The chaos-world of Nassuf Djailani
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The Franco-Comorian Nassuf Djailani is the author of a proteïforme work, shared between poetry, fiction and theater.
Author's personal archives
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
10 mins
The Franco-Comorian Nassuf Djailani is the author of a protean work, divided between poetry, fiction and theater.
Navigating between gravity and inventiveness, this rich work of ten titles, invites the reader to dive into the Comorian universe and the geopolitical turmoil that has crossed it since the breakup of the archipelago between the independent Comoros and Mayotte, which remained under the French flag.
Originally from Mayotte, the writer questions the hopes and fate of the Comorian and Mahorese peoples through poetic, poignant and deeply committed texts.
His ambition: "neither laugh nor cry, but understand".
Portrait.
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“
The French language was a large coconut tree that had to be climbed to get the nuts above.
Sometimes we hurt ourselves, sometimes we almost fall and sometimes we even fall ... But, here it was an effort.
I found out that you had to make it your tongue to tell the old master that we have - we have a heart and that we are suffering too.
It is time that they understood this and that they understood that we have the right to free speech
.
"A right to freedom and to speech that the Comorian Nassuf Djailani has exercised in a very fine way, for almost two decades, as evidenced by his latest collection of poems
Naître ici
, published last year, published by Bruno Doucey (1 ).
"
To be born here / to be nothing and everything / at the same time / slack magma
", sings the poet, sailing between dream and nothingness and drawing his freedom from the heart of the socio-political chaos that reigns in his native island.
Writing, as he likes to say “
with skin and with sensation
”, the author transforms words into “
miraculous weapons
” and promises of humanity.
“
I will tell you about the thousand and one nights full of hopes
”, he promises, inviting the reader to join him in his crossing of the Comoros, “
the green paradise of his childhood
” which has become the emblematic archipelago of postcolonial dramas of African migration .
A country on its knees
Mayotte, to which Nassuf Djailani has just devoted, in collaboration with photographer Thierry Cron, a sumptuous book of photos and illustrated texts (2), is at the heart of the work of this writer as sensitive as he is lucid.
Lucidity and openness are the hallmarks of this work which traces the history and challenges of the political and migratory crisis that this former colony is going through which since 2011 has become a French department, the poorest department in France and Navarre, say the authors. observers.
“
The island today is experiencing a triple crisis: a dengue epidemic and then the Covid, and on top of that, there is terrible, ferocious misery in Mayotte,
laments the author of
Naître ici
.
There are people who don't eat three meals a day.
It's Mayotte, it's France, it's a country on its knees, badly treated, ignored.
It is in this chaos that I try to write and I try to strain my ears to tell the story of the belly of this place, of this land
.
"
Nassuf Djailani is above all a poet.
Not quite forty years old, the Franco-Comorian is an abundant poet, with to his credit five collections of poetry in French, but also texts in Kibushi, the Malagasy language of Mayotte, which is the author's mother tongue.
He is also a playwright and novelist.
And finally, journalist.
In Limoges, where the man has put down his suitcases, he simultaneously leads a professional career as a video reporter in the limousine editorial staff of France Télévisions.
"I am a journalist by day and an author of fiction by night," he likes to repeat.
The writer was born on the island of Mayotte in 1981. His father is a mason and his mother runs a small hardware store in the village market of Chiconi, in the center of the island of Mayotte, where the future poet grew up.
Landed in mainland France in the 1990s, he studied history and journalism.
It was through journalism, moreover, that he entered literary writing, anxious to tear himself away from the pretenses and xenophobia that plague Mahorese society.
"I wanted to find through writing something that looks like me", he confides.
“
Writing precisely
, adds Djailani,
is a way of questioning.
What is it that we have become, heaps of hatred, heaps of loves perhaps sometimes, fortunately moreover, but heaps, in a sort of concentrate of all these falsehoods.
"
A quest for authenticity
Nassuf Djailani became known by publishing his first collections of poems,
Spirale
and 2004 and
Cooing
in 2006, inspired by the spiralist movement founded by Frankétienne, the Haitian poet who marked the imaginations by the power of his writing of chaos.
“
Frankétienne gave me confidence,
” remembers the Comorian.
He recognizes himself in the work of the great poet of Port-au-Prince who tries to recreate with his wobbly neologisms an authenticity in the face of falsehood, dissonance and chaos that Haitian society sends him back.
In Djailani's writing, there is also something of Léon-Gontran Damas, something of the raucous and dark poetry of this third thief of Negritude, author of
Pigments
and
Black Label
, classics of African poetic literature.
“
Reading
Pigments
was a turning point for me,”
explains Nassuf Djailani
.
His melancholy interested me a lot because we are like that at that age, we are inhabited by things a little dark.
It really is.
This language which does not encumber itself with Alexandrines and gimmicks and stuff, but which unfolds and breaks shapes.
"
The influence of Damascus is perceptible in Djailani's fictional writing, notably in his highly regarded collection Une saison aux Comores.
These stories imbued with a deep melancholy show the experience of the island through successive paintings.
They tell of the joys and vicissitudes of a land at bay, on which weigh on the one hand the weight of traditions and on the other hand the Mahorese hysteria fomented by politicians, targeting the more and more illegal Comorians in Mayotte.
From the native island to the archipelago, there is only one step and that Nassuf Djailani crosses in his polyphonic novel Comorian Vertigo, featuring the divided Comoros, published in 2017. A second novel is in preparation, publication scheduled for 2021. This new fiction has for theme, according to the author's confidences, vertigo and heartbreak, this time seen from the Mahorais side, without forgetting, however, this poignant and universal question which haunts all the Djailanian work: how to be a man facing the chaos of the world?
(1)
Born here,
by Nassuf Djailani.
Bruno Doucey Editions.
141 pages, 15 euros.
(2)
Mayotte, the soul of an island,
by Thierry Cron and Nassuf Djailani.
Editions des Autres, 186 pages, 45 euros.
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