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