Tarek Lakhrissi is a QPOC living in Paris, France who created a unique web series called Diaspora / Situations which features a series of short portraits of people of color reflecting on how their relationship to diaspora impacts their lives. He was born in France at a “banlieue-rurale” and explains, “because of my Moroccan origins, the world I inhabited was characteristically Islamico-Arab. And the typically intense vacations to Morocco every summer formed my complex relationship with France vis-a-vis my identity – simultaneously ‘French’ and yet a stranger to France itself. To this day, I’m sensitive and constantly aware of this fact, forming the circumstances of constant negotiation with my identity, both within and outside France.”
Currently the series is on its third episode and Posture reached out to Tarek to gain more insight into the mission and conversations happening around the concept of diaspora.
“My wish is to have more conversations about the traumas and illuminations caused by the fact of diaspora, especially in Western societies, but also the amount of creativity produced by wonderful souls lost in its loneliness and love.”
What made you want to begin this series? What is your personal relationship to diaspora and your identity?
I embarked on this series during a year living abroad, between Montreal and New York City. I was totally amazed by all the conversations I had about diaspora, identity politics, and sexual complexities. I felt I needed to pay tribute to some people, friends, lovers, and weirdos I had come across there – virtually all full of wisdom, creativity and beauty. During that year, I was pursuing a Master’s Degree in performance/theatre studies about QPOC and feminists of color. During my endeavors, I realized that I didn’t present my thesis to my supervisor in a timely manner. My project, I felt, had to necessarily be expanded, perhaps unmanageably so. Now that I have returned to Paris, I’m really excited to continue to pursue my scholarly endeavors. The geography of Paris itself provides an apt opportunity for my project. I’m also interested in pursuing further interviews and research in the UK and Belgium, perhaps Morocco as well. To be able to have the resources in order to fully realize the scope of my project—given the mere fact of globalization and transmigration of nationalisms and identity—is very exciting to think about. I am inspired by Cecile Emeke’s Strolling series, but also the webserie Polyglot by Amelia Umuhire, Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied, and Sunil Gupta’s work. I’m also inspired by a lot of writers I recently discovered such as Leila Aboulela, Hanif Kureishi and Edward Said. My wish is to have more conversations about the traumas and illuminations caused by the fact of diaspora, especially in Western societies, but also the amount of creativity produced by wonderful souls lost in its loneliness and love.
“I’m becoming more and more curious, perhaps obsessed, by the endless process that is decolonization and its social and political impacts, particularly in France because the context is brutal toward North Africans and Muslims.”
My relationship to my history of diaspora is inscribed in my body, my blood. My parents are from Morocco, but my father arrived in France pretty early to find a job and seek a better life. He married my mother who followed him later. I’m the last child with four other siblings. As a Moroccan, I identify as an Arab and an African, but my relationship to my body is really ambiguous. I am racialized (a subject of the dominant gaze) as a biracial person (black and some other ethnicity) or maybe from the Caribbean. People rarely see me as an Arab, and in a way, I know that I can escape police brutality in France which is – first of all – targeted towards brown bodies. Morocco is a mixed country with many different ethnicities. There are Black people in Morocco as well as really light-skinned people like some Amazighs and this makes me proud to come from this country even though a lot of issues are happening in North Africa. Also, I feel like my body is something that doesn’t belongs to me because of how I am perceived with my masculinity, my skin color, my ambiguity. I am tall and a brown guy, which leads to the perception of my body incorrigibly “dangerous” or “promiscuous” in French society, so I know that I must control my way of talking and behaving because of these things. And of course, I am queer, even though I prefer the French word “pédé” that belongs more to my history instead of the Anglophone word, but I don’t know why I’m less and less focused on my “sexual identity,” if there is such a thing. I’m becoming more and more curious, perhaps obsessed, by the endless process that is decolonization and its social and political impacts, particularly in France because the context is brutal toward North Africans and Muslims.
How do you find your subjects?
It’s usually spontaneous and I’m actually pretty good at creating networks between people. Most of my subjects are actually friends, or people I met randomly and had an intense and quick connection. I choose friends because I want to create an intimacy in my interviews that allows them to feel free to say what they want, as if we had a confession in a café, a bedroom, or in whispers I heard in the metro. It is natural. They accept sustaining long and deep genuine conversations with me, and are able to share their experiences and advices and the spontaneous quirky tales. I feel lucky to be able to show that to an Anglophone and Francophone public through social media. Social media is a magnificent way of sharing clear and accessible information, in the sense that some isolated people feel less alone because of skin color, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, class. But also other stuff that makes you part of who you are, who you want to be and who you will never be. That’s the freedom I want to offer to my subjects, the freedom to say everything that comes to their minds, and it doesn’t have to be all the time radical; it can be poetic, scientific, spiritual, and absurd. I want to access the “realness” of identities each time I am inspired by someone’s experience.
“That’s the freedom I want to offer to my subjects, the freedom to say everything that comes to their minds, and it doesn’t have to be all the time radical; it can be poetic, scientific, spiritual, and absurd.”
Do you have a goal number of interviews you wish to produce for this series?
It’s all about my free time, my own money and my energy, but I am so glad that this gets more and more attention because I am doing this project as a community project. I am really proud of it. I plan on conducting more and more interviews in the French context because I think it’s really important to give visibility to francophone people of color – or “les minorisés” as I prefer to say in French – in order to escape to the normative “POC” code or epistemology. The French context is so different from other Anglophone countries, as I’ve come to learn in my experience of living in Canada and USA. Moreover, I seek to focus less on art and give visibility to other people that don’t fit in the art world. It’s important to also show random people or folks who have so many things to say even though they don’t live within the so-called artistic framework.
I wish I can produce more and more videos with people I meet and create a whole community of thinkers that share their experiences and maybe do a gallery installation or, more interesting, to show some videos on schools or neighborhoods in Parisian suburbs with the goal of creating conversations about intersections of identity and what’s happening in a French context. I also want to produce works of fiction, and do something more than documentary and interviews. I am fascinated by cinema in general but I’ve always pushed away by focusing more on writings. I wish that more and more people will have access to these videos and maybe have their lives changed because they can relate, or just because they can have access to what we have to say, us, “minorisé(e)s”, us, the ones who’ve been robbed of their potential to develop their own organic voices.
For more information please visit Tarek’s youtube channel here.
