Poetically inhabiting the world
Keynote, Felwine Sarr
Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, December 2018
Festival Francophonie, Zébrures d’automne, 28 September 2019
My vocation as a poet was born contemplating the town of Tamba-Counda from the top of the Médina Coura neighbourhood. Its corrugated iron roofs, its clumsy flamboyant buildings, its laterite streets glowing like incandescent iron under the blazing embers of a November sun. Every morning, I left the Mamadou Lamine Dramé military camp, stranded on a hill at the end of town, to go to school in the Médina Coura neighbourhood below. From there, I could see the town. A main avenue cut this town in the depths of Senegal in two. It was lined with bougainvilleas that the tambacoundais called independances : these trees had been planted in 1960, the year of Senegal’s independence.
A few weeks after my first poem about the bucolic charm of this provincial town came the Sabra and Shatila massacres. I was deeply shocked. This was the subject of my second poem. A prose imbued with gentle candour and sincere revolt that I sometimes reread with emotion and circumspection. When I was twelve years old, I used to wonder why men were so cruel. Years later, my question remains unanswered. I’ve come to terms with the cruelty of my fellow human beings in the same way that you come to terms with the only patched jacket you have in the middle of winter. Then came the love poems. Sali Bodian Sall was beautiful. In the sixth form at Jean XXIII secondary school, we sat next to each other. As chance would have it, our surnames began with the same letter and our places were assigned in alphabetical order. My name came just after his and that made me happy. For a year, we exchanged erasers, pencils, slates, felt-tips and ballpoint pens. Sometimes I’d help him finish his homework or explain some tricky maths problem just before the teacher turned up. The Pythagorean theorem and the surface of the rhombus were my first weapons of seduction. I liked this gentle promiscuity. By the end of the year, it was as necessary to me as the air I breathed. Sometimes our arms would brush against each other and Sali Bodian would smile shyly at me. Every day, after school, I’d walk with him to his doorstep in Médina Coura before heading back to the military camp. At the end of the year, on the last day of school, as I was leaving her, I slipped an envelope into her frail little hands. It contained a letter.
I’ve just read you the beginning of Comme une mélodie, a short story in which I recount the awakening to poetry of a young teenager in short pants who lived in the town of Tamba-Counda. That teenager is me. I was 12 and I lived in this town in the south of Senegal. One day, on my way to school in Médina-Coura, in a district below the military camp where we lived, I was struck for the first time by the beauty of the town. I had walked that way every day, without ever really looking at or seeing the city. Then one day, for some reason, I stopped and looked at the city. I was literally overwhelmed.
Beauty banged angrily against the walls of my being, wanting to penetrate with its wake of lightning and pain. I wrote a few poems that I first had read to my French teacher, who validated my nascent talent, or at least my sensitivity to words, things and beings, worthy of being nurtured and protected. He advised me to read poets and patiently search for my own language. He told me that words were worlds and advised me to create my own universe. He read me the poem Ndéssé. As I drove home, these lines by Senghor rang in my ears: ” receive me in the night lit by the assurance of your gaze … “, ” redis-moi les vieux contes des veillées noires que me je perdde par les routes sans mémoire “, ” mère, je suis un soldat humilié que l’on nourrit de gros mil, dis-moi donc l’orgueil de mes pères “.
Around the Twenties, on my way to Tamba Counda to see my father, who had again been posted to this military base, on the long journey from Dakar to Tamba over chaotic roads, I wrote a text entitled Why I am a poet, in which I reflected on the reasons that inclined me to write poetry and on what I considered to be my vocation as a poet. In it, I spoke of a desire to be neither master nor slave, to rid myself of all the servitudes imposed by life in society above all, I spoke of a profound aspiration to keep myself away from all tyrannies but also from any desire for power and control over the reality of others, in short a desire for peace and inner harmony as well as a renunciation of the incessant struggles of becoming.
In this text, I opted for the compromise of the category to end all compromises, I said. The only ‘compartment’ from which I could breathe the sea air was that of poets, writers and artists.
Since my servitude lay in the dispossession of my time. And since finitude lay in wait for me, I decided to reclaim my life time to divide it into sighs and measures, stanzas and distichs, and set about revealing my soul to the world. It was what I called at the time the temptation to Be.
Be, like over there, the straight and majestic mountain.
To be, like these trees offering their shade without tyranny.
To be and to have no other desire than to be and to be fulfilled, for the human is an end.
This profession of faith may have been touching in its sincerity, but it did not lead me to inhabit the world poetically. With this desire for the absolute that was expressed in this way, I remained on the threshold of poetry in spite of myself. I wanted only a part of reality, only a fragment of the world the one that offered me peace, rest and smooth beauty.
I was not yet cured of a romantic idealism that often afflicts adolescence and sometimes even adulthood.
The other side of the moon, awaited me, the poetic conversion, was yet to be accomplished in its ferocious fullness.
As the years went by, life thickened with twilights and dawns, intimate tragedies and achievements, quests between fervour and lucidity. In the end, I realised that to inhabit the world poetically is first and foremost to inhabit it in its harshness, its tragedy, its absurdity, its deep night and its abysses. There is no guilty naivety in our relationship with it. Poetry does not make you blind. Lucidity, that wound closest to the sun according to René Char, is its companion. To inhabit the world poetically is also to inhabit it in its unfathomable mystery, in the sinister thickness of things, in those flickering gleams that are only waiting to be widened by our ardour to the light.
Poetry is the highest station, it holds in its hand the totality of the world, whose lights, shadows and protuberances it aggregates, but without erasing its asperities. I’ve always found keys in her. To unlock the forever completely open doors of meaning. To understand in a single rush an indecipherable whole. Keys to smell the winds that herald the rain that strips, the horizons that open up, victory and defeat before their time, the beauty that staggers and ends up falling on you but also this beauty that Rimbaud sits on his lap, that he finds bitter and that he reviles. Keys to approaching the unspeakable, feeling it, grasping it. To experience a sudden unveiling.
Of a sound and phenomenological reality that the word reveals, but also of this other sound reality that does not pass through the mediation of articulated language.
On a horse-drawn carriage in Rufisque, the sound of a harnessed horse’s hooves on the asphalt. A sound that punctuates the rhythm of the stroll through the streets of the town. A persistent sound that is a presence in the world and that now inhabits the memory I have of this city.
That sudden light in that furtive look you meet and will never see again.
An unexpected peace in the midst of tumult and a reminder that reality is always woven from many threads.
To inhabit the world poetically is to learn to be present to it it is to let oneself fall there, into the unknown that already exists and is the infinite complexity of life.
To inhabit the world poetically is to see it as it offers itself to us and sovereignly decide to roll up our sleeves and help reveal its beauty, its untamed power, the renewed genesis of everything, its infinite creativity; it is to put its ever-renewing shadows at a distance. Poetry is not this ivory tower made of beautiful metaphors and beautiful sentiments.
She is this permanent insurrection that no false peace coaxes.
To act as a poet is to intervene in the cauldron of the world as a madman, a wanderer, a seer and sometimes like Rimbaud as a rogue
Facing the collapse of evidence the poet responds with a salvo of the future
In 2014 in Ouagadougou the Récréâtrales foreshadowed the fall of Blaise Compaoré by playing freedom in the courtyards of Rue 9.32, the Gounghin district, the homes of the Koné, the Zaïda, and others.
It so happens that the artists performing these plays were leading the insurrection that put an end to Blaise Compaoré’s regime at the same time. They inhabited their world poetically, and therefore politically.
René Char alias le capitaine Alexandre was born on the banks of the Sorgue between the Ventoux and the Lubéron, in a land of lavender, holm oaks and vines. In 1941, when France was occupied by Nazi Germany, he decided to join the Resistance. He explained his reasons to his friend François Curel: “After the disaster, I didn’t have the heart to return to Paris. I can scarcely apply myself here in a far-off place that I have chosen, but which I still find too close to the comings and goings of faces resigned to themselves and to things. Of course, the fury and the sobs of our mortal moods must be written in silent ink, but not everything must stop there. That would be derisorily inadequate “.
These words sign the act of commitment of a man who, faced with the sight of supplicated blood, decides to leave the comfort and abstraction of the poem. In the face of horror, it is certainly necessary to write, but literature remains derisorily inadequate. To be a poet is to make the most magnificent of agreements, which is to coincide with oneself by putting actions in unison with words. René Char never ceased to question the obstinacy of human beings in not letting go of their dark side, even though light bathes at least half of their nature. He would repeat that the poet is the part of the human being that refuses to accept calculated projects. When François Curel asked him: “Is this the door to our dark end? He replies: “No. We are in the inconceivable, but with dazzling landmarks “. What are these dazzling landmarks? The watchtowers of poetry.
With Césaire, poetry is that telluric force that he sets in motion in the space of an incandescent and creative verb. It is that other side of disaster, from which he hears a river of turtle doves and savannah clovers rising. The disaster is centuries of alienation that have turned his West Indies into a land incapable of growing according to the juice of its own soil, a land trimmed, reduced, at odds with its flora and fauna. A fragile layer of earth that is humiliatingly outstripped by its grandiose future. Centuries of alienation have turned his people into a crowd that no longer knows how to be a crowd, a crowd that has so astonishingly missed its own cry, the only one we would have liked to hear it cry out, because we feel it is its own; because we feel it dwells within us in some deep refuge of shadow and pride, its cry of hunger, misery and revolt. Here, Césaire’s poetry is restorative. It says (affirms) that the work l’Humain is not finished, that it has only just begun, and that it remains for l’Humain to conquer every ban immobilised at the corner of his fervour, that the sun revolves around our earth illuminating the plot that our will has fixed and that every star falls from heaven to earth at our command without limit.
These two poets are my masters and I wanted to summon them here as watchmen. I’ll be bringing them into dialogue later in a language of fire and water, with the help of Etienne Minougou and Simon Winsey. In this twilight-scented time we live in, when monsters resurface and stare us in the eye, these two poets tell us that poetry can be contemplation, but that above all it is an acting force that the poet (the poetess) is a being of dream and action, a being of transposition and transgression, that he or she draws the geography of a desert where the living waters of freedom bubble up.
What is invulnerable about poetry is that it is the guardian of the luminous heritage of the dead and that it preserves the infinite faces of the living.