way for those who will be walking with Natalie Hyacinth tomorrow in New Cross, the vibrant and wounded heart of the history of the Jamaican and Barbadian diasporas, and the rich hours of Blues parties and sound-systems. And we could have also taken a walk with William âLezâ Henry, Colin Prescod or even Stafford Scott; we may do so on another occasion, in another place, because we have to accept that not everyone can always be seated at the same table at the same time, that there is and always will be many tables, many focal points of relation that function in parallel with this same practice of weaving together threads from different places. I will try later today to recall some of those places, and some of those people who accompany me from afar, in thought, or who will join us at another time and in other circumstances in this infinite conversation.
I believe it is important to respect the need for a certain distance, as was the case when my friend Ntone Edjabe, of the South African collective Chimurenga, asked me several years ago to participate in a working group with the objective of creating a cartography of Black imagination and its history in France for an exhibition at the BPI (BibliothĂšque Publique dâInformation, Public Information Library) at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. And I refused. Even though he had assembled a competent team and even though I was very familiar with the neighbourhood of Les Halles, and with the library itself, where I had spent long mornings with all kinds of strays who finished their nights with their heads in the morning paper, and even though I had known the Pompidou Centre when it was still bisected by an actual street that served as its ground floor, with old Arab men playing endless games of checkers. I refused.
Despite my knowledge of the geological strata of the Forum des Halles, the surface of which had welcomed one of the multiple beginnings of break dance in France, and its underground levels where on Saturdays interurban RER train lines A and B crossed, and with this all the beauty produced by northern, southern, eastern and western banlieues, I refused. It wasnât the right moment for me and probably not the right place. But this refusal was nevertheless one of the sources of this questioning that has led me here today to ask myself how to create an archive and transmit it to all those who are now moving onto the dancefloor we call âdiasporaâ. When Ntone invited me to participate in his Parisian project â and later I finally wrote a text that appeared in the exhibitionâs newspaper, imagi-nation nwar, which I will get back to later â he wasnât naive. In fact he knew a lot about the challenges and tensions that were occurring in Paris. He had the advantage that being an outsider sometimes affords, an advantage that I have today in àËĆöÊÓÆ”. But like Ntone, I have neither the desire nor the means of innocence and I well know that I am beginning to speak after many people who have already contributed to the imagining and creation of archives similar to the ones I have envisioned with my accomplices, some of whom we will obviously speak of and others whom I hope you wonât forget to bring to our attention, because today is merely a new repetition of what they tried to do â brilliantly, sometimes secretively â both in great institutions and in much smaller local communities, in a certain destitution too. We know this. Let their work be honoured.
Translated from the French by Liz Young, edited by Shela Sheikh
[1] For more details about the event and participants, see /news-events/events/distant-islands-spectral-cities-weaving-spiral-archives-london.
[2] Olivier Marboeuf, âGrow, where you can, how you can, growâ, available at . Originally published as âPousse, ŽÇĂč tu peux, comme tu peux, pousseâ in Kader Attia: Les racines poussent aussi dans le bĂ©ton, exhibition catalogue, Editions Mac Val, 2018.
[3] The question of an archive of oneâs own probably first appeared in my professional trajectory in the mid-1990s, with Ă©ditions AMOK, through which, with Yvan AlagbĂ©, I published books that attempted to recount history from the perspective of diasporic troubles, the bitter memories and precarious alliances of immigrants, solitude and the invention of dignified lives. Amongst them are NĂšgres Jaunes (Yvan AlagbĂ©, 1992â95), Les exilĂ©s, histoires (Kamel KhĂ©lif and Nabil FarĂšs, 1999), AlgĂ©rie, la douleur et le mal (Collectif, 1998), Une ville, un mardi (Olivier Marboeuf, 2000) or the famous collection La VĂ©ritĂ© (âThe Truthâ) (1997). Traces of colonial denialism and the power of speculative archives continued to inhabit me when I curated the exhibition of the Reunionese artist Yo-Yo Gonthier, âOutre-Mer, mĂ©moires colonialesâ at the Espace Khiasma in 2008, and then a few years later, in 2011, Vincent Meessenâs âMy last lifeâ, an exhibition that resulted in the film programme âHantologie des coloniesâ and also served as the starting point from which I developed the performance âDeuxiĂšme vieâ, which reinvents the origin of my family name. In 2011, when for the first time I discovered a body of archives dating from the beginnings of cinema in GuinĂ©e-Bissau through the intermediary of Portuguese filmmaker Filipa CĂ©sar, I wrote a short essay, âAn ecology of darknessâ that was included in the catalogue for the 4th âEncounters Beyond Historyâ symposium that CĂ©sar organised in 2015 in GuimarĂŁes, Portugal. In this science-fiction essay inhabitants of the future were already organising a jam session, using images of African struggles as a point of departure. A scratched record of wounded memory that still turns in the text written for Kader Attiaâs exhibition at the Mac/Val in 2018, âLes racines poussent aussi dans le bĂ©tonâ (âRoots grow in concrete tooâ), the music of which is still resonating up to this present attempt to create a genealogy of this desire for an archive of oneâs own.
[4] The expression entre-tenir evokes a community that supports each other through reparation but also conversation (entretien), as a âholding (tenir) between one another (entre)â that continues in our care (entretien) for it. Collective speech is understood here as care that incurs no debt. See note no. 1, ââEntre-tenirâ: a living archive of emancipationâ, January 2024, /institute-paris/research/banister-fletcher-global-fellowship/entre-tenir-living-archive-emancipation.
[5] Derek Walcott, âThe Sea is Historyâ in Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
[6] Bumidom, or the Bureau for the Development of Migrations in the Overseas Departments, was a public French organisation tasked with accompanying the emigration of inhabitants of French Overseas departments to mainland France. It was created in 1963 by Michel DebrĂ© after his visit to the island of La RĂ©union in 1959 with General de Gaulle. It ceased to function in 1981. Bumidom was officially presented as a tool to curb overpopulation in the overseas departments â principally the islands of Reunion, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Over the course of twenty years, Bumidom displaced a little over 70,000 people, half of whom were from Reunion. The candidates (both women and men) for this departure towards the dreamt-of mainland would in fact be regularly confronted with the humiliating ordeal of being hired as unqualified workers. As Sylvain Pattieu emphasises, âThe existence of Bumidom functioned in tandem with the persistence of certain forms of racialisation, understood as a process of construction of social reality through the production of categories linked to race. These rely more, compared to the situation in other countries, on a territorial benchmark rather than an ethnic one, even if the two overlap. They are thus characterised by the relations of the French Republic with its overseas citizens.â Sylvain Pattieu, âUn traitement spĂ©cifique des migrations dâoutre-mer: le Bumidom (1963-1982) et ses ambiguĂŻtĂ©s,â Politix, 2016/4 (n° 116): 81â113.
[7] The âWindrush Scandalâ is a British political affair that began in 2018. It concerns people who were detained, deprived of their legal rights, threatened with expulsion and, for some of them, wrongfully expelled from the United Kingdom by the Ministry of the Interior, despite the fact that they were born as British subjects and had arrived in the United Kingdom before 1973. Amongst them, many hailed from the Caribbean and belonged to what was called the âWindrush generationâ (so named for the Empire Windrush, the ship that transported one of the first groups of Caribbean migrants to the United Kingdom in 1948.) To understand the sources of this scandal and its repercussions, one can consult the Internet site for the Windrush Scandal Project, which presents itself as a three-year research project that seeks, âfor the first time, to produce a scholarly examination of the so-called Windrush Scandal within a fully transnational framework, one that properly considers the agency of a wide variety of official and non-official actors from both sides of the Atlantic and the role of the post-colonial and Commonwealth contexts of international relations.ââŻThis Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project led by the Institute of Historical Research, the UKâs national centre for history, based at the àËĆöÊÓÆ”âs School of Advanced Study (SAS), brings together a wide range of resources, with a strong emphasis on oral history and numerous interviews. See .
[8] I take the liberty here of playing with the sonic resonances between ±ôâałŸ±đ°ù (âbitternessâ) and la mer (âthe seaâ):âŻâthe sea is historyâ/ âbitterness is historyâ.
[9] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1972]).
[10] For an insider ethnography of Forest Gate, a neighbourhood in Newham, east àËĆöÊÓÆ” (the location of àËĆöÊÓÆ”âs Olympic Park), see Joy White, Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City (Repeater Books, 2020). As I try to do, White connects music, politics and the built environment. Many thanks to Shela Sheikh for sharing this valuable reference with me.
[11] Stuart Hall, âWhat is this âBlackâ in Black Popular Culture?â in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent, Bay Press, 1992, pp. 21â33, at p. 27.
[12] Arlette Farge, Vivre dans les rues de Paris au XVIIIĂšme (Ăditions Gallimard, 1992).
[13] Monique Wittig, Les GuĂ©rillĂšres (Ăditions de Minuit, 1969).
[14] Sam Bourcier, âLa fiĂšvre des archivesâ (âarchive feverâ), transcription of a talk at the University of Philology, Valencia (Spain), autumn 2018, .
[15] Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
[16] Jay Bernard,âŻSurge (Chatto & Windus, 2019). Thank you to Jackqueline Frost for having drawn my attention to this book.
Je nâinvente rien, je rĂ©pĂšte et jâinsisteâŻ: cultiver une archive Ă soi
Note no. 2, février 2024
Ce texte est la version remaniĂ©e dâune lecture introductive donnĂ©e le lundi 4 mars 2024 en ouverture de la premiĂšre session publique du programme « Distant Islands, Spectral CitiesâŻÂ», intitulĂ©e « Weaving a spiral of archives in àËĆöÊÓÆ” », prĂ©sentĂ© Ă Senate House (UniversitĂ© de Londres), dans lâeââ âcadre du Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship 2023/24. Elle a Ă©tĂ© suivie dâinterventions dâEve Hayes de Kalaf, Adom Philogene Heron, Natalie Hyacinth, Carole Wright et Julian Henriques, accompagnĂ©es de musique et de lectures poĂ©tiques de lâartiste Annotate (aka Liam Spencer)[1].
Olivier Marboeuf
Lâhistoire nous revient dans le dĂ©sordre, par cuts macabres et rĂ©pĂ©titions. Il nây a pas de grandes plumes mais un DJ qui massacre de vieilles rengaines[2].
Pour commencer cette journĂ©e, jâai pensĂ© quâil Ă©tait nĂ©cessaire de dire quelques mots afin dâexpliquer ce qui a motivĂ© ma recherche pour le Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship, «âŻDistant Islands, Spectral CitiesâŻÂ», durant cette annĂ©e acadĂ©mique et ce qui mâa conduit Ă imaginer un ensemble de rencontres, de conversations Ă Paris mais aussi Ă Londres, comme câest le cas aujourdâhui Ă la recherche des traces dâexpressions et de formes de vie des diaspora de la CaraĂŻbe. Je me suis sincĂšrement posĂ© la question. Pourquoi es-tu en train de faire cela plutĂŽt que dâĂ©crire de la poĂ©sie ou de dessiner ? Quâes-tu encore en train de chercher depuis tout ce tempsâŻ? Jâai essayĂ© de remonter le fil des Ă©vĂšnements pour rĂ©pondre Ă cette question. Câest un travail fastidieux, troublant. Mais il peut devenir un peu plus joyeux Ă partir du moment ŽÇĂč lâon accepte de regarder avec indulgence les multiples tentatives et reformulations de cette mĂȘme chose que lâon a produit dans diffĂ©rents contextes[3], cette petite chose qui ne passe pas, qui nous hante et Ă la fois Ă laquelle, sur laquelle nous tenons. Un lieu Ă soi. Un lieu qui, Ă force de le rĂ©pĂ©ter, devient plus grand. Et il devient alors possible de le partager, de lâinterprĂ©ter, de le pratiquer collectivement. De lâentre-tenir [4]. Essayer de nommer ce que lâon cherche câest tenter de dire âââdepuis âŽÇĂč on le cherche, mais aussi âpourquoi âełÙ vers ŽÇĂč on le cherche. Je pourrais donc commencer par me prĂ©senter â ce qui est dĂ©jĂ un exercice incomplet qui demandera toujours de nouvelles rĂ©pĂ©titions ââââ âełÙ de cette maniĂšre entamer le travail de cette journĂ©e, ouvrir quelques uns des chemins de cette recherche et instituer un premier lieu pour les paroles de mes invité·es et pour les vĂŽtres. Jây reviendrai au fil de cette recherche, se prĂ©senter Ă lâĂ©poque du storytelling et dâun âmarketingâ de soi des plus fĂ©roces constitue dĂ©jĂ lâĂ©noncĂ© dâune politique relationnelle, dâun lieu habitable. Aussi, jâespĂšre parvenir Ă peupler cette introduction de prĂ©sences et de matiĂšres dont je me sens redevable et qui composent lâarchive rĂ©calcitrante de ma voix.
Je suis nĂ© il y a un peu plus de cinquante ans en banlieue de Paris ŽÇĂč jâai vĂ©cu une large partie de ma vie. Jâai Ă©tudiĂ© les sciences avant de devenir Ă©diteur autodidacte, puis directeur autodidacte dâun centre dâarts visuels et de littĂ©ratures vivantes, commissaire dâexposition autodidacte, producteur de cinĂ©ma autodidacte, poĂšte et thĂ©oricien dĂ©coloniale et autodidacte, etc. Jâaurais pu commencer Ă raconter cette histoire autrement, autre part. Bien avant. Dire par exemple que mon pĂšre est nĂ© en Guadeloupe, une petite Ăźle des Antilles françaises, un peu moins de cinquante ans avant ma naissance et que son pĂšre Ă©tait lui-mĂȘme lâun des nombreux enfants dâun homme noir et dâune femme indigĂšne caraĂŻbe dont jâai dĂ©couvert le visage pour la premiĂšre fois, il y a seulement quelques annĂ©es. CâĂ©tait une petite photographie que lâune de mes cousines avait sortie dâun album photo pour me montrer la ressemblance saisissante entre le visage de cette femme dâun autre temps et celui de ma tante Claire qui venait de nous quitter. Tante Claire avait toujours Ă©tĂ© une prĂ©sence douce et bienveillante. Il fallait tendre lâoreille pour entendre le fil de sa voix. Elle Ă©tait la derniĂšre reprĂ©sentante encore vivante de toute une gĂ©nĂ©ration de ma famille, celle de mon pĂšre. Ce jour-lĂ , nous venions de finir de dĂ©guster le Calalou de PĂąques sur la terrasse de la maison familiale au Gosier, âbourg âde la Grande-Terre en Guadeloupe. De ce cĂŽtĂ©-ci, la maison Ă©tait construite dans la pente et se tenait au-dessus du vide. Au-delĂ dâun chemin sauvage Ă peine discernable et de lâĂ©paisse vĂ©gĂ©tation qui Ă©tendait son fouillis de vert trĂšs loin, la mer traçait un trait net Ă lâhorizon. Je me souviens que Tante Claire disait toujours que lâimportant pour elle Ă©tait de voir la mer. « La mer est histoire » a Ă©crit lâimmense poĂšte Derek Walcott depuis lâĂźle voisine de Sainte-Lucie[5]. Le repas touchait Ă sa fin. Il restait encore beaucoup de plats et plus assez de combattants pour affronter tout cet amour, puisque câĂ©tait de cette maniĂšre pudique quâon se donnait de lâaffection par ici, sans grande dĂ©monstration et sans beaucoup de mots, mais avec des assiettes toujours pleines. Tout le monde avait quittĂ© la terrasse et Ă©tait passĂ© de lâautre cĂŽtĂ© de la maison pour profiter de lâombre et jouer au domino. JâĂ©tais restĂ© un instant lĂ , en me disant quâavec la mort de tante Claire, jâĂ©tais brusquement devenu un aĂźnĂ©, une archive, mĂȘme si jâĂ©tais vraiment plus jeune que mes autres cousinâ·eâs. Comme beaucoup de GuadeloupĂ©en·es, la plupart dâentre eux Ă©tait rentrĂ©e en pĂ©yi gwadloup aprĂšs avoir travaillĂ© en France. LâĂźle sâĂ©tait lentement transformĂ©e en une maison de retraite. Les jeunes la quittaient pour trouver du travail et revenaient vieux, quand ils revenaient. Les habitants de cette Ăźle de paradis Ă©taient souvent malades. Beaucoup avaient du cholestĂ©rol, de lâhypertension et mĂȘme du diabĂšte, ce qui Ă©tait probablement le plus ironique des hĂ©ritages pour les habitants dâune Ăźle qui avait si longtemps enrichi la France grĂące au commerce de la canne Ă sucre. Le taux de cancers Ă©tait Ă©levĂ©, mais câĂ©tait un tabou national de dire que câĂ©tait peut-ĂȘtre Ă cause des pesticides agricoles qui Ă©taient entrĂ©s dans notre sang. Dans lâarchive du paysage Ă©tait inscrite la violence de la plantation. La monoculture avait eu raison dâune partie des forĂȘts qui recouvraient il y a bien longtemps cette Ăźle volcanique. Du moins ici, en Grande-Terre, pays de plaines. Ă toute cette histoire merveilleuse, sâajoutait les turbulences dâune rĂ©gion cyclonique â comme nous en parlera peut-ĂȘtre tout Ă lâheure Adom Philogene Heron. Les ouragans occupaient une place de choix dans le calendrier mĂ©moriel. Ouragans et plantation partageaient ce mĂȘme pouvoir de remise Ă zĂ©ro de lâhistoire antillaise. Car dans le systĂšme plantationnaire français, quand un esclave mourrait, on le remplaçait par un autre tout droit venu dâAfrique et qui ne savait, par consĂ©quent, pas grand-chose de lâhistoire du lieu dans lequel il arrivait et allait bientĂŽt disparaĂźtre Ă son tour.
AprĂšs chaque ouragan, il fallait Ă©vacuer lâeau, rĂ©parer son toit, ses fenĂȘtres et mĂȘme parfois reconstruire toute sa maison. La vie sâen trouvait dispersĂ©e dans tous les sens. Il fallait compter les blessĂ©s et parfois mĂȘme les morts. Comment apprendre dâune telle destruction, comment transmettre autre chose que le dĂ©sespoir face Ă la mauvaise fortune ? CâĂ©tait lĂ , derriĂšre lâimage colorĂ©e de lâĂźle de paradis, une difficile question.
Je crois quâil y a quelque chose dans ce retour Ă zĂ©ro rĂ©gulier que je souhaitais combattre car il prenait sans cesse de nouvelles formes. Jâavais Ă cĆur dâinventer dâautres rĂ©pĂ©titions ŽÇĂč ce qui prĂ©cĂ©dait ne disparaĂźtrait plus, mais serait amplifiĂ© comme lorsque le DJ sâacharnait sur un passage musical, le rĂ©pĂ©tait jusquâĂ ce quâil nous pĂ©nĂštre la moelle Ă©piniĂšre. Une archive.
Mon pĂšre a quittĂ© lâĂźle pour devenir soldat, bien avant le BUMIDOM[6], un programme de lâEtat français qui a entraĂźnĂ© de 1963 Ă 1981 lâarrivĂ©e massive de GuadeloupĂ©ens, de Martiniquais, de RĂ©unionnais et de Guyanais dans lâHexagone, et qui a contribuĂ© Ă vider ces territoires français dâOutre-mer de leurs forces vives au moment ŽÇĂč le dĂ©sir dâindĂ©pendance Ă©tait au plus haut. Eve Hayes de Kalaf nous fera entendre tout Ă lâheure les voix du « Windrush Scandal[7] », une autre histoire amĂšre du dĂ©racinement caribĂ©en. Je nâai jamais rencontrĂ© mes grand-parents paternels, pas plus que les parents de ma mĂšre, qui est nĂ©e Ă Paris. Mes deux parents ont fui leurs familles et se sont rencontrĂ©s dans la capitale de lâempire français pour fonder Ă leur tour une famille nombreuse. Tout cela pourrait expliquer en partie pourquoi jâai dĂ©cidĂ© dâimaginer la possibilitĂ© de lieux dâarchive des diaspora afro-caribĂ©ennes en rĂ©gion parisienne. Mais ce serait un peu littĂ©ral et pas tout Ă fait la vĂ©ritĂ©. MĂȘme si le fait est quâil nâexiste pas Ă proprement parler de lieux dâarchives afro-caribĂ©ennes en France en tant que tel. Cette absence est probablement lâune des consĂ©quences de la pugnacitĂ© avec laquelle lâEtat français a imprimĂ© dans tous les domaines de la vie, dans les corps et jusque dans lâintimitĂ© de chacun lâidĂ©e dâun universalisme dont la figure centrale serait un citoyen sans race, sans classe et sans genre. Et finalement sans dâautre histoire que le roman national dans lequel chaque français se devait de baigner. Lâamer est histoire. Mon pĂšre a Ă©tĂ© un soldat de lâarmĂ©e français tout autant quâil fut gardien de cet esprit français et de sa stratĂ©gie dâeffacement. Mais, par chance, il a transportĂ© avec lui ce besoin irrĂ©pressible de cultiver un jardin. Jâavoue que cela nous mettait en colĂšre avec mes frĂšres et mes sĆurs de passer chaque dimanche les mains dans la terre, quelque soit la saison. Et quand il nây avait plus de travail Ă faire sur notre terrain, mon pĂšre trouvait toujours des haies Ă couper et des allĂ©es Ă dĂ©sherber chez des vieilles dames du coin, au nom dâune mystĂ©rieuse charitĂ© chrĂ©tienne dont on nâavait jamais vu le dĂ©but de la rĂ©ciproque. Jâai fini par croire quâon avait quelque chose Ă se faire pardonner auprĂšs du dĂ©nommĂ© JĂ©sus. OĂč que nous soyons, mon pĂšre profitait du moindre lopin de terre pour cultiver. Jâai compris plus tard que le jardin et ses gestes de subsistance Ă©taient inscrits dans son corps comme les restes dâune archive rĂ©sistante, les traces ingouvernables du jardin crĂ©ole, lieu de survie, de ruse et de recomposition dâune humanitĂ© perdue dans la plantation. MalgrĂ© le pacte rĂ©publicain, malgrĂ© la France qui avait pĂ©nĂ©trĂ© sa conscience, quelque chose avait survĂ©cu, quelque part. Et je sais que Carole Wright qui nous accompagne aujourdâhui aura des choses Ă dire sur cette maniĂšre dâarchiver par la ruse des jardins.
De toute façon, quâon le veuille ou non, lâhistoire coloniale revient par des chemins inattendus, elle surgit parfois violemment, comme le prĂ©disait dĂ©jĂ en son temps le grand poĂšte et homme politique martiniquais AimĂ© CĂ©saire[8]. Pour ma part, ce nâest pas lâhistoire des Ăźles lointaines qui mâa fait comprendre et mĂȘme ressentir en premier les reflux de ce poison colonial, la persistance de son eau stagnante dans laquelle nous baignions tous. Mais bien mon enfance, mon adolescence, puis ma vie dâadulte en banlieue de Paris. Sans nous le dire, nos corps avaient archivĂ© les cartes du contrat racial. Nos peaux savaient Ă lâavance ŽÇĂč nous avions le droit dâĂȘtre. Nous respirions de loin le parfum piquant des lieux interdits. Notre sueur en savait trop et tentait le diable pour des cuisses Ă©lectrisĂ©es par les cris de James Brown. Nos lĂšvres rĂȘvaient tout haut de fabriquer dâautres fluides par la magie dâune chimie improvisĂ©e et collective. Nos langues connaissaient le goĂ»t de la ligne de partage entre nos dĂ©sirs et la plus crue des rĂ©alitĂ©s qui se fracassait en nous Ă lâaube dans le premier train. Il fallait livrer du muscle et garder le silence. Mais nos corps en colĂšre en avaient dĂ©cidĂ© autrement, architectures de villes spectrales, dessinĂ©es par toutes les techniques quâils avaient inventĂ© pour produire de lâespace, pour parler fort, rire et respirer, pour ne pas tenir en place, pour ne pas disparaĂźtre non plus. Câest depuis cet endroit, la banlieue de Paris et depuis cette pĂ©riode, au cĆur des annĂ©es 80, que jâai toujours commencĂ© Ă raconter, Ă rĂ©pĂ©ter mĂȘme, la vaste histoire qui nous rassemble de nouveau aujourdâhui, en y ajoutant Ă chaque nouvelle occasion, Ă chaque nouveau tour de la spirale du temps, dâautres protagonistes, dâautres lieux, dâautres voix. Jââai fini parâ accepter âlâidĂ©e âque je ne cherchais peut-ĂȘtre pas tant des lieux pour les archives mais que je faisais de lâarchive une technique de construction pour des lieux particuliers, des lieux qui sâĂ©tendaient par les paroles et les rumeurs, les images, les hallucinations, par le son et la musique, des lieux toujours plus vastes, des peyis sans nation, des peyis gazeux.
Jâai Ă©videmment des tonnes de bonnes raisons de venir au Royaume-Uni et Ă Londres notamment pour essayer de produire cette nouvelle boucle de pensĂ©e, pour me glisser avec vous Ă lâintĂ©rieur de certaines trajectoires des diaspora de la CaraĂŻbe britannique, leurs combats et leurs drames, leur puissance de vie et leurs alliances. Je suis bien conscient quâici comme en France, la pĂ©riode est difficile et que derriĂšre les cĂ©lĂ©brations de quelques rois et reines Ă la peau foncĂ©e, derriĂšre lâĂ©conomie des tokens et lâextraction des Ă©lites noires, derriĂšre le vernis des institutions, lâhistoire du racisme Ă©crit un nouveau chapitre de sa longue histoire. Car malgrĂ© la chute de certaines statues devenues soudainement gĂȘnantes, les vies noires ne valent pas encore assez pour durer aussi longtemps que les autres, pour Ă©chapper Ă des morts violentes, aux souffrances psychiques, Ă la maladie.
Avant de revenir Ă Londres mais aussi Ă âla citĂ© portuaire de âBristol au fil de cette journĂ©e, jâaimerais en dire un peu plus sur ce dĂ©sir assez Ă©trange de faire apparaĂźtre des lieux Ă Paris ŽÇĂč pourraient resurgir les archives dâune diaspora qui a tout fait pour quâon ne la voit pas trop et est mĂȘme devenue la championne nationale dans lâart de produire des petits français modĂšles. Amen ! En vĂ©ritĂ©, la pĂ©riode nâest pas trĂšs favorable pour imaginer des lieux capables dâaccueillir de telles histoires et de les dĂ©poser sur la platine du futur â nous reparlerons avec Julian Henriques cet aprĂšs-midi de ce besoin de jouer lâarchive, comment, pourquoi, pour qui ? Car nos monuments sont au fond de lâocĂ©an, mais aussi dans une rue de New Crossâ au Sud de Londresâ ou une salle des fĂȘtes de Nanterre, de CrĂ©teil, de Corbeil,â quelque part dans la banlieue populaire de Paris,â partout ŽÇĂč la musique dĂ©fait la raison depuis la bouche obscure dâun conteur-sound system.
2024 est donc une annĂ©e olympique. A AthĂšnes, Ă Rio et aussi Ă Londres, on sait Ă prĂ©sent que lâorganisation des Jeux Olympiques est loin de se limiter Ă un Ă©vĂšnement sportif planĂ©taire et festif, mais est aussi une maniĂšre efficace de nettoyer la ville de certaines de ses vieilles histoires et prĂ©sences indĂ©sirables, de ces vieilles architectures. Nous ne sommes pas dupes. Nos corps sont des morceaux de villes mobiles et sensibles. Et ce dĂ©sir tĂȘtu dâarchive a probablement quelque chose Ă voir avec la « terraformation[9] » du Nord Est parisien qui achĂšve paisiblement la crĂ©ation dâune nouvelle planĂšte, le Grand Paris, astre immense qui aurait digĂ©rĂ© cette zone Ă©trange et rĂ©sistante quâon appelait il y a peu encore « la banlieue ». Ce nâĂ©tait pas le bon moment pour faire le malin avec des archives qui rappelleraient peut-ĂȘtre des mauvais souvenirs, des visages trop sales pour se tenir autre part quâau bord de la photographie nationale. A Paris dĂ©jĂ , on avait perdu du terrain ces derniĂšres annĂ©es et quelques unes de nos places fortes aussi. Ce nâĂ©tait pas les tiers-lieux qui avaient fleuri partout Ă la place des squats et des usines fermĂ©es Ă grand renfort de produits bio et de concerts sympas qui allaient les remplacer. La belle machine de la gentrification avait nettoyĂ© ce qui restait de quartiers populaires de la capitale, des dĂ©sirs dâautonomie et de vies sans modĂšle. Ă prĂ©sent, le temps Ă©tait venu de rĂ©gler son compte Ă la banlieue, jadis malfamĂ©e, jadis mal-aimĂ©e, toujours trop bruyante, trop sale, trop communiste, trop arabe, trop africaine. Jadis, car maintenant, tout Ă©tait diffĂ©rent. Comme ailleurs, la magie des Jeux Olympiques servait dâĂ©crans de fumĂ©e et de bras armĂ©s pour cette dĂ©licieuse chasse aux pauvres. Tout devenait beau et merveilleux. Paris serait toujours Paris, mais en plus vaste. Le plus drĂŽle dans cette affaire, le plus Ă©tonnant aussi Ă©tait que nos vies qui nâavaient jamais eu beaucoup de valeur Ă©taient devenues soudainement des images merveilleuses, des minerais noirs qui forçaient le ravissement Ă condition que dâautres mains que les nĂŽtres les saisissent, Ă condition que dâautres bouches que les nĂŽtres prononcent nos mots tordus, en les prĂ©sentant un peu mieux, avec le bon accent. Tout cela devenait si excitant, si Ă©mouvantâŻ! Et il en allait de mĂȘme pour ce que nous pensions ĂȘtre nos archives, de maniĂšre un peu confuse et peu scientifique. Elles se gentrifiaient, elles aussi. De vĂ©ritables petits chatonsâŻ! MiaouâŻ! On les cĂ©lĂ©brait ces petites bĂȘtes dociles, une fois nettoyĂ©e lâĂ©paisse couche de crasse que nous appelions le peau, la chair, que nous appelions le cĆur des archives â leur flow, leur battement, leurs conflits intĂ©rieurs. Comme on nettoie un masque volĂ© du tissu et des sĂ©crĂ©tions qui le recouvrent et le remplissent pour en contempler la forme vide et silencieuse dans la vitrine dâun musĂ©e. VoilĂ quâĂ©tait venue lâheure de lâarchive noire ! AccompagnĂ©e de cette remise Ă zĂ©ro de lâhistoire que nous connaissions si bien, elle allait apparaĂźtre enfin, teintĂ©e de mystĂšre, pour une nouvelle premiĂšre fois. Un nouveau cyclone allait disperser nos vies. Peut-ĂȘtre Ă©tait-ce de notre faute aussi. Nous nâavions pas su faire archive de la bonne maniĂšre ou bien cette bonne maniĂšre ne correspondait pas Ă ce que nous voulions faire pour maintenir vivants certains gestes, certaines voix, certaines histoires et images que nous chĂ©rissions et qui insistaient en nous. Stuart HallâŻdit Ă propos des cultures diasporiquesâŻ:ââ «âŻIl faut enfin songer Ă la maniĂšre dont ces cultures ont utilisĂ© le corps, comme si câĂ©tait â et câĂ©tait souvent le cas â le seul capital culturel que nous avions. Nous avons travaillĂ© sur nous-mĂȘmes comme canevas ââââââde reâprĂ©sentationâ »[10]â. Hall parle de « caneva » plutĂŽt que de « sujet » deâ reprĂ©sentation comme pour signifier quâil ne sâagit pas simplement de travailler sur la fameuse visibilitĂ© des corps minoritaires, sur des images de soi â ce qui allait ĂȘtre la grande affaire des politiques de diversitĂ© de lâart, de la mode, de la publicitĂ© et de tous ceux qui avaient fini par faire de ces trois mondes une seule et mĂȘme chose â mais plutĂŽt dâĆuvrer depuis soi. Câest comme ça que je lâai compris en tout cas, comme la nĂ©cessaire autoproduction dâune archive terriblement â fatalement peut-ĂȘtre mĂȘme â indissociable du corps qui en est Ă la fois le motif, la matiĂšre, lâoutil et le site dâĂ©nonciation. Le mĂ©tier Ă tisser et le code de formes de presence. Travailler dans la profondeur de soi, en-dessous des images. CâĂ©tait lĂ notre seule chance de ne pas finir vidĂ©s de cette derniĂšre chose quâil nous restait. Et câĂ©tait une chance assez mince. De tout façon, je ne voyais pas ce que je pouvais pensĂ© dâautre depuis le cĆur dâune famille nombreuse de la diaspora pauvre des Antilles, trimballĂ©e dâun endroit Ă un autre de la France. Il me semble que nous nâayons jamais eu le dĂ©but du privilĂšge de nous asseoir un instant pour reprendre notre souffle, pour prendre la distance nĂ©cessaire afin rĂ©flĂ©chir Ă la trace quâallait peut-ĂȘtre laisser nos vies, câest-Ă -dire imaginer une archive aussi petite soit-elle. Nous Ă©tions trop occupĂ©s par lâurgence de trouver un lieu pour vivre et dây devenir invisibles dans le paysage paisiblement raciste de la France qui dĂ©roulait le tapis rouge Ă notre amnĂ©sie. Lâoubli est la clef du devenir français, lâignorance volontaire un sport national. Nous nâĂ©tions pas dâici et nous ne venions de nulle part. Mais ŽÇĂč allions-nous doncâŻ? La phrase de Stuart Hall le rappelle, lâarchive diasporique de la CaraĂŻbe sâinvente Ă partir dâune histoire continuĂ©e de la dĂ©possession qui fait du corps le dernier lieu dâun capital culturel, mobile, fragile. Une archive Ă soi. Câest peut-ĂȘtre lĂ lâunique raison qui pourrait expliquer pourquoi je mâĂ©tais retrouvĂ© Ă penser, des dĂ©cennies plus tard, au devenir dâune archive de la diaspora caribĂ©enne, moi qui nâavais jamais vouĂ© beaucoup dâintĂ©rĂȘt dans ma vie professionnelle aux pratiques de conservation et qui mâĂ©tais mĂȘme volontairement tenu assez souvent un peu Ă distance de toutes ces histoires dâarchive â les jugeant, peut-ĂȘtre Ă tord, un peu trop poussiĂ©reuses et fĂ©tichistes. En vĂ©ritĂ©, jâavais simplement plus dâintĂ©rĂȘt pour les histoires que pour les archives. Le mot «âŻarchiveâŻÂ» sonnait un peu trop administratifâŻet policierâŻĂ mon goĂ»t. Il me rappelait immĂ©diatement cet Etat qui nous avait toujours jugĂ© Ă charge Ă partir dâarchives justement dont il avait Ă©tĂ© longtemps le seul Ă avoir les moyens de production et de conservation â et en vĂ©ritĂ© aussi de dissimulation comme toute chose qui pouvait servir lâidĂ©e de contre-rĂ©cits. Jâavais lu il y a longtemps, avec un certain enthousiasme dâailleurs, les travaux remarquables de lâhistorienne française Arlette Farge et la maniĂšre dont elle avait su reconstruire lâhistoire du peuple de Paris au XVIIIĂšme siĂšcle[11] Ă partir des mains courantes de la police. Il Ă©tait donc possible de retourner lâarchive trop bavarde de la violence dâEtat contre elle-mĂȘme ou de simplement lire dans lâempreinte nĂ©gative dâune machine de contrĂŽle les traces de vies minuscules qui rĂ©sistaient. Une histoire fugitive de la rue, de la ruse. Mais cela nâĂ©tait pas assez et mĂȘme si on nâaccordait pas beaucoup dâintĂ©rĂȘt aux formes infantiles de lâhĂ©roĂŻsme noir, nous Ă©tions en droit dâaller chercher les traces de nos existences autre part dans les commissariats et les journaux intimes des colons.
Plus tard, jâai aimĂ© cette phrase cĂ©lĂšbre de Monika WittigâŻ:âŻÂ«âŻFais un effort pour te souvenir. Ou, Ă dĂ©faut, invente »[12].âŻElle dit tout ce quâil faut savoir dâune mĂ©thode dâarchive minoritaire. MĂȘme si Ă©videmment lâenjeu nâest pas tout Ă fait dâinventer « en gĂ©nĂ©ral », mais plutĂŽt dâorganiser un espace dâimagination depuis un corps « en particulier », depuis des moments vĂ©cus et des manques, depuis des prĂ©sences et des images fantĂŽmes qui lâhabitent. Depuis certaines nĂ©cessitĂ©s Ă©galement dâĂ©chapper aux rĂ©pĂ©titions traumatiques. Lâinvention en question est un geste de rĂ©paration. Notre archive demande un peu dâimagination, câest aussi simple que cela, afin de retisser ensemble des morceaux dâhistoires dispersĂ©es, interrompues par mille ouragans Ă©conomiques, administratifs, politiques, policiers, et peut-ĂȘtre mĂȘme par des puissances de dispersion au visage bienveillant, ouragans acadĂ©miques, ouragans artistiques dont nous sommes lentement devenus les ressources Ă disposition. « Inventer » nos archives nâavait donc rien dâune activitĂ© paisible, triviale, car câest elles qui venaient frapper violemment Ă la porte, sur le toit et les volets de notre double conscience au cours de nuits dâangoisse. Notre imagination avait toujours surgit de ventres serrĂ©s. Ce sont les histoires qui sâinventaient en nous, faisaient le siĂšge de notre corps. Je garde aussi Ă lâesprit dans ce chemin confus vers les raisons de penser une archive la lecture des travaux de Sam Bourcier, figure emblĂ©matique des queer studies en France et membre dâun collectif qui lui mĂȘme vise Ă crĂ©er une archive LGBTIQ+ Ă Paris. Ses interventions vives et sans concession mâont confortĂ© dans ce sentiment quâimaginer des archives ou mĂȘme un lieu pour des archives pouvait relever en fait dâun dĂ©sir pour des pratiques vivantes, ou comme iel dit «âŻarchivivantesâŻÂ»[13].
Sur le chemin de cette recherche archivivante donc, la maniĂšre dont Saidiya Hartman sâest emparĂ©e des documents pour son livre Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route[14] a Ă©tĂ© aussi depuis longtemps une prĂ©cieuse boussole par la puissance de son imagination situĂ©e, ancrĂ©e dans la nĂ©cessitĂ© de toujours (re)produire des possibilitĂ©s de vie et de les pratiquer, de reprendre la route de trajectoires interrompues. Imaginer câest revenir par un dĂ©tour. Jâai rencontrĂ© dans un autre livre encore dont nous Ă©couterons quelques extraits aujourdâhui â Surge, recueil de poĂšmes de Jay Bernard[15] â des maniĂšres encore diffĂ©rentes dâanimer les traces de vie depuis le deuil. Depuis les dĂ©tails de rĂ©miniscences tragiques, depuis les corps qui ont payĂ© le prix de lâexil et de lâinjustice, depuis la dignitĂ© de morts qui sont mal morts, depuis les gestes imperceptibles des familles ravagĂ©es â une main fait un signe que lâon ne comprend pas mais cela veut dire «âŻĂ§a suffit comme çaâŻÂ» et peut-ĂȘtre que lâĆil dâune mĂšre ne veut pas voir et se tourne vers un coin de la piĂšce â depuis des fragments dâhistoires sans tĂ©moin, une voix appelle. Elle appelle Ă la prĂ©sence, Ă revenir sur les lieux de lâarchive, les scĂšnes de crime et de joie comme le feront celles et ceux qui iront marcher demain avec Natalie Hyacinth Ă New Cross, cĆur vibrant et blessĂ© de lâhistoire des diaspora jamaĂŻcaine, barbadienne, des trĂšs riches heures des Blues parties et des sound systems. Et nous aurions pu aller marcher aussi, et nous le ferons peut-ĂȘtre Ă une autre occasion, autre part, avec William âLezâ Henry, Colin Prescod ou mĂȘme Stafford Scott car il faut accepter que tout le monde ne peut se retrouver autour de la mĂȘme table, en mĂȘme temps, quâil y a et aura toujours plusieurs tables, plusieurs foyers de relation, qui travaillent parallĂšlement sur ce mĂȘme tissage depuis des lieux diffĂ©rents. Et jâessayerais tout Ă lâheure de rappeler quelques uns de ces lieux et quelques unes de ces personnes qui mâaccompagnent Ă distance, en pensĂ©e ou qui rejoindront Ă un autre moment, dans dâautres circonstances cette conversation infinie.
Je pense quâil est important de respecter le besoin dâune certaine distance comme ce fut le cas quand mon ami Ntone Edjabe du collectif sud-africain Chimurenga mâa proposĂ© il y a quelques annĂ©es de participer Ă un groupe de travail en vue de crĂ©er une cartographie de lâimagination noire et de son histoire en France pour une exposition dans la BPI (BibliothĂšque Publique dâInformation) du Centre Pompidou Ă Paris. Et que jâai refusĂ©. Alors quâil avait composĂ© une Ă©quipe compĂ©tente et que jâĂ©tais familier du quartier des Halles, de la bibliothĂšque elle-mĂȘme ŽÇĂč jâavais passĂ© de longues matinĂ©es avec toute sorte dâerrants qui finissaient leur nuit la tĂȘte enveloppĂ©e dans le journal du jour, que jâavais connu le Centre Pompidou quand il Ă©tait encore traversĂ© par une vĂ©ritable rue qui lui servait de rez-de-chausĂ©e ŽÇĂč des vieux arabes jouaient des parties de dame sans fin. Jâai refusĂ©.
MalgrĂ© ma connaissance de la gĂ©ologie du sol du Forum des Halles, sa surface qui avait accueilli lâun des multiples dĂ©buts du break dance en France et ses sous-sols ŽÇĂč se croisait le samedi les RER A et B et par consĂ©quent tout ce que produisaient de magnifique les banlieues nord, sud, est et ouest. Jâai refusĂ©. Ce nâĂ©tait pas le bon moment pour moi et probablement pas le bon endroit. Mais ce refus est pourtant lâune des sources de ce questionnement qui mâa amenĂ© ici aujourdâhui Ă me demander comment faire archive et transmettre Ă toutes celles et ceux qui entrent Ă prĂ©sent sur la piste de cette danse quâon appelle «âŻdiasporaâŻÂ». Quand Ntone mâa invitĂ© Ă participer Ă son projet Ă Paris â pour lequel plus tard jâai finalement Ă©crit un texte paru dans le journal de lâexposition, âimagi-nation nwar, âauquel je reviendrai dans le prochain texte de cette sĂ©rie â il nâĂ©tait pas naĂŻf. Il en savait mĂȘme beaucoup sur les enjeux et les tensions de ce qui se passait Ă Paris. Il avait juste cet avantage quâoffre parfois la position dâoutsider qui est la mienne aujourdâhui Ă Londres. Mais comme Ntone, je nâai ni le dĂ©sir, ni les moyens de lâinnocence et je sais bien que je commence Ă parler aprĂšs beaucoup de gens qui ont contribuĂ© Ă penser et Ă crĂ©er des archives comme celles que jâenvisage avec tous mes complices, certains dont nous parlerons Ă©videmment et dâautres dont jâespĂšre que vous ne manquerez pas de porter le nom Ă notre connaissance car aujourdâhui nâest quâune nouvelle rĂ©pĂ©tition de ce quâils ont essayĂ© de faire, brillamment, secrĂštement parfois, dans de grandes institutions comme dans des communautĂ©s locales plus petites, dans un certain dĂ©nuement aussi. Nous le savons. Que leur travail soit honorĂ©.
[1] Pour plus de dĂ©tails Ă propos de lâĂ©vĂšnement et des participants, voir : /news-events/events/distant-islands-spectral-cities-weaving-spiral-archives-london.
[2] Olivier Marboeuf, «âŻPousse, ŽÇĂč tu peux, comme tu peux, pousseâŻÂ» in Les racines poussent aussi dans le bĂ©ton, catalogue de lâexposition Kader Attia, Ăditions Mac Val, 2018.
[3] La question dâune archive Ă soi dĂ©bute probablement dans mon parcours professionnel au cĆur de annĂ©es 90 avec les Ă©ditions AMOK ŽÇĂč nous publions avec Yvan AlagbĂ© des livres qui tentent de dire lâhistoire depuis le trouble diasporique, la mĂ©moire amĂšre et les alliances prĂ©caires des immigrĂ©s, la solitude et lâinvention de vies dignes, comme âNĂšgres Jaunesââ â (Yvan AlagbĂ©, 1992-1995), âLes exilĂ©s, histoiresâ (Kamel KhĂ©lif et Nabil FarĂšs, 1999), âAlgĂ©rie, la douleur et le mal â(Collectif, 1998), âUne ville, un mardiâ (Olivier Marboeuf, 2000) ou encore la fameuse collection âLa VĂ©ritĂ©â (1997). Les traces du dĂ©ni colonial et la puissance des archives fabulĂ©es mâhabitent toujours quand jâassure la curation Ă LâEspace Khiasma âde âlâexposition «âŻOutre-Mer, mĂ©moires colonialesâŻÂ» de lâartiste rĂ©unionnais Yo-Yo Gonthier (2008) et quelques annĂ©es plus tard en 2011, «âŻMy last lifeâŻÂ» de Vincent Meessen, exposition qui donnera lieu au programme de films «âŻHantologie des coloniesâŻÂ» et Ă partir de laquelle je dĂ©velopperai Ă©galement la performance «âŻDeuxiĂšme vieâŻÂ» qui rĂ©invente lâorigine de mon nom de famille. Alors que je dĂ©couvre en 2011 pour la premiĂšre fois quelques archives du dĂ©but du cinĂ©ma de GuinĂ©e-Bissau par lâentremise de la cinĂ©aste portugaise Filipa CĂ©sar, jâĂ©cris pour le catalogue du symposium (4th Encounters Beyond History) quâelle organise en 2015 GuimarĂŁes, au Portugal, «âŻAn ecology of darknessâŻÂ», un court essai de science-fiction ŽÇĂč des habitants du futur organisent dĂ©jĂ une jam session Ă partir de restes dâimages de luttes africaines. Disque rayĂ© de la mĂ©moire blessĂ©e qui tourne Ă©videmment encore dans le texte Ă©crit pour lâexposition de Kader Attia au Mac/Val en 2018 («âŻLes racines poussent aussi dans le bĂ©tonâŻÂ») et qui dont la musique rĂ©sonne jusquâĂ la prĂ©sente tentative dâune gĂ©nĂ©alogie de ce dĂ©sir dâune archive Ă soi.
[4] Voir la note no. 1 de cette sĂ©rieâŻ: «âŻâentre-tenirââŻ: une archive vivante de lâĂ©mancipation » (janvier 2024)â, /institute-paris/research/banister-fletcher-global-fellowship/entre-tenir-living-archive-emancipationâ.&ČÔČúČő±è;&ČÔČúČő±è;&ČÔČúČő±è;
[5] Derek Walcott, « The Sea is History » in Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
[6] Le Bureau pour le dĂ©veloppement des migrations dans les dĂ©partements d'outre-mer, ou « Bumidom », est un organisme public français chargĂ© d'accompagner l'Ă©migration des habitants des dĂ©partements dâoutre-mer vers la France mĂ©tropolitaine. Il a Ă©tĂ© fondĂ© en 1963 par Michel DebrĂ© Ă la suite dâun voyage effectuĂ© Ă La RĂ©union en 1959 avec le gĂ©nĂ©ral de Gaulle. Il disparaĂźtra en 1981. Le Bumidom est officiellement prĂ©sentĂ© comme un outil pour juguler la surpopulation dans les dĂ©partements ultramarins ââŻprincipalement la RĂ©union, la Martinique et la Guadeloupe. Le Bumidom a dĂ©placĂ© en vingt ans un peu plus de 70âŻ000 personnes dont la moitiĂ© pour la seule Ăźle de la RĂ©union. Les candidat·es Ă ce dĂ©part vers lâHexagone rĂȘvĂ© seront rĂ©guliĂšrement confronté·es Ă lâhumiliante Ă©preuve de leur embauche comme des travailleur·euses non qualifié·es. Comme le souligne Sylvain Pattieu, «âŻLâexistence du Bumidom va de pair avec la persistance de certaines formes de racialisation, entendue comme un processus de construction de la rĂ©alitĂ© sociale par la production de catĂ©gories liĂ©es Ă la race. Elles sâappuient davantage, par rapport Ă la situation dans dâautres pays, sur un rĂ©fĂ©rent territorial plutĂŽt quâethnique, mĂȘme si les deux se recoupent. Elles sont ainsi caractĂ©ristiques des relations de la RĂ©publique française avec ses citoyens dâoutre-mer.âŻÂ» Sylvain Pattieu, «âŻUn traitement spĂ©cifique des migrations dâoutre-mer : le Bumidom (1963-1982) et ses ambiguĂŻtĂ©s », Politix, 2016/4 (n° 116), p. 81-113.
[7] Le «âŻWindrush ScandalâŻÂ» est une affaire politique britannique qui dĂ©bute en 2018. Elle concerne des personnes dĂ©tenues, privĂ©es de leurs droits lĂ©gaux, menacĂ©es dâexpulsion et, pour certaines, expulsĂ©es Ă tort du Royaume-Uni par le ministĂšre de lâIntĂ©rieur, alors quâelles Ă©taient en fait nĂ©es sujets britanniques et Ă©taient arrivĂ©es au Royaume-Uni avant 1973. Parmi elles, beaucoup Ă©taient venues des CaraĂŻbes et appartenaient Ă ce quâon a appelĂ© « la gĂ©nĂ©ration du Windrush » (ainsi nommĂ©e dâaprĂšs lâEmpire Windrush, le navire qui a amenĂ© lâun des premiers groupes de migrants antillais au Royaume-Uni en 1948). Pour comprendre les sources de ce scandale et ses rĂ©percussions, on peut notamment consulter le site internet du Windrush Scandal Project qui se prĂ©sente comme un «âŻprojet de recherche de trois ans [qui] vise, pour la premiĂšre fois, Ă produire un examen scientifique du Windrush Scandal dans un cadre vraiment transnational, qui prend en considĂ©ration les capacitĂ©s dâagir dâune grande variĂ©tĂ© dâacteurs officiels et non-officiels des deux cĂŽtĂ©s de lâAtlantique ainsi que le rĂŽle dans les relations internationales des contextes postcoloniaux et du Commonwealth » (ma traduction). Ce projet, financĂ© par lâArts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) et menĂ© par âlââInstitute of Historical Research, le centre national dâhistoire du Royaume-Uni basĂ©ââââââ Ă la School of Advanced Study (SAS) dâUniversitĂ© de Londres, rassemble de multiples ressources faisant la part belle Ă lâhistoire orale avec de nombreuses interviews. Voir .
[8] Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, Présence africaine, 1955 (1re éd. 1950).
[9] Pour une ethnographie de lâintĂ©rieur de Forest Gate, un quartier de Newham, Ă lâest de Londres (site des Jeux Olympiques de Londres), voir Joy White, Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City, Repeater Books, 2020. Comme je tente de le faire, White connecte musique, politique et environnement construit. Tous mes remerciements Ă Shela Sheikh pour avoir partagĂ© avec moi cette prĂ©cieuse rĂ©fĂ©rence.
[10] Stuart Hall, « What is this âBlackâ in Black Popular Culture? » in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent, Bay Press, 1992, pp. 21â33, at p. 27. âMa traduction. Cet essai est inclus dans une collection de textes de Stuart Hall publiĂ©s en français sous le nom :ââ âStuart Hall, IdentitĂ©s et Culture, Politique des Cultural Studies. Articles rĂ©unis par Maxime Cervulle, traduit de lâanglais par Christophe Jacquet. Ăditions Amsterdam, 2007.
[11] Arlette Farge, Vivre dans les rues de Paris au XVIIIĂšme, Ăditions Gallimard, 1992.
[12] Monique Wittig, Les GuĂ©rillĂšres, Ăditions de Minuit, 1969.
[13] Sam Bourcier, « La fiĂšvre des archives », transcription de lâintervention Ă âŻlâuniversitĂ© de philologie, Valence (Espagne), Ă âŻlâautomne 2018, .
[14] Le livre de Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, est paru en français en 2023 sous le titre A perte de mĂšreâŻ: sur les routes atlantiques de lâesclavage aux Ăditions Brook, Paris.
[15] Jay Bernard,âŻSurge, Chatto & Windus, 2019. Merci Ă Jackqueline Frost dâavoir attirĂ© mon attention sur ce livre.