Translating Race on the French Stage

Abstract

A Black man slowly changes into the navy-blue attire of an officer of the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité (CRS), as footage of police brutality flashes up on the giant screen behind him. Turning gravely to the audience, he explains that he became a police officer so that he could “look like a man.” As he begins to recount his experience of racism, we hear a French-accented rendition of the spiritual “soon ah will be done with all the troubles of the world.” A Black woman appears stage right. Still singing, she tenderly wraps her arms around the melancholy figure of the uniformed Black man and gently escorts him off stage.I begin with the appearance of a Black American woman on the stage of French racism in order to ask a series of questions concerning the translation and performance of race across (post)colonial contexts. How does one translate race on and for the stage? What does it mean for a Black French woman to perform the role of a Black American? What are the ethical limits and political stakes of performing Blackness in translation? I will seek to answer these questions through a comparative reading of two recent plays that stage the catachrestic translation of Blackness in France: Vive la France (Long Live France) and All Power to the People! by the Franco-Algerian dramaturge Mohamed Rouabhi.Born in Paris to Algerian parents, Rouabhi has authored more than a dozen plays, most of which engage in the translation of race in some way: across imperial contexts (France and its empire, indigenous America, Palestine-Israel), languages (French, English, Arabic), and media (theater, video, dance, music). Vive la France and All Power to the People! both deliver a bracing critique of racism. Yet they elicited very different responses from the French public: republican outrage in the case of Vive la France, a fresco of French (post)colonial violence culminating in the 2005 riots; liberal praise in the case of All Power to the People!, Rouabhi’s 2010 homage to the Black Panther Party. These divergent receptions, I contend, are partly based on a profound misunderstanding of the ways in which Rouabhi “translates race” on the French stage. If the reception of Vive la France speaks to a long-standing reluctance to acknowledge the experience of racialization and the memory of colonization in France, it also inadvertently reveals the political stakes of what I am calling transcolonial performance, and in particular, the political stakes of staging American Blackness on the French stage. Before turning to Rouabhi’s plays, I explore translation as a model of transcolonial comparison and suggest that performance enables a process of identification that represents the original, even as it stages its displacement in translation.1The noun translation, from the Latin transferre (to carry across), is frequently used to convey the transposition, adaptation, or repurposing of a term, concept, or set of discursive and legal practices from one historical or political context to another. Implicit in the conception of translation as transposition or adaptation is the notion that the two contexts of enunciation are distinct, yet comparable or analogous. They might even be revealed to be co-constitutive or relational in a more meaningful sense, particularly when a term taken from one sociopolitical context lends itself to productive use in another. As scholars of comparative (post)colonial studies have persuasively shown, this is particularly true of the way racial nomenclatures have been translated across heterogeneous imperial formations.2 Take the word ghetto, transposed from medieval Europe to twentieth-century urban America and back to postcolonial Europe; or apartheid, the Afrikaans term for segregation deployed to describe the regime of separation in Israel-Palestine and, more recently, in France; or the cluster of terms used to describe those living in colonized lands at the time of first contact: indigène, native, Indian, aboriginal, autochtone. The translation of these terms into different (post)colonial situations is not entirely accurate, and yet it reveals important historical connections and structural parallels.There are, of course, historical arguments against translating racial nomenclatures in this way. In his classic work of urban sociology, Parias urbains, Loïc Wacquant argues against the pervasive analogy between US inner-city ghettos and the French banlieue.3 Benjamin Stora has likewise criticized the adoption of the term indigène by French citizens whose parents and grandparents were French colonial subjects until the dismantling of the French empire in the 1950s and 1960s, and who insist on calling themselves issus des colonies (hailing from the colonies) rather than issus de l’immigration (of immigrant descent).4 Made in the name of historical accuracy and conceptual clarity, arguments such as Wacquant’s and Stora’s ignore important insights offered by the catachrestic translation of racial nomenclatures across our contemporary (post)colonial landscape. More problematically, they also curtail the political potential of comparison, which, much like translation itself, is both necessarily inaccurate, and ethically and politically imperative.5Of course, not all translations are equally productive, or even valid. One can, in fact, mistranslate race. Lest I be mistaken for advocating “wild” translation, let me offer an example of mistranslation that also misfires in terms of translating race across contexts in this expanded, comparative, and relational sense. Widely anticipated as the definitive English version of Les damnés de la terre, Richard Philcox’s 2004 translation of Frantz Fanon’s magnum opus mistranslates a number of racial terms, including nègre. Take this passage from the opening pages of chapter 4, “De la culture nationale,” Fanon’s critique of Negritude as an essentialist discourse that reifies, by celebrating it, the very category it seeks to reappropriate and transform: “Le nègre, qui n’a jamais été aussi nègre que depuis qu’il est dominé par le Blanc, quand il décide de faire preuve de culture, de faire œuvre de culture, s’aperçoit que l’histoire lui impose un terrain précis, que l’histoire lui indique une voie précise et qu’il lui faut manifester une culture nègre” (Les damnés 202). From the ironic use of a figurative Latinate term used to describe peoples of darker complexion than their slave-masters and colonizers in the first instance, the term nègre shifts to signify a racial slur in the second, and the prescriptive, meliorative modifier of the object of Negritude in the third (“une culture nègre”). Fanon’s critique of Negritude’s self-destructive embrace of racialized thought depends on the use of the same term in different modulations, modulations that are lost, I argue, in Philcox’s translation. The subtle interplay of the different valences of the racialized term nègre in this passage—let’s call them figurative, pejorative, and prescriptive—is parsed by Philcox through the use of two different terms, one of them in scare quotes: “When the black man, who has never felt as much a ‘Negro’ as he has under white domination, decides to prove his culture and act as a cultivated person, he realizes that history imposes on him a terrain already mapped out, that history sets him along a very precise path and that he is expected to demonstrate the existence of a ‘Negro’ culture” (Wretched, trans. Philcox 150). Note that “the black man” turns into an empirical rather than ironic category in this translation, whereas “the ‘Negro,’” and even the “‘Negro’ culture” of Negritude, is a fiction created and desired by the white man. While consistent with Philcox’s stated aim of more carefully parsing the word nègre—which he opts to translate as black “when [Fanon] refers to the peoples of Africa or the diaspora,” as “nigger when it is the colonizer referring to the same,” or as “Negro in its historical context”—his translational choices do not account for the irony of Fanon’s tone in this passage (Philcox 248). Philcox’s choice of terms reduces Fanon’s critique of Negritude to one of simple mimicry, paradoxically reinstating an essentialist definition of Blackness under the guise of political correctness. As the Barbadian writer George Lamming succinctly phrased it at the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, where Fanon made his transcolonial debut, “the Negro is a man whom the Other regards as a Negro” (321). In English too, Negro carries what Philcox calls “[the] sting and [the] embrace” of nègre (248).6Compare Philcox’s version with Constance Farrington’s elegantly faithful, almost literal translation: “The Negro, never so much a Negro as since he has been dominated by the whites, when he decides to prove that he has a culture and to behave like a cultured person, comes to realize that history points out a well-defined path to him: he must demonstrate that a Negro culture exists” (Wretched, trans. Farrington 212). The only significant variant here is the use of the plural, lower-case whites, a term that is more idiomatic than “the white man” in English. It is true that the (perhaps fortuitous) echoes of Rudyard Kipling’s infamous ode to colonialism, “The White Man’s Burden,” are lost in Farrington’s translation of “l’homme Blanc” as “the whites.” But her translation also surreptitiously introduces a parallel with Jim Crow America and apartheid South Africa, a variant that is not, I contend, a mistranslation. Commissioned by the Negritudinist press Présence Africaine and first published in 1963, Farrington’s translation was required reading for the Black Panthers and an entire generation of anticolonial and antiracist activists in Africa and beyond. Her use of a racial category that is legible to readers of Fanon across Britain’s (former) settler colonies—the whites—perfectly captures the multidirectionality of Fanon’s critique of colonial racism. If Philcox rightly points out that Farrington’s use of Negro to translate both the racial slur nègre and the ascriptive identity noir in other passages “[loses] a subtle difference” in the French, here it faithfully renders the shifting valences of Fanon’s use of the term nègre (248).7How does one translate race? This is a problem of translation in the narrow sense: what word should one choose in the target language to adequately render the denotations and connotations of a particular term in the source language? Should one attempt to remain faithful to the historical and geopolitical context of the source text, as Farrington does, or adapt more freely to the cultural context of the target audience, as Philcox seeks to do? This is also a problem of translation in a metaphoric sense, indeed in a sense close to the etymological meanings of both translation and metaphor: transferre, metapherein, to carry across or transpose in Latin and Greek, respectively. What is lost, what is gained, in translating nègre as Negro or as black man? This is a problem of comparison, of relation, of commensurability and incommensurability. Asking how to translate race also begs the question: how does one speak of race comparatively?In her work on the figure of the stranger, Sara Ahmed warns us against the dangers of translation as a metaphor of appropriation, critiquing the privileging of abstracted figures of strangerness (the nomad, the migrant, the refugee) by first-world cultural critics as “a movement that is itself predicated on the translation of the collective and forced movements of others.” In the wake of a still unfolding refugee crisis, it seems particularly urgent to heed Ahmed’s admonition that “the naming of theory as nomadic can be understood in terms of the violence of translation” (83). A philosopher is not, in fact, a migrant, and to abstract the historical and political circumstances that have produced mass transfers of populations in the service of theoretical abstractions represents an act of epistemic violence and appropriation. Translation, as we know, has a history of violence. As both Mary Louise Pratt and Emily Apter remind us, translation has been deployed at the colonial frontier from the sixteenth-century Requeremiento, the proclamation declaring the conquered lands terra nullius, to the myriad practices of translation “weaponized” in the colonial contact zone (Pratt; Apter, “Weaponized”). For Apter, “‘border-crossing’ [has] become such an all-purpose, ubiquitous way of talking about translation that its purchase on the politics of actual borders—whether linguistic or territorial—[has] become attenuated” (“Translation at the Checkpoint” 56). And yet, to entertain an absolute distrust of translation would imperil precisely the forms of “impossible identification” that produce new political solidarities, the kind that Fanon himself was engaged in when he dared to write, in Les damnés de la terre, “nous, Algériens” (Les damnés 180; “we Algerians,” Wretched, trans. Farrington 189).8 Translation is a risk worth taking.How, then, are we to avoid the danger of replacing the source text through translation? Performance, I argue, makes possible a mode of translation that does not substitute itself for the original, but brings the original back into circulation in a comparative, relational, and transitive sense. This performative understanding of translation is, in fact, quite close to one of the primary meanings of translation, the act of displacing a person or thing from one place to another.9 Translation does something; it is performative in the sense that is transitive. As Sandra Bermann has argued, this meaning is present, too, in the notion of interlingual translation.10 Translation represents, aesthetically and politically, the original, even as it displaces it in translation.11 To translate is to make appear for a second time, to represent, albeit in necessarily altered form, and for a different public. Constance Farrington’s felicitous translation of Les damnés de la terre clarifies the performative potential of translation in its narrow sense. “The whites,” Farrington’s translation of “le Blanc,” does two things. At a lexical level, it introduces a comparison between French and British racial rule. Through this comparison, it transforms the universal white subject of Fanon’s prose into what Fanon, in fact, intended it to mean: the sociopolitical class of men claiming the mantle of universalism as their exclusive privilege. And yet it is also true that Farrington’s translation erases the operation, the process of reading and interpreting, that allows her to correctly translate “le Blanc” as “the whites.”What if, taking Bermann’s insights one step further, we were to think of translation as an embodied practice that requires the co-presence of both terms? How might performance allow for a more complex, multidirectional articulation of transcolonial identification, the process of speaking for and as the (post)colonized other? Does theatrical performance—in French, la représentation théâtrale—make it possible to take on the role of the other without at the same time taking her place? In order to begin answering these questions, I return to the scene I described in the prologue: the appearance of a Black American woman on the stage of French racism. My reading of Mohamed Rouabhi’s plays Vive la France and All Power to the People! will elucidate the political and ethical stakes of translation in, and as, performance.Vive la France opened at the Canal 93 theater in Bobigny on December 1, 2006, approximately one year after urban rebellions broke out throughout France in response to the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, two unarmed teenagers trapped in a generator during a police chase. An urgent indictment of French racism, Vive la France paints a complex portrait of the legacies of French colonialism, drawing on a rich archive of colonial and anticolonial documents.12 The curtain opens to reveal a TV monitor bearing the instantly recognizable image of Zyed and Bouna, smiling for the camera. For the nearly three hours that follow, a cast of some twenty actors, singers, and dancers perform scenes from France’s colonial history and postcolonial present, in a multimedia tableau of violence: two female sign language interpreters translate the oral testimony of women protesting media representations of banlieue youth; a child recites the surrealist anticolonial manifesto, “Ne visitez pas l’exposition coloniale” (“Do not visit the colonial exhibition”), as black-and-white photographic portraits of colonized subjects—the kind used by anthropologists and racial scientists—flash up on the screen behind him; a Black Marianne draped in the tricolor flag is paraded on stage as a voice recites excerpts from the first chapter of Frantz Fanon’s classic work on anti-Black racism, Black Skin, White Masks. As this selective summary of scenes indicates, the contiguous and continuous experience of racism is the thread that links France’s (post)colonial subjects, from Martinique to Vietnam, Algeria, and the banlieue, translating race across these disparate yet overlapping historical and geographic contexts. But the play also brings the memory of racism in the United States to bear on the history of antiracist struggle across the French empire, in a startling illustration of the political stakes of transcolonial performance.I return here to the scene with which I opened this article, which interpolates American Blackness into the staging of French racism. Following a triptych of tableaux devoted to police brutality and media representations of the 2005 riots, this scene occupies a pivotal place in Vive la France and serves as a transition between contemporary forms of racism and the scenes of colonial violence dramatized in the remainder of the play. It is also the only scene in the play that directly gives voice to a racialized subject, who confides to the audience in a haunting soliloquy reminiscent of Fanon’s account of “l’expérience vécue du Noir” (the lived experience of the Black man).13 I will tease out the Fanonian resonances of this monologue below—in particular the translation of noir and nègre in late twentieth-century France—before addressing the interpolation of American racism into the scene of French racism in my reading of Rouabhi’s play on the Black Panthers, All Power to the People!In the penumbra of the stage, we see a Black man slowly don the uniform of a CRS (riot police) officer, while newspaper reports on “bavures policières” (police killings of unarmed suspects) and video footage of police brutality flicker before our eyes to the tune of a melancholy cello, oral testimony about police violence, and, jarringly, Annie Cordy’s 1977 upbeat hit “Mon CRS” (“My CRS”). Now fully decked out in police attire, the Black man begins to explain, in rhyming, colloquial French, his discovery of racism: Dans le tempsOn disait pasTous ces mots-làRenoi, kebla,Pour parler d’moi.On disait rien, d’ailleursEt c’était bien. . . .J’étais rien. . . .Et même plus tardQuand tout çà passeIl est bien rareQu’on n’te parle pasDe ta race.Qu’on n’te dise pasQu’t’as pas ta placeQu’t’es comme la pesteT’es une menaceFaut pas qu’tu restesY faut qu’tu t’casses.T’as pas honteNégro?Back in the dayNo one usedThose wordsRenoi, kebla [noir, black]To talk about me.No one said anything, actuallyAnd that was good. . . .I was nothing. . . .And even laterWhen all that passesPeople keep talking to youAbout your racePeople keep telling youYou’re not in your placeYou’re like the plague.You’re a menace.You can’t stay hereYou gotta split.Aren’t you ashamed of yourselfNegro?(Rouabhi, Vive 24–25; my ellipses)14The CRS officer’s soliloquy betrays a crisis in language, one that is commensurate with the process of racialization described by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, even if the nomenclatures have changed. Note the use of three separate terms to denote Blackness: renoi (noir in French back slang or verlan), kebla (black in verlan), and Négro. Associated with the present (après, later) rather than the past (dans le temps, literally “in time”), the first two terms are contemporary colloquial nomenclatures for Blackness in France. Paradoxically, their articulation in verlan, the slang of the disenfranchised banlieues inhabited by those “hailing from the colonies,” does not suffice to make them ascriptive identities—and this despite the appropriation of an American term, Black, associated with pride. In France, these words remain ways of “talking . . . about race,” of “telling you you’re not in your place.” They are the markers of a violent process of racialization that culminates with the first modern racial slur: negro, the Latin term for the color (or rather absence of color) black, translated throughout racial modernity as the name of human abjection. That the term negro also bears the weight of the history of Black emancipation in the United States and of Negritude in the Francophone diaspora does not assuage the bite of this term in its French accented articulation. Négro, here, is a translation of nègre, with all the violent associations of that term.The character’s transformation into a police officer was meant to defy the violence of naming made manifest in these derogatory terms: “Même si ma peau / Elle est pas rose / Dans l’uniforme / Tu ressembles à tout / Même à un homme” (Even if my skin / Ain’t pink / In uniform / You look like anything / Even a man). But the performance fails. His soliloquy reveals that he is not done with race, that he is still not in his place. In a spin on a popular children’s song, he recalls the question he used to pose to his mother as a child: “Dis-moi maman pourquoi les petits bateaux qui vont sur l’eau ont des négros, dans la cale?” (Rouabhi, Vive 27; Tell me momma, why do the little boats floating on the water have negroes in the hold?). This question ushers in a dreamlike vision of the Middle Passage: Et puis j’ai vu un hommeQui s’approchaitqui tenaitUn verre de rhumQui murmurait une chansonDu temps où les bisonsCourraient sur la terreDu temps où le cotonNaviguait sur les mersAnd then I saw a manApproachholdingA glass of rumHumming a songFrom the time when the bisonRan over the earthFrom the time when the cottonDrifted over the seas(Rouabhi, Vive 31)Reminiscent of Fanon’s “vieux nègre pris entre cinq whiskies, sa propre malédiction et la haine raciste des Blancs” (Les damnés 231; “old Negro who is trapped between five glasses of whisky, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men,” Wretched, trans. Farrington 243), this figure beckons to the protagonist across time and space, anchoring the lived experience of the Black man in France to the history of deportation from Africa and the colonization of the American continent. As if on cue, a Black woman enters stage, singing William L. Dawson’s spiritual “Soon Ah Will Be Done” in accented English. She embraces him tenderly and slowly escorts him off stage, into the dark (fig. 1).Before I elucidate the appearance of a Black American character on the stage of French metropolitan and colonial racism, I’d like to pause on the critical silence surrounding this scene—a silence that is all the more puzzling given the accolades Rouabhi has received for his plays on the Black American condition. Although sympathetic reviewers praised Rouabhi for exposing the darker side of French history (“l’histoire, occultée, de la France”), the transcolonial dimensions of Vive la France were lost on most critics of the play (Sirach). Others condemned the play as a call for colonial repentance and sui generis attack on the values of the French Republic.15 Take, for example, the thoroughgoing critique delivered by historian and amateur playwright Gérard Noiriel, who takes Rouabhi to task for attacking the institutions of the French Republic—the police, the national school system, the government—and goes so far as to indict the play as a preachy “lesson in civic destruction.” Even more problematic than its anarchism and didacticism, for Noiriel, is the fact that Vive la France constitutes an example of “identitarian” theater, a product of the commodification (read: Americanization) of identities in the 1980s, pithily packaged as “black, blanc, beur.” According to Noiriel, Rouabhi’s play aggravates rather than remedies “les clivages identitaires” (150–51; identitarian rifts), indulging in the memory of a particular group at the expense of others and, more gravely, at the expense of the project of vivre ensemble (living together).16 Noiriel’s critique is unfounded on a number of scores, not least because Rouabhi’s aim is to expose the violence of the state, past and present, rather than advocate for its destruction.17 More seriously, the charge that Vive la France is a vehicle for American-style identity politics, unsurprising within the universalist, republican discourse that dominates discussions of racism in France, completely ignores the multidirectional, relational analysis of race in the play and its critique of racism in France via the memory of other racialized subjects, in particular Black Americans. In order to elucidate the transcolonial dimensions of Vive la France, I turn to a play that deals explicitly with the question of race in America, All Power to the People!To date, Rouabhi has produced three plays on race in the United States: Malcolm X (2000); Moins qu’un chien (2004), on Charles Mingus; and All Power to the People! (2010).18 None of these plays has elicited the kind of controversy occasioned by Vive la France, even though the discussion of race and racism in these plays is candid, and often bracing. This should not surprise us. The Black American condition often serves as a foil to shore up France’s putative racelessness, while, paradoxically, African American culture, music especially, has long been an object of fascination in France. Rouabhi’s plays about race in America were not controversial—but they should have been. Let me state this quite clearly: performing American racism on the French stage is a way to translate the question of race in France; it is a way to smuggle the question of racism back into a purportedly color-blind society.As noted earlier, it is important to be wary of “the violence of translation” when discussing the performance of race in translation (Ahmed 83). But to suggest that Rouabhi’s plays appropriate American Blackness to identitarian ends would ignore the multidirectional effects of transcolonial performance. As my readings will show, translation is not a one-way street in Rouabhi’s plays. On the contrary, Vive la France and All Power to the People! stage Black American bodies, voices, and archives that are themselves already engaged in transcolonial performance, bringing the history of French colonialism and the experience of racialization in France to bear on the experience of race in America.All Power to the People! sketches a genealogy, in ten scenes, of “the Black condition” in the United States, from chattel slavery to the election of the first Black president.19 Like Vive la France, All Power to the People! has a didactic function: the annex materials that accompany the play include an exhaustive bibliography on anti-Black racism and Black liberation movements in the United States, as well as teaching materials for use in the classroom. The play itself is a multimedia repository of documents: a young Black man, interpreted by the play’s choreographer, Hervé Sika, leafs through photographs of civil rights activists and victims of racist violence, including Emmett Till; an all-female cast dressed in slacks, leather jackets, and black berets dances to Public Enemy’s classic track “Fight the Power,” while excerpts of a Shirley Temple film, a Blaxploitation movie, and footage of the Black Panthers are projected on a screen behind them (fig. 2); Rouabhi, in full Panther gear, opens the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, flanked by heavily armed female Panthers; a video recording of Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory speech in Chicago plays while a white supremacist, also played by Rouabhi, lurks at the back of the stage and loads his handgun. As we will see, these multiply framed documents are not merely objects of sympathetic consumption for Rouabhi’s audience. If All Power to the People! translates documents of American antiracism for French postcolonial subjects, it also makes present, through translation, an archive that has direct bearing on the history of racism in France. I focus on two scenes that deploy extant documents to translate race on the French stage. Each scene is structured round sound recordings of poems by Black American artists—June Jordan and the Last Poets—recited in English and translated on stage through bodily performance and French text projected on a screen at the back of the stage. As I will show, multimedia performance is what makes apparent the co-imbrication of French and American racism in these scenes, translating the experience of racism in the United States to, and in, a French context.The only explicit mention of France in All Power to the People! comes in a scene titled “Black Is Beautiful.” In the penumbra of the theater we barely distinguish a female form, prostrate on the ground, slowly dragging herself toward a white rose. We hear a female voice recite June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights,” a chilling indictment of racial and sexual violence, while a nearly complete translation is projected onto the screen behind her. Invoking the literal violence of sexual assault as well as the metaphor of colonial rape, Jordan’s interpreter summons France to denounce colonialism, racism, and sexism in the language of pan-African anticolonial resistance: and in France they say if the guy penetratesbut does not ejaculate then he did not rape me. . . .which is exactly like South Africapenetrating into Namibia penet