Fifteen Eighty Four

In July 2024, amidst the global attraction of a Paris 2024 Olympics with eugenicist roots historically designed in part to prove the athletic superiority of Europeans racialized as white, Aya Nakamura, the then most streamed female Francophone pop artist in the world, found herself “at the center of France’s culture wars.” A single-parent immigrant mother from the former French colony of Mali, who had grown up in Parisian suburbs, and who now boasted French citizenship, the world-renowned song artist became thrust into a centuries-long contrived controversy about legitimacy — a stunning indication of what happens when Blackness dares to operate transgressively sans “White Gaze.” Functioning regardless, on the Olympic world stage of style and song, having migrated as a child while multilingual and Black to the land of a former colonial power, Aya Nakamura ultimately derailed the duplicitous tenor of Francophone controversy, daring to inscribe her inosans jan nwè (Saint Lucian French Creole for “Black innocence”) through the discordant demolishing of superimposed boundaries threatening to diminish her God-given capacity for flourishing with literacy in the world.              `

Like Aya Nakamura, many jan nwè often migrate from multilingual Majority World countries such as the West African country of Mali and the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia where most are racialized as Black. Though not world celebrities, and understandably varied with regards to the number of named languages they speak or use, these humans enter Minority World contexts such as the US, Canada, Australia, and Britain where being multilingual often rewards ways of using (English) literacies associated with being racialized as white. It is no surprise then that such immigrants understand all too well the resistance faced by Nakamura in the Paris 2024 Olympics. They see in the French response to the immigrant Nakamura, specific oppositions to her representation of a historically colonial France with which they are all too familiar. For instance, the media described a resistance to Nakamuran representation as being based on:

• A lack of legitimacy based on her use of languaging in a way that the white European speaker did not define it a long time ago —  suggesting that Nakamura’s use of her named languages and broader semiotics is “slang” when it is really a vivid indication of translanguaging;

• A lack of legitimacy based on the conaturalization of her racialization with her languaging as well as broader semiotics such that her use of “slang” is determined to be the “absence of French heritage, values and identity” on the part of a Black person such as herself;

• A lack of legitimacy based on a colonial past that works to repeatedly deny her entire personhood because it does not align with what has been historically defined as a humanity steeped in acceptable Whiteness nor mirrors the designed goal for how a person should be, do, and live together with others in the world, particularly given her capacity as a Black person to reflect economic viability while doing so.

But the illegitimacy ascribed to Nakamura in each case above is not inherent. Rather, it is arguably imposed – an imposition ascribed based on ways of thinking about languaging and semiotizing and about which personhoods can be acceptably attached to the literacies undergirding such practices. The fallacious foundations of these impositions of illegitimacy become visible when one considers Nakamura’s capacity to accomplish the following:

1. Nakamura liberates the African psyche from traditional notions of bilingualism and multilingualism through her transgressive translanguaging and transsemiotizing. She accomplishes this feat by using her lyrics to integrate “a French slang that originates in the suburbs of Paris” and “West African-derived slang” – “verlan” — said to originate from languages such as Bambara (now identified as a Malian language), and from French, Arabic, and English (Schunn, 2024). Through the use of verlan and “African derived slang from languages such as Bambara, from her birth country Mali, in her music,” it is possible to see how Nakamura transgresses what may be considered a normative French practice by using the lyric “le monde est tit-pe” – the world is small – in a way that inverts the French word ‘petit’ and instead presents ‘tit-pe’ in her number one hit song “Djadja” (Adeleke, 2024). It is no surprise that Nakamura engages in such a transgressive translanguaging practice given that “verlan,” alluded to previously as a type of French slang and “named after the inversion of the French word ‘l’envers’ – meaning backwards – originates from the outskirts of Paris known as ‘la cité’ (the suburbs)” where there have been “large immigrant population” (Adeleke, 2024). It is also no wonder that those who condemn her transgressiveness of the French language seek to characterize her legitimate language use as a “humiliation,” observing that “she does not sing in French, or a foreign language, she sings nonsense” in much the same way that the European speaker historically deemed African languages similarly unintelligible centuries ago (Adeleke, 2024)

2. Nakamura liberates the French psyche from its weddedness to historical and traditional notions of the complexities or personhoods possible from peoples racialized as Black. She becomes adept at this project by transgressing the ideological notions of which personhoods are allowed to legitimately inscribe their use of French languaging on the linguistic landscape of the world. Through Nakamura’s translanguaging transgressiveness, she calls into question the idea that her personhood as a Franco-Malian racialized as Black is somehow illegitimately capable of “singing an Edith Piaf song” at an Olympic Games’ Opening Ceremony designed from the inception to prove those of African heritage to be deficient. It is no wonder that “some members of France’s far-right have questioned whether she embodies French heritage, values and identity” given what they presuppose is her less than adequate claim to legitimacy when compared to the racialized as White, Edith Piaf  — “a key figure in France’s musical – and national – identity” (Adeleke, 2024). As French activist Rokhaya Diallo told CNN, “I think that the people who criticize [Nakamura] actually don’t accept that she embodies France … The slang she uses is used by young people and a lot of young French people use slang” (Adeleke, 2024).

3. Nakamura disentangles the psyche from its historically persistent peripheralizing of personhoods steeped in various representations of one’s racialization as Black. She works to achieve this by using her transgressive translanguaging to remove the personhoods racialized as Black from the peripheral positions into which they have been placed by society and instead, relocates them at the center of the human enterprise. Her capacity for adeptly maneuvering this process is visible in her zero attention to the “White Gaze” which itself, imposes upon her a lack of legitimacy based on a colonial past and has since worked to repeatedly deny her entire personhood because this personhood does not align with a certain acceptable Whiteness nor mirrors the desired goal for how a person should be, do, and live together with others in the world. This dynamic becomes even more pronounced given Nakamura’s reflection of a globally perceived social and economic viability while doing so. Her translanguaging, transsemiotizing, and personhood thus serve together, as a constant conundrum for “those who hold more traditional” and “racist” views “in relation to [French’s] colonial past,” as observed by Professor of Political Science at the University of Nice, Vincent Martigny, and others “who believe it is right to promote minorities and their role in French culture” (Adeleke, 2024).

As illustrated above, the illegitimacy ascribed to Nakamura and historically, to people like her, is not inherent. Again, it is imposed. Needless to say, the purported reasons for resistance of Nakamura’s literacies function merely as White supremacist smokescreens — smokescreens identified by proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as embedded in ideological as well as structural bases for denial of the legitimate personhoods of Black humanity. We know now that white supremacist smokescreens such as these, whose new waves have widely pervaded the United States through rewashed notions such as an unscientific “science of reading,” “banned books,” and now by extension, banned peoples, are merely examples of the ways in which legitimacy is denied to immigrant humans such as Aya Nakumara, operating fully with their God-given literacies and potential, sans “White Gaze.”

We know also, perhaps even more clearly now than we did before, through the continued unmasking of unapologetic hate and through corresponding scientific notions such as linguistic racism, CRT, intersectionality, raciolinguistics, and a raciolinguistic perspective, that a conatuaralization of race and language allows for an understanding of how the colonial past has created presents that enshrined laws and ideologies which make it possible for the Black Franco-Malian Aya Nakamura to be challenged as a performer despite her global prowess as a pop artist. We know also through transraciolinguistics, that various representations of race and language abound worldwide that allow even Black peoples to often lack the metaunderstandings largely held by people racialized as Black or more broadly as people of Color, given that they too tend to internalize the white gaze in drawing the conclusion that Nakamura’s way of speaking as a singer and cultural ways of being would not be things that they would ever want for their children. It is no surprise then that, Edith Pilaf, France’s most famous song artist, despite being an immigrant who also sang about what some describe as a vulgarity promoted by Nakamura, given her racialized as white, has nonetheless been lauded by the French nation and the world.

Admittedly, for many facets of a France and world still steeped in the proud yet damning legacy of colonial empire, the conundrum of Aya Nakamura continues to confound and to keep many a brain up at night. Perplexing questions tug relentlessly at the intellect such as: “How could a song artist who had grown up in the slums dare to use her multilingual repertoire and translanguage across Arabic French Englishes in such a compelling way? How could a single parent singer racialized as Black and also phenotypically presenting as dark-skinned resonate with global audiences on such a large scale? How could an immigrant having lived in the slums and who dropped out of school but whose living in a land that had become hers culturally mix and remix her ways of being in the world to such a large degree that transnational natives everywhere came to see themselves through her eyes? How dare Nakamura be Franco-Malian and translanguage as well as transemiotize sans white gaze when after all, she is just a Black immigrant? And how can she possibly do so and acquire a perceived financial wealth and global social acumen without attention to the white gaze?”

Amidst the tenacious warring of a French nation determined to maintain a feigned standardization steeped in colonial roots, it can be surmised then that it is not Nakamura’s language use or her slang, or her capacity to fit a colonially whitewashed version of Francophonia that is the problem. Rather, it is the beholdenness of a French system, nation, and many of its peoples to the confluence of her language and broader semiotizing with her race, and more so, with her migration, much like has unadulteratedly become the norm in countries such as a now terrifying ‘Divided States.’  In the compelling resistance of Nakamura who dares to reveal her transgressiveness as a single-parent global pop star — the dream of a child migrating while multilingual and Black, doing so sans “White Gaze” — we see a subliminal propelling of her multilingual and multicultural ways of being, doing, and engaging with the world as a Black multilingual single parent mother from the colonially demarcated periphery of Mali right into the authentic consciousness of French peoples still beholden to the long-faded glory of a former colonial power and thus, onto the landscape of imperial decadence threatening to derail a world at large. And it is out of this conundrum of centuries of superimposition of a Minority World monolingual, monocultural, and monoracial fallacies over Majority World multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial legitimacies that the book, “Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence” is now born.

Literacies of Migration, a scholarly product of the culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies demarcated and called for by scholars such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, H. Samy Alim, and Django Paris, is based on notions of critical literacy as espoused by Arlette Willis and Allan Luke, raciolinguistics as articulated by H. Samy Alim, Arnetha Ball, and John Rickford, and transnational literac/ies as advanced by Robert Jiménez and Allison Skerrett. Grounded in notions of translanguaging advanced by Ofelia García and Li Wei, Literacies of Migration extends the legacies of renowned scholars such as James Baldwin, Geneva Smitherman, John Rickford, Hubert Devonish, Lawrence Carrington, Shondel Nero, Hazel Simmons-McDonald, John Baugh, Awad Ibrahim, and W.E.B DuBois. As a portrait of imaginaries, Literacies of Migration builds from the intersectional framework for “Black Immigrant Literacies,” speaking to the complex debates surrounding race, language, and immigration and using the lifelong authentic narratives of English-speaking Caribbean youth racialized as Black across the US to do so. Operating based on but also beyond the racial logics of literacy research, teaching, and policy-making that ultimately require children and youth racialized as Black or brown to acquiesce to norms that overlook their literacies, this book reinscribes an inosans stripped from whitewashed connotations of what the Majority World has been told it should be even while it works to bring Black and all peoples together across diasporic heritages. At the same time, boldly making room through a paradigmatic shift surrounding literacies for a redemptiveness sought by peoples racialized as Whites to engineer a solidarity with historically oppressed peoples racialized as Black and as people of Color, Literacies of Migration dares to invite the acknowledgement of unjust divisive pasts and the (re)designing of reconciliatory and redemptive presents for just futures.

For me, the descendant in part of a Black great-grandfather married to a White great-grandmother, who now functions as a Black French Creole speaking immigrant single-parent-scholar-mother educator of Indian heritage in the United States, it is fitting that Literacies of Migration should emerge from the scholarly excavations of a becoming Americanness that has nonetheless kept inherent the heritages of my homeland Saint Lucia, a territory which like Mali, was also in part, formerly colonized by France. Laying claim today as a scholar to a Ph.D. but never for a moment forgetting that my mother, a descendant of enslaved Africans and the Indian indentured, walked barefoot to school, having to become a dropout only to spend her lifetime living a life solely for the flourishing of her children sans white gaze today, Aya Nakumura represents nothing but the norm. In fact, she is a living, breathing instantiation of what it means to be immigrant yet thrive.

Like Nakumura, I too am a mother, who, migrating from the small island Franco Saint Lucian nation — birthplace of the now Olympic world champion Julien Alfred and renowned Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott – has devoted my years to give my Black immigrant daughter a ‘start’ for which my mother and the ancestors sacrificed under the colonial legacy of France. It is no surprise then that Literacies of Migration should have been born on the cusp of the Black Franco-Malian star Aya Nakamura’s performance at an Olympics with eugenicist roots, a testament to the fact that a universe emanating from peoples of African descent now veers by design to fulfill its quantum destiny, propelling literacy researchers, scholars, policy-makers into the paradigm of a seemingly warped yet constantly transforming present, one in which our children now unapologetically demand the multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial norms from which our world was born to be re-instantiated into the very fabric of our educational systems today.

As observed by Aya Nakamura in The New York Times, “In the end, [my music] speaks to everyone … You don’t understand, but you sing”. And much like the music of Aya Nakamura, these norms that have been stripped from our ways of being, doing, and living together with, and from our educational systems by those colonizers of our pasts and even more so now, those attempting to derail our presents, alas, for many of us immigrants who wished for a better life in places beyond the land of our births,  these norms transcend a decadent imperialism, and now gradually yet boldly return. Beckoned by the psyches of humans whose calloused spirits have undoubtedly underestimated the power of a collective human consciousness to seek a just and shared generational redemption, these norms are captured by Literacies of Migration, representing a portrait painted to pen what happens when literacies characterizing the communal consciousness of our humanities are liberated – a speaking to every soul.

Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence does so even as it portends the paradigmatic quantum shift universally emerging in its call for recognition of the Englishes and broader translanguaging and transsemiotics of Black Caribbean transnational youth operating as multilingual people in the world. But its power lies, more fully, in the subtle nod that it offers to restoring the capacity of a shared humanity, envisioning the full redemptive liberation possible through the design of just presents and futures of literacies — a liberation visible in the simple yet stunning transgressive multilingual radiance of innocent transnational Englishes of Caribbean youth legitimized by a Black Franco-Malian pop star at a Paris 2024 Olympics with eugenicist roots.