Lessons in Black Women’s Laughter: A Play-Essay on Parisian Jazz Journeys

Abstract

Lessons in Black Women’s LaughterA Play-Essay on Parisian Jazz Journeys Rashida K. Braggs In my research on the migrations of Black jazz performers to Paris, the archives reveal little about women. For this reason, I rely on interviews to investigate their migration narratives and survival strategies away from home. When I first interviewed singer Viktor Lazlo in 2015, I asked if she had experienced racism or sexism when she moved to Paris in 1988. She answered: “I had suffered racism as a young woman. Not in Paris; I used to live in Brussels.” Then she quickly added, “Yeah, one thing, it’s so funny.”1 In this article, I explore the lived experience wrapped up in the funny. I argue that in order to excavate the unspoken or minimized emotional and embodied knowledges of Black women performers, jazz scholars can learn a lot from interdisciplinary, performative methodologies. With this article, I offer a play-essay—my term for merging expository prose with theater—as a helpful approach full of lessons for uncovering and articulating Lazlo’s “funny” experience. Viktor Lazlo was born in Lorient, France, in 1960; her Grenadian mother and Martinican father welcomed her into the world. They soon moved and she was raised in Brussels, Belgium. At eleven years old, Lazlo was already gravitating to the stage when she participated in her first musical competition. She started off studying archaeology and art history at university, but quickly found a love for modeling, singing, acting, and playing the violin. Throughout the 1980s she modeled for Chantal Thomas and Thierry Mugler, and she was a background singer for Lou and the Hollywood Bananas. Then she was discovered by Lou Deprijck, which ended up being a major sea change—starting with a professional name change. While her given name was Sonia Dronier, she altered her stage name to “Viktor Lazlo” based on one of the white, male characters in the 1942 film classic [End Page 68] Casablanca played by Paul Henreid. The name created tension between the public’s expectations for Black women performers and Lazlo’s own self-presentation. Even early in her career, she made a choice that resisted the jazz industry’s silencing of Black women. Years later she recalled her decision in a 1999 interview for the Belgian journal De Morgen: I’ve been wondering for 15 years already why I chose Viktor Lazlo as a pseudonym: it took me years to figure it out: My parents had a daughter, but wanted a son. My mother cried when I was born, not another girl . . . That’s the sort of thing you carry with you in your life, and I did that with my name. I wanted to confirm the male part of me, to cover my female side: Sonia stayed at home, was introverted, shy, loved to cook, sat in front of the fireplace; While Viktor stood on stage, was brave, vindictive, played the role everybody wanted her to.2 With the pseudonym, management, and her talents and experience, Lazlo rose to fame in the mid-1980s with songs such as “Canoë Rose,” “Pleurer d’une rivière” (Cry me a river), “Breathless,” and her steal-the-show hosting of the Eurovision Song Contest in 1987. While her most well-known songs were grouped in the pop category, Lazlo’s albums often mixed soul and jazz too. In 1988 she moved to Paris and increased her attention to acting. She played the role of Sandra in the French TV crime series Navarro, which aired from 1989 to 2006.3 In the new millennium, she performed in a plethora of roles in French and German television and film, including a leading role in the play “Hotel des deux mondes” in 2000 and the 2004 film Nord Plage (North Beach), which explored the evolution of a small community living on the North Atlantic coast of Martinique. Lazlo also expanded her oeuvre by breaking into literature; she wrote her first novel, La femme qui pleure (The Crying Woman), in 2010. At the time of writing this article, she has recorded fifteen non-compilation albums, written six novels, and acted in multiple TV and film roles—all...