The former tennis player, singer and village chief in Cameroon, Yannick Noah is the exceptional guest of Le Monde d’Élodie, all this week on franceinfo. He looks back on the highlights of his careers by evoking five of his songs that have become cult. His latest album “La Marfée” was released in October 2022.
Yannick Noah sings, coaches, plays sports and is a village chief in Cameroon. It is ultimately unclassifiable, indomitable. He is the only French professional sportsman to have succeeded in building a musical career. Several generations follow and support him. The elders first see in him, Roland-Garros and his victory in 1983, then the youngest see him as a singer thanks to his albums and his concerts since 1991.
Today, Cameroon recalls Yannick Noah, as village chief. This Cameroon which allowed him to discover tennis, music and which he was forced to leave, when he was 12, to pursue a sporting career. We come back with this artist who likes life without constraints and who works only on instinct on his sporting victories, on his life choices which have allowed him to create an atypical, solid, constant career. His last album La Marfee was released in October 2022.
franceinfo: What does it mean La Marfee ?
Yannick Noah: It is a forest between Sedan and Charleville-Mézières. Mom is from the Ardennes and when we were in Cameroon, she often spoke to us about La Marfée with a dose, a touch of melancholy because it reminded her of her youth, her childhood in France, her missing seasons. And when she created this school with us, almost in our garden, she called it “La Marfée”. It was a way for her to keep in touch with her childhood and her beloved Ardennes. And since mom is really part of everything I can experience in Cameroon, I found it obvious to call this album La Marfee and get her involved because I thought people were going to say, “Oh, he’s going to go back to Cameroon, he’s going to find the blacks, his Africa!“Yes, it’s a bit of both, here it is, being mixed race is a bit like that, this mixture, these two cultures which constantly intermingle and collide.
You are precisely the fruit of this clever mixture of love. It was a huge love story between your parents. Your mother had to face all that.
Yes. My maternal grandparents were against mom marrying a black man, it was simple. We liked the football player, but as long as he stayed away. And then, they fell in love. They got married almost in secret in Sedan and when they returned to Cameroon, they had not yet announced to my paternal grandparents, so on the Cameroonian side, that they were married because in the other direction, it also counted, that is to say that it was very strange that my father was marrying a white woman.
It is in Cameroon that you hit your first balls.
Yes. I start playing tennis, dad stops playing football because of fractures in the pelvis, tibia, fibula. He stopped playing football at the age of 26 and suddenly, we found ourselves in Cameroon. Dad still has so much energy and is athletic. Mom, she does sports like that, amateur, and they decide to go to tennis because one, they can both play, so the family stays together and then the kids can hang out in the club in a safe way, it’s cool.
“I found myself playing tennis against a wall because we didn’t have access to the courts and it was love at first sight.”
Yannick Noahat franceinfo
It’s Arthur Ashe who will spot you and have a crush on you. It is he who will speak about you in France to Philippe Chatrier who will bring you here. You were 11 years old and it was a total uprooting. It was a dramatic moment for you, away from your parents.
It was complicated. We came one month a year on vacation. When you come to France, it’s like going to paradise. So I received a scholarship thanks to the Arthur Ashe federation. The first feeling was: it’s great, I’m leaving, I’ll be quiet, my parents won’t piss me off. Except that the day of departure, well, there, it was a reality. And I took it in the face, that I realized that I was leaving. Yes, I was a kid, I was 12, I arrived in Nice in boarding school. It was a shock.
Especially since you were really alone, that is to say that the others came home on weekends. You, it was not possible.
“When I arrived in France to train tennis, away from my family, it was a lot of loneliness, a lot of crying.”
Yannick Noahat franceinfo
As soon as the pawn turned off the light in the evening, right away, that’s when I let go, when I cracked. It lasted three months. And at that age, we get stronger. And in fact, this problem was my opportunity because suddenly, at 13, 14 years old, we said: “He is mature, he is training“ and in fact, no. It was because I didn’t have enough tears to cry and I said to myself: anyway, there are not two options, I have to kill them all and then if I kill them all, I will be happy.
There is a song called Métis. This song is very important. You performed it with Disiz La Peste. I find that it represents what you are in fact.
It takes time to find your support when you have several cultures because you realize that you belong to the people who love you. It’s true that people liked me a lot when I won, they liked me less when I lost. It was quite surprising to read certain articles after defeats where all of a sudden, I went from French to Franco-Cameroonian when everything was going well. Or when I had a real shitty game, it’s downright Cameroonian. And to read on the other side also when I was in Cameroon that when I won, I was Cameroonian and when I lost, I was the Frenchman. It’s quite amazing. But in general, French, Cameroonian and Franco-Cameroonian, you should not miss each other!
Yannick Noah will be on July 31, 2023 at the Game of Trees Festival in Les Orres and on September 10 in Comines as part of the Lys Festival.