Figure of drag and contemporary dance, Matthieu Barbin, alias Sara Forever, finalist of season 2 of Drag Race France, signs with “Brûle bébé” a first novel on queer emancipation, the violence of social assignment and the successive ruptures with the environments that define us. He will meet at the Tropisme bookstore in Montpellier on Wednesday June 17 at 6:30 p.m.
We know you as a dancer and drag figure. What triggered the need to start writing with this first novel, Brûle bébé ?
There was no trigger. For me, it’s a logical progression. Writing has always informed my creative endeavors, whether as a dance performer or as a choreographer. The book simply came to respond to the need to leave more room for fiction, dreams and broader narratives than those which pass through the stage.
The title may appear violent. What should be burned? Is it childhood, the relationship with your mother, or the image of the boy that was expected of you?
It’s a shortcut. I see a connection to anger more than to violence. I wanted this book to be read like a manifesto, or like a flaming piece of paper that we try to keep between our fingers. Afterwards, queer childhoods or stories are often associated with violence, whether intrafamilial or systemic. There is violence in the social assignment, the insults, or the refusal of society to let these children transform. I wanted to make this violence the starting point of an initiatory journey. The character is constantly pushed around, moved around, and understands that he is never quite in his place, from childhood to adulthood.
The break with academia and the bourgeoisie
The narrator expresses violent disillusionment with the world of classical and contemporary dance, which he considers bourgeois. Was drag a way of seceding?
Live performance and dance remain very bourgeois environments. My journey has therefore only been a series of breakups. I first looked for choreographers from performance backgrounds to break with academicism. Then, I made my own pieces breaking with the bourgeoisie of contemporary dance, before turning to cabaret to escape conventionalism. Today, I am creating a new break with drag because it has become very mainstream. Writing allows me to enter into a relationship with time that opposes the immediacy of entertainment. Like my character, I refuse established definitions.
On stage, your double refuses to allow the queer community to be relegated to “etc.” struggles. What is the political role of drag today?
Its role is to place queer artists at the center of social, environmental or anti-racist struggles. In political speeches, we are still too often relegated to the label “etc.”, as if our identities were not concerned. However, queer people have always been at the heart of these battles. Drag carries this memory and must bring these issues together.
Drag is enjoying immense popularity, notably thanks to Drag Race France. How do you explain it?
It is very linked to French cultural history. We have a real tradition of transformation, feathers and flamboyance that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. Drag uses entertainment to impose fundamentally political issues. He does this by taking a side step, by diverting and making the stories more complex, which is very French. Thanks to the public service, the show is invited into living rooms and allows young generations to open political discussions with their parents.
The best way to show your mother what you were doing is to be on TV? Is this the reason for your participation in season 2 of Drag Race France?
No, my primary motivation was the desire to shine, to be seen and heard. It was afterwards that I understood that television was a way to recreate family ties. The real reason was textual: I needed to break away from the contemporary dance world where I had been immersed for fifteen years. This program was an accelerator for meeting the public more quickly and mobilizing me intensely in my art.
For the narrator, emancipation implies the symbolic mourning of his original environment. We think here of the figure of the class defector.
I never use this term, because it is a form of assignment. As for mourning, I think on the contrary that the character refuses to do it. If he accepted this mourning, he would not be consumed like this and the book would be two pages long. Emancipation requires a permanent break, but you have to know how to move it. You have to break with your original environment, then with the fantasies of the capital, then with the comfort of television to refuse essentialization. Mourning closes the book; rupture requires being in perpetual movement.
What does the literature allow that drag does not?
It’s simply another relationship to time. Television synthesizes and essentializes the journeys at a given moment. The book allows us to restore depth and complexity to queer stories. Ultimately, the aesthetic and political power remains the same. But a drag act lasts three minutes, while a book unfolds over hundreds of pages. In both cases, they are beings who cry out to emancipate themselves.
