Writing paths
In the rustle of worlds to come, with Abdourahman Waberi (2/2)
Audio 04:08
Abdourahman Waberi is a novelist, short story writer and poet.
He teaches French literature in the United States.
Credits: Michael Setzfandt
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
6 mins
Short story writer, poet and novelist, the Djiboutian Abdourahman Waberi has built an original work in thirty years of literary career, combining prose and poetry, satire and the quest for utopias.
In the second part of the column "Way of writing" dedicated to this important voice of African letters, a look back at the writer's literary trajectory, punctuated by ruptures, questions and renewal.
(Replay)
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The most beautiful pages of Abdourahman Waberi's latest novel,
Why do you dance when you walk?
(Lattès, 2019), are those where the autofictional narrator recounts the essential role that the teachers of his school, then of the French high school, played in his literary training by introducing him to reading and writing.
These are called in the story "Madame Annick" or "Madame Ellul".
“
Frenchwomen of France
”, immortalized by their former pupil, to whom they introduced the Hugos, the Dumas, Eugène Sue, Hector Malot, Alphonse Daudet and other great classics of French literature.
The writer, who calls himself Aden in this fictionalized autobiography, never forgets to pay tribute to these smugglers who opened the doors of the imagination to him.
The adventure of writing
However, if, as for his character, his taste for reading was born in the classrooms of his native
Djibouti
, it was when he arrived in the country of Hugo and Dumas that the young Waberi really embarked on the writing adventure.
The adventure began in 1985, when the young Djiboutian landed in France to pursue studies at the University of Caen where he was to take a master's degree in English.
"
When I arrived for my university studies in Basse-Normandie, I initially wanted to become a journalist
," says Waberi.
I thought that like that, I could both tell the world, explain it and at the same time write.
Journalism was a very good solution.
But I realize quite quickly that journalists in a dictatorial country are not the best!
But since I had come to study literature, or more precisely English, I thought that the professorship suited me.
Finally, the writing will be linked to the fact that it was a way of resolving my exile because I also started to realize that returning to Djibouti and living normally was a bit difficult, especially if you had artistic ambitions. .
The writing will be a kind of crutch to say why I was in this world and why I had come to France and why I couldn't return so easily to my country.
»
The writer fondly remembers his hesitant beginnings in writing.
“
The writing came in an almost personal way
,” he says.
He begins by writing poems, before finding the form of writing that suits him, halfway between prose and poetry.
A form that made the success of the first texts of the Djiboutian writer:
Le Pays sans ombre
(Le Serpent à plumes, 1994) and
Cahier nomade
(Le Serpent à plumes, 1996), two collections of short stories, which were followed by
Balbala
( The Feathered Serpent, 1998), a novel.
This style has become, along the way, the writer's trademark.
Thematically, Abdourahman Waberi's first books are also driven by the nostalgic need to bring the distant country to life through imagination and memory.
The tone of his “Djibouti trilogy” is set from the first book,
Le pays sans ombre
.
Torn between the lyricism of places and the ironic denunciation of power, the book is dedicated to "
Nuruddin Farah and Tierno Monenembo, two writers who saw the country of their imagination die
," reads the cover page.
These two novelists had deeply marked the stammering author, especially since he recognized himself in their situation of exile and stateless person, haunted by the memory of their country.
They were not models, however, as the author of
Cahier nomade
explains .
“
These are people who served as a focal point for my thinking about the country at the time.
As I wrote, they had seen the country of their imagination, which was their main source of inspiration, die.
What was interesting is that it was both people who wrote about their country and mainly about their country, and at the same time who had left it and had a dreamed real relationship with this country.
»
A protean work
Today, at the age of fifty, the writer has to his credit several volumes of short stories, novels, collections of poetry, essays, forums in newspapers.
It is an inventive work with a great diversity of themes and writing.
In his fiction unlike any other in the African literary field, Abdourahman Waberi happily leads his readers from the theme of political subversion (
Balbala
) to the descent into the fortunes and misfortunes of his Djiboutian childhood (
Why do you dance when you walk?
), passing through the human catastrophe in Rwanda (
Harvest of skulls )
, the geopolitical exploration of the coming Africa (
In the United States of Africa
), the return to the native country in times of fanaticism and wars of civilization (
Passage of tears
) or the story of the fragility of life through the fictional biography of a protesting African-American singer and poet told… by his cat (
The Divine Song
).
What makes the coherence of this plural work, which summons the political, the philosophical, the poetic and the intimate?
Answer of the interested party: “
It is often said that the paths do not exist.
Paths are made by walking.
I think that if there is an easy link and a trait that shines through, it is this permanent quest and it is this refusal of assignments.
It is, as the other would say, writing and reading on the border.
I like, for example, someone like Frantz Fanon.
We have the impression that he is a guy full of certainties, but no.
He said: God, make me this questioning man.
It's a man-question, that's what interests me.
»
Having become a “
man-question
” in turn, the writer questions himself through his work, made up of ruptures and renewal, how to “
inhabit the border
”, this existential reality which constitutes our human modernity.
How to inhabit the frontier, between the local and the global, between the known and the unknown, History and the rustle of worlds to come, these are perhaps the real challenges of Waber's work.
Latest book published:
Why do you dance when you walk?
, by Abdourahman Waberi.
“Folio” collection, Gallimard, 224 pages, 8.10 euros.
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