Mini Story: Godelieve Simons (Visual Art)

By the time Godelieve Simons recorded the 2002 interview with Jake Lamar and Marvin Holdt at Robert Tresoine’s Paris apartment, she likely understood better than anyone the significance of James Emanuel to his communities in Paris and beyond. Simons conducted over seventy hours of interviews about Emanuel and traveled extensively—to France, Belgium, Ireland, and the United States—to facilitate and document conversations with his colleagues, collaborators, friends, and family. Among those she interviewed were Michel and Geneviève Fabre, Chansse Evans, Daniel Leary, Jean Migrenne, and Emanuel’s sister Christine—all of whom spoke to his impact as a scholar, writer, and human being. 

Simons began this documentary project in the late 1990s and continued it well into 2004, but it was one of many collaborations she undertook with James Emanuel. Their partnership took root at the International Festival of Poetry in 1990 in Liège, Belgium. Emanuel, invited by the festival committee to present his poetry, met Godelieve, who attended as a collaborator and friend of the organization’s president. This meeting marked the beginning of what would become the most enduring artistic collaboration of Emanuel’s life. 

Simons, a Belgium-based, multi-disciplinary-visual artist with a career as a physical education teacher, was a part of Emanuel’s most innovative work in the 1990s and 2000s. She added photographs of her engravings to Emanuel’s poetry books Blues in Black and White (1992) and Jazz from the Haiku King (1999), designed the album cover for Emanuel’s Middle Passage album with Noah Howard, photographed the studio recording, read French translations of Emanuel’s poetry at his poetry readings; and infused her engravings with Emanuel’s poetry for exhibition. 

In fact, Emanuel’s Christmas Notes from 1993 under the category “Art Exhibitions Treating My Poetry” shows that Simons’ engravings of his poems “Negritude,” “Inside a smooth stone,” “Deadly James,” and “Scarecrow: The Road to Toulouse,” were presented at two art exhibits in Belgium and one in France that year. Many more exhibitions would follow. Their most popular piece for exhibition was “Smooth Stone,” which fused a haiku by Emanuel that was first published in African American Review in 1992 with a three-paneled engraving by Simons. “Smooth Stone” was selected for inclusion in Belgium’s official national art collection. 

Emanuel and Simons also collaborated as artist activists when they were invited by Julia Wright, the novelist Richard Wright’s daughter, to participate in an exhibition at the Galerie J. et J. Donguy to raise money for a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist, activist, and death row inmate who was accused and convicted of killing a police officer. The two collaborated on the book Reaching for Mumia (1995) in English and The Ballad of Abu Jamal in French translated by Jean Migrenne that contained 16 original haiku featured with engravings. Their work with Julia spanned several years. 

Michel Fabre wrote in From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (1993) that for Emanuel “living in Paris meant many things besides writing poetry. Apart from talks with Robert Tricoire and a few French academics and friends, or seeing Bubbling Brown Sugar at the Théâtre de Paris, Emanuel had little social life. He had deliberately isolated himself” (Fabre 330). This is true in as much as Emanuel social life existed a part from his writing life. Emanuel’s collaboration with Godelieve shows the rich community he was a part of during the third-wave of African American expatriates in Paris. During this period, Emanuel experienced renewed creative inspiration and productivity, and Simons was a significant part of this renaissance.

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. University of Illinois Press, 1993.