TOO BLACK TO BE FRENCH ***sold***
Isabelle Boni-Claverie
(Editions Tallandier, 347 pages, 2017)
***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE***
***RECIPIENT OF THE 2019 FRENCH VOICES GRAND PRIZE***
Boni-Claverie’s memoir explores the time-tested bonds of love and the toxic persistence of racism in modern-day France. Her singular account interweaves the extraordinary life experiences of three generations of her Francophone family: her grandfather from Ivory Coast, who married a middle-class white Frenchwoman from small-town Gaillac in the 1930s; her mixed-race mother; her white upper-class adoptive father; as well as her own life as a successful Parisian film director and writer confronted with abiding racial stereotypes and discrimination.
Written with humor and aplomb, her narrative examines the enduring effects of France’s colonial past and the deep-seated structural prejudices affecting Black people in a country that American readers often associate solely with its hospitality toward African-Americans fleeing segregation. Updating this picture to reveal the less well-known complexities and challenges of being Black in France, where one is often loath to address issues of race and racism, Boni-Claverie offers rare insights into the differences and similarities between racial dynamics in her own country and the United States.
Like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, but from the unique perspective of a Black Frenchwoman, Too Black to be French is at once a sociological portrait of France, a multicultural family album, and a transatlantic coming-of-age story. It will undoubtedly appeal to readers eager for a passionate, fresh voice devoted to better understanding the challenges facing our multiracial societies.
Isabelle Boni-Claverie is a French author, screenwriter, and film director born in Ivory Coast. Too Black to be French is an adaptation of her documentary on how France’s colonial past is affecting French society today. Since 2016, Boni-Claverie has been writing a column on the French site of the Huffington Post.