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When I was a junior in high school and taking American lit, I found myself wondering if the entire course was merely a test to see how much hippie liberal education from childhood had really been internalized--namely, if, being raised my entire life to believe that white people are not superior to black people, I had developed the hippie fortitude to survive an entire year of reading really good books by white people and really bad books by black people* without being tempted to conclude that black people are bad writers. (Luckily I passed, because I recognized this as the same trick they pull when studying "women writers," and they only have you read the most dull and sappy books about how dull it was being a woman, and never any of the books that, like, are good stories and happen to have been written by females--they go in a different unit. And then there's Octavia Butler, who is both black AND female, and has never shown up in classes about either Books By Black People or Books By Women, but only in a class about aliens.)

I'm starting to get a similar vibe from a lot of the books I'm reading for my French classes this year. All three French classes have been variants on the theme of "Non-Whites Speak French Too," with a special emphasis on "And Really Quite A Lot of Black People Speak French!" Number of black male characters I've been introduced to in Francophone novels and movies in the past year: Lots. Number of black women in same: Lots. Number of sexual liaisons between the two: More than I'm comfortable with considering my grasp of French is still less than fluent (reading a sex scene where you have to look up all the words above a fourth-grade vocabulary level is fucking awkward). Number of black male Francophone characters whose number one personality trait is being a hardcore womanizer: Lots. Number of these the text seems to dislike: none. Number of black male Francophone characters whose number one personality trait is not womanizing, but their attitudes are still problematic: Most of the rest of them. Number of black male Francophone characters whose relations with women *didn't* annoy my inner feminist: One, this being Ibrahim Ducoure from Moolaade, who refuses to break his engagement with an uncircumcised woman even though his father threatens to disown him.**

The last major thing that happened in Point-a-Pitre--Paris, which I'm currently reading for Immigration in France, is that the narrator's girlfriend Annick dumped him and he is now all upset 'n' shit that he lost her. Why did she dump him? Well, he went out clubbing with one of his friends (following a two-page monologue on the part of the friend about Why He Is Teh Awesome At Picking Up Chicks, Like Srsly, Even The White Girls Dig Him), and he hooked up with some other chick named Marie-Laure and brought her back to his place for sexytimes, and then in the morning when Marie-Laure was still asleep he goes to the bakery to buy croissants for breakfast (because they are French), and while he is at the bakery Annick stops by for something... and Marie-Laure is still there! And Frederic (this is our lovely narrator) is all annoyed, like, but I wasn't expecting her to come by this morning! Why did she come by without me expecting her, did she not realize I might be doing something that I was going to hide from her? And then Marie-Laure is *also* mad at him and calls him names for not telling her he had a girlfriend. And then he goes and tries to get Annick back, and she is like NO, WE ARE SO DONE HERE, and he keeps trying to get her back, mostly by just telling her he wants to, and at one point he grabs her and forcibly kisses her, because that is not at all assault in any way, shape or form, no, definitely not. The one thing he does not do is apologize, because he'll be absolutely damned if he'll apologize, because he didn't do anything wrong, I mean, his dad cheated on his mum all the time, and that wasn't why she left him, so how dare that uppity bitch Annick have different standards? So instead he decides it must be because Annick's family is higher up on the socio-economic ladder than he is and the problem here is really ALL ABOUT CLASSISM, and not about, like, honesty/transparency/having the same damn understanding of the parameters in a relationship, or anything like that at all. Poor put-upon Frederic, all the women in his life are mad at him because he's poor, and are PRETENDING it's because he double-crossed them! How dare they! Women are so mean and irrational!

And seriously... I, personally, am the sort of person that thinks the automatic expectation of monogamy as *the* defining factor of a relationship is vastly overrated. If people want open or polyamorous relationships or whatever, I say go for it. But put all your cards on the table and if you want something some way, ASK for it. This isn't the sort of thing where you get to keep it all secret and say IT'S MY PERSONAL BUSINESS AND NOBODY ELSE'S AND I WILL MAKE THE RULES UP AS I GO ALONG THE WAY I WANT TO AND I AM NOT ANSWERABLE TO ANYBODY ETC ETC. A person's sex life is certainly not, like, public business, but it is most definitely the business of the people they are sleeping with.

Also, if you knew you'd have to hide it, it was probably wrong. At least feel bad about it. I could be just like "Oh damn, poor Frederic made a mistake" if poor Frederic actually realized he'd made a fucking mistake. But no, we get "But my Daddy did it years ago in the Caribbean and I'm pretty sure my mom left him because he was an alcoholic and not because of that!" GROW UP.

I'm getting very tired of feeling like I'm being taught that Black Men Are Misogynistic But We Can't Have A Problem With This Because It Sucks To Be Black In France And Its Former Colonies. I mean, most white guys seem to have sexist views of women too, but some of them occasionally remember to pretend not to, so I don't feel like the entire canon of Stuff Written By White People is so uniformly unthinkingly objectifying.

I'm pretty certain there are black men out there who aren't misogynistic--I've even met a few--and I would hope this is true within the French-speaking portion of that demographic as well, but apparently none of them are writing anything Ferly can use in her classes except Ousmane Sembene (the man behind Moolaade).

I think I need to give Rue Cases-Negres another watch one of these days. If I recall correctly, the main character in that one was a little boy who was just too young to have picked up that sort of shit yet. And he had an awesome grandma.

Blar. It's not even like I have an issue with highly "male-identified" work, or even that I can't relate to highly male-identified or male-targeted work. A lot of stuff I like is total all-male, boys-and-their-toys fails-the-Bechdel-test "guy" fiction. I'll take a bromance over romance any day of the week. But I can only take so much CHICKS, DUDE, CHICKS. CHICKS CHICKS CHICKS. CHICKS LOVE ME AND I LOVE THEM EXCEPT WHEN THEY HAVE OPINIONS ON SHIT garbage before I start to lose the ability to identify with the characters at the level that's necessary to enjoy a story.

There's a dearth of decent black female Francophone characters here, too. Helene and Juletane from Juletane at least felt like fully realized people--every black female in the books written by men have felt flat to me. The mother in La Civilisation, Ma Mere! was pretty awesome, but the Chraibis are Arab, so that doesn't quite fix this problem of not being able to find une negresse that comes off like a person instead of as some "othered" thing of Une Negresse. Even in Amour, Colere, et Folie--all written by a woman!--only Amour managed to characterize its women in a colorfully human manner, even if not a positive one: everyone in Amour is CRAZY. But that's an improvement over Colere, where the in-class discussion consisted almost entirely of Charlotte lamenting "Elles sont faibles! Toutes les femmes sont faibles!" Because they were.

Colle Ardo and the women in Moolaade, obviously, are the notable exceptions here, being totally badass, and perhaps they get it from not speaking a damn word of French between them, since pretty much the whole movie's in whatever African indigenous language they speak in that corner of Burkina Faso.

I should probably top ranting and actually finish this section of Point-a-Pitre--Paris so I can do the damn assignment and move on to reading something decent. And maybe if I keep reading, something will bludgeon Frederic to his senses!

*There was also one really bad book by a white person, which was Ethan Frome; I'm not sure what that was supposed to tempt us to think.

**Ducoure actually only speaks French for one scene of the film, when talking to Mercenaire, since the rest of the movie is in I don't actually know what language.