Two oceans away and the intermediary of a computer screen can’t do anything about it: from Australia, where she lives half the year, Lucy Mushita’s laughter explodes with the same intensity as in Expat Blues. Far better. Because, since we read his new book, a kind of travel diary as painful as it is funny, in which he confides in us his experience of racism in the United States and France from the 1980s to today, we have only wanted one thing: to hear that laugh. Capture what it covers and reveals.
Since 1986, the writer, born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), followed her husband, a French scientist, to France, the United States and Australia. In Lorraine, where she taught English to business school students, the secretary mistook her for the cleaning lady. In Paris, a woman hit her with her purse on the Grands Boulevards, because she was tired of “all these black people.” Let’s also mention this stranger in the waiting room of a doctor’s office who is happy for her because of the path taken by these former slaves. “like you”. Not to mention the train passenger who warns her that she was sitting in first class.
Anyone would get angry for less than that. Lucy Mushita’s first reaction when packing her bags in France was more of relief. “In Lorena, where I arrived in an intellectual and educated environment, I felt welcomedremember. I met white people for the first time who weren’t racist. » A pleasant surprise for someone born in 1960 under the apartheid regime. Where neighbors too interested in politics disappear. Where we believe what we see, that is, that white people sheltered in their big houses are superior to black people. “My father and mother told me: ‘If you see a white man, you run away’”remember. His parents, who had a “Dickensian childhood”They work hard as waiters, servants, day laborers and finally farmers. With the money from the crops they pay for their four children’s school fees. Because only white people benefit from free education up to high school. From a young age, Lucy Mushita understood the power of education. In Southern Rhodesia, the population is divided into four “races”: Europeans, Asians, Coloreds and Blacks. “Until independence in 1980, racism was regulatedshe explains. There were queues. We could read “Only Europeans” or “Neither blacks nor dogs.” » Was “clear”.
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