Abstract
This article examines Bessora’s literary and digital criticism of postcolonial France, particularly in her first novel, 53 cm, and on her website, Tendre peau de vache. Bessora’s use of digital media in particular allows her to chronicle unofficial discourses on immigration, migration, and identity politics in France as alternative textual productions to her printed novels. Since there is a gap in academic studies regarding author websites and their contents, this study aims to start a conversation on the discursive function of an author’s digital textual productions. Following Jean Baudrillard’s theory in The Spirit of Terrorism according to which a terrorist act is successful when it distances itself from the real and exalts itself in the realm of the symbolic, this article argues that Bessora’s digital discourses on the post-Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack effectively denounce the disappearance of the real in French culture in favor of ideals such as the #jesuischarlie movement. From the publication of 53 cm in 1999 to her commentaries on France’s alienation of the lowest socio-economic class in Le Testament de Nicolas (2016), the self-proclaimed griotte’s print and digital productions complement each other and bring the reader closer to an understanding of institutional neocolonialist practices in France.
Highlights
Belgian author Bessora remains, against all of the French publishing industry’s best efforts to label her and her work, an auteure inclassable
Her printed productions as well as her authorial persona are impossible to categorize according to “traditional” standards: she is not essentially Gabonese nor. Swiss, as she writes exclusively in French, and in part because of her Belgian citizenship, her work stands at the crossroads of the eternal debate between littérature française and littérature francophone. Bessora and her works have been presented under various identifying labels over the years: in Gallimard’s Continents Noirs collection, as an author of the Black diaspora (Cueillez-moi, jolis messieurs . . . (Bessora 2007), Et si Dieu me demande, dites-lui que je dors (Bessora 2008)); as Francophone literature by Le Serpent à plumes (Citizen Narcisse (Bessora 2018b), La Dynastie des boiteux (Bessora 2018c)); and as fiction française (“French fiction”) by Le Serpent à plumes for her first novel, 53 cm, first published in 1999
Bessora is not a terrorist, nor should she be positioned on the side of the actor of terror. She has mastered the mechanisms of discursive terrorism which have allowed her to confront today’s global ideology of neocolonialism and respond to the many institutional terrors inflicted on Others in France—the non-Blanc, the immigrant, the lower social class
Summary
Belgian author Bessora remains, against all of the French publishing industry’s best efforts to label her and her work, an auteure inclassable. In having Charlotte overexplain to her the location of the République and Nation squares and metro stations—in what can be perceived as a stereotypical Parisian way, implying that Bessora is not exactly Parisian, being seen only as an “acceptable black”—Bessora satirically reveals that, in the mind of Parisians like Charlotte, the Republic and the Nation, meaning the State and symbolically France itself reside in Paris proper This sense of self-righteousness from the higher white bourgeois class of France, as well as this class’ complete disconnect with real events such as racism, terrorism, and migrations, inspired Bessora to write Le. Testament de Nicolas, which was published only one year after the Charlie Hebdo attacks
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