2023-07-27 12:42:22
“A spectacle-chaos”. At the end of July, the show Carte noire named desire was played at the 77th Avignon festival, written and directed by the author and Afro-militant performer Rébecca Chaillon. According to the festival website, the piece aimed to question “the figure of the black woman as an object of fantasies”, by playing on “tenacious, racist, sexist clichés”, in a register mixing “baroque humor”, “carnivalesque diversion ” and especially ” sorority “.
“A festival usher (mestizo) invites Afro-descendant or Afro-descendant transgender spectators who wish to go to the specially equipped comfortable seats at the back (where they will be served drinks, etc.), while the general public is placed on the usual bleachers of the Aubanel gymnasium”, describes Telerama. During the play, the artists caricature the game Questions pour un champion. The principle: “find names of known black women, or words from our world, from our history as whites”. Another sequence reported by Télérama: “the artists come to raid bags, hats, sunglasses, fans in the middle of the bleachers of sometimes recalcitrant spectators, they call it ‘colonization’, and assure the ‘looted’ worried that they will soon see the benefits”. “Nothing soothing or moralizing”, however promised the festival site.
“Anti-white racism”
The controversy is on. Because in addition to the differentiated placement according to origins, a photo of one of the scenes of the show ignites social networks. We discover a woman impaling dolls on a stake that crosses her body. According to the live performance site Sceneweb, it would be a “nanny”, and the dolls would symbolize “the French children entrusted to her”. Proof, according to the most right-wing Twitter accounts, of “anti-white racism”. “Anti-white racism has this specificity that it is authorized, acclaimed and subsidized, tweeted lawyer and columnist on CNews Gilles-William Goldnadel on July 25. It begins with hatred of the French cop and ends with the death of babies. . Either we eradicate it or we die”. For his part, the RN senator from Bouches-du-Rhône Stéphane Ravier denounces “anti-white racism assumed and subsidized with our money!”
But the case takes a whole new turn when the festival indicates on July 25 on its website that the performers of the play “face during performances but also in the streets verbal and physical attacks of a racist nature”. “The Avignon festival affirms that it is unacceptable to leave these surges of hatred in silence and testifies to its solidarity and its support for the artists”. The Odéon theater, where the play is to be resumed from November 28, also denounces the “verbal and physical attacks” of which the artists have been victims.
Two parallel worlds
The impression of two parallel realities. On the side of the detractors of the play, the controversy seems never to have left the scene of the Avignon festival. Witness Eric Zemmour’s tweet, published on July 26, in which the president of the Reconquest party castigates a show that “reveals all of the woke ideology and the complacency it enjoys”. Citing “the desire to genocide white people”, “anti-white racism”, “the triumphant reception of this show by the world of “culture” and journalists from Le Monde”, and the “funding of all this by our taxes”. No mention of said attacks.
On the side of support for the show, the “controversy” seems on the contrary to have started after these attacks were reported. In his article, the HuffPost mentions for example the aggressions of the artists, and a show “raw and explosive to question and point the finger at the stereotypes and fantasies that white people have about black bodies”. “In view of the reactions of some spectators, there is still a long way to go; several verbal and physical attacks, with racist insults have targeted the performers”. Release for his part hailed a “piece welcomed as a masterpiece”, and which woke up “the fachosphere”.
If the controversial content of the show in no way legitimizes the racist attacks suffered by the artists, this controversy offers a striking illustration of two worlds so busy defending their ideological camp that they end up truncating reality. Are all the negative reactions to this show really a sign of widespread “racism”? In its article, Télérama described, for example, two feminist viewers in their seventies leaving the room grumbling: “I can’t take it anymore! What an insult to women to spread these degrading images!”. Conversely, don’t the racist reactions following this spectacle deserve to question the reasons why some still identify a racist unconscious in the France of 2023?
So many questions, however necessary, but drowned by a growing polarization between two ideological camps, around shocking concepts (“anti-white racism” against “white privilege”). To the point of widening a little more the chasm dividing our society on the question of identity.
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