Adversity and Creativity

Abstract

Amin Ghaziani interviews activist, journalist, and documentarian Rokhaya Diallo about adapting to find the right medium for every message.

Rokhaya Diallo is an award-winning activist, journalist, author, and filmmaker whose latest documentaries include “Acting while Black: Blackness on French Screens” and “One Struggle,” an account of the allyship between American Black and Jewish activists in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and beyond (co-directed by David Rybojad, with photography by Afro Brigitte Sombie). Throughout her work, she has sought to elevate the voices and perspectives of those marginalized in mainstream society and media, to draw attention to injustices and inequities, and to maintain joy, humor, and perspective along the way. Having recently announced her addition to The Guardian’s new Europe edition team, she took time out of her busy schedule to speak with Amin Ghaziani about how adversity made her creative and why she believes honesty, not neutrality, is key to her impactful multimedia storytelling.

Rokhaya Diallo

AMIN GHAZIANI: I understand that you grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of Paris, similar to the ones currently smoldering in the wake of the police killing of Nahel, a young man of color. Can you tell me about your experiences of this reckoning? How do you blend the personal with your professional roles?

ROKHAYA DIALLO: When Nahel was killed, it really sent me back to the moment I decided to be involved in anti-racism. In 2005, two teenagers who were chased by the police for no reason ended up hiding themselves in a power station, and they died inside. It was the start of a wave of uprisings that started in Clichy-sous-Bois, which is the city where they died in the suburbs of Paris, and spread all over the country. It lasted three weeks.

I was not a journalist at that time, but seeing the coverage of those three weeks, and the fact that they were criminalized—even if they were 15 and 17 and had done nothing wrong—pushed me to try to do something. So, I started in activism, and then I became a journalist. Being a journalist when Nahel just died sent me to my mission to cover that story right and to put my part in the mainstream gaze that was still very racist, actually.

It reminded me how it was important to have people who knew those neighborhoods, who knew how it could be to be a young male of color—even if, as a woman, I wasn’t really exposed to police brutality in the same way, even to police checks. I know from my work that if you are a young man perceived as Black or Arab, you are 20 times more likely to be checked by the police than if you belong to any other group in France. I don’t have a direct experience of that as a woman, but I’ve covered that, I’ve seen that with my friends, with my family. I grew up in Paris and then, as a teenager, I moved to the suburbs, those type of neighborhoods that are always covered as being in some parts of France that are “uncivilized,” quote-unquote. Seeing that and seeing the way he was criminalized in the same way—Nahel—fake records were published, and he was blamed for his own death. To me, that was a very important moment to tell a different narrative.

AG: What are you working on currently?

RD: I just finished a documentary that I made with a friend of mine. It’s about the solidarity between Blacks and Jews in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. It aired here on TV in May, and it will be in the March on Washington Film Festival in September. And I’m working on two books [laughs]. One is a graphic novel; it’s a biopic about Angela Davis. I’d like to cross it with the fact that she studied in France, because the constant critique that I hear about race, when you try to bring [up] race in France, is that that’s “an American issue,” and that it’s something that should not be brought to the public sphere in France.

AG: What a range of powerful and visceral topics! What role do researchers play in your work? How can we more effectively collaborate with writers and thinkers such as yourself?

RD: To me, researchers [and] academics have been very helpful at the very beginning, when I was writing my first book on racism, because I really needed to get a sense of the understanding of oppressions, the specific history of French colonialism and racism, so I dug into research that wasn’t really visible, because the research on race in France is not really mainstream, and it’s not a topic that’s really discussed. Using it made me able to say that it’s not an American story; it’s something that happened here, with our specificities. And I use the data, whether it’s about history but also about current issues, like research on police brutality, the figures, the data I can collect about the percentage of the population that can be affected by this. That is very helpful to me as a journalist.

Another aspect of my work: I created with a friend of mine, Grace Ly, a podcast on race, Kiffe ta Race, and it’s the first French-speaking podcast on race. Grace is from an East Asian background; her family is from Cambodia and China. We are the same generation, born in France. As friends, we discuss a lot about race, but we bring academics into our conversation to focus on many aspects of race in our daily lives. It also brings to the public sphere some work that wouldn’t be visible in the same way. Having that very candid conversation on, like—you know, in French, you say “you” in two different ways. You can say “you” to someone who is your friend, and “you” to someone that you don’t know and that you respect. Generally, in the media, you use that “you,” very respectful. In our podcast, we don’t use that form. We use the very friendly way of saying “you,” even to researchers and to academics, so that makes the conversation very friendly and very accessible.

As a filmmaker, I made two years ago a documentary about the image of the Parisian woman and how it was so heteronormative. I interviewed one academic who really dug into the image of la Parisienne, the Parisian woman, and she was very helpful to me understanding when that myth of the Persian woman started, and who created it. So, to me, it is very resourceful to use the work of academics. It’s also a platform to display my work, to invite scholars and artists.

“When I started, I was not satisfied with what I saw… in the media. My focus is to give a voice to the people who are underrepresented.”

AG: It’s clear that your work addresses urgent social issues from racism to mans-plaining and the place of the hijab in French national identity. Sometimes, when people talk about complex issues like these, they default to a set of preexisting and polarized beliefs. How do you manage this potential problem?

RD: I think about myself 15-20 years ago, watching TV and feeling very lonely because I didn’t see anyone telling what I wanted to say. So, my goal is to relieve those people who share the same beliefs as me or who need to hear something different. I know that there are some people that I will never convince, and it’s not my goal, but I know that behind the screen, there are people who are sympathetic to what I say and people who just need explanation. What I try to do is to act like a teacher and explain—because I know that you don’t have many opportunities to learn on those issues, so you need to have someone explaining it to you with empathy. There are many things that I didn’t know 10 years ago, and I would have loved to have someone on TV trying to give me perspective. So that’s what I do.

Things that were not really understood 10, 5 years ago are now more accepted, I would say. For example, there have been many international events, international movements, like the #MeToo movement, like Black Lives Matter, and thanks to those movements, many notions don’t—like, even if they still have to be explained, they have penetrated the public sphere. Like rape culture, White privilege, those kinds of notions, you can tell about them on mainstream TV today, which wasn’t the case 5 or 10 years ago. I’d say that my work is made easier by the fact that the general understanding on those issues has shifted a little bit.

AG: It strikes me that education, explanation, and empathy are core principles of your work. Education and explanation seem like ideas we can manage more immediately, both as journalists and as researchers. Empathy, however, is a little trickier, at least in light of professional pressures for us to maintain objectivity and neutrality. How do you make these professional standards compatible with an ethos of empathy?

RD: I don’t think I believe in neutrality in journalism, because we all come from experiences, from perspectives that have shaped the way we see the world. I don’t claim neutrality; I would claim honesty: I don’t lie; I try to cross check the information I have to make sure that I have balanced information when I do a report. But neutrality? I don’t think so.

When I started, I was not satisfied with what I saw, with what I was seeing in the media. My focus is to give a voice to people who are underrepresented. There are so many people who claim neutrality and who are not [neutral], like those White men who’ve been in the sphere for decades and are not questioned about how they could be neutral. They claim neutrality, and from what I hear, they’re not neutral. Many of them went to the same schools as the ones from the government, they go on vacation in the same places, they grew up in the same neighborhoods, in the same district in Paris. So, actually, they know each other very well. I don’t think that they are neutral.

I think that honesty is much more, to me, something that we should claim. You can try to be honest and to inform in an honest way. My goal is to inform, not to depart myself from my humanity, because as long as you’re human, as long as you’re a human being, you will be influenced by whatever you experience. Like the way I covered the murder of Nahel was shaped by the knowledge I had of those kinds of neighborhoods and the fact that I could see in him someone that could be from my family. And many of my fellow journalists were not even seeing a teenager—they were speaking about a young man who had records. And I was like, he was 17! I can see the teenager, and you cannot see who he was as a human being.

AG: I appreciate and admire the redirection from neutrality to honesty. Thank you for that.

You are a multimedia powerhouse. Can you tell our readers a little bit about how you started your career and how you’ve come to explore so many types of media in your work?

RD: I started because I wasn’t happy with what I was seeing on TV regarding minority communities, especially in the suburbs of Paris (but not only). I started an organization—I wasn’t a journalist first—so I started an organization against racism, and that was focused on the media. We created a ceremony which was a parody, like an Academy Awards ceremony, a parody of that kind of ceremony, in which we honored the worst racist sentences uttered by public figures. It was a friendly way to display systemic racism and to name and shame public personalities who uttered tendencies and statements that we were tired of hearing. So that’s how I started, how I was first visible in the in the media.

I didn’t plan to be a journalist. I moved from one form of expression to another, because I wanted to focus on those issues. My work has been made more and more difficult, so I had to be creative. If it wasn’t possible for a TV show, I needed to find a new way to tell the same stories. That’s how I started documentaries.

Whenever I have an idea, I try to find the form that fits the most. But I think adversity made me creative—because when someone closes a door, you have to open another one, because you need to survive, you need to make money in order to survive, and you need to tell what you want to tell. That’s how I express myself so differently in so many different platforms.

AG: Storytelling across different types of media—filmmaking, journalism, public speaking, and more—it’s a big challenge. Can you share any advice on this style of code-switching, if you will, for our readers, many of whom are sociologists working to spread their findings through academic journals, trade books, newspapers, radio, public talks, and a host of new media?

RD: It’s totally different from one medium to another—and according to the audience. For example, there is a French-German channel that’s seen as very intellectual. If I take part of a TV show there, if I speak to that audience, I know that there are things I can say that wouldn’t be the same as if I go to another TV show I was part of that is very entertaining, the audience is younger, is not really into politics. So, I need to be funnier and to adapt, to explain everything in a very different way.

What I do is I think about the audience and I try to understand what they would like to hear, what they would be able to hear. For example, that very entertaining show that I was part of is a show I would have watched when I was in my teen years. So, I may think about myself as a teenager, about my stepdaughter, like, what would she understand from what I say if she just turns on the TV, or if she finds a clip online? Thinking about the audience, what they’re able to hear, really helps me to shape the message.

The most interesting experience I had was to write books for children. I have written two books for children. One of them was how to speak about racism to children, and the other one, how to speak about French secularism. What I got from that experiment is that, if you cannot explain something to a child, you don’t get it, you don’t know what you’re supposed to be talking about. [laughs] It’s very humbling, and it really makes you show that you understand everything that you are supposed to write about, or to speak about, because if you don’t, you will never be able to explain it to a child.

AG: One final question for you, Rokhaya —although, truth be told, I wish we had many more hours to chat. Our readers, like researchers, like journalists, are used to looking for and thinking about social problems. Your work, too, involves telling a lot of tough stories. But I also wonder what story is sustaining your hope and bringing you joy. What is the role of joy in your work?

RD: Joy is fundamental. To me, it’s the core. It’s very important because, as you said, those stories, they are very tough. We are touching some areas that could be traumatic. That’s why, as I told you, the podcast that we started was based on laughter, on friendship. Even if we speak about race, we try to own our narrative and to really put it in the way that we have conversations in real life. People who listen to the podcast say, “Oh, I really feel like I’m one of your friends. When I listen to the podcasts, I have the feeling that I’m among friends, and it’s really cheerful to hear people’s addressing those issues in in that way.” Like, when I started anti-racism activism, I used that parodic ceremony as a way to return the stigma, and to make fun of those people who harm us, like, having power over their attacks. So, joy, humor, [and] irony have always been at the center of whatever I do. It’s very important.

I have, for example, written a book about Afro hair. Eight years ago. It was with a photographer. The name of the book is Afro, and it’s a picture book. There is a picture that is taken by the photographer, and text, like hair biography of people from African descent. I really want to focus on their positive relationship to their hair. All the pictures were very cheerful, very joyful. And they all picked a place in Paris, because Paris was also a character of the book, that was meaningful to them. We had people from 10 to 80 [years old]. It was about how they embraced a body that was supposed to be stigmatized in our society. That book became an exhibition. To me, it was amazing to have those very big photographs of people from North African descent, from African descent, from Caribbean descent, being so proud of themselves, being so happy in a museum, a Parisian museum. That’s how I try to bring joy: centering my narrative on people who are marginalized and making space for joy.