Christelle Bakima Poundza

Through the main character, Maya, my novel explores the desires and aspirations of a generation that sees itself as freer than the one before it, yet finds itself confronted with the realities of the world.

My two-month residency in Atlanta will provide an opportunity to explore Maya’s formative college years. A young Black French fashion photographer based in Paris, Maya grew up between France and Germany but attended an HBCU in Atlanta as an international student-athlete. Her experience in the United States allows her to discover herself in ways she never has before and ultimately leads her to embrace photography as a medium.

The material I gather and create during the residency — stories, encounters, observations, photographs, playlists, and audio and video recordings — will provide the foundation for developing an authentic character.

To this end, I will meet with people from across the city, particularly members of Black diasporic communities and “third culture kids,” visit relevant places, and seek out experiences similar to those Maya might encounter. Life on an HBCU campus, as well as within the city and state of Georgia, will allow me to explore several questions:

• What does it mean to be Black when coming from Europe and being immersed in an elite African American environment?
• Atlanta’s role in shaping the concept of Black excellence, as well as its place in the history of Black arts and popular culture.
• The development of a perspective shaped by tensions between multiple cultural frameworks and identities — white European, African, and African American — and the creation of new imaginaries rooted in a diasporic and female-centered perspective embodied by Maya.

Maya and I share some common ground: we both first came to Atlanta at the age of thirteen — she for a summer camp, and I on a family trip. Unlike her, however, I never returned.

The United States and American culture have played a defining role in shaping our perspectives, identities, and ideas of sport and excellence. This is all the more significant for those who, like Maya, grew up in Europe and France in the 2000s as Black people, in societies where people who look like us have often been kept at the margins or represented without nuance or depth.

The diversity of Black identities and the richness of Atlanta’s cultural landscape are the product of a history deeply shaped by forced displacement, slavery, resistance, migration, and the Civil Rights Movement. The political and cultural transformations that have emerged from this history — from the reinvention of hip-hop aesthetics to the television series Atlanta and the new generation of Black fashion photographers from the American South — are contemporary manifestations of a long history that has crossed the Atlantic and become part of global popular culture.

Spending time in Atlanta as part of this residency would offer an ideal opportunity to understand how the city shapes Maya and fuels her desire to tell her own stories through photography, while exploring questions of gender, class, cultural hegemony, and diaspora.