“Milwaukee Blues”: Who was George Floyd?

Who was George Floyd?

The novel does not answer this question. But it invites us to enrich it, to take this question by the hand and take a generous walk with it…

Starting from the scene of the crime to consider the surrounding community, going beyond the angles of this camera that in the spring of 2020 made us all witnesses to the murder of this man.

A murder all the more revolting, as it prolongs the long history of abuse and violence perpetrated, often with impunity, against black people in the United States.

Inspired by this event, Milwaukee Blues by Louis-Philippe Dalembert invites us to leave the comfort of our mini screens, forget our digital reflexes to walk unmasked down the streets of Milwaukee and listen to witnesses of this man’s life give voice to his breath interrupted forever by police atrocities.

This must be a choice of the author: no mention is made of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the narrative is suspended in time as if to better address another, older and more insidious virus, that of systemic racism, long nurtured in American society but particularly revived under the presidency of Donald Trump.

In a novel so close to current events, the risk for us, the readers, of mixing fact and fiction is present in every sentence. But this is the game of fiction and especially its magic. If the circumstances of the hero’s death are the same as Floyd’s, the similarity ends there. It is rather the story of a man with a completely different past, a “former local glory of American football”. His first name is Emmett, like the black teenager whose lynching in Mississippi in 1955 also caused a wave of anger and protest.

Thus, many references to History as well as to the imaginary expand the framework of the immediate reality in order to confront us with new parts of the truth. And here we are, asking ourselves more patient and generous questions than those, often stereotyped, proposed by the media platforms. When will the ravages of this virus stop?… From Emmet Till to George Floyd, what has really changed? And what needs to be changed?…

After each chapter, we are tempted by the desire to detect what is true and what is imagined. But we quickly remember that we are reading a fiction, which does not want to substitute itself for reality or even sublimate it, but rather to supplement it, as if to remind us that behind each of these names of victims, there was a life, like mine, like yours, made of sobs and hope, blues and love.

For by dint of repetition, the illusions of white supremacy have ended up creating a society where anti-black aggressions and crimes have become tolerable to the point of being treated as news items or as simple shocking content with viral potential.

But as this crushing injustice continues, it is imperative that the voices that are still standing continue to be heard, to rescue every victim and damage from the grave of statistics and the cowardly silence we give to the topics that anger.

Reading Milwaukee Blues is part of that much needed listening. Like a new collection of blues, to summon change, now.