Entity research premises

The challenge is to answer the question “who am I? » in the privacy of my thoughts. 

When in the silence of my thoughts, completely hidden from the world, I lead debates or reflections with myself, who is this talking me? 

Is this me a woman? Does she have a face? A skin color? A sexual orientation? A size ? A weight ? 

When I desire, who desires? Is it a body? A diffuse network? A feeling ?

Who lives in me? Who likes ? Who wants? Who is ?

These few questions are those that I have found to mark out the path to the words that will allow me to define the primordial or original being.

A nice discussion with my twin sister the last week of the year 2022 comes back to me: she suggested that a human being reveals his personality very young. First instinctively, intuitively and then more thoughtfully. In the first phase, he acts because his native code works like this and in a second phase, he acts because he has understood how this native code works and now knows how to make the same decision as before but in a conscious, controlled and explained. It is only after this stage, which often occurs in adulthood, that he can learn to improve or modify his functioning.

So I started my life that way, intuitively, without worrying about my gender, my height, my sexuality or anything else.

Start life as an entity 

Make no mistake about it, I was socially identified as a young girl living in the modest or even poor class and I happened to be aware of it. But, in my daily mental representation, I was just “Djoukui”: a being with curiosities, desires, desires, conflicts, memories and hopes.

I did not ask myself the question of what society allowed me to do or not as a girl. I didn’t worry about the tasks that should be incumbent on me because of my gender, I didn’t worry about the type of ambitions that I should have according to my social class or even my physique or how other people could perceive myself.

being “Djoukui” was my default self. It was my identity when I listened to music, when I interacted with people, when I speculated on my future, when I wrote or drew.

It happened to me at that time, from time to time, consciously or not, to find myself with a skin above this identity:

a woman’s skin. Often in the context of games of seduction, I was going to put on this package which for me defined a woman: a particular care given to my body, a way of moving, a voice, a sensuality, a seduction… to be a woman was a game, a role I could adopt. On a few rare occasions, this role was imposed on me, but it remained too rare to shake up my conception of myself.

For some reason I don’t know; maybe because of the books my biological mother introduced us to very early on, or because in our upbringing they (my two mothers) had never established a difference based on gender, or even because of my nature and the fact that I benefited from a suspicion of potential (see my article on the subject), the burden or the social codes associated with being a woman had never been imposed on me.

The skin of an African: I remember that it was a skin in which I found myself embarrassed when watching a Western film or during a debate on the economic development of the countries of the continent. It was a skin that was going, younger, to impose itself on me accompanied by a feeling of envy, shame, and anger. Then in the first years of my twenties, it was a skin that I was going to put on with the rage to do everything to change this reality.

The skin of a black woman: then almost unknown to me who had only known Cameroon. Country in which almost the entire population was black. It had of course happened to me to feel vaguely black three or four times during my years in Cameroon, but nothing that could have shaken up or even seriously scratched my representation of myself.

Anyway, most of my time, my thought or my projection of myself was spent as “Djoukui”, the one I now call “my entity”.

In summary in a hierarchical way: I was entity at the core, woman second, African third and black very rarely.

Losing his entity in the skin of a black woman 

“I became black when I arrived in France”. There are no better words to express it. The person who helped me put the exact words on this phenomenon is the excellent writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her Ted Talks “The danger of a single story” which you will find here: https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg

It didn’t happen overnight. My skin did not turn black as my plane landed at Charles de Gaulle airport and this new chapter in my life began. It happened over months, even years.

For me, becoming black started at Bures-sur-Yvette station, two months after my arrival in France, when an old gentleman, in his late sixties, eyed my chest and told me without blinking that I I had nice breasts. You have to understand: I came from a country where, of course, old people eyed the bodies of young women, but where no one felt justified in saying so without an ounce of shyness. The following months, I continued my transformation with another old man honking behind my back in the heart of Paris and classmates asking me if my weave was my real hair.

To tell you the violence of the transformation, on May 2, 2013, at almost one o’clock in the morning, 6 months after my arrival in France, I was cutting my hair with a razor because I was unable to answer the question “who- are you ?”.

First, it was a sudden, violent and unconscious transformation. From the management of ordinary racism to doubt and constant questioning, everything was turned upside down. Then I wanted to learn and understand better. What did it mean to be black? What did people expect of me as a black girl? How should I position myself in society with this cap that seemed impossible to leave?

Because it was new, because it was ubiquitous, because it was reductive, demeaning, I found myself despite myself thinking like a black person.

Attention, I don’t know how a black person born in France thinks, nor how a black person born in the islands thinks. I don’t think there is a single thought of black identity. I only know how I got to thinking as I tried to fit into what I perceived society expected of me as a black person.

In my drawings, my writings, my projects, my debates, my laughter, I found myself acting in reaction to my black identity and not because it was aligned with my primordial self. In my behavior in society, I was going to try to understand how a black body should evolve, what was reproached to him and what was expected of him.

This skin was heavy and distorting. Without erasing it completely, it came to overwrite my default operation.

So my new hierarchy was black, African, female more often than I wanted and only sometimes, entity.

The social noise associated with this identity was such that I felt like I was wearing blaring headphones all day that prevented me from listening to myself think.

I hated this! I hated every single one of those internal defeats where I wasn’t able to silence the noise. I experienced it as a defeat against myself. Like the worst of all.

A small clarification with regard to the sensitivity of this subject: I do not consider that subjects related to racism should be treated lightly. I simply consider, having experienced a before and an after, that they constitute a kind of permanent pollution that disturbs our ability to concentrate, to listen and to be our deepest self. Therefore, I consider that no one should have to evolve with this permanent cloud of pollution around them.

The cost of mental load when functioning other than as an entity 

I call it “social noise”. It’s noise. Nuisance in thoughts. Nuisance in its natural alignment with its desires, its identity and its sensitivities.

I think when we talk in our common sphere of mental load we talk about this noise. If you are a woman, it is this burden that makes you think that: it is more up to you to worry about the menu of the week, replacements of wardrobes, organization of holidays, household chores . It is this noise that makes you think that you are less legitimate for a position, selfish because ambitious or too dressed up in a room full of men.

What this social noise costs me is time and energy.

Time spent peeling back the heavy layers that cover my real desires and those of others. Time before I can myself connect to the heart of my sensitivities. Time to kill preconceptions.

In a verbal or physical exchange with another being, having to first break down the barrier of skin color, gender, origin, sexual orientation, before arriving at “self”, the Being who speaks and communicates is expensive in time and energy.

Time and energy that I would like to save because they are wasted.

If we go back to my case, very fortunately for me, in this whole process of understanding my environment, history, codes of society and my identity, I returned to a more balanced functioning 4 or 5 years. It still wasn’t my original functioning and it’s not my current functioning anymore, but it was already a healthier functioning. Without calling it “the entity”, I was already functioning again as “Djoukui”, then as a black, as an African and as a woman. An order that will change again a year later when I become a mother.

The birth of a hypothesis on my projection of myself 

We theorized it in a discussion with my best friend, a discussion he has since had time to forget. A discussion that started from a debate on transidentity to arrive at the intrinsic way in which we define ourselves in the intimacy of ourselves.

These reflections on how we project ourselves were started from the following questions about the internal transformation that a transgender person should / could have: Is this person in the silence of his thoughts changing gender consciously? Did that mean that she had always represented herself in one gender and after a process of transformation represented herself as another gender? Did this person always represent themselves as an entity but had felt all their life the obligation to put on the skin of the gender that society attributed to them and therefore rather lived the process of freeing themselves from this social injunction? ?

Many unanswered questions that had led us to project ourselves.

It was therefore, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, during this discussion that I had realized for the first time that my mode of operation had changed twice since my arrival in France. First to distort and then to rebalance. 

Énoncé de l’entité  

To clearly state my definition of the entity, I suggest you play this game.

If you represent yourself as an onion, and your deep identity is the core at the heart of it, in these too many moments of intimate exchanges between you and yourselves, how do you you visualize?

Are you a man ? A woman ? A racialized person? An animal ? A child ? A big ? An entity ?

Parenthesis: All the other terms being clearly defined, I finally allow myself to state here what I mean by entity.

Entity (definition 1): a being / a diffuse presence / a web / a network of thoughts without gender, skin color, age, or geographical affiliation to a place, … A being without tangible physical representation which nevertheless represents the unique essence of a person’s identity.

Entity (definition 2): The primordial being. Once the voices about what genders, bodies, races and sexualities should be are silenced, you will find in the noisy silence of your thoughts, the entity, the one who is, who desires and who loves. 

Have you already found yours?

I end this article by sharing where I am in my internal hierarchy.

I now think of myself as an entity. Most of my time and sometimes consciously, my default functioning is entity.

Then I am a mother. Are now present in my mind and in my inner conversations of questions, concerns, hopes, curiosities relating to my discovery of the skin of mom or my children.

Then, it varies between the female layer and the black layer. Being a woman is a skin that is precious to me for the fights and the bond it represents but which is no longer so useful to me in my relationship to my body, in my default thinking or in my sexuality. And being a black woman is a role full of stories and heavy with consequences. A state that due to its social power cannot be ignored and must be activated when the situation requires it.

Finally, I see myself as an African, my ambition to impact my country and my continent has not diminished, on the contrary, it has crystallized and started. But it is more of an ambition / a dream that I wish to achieve than an identity that on a daily basis will influence the way I process information, act or react.

Going back to this default entity operation is naturally much easier for me. My life is no less busy or complicated, but it is a battle that takes place “mainly” outside and not inside my primordial core.

My projection of myself is again intangible.