Travel entrepreneur Dawn S. Booker offers a refreshing, clear-eyed alternative to romanticised accounts by Black American travellers and expats in Paris. Booker, who teaches annually in Paris, explores the complex paradox of feeling simultaneously visible and invisible as a Black woman in the City of Light. Her thoughtful insight into Africa’s profound but often unrecognised influence on French culture reveals how Paris becomes not her favourite place, but where she becomes her favourite self.
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As an avid traveller, I am often asked where my favourite place on earth is. People typically assume the answer is Paris. I understand why—after all, I’ve been there at least fifteen times, I’ve lived there for two years, and I return every year to teach. But the truth is more nuanced: Paris is not my favourite place in the world. It’s where I become my favourite version of myself.
A Deferred Dream Realised
I moved to Paris at age 46—not because I was lost or seeking reinvention, but because I had finally made space for something I had long delayed. I had been a single mother for 21 years, and whilst that experience was full of responsibility, it was also full of privilege. I held leadership roles as a director and vice president of marketing, I travelled for work, and I built a strong foundation for myself and my daughter. But I never had the time or flexibility to pause and pursue my own academic ambitions—not fully. I didn’t have the freedom, right out of undergrad, to live abroad and explore the world untethered.
By the time I moved to Paris to pursue my master’s degree, my daughter was in college. And for the first time in more than two decades, I had the space to make a decision that was entirely mine. That decision—studying and living in Paris—wasn’t a second act. It was the realisation of a long-awaited deferred dream.
Neither Tourist Nor Native
Paris, then, was more than a change of scenery. It was a place where I experienced access—not just to museums or cafés or academic spaces, but to parts of myself I hadn’t been able to express freely. In Paris, I felt more American than I ever had at home. Not more Black American, just American—disconnected from the racialised frameworks I knew so well, and momentarily freed from their weight. In that space, I felt fearless.
But the feeling was not absolute. Living in Paris made me acutely aware of a duality—feeling simultaneously both visible and invisible. The parts of me that had long been dormant—my love for research, for art, for conversation and cultural exchange—were fully alive and visible. Yet as a Black woman over 40, fluent in English but not in French, wearing natural hair in a space that often did not celebrate it, I moved through the city with a sense of quiet otherness. I was outside the vibrant African and Caribbean immigrant networks. I wasn’t a tourist. But I wasn’t entirely at home either.
This duality was most pronounced in moments of hypervisibility—when I’d step off the train at Château Rouge and be immediately targeted by African-descended men commenting on my hair, suggesting I needed it “done,” or pointing me towards salons that specialised in straightening, braiding or weaving. It wasn’t just commentary—it was a form of erasure. The implication was that I wasn’t enough as I was. That my aesthetic, shaped by confidence and maturity, needed adjusting to fit into a version of Blackness already defined and expected.
What I Thought Was French Was Always Mine
Over time, I realised the version of myself that emerged in Paris—curious, confident, untethered—was not created by the city, but revealed by it. Paris didn’t give me these qualities. It simply allowed space for them to surface. I have only been able fully to articulate this feeling when reflecting on my time in France within the context of other global travel.
The more I travelled to Africa, the more I understood that some of what I love in Paris—its aesthetic, its cultural sensibility, even its intellectual rhythm—was not uniquely French. These elements were deeply influenced by Africa, extracted and repackaged through colonialism. What I find beautiful in Paris may feel familiar because it is familiar. It is of me.
My visits to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania clarified this. I recognised the vibrational resonance I had long felt in Paris, but with an emotional coherence I couldn’t deny. In Paris, the joy was intermittent and complicated by invisibility. In Africa, the joy was rooted. There, I didn’t have to reconcile my presence; I was home in a way that needed no translation.
France’s African Soul
As I’ve deepened my study of French culture, I’ve come to see clearly how profoundly the African diaspora has shaped the country’s aesthetic and cultural identity. From the rhythms of jazz echoing through Montmartre to the fashion and language patterns found in immigrant neighbourhoods like Château Rouge, France’s so-called “high culture” has always been informed by colonial relationships. The architecture of empire, the cuisine influenced by North and West Africa, the visual art that mimics African form and colour—these elements aren’t borrowings; they’re inheritances, often unacknowledged.
The French literary canon holds space for Senegalese political leader and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor and Martinican political leader and poet Aimé Césaire not as anomalies, but as evidence that the intellectual richness of the diaspora was never peripheral to French identity—it was foundational. Their work, especially through the Négritude movement they co-founded with French Guianese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, showed that the ideas, creativity, and perspectives of the African diaspora have always been part of French intellectual life—not outside of it.
Their articulation of Négritude represents a critical intervention in African intellectual history, positioning African cultural heritage and identity not as peripheral, but as central to global thought. Senghor’s philosophy challenges dominant Western frameworks by reclaiming and affirming the value of African ways of knowing, being, and expressing identity (Adidi et al., 2024, p. 43).
Senghor, who later became Senegal’s first president, was also a member of the Académie Française. He used French to celebrate African culture, blending it with European ideas whilst challenging colonial assumptions. Césaire’s writing, especially his Discourse on Colonialism, sharply criticised empire and used the French language to confront its violence.
Illuminated, Not Moulded, in Paris
Teaching in Paris today, I continue to feel both celebrated and alien. My students respond to my methods, my background, my perspective. In the classroom, I am visible. Outside of it, I often am not. But I’ve come to understand the importance of both states. Visibility without context can be performative. Invisibility without reflection can be numbing. In Paris, I move between the two, learning more each time.
And as I move through Paris with that awareness, I do so knowing that my love for its beauty is not infatuation with something foreign. It is recognition of something deeply familiar, something that echoes across oceans and generations.
So no, Paris is not my favourite place on earth. But when I am there, I am my favourite person. Not because the city moulds me, but because it illuminates the parts of me shaped by history—both personal and collective. My presence there, much like the legacy of the Harlem Hellfighters, Josephine Baker, Ada Bricktop Smith, Nina Simone, James Baldwin and so many others, reflects the enduring paradox of Black identity in European spaces: visible when convenient, invisible when it matters most.
Paris has fed me in ways I’ll never dismiss. But the nourishment came, in part, from recognising that the beauty I was drawn to there was never entirely French. It was familiar because it came from a deeper origin—one that lives in me, and one that Paris had long borrowed from my ancestors.
Adidi, Dokpesi Timothy, Joseph Aye, Mary Linda Vivian Onuoha, and Philip Chika Omenukwa. “Negritude: Towards an Authentic African Narrative in the Thought of Leopold Senghor.” IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities 10, no. 2 (2024): 43–49. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14554.96967.
