The French Evolution is a response based on my lifetime experience as a French man. Experimenting discrimination and witnessing racism I first externalized my frustration as a teenager through the form of rap. I also played basketball at a pretty good level and that is what has first gotten me to the United States. Away from my country , through a process of contrasting with a new culture and reflecting on my original one I started looking at France with a different eye. A big part of young Black and Arab French population do not feel at home in their own country because of the way they and their parents are discriminated against and marginalized. I did not feel a full sense of my citizenship in France. I remember when me and some of my friends of African descent referred to white people, we often called them French. As a matter of fact the youth of today also call white people French people. This means that these kids do not feel that they are French. They have accepted the second class citizenship that racism has instilled in their minds. Yet when those kids go to their family’s country, they are not viewed as natives say by their cousins. This phenomenon leads us to a sense of rootlessness. A sense of not belonging anywhere. It is often away from France that we realize how French we are.
Living in major black cities in the States such as Atlanta, Chicago, DC, and Baltimore and studying at Howard university, I became deeply concerned by the problems that Blacks faced in this country, and I’ve grown to be interested by identity. I’ve noticed the cultural differences in approach towards race in the many places I’ve lived in and visited from Japan to Brazil. Yet, France and the US are the countries that I have grown to know best, and I thought that it was really interesting to share my views and open a dialogue between people of the African Diaspora of those two countries. I’d like the French Evolution to transcend and to evoke the interest from people outside the diaspora as well. I’ve grown sad to see how systematically institutions are segregated in the US but also increasingly in our World.
I can’t help but notice and revere the fact that music that Black people made have been able to appeal to the whole world because it has evoked feelings that were universal and deeply human. I want the subject matter of my work to generate discussions within the global community as well.