I left Paris and the region of Île–de–France for Berlin at the beginning of the 1990s. Seduced by the prospect of living history in the moment, it was in this city that only a few years later would become the capital of reunified Germany, and on the ruins of the Berlin Wall, that I seized the opportunity to finally become the creator and master of my own image and identity.

Ever since the end of the hostilities in 1945, Berliners were accustomed to rubbing shoulders with Afro–American soldiers, based in the enormous barracks, close to the southern border of the city. At the end of the week, GIs would parade on Kurfürstendamm, at the wheel of their luxury cars, registered in Illinois, the State of New York or South Carolina, hip–hop music blasting from the loudspeakers, sporting baseball caps, their bulging biceps hanging ostentatiously alongside the car doors. Beginning in the early 1980s, asylum seekers from Africa gathered at the foot of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a black building, half of it destroyed, and bearing the scars of the last battles between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. There was also a small group of very active Caribbeans and Latin Americans, quite well–known in the music world. This is more or less what a ‘black’ person corresponded to in the mind of the average Berliner at the time. As soon as I landed on this cultural landscape, I was considered different. Somewhere between an enigma and a curiosity, in many respects a question mark hung over me. A French man, of dark–brown complexion, holding degrees from Parisian universities… In Berlin, I resembled nothing with which they were familiar. I was a novelty, an empty rubric for which no previous category existed, no clear label. Few prejudices could be attributed to me and this was an advantage. The general ignorance made it easy for me to completely reinvent myself. There were no preconceived ideas to contend with, no intellectual aberrations from another time to lament. This distance, moreover, made it easier for me to begin to understand the archaisms and contradictions that were specific to French culture.