Local thinkers | Philippe Néméh-Nombré: utopia after all

The intellectual geography of Quebec is being redefined. In this series, our collaborator Jérémie McEwen introduces us to essayists who think about the contemporary world.

There are militant thinkers, real ones. Writers who don’t seem to spare themselves on any front, for whom everything is possible from the point of view of the will, despite a certain honest pessimism of the intellect. Thinkers such as we imagine them before we even started to think.

Philippe Néméh-Nombré struggles with every breath, whether in a simple tweet or in an essay for the general public, in a university colloquium or a casual conversation. To change the world. I also joined him in Berlin, to discuss his first book, Sixteen black times to learn how to say kuei.

That those who like to take on the left woke read it. They will clearly see what this assumed utopianism is, which likes to melt struggles into a clear anti-capitalism: we come across black, indigenous struggles, and also queer, in a literary musicality inspired by hip-hop. “Sixteen times”, transposed to the rap medium, it’s called 16 bars, 16 measures of four beats which form the basic couplet of a classic rhyme. And closing the book, I said to myself: I can’t wait for the following verses, while the chorus is already showing up.

I’ve been that thinker for some time, ever since his quickly classic essay, “Hip-Hop With White Gloves,” which appeared in the magazine Freedom in 2018, where he criticized a certain recovery of rap in Quebec, in a disproportionate emphasis on white rappers in the media and in the industry.

Following this article, which is relatively rare for such a text in such a journal, Philippe Néméh-Nombré was invited everywhere to talk about the problem. It was the right text at the right time, while Quebec’s coverage of hip-hop in the media and the most foamy label releases were questioning themselves. His voice quickly became essential, an academic voice that descended from its high, partitioned places to chatter on the radio, in the newspapers. His voice, in a word, did a lot of good.

But now hip-hop is not the heart of his career as a thinker. He is more broadly interested in black studies, digging “like a pirate” right and left in intellectual traditions – American, Canadian, European, African and Caribbean. It is important to emphasize this, since he himself recognizes that often, in this type of study, we remain very attached to the American literary tradition. I was therefore surprised to see him cite, in barely 100 pages, the names of Melissa Mollen Dupuis, Jacques Derrida, Lil Wayne and Walter Benjamin. Picking it up everywhere like that, “that’s what everyone does anyway, but I don’t hide it”.

We discussed the place of violence, in Benjamin, who describes it skillfully in his classic Criticism of violence as something that founds and perpetuates institutions. A violence linked to conservatism, therefore, and I mentioned my concerns vis-à-vis this idea, since it makes any violence other than institutional violence impossible. As if the contestation of the order in place was only a desire to take the place of the king in order to become king oneself.

Walking on eggshells, Néméh-Nombré evoked a broadening of the notion of violence outside this conceptual prism, as sometimes symbolic and necessary, to tackle traditional conservative violence, which he sees as attached to patriarchy and capitalism. .

Because with this thinker, there is no doubt that the anti-racist struggle is inseparable from the anti-capitalist struggle. Wanting a left that is only economic would then be absurd: it would be “renouncing complexity”, since economic domination generally, if not always, goes hand in hand with discrimination linked to identity.

Whether we follow him or not, the man has the merit of being clear.

One point in particular bothered me in his book. We read there that on the slave ships, a sexuality queer little known to the general public was able to see the light of day, even in the bottom of the holds. I had never thought of this link, it frankly fed my mind. But a few pages later, the author somehow makes the equation between colonialism and heteronormativity, and I was less certain to follow. Aren’t there also marginal sexualities among the settlers? And in the Western tradition of the whitest, a whole literature of the sexual margin?

Yes, he admitted on the phone. But in its populating principle, control of the female body and mass birthing are the norm, he reminded me. And then I thought of this painting by Cynthia Girard-Renard that I saw recently, at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, which caricaturally and crudely depicts the reality of the King’s Daughters: settlers with impatient phalluses waiting for prostitutes going up the St. Lawrence River.

The most delicious moments of this essay are those where the author narrates, performs his origins, updating ancestral knowledge. The protective crocodile of his ancestors will long be remembered by readers. The key to this book is moreover this idea of ​​the performance of the origins, a performance that one would be wrong to call “mythological” since it surreptitiously assigns and hierarchizes. Let’s talk instead about musical narrativity of resistance, through which Aboriginals and Blacks can unite their decolonial forces, and through which this new author carves out his own place in the intellectual geography of Quebec.

Sixteen black times to learn how to say kuei

Philippe Nemeh-Nombre

inkwell memory

120 pages