In the poetic universe of childhood and memory, with Abdourahman Waberi (first part)
Audio 04:11
Abdourahman Waberi now lives in the United States, where he teaches French literature.
© Paolo Montanaro / creative commons
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
7 mins
One of the rare French-speaking writers from the Horn of Africa, Abdourahman Waberi burst onto the literary scene in the 1990s with poetic short stories of great virtuosity.
In thirty years of uninterrupted literary practice, the Djiboutian writer has established himself as a major author of contemporary African literature, alternating story, short stories, tales and poems.
His latest novel
Why do you dance when you walk
?
just appeared in pocket size.
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Abdourahman Waberi has not yet obtained the Goncourt prize, nor the Renaudot for that matter, a prize he would have narrowly missed in 2019, according to his admirers.
The man nonetheless remains a major writer of contemporary French-speaking African literature.
Born in colonial Djibouti in 1965, which he left at the age of twenty, to continue his studies in France, the writer is today the author of ten books, divided between novels, short stories and poems. It is a singular work, which stands out for its poetic intensity and its diversity of inspiration, genres and sensibilities. Unlike many other writers who give the impression of writing the same book, the Djiboutian constantly puts the work on the job, seeking to renew the form and content of his writings. His corpus thus includes committed narratives, political fiction, thrillers, fantasized biographies, poetic short stories, with as an anchor, as the interested party likes to repeat, the refusal of any assignment and the quest for never unsatisfied with oneself and with the world.
Poignant and personal
With his latest novel, published in 2019 and which has just been released in pocket format, the writer is entering a new stage in his literary creation, by staging himself in self-fiction mode for the first time.
The author evokes in the pages of this autobiographical account existential questions, starting from a dramatized conversation between a father and his daughter.
"
Daddy, why are you dancing when you walk?"
»Asks little Bea to her father, whose club foot and swaying gait have challenged her since she became aware of the things in life. Difficult for the father to escape this innocent and daring questioning. Limping like the author, he responds by telling his daughter about his native Djibouti, his childhood, the poverty, the hardships, the torments of polio, but also the solicitude of his parents, the moving desert, the Red Sea and its light. . The memories come back at a gallop. Heat, sweat and chills also return, all that makes the strength of this poignant and personal novel. He is nonetheless surprising with his confessional writing, the author having always remained very discreet about his private life, his childhood, his adolescence, the revolts and the sufferings which were at the origin of his coming to writing. .
Formerly, in order to avoid spreading his personal ailments in the public square, to those who asked him why he writes, the Djiboutian used to answer that it was because he did not know how to dance the polka.
“…
The polka or the tango,
remembers the author
; it depended on the days and it was probably already a way of saying surreptitiously that I have a handicap, a sequel to polio. For a long time, it was out of the question for me to talk about this. "
That
"
being my body. I found that at the time indecent, even irreverent, because I had partly hidden these sufferings which are mine. And on the other hand, I tended to consider that literature mainly concerns the outside, that is to say the world. So talking about yourself, talking about your little ailments seemed totally inappropriate to me. It took me past fifty to take a tour, a little revolution on myself, and finally, to consider that writing from your ailments or small health problems, was not so foreign to the world and no he was above all no stranger to the being that I was and that I am and who was trying to catch the world. So you didn't necessarily have to go to Rwanda as I did to talk about serious matters.We could very well also talk about serious things from his small body perimeter. "
The body is political. It is a capital awareness for the novelist. For the latter, it was also linked with his installation in the United States in the early 2010s, when he was invited to come and teach French and French literature in American universities. "
The return to me, if I may say so, to my body, to write from oneself came after going to the United States,
" Waberi explains.
.
I went to the United States in 2010. In 2012, roughly, I knew I was going to stay there longer and I also discovered this other continent, this other way of being black.
I knew a little about the black way of being African, the black way of being "Afropean", as we say today.
It was also necessary to read, in particular some women, for example, like the poet Audrey Laude, who is a powerful woman, homosexual, very political, but who also spoke a lot about her body, her disease, herself and which made us understand that talking about oneself was very political by the way
.
"
Trilogy on Djibouti
Abdourahman Waberi's literary career began in the 1990s, with the publication of his trilogy on Djibouti. The Franco-Djiboutian writer belongs to what has been called the fourth generation of African authors, who burst onto the literary scene in the last years of the past century, breaking with the grotesque, the incredible and the magical. popularized by the Kourouma and the Sony Labou Tansi.
This trilogy is made up of two collections of short stories entitled
Le Pays sans ombre
(1994) and
Cahier nomade
(1994), and a novel,
Balbala
, featuring a subversive quartet. Torn between the disenchantment of African independence and the romanticism of revolutionary promises, these works have made the reputation of their author as a writer committed and sensitive to the evils of the city.
Waberi's books are also deeply poetic texts.
Coming to literature through poetry, the writer deploys in his prose an exacerbated lyrical sensibility which is nourished by the nomadic folk poetry of his land and his Rimbaldian readings.
One of the first French-speaking Djiboutian authors, he also manages to bring out through his writings the issues of the language of the colonizer imposed through the school.
It was nonetheless assimilated by the colonized with greed and talent, as the author of
Cahier Nomade
affirms
.
“I come from a very modest family. Neither my mother nor my father could read. I had a strange relationship with books. It is the French school which brought me reading and instruction. So I have this strange relationship with the French language, I understood, as a teenager, that to own the language in this colonial or postcolonial Djibouti, on the verge of decolonization, in the midst of these families or these people who did not read French, knowing the French language and speaking it was already a power. For example, when you manage to read administrative papers or write for them, that, that, that shows that all of a sudden you have more power than your own parents. "
How the power of language corrupts and liberates at the same time, how it destroys and allows speakers to rebuild themselves through writing, this will be the subject, next Saturday, of the second part of this column devoted to the writing path of the Franco-Djiboutian novelist Abdourahman Waberi.
Why do you dance when you walk
?, by Abdourahman Waberi.
"Folio" collection, Gallimard, 224 pages, 8, 10 euros.
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