Journalist at RFI (ex-DW, BBC, CBC, F24...), writer (on art, music, culture...), I work in radio, podcasting, online, on films.
As a writer, I also contributed to the New Arab, Art UK, Byline Times, the i Paper...
Born in Paris, I was based in Prague, Miami, London, Nairobi (covering East Africa), Bangui, and in Bristol, UK. I also reported from Italy, Germany, Haiti, Tunisia, Liberia, Senegal, India, Mexico, Iraq, South Africa...
This blog is to share my work, news and cultural discoveries.
This event is finally cancelled by the organisers... Sorry.
Maybe another will take over...
-
Hello everyone,
just a head's up as England is slowing reopening this month. I'll be part of this online event in a few days, organised by the People's Republic of Stokes Croft here in Bristol:
Discussion - Influencers: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
A round table discussion on how influencers influence our culture – looking at the pros & cons of a world in which social and cultural influence is formalised and commercialised.
With your phone in your hand you can browse Instagram and other social media and see people like you living a life that may come with the hashtag #ad or #gifted. What is this world? Where did it come from and where is it going?
This open debate will feature influencers, psychologists and others and presents a chance to look at what is working, who it’s working for, and where we all might be heading.
We’ve all had a chance to live in a different world for a year now so let’s debate what we now see and feel about social media influence and influencers, their role going forward, and changes we can see or feel coming down the pipe to a bubble near you.
The discussion will be hosted by photographer and influencer Colin Moody and topics covered will include:
1 – Mental Health
2 – Tiers of Influence (the likes heirarchy)
3 – Social Bubbles (who ar we talking to?)
4 – True Voice vs Sponsored Content (and when the line blurs)
5 – Culture vs PR
The Panel:
Colin Moody – Street photographer, community activist and influencer
Alan Bec – psychologist, cultural commentator, mentor and business owner
Charlie Harding – Social media manager and former food blogger
Melissa Chemam – Writer and freelance journalist
“From a social psychological perspective, there are three elements to being influenced and being influential – Authority, Power & Control. Grasping the significance of these elements as behaviours can and will change your world. I can’t wait to refer to these as a structure throughout our round table discussion, so you can know when you are being influenced and enact your influence for social good”. Alan Bec of Balance Consulting Bristol.
This will be a zoom event, but if we are allowed into the venue we will invite a live audience to enjoy the debate together (all covid guidelines will be followed).
Tickets available now from Headfirst. The suggested donation of £4 will help us keep the School of Activism as accessible & low-cost as possible, £8 will subsidise a ticket for someone else – but no-one turned away through lack of funds!
This event is part of the School of Activism 2.0, a two week programme of workshops, talks and activities brought to you by Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft over the Easter holidays. The workshops are intended to be empowering experiences equipping people with the tools to challenge the status quo, contest power structures and ultimately to change the world.
Let's talk about protests as this week comes to an end...
As an independent writer, journalist, broadcaster, since 2015 I've been writing and reporting extensively about Bristol's tradition of protests and activism. First as a foreign journalist, in French and English for French, German, Canadian and American media, such as Radio France Internationale, France24, the Public Art Review, Nouveau Projet, Socialter and Deutsche Welle.
I've documented past event through interviews with local historians, artists and activists, including Robert Del Naja from Massive Attack, graffiti artist Inkie, Dr Edson Burton, Councillor Cleo Lake, Dr Shawn Sobers and many more, notably for my book about Bristol's music, art and activism.
I'm currently conducting more research on the media coverage of protests, from the 1960s to our days, with a strong focus on the 1980s, the mid-2000s, the 2011 protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the events of the past 12 months. In the UK but also France and the USA.
I recently wrote about the toppling of the Colston Statue, the Anti-racist protests in Bristol and education, the Students' Rent Strike, NHS workers' demands for pay rise and other issues.
After following the recent protests here in the city, discussing them with protests, other news producers, activists and students involved in the movement, and while reading reading multiple reports, it remains quite clear that these few days' protests in Bristol have been mostly peaceful.
But did the media coverage reflect that fact? Online media have largely displayed photos of police vans in flames and used headlines such as 'Bristol Burns', instead of detailing the facts.
Yet the public shouldn't have to look too much into the sensationalist images from - mostly - freelance photographers enamoured with the glamour of close shots on 20-max rioters at night. And the media should be more careful about clickbait posts and zoom-in, as they focus mostly on fire and brutality.
The consequences of such coverage is an increasing discredit of these legitimate protests against a bill attacking our rights... to defend our rights.
Representation of the protests matters. And especially in such case that concern all of us.
I've been lecturing a class on the matter of visual journalism and representation to students since December 2019, at the University of the West of England.
In this case, the protests against the "Police and Crime Sentences" Bill are legitimate and will go on.
More protests took place on Friday 26 March, again, peacefully. But the media has betrayed part of the reality, even local media here in Bristol.
This should be corrected and serve as a lesson in good journalism.
Another issue that shouldn't be forgotten or overlooked is: Safety for women, which sparks this affair... Where is the coverage about that matter?
Bristol has a long history of protesting for the good of us all and that shouldn't be undermined by a few extremists or the police's response. I've lengthily detailed part of that history in my book, such as the Old Market Riots, the Bristol Bus Boycott in 1963, and St Paul's Uprising in 1980 and 1986.
But what is a book compared to free online content in these days?
In my exchanges with fellow Bristolians, filmmaker friends, news producers, broadcast journalism students and podcasters, this worry hasn't faded away for now.
So I hope a few more days of reflection, as the protests grow and rally more supports, will resonate further from here.
I hope this email finds you all well, and ready for better days!
All over Europe, we can feel that spring is almost here and I hope it is as inspiring where you are as where I find myself, back in Bristol, after a couple of weeks in Paris...
Here are the newest links to my writing and collaborations, which I thought might interest you.
Remember that all of my articles and productions are free to read / listen to. My goal is mostly to spread and share ideas.
More focus on the role of the media this season and on post-colonial / multicultural cultures and ideas.
TMR - Issue 7 !
The Markaz Review is busy working on its 8th issue! After six months of existence.
There are also contributions on endangered literacy (Marcus Gilroy-Ware), natural-born liars (Preeta Samarasan), and the truth about Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, where assassinations of journalists are the new form of national censorship.
Next: All Eyes on Marseille! And especially its Music Scene through 30 years of hip hop... Out mid-April.
-
Music/Book: Bristol & Massive Attack - 30 years of Blues Lines
Speaking of music... In the very same timeframe, the Bristol Sound is also reaching a milestone: MAssive Attack's first album, 'Blue Lines' was released 30 years ago in April 1991...
More on 'Unfinished Sympathy', 'Blue Lines' and 'Daydreaming' in my article in the Reader's Digest.
For the 'Francophones', here I am on France Inter discussing more in Pop'n'Co with Rebecca Manzoni: Pop N Co for more than half an hour !
And there'll still be more to say...
-
Film: 'Exterminate All the Brutes' - Docu series on HBO
Meanwhile, a project I worked on for years is about to come out on television! First in the US, then in the UK and in Europe.
PREMIERES APRIL 7, AT 9PM ET, ON HBO
Exterminate All the Brutes, by acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, HBO’s Sometimes in April), is a four-part hybrid docuseries offering an expansive exploration of the exploitative and genocidal aspects of European colonialism, from America to Africa, and its impact on society today.
Based on works by three authors and scholars — Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past— Exterminate All the Brutes revisits and reframes the profound impact of the Native American genocide and American slavery as it fundamentally informs the present.
I was the main researcher on this project, from 2017 to 2019, and orientated the project on its American angle.
I'd love to organise a screening/talk/debate in Bristol to discuss some of these ideas. Three years ago, a debate was organised at the Watershed around I Am Not Your Negro and I literally forced Raoul Peck to come!
Do get in touch if you feel you'd come and see the film, online or maybe in a cinema later in the spring... when they reopen.
-
Arnolfini Art Book > Release postponed to September 2021
We're waiting for the coming reopening of Arnolfini's Archives in Bristol to perfect the visuals.
And by waiting for September we have a chance of organising a real event in the art centre's auditorium.
Do get in touch if you're interested in my writing, joining efforts for an online talk or event on these issues, or if you want to commission any writing on related topics.
With my very best wishes, and a delightful long-awaited spring!
La scène musicale de Bristol et le groupe Massive Attack
Une plongée dans la scène musicale de Bristol des années 90 et de son groupe phare, Massive Attack, précurseur de la musique trip hop. Avec Melissa Chemam comme guide, autrice de "De Massive Attack à Banksy, l’histoire d’un groupe d’artistes, de leur ville, Bristol, et de leurs révolutions".
Les invités
Mélissa Chemam est journaliste, elle vit à Bristol et a écrit "En dehors de la zone de confort - De Massive Attack à Banksy, l’histoire d’un groupe d’artistes, de leur ville, Bristol, et de leurs révolutions" (Editions Anne Carrière).
Thylacine est musicien et compositeur de musique électronique.
Programmation musicale
One Love - MASSIVE ATTACK
The Look of Love - DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
The Look of Love - THE WILD BUNCH
Unfinished Sympathy - MASSIVE ATTACK
Safe From Harm - MASSIVE ATTACK
Blue Lines - MASSIVE ATTACK
Five Man Army - MASSIVE ATTACK
Karmacoma - MASSIVE ATTACK
Protection - MASSIVE ATTACK
Song 2 - BLUR
Teardrop - MASSIVE ATTACK
Angel - MASSIVE ATTACK
Paradise Circus - MASSIVE ATTACK
La jetée - LAURA CAHEN
Bibliographie
En dehors de la zone de confort - De Massive Attack à Banksy, l’histoire d’un groupe d’artistes, de leur ville, Bristol, et de leurs révolutions de Mélissa Chemam, Editions Anne Carrière, 2016.
Dit le poème, le passé vient plus vite qu'on le pense
À genoux j'implore ciel et mer
Et ce brin de bruyère
Un souvenir pour récompense
Quel est cet endroit, où, dans l'ombre confuse
Les démons et les anges se mélangent
Ah je te rejoins dans cette brume épaisse
Que le tabac, le bon joint, obscurcissent
Alors je pleure ton nom
Oui je pleure ton nom
Un oiseau chante je ne sais où
C'est je crois ton âme qui veille
Les mois, comme toujours, ont passé, les saisons
Mais moi je suis resté le même
Qui attend que revienne le printemps
Qui aime et qui espère
Connaître la fin de l'hiver
Nous ne nous reverrons plus sur Terre
Dit le poème, le passé vient plus vite qu'on le pense
À genoux j'implore ciel et mer
Et ce brin de bruyère
Seul souvenir pour récompense
Ouais, comme Apollinaire
Un souvenir pour récompense
Nous regagnerons la confiance
Nous regagnerons la confiance
Comme une terre ferme
Comme une terre ferme
À jamais
Nous regagnerons la confiance
Nous regagnerons la confiance
Comme une terre ferme
Comme une terre ferme
À jamais
De l'autre côté, de l'autre côté de la mer
Il ne me reste plus rien de toi
Que seule ton absence m'appartient
On s'est laissé à l'orée de ce bois
C'est un joli jardin, je crois
C'est un joli jardin, je crois
C'est un joli jardin, coloré il se voit
L'orée de ce bois, où l'on s'est laissé
Nous ne nous reverrons plus
Nous ne nous reverrons plus
Nous ne nous reverrons plus
Nous ne nous reverrons plus
Que de l'autre côté de la mer
À jamais
Nous ne nous reverrons plus
Nous ne nous reverrons plus
Nous ne nous reverrons plus
Nous ne nous reverrons plus
Que de l'autre côté de la mer
À jamais
Il ne me reste plus rien de toi
Que seule ton absence m'appartient
On s'est laissé à l'orée de ce bois
On s'est laissé là
Le passé qui nous hante est un jardin vivant.
ALBUM - L’OISELEUR :
https://feuchatterton.lnk.to/LOiseleurYD
Ecouter/télécharger le titre ici :
https://FeuChatterton.lnk.to/Souvenir
Réalisation : Antoine Marie
Images : Elisabeth Marie, François Marie & Antoine Marie
Montage : Antoine Marie & Arthur Teboul
Assistant réalisation : Elie Gattegno
Régie, cookies et maquillage : Victoria Werlé
Typographie : Edgard Teboul
What Faiza Guène’s new novel La Discrétion tells us about French Algerians and their perception in the French literary world
La Discrétion, a novel by Faïza Guène Plon 2020 ISBN 9782259282444
Melissa Chemam
Back in 2004, a 19-year-old French novelist of Algerian heritage named Faiza Guène shook the French literary world out of its phlegmatic complacency with Kiff kiff demain (published in the UK as Just Like Tomorrow). A teenager from the disadvantaged suburbs of Paris, Guène’s debut novel, written mostly in French vernacular, went on to sell over 400,000 copies and was eventually translated into 27 languages. At the time, Guène declared her surprise, noting that for her, writing had so far been just a hobby. “There wasn’t really a role model for me…I grew up in a working-class neighborhood. I didn’t imagine I was going to make a career out of it,” she told RFI’s Tirthankar Chanda.
I must say that I feel very grateful to Faïza Guène. She broke new ground as a young Franco-Algerian woman turned into a booksellers’ sensation with a story about the banlieues. In fairy-tale fashion, this happened just a year before major riots in Paris’s suburbs. Yet Kiff kiff demain was not about life in the troubled or dangerous suburbs, it was about adolescence.
16 years and several books later, the author published her sixth novel in September 2020 in France. This time, in La Discrétion, she writes more intimately, deriving truth from her own family. The main character is Yamina, a 70-year-old mother of four children, living in Aubervilliers with a husband. They wedded 40 years prior, in Algeria, in an arranged marriage. That took her to France, where she had never before set foot. This is a story of migration that is very familiar to North Africans in France—working-class communities in which many factory workers opted in the 1950s and 1960s for an arranged marriage with a younger woman from their homeland, and not a local, French (white) spouse. Yamina, a petite, kind-hearted woman, never had a job but raised their children. She and her husband have a lot in common with Faïza’s parents, born around the same time in the same circumstances and with the same destiny of migration.
The story isn’t so much about life-changing events, or even Algerian independence as it is about the everyday tribulations of a very humble family, in which all members feel at a point or another—and some feel this oppression on a weekly basis—humiliated by their position on the French social ladder, which is often characterized by a kind of invisibility. As the title suggests, this “discretion” starts with themselves, as Yamina chooses to remain discreet when mistreated, even when her doctor hurts her physically, or speaks to her too casually. The novel doesn’t address the issue in depth, but through a few anecdotes we feel that the French system doesn’t give her a chance to speak up for herself.
I started this review by saying I was grateful to the writer because, for once, a book by a well-known bestselling author doesn’t mention the Algerian war only through the eyes of French people, pieds noirs who had to leave their “beautiful Algeria” because of ungrateful locals chasing them away. Writers like Yasmina Khadra and Alice Zeniter have both written fine books about the 1950s in French Algeria, but not through the eyes of local natives who believed in their independence. Here, La Discrétion is divided into two sorts of chapters: the first ones retell the non-eventful, family-oriented life of Yamina and her intimates, with the intention to pay homage to the anonymous in French society and especially stay-at-home mothers in working-class families; and the other chapters dig into Yamina’s memories and past life in Algeria, from the harassment of her family by French soldiers; her birth “in a cry”, as the narrator describes, a metaphor for her future moral strength; her family’s exile in Morocco during the independence war; and her marriage and her move to France, in tears. Yamina’s father was a fellaga, a freedom fighter who battled for his country’s independence from France.
The chapters featuring Yasmina’s memories are the most charming. They describe her difficult but meaningful childhood in Algeria, with her war-traumatized mother and a father she puts on a pedestal for his involvement in the independence movement. Yamina worships the memories of their fig tree back home; all her family responded with courage, even when the women were sent away in exile in Morocco to avoid the war, facing famine. These chapters are also filled with other characters, and not reduced to a narrow sort of unaccomplished sub-life only, as are the chapters set in Aubervilliers and Paris in 2019-2020, which are characterized by a fair amount of repetition.
When dealing with France, the novel follows Yamina’s family, described as people who would only be minor characters with a brief mention in other books, as they are in Leila Slimani’s award-winning novel, Chanson Douce (Lullaby in English), in which the Arabs are only of secondary interest, if that. Here, the main characters are all workers with humble jobs and all Algerians, which is formidably rare. The father, Brahim, was a miner before retiring; the brother, Omar, is an Über driver; one of the sisters, the eldest, Malika, works in the local town hall; the other one, Imane, the youngest, is a saleswoman; and Hannah is… more or less professionally angry for everyone else in this society that appears profoundly discriminatory and sometimes outwardly racist.
None of them ever escapes their milieu. For instance, for years, Omar drives by the luxury hotel Lutetia, but never dares to actually go in until the very end. Most of them feel they don’t belong in nice French places and in most of central Paris.
Fortunately, none behaves in the way that typical suburban stories in French films depict French North Africans, as drug dealers, thieves or thugs (consider La Haine, Les Misérables or even Taxi, set in Marseille). Here, for 250 pages, we observe a loving family, and especially a mother who went through a lot of pain as a child, and whose story will never be heard by her neighbors, her children think, let alone any other French citizen. People making no particular trouble.
It’s a very noble goal, and the book reads extremely easily.
Yet, as a French woman who also grew up in a Parisian suburb, with an Algerian dad who came to work in Paris in a factory in the 1950s, and a mother who married him in the late 1970s, then joined him in France without having ever seen the country previously, I can’t help but feel frustrated at these portraits of lovely people whose main social occupation is to remember the price of every item they ever buy.
Yes, Hannah praises her mother for her strength, and she is angry at racism and humiliation she undergoes, but she doesn’t do anything about it. Actually, none of them ever really tries to change their lives. Malika, the first born, has to endure an arranged marriage just like her mother did, and unfortunately her father chooses really unwisely so she divorces once she discovers her husband had a child with a French lover. Afterwards her father only feels pity for her, sees her as “damaged goods.” She never remarries and none of her sisters even try to. They all seem to have trouble falling in love—they resent French men for not being masculine enough, and Arab men for looking for French trophy wives to reward their self-projected integration, the Holy Grail for an immigrant in France. In that matter, La Discrétion is no feminist novel.
The family’s culture is also limited to a few television programs and the mother’s quotes from her prayers and the Qu’ran. They don’t feel French and don’t even try to be French, spending all their summer vacations in Algeria with their mother’s family, except the last one, in 2020, when they discover the Poitou-Charente region.
The depiction of these first-generation French Algerians wants to be loving and accepting, but it risks being alienating by virtue of the sum of its clichés on Muslims and their cultural desert, naming more supermarkets, brands and suburban malls than a Simpsons episode ever could. Something in me is really saddened by the fact that French immigrants can only represent themselves as humiliated, not fitting in, feeling half the time like failures or looking a bit like caricatures, wearing burkinis and eating cheap halal Chinese food. It’s not Faïza Guène’s fault, of course; it’s mostly because France has so few Muslim or Arab writers, the most successful and known being Nina Bouraoui (whose mother is Algerian), Rachid Djaïdani and Sabri Louatah (author of the brilliant novels Les Sauvages or Savages in English and 404).
(We should note that Kaouther Adimi writes in French but she is Algerian, like Yasmina Kadra; she was born in Algeria, spent a few years in France as a child, but studied in Algeria and was living in Algeria until 2009.)
Faïza Guène is calling for more acceptance, through the eyes of her female characters especially, in a France that is every day nearly as racist as it was in the 1950s, considering that the Macron administration is openly discussing the arrest of so-called Muslim “separatists”. And she mentions in passing that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Charlie Hebdo only made the country more Islamophobic.
The French literati has mostly praised La Discrétion, while they came down hard on her first novel, often not taken seriously because of its heavy use of slang and humor.
Unfortunately for now, unlike the likes of Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, whose novels have become more broadly universal both in the UK and within the Anglophone literary world, France’s generation of Arab/Muslim novelists mostly represents members of ethnic minorities as lonely outcasts, with no sense of belonging or desire to fight for greater inclusion. Too often, their stories end with some version of failure and tristesse. This may be a reflection of the state of French diversity, or lack thereof. For now, with her novels, Faïza Guène doesn’t really celebrate the empowerment of first-gen French citizens of immigrant heritage; she puts them on the radar and describes their isolation well, but doesn’t embody a bold and proud appearance into the French cultural landscape. But she definitely stands as a rare and important French-Algerian female voice.
According to Faïza Guène’s English translator, Sarah Ardizzone, Discretion will be published in early summer 2022, while her novel Men Don’t Cry (Un Homme ça ne Pleure Pas) will be published by Cassava Republic in July 2021.
Melissa Chemam is a writer, broadcaster, cultural journalist and author. She has been based in the USA, France, the UK and East Africa (for the BBC World Service, AFP, Reuters, CBC, DW, RFI, etc), also traveling to North Africa, the Middle East and the Caucasus regularly. She works mainly on multiculturalism, post-colonial issues, East-West and North-South relations, and is an associate lecturer at the University of the West of England in journalism. She is a TMR contributing editor.
