Kiyémis

Kiyémis (born 1993) is a militant French Afro-feminist, poet and lecturer. The name she uses is a pseudonym, combining the first name of her mother with that of her grandmother. Realizing during the 2005 French riots that the police were treating Black people differently from the native French, she became interested in supporting their rights. In 2012, while at university she began to contribute to Twitter and two years later launched her popular blog Les Bavardages de Kiyémis (Chat by Kiyémis). Her collection of poetry, À nos humanités révoltées (To Our Outraged Kinsfolk), was first published in Toulouse in 2018 and republished by Premiers Matins in 2020 with a supportive introduction by Gerty Dambury.

Biography Born in 1993 in the Paris area, Kiyémis was raised between Bobigny and Paris before moving to Lyon. She had a happy childhood with her Cameroon-born father, mother and grandmother, and her twin brother. From the age of 13, she realized that as a Black women, she was not being treated in the same way as the ethnic French.