PROPHÉTIQUE (ON EST DÉJÀ NÉ·ES)

n early memory… 

I am a child, one of many children born to my father, a chief of a Muslim clan and respected by his community.  

I’ve slipped into my father’s room without him realising. Sitting at his dressing table, pomades in front of him, he does his hair, thoughtful, vulnerable, helpless…  

I am a child sleeping or pretending to sleep, aunts talking next to me saying I’m like that because my mother didn’t breastfeed me. I keep my eyes closed. 

Later, I’ve grown up and become like that, my mother has already left us. I sometimes wonder whether she would have had me if she’d known I’d become like that… 

Later still, a woman comes to see 10 000 Gestures by Boris Charmatz, a piece in which I dance in a G-string and bra, and she asks me after the show why I chose this “role”. Why is she asking me this question, me out of the twenty or so other performers on stage, and what “role” is she talking about? I realise that I’m missing something in the way people see me here in Europe.         Perhaps the same year, I’m in Abidjan, out for a night drive, and find myself in a little place, a bar. The atmosphere’s electric, a stage is being put up with a set, and there are costumes and plenty of secret sparkle: my first encounter with the trans community. Secret divas on the dance floor by night, they’re the ones who look after other 
people’s beauty by day; hairdressers and beauticians in the little salons around the markets. So what happens between day and night?         

To people doing their shopping in Yopougon, they’re “queens”, forgetting that their wives, sisters and daughters have their hair braided every month in their colourful salons.    

Ignoring of course the strength born out of madness and the incredible nerve it takes to find a way round the roles society imposes on all its members, from childhood to death.         

Would my mother have had me?         

In 2022, I decide to bring on stage the hairdressing salons of Yopougon, my father’s pomades, the roles: the ones you’re given and the ones you take, the ones you reject; and these girls on the margins, the “failures”, the ones who are rejected, the ones who are ignored, the ones who are embarrassing, the ones who shout, the ones who always show solidarity, the ones you desire out of the corner of your eye, the ones who invent their name, the ones who are on the fringes, the ones who burn like oil, the ones who take their place… no, the ones who make space, the magicians, the ones who read your palm to write tomorrow’s world. Prophetic?           

• Nadia Beugré, Virginie Dupray         
• April 2023