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Avignon (AFP)
A show that ends with a tasting of a mafé, but not only for the pleasure of the taste buds: at the Avignon Festival, rice, bananas or chocolate are told through stories of colonization and exploitation.
As you enter the room, the smell of food tickles your nostrils: the audience, seated on both sides of the stage, can see the chef-comedian Alexandre Bella Ola cutting carrots, zucchini and other vegetables on a large table that he will simmer. in a large steaming saucepan, where he will add soumbala (a condiment widely used in African cuisine) and especially peanut sauce, commonly called mafé.
Why the mafé?
For the Franco-Ivorian-Malian author and director Eva Doumbia, the project started from a personal story.
In the 80s, “my immigrant father undoubtedly opened one of the first African restaurants (in Le Havre, Normandy) with a Tunisian partner who made couscous. He prepared the mafé for him and I thought for a long time that this dish was traditional. But it is recent and linked to colonialism: rice did not grow in Africa, peanut paste was imported by the colonist from the United States, ”she told AFP.
“This food has imposed itself on the continent, especially in East Africa, and eating habits have been changed,” she adds.
– “Not to accuse” –
“Autophagies. Stories of bananas, rice, tomatoes, peanuts, palm trees. And then fruits, sugar and chocolate”: here is the title of the show, or rather of this “documentary Eucharist” as she prefers to call it.
“We meet to feed together, to remember” these stories “of exploitation that continue to this day,” says Eva Doumbia.
The performance mixes dance, music, songs but also images filmed in Africa and broadcast on a screen where we can see a cocoa farmer in Ivory Coast who barely earns to provide for his family.
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In the room, each spectator receives a piece of “fair trade” chocolate made in Ivory Coast. Present on the set alongside the chef, two other actresses and a dancer, Eva Doumbia asks the audience to thank those who “sowed, planted, fed, watered, transported” this food.
This historical-culinary journey, which also evokes the forgotten fate of the Indochinese requisitioned in 1939 to revive rice growing in the Camargue, “is not to accuse” anyone, she insists.
“He wants to be a beginning of reflection, we make an observation, not a solution, hoping that people will be more aware that most of what we eat on a daily basis comes from the exploitation of underpaid human beings on other continents or migrants who work in deplorable conditions. + We eat people, + hence the word + autophagies + (eating oneself) “, she says.
The question of culinary origins has grown in recent years, as evidenced by the success of the documentary aired this spring on Netflix, “High on the Hog”, which traces the influence of African food and culinary traditions in American gastronomy. , by evoking in particular the contribution of slaves to the United States.
– Who tells the stories –
“Awareness is still limited to informed people,” said Eva Doumbia, who has made several culinary trips to Africa and New Orleans.
The artist, who defines herself as “Afropean”, is the co-founder of the artist collective “Décoloniser les arts” which calls for rethinking narratives in performing arts and the arts in general.
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In her shows, she constantly questions the way in which the racial relations inherited from colonialism are still expressed in society. Ten years ago, in “My hair and me”, a cabaret show on the history of the treatment of frizzy hair, she told a story of alienation to the Western model, with black women wanting to smooth their hair at all costs. hair.
She prefers not to comment on the “tension” in France between universalists and racialists.
“Things have changed over the past five years thanks to a lot of voluntarism, but we must make an effort at the level of the stories and (of) those who tell them,” says the artist.
© 2021 AFP
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