- Tweeter
republish
The day after the International Day of La Francophonie, Haitian author Yanick Lahens will deliver this Thursday, March 21, the inaugural lecture of the Chair Mondes Francophones at the College de France. A first in this venerable and respected institution. RFI will broadcast this lesson in full on March 22 in a special program "De vive (s) voix", from 2.30 pm to 4.00 pm, then on the site rfi.fr where we will also find all eight courses that it will give throughout the year !
By creating the Collège de France in 1530, a few years before the promulgation of the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, which imposed French as the administrative language in the country, François 1er knew nothing, could not imagine that this same language would become global and mixed. .
A space of thought
The first step was taken in 2016, when the chair of artistic creation was entrusted to the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou. A second step is taken today by opening a specific chair that will see succeed for three years of personalities of culture, science or law, from the French-speaking world.
By creating an annual "Mondes Francophones" Chair, the Collège de France, in partnership with the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), is not responding to a fashion trend that since the election of Emmanuel Macron has given cultural and educational institutions. It defines a space of thought and research " out of all Eurocentrism " as written by Yanick Lahens who will be the first holder. A plural space by definition in which the imaginary and the knowledge are shared in a common language, but not exclusive, because it is a question of " decolonizing the knowledge ".
Yanick Lahens will deliver "a 21st century culture"
Based on the history of Haiti, cradle of modernity, and on her experience as a writer of a distant French-speaking world, Yanick Lahens says she wants to reflect on this inaugural lecture and the teaching she will teach. throughout the year to " a 21st century culture in the making ".
Between novels and short stories, Yanick Lahens is the author of an essentially novel work. Winner of the Femina prize in 2014 for Bain de Lune , she focuses on telling all the tremors of love or geology, in a writing deeply marked by the history and beliefs of Haiti. It's a safe bet that in the teaching of Yanick Lahens at the College de France, a touch of magic will color the thought.
On the occasion of his inaugural lecture of the Francophone Worlds Chair, Yanick Lahens signs a text that we reproduce below in its entirety.
Haitian literature : emergency (s) to write, dream (s) to live
Today, research on the formation of modernity, the Empire and its national projects can not be isolated from those dealing with the colonial world. Haiti is both a product and a matrix of these crossings and its literature is one of the first metaphorizations. It is essential to understand from the dynamics of these crossings how Haiti, isolated for many decades, has, since the early nineteenth century, relocated the culture and language of France and arranged their acclimatization in its own way.
The victorious revolt of the slaves of Santo Domingo in 1804 against the Napoleonic army is one of those essential skills to exhume. This insurrectional movement was an unthought and made an unprecedented qualitative leap. If the American Revolution represents an undeniable progress of the Enlightenment because it advances individual freedoms, the practice of slavery will survive nearly a century later, if the French Revolution advances human rights, France maintains slavery in some countries and strengthens the process of colonization in others, the Haitian revolution, it oversteps the Enlightenment project by advancing in a radical way the issue of equality, thus putting into action another intelligibility of the world. The writers of Haiti, from the end of the eighteenth century to today, have always tried to formulate both the enactment of this new intelligibility and what only literature can say to the world when the other meanings abut.
Haiti is the first country of the South made by this economic and political modernity born of the Enlightenment and it is the mold in which will be cast the relations that will be established between the North and the South until today. From the South it knew before the others all the avatars that will engender these relations, whose reproduction after the independence of an internal colonization.
Never has the urgency loosened its grip on the deportees that we were and always the writers have pursued a dream of living in the world " full day and walk ".
The French-speaking world is one and divisible. The Collège de France has understood this well by choosing this title Francophone worlds , which seals both unity as what passes through these worlds and the plurality that constitutes the dynamics of each of these spaces. To make the Francophone worlds happen will require to pass by the sharing of the historical and cultural knowledge of these worlds and by listening to new narratives which will make more audible the othernesses that constitute them. Because, although Francophone spaces and especially Haiti share a common memory, their historical and cultural knowledge is not yet recognized or admitted in its own right. Haitian literature is one of the aesthetic expressions of this historical and cultural knowledge. The inaugural lesson as well as the lessons that follow will not be able to do without this introductory clarification.
To say Haiti and its literature differently through all the courses, is to ask through its literature what lighting can bring today to the French-speaking world if not the whole world the experience of Haiti? How in the impasse that follows its independence, men and women dispossessed, displaced, destabilized linguistically create a civilization of which literature will be a major element? How writers have not stopped saying or writing a dream of living, showing that literature often begins where speech becomes impossible. Where the world is so shaken that we have to go through language to find bursts of meaning.
From 1804, those who have no choice but to live in these 27,750 km2, hardly more extensive than some departments of France, are summoned to invent and invent in this place unknown, unimagined, undesired. To this summation the writers will respond for two centuries nourishing a dream of inhabiting a body that is no longer that of the naked migrant, according to the beautiful formula of Glissant, a place and a time founder, to inhabit writing as the first place , original, a place not only of simple rooting, but of possible stay and finally a place beyond ethnicity or class, as vast as the silence or the unknown.
And today that Haitian literature is written in three languages other than French, it testifies that languages are called to live together, that they can have only one flag or one homeland and prefigures a culture of the twenty-first century being made.
Studying Haitian literature in the light of its history makes it possible to give the French qualifier a meaning outside of any Eurocentrism. A meaning that befits our time, the only one capable of securing a future for it.