Carine Durand is seven days old when she receives her father’s clan’s hereditary name: Ayélé. Growing up in France, it was as though everything conspired to make her forget her Afro-descended and Middle Eastern origins. In history classes, she was taught that the colonization of the African continent belonged to the past. So how, then, to understand the confusion that crept into her during adolescence? How to explain that increasingly painful sense of having had her tongue torn out?
Now an ethnologist, Carine Ayélé Durand has found, in her own multiple identities and those of others, a constellation of word-stars that revives forgotten colors. From Togo to Lebanon, by way of the Sámi people, Ayélé sings a life of mixed heritage and the right to the joy of being.
