This is how the tarama en l'étalant sur un pain Italy vieux de plusieurs jours. At a moment, I am dead on a tranche with a tache ovale and black. J'ai quand même tartiné.
Ce jour-là, à la télé, a chain that je ne regardais jamais rediffusait ses émissions de la semaine. Depuis quelques années, on en parlait tellement dans les médias que j'ai décidé de prendre mon repas devant l'une de ces émissions.
On the plateau télé, two histories are revealed en longueur on the history of Joan of Arc. Elle n'avait jamais emmené paître les moutons comme le montrait le tableau qui défilait à l'écran, mais elle était une fille de laboreur, ce qui n'était pas tout à fait la même chose. Elle is available in a very beautiful piece, which is based on the origin of mysticism that infuses the suite in the elle. Les Anglais occupaient a bonne partie de la France actualuelle, les Bourguignons aussi, et "les vrais Français", les duchés, de mémoire, avaient du mal à accorder leurs violons pour faire front contre l'ennemi qui les dévorait petit à petit. S'ensuivaient les différents tests que Jeanne d'Arc avait passés pour obtenir sa légitimité: passage devant un curé exorciste, déjouer le subterfuge du dauphin qui s'était caché dans la foule et qui avait placé sur son trône un de ses courtisans. Mais cela n'avait pas dupé Joan of Arc.
Je savais que Jeanne d'Arc était un morceau de l'histoire de France confisqué intellectuellement par le FN. I revoyais in the many images of Jean-Marie Le Pen implorer Jeanne d'Arc les mains au ciel quand il avait considéré être trahi par sa propre fille.
The mission for me is also instructive, to look at the success of the plan of the camera and to create a troubling impression that it works in the same way as the theater scene that appears on the train on the plateau: two histories plus or many vieillissants, or alors juste des chroniqueurs férus d'histoire, faisaient the leçon à une presentatrice à la peau black qui écoutait sans broncher.
Ceux du plateau télé, les deux bavards donneurs de leçons et la presentatrice, faisaient peut-être cela innocemment. Mais pour le téléspectateur, cela ne faisait aucun doute qu'une telle scène flattait le Blanc moyen, qui voyait preuve à l'appui this ravissante femme noire se faire instruire docilement de l'histoire de France.
Source était l'intention des creators de this émission ? Acceptait-on plus facilement the color black si c'était celle d'une belle femme?
J'avais déjà vu this present sur un plateau télé revenir sur son passé d'enfant maltraitée, et, sans faire de grande psychology, je me disais en la voyant qu'elle était dans un beau traquenard, ici, sur this chaîne, et que lorsqu'on avait This victim is the difficult thing to sort.
I imagine myself bien debating the plateau with all the gugusses. Demand that this woman give the parole and force her hommes, whites, with her... Toutefois, faire ça, c'était encore la forcer, elle, à s'opposer, la contraindre et la déplacer comme un pion. Ça devenait a casse-tête infernal.
Je finissais désormais a fromage mou et malodorant sur le reste de pain italien. Je ne retiens pas facilement les noms des fromages. Lorsque je les ai en main, l'envie de bouffer écrase l'envie d'apprendre. Ça a sonné à la porte. J'ai change de chaine avant d'aller ouvrir. Isabelle passait à l'improviste.
Franck Mignot Softness (POL, 2023).
I ate the tarama by spreading it on a slice of Italian bread that was several days old. At one point, I came across a slice with an oval, black spot. I spread it on anyway.
That day, a television channel I never usually watch was showing reruns of the week's programs. There had been so much media coverage of them in recent years that I decided to have my snack before one of these broadcasts.
On the television stage sat two historians who were discussing the story of Joan of Arc in detail. She had never tended sheep in a field, as the image on the monitor suggested, but was the daughter of a farm laborer, which was not quite the same thing. She had a very devout mother who seemed to lay the foundation for the mysticism that later influenced her. The English occupied a large part of what is now France, as did the Burgundians, and "the real French," the duchies, as I recall, were having difficulty raising their voices against the enemy who was gradually swallowing them up. Then followed the various trials that Joan of Arc had passed to prove her legitimacy: an appearance before an exorcist priest, the thwarting of the Dauphin's attempts to deceive him by hiding in the crowd and placing one of his courtiers on his throne. But none of this had deceived Joan of Arc.
I knew that Joan of Arc was a piece of French history that had been intellectually appropriated by the National Front. In my mind, I saw old images of Jean-Marie Le Pen, his hands raised in supplication to Joan of Arc, feeling betrayed by his own daughter.
The program seemed educational to me, but when I looked at the sequence of camera shots, I had the disturbing impression that what was happening on stage worked primarily as a theatrical scene: Two more or less older historians, or perhaps just history-enthusiastic columnists, were giving a lecture to a dark-skinned presenter, who listened without any visible reaction.
Those on the television stage—the two lecturing windbags and the presenter—may have done so innocently. For the television viewer, however, there was no doubt that such a scene flattered the average white person, who got to see the pretty black woman being lectured on French history.
What was the intention of the program's producers? Was the color black more readily accepted if it was the skin color of a beautiful woman?
I had seen this presenter before on a television stage, talking about her past as an abused child, and without resorting to much psychology, I thought, seeing her, that she had fallen into quite a trap here on this channel and that it would be difficult to get out of such a situation once you had been her victim.
I could easily imagine myself on that stage, debating with all those figures. Asking this woman to speak for herself, and thus forcing these—white—men to listen to her… But doing that would still mean forcing her to resist, coercing her, and moving her around like a chess piece. It became a hellish puzzle.
I then ate a soft, foul-smelling cheese on the rest of the Italian bread. I don't remember the names of cheeses very easily. When I have them in my hand, the urge to eat overrides the desire to know.
The doorbell rang. I switched channels before opening the door. Isabelle unexpectedly dropped by. 1
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- “A man, the narrator, accompanies his children to the beach, sympathizes with them after school, with his new neighbors, and seems to be absorbed into the everyday life and banality of family and social interaction. The art of this debut novel, however, lies in making audible the cracks or dissonances at the heart of this simplicity: ‘I no longer supervised my children. I, who had always done so conscientiously, let them wander, and in the end, it wasn’t so bad after all.’ Franck Mignot’s world consists of these few lines, of this ‘it wasn’t as bad as it was,’ an understatement that foreshadows the worst. This first novel becomes a novel about lies in life, in relationships. It describes the fascination with material life, with its bleak precision and the disorder it creates. Franck Mignot lends a dizzying dimension to the everyday, the banality that unites a woman and a man.” He writes of silence, not the silence of serenity, but the silence of incomprehension and of social, intimate, and sexual unease. His sentences may seem harmless and insignificant, but through a single word, they foreshadow the impending catastrophe: abandonment, betrayal, cowardice, and loneliness. When discussion is no longer possible, what can a character do, faced with others who remain silent? Accept the emptiness and the silence, or else cease to be rational. The scene is built up in just a few pages by revealing as little as possible about the places and the characters. A detail, a gesture, a word. The narrative progresses step by step until the catastrophe that no one saw coming and that, likewise, suddenly seems to belong to this flat and silent life. (Translation of the publisher's announcement)>>>
