My writing is a mere extension of my life interests, within which the process of identity self-fashioning figures prominently. Born in France during the Algerian war to a French mother and a Senegalese father, I grew up in a situation of in-between-ness that today, from a postcolonial perspective, seems desirable but was then regarded with great suspicion. (Think for instance of the lengthy and apologetic definition Richard Wright gave of himself as a Black Westerner endowed with a third point of view at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956.)
As the French colonial empire began crumbling, I had to examine issues such as identity, citizenship and myth of origin; the invention of races and slavery; racism and métissage. It was not a matter of theoretical interest yet, rather one of mere survival. Indeed, the struggle for decolonization was also enacted at my school, on my playground and in my building, where I was —inexplicably at first— cast in the role of the metoika (to borrow a concept from ancient Greece, which could be roughly translated as “denizen.”) By questioning the mythologies of the time, looking for alternative sources of information and using a method of trial and error, I realized that my individual predicament, far from being a pathology (as the then-popular belief would have it), was rather a “condition,” which sociologist Pap Ndiaye recently defined as “a social location that is not that of a class, a State, a caste or a community, but of a group of persons who share nolens volens the experience of being generally considered as …”[1] Early on then, I came to realize that my “métisse condition” required sustained attention. The intellectual and creative trajectory I have subsequently followed reflects my changing views on identity, memory and belonging. Each of my texts has enabled me to overcome a specific roadblock, and move to greater emotional and intellectual freedom. Since stories that want to be told find their tellers, I am grateful to each of my stories for choosing me as a narrator: that I am part of the said “Black diaspora” is probably not unrelated to their choice.
— Your first two books were based on historical research: Terres, urbanisme et architecture “créoles” en Sierra Leone. XVIIIe - XIXe siècles (1998) and Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses (1999). Two poetic and epic fictions followed. Why this transition? What is the relationship between these two types of writings for you? How do you reconcile them?
I have not abandoned history to write fiction, and feel deeply engaged with both perspectives. It helps that the “linguistic turn” of the 1970s, with its emphasis of textuality and language, paved the way for a new understanding of the plurality of truths; the poetics of action in time; and a more porous border between literature and history. As a result of this turn, my work went from disciplinary polarization to disciplinary fusion; and my resistance against being corralled into one single discipline morphed into a celebratory un-discipline.
A Celebratory Un-Discipline
I began working on my first fiction, Lagon, lagunes, while writing the introductory remarks for a conference on métissage that I organized at New York University (NYU) in 1998. In spite of the personal nature of this essay, much was left unsaid -- the academic context of the gathering having somewhat hampered the full expression of my subjectivity. Fiction provided me with the desired space to roam and err, and to invent a language able to undo the past rather than explain it. As to La quête infinie de l’autre rive, it rests, as the epic genre requires, on a fusion between history and literature, and on a decidedly “clived habitus,” to borrow Capucine Boidin’s terms.[2] It brings together the maritime expeditions launched around 1310 by Mansa Abubakar II (the predecessor of the famed emperor of Mali, Mansa Musa) and the sea-crossings undertaken by contemporary African migrants who attempt to reach Europe on precarious boats. The narrative concerning Abubakar’s voyages is generally thought to be apocryphal; as for the present-day migrants, their travels are analyzed through a sociological or political prism, rather than considered as an historical phenomenon, or a poetic feat. My purpose was to celebrate the prowess of the African explorers of yesteryears and those of the twenty-first century: in that regard, I feel a close connection to Mexican artist Dulce Pinzón who created a striking series of photographs entitled “Superheroes.”[3] While she highlights the heroic labor of Mexican migrants in the USA, I locate African migrants’ heroism in the preparation and the implementation of the Atlantic/Mediterranean crossing.
— As many other scholars and writers from Africa or of African descent, you are now living in the United States. For a long time you taught at New York University (NYU). You are now a tenured Associate Professor at State New York University (SUNY). Could the marginalization of African history in the French education system be one of the reasons why you left? How would you describe your experience? How do you name it?
I left France for a number of reasons that do not include the pursuit of the American dream or specific career goals. It was not a forced migration, or an exile: as a matter of fact, I do not consider myself an expatriate and visit France quite regularly. Yet the decision to settle in the USA was an arduous one, given my relative lack of preparation at the time of my departure: I could read English, for instance but did not understand spoken American English. Ironically, the impression of linguistic confinement I long felt fueled my desire to write “with the words of France,” to use medieval poet Marie de France’s expression. Today, I enjoy reading literature written in English, and can appreciate the differences between standard and non-standard English. A few weeks ago for instance, I discovered Zoo City by Lauren Beukes[4] and read it without strain, in spite of the novel’s reliance on a combination of South African localisms and Internet slang. Nowadays, I teach either as an Africanist or as a Francophone literature specialist, and either in French or in English: the excellent academic training I received in France, with its emphasis on close reading and critical thinking, enabled me to market my skills in an (initially) foreign cultural context.
During my formative years, the glaring absence of African history in the French schools’ curriculum weighed heavily on my ability to make sense of my circumstances and to gain recognition from my peers. However, having been trained later on by Professor Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, and being a French citizen, it is possible that I could have landed a teaching position in African history in the French academic system. But I had grown impatient with the socio-cultural stalemate of the 1980s: back then, France could not imagine itself as a multicultural society with all the creative tensions it implies. “Non-whites”, and notably people of African descent, were notoriously absent from the public sphere, or figured in the national conversation as the new “burden” of the post-metropole. Moreover, in the midst of operations of racial profiling and repression of migrant workers, debates around racism were paradoxically taboo. Today, France as a whole – and not just immigration policies, as Dominic Thomas once suggested – is caught between “both greater social incorporation and exclusionary measures.”[5] While exclusions need to be tackled in a much more forceful way, and the pervasive assumption of European cultural hegemony challenged, change has indeed already occurred: outlets such as publishing houses, magazines, TV programs, festivals, etc., are now open to non-mainstream voices (at least from the artistic elite) and the antithetical representation of the Self and the Other is being deconstructed. A new awareness of a specific history of Blacks in France, their struggle for representation and their contributions to the nation in all areas, from economy to arts (illustrated in documentaries such as Noirs de France by historian Pascal Blanchard) has already generated a “French post-Black attitude”[6], which Simon Njami, a writer, a curator, and the co-editor of the now defunct Revue Noire, precociously emblematized in the late 80s.
— Michel Fabre, Tyler Stovall and Benetta Jules-Rosette’s scholarship has highlighted the intellectual and political dimension of the exchanges between African, Caribbean and African American writers at the beginning of the 20th century until decolonization and desegregation during events such as Black writers and artists’ Congresses, or through encounters with expatriate writers such as James Baldwin or Richard Wright[7]. In what way has your stay in the USA generated or confirmed your interest for the Black Atlantic[8], and first and foremost, for the history of Black people in the USA?
A sizable number of Francophone writers and intellectuals have come to the United States to reside, teach and write, albeit for a short duration in most cases. A notable exception is novelist Emmanuel Dongala who, according to the Boston Globe Magazine, was refused a visa from France, in spite of his appointment as Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and the life-threatening situation he faced in the Congo.[9] He now teaches at Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts. Since the personal is also the political, my presence in the USA is probably part of a new wave of exchanges that in an incremental way, brought together the French-speaking and the English-speaking worlds, challenging the once defensive definition of Francophonie and opening the theoretical work done in the USA, notably around the issue of postcolonial identities, to other linguistic regions of the world. These exchanges have taken the shape of intense textual diffusions, and new academic and artistic conversations: as a result, luminaries such as Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Euzhan Palcy, Edward Said, Jacques Schwarz-Bart and Ousmane Sembene now belong to a trans-Atlantic postcolonial canon. However, contemporary Diasporic encounters in the USA, unlike the pan-African gatherings and congresses of the past century that all wrestled with the “colonial question”, are not framed by any unified political aspiration. Individuals associate or clash on the basis of moods, aesthetic choices and marketing strategies, not within a political culture of Black transnationalism, even a disjointed one, as the historian Brent Hayes Edwards defines it.[10]
African-Americans represent a model of political and cultural achievements, all the more powerful that they experienced, as a minority, all manners of oppression. Thus the inescapably symbolic dimension of president Obama’s successive elections. My interest for the history of Black people in the USA long predated my departure from France and may, to some extent, explain it. In my teenage years, this interest was sparked by the Negritude literature that claimed the Harlem Renaissance as one of its major references: I was deeply moved by the translated works available at the time, specifically those of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Additionally, the (distorted) echoes of the Black Power Movement, upon reaching my banlieue, managed to provide a form of distant and passionate alternative to the locally expected passive acceptance of the discriminatory status quo. (See how, even in 2005, civil unrest initiated in the banlieues by young people, unemployed and subjected to discrimination, was trivialized in the right-wing discourse as mere vandalism). I soon became aware of even older and more surreptitious forms of African-American resistance that operated from within institutions such as the army or the churches, as I undertook a research on the itinerary of the Black Loyalists, sent to Canada at the end of the War of Independence, then to Sierra Leone where they finally settled. And when I landed in the mid-eighties, straight from Paris, into a small African-American community in California, I met people whose involvement with an array of Black nationalist ideas was in most cases mature, serene and constructive. Thus, although my posture and my work, as a writer and a scholar, could be subsumed under the concept of hybridity, I do share with Christine Chivallon a concern about the aporia represented by Black nationalism in Paul Gilroy’s construction of the Black Atlantic.[11]
After more than twenty five years spent in the USA, I have now a much better appreciation both for the complexities of African-American identity, diachronically and synchronically, and for the intricate network of intimacies that developed across the institutionalized or recanted racial divide and political divisions. Over time, my interest for the Black Atlantic has developed into an interest for the Atlantic, a network of exchanges across the ocean between at least three continents, and beyond: I am pleased that new scholarship and recent literature are now making linkages between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. As a matter of fact, it is telling that Gilroy’s chose as a metonymy for the Black Atlantic “the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering…” [12]
An Archipelago of Forms. Diffusions, Appropriations and Resistances
— Your scholarly and creative work strongly emphasizes cultural forms, and the historical and social conditions of their diffusions and re-appropriations. Why this emphasis?
I am fascinated with cultural forms of communication and their supports — objects, signs, gestures, the texture of languages and their various registers. Remarkable when decontextualized, they are also encoded in ways that strengthen the cohesion of the society in which they emerge and thus can play a conservative or subversive role, depending on who manipulates them and for what purpose. However, I am primarily interested in the changing and transformative qualities of these forms, once they are set in motion by reciprocity relations, retentions, museification, de- or re-mythologization, and so on.
In Lagon, lagunes, subtitled Tableau de Mémoire (Memory Board), the main metaphor was the Lukasa, a small wooden plank decorated with beads, seeds and shells, that serves as a mnemonic device for Luba recitants. Held in the left hand, the Lukasa is in effect read by a recitant, who touches the ornaments and deduces from their positioning connections between people and events of the past and players and factors in a present crisis. In a similar way, the various parables I propose in Lagon lagunes have to be sorted out and pieced together through reading -- according to or in spite of, the linear presentation of the book: the overall meaning of the narrative is not stable and calls for a hermeneutic approach. Silent trade -- a commercial practice whose existence is debated among historians since Antiquity and that allegedly consisted in an exchange gold/salt between two parties who remained invisible to one another -- is another overarching metaphor in my poem. It allows me to represent writers and readers as partners engaged in precious and reciprocal offerings. In La quête infinie de l’autre rive, it is the chronotope of the boat that dominates, quite naturally: the pirogues in which African migrants embark today mirror those of the flotillas launched by Abubakar II, and time is bracketed by the crossing. The slave ship, “inadequate but necessary” (to borrow Jacques Derrida’s famous formulation) is under erasure: its presence-absence is felt throughout the poem.
— Let us take a few examples, starting with architecture. Terres, urbanisme et architecture “créoles” en Sierra Leone. XVIIIe - XIXe siècles discusses the contributions of the Returnees --who came either from the Caribbean (the Jamaican maroons) or from the U.S.A. (the liberated slaves) -- to the construction of Freetown, and their profound influence on the style of a creolized city. Why did you choose to focus on the city’s architecture?
With Terres, urbanisme et architecture “créoles” en Sierra Leone, I intended to examine the vexed question of the “Return to Africa.” Sierra Leone was “bought” by British abolitionists at a time when the economy of the slavery-based plantation began to appear archaic to enlightened minds, although the slave trade was not yet outlawed. As the first modern colony in Africa, Sierra Leone is a great example of the entanglement between slavery, abolition and colonization. This peculiar Return to Africa was imposed on “undesirable Blacks”, that is to say, on a critical mass of free or rebellious individuals whose integration would have been too costly for the State. Conversely, the Returnees were expected to earn their passage by disseminating “the three Cs” (Commerce, Christianity and Civilization) upon landing in West Africa. The diversity of the Returnees, who may have had (or not) a prior experience in Africa or in the West, makes the example of Sierra Leone a dramatic, albeit understudied, episode in the history of pan-Africanism. Eager to understand how they themselves perceived the Return, I decided to look for clues in the city and the houses they built. Indeed, founding and building were the newcomers’ concrete covenant with the “Province of Freedom,” as well as a material anchor for the legacy they brought with them and the vision they harbored for future generations. To build, the “Black Settlers”, as they came to be known, had to assess the region’s environmental wealth and limitations, to accommodate the decisions of the British donors, and to assert their own status in the new colonial order. Freetown emerged as a creole city because the Returnees imported some of their African, Caribbean, European, American architectural experiences in a place that was not devoid of indigenous building forms; moreover, they were expected to implement the metropole’s policies and adopt a colonial posture vis a vis “Africans,” a constraint which is reflected in the original layout of the city, for instance.
Thanks to Jean-Pierre Chrétien, Gérard Prunier et Paul Mercier’s deconstructive work on the concepts of tribe and ethnicity, I refuted the idea (supported by most historians at that time) that the Returnees came to constitute a new ethnic group, the “Creoles.” Actually, a detailed study of Freetown’s architecture suggests that marginalized people were “returned” to Africa where they landed with vastly diverging projects, played various roles in or against the colonial scheme, and as “new Africans,” preserved to some extent the diversity of their identities. An analogy with métissage can be made: hybridity too, runs the risk of being essentialized and losing its subversiveness, if we do not resist a transcendentalist tentation.
— Let’s turn to the graphic signs. In an essay published in Research in African Literatures, you analyzed the “travels” of the Dogon sign that appears on the cover of the Presence Africaine journal, founded by Alioune Diop in 1947 to contribute to the emancipation of the people of the African continent. At the beginning of each chapter in Lagon, lagunes, you integrated symbols of the Bushoong societies of the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Mande from West Africa …
Drifting away from all things literal and conspicuous is the most pressing task of poetry. As such, it has much in common with semiotics, which is a quest for the world hidden behind symbols. The initial impetus behind the essay on the Présence Africaine symbol was a question raised in class by one of my students. On the basis of Germaine Dieterlen and Marcel Griaule’s work, I was able to reconstitute the symbol’s various layers of meaning, from a vaguely anthropomorphic shape to the Dogon myth of creation of the world. In the Africanist discourse however, as linguist Simon Battestini observed, art appreciation is inversely proportional to the recognition of indigenous writing: graphic signs are perceived as decorative appendices, and if they are sometimes recognized as narrative support, they are rarely acknowledged as writing per se.[13] Since the focus of my essay (still unpublished in its French version) was ultimately on the migrations, displacements and voyages of a sign, away from its initial context of currency, I decided to assess the significance of the adoption of the Dogon sign by Présence Africaine. Could this initiative be seen as a “refreshing” of the sign, one that would assure its continuity outside of Bandiagara, its original location? Or was the astounding depth and condensation of thought behind the sign obfuscated by its relocation near a name (written in the Roman alphabet) that came paradoxically to signify the African intellectual and artistic presence in France?
In Lagon, lagunes, I attempted to facilitate, on the same intertextual principle, an encounter between the graphic signs I used at the beginning of each chapter and the canto, hoping that new interpretative possibilities would be liberated in the process. Henri Michaux, Philippe Sollers and Pierre Garnier’s similar recourse to Chinese or Japanese ideograms rested on the hope that they would deliver new aesthetic lessons. Additionally, my poems tend to emphasize the iconicity of the word, that is to say the visual effect produced by the word on the page, and its contribution to the overall meaning. For instance, in the fourth canto of Lagon, lagunes, I plotted the position of the words on the page so that they would depict, by their mere presence, a flight of stairs and the direction taken by the immigration officers. In La quête infinie de l’autre rive, I used the same strategy to imitate here and there the movement of the waves, or water dripping from an oar.
— Lastly, let’s talk about poetic forms. From his departure from the United States until his death in 1960 in France, Richard Wright, the author of Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), wrote thousands of Haiku.[14] This aspect of his European work was long disparaged by Black nationalists and is still little known. Where does your interest in it come from ?
You also quoted some verses by Cassandra Wilson and Ntozage Shange whose play for seven Black women was staged on Broadway. What is your relation with Black music and African American poetry ?
Many critics concur regarding the detrimental effect French exile had on Richard Wright’s talent, noticing that his major and most successful novels were written prior to his departure from the United States. Others felt that the physical and ideological distance he took from the Civil Rights movement was not only a form of betrayal of his community, but also a tactical error that cut him off from a vital source of inspiration for his literary endeavours. Published posthumously, associated with his exile’s flawed output, and allegedly reflective of his detachment from Black America, Wright’s haiku have received scant attention. Or, interestingly enough, they were found lacking in Japanese authenticity. I personally deem Haiku. This Other World a formidable literary achievement that bridges the gap between geographical, aesthetical and ethical continents: based on a frequentation of the works of Japanese Haiku and Zen masters, this collection also reflects a modernist concern for the processes by which writing occurs, while hinting at the author’s subaltern experience in America.
For me, categories such as Black music, African American poetry, or French and Francophone literature for that matter, are convenient thus suspicious tools to apprehend artistic creativity in its proliferation. Let’s take the example of the blues, an African American musical genre from the Deep South. Its African elements – among which its name probably, its blue note, its antiphonal preference and its instruments – are insufficient (though necessary) to define it. For the blues also carries a legacy of European harmonies, and its repertoire was often common to Black and White songsters. So, rather than attempting to label it properly, I am much more interested in enjoying it as a traveling musical form; in appreciating its profound influence on artists and bands as diverse as Georges Gershwin, Cassandra Wilson, Jimi Hendrix and Fleetwood Mac, as well as on genres and styles that include jazz, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, but also literature. This « never reneged intimacy of blues with jazz,»[15] to borrow poet Jacques Réda’s words, motivated me to write an essay on jazz and Francophone literature, in which I discussed the thematic presence of jazz in several novels, poems and short-stories, but also the poetics of jazz in prose and poetry[16].
I was first introduced to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Sterling Brown) through the prism of the journal Présence Africaine and Lilyan Kesteloot’s Anthologie négro-africaine. Later on, I discovered other fabulous poets, for whom identity is a diffracted, kaleidoscopic package or a cumbersome baggage, and whose voices contribute to both buttress and deconstruct the very concept of African American poetry. Jayne Cortez for instance, though firmly committed until her last days to the ideals of the Black Arts movement, was also unrelenting in addressing issues of male patriarchy. Yusef Komunyakaa brought to his readers his experience as an African-American soldier in Vietnam. Essex Hemphill works on articulating his commitment to his community, and his celebration of homosexuality. Brenda Marie Osbey’s poetry, steeped in the old Creole culture and spirituality of Louisiana, has a distinctive neo-soul glow. Also from the Gulf region, Natasha Trethewey developed a vision of métissage in a cultural context, that of the United States, where the notion barely exists. Ultimately though, what attracts me to a poem is its texture, the celebration and profanation of language I see in it, not the category where it best fits. As I was working on métissage and the mythologies of the moon, I quoted from Cassandra Wilson’s, Ntozake Shange’s and many other works that addressed one of those themes in a deeply moving way, aesthetically or otherwise. The quotes in Lagon, lagunes constitute a sort of scrapbook of the textual memories that fed my text as it was writing itself. I wanted to honor the interventions of other texts in my own writing, and leave exposed the inner workings of intertextuality. This « sampling, » reminiscent of rap music, deals mostly with canonic texts, but could easily have included works by poets like Marina Tsvetaeva or Benjamin Fondane whom I have discovered more recently.
— Could the current proliferating wealth and creative appropriation of Black cultures amount to a rejection of the national and racial identities that are valued by contemporary public discourse in France and in other European countries?
Militant forms of nationalism, clanism and patriotism are globally on the rise, often fueled by imaginary threats at borders that are specifically created to divide countries, villages, races, families or religions ; or by a politically-engineered notion of scarcity of resources. Moreover, the said « poor » regions of the world are deemed responsible for their lack of competitiveness on the global market – a pernicious indictment, if only because of the subsequent internalization of a « poverty logic » in those regions. In a remarkable documentary entitled Afro@digital[17], this point is well made by musician Ray Lema who underlines the tension between the tremendous human and mineral resources Africa possesses, and the limitations of African aspirations : our dreams are poor, our words are poor, says he in substance; and we need to convince ourselves of our creative potentials.
However, art can help us all to imagine ways to subvert exclusionary politics without being trapped into a counter-discourse that operates on reverse binary propositions. The rhizomatic quality that you seem to associate with Black cultures is reminiscent of Édouard Glissant’s notion of creolization, which he defined as an exchange between two mutually constitutive Othernesses: although this exchange involves risks and paves the way for changes, it will not lead to a loss of identity for the parties engaged in a quest for « lieux communs. » In an opuscule co-signed with Patrick Chamoiseau, Edouard Glissant denounced the recent creation of a Ministry of National Identity and Immigration in France, insisting that identity is the unstable result of a slow, complex and largely mysterious process of self-definition that no administration should ever attempt to control. It is not African immigration (constructed as the most visible of all) that threatens the nation, they add, but the erection of walls, of « ministry-walls » that aim at regulating the convergences that people and cultures spontaneously desired. Ultimately, this State-sponsored policing of hybridity is « in radical opposition with beauty »[18], a beauty which, according to Césaire, signals poetic truth. And poetry can only disavow postcolonial nostalgia, the destructive anger and pathologic sadness incurred by individuals or empires after an unnamed loss (that of their colonies, for instance), diagnosed by Gilroy in contemporary Europe.
Immigrations
— Lagon, lagunes evokes your own itinerary, intertwined with references to Haitian history. Underneath the theme of metissage , that of immigration appears as an undercurrent…
In Lagon, lagunes, the narrator is looking for key-moments in her personal memories and in collective history to understand her station in life, assess her failures and measure her ability to survive a series of traumas tied to her “métisse condition.” As a matter of fact, Thot, the Egyptian god of the letters, rhythm and patterns is a preeminent figure in the poem that ends on a Sanskrit inscription meaning “measurement.” Lagon, lagunes is first and foremost a poetic quest, an attempt to find a restrained, measured, yet impish voice to express hubris, excess and chaos. Undeniably, it contains autobiographical elements, but the narrator is to be understood as an avatar of the author: she has the power to make histories collapse (that of the mulâtres of Saint-Domingue with Rastafarianism, for instance), to access and discuss openly incidents she does not and cannot remember, to understand all languages, to converse with the gods and holler at the moon. My wish was to describe an embodied experience, that of a métisse/mulatta, whose gendered body exists both as a metaphor for the anxiety and ideal of a nation working at defining its authenticity in a global order; and as a site of desire, vulnerability and heightened consciousness of the Self. I wanted to locate that experience in a specific period and place – that of postcolonial France – and yet undo the limitations of the proposed settings by leaps in time, in other regions of the world and in imagination.
You are right: the theme of immigration is not openly explored, except in the fourth canto that evokes the deportation of a North African neighbor – the distant and reconstructed memory of a scene whose psychological violence haunts me to this day. The realization that métissage, at least in its euphoric and consensual definition, can be an alibi not to discuss what constitutes, in the European context, its pre-condition, namely immigration, certainly contributed to my desire to take a different course in my second fiction.
— In La quête infinie de l’autre rive, you establish another parallel between two narratives. The first is the expedition organized in the 14th century by Boubacar II, the emperor of Mali, to explore the Atlantic Ocean and, allegedly, to discover America. The second is the 21st century adventure of African migrants, “people of good faith embarked on dark waters” to reach, alive and sometimes dead, the European costs at the price of “prowess”, “hell” and “travails.” Why the clash between these two narratives?
The composition of Lagon, lagunes and that of La quête infinie de l’autre rive differ considerably. Even though both blend history and stories, Lagon, lagunes is made up of a series of fragments, short, moody and derisive; serious issues (be they discrimination, homelessness, and class or domestic violence) are approached in a purposefully offhanded way. In La quête infinie de l’autre rive, the core narrative -- that of the contemporary sea-crossing of a group of African migrants towards Europe – is delayed until no less than three versions of the fate met by Abubakar’s expeditions are told. In accordance with the epic genre, the poem is long, compact, endowed with a distinctive breath and an elevated vocabulary; it lends itself to declamation. The mirror effect I created between the African past and present sea-crossings allowed me to replace the latter in the longue durée. Indeed, while they are often interpreted in the media as a result of economic necessity, environmental degradation or an abrupt individual decision (mbëkk mi in wolof, which is the title of a novel by Abasse Ndione that served as a script for Moussa Touré’s feature-film, La pirogue), I posit that they reiterate, refresh, rewrite the medieval meta-narrative established by Abubakar’s quest of the other bank. Both the rowers of the past and the passengers of today’s motorized boats experience untold sufferings, in the name of the same values, namely an exacting notion of honor tied to the family name, a sense of abnegation and self-sacrifice, and a taste for the unknown. Their triumph is represented by Alassane’s surreptitious entrance into the City, while the other passengers watch from a Frontex rescue boat, and rejoice.
Since Africans were admonished in the “Discours de Dakar” to enter history at their earliest convenience, I felt that it was not without merit to reflect upon the Malinke’s attempt to launch two major trans-Atlantic expeditions, almost two centuries before Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas. Even if al Umari’s report on Mansa Musa’s interview with the governor in Cairo is historically inaccurate, it remains that in the fourteenth century, the scope of the African imagination was as wide as the ocean. Didn’t Mansa Musa himself cross the Sahara, a sea of sand, in his pilgrimage to Mecca?
— Métis children are humiliated by “a nation of teachers and parents” because of their names which sound like “an uncomfortable barbarism” or “a treason of sorts.” The press publishes pictures of the remains of those who drown, with the legend “Threats to tourism.” What (new) representation should be imposed?
Poetry does not have the ambition to teach correctness to the world. Today, a writer’s “engagement” has less to do with his/her adherence to a political platform than with his/her involvement with language and representations. As a poet, my main concern is to carve a language of freedom and beauty, able to deliver to the page some of the emotions I feel, some of the visions I am visited by. Although writing fiction is a process that remains, in my experience, largely shrouded in mystery, I feel responsible for the themes I explore, the characters I create and the words I select. Since the text tends to write itself and surprise me, I often have to ask myself if I will accept who or what came to me. While writing La quête infinie de l’autre rive for instance, I discovered that in the third canto, two male lovers had embarked as passengers in my boats. After considering the meaning of their not so fortuitous presence (a series of homophobic incidents had happened at the time in Senegal) I decided to let them stay: I then noticed that these lovers already had counterparts in the incipit of the poem, i.e. two young rowers whose presence had enabled me to broach the allegory of the “Ship of Fools.” Erasing them would have damaged the internal balance of the poem; and welcoming them confirmed the reader’s impression that each of the boats is a microcosm, diverse and contrasted. As to Lagon, lagunes, the text is haunted by scenes that are emblematic of the difficult process of individual recognition in a postcolonial European metropole. It hints at the narrator’s conflicted relation with the literary canon and the institutions whose mission it is to propagate it. Yet it is also a tribute to a language, a literature and a field able and willing to celebrate dissenting voices and non-canonic texts.
It is my hope that poetry in general, and my work in particular, will contribute to the development of a new imaginary of our identities, whereby, in full knowledge of our reinvented pasts, we accept to leave the safety of the old bank behind and row towards a new one.
