Up until that morning, Caroline thought that she had protected her daily life from the torrent of hate that spewed out on the nation's airwaves. It was the early spring of 2022, right in the middle of the French presidential campaign. As her French identity card showed, Caroline had just celebrated her 34th birthday.
During that period the far-right polemicist and presidential candidate Éric Zemmour was debating on public television the idea that foreign first names of French citizens should be Christianised; indeed, on Friday November 4th he stood trial for abuse of a racial nature after telling television presenter Hapsatou Sy that African names such as hers were an “insult to France”. The verdict will be delivered this January.
Caroline was aware of these controversies but only vaguely so. For several years she had stopped listening to the news. For her, hatred was a part of life you had to deal with. Showing resilience helped ensure a calmer existence.
A senior executive, Caroline is a vegetarian, speaks at least four languages, reads poetry, sews her own clothes, has taken up pole-dancing, travels, writes, practices yoga, cooks and meditates. Between all these activities who help define the person she is, there is her work in digital marketing for a businesswoman based in the United States and the more everyday life of a single mother looking after her two children.
On the morning in question, in the spring of 2022, Caroline was at the wheel of the family car on the way to school when politics suddenly interrupted the calmness of her normal daily routine. The dam she had built between her household and the rest of the world began to give way when her son Louis, who was sitting in the back, asked her: “Will we be able to stay in France?” Caroline's spirits fell.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The young woman continued her journey but in the days ahead her son's question kept chipping away at her. His choice of words had already begun to change in the preceding weeks. One day he had woken up and remarked that his mother was “black”. Up until then the colour of Caroline's skin had been “brown”. She recalled: “It broke my heart to see the fear that the political climate could provoke in a little boy.”
Louis, who born in France to French parents, was barely seven yet here he was, imagining being expelled from the country if Éric Zemmour won the election, because he had discovered that, like his mother, he was black. Caroline was acutely reminded that though she might have given her son the name of a French king, society always made it about the colour of your skin, whatever the far-right polemicist Zemmour, who is obsessed about assimilation via first names, might think. Caroline knows more about this than most; for 'Caroline' is not the name she was given at birth. She had chosen to change her first name after arriving in France from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) twenty years earlier.
Her story, the official details of which have languished and faded in the databases of the registry office system, was gradually refined by her years living in France. Eventually this past virtually vanished from view altogether. It is yet another story of hate in society, one that has taken place at a very intimate level.
She left the DRC, then called Zaire and ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko, at the age of four. And right up until 2002, when she turned 14, the young woman continued to be called 'Molima', a name that comes from molimo meaning 'spirit' in the Lingala language spoken in much of the Congo. But since then she has lived under the name 'Caroline'.
Mobatu was no Zemmour, but like any good authoritarian ruler the dictator shared several views with the French polemicist, one being an enthusiasm for national identity. This led to a ban on “foreign sounding” first names. The difference was that while the French polemicist was obsessed with Muslim and African names, the ruler of Zaire obsessed over the prevalence of Christian names in his country.
The policy of “authenticity” that Mobutu introduced in 1971 required the country's population to abandon first names that dated from its days as a Belgian colony and to replace them with names that were “authentically Zairean”. As Mobuto's long rule continued – he stayed in power until 1997 - Molima and her family made their way to France.
Worn down by clichés
In the chill surrounds of the northern French region of Picardy where the young girl's family arrived, her father, the only black doctor in the area, employed the well-worn tactic of using humour with his colleagues to defuse racism. “His jokes were mostly based on the weather,” says Caroline. “For example, he would say 'It's no weather to put a black man outside'”.
In France in the 2000s there was an oppressive atmosphere and no great mood to ditch the country's racist heritage. In the town of Compiègne, where the family lived, the mayor refused to rename rue Alexis-Carrel, which had been named after a prominent surgeon who supported the collaborationist wartime regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain and who was a proponent of eugenics. The patronisng marketing slogan 'Y'a bon' exclaimed by a jolly-looking Senegalese infantryman – the slogan means 'It's good' in made-up pidgin French - still appeared on the label of a popular cocoa-based breakfast drink made by Banania. And beauty queen Sonia Rolland, the first 'Miss France' of African heritage, had the words “dirty negress” scrawled on her car, and received parcels of excrement through the post.
Dangerous fantasies were still present in society and Molima was aware of them all: that 'Black' was dirty; that 'Black' did not represent beauty; and that 'Blacks' were animal in nature, who laughed heartily and who compensated for their intellectual deficiencies with incredible physical prowess. The main purveyor of these ideas, far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, was an ever-present on television and spoke publicly about the supposed inequality of the “races”.
This all left its mark on a young black teenager who looked at herself in the mirror every day. She examined her own situation in minute detail. How should one dress in order not to confirm other people's prejudices? But at the same time, was it okay to wear Dr Martens if you were black? “I'd never seen a Black person in Dr Martens, so this was something I asked myself. I was afraid it might seem strange,” she says. Also; how should she do her hair?
With Caroline as a first name, I thought life in France would be easier.
Given the political climate as the first round of the presidential election on April 21st 2002 loomed – far-right Jean Le Pen was to create a sensation by making it through to the second round run-off - the lawyer who helped Molima's family to become naturalised advised that she changed her first name to a more French-sounding one.
So, as Éric Zemmour today suggests people should do, Molima took a calendar containing the names of Christian saints and pored over it in order to choose a new name. “I remember the scene very well,” she says today. “I was looking for what the female names of 2002 were. I wanted to call myself Marion like my friend at school. I was hesitating between Marion and Margot.” But in the end she chose Caroline, whose name day in the calendar is celebrated on July 17th.
The young girl adopted this “new costume” overnight. What was it like in the school playground in the following days? That memory has faded. But she does recall that her prevailing thought at the time was that “with Caroline, life would be easier in France. Caroline blends into the crowd, that's what I thought for a long time.”
The naturalisation decree was made public a year later. The name Molima still remains in the archives of the official state publication Le Journal Officiel, though lost in the long list of the several thousand other people who followed the same naturalisation route at the time. Some 44 of them also chose a French first name: so Fatma, born in Morocco, became Noémie, Mohamed from Syria took the name Jean, and Hassan became Henri.
Sociologist Nicole Lapierre, emeritus research director at the French research institute CNRS and the author of many standard texts on the issue, says that each year some “20% of naturalisations are accompanied by the gallicisation [of names] ”. And out of these “only 7 to 8% involve surnames”.
The literature on the issue has focused in particular on the personal harm the move has caused to members of Jewish families who were persecuted simply because they had a name that “sounded Israelite”, leading many of them to gallicise their surnames after World War II.
My father stopped speaking Lingala to us, saying that if we continued we'd have an accent when we spoke French. It became an underground language.
For those who have undergone it, changing one's name is an “internal exile” which starts with a “denial of oneself”, wrote Albert Memmi in his 1966 book 'La Libération du Juif ' ('Liberation of the Jew'). Writing about Jews who “abandon” their name he stated: “One is led to it for protection against non-Jews, but one cannot resign oneself to pay for one's security at the terrible price of one's own destruction.”
As far as Molima is concerned, this “denial of oneself” that goes with the process of assimilation is initially a linguistic one, which comes with the sudden extinction of one's language. “My father stopped speaking Lingala to us, saying that if we continued we'd have an accent when we spoke French. It became an underground language,” she recalls. Food was next. “We no longer ate Congolese dishes in the house. Not the children, anyway,” Caroline recalls.
During this period two personalities inhabited her body at the same time. There was 'Caroline' in public, while studying, at work or on her identity card, and there was the “real life” personality of Molima with the hidden first name, which was now restricted to close friends and family. There was a marked difference between the two. “At work, people saw Caroline as a retiring and shy girl,” she says.
But the new first name was no barrier to racism; to other people Caroline is still black. And while she has never suffered physical violence, she has many stories to tell about her experiences. There was the man who one day held out a broom towards her “because street cleaners are black”; the young woman who was amazed that she did not have a “black accent”; the people who endlessly seek to touch her hair.
A new stage in her life began in 2014 when Caroline got married. It was a “very French” affair with a “reception after the town hall [ceremony]”. Her husband is from Brittany in the west of France. He has red hair, very pale skin which is “almost transparent”, and a local Breton name The couple went on to have two children who both have French first names.
Farce
The first letters that subsequently arrived from the benefits office the Caisse d'Allocations Familiales (CAF) came as a shock: the last trace of Molima's Congolese heritage had disappeared with the adoption of a new surname. Thanks to having a new, invented first name and the disappearance of her old surname, in administrative terms 'Molima' had entirely vanished.
“It was as that point it became too much,” says Caroline. “It was at that moment that I asked myself: how much further will this farce go? Caroline was a fiction. She had become an emblem of enforced integration amid some futile notion of assimilation: you were no longer supposed to think with that side of you that you had inherited; you just had to be one person. I dared not let it overwhelm me. I kept a low profile, I didn't laugh. I was what France wanted to see from its little immigrants. Well-behaved, silent and no baggage.”
Since then Caroline has begun the slow process of “personal re-appropriation” and has also revisited the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She will not embark on the bureaucratic battle to restore her old first name but does look back at what she missed out on.
For example, one day, when looking at a video clip of the Franco-Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo, Caroline realised that for years she had avoided wearing colourful clothes. “I always dressed in black and white. I didn't even dare use wax,” she says.
In April 2022, her two children tucked under her arms, she thus headed for the voting booth for the presidential election wearing a coloured jacket. An unremarkable act, but one which highlighted a constant internal struggle. There was also more personal heartaches that she finds difficult to talk about. “When my daughter was born, I was afraid because she does not have such light skin as her brother, who was born very white with red hair,” she recalls. “It saddens me but it's true. My daughter would stand out less with lighter skin. It's a mother's reaction.”
It was this fact, Caroline explains, that led her to make an urgent exit from a bus with her two children when she came face to face with a neo-Nazi. She concludes: “I've long wondered what goes through the mind of racists who want to assimilate us so violently. I think in the end they're jealous. What annoys them is that they have nothing extraordinary in their lives. They have no other lands, no other countries. They resent us because of their own ordinariness.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter