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bousso benussi thioune
Nov 16, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Nov 17, 2020

As a child, like all the girls of the 90s generation, I had dolls.

Nice dolls.

Maybe even Barbies, I don't remember well, what I remember is that at some point I started cutting hair, making braids.

I wanted to be able to do like all the girls of my age: say that they looked like me or vaguely reminded me of someone in my family.

I wanted to look at them and find something that belonged to me, even if it was a hint.

The tip of the nose, the color of the eyes, the shape of the mouth.

The hair.

I grew up in a world where I didn't exist.

I didn't exist on TV or in the media and if I existed it was to talk about poverty, violence, or a distant and exotic world that I had never known.

I did not exist in books, in theater, in cinema and if I existed it was always a backup role helping other characters - white.

ree — Flavie Cassard - Bousso, crayon 2015

I didn't exist in toys.

Dolls, children's books, Lego characters, cartoons, didn't represent me.

I didn't exist in the world of fashion: the products for my hair, for my skin, were the result of a treasure hunt or otherwise impossible to find in supermarkets and department stores.

The advertising panels showed women I couldn't recognize myself in.

And I honestly don't think anyone could recognize themselves ...

I didn't exist in the upper classes of society: women like my mother could only be cleaners, carers, nurses in retirement homes.

I have never met a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, an architect, a teacher, an employee in whom I could have recognized myself before my 20s.

The few that I could meet seemed to me to be exceptions that confirmed the rule and probably were.

I grew up in a world that constantly sent me a kind of error message: I was an image not found in the system I lived in.

ree — Flavie Cassard - Femme, Pastels 2017

It took me years to find myself naturally beautiful without artifice, coverings that made me more like my white fellow.

As a teenager I spent hours trying to tame my hair

"Messy; strange; afro; wild, how do you wash them? how does it work? don't they hurt you? How do you do your hair? ".

I ironed them, cut them, burned them, stretched them, covered them, hide them.

I went to great lengths to resemble and assimilate the norm: a white teenager with the smoothest hair possible.

I perfectly remember the day I first went to high school with straight black fake hair: the look of others changed immediately, the boys smiled at me, the popular girls spoke to me, the magic of the mass effect got me famous for 5 seconds.

And I enjoyed them all.

A guy I liked and had completely ignored me until then came to talk to me with a smile that would make any sixteen year old in the 2000s swoon. (Forgive me, my feminist conscience still hadn't woken up!) looking me straight in the eye: "you look much better this way, because black hair isn't exactly desirable".

Ladies and gentlemen: what was I supposed to say?

I gave a goofy smile and during a week desperate to lose my new status quo, I didn't wash my hair hoping to keep it smooth and perfect, white enough to make me desirable.

In short, I was a teenager like many others.

I wanted to please and would do stupid teenage things to please other teenagers..

But the problem is another.

Once again, my ethnic group had caused me to be bottled up in one category: unattractive.

Only in my periods of thinness and slenderness, when my body was less disturbing and my features had refined, I began to have love affairs.

And even then, my nappy hair was either hidden by extensions or disguised in

long braids.

It took me many years to be able to love my crown.

It took me many years to be able to love myself.

The fact of not seeing women like me represented in mass culture gave me the idea of not existing at the beginning and of being a "niche" later on.

When they asked me “what do you want to be when you grow up” even though I was very ambitious and talked about journalism, I always imagined a white woman at my place.

Having never seen any other reality, my mind struggled to construct an overlap that corresponded to me.

I had my first black doctor in France at 26.

I was so excited that I told my (black) friends about it, sadly surprised that such a reality could exist in Europe.

On TV there are programs presented by black or colored TV journalists, important newspapers, the tv news, actresses.

I am not saying that France is better on a racist level, but there is no doubt about inclusion!

Things are starting to change, even in Italy.

I see advertising panels, characters timidly popping up on national TV, products in the supermarket.

It's not much, but you have to start somewhere!

The sad thing about all of this is the fact that I have internalized non-representation to such an extent that I am surprised when I see a black woman walk out of court as a lawyer or judge, working for large companies as an executive, teaching, saving lives.