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.
Since the late June events and the killing of 17-year-Old Algerian French Nahel in Nanterre, France is still obsessively trying to assess its mistake.
When it comes to police brutality, the UNCommittee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), made up of 18 independent experts, flagged concerns on racial profiling and the excessive use of force by law enforcement" in France.
Yet the current French government remains stubbornly in denial.
Last Sunday, I was invited to comment on the events, as I live nearby, grew up around in the western suburbs of Paris, and followed the issue of police brutality for a decade, as well as the “quartier”s for over 15 years.
First, here is what I said on Channel 4 News, the British channel:
‘People feel like the police are constantly attacking them’, says French-Algerian journalist Melissa Chemam
They invited me to speak live from the Champs Élysées, where their reporter had been filming some protests the night before.
It was the first time I walked by the famous avenue in years…
I couldn’t help but notice how unaffected central Paris was, and mostly always is, by these issues: poverty, segregation, violence, police brutality. Only the 18th and 19th district, where I lived most of my adult life, bear resemblance with the rest of the problematic suburban areas of big cities, Paris, Lyon, Lille, Marseille…
Later that night, I was invited to speak on the British news radio LBC.
And the next morning, to write a piece for the i newspaper, also British.
Here is the piece:
‘Nothing can change if we’re in denial’: French-Algerian journalist on the riots that have rocked her hometown
Had a wonderful time with artist Hew Locke discussing his art, journey, visions of empire, travels and #multiculturalism… at the Royal Academy of Arts !
Thanks for having us.
Hew Locke in conversation
Wednesday 5 July 2023 6.30 - 7.30pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre | Burlington Gardens or digital livestream
Join artist Hew Locke RA and writer Melissa Chemam for a conversation exploring whether creativity can inspire connection.
This event can be enjoyed in person at the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, or via a digital livestream.
In this talk, artist Hew Locke RA discusses art and connection, inspired by the RA’s Summer Exhibition theme ‘Only Connect’.
Hew Locke produces works that invite us to engage with the past. Chaired by writer Melissa Chemam, this conversation explores the ways in which we re-enact, re-imagine and re-perform history.
Looking to the future, this discussion also focuses on new opportunities for creative connection, and the importance of art in bringing us closer together.
Hew Locke RA spent his formative years in Guyana before returning to the UK to study art, later completing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. His work explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, and how cultures fashion identities through visual symbols of authority. In 2022, Hew was awarded Tate Britain’s Duveen Hall commission (culminating in his work The Procession) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Facade Commission, as well as becoming a Royal Academician. His work is held in numerous collections, including the Government Art Collection, the V&A and the British Museum.
Melissa Chemam is a journalist, broadcaster and writer on art, music, social change, multiculturalism, African affairs, North/South relations, and activism. She is the author of the book Massive Attack - Out of the Comfort Zone (2019), and has been published by BBC Culture, Al Jazeera, RFI English, Art UK, CIRCA Art Magazine, the Public Art Review, the New Arab, The Independent, Reader’s Digest, UP Mag and Skin Deep. She also worked as a journalism lecturer and as the writer in residence at the Arnolfini art centre, in Bristol, from 2019 to 2022.
The event will be accompanied by speech to text transcription courtesy of Stagetext.
Hew Locke will be back at the Academy next year, his work will be part of this great project:
Entangled Pasts, 1768-now
Art, Colonialism and Change
3 February - 28 April 2024
Main Galleries | Burlington House
JMW Turner and Ellen Gallagher. Joshua Reynolds and Yinka Shonibare. John Singleton Copley and Hew Locke. Past and present collide in one powerful exhibition.
Next spring, we bring together over 100 major contemporary and historic works as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism – and how it may help set a course for the future.
Artworks by leading contemporary artists including Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling, John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien will be on display alongside works by artists from the past 250 years including Joshua Reynolds, JMW Turner and John Singleton Copley – creating connections across time which explore questions of power, representation and history.
In the setting of our Main Galleries, experience large-scale works including the life-size painted cut-out figures of Lubaina Himid’s installation Naming the Money, and Hew Locke’s Armada, a flotilla of ‘votive boats’ recalling different periods and places. Plus, powerful paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings and prints by El Anatsui, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander, Mohini Chandra and Betye Saar.
Informed by our ongoing research of the RA and its colonial past, this exhibition engages around 50 artists connected to the RA to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.
This exhibition will contain themes of slavery and racism, and historical racial language and imagery. Please contact us for more information.
Our Friends preview days take place 31 January, 10am–6pm, 1 February, 10am–6pm, and 2 February, 10am–9pm.
Unrest may have ceased in France, but the anger remains. Following seven nights of riots, chaos and looting triggered by a fatal police shooting and its attempted cover-up, the nation is now trying to pick up the pieces. The dust has settled, but discussions about police brutality, systemic racism and social deprivation will remain in the spotlight. The time has come to recognise the urgent need for reform within the French police. But the events also force France to face a harsh reality: in the suburbs, too many feel that the promise of égalité, which lies at the very heart of France's republican mythology, does not apply to them. And that also needs to change.
In other news this week: The Dutch King apologises for slavery, Luxembourg has a new constitution and a British archipelago expresses its desire to secede from the UK and join Norway.
Editor's note Nathan Domon
France ・ Opinion
North African Lives Matter
Melissa Chemam
Calm has come back to France. But it does not mean that the emergency is over. The killing of 17-year-old last week of Nahel Merzouk, a French citizen of Algerian descent, by a police officer in the Paris suburb of Nanterre was caught on camera and posted on social networks. Police initially tried to cover it up, but the video depicting the brutal police response went viral and provoked seven nights of violent clashes between police and residents around housing estates in many working-class suburbs of French towns. Images of the violence made headlines in international media. However, the fact that the French government tries to shift the narrative away from police brutality and constant discrimination against young North African and Black men is the main issue to worry about.
Nahel’s mother and grandmother led a mostly peaceful march last week on Thursday in his memory, calling for calm. They reiterated their demands on the day of the funeral on Saturday. Those who marched share a hope for change, not only in the police force but also within France's impoverished suburbs. I myself currently live a stone's throw away from Nanterre, just as I did during my teenage years. This is the town where I passed my final school exams years ago. As someone who shares the same origins as Nahel, I am deeply saddened by the situation here. The residents not only grapple with social deprivation but also have to deal with an excessively violent police force. As journalists, we have a responsibility to help people understand.
Most of the political elite and privileged classes have no direct insight into the issue at hand, and often remain in denial of the state’s responsibility over the past five decades. In fact, most of central Paris largely remained untouched by the protests and violence. Because the city has been increasingly pushing out its working-class residents, low-income workers and those deemed “undesirable” – as the far right in France openly calls them.
Nanterre, Clichy-sous-Bois, Beaumont-sur-Oise, Aulnay-sous-Bois, and so many more have all seen young North African, Caribbean or African young men killed by the police. Few officers have ever been tried or condemned for such crimes. While French media focus on the aftermath of the riots, the real issue is that the French police force, unlike any other police force across Europe, is at war with the youth living in the banlieues. Harassment and discrimination have been repeatedly condemned by a multitude of observers, including organisations like Human Rights Watch and the United Nations.
I do feel that Nahel is our George Floyd. As James Baldwin often said, the Algerians have always been deemed undesirables in France since their land was colonised in 1830. France needs its #NorthAfricanLivesMatter movement. The marches in Nanterre and elsewhere will not be the last, nor were they the first. As early as 1983, people of North African and African descent walked across France to denounce discrimination, poverty, and blatant racism, especially from the police. This event, known as "La Marche des Beurs" (slang for French Arabs), will be commemorated for its 40th anniversary later this year… What a sad celebration.
The marches, like the protests, are only signs of the need for real change in the police and the respect of basic human rights.
Image above: The Pink Waterfall (detail), 2019–2023
Chris Ofili: The Seven Deadly Sins
Exhibition 2 June–29 July 2023
Victoria Miro - London Tuesday–Saturday: 10am–6pm Special opening for London Gallery Weekend: Sunday 4 June: 10am–5pm 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW
The Seven Deadly Sins is a major new series of paintings by Chris Ofili. Completed over the past six years, the works offer an expansive meditation on sin and the complex experience of sinfulness.
In this series of works, Chris Ofili contemplates the seven deadly sins – a subject with Biblical origins that bears fundamentally on the human condition and human behaviour.
Accompanying the exhibition is a new publication: Ofili invited seven writers – Hilton Als, Inua Ellams, Marlon James, Anthony Joseph, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Attillah Springer and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye – to contribute new writing. Like Ofili’s paintings, their poems and narratives are not confined to illustrating single sins but meditate, personally and expansively, on the seven deadly sins.
Excerpts from the book feature below, along with commentaries about the paintings on view.
The artist, raised as a Roman Catholic, had long wanted to work through the themes and associations – personal and broad-ranging – that gather around sin. Aware that this significant project would require the devotion of a substantial and unbroken period of time, he couldn’t have foreseen that it would be the long intervals of enforced isolation accompanying the onset of the Covid pandemic which would occasion heightened reflection and introspection. Ofili has said of the resulting series of seven works, ‘It felt like the right subject: for the time and for these times.’
The artist intended each painting not to cleave to a particular sin, but to encompass a spectrum of excessive and transgressive behaviours. For Ofili, ‘There are seven days; each day is made of the same elements – the same hours – but each day turns out differently. Each work takes a slightly different approach, and one sin might become more dominant.’
Moving through dreamlike realms at once paradisiacal, other-worldly and cosmic, these works depict scenes where humans and mythological creatures co-exist. The natural world is fecund and mysterious in this territory of sinfulness, a place where magnetic forces of attraction and repulsion hold sway. It seems born of a liminal, trance-like state, perhaps between wake and sleep, when strange visions swim up into the mind’s eye from a creative, playful place in the unconscious that has little to do with the strictures of rationality.
If these paintings symbolise the mind’s innermost workings, then sin is almost a generating principle, catalysing internal dynamics of self-interrogation and self-knowledge. Although they are not simply autobiographical, Ofili found that their subject matter resonated with his formative religious education, and the impact on his psyche of ideas of right and wrong, guilt, innocence and confession. Here, sin and reflection go hand in hand: ‘I think the works are more about the inner feelings one has about the sin – not necessarily only in the moment of committal – than about what happens afterwards, or the idea of judgement.’
In these works the artist’s interrogations move beyond the straightforward dichotomies of good or bad, before and after; moral and temporal simultaneity are inextricably linked. Characters and events are suspended in a state of growth or motion as the artist seeks to expand the threshold of the moment – discrete instants becoming broad planes which can be inhabited and explored. As Ofili notes, ‘Time can be conceptualised as a sweeping hand, rather than a ticking hand – I’m trying to find a sweep of time, rather than the mechanical units of time.’
Also on view is Ofili’s Pink Daydreams of a Faun, a series of ten prints on unique Suminagashi paintings, inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s Symbolist poem L’Après-midi d’un faune, and printed and published in 29 suites by Two Palms, New York. Alongside the suite on view is a new book published by Victoria Miro, which includes Mallarmé’s poem and an essay by Minna Moore Ede, who traces its legacy across works by Debussy, Manet, Nijinsky and others, and considers its influence as a generative impulse in Ofili’s work.
‘I think the works are more about the inner feelings one has about the sin – not necessarily only in the moment of committal – than about what happens afterwards, or the idea of judgement.’ — Chris Ofili
‘Nothing can change if we’re in denial’: French-Algerian journalist on the riots that have rocked her hometown
What could be a game-changer now is a public trial, writes Melissa Chemam
Demonstrators run as French police officers use tear gas in Paris on Sunday, on the fifth day of riots after a 17-year-old was killed by police in Nanterre, a western suburb of Paris (Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP)
PARIS – Nahel Merzouk, 17, was shot dead by police in broad daylight in Nanterre, just minutes away from where I live and where I grew up, west of Paris.
After years reporting abroad, I moved back to France and recently resettled in Colombes, just beside Nanterre. It is a very multicultural area, where my parents settled after we left the city, already becoming too expensive for a family of immigrants. My father had arrived from Kabylia, northern Algeria, in the early 50s, my mother from Algiers, the capital, in 1979.
At the exact moment that Nahel – who was of Algerian and Moroccan heritage – was being pulled over by the police, I was unknowingly passing nearby to go to work in another part of Paris’s outskirts.
In the days that followed, all night I could hear the sound of fireworks, police cars and helicopters.
Glued to the news, I also received reports from friends from all over the country of protests and looting in Pantin in northeast Paris, Marseille and other towns.
Buses and tramway carriages were set on fire. Shops were attacked and looted. The supermarket where my mother shops was smashed to pieces.
Local authorities decided to close some public transport in the evening, buses and trams, creating more panic in areas already deprived of connections.
In my town, Colombes, a curfew was put in place on Saturday for three days.
But our residential neighbourhoods remain liveable. In fact, in central Paris, it mostly felt like nothing had happened.
The images of the violence were however all over the news, and every radio and television programme. Just like in 2005, when similar events occurred, the media of the whole world headlined: “Paris is burning”.
Yet, if French media focus on the anger and the violence, the real issue is that French police, unlike any other force in Europe, are at war with the youth of the “quartiers”. Harassment and discrimination have been denounced for years by many observers, including Human Rights Watch and the United Nations.
Firefighters in Lille at the scene of a vehicle burned by demonstrators to protest the death of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, who was shot in the chest by police on 27 June (Photo: Hadi Mehraeen/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
This goes way back. The first year I worked as a young journalist in Paris, 2005, ended with similar tragic events, in Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris. Two young boys, Zyed and Bouna, died because they hid from the police.
Their deaths triggered some of the biggest protests French suburbs had seen, followed by looting and violence in most similarly deprived areas, where immigrants and France’s poorest have been living since the late 60s.
The protests stayed with me. Ever since and over the years, I have always tried to cover the outskirts of Paris outside of such horrific moments, to understand the roots of it, and to bring a more positive look at these areas as well.
I hoped that the events of 2005 would not repeat. But indeed, I knew the circumstances had not changed. They had, on the contrary, worsened.
In 2016, the killing of Adama Traoré, 24, of Malian origins, on his birthday in mid-July, inflamed France again. This led to a proper French “Black Lives Matter” movement.
Many occurred in between, all over France. Long before these tragic deaths, in October 1983, people of North African and African descent had walked all over France to denounce discrimination, poverty and blatant racism, especially from the police. The event was baptised “La Marche des Beurs“, beurs meaning French Arabs in French verlan slang.
So, has nothing improved? Have none of the promises been kept? The main problem, I believe, is that none of these leaders ever admitted that the police are part of the problem.
The poorest French neighbourhoods are abandoned, and the police, a public institution supposed to keep the peace even if not more in such areas, only put fuel to the fire.
The difference is that, this time, the killing was filmed. This moment of excessive police response and violence was recorded. The video, posted on social networks, went viral and led to protests in many working-class neighbourhoods. Some turned more violent.
As the calm seems to return, important questions must be raised. Nahel’s family led a march on Thursday in his memory, calling for change in the police, and in the victimised suburban areas. His mother called for the looting and violence to end.
What could be a game-changer now is a public trial, forcing the French police to look at itself and for once actually acknowledge the discrimination, the bullying, the racism. For nothing can change at a stage of denial.
