[Yale University Press; 2026]
Tr. from the French by Emma Ramadan
“Of Course, Carolina,” begins Notes to a Black Woman, “the woes of the poor the world over are as similar as sisters.” We don’t know who Carolina is, or indeed who our narrator is, but details start to reveal themselves. We learn Carolina is an author, someone our narrator learned about in Match, a French magazine mixing photojournalism, news, politics, and pop culture. A page later we learn her full name, Carolina Maria de Jesus, and that she lives in a shack in a Brazilian slum, and that she will never read these letters.
Our narrator, a settled Antillean immigrant in France, is an aspiring writer. Between her domestic responsibilities caring for two children, intermittent paid work, and her role as an unofficial community leader, she finds little slivers of time to work on her book, and to write this diary in the form of letters. She aspires to have this book published one day, and as her readers we know that she will, but back in 1963 it is only a pipe dream. She would publish one novel in her lifetime, the semi-autobiographical La temps des madras (The time of madras, currently untranslated into English), but Notes to a Black Woman was not published until after her death in 1978. Emma Ramadan’s skillful translation brings it now to an English speaking audience, joining her long resumé of political work, including Françoise d’Eaubonne’s Feminism or Death and Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying.
Françoise Ega was born in Martinique in 1920, where she trained as a secretary before moving to France as a young woman during the Second World War. There she met her husband, a soldier, and they spent the early years of their marriage stationed in different African countries with the French military, before eventually settling in Marseille. In Marseille Ega became very active in community organizing among Antillean immigrants, from teaching adult literacy classes to trade union organizing and supporting migrants in sports in France. She ran after school programs, helped migrants navigate French bureaucracy, and much more.
From Notes to a Black Woman, you’d never know most of this. Ega’s love and empathy for her countrywomen is evident, and she recounts many incidents of standing up to cruel bosses or helping people to find work and access social services. By the end of the book Ega is in her forties, well into her activist days, but there is no discussion of committee meetings. Instead we hear about her stresses in feeding and clothing her children, her holidays to Paris and to the beach, the absurd cruelties of the women whose homes she cleans, and the lives of her friends and community in Marseille. Notes is in a sense an autobiography, but it is not at all self-important. It is vulnerable and honest, as much about life as a working-class Antillean in France as about Ega herself.
The book is both a moving narrative and a useful primary historical source on French middle and upper class women’s racist treatment of domestic workers. After hearing about the abusive employer of a fellow Antillean woman, Ega begins taking jobs as a maid. She does not need to financially. Though not well off, her husband has a stable income through the emploi réserve, a scheme that allowed veterans and victims of war in France to be fast-tracked into civil service. But Ega wants to suffer the oppression of domestic servitude because she will only be able to speak on her community’s struggles with authority if she has experienced them.
Ega’s experiences working as a maid are incredibly revealing. We hear time and time again that these women want a black maid because they are stronger, more durable, and will put up with more abuse. She describes one mistress who makes her walk up and down six flights of stairs to use the outdoor laundry in the dead of winter instead of using the washing machine. While Ega could have left this job, she chose to stay, because otherwise she “will never know just how low a lady can go with a Black maid.” In another job, Ega is made to climb a precarious ladder to clean the inside of a sixth story window. She makes a valiant effort at this until her employer’s husband arrives home and chastises his wife for making her do something so dangerous and insists on hiring a specialised window cleaner. Both of these women are never as harsh when their husbands are present, highlighting the spheres of oppression in domestic life.
During this period in France, as across most of the western world, a women’s liberation movement was emerging. This coincided with the beginnings of a student movement, an LGBT rights movement, an environmentalist movement, and a surge in activity in the labor movement, but unlike in the US and UK, an anti-racist movement did not form a substantial part of this push for civil rights. A prominent anti-racist movement would not emerge in France until the 1980s with the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism and the formation of the NGO SOS Racisme. French women in the 1960s who considered themselves progressive on women’s rights, fighting for things like access to contraception and the right to work without their husband’s consent, often still harbored very racist views towards Black and immigrant women. As working-class white French women gained more rights and options for work beyond domestic service, immigrant women stepped into their place. The rigid and oppressive system of live-in domestic service we associate with nineteenth-century Europe did not die out in the early twentieth century. It was merely transplanted onto a new group of women. In France in the 1960s, this meant Caribbean migrants. In Europe today women from the Philippines and South Asia are most likely to fill this role. The UK immigrant workers charity Kalaayan reports that as many as 73% of their service users do not have access to their own passports, mirroring the system of domestic servitude Ega encounters wherein domestic workers are forced to pay back their migration costs to abusive employers.
Aside from her work, Notes to a Black Woman provides a vibrant insight into community life in French immigrant communities. The days of menial drudgery are punctuated by carnivals, cultural celebrations, christenings, and parties. The women don their madras and dance the benguine, laughing and flirting and forgetting about the abuses of their work lives. They save their francs for trips to Paris and the seaside. At the fishmongers and the butchers there is lively discussion of everything from political referendums to recipes for stew. It is here that we catch glimpses of Ega’s personality: she jokes that she’s going mad when she starts chanting about going to vote, or when she buys ice creams for her employer’s children after a chance encounter in the street. We catch beautiful glimpses of joy, such as at a friend’s wedding. She writes, “Cécile was beautiful in her white dress; a spectator said rather loudly: ‘I didn’t know gowns suited Black women so well! See how good they look?’ We looked more than good! I would even say we looked elegant! I wore long gloves because I couldn’t stop thinking about Solange’s comment, and my hat was a big hit! Solange had the poise of a great lady, and the others proved they weren’t West Indian in name only!” Whereas only a few days previously she had stormed out of a cruel employer’s home in rage, today she is proud of her community and culture and delights in celebration. Her defiant joy seeps through the page and you, the reader, feel it too.
Above all, Ega approaches the world with love and empathy. Her Catholic faith, rooted in love, and her passion for creating a better life for her fellow immigrants seem like the driving force of her being. She uses the advantages of her literacy, established life in France, and free time to become a voice for the marginalized. And this is what is most moving about the book: Ega herself. Her defiant joy in the face of oppression is infectious. When she makes money, she happily spends it on things she wants, whether it is a handbag or lollipops or trips to visit her friends. She reminds us, “who cares about an empty wallet when we make those around us happy[…]?” She fights for the rights of her community not just to exist, but to thrive. When she suffers tragedy, like the unexpected death of a friend, it is felt acutely, but this gives all the more meaning to the moments of joy. She is unapologetic in her independence. No time is spent in explaining her native culture to the readers—we are fortunate only to be able to observe. Ega is determined to carve out a beautiful life for herself and her fellow immigrants in their new home, and she makes an incredible effort. Many Black feminist writers over the years, from Audre Lorde to Toi Derricotte, have written about joy as a form of resistance. Françoise Ega lived that philosophy. Her life was one spent in service to her community, but also one lived for herself.
Kate Bugos is a writer and feminist historian in London. She co-convenes Re-enchantment, an interdisciplinary arts and literature network and London based reading series.
This post may contain affiliate links.
