If you like graphic novels and if you are a tad feminist – or just curious – the series of literary works by Catel and Bocquet dedicated to great female figures in History should interest you.
Why trace the history of these women?
When I asked myself what I wanted to convey in my life as an illustrator, I understood that I wanted to be inspired and work on female models. We sorely lack female references, whether in fiction but also in life, in the news. I realized that in the history books, there were very few female role models, while many women did amazing things and even changed the course of History.”
In fact, after Kiki de Montparnasse, Olympe de Gouges, Benoîte Groult and Alice Guy, the literary duo undertakes to put down on paper the life of Josephine Baker the tumultuous, Josephine Baker the luminous.
Catel’s drawings are fine, delicate and elegant and Bocquet’s texts perfectly synthesize the rich hours of Josephine Baker’s life.
Josephine Baker had several lives: as a black artist despised by her American public, as a performer revered in France, as a resistant, as a mother of a rainbow humanity, as a political activist. The sky is the limit, as the saying goes.
Josephine was born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906 in Missouri, to an artistic and poor father and mother. She is probably the daughter of Eddie Carson but he abandons his family when Josephine is only one year old. Josephine quickly alternates between school and work, since the extreme poverty that afflicts the household forces her to financially contribute to the family. She marries at 13 with Willie Wells, it was love at first sight.
She is also a street artist. Her talent, all in flexibility and clowning, allows her to be hired in the itinerant troupe of the Dixie Steppers. It is in Philadelphia that she meets her second husband, Willie Baker – whose name she will keep for eternity. Broadway attracts her so much that she leaves her second husband.
She is only 16 years old but her talent is that obvious that Caroline Dudley Reagan, the wife of a member of the American embassy in France, pushes her to leave for Paris where she predicts a stunning success.
In 1925, Josephine is in Paris. She performs in “La Revue Nègre” at the Champs-Elysées Theater. And Caroline Dudley Reagan was right: her quasi-nudity, her smile and her grimaces conquer the public.
One day, I realized that I lived in a country where I was afraid of being black. It was a country reserved for whites. There was no place for black people. I was suffocating in the United States. Many of us left, not because we wanted to, but because we couldn’t take it anymore… I felt liberated in Paris.”
The banana belt will come later: at the Folies-Bergères Theater in 1927. Her cheetah, which she has (almost) domesticated, terrorizes the orchestra but excites the crowds: she is already a legend. The purity of her lines and curves captivates the cubists and her freedom of being hypnotizes the public who discovers jazz music with her.
Is Josephine’s embodiment of the archetypal exotic, erotic and wild black woman another kind of racism and colonialism? Obviously. Is Josephine aware of it? Probably. But in Paris she is celebrated exactly for who she is.
She never loses sight of her modest origins and offers the popular soup in Montmartre to the people ruined by the crisis of 1929.
In 1937, she marries Jean Lion, acquires French nationality at the same time and purchases the now famous Château des Milandes. Jean Lion, who is of Jewish origin and who will suffer from anti-Semitic repercussions, will probably pave the way for Josephine the Resistant. Because she is soon singing for the soldiers as the war is coming. She becomes a counterintelligence agent for Free France, hiding coded messages in her music scores. She will receive the medal of the French Resistance in 1946.
At the Liberation, she offers her services to the Red Cross. Her castle of Milandes, where she raises her twelve rainbow children, swallows up her fortune. She runs after the concerts, after the money.
She tries her luck in US between 1947 and 1951, but the tour suffers from bad publicity because an influential and acrimonious journalist called her a communist and an enemy of black people.
However, she will be the first to fight for the black cause all around the world and will become a frenetic political activist. She will never stop fighting against inequality and racism. Despite the help of Brigitte Bardot and Princess Grace of Monaco, Josephine Baker will end up ruined. She dies on April 12, 1975, aged only 68.
She will have navigated the troubled waters of racialism to make the most of it. Crazy head, free head, egalitarian head, she may have been pantheonized at the end of 2021 for purely political reasons (a woman, a black woman) but the fact remains that Josephine Baker fully deserves this pantheonization.
She is forever synonymous with freedom and independence. Of generosity. Of Integrity. Of life.
I love Josephine the luminous.
Dress from the 20s, cape from the 1900s, cane from the 40s, clutch from the 40s found at Marcel et Jeannette, Parisian Flea Market – Prada heels – Vintage opera gloves
March 8, 2024
