As a child, Phara Thibault would have liked to get rid of his skin. Every night, she prayed for her greatest wish to come true: to become white. Today, she is proud to be black. And it’s a big win.
It is this difficult relationship with herself that the young 22-year-old playwright recounts in the play Chocolate, which is shown at La Licorne, and where she plays herself. It is moreover at La Licorne that she receives us, her magnificent black skin draped in an elegant pink dress.
This piece, she believes she started writing it in her head at the age of two and a half. When she left her native Haiti through international adoption, to land with a family in the small village of Sainte-Germaine-du-Lac-Etchemin, in Beauce. “It was from the moment I arrived here, in the snow”, that the piece began to be written, she says. “The text had been in my head for years, and when I decided to write it, it all came out in a few hours. »
The hurt of difference
The initial wound is that of adoption. Then was added that of the persistent and terrible impression of being different, alone, in a village where there is no other person of color but her. It could only be an accident. Like having fallen into chocolate, as his mother said to him “adopt-heart” while joking.
“It’s the fault of the love jokes of my adoptive mother too, who wanted to make me laugh. “Do you know why black people’s noses are crushed? It’s because the women in your country are poor and they give birth standing up. You fell face first to the ground, that’s why your nose is crushed,’” she wrote.
For the little girl that she was, in this universe where everything was white as snow, joke or not, it was the only explanation available. An impossible explanation.
So little Phara began frantically looking for her biological mother. Grown up, she tirelessly consults her adoption file, sends signals, stretches poles. Original name: Phara Desroches. Father’s name: Brulant Desroches. Born in Petit-Goâve. Has four or five brothers and sisters. The play, an autobiographical monologue that begins in a psychologist’s office, will tell the rest.
In the adoption process, we talk a lot about the affect of the parents, but not enough about that of the child, she remarks in an interview. Of Haiti, where she has never returned, she has some vague memories. She knows she learned a few words of Creole before forgetting everything in favor of French.
Phara Thibault first wrote this play for herself, before sending it to a playwriting competition for the L’Égrégore prize, which she unexpectedly won. But it was probably the fact of having her adoptive parents read it that was the most decisive.
A long way to go
“I said to myself: make it or break it,” she says, adding that she feared having to break up with her adoptive family to be able to shout her truth. “I told them, ‘you were racist towards me,'” she said. Not from hateful racism, but from this little daily racism that persists, she explains, which means that you won’t buy a black Barbie for your daughter, for example, that you won’t intervene about of a racist comment overheard.
In this regard, she notes that although society is changing, certain stereotypes remain anchored, even in the minds of very young children. She says that, in the 1950s, tests revealed that between two dolls, a black and a white one, presented to a child, it is the black one who is designated as being naughty and that tests carried out recently in France led to the same results. She adds that while anti-racist reflexes are developing among artists, in particular, that does not mean that the entire population is necessarily involved to the same degree in the process.
I told them: “you were racist towards me”. Not from hateful racism, but from this little daily racism that continues, which means that you won’t buy a black Barbie for your daughter, for example, that you won’t intervene about a racist comment overheard .
Everything leads us to hope, however, that Phara Thibault, proud and strong, is from the generation that will get things done. “Today, I can say that I look beautiful with my natural hair, but I wouldn’t have said that in 2019.”