Négritude et négrologues

On the banks of the river Ilissos, Orithyia was sketching out a few nonchalant dance sequences. Wholly absorbed in her capering work, captivated by the cadence of her steps and warmed by the rhythm of her choreography, she did not perceive the icy breath of the north wind. And with one beat of his wings, Boreas, enamored of the young Athenian princess, flew to his Dulcinea and ravished her from her maternal shores to bear her off to the field of the Thracians. The princely abduction, hailed by the revolutionary jury, was woven a few steps from the place of our meeting with the philosopher Dominique Pagani. And like the tapestry weavers of the Gobelins, our eloquent prefacer interwove, with the thread of his own story between Corsica and the colonies, the providential universalism of Stanislas Spero Adotevi, breaking the wings of the septentrional essentialists fantasizing about the innocent ballerina, negritude, and plucking with his verve the feathers of their boreal identitarian epigones, from his island and elsewhere.

The collaboration of Delga and Materia Scritta on this reissue is far from insignificant, as François de Negroni underlines on the back cover. The Riacquistu drew from the concept of negritude the sources of its own concepts of emancipation. In 1974, there even appears, from the pen of Rinatu Coti, the word cursitudina, which he sets against cursichezza¹. To what extent can Adotevi’s interpretive grid be applied to corsitude?

The dichotomy “corsitude / Corsicanness” does not strike me as operative. The only objective dichotomy I perceive has nothing to do with substance, but rather with the worldly distribution, in the Clouscardian sense of the term, of these two notions. Corsitude makes one more ridiculous than Corsicanness, britannitude than Britishness, the bravitude so dear to Ségolène than bravery. Beyond the form, corsitude seems to me even more essentialist than Corsicanness. In mocking the beatitudes of the identity suffixers, I in no way mean to suggest that I am embarrassed to be Corsican. It is not an identity that encumbers me. I am delighted to be so, certainly not only for the (so) manifold splendor of its landscapes, but also for its history and, above all, for the face sculpted over the millennia by the actors of that history in the granite, the schist, and even at times the limestone, of its original geography, amid mountains, main and marvels. Since antiquity, it has been a people that has always suffered violence from outside, as islands often do. Already Aulus Gellius, in the Attic Nights, draws up a typology of slaves, placing Illyrians and Germans at the summit of the servile pyramid and at its base the Corsican slave, who would let himself die rather than submit to an unjust master. By ricochet, it is a great quality of the Corsicans that he brings out while seeking to reduce them to nothing. An insubordination that I salute, but which troubles me when it becomes a pretext for exclusionary smugness. When I see written on the walls of Bastia or elsewhere: “French out,” followed underneath by “Arabs out.” I am disturbed by this double imprecation. Either one on its own would end up fading. But both of them mean that we alone are good. This ridiculous litany of “We stand apart, we have hospitality,” already harped on among the Croats, the Ukrainians, the Bretons, the Scots, far from expressing a particularism, intones the psalm of traditional society as opposed to urban, modern society. These incense-bearers of hospitality believe they are expressing a geographical identity whereas, like Africa, all they display is a solidarity of proximity, peculiar to the countryside. And they all pride themselves on an exceptional mutual aid that embodies resistance to the city and its indifferent outskirts: the housing project or the so-called rotten suburb. I make this somewhat labored preamble in order to reaffirm my Corsicanness, bound up with the happy accidents of my biography. A Corsicanness I would not trade for anything in the world, since it formed me, and which, I am delighted to say, has opened itself up. I was born—there is nothing more Corsican—in Vietnam, in the Empire, one of the few outlets Corsicans could benefit from—just as the Basques raised sheep in Chile and the Irish were mixed up in the mafia in Brooklyn before the Italians drove them out. Corsitude, on the other hand, is a construction that rings hollow, an abstraction gone flat. The last time I talked about it with someone who kept dinning this concept into my ears—I retorted: “Look at the drailles, those mule tracks paved with flagstones, that’s a titan’s labor. Those path-pavers didn’t talk about corsitude, they produced it.” In my view, true Corsicanness is embodied in its island builders. Those who shaped this nature, so resistant at the outset. Corsica is a thankless mother, a sublime mother, but austere and thankless.

Beyond the derisory abstraction that, in your view, corsitude constitutes, is it not—contrary to the conception of its bards—in opposition to negritude in the very process of its elaboration. As the playwright Frantz Succab wrote in the journal Fora, how can one compare a “‘race’ that proclaims its uprootedness and a people that claims its rootedness”?

That text is there to distinguish between a rootedness, that of the Corsicans who lament being dispossessed, and an uprootedness, that of the Africans who complain of an acculturation. But this distinction does not distinguish, since the same avuncular tales lulled my childhood in Corsica and in Africa. How many times did I hear my aunts say that it was forbidden to speak Corsican in class, that any departure from the linguistic rule was punishable. And the voice of my Beninese schoolteachers, like our dear Stanislas, ring out with the same sentence against deviant palavers. At that level, I see an identity, a continuity, rather than a difference. What the vicissitudes of history have moreover added to this linguistic community is the effigy on our flag, which displays the dark head of the Moor. An involuntary pigmented rapprochement that pleases me and makes the Corsicans kin to the Negroes of France, just as the Russians were, in the pan-Germanist delirium, the Negroes of the white race, the Poles, the Negroes of the Germans, and so on as one moves westward. At the Corsica/colonies conference—that odyssey, in the strictly geographical sense, of the Corsicans within the colonial Empire—held at the University of Corte in September 2002, François de Negroni had studied the figure of the Corsican in the colonial or exotic novel, such as those of Jean Hougron or Pierre Benoît. And throughout his talk, the Corsican always cropped up next to some shady Maltese or Levantine. A novelistic entourage that makes me all the prouder to belong to the family of these “inferior races.” And the more I dig, the more invariants come to light between the island’s family tales and friendly conversations in Africa.

Back to Africa, then: how would you present the author Adotevi, intellectually, ideologically?

First of all by his country of origin! My turn to be an essentialist. Having criticized it among the Corsicans, I allow myself this identitarian lapse in order to light up our author with the glimmers of his origins. He is Beninese, or rather, he is Dahomean. By a chance of my biography, my first contact with Africa, in 1954, took place in Dahomey. I deliberately use the old colonial toponym, because the Beninese christening is, to my mind, an absurdity (unlike, for example, Sankara’s transformation of the colonial name “Upper Volta” into Burkina Faso). The word Dahomey is sedimented with history dating from long before the Colony. Dan was a prince of Allada who reigned over the South¹. One day, he sees a fellow from the North arrive, who asks him whether he may settle on his land (a classic of the founding-hero genre). He grants him the right to settle and comes to visit him a few months later. Dan, enraged at this threatening prosperity, says to him: “Are you going to go on building houses right into my belly²?” In reply, the other took his machete, slit open his belly, and with his blood kneaded the first elements of the royal hut of the kings of Abomey: literally, the belly of Dan. So I regret the Beninese christening³. But beyond these toponymic grievances, I am above all evoking a country that used to be called “the Latin Quarter of French West Africa.” At the time of its independence, little Dahomey counted a thousand holders of the baccalaureate, while immense Zaire had only about ten. This nursery that Benin represents is home both to my valiant schoolteachers, who inked my first words in downstrokes and upstrokes, and to my two favorite African philosophers, Stanislas Adotevi and Paulin Houtondji. Without essentializing Dahomeanism in these two authors, chance would be hard put to explain that they are both from this same country and both wary of any essentialism of negritude. They emerged from that effervescence of the local intelligentsia endowed with the particularity one can point to as “Beninese débrouille,” in the practical denotation of the term débrouille, certainly, but also and above all here, in its intellectual connotation, in the sense in which one untangles a skein. I had the happy honor of knowing Houtondji when he was courageously running a dusty bookshop in Cotonou, which I frequented assiduously for the richness of its shelves, finding there texts such as Anti-Dühring and the works of Lukács! I saw him magnificently cut down the ethno-philosophers who had invited him to the Collège international de philosophie, to give a talk on African philosophy:

“I am not condemned to serve as your supplement of soul. African thinkers have the right not to wallow complacently in this status that soul-starved Whites have assigned them.”

A sublime rejoinder, rising up against the question of a participant:

“You speak ill of ethnophilosophy, but, you have, you Africans, an intuitive depth that you must keep. Preserve your roots.”

His intervention, all by itself, synthesized the essentialism he was vituperating. On one side: the White man, reason, and the Black man, instinct; the White man, the concept, and the Black man, rhythm. A division that I will sum up thus: “You dance, and I keep the tractor.”

It is against this partition, characteristic of Senghor far more than of Césaire, that Adotevi rises up. He does not deny the necessity of negritude at the beginning of the processes of national liberation, a polemical concept that initiated an emancipatory foundation. A founding identity, just as every history begins with a founding myth. But the legend then becomes more encumbering than liberating. Just like the concept of the nation, which at the time of the Revolution proves crucial to the awakening of nationalities in Europe. The far-left nation, struggling against the Empire of Austria-Hungary, was a liberating concept that had to be transcended so as not to end in the nationalist drift that ensued. Negritude met the same fate.

I have the impression that negritude was in essence a notion peculiar to black citizens living as a minority in the West. But did it make sense on the sub-Saharan continent?

I am going to make a radical detour by way of the val and the gal¹. Their derivatives: the Welsh, the Gauls, the Walloons, Wales, the canton of Vaud, etc. The Walloons designate the populations who live on a march, at the border of the Germanic Flemings. The Walloons in relation to the Flemings, the canton of Vaud in relation to those of “Alemannic Switzerland.” The demonym is determined not by the center but by the periphery, by the limit beyond which one risks being in the minority. Let us take an African example: the people of southwestern Niger, a region bordering Burkina, are called the Gourmantchés, a name that means, for the Djermas², “west of the river.” It is not a substance, it is a relation. This does not mean that they are different in essence, but that they are to the west of a river whose crossing would put them in the minority. So indeed, never has the sub-Saharan, to use a less ontological term, felt so much a “Negro” as when he was on the cobblestones of Paris, or of its suburbs.

Did this settling of scores with negritude have an impact on the continent? Who in Dakar, in Lomé, in Abidjan, could and can read and receive Adotevi on this question?

My answer will be highly differentiated, for the African crowd is not homogeneous. It is obvious that the Burkinabé or Guinean official applying for a mission at UNESCO does not lack opportunities to refer to the essentialist connotations of “negritude,” in his publications or in his reports. This ambitious youth—whose right to take this official channel to achieve its social emancipation I do not in the least criticize—will spontaneously reproduce the Senghorian epic and use it as a vehicle for promotion. He will invoke his color and not his geography to justify a discrimination. Even though one may point out to him that he was not designated by the sub-Saharan masses as ambassador of negritude! Africa has the right to be diverse, I do not say divided, but diverse.

By contrast, the old civil servant, the old schoolteacher who trained generations in the French language, who went through William Ponty¹ with the Mamadou et Bineta. That one will pay close attention to Adotevi’s words. This negritude business runs counter to his sacred calling. For by valuing the innate and the unreflective over learning and reasoning, the kinetics of bodies over the movement of the mind, it calls his educational vocation into question. And, beyond the page, it embodies the white-and-black duo of Robinson and Friday. It is no accident that, in that novel, the first encounter of the white castaway’s solitude with island humanity establishes, from the very first contact, a relation of master to slave.

Symmetrically, by whom and how is the book received here, among the Africanists of the university, in publishing circles?

In my opinion, if it was already disturbing yesterday, it is even more discomfiting today, with the frenzied return of identitarianism. Conferences on French (?) or European (??) or even Western (???) identity are proliferating, and the unprecedented infatuation with the theme of identity shows no sign of flagging. But as Hegel said: “The owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk.” And when identity questions itself, it is already too late. The Bororos with whom Lévi-Strauss conversed did not ask themselves whether they were really macaws! But today the -itudes come in every form at every latitude, from the britannitude of the bonnets rouges to the tibétitude of the prayer-wheel spinners, by way of Moor’s-head corsitude. And to account for this revival, the particular attitude of populations is hard put to justify the essential. Let us take an African example, that of the Sénoufos, an identity, or at least a linguistic community, straddling two nation-states, Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina, with Korhogo on the Ivorian side and Banfora on the Burkinabé side. At the time of Côte d’Ivoire’s economic acme, in the eighties, Mr. Ouattara felt Ivorian and not Sénoufo, and had contempt for the Burkinabé, whose standard of living could not hold a candle to his own. Just as the Katangese felt Congolese until Mobutu, by centralizing all the wealth, neglected his periphery, where the wind of independence blows. It is obvious that the abandoned region no longer feels concerned by the nation. And such was the case of Corsica, with the action of the nationalists and the autonomists through the agency of a few bombs, which had at the very least the salutary effect of sketching out the first development plans for an island that had never before—or so little—counted. This logic of identitarian withdrawal on the part of the peripheries is neither Corsican nor African, but both at once. It could be summed up in this adage: “The nation has the region it deserves, and vice versa.” If the nation does not reward its regions, sooner or later they will demand their independence.

What discipline or what register does he use to transcend determinations?

His background is socio-political. He perceives perfectly at what moment, in the Hegelian sense of the term, the concept of negritude is fruitful and a promoter of liberating elements in the struggle for a recognition that is not even granted. Then he explains how this emancipatory instrument became a brake, indeed a tool of regression, contrary to its initial motivations. And on this historical backdrop he imprints his ideological watermark, in a sense opposed to that of the politicians. He lets show through, all along his essay, a symbolic, semantic analysis of the way the Negro is represented, supposedly possessing, through melanin, a sense of rhythm—as if the Spaniards and the Russians, among other great “dancing peoples,” were devoid of it¹. Adotevi always places himself at the universal standpoint. He shows that what is said to be consubstantial with the Negro is nothing new. That the discourse is the same, issuing from the mouths of the Hispanics of Nicaragua regarding the Miskitos, of the Vietnamese regarding the Moï highlanders, of the Egyptians against the Hittites, savages come down from the mountains to swipe the harvests laboriously reaped on the banks of the Nile. More contemporary is the relationship between the Chinese and the Tibetans, who came down from the Himalayas to filch the rice harvested in the valley of the Yangzi Jang. These are old, recurrent and structural conflicts that confirm the disturbing, even, today as never before, subversive, aspect of the concept of universality. A tendency cursed today by the reign of culturalist relativism. And to illustrate the absurdity of this inclination, I am going to take the standpoint of humor by recounting for you a scene that my professional stays south of the Sahara gave me many occasions to repeat. When I was posted in Niger, businessmen passing through would often ask me for advice: “Tell me, Pagani, what should I do, should I leave a tip? Invite his wife? What is the custom in this matter?” I would lean toward him and whisper to him, like a confidential revelation, that the “deep” desires of Africans came down to this: that their children go to school, bring home good grades, later get a good job, bring back some cash to their parents, and stay in good health as long as possible. The faces froze, dumbfounded by my answer, so far from their juicy, exotic expectations, far, in short, from their desires for negritude. They wanted Negroes and I was showing them that these are men. What a disappointment, to reaffirm nothing but the universal!

And how do you yourself receive this work?

My reception of Adotevi is a function of my African history during the three phases of independence. In that pivotal period, most African authors had to fit into the boxes of RFI’s programming grid. A radio station that fulfilled the political function of bringing onto the airwaves the writers who unspooled the same narrative reel of the innocent country boy corrupted by contact with the pernicious city. And all of a sudden I discover an essayist who extracts himself from this schema and who reconstructs a history and not a fantasy.

Adotevi devotes a long section to the figure of the ethnologist, who today has virtually disappeared from the media horizon in favor of the expert. How do you explain this eclipse?

The disappearance of the Avenue Delafosse in Abidjan, named after the first ethnologist-governor specializing in Côte d’Ivoire, points the way to an answer. At the origins of all the disciplines that are, or are not, classed in the category of the “human sciences.” Pharaoh’s scribe, and much later the ethnologist, sliding semantically, through the pen of Lévi-Strauss, toward anthropology, does not initially have a cognitive aim. The disciplinarian, the one who writes what has never been; the one who transcribes orality never has an innocent function at the outset. His work may lead to a cognitive enrichment, but that is not its primary aim. The emblematic example is that of the pharaoh’s scribe. These first historians do not transcribe facts but magnify warlike exploits. At the outset, the scribe is not there to transcribe objective truth but to “hagiographize” history. Since then objectivity has progressed; yet no ethnology, no anthropology is fundamentally innocent. When even the highly transversal Lévi-Strauss opens Tristes Tropiques with this sentence, “I hate traveling and explorers,” he joins—as François de Negroni¹ has admirably shown—the fantasy of the White man on an exotic jaunt who would like to be the only White man where he is. The one who wants to have Africa all to himself, like Tarzan. By making the yodels (tra-la-la itou!) of our ape-man ring out, I am evoking the “white spots,” the still unexplored regions of Africa which, at the time of Tarzan’s birth, still stained the white imagination, those virgin lands where “the hand of the white man has not set foot,” to paraphrase Tintin in the Congo. Those places that arouse the reveries of explorers in quest of the famous “missing link,” that “missing link” between beast and man, that King Kong, that yeti. And indeed, it is in the heart of virgin Africa, in that holy of holies, the “elephants’ graveyard,” that this link in the evolutionary chain appears: a German, a blond dolichocephalic Siegfried: Johnny Weissmuller, the white miller. The quintessence of anthropology in general and, singularly, of Africa is a White man!

At the bottom of anthropology, there is an investment, in the Freudian sense, in a purity of the native, not only negritude. There is nothing more fantasy-generating than the story of our origins.

Who, in your view, would gain from reading Adotevi today?

Objectively, all the regionalist drifts when they express themselves in identitarian, divisive / hostile terms (I am Corsican by way of being anti-France). By telling them, in the end: “I am confusing the Negro and the African, whereas I am only an African who must build his identity more through relation than through substance.”

In the face of this immersion in a deadly ideology that contributes a great deal to the anguish of today’s man, even—especially—for the one who embraces it, this book is providential. Through its universalism, it re-instills a saving fraternity. With Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Négritude et Négrologues is assuredly the greatest book written on this theme.

Slim but solid to the point of the irrefragable.

Interview with Dominique Pagani,
conducted by Claire Cecchini, May 3, 2017

Notes

1. The cursichezza takes on the form of “being” (a fact of being in an innate manner) of one who speaks Corsican through transmission from Corsican parents, living in Corsica or not, and that is all. Corsitude, on the contrary, has nothing to do with that. For youth, even when ill at ease in spoken Corsican, possesses in its deep self the intense and rooted feeling of the becoming of the place. This youth does not tinge itself with it by having its fill of it or by lamenting over little Corsica. Not at all, this youth, which is well versed in Corsica and Corsican things, keeps in mind the concerns torn by the heart, is always stifling under worries, and wants to act all by itself, according to Corsican thought. What will become of corsitude? One can say without ambiguity that we are dealing with an idea of difference, We are not like the others. We are what we are and want to be, because of a manner of speaking, a way of living, or even of not being (like the other.)
2. The North/South dichotomy is crucial in these countries, between the North, the Sahel, difficult to cultivate, and the better-watered South.
3. In Fon, the language of southern Benin, the word for belly is “homey.”
4. Present-day Benin is merely an appendage of the immense kingdoms of Benin, which lie rather in Nigeria.
5. Legal, which is incidentally a common surname in Brittany, designating the one who comes from the interior.
6. The Djermas are the speakers of the most widespread language in the region.
7. Famous training center for schoolteachers, doctors, officials, during the colonial era, located in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal.
8. It is interesting to note that these two dancing peoples, the one at the Asian limit of Europe, the second at its African limit.
9. François de Negroni, Afrique fantasmes, Plon, 1992 (reissued by L’Harmattan, 2008).