What voice does Samira Fall's poetry call to mind, and what does it reveal about the renewal of French-language poetry coming from Africa?
In this preface to Oxymoriques, a collection of poems by Samira Fall, Dominique Pagani starts from his discovery of the author in La Cause, an anthology of Senegalese slam poets. He sees rap and slam as a renewal of French-language poetry, carried by an educated and underemployed African youth. Samira Fall unites the flow of the griot with the language of the intellectual, a French won through servitude, war, and school. Her voice recalls that of the Grande Royale in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure, who sends the children to the new school. This renewal comes, through writing, from the continent of orality.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
Of what, of whom does it remind me, then?
I clearly remember the way these questions crowded into my head on my first reading of Samira Fall’s poems: it was thanks to the excellent initiative of Materia Scritta, that “small” Corsican publishing house, decidedly most precious, that I had been able to come into contact with the powerful richness of this speech, singular to the point of being immediately identifiable.
They had just brought out La Cause. The volume presented itself as an anthology of texts composed by some ten Senegalese slam poets. It was less the revelation of this or that individuality than the musical, and/or literary, genre that had first aroused my interest in the book.
For some years already, I had been able to note that Sprech Gesang, to speak like the musicologists of the classical repertoire, the “speech-song,” in its popular forms of rap, then of slam, whenever it managed to avoid - far too rarely, alas! - getting bogged down in the traps of show business, offered rather the example of a veritable “cunning of reason,” by opening up to the young people of the Hexagon, as well as to their emulators across the vast and teeming creativity of the French-speaking world, the unhoped-for opportunity of a powerful renewal of poetic speech. This speech being all the more fertile and diverse here in that it takes paths - voices! - entirely freed from the stuffy air, or from the rehashed debates and problematics, peculiar to the chapels supposed to circumscribe the agreed-upon stakes of Francophone literature:
the breath that animates it is rather the one that the young people of the new African civil society, in this case Senegalese, breathe in the street, on the beaches, in the courtyards of middle schools, high schools, universities, bars, improvised dance floors and any other place of collective gathering, or of solitary reverie, haunted by an age group that took the gamble of schooling and education, only to end up...in the dramatic skilled underemployment that characterizes the countries that suffer most brutally the effects of what one goes on calling, no doubt out of an immoderate taste for antiphrasis, “development aid.”
For it is neither the traditional griot, nor the consecrated intellectual who speaks here in the work of Samira Fall, but the unity, at last regained, of these two extremes too long torn apart: from the first she recovers the irreplaceable, the “FLOW,” that speech which writing has not yet reduced to discourse, that primordial fusion of music and word, of thought, of its vocal modulation, and of the ear, which defines, transversally to all “culturalist” relativism, the specificity of the genre “poetry,” for every people, in every time and every place.
With the second, she shares the language, our language, not “our” in the sense that it would be the property of I know not what Gallic parochialism, but in the sense of the whole French-speaking community, all continents together; so true is it that its only legitimate owners are all those, women and men, who have won it through hard struggle. In servitude first, on the work sites of forced labor, in the decimated regiments of those who died for France and finally, and above all, on the “benches of the School”: who will ever be able to reckon what “our” language owes to the African schoolteacher?
And now, simply by asking the question, I at last produce the anamnesis that my vague initial reminiscence lacked, I at last recognize, to the point of identifying her, of naming her, the one whom Samira’s accents, tone and voice recall to me: another, and so close, woman’s voice, heard long ago, long before our young author came into the world: the voice of “the Grande Royale of the Diallobé.”
Who does not remember that unforgotten scene, at the beginning of Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, when, reversing the usual distribution of roles, this untamed woman, the king’s sister, facing an extraordinary council of the wise, hastily convened under the palaver tree, facing these men unhinged by the traumatic distress of having to bear the yoke of the invaders, re-instills, by gesture, gaze and voice, the pride and courage capable of turning the constraints imposed into so many weapons for a coming liberation. She who is most firmly opposed to the new submission prescribes to the council the first act of resistance to this domination, by enjoining them to send their children to the new school:
“Strange dawn! The morning of the West in black Africa was spangled with smiles, with cannon shots and with glittering glass beads. Those who had no history were meeting those who carried the world on their shoulders. It was a morning of childbed. The known world was being enriched by a birth that took place in mud and in blood.(...)
People began, on the black continent, to understand that their true power lay, not in the cannons of the first morning, but in what followed those cannons. Thus, behind the gunboats, the clear gaze of the Grande Royale of the Diallobé had seen the new school.”
No doubt it is this “clear gaze,” that of implacable lucidity and of fidelity to a childhood so often wounded, which allows Samira to leave unspoken nothing of the darkness she has passed through, thanks to the filter of this language that she wields with confounding mastery, to the point of making it capture the most intimate part of everyday lived experience, as in the eponymous poem, that savor of smoke, raised by the Atlantic spray, torn from the straw huts of the fishermen of Rufisque, where fish is dried, and carried all the way to the nostrils of the soul, whence the language will soon resurrect them, like a song of gratitude.
One cannot fail to be won over oneself by a feeling of gratitude, almost mischievous, at the thought that this renewal of poetic speech, this victory of the lyrical over the dramatic, should come back to us, via writing, from the continent of orality.
Dominique Pagani