Roundtable on Women’s Traversing Paths: Forms of Political Engagement and Production of Knowledge
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I am Rose Ndengue, temporary research associate at the University of Rouen. Two and a half years ago I defended a thesis on women’s political participation in Cameroon from 1945 to the 2000s. [Engagement means] bringing to light, [with a particular focus upon gender and women] all of the mechanisms of domination, of oppression, but also making visible the spaces where we fight, agentive spaces, the ability to act in people whom we frequently believe to be thoroughly dominated but who benefit nevertheless from spaces that we do not make visible enough.
Hello, I’m Jocelyne Béroard. I’m from Martinique. Well, I sing! I’ve been singing with the group Kassav for about forty years, maybe a little less, since the group has been around for forty years and I joined a few years after it started. Engagement is being able to say: “This is who I am.” With music, I often say that when you have a microphone, you say whatever, so I write lyrics and I try to elevate things a little bit. It’s perhaps not hyper-intellectual, but in any case, I try to work with the language, our mother tongue, which is Creole, a superb language that everyone should learn because it’s really so beautiful, evocative, and so forth.
Hello, everyone. I am Bintou Dembélé. I am the daughter of Demba Dembélé and Salimata Dembélé, Soninke from Senegal. I was born near Paris, [End Page 154] in the suburbs, and I say that I come from hip-hop. Nowadays, I use an expression from Casey [a rapper with Antillean roots] that I like, which is, “I am neither man nor woman, half-man half-woman.” I find that that fits me well too. Thinking about the world, thinking about my body—it was through movement. To move from the projects to this space here to be in front of you. I am not tied to a particular place. I go, I come, I’m always moving.
I am Joëlle Kapompole. First, I define myself as a Black woman. A female politician also, because I’ve been the Walloon Congressperson in Belgium since 2004. In 2004, I was also the first Black female senator in Belgium. I am also Congolese on my mother’s side, Rwandan on my father’s, and [linked] with Africa—I came to Belgium when I was two years old. So, when we talk about engagement, my political engagement has been more and more tied to the battle against all forms of discrimination. I wanted to work on questions beyond race, of class, to look at all these questions of poverty, of that particular fight—because I come from a social housing projects, too—and more and more, this forced me to include gender.
My name is Fania Noël. I am an activist with the Afrofeminist collective Mwasi. I am an Afrofeminist activist not just as an identity, but as a political choice— the way I live my life as a reflection of the political project that I support, my thinking about the ethics and praxis of my activism, and also in the choices that I make in my life. And after that, I am Black. But it’s easy for me to say, “I am Black,” because I’m Haitian. Haiti has sort of made it so that being Haitian and Black are synonymous, has politicized and conceptually theorized them together. I believe in the balance of power, I believe in opposition, I believe in mobilizing. I’ve even accepted the idea that I won’t see a thing come to fruition in order to be more at peace. That allows one to take the long view, rather than say that it’s this act that’s going to change things, to think in terms of “massive action,” which is to...
