Chronicles of a Strange Foreigner: Survival Is Not Living

When Boubacar Dramé, a community mediator, was brutalized by French police in 2019, more than a body was wounded. An entire illusion cracked. Astou Coly, our Strange Foreigner columnist, a PhD candidate in sociolinguistics and collaborator at the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, seizes this rupture to speak about those who survive. About those who, after the ordeal, must relearn how to breathe. The illusion, precisely. The belief that by doing everything right — by being integrated, polite, useful — one escapes the reductive gaze. Boubacar Dramé believed it. Many of us, whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, have believed it too. We tell ourselves that with time, with degrees, with good work, prejudices fade. Then one day, an incident, a violence, a look reminds you of your foreignness. Not the one you carry, but the one assigned to you. Astou Coly doesn't just recount this violence. She explores its aftermath. What becomes of those who survive. Because survival is not healing. It's carrying within oneself the memory of the shock, the crack in trust, the doubt about one's own place. It's learning to navigate a world that has shown you its hardest face, while having to continue living, working, existing within it. For the diaspora, this chronicle strikes a deep chord. It speaks to that double consciousness, that permanent gap between who we are and how we're perceived. It questions the price of survival. Must we rebuild on the ruins of silence? Or should we, in