The Power of the Word La Puissance du Verbe: The Cambridge Colloquia

The Power of the Word / La puissance du verbe

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

83 Series Editors Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

The Power of the Word

La puissance du verbe

The Cambridge Colloquia

Edited by

T.J. Cribb

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

The glyph used as a logo for the Colloquium is an Akan adinkra symbol indicating adaptability and the ability to transform oneself to play many different roles.

Front cover image: Japanese scroll (?Nagasaki, late 1860s/early 1870s) Back cover montage of artworks (courtesy October Gallery, London) by El Anatsui, Leroy Clarke, Brion Gysin, Elisabeth Lalouschek, Julien Sinzogan, Wijdan, Aubrey Williams, and Kenji Yoshida The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1938-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

To Èshù: god of crossroads and disguise

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Illustrations Prologue Introduction

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First Dialogue: The Power of the Word Between Word and Word Niyi Osundare and Henri Lopés (chair: Alioune Sow)

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Second Dialogue: The Power of the Word in the Arena of Theatre Femi Osofisan and Christiane Fioupou (chair: Alain Ricard)

21

Third Dialogue: The Power of the Word in Space and Place Wilson Harris and Daniel Maximin (chair: Jacques Chevrier)

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Fourth Dialogue: The Power of the Image Gerard Houghton and Julien Sinzogan (chair: Maria Tippett)

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Fifth Dialogue: The Word in Music: Chaka Akin Euba and Company

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Sixth Dialogue: The Power of the Prize Marika Hedin and Anthony Kwame Appiah, with George Steiner (chair: Ato Quayson)

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Seventh Dialogue: The Power of the Poem Lorna Goodison and Véronique Tadjo (chair: Irène d’Almeida)

113

Eighth Dialogue: Powers that Be and Words that Will Wole Soyinka and Assia Djebar (chair: Abiola Irele)

137

Ninth Dialogue: The Word in Disguise Biyi Bandele and Olabiyi Yaï (chair: Tim Cribb)

163

Epilogue after Baudelaire, “La Chevelure” John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan

181

Notes on Contributors

187

Acknowledgements

The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge The British Academy The Smuts Memorial Fund, University of Cambridge Schlumberger Cambridge Research Limited The Judith Wilson Fund, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge The Royal African Society The African Studies Association of the United Kingdom The African Studies Centre, University of Cambridge The Nobel Museum, Stockholm The French Embassy, London The performance of Chaka was made possible by a generous grant from the A.G. Leventis Foundation. The exhibition was curated by the October Gallery, London.

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Illustrations

The glyph used as a logo for the Colloquium is an Akan adinkra symbol indicating adaptability and the ability to transform oneself to play many different roles. C O V E R : The scroll is executed in the Southern Literati style of painting, a Chinese style practised by an educated elite of ‘scholar-painters’ who favoured idealized landscape scenes rendered with an elegant individuality of expression. The literati painters emphasized the ‘Three Perfections’ of Calligraphy, Poetry and Painting, and besides the traditional use of sumi (black ink made from charcoal) often added pale washes of colour, as in this painting, executed on a strong paper made with bamboo fibre. The artist – who signs using a pen-name which might best be translated as “eccentric old man” – was actually Japanese, though he had travelled in China as a young man. The pen-name and seals indicate this to be a late piece from his hand, probably produced in Nagasaki during the late 1860s or early 70s – tumultuous times, which saw the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate, swiftly followed by the restoration of the Meiji Emperor. October Gallery images (for Gerard Houghton and Julien Sinzogan, Fourth Dialogue) – these can be consulted at: http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/power/index.shtml The images are keyed as follows to discussion in the text (page numbers indicate where the “Slide” is commented on):

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Owusu–Ankomah (Ghana), “Get Off My Back” 150 x 200 cm. (oil on canvas).

57

Masahito Katayama (Japan), “Genealogy of the Wind” (1996), 76 x 56 cm. (pigment and acrylic on canvas).

57

Elisabeth Lalouschek (Austria/UK), “Parted Sky“ (2000), 100 x 100 cm. (acrylic on canvas).

57

Brion Gysin (England/Canada), “Untitled“ (1960), 55 x 43.5 cm. (red and brown inks on paper).

57

Wijdan (Jordan), “Calligraphic Abstraction – Ba“ (1993), 50 x 69 cm. (mixed media on paper).

58

Laila Shawa (Palestine), “Letter to a Mother“ (1992), 95 x 150 cm. (silk-screen print on canvas).

58

Leroy Clarke (Trinidad), “Enigma” (mixed media on paper).

58

Mariano Valdez (Mexico), “Shamanic Ceremony“ (1998), 38 x 55 cm. (coloured yarn on canvas).

59

Aubrey Williams (Guyana), “Bio IV“ (1988), 61 x 76 cm. (oil on canvas).

59

10 Alejandro Lopez Torres (Mexico), “Peyote Vision“ (1998), 51 x 51 cm. (coloured yarn in beeswax on wood) Collection of Wade Davis.

59

Jimmy Pike (Australian Aborigine), “Waterhole“ (acrylic on canvas).

59

Clifford Possum (Australian Aborigine), “Territorial Dispute“ (acrylic on canvas).

59

Yvette Bouquet (New Caledonia), “Dji Nu Owa” – Petroglyph“ (1993), 49 x 65 cm. (acrylic on paper).

60

El Anatsui (Ghana), “Unfolding the Scroll of History II” (1994) (detail), 61 x 141 cm. (African hardwoods and tempera relief). Private collection.

60

El Anatsui (Ghana), “Unfolding the Scroll of History II” (1994), 61 x 141 cm. (African hardwoods and tempera relief). Private collection.

60

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

11 12 13 14

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El Anatsui (Ghana), “Patches of History III” (1993), 141 cm x 69 cm. (African hardwoods and tempera relief). Private collection.

60

El Anatsui (Ghana), “Leopard Cloth” (1993), 162 x 69 cm. (burnt African hardwoods relief). Private collection.

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18 El Anatsui (Ghana), “Erosion” (1992), height 296 cm (installation of piqua-marfin and tempera). National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.

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Cyprien Tokoudagba (Benin), “Dan Aido Houedo” (2000), 78 x 112 cm. (acrylic on canvas).

61

20 Julien Sinzogan (Benin/France), “Divinatory Platter with the Sixteen Signs of ‘Fa’” (1997), 98 x 98 cm. (collage of barks and acrylic on board).

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Julien Sinzogan (Benin/France), “Abakua: The Crying” (2000), 75 x 100 cm. (acrylic on canvas).

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22 Yves Apollinaire Pede (Benin), “Dan Aido Houedo II” (nd), 215 x 66 cm. (sequins on cloth).

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23 Gerald Wilde (England), “Intelligence Now” (1977), 135 x 177 cm. (oil on paper).

63

24 Kenji Yoshida (Japan), “La Vie” (1992), 19 x 24 cm. (oil and metals on canvas).

65

25 Kenji Yoshida (Japan), “La Vie” (1991), 116 x 89 cm. (oil and metals on canvas).

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26 Kenji Yoshida (Japan), “La Vie (Maya Series)” (1990), 73 x 93 cm. (oil and metals on canvas).

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27 “Chinese Literati Scroll” (c. 1870), 82 x 51cm (Chinese ink on washi with bamboo fibre).

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Prologue

(The Master of Churchill College, Sir John Boyd, opened the colloquium with a reading of the following verses from ‘Souffles.’) Ecoute plus souvent Les Choses que les Etres La Voix du Feu s’entend, Entend la Voix de l’Eau. Ecoute dans le Vent Le Buisson en sanglots: C’est le Souffle des ancêtres. Ceux qui sont morts ne sont jamais partis: Ils sont dans l’Ombre qui s’éclaire Et dans l’ombre qui s’épaissit. Les Morts ne sont pas sous la Terre: Ils sont dans l’Arbre qui frémit, Ils sont dans le Bois qui gémit, Ils sont dans l’Eau qui coule, Ils sont dans l’Eau qui dort, Ils sont dans la Case, ils sont dans la Foule: Les morts ne sont pas morts. Birago Diop; from Leurres et lueurs (Paris: Présence africaine, 1967)

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Introduction

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whose proceedings this volume records was convened because there appear to be few opportunities for writers who use formerly colonial languages, in this case French and English, to exchange views across those politically imposed boundaries. The steering committee consisted of Abiola Irele, Anny King, John Kinsella, Alioune Sow, Casimir d’Angelo and the present editor. The colloquium was supplemented by a performance of Akin 1 Euba’s opera Chaka and by an exhibition of paintings, mainly from Benin, curated by the October Gallery. Both of these are also represented in what follows, and the pictures discussed by Gerard Houghton in the fourth dialogue, on the power of the image, can be seen on the October Gallery website. Writers were invited to group themselves in pairs representing the two languages, to communicate with each other before arrival, and to agree their final lines of discussion at a dinner the night before the colloquium opened. A few contributions were written out in advance but most were talks improvised on the spot. They were recorded and transcribed under the aegis of Anny King, Director of the University Language Centre. Some were then revised to incorporate responses to the following discussions; in other cases the discussion itself is transcribed. Revision has aimed to retain the feel of the oral for reasons partly explained below. This is especially so in the eighth session, where the participation of the audience is transcribed almost verbatim, and in the sixth, where George Steiner gave a masterly performance that was designedly unrepeatable in print; the resulting textHE COLLOQUIUM

There is a C D of a concert performance by the City of Birmingham Touring Opera, MRI-0001C D (1999). 1

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ual lacuna testifies to the fact that the power of the written word has its limits. The order of the dialogues has been changed in the editing so as to group the sessions on the opera, the image and the Nobel Prize together in the middle. I am most grateful to Dr Gerald Schmidt for his time, eagle eye and expertise in the later stages of preparing the text. Since the whole occasion was intended for the benefit of the writers, the academics limited themselves to setting up the general form of the colloquium and acting as facilitators. It was the writers who set the terms of discussion. On reviewing the results, it is chastening to an academic to find that the writers almost entirely eschewed the terms of postcolonial theory which so dominate current criticism. The writers were from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, yet the reader will search the following pages in vain for references to hegemony, Orientalism, subalternity, centre and periphery, marginality, mimicry, discursive epistemes, interpellation, writing back – in other words, all the terms descending from the Gramscian attempt to modify marxist theory to account for the persistence of capitalism, adopted and extended by Foucault. The writers did not appear to feel conditioned by such orientations to the ‘West’; Daniel Maximin, for example, contrasted what he called the nudity of Caribbean culture (which he saw as a resource) with the opulence not of the ‘West’ but of Nigeria. Culture is not to be reduced to economics, so it is dangerous to borrow metaphors of centres and peripheries from the dismal science without circumspection. Similarly, considering that the topic of the colloquium was the power of the word, there was little reference to discourse (in the Foucauldian sense), or to sign, langue, parole, textuality, intertextuality, semiotics, trace, différance, inscription, the lisible and the scriptible – all the terms derived from structuralist linguistics as transferred to anthropology and taken up by poststructuralism and deconstruction. Paris was an absent capital, even for the francophones. Assia Djebar, for instance, was concerned with the dynamics of a quite different politics of language between hegemonic and popular varieties of Arabic, French and Berber. For good measure, one can add that Vienna, too, seemed an unreal city for the writers: there was no reference to the phallus, the Name of the Father, desire, the gaze, to alterity, the Other, the sublime, powers of horror and the long chain of terms descending from Freud. It seems that writers find little use for these vocabularies, which mean so

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much to academics. Maybe that does not matter. There is certainly no obligation on writers to conform to the fashions of academia. And given that both writers and critics have long been in agreement that the work, once written, constitutes its own way of meaning independently of its author, it follows that academia is under no obligation to conform to the writers. It nonetheless seems odd that there should be such a gulf between the students and the authors of the objects of study. After all, the act of writing involves criticism from moment to moment; hence those writers who gather their reflections on this activity have proved seminal critics: Soyinka, Walcott, Wilson Harris are all such. It seems worth pausing for a moment at the threshold of their discussion of the power of the word to examine this issue, and since the colloquium was very much an oral occasion, and since Abiola Irele refers us to Homer in his introduction to the seventh session, let me begin with orality. According to Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales, were you to ask an oral poet in 1930s Yugoslavia what a word was, either he would say that he did not know, or he would reply with “a sound group which may vary in length from what we call a word to an entire line of poetry, 2 or even an entire song.” This is because non-literate peoples divide language up into sound groups, not lexical items, and anyway, the word for ‘word’ in Serbo-Croatian translates as ‘utterance’, which, reflecting social practice, marks out a more specific sector of the semantic field than does ‘word’ in English. There are similar mismatches and differences of overlap between English and French. In the second dialogue of this volume, Christiane Fioupou calls attention to the fact that whereas English has little option but to translate ‘logos’ as ‘word’ at the beginning of St John’s Gospel, French presents translators with a range of choices: ‘parole’, ‘verbe’, even ‘logos’ itself – but not ‘mot’, too restricted in scope to capture the original, for the Greek indicates both the word by which the inward thought is expressed and the thought itself. By moving from one language to another we highlight a range of kinds of meaning for ‘word’ from the oral utterance through the partly ideational logos to the relatively lexical mot. The constellation of possibilities shifts yet again when Yorùbá is brought into the picture. In the last dialogue, Olabiyi Yaï argues that the 2

Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge MA: Harvard U P , 2nd ed.

2000): 25.

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various words for ‘word’ in Yorùbá, such as òrò and ofo, are like masks or disguises for the ultimate power of the word. His argument goes better in French than in English, because he can avail himself of the differentiation that French provides to move from the full scope of verbe to the restriction of mot – for example, when he paraphrases Aimé Césaire: “Je dirai que le verbe est un vaudou puissant qui par le poète se fait mot.” (A literal translation into English would be meaninglessly redundant: ‘The word makes itself word’.) The differentials in French enable Yaï to suggest that the mot derives what power it has from the verbe. The verbe itself remains reserved, inscrutable, veiled by the masks even of its utterances. Among the languages considered so far, it is plainly Yorùbá that most links words to power. Such a view of the word presumably derives from a strongly performative set of assumptions arising from the cults of the gods and the ancestors. In Yorùbá there is no doubting the power of the word to command, to cure, to kill. Karin Barber has demonstrated, in a classic monograph, how very per3 formative some kinds of poetry in Yorùbá can be. The fields of meaning and social practices within which literature is produced are thus highly variable, and the idea of the word with which any given literature operates will take its colour from its cultural surroundings. However, even in Yorùbá, poems, unless they are indeed spells, are not intended to command, cure or kill (although they may and do save lives even in English – witness Niyi Osundare’s testimony at the end of the first dialogue). The principle Yaï advances is nonetheless illuminating for poetry. His model may be derived from cultural practices of power but he is referring, after all, to the general power of language which partially realizes itself through the intermediary of the poet. Every poem, every actual word in a poem, is only, to modify Piaget, “an 4 instance of the possible,” and that sense of infinite possibility ghosts the particular words chosen. The extreme illustration of this is when all the words are changed and the poem is re-created by translation into another language. The measure of the success of the translation will be 3 Karin Barber, I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oríkì, Women, and the Past in a Yorùbá Town (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 1991). See also her important article “Yorùbá oríkì and deconstructive criticism,” Research in African Literatures 15.4 (1984): 497–518. 4 Jean Piaget, Structuralism, tr. C. Maschler (London: Routledge, 1975): 38.

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the degree to which it captures in the new language that sense of the words being haunted by a host of other words, a sense of transcendence which marks it as a poem. Poetry is only the type-case of this principle, which is general for literature. In narrative, for example, every story told takes the place of another, perhaps closely related, perhaps quite different story that is not told, and a sign of the storyteller’s art is precisely that he invests the story he is telling with a sense of those other stories that he could be telling instead. This is evident in oral conditions of composition, as Albert Lord showed, but it is implicit within printed literatures as well, if only because it is in the nature of language. The truth of this was impressed upon those attending the colloquium at the remarkable session when Lorna Goodison purported to be reading some of her poems. In fact, she neither read them nor recited them from memory but re-composed them in the rhythm of the impulse of their formation. The poems accordingly came through in words somewhat different from those published in her collections, and it is these re-created versions that are printed here. Variability is thus held in a kind of suspension within the literary text and is indeed the principle that makes it creative rather than discursive. The self-evidently conventional form of poems brings the intrinsic conventionality of language itself into play and thus disposes us to receive the words of the poem as pointing beyond themselves. In Yaï’s terms, the restricted definition of the mot is invested with the infinity of the verbe – hence the intensification of meaningfulness associated with poetry. Were the words to limit themselves to a local social formation they would cease to be literary and in due course would perish with that formation, whereas if the currently available social discourses are deployed in a way that makes them point beyond themselves, the poem will achieve a longevity that outlasts the discourses from which it is made. The literary word thus achieves its power by side-stepping the discourses of practical power even as it uses them. This does not at all imply that literature has no practical application; no fewer than three speakers referred to the power of the word in political graffiti, a power that the poem can borrow. I have deliberately sought to push Yaï’s terms in a direction that tends towards Derrida’s thesis of the umotivated trace driven by différance. This is made possible partly by Yaï’s exploitation of the differentiation that French makes between the words for ‘word’ already de-

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scribed, reminding one of the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole. Also like Yaï, Derrida speaks of disguise, though in his case it is not words themselves that are the disguise but the Western metaphysics of language which conceals a primary ‘writing’: that is, the unmotivated institution of the sign; once this ceaseless activity of ‘writing’ is released, it perpetually unmakes the constructions of presence. However, the early Derrida of Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology would not have permitted himself the figure of the verbe as a powerful voodoo, with the metaphysics of presence which that might be taken to imply. Nor does he speak much of the verbe and scarcely of the parole, but of the mot, analysed into signifiant, signifié and signe. True, the programme he sets himself is in fact to destroy “the concept of the ‘sign’ and its entire logic” on which, he argues, the ‘Western’ concept of lan5 guage is founded, but setting that as his target inevitably circumscribes his horizon of possibilities. As we have seen, the word can mean different things in different cultures. The object of Derrida’s anti-linguistics is the word as defined by Saussure, and Saussure, it should be remembered, had proposed to re-found linguistics on the model of the natural sciences as a body of objective phenomena capable of being known by a detached observer. To treat language like the natural world, he had to abstract it from the contingencies of history, culture and the human subject and treat it as a timeless set of formal properties governed by ascertainable laws. He thus followed the precedents for describing human behaviour by the methods of the natural sciences that had been set in the eighteenth century by economics and in the nineteenth by positivist sociology. The kind of science assumed is, of course, that founded in the seventeenth century by Descartes and Newton, a paradigm which was just in the process of being dislodged from its preeminence by modernist physics when Saussure was giving the lectures between 1906 and 1911 that became the posthumously published Cours de linguistique générale of 1916. This, then, is the science of which Derrida writes the anti-science, the anti-linguistics and the anti-philosophy. Consequently, despite his avowed aim of overturning the ethnocentrism of what he takes to be a Western metaphysics imposing itself on

5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1977): 7.

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the world, his own programme in those early books can hardly escape being thoroughly ethnocentric. Its claims to totality suffice to show this. In Myth, Literature and the African World, Wole Soyinka wittily exposes the reactive Achilles heel of Négritude by pointing out that it simply replaces the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” with “I feel, therefore I am [an African].” We might adapt this to Derrida as: “I write, therefore I am not,” a turn which may be coherent, appropriate and productive in the philosophic tradition in and against which he is thinking, but not necessarily in other traditions. That is the point which Soyinka goes on to make – the simple incongruity of Descartes in a pith 6 helmet imposing his final solutions on Africa. If one seeks a general philosophy of language which is less totalizing than that offered by Derrida, it can be found in the work of Mikhail 7 Bakhtin writing as Volosinov. This has the advantage that it is not founded on (or against) a formalist or scientistic idea of language but on social usage, enabling a continuity between thinking about society and thinking about literature. As the Princess of France points out in Love’s Labours Lost, “A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it” (V.ii.861). Just so, a word takes its life in its hands every time it is uttered, for who can tell how it will be received? A word can never have a single meaning, for the speaker always imparts a nuance s/he deems appropriate to the situation, the hearer does the same, and the exchange of meanings is thus partial on both sides. The communication, if successful, is an agreement on what the words exchanged mean to the interlocutors at a given time, and the agreement is likely to include an element of compromise. This is where social joins with literary thinking about language. The lexical word, the mot, plays the role of conventional form in a poem; it preserves a certain stability, but is continually being filled with meanings from the reservoir of individual and collective usages, the reservoir of the verbe. This is the plenitude to which Irele refers in his introduction to Soyinka and Djebar; the word is filled with the absent presence of the word. Most of the time the different meanings speaker and hearer have in mind approximate to a degree Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976): 138–39. 7 V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973). 6

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that suffices for practical purposes and any velleities of misunderstanding go unnoticed and are inconsequential. Alternatively, the interlocutors may take advantage of the slippages of meaning to play with puns, double entendres, riddles, teasing and so on. But when people resist the play of meaning and entrench themselves in single but opposed meanings of words such as ‘king’, ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and ‘the Word of God’, then they kill each other. This, too, shows the power of the word, but it is achieved through a reification and arrest of the play of the word and as such is deeply inimical to the powers of the word that make for literature. It would seem that Bakhtin/Volosinov’s philosophy of language can be applied within different social usages and cultures and can thereby escape the ethnocentricity that Derrida deplores, while allowing for the play of difference, though admittedly in a less formal and consequently less radical sense. This more social approach runs the risk of a cultural relativism, a weakly liberal multiculturalism, which Derrida would also deplore, but that seems a risk worth taking if the alternative is a totalizing method or programme. Literary criticism is a second-order activity and should not aspire to universality. Cultural differences (in the ordinary sense of ‘difference’) are values, even if they can also become obstacles or killing-fields. The differences are challenges to negotiation, and in the case of literature the negotiations are not for the purpose of practical compromise as in ordinary social discourse, but a means towards an essentially intuitive understanding both of the natural world and of human participation within it. Criticism can assist that understanding by bringing appropriate knowledge to bear on the infinite variety of literary productions, knowledge made appropriate by a certain humility and preparedness to learn from the differences that distinguish cultures, since there are as many ways of knowing as there are languages and cultures. Criticism should aim to develop methods appropriate to the cultural material it addresses. Wilson Harris’s vision of the unfinished genesis of the imagination and of cross- (not multi-) culturality has shown us the way. T.J. C R I B B \

First Dialogue: The Power of the Word Between Word and Word N IYI O SUNDARE AND H ENRI L OPÉS

A L I O U N E S O W (C H A I R )

F

of these dialogues we are very pleased to welcome Niyi Osundare from Nigeria and Henri Lopés from Congo. To underline the idea of dialogue, I will introduce Niyi Osundare in French and Henri Lopés in English. Henri Lopés was born between, as he puts it, two banks of a river with two names, two races and two languages. His first book is a collection of short stories called Tribaliques, and this first book received the Grand Prix de l’Afrique Noire; Tribaliques is considered to be the first in a series of works attempting to answer questions of identity, transition, borders and languages. His other works include La Nouvelle Romance, Sans tam-tam, Le pleureur-rire, Le chercheur d’Afriques – “d’Afriques” with an ‘s’, I have to insist on that plural – L’Autre Rive and Le lys et le flamboyant. In 1993 he received the Grand Prix de la Francophonie de l’Académie Française, and he is now ambassador of Congo to France and England. Niyi Osundare est poète, dramaturge, essayiste et professeur d’anglais. Niyi Osundare a publié plus de dix volumes, plus de dix recueils de poésie, quatre pièces de théâtre, et il a reçu de nombreux prix: le Prix du Commonwealth, le N O M A et, en 1998, le Prix Fonlon/Nichols pour OR THE FIRST SESSION

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son excellence dans la création littéraire et sa contribution à la défense des droits de l’homme. L’année suivante, l’université de Toulouse lui a conferré le titre doctor honoris causa. Alors je cite juste quelques recueils: Les Voix du village (1984), Les Yeux de la Terre (1986), Les Chevaux de la Mémoire (1998) et son recueil le plus récent, Le mot est un œuf (2000).

NIYI OSUNDARE In the Beginning was not the Word In the Word was the Beginning Àràbà poumbé poumbé poumbé Àràbà poumbé poumbé poumbé*

Without the Word there wouldn’t have been the Beginning. For it was the Word which subverted the Silence of the Void, gave the universe a multitude of tongues and voices teasingly similar and frustratingly diverse. The Tower of Babel didn’t just collapse; its bricks rearranged themselves into walls between the tongues. But desperate dialogues do go on across the walls as some words travel back and forth, bearing imprints of both sides, while quite a number operate in the middle ground between languages. Attention has largely eluded these denizens of the middle tongue, but quite frequently there is something about their ‘grey zone’ that is richly textured and protean. Most multilingual and multicultural writers and scholars are familiar with the power and promise of this borderline territory, while constantly conscious of its snares and ambivalences. So what happens to the word between word and word? Does it turn flat as a wedge or does it take advantage of its hybrid capacity and flesh out into something more adventurous, less particular than its two ancestors? What kind of ‘word’ is the word between the word: is it what the Yorùbá call sekuseye (playing-rat-andbird) or amulumala (odd hybrid)? Is it strong and frothy like fresh palm wine because it is relatively free from the baggage of its forebears? Who are its speakers? Who are its audience? How liberal are ordinary language users about this kind of word; how ready are lexicographers to

*

These two lines are used for their phonic/musical/dramatic effect; they are untranslatable.

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include it in the ‘list’? How does the literary critic (or literary theorist) react to this kind of word? In the rest of my contribution, I’ll be exploring the borderline between the two languages I use: Yorùbá and English. I’ll try to see myself as a bilingual writer and provide some insight into the obstacles and challenges I confront in my thinking and writing process. What does it mean to think in one language, one culture and write in the language of another? By the time I finish writing, in what language do I end up writing? Does Yorùbá recognize itself in my English? Does English recognize itself in my Yorùbá? I’ll be exploring the intricacies of what I call ‘the language between’. Let me begin by poaching the opening paragraph of a recent essay of mine titled “Yorùbá Thought, English Words: A Poet’s Journey Through the Tunnel of Two Tongues,” which you will find in a book edited for the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham University by Stewart Brown, Kiss and Quarrel: Yoruba/English Strategies of Mediation (2000): When two languages meet, they kiss and quarrel. They achieve a tacit understanding on the common grounds of similarity and convergence, then negotiate, often through strident rivalry and self-preserving altercations, their areas of dissimilarity and divergence. Phonology, the organising component of the sound and sounding system of a language, is a notorious bone of contention in the quarrel between tongues. It is common knowledge that by the time we are in our early teenage years, all the speech organs are virtually set and adjusted to the realisation of the sound they have been exposed to since early childhood. Mastering the phonemes of other languages after this is still possible, but at great pedagogical cost and enormous investment of talent. This is why many Yorùbá speakers often pronounce ‘those’ as ‘dose’, ‘chew’ as ‘shoe’. English dental fricatives and affricates simply do not exist in Yorùbá. This is also why, in the mouth of an untrained English speaker, Yorùbá words such as ‘rogbodiyan’, ‘fiangbonfiangbon’, ‘Ajimatanrareje’ are likely to quarrel incoherently – and at times loudly enough to attract the attention of the language police! The syllable isochronicity and complex tone system of Yorùbá are as much a tongue-ache to the English speaker as the stress and intonation patterns of English are a constant worry to the Yorùbá speaker.

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Differential Expressivity and the Word-Between What I see myself engaging in – the location of my operation most of the time – is the interface between these two languages. It is an interface that is also made up of intersections and borderlines. It is a grey zone – grey because it takes something from the black, takes something from the white, concocts and merges what has been taken in such a way that the tonality and density of this grey zone is at times more attractive, much more puzzling, than what is possible in either of the two languages alone. The biggest problem I face when crossing this linguistic and cultural borderline arises from the differential music of the two languages. Yorùbá is a sound-powered, music-driven language, a syllable-timed language in which the syllable is not only a rank and category, but also a unit of utterance and locus of communicative drama. Yorùbá’s complex tone system is the fountain of this drama and its music, and it is what complicates the crossing of the bridge between Yorùbá and English, because the meaning of words is heavily dependent upon the specificity of tones. A word may have one graphological form but different tone realizations, resulting in difference in meaning. An example is the word ‘oko’: oko (middle tone + middle tone) – farm okó (middle tone + high tone) – penis

The story is still told of a stranger who once got into trouble when he asked the townspeople, “Where’s the king’s penis?” when what he meant but couldn’t articulate correctly was, “Where is the king’s farm?” Of course, the drama of the whole episode is located in tone variation and the inability of the speaker in question to master this. With many Yorùbá words, the devil is in the uttering! All languages rely on words and the sounds they employ in the evocation and representation of reality. Words are not just purveyors of reality; they are also instances of the phono-aesthetic processes by which sounds call – or sometimes provoke – meaning into being. Far more than English, Yorùbá is a language replete with ideophones, those sound forms/symbols in which sound suggests (rather than denotes or mimics) meaning. To make a statement of meaning (as J.R. Firth, the revered English linguist, was fond of saying), the speaker first has to

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produce the music that would aid the dance of the word from the ear to the mind. Yorùbá has a way of creating ‘new’ words and meanings by bringing ‘sounds’ together: Nkan hèrìmò hèrimò: something grotesquely large Obìnrin rògbòdò: tall, well-built woman Tèfètèfè: completely; make a clean sweep of Olórí kùndùnrùn: one with a big-heavy head O pupa fòò: it’s strikingly red/yellow

The meanings and communicative drama of the italicized ideophones reside in the semiotics of sounding: the regular duplication in tèfètèfè (suggesting completeness); the contrapuntal duplication in hèrìmò hèrimò (suggesting largeness); the centrally placed labio-velar plosive /gb/ (suggesting stoutness) in rògbòdò; the extensive nasalization aided by the phonemes /k/ and /d/ in kùndùnrùn (suggesting ponderousness); the breezy labio-dental /f/ and the prolonged /o/ in fòò (suggesting richness in colour). The journey from sounding to meaning in the above words is so striking yet so ineffable. Such words come quite naturally to the Yorùbá native speaker (or a person with native-speaker competence), so much so that the complexity involved in their rendering is either forgotten or taken for granted. Do I, too, take them for granted as a writer? Sometimes I do, especially when I am writing in Yorùbá. But problems arise when I try to carry these effects across to English where there are no happy equivalents or appropriate correspondences. For, in Yorùbá, poetry is music. You do not read poetry in Yorùbá; you chant it, you utter it, you sing it. Tone, cadence, voice modulation etc constitute part of the drama of the uttering. The English poem may be read with the eye; the Yorùbá poem is ‘read’ with the ear. English poetry operates though a panoply of metrical and prosodic features, Yorùbá poetry through a complex and comprehensive rhythmic pattern in which all linguistic units right down to the syllable are suffused with music and its drama, the poetic line being unamenable to scansion because it is constantly mobile and elastic. How does one count the feathers of an eagle in flight? How do I mediate the space between these two demanding languages? How does one ‘read’ a poem written to be ‘chanted’? That brings me to the politics of the line or, in a manner of speaking, the

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music of differential syntax. In Yorùbá, the words throb within the lines, which are themselves rich and supple, employing all manner of repetition subtle and/or direct, tonal and verbal play, tonal counterpoint, and so many other devices to be ti mu ba kun gbe (that are agreeable to the ear and the mind). Emphasis, almost always, is on euphony, rhythmicality and polyrhythmicality, music and meaning. The rhythm of the voice, the pulse of the human breath, often dictates or strongly influences the length of the line. Most times what may sound pleonastic in English is pleasurable adornment in Yorùbá; what may sound too ‘corporeal’ in English is, in Yorùbá, indispensable metaphoricity. But there are times when the penchant of English for syntactic parallelism, balance, and antithesis enriches that interface between the two languages, as I discovered in the process of sing-writing the following: I look through the sand, I see a fountain I look through the fountain, I see the river I look through the river, I see the sea I look through the sea, I see the sky. I am the bard who sings of water in shrivelled seasons (Midlife, 35)

The excerpt above is an instance of oríkì (praise poetry), whose archetypical patterns fall into the ‘I do’, ‘I am’ paradigm and the rhetoric of overlap and accretion. It is both declarative and incantational, the looseness of its syntax substantially helped by its heavily parallel structure. Here is the rhetoric of oríkì mediated in English, so that in the end what we have is neither one hundred per cent Yorùbá nor one hundred per cent English. The ideation, sentiment, rhetorical complexion, and sensibility originate in one language-culture, the verbal and other surface structural elements are in the other. Where lives the power of this poem: is it in its essential Yorùbáness, or its English verbalization, or the space in between? Syntactic mediations like the one seen above are relatively easier to manage, since the disparity between Yorùbá and English seems least forbidding at the syntactic level. Words are much more difficult to handle. Many Yorùbá words and expressions simply do not have equivalents in English, and getting them to do their dance in that borderland between the two languages often comes at great creative and

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stylistic cost. Here is an example from the first movement of Horses of Memory, dedicated to the memory of my father, a farmer with the teeming barn: The yams you planted last season Have burst into bloom Efùrù has sprung muscular tendrils From the womb of a faithful soil; Ewùrà sprawls in fields and furrows Like a royal python with a million limbs; Aro eléwé is sky-bound, its leaves screening The sun like a prosperous grove. (Horses of Memory, 10)

The employment of the seamlessly generic word ‘yam’ as translation equivalent for efùrù, ewùrà, and aro eléwé creates more problems than it solves. Yes, indeed, all three are yams, but yams in different ways: different in character, different in nature and texture, and, even more important, different in their symbolic and ritual significance in Yorùbá culture. One device for making words of this kind intelligible in English is elaborate glossing and footnoting. In such situations the poet finds himself trespassing the threshold between literature and anthropology, between the generation of ideas and the mediation of ‘exotic’ culture. Even so, the glossing of some Yorùbá words cannot wait for the footnote. It is done right in the sentence and becomes part of the lexical and syntactic flow of text: àràbà ò wó Ojú t’ìrókò Agbe ló laró O wo sanyan Mo w’etù

(The araba tree has not fallen The iroko tree is shamed) (The agbe bird is owner of indigo) (You wore sanyan garment I wore etu garment)

The hybrid formations ‘araba tree’, ‘iroko tree’, ‘agbe bird’, ‘sanyan garment’, ‘etu garment’ live in the borderland between Yorùbá and English. What occurs as a single element in the Yorùbá text takes on a glossing word in the English version. In the resulting noun phrase (‘araba tree’, ‘sanyan garment’, etc), the Yorùbá element which is a full, independent noun in the Yorùbá environment is class-shifted to a de-

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scriptive adjective in the English text, where the glossing element (‘tree’, ‘sanyan’, etc) functions as nominal head. Translation, transference, and other strategies of mediation hardly come without a price. Languages have a strong sense of territoriality: each has its own border guards and toll-gatherers. Which is why the word-between is complex, often Janus-faced, in its hybrid possibilities, why it is one of our eloquent weapons against purism. In the end I ask: is the phrase ‘agbe bird’ Yorùbá or English, English or Yorùbá, or something in-between, a product of two different parents, owned totally by neither of them, catering to the needs of two cultures, of two audiences? The word-between is potent but also vulnerable. Made strong by its double ancestry, it is also the site of constant questioning and ambivalence. The borderland between Yorùbá and English is rich and thronged. And problematic: for as a writer I have always acknowledged the reach and power of English without losing sight of its colonial scars, its “Ambiguous Legacy,” as captured in the following poem: I touch the maple, playfully, on its bark, the maple laughs its joy in an accent unmistakably English I walk along the Strand, the Thames arrests my ears with ripples of Anglo-Saxon idioms Here roads wriggle underfoot, ever so conscious of the complexion of the sole; History wags its tale through rubbles of macadamised silence... This conquering tongue whose syllables launch a thousand ships: its protean conjugations the evangelism of its nouns the uneven grammar of its clauses Wall or window curse or cure Can’t you see the purple scar

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at the edge of the stammering mouth, the battle of the diphthong in the labyrinths of the throat? Oh the agony it does sometimes take To borrow the tongue that Shakespeare spake! (Downing College, Cambridge, July 1991) (The Word Is an Egg, 51)

HENRI LOPÉS Je commencerai tout d’abord par m’excuser. Hier, quand nous nous sommes rencontrés pour préparer cette session, nous avons décidé que je parlerais anglais pour le bénéfice de Niyi, mais si vous le permettez, je passerai quelquefois au français. Je vais commencer par quelques remarques. Un: je ne vous apporterai pas de réponses donc, s’il vous plaît, ajoutez un point d’interrogation à tout ce que je vais dire. Deux: je commencerai là où Niyi s’est arrêté. J’ai l’habitude de dire que mon écriture est une écriture métisse en langue française. En me regardant vous pourriez vous dire que je ne suis pas un Congolais typique. Mais cela est compliqué parce qu’il y a deux sortes de Congolais, selon la rive du fleuve à laquelle vous appartenez, et, en ce qui me concerne, j’appartiens au deux. Je suis né à Kinshasa, mon père était Zaïrois et je suis citoyen de Brazzaville. Mais au-delà de tout ça, ni mon nom ni ma peau n’indiquent ma citoyenneté. Comme c’est déplorable! A qui la faute? Pas à moi! Mes ancêtres peut-être. J’ai des ancêtres étrangers et des ancêtres Bantous et je salue ce concubinage; j’utilise ce mot et adopte le métissage. Peut-être suis-je comme un de mes compatriotes, hélas disparu, et à qui je voudrais rendre hommage en rappelant qu’il a dit une fois: “je suis un Congolois.” Ou encore comme je disais souvent, je ne suis pas un “sans domicile fixe” mais un homme sans identité. En français je dirais que je suis un S.I.F: “Sans Identité Fixe.” Tout cela parce que je suis né non pas entre mais dans deux langues, le lingala et le français et quand je suis allé à l’école mes camarades m’en ont appris une troisième, le kikongo. Et puisque j’ai du vivre dans ce qui s’appelle aujourd’hui la République Centrafricaine, qu’on appelait à l’époque l’Oubangui, j’en ai appris une quatrième, le sango. Avec ma grand-mère je n’avais d’autres moyens de communiquer que le lingala. J’étais alphabétisé, elle ne l’était pas, mais

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en parlant avec elle j’avais le sentiment que c’était moi l’analphabète et elle Socrate. Pourquoi ai-je choisi d’écrire en français? Ma réponse est simple: je n’ai pas choisi, c’est le français qui m’a choisi parce que j’ai été alphabétisé en français. Pourquoi? parce que j’appartiens à une culture qui n’est pas alphabétisée (écrite) et qui est de tradition orale. Cela pourrait être considéré comme une faiblesse. Considérons par exemple l’histoire et les livres qui ont révolutionné le monde. J’en profite pour préciser que personnellement je ne pense pas écrire de romans pour provoquer des révolutions. Et pourtant il y a des livres qui en ont provoqué. La Bible, le Coran, ou encore Marx dont les œuvres, pendant une certaine période et en dépit de l’effondrement de l’union soviétique, ont servi de référence politique, à un tiers du globe. Malheureusement, en Afrique, la plupart de nos langues ont été transcrites tardivement donc j’ai été obligé de donner une bibliothèque à mon pays afin de pouvoir écrire dans la langue dans laquelle j’ai été alphabétisé. Ce problème, cette tragédie est exprimée dans un poème d’un écrivain de la négritude, Léon Laleau. Il écrit: Ce cœur obsédant ... Ce désespoir à nul autre égal d’apprivoiser, avec des mots de France ce cœur qui m’est venu du Sénégal (“Trahison” en Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, Paris: P U F , 1948: 108)

Je pense que tout le problème est là. Moi-même, pardonnez la publicité, j’ai été si obsédé par cette idée que dans un de mes livres, Le Chercheur d’Afriques, un de mes personnages essaie de traduire en lingala plusieurs auteurs qu’il apprécie, d’origines diverses et pas seulement issus de la francophonie. C’est le projet de mon personnage mais peut-être qu’il me ressemble. En réalité c’est un problème de langues, disons – ce n’est pas un mot adéquat mais je vais l’utiliser – que c’est un problème de langues indigènes et de langues européennes. Mais aujourd’hui, malgré ce que nous pouvons en penser, l’anglais, le français, et le portugais sont elles aussi devenues des langues africaines. Peut-être que maintenant la difficulté supplémentaire est de savoir si le français parlé en Côte

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d’Ivoire ou à Poto-Poto au Congo est le même que celui qui est parlé en France. Mais ça non plus ce n’est pas un problème nouveau. C’est comme l’américain et l’anglais qui ne sont pas tout à fait identiques et il n’est pas non plus nécessaire de chercher ici à savoir si elles devraient l’être. Je devrais aussi prendre en considération qu’avant de commencer à écrire j’étais influencé par des deux familles de mentors. L’une appartient à mon identité internationale et je cite, au hasard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Heine, Flaubert et ainsi de suite. J’ai aussi une famille de mentors africains; certains sont Bantous, et les autres, d’Alger à Cape Town, appartiennent à d’autres cultures africaines. Et je dois avouer que quand j’étais jeune et que j’ai rencontré Abiola Irele à Paris, à une époque où nous n’avions encore rien publié mais où nous étions occupés à parler de choses, il n’y avait pas beaucoup de romanciers francophones. La plupart des romanciers africains que j’admirais étaient anglophones: tous les sud-africains comme Peter Abrahams etc. Alors, si Senghor, Césaire, Frantz Fanon avaient écrit dans leur langue maternelle, il en aurait fallu du temps pour que je puisse les lire: donc je pense qu’en fait nous avons été favorisé en ayant cette langue de communication, dont les bienfaits étaient peut-être bien cachés. Cela dit, à chaque fois que j’écris j’ai le même problème que Niyi. J’essaye d’intégrer au français des expressions qui ne sont pas tout à fait françaises, produisant des “congolismes, congaulismes.” Certains écrivains sont allés loin dans ce sens. En Afrique je pense à Kourouma qui, je pense, fut le premier à essayer d’écrire en français à partir des langues bambara. Aux Caraïbes, c’est l’école de la créolité qui a systématisé ce phénomène que l’on retrouve, en anglais, chez Earl Lovelace. Quelle est ma position par rapport à cette école? Je fais la même chose, mais pas systématiquement de la première à la dernière page. Pourquoi? C’est ce qui fait ma différence; j’utilise cela dans les dialogues ou dans ce qu’en français on appelle le style indirect libre, qui est pour exprimer l’interactivité. Et j’ai remarqué que dans nos pays, vous voyez des gens qui sont absolument bien plantés dans les deux langues, et qui vous racontent une histoire, et ce qui est la partie narration, its vont la raconter en français, et quand on arrive au dialogue, pour que le dialogue soit plus vivant, its vont recourir au lingala, pour mettre en situation. Et de la même façon, les cinéastes et les hommes de théâtre, sont plus amenés à utiliser les langues locales.

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Pour terminer, ou pour presque terminer, je voudrais dire que je me demande, si au delà de notre situation d’Africain à qui on a imposé, disons-le, d’autres langues, ce n’est pas un problème de tout écrivain; si tout écrivain quelqu’il soit, même s’il appartient à des ‘métropoles’, n’est pas coincé entre deux langues. La langue de l’écrit n’est jamais, même lorsqu’elle imite la réalité, la langue de la vie réelle. Il y a une élaboration, quelque chose d’intérieur qui surgit, et qui fait que le problème que Niyi vous a clairement expliqué, et que j’ai essayé de bredouiller, est facilement compréhensible à même quelqu’un qui ne connait pas nos langues. Alors, je serais tenté – là vraiment pour terminer – pour répondre à une question par une autre question: pourquoi j’écris dans ces conditions? Et je voudrais vous lire un petit texte très court. Je m’excuse auprès des anglophones. Je ne pourrais pas le traduire: J’écris parce que, d’abord parce que je suis un Africain. Je veux dire un homme vieux de plusieurs millions d’années, un homme de plusieurs millions d’années dont la mémoire et l’imaginaire sont entretenus par une maigre tradition orale, fragile, et dont les premières tentatives de constitution, de bibliothèque datent de moins d’un siècle. J’écris pour introduire dans l’imaginaire du monde, des hommes, des femmes, des paysages, des saisons, des couleurs, des odeurs, des saveurs et des rhythmes qui en sont absents. Pour dire au monde des quatre saisons celui des saisons sèches et des pluies. Pour dire au ciel de la grande ourse, celui de la croix du sud. Mais vous dire l’Afrique ne consiste pas pour moi à vous en faire un reportage, ni à vous rédiger un traité de sociologie, ethnologie ou d’entomologie. Le pays que mes romans évoquent n’existe dans aucun guide Michelin, ni dans aucun ouvrage d’histoire ou de géographie. C’est de mon pays intérieur que chaque fois je vous entretiens. Peut-être ne suis-je au bout du compte, qu’un dangereux menteur, mais un menteur d’haut vol, car il s’agit dans ce jeu-là de mentir juste, et pour reprendre l’expression d’Aragon, de mentir vrai. Ecrire, c’est transfigurer la réalité. J’écris pour recouvrer mes poupées noires. J’écris pour […] l’homme qui se rase avec un tesson de bouteille, l’homme qui ne sait pas que la terre tourne. J’écris pour dépasser ma négritude, et élever ma prière à mes ancêtres les Gaullois. Gaullois de toutes les races, s’entend, de toutes les langues, de toutes les cultures, car c’est pour moi que Montaigne s’est fait Amérindien, Montesquieu Per-

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san et Rimbaud nègre. C’est pour m’aider à déchiffrer l’Afrique que Shakespeare a fait jouer ses tragédies, que Maupassant m’a légué ses nouvelles. J’écris pour avoir la force de vivre le pays de solitude, le pays métis. J’écris pour atteindre le plaisir, pour m’y baigner. J’écris dans la bonté, j’écris dans la fureur, j’écris pour ne pas basculer, j’écris dans la folie, j’écris pour revenir de la folie, j’écris pour me soigner, j’écris parce que je ne sais pas, j’écris pour apprendre. Chaque ouvrage est une université, et quelques soient les préférences de mes lecteurs, pour moi, mon dernier livre est toujours le plus abouti. Quand je crois maîtriser ces mots qui me sont à la fois outils et matières, ils me glissent entre les doigts, m’échappent et m’enivrent. L’écrivain n’est ni un grammairien, ni un savant, peut-être un alchimiste, mais à coup sûr un artisan. Mots de France ou mots d’Afrique, j’écris pour courir après eux. Pour les éplucher et disséquer leur chair, pour tenter de percer leur mystère. Chaque fois que je joue avec eux, et que je les palpe, je suis comme l’aveugle qui tâche de reconstituer la forme de l’objet entre ses doigts, et d’en imaginer la couleur. J’écris pour étudier; ni Dieu ni prophète, je n’ai aucun message à délivrer à mon lecteur; ni philosophique ni politique, je n’ai pas de culture, ni de civilisation, ni de morale à vous proposer en modèle. Jetez le livre qui vous offre des images pieuses, des héros ou des certitudes. Écrire, c’est s’ouvrir à tous les vents. Écrire, c’est entreprendre la quête inachevée. J’écris parce que la vie me déroute, j’écris parce que j’ai peur de la mort, j’écris pour apprendre à penser, pour mieux comprendre autrui, j’écris pour me comprendre, j’écris pour me racheter.

Merci.

N O U R É I N I T I D J A N I –S E R P O S First of all I’d like to thank the two authors. I want to ask them some questions and make some comments. The first is, when they say that they write in two languages and so on, I think that’s not correct. Take the case of Henri Lopés: when he went to school, the colonial school, he learnt Latin, he learnt Greek. Those are dead languages, but they’re part and parcel of him, and some of their images, pictures, ways of thinking, ways of writing will flow through his pen without his knowing. So saying that your writing comes only from the languages that you remember that you learnt is wrong. We have many, many other languages. I’m sure that Niyi has the languages of all the Igbo children he

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has met, all the problems he has with other people, people speaking Hausa, speaking Igbo and so on, and he picks up some of their words, and all these are part and parcel of his personality. So he will never know, when he is writing, where the picture is coming from, it’s just there, and we call it inspiration. That’s the first thing I want to say. The second is that you didn’t talk about the language of the people reading your works. When I take your poems, when I take your novels, I have my own language, and it’s through my language that I take your books. And that’s another language you don’t know about; I give all my culture to your work. [(Mobile phone interferes with sound) Excusez-moi, vous avez un portable? Oui, je crois; ça interfére avec le son. That’s another language!] The last matter I want to raise concerns the power of the book, of your books, which is different from the power of the language within them. Given the price of your books today in Africa, to whom are you sending out the power of your words? In the villages they cannot buy your books, so the power of their language stays here, among us, the elites. The language belongs to the people, but the people cannot get in touch with the books. We have no publishing houses in Africa, we publish everything here, so the power of your words will just stay here. We want that power to go to the villages, to go to the rural areas; what do we do?

FEMI OSOFISAN Professor Tidjani–Serpos has raised a crucial point – accessibility of the word. And I think he has also made a point I consider germane to our discussion; in fact, it’s more or less like a sub-text to the theme of this colloquium: how do we define the power of the word? Does that power inhere in the producer of the word? Doesn’t it really reside in its affective power: that is, what it is able to do to the person who reads or hears it? And this is where the problem arises. For how many people are we as writers reaching in Africa today? This must sound like a rhetorical question, for in the past fifteen years or so, the publishing industry has literally collapsed in Africa. We all know this. It’s a very unfortunate happening indeed. So many manuscripts are gathering dust in different parts of Africa. I know this because I’m actively involved with teaching, writing, and the literacy campaign. As a teacher of creative writing, I know how many publishable manuscripts emerge from my classes

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every year – most of which have never seen the light of day. As I’ve always said, if Things Fall Apart were written by a new author today, it wouldn’t find a publisher! The power of the word has been sabotaged, if not completely wasted, in contemporary Africa. However, I strongly believe that this situation, sad as it is, is not enough reason for not writing, for not trying to reach out and engage the world. Ironically, the power of the word (from both oral and written sources) is one sure way of rescuing ourselves from the tyranny of silence. I agree also with his psychological take on this issue. Each time we speak, we speak in the tongue of our ancestors. Our study of the history of English has shown that what we call modern English today is a configuration of tongues, ancient and modern – Greek, Latin, French, etc. This is also the situation with many African languages, because of the various interactions and intersections of our peoples in the past millennium or so. Languages are fascinating. Even when we human beings who speak them are at war with one another (which, sadly, we often are!), languages have a way of going behind the lines and negotiating their own kinds of relationships. They even marry each other behind our backs! When languages come into contact, they make concessions – fluid, on-going concessions. They know how to negotiate their way; they know what to accept from each other, and what to reject. They know how to put bridges across gulfs. I think languages have a life of their own (which we human beings can learn from), which is why the word has so much power.

NIYI OSUNDARE This takes me to the point made by Professor Abiola Irele. Yes, the word has an oral essence. I believe this realization is so important when we speak about the power of the word – that it’s not always something imprisoned between two bound covers. We’re talking about the breathing, pulsating word. Every human society started from the oral stage. The ballad came before the written verse. Music preceded the scripted score. I think what has happened in modern times is that, because of our technological hubris, we tend to think everything good or valid must be on paper, on the screen, and so on. However, poetry has a way of taking us back to its oral origins, and I assume that is what Gerard Houghton experienced among the Sotho. I see some revolution happening, some ‘Spoken Word’ revolution, in spite of all the technological

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hype. In New Orleans, where I currently live and work, I can see some kind of renaissance going on – coffee houses, restaurants, all kinds of little joints where every week end people gather around open mikes to do their bit. There are also ‘Poetry Grand Slams’ going on in several parts of the United States. It’s no different in Yorùbáland, which has witnessed a tremendous resurgence of ewi (poetry) performance in the past two decades. Poetry in Yorùbá is music, it’s chanting, most times involving a call-and-response process. Reading Yorùbá merely as written is like removing the wings of a bird and asking it to fly. The language the reader interprets us in – that’s the point made by Professor Tidjani–Serpos; readerly competence, readerly authority, and so on. Each reader has her or his own language, I agree. But there is the necessity for agreement or negotiation between the language of the text and the language in which the reader seeks to interpret it. If negotiation breaks down between the two, then we have a situation of dis-articulation and communicative hiatus; but most texts seek to establish a dialogue between the writer and the reader. Gerard Houghton asked about the advantages of writing in English. I need not delay us here with the usual mantra: English is a world language; it’s an international language, and so on. I think everyone knows that by now. The language itself has established that fact. There is no denying the resilience, the elasticity of English. It can take all kinds of beating, you know: bend it almost to breaking-point, and you find it bouncing back. I think that is why it’s been able to negotiate its way with many other languages in the world. So, the phonological difference that I noted between Yorùbá and English comes in as a challenge, something that brings the relationship between the two languages into bolder relief, rather than deepening the gulf between the two tongues. It’s common knowledge that it’s at the phonological level that the lack of correspondence between languages is most profound. To cite an immediate instance: Professor Fioupou and I have been working on the translation of one of my books, Waiting Laughters, for quite some time now. At times we are on the phone for about an hour, arguing over the ‘correct’ translation of a word or phrase, looking for corresponding music in the French translation. Remember that the translation in this instance has to cross two borderlands (Yorùbá and English) on its way to the French destination. At times I ask her: “Are you sure I wrote that?” Many of the questions she asks bring me face to face with the

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Yorùbá origin of some of my English phrases. Oh yes, many languages jostle for attention in my consciousness. Many times, ideas conceived in Yorùbá and expressed in English give rise to idiomatic creations, fortuitous formations that may sound ‘quaint’ and fresh to someone unfamiliar with my linguistic/cultural geography. But the experiment doesn’t work all the time; sometimes the dough just refuses to rise! Returning to this question of reaching audiences, Femi Osofisan has reminded me of my experiment with newspaper poetry. I have always been fascinated by the popularity of oral poetry in Nigeria and the relative unpopularity of the written. So, many years ago, I decided to research this anomaly, and I discovered that the kind of written poetry introduced to us many, many years ago, and the way that poetry was taught, put many people off poetry almost on a permanent basis! Many of these poems were difficult, their music foreign; their subject-matter had little to do with the lives of their readers. And so, many people exclaimed, “Oh, this is not meant for me!” I decided to try to redress this situation by writing poems on topical issues that touched the people’s lives, in a style that had a lyrical/musical appeal. I mentioned the project to Felix Adenaike, managing director of The Tribune, one of Nigeria’s ‘grassroots’ newspapers. He and his editor, Folu Olamiti, agreed and cooperated. The experiment was originally to run for a short time. But, barely one month after its commencement, readers’ responses in the form of letters, feed-back poems, etc were so tremendously encouraging that we kept the poetry column on for five years. When I was going on sabbatical leave abroad, I put it on hold. Particularly memorable is the case of a man who came one day to thank me for ‘saving’ his life. Married, with seven children, he had just been retrenched by a factory he had served for almost half of his life. This was in a spate of I M F -induced lay-offs and other ‘belt-tightening’ measures imposed on the Nigerian people in the 1980s. According to him, he was tired of living, but what ‘saved’ him from suicide was a stanza in one of my newspaper poems: My wife is wan, my kids are cold The times are hard, not so my heart I will never die on the rubbish heap I’ve sowed my sweat, I deserve to reap (“Retrenched,” Songs of the Season, 19)

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“I read that and I changed my mind,” he said. I was dumbfounded. Surely the word has power, and that fact came to this man not from academic books or frozen journals in senior staff common rooms, but from the pages of a newspaper, from the tabloid platform.

HENRI LOPÉS J’essaierai d’être bref. Je suis tout à fait d’accord avec le Professeur Serpos. Ma réponse est que, comme je vous l’ai dit, j’ai trois identités. La première est mon identité originale; présentons les choses de façon stéréotypée: c’est mon identité bantoue et cela est important quand vous appartenez à un pays qui a été colonisé. Nous avons dû réétudier notre histoire, nous ne connaissions même pas notre histoire, donc c’est déjà une tâche importante. Cependant, en me confinant uniquement dans mon identité originale, je peux devenir xénophobe. C’est pour cela que j’ai besoin du réseau d’une autre famille, que j’appelle mon identité internationale et quand je faisais référence à mes mentors, ce sont les membres, les nœuds du réseau de ma famille internationale. La troisième chose, qui pourrait aussi être la première, est mon identité d’écrivain. Cela m’amène à la deuxième remarque du Professeur Serpos qui est que le lecteur possède aussi sa propre langue. Personnellement, je pense que le pouvoir de l’écrivain, qu’il soit poète, dramaturge ou romancier, est de vous faire découvrir un monde intérieur, un monde et des langues. Si vous êtes satisfait avec cela, vous aimez l’auteur, vous aimez les livres mais demeurez un lecteur. Vous pouvez être fasciné par cela mais en même temps vous vous dites “il y a quelque chose qui manque” et ce qui manque c’est ce que vous voulez, ce qui vous incite à écrire. Le prix du livre en Afrique est un énorme problème mais ce n’est pas celui de l’auteur. C’est un problème crucial mais pour en parler nous aurions besoin d’une autre session. Les choses qui me plaisent dans l’écriture en français ou en anglais sont les suivantes: Quand j’écris en français je suis sûr que je peux atteindre immédiatement beaucoup d’autres africains qui parlent aussi français et cela est un plus. De deux, j’espère que nous créerons, un jour, un programme croisé, un programme de traductions d’œuvres représentatives de langues africaines vers les langues importées, le français, l’anglais, le portugais et l’arabe mais aussi entre langues importées. Quand j’étais à l’U N E S C O , j’ai essayé de faire cela, mais j’ai eu des

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problèmes financiers comme le sait Prof. Irele. Mais je pense que nous devons persévérer, et essayer encore, si ce n’est pas par l’U N E S C O par un autre moyen. De trois, aller au-delà de tout ça c’est développer un bi- ou tri-linguisme en Afrique, au moins à un niveau passif. Cela veut dire que si je ne parle pas anglais au moins je le comprends et cela me permet d’avoir accès parce que je crois à la nécessité d’une unité africaine. Je crois qu’effectivement, nous, nous écrivons en français parce que, comme je l’ai dit, nous ne l’avons pas choisi, il nous a été imposé; bon, c’est l’histoire et cetera, on fait avec. Mais, cela dit, il y a, quand-même, un déséquilibre. C’est à dire que chacun d’entre nous qui venons d’Afrique, nous savons qui est Mozart, nous savons qui est Shakespeare, nous savons qui est Rainer Maria Rilke et Confucius, et si nous le savons pas, nous sommes considérés non pas simplement par vous, mais par nous-mêmes, comme quelqu’un qui a peu de culture. En revanche, vous ne nous connaissez pas. Et, quand je dis vous, l’ensemble, pas vous qui êtes dans cette salle, et vous estimez que vous pouvez bien vous porter sans nous connaître, et alors c’est là justement que je pense qu’il y a un flux à double sense à établir par toute forme de dialogue. Voilà, je m’arrêterai là. Merci.

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Second Dialogue: The Power of the Word in the Arena of Theatre F EMI O SOFISAN AND C HRISTIANE F IOUPOU

A L A I N R I C A R D (C H A I R )

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to have a conversation with friends. As it happens, I have known our two guests for a long time. In Femi’s case, for nearly thirty years, since the early 1970s, when he was a young, promising graduate student in French and Drama from Ibadan; we shared, and still do, the same interest for ‘littérature engagée’, for the powers of theatre to help us understand how things worked in the social world and how they could be changed by the power of the word. But that was at a time when these powers were questioned, at least in the north: Waiting for Godot was on the Nobel agenda, and waiting is the acute consciousness of the lack of power. Femi felt that for Nigeria the agenda was not the same, and I agree: I followed his many careers as a scholar, a dramatist, a journalist, and more recently a poet and I was always amazed by his great satirical talent as well as by the relevance of his analysis and his linguistic creativity: he can write songs and polemical pieces in newspapers as well as academic theses. I also have a great respect for his engagée attitude : he stayed in Nigeria, to write and teach, and he has managed to make a continuous impact on the intellectual life there, as well as to keep in touch with the rest of Africa: he is not a provincial nationalist, as many T IS ALWAYS A PLEASURE

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have become, unfortunately, out of resignation and frustration. He has tried to bridge the gap between so-called francophone and anglophone Africa: we worked together in a literary workshop in Togo a few years ago and his bilingual performance was a magnificent tribute to the powers of words in the arena of theatre! This continued African commitment had a price: his work was not well-known outside Nigeria. This is changing, thanks to two publications: Sandra Richards’s Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan, published by Howard University Press (1996), and Femi’s own essays, The Nostalgic Drum: Essays on Literature, Drama, and Culture, published by Africa World Press (1999), with an introduction by Abiola Irele. I am just wondering: what has happened to Okinba Launko, the poet, winner of the Okigbo prize? Maybe Christiane will provide the answer! I met her in Ife, where she had come from Upper Volta – Burkina Faso today – by road, of course – to enter the Yorùbá country and Soyinka’s world. She has travelled a long way on these roads and she has taken us with her. We belong to the same tribe, that of the troubadours, who invented love poetry in the Romance languages…. Christiane has this poetic gift: I am amazed by her inventiveness, by the vibrancy of her translations. We may disagree at times – as we did when she translated the “rotten” English of Ken Saro–Wiwa into “petit français” – but we share a common love for the power of the word and for experiments to make available to francophones what we love in the Nigerian literary tradition, of poets and playwrights, of those truly performing in the arena of language innovation. On the areia babelica, on the sands of Babel, Luandino Vieira drew a line, placing language innovators on one side. Vieira, a political prisoner in the 1960s, was born in Portugal but resided in Angola. His collection of stories, Luuanda (1964), and the novel A vida verdadeira de Domingo Xavier (1974) show the imaginatively calqued language also seen in his poetry. Our two guests are truly on the same side of the line, with those who believe in the poetic power of the word.

FEMI OSOFISAN When I went as a student to Paris there were various movements which saw literature as part of the political process. Jean–Paul Sartre was the Czar of theory in that period. This was something I identified with. So my orientation changed, and by the time I went back to Nigeria, as far

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as I was concerned, the writer could no longer be an indifferent person in society. Literature could no longer be just for entertainment, particularly in the context of the country to which I was returning. Nigeria, like many parts of Africa, was in the turbulence of the development process, with poverty everywhere, and with corrupt leaders. I saw my work as part of a struggle – a second struggle for independence, if you like. The first struggle for independence was against European colonialism, but the second struggle was against corrupt leadership, and yet a third struggle was to come out of that – the struggle against military dictatorship. Underlying all this was the problem of under-development – the social problems, the economic problems – which gradually became worse as independence progressed. I’m sure some of you have heard the story of how a delegation from one of the villages went up to the capital city to see the new head of state. When asked what they wanted, they said: “Well, this independence, we like it, but when will it end?” The struggle had many dimensions – I don’t need to go into all of them: “L’Afrique noire est mal partie.” In sum, our generation developed a different attitude to the kind of work we did, and that was when English became a problem. Because we were now interested in “committed literature,” literature of engagement as well as commitment, the problem was how to reach as many people as possible. Hence the language and the form of communication became problematic. How do you communicate with people if they are mostly illiterate in English? Also, by what form of literature can you reach them? There was a choice, of course. We could write in our indigenous languages, Yorùbá for me, just as for Niyi. But that brought up its own problems, because Nigeria is a multi-ethnic society, with over 300 language groups, three of them quite large – Yorùbá, Hausa, and Ibo. If you choose to write in one of them, what then happens to the people in the rest of the country? How do you reach them? That’s the first question. Of course, Yorùbá is a privileged language in this context, because there is a thriving literature in Yorùbá. We have over fifty published novelists, and several dramatists. The problem that arises, however, is that one of the crises we have to deal with is precisely the crisis of ethnicism. If you are trying to develop a nation-state, ethnic problems arise, which is one of the reasons why we’ve never been able to select

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one of our own languages as the national language. There is so much ethnic suspicion, and the leaders, of course, use this all the time to keep the people divided. If you select one of the ethnic languages to write in, the danger is that then you are seen as one of the ethnic warlords, and as not interested in the national question. And the national problems are really not ethnic problems – they are economic problems arising from class divisions. Thus it became necessary to select a language that would go beyond the ethnic limitations, or, at least, to write in both that and in local languages. Hence some of us felt that we needed to continue to write in English. But we had to find a different kind of English, an English that would be accessible to as many as possible. We tried to find an English that was simpler and more accessible and to use the pidgin forms which have developed in certain areas. As far as theatre was concerned, we looked for the popular forms of indigenous theatre and tried to adapt these for our stage. This meant bringing in music, spectacle, magic, incantations – all those forms in which indigenous theatre was very rich. We also looked for cheap outlets through pamphlets and newspapers to make our work available. In making that choice, some of us in effect turned our backs on an international audience. And so it is that although I am glad to see everyone here, I’m also glad to know that most of you are not acquainted with what I’ve written (through no fault of your own). Let me say a little more about language from a different angle, because Christiane Fioupou is here. She is called a translator, I am called a writer, but there is a sense in which we are both translators. When I bring farmers on stage, they speak in English, yet, obviously, these farmers don’t know English at all. This is a bigger challenge in drama than in prose. When you are writing a novel, the novelist stands in as narrator and can present everything, even people’s silent thoughts, but on stage it is the dramatist who is silent and who presents people in their immediate situations. And you in the audience are meant to imagine all the time that these people are not in fact speaking English, that they are speaking their own thoughts in their original language. The same goes for the touts in the motorparks, the mechanics and so on, all those working-class characters who don’t normally speak English at all. A similar issue arises when presenting history. The problem there is that you are dealing with chiefs and commanders of a precolonial

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period when English had not come in, yet you present them speaking in the English language, or in the French language. In all these cases I represent the characters in English, so there is a sense in which what I am doing is similar to the work of a translator. I, too, am translating into a language in which the original speakers did not speak. And you, the reader or audience, are meant to hear this and think and imagine that they are in fact speaking their original languages. That kind of paradox has dogged our work all the time. This is where Professor Tidjani– Serpos posed his question about the language of the audience. In which language does the audience hear you? That’s a very serious problem. And that is why it is more challenging to do this kind of work in theatre than in fiction, I think. Before I stop, I want to talk of one more challenge that we face nowadays: the rise of the video generation. Everywhere in Nigeria people are making videos. Many of our dramatists despise videos as cheap and disgusting, but they are a very popular form. They offer new possibilities for the development of theatre. At the moment, unfortunately, they are being exploited by sharks. The films are made in two days. They make about forty a week and flood the market. The videos are about ritual murders, violence, sensation. This is the current challenge that we have to face. Serious writers and dramatists must seize this new medium and make more serious and engaging pieces of work.

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

Niyi Osundare nous a donné l’impression que les écrivains pensent d’abord dans leur langue nationale, et traduisent ce qu’ils ont pensé dans leur langue nationale en français ou en anglais,* et je me demande si c’est vraiment ce qui se passe.

FEMI OSOFISAN In this matter, I think one can only speak for oneself. I can’t say what language other people think before they write, not having access to their brains, but I can talk about my own. I think it depends on what language you think before you write and on the particular experience you’re writing about. We experience reality in different languages in our society, because we are a multi-language society. For instance, I *

See First Dialogue above, Osundare’s first statement.

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may have contact with, say, Hausa-speaking people in the markets when I go to buy meat, or I may have contact with Igbo people when I go to the market to buy clothing or building-materials, or perhaps I’m thinking about a teacher of mine whose contact with me is in English: with all these various people I think it’s normal that I think in the language in which I share experience with them. So it’s not just one language in which one thinks, particularly if you come from a plural society like ours. The best thing, really, is to imagine this issue as you imagine polygamy: it’s a polygamy of consciousness – a ménage à trois, a ménage à plusieurs! I use these examples deliberately, because people who come from monocultural backgrounds will normally think in only one language, but if you live in the kind of society we do, in which various languages are in collision all the time, you will think in different languages.

NIYI OSUNDARE You try to reflect the speech rhythms that will contain the idioms and metaphors of your own language, and that will try to reflect the musicality of the language. Yorùbá happens to be what is described as the missing link between speech and song; it is an extremely musical thing. So how do you capture this? What you write will be English, but it will have all these various changes and adaptations. That’s why I was saying that writers are basically translators, because this is what they are doing. We’re trying to present in English, but in an English which suggests to you right away that this is not English English – although I don’t really know what is English English. I have travelled around Britain and sometimes I wonder if the people are speaking English. There are many natives of England who don’t speak English English. So it’s the variety that we try to use, and this is what all the writers are trying to do with various degrees of innovation, experimentation, and varied success.

HENRI LOPÉS Femi Osofisan a dit toute-à-l’heure que l’écrivain était un traducteur. Je pense qu’il est aussi autre chose; c’est un imitateur. Nous imitons des personnages, nous imitons des situations, et imiter ce n’est pas photographier. On fait sentir qu’il y a une différence, mais on essaye de re-

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créer quelque chose, et c’est pour ça qu’on est entraîné pour des personnes qui sont dans notre situation à justement faire ressentir ces différences de langue, notamment en Afrique. Moi, je l’exprime d’une autre manière que toi mais c’est exactement la même chose; c’est-à-dire je dis que dès qu’on veut acheter son manioc à cinq kilomètres plus loin, il faut parler une autre langue, ou au moins la comprendre.

FEMI OSOFISAN Oui, je suis d’accord. Imiter, mais dans quel sens? On imite, mais pas simplement pour reproduire la réalité qu’on voit. Je crois qu’il y a l’autre côté de transcendre, de surpasser, de prophétiser même, de prédire le futur.

CHRISTIANE FIOUPOU Splendeurs et misères de la traduction…. On me demande avec insistance de parler en français; je retourne donc à ma langue d’origine! Je dirai, pour amorcer le dialogue avec Femi Osofisan, que je viens de relire sa pièce, Èshù and the Vagabond Minstrels, avec grand plaisir. Je l’ai lu dans l’édition parue chez New Horn Press à Ibadan en 1991. L’action se situe à un carrefour, lieu hautement métaphorique et mythique, et une simple lecture du texte et des indications scéniques permet d’imaginer l’énergie débordante des danses, des chants et des dialogues, qu’ils soient poétiques ou satiriques, lorsque la pièce est mise en scène. J’y reviendrai. Et je me disais que c’est le type de pièce que je pourrais peut-être traduire. ‘Pourrais’ dans le sens de ‘j’aimerais,’ mais aussi ‘pourrais’ grâce à l’expérience que j’ai acquise en tant que traductrice (de l’anglais au français) d’autres écrivains yorùbá. Car (sans faire de tribalisme…) c’est tout un monde, toute une mythologie, dont il faut s’imprégner si l’on veut traduire efficacement; il convient de respecter l’esprit de l’œuvre, évidemment, mais aussi la langue que les personnages parlent et celle que le public ‘entend’, comme Femi vient de nous l’expliquer quand il évoque la convention qui fait parler anglais à des personnages qui s’expriment dans une langue qui n’est pas l’anglais mais le yorùbá, ou toute autre langue africaine. Mon expérience de la traduction, je l’ai acquise pratiquement à mon insu pendant les années où j’enseignais au département d’anglais de l’Université de Ouagadougou, au Burkina Faso, et surtout lorsque l’on m’a demandé de faire des

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cours sur le théâtre africain, puisque j’étais censée être spécialiste de théâtre…. Le théâtre européen, peut-être, mais pour le théâtre africain… j’avais vraiment beaucoup de retard à rattraper…. J’ai donc lu avidement toutes les pièces de théâtre africain que je pouvais me procurer et c’est dans ce contexte que j’ai découvert la pièce de Wole Soyinka, The Road. Mon enthousiasme pour l’œuvre de Soyinka en particulier et pour le théâtre nigérian en général vient de ce premier rapport avec The Road. D’ailleurs, je me suis souvent demandé quelles étaient les raisons ‘objectives’ qui d’emblée me l’avaient fait aimer, intuitivement, pourquoi j’avais retiré un plaisir intense à la simple lecture de cette pièce extrêmement complexe alors que je connaissais très peu Soyinka, que je n’étais jamais allée au Nigéria, et que la culture yorùbá m’était pratiquement inconnue. J’avais l’impression d’être entrée dans un monde que je ne connaissais pas du tout et que pourtant j’arrivais un peu à saisir d’une manière diffuse: j’appréciais la pièce comme texte littéraire (évidemment, puisque je ne l’avais jamais vue sur scène), pour la variété de ses registres de langue, pour ses voix multiples et déroutantes, pour la qualité des dialogues, pour l’omniprésence troublante et inquiétante d’Ògún le dieu de la Route, et en fin de compte, je pense, surtout, pour l’énigme qu’elle représentait. Je me suis donc lancée avec enthousiasme dans l’étude de Soyinka, de la culture yorùbá, et je me suis rendue à plusieurs reprises au Nigéria. J’ai plus tard soutenu une thèse d’État sur le thème de la route dans l’œuvre de Wole Soyinka après avoir traduit la pièce La Route en collaboration avec mon collègue et ami burkinabè, Samuel Millogo. La traduction est parue chez Hatier à Paris en 1988. Si à partir du “carrefour d’Èshù” de Femi Osofisan et de la “route d’Ògún” de Wole Soyinka j’ai évoqué le parcours personnel qui m’a conduite à la traduction d’une pièce de théâtre et plus largement à la traduction littéraire d’œuvres africaines, c’est qu’il est lié, me semblet-il, au thème du Colloque, “The Power of the Word.” Et j’imagine que les organisateurs, à un moment ou à un autre, ont dû faire face au problème de la traduction: comment traduire en français “The Power of the Word”? Le pouvoir (ou la puissance) du ‘mot’, de la ‘parole’ ou du ‘verbe’? Ce problème s’était présenté concrètement à moi dans les années quatre-vingt, à l’occasion d’un bref passage à Ifé, lorsque “Skip” [Henry Louis] Gates, sachant que j’étais en train de traduire The Road, m’avait

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posé la question qui précisément me taraudait: “But how are you going to translate ‘the word’ into French?” Et nous avons longuement discuté des diverses possibilités (et impossibilités!) de traduction étant donné la polysémie du mot ‘word’ en anglais, et des stratégies à adopter pour essayer de rendre ou de faire percevoir cette polysémie en français, dans le texte imprimé et théâtralement. Car dans The Road, le Professeur qui est en quête de ‘the word’ – avec ou sans majuscule, selon le cas – fait son entrée sur scène chargé de quatre énormes paquets de journaux, d’une tige de fer sur laquelle sont embrochés des bouts d’imprimés, et contre lui, il serre un panneau de signalisation indiquant un virage en S et le mot B E N D . Des ‘brassées’ de mots physiques, donc, des mots concrets, des mots imprimés, envahissent l’espace et s’insinuent d’une manière d’autant plus prégnante que Professeur marmonne ou déclame qu’il est en quête de ‘the Word’. La répétition obsessionnelle de ‘word’ dans des contextes très différents et l’association de ‘word’ à ‘Word’ produisent rapidement un effet cumulatif qui, en anglais, se répercute dans toute la pièce. Professeur, ancien prédicateur laïque et moniteur de l’école du dimanche dont il a été exclu pour blasphème, rejette l’Église mais parle encore une langue fortement imprégnée de références bibliques. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” nous dit la Bible de King James (Jean 1:1). Et ici surgit un problème pour le traducteur français: contrairement à la langue anglaise qui possède une version ‘autorisée’ de la Bible, le français propose des traductions très différentes de ‘the Word’: “Au commencement était le Verbe” (Osty), “Au commencement était le Logos” (Chouraqui), “Au commencement était la Parole” (Louis Segond), mais évidemment, à ma connaissance, aucune traduction ne donne ‘Mot’, trop restrictif, pour exprimer le verbe créateur. Le ‘Verbe’ est d’ailleurs la traduction la plus courante, en l’occurrence celle qui a été retenue pour le titre du colloque, mais ici, j’imagine, plus comme expression verbale de la pensée que comme verbe divin. L’un des problèmes pour le traducteur de The Road repose donc sur l’ambiguïté et l’ambivalence de ‘word’ qui se traduirait soit par ‘mot’ soit par ‘Verbe’, mais où l’un est rarement l’équivalent de l’autre. De plus, s’ajoute encore en filigrane la référence à l’àshe ou logos de la religion yorùbá, dont parle Skip Gates dans The Signifying Monkey, et d’ailleurs citée par Soyinka dans la note de présentation de The Road, traduite dans l’introduction de l’édition française. Ainsi, en anglais, la récurrence de

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‘word’ est associée pour les hommes de la route, mais aussi pour le lecteur ou le spectateur, à une sorte de mot de passe qui finit par s’imposer par sa présence quasi musicale, même s’il demeure énigmatique. Le problème est donc: comment, théâtralement, va-t-on faire pour suggérer que ‘mot’ et ‘Verbe’ sont irrémédiablement liés et que Professeur récolte des mots matériels, écrits, visibles, pour alimenter sa folle quête métapsychique du ‘Verbe’? La solution que nous avons adoptée, pour imparfaite qu’elle soit, vise à ce que le public francophone se rende compte insensiblement que ‘verbe’ et ‘mot’ sont indissociables, en les martelant l’un à la suite de l’autre, comme lorsque Professeur rentre en étreignant le panneau “virage dangereux”: “Almost a miracle […], for there was no doubt about it, this word was growing, it was growing from earth until I plucked it” (157), que nous avons traduit par: “car il ne fait aucun doute, ce mot, ce verbe poussait, poussait de la terre jusqu’à ce que je vienne l’y cueillir” (32). Ou encore, puisque même Salubi, l’apprenti chauffeur, a compris qu’il y a un rapport entre mots imprimés et quête obsessionnelle du verbe, il semblait nécessaire dans la traduction d’expliciter les deux acceptions de ‘word’: “Don’t think you can scare me with that word business” (176): “Ne crois surtout pas que tu vas m’effrayer avec cette histoire de mot ou de verbe” (66). A force de répétitions – ‘mot’ ‘verbe’, ‘mot’ ‘verbe’, ‘verbe’ ‘mot’, ‘mot’ ‘verbe’, ‘verbe’, ‘mot’ – le public finira par saisir leur correspondance et continuera à les associer pour décrypter le sens (ou non-sens) des débordements oratoires de Professeur. Le jeu sur ‘word’ en anglais, et en français sur ‘mot’ ‘verbe’, véritable bruitage textuel, est central à la compréhension de la pièce et il est donc impossible d’en faire l’économie, même si, une fois le message capté, il suffira d’utiliser l’un ou l’autre suivant le contexte; il reste aux metteurs en scène potentiels à travailler sur le pouvoir du geste pour accompagner la puissance du verbe. Au commencement, donc, était le problème de traduction du mot ou du verbe, puis de leurs variations parodiques dans une autre pièce de théâtre de Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists, que Femi connaît bien puisqu’il y jouait le rôle de l’Aveugle dans la mise en scène de Soyinka à Ibadan en 1971. “In the beginning was the Priesthood and the Priesthood was one. […] The loyalty of homo sapiens regressed into himself, himself his little tick-tock self, self-ticking, self-tickling, self-tackling

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problems that belonged to the priesthood.” Traduire la longue tirade-jeu de rôle d’Aafa, chef de file des Mendiants mutilés par la guerre, était un vrai défi, ce qui explique que je peux encore citer de mémoire l’original et la traduction de certains passages isolés (faite ponctuellement pour un article en français): “Au commencement était le Clergé et le Clergé était un. […] L’homo sapiens rentra en lui sa loyauté, en lui son petit moi faisait tic tac, trouvant tout seul le doux tic tac et la vraie tactique pour attaquer et résoudre les problèmes appartenant au clergé.” C’est en travaillant sur le sens et le son de ce type de texte, en essayant de restituer le rythme avec force allitérations, consonances et assonnances, que le goût de la traduction s’est véritablement installé en moi. La musique du texte me renvoie à mon point de départ, à l’énergie créée sur scène grâce à l’utilisation des chants dans The Road et également dans les pièces de Femi Osofisan, dans Èshù and the Vagabond Minstrels, que j’ai déjà mentionnée, ou dans Once Upon Four Robbers, parue à Ibadan en 1980 chez Bio Educational Services. Dans tous ces cas, les chants yorùbá sont accompagnés de leur traduction anglaise en face, dans le texte, ou en annexe. Femi m’expliquait que devant un public yorùbá, les chansons étaient chantées en yorùbá, mais que dans une mise en scène aux États-Unis, par exemple, les chansons pourraient être soit en yorùbá (il m’a parlé d’une telle mise en scène où les chants yorùbá étaient très réussis), soit en anglais. L’important pour le metteur en scène est d’adapter, et, il vient de nous le dire, de dépasser ‘les limites ethniques’ et, en fin de compte, de rendre la pièce accessible au plus grand nombre de spectateurs possibles. Pour moi, au-delà du langage théâtral du chant, de la danse, et du mime qui dépasse les mots en tant que tels, la traduction anglaise est cependant utile car elle participe à la compréhension globale de la pièce. Et ce désir de communiquer se retrouve dans l’utilisation du pidgin English, dans certaines des chansons de Èshù and the Vagabond Minstrels. Mais voici que se greffe ici un problème supplémentaire: celui de la traduction des variations à l’intérieur même de la langue source, et plus précisément dans ce cas celui de la traduction du pidgin English en français. C’est un des défis que Samuel Millogo a voulu relever (et il m’a convaincue de le faire!) dans la traduction de The Road non pas, comme aurait dit Senghor, pour déchirer “les rires Banania de tous les murs de France,” mais, si j’ose dire, pour supprimer les stéréotypes lin-

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guistiques, comme “ya bon Banania” et autre “petit nègre,” de toutes les traductions françaises du pidgin. Samuel Millogo, dont la langue maternelle est le bobo et qui parle aussi le dioula, avait passé un an à l’Université d’Ibadan, s’était intéressé au pidgin English dont il s’était imprégné au Nigéria, avait été professeur d’anglais dans une école à Abidjan et parlait avec des membres de sa famille qui vivaient en Côte d’Ivoire le français de Moussa, appelé français populaire d’Abidjan ou F P A par les linguistes. Le choix qui s’imposait était de traduire le pidgin English de Lagos dans une langue qui a une réalité linguistique, qui existe, qui se développe, qui change et qui vit, comme le F P A . Nous nous sommes inspirés de l’Abbé Kodjo, prêtre ivoirien qui, par désir de communiquer quelques grands moments de la Bible à ses ouailles, avait fait des disques 45 tours dans cette langue truculente; des “chroniques de Moussa” ou de la bande dessinée de “Monsieur Zézé” publiés dans Ivoire Dimanche. Je me suis moi-même immergée dans le pidgin du Nigéria et le F P A d’Abidjan. Comme je l’ai évoqué tout à l’heure, nous trouvions regrettable que le pidgin ait été traduit depuis toujours dans un “petit nègre” qui n’a aucune réalité linguistique et qui n’est qu’une construction caricaturale de ce que les étrangers imaginent être la langue des Africains non lettrés. A ce propos, je relisais récemment un article passionnant du linguiste Maurice Houis dans Afrique et Langage (1984) sous le titre “Une variété idéologique du français: le ‘langage tirailleur’.” Houis analyse un manuel militaire paru en 1916 intitulé Le Français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs sénégalais. Il démontre que la langue qui est proposée par les instructeurs militaires pour être enseignée aux Africains est forgée “à partir de la représentation que les auteurs ont de la simplicité des langues africaines et, par voie de conséquence, de la capacité de comprendre des tirailleurs.” C’est pour cette raison que le “langage tirailleur” peut être considéré comme une variété idéologique du français, “une variété de français née dans une situation de domination” (15). Quant à la “simplicité” des langues africaines, de toute évidence les auteurs du manuel n’ont pas dépassé comme le dit Houis, “‘les fantasmes’ à l’égard des cultures et des langues situées hors d’Europe” (15), cette Europe qui croyait pourtant apporter la bonne “parole,” “spreading the word,” en quelque sorte. Cette expérience de traduction du pidgin a conduit Samuel Millogo, avec Amadou Bissiri, à traduire une autre variation de l’anglais, le

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“rotten English” de Ken Saro–Wiwa, dans son roman Sozaboy -- en français, Sozaboy (petit militaire): roman en anglais ‘pourri’, paru chez Actes Sud à Arles en 1998. Ce n’est pas le français d’Abidjan ou le français de Ouaga mais, comme pour Saro–Wiwa, une véritable re-construction littéraire. Pour moi, c’est une traduction inspirée, et un véritable tour de force. Pour ma part, j’ai compris, à travers les jeux sur les mots et sur les rythmes de Soyinka, toute la difficulté à traduire les langues à tons, et, pour beaucoup d’Européens, d’entendre les tons. Niyi Osundare disait, à propos du passage pour lui du yorùbá à l’anglais: “When two languages meet, they kiss and quarrel.” Mon problème était, lorsque plus tard je me suis lancée dans la traduction d’un volume de ses poèmes, Waiting Laughters, non pas “Lorsque deux langues se rencontrent, elles s’embrassent et se disputent,” mais lorsque “trois langues se rencontrent,” que se passe-t-il? Comment traduire ce que Femi appelait justement, dans le contexte nigérian d’une société plurielle et multilingue, “a polygamy of consciousness”? Lorsque Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan ou Niyi Osundare ‘conçoivent’ un poème en yorùbá, langue tonale, l’écrivent en anglais, langue accentuée, quelles stratégies le traducteur doit-il adopter pour rendre le poème en français, langue qui n’est ni tonale ni accentuée? Quels sont les écarts nécessaires à respecter si l’on veut restituer les écarts culturels et linguistiques de ce que j’appelle en tant que traductrice ‘ménage à trois’ et que Femi appellait déjà, en tant qu’écrivain, “ménage à plusieurs”?! Mais cela va nous entraîner vers d’autres débats sur la traduction et la poésie et je m’arrêterai donc ici. J’ai voulu simplement témoigner de mon expérience dans ‘l’arène’ de la traduction d’œuvres africaines, expérience qui découle de ma fascination pour la verve d’écrivains complexes et multiformes, pour la polysémie ‘galopante’ de leurs mots et pour la force de leur verbe, sans v majuscule, bien sûr!

ALAIN RICARD Christiane disait qu’il était difficile de traduire les gestes, mais je crois qu’effectivement nous n’aurions beaucoup de mal à traduire les tiens. En tout cas, on voit combien le théâtre est un lieu où le jeu linguistique et le jeu du traducteur et le jeu de l’auteur sont essentiels. \

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Third Dialogue: The Power of the Word in Space and Place W ILSON H ARRIS AND D ANIEL M AXIMIN

J A C Q U E S C H E V R I E R (C H A I R )

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va nous entraîner cette fois-ci du côté de l’Ouest, d’une certaine façon, de la Caraïbe, puisque ce dialogue va permettre une rencontre entre Wilson Harris, qui est originaire de la Guyane anglophone, et Daniel Maximin qui est originaire de Guadeloupe, donc dans les Petites Antilles. Alors je présente très rapidement, parce que je pense qu’il est largement connu, en particulier du public anglophone, Wilson Harris, qui est déjà à la tête d’une œuvre importante, assez mal connue des lecteurs français. Il y a néanmoins quelques traductions, notamment le premier roman, Palace of the Peacock (Faber & Faber, 1960), qui est devenu je dirais une œuvre culte. Et puis la Carnival Trilogy (Faber & Faber, 1993), la trilogie du carnaval. Alors, c’est une œuvre effectivement forte attachante, que je connais moi assez mal, mais le peu que j’en ai lu me donne envie d’aller un petit peu plus loin, mais de souhaiter surtout (et c’est un aspect qu’on a abordé sans véritablement le formuler depuis ce matin) le problème de la traduction. Le problème de la traduction me paraît capital pour permettre une meilleure circulation des œuvres littéraires des écrivains anglophones et des écrivains E TROISIÈME DIALOGUE

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francophones, parce que j’ai l’impression qu’il y a un petit peu comme une opacité, un obstacle, une difficulté à entrer dans certaines œuvres. Alors je serai un peu plus disert sur Daniel Maximin, parce que je le connais depuis longtemps. Il est l’auteur d’une œuvre romanesque, d’une trilogie – je ne sais pas si il considère ça comme une trilogie – qui commence avec L’isolé soleil (Paris: Seuil) en 1980, qui se poursuit avec Soufrières (Seuil) en 1987 et qui s’achève provisoirement avec L’île et une nuit (Seuil) en 1995, et récemment Daniel Maximin a publié un recueil poétique qui s’appelle L’invention des désirades (Présence africaine, 2000). Alors ce sont deux auteurs qui n’appartiennent pas à la même génération, qui opèrent dans des espaces culturels sensiblement différents, mais les ayant lus, totalement en ce qui concerne Maximin, partiellement en ce qui concerne Wilson Harris, je trouve qu’il y a entre eux des échos, des relations, parce que les textes qu’ils nous proposent sont des récits poétiques qui se jouent de la narrativité littéraire, qui se jouent d’un certain souci reférentiel auquel étaient attachés les écrivains de la première génération. Et je dirais que leurs œuvres (et ça fait un petit peu écho à ce qui s’est dit tout à l’heure à propos des images), leurs œuvres me paraissent des œuvres élémentaires – je m’explique tout de suite sur cette adjectif. Œuvres élémentaires non pas parce qu’elles seraient simples ou simplistes, mais parce que de l’une à l’autre j’ai l’impression qu’il y a une sorte d’arrière-plan, de fond plus ou moins mythique, de fond tellurique, et ce qui m’a frappé en les lisant c’est l’importance des éléments. Alors lorsqu’on pense à Wilson Harris, évidemment c’est l’importance du fleuve, de la forêt, des rochers, et lorsqu’on lit Daniel Maximin, les titres-mêmes sont parlants. Le premier roman s’appelle L’isolé soleil; le second, Souffrières, fait évidemment allusion au volcan qui domine la Guadeloupe; quant au dernier titre, il est un peu plus énigmatique: L’île et une nuit – c’est en fait le récit du passage d’un cyclone, sept heures pendant lesquelles un cyclone se déchaîne, et sept heures pendant lesquelles l’héroïne du roman revit toute une série de situations et écoute de la musique – virtuellement d’ailleurs, puisque à la suite du cyclone l’électricité a été coupée, mais dans sa tête il y a un certain nombre de pièces musicales, de jazz surtout, qui défilent. Et donc je crois que l’un comme l’autre, bien sûr avec des nuances importantes, représentent cette modernité textuelle dont on a parlée

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depuis ce matin, sans véritablement théoriser, mais il me semble que, dans ce dialogue des langues, dans ce rapport des langues on s’achemine vers une sorte d’échange, de maronnage littéraire, de métissage littéraire au carrefour non seulement de plusieurs langues, mais je dirais de plusieurs langages et de plusieurs cultures. Voilà un petit peu ce que je voulais dire pour présenter ces deux écrivains. Donc je vais me tourner vers Wilson Harris, et je vais lui donner la parole.

WILSON HARRIS May I say first of all that the dialogues and talks I have heard today have been most interesting, and in that sense it seems to me that the colloquium is proving a success. [Applause] The power of the word in space and place – an immense theme: the power of the word. Fiction, in this context, should be concerned with inexplicable truths. This is a paradox, for fictionality tells untruths. Human discourse of truth, however apparently brilliant, becomes inevitably hollow and a wasteland. Fiction therefore, one would hope, reaches beyond human discourse into glimpses of timelessness humanity can never absolutely seize, though it may learn from such glimpses, and gain some measure of complex foresight. The time-bombs that tick away in our world need not be wholly unheard or unseen when we approach the language of the imagination as something we cannot immediately encompass, but from which we must learn in new far-reaching ways. There is an intangible word secreted in narratives, an intangibility born of intuition that apprises us of timelessness and of priorities within language which we overlook through ignorance or bias. The intangible word seems to be a gnostic dimension, but it is only comparatively recently that I have come to equate what I have been doing in fiction intuitively over decades with the gnostic. Intuition arouses fantastic questions about the nature of consciousness. Does intuition mean that one knows deeply in some other self, in oneself, what one does not know by sheer intellect or logic? This is a question we can never answer. But it seems to me the only hopeful ground for art, if art is not simply an ornament or a material extension of our vested interests. In this respect, which seems to me the true hope of art, I have broken the material rules of human discourse by employing dream in my fiction to bring into play layers that do not accord with fixities and

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absolute normalities of material sense; layers that diverge into chasms between human passion and animal spirit, or animal passion if you wish and human spirit. As I said a little earlier, I had not realized this could be viewed as gnostic, but looking back across my fiction, I now see the possibility looming in paradoxical ways. Time permits me to give but a few instances. The first short passage I shall read is taken from a novel written in 1982 which is called The Angel at the Gate: The compression of an ocean into a bath, a ship into minute-hand sail in the clock of the globe, invoked a new scale into Mary’s epic, tragic, comic book. The scale of the diminutive. No gigantic pretensions. Infinity of hope. Seed of hope. Endangered seed of life everywhere. (The Angel at the Gate, London: Faber & Faber, 1982: 65)

The implications in this passage were ignored by critics, who did not sense that such compressions of the imagination may bring us closer perhaps to the seed of life, the seed of variable consciousness. In such variations Imagination is tested through the Word to realize its true nature and to release one-sided discourse from illusory absolutes that block the passage of new, often hidden, potentials. A page later, the passage continued as follows: “A dangerous mystery is human paradise.” “Why dangerous?” precocious infant asked. Joseph replied out of hidden retreat in pooled nature but Mary alone heard. “Dangerous, child, because flowers and birds mimic each other’s timeless return around the seasons, yet rarely tell how vulnerable the cycle of nature is, that that return needs to be woven with care. Such rarity of infinite care is the mutual genius of flower and bird – divisions within divisions – mimicries within unravelled mimicries – marriageable creations, birds, beasts, flowers. You shall see….” His voice descended into the pool and left her to ponder the truth, the inexplicable truth. (The Angel at the Gate, 66)

The “rarity of infinite care” unravels mimicries within nature and alerts us to the mystery of the Imagination, its priorities, its sensation of infinite music and embodiments of sculpture. Fiction, it seems to me, has to approach recorded histories as partial, never as absolute,

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and therefore it brings into play many deeply versed, possibly hidden issues that may seem inimical to the man-made natures of dominant institutions. As a consequence, fiction engages with, or should engage with, a void – V-O-I-D. The Void, I understand, is a term used in Indian philosophy. It is scarcely known, I gather, to general readers. I do not know whether the Indian Void bears a resemblance to the Void which I have arrived at by intuitive degrees across my fictions. In The Dark Jester, a novel to be published by Faber next March, I bring a pretty full meaning to what I mean by the Void. It is a term that crops up throughout the novel, and it occurred to me that I should read one instance as follows: “The Void is rich. It offers bridges from time into the timeless. On those bridges we come upon caves in which are works of art. Forbidding works they seem since they tell us of our deepest selves. And through those selves that may seem alien we touch the frontiers of regeneration. It is a process of well-nigh unimaginable knowledge linking by creative and re-creative degrees the opposites in reality.” I had listened as carefully as I could and sought to translate what I heard but his voice faded (was it his voice?) in the darkness of the moment, in the darkness of the Void. (The Dark Jester, London: Faber & Faber, 2001: 51–52)

That passage from The Dark Jester throws some light I believe on the final passage I have chosen to read, which comes from Tumatumari, a novel I wrote in the 1960s. Critics have rarely spotted the reason why this passage – indeed the entire narrative – differs from the smoothness of human discourse. The novel, Tumatumari, is, I agree, not a smooth narrative, and the reason is simple; simplicity, however, is of complex duration. The images in Tumatumari jump and leap into uncovering a vital glimpse between word and sculptures, or works of art, let us say. ‘Tumatumari’ is an Amerindian expression which means ‘sleeping rocks’ – rocks that have the ancient connotation of sculpture; or, depending on the voice of the Tumatumari waterfall, they may slide into singing rocks. The landscape is not fixed. It is not absolute. It varies as if everything breathes of other lives, other forms, intermingling with what appears to be fixed in our immediate eye. Here in a nutshell is the immense problem of the life of the land, the life of

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rivers, which has been tragically misunderstood, until it has led to a biased conviction of purely passive, rather than actively living, lands and waters. Such passivity has made civilization into a machine, manipulating the globe. Such manipulations and poisonings of global resources seem irreversible, though they have brought the ticking bomb of latent catastrophe we have been building into tumultuous action in landscapes we thought were passive. Fiction must question such irreversibility. Perhaps, indeed, it is too late. Perhaps it is irreversible. But fiction is, or should be, a form of hope in the scrutiny it casts upon the life of art. What is art? Sculpture appears to have existed long before man existed in his present evolutionary shape. Long before man existed, sculpture existed. Out of the turbulence of the Earth, the rocks appeared, looking like sculpted bees, sculpted insects, sculpted animals and sculpted man himself. Man and woman are promised by nature as living works of art in a long terrain of intuitive shapes. They, man and woman, resemble the rock-hewn and earth-shaped, the cloud-shaped faces of creation, which they share with every creature. Thus they have the Voids, well-nigh unimaginable knowledge, linking by creative and re-creative degrees the opposites in reality. This linking of opposites that takes us back before humanity was, before humanity existed, and brings us forward into humanity’s present shape is in part the variegated substance of the passage I shall read. Roi Solman drowns, and his wife Prudence sees him in the rocks in the waterfall, hunting. He resembles the ancient rock-sculpted huntsman, figured in the rapids long before he, as a human form, had appeared: It was a trail he must follow – the first task he must perform in the absence of his huntsman. The beast pulled in its rocky horns as he fired again – its eyes half-closed like two bees or stars in the shadow of the waterfall. There was a sudden arrow of sun and it could not now conceal the gross ham or hive of its body in the waving undergrowth. It leapt at him like a constellation, like a boulder, and he fired a third time at shoulder and brow. It seemed to drop at his feet but turned and charged again with a flag of trees. It had been wounded he knew beyond a shadow of doubt but still ran with head held high. As he pursued it he could hear the crash of its limbs spread-eagled in the distance. A great transparent void grew and waved upon his back in

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which he and it still swam towards each other like an interior standard – reflection of the huntsman whose game is the wild boar of the rapids. […] His head was bowed to the ground under the bulk of animal he bore. She could not really see his expression but – as in a piece of sculpture – the tension of his limbs indicated that his glance too was threaded to an umbilical cord of strength, the navel of art. No longer a tissue of fears but wires knotted into a crucial rose which possessed him. From within the animal of the hunt (the mask of horror as well as seduction) an ecstasy enveloped her unlike all dreadful flight of appearance though its constitution of heaven was born of the raging spittle of the chase on the boar’s lips which mingled now with hers as well as Roi’s like the water of life. (Tumatumari, London: Faber & Faber, 1968: 53, 54–55)

Thank you. [Applause]

JACQUES CHEVRIER Merci infiniment, et je passe tout de suite la parole à Daniel Maximin.

DANIEL MAXIMIN Merci. Lorsque je suis arrivé ce matin, j’avais sur mon programme au départ “Le pouvoir du silence” dans un dialogue avec le poète, Niyi Osundare, et puis, en arrivant, je me suis retrouvé dans ce dialogue avec ce grand Wilson Harris, sur le pouvoir de l’espace et de la place. Le pouvoir du silence, en regardant justement tous les invités, est essentiellement juste dans un dialogue où l’Afrique était très présente. Là, nous saurons quoi dire, nous de la Caraïbe. Puisque c’est de ce grand silence que nous avons émergé. Et quand on nous demande de voir en quoi il y a un pouvoir de l’espace, même à la différence de Wilson Harris qui, lui, s’accole par sa Guyane au continent de l’Amérique latine, alors nous qui sommes de l’île, de la petite île de la Caraïbe, nous n’avons aucun espace valable, sérieux et suffisant à offrir pour un dialogue, où l’Europe, l’Afrique, l’Amérique, l’Asie dialoguent ensemble. Et en arrivant ce matin, je suis tombé juste sur cette – j’ai envie de dire cette extraordinaire confrontation de mots. Quand on parlait de la

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traduction avec Femi et Christiane, où il a parlé à l’évidence que tout le problème dont on doit sortir, quand on est par exemple l’Afrique ou l’Europe, ou la traduction entre les deux, c’est celui de sortir de la surabondance. On a parlé de jeux de mots en trois langues, et face à cette surabondance dont il faut se dépêtrer pour donner un sens, là aussi nous de la Caraïbe, nous partons exactement du contraire. C’est-à-dire de l’absence du mot, de l’interdit du mot, du silence imposé, de l’oubli de toutes ces surabondances qui ont constitué toutes les sociétés, toutes les cultures depuis des millénaires, et qui ont été brusquement perdues par ce phénomène de la traite et de l’esclavage dans l’Amérique noire. Donc, c’est très intéressant, parce qu’on s’est dit: “Mais alors, mais qu’est-ce qu’on a à apporter face à ces surabondances-là?” Et puis quand je regarde cet après-midi ce qui vient de se dire sur les arts plastiques, la représentation,* avec là encore une telle surabondance de significations, y compris pour celui qui dessine, pour celui qui peint, qui sait parfois aussi ce qu’il fait – là encore je me dis que dans la Caraïbe nous sommes partis de la perte, et quand nous avons peut-être commencé pour la première fois à re-dessiner, c’était sans rien savoir concernant de ces origines, de ces rituels, de ces significations etc. Et que par exemple, lorsqu’on redécouvre le Yin et le Yang à travers un dédale de forêts et de montagnes comme dans le tableau chinois de toute à l’heure, cette surabondance-là qui fait le prix, le coût, l’intérêt de cette offrande que nous fait le tableau, à un moment, comme les deux tableaux ont été mis en gros plan puis en plan général, à un moment j’ai eu dans mon œil une superposition qui s’est faite, et à un moment donné, peut-être en caraïbéen, j’y ai mis des couleurs en désordre: rouge, vert, bleu, des couleurs vives, et non pas évidemment cette espèce de beaux pastels généralisés qui finit par nous donner une seule couleur, qui n’est ni le blanc et noir, ni les couleurs dans le tableau chinois qu’on vient de voir. Et d’un seul coup, je me suis rendu compte qu’en faisant ce ‘tremblé,’ cette confrontation et cette addition sauvage, je faisait de ce tableau un tableau naïf haïtien. Et que les escaliers, les couleurs, les choses, les formes secrètes etc réapparisaient dans quelque chose qu’évidemment je ne pouvais pas maîtriser, et qui pourtant retrouvait une signification depuis des millénaires, cousinant avec l’art chinois très, très ancien. *

See Dialogue 4.

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Donc, il y a un mystère et un miracle de la Caraïbe. Les mots et l’image, le pinceau et le son et la note, ont-ils tant de puissance, qu’à partir de la nudité des phrases, de l’absence des rituels, de l’absence des écoles, des groupes, des ancêtres, des cultures, on puisse recommencer, refaire, revenir et retrouver, malgré les interdits, malgré les pertes, malgré les empêchements – retrouver le travail général de l’humanité toute entière partout où elle se trouve et à chaque instant où elle évoque ce qu’elle peut faire et ce qu’elle sait faire? C’est pour cela que la Caraïbe a bien sa place quand on cherche “y-a-t’il un pouvoir aux mots?” Et non pas aux phrases, et non pas aux textes, et non pas à l’ensemble, et non pas à l’épopée et non pas à la saga – tout ce qui prend le temps de se construire dans la durée, tout ce qui a l’espace suffisement rassurant pour s’étaler dans le temps. Il y a quelque chose de très original dans la création des cultures dans la Caraïbe, c’est qu’elles ont repris en quelque sorte à zéro – ce qui est toujours le vieux mythe de toutes les sociétés: si on pouvait recommencer comme après le déluge. Contrainte et forcée bien entendu par l’histoire, par les malheurs, par la colonisation et la traite, on a en quelque sorte joué à recommencer. Et c’est cette expérience qui peut être enrichissante – y compris pour comprendre ceux qui sont fermés dans la tradition, enfermés dans l’héritage, qui connaissent leurs parents, qui connaissent leurs ancêtres, qui savent où est le village natal de ce qui les ont conçus. Alors dans cette perte originale qui aurait dû aboutir à une existence à l’inhumanité comme c’était postulé par ceux qui avait fabriqué ce monde-là, on a finalement atteint l’inverse. C’est-à-dire, des régions du monde, l’Amérique noire, on a pratiquement retrouvé ces surabondances qui pourtant depuis des millénaires constituent le monde. Un peu comme si la viellesse de l’Afrique, de l’Europe, de l’Asie et de l’Amérique, s’était donnée quand même ce rendez-vous pour, au milieu du désordre, du bruit, de la fureur, de l’enfer originel, ce que Césaire appelle un “paradis raté,” arriver à faire passer par le mot, par l’image comme les autres, cette présence d’humanité. Et justement par le mot, et je disais non pas la phrase, non pas le temps de la saga, non pas le temps du griot, non pas le temps du rhapsode, non pas le temps de celui qui, avant de parler, intègre tout l’héritage pour sortir une parole maîtrisée, mais le temps de la nudité. Au fond, lorsque s’est passé ce voyage, et c’est comme un conte que je vous raconte, il y a eu

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la postulation à goret que si on faisait perdre à l’humain toutes les caractéristiques de l’humanité, il pourrait redevenir un animal. C’était ça, l’idée centrale. Donc perte des langues, perte de la famille, du groupe, du village, des solidarités, et que donc, en imposant la solitude la plus absolue d’un être qui se retrouve ailleurs sans espaces reconnus, sans temps et sans héritage, on pouvait en quelque sorte inventer une machine nouvelle, une machine à travailler. Et c’est l’inverse qui s’est passé. Autrement dit, il s’est passé dans ce voyage, qui est le contraire du voyage initiatique, ce voyage de l’Afrique et l’Europe vers l’Amérique, il s’est passé les retrouvailles de l’humanité élémentaire, pour reprendre le mot très juste que Jacques Chevrier a signalé dans son introduction. C’est-à-dire les retrouvailles de l’élémentaire à tous les senses du terme. C’est-à-dire le mot derrière la phrase; c’est-à-dire la couleur derrière le tableau; c’est-à-dire le feu derrière le volcan, l’eau derrière la mer, le vent derrière le cyclone et la terre derrière le séisme et le tremblement de terre. Evidemment, les quatre choses dont je vous parle, le séisme, l’éruption, le raz-de-marée et le cyclone, donc la terre, l’air, l’eau et le feu sont géographiquement dans l’espace de la Caraïbe totalement présents. Et c’est quelque chose, là aussi, qui est une espèce de miracle de la nature qui fait que dans ces petites îles qui sont des poussières d’îles, on retrouve, dans leur force la plus violente, les quatre éléments qui, comme dit le poète, qui crucifient le monde. Lorsque l’eau exagère, lorsque la terre exagère, lorsque le feu exagère et lorsque l’air exagère, ils sont là, présents dans la Caraïbe. En même temps que bien entendu, dans l’image exotique d’Epinal, ils sont tous les quatre présents dans leur aspect le plus paradisiaque. C’est cet espace-là, quelque soit donc sa limite et sa réduction, qui a été offert à l’homme nu qui est arrivé d’Afrique. Et donc, on comprend que l’acte d’humanité premier a consisté non pas à se considérer étranger à ce monde dans lequel l’obligation de la traite et de l’oppression avait conduit l’esclave, mais au contraire à en prendre immédiatement possession. Et à se servir de ces éléments dans, encore une fois, leur aspect le plus élémentaire pour signifier à l’oppresseur la résistance, l’humanité de celui qui en apparence avait été totalement mis à nu. Il est vrai que c’est comme cela que l’homme s’exprime quand il veut dire l’amour, quand il veut dire la détresse, quand il veut dire la douleur, quand il veut dire la blessure, quand il veut dire la rencontre.

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Il cherche le volcan, le fleuve, la mer, l’eau, la goutte d’eau, la feuille, la racine. Il traduit cela dans le poème. Donc quelque part cet effort pour reprendre possession du mot a été l’acte culturel premier de la résistance de l’humanité à la déshumanisation. Ça n’est pas quelque chose qui vient après, après la victoire, c’est quelque chose qui est le premier acte constitutif. Et c’est en ce sens que cette question du pouvoir des mots, du pouvoir de l’image, du pouvoir du chant, est primordiale dans la création culturelle de toutes ces régions de la Caraïbe, puisqu’en fait elles ont prouvé que c’est par là qu’il faut commencer. Par là qu’il faut commencer: on ne le sait pas toujours, mais on le sait bien lorsque la chose qui vous a été enlevée plus précieuse, c’est justement l’humanité et la culture prétendument. Puisque, dans le voyage, ce qui avait été tenté, c’était, encore une fois, arracher l’humanité à l’homme pour essayer d’en faire une machine à produire et à travailler. Donc, l’acte premier de résistance consistant à nier cette inhumanité ne pouvait traduire le cri que par le chant, ne pouvait traduire la chaîne que par la danse. On a du mal parfois à comprendre cela, que le cheminement soit si direct de l’oppression la plus violente, c’est-à-dire la déshumanisation, à l’acte de résistance le plus extrême, c’est-à-dire l’acte culturel de création comme cela. Mais il est vrai que tout animal qu’on pique crie, que l’homme qui est fouetté c’est pour qu’il puisse crier, et que s’il crie quelque part, il répond à ce qu’on attend; s’il reste silencieux, nous sommes déjà dans un acte de résistance humaine extrêmement violent, puissant; c’est le pouvoir du silence. Et si au lieu de rester silencieux il chante sous les coups, ou il chante dans la cellule, dans la prison, ou bien il dessine des notes de piano blanc/noir sur le mur, et avec ses mains il joue – là, nous sommes dans l’acte de résistance suprême. Nous sommes bien dans l’élémentaire, puis que évidemment on n’entend pas les notes. Mais l’imagination est d’une puissance telle que ce n’est plus la mélodie qui compte, ce n’est plus le déroulé de la portée et de la partition, c’est l’acte même de postuler le son au-delà du cri, l’acte même de postuler le mot et la parole au-delà du baîllon qui est mis. La preuve de ce pouvoir du mot est donnée dans ce sens. Et contrairement à ce que, en quelque sorte, pensent tous les oppresseurs, qui essaient d’enlever les livres, qui essaient d’enlever les phrases, plus on enlève, plus on touche à l’élémentaire et à l’essentiel. Et à ce moment-là tout ce qui colore les discours, tout ce qui colore les

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bruits, perd, petit à petit, de sa valeur, de son importance, de son espace et de son temps, pour en revenir à l’essentiel – c’est-à-dire à la production de quelque chose qui signifie immédiatement un imaginaire postulé, une liberté postulée, un dialogue postulé, une écoute de l’autre postulée. Quelque soit la puissance des murs, c’est, pour prendre un exemple, le pouvoir du graffiti par rapport à un mur. On peut construire des murs en pierres de taille sur les châteaux-forts, des murs pour les palais présidentiels, et il suffit qu’une main passe la nuit et écrive avec un craie “Freedom, Liberté” et tous ceux qui le lendemain vont passer devant cet endroit ne verront plus le mur et verront le graffiti. Et plus le graffiti est fragile, plus il est réduit dans sa signification à l’essentiel (c’est-à-dire un seul mot, par exemple, ‘freedom,’ ou par exemple, ‘free’ tout court) plus il prend de poids, plus le reste de la phrase s’écrit naturellement pour tous ceux qui le lisent, plus le danger du discours qui est derrière ce mot prend de valeur et d’importance et met le dictateur en péril. Il n’y a pas besoin comme sur les graffitis d’écrire cinquante lignes sur un mur. [Laughter] Il y a besoin de signifier deux mots, ‘la résistance.’ Et lorsqu’on est dans ces situations, on a que de la craie face au mur et non pas des bulldozers, la puissance du mot est utilisée en ce sens-là et on voit bien qu’elle sert, comme les trompettes de Jéricho aussi, à détruire les murailles et à faire trembler les maîtres de l’oppression. C’est en ce sens que l’acte culturel, derrière tout ce qu’il peut accumuler de rhythme, de rituel, de passé, d’histoire, de tradition, en revient toujours chez chaque créateur à ce geste-là. Parce que ce geste et ce conte quelques sorte que je vous décris, et qui a un peu cette histoire de la création de la Caraïbe – ce que j’appelle la création des ‘désirades’ – chez nous, c’est l’acte créateur de toute humanité. C’est l’acte de tout être qui décide de transformer la feuille en tableau, de transformer le dictionnaire en poème, et quelque part donc, c’est bien l’ordre du vivant qui derrière cela est bien à l’œuvre. Beaucoup de sociologues qui ont étudié la différence entre la Caraïbe et le continent, Amérique Latine et Amérique du Nord, parlent du voyage inachevé. C’est-à-dire que tous ceux qui venaient des continents ‘sérieux’ – l’Europe, l’Afrique – l’Afrique avec ses immensités, les fleuves, les forêts, les savanes, l’océan – allaient se retrouver en Amérique dans un continent lui aussi sérieux, et qui offerait le même type de repères: fleuve contre fleuve, Nil, Mississippi, Danube. Mais la Guadeloupe, la “Désirade,” ce n’est pas sérieux, c’est au mieux une

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étape vers la suite. Et il faut imaginer le tragique pour l’homme de se retrouver au lieu et place de l’espace du continent sur un bateau, sur une barque, sur quelque chose qui bouge, puisque l’île bouge, l’île remue. Le séisme, le cyclone, le raz-de-marée, l’éruption sont là pour le rappeler aux hommes à chaque instant. Et donc il a du falloir accepter cette fragilité et lui donner toute sa force et toute sa puissance, comme le poète donne toute sa force et toute sa puissance aux mots. L’originalité c’est que, comme vient de le dire Wilson Harris, on met un océan dans une baignoire – c’est un peu trivial, et ça donne des enfants inachevés. Je pense justement au premier texte de Wilson Harris, Le palais du paon, que j’ai découvert lorsque j’étais étudiant à la Sorbonne et qui m’a énormément influencé. Pourquoi? Parce que peut-être grâce à son Amérique Latine, grâce à cet appui sur la forêt équatoriale qui offrait un débouché au drame, il a pu imaginer un voyage initiatique dans une réalité d’espace et de temps. Mais ça n’est pas possible dans l’île de la Caraïbe. Et quelque part, nous des Antilles, avec Le palais du paon, on a pu découvrir ce que professeur Chevrier appelais en effet toute une modernité de l’écriture caribéenne, de l’écriture du tiers-monde, qui n’était pas simplement le récit des malheurs, mais qui était la tentative de la mythologie, la tentative de retrouver le poétique aussi, grâce au voyage initiatique dans la grande forêt, qui s’offrait à mon voisin, mais pas chez nous. Donc, il fallait que chez nous on la réinvente. Comme deuxième exemple, je prends Idanre, ce texte fondateur de Wole Soyinka, et en même temps le Cahier d’un retour au pays natal d’Aimé Césaire. On a un profond sentiment du tragique, de la perte. Pensez au voyage initiatique du jeune homme d’Idanre qui part lui aussi, mais avec ses rites, avec ses rituels, avec son monde Yorùbá, avec son savoir et avec sa quête pour affronter les cyclones, la montagne, la nuit, la pluie, mais en sachant qu’il y a une trouvaille au bout du compte, qu’il va y avoir une création à assumer au bout du compte et que de ce risque de la fragilité va surgir l’œuvre. A l’inverse, nous avons dans la Caraïbe quelque chose qu’on peut appeler comme voyage initiatique à l’envers. C’est-à-dire qu’on sait déjà que tout cela on ne l’a pas en maîtrise. On sait qu’on part de l’enfer, alors que le voyage initiatique c’est celui de l’enfant vers le monde adulte et vers le monde d’une maîtrise de soi et de son destin. Mais dans l’autre grand texte initiatique que constitue le Cahier d’un retour au pays natal d’Aimé

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Césaire, on voit qu’en guise de montagne, en guise de fleuve, en guise de Dieu, nous avons les trottoirs sales d’une rue de la ville, avec l’eau sale qui découle des maisons – la rue Paille. Nous avons les clochards qui traversent dans leur misère le village. En guise de fête des dieux, nous avons le petit repas de Noël où tout le monde se retrouve pour manger le boudin et ensemble dans la famille fêter cet instant de retrouvailles et de bonheur, d’où la spiritualité semble totalement absente. Pour les preuves du cyclone et de la rencontre de l’autre, nous avons la rencontre à Paris dans le métro d’un noir tellement laid que le jeune homme fait semblant de ne pas le reconnaître pour ne pas être confondu avec ce clochard. Nous avons, autrement dit, toute la trivialité du monde, de la modernité, de la ville, du présent, du réel et du quotidien pour fabriquer ce qui dans toutes les sociétés du monde permet d’accéder à l’humanité vraie par le voyage initiatique, par le conte, par le poème, par la création. C’est en quelque sorte cela qui est à la fois le défi, la beauté et l’histoire de la Caraïbe de ce point de vue-là. Comme un de nos poètes a dit, “Nous ramassons des injures pour en faire des diamants.” Quelque chose alors se passe là qui est très intéressant, c’est que la grande tentative de départ, qui avait été celle de l’isolement: isolé de sa langue, pour qu’on ait plus que peut-être un mot, un dernier mot, espérait l’oppresseur; isolé de son histoire, pour qu’on ait plus qu’une vague réminiscence; isolé de sa famille, pour qu’on ait plus que le vague souvenir d’un frère vendu à côté – tout cela revient à créer de la solitude, sauf que, ce que les oppresseurs oubliaient, c’est de la solitude que ressort le plus fortement l’aspiration à la solidarité, l’aspiration à la retrouvaille de l’autre. Loin d’affaiblir, il y a dans le mot quelque chose qui appelle la phrase, il y a dans le son quelque chose qui appelle la mélodie, et il y a dans l’homme quelque chose qui appelle à l’humanité collective. Et donc, l’invention, les retrouvailles, avec ce qu’on a osé et qu’on appelle en musique le solo, ont permis de postuler que ce solo pouvait s’exprimer sans notes, sans partition – c’est ce qu’on appelait l’improvisation de l’Amérique. On pouvait improviser l’homme, à condition d’en être persuadé. Ce solo avait pour but de créer autour de soi dans l’imaginaire la présence poly-rhythmique des autres, jusqu’au moment où l’autre a pu, avec ses débris de souvenirs, avec ses restes de tambours, avec ce qu’il avait appris, avec ce qu’on lui avait imposé, l’autre a pu fabriquer l’ensemble, le groupe, l’orchestre, et synthétiser

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ainsi deux choses qui paraissent justement absolument contradictoires. C’est-à-dire, la solitude et la liberté du solo qui peut partir jusqu’à dans la folie (on a bien vu avec le free-jazz), et en même temps la solidarité cimentée dans la poly-rhythmique qui fait que chacun, contre-basse, piano, tambour, tomba, tiboit etc fait quelque chose de différent dont seule l’oreille de celui qui écoute refabrique l’unité nécessitant évidemment l’unité générale de chacun. Donc poly-rhythmie et solo postulant une humanité nouvelle retrouvée (évidemment avec l’improvisation libre), quelque part le pouvoir du mot c’est cela: avoir retrouvé le pouvoir du solo, non pas pour exprimer une solitude, mais pour exprimer au contraire la certitude imaginaire et en même temps hypothétique de l’humanité certaine. On était parti du paradis râté. On voit bien que c’est une métaphore de tout ce qui, partout et toujours, constitue le projet même de toute humanité. Merci. [Applause]

GEMMA ROBINSON I want to make an observation about some of the differences we’ve heard between the sessions this morning and the sessions this afternoon. It seems to me that, this morning, people’s concerns were to do with practicalities: where to take the tonalities of Yorùbá into English, how to choose between different words when thinking about Soyinka, the practical choices of English, French or Yorùbá, the practicalities of where to publish newspapers; that kind of thing. And it seems to me that this afternoon our concerns have turned more to ideas of what’s essential, the essentialisms about the power of the word. The words that seem to have cropped up this afternoon have been those around ideas of what’s organic, what’s universal, what’s collective, what’s singular to humanity. And I wonder whether we could reflect on why there does seem to be that divide – if that’s how we see it. I would speculate that maybe it is something to do with the implicit creolization of ideas within the Caribbean, the extra-verbal world of art that makes us move away from those practicalities of writing and reading the word towards the essentialisms that it seems to me people have been interested in this afternoon. And, as a final thought on that, I wouldn’t like to see it as being the separation that Wilson Harris made between logic and intellect versus intuition. I’m not trying to say that this morning was about logic and this afternoon was about intuition,

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but I thought maybe we need to think about the differences of interest that seem to me have been expressed.

WILSON HARRIS Well, if I may reply to that. What I was getting at – I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to explore it – is that I believe that the language which we use tends to be a static language. At this time, we face grave crises. Floods are occurring – that’s a very practical matter. They have been studying this for years and years. I see the B B C is bringing out a programme called “Is global warming taking us by surprise?” Well it hasn’t taken me by surprise. [Laughter] For years and years I’ve been looking at this, and I’ve tried to discuss it with people and they have all turned away from it. In the bus in which I travel in Essex, I see a sign on the walls saying, “People turn away from global warming.” This is a very practical matter, and my point is that the language we use does not allow us to see a certain kind of movement in the landscape. That is what I was getting at; there is a movement. I call that a gnostic thing. The gnostic landscape cannot be pinned down in the way you may appear to be able to pin down landscapes. The gnostic cares for every landscape but recognizes that landscape cannot be pinned down. What I was saying was that when this novel, Tumatumari, appeared in 1968, critics could not see this. They may see it now, but they couldn’t see it then. What one was doing was bringing into play a landscape which is partial, because it has so many relationships going back before man himself appeared on the planet. And that is the point I was making – that we have to sense in the language we use this capacity to bring about the sensation that what we look at, what we encompass, what we seem to see as fixed, as absolute, is not as fixed and as absolute as it appears; and that is where the life of the land comes into play, where the life of the waters comes into play. And this is something we need at the moment. What is more practical than that? Now, I say “intuition” because intuition obviously plays an important part. One has a knowledge of things which seems to run deeper than one’s logical self, as if there’s another self under one’s logical self, and that other self tells us – works through to tell us – these things; therefore intuition is something we have to pay the closest attention to. I have seen it work out in many of my fictions. But this has been rejected by critics. Critics want a smooth human discourse, which they

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believe is everything they have, but that smooth human discourse is partial. It has priorities from before human discourse appeared. It has priorities to do with the sculptures which are created by the Earth, sculptures which resemble us, resemble the animals. It has priorities to do with the life of the water, the life of the land. All those are at work in helping the human discourse. Human discourse is not absolute, it’s not final, and therefore I think one was engaging in a very, very practical matter, though it seems to be not practical. [Applause] I claim that human discourse is partial and that it can only be understood when it is seen in this way, when it is understood in this way, when it allows us to sense these priorities of which I spoke, these sculptures. And that is where I spoke of the unimaginable knowledge – unimaginable: we can scarcely understand how to bring opposites together, because our whole civilization has tended to work with absolute positions. Consider the eighteenth-century novels, the nineteenth-century novels, on which most novels are based today: those are novels when the British possessed an empire on which the sun never set, and yet all their novels were concerned with the English family. Dickens’s Great Expectations speaks of an Australian. That Australian you never learn anything about; you never learn how how this man gets his money in Australia. You learn only about the English family, and that was at a time when the British Empire possessed an umbrella over many diverse peoples. So there you have a static position, and that static position has got to be moved if we are to get anywhere. It may be too late. It may be an irreversible situation in which we live. But unless we can do that we cannot get anywhere. Well, I don’t see anything less impractical than that. [Applause]

JACQUES CHEVRIER Je voudrais remercier bon d’abord Wilson Harris pour nous avoir rappelé que la littérature est peut-être aussi une entreprise de dévoilement, de décriptage d’un monde qui ne se laisse pas saisir aussi facilement. Et je remercie naturellement Daniel Maximin pour avoir retracer son itinéraire intellectuel et spirituel avec le talent que nous lui connaissons. Merci encore. \

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Fourth Dialogue: The Power of the Image G ERARD H OUGHTON AND J ULIEN S INZOGAN

M A R I A T I P P E T T (C H A I R )

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we focused on the power of the word and in this session this afternoon we will focus on the power of the image, marvellous examples of which we saw an hour ago in the Jock Colville Hall. I’d like to thank the October Gallery and Elizabeth Lalouschek for bringing those images to us. They are magnificent, and show the diversity of African and Caribbean artists, both in the ideas that come from the indigenous culture and those that have been borrowed and absorbed. It was very exciting for me as a rather traditional cultural historian. In this session we have an art historian, curator and one of the directors of the October Gallery, Gerard Houghton, and we have Julien Sinzogan, an artist from the Republic of Benin, currently working in Paris. I’ll ask Gerard to start with his introduction and then ask Julien to speak, before returning to Gerard. HIS MORNING

GERARD HOUGHTON I must say that I’m delighted to be back at Churchill College, and still more delighted to have been invited here, together with Julien Sinzogan, to talk about images and the power that they exercise over us. I’ve known and admired Julien’s work for many years, but I’m also aware

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that, as a francophone, African artist working in Paris, Julien frequently holds quite different views about the theory and practice of art to myself, who am not a practising artist, yet am still professionally concerned with the exhibition of art from many different cultures around the world. Despite our differences, though, I know that we do share a common ground of basic beliefs about this complex human activity that leads us both to the creation and the enjoyment of powerful works of art. So, from this shared centre of agreement, I’d like to sketch out the framework for a dialogue that Julien might later use as a springboard to develop his own thoughts on the subject from an artist’s perspective. To begin with, I’d like to say a little about three separate elements of the visual field that, for today’s purposes, I’ll differentiate as: ‘signs’, ‘symbols’ and ‘images’. Not to be too contentious, I’m going to take a fairly simplistic view, and hope that you’ll not think that I’m attempting too rigid a definition of the three categories I’m trying to describe. If I take a stick and draw a shape in the sand, a straight line, for example, or again, if I take a pen and draw another shape on paper, perhaps a cross, I want to call the result of such actions, quite simply, a ‘sign’. By contrast, a ‘symbol’ I would like to describe as a particular kind of sign, one that somehow accumulates or attracts more meaning to itself. For instance, if I had drawn a circle in the sand, that rudimentary sign could be read as the letter ‘O’, or again it might be interpreted as a zero. Such a sign might therefore mean ‘absolutely nothing’, or, by the same species of transformative magic, it could represent the opposite idea entirely, that of completion or fullness. The transformation of sign into symbol, therefore, has something to do with the reader’s or writer’s investing any particular sign with additional layers of significance, thereby freighting the symbol with a wider range of resonances than the simple sign that denotes it. Written languages make use of specialized sets of signs that, in English, French, Arabic, Yorùbá and the other languages that we’ve been talking about today, we recognize as alphabets of one form or another. Drawing on my own experience of living for some time in Japan, I’d like to talk a little about oriental writing-systems that primarily use pictographic signs to describe the world. By examining these ideogrammatic signs, I hope to tease out some of the ways in which signs develop into symbols. If I succeed, then I will later develop another line of approach using slides, to show how ‘images’ – which I take to be

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more specialized signs operating at a higher level still – come to exercise their quite extraordinary powers over us. The Japanese, of course, borrowed their writing signs from the Chinese. Similarly we northern Europeans borrowed our alphabet from the Romans, who had it from the Greeks who, in turn, used the Phoenician alphabet that, together with the scripts of the Arab and the Hebrew peoples, was derived from the writing signs of the earlier Northern Aramaic culture. The origin of writing is a fascinating subject in its own right, and we can still only speculate as to the complex processes that led certain cultures to develop, by quite different strategies, the facility of describing the world using particular signs. Nevertheless, let us continue with our attempts to elucidate the differences between basic signs and symbols, and let us make things easy for ourselves by choosing examples taken from a writing system very different from our own. In Japanese, or Chinese, if I draw three equally spaced, horizontal lines, the resulting sign represents the cardinal number ‘three’. However, if I draw the same three lines, but instead this time write them vertically, then the meaning changes totally, for I have made a different sign entirely, and this new sign means ‘river’. It’s also quite possible to write these two signs (for ‘three’ and ‘river’) in a number of different ways. I could draw them stiffly, with each of the strokes being of exactly the same length and weight, or they might be written with lines of slightly differing lengths, the central line often being shortened by convention. Another possibility is to write the character for ‘river’ using a more cursive script, the three vertical lines being allowed to ripple, so that, suggestive of the fluidity of water itself, they illustrate the meandering flow of the river. Thus, while both formal and cursive styles denote the same object, the cursive script can be made to express qualities that are absent in the purely formal Chinese character meaning ‘river’. Thus it appears that stylistic differences in notation can begin to increase the layers of association attached to a particular sign. Let’s now go on to look at the logo for today’s colloquium, “La Puissance du Verbe / the Power of the Word,” which is based upon a sign found among the Akan people of Ghana.* This glyph is one of a series of signs developed by the Akan that are collectively known as adinkra, and that are most often found printed on fabric and as decorations on *

The logo is reproduced on the inner title-page of the present volume.

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clothing. Each adinkra sign is associated with an idea that is generally expressed as a proverbial saying among the Akan. In other words, each single sign represents a complex of meanings that, so to speak, are packed away inside it. The design used for the colloquium has a range of meanings that might be summed up in the idea of ‘adaptability’, since it indicates the ability to transform and adapt positively to inevitable changes in circumstance. If you look at the symbol carefully, with this idea in mind, it does become largely self-explanatory. Let us, for the moment, imagine the sign flowing down the page, like a river. Following its course from the top left-hand corner, we can suppose that we move off in our chosen direction, until a bend in the river occurs, which forces us to continue in entirely the opposite direction. Another bend in the river forces us to turn again before eventually allowing us to resume our original direction. But not for long, for we are again made to sweep backwards and forwards in order to make any progress at all. The outcome of this inescapable back-tracking is that, where we began intending to pursue a single way, by journey’s end we have four potential courses that can be followed, each, perhaps, issuing from the experience accumulated as we negotiated the four deviations that lay along our route. Thus, as we unpack this sign of its contents, teasing out the ideas assimilated within, we realize that we’ve moved far beyond the realm of simple signs, and that all sorts of ideas – whose meanings can evidently be quite complex – can be hidden within a fairly simple structure. This adinkra glyph, therefore, can be said to be operating on the symbolic level, offering a visual reference point for things which cannot so easily be put in words. Obviously the movement of the figure itself, winding like a river meandering towards some final delta, makes short work of representing in visual form a complex set of contained ideas that would take far longer to spell out in writing. I’ve imitated the logo a little myself, winding backwards and forwards to arrive at this transition-point where sign transforms into symbol, and so I’d now like to press on more quickly and examine multiple instances of where these loaded signs we call symbols interface with the even more complex structures we call images. I’d like to do this by projecting a sequence of images by a range of artists from quite different cultures whose work either represents directly or otherwise incorporates these elements that we’ve been discussing – of signs and symbols

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and alphabets and scripts. What follows, then, is a brief multi-cultural tour of artists who incorporate into their images the particular powers of words, signs and symbols. [Slide 1]∗ To continue for a moment with other examples of adinkra glyphs, here’s a picture by a Ghanaian artist, Owusu–Ankomah, who has chosen four adinkra glyphs, each with its particular meaning associated. The artist here uses the glyphs as repeating motifs that both hide and reveal the other subject of the painting. If you look very carefully, hidden within the black and white shapes can be discerned first a head, then hands and legs, until at last you become aware that there are two male figures wrestling amongst the adinkra signs, cleverly hidden by a trompe-l’œil effect. Called “Get Off My Back,” this canvas demonstrates a highly contemporary approach that increases the range of reference of the work by appeal to a traditional set of symbols, holding the two in exquisite balance. [Slide 2] To give an example of the way a pictographic writing tradition provides Oriental artists with alternative strategies for expression, here’s a piece by a young Japanese artist from Kyoto, called Masahito Katayama. The work is entitled “Genealogy of the Wind,” and although it is not calligraphy that can be read as such, you can see the way in which the power and practised fluidity of the brush-strokes are used to convey the impression of the wind’s turbulent energy, and represent an integral part of the painting’s achievement. [Slide 3] To make a direct comparison with a European artist whose brush-work shows many similarities with the Katayama we’ve just seen, here’s a canvas by the Austrian-born artist Elisabeth Lalouschek, the artistic director of the October Gallery, and the curator of the wonderful visual arts exhibition now hanging in the Archive Centre next door. Although Elisabeth is not herself a calligrapher and wasn’t brought up in a tradition of pictographic writing, you can see the evident intention to articulate an abstract language of expressive feeling in her gestural use of the brush, reinforcing the emotional content of the powerful strokes by means of these vivid colours. [Slide 4] Another Western artist, this time one who was acutely aware of other alphabetic and ideographic scripts. This work is by Brion *

The October Gallery images referred to can be consulted at http://www

.octobergallery.co.uk/power/index.shtml

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Gysin, the English-born polymath who was an important member of the Tangiers group that, during the 1960s, included William Burroughs, Paul Bowles et al. It was Gysin, the artist, who encouraged Burroughs to take up painting, and it was Gysin, the writer, who must be credited with inventing the ‘cut-up’ technique that Burroughs would later make famous. Gysin, who spoke seven languages fluently, including both Japanese and Arabic, was fascinated by the calligraphic traditions of both those languages, and many of his works were subtle explorations of the empire of the signs that becomes available to an artist alive to the refined strategies offered by Oriental and Arabic calligraphy. What most fascinated Brion Gysin was the capacity of his calligrammes to portray a dance of pure signs that attract and appropriate fresh meanings of their own. [Slide 5] Continuing on from North Africa to the Middle East with several other contemporary Arabic artists. Here is a work that, while it might appear to us to be a pure piece of abstract art, can, if you know Arabic, be read as the phoneme Ba. Taken directly from Arabic script, the simple letter with its diacritical is entirely transformed by the artist’s vibrant use of colour. This wonderful work, which partakes of two cultures, traditional Arabic calligraphy and modern abstract painting, is by Wijdan, a Jordanian princess and cousin of the late King Hussain, who trained in London and holds a doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies. [Slide 6] Next a picture by Laila Shawa, a Palestinian artist living in London, which being a silk-screen of a photograph, can reproduce Arabic script directly within the body of the work, and if you read Arabic you will be able to make out the message. This is from a series of silk-screen prints that were based on photographs, taken by the artist, of graffiti on the walls of her home town of Gaza. This print, called “Letter to a Mother,” reproduces a letter written to his mother by a young man, explaining why he must leave to join the Intifada and to fight against the occupying Israeli army. The ‘letter’ is highlighted in the colour purple because purple was the colour used by the Israeli troops to paint over and censor the many messages of anger, hope and despair that were daily posted afresh on the walls of Gaza. [Slide 7] Here is a sequence of images that make use of some of the most basic of all signs and symbols. This one, a circular sign, is by Leroy Clarke from Trinidad. Artists are always on the lookout for symbols

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that are instantly recognizable to everyone, so-called universals, and perhaps the circle is the original universal sign. Here, Clarke uses this image-sign to convey his own complex message, calling the work “Enigma” [Slide 8 ]. Another universal circular sign is this one, by a Huichol Indian artist from the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico. I think everyone immediately recognizes the Sun. [Slide 9 ] A similar subject, though given an entirely different treatment, by the wonderful Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams, one of the founder members of C A M , the seminal Caribbean Artists Movement that flourished in London during the 1960s and was critically important in gaining recognition for the work of Caribbean and black artists in Britain. [Slide 10] More circles found in the work of another Huichol artist; though these circles don’t represent suns but the sacred peyote cactus that the Huichol ingest in order to see visions during their religious ceremonies. These five circles arranged in the four corners and centre of the work represent the five sacred pillars that support the sky above us; they are also obvious representations of peyote buttons. This wonderful piece is in the collection of the Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis, and is executed in the traditional Huichol manner by pressing dyed yarn into a beeswax substrate. Interestingly, if you move your eye around this yarn-painting – I think it works even when projected and at a distance – you might catch the result of saccadic movements, perceived as flickering effects that occur in the periphery of your vision, a very sophisticated device built into the yarn-paintings to mimic some of the visual effects observed under the powerful influence of peyote. [Slide 11] Here we see another circular sign, though this time as interpreted by the Australian Aboriginal artist Jimmy Pike. This one doesn’t represent the scorching sun of the great Australian desert, but that other source of life in that harsh environment, the water-hole. Another Australian Aboriginal artist, perhaps even better known than Jimmy Pike, is Clifford Possum. [Slide 12] Here the dot-painting technique is used to create what is essentially a map of a place, but the location is inextricably linked to a story. You can see two separate sets of footprints traversing the detailed landscape until their paths converge. Here there are two spears, and two clubs. Below are two skeletons. This visual narrative recounts the story of two brothers who fought over the ownership of ancestral lands until they killed one another.

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[Slide 13] Remaining in the South Pacific but moving eastwards to the island of New Caledonia, here is an image by Yvette Bouquet, an indigenous artist whose work is based upon a tradition many thousands of years old. Yvette is an autodidact artist who covers her canvases with the signs and symbols found as petroglyphs engraved on the ancient stones and hidden within the caves of the island. This particular canvas, filled with interconnecting lines, describes how all living creatures are mutually independent. [Slide 14] On to Africa, where again the most ancient art can be found inscribed in rock. These images show the earliest development of signs themselves – the precursors of written languages now lost – out of the images found painted on rock walls and in caves the length and breadth of Africa. Only in the last decade or so, with the work of David Coulson and Alex Campbell, have we become aware of the vast extent of African rock art [Slide 15] and the beauty and sophistication of some of mankind’s earliest art offerings. [Slide 16] One significant African artist who has always tried to incorporate some of these disappearing African scripts into his work is the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, whose standing figure you will have seen at the centre of the exhibition next door. This powerful wall-mounted relief is called “Unfolding the Scroll of History,” and it might be taken as representing the development of written languages on the African continent, from the early stick figures found on cave walls to the dedicated scripts of later times. [Slide 17 ] One of the things El Anatsui relishes is mixing several different written languages in a single work. Many of the languages he reproduces are no longer spoken, so nobody can interpret the signs any more, and yet we know that for one particular culture at least they were the signs and symbols that described the warp and weft of a consensual reality. El Anatsui is an artist who places signs and languages at the very centre of his work. [Slide 18] Here is a huge tree-trunk sculpture that he created during the Rio de Janeiro summit, and which now stands in the Smithsonian Museum. First he covered the entire trunk with sign sequences representative of all the different African cultures throughout history; he then took a chainsaw and slashed thousands of cuts into the wood, thereby destroying most of the decorative patterns. For the artist, this represented the Western cultures moving into Africa, eroding and destroying the languages and traditions of the indigenous cultures. The whole

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piece is called “Erosion,” and the pile of pieces surrounding the base of the work represents all that is left of the cultures that have disappeared. A sombre work perhaps, but there still remains a path of cultural continuity, that winds round the tree trunk from the base to the summit and that indicates the resilience of the many African cultures that still maintain links with the historical cultures of the past. [Slide 19] And finally, an image that reminds me that the first part of my talk has come full circle. This is a piece by the Beninese artist Cyprien Tokoudagba that is part of the Rendering Visible exhibition of Beninese art currently showing at the October Gallery. To Western eyes this particular sign, the Serpent that bites its tail, is often thought of as a gnostic symbol, but in fact it is very much older again. It was found in ancient India and was present in Sumerian deposits going back at least as far as 2,600 years B C . Yet here we find the same symbol on the African continent, where the Beninese kings were using it as a sign representing almost exactly the same things as we use it to mean. To the Fon people of Benin it was a sacred symbol that implied ‘continuity’, ‘recycling’ and continuous growth and re-growth. I leave it to you to speculate whether we are talking about independent genesis of the same symbols and meanings or whether the symbol is so old that it has had time to disperse over entire continents, yet in all that time has still managed to retain, almost unchanged, a set of essential meanings. This then, is a good example of the extraordinary power of the sign.

JULIEN SINZOGAN Quand on est peintre, on peut être intarissable sur le sujet du pouvoir de l’image. On peut le peindre et le dépeindre à l’envi; et notre discipline ne lasse jamais de faire des gorges chaudes ou de déclencher des torrents d’encre. Le verbe exerce donc bien son pouvoir dans notre monde merveilleux des Beaux Arts. Mais pour le peintre plasticien que je suis, écrire sur le pouvoir du verbe semble pour le moins un exercice de haute voltige. Devant l’appliquer à mon art, je ne traiterai que ce qui est en rapport avec ma sensibilité et ma création personnelle. N’étant pas calligraphe, je n’utilise pas dans mes tableaux le verbe sous sa forme épistolaire. Le sens le plus approchant du verbe y est le symbolisme, auquel j’ai recours dans de nombreuses œuvres. Je le traiterai ici à travers deux principales traditions qui m’ont nourri ces dernières années: le Fa, système divinatoire ancestral de mon pays, et la

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symbolique de la société secrète des Abakua de Cuba, survivance de son homonyme de la région de la Cross River du Nigéria, dont le graphisme a été pour moi une rencontre bouleversante. Le système de géomancie par le Fa est constitué de seize grands signes. L’on entend généralement par ‘signe’ un ordre précis, comme les panneaux routiers. Au signe indiquant “tourner à gauche,” le conducteur n’a pas d’autre choix. En revanche, le symbole pourrait se définir comme un signe à géométrie variable, ce qui le soumet davantage à l’interprétation qu’en donnent les multiples cultures, ou à différents domaines à l’intérieur d’une seule. Dans la culture occidentale, la colombe est un symbole de paix au plan séculier, et le symbole du Saint Esprit au plan religieux. Que dire de la croix, et de sa symbolique multiple selon les divers plans (religion, code de la route, mathématiques, etc)? Un exemple éclairant la concernant est l’anecdote suivante: au cours d’une discussion avec mon grand-père il y a bien longtemps, je fus amené à tracer sur le sol une croix en lui demandant quel en était le sens selon lui. “La croisée des chemins,” me dit-il. “Tes lignes représentent la rencontre des destins. Même les blancs l’utilisent quand ils vont au devant d’autres races.” L’on apprécie toute la distinction entre signe et symbole. Alors que le signe a une limite précise, le symbole a une amplitude incommensurable et ouvre sur l’imaginaire en portant couleurs et philosophies de la vie. Ce n’est donc pas sans raison que nombre d’artistes et plasticiens trouvent dans le symbolisme une source inépuisable d’inspiration. [Slide 20] Les ‘signes’ du Fa sont-ils réellement des signes? Ne seraient-ils pas plus proches de la définition du symbole? En effet, chaque ‘signe’ du Fa contient en lui tout un monde dense et complexe de formes et de couleurs. Par exemple, le signe Gbe Meji est dit correspondre à l’est, commander la voûte céleste pendant le jour, et être le signe mâle père de quatorze autres signes. Il est représenté par un cercle blanc. Il a engendré pêle-mêle les têtes des humains et des animaux, les montagnes, les mers, les vaisseaux sanguins, la cage thoraxique, certaines espèces de plantes ou d’arbres comme l’iroko. La divinité Legba du panthéon vodun lui est associé. Voilà beaucoup de contenu pour un ‘signe,’ à moins que l’on ne limite le sens de ‘signe du Fa’ au tracé en pointillé effectué par le devin sur le plateau au moment de la divination. Ce tracé est en fait une écriture, chaque signe ayant le sien, et correspond à une forme d’alphabet propre à notre géomancie. Ce simple

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tracé, ce signe, ouvre pourtant sur tout un univers pour qui sait le lire. J’ai pour ma part souvent développé dans mes œuvres l’imaginaire fécondé par certains de ces signes du Fa, et un grand nombre d’artistes issus des cultures où cette forme de géomancie est pratiquée ont eu cette même inspiration: Jorge Da Silva à Bahia, Dominique Kouas au Bénin, Édouard Duval-Carié à Haïti, pour n’en citer que quelques uns répartis entre le Bénin, le Togo, le Nigéria, Cuba, Haïti, le Brésil, etc. Ces cultures issues d’un même berceau en Afrique offrent à leurs artistes des possibilités graphiques et plastiques infinies de par leur tradition religieuse, où foisonnent les symboles. Au Bénin, l’un de ceux récurrents sur les murs de nos temples est l’Ourouboros, appelé Dan chez les Fon et Mahi, et Olumare chez les Yorouba. Ce serpent qui se mord la queue est le symbole du temps cyclique et de la richesse, et c’est un symbole que nous partageons avec maintes autres cultures.

GERARD HOUGHTON I finished the first part of my talk with an image of the ancient symbol of the ourobouros, the serpent eating its tail, a sign that perhaps first came out of Africa and travelled towards Persia, before later being passed on to us by the Greeks. [Slide 22] As Julien just mentioned, this Beninese version represents the deity known as Dan Aido Houedo – the rainbow serpent – a sky god whose multicoloured body contains all the hues of the rainbow. However, other versions of this same symbol were common in Mesopotamia in which the serpent’s body was divided into two bands of black and white, indicating that the cycle of rebirth or repetition was thought to be composed of two complementary and opposite elements. In this second part, I’d like to follow this hint, while still pursuing my earlier Oriental tack, and talk a little about those representations of complementary cycles that in the West we refer to by their Chinese names of Yin and Yang. [Slide 23] Perhaps a little oddly, I want to return to the Orient by way of an extraordinary English artist – this being a large gouache-on-paper work by Gerald Wilde (1908–86). One of England’s great post-war painters, Wilde is often overlooked today on account of his work’s being so unlike that of any of his contemporaries that he didn’t fit into any of the neat pigeon-holes which art historians use to describe paintings of that period. Simply put, Wilde was an original, and his work quite unique. Trying to explain Wilde’s elusive otherness, the art critic

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David Sylvester once said that he was the only British painter whose work could truly be described as Abstract Expressionist in style. However, such a description, pointing us towards New York of the 1950s and 1960s, leads us in the wrong direction entirely. My own feeling is that Wilde’s genius points us towards the East – because these rippling forms that we see here in a work entitled “Intelligence Now” (though other versions were also called “Transformation”) obviously describe some sort of organic process, a most uncommon subject for a Western artist of that time. It’s difficult at first glance to imagine exactly what it was that Wilde was seeing and representing; but these red lines might be thought of as ripples fanning out across the surface of water. What is clear is that there’s an implicate order within the apparent chaos of lines that appear to radiate from some common centre. Perhaps this ‘centre’ offers us a clue, looking as it does rather like the original version of the Chinese Yin–Yang symbol. As many of you might know, the original version of that symbol found in the ancient texts is always shown not as the two black and white interpenetrating shapes now so familiar in the West, but as three rotating forms – commas, fish, dragons or whatever they may be – spiralling around a single point. Now, imagine that we are looking down upon a large weather system – looking at a radar map provided by today’s weather satellites. The Wilde image now begins to make some sort of sense as one realizes that the patterns radiate outwards from the central ‘seed cells’. There is a natural logic to the patterns of development and transformation shown, with, every so often, the formation of an entirely new ‘seed cell’ as the interacting lines of force unite to create new centres that again generate newly evolving patterns of energy. This image, of course, represents just one moment in this organic development – a single snapshot of a moment in time – but it is evident that the picture refers not just to the instant captured, but to the entirety of the process surveyed. Notice that in the lower right-hand area, at the developing edge of the ‘front’, the spiralling eddies unite, for a brief moment in the flowing cycle, to create a flawless circle – that perfect sign, and powerful symbol. Wilde, I would suggest, was here trying to render visible a complex set of ideas not often attempted by English artists – though such ideas have been long been familiar territory for Oriental artists.

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To demonstrate this quickly, let me show some images by the Japanese artist Kenji Yoshida [Slide 24], who, having been selected, as a young man, to become a kamikaze pilot, knew just how fortunate he was to have survived the war. Every canvas that Yoshida has painted ever since has borne one and the same title – “La Vie.” Let me run through a few examples of Yoshida’s beautiful work to illustrate the constant – almost unconscious – appearance of Yin–Yang elements in his work. Here’s another one [Slide 25], again done in Yoshida’s vivid colours, the whole palette intensified by the application of gold and silver leaf. This picture, I think, is very beautifully done [Slide 26 ], and, as with the earlier Wilde, you can sense how Yoshida is attempting to paint, in two dimensions, a moving process of transformation. There isn’t just one simple static Yin–Yang symbol here, the familiar black and white rotating forms, each carrying within it the seeds of its opposite, but a complex rotating spiral of energy that manifests as shape-shifting images of those elemental forms, the whole emblematic of an organic process in a state of vital flux. Although both Wilde’s and Yoshida’s visions point us on the way to an understanding of just how complicated may be the layers of meaning that might pervade an abstract image, I now want to introduce an even older painting to develop this idea further. [Slide 27 ] This is a slide of a Chinese scroll that I’m fortunate enough to have picked up during my time in Japan.* In fact, it isn’t even Chinese, being painted by a Japanese artist, but he’d studied and travelled widely in China during his apprentice years, and this scroll is executed in the distinctive style of the Southern Literati school, a tradition which flourished about four hundred years ago. This particular work is more recent, probably having been painted in the 1870s, towards the end of the artist’s life. Before I say anything more about the painting, however, I’d like to ask you to look at it yourself for a few minutes, to enjoy its charm, listen to what it says directly to you, and gather those critical ‘first impressions’ of your own. One of the signal differences between any piece of writing and any picture is that the written work is presented in a linear fashion, whereas an image is arranged spatially, with no fixed point from which to begin, nor any end-point at which the viewing of the image can be said to be *

The scroll is also reproduced on the cover of the present volume.

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complete. An American neuroscientist, Harry Jerison, a professor at U C L A , has demonstrated, in detail, just how different are the ways in which any two individuals will look at and ‘construct’ a given picture. He does this by tracking very precisely the path taken by a person’s eyes as they roam around within the picture-frame. Indeed, so different is each individual’s way of seeing that it defines what Dr Jerison calls that person’s “scan-path,” a mechanical description of a way of looking at a picture that is recognizably distinct from the scan-paths of other people. Apparently, each of us, when presented with the same image, will examine it quite differently, scrutinizing objects in the foreground and background of the picture in different ways, in different spatial sequences and at quite different rates, in order to determine first the content and then, by extension, the ‘meaning’ of the picture. When I showed him this scroll at a conference in France, Dr Jerison was fascinated by my assertion that Chinese artists of the time were more than aware of the phenomenon of scan-paths, and would even attempt to control a viewer’s idiosyncratic construction of the painting by manipulating that viewer’s scan-path from the outset. Let me show you what I mean. When we look at the scroll, what we initially see are the several large ‘blocks’ of mountains and trees set out within the picture, and immediately we recognize a Chinese landscape scene. There are three ‘mountain’ elements arranged along the diagonal from bottom left to top right, and there are two slightly larger ‘tree’ elements which fill the intermediate spaces in the upper-middle-left and lower-middleright positions, and which align themselves about the opposing diagonal. At the very simplest level, therefore, the painting sets up a creative tension – in the form of a cross – between these two main ingredients, the mountains and the trees – between, if you like, the geological realm and the biological. To the Chinese, rocks symbolized the Yang (male) aspect, while the second term of this dyadic relationship, the plants – living material intimately associated with water – would be understood to be essentially Yin (female) in character. Both plants and rocks, Yin and Yang, represent separate but integrally related aspects of the same overarching natural system known as the T’ai Chi – the Great Primordial. Now, if we enter the picture via the closest point to us, the little clump of foothills in the left foreground, our gaze is immediately drawn upwards, past the little shrine on the promontory, to the highest point

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of that outcrop. From there, the eye is swept onwards along the backbone of hills climbing from left to right through the middle ground, irresistibly upwards towards the tallest of the mountain peaks in the distance. The farther summits, being successively lower, cause the eye to traverse to the left and, by a clever ruse, to reverse direction and begin to descend. Encountering a closer copse of trees, our attention is pulled back from the distant mountains, diagonally downwards across the central point, and on towards a second grove of trees growing even closer by in the foreground, whereupon another subtly integrated visual bridge leads us back towards the foothills from where we first began our ascent. In fact, the viewer’s gaze is lured round and round an endless circuit within the picture-frame, a three-dimensional perspectival loop that almost seems to trace out the Moebius-strip figure of our Western symbol for infinity. Whether rising along the rocky mountain paths or climbing the tree trunks up to the highest branches and beyond, the end of all our circular journeys within the picture-space is found to be at the starting-point again. As we tread these mountain paths of the imagination, the captive eye intuits two complementary circles, one above the other, and while it is possible to circle, for a time, within the closed ambit of either one, we can also cross between the two circuits at the point where they intersect in the very centre of the picture. If we travel in a clockwise direction around the lower circle, then we will inevitably find ourselves moving anti-clockwise (though, as with the adinkra glyph, we have neither stopped moving forward nor intended to change direction) around the upper circle, and vice versa. This form, with its mysterious properties, is one of the variants of the Chinese T’ai Chi symbol. We can test this intuition by looking within each of the two circles for the ‘seed’ of its opposite – and there they are. Each circuit encloses an area of negative space. At the centre of the one in the lower half of the picture we find a rather strange looking ‘man’, and, central to the opposite circuit, an even odder figure to Western eyes, one that represents a natural rock formation which the Chinese would recognize to be a ‘spirit-stone’ or kwai-shi, an object that radiates great natural power. These two focal points are drawn differently: the man is represented by a dark blot, whereas his complementary opposite, the spirit-stone, is depicted as light and open. According to the Chinese convention, we know, therefore, that man here represents the Yin element within the Yang cycle,

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the spirit rock exemplifying the Yang element at the moving heart of the Yin. Now that we’ve discovered a key to help us read further into the painting, we can be certain that interpenetrating Yin–Yang elements will be discovered at even deeper levels within the fabric of the picture. The Chinese artist who painted this serene landscape scene may not have realized all that he was inscribing into his image, yet at the same time he could not have done otherwise. He was describing the world as it is, and he could no more avoid finding within it the complex interplay of ever more finely shaded patterns of complementary opposites than a Western scientist could avoid finding the same world to be an arrangement of elements made of molecules and atoms. Primordial matter was composed of two opposite principles, everywhere manifested as light/dark, male/female, strong/soft, geology/biology and so on. The natural world, therefore, could not do other than show forth these two principles found mixed in different proportions, and could be analysed according to a mathematical progression that developed from the monad of the T’ai Chi to the Yin–Yang dyad and on through a set of six ‘trigram’ combinations, which could be arranged to form sixty-four hexagrams, and so on to ever more subtle levels. The character at the centre of the lower circle is a significant addition to the scroll’s narrative. If you look carefully, you can see that he’s carrying some sort of twisted staff, which announces him to be an old man of the mountains, a magician or Taoist sage. These sen-nin, or hermits, living in ascetic seclusion high in the mountains, were believed to feed on nothing but the rising mist as they maintained their esoteric practices in the single-minded pursuit of the elixir of immortality. They were adepts of the Way, seekers after chi, or vital energy, initiates who knew that the same energies expressed in the great macrocosm of the natural world were also to be found controlling the microcosm of the human organism. In these mountain hideaways, at one with nature, their numbers were certainly swelled by poets and painters, by alchemists and other seekers of the way, all possessed of practical skills and knowledge gleaned from a close reading of the great book of nature. It is significant that the sage appears to be orienting himself towards and paying obeisance to the little shrine on the promontory above. Standing where he does, the magician symbolizes the necessary third element of the scroll – humanity, the link between heaven and earth. We find man

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occupying a critical position within the scheme of things, as shown by the little clusters of dwellings half-hidden at the very centre of the scroll, a position precisely pin-pointed by the circular window of the main house. Closer inspection reveals two human figures (almost certainly a man and a woman) with their arms raised in the traditional manner of greeting with great respect. Another human community is to be found nestling in the foothills of the distant mountains, identified by its encircling and protective thicket of trees, a small pocket of Yin encircled by but existing harmoniously within the surrounding world of Yang. Diametrically opposite the corner where we first entered the frame, in negative space unvisited by the circling eye roving through the landscape scenes, is a corner reserved for words. Remember, however, that in Chinese words are also pictures – and, in fact, the Chinese painters made little or no distinction between what to us are the quite separate realms of writing and painting. Just as the same instrument, the brush, is used to perform both actions, so too the same verb describes both painting and writing. The poem was an integral part of any painting, and the painter was, of necessity, also a poet, the two being complementary aspects (Yin–Yang) of the one expression. This picture-poem, simply translated, says, “Far away and high above Cold Mountain, a small rocky path / White clouds with mist rising.” This next symbol is difficult to read, but I take it to be “In this place, the houses of men.” And the last line mysteriously adds “The whole [locale] is encircled by a mighty river.” So the picture, we learn, as well as being about ‘mountains’ and ‘trees’ and ‘men’, is about a ‘mighty river’. By the way, the very last character in the poem – the three vertical lines that I mentioned earlier – is that Chinese sign for ‘river’. One of the several odd things about this particular scroll is that, whereas in almost any other painting done in this San-Sui (Mountain-Water) style you would expect to see water coursing down through the rocks, growing in size before flowing out of the picture-frame in the lower foreground as a mighty river, this image is devoid of any visible sign of water. We infer the presence of water from the abundance of trees, but – except in the poem – water itself is signally absent. If the poem is to be read strictly, the mighty river, rather than running through the scene, surrounds and protects it. Something very strange is happening here, a dislocation between the image and the ex-

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planatory poem has been introduced, and the convention consciously subverted. Taking into account some of the things we’ve already discovered in the scroll, we are required to make an interpretative leap in the dark to understand the meaning of the whole satisfactorily. I take the absent ‘mighty river’ to refer to some absolutely essential thing which is so obvious that we seldom even notice it. I read the scroll as a carefully coded text concerning man’s place in nature. The great cycle of nature that ensures the succession of seasons, that sees water evaporate from the rice fields only to return as rain, is the ‘mighty river’ protecting the whole fragile ecology of this hidden place among the mountains. Here man must know how to support the natural world in order to be supported by it, in his turn. Taken together as both poem and painting, the scroll can be read as an ecological – or philosophical – treatise, describing the part man must play in maintaining alignment and harmony with the greater whole. The wise old magician performing his solitary rituals sees sufficiently into the heart of things to point us in the direction we must follow, and he must warn us when we go against the flow of that mighty river upon which our survival depends. As our eyes follow the path prescribed by the picture itself, the endlessly circling loop, we read about and see repeatedly confirmed on every side the narrative of man’s necessary interdependence and co-existence with the natural world. By controlling our scan-paths, the image corporeally confirms its hidden message: we are initiated, inculcated, and transformed. It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in talking about pictures painted by artists from a range of different cultures around the world, I’ve tried to limit myself to just a few words of commentary for each picture presented. However, with an image of the subtlety and complexity of this last Chinese scroll-painting, it quickly becomes obvious that it requires far more than a thousand words to unpack even a small part of the meanings contained within the work. Although we were visually oriented beings long before we become enthralled by the power of words, what often surprises me is how few people, in front of an image, are able to articulate the powerful sense impressions encoded in that image. Perhaps our literate cultures have become seduced by language, overcome by the power of the word. But then again, as my Chinese scroll always reminds me, perhaps the visual and the verbal fields, the picture and the poem, are not two separate

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super-powers vying for ultimate supremacy. Perhaps they are simply different aspects of the same instinct to make sense of an always mysterious world, complementary opposites, twin aspects of one and the same thing.

JULIEN SINZOGAN J’en viens à la deuxième partie de mon exposé: la symbolique Abakua est un agencement de signes formés de points, de ronds, de croix, et de flèches. Partie de la Cross River au Nigéria dans les cales des négriers vers Cuba et Haïti, elle me revient comme une page déchirée de notre histoire. Les sociétés Abakua sont exclusivement masculines et secrètes. Mais l’anthropologue cubaine Lydia Cabrera a levé un coin du voile en publiant il y a quelques années Anaforuana, où sont présentés les principaux symboles Abakua dont je me suis inspiré pour mon travail [Slide 21]. Parmi les œuvres exposées ici à Cambridge figure, par exemple, la toile intitulée Castigo (punition/châtiment), qui reprend les trois niveaux de punition au sein des sociétés Abakua: le castigo simple, le castigo riguroso et la peine de mort: le castigo capital. Il n’y a pas de date formelle pour l’exécution de la sentence. L’éventail dans le temps est donc relatif et si le condamné rectifie sa conduite, la marque de sa punition peut être effacée ou annulée par une croix. Dans leur esprit tout comme dans leur forme évolutive et fantaisiste, les tracés Abakua sont donc de véritables symboles. Je vais conclure avec l’exemple d’une aventure qui m’est arrivée en 1986: à l’époque, je travaillais pour un laboratoire, et nous sont arrivés de Bamako quatre médecins. Ils avaient un problème délicat: expliquer à leur population les causes et le développement de la bilharziose, qui sévissait dans la région. J’avais suggéré – ce fut adopté et j’en fus très fier – que nous procédions par images pour régler le problème. Nous avons réalisé en commun un film d’animation qui montrait comment le virus de la bilharziose, doté d’une ventouse, passait par le pied dans le sang quand on marchait dans une flaque d’eau polluée; comment il remontait jusqu’aux poumons où il se multipliait rapidement et devenait donc mortel. Nous avons testé le film dans un village au Mali où il reçut un écho extraordinaire. Le principe fut adopté à l’échelle nationale. Comme quoi, parfois, l’image fait le travail du verbe. Je vous remercie.

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T I D J A N I –S E R P O S Madame la Présidente, j’ai écouté avec beaucoup d’intérêt ce que nos amis ont dit tout à l’heure, et ils ont commencé avec l’une des premières images. C’était justement le serpent qui se mordait la queue, et qui chez nous a une signification capitale. Il ne faut pas oublier que ce matin, quand le président du collège ouvert le colloque, it a lu le poème “Souffles” qui disait que les morts n’étaient pas morts. Cela que disait le peintre avec le serpent qui se mord la queue et qui montrait un éternel recommencement, le mot l’a dit, l’image l’a montré. Donc, déjâ, il y a ce dialogue qui peut se faire entre les mots et l’image. Chez moi, quand le roi monte sur le trône, la première parole qu’il prononce, c’est cette parole-là qui détermine ce que les artistes feront pendant tout son règne. Et si vous regardez la façon dont ce serpent a été fait, il y a eu collision de deux symboles. Il y a le symbole du roi qui a dit – et c’est pour ça que ce serpent a des dents – qui a dit, “Je suis le requin qui terrorise la barre chaque fois que des étrangers viennent troubler le royaume.” L’autre serpent, qui est un serpent qui mord la queue, ce serpent normalement n’a pas de dents, et c’est le signe de la richesse. Donc ici, il y a collision de deux formes de discours. Il y a le discours royal, qui date de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, au moment où les Français voulaient envahir le royaume, et il y avait aussi le premier symbole, qui était un symbole de richesse, un symbole de continuité, du refus de la mort, etc. Et l’artiste nouveau a pris deux symboles anciens, il les a mis ensemble pour créer le discours contemporain, parce que ce type de serpent n’existe pas dans la tradition. Mais il a pris la tradition pour parler à la modernité. En allant prendre l’inspiration dans la tradition, cet artiste-là nous a convié à un nouveau dialogue qui n’existait pas et qui est le dialogue d’aujourd’hui.

JULIEN SINZOGAN Je remercie Professeur Tidjani–Serpos pour son explication. C’était remarquable.

MARIA TIPPETT Thank you to both our speakers. \

Fifth Dialogue: The Word in Music: Chaka A KIN E UBA AND C OMPANY

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I W E R E A S K E D to summarize the key elements of my career as a composer I would say that my interest in poetry and the setting of modern African poetry in English would be of most importance; second is my interest in music theatre. I find it almost impossible now to write so called ‘chamber music’. A friend of mine wanted me to write a piece for clarinet and piano. It took a long time before I could write it, before I could conceptualize the idea of clarinet and piano, but I am glad to say that once I arrived in Churchill the problem was finally resolved and my friend is going to perform it in Pittsburgh. Another friend wanted a piece for violin and piano and the creative momentum that was generated from the clarinet piece is now moving into the piano piece and I have started that too and feel positive I am going to complete it. But basically I am excited by music theatre; that is what actually triggers my inspiration, and when I returned to Nigeria from my studies at Trinity College of Music, I wanted to write songs in the English language. Where was I to go for my text? I am not a poet, I am a composer. Am I going to set Shelley and Keats or am I going to look for inspiration in my own culture? As you know, the German Lieder of the nineteenth century were one of the most important idioms in Romantic music and composers like Schubert, Schumann and Wolff went to German literature, to their leading poets, and set them to music. That was the model for me. I decided to look into the literature of modern African poetry to F

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see if I might find suitable things to set. So that was my introduction to modern African poetry in English and in English translation, and I found not only that there were a number of things that I could set, I found also that the things that they were trying to say with their poetry were very similar to the things I was trying to say with my music, and so there was a double source of inspiration there. Chaka should be seen in that context. It was not an isolated work that happened to be set to music but the result of my general interest in setting African poetry to music. I will try to give you an idea of the theoretical framework that guided the composition of Chaka. I should say, first, that I have been engaged in a number of theories of composition. I love to design theories and to teach theories – not only composition theories but theories of scholarship. How do we look at music? What kind of things should we be talking about? What kind of ideas are important in scholarship? In fact, my interest in theory of composition sometimes exceeds my interest in actual composition! I looked back a few years ago and found that I had actually theorized more than I had composed. So I decided to begin to reverse that situation. A number of people had told me that they did not see anything in the theories. It is true that when you take theories in the abstract it is difficult to relate to them, but if you articulate them in practice, then people see better, and Chaka is a work that articulates almost all of my theories of composition. One is a theory of Inter-Cultural Composition, where you bring elements from different cultures together. This is not a new theory, it has always happened in music; composers look beyond their own culture and extract elements that they like and put them into their music; so that, simply enough, is the theory in practice. There is the theory of Creative Ethnomusicology, which in fact was practised by Béla Bartók of Hungary, for he would go into the field and do research as an ethnomusicologist would do research. He would live with so-called ‘peasants’, record their music, interview them, and go back to his study to analyse the music. But whereas an ethnomusicologist would use the information derived from research as the basis for writing a book, Bartók went beyond that. He wrote books too, and he published transcriptions of Hungarian folk music, but he also used the information derived from his research in his own composition. Of course, a number of composers, such as Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, Grieg,

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have used folk elements in their music, but most of them did it rather at second hand. Brahms got his information on Hungarian folk music by going to the cafés and listening to gypsies playing their version of Hungarian music. Bartók condemned that; he felt that a composer who wanted to use folk material should go into the field and live with the peasants and feel the music. The end-product of this was that Bartók became so influenced by folk music that he could write music that sounded like folk music but was not in fact a quotation, it was original music in the folk idiom; he seldom used quotations in his works except for transcriptions, when he arranged folk songs for voice and piano. Those were directly taken from the culture, but when he composed his string quartets these sounded like folk music even though they were in fact original. There is also a concept I designed which I call African Pianism. This is the idea that African music written for the Western keyboard will nonetheless have an African element. The piano is a popular instrument in Africa, especially in pop music, where you have many groups using keyboard instruments derived from the piano. If I look into the future I think that there will come a day when the piano will indeed be an African instrument, for instruments migrate. Most of the instruments of the Western symphony orchestra, for instance, did not originate in Western culture; they came from the Middle East: the oboe, the violin, the timpani, the bassoon – most of these came from the Middle East, but they have become Western instruments. Indeed, there is already a North African Pianism in which people are writing, using the piano as if it were a North African instrument. I digress: the main thing is that the various theories that I have tried to preach have now been crystallized, so that I can use Chaka as a kind of demonstration. Now for the text: you will have noticed that some of the text of Chaka was in Yorùbá. The original text by Senghor was, of course, in French, and I worked with an English translation. However, I needed some dramatic elements that were not in the original and that would involve additional text and it seemed to me that it would violate Senghor’s authorial control if I were to add texts in English as if they were part of the English translation of his work. I felt encouraged to use Yorùbá because this had already been done by playwrights like Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi and Femi Osofisan, who write plays in English that

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include Yorùbá songs and chanting; that is now quite accepted. So I designed, for instance, the role of the female lead, Noliwe, to be sung in Yorùbá. That in fact is the only properly melodic part in Chaka, since most of my writing is non-melodic. In fact, I barely indicate what the singers should sing; they realize much of it for themselves. I am not concerned that they should sing precise notes as such. In the First Chant, I use the treble clef and the singers can sing what I wrote or they can interpret what I wrote in their own way. In the Second Chant, I not only remove the clef altogether but I base the tonality on the three-tone system of Yorùbá: the low tone, the middle tone, and the high tone. The singers move only between these three tones, occasionally splitting them between the high tone and the middle tone and the middle tone and the low tone, but basically the whole of the tonality in the Second Chant is based on the three-tone movement. When I designed this I wasn’t sure how it would work, but the audience did not seem to notice it and that means the idea must have worked, because if you noticed it, it would be quite boring, a monotonous movement between three tones when you have twelve possible tones in the Western system. Now, another aspect of the tonality is that I use the twelve-tone idiom. In fact, there are two tone rows in the so-called twelve-tone idiom originated by Schoenberg. One of them is associated with the trio that accompanies Chaka when he speaks or sings. The second tone row I use in some of the brass sections – for example, the opening orchestral theme. There are a number of aspects of the score that I have removed and a number that I have retained, but that theme has been there since the first performance in 1970. I then decided to use the four notes of that theme as the first four tones of the row, so that is where the second tone row comes from. I wanted to introduce a row for the brass but I wanted to retain the four notes that were there originally, so I added eight more notes to form the row. Now, the use of the twelve-tone system seems to alienate audiences. One of the characteristics of Schoenberg and the Vienna School is that they were not really speaking to a general audience. Indeed, a number of composers now disassociate themselves from the twelve-tone technique, as they think there is no future in it, but I think it works for me. I don’t use it in its classical form but I combine it, for instance, with African drumming. African audiences listen to the drumming and ignore the twelve-tone aspect, and that way I can still

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engage the interest of a general audience. I find that you can bend the system to suit your purposes. Hence somebody discussing my music said that despite my use of Western avant-garde techniques of composition, my work was still firmly rooted in the mystical and mythological beliefs of the Yorùbá people, and that is true. I am interested in ritual. I tend to choose subjects that derive from traditional theatre and traditional performing arts, as in Chaka. It in fact is modelled on the folk opera, in the sense that it makes use of a combination of elements as in popular theatre – the use of ceremonial music, ritual music, and some of the arts that normally go together in ritual and ceremony. Now for the instrumentation. When I decided to revise Chaka, after the first few performances in the 1970s, I decided that I wanted to write a definitive version, so I began to make notes and I found, early on, that the idea of a full symphony orchestra just didn’t seem to me to be something that was wanted. The kind of melodic, lyrical style that one associates with the string section of the Western orchestra did not seem to me to be something that was wanted, so I decided to choose specific instruments: for instance, there’s one flute, one clarinet, one bassoon, one trumpet, one horn, one trombone, and a Western xylophone – and the timpani of course. The normal orchestra would use three timpani, sometimes four, but I found that I needed five. That is unusual for Western orchestration. When we recorded the C D the timpanists adapted the music for four timpani, people said it wasn’t possible to group five timpani so that the timpanist could play them. But we demonstrated yesterday that it is indeed possible to use five timpani, as you saw. [Laughter] However, there is nothing dogmatic about this, I can reverse my own decisions! The major project that I am working on at Churchill is a new orchestral work for soloists, chorus, dancers and a full symphony orchestra that will not include a single African instrument. Yet in this work I am trying to set ritual poetry, poetry of Ifà divination. How can I do that without using African instruments? It seems I am setting myself an impossible task. Yet suddenly I find that I am excited by the idea of working with a full symphony orchestra, trying to make the orchestra speak an African language, trying to make the instruments behave like African instruments – without introducing any actual African instruments. I’ve suddenly discovered that this seems possible.

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Mind you, there’s a pragmatic reason also. If you sent the score of Chaka to Australia, and you wanted the Sydney Opera House to perform it, I am sure the first problem would be how to get the African musicians. Although it could well be that there are African musicians available in Sydney, nonetheless one of the problems of writing music for African instruments in combination with Western instruments is that when you are in Africa you have all the instruments and performers in abundance but who is going to play the French horn? You can’t just pick them from the streets of Lagos. And, of course, vice versa. So you have a problem bringing musicians together when you write for instruments coming from different cultures. When, in 1993, we were planning to do Chaka for the Africa ’95 festival, we assumed we needed a budget to bring musicians from Africa, though when the City of Birmingham Touring Opera actually commissioned the performance, we found that there were a number of competent drum players in London. But will this be the same in Australia? Will this be the same in China? In Thailand? In Japan? So that is the pragmatic constraint that may lead a composer to write for a symphony orchestra. Moreover, the typical symphony orchestra today has a wide variety of percussion instruments from various cultures – temple bells, Chinese blocks, a number of Latin American instruments – so you can in fact simulate African sounds using percussion that is readily accessible in the West. I’ll leave the matter at that point. Let me introduce the director, Sola.

OLUSOLA OYELEYE My first introduction to francophone African poetry was through Bernard Dadier’s poem “Je vous remercie mon Dieu de me créer noir.” That poem inspired me, and from there I went on to read Senghor and David Diop and many of the Caribbean francophone poets and writers, so it was a real pleasure to have the opportunity to work on this piece and look closely at the language Senghor uses to create both the mystical image, the history and the very specific story of the life of Chaka. When I came to approach this as a piece of work, I saw that it wasn’t a straight narrative or simple piece of storytelling. We have the straight story, we have the history; we have the music, we have the legend – in fact, the whole multi-faceted African mode of telling stories going back many thousands of years. So I couldn’t approach this like one of any number of operas that I have had the opportunity to work on. It was

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clear that the ritual aspect was something that we had to include in the mode of performance. We also had to get the idea over that the piece starts with Chaka being killed and then there are a series of flash-backs which tell us about his romance, and about the people guiding him into the new world, and all these different layers had to be achieved in a dramatic way. Those were some of the kind of elements that I was trying to bring together on stage yesterday. Also, it would be interesting to hear from the floor about the notion of pan-Africanism in relation to this performance. Various different motifs occur in the music and also in the traditions. For example, in one of the Ifà divination poems we were talking about there are references to Shangó, the god of thunder, while the chorus have a reprise of Chaka, Chaka Zulu, which is thunder as well. So there are these different links and overlaps of and between different ethnic traditions – hence the notion of pan-Africanism. Each time we approach the piece, it’s a new piece of research in itself. This time I was trying to bring in that pan-African notion, so that we had the South African elements stated strongly, the Yorùbá elements stated strongly; and yet we find that although there are very specific elements in each of those cultures, the links between and the interlacing of those cultures is something that is very strong as well, because culture travels. The challenge will be, when we come to full production, to bring all those different elements together.

AKIN EUBA Another of the challenging aspects of this composition is how to cope with the score, and I’d now like to bring in Peter Tregear. In this score one of the problems is that things are happening at so many different levels in the music. When this piece was first performed in 1970, Professor Nketia, the eminent Ghanaian ethnomusicologist, was present, and he said to me afterwards, “There are too many things happening at the same time.” Different elements are played in different meters, or ones related to one another. For example, the flutes are playing one meter, the singers are using a different meter. Now this means that things that have to happen together at the same time in actual performance cannot be put together on the same page. Something may be two pages before and something else one page after the page on which you are, so that the conducting is by no means easy. When we were pre-

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paring an earlier performance, a conductor was approached and accepted, a conductor who has a music group that specializes in playing modern music. But then he sent me an email saying, “Can you please send me a score that is easier to read than the one that has been presented to me by the chorus” (who were the sponsors). I replied, “No such score exists, so I’m sorry, I cannot help you….” So he decided not to conduct it. We had to appoint another conductor, and he said he found all the information that he needed in the score and so he was the one who conducted it. Now let’s hear your story, Peter.

PETER TREGEAR Thank you. It was certainly a terrific learning experience for me. I have conducted a number of what might be considered more traditional Western pieces of music-theatre and I think this work is particularly good at bringing out certain special aspects of music theatre. The idea of having different tempos going on at once is a terrific way of exploiting the potential that music has when put to words in a dramatic context to make aspects like time and place merge into each other. Hence you get this sense of mythic time. Music can actually create that kind of space-time. One of the particularly interesting exercises for me was to re-negotiate the necessity of the conductor, to be ‘the boss’ between groups of African drummers and Western instrumentalists. This seems to be a great example of cross-cultural music politics. It was a curious exercise, not having worked with traditional African drummers before, to know the best way to bring the ensemble together, because they have certainly completely different ways of communicating and also different understandings about how music unfolds in performance. As Westerners, we are trained to work to a beat that is given to us. But when you are an African drummer the beat comes from within. So for them it is quite difficult to work with the idea of the externally given beat, and likewise, for the Western instrumentalists it is quite difficult to work with instrumentalists who are proceeding on a different impulse. And I must say, last night, one of the exciting things that often happens in live performance with an audience is that at the very opening we had that sense of silent communication, in this case between the Western instrumentalists in the back rows and the African drummers in the front, when we realized that for the first time we were all actually within each

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other’s beat. You could see the smile on people’s faces – including mine [Laughter]. I found that sense of uniting two musical traditions, disparate and integral in their own right, a powerful and moving experience. It was a great privilege to conduct. I thank you.

AKIN EUBA Thank you, Peter. Jonathan Paxman was in charge of the chorus and he also had to negotiate a few tricky elements.

JONATHAN PAXMAN I thought I would speak about what this piece is like vocally, both as a performer myself and with the chorus, especially working with the Yorùbá three-tone system that Professor Euba was talking about. It is very liberating to sing in this way, because everything is placed within your own voice. You are not restrained by placing particular semi-tones in precise locations and the result of that is something which can be a lot more powerful vocally. Negotiating the music with the chorus originally, it was very difficult for them to improvise in the way that’s required by the score. A chorus are used to singing Mozart or Handel and to having some notes on the page and an accompanist playing their lines. For instance, in Senghor’s poem “Man And Beast” at the opening of the Second Chant, the chorus are required to deliver all of this energy in the tones of their own register: “Claws of lightning, scribble their initials on his back of billowing clouds.” It was a tremendous experience to see the chorus coming to grips with this and in the final rehearsals and the performance really delivering the energy in the way that is allowed by this tone system. I think, both for myself and for the chorus, it was a privilege as well as a tremendous experience.

AKIN EUBA Anike saw this from a different perspective. His role was to behave like Chaka, to dramatize Chaka, without uttering a single word. So how did you face that?

NDUBUISI ANIKE Well, it was a very novel experience for me. I wish Keel Watson was here, he who sang Chaka. I would have loved to understand what he

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was feeling. The words: I listened to the words and reacted. I thought about who Chaka was and what he went through, being an African and growing up during the Western incursion into African society and the things that Chaka had to deal with as leader of his people. Coming to performance last night was my first experience working in opera or music theatre and it’s also the first time that I had to stay on stage and mime instead of talk, so I was experiencing two different new things in one performance and it was a hellish experience. [Laughter] I remember telling Peter when we got backstage that my ribs were so painful, standing erect, not having to say anything; maybe I’ll now have to apply to be one of the Queen’s Guards. But it was also a very liberating experience, being involved in something like this, a liberating and a learning experience.

ABIOLA IRELE I have a very personal take on Chaka because I was at the first performance in 1970 at the Ife Festival and Senghor is a particular specialization of mine. I have heard the version on disc. The word that sums it up for me is counterpoint. It sets off the Western and the African to play sometimes together, sometimes against each other. As somebody who grew up in a Yorùbá context – I am not ethnically Yorùbá but I grew up there – I was struck by the Yorùbáness of the piece. For example, the trumpet at one point was doing what we call in Yorùbá “cacaki.” This is the way in which the Yorùbá sound system has domiciled the Western instrument; it is not just the piano that has become an African instrument, but the trumpet too. We can’t think of high-life without the trumpet, particularly with the influence of Louis Armstrong. So I was getting all these elements. And there is also very strong Ghanaian influence. Akin Euba researched his PhD in Ghana, because he chose specifically to study with Professor Nketia. The adoa, for example, was a very prominent part of the music yesterday and of course the flute, the atenteben, which was invented by Ramon in Ghana. So there were all these elements working, and it was for me a tremendous experience to have heard the first version in 1970 and to come here and hear it again live, not just on disc, in Churchill College. Finally, I am very happy that he is now working on his new piece with Ifà texts. I remember when we were talking about this project, and the comparison we made was with

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Mahler’s “Song of the Earth” and of course Ifà is the song of the earth in the Yorùbá language.

Voice from Auditorium I’d also like to say congratulations. It was a very, very good production. I am particularly interested in the role of the chorus. I wanted somebody on the panel to address the symbolic use of the mass voice in the tragedy of Chaka. I wanted to know if the word of the masses, which seemed to echo actions rather than change them – if it was used solely on the basis of the musical element, the creativity of Yorùbá speech, or if there was some symbolic use of the chorus for the production?

OLUSOLA OYELEYE Obviously one of the major elements for Chaka was that he was able to bring together many different tribes by force or by consent to make up the Zulu nation, and so that sense of masses is quite an important one. The chorus represent both those people who were against what was happening and also the people that were being forced to come together or were coming together by consent. So there is that vast sense of masses, of different tribes in South Africa coming together. This is partly against a greater force again, which was the colonial influence that was about to come into that land. So the chorus are the pride of the Zulu nation, and also what happened through colonialization, which we then understand as apartheid. So there is a symbolic nature to the chorus in terms of their movement and their performance and in terms of the way that they sing.

DAVID ATTWELL I’m from the University of Natal, which adjoins KwaZulu, which is the place of origin of the story. You will have to forgive me for responding as a South African. I hope my responses don’t reflect too much the crudities of history but I can’t help bringing them up because that is the lens through which I look at some of this material. Let me say before I ask the questions that I do have to ask, that I thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle and the electricity of the event, it was truly wonderful and remarkable.

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My first question has to do with the choice of Senghor for the libretto. We have had references made to the history and the historiography of the rise of Chaka and so forth but if one looks at that history, Senghor’s take on it is actually quite peculiar. Perhaps that isn’t important; perhaps it is Senghor’s rather than other versions of the historical events that you wanted to produce here, and if that’s the case I would be happy to hear you say so. But there are two particular aspects of the Senghor version of the history that are perhaps remarkable. It is easy to forget that the rise of the Chakan state pre-dated the full incursion of British colonialism into KwaZulu. That’s the first quite significant point. So when we turn Chaka into a figure of anticolonial resistance, we are in fact indulging in a certain historical anachronism. Another point that’s related to that is that where the colonial perspective does have an influence on the historiography we have to recognize that this notion of Chaka as the blood-thirsty tyrant was something that was introduced into the travelogues and the journal writing of the early British mercantilists who were beginning to explore the region. I am talking about Nathaniel Isaacs and Henry Francis Fynn: they were responsible for propagating the idea of Chaka as a blood-thirsty tyrant. Now, it’s that version of the history that was picked up much later, of course, by Thomas Mofolo when he wrote the first novel written by an African in Southern Africa. He wrote this novel in Lesotho, under the influence of the French Protestant missionaries at that mission-station in Lesotho; that was the version of the history that he picked up. So, Mofolo was writing as a Lesotho and a Christian and that is why he produces this figure of tremendous moral ambivalence – and that is the version of events that Senghor has picked up. It’s pretty clear that Senghor’s source is Mofolo’s novel and one has to recognize, I think, that this implies that certain other perspectives have been left out of the story. What’s not evident, for example, is the oral history of KwaZulu itself: for example, the praise poetry that we do have of Chaka. A quite different version of events would have come out if Senghor had used that material, so I think that’s relevant to the question of the kind of perspective of Chaka that’s contained in Senghor’s poem. The other question that I have would be perhaps even more crude. However, if it is the case that Chaka has, as it were, been lent to West Africa to produce a particularly West African version of history and of a certain kind of moral drama, that is all well and good, obviously, and

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perhaps that’s also true of the music, but that’s the other question that I have. The one tradition that doesn’t seem to feature strongly in the music is the South African choral tradition, which is particularly melodic in fact but also, of course, rich and sonorous. Perhaps you would like to comment on the absence of that tradition, or to what extent it features or does not feature in your own musical language.

AKIN EUBA I’m pleased to hear comments from somebody who understands the history and the culture and other aspects of the Chaka personality. As a matter of fact, a number of the things you said are quite correct. I make absolutely no use of South African music. In fact, the brief introduction yesterday before the brass opened with their theme, that was Sola’s device. I allow directors to do what they want with the production and that was something she designed and brought a Zulu lady in to sing. But that was minimal. There’s certainly no lack of South African music and as you pointed out there is four-part singing, unaccompanied a-capella singing, which is very melodic and very interesting. In fact, after Paul Simon’s C D was made with the Ladysmith Black Mambazo group, it is what many people in the world know as South African music. Now, first of all, I have not studied South African music. I have studied Yorùbá music. I also am very deeply influenced by West African music, so what I try to use in my composition is basically what I know intimately, what I can do spontaneously. In the same way that Bartók would write a Hungarian folk song without reference to existing folk songs, so I use what I know. I’m now going to make an outrageous statement: I am not basically attracted by the Black Mambazo style of music; it doesn’t move me. If I were to use something merely as a cultural reference that does not actually inspire me, I would not be doing justice to my work. So I take artistic liberty by using an idiom that I know intimately, that I can speak in. I take artistic liberty, and I also claim that the Chaka story is relevant to Africa in general. Chaka tried to build an empire comprising a number of small nations, and today we are trying to create a kind of pan-African speech, so that for me whether or not I use the Zulu music or the South African idiom is not very important. But then, other composers would deal with this in a different way. For instance, there is the South African, Mzilikazi Khumalo – he used to be a professor of linguistics – whose musical epic Ushaka came

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out on C D in 1996; this is undoubtedly more historically authentic than my version, but the two can be seen as enriching the general tradition of modern African art music. Now, secondly, Senghor’s interpretation is based on Thomas Mofolo's interpretation in his Chaka, published by Heinemann in Daniel Kunene's translation in 1981, and Mofolo, being a Christian and influenced by the missionaries, was bound to moralize on Chaka. In fact, Daniel Kunene, the most recent translator of Mofolo’s work, says in the introduction that Mofolo was not always true to the history, that he made a number of alterations or errors. Mofolo claimed that Chaka killed his mother and that was not true. Kunene showed that, in fact, Chaka’s mother died of natural causes and that he had travelled to be with his mother when she died and had commanded one of his European friends to make her well, though in the event she couldn’t be saved. So there are a number of inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the Mofolo version. We also have to remember that much of Chaka is, as you said, seen from Senghor’s point of view: Senghor, a good catholic; Senghor, an African politician; Senghor, one of the leaders of Négritude. Hence a number of things that he said in Chaka are based on his being a Catholic, on his being an African politician and on his being one of the leaders of Négritude. The negritude shows, for instance, in the way he constantly refers to blackness, so that there’s no doubt that Senghor’s is a definite kind of view of Chaka. Now, why should I decide to pick this particular interpretation as the work that I was sent to rather than look for more historically authentic interpretations? When I first read Senghor’s poem I was fascinated by it. The words are so sonorous, even in the English translation. I must admit, too, that there are so many lines that I don’t understand: “Oh my father says, Oh my mother the back of the rought” – God knows what that means. [Laughter] But the sonority of that text inspired something in me. If confronted with a libretto that was more historically authentic, I might not have had the same reaction. I’d like to refer to Abiola’s comment on the trumpet. Sometimes some of the best moments in an artistic work happen as a result of something accidental. Normally the chanter would lead this song: [Sings]. Now, why did I give that particular theme to the trumpet? In the finale, why is it that the trumpet is the one that leads? The reason is that the chanter for this kind of work has to be somebody fluent in Yorùbá, so in the first production we looked for somebody who was

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fluent in Yorùbá, and because she had never chanted before I trained her to chant and taught her how the chanters behave. Now, this lady didn’t read music and she was not in a culture where you give a tone and it can be picked up, where you give ‘C’ and the singers know the note ‘C’. When she sang this chant in the other parts of the opera, she did not have to relate to Western tonality, because she was accompanied only by the drums. But in the finale, she was being accompanied not only by the drums but by the full ensemble, so that she had to be in tune with the full ensemble. The only way to give a clue to the pitch was to let an instrument actually sing the first phrase. [Sings] But even with this aid the lady who chanted that part in Ife didn’t get it. But then, in retrospect, after having designed it, I thought, “Oh, that sounds traditional – the trumpet backing the singer, that is traditional.” So I found that I had done something without meaning to do it, purely as a technique for solving a problem; and there it was, something that was very catchy – I liked it. Thank you very much.

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Sixth Dialogue: The Power of the Prize M ARIKA H EDIN AND A NTHONY K WAME A PPIAH , WITH G EORGE S TEINER

A T O Q U A Y S O N (C H A I R )

I

T’S MY VERY GREAT PLEASURE

to introduce the panellists. On my right is Professor Anthony Kwame Appiah, who is listed in the programme as Ghana and Boston. He is really a professor of philosophy at Harvard and a very well known cultural commentator. On my left is Marika Hedin, of the Nobel Musem in Stockholm. And George Steiner, who is listed here as “Cambridge,” but who is a citizen of the world. This panel will be conducted in English, but the two middle speakers both speak French, so at question time they are happy to take questions in both English and in French – indeed, Professor Steiner assures me that all his best jokes are in French. [Laughter]

MARIKA HEDIN I know very little of African cultures and literature, so this conference has been a learning experience for me, but I do know a little bit more about the Nobel Prize, which is why I am here. The background of the Nobel Prize for Literature is this. In 1896 the dynamite king, Alfred Nobel, died. He left some 250 million dollars in today’s money-value and he wanted this money to be invested in a

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fund and the interest to go to five prizes. I will quote now from his will. He wrote: “The prizes should go to those who have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” The Prize in literature should go to “The person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” He ended his will by saying: “It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates but that the most worthy shall receive the Prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.” Alfred Nobel also said that he wanted the Swedish Academy in Stockholm to be the institution to award the Prize. The Academy was then over a century old and at that time consisted of a conservative group. The number of members is set at eighteen and once you are elected into the Academy you are there for life. During the nineteenth century the Academy had evolved into becoming the official institution to take care of the Swedish language and also to support Swedish authors with scholarships and stipends. But at the time that Alfred Nobel died they were at odds with most of the radical authors in Sweden at the time, Strindberg, for example. So this conservative group were given all this money to give away to foreigners and not all of them were happy with this. One said that they didn’t want the Academy to turn into a cosmopolitan tribunal of literature. But they had a far-sighted and visionary secretary at the time and he saw this for the opportunity that it could be. The provisions of the will said that if the Academy gave out a Prize then they would be reimbursed for whatever they had expended in preparations, and the secretary saw that this was a way for the Academy to gain financial funding. If you look at how the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded you can see that there is a shift around World War II. One of the present Academy members has written a short history of the years leading up to World War II and according to this account you can see four phases in the criteria used in the pre-World War II era. The first ten years or so were an attempt at interpreting those words in Alfred Nobel’s will: “in an ideal direction.” Since the Academy was quite conservative, they interpreted this to be a kind of lofty and sound idealism. This meant that they could award the Prize to someone like Rudyard Kipling, for example, but not Émile Zola, because he wasn’t regarded as lofty and sound.

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Then, during World War I, Sweden, as well as the other Scandinavian countries, was neutral, and so this became an era of prizes to neutral, small countries, meaning Scandinavian countries. Quite a few Scandinavian writers got the Prize during World War I. Next, in the 1920s, it was a return to trying to interpret this “ideal direction,” but the Academy went a little further. They were still out of touch with much of what was happening in contemporary literature but, for example, they could award the Prize to Thomas Mann, who had been discussed previously but rejected. However, when they awarded it to him, it was not for his more recent works but for books like Buddenbrooks, which he had written before the war. In the 1930s there was another re-direction of the Nobel Prize. Now the Swedish Academy were more interested in the other provision in the will, the “greatest benefit to mankind,” and they interpreted this in the 1930s as meaning authors with a large number of readers, so that’s why almost no poets got the Prize. It went instead to people like Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck, who is generally considered now to be an author who wasn’t worthy of the Prize, but she had a lot of readers. During World War II there was a gap; the Prize wasn’t given, and the money was saved. After World War II you can see how the Prize begins to evolve in a new direction. There are three main criteria of how the Academy has reasoned. Now, you have to remember that a lot of this reasoning is still hidden from most of us, because the information in the archive of the Swedish Academy concerning the Nobel Prizes is kept secret for fifty years. So it is difficult to validate what this member of the Academy has written. However, he sees three criteria, which can alternate or coincide, so that some authors can be seen as representing only one, some two or more of these criteria. The first is the criterion of the pioneer – people who in various ways have renewed literature, have tried new ways. For example, Herman Hesse, who starts this new trend with a Prize in 1946, had been rejected previously on the grounds of ethical anarchy, but now he was considered a just candidate because he was a pioneer within his field. Other authors who got the Prize on this ground are T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Saint–John Perse. After a while this criterion also started to mean pioneers who were pioneers within a specific language. The Prize to Naguib Mahfouz would be an example of such a Prize, because he is the creator of the modern Arabic novel, and al-

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though his novelistic style may not be new in the Western tradition, it’s completely new in Arabic, so he becomes one of those pioneers. The second criterion started later, in the mid-1970s, and is something that the Nobel committee in the Swedish Academy have been criticized for, that is, calling attention to unknown masters in an attempt to bring to the world’s notice masterpieces that would otherwise be ignored. We have a lot of jokes in Sweden about the Nobel Prize winners in literature that no one has ever heard of. This is also a new way of interpreting the clause on the “benefit of mankind” by trying to bring new authors to mankind. It, of course, also means that more poets get the Prize, because they usually don’t have a large readership – writers like Odysseus Thelitis, Jaroslav Seifert, poets like Derek Walcott, Octavio Paz, they would fall into this second category. An early version might even be considered Rabindranath Tagore, who got the Prize in 1913. But that was under very exceptional conditions and it was through his English writings and through English advocates of him as an author. I went to the Swedish Academy to read what they had written about him and one of the comments was that his writing was so good because it lacked the absurd turgidity of other authors from his country, so he got the Prize only because he wasn’t too Indian! [Laughter] The third and final criterion then of the post-World War II Nobel Prizes in Literature is the aim to include literature from the whole world. This is fairly late; it’s only in the mid-1980s that the Swedish Academy decided that it was going to make an effort to get in touch with authors from the whole world, not only authors that they already knew of. The Academy has justly been criticized for making the Nobel Prize for Literature a European affair. You can see this in the case of some of the prizes earlier, such as the award to Yasunari Kawabata in 1968. He had been a major Japanese writer since the 1920s but the Academy found it very difficult to make the award; it took seven years and four international experts before they dared to award him the Prize. But from the 1980s onwards this internationalism is an expressed intention, and you can see Wole Soyinka’s Prize in 1986 as a starting-point for this third criterion. The Swedish Academy is always very eager to point out that the Prize is not given to a specific country or a specific language but to an author. Now, there are three ways to exclude yourself from ever receiving the Nobel Prize. [Laughter] These are to nominate yourself, so

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there’s no point in that; to become a statesman, and quite a few famous authors have also been statesmen and so haven’t been able to receive the Prize; and to die. Only one Prize has been given posthumously. This has been a principle, so some great personalities and authors and others haven’t got the Prize, because they died before they could be given it. Out of the ninety-six Prizes so far awarded, five come from Africa or the Caribbean. I counted them this morning. They are Saint–John Perse, who was born in the Caribbean, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Naguib Mahfouz and Nadine Gordimer. That’s not a very large percentage. Even if you take seriously the Academy’s claim of not giving the Prize to a nationality or a language, it seems rather meagre. One of the Academy members has written an essay about these difficulties (and also the possibilities) that the Academy have in trying to assess authors from different literary cultures. One of the points he makes in the essay is that what he calls originality and subjective artistic expression exclude some literary traditions which do not value these aspects highly, so immediately the Nobel Prize for Literature is focused on a certain type of authorship. He also quotes an author from Ghana, Ayi Kwei Armah, who said that no European writer should ever be allowed to write on African writing because there will be an unfair meeting between the different cultures. The European writer would have all these European traditions and not be able to assess the African writing justly. And although most of the Academy members are quite prominent experts in literature and well-known authors who have often translated works, they are also readers, and for a reader to read a book and to appreciate it, he or she tends to search for a mirror, something to identify with and recognize. This is inevitably a hindrance if you approach literature where you think you won’t find that, whereas it might be merely that you are reading through a cultural veil. Another point that this Academy member makes is that good books and good authors often require an effort; they’re not easily accessible; you have to read hard and think and even do your homework. Anyone who has read Marcel Proust knows that if you can take the time and concentration then you have a really big reading experience. But when you approach an author from a different culture, it might be difficult to know where to begin doing your homework, so this might also be a hindrance for the members of the Academy. As I’ve explained, the Academy tries to give the award to authors who are pioneers or who have

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renewed literary traditions. But if you know very little of a literary tradition it’s difficult to know when someone is actually rejuvenating that literary tradition, so that’s another problem for the members of the Swedish Academy. Mahfouz is a case in point, where the Academy managed to see that this was a pioneering author. This same Academy member also says that a really good book is a book that makes the reader sit up in his café chair and think, or one that touches you. That also is very difficult if you’re approaching an author from a different culture. The distance between the reader and the author could lead the reader to think that the book showed lack of psychological insight or a childish view on psychology when in fact making distinct characters was not the point of the book. Being a reader from a tradition where this psychological insight is important might pose a big problem. These are some of the problems that the Swedish Academy is facing, and I think that this essay by the Academy member is a start towards addressing them. The Nobel Prize may not be a fair prize, a just prize – it never has been – but at least creating awareness of these problems begins to minimize them. I think that that is something that’s fairly late in coming but that the Swedish Academy today are aware of themselves as rooted in one literary culture. Another measure that they are increasingly using are special translations and this is, of course, possible because of the enormous amount of money that they get every time that they give out a Nobel Prize. So they have started to commission more and more translations from various languages exclusively for the eighteen members of the Academy. During the 1970s and 80s they also had more and more used experts who work under oath for them. So hopefully in the next century of Nobel Prizes we can see a prize that is awarded to great works of literature, whether the author is Scandinavian, European or whatever. [Applause]

GEORGE STEINER [George Steiner gave a talk specifically intended as not for publication, but we can record that his best joke was indeed in French. In his talk, Steiner argued that political and even private considerations (the Nobel committee with its own interests) have often devalued the Prize in literature. A list which overlooks or omits Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Borges, René Char, Paul Celan in favour of almost

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ephemeral but officiously favoured candidates hardly inspires confidence. The contrast with the sciences is glaring.]

ANTHONY KWAME APPIAH Abiola Irele asked if I minded speaking after George Steiner and foolishly I said I didn’t. [Laughter] Yesterday we were privileged to hear a discussion of a Chinese painting, and the painting, you’ll recall, included a poem. I don’t know any Chinese but the translation of the poem was like many translations of Chinese poems that I am sure we’ve all read. It was a series of words describing a landscape rather simply. I don’t remember exactly how it went but it must have been something like this: Mountains in the mist of morning Forests on the slopes Around it all a river.

The connection between these words and the image was intimate. They are an artwork together – either, on its own, would be less than they are as a unity. And this is true in another way as well; the calligraphy of the poem is part of the poem’s existence. The poem is not defined by its sound alone. It has also a look. And the look is not just a matter of the elegance of handwriting; it is a matter too of the choice of characters and their relations with one another. So at least I believe, on the basis of having heard the occasional lecture on Chinese poetry. When Chairman Mao’s poems were published in English translation – I think that was when I was a student at this university – some of the original poems in Mao’s own calligraphy were included in the edition I read, in part, I suppose, for this reason. The result is that a classical Chinese poem is essentially untranslatable. Indeed, if we use the word ‘poem’ strictly, the artwork is not a poem at all. The aesthetic norms by which it is to be evaluated include the calligraphy and the visual character of the writing. Someone who remarked on the beauty of Shakespeare’s handwriting in a certain sonnet would be making an aesthetic evaluation, but it would not be an evaluation of the poem. Now, I should make it plain that I know that the idea of a perfect translation is a chimera; for a literary translation aims at producing a

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text whose relation both to the literary and to the linguistic conventions of the culture of the translation is, relevantly, like the relations of the object-text to its own cultural conventions. A precise set of parallels is always impossible, just because the chances that the metrical and other formal features of a work can be reproduced while preserving identity of literal and non-literal, direct and indirect meaning, are vanishingly small. And in fact, as we know, we may choose, rightly, to translate a term in a way which is unfaithful to the literal meaning, because we are trying to preserve formal features that seem more crucial. But even if we did not have to make such choices, even if we could, per impossibile, meet all the constraints of the meanings of the words and all the literary conventions, we would not have produced the perfect translation: because we could do better, we could aim to reproduce literary qualities of the object-text that are not a matter of the conventions, that have to do with its relations to other texts, to the social experience of the culture and so on. So the reason why we cannot speak of the perfect translation is not that there is a definite set of desiderata and we know that they cannot all be met; it is, rather, that there is no definite set of desiderata. A translation aims to produce a new text that matters to one community the way another text matters to another; but it is part of our understanding of why texts matter that this isn’t a question that’s settled by convention; indeed, it is part of our understanding of literary judgement that there can always be new readings, new things that matter about a text, new reasons for caring about new properties. All this conceded, it is still the case that the obstacles to translating a classical Chinese poem are, as a practical matter, so immense because there is no practice in our society in which the visual, semantic and formal features of a piece of writing matter together in the ways in which they matter in a Chinese poem. What does all this have to do with the Nobel Prize? Well, over the last generation or so, ambitious Chinese poets, influenced by many factors internal to the history of poetry and society in China, no doubt, but also in part by a knowledge of poetry outside China and, perhaps, by a desire for a readership beyond the Middle Kingdom, have started to write poems that are more translatable. They are writing poems, increasingly, where the meaning matters more and the form and the calligraphy, the look of the thing in Chinese, matters less. And the Chinese

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poets we know today outside China are increasingly those whose work is, in this way, accessible to us. The first modern Chinese poet to get a Nobel Prize, I guess, will be a translatable poet. So, at any rate, I gathered from hearing a lecture some years ago by a distinguished American student of Chinese poetry, who spent many years learning to appreciate the relations between calligraphy, script and meaning in classical Chinese poetry, and was now faced with new poems that it was just easier to explain to his non-Chinese-speaking students. He wasn’t complaining; and nor am I. The history of literature is full of such transitions, but what is interesting about this one is that it is like many such transitions in the literatures of many parts of the world today. It is a response to something that we might call globalization, if that word hadn’t already been taken up to mean the processes associated with the free movement of capital. So let me instead use older language and call these changes the growth of cosmopolitan reading and writing, the increasing existence of an international community of literary folk who read the literatures of a few lands in their original tongues, but who read many other literatures in translation. Many people in this room, I am sure, have read García Márquez and Oe and Fagunwa and Sartre and Brecht in translation; some will have read Senghor and Laye and The Laughing Cry in English; some may even have read Soyinka in a language other than English, since not everybody in this room reads English as easily as they read Swedish or French. What I am calling cosmopolitan reading presupposes a world in which novels and poems travel between places where they are, inevitably, understood differently, because people are different and welcome to their difference. Cosmopolitan reading is worthwhile because there can be common conversations about these shared travelling objects, the novel prominent among them. And cosmopolitan reading is possible because these conversations are possible. But what makes the conversations possible is not always shared culture (though, if the word ‘culture’ is to be kept for anything, there will no doubt be shared cultures, and conversations based on them); not even, as the older humanists imagined, universal principles or values (though sometimes people from different places can discover that their principles do meet); nor shared understandings (though sometimes people with very different experiences end up agreeing on the darndest things). What is necessary

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to read novels across gaps of space, time and experience is a capacity to follow a narrative and conjure a world; and that, it turns out, there are people everywhere more than willing to do. The increasing significance of the Nobel Literature Prize outside Scandinavia is, for me, one of many signs of the increasing existence of cosmopolitan readers around the world. We should not exaggerate the significance of this phenomenon. I am told by my publishing friends that there are about 100,000 people in the U S A who read serious fiction. (This does not include all the students who read set books at school and college and then never read a word of literary fiction for the rest of their lives.) But I myself am happy that there is now a world in which García Márquez and Soyinka and Mahfouz and Gordimer and Oe are known to some of the same people. It enriches our experience and expands the meaning of literature for our lives. It is also an extension of a very old literary phenomenon, which is the interaction of literary traditions in different languages: China and Japan, as we were reminded yesterday, Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy and England. Shakespeare’s sonnet form came from Italy and he took some of his plots from Latin texts. In Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, a character the author calls only an “old French officer” insists at one point that, and I’m quoting from this famous English novel: Le pour et le contre se trouvent en chaque nation: there is a balance, said he, of good and bad every where; and nothing but the knowing it is so can emancipate one half of the world from the prepossessions which it holds against the other – that the advantage of travel, as it regarded the sçavoir vivre, was by seeing a great deal both of men and manners; it taught us mutual toleration; and mutual toleration, concluded he, making me a bow, taught us mutual love.

A Sentimental Journey is about the travels of an Englishman in France in the period when the two countries were at war. It is the classic English novel that assumes readers who understand French. But it also assumes that, whatever separates us in politics, there is a place in literature for mutual understanding. Contemporary cosmopolitan reading practices are often undergirded by the instinct of the French officer. We travel in books to learn “mutual toleration,” even the sympathy and concern for

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others – the caritas (if I may permit my theological upbringing to show through for a moment) that Sterne must have meant by the word ‘love’. If the Nobel Prize has more significance than it is entitled to in the world of cosmopolitan reading, that significance is nevertheless a reflection of the existence of this small but engaged cosmopolitan readership. And rather than disagreeing with the choices of the committee – the very idea of trying to rank writers within hundreds of traditions and then trying to rank them across those traditions is, of course, quite crazy – I think we should remind ourselves of the changes in the world that have made it possible for people from five continents in scores of languages to be read, productively, together. [Applause]

ATO QUAYSON Thank you for three very stimulating meditations. I teach literature and I love it a lot. I love teaching, and when I was thinking about this panel, my mind went back to an Irish teacher we had in secondary school who was called Patrick Lavell. Now, Patrick Lavell banned us from consulting the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, for the reason that he had attended school with – A.S. Hornby, I think it was, the editor – and he was brighter than Hornby at school. [Laughter] He was a fantastic teacher. He introduced us to Chaucer in Chaucerian English – it was magical. But when he came to teaching African literary texts, when he came into the classroom he often held the text as if it was something disgusting, though he’d proceed to treat it very thoroughly. Now, at that time we didn’t recognize what he was doing as racism or prejudice. We just thought he was mad. [Laughter] So to us it was a laughable matter that we always waited for. It would be very good if we could equate prejudice and racism with madness, except that in reality they are much more deep and disturbing. But I am very happy to see that there are people who read not just to get access to the thinking of other cultures but just out of the curiosity of it. It is curiosity that drives us on. Now let me shut up and invite questions in any languages, including Twi, which is mine. [Applause]

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ABIOLA IRELE This question is really directed to Marika Hedin. Several years ago Lilyan Kesteloot organized some kind of campaign so that Aimé Césaire could be given the Prize, and we were told later on that this was a terrible mistake, that you don’t organize on behalf of particular individuals. So when Professor Steiner tells us these stories I wonder what went wrong on that particular occasion, because if any poet, in my view, deserved the Nobel Prize it’s Aimé Césaire. Of course, you have touched on one condition, and that was that he was in politics. But he had left politics for some time. Senghor also retired from politics – in 1970, I think it was – but I don’t see that that condition really should have prevented the Nobel committee from considering Aimé Césaire. Now, what this boils down to is that some of us have ideas about who should get the Nobel Prize, the committee has its own ideas, and there are of course other factors working. The Nobel Prize is not necessarily a democratic thing, but is the Nobel Committee doing anything to extend its consultations so that they get a fairer sense of what is out there that is, as they say in French, ‘nobelisable’?

MARIKA HEDIN I’ll attempt an answer. The kind of stories that Professor Steiner tells us are in the Swedish newspapers every year when the Nobel Prizes are being announced and I feel it’s not my job to judge whether they are true or not. But I can tell you how the nomination process works. As for all of the Nobel Prizes, which I think is a good part of the Nobel system, a number of people and institutions world-wide are allowed to nominate for a Nobel Prize in Literature. This group nowadays includes all former literature Laureates, a number of academies and institutions and author organizations all over the world, and also a group of university professors whose composition varies in a rolling scheme. Each year these past ten years the academy has received about two hundred nominations for the Prize in Literature. Once the nominations are in, they themselves are allowed to nominate, so they, of course, can influence the outcome. They then start trimming the long list down. Nominations should be in by February, and by the end of April every year they are supposed to have a long shortlist of fifteen to twenty candidates. By the end of May they will have discussed this list

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down to five; and then they take their summer holiday and all of the eighteen members read until mid-September. You might argue that it’s a short time to have only a few summer months to read up on five authors, but then you have the added condition that it has been the custom never to give the prize to someone the first year that they’re nominated, so several of these people on the shortlist will have been in the discussions for a number of years and they will already be well-read on them. This custom is because of second thoughts about several prizes, among them the prize to Pearl S. Buck. As for the political criterion, I think that the Academy learned a lesson from giving Winston Churchill the Prize in literature, because that was too close to the war; that was a very debated Prize. Since then it’s been a policy not to give it to statesmen.

MARY JACOBUS I feel rather bold speaking in this group on a subject I know very little about, but I couldn’t help thinking about Toni Morrison and the whole question about Morrison’s status as an African American and as a woman. I want to say that the last time I was in a room with Toni Morrison she spoke about voter registration and she spoke about herself as somebody who had organized with other people to get African-American people in America to vote. That was a highly political campaign to which she gave herself as a writer and I want just to correct the impression that someone like Toni Morrison might only have been interested in the Nobel Prize as herself, because her symbolic status in America, really, one can hardly summarize under the heading of a literary prize. That is, she has managed to bring black students and white students together in classrooms to read her books. So I think there is a way in which the Nobel Prize winner has to be seen as political, and is rightly seen as political, by certain people who represent very much more than their own literature or their publishers. So I just want to interject that, and perhaps to say that if one throws the cosmopolitanism of the world open also to people in countries like America, where it’s by no means clear what Africa means, what even the Nobel Prize means, one might come at this discussion in a slightly different way.

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ATO QUAYSON It’s the same position that Wole Soyinka occupies for most Africans. He’s a very political person without holding any political position. When he won the Nobel, I was at university in Ghana. When it was announced, we all ran out spontaneously, we were jubilant, we were running all over the place, we were so happy; and after that we went to the pubs to drink. We were in Ghana but we didn’t care that he was Nigerian – he was an African, and, not only that, he was a radical figure. Many of the people who were celebrating the Prize had not read his work, but there were zillions of anecdotes, completely apocryphal, many of them false, but they’re recycled so he becomes a legendary figure. And the anecdotes are mainly to do with his politics, so that when he won the Prize most people, at least in Ghana, were pleased that they had given him the Prize, because it would allow him a platform to be even more political than he was before.

GEORGE STEINER Great literature is a very dangerous business. It does not give a damn for justice, for good or evil. I’m sorry: great literature lives beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche said. Bringing black and white students together in America is an immensely important fact and might deserve the Peace Prize, not the quality of the books. Shortly before his death, in sombre bitterness Sartre said, “God damn it, do you know who alone of all of us will endure? Céline.” He was totally right; Céline and Proust divide the French language between them, perhaps European literature. Céline was a swine beyond anything one can say; alas, alas, Voyage au bout de la nuit will be a masterpiece as long as human beings know what a book is. Literature is a very tricky business; it’s not a Prize for being nice, not a Prize for bringing people together; on the contrary. And that’s surely why, to say it again, the extreme fallibility of the Nobel in Literature is a wonderful thing. It keeps reminding us of what we’re dealing with. Something you can’t rank, something that is not on the stock market of fluctuating values. Last, a little example (probably God is Kafka – which is a very bad business). There was a minor Elizabethan poet, Thomas Nashe, you know about him because he seems to have been jealous of Shakespeare, and why not? And he was translating Villon – I come back to Tony Appiah’s lovely points on translation – he was translating “La

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ballade des dames d’antan” and he translates very nicely a line: that a lady is getting old, her hair is getting grey, the brightness falls from her hair – very nice. A printer – a printer! – makes a mistake. “Brightness falls from the air” – a line which will sing in the human language and memory as long as we speak on this earth. “Brightness falls from the air.” It’s so unfair; every night I pray for a printing error like that. [Laughter and applause]

ANTHONY KWAME APPIAH It’s the job of philosophers to cavil, so let me cavil. I think that it’s one thing to agree that literary evaluation and moral and political values are clearly different; I think that it’s another thing to say that literature doesn’t care about other forms of value at all. There are no texts we value purely because they say good things, but there are surely many texts we value that do say things of moral importance and that we value in part, and rightly, because of the morally important things they say. That’s true of at least some of Toni Morrison’s writing. I happen to be one of those rare people who genuinely admire her writing, but I think part of what I admire in it is that it’s struggling with morally serious questions. That by itself wouldn’t make it great literature. What makes it great literature is that it struggles with them at the same time as struggling with language and with literary traditions and with relations to other texts and a whole bunch of other things. So I think I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s got nothing to do with it. I myself am too moralistic a person to be able fully to enjoy certain writers whose prose I admire, because the prose is wicked – I mean, morally wicked. This is one of the reasons why I, again, am one of the few people in the world who cannot read certain passages in Naipaul. I admire his command of English prose, but occasionally he’s saying things that in context are so much on the side of misunderstanding and hatred and contempt that my admiration for the prose collapses and I cease being able to read. So I find in the actual experience of reading that the ethical and the aesthetic may struggle for my attention in certain ways; so I wouldn’t want to separate them too absolutely.

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MARIKA HEDIN If I were a member of the Nobel Committee for Literature I would probably reply to Mary Jacobus that the Prize, at least today, is given purely on literary qualifications, whatever that means. It might have political implications, but that’s not for the Nobel committee to decide on; they just judge the literary qualifications. That’s what they would say.

GEORGE STEINER Please, please be careful. Solokov was already known to have plagiarized Quiet Flows the Don but Stalin was pressing for that nomination – and how! – and dear old Solokov got it. So you can’t generalize. Everything you say is true and of good hope, and the sooner you get on the committee the better. [Laughter]

T I D J A N I –S E R P O S My first question is for my sister, who is a would-be member of that committee. [Laughter] When you take the World-Heritage list you discover that Africa has only four per cent of the cultural sites on the list. That four per cent started from 1960, which means that politically, because we became independent, suddenly they have to quickly put some sites in Africa on the list. So maybe when we come to the Nobel Prize we should ask ourselves some questions. You say that it is only the literary value, but then, why does 1960 become the moment when we started having literary values? Somehow Prof. Steiner is wrong, because we should fight to have world prizes in Asia, in Africa, in the Caribbean and so on. That’s what Houphouët–Boigny did by putting forty million dollars in U N E S C O for the Prix de la Culture et de la Paix. We should have more and more people who set up world prizes and that will help to balance it up, it will help to recognize the people whom other prizes don’t want to recognize. I wanted also to know why when you get the Prix Goncourt or when you get other prizes you are more or less dead for the Nobel Prize. Is there any link? Is it part of the criteria that if I am a Goncourt then I have a ninety-per-cent chance of not being a Nobel? And the last point I want to raise is that the only really good thing I found in the Nobel Prize is that it gives protection. I remember that when President Abacha was after Professor Wole Soyinka the

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Nobel Prize helped a lot to protect him; they knew very well that if they touched him they were in trouble; while at the same time an organization like U N E S C O gave diplomatic protection. The other advantage that the Prize gives, and the Prof. talked about it, is that it gives you the right to talk about anything you like; whatever you utter is good. [Laughter] So don’t forget me: I’m ready. [Laughter and applause]

MARIKA HEDIN I’ll remember you when I get on the committee, I promise. I just wanted to say, about being excluded from the Nobel Prize: if you have received other awards those are not part of the process of selection, so it shouldn’t be a hindrance at all.

GEORGE STEINER I think the point about protection is very important and it remains a horrible fact that only the Nazis beat a Nobel Prize winner to death. They beat Carl von Ossietzky to death after his Nobel and it took the Nazis to do that. As you know, Pasternak was in great danger, but it may have saved him even at that point. But I couldn’t agree with you more: for people who are hunted or in great danger, it is an important Nansen passport.

ATO QUAYSON Except that in Wole Soyinka’s case, actually, his Nobel did not really save him, it was his legs and his wits that saved him. [Laughter] He was going to be killed if they had laid hands on him. Abacha was a Nazi. Forget about the Nobel, Abacha was going to kill him. But once he stepped out of the country then the Nobel kicked in.

DURO ONI As this is the last session, I thought if I didn’t get a chance to say what I wanted to say now then I would have to hold my peace forever. I am Director of the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation in Lagos. I’d like to thank the organizers for very stimulating dialogues. My contribution and intervention is centred on the future of black and African literature. My concern has been prompted by the manner in

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which the listing of the participants has been made. Some comments have already been made about this. The listing says “Niyi Osundare: Nigeria and New Orleans” and “Lorna Goodison: Jamaica and Canada” and “Wole Soyinka: Nigeria and Atlanta” and so on. Now, this is for me something rather disturbingly akin to professional football parlance: “Fashenu: Arsenal and Nigeria,” “Cole: Manchester and Somewhere.” Now, if the writer’s inspiration comes from within and also from their environment, what is the future of literature as far as these writers are concerned? Will Niyi Osundare be writing of the bridge in South London and not about the yams in his father’s farms? The reasons for the apparent brain-drain that we are witnessing are quite complex. Some have been forced out, like Soyinka, while others have forced themselves out, for several reasons, not unconnected with economic considerations. So the question to ask here is: is the Western literary tradition being enhanced at the expense of other cultures? Are our writers perhaps wanting to get closer to the demands of the West? I am not here referring particularly to the Nobel Prize. Are they uprooting themselves from their cultures in order to be closer to a wider readership, and how is the literature of the black and African going to be enhanced by this current trend? Of course, there are exceptions. Femi Osofisan is still listed as in Nigeria. At least we still have people like him who are resident at home. But what about the others? When are they coming home?

OLABIYI YAÏ Je voulais d’abord remercier les trois intervenants ainsi que le président. C’etait très enrichissant et je crois que n’est-ce que pour cela, mais pour d’autres raisons aussi, cet conférence “valait le coup” – pour répéter ce que vous avez dit [Laughter] – bien qu’il n’y ai pas eu un coup. I take my point of departure from Tony and I thank you for taking us back to the Chinese poetry and this notion of compositional reading. I link that with the kind of debate which took place between you and Professor Steiner, and my question, then, is: is there any debate in Sweden about something which can be called cosmopolitan or plural or differential literariness? I think both of you will agree that literariness should be the first criterion for selecting. Now, is there any debate among those who select to agree on something that could be called cosmopolitan literariness?

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MARIKA HEDIN That’s a very good question, because it’s something I have had occasion to think about during these past few days. I think that you can characterize Sweden and the intellectual debate in Sweden as quite provincial in a sense. It’s a small country in the north of Europe and it’s also a country that has been quite isolated culturally for a long time, so probably the Swedish Academy is, shall we say, less in tune maybe with discussions on cosmopolitan literature than an Academy would be in the U S A . Having said that, the eighteen people, minus the ones that don’t sit there anymore because of the Rushdie affair, these people sitting in the Academy now are, I think, quite well-read and at the forefront of this discussion of what a cosmopolitan literature tradition could be. They are quite linguistically able too, reading Chinese and Russian and Spanish and the bigger languages, and so, both yes and no: Sweden is more provincial, less at the forefront as a country, but I think that within Sweden we have a good selection of people with good ambitions, at least at the moment.

GEORGE STEINER Forgive me if I find the very expression “cosmopolitan literature” extremely problematic (to be very courteous). The Anglo-American esperanto is spreading across the globe at such speed that the present U N E S C O estimate is that three-fifths of the Earth speak it as a first or second language, as you know. What very few laymen realize is that every time you use a computer you are speaking Anglo-American, the language of Boole, Shannon and Turing: the logic is a specific Anglo-American formation, etc. The struggle for languages to stay alive is becoming desperate. Now, quite innocently – we all do it – you just used the word a “small” language. There is no such thing on this earth. There are languages in the Kalahari which have 28 subjunctives; that is 26 more than Aristotle had. There is no small language. Every language is a unique window on creation, on being, on the possibility of reading the world and ourselves. It is in one of those remote languages that right now or yesterday or tomorrow the great masterpiece can come – or already exists, which is very worrying indeed. In Israel, in Holland, in Norway there are immensely gifted writers who, in order to earn a living, translate Anglo-American blockbusters and best-sellers into their

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languages, knowing those books will drive out their own from the shop window and from the library shelf. I don’t have any shadow of an answer to this problem. In a sense, one is shamed in coming to visit such a colloquium by one’s ignorance of your languages and shamed by what you have achieved by speaking ours. And they’re not your language, French or English, and they never will be; sorry. Dying, Valèry was told that basic English could be learned in twenty hours; he was happy to say that French can’t be learned in twenty thousand, and that ironic word is deeply true. Languages are ways of breathing, of living, of remembering, they involve every inch of our body, mind; and the danger is indeed a uniformization in which people will write in order to be translated, as Tony Appiah interestingly pointed out in the Chinese case. Already publishers ask of novelists in minority languages: “Can you see a market?” – an Anglo-American market, of course, with all the distortions that that brings, with all the bending out of shape. Possibly one suggestion – all of us have suggestions, and why meet otherwise – would be to create awards not only for translation, which as you know has finally become much more help, but for non-translation: helping writers to create in their own difficult minority language. This is urgently needed. My predecessor on the New Yorker, Edmund Wilson, already very ill, studied with a teacher up to five hours a day to the day of his death that very difficult language, Hungarian, because he was sick and tired of having people tell him that Sándor Petőfi and Attila Jószef were as great as Pushkin, as great as Byron, as great as Keats. He had to find out for himself. Ideally, that is the responsible way of loving great poetry. Immensely difficult; none of us has enough time, I know, but be on your guard: the more standardization determines what publishers want, what adaptations to film, television, theatre, radio want and what the book fair in Frankfurt will put on its stands, the more dangerous the situation of literature; and it’s very late in the day, please believe me.

ANTHONY KWAME APPIAH On the diaspora question: on the one hand, clearly it’s not just a loss for literature. Societies need their resident intelligentsia for many purposes and the stronger and richer they are I think the better for their societies, so we have to worry about that as a general phenomenon. On the other hand, in my famously Pollyanna-ish way, I should like to point out that

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this diaspora has been enormously enriching for the rest of the world. A great deal has been gained by the openness of American universities to writers and intellectuals from Africa and other parts of the world, both for young people who study in them and for American colleagues. The upside there seems mainly to be for the benefit of the host, but at least it is an advantage. We owe the Poles a great debt for Conrad, and world history is full of examples of writers important in one languagetradition who are owed to other places. On the question of sustaining minority languages that are small in the sense of the number of people who use them (though, as Professor Steiner rightly says, no language is small in any other sense), I’m slightly hopeful about the possibilities of the new technology. They radically lower the costs of production of texts, and I mean printed texts. I’m not talking about the bizarre notion that people might read novels on screen, which I regard as ridiculous, but the idea that, for example, a group of Fanti-speaking writers could get together at relatively low cost and make available through the internet short stories in Fanti, which you could print out anywhere in the world where there are Fanti speakers. Thus you would create communities of people who have a shared awareness of the possibilities of the language and are encouraged by that experience to go on seeing the language not just as an everyday vernacular but as something that they want to make fully living as a literary language. I think some of this is going to happen and there are small signs of this. I was at a meeting the other day organized by the people at the media lab at M I T who invent a lot of this new technology. There are people working simply on the question of making sure that all the languages of Africa have their orthographies easily accessible. A trivial point, but there are two characters in the normal orthography of our language, which is not Fanti but Twi, which it’s extremely hard to get on a standard P C ; you have to go and buy special software. For one of them you can use an epsilon but the other doesn’t exist in most European languages; and that sort of tiny obstacle can be solved.

GEORGE STEINER Have you deliberately used that sentence, “We owe the Poles a great debt for Conrad”? Don’t try that sentence in Warsaw. [Laughter] No, this is terribly important, we bloody well have taken him. I was with

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Czesław Miłosz and he explained the horror of the situation. Of their two greatest writers (he excluded himself modestly), Conrad and the man who wrote Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, Jan Potocki, one wrote in French and one in English, and we have nothing, Miłosz said, we have to translate back our greatest writers. There is one of the real ironies of everything we are talking about here. Nabokov at the end is so haunted by this that he re-writes himself into Russian, as you know, saying I can’t bear that Lolita, for example, or Ada, is not available in Russian. So this is a very, very difficult problem. You’ve absolutely highlighted that: so many languages have something which no other language can translate. There are Quechua languages high up in the Bolivian uplands where the past is always in front of you because you can see it, you know it; the future is in back of you, because you can’t see it. I find this magnificently convincing. We can’t make that switch, it’s totally impossible for us, save artificially for a few moments, and we can’t create the poetry that has made that switch. It’s a different world-view, and anything that takes these things away, I think, leaves us much, much poorer. We don’t have time, but the situation for the Hebrew language is profoundly dramatic in this respect. I just mention it to those of you who know that Hebrew writers are up against this very problem.

ANTHONY KWAME APPIAH The ‘we’ that Professor Steiner used there was a profoundly cosmopolitan ‘we’.

ATO QUAYSON It’s been a very wonderful session. We should have closed at 6 for other things to take place. I know people are excited for more, but I think we can continue the discussion outside. I want to make two quick closing remarks. The first is that I’ve devised a kind of cocktail of the imagination for my children which I want to share with you. I tell them lots of African stories, I also read them books like Alice in Wonderland, and then the third thing that I have introduced them to is poetry. I have started with T.S. Eliot – T.S. Eliot on cats: highly recommended. My desire is to get them to fall in love with images, to fall in love with things that they do not possibly understand, to fall in love with sound, to fall in love

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with rhythm and rhyme. And I keep my fingers crossed that when they grow these things will grow with them. The second comment I want to make is to recall the dying words of a character in Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, Pilot. Pilot is shot and she’s dying and her last words are, “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all.” For me, I wish I’d a knowed more languages, I’d have read them all. Thank you very much. [Applause]

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Seventh Dialogue: The Power of the Poem L ORNA G OODISON AND V ÉRONIQUE T ADJO

IRÈNE

G

D ’A L M E I D A

(C H A I R )

OOD MORNING EVERYBODY.

Bonjour tout le monde. Nous sommes contents de vous accueillir au 7ème dialogue où nous aurons deux poètesses renommées qui vont se mettre en

dialogue. I would like first to introduce Lorna Goodison, who is one of the most distinguished poets in the Caribbean. She has written five or six volumes of poetry and a volume of short stories. Her latest volume of poetry is called Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems and she’s been praised by a number of highly respected literary critics for her poetry, which borrows from different cultural backgrounds. She has won a number of prizes for her work, and we are very happy to have her here in dialogue with Véronique Tadjo. Véronique Tadjo: j’essayais tout à l’heure de savoir quand je l’avais rencontrée pour la première fois, si c’était à l’A L A (African Literature Association) qui est une association, basée aux États-Unis, de professeurs de littérature africaine, caribéenne et africaine-américaine. On cherche de nouveaux adhérents à cette association qui est très dynamique et très familiale, contrairement à beaucoup d’associations en Amérique du nord, en tout cas. Donc, Véronique Tadjo est romancière, poète, elle s’occupe beaucoup de la littérature enfantine et elle a, en

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particulier, un poème que j’affectionne beaucoup qui s’appelle “Crocodile” et qui est sûr de marcher avec toutes les audiences quand on l’utilise. Son dernier livre est un roman qui s’intitule L’Ombre d’Imana, voyage jusqu’au bout du Rwanda (Actes Sud, 2000). Elle fait partie de ce groupe d’écrivains et d’écrivaines qui est allé au Rwanda pour écrire par devoir de mémoire. Donc voilà, sans plus tarder, je vais donner la parole à Lorna Goodison qui va nous parler pendant une dizaine de minutes et après Véronique Tadjo va parler pendant une dizaine de minutes et comme elles sont toutes les deux poétesses et que nous parlons aujourd’hui de la puissance du poème – the power of the poem – elles vont toutes les deux également nous lire un peu de leur poésie. Lorna.

LORNA GOODISON I Shall Light a Candle of Understanding In Thine Heart Which Shall Not Be Put Out I shall light first, debts to pay and fences to mend and lay to rest the wounded past, foes disguised as friends I shall light a candle of understanding and cease the training of impossible hedges round this life for as fast as you sow them, serendipity’s thickets will appear and outgrow them I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart all things in their place then, in this many-chambered heart for each thing a place, and for him a place apart I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart which shall not be put out

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and by the hand that lit the candle and by the never-to-be-extinguished flame by the candle-wax which wind-worried drips into candle wings luminous and rare by the illumination of that candle exit death and fear and doubt here love and possibility within a lit heart shining out.

Good morning. I am very, very pleased to be here. That was for Professor Irele; thank you very much, sir. I just want to say a few words on the power of the poem. The poem’s power is the antithesis of power as we know it. It does not render us mighty – bull-bocker, duppy conqueror – it disarms us, leaves us vulnerable and open. Poem-power is then lock-picker, insidious, beneficent intruder, enabling our corporeal selves to assume sweet John Keats’s negative capability. It turns on sympathetic imagination and we rise on viewless wings with the nightingale or chant and levitate with the bard of righteousness, Bob Marley: “One bright morning when my work is over, I will fly away home.” Poem’s power does not travel alone, it comes with corollary, it comes with company, like Rilke’s lament sisters, pathetic fallacy of Shakespeare, or Mabrak, black lightning of Rastafari. It comes with a call to which the poet responds: “tell the hearth that has never been told.” So you rose and thereafter spoke, wrote of atoms, inanimate objects, the bird, the tamarind fruit, the tamarind, the tamarind tree; your Guinea woman great grandmother, your jump-ship Irish great grandfather; of Arawak and Taino, Don Cristóbal Colón who set out for Xipangu and China and thus the Arawak was undone. Poem-power wants to know if Jamaica rose up from Atlantis drowned in the breakaway shape of a swimming turtle – if the turtle-call is what we call ska, did a rock-steady rhythm anchor survivors as slavers? “Return again,” it said, “and never leave, never cease to speak of the charnel house, the blood-bath Atlantic. Tally up and publish, cane profit, praise the Lazarus factor, the inexplicable resurrections of the remnant plagued by social death. Seek and find the

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chosen word, the fitting phrase. Here poem-power gives letter of mark to siege, pillage, plunder, take prizes from all and any sources: the blessed patois turned Creole of your fore-mothers transported with its thick glottals holding seeds of wisdom, any and all of the great books your great-grandfather gave you in exchange for your land. “Take them all,” it said, “take them and there’s wonder, wonder-working power in the word, in the poem.” This is a poem about my great grandmother:

Guinea Woman Great-grandmother was a guinea woman wide eyes turning the corners of her face could see behind her her cheeks dusted with a fine rash of jet-bead warts that itched when the rain set up. Great-grandmother’s waistline the span of a headman’s hand slender and tall like a cane stalk with a guinea woman’s antelope-quick walk and when she paused her gaze would look to sea her profile fine like some obverse impression on a guinea coin from royal memory. It seems her fate was anchored in the unfathomable sea for great-grandmother caught the eye of a sailor whose ship sailed without him from Lucea harbour. Great-grandmother’s royal scent of cinnamon and scallions drew the sailor up the straits of Africa, and evidence is my blue-eyed grandmother the first mulatta

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taken into a backra’s household and covered with his name. And they forbade great-grandmother’s guinea woman presence, they washed away her scent of cinnamon and scallions, controlled the child’s antelope walk and they called her uprisings rebellions. But, great-grandmother I see your features blood dark appearing in the children of each new breeding and the high yellow brown is darkening down. Listen, children it’s great-grandmother’s turn.

A poem about language. This next is a poem about a woman who worked with us as a child; she was our domestic helper, and she didn’t like me. To say she didn’t like me is to put it mildly; she really, really didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her; and she didn’t like the English language very much, and the English language didn’t like her; so they had a kind of mutual, adversarial relationship, she and the English language. This poem is taken from my collection of poetry called Turn Thanks, published by the University of Illinois Press, in which I give thanks to a number of people. I never thought I would write a poem for Miss Mirry, but she did something very nice for me and it’s also about language. It’s called:

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry I turn thank to Miss Mirry ill-tempered domestic helper who hated me. She said that she had passed through hell barehead and that a whitening ash from hell’s furnace

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THE POWER OF THE WORD had sifted down upon her and that is why she gray early. Called me ‘Nana’. Nanny’s name I have come to love. She twisted her surname Henry into Endry in her railing against the graceless state of her days. She was the repository of 400 years of resentment for being uprooted, transplanted, condemned to being a stranger on this side of a world where most words would not obey her tongue. She said that she came from ‘Ullava’ in the parallel universe of Old Harbour. She could not read or write one word in English but took every vowel and consonant of it and rung it around, like the articulated neck of our Sunday dinner sacrificial fowl. In her anger she stabbed at English, walked it out, abandoned it in favour of a long kiss teeth, a furious fanning of her shift tail, a series of hawks at the back of her throat, a long extended elastic sigh a severing cut eye, or a melancholy wordless moaning as she squatted over her wooden washtub soaping our dirty clothes with a brown wedge of hard key soap. To Miss Mirry who subverted the English language calling Barbara, Baba; my father, Tata; who desiled her mind that I was boofuttoo, a baffan and too rampify. Who said pussbrukokonatinnadalikklegalnanayeye. Miss Mirry versus English against the west once assured me that for every sickness there exists a cure growing in the bush. I thank her for giving me a bath in her washtub which she had filled with water heated

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in a kerosene tin and in it she had strewed the fringed leaves of the emancipation tamarind. I turn thanks for the calming bath that she gave to me which quelled effectively the red itching measles prickling my skin. And as she sluiced the astringent waters over me she was speak-singing in a language familiar to her tongue because it rose unfettered up and down, in tumbling cadences, ululations in time with the swift sopping motion of her hands, becoming her true self in that ritual bathing, that song. I turn thanks now to Miss Mirry African bush healing woman.

My very first book was called Tamarind Season. The tamarind is a tree with which I am sure all West Indians and Africans are familiar. I found out many years later that the thing about the tamarind tree is that there is no part of it that is not of use to humankind. Every single part from root to the leaf tip can be used by humanity. Some people regard it as a symbol of the slaves of the African diaspora, because it bears when nothing else bears; when all the other food crops are finished, the tamarind, it just stays there and it just bears, and this poem is called:

About the Tamarind Under strict dry conditions I can grow as high as eighty feet and my open frame half as wide. Then my trunk which yields a kind of timber called by some the mahogany of Madeira will become too substantial and stout for you to wrap your short arms around. My crown, a mass of fine light green foliage, pinnate leaves, which dip gracefully to shade you

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THE POWER OF THE WORD fold in upon themselves at night, private. I bloom small gold flowers which appear to bleed the gold of guinea and the blood drawn by the cut of slavery. I am slow growing, rooted deep, resisting breeze blow, hot air and hurricane winds. I flourish even in rocky terrain with little or no cultural attention. My suede brown pods grow in profusion, I bear long, I bear abundance and Pharaohs ate of me. Tamir Indi the Persian poet chanted under my shade. Rooted first in Africa, transplanted wherever I can thrive, that is where there is sun of life. I require his constant kiss in order to flourish. His hot caresses I absorb and return in the form of fire, purifying, all-consuming. Tamarindus Indica is native of Africa, from root to leaftip my every part has been employed to meet human need. Consider how they eat my flowers, my leaves, roast my seeds, pound them into paste for sizing. My fruit which is sometimes sour can be sugared into tamarind balls, symbols of slavery. Sometimes in alluvial soil I grow large and sweet, that is in places where I’m valued and needed, and then I heal, refrigerant for fevers, I am laxative. I work alone or can combine with juice of limes or extrusion of bees, together we can cure bilious digestive systems large as that of elephants. I reduce swellings, loosen the grip of paralysis, and return the drunken inebriated on illusion, the cheap coarse wine of the world, to sobriety perhaps to become one day truly drunk like me

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Seventh Dialogue with Khayyam’s wine, which causes me to sway so that the unanointed mock me. In Africa, they soak my bark with corn and feed this to domestic birds in the belief that if they stray or are stolen they will return. In Asia, a nectar of tamarind and coconut milk is touched to the lips of infants as their first drink, the world’s initial, welcoming libation. And the elephant’s long memory is aided by the eating of my bark and the pods, flesh and seeds of my fruit. My leaves give soothing bush baths for rashes or the cut of the tamarind whip. The correction and the cure both come from me. There are believers who claim I am dwelling place of the spirit of rain. I raise the temperature in my immediate vicinity so the cold-hearted might fear me, and I will tell you now why few plants grow wild beneath me and why you should not use me as policetree to tether your horse, for I have not come to rule over, overpower vanquish, conquer or constrain anyone. I provide the mordant for dyes. Burn me for charcoal and I will rise as incense. My sapwood is pale and golden, My heartwood though is royal purple and earth brown, I am high and low all at once, sour and sweet. I came with the enslaved across the seas to bear for you when force-ripe capricious crops fail. I bear. Not even the salt of the ocean can stunt me. Plant me on abiding rock or foaming restless waters, Set me in burying ground and I will shade the ancestors. O bitter weed and dry-heart tree, wait for me to bow or sway, I hope you can wait. Rest in peace, Arawaks. I am still here, still bearing after 400 years.

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[Applause]

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

Thank you. I hope everybody could hear loud and clear the power of the poem. So now we are going on to Véronique Tadjo, and we have dans les coulisses Anny King, who is going to serve as an interpreter for Lorna if she needs it. Véronique, tu as la parole.

VÉRONIQUE TADJO J’ai toujours aimé la poésie. Je lisais des recueils de poème comme d’autres lisent des romans. Je m’installais dans un coin tranquillement et je lisais. La poésie, pour moi, est peinture, musique, danse, rêve et réalité, passé, présent, futur. Elle est exil, elle est enracinement aussi, intime et combattante, douleurs et renaissance. Elle est chant et murmure, cris et chuchotements. Elle est tout ce qu’on voudrait dire et tout ce qui a été dit. Elle est le plus court chemin entre nous, la flèche qui se plante dans le cœur de l’émotion. Habiller la vie des mots en couleurs, des mots cueillis sur un arbre qui n’en finit pas de pousser. La poésie est puissance et impuissance. Car la poésie se meurt sur les rayons des librairies. Elle est condamnée chaque jour par des éditeurs, par ceux qui disent que le pain se vend, bien sûr, beaucoup mieux. “Les temps ont changé, les temps sont troublés, la poésie ne peut plus rien quand la vie tombe à la renverse,” disent-ils, quand les jours tournent trop vite. Dans cette Afrique aux mille conflits, cette Afrique qui souffre par tous les pores, qui écoutera encore les poètes? Alors, moi je dis, et d’autres aussi, c’est justement à ces moments-là que la poésie devient puissance, épousant les contours de l’espoir, résistant aux cyclones et à l’anéantissement du futur. La poésie peut dire ‘non’ aux raz-de-marée. Arme secrète qui vous touche au moment où vous ne vous y attendiez pas, au moment où vous ne vous y attendiez plus. Car, détrompez-vous, la poésie a plus d’un tour dans son sac. La poésie dans tous ses états. Vous l’attendez en rhyme, en strophes, dans des recueils – et la voilà qui surgit sur les murs de la ville, dans les cahiers d’écoliers, dans cette prose qui ne veut pas dire son nom de peur d’effrayer, de se heurter aux préjugés aussi. Elle se réfugie dans

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d’autres demeures, investit d’autres contrées, part à la conquête d’autres manières de dire. La poésie refleurit, sous un autre nom, car de tout temps, l’homme et la femme ont voulu dire la vie avec des mots nouveaux. La poésie, avant tout, est un état d’esprit. Alors pour illustrer mon propos, je vais vous lire quelques uns de mes poèmes pris dans À Mi-chemin (L’Harmattan, 2000), qui est mon dernier recueil de poèmes, un texte qui parle un peu de l’exil, comme le titre le dit: On ne part pas sans perdre du sang. Tu reviens, le cœur plein de bonnes intentions. Mais tes yeux parcourent la ville et tu tombes de haut. Il faut tout Reprendre à zéro. Tu veux toucher les autres, ceux à qui tu pensais, là-bas, dans ton exil souterrain. Leur peau est flétrie. Leurs visages se creusent de rides assombries et la solitude se lit dans le fond de leurs yeux. Le retour, ah oui, le retour! Pour apprendre que la mort était là avant toi et que les oiseaux sont partis avec les dernières pluies. En vérité, la solitude n’a pas de nom, puisqu’elle se cache dans les recoins de ton corps. Elle se cache suivant le chemin de tes veines, la ligne de ta colonne vertébrale et le marécage dense de ton esprit en éveil. Interroge le miroir brisé, les fragments de ton âme qui te disent la vérité. Interroge la cassure, l’éparpillement. Interroge, interroge, jusqu’à l’épuisement. Car, il a fallu que nous naissions seuls. Il a Fallu trouver la lumière au bout du tunnel. Il a fallu quitter la chaleur moite pour l’air Sec du dehors.

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La vérité survient à la fin des marchés. Plus de fruits dorés ni de légumes verts. Pas de viande rouge vif. Mais des morceaux de nourriture gâchée. Mais, des papiers jonchant le sol poussiéreux. Quelques êtres mendiants à la recherche des restes.

[Applause] C’est un cimitière comme les autres. Il y a des plantes sauvages qui poussent n’importe où, des feuilles libres qui dansent, des arbres un peu fous et un chemin de terre qui court tout autour.

[Applause] Dans le ciel, les nuages n’ont pas d’horizon. Les pieds s’enfoncent jusqu’aux chevilles dans un duvet de bulles. L’air est glacé. Il lave la gorge. Il liquéfie les yeux. Elle crie: “Y a-t-il quelqu’un? Y a-t-il quelqu’un?” Mais le vide est lumineux. Des éclairs trouent l’écume. Maintenant, elle a peur. Elle se dissout dans la pluie qui fait pousser les fleurs.

[Applause] Je pense que c’est le dernier poème du recueil: Il n’y a qu’une seule histoire d’amour que nous habillons et déshabillions avec nos mots et nos espoirs, une seule vraie raison du cœur où l’univers peut éclore, un seul moment de grace pour renaître et reconstruire le monde envers et contre tout.

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[Applause]

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

Alors, là aussi nous avons entendu cette belle poésie, la sonorité des mots, la diversité des thèmes et j’aimerais maintenant ouvrir la discussion au public. Si vous avez des questions à poser ou des commentaires à faire, vous êtes les bienvenus et veuillez vous approcher du micro, s’il vous plaît, merci.

Voice from Auditorium My question is for Lorna. I was fascinated when you said that “the power of poetry is actually the antithesis of power as we know it.” I was wondering whether you could tell us more about this.

LORNA GOODISON I think poetry does that: it disarms you; it renders you vulnerable; it doesn’t make you feel: well, that was that. I guess it’s a very subjective definition. I was trying to lead into the business of negative capability, John Keats’s theory about being able to come out of yourself completely and enter into a small bird picking about in the gravel. But for me that’s what poetry does: it makes me completely open and vulnerable to the sympathetic imagination. I don’t know that poetry has the power that other things have, I don’t know if it can do all the mighty things that other great forces can do, I question that, but I do think it can open you up. Another way of answering is that I found poetry when my father died. I was fourteen years old and I had no idea what to do. I don’t come from a society where people go to therapists, we did not have any grief-counselling sessions or anything. [Laughter] I was just left to deal with the fact that at fourteen my father had died before my eyes, and poetry saved me. I didn’t feel mighty or anything but poetry made sense of it. Freud said, I think, that no matter where he went in his explorations of the human psyche he found that a poet had already passed that way. And that’s the kind of poem I am trying to talk about. Does that help at all?

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TIM CRIBB Could we perhaps ask Véronique Tadjo to comment on what Lorna has been saying about negative capability and that capacity to open yourself to things which may be very ‘other’ indeed, given those very painful experiences she was writing her poems from.

VÉRONIQUE TADJO I think I said that poetry was both power and powerlessness. I think it is true that you are extremely vulnerable when you use poetry and in that sense you’re not talking about truth. You’re not saying things for certain, you’re just putting yourself bare, naked, if I can say that; but not all poetry is like that. I said it could be an intimate kind of poetry but it could also be a combative poetry. We have seen in history that poetry has played quite a revolutionary role. So poetry is everything and nothing at the same time. You see how sensitive children are to poetry. It’s amazing: their minds are open, they can take poetry, they’re poets themselves. They are born poets and then gradually – you can see as they grow older – they lose it. Now, is it the school system?

Voice from auditorium Yes, I think so, yes.

VÉRONIQUE TADJO Yes, definitely, it is the school system. And that’s why I have just edited a small anthology of poetry for children, Talking Drums, published by A&C Black, because I’d like them to keep their love for poetry, to grow with it, because it’s such a free territory. That’s why I think it can be a power, but never a tyrannical power.

LORNA GOODISON I just want to add one thing. We’re in Churchill College, so I think it’s entirely appropriate to cite Sir Winston Churchill when he called upon the words of the great Jamaican poet Claude McKay (here am I being jingoistic!) to rally the people of this great island nation: “If we must die,” you remember that?

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If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs.

Those are fighting words, published in New York back in 1922 in McKay's collection Harlem Shadows, and that same poem became a mantra for African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement in the U S A . So there are clear instances like that when poetry can show people a way through in extreme and violent circumstances, so I have to make allowance for that. I want to add that to what I said, and I agree with Véronique: it is both powerful and not powerful.

VÉRONIQUE TADJO Yes, what I try to do is to mix the human dimension, the personal dimension, with the big issues of our lives, because even if you have a combative poetry there’s always the human side which is what is most important; I don’t think you can do anything without that. Somebody once asked me, “How do you make your poem powerful?” I replied, “Good question, I’ll think about it.” I think in the end what I do is just work at it, work at it, cut, cut, cut, cut until I maybe get to the bare essentials. There are other ways of doing it, of course; that’s just my personal way. It’s trying to get to that power hidden in the word that’s going to go straight to the emotion of the reader.

T I D J A N I –S E R P O S Merci beaucoup. My first question is not a question but a comment to my sister from the Caribbean. I just want to say that, for me, the power of poetry is indeed real, because today I saw this room full of Indians and they were not dead, they were alive because of you. That is the first power I see in poetry. [Applause] The second comment is for Véronique. I would like you to read your last poem again, because during it I became younger and it brought back to mind the first woman I knew and all the wonder around it. Please read it for me. [Laughter and applause]

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VÉRONIQUE TADJO Ah bon, d’accord. Mais d’abord….

ATO QUAYSON I want to say that the power of poetry is not necessarily exerted through direct interventions in reality. A poem cannot change the structure of the world. But if a poem is really good, you return to it again and again over the course of your life. Now, this power of arresting and keeping the attention, of wanting us to go back again and again, is a power that other aspects of reality do not have. The only things other than the beauty of poetry that make us go back to a moment are ugliness and pain. If something is really ugly or something is horrible, for some reason your mind is arrested by the horror. So the power of poetry is to make us go back to something that is beautiful which becomes sedimented in the spirit. The other thing that I think the really good poem forces us to do is to exist fully in one moment. So instead of worrying about what is going to happen in six months time, before a really great poem you are focused. And the only thing that we have is the moment in which we exist; we don’t have tomorrow. Tomorrow is actually within the particular moment, but people are always anxious and nervous or in a malaise, so they don’t fully exist in the moment. So the beauty of poetry, I think, the power of it, is actually to enforce a focus on the moment. It’s almost akin to what Buddhist meditation seeks to achieve. I suppose a final thing is the range of sensitivity that an exposure to poetry gives – such that, for example, hearing Lorna Goodison’s poem about her great-grandmother, the idea of a grandmother had meaning for you and you became sensitive to all grandmothers, to grand-motherhood, even if you didn’t know your own grandmother. Perhaps for one moment whether I had a grandmother or not was not really relevant but her poem evoked grand-motherhood, so its power also resides in the way it can sensitize us to experiences that we might not ourselves have lived through.

DANIEL MAXIMIN Forgive me for speaking in English once more but I would like to have a dialogue with Lorna, and the constraints of my timetable will not give

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me the possibility to do it afterwards. I would like to say, I fully agree with your presentation. I would like to add two things. Number one, a poem is what you cannot say in any other way. My discipline is: if you can say something in prose, then please don’t write a poem. Number two, I think both of you have been too modest, because a poem is also music and music is a power, in every civilization, in every culture. Whether you go to school or not, you need to sing and you need to hear sound. It’s with music, with song, that your mother educates you, and if, tragically, you have to die, you think a song. An example which comes to me is the poet Langston Hughes, his poem:

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes.

And for me that’s like a song. I am not a singer, but like every human being, I like to sing. I just wanted to add that in bad English, but I hope you understood me. Thank you.

FEMI OSOFISAN I actually have three questions. The first one is, what is poetry? [Laughter] There is a general assumption that we all know what poetry is. I come from Nigeria. There you find at the moment quite a number of people who claim to be writing poetry and on every occasion like this they get up to read things, and I am fascinated by their great confidence that they are actually producing poetry. [Laughter] So maybe this is a good occasion to enlighten us. What actually is poetry?

LORNA GOODISON You want an answer now?

FEMI OSOFISAN Can I ask just my second question so I can go and sit down? [Laughter] The second one is, where do you place yourself in relation to tradition? Particularly Véronique: how do you place yourself in relationship to

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previous poets? I get the sense that many people are producing as if nothing came before. I am bothered by this, because there is a sense in which we don’t seem to be inside a continuous, flowing stream, as if we were all islands, just popping up here and there. So I would like to know really what you think about this. The third one is about your statement, Véronique – that, translating roughly, “in this Africa of so many conflicts, who needs poetry?” You said that, for you, this is just the moment, in fact, where you think we need poetry the most. Am I translating right? Yes? OK. So can you tell me, really, what is the place of poetry in today’s conflicts? Maybe I am putting it a bit crudely, but it seems to me that’s an assumption you make as a poet – but is it an assumption that is shared by the community?

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

OK. As for the first question, I think we might be here until tomorrow if we attempt to answer that but I will give the floor to Véronique. [Laughter]

VÉRONIQUE TADJO No problem, no problem. I will be quick. When you ask what poetry is, the funny thing about poetry is that normally you shouldn’t call yourself a poet; you can’t just get up and say: “I’m a poet.” It is the people who will say after reading your work, “Yes, this is a poet” or “This is not a poet.” I have a bit of a problem with poetry these days, because I am disappointed by the typical collection of poems. The conventional way of serving poetry doesn’t satisfy me any more. Times have changed, people have prejudices, you say “poetry” and they go “ugh” as if you were going to do something very bad to them, as if you were going to ask them to go into a realm that they don’t want to go to. This idea that poetry has nothing to do with reality – well, I think Lorna’s poetry has shown us that this is not the case. To jump to the other question: when you ask: What is the relevance of poetry in troubled times? I answer that it is very relevant. In fact, we see that people naturally turn to poetry when they are in a situation of crisis. Also, people are very sensitive to poetry, especially maybe to

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traditional poetry. Perhaps it’s the whole way we serve poetry that is not good, which is why I try to put poetry in prose. I am open to all sorts of ways of listening to poetry or using poetry. In urban poetry today you see poetry in music, you see poetry in all sorts of mediums, because poetry is alive; but maybe the way we are serving poetry and presenting poetry is not right.

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

He also asked you where you place yourself in terms of writing.

VÉRONIQUE TADJO Senghor was a very important influence for me and the poetry of the whole Négritude movement. But I like also a poet such as Raymond Carver and I like Japanese poetry. I like poetry from all over. What is important to me is to speak about the reality of Africa, where I have lived most of my life; it is my main source of inspiration. I am not versed in traditional, oral poetry, but I am interested in talking about what I know best in the way I find most appropriate.

LORNA GOODISON He only asked me one question, I think, and that’s the definition of poetry. I do some teaching of poetry and it’s a question that comes up all the time, and there are all these millions of definitions. Thomas Carlyle said it’s “musical thought”; there’s “the best words in the best order” (I think that’s Coleridge). The one I really like is Emily Dickinson’s litmus test, which said something like: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” You'll find that definition in her letters in the big Harvard collection edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1986. It’s a very hard test. And you can apply that to those poets you are worried about, I think. I speak these words and a lot of times, having spoken them, I think, “Nah, that’s still not it.” Do you mind if I read a poem? I assure you it’s not too long a poem, but it begins with a definition of poetry. It’s called “The Mango of Poetry” because I concluded that poetry’s really a mango. [Laughter] You ever heard of mango?

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Voice from auditorium Huhun!

LORNA GOODISON A really big and nice Julian mango. You know that mango?

The Mango of Poetry I read a poem about the meaning of poetry. The writer defines it as silence, then breaks the lines to construct ideas about the building of bridges, the reconciliation of opposites and I’m still not sure what poetry is. And now I think of a ripe mango yellow ochre niceness sweet flesh of St Julian, and all I want to do is to eat one from the tree planted by my father three years before the sickness made him fall prematurely. The tree by way of compensation bears fruit year round in profusion, overabundance making up for the shortfall

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of my father’s truncated years. I’d pick this mango with a cleft stick, then I’d wash it and go sit upon the front wall of our yard. I would not peel it all back to reveal its golden entirety, but I would soften it by rolling it slowly between my palms. Then I’d nibble a neat hole at the top of the skin pouch and pull the pulp up slowly into my mouth. I’d do all this while wearing a bombay-coloured blouse so that the stain of the juice could fall freely upon me. And I say that this too would be a powerful and overflowing and fitting definition of what is poetry.

That’s my definition. [Laughter, applause]

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

OK, Véronique Tadjo will add something and then read her last poem, her poem for Tidjani–Serpos – but I see that Daniel Maximin wants to ask a question, so why don’t you do that first, please?

DANIEL MAXIMIN C’est une remarque pour Lorna et Véronique. Ce que cachaient toutes les questions et remarques de tous les hommes qui se sont succédés

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depuis tout-à-l’heure et qui n’ont pas envie d’arrêter de venir, c’est en fait un message d’amour. [Laughter] Et ça se comprend, parce que, en réalité, on se rend bien compte que, dans la définition que l’on cherche, il y a toujours cette chose un peu secrète, qu’il y a quelque chose de très secrètement en connivence entre la femme et la poésie et que, à condition de dire que le féminin c’est ce que nous avons en partage, hommes et femmes, il y a en réalité la parole du féminin en nous, dans la poésie, et on a envie de le reconnaître, de le dire et de l’affirmer d’autant plus que quand c’est si bien dit et représenté par des femmes et je crois qu’il y a ça qui circule. Et quand on dit qu’il y a fragilité dans la poésie, qu’il y a une puissance secrète, quand on dit, par exemple “What’s the relevance of poetry?” lorsqu’il y a la bagarre, la bataille, l’oppression:– si à la place de poésie on disait “What is the relevance of woman?” pendant la bataille, pendant la guerre, pendant le viol, on comprend très bien comment c’est l’essentiel qui est toujours à préserver quand on dit cela et qu’en réalité cette présence dans la vie après l’oppression, malgré l’oppression, c’est cette présence en fait de tout ce que nous pouvons résumer par un mot, qui est: la possibilité de création, la possibilité de créativité, et qui est très fortement en nous tous représentée par la possibilité de préserver ce que globalement on peut appeler le féminin en nous. Je me souviens de mes rares phrases anglaises, de cette phrase de Shakespeare: “Frailty, thy name is woman.” Je crois que l’on peut dire “Poetry, thy name is woman” quelque part. Si, encore une fois, on accepte de dire que ‘woman’ c’est le féminin que nous avons en partage, hommes et femmes, à des degrés évidemment divers, c’est pour ça que, moi aussi, pour mon message d’amour, comme tous les autres, je voulais juste dire trois vers qui sont pour la femme et qui sont autant pour la poésie: voleuse du feu noir à l’heure où le soleil en toi se déshabille, tu donnes un corps à l’espérance.

[Applause]

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D ’A L M E I D A

Après cette psychoanalyse [Laughter] nous allons demander à Véronique Tadjo de nous lire ce poème d’amour justement. Voilà.

VÉRONIQUE TADJO Oui, je vais faire, juste une entorse, j’aimerais lire juste quelques poèmes mais en anglais, juste pour les anglais, les anglophones.

Uncover For Her the Thousand Masks Uncover for her The thousand masks Of your deepest soul Your absent words And sad memories Unwrap your anguish And look at her Once more Then, together You’ll understand The obscure nights And the aborted dreams Then, And only then, You’ll start walking. Remember The hunch-backed man The shanty-town man The less-than-nothing man Sing for me The story Of the toiling man His burning sweat And the red, red, earth Speak to me

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Of the woman with heavy breast And a calabash-belly In the fiery heat Of a night without morrow Teach me The closed books And the outstretched hands Blocked hopes In the dark oblivion Of an over made-up city

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[Applause] And the last one for Tidjani – et c’est je crois la définition de la poésie pour moi. Il n’y a qu’une seule histoire d’amour que nous habillons et deshabillons avec nos mots et nos espoirs, une seule vraie saison du cœur où l’univers peut éclore, un seul moment de grâce pour renaître et reconstruire le monde envers et contre tout.

[Applause]

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

Alors, nous allons terminer la session et je vous remercie tous pour cette participation animée. Voilà.

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Eighth Dialogue: Powers that Be and Words that Will W OLE S OYINKA AND A SSIA D JEBAR

A B I O L A I R E L E (C H A I R )

I

for me to introduce two very great writers and, as you can see, the correspondences have been nicely balanced. On my right is the woman, on my left is the man; on my right, North Africa, on my left, Black Africa, and between them let me just say a few words about the idea of the power of the word that has been the theme of this conference. “Poetry makes nothing happen.” So declared W.H. Auden, at a moment of his life and career when the burden of experience had come to weigh heavily and with an almost crushing effect upon his poetic mind. For, in its lapidary terseness, the statement conveys a mood of bitter disillusionment on the part of a poet who had invested immense hopes in the power of the word to transform the world, only to be mocked by the cruel march of events in his own time. The grim outlook on the human condition provoked by his disenchantment with the world begins to register in his poetry in these lines, from the poem “Spain, 1937”: T IS A VERY GREAT PLEASURE

History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

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It is well to remember, however, that in an earlier phase of his work, Auden, along with other poets of the 1930s – Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice spring at once to mind – saw it as his task to carry forward the visionary zeal of the Romantics, to give new and resonant meaning to the mission to humanity these predecessors had envisaged for themselves as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” a phrase to which, even more than Shelley, its originator, Wordsworth sought to give full moral weight. Auden’s later loss of faith in the power of poetry springs from a sense of betrayal by history, a sentiment that came to breed in him a suspicion even of the creative force of his early work, a force that, ironically enough, continued to be manifested in his work well into his later sceptical years – for example, in the powerful opening sections of The Age of Anxiety, that searing allegory of modern times, and the celebrated elegy to Sigmund Freud. The hieratic conception of poetry that Auden came to repudiate not only animated the work of the Romantics but is also attested in the Western literary and philosophical tradition from the very beginning. Plato’s preoccupation, in the Cratylus, with the nature and quality of the spoken word, his defence of its integrity in this and other dialogues, provides a demonstration of the centrality of this question to his thought. It is, of course, in the imaginative sphere that we are made aware of the value accorded to poetry and song, to the word, as a dimension of existence. We might point to the scene in the Iliad in which Achilles is discovered by the Greek delegation in his tent singing heroic songs, while he accompanied himself on the lyre, or to that other scene in the Odyssey in which the blind poet Demodokos, “whom God made lord of song,” is led into the great hall where Odysseus is being entertained by Alkinoos, and sings the exploits of the Greek heroes at Troy, moving the exiled hero to tears. These two moments of self-reflexivity in Homer deepen the narrative effect of his epics by drawing attention to the very process of their elaboration, by focusing upon their generic category, upon their essence, as it were, and thus throwing into relief their functional correlation with the life of the community. As in all early, agrarian societies, the word operates in Homer’s world through epic and song to structure the collective consciousness. But perhaps the most significant expression of the power of the word in Western tradition is the myth of Orpheus, who emerges in the accounts by Virgil and Ovid as the very embodiment of its operative

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principle. For the myth recounts how his song moved rocks and trees, and exerted such a force of conviction upon the gods that he was granted access to the underworld in order to bring back his dead wife to the world of the living. This myth has proved to be perhaps the most enduring of the Western imagination. It informed the medieval sensibility and from the Renaissance onward has provided the theme for countless artistic works; the lineage runs from Monteverdi’s opera, the first veritable work of music drama in the Western convention, through Gluck to Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and then to Offenbach, who brought a lighter touch to the theme, right down to Jean Cocteau’s modernist adaptation of the myth in the cinematic mode. Indeed, Auden himself returns to the myth, which he incorporates into a passage of The Age of Anxiety, placing emphasis on the tragic outcome of Orpheus’s quest when, having lost Eurydice, he is torn to pieces by the Furies. We might note, finally, that the myth suggested itself naturally to Jean–Paul Sartre, who, in his celebrated essay “Orphée noir,” saw it as an appropriate representation of the black poet’s adventure, his descent into the underworld of the racial memory in order to retrieve the collective soul. It is not without interest to observe that Derek Walcott employs the same topos in his Omeros, in which the same movement of descent and recovery is re-enacted through the figure of his St Lucian fisherman Achille. This movement is fully consonant with Walcott’s stance in Another Life, in which he claims for himself, as poet of the Caribbean, Adam’s task of giving things their name. The word is held at the beginning of creation. Walcott’s re-appropriation of the myth of genesis to express his sense of origins and organic relation to the Caribbean derives from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and serves as a reminder that it is in the Christian doctrine of Incarnation that the reverence for the Word is given its most significant expression in Western civilization. In the Gospel of St John, the word, or logos, is represented in all its plenitude as epiphany. Every Catholic of my generation is familiar with that passage of the Nicean creed on which the sense of a spiritual community sustained by Christian revelation is predicated: “Et verbum caro factus est” (“And the Word was made flesh”). And it is by virtue of this doctrine that Christian poetry, in its most fundamental function as testimony of the faith, derives its sanction, sharing some of the divine power attributed to the word, so that, for Dante, for example, poetry

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was not only the procession of a series of individual visions, however exalted, but also an embodiment of moral and spiritual truths. To recall these instances in the West of the privileged status of the Word, now practically forgotten in a civilization that has divested it of all its mystery, is to begin to appreciate its significance in the African context, for it is probably safe to affirm that it is in Africa today that we come nearest to the high valuation of the word that, not so long ago, used to form such an essential dimension of the Western sensibility: of the word as a real presence in the world. The primacy of the word is clearly in evidence in the oral tradition that continues to provide the fundamental reference for communication and social interaction on our continent. For, in a situation where orality functions in all its immediacy as the mediator of consciousness and discourse, the spoken word remains at the heart of all modes of expression and performance, the condition of the efficacy of all action, of ritual, of the collective gestures that mark the rhythms of the communal existence and thus serve to structure modes of thought and apprehension in our traditional societies. It is in relation to this pervasiveness of the spoken word in our traditional cultures that the griot, the dyali, the Babaláwo – terms that in each case designate a ‘master of the word’ – was and in many parts of Africa remains central to the life of these cultures, where they function as guardians of the community’s fund of knowledge and of symbolic capital. The fundamental importance of this symbolic realm associated with the word is well illustrated in the epic of Sundiata, in which the action involves a struggle as much over control of territory, for political power, as for its symbolic projections, embodied by Bala Faseke, the griot of the magic balafong. With the Dogon sage Ogotommeli, for whom the visible world is an emanation of the word, we encounter the imaginative grounding of an African conception of the word as primordial essence. This conception of the word represents part of the inheritance of African and black poetry in the European languages. It confers that amplitude of voice that authorizes Aimé Césaire’s sovereign affirmation in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: Et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête et nous savons maintenant que le soleil tourne autour de la terre éclairant la parcelle

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qu’a fixée notre volonté seule et que toute étoile chute de ciel en terre à notre commandement sans limite.

It is this heightened awareness of the word as formative principle in the organic constitution of the community that governs Senghor’s aesthetic theory. “L’encre du scribe n’a pas de mémoire,” Senghor has asserted, and he has given poetic formulation to this idea in “L’Absente,” a poem that may be said to represent his ars poetica in the sense not of a formulaic approach to art but of a comprehensive vision of the poetic and imaginative function. It should be noted that Senghor envisages this function of poetry in socio-political terms: as the evocative quality that calls the organic community into being and projects its visionary purpose, summed up by the phrase “prophétiser la Cité de demain.” The word assumes for Senghor, in the precise historical context of his poetic expression, a distinctly utopian significance. The meaning of the oral tradition as the enabling principle of the communal compact that Senghor evokes is further evidenced in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Monné, outrages et défis (Seuil, 1990), when Djeliba, the griot of the old king Djigui, upon whose fate turns the destiny of the novel’s fictional kingdom, offers an interpretation of history in terms of the living correspondence between the realm of creation, the phenomena by which it is peopled and animated, and the words by which they are designated: Je suis un griot, donc homme de parole. Chaque fois que les mots changent de sens et les choses de symboles, je retourne à la terre qui m’a vu naître pour tout recommencer: reapprendre l’histoire et les nouveaux noms des hommes, des animaux, et des choses.

This conception of the word (‘parole’ in the language of Kourouma’s griot) as a relation to the world receives a more intense projection in Wole Soyinka’s The Road, in which his memorable character, Professor, is engaged in a quest for the word as transcendental principle, as ‘verbe’. For Soyinka’s protagonist imagines the word as access to a beyond that gives meaning to the world in its immediate manifestation. Thus, through Professor, and despite his ambiguous status, the word, made consubstantial with ritual in Soyinka’s play, is invested with a deep metaphysical import.

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These examples indicate the ways in which the power of the word (nommo, òrò, asem) is not only acknowledged but has been celebrated in Africa and continues to be accorded the reverence due to its compelling nature. It is this faith in the power of the word, and the passion that it generates, that both Wole Soyinka and Assia Djebar have brought to their expression. Their works attest to the power of the word not merely as expressive medium but also as creative impulse, in the fullest sense of the term: as a potent force in the world. I will call on Wole Soyinka first.

WOLE SOYINKA Thank you. First of all, a small correction. I haven’t had the opportunity to talk to Assia Djebar, so nothing has been planned. I was told she was coming to Bologna and I thought that was where we would have our small conspiracy and decide what we would speak about today. She has just told me that she did not know that she was expected in Bologna, where everybody was getting scared that she had been kidnapped by fundamentalists. I’ll in fact be speaking about fundamentalists, certain fundamentalists of language. I’ve chosen this theme because the kind of fundamentalism I’m talking about is vitiated by the differences between the structures and sounds of languages everywhere. So I’m hoping that the francophones here will also point to the idiocy of this kind of fundamentalism, because the claims of this fundamentalist strand in the use of language are totally negated by the structures and histories of other languages. So to try to universalize a certain notion of purism in a language and promote it as if it had universal application is a project which I hope will be demolished by others who speak, who use a very different language. I won’t be dealing with the French aspect of it, obviously; I’m concerning myself merely with the English. I first addressed this subject about three years ago at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We approach, I suggest, a phenomenon quite akin to the inquisitional fervour that once operated in medieval society, guided by nothing but the engines of guild and fanaticism, ferreting out unsuspecting heretics, and hounding them into recantation, conformity, or else a conspiracy of ostracism. Circumstances have thrown me in recent years into a more sustained interaction with American society, in academia and the intellectual world

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especially, than I would normally have prescribed for myself, but it has proved a most instructive phase. It is actually possible, I believe, to construct a working model of fundamentalism from that society, one that would have universal applications. Yet even I could never have predicted that the territory of language and sense would fall victim to the spasmodic impulses of that society, which always come packaged in solemn hermetic catechisms. By this I mean that each new direction of discourse in the kind of society I’m talking about tends to be presented as a self-sustaining holism, one that soon separates itself from other considerations that shape and effect other mechanisms of society: other mores, other usages, other human vectors, including comparable or contrasting cultures and histories of other societies. Within such a culture, language becomes the first line casualty, but also the instrument of indoctrination. Now, here’s one absurd example of such conditioning, from the world of the civil service. In the normal course of his public utterances, a senior official in a City Hall employed a word that has never raised an eyebrow since Oliver Twist raised his tin bowl in the poorhouse dining room in Victorian England and asked for a second helping. This time, however, that official would discover that he had unleashed, a century and a half after Charles Dickens’s memorable fiction, an earthquake that was comparable to Oliver Twist’s. Now, it is true that a millennial speech police has not actually been inaugurated in God’s own nation of wonders, but I suspect that it must be a project in the making, one that ensures that we are truly inducted into the millennium of odourless, detextured, risk-free, offence-free, nuance-free, and history-free – in short, into a neuterized – world of human communication. This word, another n-word, like the politically correct agenda of neuterization, was ‘niggardly’ – ‘niggardly!’ It is a word that, in retroactive consideration, it would appear that even the intrepid Oliver Twist was afraid to utter. So that instead of saying to the dining room overseer, “Please sir, that was a niggardly spoonful of gruel” [Laughter], he uttered instead the famous line, “Please sir, I want some more.” His unconscious genuflection towards political correctness did not save him, however, [Laughter] and he was duly hauled off to the house of correction for attempting to destabilize the poorhouse code of conformist hypocrisy. Oliver Twist’s descendant, a City Hall official, did not wait for the speech police to pounce. He quickly pronounced his mea culpa and

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tendered his resignation. His immediate boss, the governor or mayor, I forget which, did not, as most anachronistic minds like mine anticipate – he did not tell him not to be an ass, and throw his resignation into the wastebasket. No, he accepted it with equally solemn regrets and a high-minded sense of political duty. Now, that some linguistically deprived – note, I studiously avoid the politically incorrect word ‘illiterate’ – that some linguistically deprived individual should mistake the word ‘niggardly’ for the racial slur ‘nigger’ and raise a protest is quite in order. All societies have their normal share of assiduous monitors of probable offence whose qualification for the role is what we have already described as linguistic deprivation, and American society appears to be singularly over-endowed in this respect. [Laughter] But what does it say about that society when the vocabulary deficiency (we’ll call it the V D quotient) of one individual, of two, three, even a thousand individuals, once articulated, exacts from the innocent unpredictable consequences, including the loss of livelihood? It is a thought process that some of us benighted aliens find rather frightening, for this is nothing short of terrorism by the ignorant, and intellectual abdication by the knowledgeable. The civil servant apparently did not give the matter one fighting thought – no digging in behind the ramparts of guiltlessness. No, he blamed himself for the crime of insensitivity that he had neither contemplated nor committed and he did the Right Thing: he resigned, and an elected representative of the people endorsed his subordinate’s act of penance, issued an official apology for a crime that no one had committed, and accepted his resignation. I think we approach, surely, George Orwell’s era of Newspeak. This case had a happy ending, by the way. Thanks to the New York Times and a few sensible letters, the resignation was eventually withdrawn. Now, this may be regarded as the absurd, truly insane limit of political correctness, but could it have been possible except in a society that had clearly lost its collective mind? Well, let us ask the question: are there other signs that assail us daily, signs that should have foretold the inevitability of that colossally banal instant of surrender? We have only to walk through offices, shops, businesses, patronize a few bars etc, etc, to wonder. Once upon a time, storming a world of social inequality and heralding the vision of a universal utopia just over the horizon was the rallying cry, “Workers of the world unite!” The worker had honour in his or

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her own workplace, and even thrived on the illusion of becoming absolute master of the transformed world. His or hers for the taking was the dictatorship of the proletariat. Now, could there be a possible correlation between the disappearance of the Communist world and the disappearance of the worker, as that crucial member of society was once known? Check into any hotel these days or walk into a departmental store, and behold, what a transformation (dare we call it a revolution?) is taking place! The worker has joined the ranks of the endangered species. Among the thousands of individuals manning reception desks, feeding assembly lines, attending to customers, etc, etc, and drawing salaries at the end of each week, it is becoming increasingly rare to find a worker, only ‘associates’ or ‘partners’. The hotel, fast-food joint, mall or storefront billboard of honour no longer pays tribute to the worker or employee of the week. It is now ‘associate’ of the week. But wait! Let that associate allow his new nomenclature to go to his or her head for one moment, and we’ll find that there’s still one unexpunged word in the business dictionary – ‘fire’! [Laughter] The now almost closet word ‘boss’ still retains the power of hire and fire, and that relationship remains untouched, even though the titles undergo daily transformations in the House of Correction. Mister or Mrs Associate learns the hard way that all associates may be equal, but some are more equal than others. The victim of a purely verbal illusion finds himself out in the street for failure to keep up his mortgage payments – next recourse, the injury lawyer. Now, it’s a wonder that the ubiquitous injury lawyer of billboards and television slots still advertises as such. Does any such advocate attract any clients under this new linguistic dispensation? After all, no one gets injured anymore, either in the workplace or in a motor accident. Effect is a product of cause and so, by a logical extension, even if you are run over by a truck you are not injured, maimed or crippled, not even if you spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair, paralysed from the neck down. You are merely physically challenged. [Laughter] There’s a denizen of the Yorùbá world, Obatala, the protector and deity of the crippled, the blind, the deaf, the hunchback and other handicapped members of humanity. I’ve tried to envisage a transcription of this deity’s praise names and invocations from the Yorùbá, in order to expunge his obviously politically incorrect attributions in my mythology – the exercise insults the labour of love that informs translations. Let us

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simply propose that if challenges constitute a test of morality and will, then we should all assiduously court them, stand in the path of a moving train or an enraged bull. Language, put simply, is being abused, and responsibilities deftly diverted, since it is society that should remain eternally challenged by the presence of the disabled and the handicapped. It is society that should be compelled to eliminate their causes, end the proliferation of landmines, act to prevent wars, improve road safety, adopt stringent measures to reduce workplace accidents, etc, etc, etc. However, the question arises: should we leave language entirely to the quirks and vagaries of its users? In short, shall we bask unchecked in the accommodative indulgence of Liberty Hall? Well, obviously not. Language, it is readily conceded, is repository of the mores, the history, the philosophy – indeed, the world-view – of society. Not merely within the morphology of language, but in its very mode of application is encoded, if I may borrow from the world of science, the basic D N A of society. And herein lies the dilemma. Recognizing, in short, that since certain assumptions in language reflect the character – that is, the defects and virtues – of society, language may actually be used to disguise or entrench society’s retrogressive culture, manifested in such conduct as racism, sexism, marginalization, intolerance, class or caste domination, hegemonism, etc, etc. It is only appropriate, therefore, that society constantly interrogate the vehicle in which such traits are transported or hidden. But then, language, I believe, is more than moral register, it is more than a bundle of significations of societal relationships, or commentaries on the power agenda. Language, like it or not, is also an autonomous territory of history and aesthetics, admittedly not hermetic, not closed, constantly evolving, but autonomous nevertheless, ruled by values that are germane to its very properties and to none other, or at least primarily. We destabilize and enfeeble that vehicle by subjecting its transformation entirely or predominantly to the dictates of period ethics or faddist social consciousness. In other words, geneticists do not tamper with the human D N A every time there is a new or seemingly incurable disease. We understand also that their ultimate purpose is not to create a humanity without vulnerability or defects – at least, so we hope. We understand that a human unit is made up of more than mere immunity from disease or imperfection of limbs. An unsuspected Pan-

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dora’s box may be hidden within the loop of one of those D N A spirals, and heaven help the world when a geneticist makes the mistake of simply altering a loop, even in the certainty that one particular human ailment may thereby be permanently cured. The monitors of language as an active social phenomenon would do themselves and the rest of the world some good by applying the same cautionary process to their mission. That digression into the realm of words was, of course, meant to reinforce my concept of sound-clusters, natural properties of words, their euphony etc, which then, quite apart from whether or not they make immediate factual connection or convey information, go to fill a certain aesthetic space within the utilitarian agenda of communication. And, as a user of words, I believe the units of those clusters and structures are, when associated with history, reinforced by a near-tactile patina, almost accessible to taste, bestowed by association and usage commencing from their nebulous origins in remote antiquity – in short, by their history. ‘History’, I said, by the way, not ‘herstory’, which is another ugly word, like ‘strategize’. In fact, whenever you hear ‘herstory’ someone is clearly strategizing. Now, does this mean that her story should not be told, should not be given equal time and space as his story? Obviously not, and the gender-driven, lopsided narratives of centuries are constantly clamorous for revision. But her story is not told by distorting the shape of language and thus diminishing that medium. Medical science may be both scientifically and politically correct in insisting that both sexes, not just women, are susceptible to bouts of screaming and/or laughter, caused by suddenly induced shock or cumulative stress, but there is simply no value to be adduced from renaming that psychological outburst where the victim is a woman ‘hersteria’. [Laughter] History may have been slanted in favour of ‘his’ in myriad, myriad narratives, but the means to its correction will not be found in doing explicit violence to the history of words. The Greek root of the word ‘history’ does not implicate any social relations between the sexes; it takes life from a world of neither ‘he’ nor ‘his’, it is asexual, dealing only from antiquity with learning. As for the latest mutation, called ‘shero’, with which I was recently confronted during a television interview, shall we now retroactively rename that female named Hero, the priestess of Aphrodite, for whose love Leander became our earliest recorded

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long-distance Channel swimmer? Heroine now appears unsuited to the legendary status of Athena, Boadicea, Indira Gandhi, Moremi, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Aung San Suu Kyi, and others, but must now mutate into a world of ‘sheros’. one of the most monstruous neologisms in the vocabulary of political correctness. It goes, therefore, beyond aesthetics. Knowledge, plain simple knowledge is also being obscured, and that includes, incidentally, knowledge of the disreputable origin and history of that very expression ‘political correctness’. Its ravenous sanctimoniousness is not new, for it was, and dressed in that very expression, the ultimate barometer of allegiance to or divergence from the Communist party line, one that with the egregious self-contradiction of the time left no room for dialectical challenges. The word of an assiduous party hack who unmasked the politically incorrect citizen, along with other convenient ideological crimes such as revisionism, deviationism etc, etc, was sufficient to send streams of intellectuals, writers and artists, managers, workers and peasants, and even unlucky party apparatchiks to their lingering doom in remote gulags, or executed outright during the darkest days of Soviet communism. Yet here we are today, with that very lethal garbage of a totalitarian state being fashionably inserted into intellectual life, refurbished, hallowed and embraced with the same blithe dismissal of its dialectical implications in democratic societies, and with a mind-boggling mechanistic obeisance. The politically incorrect are not being exactly executed in Canada or the United States, but some already have a story to tell about the abrupt termination of their tenureship prospects in some American or Canadian universities. Newspeak is dead, but it needs no soothsayer to predict that Soothespeak will soon become the language of the new millennium, at least in the susceptible parts of the world. Hopefully, however, there will survive some spots on the planet, where, just to cite an example, those painted, alluring, flesh-advertising figures at traffic lights, beneath the lampposts, or servicing their clients in bordellos, are still considered as human as you and me, even though they are still called ‘prostitutes’, not tagged with the cast-off ropes of the proletariat to be called ‘sexual workers’. Let the final morality tale be reserved for the proletariat, and, to close a circle, in the province also of words. Having lost the promised dictatorship, the proletariat now appears resolved to contend at the very

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least for a prominent place in the House of Correction, striving to outdo the commissars of political correctness in the brave new world. Webster’s New World College Dictionary, and I’ve merely picked on any random source, may pride itself on being competitively up-to-date with every new edition, but I regret to inform that linguistic institution that, like others of its kind, it had better start looking to its laurels. Concerning the definition of the word ‘stopcock’, for instance, as – I quote – “a cock or valve for stopping or regulating the flow of a fluid, as through a pipe,” end of quote: that definition, I regret to inform Webster’s, no longer holds water. [Laughter] A few years ago, the London chapter of the Union of Plumbers, even in staid old England, resolved to inaugurate its own language police by expunging the word ‘stopcock’ from its working list, for its alleged sexist suggestiveness. Cockerels: what shall we name cockerels? Shall there be no more cocks and tits because thou art virtuous? – to paraphrase Shakespeare. [Laughter] More than a mere word, alas, is being flushed down the digestive system of society [Laughter], when even the proletariat, the last bastion of common sense, struggles to prove itself no longer a race of workers, but true ‘associates’ of middle-class intelligentsia, with all its confusion and reductionist strategies for the alleviation of social guilt. When the proletariat also elects to legitimize Soothespeak, it needs no soothsayer to predict that Orwell’s nightmare is coming to pass. Liberty Hall is falling down, Big Brother, or Sister, is listening to every breath we take, and the tumbrils are lining up to take us all into the House of Correction. My consolation is that George Orwell himself will be at the gate to receive us, and if you have not guessed what mortal sin took him there ahead of the rest of us, then you are truly either literacy-deprived or else have been miraculously insulated from the environment of what we can only describe as the dictatorship of Aphasia. Thank you. [Applause]

ABIOLA IRELE You can see from the applause how that has gone down. I wish that George Steiner was still here, because I’m sure that this would have appealed to him, in terms of what he has had to say about the abuse of words under certain regimes.

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WOLE SOYINKA That’s the only point on which we agree!

ABIOLA IRELE Well, at least you agree. So I’ll turn to Assia Djebar, who will now speak on the theme. Assia Djebar.

ASSIA DJEBAR Dans le cas particulier de mon pays, après plus de huit ans de cette guerre civile et de cette violence pas tout à fait terminée, je voudrais tenter d’expliquer le pourquoi de ces années noires: elles me paraissent comme la conséquence d’une politique de monolinguisme agressif, voulu par un nationalisme étroit dès 1962: cette politique nous a progressivement installés dans une violence d’abord entre les langues. Certes, mon pays n’a pas eu l’exclusivité de cette violence en Afrique, durant cette dernière décennie (je pense en particulier au Rwanda et à sa tragédie plus terrible encore). Mais l’Algérie s’est distinguée, hélas, par une triste spécialité: violence visée à la tête: les élites, en particulier les intellectuels: écrivains, journalistes etc. En effet, un fondamentalisme ensauvagé – qui au départ aurait pu s’expliquer comme une protestation avec une révolte populaire et sociale – s’est attaquée dès le début à des écrivains et journalistes francophones, puis arabophones mais réputés marxistes ou syndicalistes, puis à des femmes enseignantes et journalistes écrivant elles aussi dans une, deux ou trois langues. Ainsi se présentaient les victimes ciblées dans les années 93, 94 et 95 avant que la fureur ne se généralise en s’attaquant aux familles (y compris femmes et enfants) de paysans isolés. Pour cela, je me vois contrainte de faire ici un rapide résumé historique du passé algérien. Rappelons d’abord qu’au tournant des années 60, les états africains qui ont eu leur indépendance politique, au nord et au sud du Sahara, ont du respecter les frontières de la colonisation française. Mais, du point de vous du ‘pouvoir des mots’ – qui est notre sujet aujourd’hui, presque tous les états africains au sud du Sahara possèdent une multiplicité de langues autochtones, de langues vivantes du terroir. Et que ce soit le français ou l’anglais, cette langue de l’ex-colonisateur s’est d’une façon toute naturelle imposée comme langue fédératrice,

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langue de l’administration et du pouvoir central qui devait unifier. Ainsi, pour rester dans l’Afrique francophone que je connais le mieux, face à un espace multilingue, multitribal, multiracial, la langue française a eu un role nouveau: celui de l’unification étatique post-coloniale. Or, contrairement à cette partie de l’Afrique, le Maghreb et l’est du Maghreb a une situation différente, que l’on veut placer trop hâtivement sous le signe de l’unicité. L’unicité, je la note d’abord sur le plan religieux – mais pas pour l’Egypte avec son importante minorité copte, ni pour le Soudan – signalons la pour l’Afrique du Nord et la Libye ou l’Islam est prédominant, surtout après qu’en 1962, la minorité de ‘Français pieds-noirs’ et les populations juives très anciennes, souvent arabophones autant que francophones, parce que autochtones, se soient trouvées en situation de diaspora brutale. En 1962, dans les trois états du Maghreb, l’arabe devient langue officielle. Ainsi l’unicité de la religion se trouve doublée par une forte poussée de ce monolinguisme arabe – qui va ignorer le berbère resté de pratique orale – ce qui va renforcer une certaine culture arabe. Celle-ci ne ressemble plus guère à celle des siècles passés de la civilisation musulmane en Méditerranée. Je pense aussi à l’espace ottoman entre le 16ième et le 19ième siècle, où, avec un Islam certes dominant et un pouvoir militaire turc, les minorités non-musulmanes étaient restées présentes: les expulsés de l’Andalousie, juifs et musulmans, s’associaient culturellement, économiquement avec des minorités chrétiennes, orthodoxes et catholiques. Mais dans le Maghreb des nouvelles independances, avec la disparition des minorités, l’Islam est ressenti comme la religion de tous, et non pas seulement de la majorité. Pour les langues, cela aboutit, dans le Maghreb francophone, à une confrontation entre un arabe – soudain monolithique – avec le français, paraissant à tort culpabilisé par son passé colonial, tout de meme toujours vivant. Je dirais que cette situation va nous amener à une régression, surtout au Maghreb. Je voudrais m’arrêter toutefois à la spécificité algérienne, que je vais résumer brièvement: rappelons qu’en Algérie il y a eu violence excessive et sous diverses formes (militaires, administratives, identitaires) de la colonisation de 1830 à 1962 – 130 ans de conquête brutale avec repressions successsives des revoltes qui ne s’épuisaient pas. Cela n’a été le cas ni pour la Tunisie, ni pour le Maroc, ex-protectorats. Ainsi,

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l’intrusion coloniale en Algérie fut la seule dans cet ensemble du Nord, où, après une brutalité et, comment dire, une atteinte des assises même de la société autochtone, le français s’installe comme langue unique, chassant des institutions et des écoles l’enseignement de l’arabe (également le berbère) qui existait pendant des siècles à divers niveaux. Donc le français devient, pendant je dirais au moins trois générations, une langue monopole et forteresse unique de l’écrit. N’oublions pas que, à un certain moment, dans les années 1960, on a espéré faire de l’Algérie une colonie de peuplement. Il y a eu alors des projets pour faire de l’Algérie un nouveau Canada. Quant aux Algériens ‘natives,’ qui mouraient de famine, apres les massacres, puis l’expropriation massive de leurs terres tribales, on pensait les parquer au Sahara. Donc, les insurrections armées s’étant épuisées, le nationalisme resurgit dans les années vingt sous forme politique, avec deux conséquences. Les femmes étaient enfermées: enfermement et ségregation des femmes qui, rappelons le, ne peuvent pas se marier avec des non-musulmans: cette restriction, collectivement observée, est devenue la seule sauvegarde de l’unité familiale; ainsi, il n’y eut pas métissage. Par ailleurs, l’arabe, soudain réservé à la rue, aux marchés, a été l’expression d’ une culture populaire très vivace, avec une poésie de résistance, poésie en arabe mais aussi poésie en berbère. Tout cela pour expliquer la spécificité algérienne. Quand on parle de ‘nuit coloniale’ – c’est l’ expression d’un leader nationaliste comme Ferhat Abbas – c’était véritablement une nuit sur le plan de l’état des langues, mais certes pas de l’identité proprement algérienne. Ceci explique la différence, après, dans les années 1960, avec le Maroc et la Tunisie qui, eux, avaient conservé un bilinguisme franco-arabe plus opératoire. En Tunisie, le collège Sadiqui fut un collège bilingue de qualité où se formaient des intellectuels en français et en arabe littéraire. En Algérie, seulement une minorité, peut être quelques centaines de jeunes, jusque dans les années 1950, sont formés en arabe coranique pour devenir des juges appliquant le droit musulman aux Indigènes. Je fais exception toutefois des régions de Constantine et des Aurès, qui ont gardé des liens profonds grace aux confréries musulmanes reliées au Moyen-Orient, et qui envoient quelquefois leurs enfants au Caire. Ainsi Boumédienne, l’ex-président de la république, était arabisant du Moyen-Orient. Exception faite d’une minorité donc

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de l’Est, l'Algérie, quant à la petite élite qui se forme, devient francophone dans les années 1920, 1930. En 1962, quand l’Algérie est indépendante, avec le départ massif de la minorité européenne et des Juifs algériens, on ne peut s’étonner que la religion, l’Islam, devienne la religion officielle. Toutefois, dans la constitution, tous les citoyens sont égaux et la république est laïque, mais avec l’Islam ‘comme religion de la majorité.’ La revendication soudain plus forte tourne autour de ce qu’on a appelé la langue nationale. Ce terme de ‘langue nationale’ semble presque signifier, dans l’inconscient algérien que, plus on va réparer la perte d’une maitrise dans la langue arabe, plus on va se sentir ‘de nationalité algérienne’. Des langues de l’Algérie, il y avait pourtant l’arabe et le berbère, puis le français, qui restait en partie la langue de l’école, de l’université; appeler l'arabe ‘langue nationale’ était en quelque sorte assigner à l’arabe une valeur de revanche a posteriori contre le monopole dont avait joui le français en période coloniale. A partir de là, en moins d’une génération, en vingt ans, on décidait d’arabiser par le haut, en amenant des professeurs de beaucoup de pays arabes. Comme il y eut scolarisation massive, l’arabisation a été opérée sur les seuls critères quantitatifs, d’où une fermeture, une régression qualitative évidente. Je vais donner des exemples de la vie concrète. Je prendrais d’abord l’exemple de Ben Bella. Je me souviens bien, cela faisait quelques jours que nous étions indépendants, Ben Bella arrive à Alger, et il lance cette phrase qui m’était restée, parce que je l’ai entendue alors, en direct, dans la rue, en plein centre d’Alger: “Je déclare que nous sommes arabes, arabes, arabes!” Moi, je me suis dit: “Pourquoi répète-t-il cela trois fois? C’est comme si un Français me disait: ‘Je suis français’ trois fois. Cela signifierait qu’il n’en est pas tellement sûr!” [Laughter] Trois ans après, quand Ben Bella est démis par Boumédienne, Boumédienne lui, se considérait, et était un lettré en langue arabe. Donc à partir de 1965, les médias, la télévision, fonctionnaient avec, je dirais, le discours du chef, du chef de l’État. Et ce discours, alors on l’entendait le dimanche. A cette époque là la télévision entrait par modernisme partout. Dans les hameaux les plus reculés, il pouvait ne pas y avoir encore l’eau courante, mais il y avait la télévision, pour que le discours du chef pénètre dans les foyers. Et le discours du chef durait trois heures, quatre heures, presque tous les dimanches. Très bien! On sait

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que le parti unique est générateur d’une logorrhée verbale du ‘Père’. Or, ce qui était frappant, c’était que le chef s’adressait au peuple non pour être compris – au contraire, pour ne pas être compris! [Laughter] On ouvrait le poste, il parlait dans une très belle langue, presque coranique; le comprenaient les Imams; le comprenaient les Orientaux qui vivaient là, et presque tout le monde en était fier, même si l’on ne le comprenait pas! Ou, pire, parce que l’on ne le comprenait pas, c’était donc qu’il était vraiment le chef! [Laughter] Il était lettré, il était le seul à posséder la langue nationale! Je ris à present, mais pourtant j’étais étonnée. Tout le monde baignait dans une léthargie de soumission, ou sans doute d’auto-culpabilité linguistique, tout comme effectivement la messe qui s’est dite en latin pendant des siècles, sans qu’on la comprenne, du moins avant Luther! Voila pour la langue dite ‘nationale’. Cela ne peut vous étonner qu’évidemment les francophones qui, eux, avaient été instituteurs, professeurs, universitaires essayaient de faire leur travail le plus efficacement malgré cette avalanche de langue boursoufflée. Les femmes, quand elles parlaient entre elles, utilisaient un dialecte souvent de nuances, de litotes, de sous-entendus. La vie continuait, mais elle continuait dans d’autres langues ou dans l’oralité populaire, quotidienne, secrète de l’arabe dialectal. Pour résumer, je dirais que, finalement, ce qui s’est developpé, effectivement, après 15 ou 20 ans d’indépendance, c’est une fermeture, une non-communication entre les diverses catégories de population. Lorsqu’est arrivée la violence, on pourrait expliquer sociologiquement la frutration de tous ces jeunes qui deviennent des terroristes ou des fondamentalistes violents, on pourrait l'expliquer par le fait qu’ils ont suivi une alphabétisation en arabe jusqu’à 16 ans, 17 ans; ils échouaient au baccalauréat, et on ne s’occupait plus d’eux. On les excluait. A ce moment-là, ils voyaient que, dans la ‘middle class,’ les enfants des parents qui avaient pu avoir l’enseignement bilingue, pouvaient, eux, trouver des emplois. Dans la réalité, quand vous aviez une licence en droit en arabe, vous pouviez être engagé comme postier, mais ensuite vous ne pouviez pas trouver facilement un emploi. Au contraire du moindre diplôme en français, surtout dans les domaines technique et scientifique, qui donnait droit à des postes. Donc vous voyez bien que même pour les jeunes, il y a eu cette rivalité linguistique: officiellement

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l’arabe est la langue qui valorise, mais dans l’économique et dans la réalité, elle ne produisait que des chômeurs. Mais, je ne suis pas là pour faire une critique de l’échec pédagogique de l’Algérie indépendante; je voudrais tout de même dire que lorsque la violence de tant d’exclus s’est exercée d’abord contre les francophones, cette ‘guerre des langues’ a été entretenue par une politique culturelle inconsciente, ou plutôt stupidement démagogique. Dans mon livre Le Blanc de l’Algérie, j’ai voulu revenir en amont, pour analyser les causes endogènes de cette violence dont se sont emparés les fondamentalistes: j’ai rappelé, dans l’histoire cachée de la résistance algérienne, comment cette ‘guerre des langues’ avait déjà si terriblement sévi. Je pourrais faire le même raisonnement pour les femmes. Là j’ai eu également une amie qui était avec moi au collège, et dont j’étais sûre en 1962 qu’elle était morte, tuée par l’armée française puisqu’elle était infirmière au maquis. Six mois après l’indépendance on m’apprend, que non, elle n’est pas morte tuée en héroïne par l’armée française, elle aurait été tuée par un des chefs maquisards parce qu’il l’aurait trouvée une nuit dans les bras d'un autre. On a décidé que ce n’était pas moral! Et moi, six mois après l’indépendance, j’ai senti vraiment que cette misogynie contre le corps des femmes, véritablement, se révélait, comment dire, véritablement hideuse! Ainsi, cette décennie récente de violence sanglante, les femmes dans les villes et les bourgs, menacées en premier, ont été en nombre des victimes. Souvent elles étaient simplement des enseignantes; certaines ont dit: “Ah, ils veulent me tuer parce que j’enseigne le français, langue étrangère.” Et elles ont été tuées. Mais souvent c’etait simplement parce qu’elles travaillaient au dehors! Ainsi, à ce moment-là, le fondamentalisme intolérant s’est acharné sur les femmes – sur les femmes qui après quarante ans d’indépendance avaient acquis leur autonomie, un travail, avaient un métier, croyaient vraiment à l’égalité sexuelle. Et pourtant, moi, je pense (ce fut peut-être la raison de mon travail) trouver une continuité; cette intolérance était en germe dans la manière même dont la violence ‘nationaliste’ s’était parfois exercée avant 1962. Alors, je voudrais dire que pour ma part, dans mon travail d’écrivain, j’essaie de faire le contraire. C’est-à-dire que – et je ne suis pas la seule – la littérature algérienne ou du Maghreb pour moi est une littérature qui a toujours fonctionné avec un triangle linguistique, avec

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une langue, une des plus anciennes d’Afrique, le berbère. A un certain moment le berbère a perdu son alphabet, mais il est vraiment inscrit là, dans l’identité du Maghreb. Ma grand-mère parlait berbère avec les métayers, c’était sa langue de comptabilite pour ses propriétés; en même temps c’est la langue de la campagne. Ma mère a perdu le berbère. Mais il y a un moment où la langue absente est probablement celle dans laquelle vous vous sentez irréductible aux autres influences. C’est la langue des minorités, c’est la langue pour les Kurdes, c’est la langue pour les Basques, c’est la langue pour les Celtes. La langue risque de disparaître et vous avez une sorte de refus intime pour la conserver, même en creux. Ceci, c’est le premièr point. Le second, je devrais rappeler que, comme Henri Lopés, je n’ai pas choisi ma langue française. Je suis allée à l’école: il n’y avait que l’école française. Donc, c’est la langue de ma pensée, c’est la langue de mon écriture. Quant à l’arabe que j’ai écrit à l’école coranique, j’ai tenté de le récupérer, puisque je le parle comme dialecte, et surtout j’ai tenté de faire un travail au cinéma parce que c’était travailler sur ma langue avec la musique, avec les voix. Mais après avoir fait deux films, le cinéma étant d’État, on considérait que je n’avais rien à voir avec ce type de création. Néanmoins, je dirais que cette langue maternelle qui vit en moi, je sens qu’elle tourne. Elle n’est pas une langue statique. Je vais donner juste un exemple. Pendant longtemps pour moi l’arabe littéraire était la langue de la nostalgie – mais de la beauté, de la beauté poétique. On apprenait des poèmes, on apprenait les ‘mo’allaquat’, les poèmes suspendus où il y a des mots innombrables pour dire l’amour et j’étais dans le désir de récupérer cette richesse. Puis le temps est passé; je suis restée dans mon dialecte, que j ai pu utiliser dans mes films jusqu’au moment où, en continuant à vivre avec des femmes traditionelles, j’ai découvert que dans ce dialecte, il y avait un arabe des femmes certes secret, mais, parfois, cet arabe enlevait aux mots d’amour toute leur consistance. C’est ce que je raconte dans Vaste est la prison: un événement autobiographique dans un hammam. J’entends deux dames: l’une dit à l’autre, “L’ennemi est à la maison.” Je dis, “Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire? Où est l’ennemi?” On me répond: “Il s’agit du mari.” Ah bon! “Et ce mari, il est si terrible que cela pour que…?” “Non, non, c’est un mari très gentil, mais… c’est un mari!” [Laughter]

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Donc, à Blida, dans cette ville qui n’était pas la mienne (ma ville est une ville peuplée d’Andalous, où l’arabe amoureux est resté encore très prenant), dans la ville de Blida, qui comme par hasard est devenue la capitale de l’intégrisme, les femmes entre elles appellent leurs maris même gentils, ‘l’ennemi’. Et pour moi cela m’a paru une désolation, car brusquement le désir d’écrire en arabe a disparu. Comment peut-on écrire dans une langue si les mots d’amour disparaissent? On ne peut même pas inventer la moindre fiction amoureuse. Ainsi, l’arabe au feminin a tourné; c’est comme s’il présentait son envers. Alors, évidemment ce n’est pas l’arabe de tous les pays arabes, ce n’est pas l’arabe d’un certain nombre de poétesses et de romancières égyptiennes, syriennes, ou même une ou deux algériennes, mais qui vivent en dehors d’Alger. C’est l’arabe au quotidien, vécu par des femmes reserrées, renfermées et qui ne peuvent que se plier à la domination masculine. Alors quand vous utilisez deux langues, c’est-à-dire pour moi le français avec un oral en arabe, évidemment les équilibres peuvent changer. Le français lui-même, je l’utilise dans les marges, c’est a dire volontairement un français perméable aux autres langues, qui en même temps, probablement n’a pas les mêmes enjeux que celui d’écrivains vraiment français. Bref, je dirais que, pour ma part, être écrivain dans l’Algérie d’aujourd’hui, c’est rétablir les passages de langues, c’est rétablir entre les langues des éclairages multiples pour écrire du texte, du texte métissé ou du texte différent, mais évidemment pour résister à la violence. Voilà, j’ai terminé. [Applause]

WOLE SOYINKA A few years ago there was a very strong movement, demonstrations included, led by women, for the teaching of Berber in Algeria. What became of that movement? It was very strong.

ASSIA DJEBAR Oui, l’enseignement du berbère, je vais répondre. Dans un premier temps, pendant la colonisation, il y avait une chaire de berbère à l’université. Et lorsqu’en 1962, on a un écrivain, un romancier kabyle Mouloud Mammeri, qui est mort en 1989, aurait pu enseigner le ber-

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bère. Et bien, on a supprimé cette chaire, alors qu’en Italie, à l’université de Naples, cette chaire continuait à fonctionner! Mais tout a changé en 1980. En 1980, il y a eu un mouvement de résistance linguistique en Kabylie. Ce fut “le printemps berbère.” Beaucoup de jeunes ont fait de la prison, ont été arrêtés. Et ils ont obtenu en 1983 et 1985 la reconnaissance de leur enseignement et de parler le berbère dans les écoles primaires. Ils demandent maintenant la reconnaissance du berbère comme deuxième langue nationale, ce que leur refuse pour l’instant l’actuel pouvoir.

GERARD HOUGHTON I thought I might add a word to Wole Soyinka’s Soothesaying dictionary. I had a friend, an American, who became a pilot, and she moved up the ranks and became a pilot for American Airways, and there was a time when they didn’t want to use the word ‘cockpit’, because the ladies didn’t wish to use that word. So the ladies invented the term ‘box-office’ [Laughter], but that was an example of the ladies themselves using the term, for whatever reasons. Alors, je vais m’addresser à Assia Djebar. Parce que aujourd’hui on a parlé beaucoup de langues nationales, j’ajoute une réflexion sur la langue japonaise. Là aussi on a une langue qui est bien divisée entre les femmes et les hommes. On pense qu’il y a une seule langue, mais en fait il y a deux langues tout à fait différentes. Les femmes ne parlent pas avec les mêmes mots, avec les mêmes sens, avec les mêmes significations, et ça se passe même au niveau de l’écriture. Parce que les hommes écrivent d’une certaine façon, en fait c’est tiré de ces caractères chinois dont j’ai parlés tout à l’heure. C’est très masculin, c’est très ‘coarse’, c’est très bref. Il y a même un style de poésie qui est fait par les hommes. Tandis que pour les femmes, c’est beaucoup plus fluide, c’est beaucoup plus souple, et il y a un façon de dire des choses plus subtile. Il y a même toute une orthographie qui est tout à fait différente. En ce moment, c’est en train de disparaître, mais je veux simplement ajouter qu’en fait, quand on parle d’une langue nationale, on pense qu’il n’y a qu’une seule, mais en fait, si on en prend conscience, même en anglais, même en français en fait, il y a quand même des légères différences: des choses que les hommes peuvent se permettre de dire que les femmes ne disent pas.

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ANNY KING Pour ajouter un peu à ce que vient de dire Gerard: je vis dans une société complètement anglophone ici, et avec les difficultés, des joies aussi quand même, et on m’a tout de suite dit que si je voulais vraiment arriver à l’université, c’est-à-dire vraiment grimper les échelons, il y a quelque chose qu’il fallait surtout pas que je dise. Il fallait pas que je dise que j’étais ‘anxious’ ou que j’étais ‘worried’, mais il fallait que je dise que j’étais ‘concerned’. Et ça, ça fait toute la différence.

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

I have a question for Wole Soyinka. I really enjoyed your paper. It was brilliant as always and entertaining. I’m sure that there is the sense in which all these neologisms like hero, shero etc seem and are ridiculous in a way, but I’m wondering whether you cannot tell us whether you think that the way we use language does affect us. It seems that your geographical location was the U S A . What does it do to a person to call them a minority? For instance, to call blacks a minority – there is no way in the world that blacks could be a minority, but what does it do to you psychologically? What does it do to somebody in the French context, where they are always speaking of ‘les hommes, les hommes, les hommes’, meaning humanity or humankind, as people say now? There are psychological implications to the way we use language, and in that sense the word is extremely powerful. Maintenant, pour Assia Djebar: j’étais vraiment, enfin très touchée par tout ce que vous avez dit, parce que vous nous avez montré que la puissance du verbe peut avoir une telle force, que ça peut devenir une question de vie ou de mort, quand il y a des gens qui meurent à cause de la langue qu’ils parlent. Vous avez dit que la violence s’est acharnée d’abord sur les écrivains. Et je voulais savoir si c’était seulement parce que ces écrivains étaient francophones, ou bien c’était justement la puissance du verbe qui gênait les autorités dictatoriales.

WOLE SOYINKA Yes, I agree with you absolutely, and I did mention it. I did devote a small paragraph to that acknowledgement that, yes, language can actually form minds, and I used the expression, “Should we leave language to Liberty Hall and not even bring it into the House of Correc-

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tion.” I agree. Look at the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme.” It is called universal, but it says “droits de l’homme.” But then again, there is also the problem of indoctrination. You can use the word ‘man’ in a way in which it is accepted as being generic of the entire human society, but that depends very much on the particular society, and the context, in which it is being used. Certainly, when you get to a state where instead of ‘man’, you put ‘person’, and so instead of ‘man-handle’ you put ‘don’t person-handle me’: now you are doing violence to a word which goes beyond what you’re trying to redress, because now you are assaulting my sense of language itself, you’re assaulting euphony, you’re assaulting the history of the language. So I agree with you absolutely, it’s just that I think that the House of Correction is being intellectually lazy, is being uncreative in very many respects and is actually extending its territory beyond sense, as in cockpit and box-office. This extremism is why I use the word ‘fundamentalism’; but I agree with you absolutely.

ASSIA DJEBAR Pour répondre à la question, je dirais que les premières victimes ont été les journalistes, 1992–1993. Dès que le parti unique a été supprimé, certes, les fondamentalistes ont obtenu d’être le parti légalisé, mais, en même temps, il y a une vie associative de femmes très forte, et en même temps une presse indépendante. Tout naturellement, ils ont été les premiers visés, qu’ils soient francophones ou arabophones. Jusqu’à l’heure actuelle il y a un chiffre de, je pense, autour de 200 à 250 journalistes assassinés, mais ce n’est pas par une différence de langue. Certes, les francophones sont plus voyants parce que leurs articles sont répercutés en Europe. On peut considérer qu’entre 1993 et 1998 il y a eu je crois quelque chose comme 10,000 intellectuels algériens qui ont dû partir, qui se retrouvent maintenant beaucoup au Canada, un tout petit peu en Europe. Des écrivains ont été tués parce qu’écrivains, des poètes, des hommes de théâtre. Par exemple, Abdelkader Alloula, le plus grand dramaturge en langue arabe. Les acteurs, les directeurs de théâtre, donc tout ce secteur culturel a été visé dans une sorte de logique sinistre du fondamentalisme!

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ABIOLA IRELE This has been ‘passionnant’, but we have to stop, because we will run over our time. I would like to thank our two speakers, Assia Djebar and Wole Soyinka, for what has been really a wonderful event. Thank you very much. [Applause]

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Ninth Dialogue: The Word in Disguise B IYI B ANDELE AND O LABIYI Y AÏ

T I M C R I B B (C H A I R )

L

ADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

mesdames, messieurs: we continue now with the next session. We are back on schedule. I know not how this can have happened. Some god is watching over our wanderings. This session is something of a mystery session. As you probably gathered, Gaston–Paul Effa is not able to be here, and we’re therefore extremely grateful to Professor Olabiyi Yaï, who has stepped into that breach, necessarily at very short notice. I am sure he needs no introduction. Many years ago when I was at Ife his very powerful presence there, his articles in Odù on African philosophy, or indeed of African philosophy, were well known and circulated and frequently referred to, and he has pursued his lines of thought and his career in many parts of the world. He is currently the ambassador to U N E S C O from Benin. So it is a great good fortune that this space has opened to give him the opportunity of speaking to us. He will be speaking in French. Before that Biyi Bandele will be springing on us something perhaps a little unexpected. Some of you may know his novels, such as The Street, or his plays, such as Death Catches the Hunter. Picking up on the title of one of his other novels (and on the colour of my clothing and the grayness of my hair), Christiane Fioupou has already dubbed me a Sympathetic Undertaker and some of you may

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have seen his latest play, now touring to London and Edinburgh and Birmingham. Just a week ago, Biyi was coming back from Berlin, where this most recent play, Happy Birthday, Mr Dekka Dee, which was at the Edinburgh Festival last summer, was being reincarnated by the touring company for whom and with whom he wrote it. He is currently resident here in Cambridge as the Judith Wilson Fellow in the Faculty of English and I believe he is developing a dramatization of Dr Johnson’s Rasselas with some students. Lucky students! Without more ado I will now hand the word to Biyi Bandele.

BIYI BANDELE We were talking yesterday about signs and symbols and I have decided that I am going to talk about my muse, my way into creativity, through a very powerful symbol that speaks to me from within the Yorùbá pantheon of deities, of divinities. The deity is Èshù, who is known all over the world as something of a prankster, but has been, I think, widely misunderstood. When I sat down to write this little talk I thought I might try to see if I could go beyond the signs, and, through explaining to myself what the symbols represented by Èshù are, I might be able to understand him and hopefully help you to understand him. It’s called “The Trickster in Disguise.” The Trickster God, Èshù, came walking once along the path between two farms. Èshù wore a cap that was white on one side and red on the other, black behind and green before. The two farmers, on either side of his path, saw him and wondered who on earth, or beneath the sea, or in the land of the unborn this rude stranger imagined himself to be who walked past them without so much as a “good morning.” It preyed on their minds for awhile but they had work to do and no time to gossip, so they farmed on and kept their counsel and soon forgot about the mannerless stranger. Later on that day, in the evening, after the two friends had finished at the farm and as they drank palm wine together in the village square and ate pepper soup, one of them finally brought up the matter: “Did you see that strange man in the white cap who walked past the farm today?” he asked his friend. “I did see the fool,” said the other man, “but his cap was red, I saw it with my own two eyes.” “Well then,” said the first farmer, who was severely short-sighted but would sooner die

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than admit it, “you must be blind….” “You,” responded the other, who was legendary for his drunkenness, “must be drunk.” Well, you know what happened next: the two men, best friends since childhood, came to blows. So angry at each other were they, so bitterly upset, they became sworn enemies. They forbade their wives and children from going anywhere near the other’s compound. They ignored each other on their way to the farm. They erected two walls, spite for spite, along the path that connected their farms. The drunkard got very drunk one night and forgot his way to his own compound. He heaped blame upon the other one for casting an evil spell on him. He shrugged off the evil spell by dedicating special sacrifices to the deities of his fathers, and beseeched them to keep extra watch over him. The other man woke up one morning and was gripped by severe toothache, which gave him a severe headache, which, in turn, further diminished his range of vision. He leapt into his gown and trousers and ran in a panic to the elders of the hamlet. “I would not have minded in the least,” he said when he found his tongue, “if I had five eyes or four or even three, but I have only two eyes to my name, and that man is trying to take them both from me. Tell him to leave my eyes alone.” The elders consulted among themselves and decided to settle the feud once and for all. They sent for the other man and put both men to trial. Èshù was there among the spectators at the trial, disguised as a wayfarer, and when the elders could not apportion blame or praise the trickster divinity revealed himself, and showed the cap. “Pardon them,” he said to the elders. “They could not help but quarrel. I wanted it so. Spreading strife is my greatest joy.” I once had a friendly row about Èshù with a friend of mine back home in Nigeria, a self-proclaimed monotheist of a fundamentalist vein who loved nothing better than to unleash his righteous intelligence on the wayward and the damned and the heretics like myself. He turned me into a pillar of salt almost when I expressed admiration and empathy for the syncopated morality personified by the Trickster God. I referred to Èshù as a poet, although what I meant was that he was birthed by an extraordinarily gifted visionary whose name is now lost to us but who continues to bedazzle us and illuminate the hidden recesses of our being through his wondrous and tantalizing character, the inimitable trickster divinity. And what better way to salute this

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genius than to name him after the deity of his creation. “Èshù is the devil,” my friend said: “What is so loveable about the devil?” I knew it was futile arguing this point with my friend; he knew his bible only too well. The missionaries, when they translated the bible into Yorùbá, had appropriated Èshù, a deity they liked and understood least of all the deities of the Yorùbá pantheon, as the translation for Satan, the devil. Èshù is, properly speaking, the god of fate. For reasons that I don’t have time to go into here, he is often represented in carvings as a man with a half-shaved chin. The missionaries took one look at this man, listened to his devotees talk about him, his sense of humour, which is bizarre, his moral values, which are dubious, and his dress sense, which – well, to begin with, look at the beard: they didn’t like what they saw or heard, and as it happened they had a vacancy going for the local post of Satan, whose job is to go around scaring the hell out of anyone who falls out of line. Without so much as a blink, they gave him the job: they kicked Èshù upstairs. So now what you have in the Yorùbá Christian psyche is a great symbological dissonance. Your god of fate, or rather, your friend in good times and bad times, is now also your worst enemy. Those missionaries were certainly onto something there – but I digress…. The two farmers were speechless when they discovered that they had been the unwitting victims of Èshù’s prank, and long after they had made up and re-affirmed their vow of friendship, long after they had buried the corrosive enmity that had nearly destroyed them both, they often wondered why the Trickster God had chosen to play such a childish prank on them and they concluded, and perhaps they were right, that the divinity was only living up to his reputation for creating mischief. But there is an all-pervasive constant that resonates in the profane poetry of the wit of Èshù, a deadly serious message: life is too serious to be taken seriously. That is to say, what does it matter whether the cap was red or white? But like all great poets Èshù manages to say one thing while also stating and affirming and amplifying the exact opposite. Is the cap really red or is it really white? It is both red and white. It is neither red nor white. Let the buyer beware. Life is too serious to be lived inadvertently. Now you see what I am driving at, don’t you? The two farmers were wrong again. Èshù was not making mischief for the sake of being seen to make mischief. The seriousness of his intent may have manifested

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itself as a joke, but the joke was far more than a joke. It was a subtle recapitulation of simple and transcendental wisdom. The eye never lies, but rarely do we ever let it tell the truth. This is not a moral judgement; Èshù does not moralize. In Èshù’s world, the truth is a cap with many colours. At the beginning of this little talk, when I described the cap on Èshù’s head on the day he chose to amuse himself at the expense of the two poor farmers, I said it was white on one side and red on the other, black behind and green before. The two farmers saw the white side and the red side, but because he walked past them in profile, they did not see the black rear and the green front of the cap. I don’t think it would have mattered at all if they had, they would still have found a way of picking a fight with each other. But the cap is much more than a theatrical prop in Èshù’s repertory of mischief. The four colours on it and their positioning on his head represent the four world-directions: east, west, north and south. In other words, the cap is a scrupulously delineated symbol identifying Èshù as a personification of the cradle or the centre of civilization, which in Yorùbá mythology is Ile-Ife. But the point that Èshù is making to the farmers, and to us, is far from parochial. He is not staking an Ile-Ife claim to be in the centre. What he is saying is to my thinking much more radical. He is saying, I think, that the centre is everywhere. He is saying that it’s not this colour or that colour; it’s not this sacred monument or that parish’s position, it is not geographically located here or there, east or west, north or south; the centre travels with you when you journey to Sokoto and back in search of it; check your pocket, it’s right there among the loose change. In other words, the truth nestling so transparently on Èshù’s head is visible to all who render themselves transparent to it. But like the two farmers in Èshù’s metaphorical universe, we’re all too often condemned by sheer hubris and naivety, or by deficit in empathy, or by colossal failure of the imagination to be blind watchers of the sky. It is said, in praise of Èshù, that he, untroubled by the inhibitions of our literal, prosaic and all too linear logic, threw a rock today and the rock, sharp as a mamba’s retort, cut a wide arch through the air, sailed back into time on the fangs of eternity and killed a bird yesterday. I like to imagine that bird and the rock together as twin inflections of a transcendent singularity. Past hopes and future horrors collide and are equalized in this joyously transgressive ritual of continuity. No pity here, nor terror either; moral judgement is deemed irrelevant and inconsequential. It sounds quite

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hard-hearted, but I think there’s profound compassion there. What’s missing, and I think this is why Èshù is so widely misunderstood, is any trace of sentimentality. “The ripest fruit was saddest” – to paraphrase Wole Soyinka: in silence of webs, Abiku moans, shaping mounds from the yolk.

The message of Èshù is simple: the story never ends, no matter what happens: the story continues. [Applause]

OLABIYI YAÏ On m’a demandé, selon le programme, de parler des déguisements ou des habits du verbe, des masques du verbe. Dans ce genre d’exercice, je préfère toujours partir des traditions intellectuelles africaines et, dans ce cas-ci de la tradition intellectuelle Yorùbá, pour la lier ou l’allier, le cas échéant, à celle d’autres peuples et d’autres continents et ainsi contribuer au tissage d’un universel. Car l’universel pour moi n’est jamais donné, il se fait. Donc je partirai de la tradition intellectuelle Yorùbá, à laquelle j’émarge pour l’interroger et me poser la question de l’essence du verbe et de sa transformation. Que nous disent les philosophes, que nous dit la philosophie Yorùbá dans Ifá, par exemple? Elle nous dit – et en cela je rejoins mon frère et ami le Professeur Serpos, qui, ce matin, nous posait la question, à mon sens très rhétorique, de savoir si au début était le verbe – cette tradition Yorùbá nous dit qu’au début n’était pas le verbe. Il existe un ese Ifá de odù Osaguda spécialement dédié à la naissance du verbe. La tradition nous dit que le verbe fut d’abord dans le ventre de Olódùmarè. (Pour parler en termes plutôt judéo-chrétiens, Olódùmarè est ce qu’on appelle l’être suprême; en fait, il y n’a pas de suprématie dans le panthéon Yorùbá, mais pour des esprits occidentaux il convient d’utiliser cette expression.) Alors, le verbe était dans le ventre d’Olódùmarè et, un peu comme un bébé, il demandait à naître, et il faisait tant de tapage que Olódùmarè a décidé de s’en débarrasser. On le nommait alors “Hùnnùhùnnù.” Pour les oreilles Yorùbá qui sont ici – Niyi Osundare parlait hier des idéophones – cet “Hùnnùhùnnù” connote l’impureté alliée à l’impatience. Le verbe était un mélange d’impatience et d’impureté. Donc Olódùmarè, l’être suprême, fit un geste (ce geste s’appelle “Hòo-rò”), comme pour vomir

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le verbe, pour vomir “Hùnnùhùnnù,” et “Hùnnùhùnnù” en tombant devient “Òrò.” C’est ainsi que le Yorùbá explique de façon très savante la naissance du verbe par un subtil montage étymologique qui requiert une profonde connaissance des structures phonologiques et morphologiques du Yorùbá, quoique les linguistes, dans leur arrogante ignorance, parlent d’étymologie folklorique ou “populaire” (folk etymology). Mais c’est un montage très savant, en fait. Ainsi “Hùnnùhùnnù” devint “Orò,” et depuis ce jour est né le proverbe qui dit: “Orò Hùnnùhùnnù inu eledè ni i gbé,” “Tout ce qui est Hùnnùhùnnù depuis lors reste dans le ventre d’un porc,” ce qui confirme l’impureté et l’impatience. Donc, je dirais que, au début n’était pas le verbe, mais le déguisement était au début du verbe. Et cela, comme par hasard, rappelle l’approche de Césaire, quelqu’un que j’aime beaucoup citer. Césaire concevait la parole poétique en termes de gestation et de parturition. Le poète démiurge était “enceint” du verbe. Je crois que c’est Césaire lui-même qui disait: “Donc gros du monde, le poète parle,” une citation dans ce fameux poème-essai “Poésie et connaissance,” qui fut publié, je crois, en 1945 dans Tropiques. Et il continue par un néologisme éclairant (je le cite encore): “La démarche poétique est une démarche de naturation” – pas de ‘maturation’ mais de ‘naturation’ – “qui s’opère sous l’impulsion démentielle de l’imagination.” Ainsi donc, le monde brut, après un stage de maturation dans le poète, devient sa nature de verbe poétique. Et ainsi commence la saga inachevée d’une aliénation du monde dont il faut bien faire l’éloge. Pour paraphraser Césaire, je dirais que le verbe est un vaudou puissant, qui par le poète se fait mot, “mot transe,” “mot Macumba,” “mot flamme,” “par tous mots guerrier silex,” comme il dit dans son texte Moi Laminaire, paru chez Seuil en 1982. Et ce genre de déguisement continue. Mais permettez-moi de revenir à la tradition intellectuelle Yorùbá. Le verbe dans un de ses meilleurs déguisements est un verbe secret, pur et lourd, appelé “ofò,” ce qui à mon avis est mal traduit par le mot ‘incantation’ qui est la forme la plus approximative pour le rendre. Mais c’est plus que cela, parce que “fò” dont il est issu, veut dire ‘parler’, ‘lancer’ quelque chose. Et cela veut dire aussi ‘laver’, ce qui éclaire la métaphore d’impureté. Donc la parole pure, délavée de son impureté de “Hùnnùhùnnù” est par excellence “ofò,” soit ‘l’incantation’. Toujours gros des rêves, des transformations, puisque le “ofò,” la parole

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incantatoire, a pour mission de transformer le monde, de le parer, de l’habiller. La raison, donc, pour laquelle on dit ‘incantation’ est que cette incantation sort de la bouche de ce qu’on appelle généralement ‘aláwo,’ soit les maîtres du verbe. Au sommet de la hiérarchie des ‘aláwo’ se situe le Babaláwo. De plus, ‘aláwo’, dans la partie occidentale du pays Yorùbá, signifie poète, maître ès-verbe, créateur. Mais, il y a aussi d’autres déguisements: les verbes d’outre-tombe. Le verbe peut se transformer et se déguiser au point de retourner aux Ancêtres. Donc, un verbe voilé, un verbe masqué, de la bouche d’un “egungun,” car la puissance porte toujours un masque. Ces verbes, ce sont les paroles qui viennent évidemment de la divination d’Ifá. Voilà quelques exemples d’habits du verbe ou des déguisements du verbe, si je puis dire, des masques de la puissance du verbe. J’aimerais terminer en évoquant un problème, en le pensant à haute voix pour vous le soumettre – par une interrogation, donc, sur ce que peut être le rêve, sur ce que peut être la puissance du verbe africain, ou quel rêve pour la puissance du verbe africain, pour dire mieux, par nos temps qu’on dit de mondialisation et de globalisation. Cela me préoccupe et j’aimerais faire partager ma préoccupation. Il est de la nature du verbe poétique africain en général et Yorùbá en particulier d’agir comme je viens de le dire: d’agir sur celui ou ceux auxquels il s’adresse, de susciter une réaction, y compris une réaction de réciprocité créatrice. Le verbe engendre le verbe – parfois un verbe plus lourd, comme j’ai dit, plus secret, plus haut, plus beau – un suprême déguisement donc, ou rêve ultime, un autre verbe plus haut. Il s’agit là d’une aliénation voulue, et je rappelle que lorsque dans la tradition orale Yorùbá on prononce l’oríkì c’est pour susciter une réaction de celui ou de celle ou de l’objet auquel l’oríkì s’adresse; même si c’est un objet inanimé, comme du papier, il est censé par l’incantation répondre. Donc, à mon avis, pour que le verbe engendre un verbe suprême, il faudrait que les conditions, de bonnes conditions, sinon les conditions optimales, soient créées pour sa réception. D’où la nécessité, le caractère central de la traduction. Par nos temps de mondialisation, il me semble que le verbe africain vise plus que jamais à une ‘translation’, à un changement de lieu, à se positionner du côté d’autrui de façon non pas à provoquer la simple jouissance ou l’admiration, mais à y semer des potentialités de créativité littéraire. Et je crois que les intellectuels d’autres cultures n’auraient pas compris ce

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que l’Afrique a de meilleur parmi nos poètes et nos écrivains s’ils ne les perçoivent pas comme des gens qui veulent semer des potentialités de créativité littéraire dans les lieux où leurs œuvres sont lues ou jouées. Il me semble donc qu’une mondialisation saine consisterait à créer des conditions de réception telles que, par exemple, un Ben Okri ou un Soyinka, puisse être écrit, je ne dis pas ‘imité’ mais ‘écrit’, en français, en russe, en japonais, en hindi, en d’autres langues par les citoyens des pays où ces langues sont parlées. C’est cela le déguisement ultime. Cela évidemment suppose que la position des études de culture africaine soit radicalement revue dans les autres cultures. C’est donc un appel que je nous lance, puisque nous sommes tous africanistes ici, pour que nous commencions à créer ces conditions, de façon à ce que le verbe africain et sa puissance soient semés dans les cultures de réception, de façon à faire naître d’autres auteurs qui ne soient pas des poncifs ou des imitateurs de ceux que nous admirons, mais d’autres créateurs. Ainsi que le dit le poète en Yorùbá: [Ibà ni n o fojo oni ju Orin mi dola] “Aujourd’hui je ne veux que rendre hommage. Mon chant, c’est-à-dire le verbe, est pour demain.” [Applause]

TIM CRIBB Thank you, Professor Yaï. We’ve been privileged to have, on the one hand, the poet Èshù himself giving you the story of the kernel of Being; on the other, the Babaláwo, whom you consult about the meaning of the story [Laughter], the Babaláwo who unfolds it and leads you into a possible meaning. And that is what they have thrown into the world of the audience in this act of oró. So please now take the word, pass it back, make it creative.

T I D J A N I –S E R P O S Merci monsieur le président. J’ai deux questions pour l’ambassadeur Yaï et puis une question pour l’ami Èshù. Ma première question concerne le masque du mot: est-ce que l’ambassadeur peut nous expliquer pourquoi, dans justement la culture dont il parle, le silence est imposé à l’enfant, aux jeunes. Il faut qu’ils s’assoient, il faut qu’ils écoutent, il faut qu’ils mettent les pieds là où les ancêtres ont mis les pieds, il faut qu’ils portent ce masque jusqu’à ce qu’on estime que, maintenant, il peut enlever le masque et parler le langage de sa propre classe d’âge. Pour-

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quoi le jeune doit s’avancer masquer, et est-ce-que quelque part au moment où nous avons fait la rencontre avec l’occident, au moment où l’occident démocratisait son éducation et a mis les connaissances partout dans les bibliothèques, est-ce que ce verbe masqué que nous avons, ce silence que nous avons imposé aux jeunes n’a pas fait qu’ils étaient pas prêts à cette rencontre-là? Ma deuxième question porte sur l’utilisation des proverbes, des adages dans la conversation quand les anciens parlent. Si vous n’êtes pas initié, si vous n’avez pas atteint un certain niveau de connaissance, vous pouvez être là, ils sont en train de dire des choses et vous, vous comprenez, mais vous restez à la surface de leurs discours et eux, en utilisant les proverbes, les adages, ils disent autre chose. Est-ce que ce n’est pas également une forme de masque, l’utilisation de ces proverbes, et qui fait que vous pouvez être là et on parle de vous et vous ne saurez même pas, parce que vous ne maîtrisez pas ce niveau de langue? For my friend Èshù, I would like you to tell me the difference between Èshù and Elégbéra. Why do you think that the same god can be Èshù at a given time and at another time he’s Elégbéra? Therefore, he has a mask. Do you think that there is a bad mask and a good mask? And when is it to be used by the same god?

BIYI BANDELE I think what I was trying to say was that Èshù’s essence transcends any kind of reductive notion of evil. He is evil, he is benevolent, he is absolutely everything that you experience in the fullness of your life as a human being. He is a god of fate. He is a sort of mirror. I think one of the reasons people equate him with the devil is that he can be a very unforgiving god. He gives back to you exactly what you give to him and so he’s pretty tough in that way. But that’s fate. He’s Èshù in Yorùbá land, he’s Elégbéra; he goes by all sorts of names. He manifests himself to you by the extent to which you make yourself transparent to him. I don’t think you need any kind of initiation. I certainly don’t know of any kind of initiation that I went through. I found my way to him just through being alive and experiencing life.

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OLABIYI YAÏ Toute question posée dans les interstices du pré-colonial et du colonial est potentiellement dangereuse. Il faut faire attention de ne pas juger les pédagogies ou les formes de savoir anciennes à la lumière de, ou selon l’étalon de ce que nous avons reçu du maître colonial. Il faut trouver un terrain médian de comparaison. Je crois qu’il y a une puissance dans le silence aussi, et à mon avis le silence est une des formes de déguisement du verbe. Le silence qui a été imposé ou qui s’impose à celui qui apprend, est un silence de respect du maître; mais il est des cas où l’apprenant pose des questions. Je le dis parce que je crois avoir déjà eu un échange de ce genre avec le Professeur Tidjani, qui estime qu’un silence répressif n’encourage pas la créativité. Mais comme lui-même le sait et comme la plupart des gens qui sont Yorùbá ici le savent, la phrase finale qu’on prononce lorsqu’on finit d’initier quelqu’un est celle-ci: “A tefa fun o io tun ara re tè,” “On t’a initié, mais ce n’est pas la fin du savoir, va t’initier toi-même.” Donc, il y a responsabilisation dans le silence du responsabilisé. Car l’initiation est une responsabilisation. Un initié est avant tout responsable. J’ai passé douze mois au Brésil et pendant six mois je ne posais pas de question et un jour un prêtre me dit, “Vous, vous n’êtes pas comme les autres anthropologues, vous ne posez jamais de questions.” J’ai dit, “Oui, mais on ne m’a pas appris à poser des questions.” Il faut ouvrir d’abord les oreilles, les yeux et tous les sens, au moins pendant six mois. C’est ce que mon grand-père m’a appris. Il ne faut pas poser de questions quand tu vas dans un pays étranger pendant six mois, tu apprends d’abord. A mon avis, c’est une question de méthode pédagogique. Quant à la deuxième question, qui est liée d’ailleurs, l’utilisation des proverbes et adages, c’est aussi une forme de masque: il est certain que les niveaux du langage que vous maîtrisez vous imposent ou ne vous imposent pas le silence. Si vous estimez que vous êtes initié au point d’intervenir dans le discours, vous pouvez. Mais lorsqu’un jeune veut proférer un proverbe, il dit: “Òwe mi ko òwe eyin àgbà ni,” “ce n’est pas mon proverbe, c’est le proverbe de Vous les Ancêtres”; il crée ainsi lui-même les conditions de son intervention en disant, je rends hommage, mais voilà le proverbe qui me semble être le plus approprié pour l’occasion. Donc, le problème n’est pas tant de parler mais de savoir qu’on est à même de parler, et de dire le proverbe qu’il faut au moment

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où il le faut. Donc, on ne réprime pas les gens parce qu’ils interviennent avec des proverbes et s’il y a un Ancien qui ne connaît pas le proverbe, il est assimilé à un jeune, il devient immature. Donc, ce genre de masque s’apprend; on le met ou on apprend à le mettre; il y a des gens qui l’apprennent vite, il y en a qui ne l’apprennent jamais. Il y a des Anciens qu’on ne fera jamais chefs de famille parce qu’ils ne peuvent pas au sein de la famille dire le proverbe idoine pour éclairer une situation, et ce malgré leur âge. Je crois vous avoir répondu un peu.

IRÈNE

D ’A L M E I D A

J’aimerais poser mes questions à Yaï. D’abord, question de terminologie. Tu as utilisé le terme ‘tradition intellectuelle’ alors que nous sommes habitués au terme ‘tradition orale’ et je voulais savoir si c’est intentionnel ou si c’est un nouveau terme et qu’est-ce que ça recouvre. La deuxième question est liée à la discussion sur l’enfant et sur le silence, et tu disais que c’est une question de méthodologie qui serait différente. Est-ce que on ne peut pas avoir un regard critique sur cette méthodologie? Parce que ce n’est pas seulement le silence de l’enfant mais c’est également le fait qu’il y a tout un savoir qui demeure ésotérique, qui demeure caché, et auquel on n’a pas accès facilement. En terme de littérature, je suis en train de penser, par exemple, à Diallo dans L’aventure ambiguë, qui a appris tout ce Coran par cœur, sans comprendre, et lui même il dit qu’il a été eu, si vous voulez, que l’occident l’a eu, à cause de l’alphabet où tout de suite il a pu comprendre de façon immédiate ce que c’était que de lire et d’écrire. Donc, c’est un peu dans ce sens-là. Ma dernière question a à voir avec le dernier volet de ta communication où tu parlais de mondialisation et où tu disais qu’il y a une ‘translation’ qui se fait, et j’aimerais que tu éclaires cette partie parce que, ce que j’ai compris moi c’est qu’il fallait que nos grands écrivains comme Soyinka soient traduits dans des langues mondiales; tu disais qu’il fallait semer les potentialités de créativité littéraire. Est-ce que tu pensais à ces semailles à l’intérieur de l’Afrique ou à l’extérieur de l’Afrique dans le monde ou bien dans les deux aires géographiques. Enfin, si tu pouvais éclaircir un peu plus cette notion de mondialisation et de créativité littéraire par rapport à cette mondialisation. Merci!

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OLABIYI YAÏ Je vais répondre à la dernière question. Je n’ai pas été suffisamment clair: on doit créer les conditions d’un échange de plus en plus égal entre les cultures et les littératures. Et notre verbe, dont on reconnaît de plus en plus la puissance, doit, à la manière africaine, semer ailleurs où il est reçu et pousser, c’est-à- dire engendrer des gens qui puissent créer à la manière africaine. C’est cela la vraie tradition africaine de la littérature: c’est un échange. Et la meilleure critique consiste en une œuvre poétique meilleure que vous renvoie un autre poète. Pour arriver à cette situation, il faudrait que les cultures africaines soient mieux étudiées, mieux perçues partout, y compris évidemment dans les grandes métropoles des pays qui nous ont colonisés. C’est pour ça que j’ai parlé d’études africaines. Cela suppose aussi que, par exemple, les britanniques apprennent, je ne sais pas: le Hausa, le Yorùbá, le Somali … de façon à maîtriser les mécanismes de créativité pour créer en anglais de façon hausa, yorùbá, somalienne etc. Ce n’est pas impossible puisque il y a déjà ceux qui créent dans plusieurs langues. C’est cela qui serait un véritable échange. Moi, je ne serais pas très fier si l’occident ou toute autre culture se contentait d’admirer la littérature africaine; c’est très bien, mais cela ne me suffit pas. Je veux qu’elle fasse naître quelque chose chez l’occidental, y compris la créativité, comme nous avons nous-mêmes créé dans leurs langues. Les conditions seraient ainsi réunies pour une véritable mondialisation qui ne saurait être à sens unique. C’est à peu près ce que j’ai voulu dire. Cela peut être le sujet d’un autre colloque, mais j’espère que je me suis fait comprendre. Pour répondre à la deuxième question, je suis d’accord, il faut avoir un regard critique sur tout. Là, ma position est que tout ce qui est fait avant ma naissance est critiquable. [Laughter] Mais cela ne veut pas dire que je fais de la critique systématique. Quant aux savoirs ésotériques, je crois qu’il y a un malentendu à ce propos. Il faut dire qu’il y a beaucoup de choses qui sont devenues ésotériques parce que précisément ceux qui possèdent ce savoir ont des doutes sur la valeur de leurs étudiants. Tout savoir, qui est un pouvoir et une puissance, a un certain ésotérisme. Si vous voulez avoir un savoir et que vous ne savez pas ce que vous allez en faire, je ne vous le donne pas, puisque je sais que j’ai un avantage sur vous. Lorsqu’on critique nos traditions, on oublie qu’elles viennent d’un contexte culturel qui a produit une hiérarchie du savoir et de savants, où les maîtres détenteurs du savoir ‘traditionnel’ sont au

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bas de l’échelle. Et ils le savent. C’est-à-dire que nous sommes dans un contexte culturel de colonisation ou de post-colonisation, où ceux qui ont les savoirs pré-coloniaux, ne sont pas perçus comme des savants à part entière. Donc ceux qui vont vers eux ne peuvent que susciter des soupçons; il faudrait considérer, je crois, que les savants sont des gens intelligents et qu’ils ne peuvent que garder jalousement leur savoir, s’ils ne savent pas ce que l’étudiant va en faire. Tout le monde sait ici que les gens ne passent pas leur savoir même à leurs fils de sang lorsqu’ils ne sont pas sûrs qu’ils vont en faire quelque chose de bien. Ils préfèrent le passer à quelqu’un qui est intelligent et qui va continuer l’éthique de ce savoir. Donc à mon avis, c’est dans ce contexte qu’il faut faire la critique de ce savoir, parce qu’on oppose l’ésotérisme à l’ouverture du savoir occidental, comme si le secret atomique était à la portée de tout le monde alors que les états font de l’espionnage pour acquérir ce savoir atomique. Donc, tout savoir est ésotérique. Quant à la question de terminologie de ces traditions orales ou intellectuelles, j’estime qu’il y a une tradition intellectuelle dans chaque culture. En tout cas en Yorùbá, il y a des traditions intellectuelles qui sont surtout orales. Il y a d’autres parties du pays Yorùbá où les traditions sont aussi écrites en caractères arabes. Mais ce n’est pas toute la tradition orale qui est intellectuelle. J’entends par tradition intellectuelle une certaine façon de concevoir et d’aborder les phénomènes. Ce n’est pas la même dans toutes les traditions africaines. Pour le cas des Yorùbá, elles sont surtout consignées dans le corpus Ifá. ‘Corpus’ est un mauvais mot parce que ‘corpus’ veut dire un livre ou un corps clos, alors qu’en fait Ifá est quelque chose qui se renouvelle. En tout cas ce que nous appelons Ifá en Yorùbá est ce que j’appelle la tradition intellectuelle. Je ne sais pas si je me suis fait bien comprendre.

VÉRONIQUE TADJO One question for Biyi and one question for Yaï. Biyi, in view of your rich Yorùbá background and the fact that you live here in England and that you are published here: how do you view yourself? As an African writer? As a Black British writer? Or as just a writer? And then for Yaï: qu’est-ce que tu veut dire par ‘langage impure’? Tu as parlé du langage impure, de l’impatience: je n’ai pas tout a fait suivi mais ça m’intéresse énormément.

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BIYI BANDELE A very simple answer to that question is that I have given all three different answers you suggest on several different occasions. It depends on the context. I am a writer, I am Nigerian, I am a Nigerian writer who has lived in England for almost twelve years. My last novel was set in Brixton, where I have lived for about eight years, and during that same year I wrote a play that was set in Nigeria and I wrote another play that was set neither in Nigeria nor in the U K , it was set in this universal everywhere, nowhere. To be honest I don’t know. These questions are personally redundant to me. I know it’s other people’s jobs to try and pin you down by place and town and I am quite happy with any tag that is thrown at me. I ignore it and just go on writing. [Laughter] That’s the honest truth.

OLABIYI YAÏ Je parlais de parole impure dans le contexte de la naissance du verbe dans les mythes Yorùbá du verbe. Cette parole impure et impatiente est appelée “Hùnnùhùnnù.” Elle est impure, et toute parole est impure, par exemple, lorsqu’elle est malveillante. Lorsque vous parlez mal de quelqu’un, c’est une parole impure, moralement. Mais aussi la parole est impure, esthétiquement, si elle tombe et n’est ramassée par personne: la parole est comme un œuf qu’il faut prendre comme quelque chose de précieux. C’est pourquoi la parole impure, malveillante et ramassée par personne doit donc rester dans le ventre du porc. La parole impure est soit mort-née, car elle n’est pas née et reste dans le ventre de quelqu’un, comme la parole primordiale est restée dans le ventre de Olódùmarè, ou bien la parole impure est celle qui peut faire du mal, parce qu’elle n’est pas adressée de façon sincère à quelqu’un, enfin elle est impure parce qu’elle n’est pas esthétiquement acceptable. Donc il y a diverses formes d’impureté.

FEMI OSOFISAN I have questions for the two Biyis. [Laughter] First, for the younger Biyi: some have raised this question of the Christian interpretation of the Èshù, and there are quite a number of scholars, like Skip Gates, who have tried to reappropriate the image of Èshù, so you are following that stream. What I want to ask is, what are the implications of this re-inter-

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pretation for your own writing? Because I think it brings on the question of how sufficient is English and the whole English culture for the translation of Yorùbá thoughts and the Yorùbá world view within which you are writing. If you could talk a little bit about that, because I think we all face it. There’s a whole tradition of mis-interpretation that precedes one’s own writing and you have to clear that to go on to your own. I had that problem when I wrote the play Èshù and the Vagabond Minstrels. The typist had about five people reading the bible while he was typing it so that God would pardon him. [Laughter] Then, second Biyi: there’s a whole problematic here of development in the Yorùbá intellectual tradition as you described it and the needs of the present society. If wisdom is a question of experience, for which one has to go through stages of initiation at various ages, how does that help present society with its need for rapid modernization, in which young people acquire knowledge, technological knowledge, better than old people, because of the change in the world culture? What I seem to sense is that age being linked with wisdom and knowledge implies a humane and moral world, whereas in the industrial, technical, technological society one tends to get the impression of development without morality, without the ethical basis of living – those things seem to become irrelevant. Even societies which are supposed to give examples begin to rig elections and can’t count simple votes! [Laughter] But how do we get out of this trap? What is your thinking about this and the implications for African development?

OLABIYI YAÏ If I may respond partially to the question asked of Biyi number two, I think there is a job of de-missionization of Èshù ahead of us for anyone who creates in Yorùbá language, poetry, or philosophy. We have to undo the job which the missionaries did in appropriating and misrepresenting Èshù. We were both fortunate and unfortunate to have someone like Bishop Ajayi Crowther who knew that mythology from inside and twisted it to make Èshù into a devil for a people who had a world-view without a devil. So I think our generation has a duty to de-missionize. And as much as we talk of Ògún or Ifá we should make Èshù one of the most prominent Yorùbá deities, at least in the present circumstances.

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Femi has reminded me of a certain problematic with the development of Yorùbá tradition and the needs of present society. There is no doubt that there is a problem. But the problem also is whether you want education and technological learning and advancement without wisdom or whether you want it with wisdom; whether you want to appropriate knowledge from Japan or from America and adapt it to your own situation – maintaining wisdom by revisiting it, of course. So you still have to evaluate somehow the two things you oppose, age and knowledge. Yet these are not necessarily contradictory. In our own tradition we find that people who had knowledge even when they were young were made senior Babaláwo; they would respect the older Babaláwo, even though they had less knowledge. So, in our own intellectual tradition, we have ways of reconciling age and knowledge. So that’s a question the educationist and all of us have to think about. I don’t have a definite answer to it but that’s my approach – that in our own tradition you can find at least lineaments of solutions.

BIYI BANDELE Èshù has defined my aesthetics, I think, since day one, even before I realized it. I think I just gravitated towards his way of thinking right from when I was a child and I began to gather stories. I’ve got hundreds of anecdotes about Èshù, stories from all over the world, and I’ve been doing it for years. Often I would read a story and it would totally confound me, and then months later, sometimes years later, I would suddenly understand it. The symbol and the person at whom the symbol is addressed suddenly become one, they become transparent to each other. And so when I look back at some of my earlier work I am pleasantly surprised to see that there’s always been something wrong with me: I’ve always been a devotee of Èshù; which has also meant that I have always tended to get into trouble with the kind of people who are very obsessed with things like having the writer situate this big moral position within their story. People would say to me: what’s the moral position there? And I would say: well, it’s quite clear to me, I don’t understand why you think there isn’t one. I realize now it’s probably because of my affinity for Èshù’s very syncopated way of making judgements on the world, a very ambiguous way sometimes. I am sometimes in danger of being seen not to be taking a big moral position – you know: I am high up here, you are way down there. I think it’s

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important for all Yorùbá, all Nigerians who are devotees, actually to make him theirs once again. We’re just putting right something that went wrong at one point.

OLABIYI YAÏ I want to give an example of how we might proceed. Not many Yorùbá nowadays will name their children Èshùbiyi, precisely because of the missionaries’ appropriation of Èshù, and that’s a name that was once very current – Èshùfunke, Èshùgbemo, Èshùgbenga or whatever. Maybe we, as intellectuals, should re-appropriate Èshù, or Shangó for that matter, and name people Sangofemi instead of Olufemi. We have changed Olu into a Christian Olu. We should name children Sangowumi, Sangogbenga, as model-setters that maybe people will follow. But we do have some kind of reparation-job to do.

TIM CRIBB I see tea-time approaching. It was most illuminating to hear Professor Yaï on the idea of the word as self-alienating, seeking its own alienation in order to reach for a word beyond. It reminded me of the title of Professor Irele’s inaugural address at Ibadan “In Praise of Alienation.” There we see some of the resource and strength of that tradition. It’s a resource and creativity in renewing and re-projecting itself that one also sees enacted in the work of Biyi Bandele. If you look at the text of the play by Biyi that the Royal Shakespeare Company was performing last year, it looks like a re-working of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, but it is not just a re-working, it is a re-creation. It is the old word alienating itself to create a new word, and that new word is very much under the aegis of Èshù. And as Nigeria moves, as the world moves, the gods change; and where Ògún might have been the god for one generation, going that road now, does it not seem that Èshù might be the more appropriate deity? But maybe it would be unwise to name your child quite so openly; maybe the word should be kept in disguise. I think of Wole Soyinka’s own dramaturgy, where the word that is passed by the King’s Horseman to his child is never revealed to the audience. [Applause] \

Epilogue

La Chevelure O toison moutonnant jusque sur l’encolure! O boucles! O parfum chargé de nonchaloir! Extase! Pour peupler ce soir l’alcôve obscure Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure, Je la veux agiter dans l’air comme un mouchoir! La langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique, Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque défunt, Vit dans les profondeurs, forêt aromatique! Comme d’autres esprits voguent sur la musique, Le mien, ô mon amour! nage sur ton parfum. J’irai là-bas où l’arbre et l’homme, pleins de sève, Se pâment longuement sous l’ardeur des climats ; Fortes tresses, soyez la houle qui m’enlève! Tu contiens, mer d’ébène, un éblouissant rêve De voiles, de rameurs, de flammes et de mâts; Un port retentissant où mon âme peut boire A grand flots le parfum, le son et la couleur; Où les vaisseaux, glissant dans l’or et dans la moire, Ouvrent leurs vastes bras pour embrasser la gloire D’un ciel pur où frémit l’éternelle chaleur.

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THE POWER OF THE WORD Je plongerai ma tête amoureuse d’ivresse Dans ce noir océan où l’autre est enfermé; Et mon esprit subtil que le roulis caresse Saura vous retrouver, ô féconde paresse, Infinis bercements du loisir embaumé! Cheveux bleus, pavillon de ténèbres tendues, Vous me rendez l’azur du ciel immense et rond; Sur les bords duvetés de vos mèches tordues Je m’enivre ardemment des senteurs confondues De l’huile de coco, du musc et du goudron. Longtemps! toujours! ma main dans ta crinière lourde Sémera le rubis, la perle et le saphir, Afin qu’à mon désir tu ne sois jamais sourde! N’es-tu pas l’oasis où je rêve, et la gourde Où je hume à longs traits le vin du souvenir? CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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The Wig after Baudelaire’s “La Chevelure” A woodlander stranded in desert the coils of spinifex will do for a wig: the smell is dry and brittle and I wish for unseasonal rain – rare rain – to undress the emptiness of its senses. I want to mingle my natural hair – dry and brittle – nonchalantly, with moisture, a far-away rain that might roll all the way around the world from Africa, from complex heats, from polarised seas, in boats of petrified wood with ropes twined from hair fallen from souls, like fetishes. My black ocean spreads as the sun burns through me, flocks of birds appearing where there is nothing to eat but my hair, nothing to drink but my sweat: the moisture I take is memory, your hair fading with brittleness, my hand entangled in wrecked histories: out here, stranded, alone, where my desires thin and weaken, though I breathe their old strength though I follow the chant like occupation, as if it’s mine to give back, as if this wig is really our hair. The rivers twisting away,

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JOHN KINSELLA

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In the Absence of Hair Je la veux agiter dans l’air comme un mouchoir it was the other differences we saw all those markers we’d learned in school and never proved, your tongue behind my flattened teeth, or in the crevice of my alien ear (it tasted bitter, like yours) together we tested hypotheses of the body can you kiss Caucasian or is it elsewhere this elusive presence – no langoureuse Asie I was a sea of white Australian faces in the shop where they wouldn’t serve you I could be flat as the posters on bus stops that shouted get out you affected the silks and the sandalwood the Chinese vodka clear as candour, deaf to no desire but making yourself heard – shaved your head and wore your good butch beauty like a placard I could never quite read and why should I expect to, there was nothing for me to run my fingers through there was no Political Issue for me to tease out as I might have wished to there was only the sweet real nothing like this and resistant you TRACY RYAN

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Notes on Contributors

IRÈNE D’ALMEIDA Associate Professor of French and Francophone African Literature, University of Arizona. Translator of Achebe’s The Arrow of God as La Flèche de Dieu (Présence africaine, 1978), author of Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (U P of Florida, 1994), poetry published mainly in French and also in The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry (Heinemann, 1995) and New Poets of West Africa (Heinemann, 1995). CASIMIR D’ANGELO Director of the Language Programme, Lecturer, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH Professor, Harvard University. Cambridge PhD in probabilistic semantics published as Assertion and Conditionals (Cambridge U P , 1985) and Truth in Semantics (Blackwell, 1986). Author of In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford U P , 1992); with Amy Gutman: Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton U P , 1996); with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (Basic Civitas Books, 1999); with Peggy Appiah: Bu Me Be: The Proverbs of the Akan (Accra, 2003). His first novel, Avenging Angel (Constable, 1990), is set largely in Clare College. Most recently published: The Ethics of Identity (Princeton U P , 2005). BIYI BANDELE His home town of Kakanchan, Nigeria, features in some of his early novels, such as The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams (Heinemann, 1993) and The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond (Heinemann, 1992); his more recent novel The Street (Picador, 1999) is set in Brixton. He studied drama under Soyinka at the University of Ife and his plays include Two

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Horsemen, Resurrections, Death Catches the Hunter, Marching for Fausa, Happy Birthday Mister Deka D, and Oroonoko (for the R S C ), also adaptations and translations of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (for the Royal Court) and García Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba (West Yorkshire Playhouse). He wrote the screenplays of Bad Boys (B B C , 1995) and Not Even God Is Wise Enough (B B C , 1999). He was the Judith Wilson Fellow in the Faculty of English, Cambridge in 2000–2001 and an Artist By Fellow at Churchill College.

JACQUES CHEVRIER Professor Chevrier is the Director of the Centre International d’Etudes Francophones at the University of Paris I V –La Sorbonne and contributes to Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, Jeune Afrique, Présence Africaine and Notre Librairie. He is the author of Littérature nègre (Armand Colin, 1974), which received the Prix de l’Académie Française, and of numerous books and articles, including L’arbre à palabres (Hatier, 1986), Anthologie africaine d’expression française (Hatier, 1981) and Les Blancs vus par les Africains (Favre, 1998). TIM CRIBB Director of Studies in English and Tutor for Advanced Students, Churchill College and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Ife, 1978–79. His main interests are in Shakespeare, Dickens, West African and Caribbean literature and drama. Since 1980 he has run a seminar on Commonwealth and International Literatures in English for the English Faculty, papers from which he edited as Imagined Commonwealths (Macmillan & St Martin’s, 1999). ASSIA DJEBAR Assia Djebar was the first Algerian woman to be accepted by the École Normale. In 1996 she won the Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature, in 1997 the Yourcenar Prize and in 2000 the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. After teaching history for many years at the University of Algiers she moved to the U S A and is now at New York University. Her publications include La soif (Julliard, 1957), Les impatients (Julliard, 1958), Les enfants du nouveau monde (Julliard, 1962), Les alouettes naïves (Julliard, 1962; 2nd ed., 1967), Rouge l’aube (E N A L , 1969), Poèmes pour l’Algérie heureuse (E N A L , 1969), Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartements (éd. des Femmes, 1980; tr. as Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, U P of Virginia, 1992; 2nd ed. 1999), L’amour, la fantasia (J.–C. Lattès, 1985; tr. as Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, Quartet, 1989), Ombre sultane (J.–C. Lattès, 1987; tr. as Sister to Sheherazade, Quartet, 1988), Loin de Médine (Albin Michel, 1991; tr. as Far from Medina, Quartet, 1983), Vaste est la prison (Albin Michel,

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1994; tr. as So Vast the Prison, Seven Stories, 1999), Les nuits de Strasbourg (Actes Sud, 1997; tr. as The Strasbourg Nights, Northwestern U P , forthcoming), Le blanc de l’Algérie (Albin Michel, 1995; tr. as Algerian White, Seven Stories, 2000), Oran, langue morte (Actes Sud, 1997), and Ces voix qui m’assiègent: en marge de ma francophonie (Albin Michel, 1999); and La femme sans sépulture (Albin Michel, 2002), La disparition de la langue française (Albin Michel, 2003). Assia Djebar has also produced two films, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1979) and La zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (1982).

AKIN EUBA Andrew Mellon Professor of Music, University of Pittsburgh. Founder and director of the Centre for Intercultural Music and Arts, which organizes biannual symposia, mainly for composers. He was the first director of music for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation at independence and was for some years Professor of Music at Ife. His books include Yorùbá Drumming: The Dundun Tradition (Eckhard Breitinger, 1990) and Essays on Music in Africa (Iwalewa-Haus, 2 vols. 1988–89). Since 1970 he has developed various theories of African composition and his theory of African pianism has been widely adopted by contemporary composers. His most recent work is Chants for Orunmila, written while an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College and premiered in New Orleans early in 2002. The chants are based on Ifá divination verses. CHRISTIANE FIOUPOU Professor of French at the University of Toulouse–Le Mirail. She taught English and African literature at the University of Ouagadougou for twelve years. She has translated Soyinka’s The Road as La Route (Paris: Hatier, 1988) and published a monograph, La Route: Réalité et représentation dans l’œuvre de Wole Soyinka (Rodopi Cross / Cultures, 1994). She was guest editor of Thresholds / Seuils: Anglophone African Literatures (Anglophonia Caliban 7, P U M , 2000). LORNA GOODISON In 1986 Lorna Goodison won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and took up a position as Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College before moving to the University of Michigan. Her publications include I am becoming my mother (New Beacon, 1986), Heartease (New Beacon, 1988), Baby Mother and the King of Swords (Longman, 1990), To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (U of Illinois P , 1995), Turn Thanks (U of Illinois P , 1999), Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2000), Travelling Mercies (McClelland & Stewart, 2001), and Controlling the Silver (U of Illinois P , 2005). She is now based in Canada.

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WILSON HARRIS Wilson Harris trained as a hydrographic surveyor in colonial Guiana. His first expedition to the interior was in 1946 and was followed by many others, during which he rose to the top of his profession. At the same time, he was struggling to find a new form of writing, which finally emerged in Palace of the Peacock (Faber, 1960). This has been followed by a series of novels, all published by Faber, which still continue: The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), The Secret Ladder (1963), Heartland (1964), The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965), The Waiting Room (1967), Tumatumari (1968), Ascent to Omai (1970), The Sleepers of Roraima (1970), The Age of the Rainmakers (1971), Black Marsden (1972), Companions of the Day and Night (1975), Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns (1977), The Tree of the Sun (1978), The Angel at the Gate (1982), Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990), Resurrection at Sorrow Hill (1993), Jonestown (1996), The Dark Jester (2001), and The Mask of the Beggar (2003). In addition, Harris has published an equally original body of criticism: History, Myth and Fable in the Caribbean and Guianas (rev. ed. Calaloux, 1995), Tradition, the Writer and Society (New Beacon, 1967; 2nd ed. 1973), Fossil and Psyche (U of Texas P , 1974), Explorations (Dangaroo, 1978), The Womb of Space (Greenwood, 1983), The Radical Imagination (Université de Liège, 1992), and Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays (Routledge, 1999). MARIKA HEDIN Historian and Curator at the Nobel Museum, Stockholm, Markia Hedin is a frequent contributor to debates on education on the radio and in the press in Sweden. She has edited several books on the history of science for Science History Publications, including Center on the Periphery (1993), Nordic Energy Systems (1995; co-ed. with Arne Kaijser), and Museums of Modern Science (2000). GERARD HOUGHTON After reading English at Churchill College, Gerard Houghton spent two years in West Africa and the Sahel as an interpreter before moving to Japan, where he was employed as Education Adviser by the Kyoto City Board of Education to design and implement a teaching programme for English in high schools. This subsequently became the model for a nation-wide programme. Since 1995 he has been a director at the October Gallery and is secretary to the Institute of Ecotechnics, which develops projects on the ecology of human culture around the world.

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ABIOLA IRELE Abiola Irele was the first Nigerian Professor of French at the University of Ibadan; at the time of the colloquium he was Professor of African, French and Comparative Literature at Ohio State, and is now Professor of Afro-American and Romance Languages at Harvard. He is editor of Selected Poems of Léopold Senghor (Cambridge U P , 1977) and of Césaire’s classic Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (New Horn, 1994), general editor of the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, author of The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (Heinemann, 1981) and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (Oxford U P , 2001), co-editor with Simon Gikandi of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge U P , 2 vols. 2003), and an advisory editor of A Companion to African Philosophy (Blackwell, 2004). He was an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College 1999–2000.

ANNY KING Director of the Language Centre at Cambridge and Fellow of Churchill College, Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques for services to French language and culture in the U K . Consultant and script writer for The French Experience (B B C , 1993) and France Magazine (Thames T V , 1994) and author of French Means Business (B B C , 1993) and of Cours de Français Contemporain (Cambridge U P , 1979). JOHN KINSELLA Since 1997 a Fellow of Churchill College, a director of the Centre for Landscape Studies at Edith Cowan University in his home town of Perth, South Western Australia, a trustee of the Menzies Centre at University College, London, Visiting Professor at Kenyon College, Ohio, and editor of The Kenyon Review and Stand. His poetry was first published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press: Night Parrots (1989), Eschatologies (1992), Syzygy (1993), Full Fathom Five (1993), The Silo (1995), Lightning Tree (1996), The Undertow (1996), Poems 1980–1994 (1997) also issued in a British edition by Bloodaxe (1998), and The Hunt (1998), also issued by Bloodaxe (1998). Fremantle Arts Centre Press have also published his experimental novels Genre (1997), Auto (2001), Peripheral Light, edited by Harold Bloom for Norton (2003), and Doppler Effect (2004). His on-line poems can be read in John Tranter’s ejournal, Jacket, and his plays are published by Salt as Divinations (2003). HENRI LOPÉS Ambassador of Congo in France and Britain, formerly Director General for Culture and Communication, U N E S C O . His first collection of stories, Tri-

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baliques (1972 ; tr. by Andrea Leskes as Tribaliques: Contemporary Congolese Stories, Heinemann, 1987), won the Grand Prix de la Littérature d’Afrique Noire. Following works include La nouvelle romance (C L E , 1976), Sans tam-tam (C L E , 1977), Le pleureur rire (Présence africaine, 1982; tr. by Gerald Moore as The Laughing Cry: An African Cock and Bull Story, Readers International, 1987), Le chercheur d’Afriques (Seuil, 1991), Sur l’autre rive (Seuil, 1992), Le lys flamboyant (Seuil, 1997), and Dossier classé (Seuil, 2002). He is also the author of the literary-critical study Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes ancêtres les Gaulois: simples discours (Gallimard, 2003). In 1993 he received the Grand Prix de la Francophonie de l’Académie Française.

DANIEL MAXIMIN Chargé de mission for the Ministry of Culture, Guadeloupe and from 1980 to 1989 literary director at Présence africaine. He is author of a trilogy of novels: L’isolé soleil (Seuil, 1981), translated as Lone Sun (U P of Virginia, 1989), Soufrières (Seuil, 1987) and L’île et une nuit (Seuil, 1995), and Tu, c'est l'enfance (Gallimard, 2004), which received the Prix Genevoix. His poems have been published as L’invention des Désirades (Présence africaine, 2000). He has also directed plays, among them Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. FEMI OSOFISAN Director of the National Theatre, Lagos and Head of the Department of Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan and commentator on Nigerian public affairs in the newspapers. His first book was a satirical novel, Kolera Kolej (New Horn, 1975). He has adapted Gogol’s A Government Inspector as Who’s Afraid of Tai Solarin? (Scholars Press, 1978) and Césaire’s Une Tempête. His own plays include The Chattering and the Song (Ibadan U P , 1977), Once Upon Four Robbers (Bio Educational Services, 1980) and Èshù and the Vagabond Minstrels (New Horn, 1991). He is co-editor, with Martin Banham and James Gibbs, of African Theatre in Development (James Currey, 1999) and of Playwrights and Politics (James Currey, 2001), and, with Martin Banham, of African Theatre (James Currey, 2004). NIYI OSUNDARE Professor of English, Ibadan; at the time of the colloquium a Visiting Professor at the University of New Orleans. He has won numerous prizes, including the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1986) and the Noma Award (1998); in 1999 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Toulouse–Le Mirail. From 1985 to 1990 he ran a weekly poetry column in Nigeria’s Sunday Tribune and has run many workshops in creative writing. His publications include Songs of the Marketplace (Evans, 1983), Village Voices (Evans, 1984),

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A Nib in the Pond (U of Ife, 1986), The Eye of the Earth (Heinemann, 1986), Waiting Laughters (1987; Malthouse Press, 1990), Moonsongs (Spectrum, 1988), The Horses of Memory (Heinemann, 1998) and The Word is an Egg (Kraftgriots, 1999). A recent critical study by Osundare is Thread in the Loom: Essays on African Literature and Culture (Africa World Press, 2003).

OLUSOLA OYELEYE Staff director at English National Opera and Artistic Director of the opera and theatre company Ariya. Her training was at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris and the National Film and Television School in London; she also holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Theatre Practice and Psychology from the University of Essex. At E N O she founded Live Culture, the Youth Opera Group. Her production credits include Spirit of Okin and Sankofa for Adzido, the Pan-African dance company, and both Medea and Dido and Aeneas for Ariya / Royal National Theatre Studio. She has directed Chaka both for the City of Birmingham Touring Opera Company’s recording and for the U S premiere by the St Louis African Chorus. Her most recent compositions include Below Rusumo Falls, about the Rwandan genocide, set to music by Akin Euba. JONATHAN PAXMAN At the time of the colloquium, Music Sizar at Churchill College, where he conducted the chorus and orchestra, while also reading for a PhD in Engineering. He has now acquired the PhD and has returned to his home country, Australia, as a lecturer at the University of New South Wales. ATO QUAYSON Director of the African Studies Centre, Lecturer in English, and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Ato Quayson is a specialist in African and Afro-Caribbean literatures. During the Spring semester of 2000 he was a Visiting Professor at Berkeley. In addition to numerous articles he has published Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri (James Currey & Indiana U P , 1997), Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Polity, 2000), Relocating Postcolonialism (Blackwell, 2002, co-edited with David Goldberg), and Calibrations: Reading for the Social (U of Minnesota P , 2003). He is also on the editorial boards of Wasafiri and African Literature Today, and founding co-editor of Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Routledge). ALAIN RICARD Research Professor with the Centre National pour Récherche Scientifique at the Centre d’Études Africaines, Bordeaux. Among his numerous publi-

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cations are Naissance du roman africain (Présence africaine, 1987) and Wole Soyinka, ou l’ambition démocratique (Nouvelles éditions africaines, 1988); his most recent studies include Ebrahim Hussein, Swahili Drama and Tanzanian Nationalism (Mkuki na Nyota, 2000) and the travel anthology Voyages de découverte en Afrique (Bouquins/Laffont, 2000).

JULIEN SINZOGAN Born 1957 in Porto Novo, Republic of Benin, he was for a time director of the Department of Media Images (L I C I A ) in Paris before dedicating himself to painting full-time. He works in several media: oil, acrylic, ink, papyrus, bark, jute – as well as in sculpture, and his topics are taken from all aspects of the Benin: daily life, dream-life, rituals, history. He has twice exhibited at the October Gallery and many times in Paris. ALIOUNE SOW At the time of the colloquium, Alioune Sow was completing a comparative study of childhood narratives in African anglophone and francophone literature at the University of Paris–Sorbonne Paris I V (completed 2003). His other main area of research is locally produced Malian literature and the French language in Bamako. He taught at Cambridge University before taking up his present appointment as joint assistant professor at the Center for African Studies and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Gainesville. WOLE SOYINKA Wole Soyinka has been a legend in his own country and beyond ever since he held up a radio station and replaced the Governor’s address to the region with one prepared by Soyinka himself in an attempt to halt the slide towards civil war. Until the third volume of Soyinka’s memoirs, Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (Methuen, 1994), the legend had it that the pistol he used in the hold-up was a toy; we now know that it was real. At the subsequent trial, observed by John Mortimer on behalf of Amnesty International, the jury refused to convict but a year later Soyinka was in solitary confinement for two years as a political prisoner in the north. Some of the poems he wrote were smuggled out and published by the late Rex Collings as Poems from Prison, the kernel for the longer collection, A Shuttle in the Crypt (Methuen, 1972), alongside his classic prison journal, The Man Died (Rex Collings, 1972), a touchstone volume in Nigerian political life. For a period after his release Soyinka was persona non grata in his home country and it was during this time that he was an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, where he wrote Death and the King’s Horseman

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(Methuen, 1975) and delivered the lectures that became Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge U P , 1976). These were hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology, the Faculty of English in those days showing little awareness, apart from Muriel Bradbrook, of the new writing that was emerging around the world. Soyinka briefly alludes to this chilly period in his life in the prefatory note to his second volume of memoirs, Isarà: A Voyage Round Essay (Fountain, 1989; Methuen, 1990): “I stayed put in an indifferent clime.” But not for long; he then became editor of Transition, basing himself in Ghana, before returning to Nigeria as Head of the Department of Theatre Arts and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Ife. It was from there that he wrote his own salute to Chaka, Ogun Abibiman (Rex Collings, 1976), dedicated to the dead and maimed of Soweto. Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was forced to flee his country yet again, escaping through the bush, when his U N passport was seized under the military regime of the late Sani Abacha; this was not long before the execution of the writer and Ogoni activist, Ken Saro–Wiwa. Soyinka is based at Emory University in Atlanta, although, since the restoration of civilian government, he is seen again in Nigeria with increasing frequency. The most recent of his many plays is a version of Jarry’s Ubu Roi (and a satire on Abacha), premiered in Lagos in 2000 and published as King Baabu (Methuen, 2002). Wole Soyinka delivered the Reith Lectures in 2004; his most recent poetry collection is Samarkand and Other Markets (Methuen, 2002).

GEORGE STEINER Born in Paris to a Viennese mother and Bohemian father who fled to the U S A in 1940, George Steiner has had an international career, constantly returning to the problematics of culture and language since the Shoah. His last appointment before retirement was to inaugurate the Lord Weidenfeld Chair of Comparative Literature at Oxford. He has received numerous prizes and awards, such as the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement award, and has been a Fellow of Churchill College since its foundation in 1960. George Steiner published his autobiography, Errata: An Examined Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), in 1997. Among his many books, ones that bear especially on the themes of the colloquium are Language and Silence (Faber & Faber, 1967), Real Presences (Faber & Faber, 1989) and After Babel (Oxford U P 3rd ed. 1998), which engages with the process of translation both inside and between languages. His most recent publications include Lessons of the Masters (2004).

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VÉRONIQUE TADJO Véronique Tadjo is a writer, illustrator and painter from Côte d’Ivoire. She took a BA in English from the University of Abidjan and a doctorate from the Sorbonne in African American literature. In 1983 she went to Howard University on a Fulbright research scholarship, returning to lecture at Abidjan until 1993. Her publications include her first book of poems, Latérite (Hatier, 1984) and three novels, A vol d’oiseau and Le royaume aveugle, both published by L’Harmattan in Paris in 1992, and Champs de bataille et d’amour (Présence africaine, 1999; Les Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes, 1999). A vol d’oiseau has been published by Heinemann in their African Writers series: As the Crow Flies (2001). Her second book of poems is A mi-chemin (L’Harmattan, 2000). L’ombre d’Imana, on the Rwanda genocide, is published by Actes Sud (2000; tr. by Véronique Wakerley as The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda, Heinemann African Writers, 2002). She is editor of the anthology of poems from Africa, Talking Drums (A & C Black, 2000). She has also written and illustrated a number of books for children, including the story-collection Reine Pokou (Actes Sud, 2004). NOURÉINI TIDJANI–SERPOS Assistant Director General of U N E S C O . His early education was in Porto Novo, Republic of Benin, and he took his PhD in Francophone African Literature at the University of Paris. He was awarded a Doctorat d’État by the University of Lille in 1980. Before joining U N E S C O he lectured in Nigeria and Benin. Among other honours, he was made Knight of the National Merit Order of Benin Republic in 1991 and Commander of the French Republic Order of Palmes Académiques in 1992. He has published five books of poetry, including Agba’nla (P.J. Oswald, 1975), a novel, Bamikilé (Présence africaine, 1996), and Aspects de la critique africaine (Ilex, 1987). MARIA TIPPETT Maria Tippett has written numerous books on Canadian cultural history, from the biography of Emily Carr to a monograph on Canadian war artists of 1914–18 and a study of Canadian women in the visual arts from 1690 to 1990. One of her best known books is Between Two Cultures (Hamish Hamilton, 1994), a study of the photographer, Charles Gimpel at work among the Inuit from 1958 to 1968. In 1992 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 1994 the University of Windsor, Ontario awarded her an Honorary LL.D. She has won several prizes, including the Governor-General’s Award (1979). Her monograph Stormy Weather (McClelland & Stewart, 1998) focuses on the life of F.H. Varley, and Bill Reid:

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The Making of an Indian (Random House of Canada, 2004) on Canada’s leading First Nations artist.

PETER TREGEAR Director of Studies in Music, Fitzwilliam and Churchill Colleges. His main research area is Viennese and European music between the two world wars and he has completed a study of the early operatic works of the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek. He is active as a conductor of opera, including the premiere of the first Australian opera, a setting of Riders to the Sea in 1915 by Fritz Hart, a revival of Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787), for which he reconstructed Samuel Arnold’s original music, and a revival of Max Brand’s operatic version of Toller’s Maschinist Hopkins (1929), which transferred from Churchill to the Queen Elizabeth Hall. OLABIYI YAÏ Olabiyi Babalola Yaï is currently Ambassador and Permanent Delegate of the Republic of Benin to U N E S C O , Paris. He is professor of Yorùbá Studies with specialization in and publications on Yorùbá oral poetry and stylistics, Yorùbá diaspora in the Western hemisphere and language planning. Prior to his position at U N E S C O , he held teaching and research positions at various universities, including Ibadan, Ife, Bahia (Brazil) and Kokugakuin (Japan). He was formerly chairman of the Department of African and Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Florida, Gainesville.

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