Lights, essays on a life is an autobiographical story. Its author Bernard Mouralis (1), little known to the general public, was an unforgettable professor of African literature, now retired. Author…

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"Lights": the African lesson of Bernard Mouralis

Bernard Mouralis, professor emeritus at the University of Cergy-Pontoise.

He is the author of about twenty books on African literature.

He has just published his autobiography: Lights: Essays on a Life (Présence Africaine, 2021) © Personal Archives of Bernard Mouralis.

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

11 mins

Lights, essays on a life

is an autobiographical story.

Its author Bernard Mouralis (1), little known to the general public, was an unforgettable professor of African literature, now retired.

Author of twenty books on literary Africa and literature in general, Bernard Mouralis spent most of his university career in France, but he also taught in African high schools and universities.

RFI: As one might expect, Africa occupies an important place in your memories.

You didn't know the continent, but you discovered it when you landed in Senegal in the mid-1960s. How did you find yourself in Africa at the young age of 24?

Bernard Mouralis:

It happened very simply.

After my studies, I felt more and more the need to change my living environment, to free myself from the intellectual framework in which I had grown up.

In 1965, I filed a file with the administration to go abroad as a national service volunteer (VSN).

In June of the same year, I was informed that my file had been accepted and that I was assigned from the start of the school year as a classics teacher at Malick Sy high school in Thiès, Senegal.

At first, I regretted not being appointed to Dakar, but I soon realized that being a teacher in a small town was a great experience, because it allowed me to come into contact with the within Africa itself.

It was, perhaps,

As a specialist in African literature, throughout your life you have had many other opportunities to see Africa up close.

What memories do you have of this first contact?

When I landed in Senegal in the 1960s, I discovered an

independent Africa

I had certainly not known colonial Africa

stricto sensu

, but I was sensitive to the assertion of freedom found.

This affirmation did not pass through any manifestation of national pride or pride of the Senegalese in having escaped the tutelage of the colonizer, but one can speak of a way of being, both subtle and emphatic.

Above all, I found men, women and young people who were thinking, who were trying to give meaning to their lives.

This is perhaps what struck me the most in this Africa of independence.

Lights: Essays on a Life is the first volume of Bernard Mouralis' memoirs, published by Présence Africaine, 2021 © African Presence

Can we say that it is partly this encounter with young Africans anxious to give meaning to their lives that led you to call up your memoirs of those

Light

years ?

You will notice that it is

Lights

in the plural.

I hesitated for a long time on the title.

Initially, I thought of calling the book "Essays on a Life", because it was intended as a collection of essays, but ultimately the idea of "lights", which constitutes the red thread of the experiences that I have tried to bring together in this book, imposed itself on me.

Among these experiences was the light in which the landscapes of my childhood bathed.

I grew up in the south of Drôme, where we are lucky enough to live in one of the most beautiful landscapes there is.

As a child and teenager, I was truly intoxicated by the light that marked the days with its enchantment, whatever the season.

These luminous landscapes, I found them later in certain countries like Greece, but also in Mali and Senegal.

How did your interest in literature come about?

By discovering that literature creates concepts, which precisely make it possible to conceptualize the world, to pass a more rational judgment on the world.

I give in the book a few examples of novels that moved me, including the maritime story of the American Thomas Mayne-Reid, At

Sea

It is the story of a ship's boy who embarks on a boat because he wants to travel, but realizes on the way that he is on a slave ship.

There is a chase with the English, who will seize the boat, since the slave trade is prohibited.

We are in the years 1840-1850.

Anxious to do a good deed, the boy frees the

slaves

, without realizing that by freeing them, he condemns them to certain death, because the slaves throw themselves into the sea which is infested with sharks.

It's a terrible outcome, which raises the question of what a good deed is.

This dilemma between morale and politics, I became aware of it very early on.

I was young when I read this novel for the first time.

He had upset me.

The memory of this reading continues to overwhelm me even today.

You may feel the emotion in my voice...

Your installation in Africa led you to take an interest in African literature.

Who are the first authors you read?

Before leaving for Senegal, I went to the Presence Africaine bookshop, rue des Ecoles, in Paris, where I obtained the first books which today constitute the “historical” core of my library.

Among my first purchases were notably

Nini Mûlatresse from Senegal

and

Maïmouna

by Abdoulaye Sadji,

L'enfant noir

by Camara Laye,

Le Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

by Aimé Césaire,

Ville cruel

by Mongo Beti and

L'aventure ambiguë

. by

Sheikh Hamidou Kane

I remember having also bought storybooks, poetry.

In France, I had done classical studies.

I was kind of at a crossroads.

Precisely, for a mind formed by classical studies, was not the discovery of French-speaking African literature, then in its infancy, a bit frustrating?

No, contrary to common practice in the academic world, I do not establish a hierarchy between the objects of study.

In my eyes, each object has its eminent dignity and the study of the African novel is no less interesting than that of the French novel.

I also very quickly moved away from the tendency in critical approaches to African literature to see in texts written by African authors a kind of reflection of the sociological reality of the continent.

Just like French or American novelists, Africans always speak more or less of the society in which they live, but they never present it as a pure reflection of this reality.

They may even be harsh with her.

I was struck, from the start, to see the great place that African authors give to the individual,

whereas, according to the accepted discourse, in Africa, the individual disappears in favor of the community.

African novels often reflect the experiences of unhappy individuals, out of step with their society.

Suicide, the marginalization of women are major subjects of modern African literature.

When you arrived as a teacher in Senegal, five years after the country's independence, the textbooks for teaching literature were the same as in France, but your students knew African literature well.

The President of Senegal was then called… Léopold Sédar Senghor, a rather contested man in the 1960s. How did your students perceive this poet-president?

Entrance to the Lycée Malick Sy, in Thies, in the 1960s © Bernard Mouralis, personal archives

There was a certain pride in having a president who had culture, which was not quite the case everywhere on the continent.

On the other hand, they were sensitive to the poetry of Senghor, to his reflection on negritude.

His poetry, as we know, could be extremely violent in its criticism of colonization.

My students had the maturity to understand that it was not because Senghor had made political mistakes, particularly in his relations with his Prime Minister Mamadou Dia, that everything he had written should be condemned.

Whether it was the high school students I had in class in high school or at the Normal School where I also taught, they clearly distinguished between the politician and the poet.

What also struck me about these young people,

it is that they were extraordinarily sensitive to the beauty of literature, to the originality of the ideas conveyed by the authors, to writing.

When they gave presentations or read poems aloud to the whole class, there was a kind of almost sacred respect for the text on their faces.

Another important thing that I discovered during these African years, the students did not distinguish between the European world and the African world.

They vibrated with the poetic beauty of writing, wherever it might come from.