The Culture of the Islands festival highlights Creole culture and the memory of slavery. Its 21st edition, focused on Afro hair, questions the colonial heritage and the discrimination still present.
For more than thirty years, the Couleur Piment Créole association has been restoring colors to the image of overseas France. And to raise awareness of Creole culture and customs, and also to develop exchanges between islanders and metropolitan residents, allowing them to forge links, it organizes each year the “Culture of the Islands” festival. The 21st edition, which will open this Saturday, June 20, 17 rue Jean-Mermoz (opposite Paul-Éluard college), will have the theme “Sky, my afro hair”.
A theme inspired by Martinican sociologist Juliette Smeralda, who published “From relaxed hair to frizzy hair”. And, at the heart of an increasingly mixed society, it is the opportunity for President Julien Liméry to recall that “UNESCO has classified hair straightening among the psychological after-effects of the slave trade”.
Discrimination at the heart of the debates
From 12 p.m., the festival will turn the pages of works by overseas writers and will address another subject of discrimination through the reading of texts by the Chevalier Saint-Georges, a Guadeloupean classical musician from the 18th century, “victim of his color”.
Reading extracts from the Code Noir will remind you that people reduced to slavery, until 1848, were considered “movable property”. It took 178 years for the National Assembly to vote, on May 28, for the symbolic repeal of the Code Noir and the texts governing slavery in the French colonies. And 25 years ago, the Taubira law made France the first country in the world to recognize slavery as a crime against humanity.
A happy birthday celebrated around the sharing of Reunionese dishes and board games. More information: 06 21 46 14 95.
