“You wake up one morning, you are black. Not in a rapid or gradual metamorphosis, but just like that, overnight. We are not at Kafka’s, let us be reassured, and this transformation is one of those which is not the most visible.
dark thoughts, the second novel by Laure Gouraige, an author born in Paris in 1988, is undoubtedly one of the most astonishing of this beginning of the year. He takes head on, with a delicate, flowing irony, a quest for identity as real as it is unexpected.
For the narrator, she comes in favor of a phone call from a journalist asking her to testify to the anti-black racism of which she may have been a victim. “Black, me? “Amazed this Parisian with” reasoned alcoholism “, translator of German in the early thirties, who had always thought not to be more white than black. Without warning, it is the train of identity (“A dung nest.”) which catches up with her and passes over her body.
“You were nobody the day before, now you are black,” thinks the young woman, panicked, born to a white and French mother and a father from Haiti. A country where she has never set foot, a “half island” of which the young woman knows almost nothing, while carrying the burden and the shame of her own ignorance.
From discomfort to misunderstanding, we follow her through the winding journey of her awareness, which will lead her to Miami, where a large part of her father’s family resides, for the time of a wedding. In this family, hers, under the Miami sun, we know her and we recognize her for what she really is: a young woman who is passionate about “films in the worst taste” (of the Godzilla), much more than for its “hesitant darkness”.
Arrested by two police officers for speeding, she will be confronted with pragmatism made in USAbeing forced to tick “Other” on a form that asks her what race she belongs to.
We also accompany him on a whirlwind and unbridled trip – but also highly secure – to Port-au-Prince, the time to see that there is nothing left of his grandmother’s little house, destroyed by the earthquake. land of 2010.
Between stupor and light disbelief, the tone of the novel intrigues and defuses at the same time. The second person plural, which could quickly irritate, on the contrary comes to mark the distance and the strangeness that invite themselves in this narrator whom we take for someone else – another that she will perhaps become. , in his way.
Forced to choose her side by events, police violence or administrative assignments, she will feel the urgency of filling a void which, in reality, has obsessed her for a long time.
“It’s a cumbersome object, identity,” says the narrator somewhere. It’s not always funny that you are sometimes put in your arms without being asked or without knowing what to do with it. And if Laure Gouraige addresses in dark ideas the identity questions that cross our time, it is as intelligent as it is subtle that she does it.