Elisabeth Boyi on African and Caribbean Francophone Writers

10/11/2005

Professor Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is affiliated with both the French & Italian and Comparative Literature departments. Her teaching and research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals and society; and women writers. Before coming to Stanford in 1995, Professor Boyi taught at universities in the Congo and Burundi, as well as […]

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00:00:00.000	[ Music ]
00:00:12.000	This is KZSU Stanford.
00:00:14.500	[ Music ]
00:00:16.500	Welcome to entitled opinions.
00:00:18.500	My name is Robert Harrison.
00:00:20.300	And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
00:00:26.000	[ Music ]
00:00:49.000	In the beginning was the logos, the word, or so it has been said.
00:00:55.000	That's fine and good, but the problem is that no one really knows what the word logos meant in the beginning.
00:01:01.500	By the time our words begin to mean something, they already have a past.
00:01:06.000	They already reach us by way of our fathers and mothers and forebears.
00:01:11.000	So in the beginning was a word that had already been around for a while in one form or another.
00:01:17.500	That's the strange thing about words.
00:01:20.500	They link me to a community of prior speakers.
00:01:24.000	Regardless of our dialect, we always speak with the words of the dead.
00:01:28.000	That, in a special sense, is how and why we speak at all.
00:01:32.000	Just as humanity begins, where there is already an ancestor.
00:01:37.000	So too, language begins, where it has already begun.
00:01:41.000	[ Music ]
00:01:48.000	[ Music ]
00:02:09.000	Think about that.
00:02:10.500	All our words are somebody else's.
00:02:13.000	They belong to others before they ever belong to us.
00:02:17.500	The words I'm pronouncing right now have been used countless times by countless predecessors unknown to me,
00:02:23.000	long before I ever found my way into the world.
00:02:26.000	Words are like very old houses that have been inhabited by untold generations, each of which leaves a trace of itself behind.
00:02:35.500	We tend to think of language as a medium of communication between those of us who are alive here and now.
00:02:44.000	But in fact, language is what binds us most rigorously to our predecessors.
00:02:49.000	The reason we can read a play by Shakespeare or a book by Thoreau is because English unites us as a family.
00:02:56.500	There's something reassuring about that, I suppose, through my mother tongue I am bound, as if by an umbilical cord,
00:03:05.000	with the vast hosts of my ancestral dead.
00:03:09.500	And when writers write great literature, it is invariably the dead precursors who make their voices heard in its pages.
00:03:16.500	But what happens when a language is imposed on me from the outside by people or conquerors who come from a long way away with their incomprehensible speech, their violent ways and their strange behavior?
00:03:35.000	What happens to my natural low-quacity when I am forcibly inducted into a language whose ancestral dead have nothing to do with my ancestral dead?
00:03:44.500	How do I find myself in their foreign words? Can I ever make myself at home in the speech of my repressor?
00:03:54.500	Can I ever become the adopted child of the great ancestral ghosts that haunt their language or that haunt any language?
00:04:03.500	What does it mean to speak the language of the oppressor and to make it my own?
00:04:08.000	These are questions that are raised by the phenomenon of colonization and in particular by French colonization,
00:04:16.000	the French are extremely proud and chauvinistic when it comes to their language,
00:04:20.500	and wherever they establish colonies in Africa, Caribbean, Canada, they instituted rigid programs of French education and French instruction.
00:04:32.500	Most of France's African colonies were decolonized in the 50s and 60s, but worldwide still today a lot more people speak French outside of France than in France.
00:04:44.500	These are the so-called "frankophones" or the French-speaking peoples who live outside of France, in Africa, the Caribbean, Indochinas, Switzerland and so forth.
00:04:57.500	The "frankophone" world is given rise to an extraordinary body of literature. That should be in the plural actually, extraordinary bodies of literature, poetry, fiction and drama, which in the past century or more has become an integral part of the history of French literature.
00:05:13.500	I have with me in the studio a very special guest who was a distinguished scholar of "frankophone" literature, and we're going to be talking to her not only about some of its writers,
00:05:25.500	but also about some of these larger questions I've been raising in these opening remarks about language and belonging.
00:05:32.500	Elisabeth, welcome to the program.
00:05:35.500	Thank you, Robert.
00:05:37.500	Elisabeth Bois, a professor of French here at Stanford and the author and editor of several books,
00:05:43.500	the most recent of which will appear in a few months in France under the title of "Vois de Vercz, the "Hégad Moutipla".
00:05:53.500	Not easy to translate into English, diverse voices, and what would you say, "multiple gazes," Elisabeth?
00:05:59.500	Yeah, something like that, something like that.
00:06:02.500	Can you tell us before we get into the heart of our discussion a little bit about what this new book of yours is about?
00:06:12.500	Well, what I'm really interested in is the contact between different cultures and societies.
00:06:21.500	And in this case, the contact between France as a colonizer and Africa, but also on the other side, the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean, if we can see the Caribbean as some continuum of Africa through this slavery.
00:06:41.500	So, when I gave the title "Vois de Vercz, a "Hégad Moutipla", I mean by that, that each voice, each gaze is something we have to pay attention to, because so far, the official discourse was presented from the point of view of the West.
00:07:05.500	And in "Vois de Vercz, a "Hégad Moutipla", I would like to hear to grasp the voices and the gazes of those other societies and groups voices which were never been heard before.
00:07:26.500	The point also is that there is no one given position or situation forever. I think that the truth, if truth there is, has to be found in the diversity of voices and gazes. That's why I gave that title.
00:07:48.500	Is this mostly the voices of the writers or are they political and everyday voices? Do you privilege certain kinds of voices?
00:07:57.500	Yes, by my profession, of course, I choose to analyze literary works by group of writers from France, from Africa and from the French Caribbean in the so-called "Triangle" in which colonisation and slavery were coming into play.
00:08:16.500	And in the Caribbean, you said that you're interested in the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean and the way there's this Africa has this extension in the Caribbean.
00:08:25.500	Is that an unproblematic relationship for the people in the Caribbean? Where is there a strong identification with Africa in the voices that you're...
00:08:39.500	It's a problematic relationship. On the one hand, there is the question of the origins, but on the other hand, there is the question of, I would say, a rejection since those Caribbean people have been transplanted out Africa to the new world.
00:09:02.500	To use the literary image, we find in many literary works from the Caribbean, for example, in the Sun, there is the image of people thrown out of the mother's womb.
00:09:15.500	Of the mother's womb, yes.
00:09:18.500	In nostalgia of the mother's womb, but we know also that despite that nostalgia, one cannot never go back to the mother's womb. We can dream, we can imagine, we can recreate, but a physical return is impossible.
00:09:36.500	That's what created the complexity of the relationship between the Caribbean and Africa. There is at the same time a desire to go back to the mother, and at the same time, especially after those identity movements like negative or genetic heritage, there is a desire to find roots in the new place, because that's where they live, and that's where they have to build their life and their future.
00:10:07.500	We're going to want to talk about some of those concepts like "negritude" and the relationship between Africa is the African literature, as Francophone literature, and the Caribbean, who try to draw the distinctions.
00:10:21.500	Clearly, our listeners here, you want air, they hear an accent, and there is just a natural curiosity for some biographical information.
00:10:32.500	Your origins are African, you were born in Africa.
00:10:38.500	In what was then known as the Belgian Congo.
00:10:44.500	Which now is known as the Republic of Congo.
00:10:48.500	The official name is the Democratic Republic of Congo.
00:10:53.500	Prior to that, it was a year.
00:10:56.500	It was a year, the same several times, according to the regime, in place.
00:11:02.500	At least we were born in the Belgian Congo. Did you grow up speaking French or learning French immediately?
00:11:11.500	Was it a first language or a second acquired language? What is your relationship to the French language?
00:11:18.500	Well, that's a question I never know really how to answer. What is the first language? I don't know.
00:11:27.500	I wrote a short article entitled "French Long Paternail".
00:11:34.500	For me, French is the language of the father, the language of the biologic father, because I started learning French at home with my father, before I go to elementary school.
00:11:46.500	Of course, the French is also the language of the colonizer, who, some extent, they are also father.
00:11:56.500	That kind of ambiguity, because it's my biologic father language, at least the language I spoke with him, I have some kind of emotional attachment to the French language, especially because my father passed away a couple of years ago.
00:12:12.500	At the same time, it's a language of the colonizer, which was somehow imposed to us through the school system and through the policy of a cultural isolation, which was practiced in the French colonies, as well as in the Belgian colony.
00:12:29.500	Well, the French did impose this rigid instruction in French, and you went immediately to French school?
00:12:39.500	We started elementary school, first year in French, not that all the schools were in French.
00:12:46.500	There is always some kind of class distinction, the way the so-called elite schools, where everything was in French, and we were not even allowed to speak in the local languages.
00:13:00.500	Of course, it was for Sweden, officially, by the nine, it was a Catholic school, ruled by the nine, it was for Sweden to speak in the local languages.
00:13:09.500	So French was, let's say, imposed the dominant language of the school system.
00:13:16.500	You spoke French with your father, and was this a deliberate decision on his part that he wanted you to be completely at home in French?
00:13:28.500	I really don't know, you know, I was a kid, so I don't know really what was at least in those days when I was young.
00:13:35.500	I really don't know what was in my father's mind.
00:13:38.500	But when I analyzed the situation from my position as an adult, and when I remember several things and sentences which my father will use all the time, I will say, yes, it was probably a deliberate decision to speak in French, because it was for him.
00:13:57.500	And for us, a way of entering into, let's say, modernity. But at the same time, we were not cut from the tradition, because, as I say, in that article, the French said, long paternel.
00:14:14.500	What I know about African culture came from my father, he's the one who taught me about the correctness of our ethnic language, Chiluba.
00:14:26.500	He was some kind of, how do you put it, a piece of the Chiluba language.
00:14:33.500	So he introduced me to French, but at the same time, he forced me, or he trained me to some extent, to keep with some element of the tradition.
00:14:46.500	So if French is the father language in your experience, would you call it your mother tongue?
00:14:55.500	So my mother tongue, because that's the only language I spoke with my mother, my mother didn't speak French at all. So the conversation with her, we're always in Chiluba. Even with my father, I spoke with Chiluba.
00:15:07.500	When we were alone, he and my sisters and brothers, especially when we grew up, we will speak rather in French. But when my mother was there, we will always speak in Chiluba, of course.
00:15:22.500	Did you get interested, finally, in literature, in Francophone literature, did you come to it through a passion for French literature? When you were studying in school, or did you come to it through some other route?
00:15:40.500	I will say in the general sense books, I love books, because I always saw my father reading something. He had those of course from a child point of view, those huge big books. I did what it was, of course, the dictionary is an ethical media, as I discovered later.
00:16:01.500	So I always saw my father reading, and of course when I went to school, in those days, there were big emphasis on reading. So we'll read all those books in the collections of the time. There was the Serri of La Contes de Seguir in the Bibial Tech Verte. There was La Bibial Tech Vision.
00:16:26.500	So in the school, I went to where providing us with a lot of reading books. I always been fascinated by books. And of course, in those days, I was reading only books in French. So maybe that's where I wear my passion of reading and literature comes from.
00:16:48.500	That's what I can say as an adult, but when again, when you are young, you don't do that kind of analysis. You just read the books and they tell you about them.
00:16:56.500	So before we turn to the corpus of Francophone literature, at least a part of it that we're going to talk about, you know, one last biographical question about, I guess from your perspective as an adult, the French was the father language, the language of the colonizers.
00:17:16.500	Do you feel in retrospect a debt to the French education that you received and are you reconciled? Or is there still a great deal of unresolved tension in the relationship that you have to the French?
00:17:32.500	In my case, I would say no. Of course, when we read literature written in French by non-French writers, many of them talked about that tension. I wrote a writer as such.
00:17:48.500	I will not say that in my case, I never really felt the tension because it was very clear to me, since I was young, probably because of my father influence, it was always been clear to me, that I belonged to local culture.
00:18:04.500	And my introduction to foreign culture was meant to allow me to enter a new world because the word was changing. And what my father wanted by giving us boys and girls a good selective education is that, well, you must be autonomous one day in your life.
00:18:29.500	The doors to that new world is education and education was in French. So I never really felt the tension. I speak my maternal language even today, although I don't live in an environment where I can practice every day. I learn some other languages of my country.
00:18:55.500	It is just for me, the language introduced me to modernity. It's the language of my schooling, it's the language of my profession. And I have deep attachment to the French language, especially since living in a non-French speaking country. I feel that we have emotional attachment because living in a right-of-state, French is a link for me to, of course, the funk of own world, but it's a link for me to Africa and to my past.
00:19:24.500	Well, I think that here at Sanford, we all have a debt to your father for having pushed you in the realm of education, giving you the sense of the value of an education and having been somehow a catalyst for producing what is really a wonderful scholar and teacher and colleague of ours here at Stanford. At least since time is limited, we're not going to talk about all the various traditions within the Francophone literary corpus.
00:19:50.500	That would deal with African fiction and poetry and drama and essayist writing that it would be the Caribbean. It would be Switzerland. It would be Canada. It would be North Africa, the Magrebe tradition. It would also be in no China and Lebanon itself. Even in places like Turkey where I grew up, there's a Francophone little strain as well.
00:20:17.500	The idea is that we will try to focus on one of the great poets of the Caribbean, which is Amisses' Air.
00:20:25.500	Great, yes.
00:20:26.500	And begin with the concept that you mentioned earlier about Negri-Tude, Negritude. I believe he is the one who first coined that word.
00:20:38.500	Yes, that's correct.
00:20:39.500	Can you tell our listeners in a schematic way, what did he mean by Negri-Tude and why did he choose this rather provocative word for his concept of a new kind of black identity or African Caribbean identity as well as politics?
00:21:03.500	The word this indeed provocative because in choosing the word Negri-Tude with Negri-Tude as the beginning of the word, Césé wanted somehow to challenge the existing establishment because in the words in the mind of the colonizer, Negri had acquired a negative connotation.
00:21:29.500	It was rather an expression of contempt and it was considered as in inserting a word.
00:21:38.500	And what Césé would do is somehow subvert the signification or the meaning of the word and give it a new meaning which is self-assertion, which is pride, racial pride, and by extension pride in the culture, to which
00:21:59.100	the neg is related to Africa.
00:22:02.100	Césé is a Caribbean subject was submitted to the same policy of cultural assimilation as in the colonies.
00:22:12.100	And as a transplanted subject also, he had been cut from the roots from Africa.
00:22:21.100	And Negri-Tude came as a way of red discovering African culture and acquiring or asserting racial pride and the valorization of the African past and is belonging to the race.
00:22:42.100	There is a racial component but which also was meant to be more cultural, the culture of the black world.
00:22:51.100	That's really what it is about.
00:22:53.100	Well let's back up a minute and tell our listeners something about Emus is he was born in 1913 on the island of Maté Nic.
00:23:02.100	Yes.
00:23:03.100	I think he was born in a small town on the northeast coast of Maté Nic.
00:23:06.100	His first language was Céol but from his grandmother Eugenie taught him French, had a read and write French already by the age of four.
00:23:19.100	He was a very gifted student and went to at least say when the family moved to the Fórofos which was the capital of Maté Nic.
00:23:30.100	And there in the French Leesé, he excelled and drew the attention of one of his French teachers.
00:23:36.100	I think the name was Feve, who recommended him to the Echotenos Malzupédio in Paris.
00:23:43.100	The Echol-Nór Malzupédio is a highly elitist, top-notch educational institution which is where he went and did his studies.
00:23:51.100	And then he went on to have a very important political career in the local politics of Maté Nic.
00:23:58.100	It was mayor of the town and the leader of a political party.
00:24:02.100	But mostly we know him now as an extraordinary poet as well as essays.
00:24:10.100	Yeah, that's what actually I am interested in.
00:24:13.100	I'm not so much interested in the political personality but the writer is a great poet indeed.
00:24:20.100	At the same time, his career shows that to be a great poet and a very committed and efficacious politician are not mutually exclusive.
00:24:30.100	No, it was not for Césé and the trio Céséres and Dámas, the Olmet in Paris.
00:24:39.100	Yes, who can you say who is this trio?
00:24:42.100	Can you identify them?
00:24:43.100	We're talking about Césédio and you mentioned songour and Dámas.
00:24:47.100	Yes, actually Césédio and Dámas were together at the Lisei in Maté Nic.
00:24:53.100	And then they find, again together, they found themselves together in Paris.
00:24:59.100	And Césédio, before going to a normal economic superior, he attended one of those elite schools, high school Lisei, Lélochon.
00:25:11.100	And that's where he met with Cengor.
00:25:14.100	And Cengor, Lélochon, from Cénegal.
00:25:17.100	He was from Cengor, and he also, we called him a triangle because all three are poets.
00:25:22.100	Yes, yes.
00:25:23.100	So they were a group of them, the three of them, and they created a journal like, you know, young students, politicized, militant,
00:25:33.100	they created a journal called "Létigio noa" and in Bástro, no black students, they were publishing creative writings.
00:25:42.100	They were young people trying to write at that time.
00:25:46.100	But also, Létigio noa was the site for discussions about black culture, those Caribbean intellectuals, didn't know anything about Africa.
00:25:56.100	And meeting African people in Paris was a discovery for them.
00:26:01.100	They discovered what was Africa and what was the richness of the African culture.
00:26:06.100	And that's where progressively they became aware that it was necessary for them to reestablish the links with the origins and the same time to assess the validity and the value of African culture.
00:26:23.100	And that's where the magnitude movement started.
00:26:27.100	Of course, they didn't say, let's create negative notes, just, you know, through their discussions and meetings.
00:26:33.100	And the creative work, the created movement, which would be called the "Necretute".
00:26:41.100	When we turned to says, there's poetry, it's quite a remarkable corpus.
00:26:49.100	Let's speak first about his debt to his French precursors.
00:26:57.100	For example, Arthur Rembo, the late 19th century French poet, was extremely important, I think, for the symbolists in general, Lothre Amal.
00:27:10.100	And then surrealism with Don Tret-Buhr-Tawn, who actually kind of discovered him, I think in Martinique early on.
00:27:19.100	His poetry takes many of these elements of these traditions that we're talking about.
00:27:27.100	But of course, recasts them in a different framework and with maybe a different purpose.
00:27:33.100	Would you like to speak about this debt to the French poetic tradition first before we talk about what he does to morph it into something else?
00:27:43.100	Yeah, we might say that Césaire is adapted to some French literary tradition.
00:27:51.100	Of course, he was trained in the tradition of French literatures from high school to economic superhear.
00:27:59.100	So he knew very well those French writers.
00:28:03.100	But what attracted him to the so-called "Pret-Mudie" poem, "Lothre Amo" and later, the "Cior-Elista"
00:28:11.100	is the kind of revolt existing in those writers.
00:28:17.100	I think that's where the link is.
00:28:20.100	And when we can read in interviews, Don Tret-Buhr, he acknowledges his debt or the influence he received from those French poets of the 19th century,
00:28:37.100	he acknowledged the debt.
00:28:42.100	At the same time, he is very careful to draw the line.
00:28:47.100	He is not a surrealist.
00:28:49.100	He doesn't want to be a surrealist.
00:28:51.100	But he says that there was in him the feeling of revolt and rebellion.
00:28:56.100	And for him, "Cior-Elista" was not an end.
00:29:00.100	"Cior-Elista" has been a reign and somehow surrealism validated his poetic aspirations and his poetic stance in terms of revolt, not only political revolt, but also artistic rebellion and innovations.
00:29:20.100	That's certainly the case where his poetry is not conventionally surrealist, but it does exacerbate the very limits of syntax and grammar as well as imagery.
00:29:37.100	And this revolt element is very important.
00:29:42.100	He said that poetry must always remain insurrectionally.
00:29:45.100	Yes, exactly.
00:29:46.100	Yes, yes.
00:29:46.100	Intersectional in poetry means to do something at the linguistic level, not just to incorporate politics into the poem.
00:29:54.100	I think that was one of the problems that he had with the Marxists, where although he was aligned with the Communist Party's and this demand for social realism was really antithetical to a kind of
00:30:06.100	insurrectional poetry that really strove for certain kind of dream states and states of Dionysiac, excess and dissolution of the fixed boundaries of form and of grammar and so forth.
00:30:21.100	There are a few examples of the poem, "The Post-A-Cior" where the poem has to submit to a systematic deregulation of all the senses.
00:30:39.100	The regulation of the senses, I think that's what we find, for example, in the Cayeda-Hout-Tour-O-Pain-Atel, there is this kind of explosion of words and of images.
00:30:51.100	There is a force or an energy coming from all the lines, all the words used by Cesar.
00:31:01.100	There certainly, and what is most seductive to him in Sir Halism is that we might say that Sir Halism was a politics of freedom in terms of forms and content.
00:31:16.100	And that freedom, precisely, that Cesar implement in his poetry.
00:31:22.100	There is no fixed forms distinctive or making a distinction. This is poetry, this is prose.
00:31:32.100	There is no separation for him, prose and poisee and poetry are come together and mingled with each other.
00:31:43.100	I think this has to do with, again, the relationship to Africa, the discovery of Africa as the mother country and the desire to return to the womb as you were saying earlier, because Cesar felt that poetry was a medium for a recovery of a primordial relationship to nature in ways that would be anti-Western.
00:32:06.100	If the West is committed to values such as rationality, technology, the individualism and Christianity, the other is to use poetry to take it into a kind of ecstatic dissolution by which a relationship to nature that is a
00:32:36.060	much more profound and primordial can be liberated. And therefore, the poetry is connected both to insurrection and to the idea of a liberation from him.
00:32:46.060	Yes, yes, exactly. And in this liberation of the world and liberation of the feelings and liberation of the emotions, he wants to go back to some kind of a traditional African forms of art, in which
00:33:05.060	there is a spontaneity, there is no control by reason, for example, reason which is the major elements of the European tradition.
00:33:18.060	And he in the kind of a topel atel, for example, there are some ironic passages in which he recuperate and re-fendorize the so-called irrationality of the primitive meaning Africa to make of it
00:33:34.060	is way of writing. And when he says, "Well, the priest from psych is an example."
00:33:42.060	Yes, exactly. It's a way of challenging that Western rationality.
00:33:48.060	And in this challenge and insurrection, there are certain, let's say, column tropes or poetic figures that recur in his poetry.
00:33:58.060	One has to do with the earth's god or goddess because also even the boundary between genders is also to be collapsed so that he speaks of home funders as the earth god goddess,
00:34:15.060	as a powerful sort of African deity. And the trope of metamorphosis, so many of his poems involve the transformation of the human into the animal or the human into the plant or animals into minerals.
00:34:36.060	And this primordial promiscuity of all living things which come from the same sort of matrix, the same source, which is the vitality of nature as such.
00:34:50.060	The poetry of metamorphosis as an attempt to give life to this imaginary, pre-differentiated power of nature comes forth very strongly, I think it is poems.
00:35:08.060	Yeah, I think one of the first or the strong point of the Cesar poetry is that cosmic dimension in which he presents unity of the universe.
00:35:24.060	In the Western tradition, maybe there is this, at least the modern world, there is this separation between nature and culture between the visible and the invisible.
00:35:34.060	And Cesar refers to some kind of magic project in which there is no more separation and this could be changed and transformed.
00:35:45.060	I can become a tree, I can become a snake, I can become a river, all those metamorphosis, as you say, are possible because the universe is one human vegetal animals all belongs and participates to the same project.
00:36:09.060	And hence the importance that Nietzsche's first book of the Birth of Tragedy, where it's speaking about the Dionysian as Dionysus, the God who when he arrives, they whole community gets into a kind of trance and that there's a, through the power of Dionysus, there's a dismemberment and a return to some kind of primordial even chaos.
00:36:32.060	Oh, yes, absolutely.
00:36:36.060	You can only return to chaos, can a new order, a more redeemed order emerge.
00:36:42.060	Yeah, and you find in Sprefidat Kaus is expressed through a plethora of words and of images, as opposed to the Apollinean, which is major, a serenity and so on.
00:37:01.060	Yeah, so we have metamorphosis, the plants, even more than metamorphosis from human to animal, the role of plants is huge in his forms where, and especially trees, he speaks about the tree as learning how to be a tree that the West would never understand the wisdom of what it means to be a tree and which is rooted in the earth on the one hand and it reaches out to the sky.
00:37:30.060	And the sort of arboreal poetics, I think it's some of the most beautiful things in his poems.
00:37:40.060	So we're going to read a little bit, but, you know, from a poem or two, and see if we can maybe talk about the shock experience that someone who's never read a message, a canned experience before the
00:38:00.980	subversive, syntactical and poetic strategies that he adopts where he's very sensitive to the musicality and to the nonlinearity and, let's say, the non-conceptual nature of what he's trying to achieve.
00:38:19.980	And perhaps you would be kind enough maybe to read some verses that you think would be most appropriate for this occasion.
00:38:29.980	Yes, maybe a short step from Kaje Nauratur, Opelatal.
00:38:35.980	Of course, any poetry in French or in other languages coming from Africa or from the West, any poetry has that rhythmic and musical dimension.
00:38:49.980	But in Sézères, what he wanted to do in that musicality in the rhythm is to go back to one of the characteristics of Africa literature, the oral literature.
00:39:00.980	And music and rhythm are somehow marked by the rhythm of the Temptam.
00:39:09.980	The Temptam, yeah. And the percussive dances, the African dances, the percussive, the syncop and all those characteristics.
00:39:17.980	So here is a short passage from... actually it's from Lizzarme Miraculos, one of his collection of verse.
00:39:26.980	This is... we're reading from Batuk.
00:39:30.980	And we're reading from the Panchué.
00:39:32.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:39:38.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:39:44.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:39:50.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:39:54.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:39:58.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:02.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:06.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:10.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:14.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:18.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:22.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:26.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:30.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:34.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:38.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:42.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:46.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:50.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:54.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:40:58.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:02.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:06.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:10.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:14.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:18.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:22.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:26.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:30.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:34.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:38.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:42.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:46.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:50.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:54.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:41:58.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:42:02.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:42:06.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:42:10.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:42:14.980	The Panchué is a very important part of the Panchué.
00:42:18.980	If you were in a classroom, what would you draw attention to in these verses?
00:42:28.980	Well, first, the lexicon.
00:42:31.980	The Cesar has a very complicated lexicon, because he uses all kinds of words.
00:42:39.980	Regular, normative, French words.
00:42:43.980	But he creates also his own words, which sound French in spelling and in structure.
00:42:55.980	He uses also French words, but in an archaic sense, in a meaning which is not really used anymore today.
00:43:06.980	So that contributes to the difficulty of his poem, of his poetry.
00:43:11.980	So I will first of all try to explain the vocabulary.
00:43:15.980	And then second thing, the written he wants to give to the poetry, because he wants to have in echo those traditional instrument, like the Tum Tum, sometimes the Gilo phone.
00:43:32.980	So I will insist on the written in terms of the succession of different readings, melody, the staccato of the poem.
00:43:45.980	And the repetition as a major trend, because it refers to the orality, the orality in which, of course, repetition is a major trend, because repetition was used in Africa.
00:44:01.980	But also, look at the medieval, the
00:44:02.580	Sean Sundar's just repetition was some kind of a minimal technique, devices which allowed the storyteller to remind himself what he has to say.
00:44:18.980	So I guess I will start by that in terms of the forms.
00:44:22.980	And then in terms of content, the cultural elements the poets wants to put in front of the reader, which is, of course, the African tradition.
00:44:35.980	It is history, it is mythology, it is nature, all things we can talk about.
00:44:44.980	Why don't we read it? So it is the poetry speak so much for itself that maybe we can just read a little bit more from either more from Batukur or another poem.
00:44:54.980	Let's maybe from Corpaerdieu.
00:44:58.980	Yes, good.
00:44:59.980	A short passage.
00:45:02.980	Which show relevance of Onamatopoeia in the previous poem Batukur, BTP, which is short letters and reminding the syncope of the term term.
00:45:18.980	In Corpaerdieu, let's just read the first verse.
00:45:22.980	[SPEAKING NAMES]
00:45:26.280	[SPEAKING NAMES]
00:45:55.600	I who krakatoa, I who everything better than a monsoon,
00:46:01.440	I who open chest, I who lay laps,
00:46:05.280	I who bleed better than a klouaca,
00:46:08.680	I who outside the musical scale,
00:46:11.640	I who is ambisee, or frantic, or rumbos, or cannibal.
00:46:17.120	I would like to be more and more humble and more lowly,
00:46:20.520	always more serious without vertigo or vestige.
00:46:27.280	Here, he takes down and turning them into verbs and vice versa.
00:46:31.640	Yes, exactly.
00:46:32.440	That's one of these things.
00:46:33.640	I who is ambisee.
00:46:34.680	Yes, yes.
00:46:35.760	You know, using the river, some bass,
00:46:38.440	and creating a verb to some bass, what does it mean to some bass?
00:46:44.320	But it has a meaning.
00:46:45.360	You feel the meaning.
00:46:46.680	Even if it's not possible to spell it out, but you feel the meaning of it.
00:46:51.520	Yeah, it's like saying, I who misses cities.
00:46:53.480	Exactly.
00:46:54.320	Anything like that.
00:46:55.240	Yeah.
00:46:57.320	krakatoa.
00:46:58.520	That's another word.
00:46:59.680	Just mwakikakakatoa, the percussive intensity of just that opening
00:47:05.720	verse is something that you might find in a humble here or there.
00:47:11.520	But we have to remember a humble went to Africa,
00:47:13.480	or as after it is.
00:47:14.760	But it seems to be very distinctive of this attempt of his to,
00:47:20.280	even though he's writing this poetry in a, in the French language,
00:47:25.520	to African eyes and naturalize it in a way that I think is quite new in the history
00:47:34.360	of French poetry.
00:47:35.440	Yes, at the beginning of the talk, you mentioned how people use words.
00:47:39.920	Your words over language belong to everyone.
00:47:43.280	Those words have been used the centuries and years before us.
00:47:47.720	But what the poet, his there and other poets of course do is exactly to appropriate
00:47:53.960	themselves those words.
00:47:55.520	And he used the French language with some kind of different project.
00:47:59.640	And the French language becomes his language also.
00:48:04.360	And I would say further, I spoke about the way in which language and words
00:48:07.680	relate us to the previous speakers, the dead and so forth.
00:48:10.880	And one could say that he is forcibly introducing into French his own ancestors,
00:48:19.520	African by nature.
00:48:21.800	And therefore, forcing French to make room for a whole new host of the ancestral
00:48:30.920	dead that come from the African continent by precisely as you say,
00:48:36.400	appropriating the language and making it his own.
00:48:39.240	Yeah, that's the project of a Francophone literature, the so-called "Fancuron"
00:48:43.160	literature.
00:48:44.160	And one could say that he does very much the same thing when it comes to things like Greek
00:48:47.480	myth, where there is a recurring figures in his poetry at times, you know, he'll speak
00:48:54.800	of himself like Hercules, or Prometheus, the one who stole the fire from the gods and gave
00:49:01.880	it to men and who was punished by the gods for that theft by being tied, chained to a
00:49:08.440	rock where a vulture is eating his liver for all eternity.
00:49:14.720	And Prometheus, of course, is appropriated by Cezanne very much as the figure of the colonized
00:49:20.880	people who in their, what you want to speak a bit about Prometheus, I have my own ideas,
00:49:26.120	but I first want to hear you.
00:49:27.160	Well, the way I understand his use of a Prometheus is it goes in both positive and negative
00:49:33.480	sense.
00:49:34.480	And the question of how Prometheus was punished by the god.
00:49:37.960	But I think in Cezanne poet, Prometheus becomes mostly a positive figure.
00:49:44.520	He is the image of the poet who goes and steals the language of the master and brings
00:49:51.040	it to his people.
00:49:52.480	So he's the a horse, he begins to some extent.
00:49:57.040	And thanks to him, his people will open up their eyes, they will reach some kind of awareness,
00:50:06.280	which precisely will help them to liberate themselves and enter the voice or the road
00:50:13.360	of freedom.
00:50:16.520	And also this ambiguity referring to with Prometheus, who is both punished, but also
00:50:21.240	he's the hero giver of fire, which is the beginning of domestication for human beings and
00:50:27.600	human society.
00:50:29.640	And the idea that if it's related to Africa, that it's a reminder that all of human culture
00:50:36.760	and society comes from the womb of Africa, that the domestication of fire, you know, language
00:50:44.560	rituals, families, religious, all these things have an African origin.
00:50:48.400	In that sense, Africa is the Prometheus that brought humanity out of its, you know, out of
00:50:55.360	its womb and into its culture, its cultural modes of being.
00:51:00.120	And yet Africa was 18th and 19th century enslaved and chained the way Prometheus was, you
00:51:09.440	know, for this enormous gift that it gave.
00:51:12.000	Yeah, yeah.
00:51:13.000	I'm glad that, you know, you mentioned that because it's something which really, except
00:51:17.760	in the mid in the milieu of a scientist, it's something which is not really known or which
00:51:23.960	has been forgotten that Africa is the best of humanity.
00:51:29.360	The cradle of Africa.
00:51:30.360	The cradle of the United States.
00:51:31.920	And the same way, the contribution of Africa in the domain of art when we think about
00:51:38.080	the French artist of the political duperry, or when we think about jazz, African contribution
00:51:45.040	in those domain is barely mentioned and you bring that so.
00:51:50.480	Oh, yeah.
00:51:51.480	I mean, and if I think of what American culture would be, you know, without the African
00:51:57.280	American element in it, it would be one of the most impoverished things compared to what
00:52:03.280	has been given to us, you know, through the African American.
00:52:08.080	Just as you mentioned, jazz and blues is just, you know, just the beginning.
00:52:12.080	At least we only have a few minutes left.
00:52:15.080	I, we're talking about the way it says that appropriates, you know, the oppressors language
00:52:21.880	and also the myths and so forth.
00:52:23.760	There's another very interesting trope that I think falls under this rubric of appropriation
00:52:30.400	and that is cannibalism.
00:52:32.400	As the first Western ethnologists ago and then they talk about the cannibals, you know,
00:52:39.760	Africa, it says, says there takes the idea of cannibalism and appropriates it for himself
00:52:44.560	and often insists on himself as a cannibal.
00:52:49.640	Suzanne says there, whom I believe was his wife and wrote for Topik, speaking about Martin
00:52:55.480	the Nickon poetry said that Martin Nickon poetry is cannibalistic or it's nothing at all.
00:53:02.480	How do you see, says there's appropriation of cannibalism?
00:53:07.120	What does he do with this concept?
00:53:11.000	The same way the word "neck" was re-appropriated and re-invented as a positive word, he does
00:53:19.400	the same with cannibalism and I see cannibalism very often I put cannibalism in relation with
00:53:28.640	cannibal.
00:53:30.280	Cannibal is an ex-egetua, it's a place...
00:53:35.080	And you explain it for an ex-egetua.
00:53:39.320	Ex-egetua meaning that things which were inside come outside.
00:53:45.480	Very pressed because of the rules of society, you know, all of you are just remembered
00:53:51.120	that word ex-egetua.
00:53:52.840	Ex-egetua, yes.
00:53:54.040	While cannibalism is in, is taking inside, cannibalism is ingestion, it's incorporation
00:54:04.320	and incorporating what the foreign culture, the French language, in the act of cannibalism
00:54:13.320	when we refer, for example, to ritual cannibalism in the so-called primitive society.
00:54:21.840	What is the goal?
00:54:22.840	It's not an expression of barbarism, there is symbolic meaning in cannibalism which is
00:54:29.720	precisely to incorporate in oneself what comes from the other and recreate and
00:54:37.460	the original self with the ingestion of that outside strange body.
00:54:45.780	And in terms of poetry, yes, there is some kind of cannibalism because they use the French language.
00:54:53.240	By they use the French language in their own way, they put in the French language contents,
00:55:02.100	that are stranger to the French language and the French culture itself.
00:55:09.140	So for me, cannibalism, the way it's used here, it's some kind of a
00:55:16.900	formation, again, a formation of a new self which is not the assimilated one,
00:55:23.780	which is not the colonized one, but a recreated new being.
00:55:28.820	And thanks to that indigestion, what is indigested by the poets or by the subject becomes
00:55:37.860	Arme Miraculius, which is one of the title used by Cesar, precisely talking of a poetry and the use of French language.
00:55:47.060	Exactly, the miraculous arms and this reverse assimilation.
00:55:50.580	It's not now the Cesar de Bismilléber, it's him being the assimilator.
00:55:56.100	And again, going back to this dainigian way in which cannibalism dissolves boundaries between
00:56:01.460	I and the other, the human and the animal and the vegetable, once you start taking in
00:56:07.220	and assimilating, digesting all these things, you have complete new reconfigurations of identity.
00:56:13.060	At ease of it, we're going to continue this discussion at a future date, I hope.
00:56:17.780	Thank you very much for this discussion.
00:56:21.780	I want to remind our listeners at Professor Elizabeth Boyy, his professor of French literature,
00:56:28.420	here at Stanford, and you want to find out what she's teaching, those of you who are among the
00:56:33.220	students in our audience and take a class. I also want to remind our listeners that we have a
00:56:40.580	web page for this program entitled opinions that you can access by going to the home page of the
00:56:46.180	French and Italian department, and there you can also listen to previous shows that have been archived.
00:56:54.260	My name is Robert Harrison and we're going to be seeing you next week at the same time.
00:57:00.660	Thank you, Robert.
00:57:01.540	Thank you, Elizabeth.
00:57:02.420	Bye.
00:57:02.420	good day.
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