Writing worlds, inhabiting worlds
Inaugural lesson of the Colloquium Littératures Africaines et Écologie
Felwine Sarr
Université cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar November 2023
The ambition of this text is to question the relationship between literature and ecology, and to do so reflect on what literature (language/languages) can do. I will make occasional forays into literary theorists to shed light on one or other point. Alongside this mediation, I’d also like to take you on a journey through my personal writing and reading, and tell you how literature has been and remains for me the place par excellence for weaving the links that make up my worlds and my personal ecology. It is the place through which I inhabit the world and experience my relationship with it this place is made of the luminous legacy of the dead and the infinite faces of the living.
So this reading will be a combo. A few thoughts on the powers of literature, but also a journey into my literary ecology.
I’ll tell you about some of my masters, those who shook me up and woke me up, those who kept alive the glow under which I’ve been stirring ever since those who pointed out paths for the climbers, oases for the offenders, rest stops for the wanderers.
For as long as I can remember, writing has been for me an attempt at lucidity about the world and my inner states. To take stock of the experience I’ve had, the days I’ve lived through, the emotions I’ve felt, the flashes of insight to explore the continents of my own opacity. To fix my streams of consciousness and ward off the pressing feeling of a life that is inexorably slipping away.
Writing, then, as a means of fixing things long enough to have time to see them, to really see them, to become fully aware of them slowing down the passage of time, untangling the skeins of existence. Here, writing acts as an attempt to make sense. Most of those who engage in this practice say it writing is first and foremost about revealing ourselves to ourselves and revealing the inner worlds we carry and which are sometimes unknown to us.
But it’s not just that.
I devoted myself to this practice, for some lived time to make a trace, but also and above all to get my existential experience out of its solitude and share it. Because that’s what it’s all about reaching out to others : meeting their sensibilities, hearing the echo of their voices in mine and seeing the reflection of their faces in mine.
In its infancy, writing can, for many of us, still be too closely linked to the self, to our personal subjectivity, to our intimate territories. However, in its grace, it allows us to extend reality, to stretch it and to ward off its incompleteness (through the work of creation). Creating worlds that are superimposed on the worlds through which we pass and where we stay. So, rather than working on meaning, writing became for me a way of inhabiting the concreteness of the world, its materiality, its rough edges, its uncertain glimmers, its harsh light. Writing was about seeing the world as it was and making a sovereign decision to roll up my sleeves and reveal its untamed power and infinite creativity. But it was also about writing reality, writing with reality, and to do that we had to open ourselves up to the many voices of the living world. I’ll come back to this later.
The counterpart of writing, its spectral double is reading. Reading as the first and initial condition, which for me enabled later the act of writing. As a child, I spent hours sitting on a chair in a veranda, in angulo, a book on my lap. My body was there, but it was as if my being escaped from it. I no longer felt its weight and compactness. Reading was not just travelling, but dissolving, floating into another place.
One of my great masters in literature says this ” I love books. I love their world. I love being in the cloud that each of them forms, that rises, that stretches. I love reading them. I get excited when I feel their light weight and volume in the palm of my hand. I love growing old in their silence (…). It’s an overwhelming shoreline, set apart from the world, which looks out onto the world but doesn’t intervene in it in any way”. You recognised it, I quoted Pascal Quignard, L’Homme aux trois lettres, Volume 11 of Dernier Royaume.
I like the relationship to the world that this double writing-reading, systole-diastole, inspir-expir, intervening in the world through writing, withdrawing from it through reading allows. Maintaining the right relationship with things is one of the difficulties of our time. Acting in the world, but also giving it back its unavailable, inconstructible, non-transparent part considering our necessary interdependencies and our relational identity. It is perhaps here that literature could participate in the enterprise of connecting and repairing the world (of worlds).
In a world where the ecological emergency is becoming ever more pressing, one might ask, what can literature do, what does literature do?
The literary space has long been a place of debate between those who uphold the neutrality and ontological autonomy of literature and those who believe that the aesthetic gesture has the power to act on reality, and is therefore eminently political. Vargas Llosas defends the ethical and ontological autonomy of fiction, which he argues owes little to reality (it is self-sufficient and autonomous). We might ask, however, whether literature, through fiction, can help to raise ecological awareness. Victoria Saramago[1], analysing deforestation and urbanisation in Latin America and particularly in Amazonia between the 1940s and 1960s, and questioning the relationship between the rigidity and fixity of representations in literary space on the one hand, and the changing ecological realities of the world on the other, indicates the presence of these mutations in Latin American literature, particularly in the texts of Alejo Carpentier, Clarice Lispector, Juan Rulfo, and those of Mario Vargas Llosa.
It shows how fiction among these Latin American authors accounted for the transformations of the ecosystem and the biotope.
Émeline Baudet in her research on African literatures, is interested in how the experience of human, ontological, political, social and ecological unbinding of our time echoes in the sub-Saharan novel. Its conceptual premise is that ” literature speaks to us about the world and can play a role in it “. It does so by virtue of its ability to imagine other worlds, fictional of course, but linked to reality. Literature’s experimental role consists of fictitiously testing societal choices and proposing hypotheses for societies. The aim is to use literary texts to formulate a collective political response to phenomena that are a source of disconnection. It attributes to literature performative virtues and a capacity to create possibilities. In their attempts to forge new links between beings, things, humans and non-humans, the literatures of the South could provide answers that Western societies have not yet managed to imagine. These are the site of a renewal of modes of relating to the world.
Literature is envisaged here as a place for the construction of speech and the production of the imaginary, certainly, but also as an epistemic focus. It is a space for representation, but also for experimentation. Amitav Gosh believes that it is only when fiction takes hold of an issue, that it becomes easier to talk about it in the real world.
The text of African literature has long given an account of the impact of ecological upheavals in social space (Dongala, Mia Couto, Achebe ; more recently Caroline Meva, Marie Rose Abomo-Maurin, Assitou Ndinga). In African literature, the ability to express and represent reality in the literary space is accompanied in the narrative by a rejection of exclusive anthropocentrism and its soliloquies. The text of African literature has also given voice to the words of non-humans. The expression of meaning is not the prerogative of the human species. Fiction authorises a decentring of human voices and perspectives and allows us to see the world at the level of plants, stones, animals, non-humans, the more-than-human (Le Dieu perdu dans l’herbe by Gaston Paul Effa ; Sami Tchak, les fables du moineaux).
If we wish to build a common world with living things, the challenge facing humans is to perceive the discourses and modes of representation distinct from human languages and to interpret them. Like Tokor Waly teaching Senghor to decipher the language of the animals that populate his childhood kingdom, as well as the polyglot savannah and the biophony that surrounds it. It’s a question of listening to the many voices of the living and the presences that signify. This attention to the presences that signify could lead to a conversion of the senses and a new relationship with the world. The aim is to continue our tireless exploration of the question: what does it mean to live? How do we live, what do we live by and why do we live? To constitute ourselves as subjects, certainly, but to draw the consequences of our relational identity and recognise the fundamental interdependence of all living things.
In human groups that have gone through the experience of dispossession (lands, cultures, objects, relationships to worlds). Writing : is repairing damaged worlds. It is an enterprise of repairing worlds, of reweaving the bonds of meaning, especially those that enable life to regenerate. It’s also about reweaving places and the people who inhabit them. As Mamadou Ba rightly points out, African and diasporic literature was, in its inaugural gesture, an undertaking to recapture and requalify a culture, necessary to initiate a different relationship with history. African literature thus set itself the task of disqualifying the calamities and disasters of post-colonial situations by imagining counterfactuals. Lydie Moudileno points out that it functions as a counter-archive to the colonial library. Fiction allows us to imagine places, but it also takes the place of origin by reviving filiations and reweaving geographical, cultural or emotional links in the texts.
Ecology studies the relationship between living beings and the environments they inhabit. Literature can be seen as a relationship with places. African literature has produced a counterpoint to the physical and symbolic dispossession of its places that was the colonial fact for the continent. Xavier Garnier[2] notes that the latter has given rise to places outside colonial zoning and cartography. The places of the African continent are not just the phantasmagoria of the conquerors. They are first and foremost places practised by their own inhabitants before being dreamt of by others. The practice of places, by African peoples predates colonial cartography and this changes the perspective.
These places are situational powers. They are not produced by texts it is they who welcome maps, texts and imaginaries into their crucible.
The argument I am putting forward here is that literature is an epistemic place and as such it is also a power (an ability/power). I borrow part of his definition of literature from Roland Barthes. For him, literature is more than a corpus of works; it is the complex graph of traces of the practice of writing. Barthes is essentially interested in the text, i.e. the fabric of signifiers that makes up the work. Literature is a focus which, in the space of the novel, takes in a great deal of knowledge (historical, social, geographical, anthropological), and in this respect literature is realistic. It rotates knowledge, it does not fetishise any of them, it gives them an indirect place, and in that it allows possible, unsuspected knowledge to be designed.
This definition by Barthes lacks a reflection on oral literatures and on the paradigm of orality. It seems to me that a reflection on African literature and its relationship to the ecological question cannot ignore oral literature, and more generally narratives as places for the production of meaning and the imaginary that structure relationships with the living. The aim is to move away from the scriptural paradigm (scriptolatry), which sees the written word as the exclusive means of transmitting the collective memory and cultural capital of a people. Many human groups have not needed writing to transmit their cultural heritage. There is no human group without a language, and without a codified means of perpetuating its collective memory, and therefore of exchanging texts at a distance. African societies have produced cultural and epistemic resources that have enabled them to ensure their survival and continuity over the long term. Some of these resources have been channelled through written texts and the material production of societies. However, to fully mobilise the cultural resources of these societies, it is necessary to explore their language arts, which include oral traditions, cosmogonies, myths and onto-mythologies. The aim is to question these cultures through the processes they have mostly used to transmit their collective memory.
Lylian Kesteloot, to whom we paid tribute yesterday, speaking of oral literature in African societies, says this ” Foundation and vehicle of the continent’s civilisations and its differences ; it is the inexhaustible source of interpretations of the cosmos and cults ; of laws and customs of systems of kinship and alliance of systems of production and distribution, of modes of political power of social stratification, of criteria of ethics and aesthetics of concepts and representations of moral values “.
Mamoussé Diagne shows that African societies, although not ignorant of the written word[3], have developed an Oral Reason. He analyses the latter by highlighting the discursive processes at work at the heart of orality and reveals the laws and intellectual processes that organise the living word and its writing (i.e. its fixation and transmission). These processes are irreducible to those found in a scriptural civilisation. In addition to his work on the mechanisms that govern the production, archiving and transmission of individual and collective knowledge, Mamoussé Diagne has led a philosophical reflection on the content of this knowledge and thought. These narratives, oral texts and myths, which must be added to the corpus, inform us about the relational conception of ontologies inscribed at the heart of his cultures and the relationships to the living that they induce.
At this point in my remarks, I’d like to ask the question again from the beginning and sketch out a few answers. What can literature (particularly African literature) do in a world in ecological crisis ?
- Writing the real
- Imagining possibles and counterfactuals,
- Echoing the voices of the living and working to decentre the human perspective
- To separate in symbolic space, damaged worlds
- Echoing cosmologies founded on the unity of the living and thus contributing to the conversion of our relationship with the world.
One of the roots (origins) of the ecological crisis can be considered to lie in a representation of the centrality of our humanity in the order of the living, in a cosmology of separation and in the transformation of the rest of the living into objects subjected by an instrumental reason to our exclusive ends. An instrumental relationship with what we call nature, inherited from the mechanistic cosmology of Western modernity, has led us to overexploit the resources of the biotope and to endanger the conditions for the reproduction of life on earth. Thus, responding to the ecological challenges posed by our techno-scientific civilisation requires us to rethink the cosmologies that underpin and structure our relationship with living things, our place within this order ; the relationships we have with its different modalities as well as the languages that give meaning to the links we have with it.
Since the text of Genesis, the religious texts of the Semitic religions have made animals, plants, non-humans and all living things into beings /things in the exclusive service of our self-fulfilment. We humans placed ourselves on a pedestal: the measure of all things, the Alpha and Omega of the cosmos, the awakened conscience of the universe, the only ones capable of language, interiority and sensitivity. We gave ourselves the mission of being vicars and ordinators. Our arts, our letters, the discourses that structure our imaginations and indicate the place we have granted ourselves within the universe, intoned this same song.
Here, the question of the role of literature and, more broadly, that of narrative and spaces of representation arises acutely. What literature can do, and what narratives can do, is to contribute to a change in mythology and metaphysical discourse. To invent myths (or give an account of eco-mythologies) that remove us from the pedestal on which we have hoisted ourselves and reinstitute us at the heart of the living world in a more just place.
In Africa, Latin America, the Amazon, Oceania and pre-modern Europe, human groups are heirs to cosmologies and cosmovisions that established relationships between humans and non-humans based on the unity of the living. These cosmologies established a continuum between existing beings and made no clear distinction between humans, plants and animals. There is no clear separation between nature and culture. Moreover, reflective consciousness, intentionality, sociality and emotional life are not unique to humans. Collectives of existing humans, animals and plants share the attributes of mortality, social life, reciprocity and knowledge. Interactions with communities of living beings are certainly conceived under the sign of utility and necessity, but also of affinity, cooperation and interdependence. Because of the metamorphic capacity of the living, the boundaries between existing collectives are porous, as are their ontological categorisations.
In Ewe and Yanomami cosmology[4], animality and its discontinuities emerge from an original humanity that condensed the attributes of both orders. So humans do not come from an earlier animality of which they would constitute the summit, and of which they would be condemned to become masters and possessors. This is the opposite of modern and Western naturalistic evolutionism. Humans are just one of the many existing peoples who inhabit the vast world of the earth-forest and form each other’s cosmopolitan and interlocutory landscape. In these cosmovisions, there is no denial of co-humanity. The hierarchies of living things postulated by Western mechanistic cosmology are overturned, implying other relationalities. These cosmologies postulate a link of continuity between individual and social bodies and ecosystems, which implies that damage to the environment affects social links and vice versa. The issues of social, political and environmental ties therefore call for joint thinking ; and these cosmologies are important imaginary, symbolic, and political resources that make it possible to think through a new relational ontology.
Achille Mbembe in reflecting on the idea of an earthly community recalls that in the animist metaphysics of ancient Africans, all invisible forces, genies, ancestors, spirits and masks, the red fibres of clothing and finery, the innumerable luxuriance of life ; all these forces, though not part of the same species, though different entities are each in their own way sketches of the living. They are all subject to mutation ; and the survival of some depends on that of all the others. They form a framework, better, a community : the community of the Earth’s inhabitants.
In a novel written in 1952 entitled L‘Ivrogne dans la brousse, Amos Tutuola paints a striking picture of these metaphysics. First, we learn that there is no watertight wall between living forms, governed as they are by the constant circulation of flows and energies. In order to adapt constantly to the changing conditions of their environment, they resort to transfers and exchanges. Humans borrow from plants, which in turn take the form of animals, who do not hesitate to don the masks of their ancestors, against a backdrop of infinite variations.
Life, like the Earth itself, is a vast mosaic. Each form of life contains and shelters other forms of life. Each being, including humans, is not just a composite subject, but the relative sum, at a given moment, of multiple combinations. Because the product of recombinations, every living subject is also, and by definition, constantly open to incompleteness and the unexplored. Mountains, rivers, animals and plants are natural persons. These are distinct from human persons. They do not need to be protected by guardian figures. In fact, it is humans who need guardians and representatives…
In Tutuola’s Universe, Achille Mbembe reminds us that, What is, only becomes real, i.e. animate, when it is put into relation with other existing. This becoming-real is permanent. It never takes the same forms and almost never leads to definitive closure. For those involved in the drama of existence, the only thing that counts is the ability, when the time comes, to become something other than what we were. Living things are arborescent. The result of tangled, indistinguishable pasts and a concentration of multiple presents, it is made up of a multitude of possible futures.
Always in line with these metaphysics, the Earth has vibratory, bodily, sensory and carnal properties. These properties pre-exist those of human beings, the last-born of the cosmos. The Earth can only achieve unlimited duration if it is capable of fertility and regeneration. Fertility and regeneration are, in turn, only possible if reserves are built up. In the absence of this capacity for periodic begetting and re-begetting, it is no more than the darkened mask of a vast death house. If there is one enigma that most myths and ancestral knowledge strive to solve, it is how to pass from one world to another, from one form to another and, in so doing, give new life to what is threatened by death. This is the function assigned to techniques and other objects, starting with masks. It is through it and through it that new imaginary territories and new languages will appear, that coexistence between the living will be organised, that other ways of making or unmaking the world will emerge.
The civilisational crisis we are experiencing, which is forcing us to rethink our relationship with life, death and the earth, is a crisis in the way we inhabit our primary ecological home, which is the earth.
First of all, as Pierre Madelin and Val Plumwood assert, we need to get out of the denial of belonging to the earth that leads us to wish to eradicate nature’s otherness by subjecting it to our will. Geneviève Azam invites us to consider ” that living things and species, those that exist outside human ingenuity (…) are a gift that we inherit “. A gift that commits us. Acknowledging the otherness of natural things, their given nature,” he points out, “for the individual, means acknowledging the non-human foundations of his being, and it is only in this way that we will be able to inhabit the earth without destroying it. To recognise, then, the other-than-human foundations of our being in the world, their necessity, and to draw all the implications from them.
In this meditation on the relationship between literature and ecology, I would like at this point in my remarks to return to the word and its virtues.
For me poetry is the ultimate form of speech and at the same time it is its limit. It is a beyond of language that can serve as a viaticum for a poetic inhabitation of the world. An ecological way of inhabiting the world would involve inhabiting it poetically. I sensed very early on that poetry was one of the highest stations; that it held in its hand the totality of the world whose protuberances it aggregates. I have always found keys in poetry. To unlock the forever completely open doors of meaning. To com-prendre in a single rush an indecipherable whole. Keys to smell the winds that herald the rain that strips away, the horizons that open up, the light that staggers and eventually falls on you. Keys to approaching the unspeakable, to feeling it, to grasping it. To experience a sudden unveiling ; of a sonic and phenomenological reality that the word reveals, but also of that other reality that does not pass through the mediation of articulated language.
Poetry in the variety of its expressions (modalities) makes it possible to open up to the voices of the living. On a horse-drawn carriage in Saint-Louis, the sound of a harnessed horse’s hooves on the asphalt. A sound that punctuates the rhythm of the stroll through the city streets. A persistent sound that is a presence in the world and that now inhabits the memory I have of this city.
The poetic state is this complete upheaval of perception this immersion in a vast ocean that dislocates you, dislocates you and blurs your bearings. The possibility of a new experience of things. Sometimes, in this inferno of poetry, I felt the density of time its concatenation, the multiplicity and concomitance of levels of reality. The sentiment-poétique (the poetic state) is woven from something diffuse. It sometimes insinuates itself outside language and attempts to formulate the poem. The softness of an evening falling over the town of Tamba-Counda. The weary, humming gait of the Peul women with their calabashes on their heads, selling milk in the neighbourhood. The clear summer sun. The atmosphere cooled by a sudden downpour. The creaking shutters blown open by the lightning. The winter tornado and its lamentos. Tree leaves twirling in the courtyard. The songs rising from the church of the Saint Jean Don Bosco congregation on a Sunday when a Diola priest was ordained there.
The coal of this brazier a cottony soul sensitive to things, soaked in the vibrations of the world, affected by its gleams and roughnesses. The highest flames in this inferno, the ones that licked my face and made me shudder, were the fires lit one day by René Char and Aimé Césaire. My encounter with these fellow travellers was decisive. One day I came up against them.
With Char, poetry is an intimate resource, a sacred space and a permanent insurrection. To be a poet is to coincide with oneself by putting actions in unison with the word the poem is furious ascent poetry, the game of arid banks.
With Césaire, poetry is this telluric force that he sets in motion in the space of an incandescent verb. It is that other side of disaster. Disaster, is an earth incapable of growing according to the juice of its own soil, an earth trimmed, reduced, in rupture of fauna and flora. Césaire’s poetry is restorative. It is a sacred wound that inhabits the debacle, breaks a long silence and revives a thousand-year-old memory. It affirms that the work of the human is not finished, that it has only just begun.
Maybe today, the work of the human is to Ralentir Travaux, to disengage, to dis-inhabit, to listen to and care for the all-living.
The ultimate favour that Césaire does us is to have (for us) taken care of his word. He instructed her to play with fire between fires and to carry the ultimate drop of saved water to some offshoot of the sun.
In the fraternity of poets’ companionship, I learned that the ultimate poem was outside language. That it lay in the ability to live the poetic state to the full. It was a ceaseless labour of inner, moral, intellectual and aesthetic perfection. It was a labour against egoism, organised deafness and blindness, confinement a work of decentration. The ultimate poem bears witness to a liberated consciousness that inscribes existence in vastitude.
Marielle Macé in Parole et Pollution, says this : ” It is part of our ecological, immediate responsibilities to ” faire parole “. The urgent thing is not to remain silent, but to exercise our responsibilities as living, speaking people with care, because the way we speak (and speak to each other) about the world counts for the world. It could even be that the spoken word is one of the most polluted areas on the planet, and that this calls for a real re-commitment. There is something in the exercise of speech that can participate directly in the contamination or care of our living environments “.
[1] Fictional environment
[2] African Ecopoetics
[3] Contrary to widespread myth, the existence of writing has been attested on the African continent since -3400 BC (at Abydos, southern Egypt), well before Sumerian writing. More generally, pre-colonial black Africa knew several writing systems (Maucler and Moniot (1987), Kaké 1991) : the arako scripts of the Yoruba of Nigeria, giscandi of the Kikuyu of Kenya, the Tfinaagah of the Tuareg peoples, the Nsibidi of the efik of Nigeria, mendé of Sierra Leone, the moum of Cameroon.
[4] Bruce Albert, Davi Kopenawa, The sky is falling
Conclusion
I cannot end this communication without remembering what a privilege it is to be invited to speak and the demands of that privilege. We are speaking here in an amphitheatre at the University. It is a sacred space, devoted to knowledge and its transmission. All intellectual pursuits are authorised, permitted and protected here. But what, above all, consecrates the University is its mission to profess the truth. To seek out and tell the truth about the world, in all its difficulty, complexity, nuance and implacability; but to tell it unconditionally, not only to oneself, but also to those in power, the powerful, the vulnerable, the unbelievers and those who hide from it. Reminding societies of their luminous side and the living of their dignity. To speak out tirelessly when faced with injustice and oppression: to speak the naked truth, because the spoken word affects the course of things, and the true word sustains the foundations of the world when it threatens to collapse. the demands of the task entrusted to us here in this place: to disestablish lies through knowledge. The learned word fails in its duty when it fails to tell the truth and bows to injustice. Our role as academics is not to justify ruin, but to pave the way for the day that is dawning and to hasten its arrival. That, too, is taking care of the word.