Charlie Hebdo tried to humiliate me. Instead it debased the freedom of speech it symbolises |
The day before Christmas Eve, just as France readied itself to slip into the holiday slowdown, something abruptly shook me out of any festive torpor. The satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, known globally and tragically for being the target of an Islamist attack in 2015 published a caricature – of me. And it was appallingly racist. A huge, toothy grin, an enormous mouth, the cartoon depicts me dancing on a stage before an audience of laughing white men, adorned with a banana belt on a largely exposed body. The headline: “The Rokhaya Diallo Show: Mocking secularism around the world.”
Stunned by the violence of this grotesque cartoon, I shared it on social media with a brief analysis: “In keeping with slave-era and colonial imagery, Charlie Hebdo once again shows itself incapable of engaging with the ideas of a Black woman without reducing her to a dancing body – exoticised, supposedly savage – adorned with the very bananas that are hurled at Black people who dare to step into the public sphere.”
The reference to Josephine Baker was as obvious as it was disrespectful and incomprehensible. One of the most iconic performances of the American-born dancer, actor and activist in the 1920s involved Baker in a (rubber) banana skirt, at a time when France took pride in displaying what it claimed was its superiority over the territories of its colonial empire. But Baker was far more than the act whose erotic charge she deliberately chose to subvert through exaggerated, clownish gestures. She was a