University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Ivoirité: the aesthetics of postcolonial rupture in contemporary Ivorian poetry (critical dissertation); & Century worm (creative dissertation)

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Ivoirité: the aesthetics of postcolonial rupture in contemporary Ivorian poetry (critical dissertation); & Century worm (creative dissertation)

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Ivoirité: The Aesthetics of Postcolonial Rupture in Contemporary Ivorian Poetry
[critical dissertation]

&

Century Worm
[creative dissertation]

by Todd Fredson

Conferring Major/Program: Faculty of the USC Graduate School
Degree being conferred: Doctor of Philosophy (Literature and Creative Writing)

University of Southern California
Degree conferral date: 8 August 2017

Table of Contents:

Ivoirité: The Aesthetics of Postcolonial Rupture in Contemporary Ivorian Poetry [critical
dissertation]

“Casting the “New Côte d’Ivoire”: Ethnic Assertion and the Adaptation of Oral
Traditions in Azo Vauguy’s Zakwato
pp. 1-27

Works Cited
pp. 28-30

Afro-francophone Poetry and The Arrival of Josué Guébo, Poet of the “Second
Independence” Movement
pp. 32-77

Works Cited
pp. 78-81

Century Worm [creative dissertation]
pp. 83-175

Notes
pp. 176-177

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Casting the “New Côte d’Ivoire”: Ethnic Assertion and the Adaptation of Oral Traditions
in Azo Vauguy’s Zakwato

In 2009, Ivorian poet Azo Vauguy published the book-length poem, Zakwato. It is
a myth adapted from the Bété ethnic heritage. Zakwato tells the story of a man who is
trusted by his village to watch for an enemy force. The man falls asleep, however, and his
village is ambushed. When he wakes he is faced with the massacre that has taken place.
Bereft, he wanders toward a distant blacksmith who will remove his eyelids so that his
vigilance never again softens. Zakwato’s 2009 publication date positions the book within
a defining political moment. The first Ivorian civil war, from 2002 to 2007, ended with a
2008 reconciliation agreement. A long-differed presidential election was on the horizon.
Vauguy dedicates Zakwato to Laurent Gbagbo, who had maintained the Ivorian
presidency following a disputed 2000 election, the first civil war, and the unofficial
north-south division of the country. In the note of gratitude to Gbagbo, “whose counsel
has guided my pen,” Vauguy interjects the epithet Séplou as a term of endearment—the
séplou is a pathfinding bird in the Bété culture (my trans.; 15). Like Vauguy, Gbagbo is
Bété. Vauguy is working out of an oral tradition that, within Francophone African
poetics, has been particularly vibrant in Ivorian poetry. Discussing Zakwato in the Ivorian
paper Notre Voie, Abdoulaye Villard Sanogo suggests that in our “reading of this
tragedy, we think of a scene that combines song, dance, story, tale and myth” (my trans.;
Sanogo). This oral tradition and the migration of its values into the literary milieu have
been crucial in continually vitalizing local cultural values. The complication comes when
such a strong insistence on cultural or ethnic specificity rubs up against the political work
of creating a unified national identity.

2
The conundrum of Ivorian national identity has vexed the country for the last few
decades. The question of what constitutes Ivorian-ness or national belonging has
dominated the socio-political scene since the death of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the
country’s president from independence in 1960 until his death in 1993, and the
emergence of multiparty politics that followed. The instability and violence that has
disrupted the daily lives of those living in Côte d’Ivoire is typically characterized as the
result of religious and ethnic conflict. This assessment deserves considerable nuance,
however. Poet and scholar Henri-Michel Yéré, in his doctoral dissertation “Citizenship,
Nationality & History in Côte d’Ivoire, 1929-1999,” adopts the idea of “nationness” as a
contingent event rather than an unfluctuating entity gaining stability along some
historical arc. Rogers Brubaker theorizes this concept in Nationalism Reframed:
Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Yéré considers that for
Ivorian politicians and other stakeholders, the issue of national belonging has more
basically been a question about how the idea of nation can be used, particularly as any
definition of an Ivorian state has been haunted by the fact that it is a French colonial
invention.
The north and south of the country are often contrasted in broad ethnic and
religious terms. The dominantly Christian south (the Agni-Baoulé and Bété ethnic
subgroups are to be noted here) has controlled the government since independence in
1960. The south is pitted against the Muslim north (and here, more than an ethnic group
we must think of a population marked by their use of the Dioula language, a language of
commerce that traverses three national borders in the north and is used in markets
throughout Côte d’Ivoire). While these north/south cultural and religious distinctions are

3
significant, such distinctions extend well beyond north/south considerations. There are
four major ethnic clusters in the country and at least 60 subgroups that are identified by
cultural and linguistic differences (Skogseth). And there is an animist lens through which
the concepts of monotheism, Islamic or Christian, have largely been interpreted. A
commitment to local belief systems remains prevalent in much of the country, as a
reading of Zakwato will demonstrate. The contrast of ethnic and religious differences
does not wholly explain the country’s seemingly sudden rupture.
A more complete explanation must include the prolonged conditions of scarcity
that eventually forced many Ivorians, particularly the urban unemployed, to return to
villages to farm beginning in the late 80s. During the country’s post-independence boom
in the 60s and early 70s Houphouët-Boigny had invited migration to the south to help
increase agricultural production. As a result, the move by many urban unemployed back
to land traditionally allocated through ethnic kinship led to territorial disputes in the 90s,
particularly in the fertile south, which had absorbed generations of immigrants from
northern communities—not just from within the Ivory Coast but from beyond its borders
as well (Skogseth). This narrative of immigrant occupation, though, is also an incomplete
rationale for the country’s rupture. The complicated relationship between the Baoulé and
Bété ethnicities in the south must be taken into account as well, because when saying that
the government has been controlled by southerners one ought to specify that Houphouët-
Boigny was Baoulé and political cronyism has always been the mode du jour. When
saying that immigrants were invited to the fertile south one ought to note that much of
this zone of national agricultural production was, historically, Bété territory (“Krou”).
And in his essay, “This is Play: Popular Culture and Politics in Côte d’Ivoire,” Mike

4
McGovern argues that, rather than ethnic and religious difference, the conflict stems from
this model of crony patronage having bankrupted itself.

In the Ivorian context of diminishing cash crop income and rising demands for
transparency from donors, Ivorian elites were no longer able to maintain the
comfortable lifestyles to which they had become accustomed while distributing
the patronage that had been the basis of an earlier generation’s political
legitimacy. Insurgent youths chafed against the sudden downturn in their
prospects, both in the short and the long terms. (74)

For McGovern, the conflict is an intergenerational struggle. The youth from the north and
the youth from the south have organized militantly to play out their frustrations against
one another. They have taken to the streets to invent scenes that they can dominate,
gaining, at the very least, an expressive freedom, McGovern suggests.
In an effort to cultivate a national identity, Houphouët-Boigny’s successor, Henri
Konan Bédié proposed the term Ivoirité in 1996. Bédié intended the term to reflect the
common cultural heritage of all Ivorians, including many immigrants who were by then
two or three generations into residency. Shortly after his election he assembled a panel of
intellectuals, Cellule de Réflexion et de Diffusion des Idées du Président Henri Konan
Bédié (CURDIPHE), to invest the term with some philosophical weight. Yéré describes
the panel’s deliberations:

The insistence on the need to distinguish between Ivorians and non-Ivorians
turned out to be one of the central thrusts of ivoirité. …Once that distinction was
clearly established the priority would be to find an adequate answer to the
question of how to be an Ivorian. Niamkey Koffi suggested that this quest was in
the main the task of artists whose work it was to provide the nation with the
symbolic figures fitting its symbolic ambitions. (180, 184)

5
After a coup ousted Bédié in 1999, the term Ivoirité acquired a more xenophobic
connotation. Ivoirité defined “Ivorian-ness” by the character of southern ethnicities,
though these ethnicities might have cohered most simply by being “not-northern”—not
Dioula speaking, not culturally and linguistically descended from, not diasporically
related to, the dominantly Muslim kingdoms that had come and gone for thousands of
years along the Niger River in the Saharan desert.
This appropriation of Ivoirité informed a constitutional revision prior to the
disputed presidential election in 2000 that installed Gbagbo: any candidate had to have
proof that both parents were born in the Ivory Coast. This legal inscription was used
broadly as a mandate for driving “foreigners” from the south and out of the country. Prior
to what became known as the first Ivorian civil war, spates of violence claimed many
lives: 44 in one clash, 33 another day, 15 somewhere else, 52, 120. Mass graves were
discovered around the de facto capital of Abidjan in the south. Survivors describe the
ethnic targeting around the country—this, for example, where those marked by name,
language, and custom as Dioula (in Dioula, the word itself means “trader”) are conflated
with the leading opposition party from the north, the Rassemblement Democratic du
République (RDR), which was seen by many Gbagbo supporters as, paradoxically,
representing an extra-national citizenry:

…As I was led to this place I saw there were thirteen prisoners; even though I’m
old my mind is sharp and I took time to count. The gendarmes were all around
and they kept pointing their guns at us. When I arrived they told me to take off my
bobo and lay down on the grass with the others.

While lying there the gendarmes asked our nationality, which is how I came to
know there was also one Burkinabé and one Mauritanian among us. One of them
said, “all of you are RDR, all of you are Dioula.” They beat us for about thirty
minutes. They kicked and beat us with the thick iron buckles of their red belts.

6
They were especially tough on the younger men but left me alone because I’m
old. We were asking pardon and telling them we were sorry. One gendarme came
by and said, “haven’t you killed these people yet?”

Then after about thirty minutes of this a light-skinned gendarme said again, “what
are you waiting for, why haven’t you finished these people yet?… .” And then
this one started firing. Maybe others were firing as well. I couldn’t tell. But I was
sure about the light-skinned one. It seemed like he fired back and forth for about
three to five minutes.

I don’t know why I wasn’t hit. Perhaps it was because I was the only elder. ((“The
New Racism…”, 26)

In studying Zakwato, it is impossible to avoid the socio-political and ethno-
cultural contexts from which the book emerge. They are, in fact, central to understanding
how and why Vauguy adapts the orally-kept myth into written French. Stories have the
capacity to institutionalize state narratives and to determine cultural citizenship—Edward
Said made this observation fundamental to the field of postcolonial studies (Said). And
this was exactly the expectation of Niamkey Koffi and the CURDIPHE panel. However,
as Oyeniyi Okunoye explains in his 2004 article, “The Critical Reception of Modern
African Poetry,” when modern African poetry is discussed ethno-cultural specifics are
largely glossed over. Discussions of modern African poetry are often restricted to literary
analysis or comparison, ignoring a work’s particular conditions of production. Local
contingencies are under-examined. Discussions of modern African poetry typically aim
to position the work within a broad postcolonial discourse, and the work is viewed in
relation to national formations that are presumed stable or given cursory inspection.
“Ethnic formations,” though,

constitute significant cultural units in the African context. The assertion of ethnic
identities within the context of nation-states in Africa in recent times is adequate
proof of their influence not only in the sphere of politics but in the making of the
cultural identities of various nation-states. (17)

7

The recent decade of violence in Côte d’Ivoire attests to this. Without reading Zakwato
through an ethno-cultural lens and considering its place within its specific socio-political
scene, the book-length poem will appear as a conventional anti-Western myth, familiar,
even tepid, and, perhaps, anachronistic in this era when colonialism’s economics of
extraction (or “vampirism,” in the popular Ivorian reggae vernacular) have been
institutionalized globally. Zakwato may, then, hold interest for the formal gestures
Vauguy uses to maneuver the Bété oral myth into its written French medium, and for the
way it continues the work of extending Ivorian oral poetics within the literary milieu. It
is, absolutely, interesting for these reasons. But myths, which are central to African oral
traditions and to locally-maintained value systems (i.e. ethno-cultural structures), are
often adapted in order to assert a set of values in relation to contemporary circumstances.
These values are intended to help an audience determine its role within the contemporary
social drama—what is an appropriate action? Harold Scheub explains that

the African oral tradition distills the essences of human experiences, shaping them
into rememberable, readily retrievable images of broad applicability… . These are
removed from their historical contexts so that performers may recontextualize
them in artistic forms. The oral arts, containing this sensory residue of past
cultural life and the wisdom so engendered, constitute a medium for organizing,
examining, and interpreting an audience's experiences of the images of the
present. (Scheub, 1)

When we consider what “images of the present” in 2009 in Côte d’Ivoire needed to be
reorganized, examined, and interpreted, the images from the political violence that had
saturated the lives of Ivorians for nearly a decade loom.
Certainly these images had saturated Vauguy’s life. His residence in Yopougon, a

8
quartier of Abidjan considered a Gbagbo stronghold, put him amid some of the city’s
most intense fighting. Yopougon has a large Bété community. This Bété culture supplies
Vauguy not only with a kinship to Gbagbo, but also with a stock of myths—“[m]yths he
knows because he has long sucked the breasts of the village, its tradition, before coming
to settle in the city,” explains poet Henri N’Koumo (my trans.; Gbogbo). To the title,
Zakwato, Vauguy adds Pour que ma Terre ne dorme plus jamais… —“so that my Land
never sleeps again” (my trans.). Vauguy’s own comment on his process succinctly
paraphrases Scheub’s appraisal, that the oral form refreshes cultural wisdom. Vauguy
remarked in an interview: “I interrogated the past to speak to the present and read the
future” (my trans.; Sanogo).
…
In Zakwato, the tragedy that prompts Zakwato’s departure, the annihilation of his
village, is revealed through recollections and dream torments that seem scarcely separate
from Zakwato’s waking world—less so as Zakwato travels. He passes through a natural
world landscape that is familiarly southern Côte d’Ivoire and the subtropical forests of
the Bété region—the dents de Man, mountains in the west, near the city of Man, named
for their likeness to giant teeth sprouting from the earth; the panther-spider, whose web is
so strong it catches birds; the melodious wood pigeon; weaver birds and their nests;
carrion-seeking griffon vultures. The familiar landscape does not just decorate Zakwato’s
path, the plants and animals and insects also perform in the Bété spiritual realm. The
corpse ant, so named because it emits a cadaverous stench, digs underground to live, and
in its movement between above-ground and below-ground it becomes a messenger to the

9
land of the dead. The songs of the Turaco bird announce the hopeless times. As Zakwato
travels, the topography becomes psychical.
Zakwato must recognize the perils and potential of this immaterial world in order
to pass the tests that face him on his journey. Zakwato’s journey to the straightener-of-
iron, Blègnon-Zato, is a haunted journey, and Zakwato must widen his vision in order to
commune with this world of haunts. Early on, Zakwato surrenders himself “to the heart
of the Ibo River’s waters” (my trans.; 22). In the Bété universe, the Ibo is the mythical
river that separates the countries of the living from the far countries of death.

He knows that its mouth, plowed through by the sullen beings, those of negative
vibrations, will help him to undergo life’s circumstantial trials. Zakwato took the
water in the hollow of his hands. Four times he gargled to purify his heart and
soul, then, jolted by the shivers browsing his body, Zakwato made incantations.
Mysterious water that connects two worlds, those of the living and the dead, you
crawl, since ancient times. No human memory can divine the date at which the
placenta delivered you into this war of existence. (my trans.; 22)

Zakwato must overcome the evil that has snuffed out “the city of honest souls” (my
trans.; 19). He cannot become dispirited, yet he is also facing a grim sacrificial destiny.
Resourceful, he begins to commune with the spiritual aspects of his landscape. In order to
bypass a mountain range that has reared from his rocky path Zakwato transforms into
Gofa-Gniniwa, the long-legged wader bird. In its spirit-form, Gofa-Gniniwa’s steps can
traverse continents, cut across time. To escape the serpents that have wound around his
legs, Zakwato becomes a python and devours them. Zakwato is like the chameleon
finding ways to match his environment, shaping himself according to his encounters, able
to do so because he knows the land, is of that land.

10
He is addressed by many names. The names often describe an aspect of Zakwato
that presents itself as he travels toward the blacksmith. Kanégnon Didigbé, for example—
he is the brave one, the one in a group who steps forward first to fight. Or Zizimazi—he
asks, “who is stronger than me?,” and answers himself, “nobody—I am above
everybody.” People who feel they are a little strong say they are the child of Zizimazi
(my trans.; Vauguy, Personal interview, 18 February). One of Zakwato’s names is,
finally, the man-of-many-names. In West African cultures, men and sometimes women
are often given several names, each characterizing the person based on personal traits,
professional functions, talents, memorable encounters, and so on. This practice may be
best known through the praise poetry in Nigeria’s Yoruban culture called oriki, where
person’s or clan’s characteristics are listed as part of an invocation (McHugh). Zakwato
becomes Azoumané—he who is numerous. “I am not alone, because of my competence I
can do the work of many people at the same time” (my trans.; Vauguy, Personal
interview, 18 February). Zakwato is ultimately recognized by the mission he is
undertaking. He is named by the stages of his transformation as he breaks through to a
new state of mind, one marked by each moment of transformation but that is not
aggregated into a totalizing self. Rather, Zakwato activates his plurality.
In order to shape himself, in order to have this kind of commerce with his
environment’s spiritual dimension, Zakwato must envision these possibilities. It would be
too easy to say that his test is one of pure conjuring because this proving ground is
located within a distinct ethnic cosmology. Zakwato must know the possibilities of the
Bété world. He must understand the properties of its plants and animals and insects. Their
genie personalities are extensions of their “real-world” functions. He must know the

11
ancestors if he is to call on them. So, of course, Zakwato’s test is also the poet’s test.
Vauguy must know how to inhabit this Bété universe. And as Henri N’koumo has
pointed out, Vauguy knows this universe intimately. Vauguy grew up with the myth of
Zakwato. He also researched for fifteen years in order to provide the cultural depth that
his literary version offers. Eileen Julien, in African Novels and the Question of Orality,
however, proposes that the question is not what in an author’s past makes him use his or
her oral traditions in written literature. Rather, what is it about the present moment that
compels the author to use the oral tradition? Julien wonders, like Scheub, how is the
orality in useful service to the present? If we consider that Vauguy has an ideological
agenda, that is, to propose the myth as part of the national symbology, and to define
Ivorian culture in Bété terms, then what about the oral form helps Vauguy to achieve
this? How does his presentation of Zakwato recruit new listeners?
…
In order to suss out the advantages that the oral form might offer Vauguy, it will
be profitable to sidestep those questions for a moment. In Francophone African poetics,
the oral tradition has long existed in relation, and in contrast, to the towering influence of
Négritude. Poetry from the Négritude movement is probably still the most visible
representation of Francophone African poetry, especially for English-speakers accessing
Francophone African poetry through translation. Peaking in the 40s, the Négritude
movement was explicitly tied to an anti-colonial mission. In order to unite French
colonies through a shared African heritage, the movement proposed a kind of black or
African essentialism—F. Abiola Irele describes Négritude as black cultural nationalism
(Irele). Négritude’s poetry was obligated to present itself in an idiom that was legible to

12
those reading out of European traditions—legible to both allies and opponents of
Négritude’s liberation objectives. Novelist and literary critic Guy Ossito Midiohouan
suggests that the Western intellectuals who supported Négritude literature, such as Jean-
Paul Sartre, Lillian Kesteloot, André Breton, André Gide, and Albert Camus were
searching for voices from the colonies as a way to forward anti-colonial arguments within
France (Midiohouan, 187). As the movement was borne out of the Parisian metropole by
students and scholars who had come from French colonies to study, the aesthetic drew on
French art and intellectual traditions. Writer and critic Lewis Nkosi sees Négritude’s
family tree including Freudianism, Marxism, Surrealism, Romanticism, and “living
African heritage” (Nkosi, 290). But its international character and political ambition
precluded ethnic and cultural specificity. As his translator, Melvin Dixon, explains of
Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of Négritude’s guiding figures, daily life in
Africa was not his “present reality” (Senghor, xxx). Too much living African heritage in
the poetry risked making its humanizing gestures again incomprehensible to the French.
As liberation movements succeeded and the newly independent states explored
models of self-governance in the 60s, Négritude’s revolutionary fervor, its exaltation of
the cultural wealth of a shared black imaginary, which promised to change not just
conditions for colonies, but also to transform the colonizer, the polity of France, did not
speak to the evolved political reality. Négritude’s aesthetic was sapped. Robert Fraser
identifies a backlash against Négritude poetics that occurred during this period as national
identities were being debated. “Throughout much of the period [there] was a tendency to
retreat from the broad canvas of négritude towards a conception of tradition based more
securely on an appreciation of distinctive local cultures” (Fraser, 280). He cites

13
Mauritanian poet Oumar Ba and Senegalese poet Mbaye Kébé as early models from the
60s, but there is also a continuous line of poets in the Ivory Coast who have also done
this work, framing local poetic modes in written texts.
Ivorian Bernard Dadié was, in fact, a contemporary of the Négritude poets.
Though his two poetry collections easily fit into the movement’s thematic and aesthetic
principles, he rarely figures into Négritude’s poetry canon. His poetry’s Romantic tropes
were at odds with Aimé Césaire’s French surrealism, and his vernacular style sat un-
easily next to the careful staging of Senghor’s African reminiscences. As one critic writes
of Dadié’s poetry, he “never achieves the sonorous eloquence of a Senghor, but he avoids
that poet’s pedantry, his message being more directly accessible to the literate African
who might read French” (Blair, 164). Unlike Négritude’s core figures, Dadié did not
come of age in Paris. Based on his academic potential he was selected for the École
William Ponty, a teacher’s college in Senegal, but he returned immediately after finishing
there and engaged in Côte d’Ivoire’s liberation struggle. Prior to the publication of his
first poetry collection in 1950 Dadié was imprisoned for 16 months by the French
colonial government. Africa has always been his “present reality.” In February 2016, at
one hundred years old, he was awarded UNESCO’s Jaime Torres Bodet prize for his
body of work at a ceremony in Abidjan. His writing developed in genre-defiant ways. His
1956 book Climbié is an assemblage of memories and impressions that are Dadié’s, but
that he attributes to an alter ego. These fragments ultimately form an episodic arc from
his boyhood through his engagement with French colonial institutions that reveals his
philosophies and principles. Climbié is sometimes referred to as autobiographical fiction.
Dadié would also publish short tales popularly maintained within the oral tradition. His

14
spirit of self-authorization and attention to cultural particulars have left their imprint on
Ivorian poetics. Dadié is “our godfather,” remarks Boua Fidéle Diomandé, the general
director of the Ivorian publishing house, Vallesse Editions, which published Zakwato
(Sangaré).
Following independence, Abidjan came to be an artistic center and a repository
for oral forms. Jean-Marie Adiaffi, to whom Vauguy sings in Zakwato, “Adé Adé Adé,
Jama Adé,” is a forefather to Vauguy in transferring oral tales to written poetry (47).
Adiaffi’s D’éclairs et de foudres (1980) and Galerie infernale (1984) are landmark
contributions to Ivorian poetry by the deceased poet. Niagoran Porque published two
collections, Mariam and griopoems (1978) and Zahoulides (1985), which similarly
transfer local stories and oral poetics to the page. In Mahieto pour Zékia (1988) Joachim
Bohui Dali adapts a Bété origin myth about the end of the separation between men and
women. Both poets died young, at 47 and 50, respectively. Porquet, along with
Aboubacar Touré, also created the concept, “griotique,” which gained definition in 1981.
Poetic recitals transformed into what its creators called “total theater,” integrating the
word with self-expressive movement and music (Porquet). During this period, dramatist,
poet, and public intellectual Zadi Zaourou was perhaps most influential in bringing oral
performance values in contact with the page. He mentored Bohui Dali, and widely
influenced this generation of literary artists who sought to decolonize literary forms. Poet
and novelist Véronique Tadjo instructed me that one “cannot speak about contemporary
Ivorian poetry without first discussing Zadi. One cannot underestimate the influence of
Zadi on Ivorian poets, his evolution of the oral tradition” (Tadjo). The year before his

15
death in 2012, Zaourou published the Anthology of Oral Literature in the Ivory Coast, a
tome of over 300 pages.
Attention to the characteristics of the oral tradition, which have long been studied
by ethnomusicologists, social anthropologists, and folklorists, are often focalized through
the figure of the griot, to which Porquet and Touré refer in their concept of “griotique.”
The griot is responsible for keeping the stories of his or her communities. These stories
transmit cultural knowledge, expose social habits, and morally instruct. The transmission
happens through performance. The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theater
identifies the griot’s art by its

plural voice where parable and gesture are imbued with rhythm and accompanied by
music. …The griot’s art includes spoken word, chant, and song. Depending on the
occasion, the griot can be a historian, a teacher, a mediator or even a healer, all of these
roles being rooted in language. (“Côte d’Ivoire,” 102)

Because the oral structure is a practiced intermingling of these parts, its textual
presentation cannot replicate the immersive quality of the performance. Ghanaian poet
Kofi Anyidoho, talking about Ewe oral poetry, called the text a kind of shrunken
composition in relation to its oral counterpart (Fraser, 313). But, fundamentally, this oral
form offers an alternative to the European traditions that arrived through colonial
education systems. While a written version of the oral form such as Zakwato cannot
reproduce the experience of an oral performance—and keep in mind that these written
texts are not trying to replace or preserve the oral tradition, which continues away from
literary production—the oral form offers a relationship with audience that lyric modes in
the European tradition do not. How they approach their audiences is a principle

16
difference, perhaps the principle difference, between the oral tradition and the Négritude
aesthetic.
Négritude’s Romantic legacy of a singular literary personality, the lyric poem’s
“I” perspective, stands in stark contrast to the “plural voice” of the oral form. The lyric
speaker provides an already consolidated point-of-view, a gaze that keeps itself staunchly
divided from the object of its gaze and, likewise, keeps its reader safely at an observer
distance. The lyric mode protects the reader’s privacy. The oral model requires that the
griot poet play many roles and inhabit many characters. Many speakers—human and
otherwise—speak through him or her. The griot poet does not own the story, but is
trusted to carry it forward from predecessors, whose voices might also be remembered in
the telling. Just as Vauguy invokes Jean-Marie Adiaffi—“Jama Adé”—in his telling of
Zakwato, Vauguy also invokes Gbaza Madou Dibero, a Bété poet who did not read or
write but was renowned in the Bété oral tradition (Vauguy, Personal interview, 18
February). Vauguy is described as a neo-oralist, and among his peers no one has
remained more dedicated to the oral tradition. In his presentation of Zakwato, Vauguy
capitalizes on this integrated relationship between speaker, audience, and text. Through
the oral form he dispossesses audience members of their stable and centrally situated
viewing stations in order to compel readers into the drama, and into a sympathetic
relationship with Zakwato, the model patriot.
…
Vauguy builds a stage of sorts. The poet narrates the journey of Zakwato in a third
person fashion—“Zakwato woke himself, staggered, a starved chameleon. He sat, arms
and legs crossed, then pushed a long and noisy sigh of hopelessness” (my trans.; 26). But

17
the poet also interjects, speaking directly to genie-spirits and ancestors. The poet, for
example, summons Zagréguéhia:

Child-thing taken from the depth of the giant palm, centuries old tree whose milk
has served as beverage to my elders! Zagréguéhia, let us hold hands, let us open
our chests to the human warmth. That our hearts have long and bruisingly
entwined to create new brotherhood and new friendship. Let us embrace. …
Zagréguéhia, sparks sprung from fireflies in the paddy fields, earthly stars which
hushed my youth under the drunkenness of liberty, we are building together a new
homeland. (my trans.; 20)

Here, Vauguy incorporates another Bété myth. Zagréguéhia was a palm nut that had
transformed into a child—then, having had his secret betrayed by his mother, returned to
existing as a palm nut, leaving his mother heartbroken. Vauguy similarly invokes a
warrior chief from the colonial period, Zoukou Gbeuli, to help Zakwato make his
journey. The poet slips out of his narrator role in order to directly appeal to allies and to
usher them into the story. The poet addresses Zakwato directly as well. It is Vauguy’s
first invocation. “ZAKWATO !,” he calls at the opening of the poem, summoning the
hero out of history’s recess.

Time, because of deceitful men, has buried my name in the beggar’s cemetery.
Time, because of the wickedness of men, has buried my exploits in oblivion’s
abyss. Time, because of men’s ingratitude, has tarnished the splendor of the shell
from which my renown hatches.

ZAKWATO !

I am Zakwato father of courage. Even reduced to ash, I rediscover myself in the
waves of the oceans. Metamorphosis ! Me-ta-mor-phosis filth of the oceans. It is
in these tests of modesty that I show my bravery, that my genius expresses itself
valiantly. I am valor.

ZAKWATO ! (my trans.; 18)

18
To begin the story, Vauguy and Zakwato are momentarily synonymous. Zakwato must be
in attendance for the journey to begin, and must come to form through the poet. Poet and
hero merge as Zakwato is lifted into the present, is present-ed. Zakwato is disinterred,
separates, begins his journey. The poet becomes a sympathetic guide—mediating,
goading, instructing. “Gather the moon and the sun, tip the bowl of fire and the bowl of
milk, inexhaustible teats,” he says to Zakwato, addressing him as Zizimazi (my trans.;
28). But periodically the poet and Zakwato merge again, as when Vauguy calls upon
Gbaza Madou Dibero, the Bété poet who did not read or write but was influential in the
oral canon. Vauguy implores, “[s]ay the true word to me” (my trans.; 23). Vauguy tells
Gbaza to “prepare your reedy voice for praise to the Bagnon”—Bagnon is another name
for Zakwato (my trans.; 24). The poet speaks on behalf of Zakwato, and in reference to
Zakwato.
Vauguy moves between first, second, and third person points of view. He mixes
chants and fragments of dialogue between narrative stretches. Vauguy explains the
poem’s structural influences in relation to the village sensorium in which he was raised.
His mother’s riziere—his mother’s rice field—is one model. In this Bété region, a rice
field grows not just rice, but eggplant and okra and corn as well. These plants are mixed
in the rice field just as the chants, fragments of dialogue, and narrative stretches are
mixed in the field of the text. Vauguy interrupts his narrative stream—prose running from
margin to margin—with songs and chants and appeals that appear as columns. It is the
rhythm of the tambours that moves the reader through the poem’s textual field—this is
the second organizational influence, the beat of the drums from Vauguy’s village
(Vauguy, Personal interview, 18 February). Heroic in cadence, tone, and diction, the

19
poem is punctuated by refrains, cries and declarations, often commands. The delivery
becomes incantatory and is often motivated by repetition—“…it rained. It rained, rained,
rained” (my trans.; 19). The repetition becomes the onward-ness of Zakwato. His walk is
his work, his purpose. Vauguy employs a constant word play with the verb “marcher”—
“to walk” and “to work or function.” “Il marchait, marchait, Zakwato marchait” (“He
walked, walked, Zakwato walked”; my trans.; 25). There is at first a sense of direction to
the journey, but it may be more appropriate, ultimately, to say that there is a sense of
motion.
As Zakwato more fully enters into the psychic dimension of the landscape,
simultaneity becomes the mode of his experience. Just as the traumatic event that
precipitated his journey presents itself through fragmented remembrances, his future too
flashes into the shared moment that the figure of Zakwato converges. As Vauguy
interrupts his narrative stream with songs and chants and appeals, he seems to be turning
to the audience, like a one-man chorus commenting on the drama. “Zakwato goes with
his eyelids torn off / to knot a new dawn, / and fight for the new homeland / Africa,
Afrikaaa !” (my trans.; 29). Before he arrives at Blègnon-Zato’s forge, Zakwato has
nearly already succeeded. As long as he is unwavering, as long as his mind and spirit—
his ésprit—are set on accomplishing the sacrifice, then his transformation holds; it is
taking place, has taken place, and will take place. Zakwato’s vision expands as he
journeys toward the distant forger. What Blègnon-Zato is to do, removing Zakwato’s
eyelids, is being accomplished. So long as Zakwato trains his attention on the destination,
his intention makes it metaphorically present. His walk is his work.

20
Zakwato’s arrival at the forge itself is an epiphanic moment, then, that must
escape a narrative frame. In the same way that Zakwato transforms into Gofa-Gniniwa,
the bird who cuts through time, being both here and in an entirely other place with its
step, Zakwato must finally transform into his audience. Vauguy’s voice of narration is the
omniscience from which Zakwato emerges. This meta-cognition is also the awareness
toward which Zakwato advances. Zakwato’s acquisition of this meta-cognition at the
forge, or, if not acquisition, then the molding into permanence of an illumination he has
endured—a confirmation of the meta-cognition—this is where the hero becomes the
gazer who has brought him to life. But the reader is changed with this integration, is
changed by the journey that Zakwato has undergone, is not the same gazer who brought
him to life. Just as Zakwato has emerged from the poet, he must merge with the reader.
Through this act, Zakwato, finally, is hoisted out of the event into the immediate. His
escape corresponds with the reader’s entry—his walk is our work. Vauguy, as he would
in an oral storytelling setting, performs poly-vocally. When he instructs Zakwato or
recruits ancestors, he is also instructing and recruiting the reader. With the oral form,
Vauguy triangulates a space of encounter; he situates the reader within a psychology of
enactment. The mythic hero is retrieved from his historical keeping and his tale is made
applicable to present circumstances. This is the capacity of the oral arts that Scheub
describes. As Vauguy explains of the Bété storytelling tradition, “We do not count the
time. We tell a story. The time does not count. It passes, passes, passes, and we, mortals
trapped by impatience, nibble at it as it passes” (my trans.; 33). Vauguy’s stage is a non-
Euclidian space, a performance space constructed for the purpose of awakening a
Zakwato-consciousness in his audience, a patriot’s willingness to sacrifice for the

21
liberation of the homeland, ma Terre that sleeps no more. The question, though, remains:
whose homeland?
…
The book’s dedication to Laurent Gbagbo is accompanied by a note to Gervais
Koulibaly, who was the president’s official spokesperson, and then opens to include “all
those who believe in the awakening of Africa.” When Vauguy writes, “Zakwato goes
with his eyelids torn off / to knot a new dawn, / and fight for the new homeland / Africa,
Afrikaaa !,” whose belongs in this homeland (my trans.; 29)? ? Who are its foreigners?
The cri de coeur has the ring of pan-Africanism proposed by the visionaries of the
Négritude movement. It resembles their intention to define African-ness against
European-colonial interference. There is a scene that reflects this intention shortly after
Zakwato begins his journey: Zakwato drops into a nightmarish sleep—

a traitorous sleep completely removed from the courses of normal life. …Zakwato
slept wrapped in the centuries. Guns of men with long red ears sneezed : di-di-di-
dizain ! And Zakwato slept. Their cannons hailed dou-dou-dou-goudrou !
Zakwato slept. Their sky canoes howled : voum-voum-voum-voumg-baaa ! But
Zakwato slept. Kanégnon Didigbé slept like no one on earth has ever slept. (my
trans.; 25, 26)

In this passage, “sky canoes” refers to France’s colonial arrival by boat in 1893, and also
to the French air force stationed at the French military base that was established on
Abidjan’s outskirts in the 1960s. The “men with long red ears” are white men. However,
this is mythologized so as to be a legend, an origin story for the designation of a land
called Côte d’Ivoire—the Ivory Coast—by French colonizers. “It rained on this day, the
wrathful sky scolding like it was the first day of Creation” (my trans.; 26). But for
Vauguy, writing at the beginning of the new millennium, another phase of

22
decolonization, another liberation movement, is under way. He looks back to a territorial
arrangement that pre-dates the French imposition. The contest immediately at hand is
with the colonial structures left in place after independence and managed by Höuphouet-
Boigny. The embodiment of these structural remnants, the “remnants” most visible to
many Gbagbo supporters, are other West Africans who have overstayed Höuphouet-
Boigny’s invitation to booster the country’s agricultural production. Burkinabés,
particularly, have been targeted. Though, again, it is the cultural markers—Muslim,
Dioula speaking, names common to northern ethnicities—that betray the opposition for
many Gbagbo supporters.
For Vauguy, ma Terre is Éburnie, to which the authentically African in Côte
d'Ivoire belong. This refrain appears throughout Zakwato:

People of Éburnie : Woooa !
Here is Bagnon
People of my country : Woooa !
Here is Bagnon (my trans.; 18, 24, 34, 56)

“Woooa!” is a traditional reply within and across many tribes in Côte d'Ivoire and
continues to be used as a confirmation by people listening to tales. In Bété, Bagnon
means “the most beautiful man.” “Woooa,” in this passage, has the additional
connotation of warriors at attention. Zakwato, le Bagnon, is the beautiful warrior—the
warrior of Éburnie. Éburnie harkens to a kind of pre-lapsarian state. In a 1970 speech
Gnagbé Kragbé proposed “Éburnie” as a new name for Côte d'Ivoire. Kragbé, also Bété,
accused Houphouët-Boigny of selling off the country to French and other Western
interests, and of privileging the Baoulé, the president’s own ethnic group. Against what
had settled into a one-party system, Kragbé proposed a violent dispossession: “It is too

23
late, at present, to dream of elections. We must fight now. We must fight with all our
means, even with our bare hands… . Blood speaks better to the masses, because it is the
true language of politics” (my trans.; Gadji Dagbo, 266). In a short manifesto, Kragbé
lays out the rules of the new country, inclusive of all Ivorians interested in unsettling the
“disguised colony” (my trans.; 266). The French and Ivorian militaries hunted Kragbé,
who was eventually killed. In his book, Les faux complots de Houphouët-Boigny,
professor and political prisoner Samba Diarra estimates that 4000 Bété villagers were
killed during the search (Diarra).
At its inception, this revolutionary nationalism pushed for expanded political
inclusion, and Gbagbo was instrumental in the effort to challenge the one-party system.
With a PhD from the Sorbonne in France, Gbagbo directed the Institute of History, Art,
and African Archaeology at the University of Cocody-Abidjan in the early 80s. He had
been jailed from 1971-73 for “subversive teaching” (“Profile…”). In 1982 he founded
the first opposition party, the Front Populaire Ivorian (FPI), in collaboration with teachers
and trade union organizers. The FPI emerged out of teacher’s strikes, and Gbagbo went
into exile for six years. He was jailed again in 1992 for his role in organizing student
protests. The government violently repressed the demonstrations, jailed hundreds, and
banned public marches and a leading student union. Amnesty International called the 77
prisoners convicted “prisoners of conscience” (Research Directorate) and an article in
“Africa Report” concluded that the episode “marked the most vigorous breakdown
against opposition activity since the introduction of multi-party politics in May 1990”
(Research Directorate). The FPI journal for which Vauguy was a journalist, Notre Voie,
was lauded for its human rights work, exposing political corruption throughout the 80s.

24
In the negotiation for power, however, the nativist ideology at the heart of what was once
a revolutionary nationalism intensified its anti-colonial focus. It became increasingly
xenophobic. Envisioning the renewed country, Gbagbo sought to define Ivoirité
according to a limited ethno-cultural profile.
Vauguy fulfills the mandate that CURDIPHE thinkers assigned to artists, “whose
work it was to provide the nation with the symbolic figures fitting its symbolic
ambitions,” that is, “to find an adequate answer to the question of how to be an Ivorian,”
as Yéré describes. Vauguy ideologically positions the text, providing an affective contour
to the political rhetoric associated with Ivoirité. The heroic Bété figure, Zakwato,
becomes a model for the true—the patriot—Ivorian. Like many of his peers, Vauguy is
writing to journalist and university colleagues, university students, and, importantly,
readers in a future that has (with higher literacy rates and access to education) a literary
audience. As Tendai Huchu, favoring the broad postcolonial discourse, perhaps too flatly
claims in “The Problem of the African Reader,” “[t]he truth is that literature from the
African Continent will not amount to anything substantial if the continent does not begin
to produce readers” (Henchu). Particularly in the Ivory Coast, though, one cannot
underestimate the political strength of Vauguy’s limited readership. Zakwato is inserted
into a community of readers who are crucial to the curation of a national cultural
narrative. It was from within the university, after all, that the FPI emerged. And in the
political violence to come, following the 2010 presidential election, student groups such
as the Young Patriots would become some of the most violent and feared militias
associated with Gbagbo. Even now, though many scholars and poets, for whom Gbagbo
was a long-time colleague, are saddened by the violent turn his ideology took, they

25
remain sympathetic to his vision of an Ivorian nation less infiltrated by the colonial
relationships courted by Houphouët-Boigny.
As Gbagbo and his supporters returned to trafficking the rigid nationalism
incorporated by Ivoirité, the 2010 election, rather than reconciling the country, produced
a three-month period of violence often referred to as the second civil war. After losing a
nearly split election, and with the weight of the international community against him,
Gbagbo refused to leave office. He was forcibly removed from the presidential
compound by United Nation and French military forces. In addition to the thousands who
died following that election, hundreds of thousands fled the country. Gbagbo became the
first head of state extradited by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In June 2013 the
court decided that it was not releasing his case, but could not yet sufficiently prosecute
his charges. Following the 2015 presidential election that retained incumbent president
Alassane Ouattara, the court recommenced its efforts to prosecute. It is worth mentioning
that although Gbagbo is charged with murder, persecution, rape and other sexual
violences, actions carried out by the police, the military, and street militias, the ICC is not
particularly credible in Africa. Its efforts at international justice have dominantly targeted
African heads of state. While Gbagbo’s case has been in limbo, Ivorians on either side of
the violence complain that his absence has stalled any process of reconciliation or
healing. Gbagbo supporters, particularly, point out that the prosecutions are one-sided,
and that Ouattara’s northern forces are escaping accountability for war crimes.
Vauguy’s rendering of the Bété myth is thoughtful and accomplished. It is a tale
of sacrifice, and so we might, finally, ask, as Zakwato the hero is absorbed back into the
poet’s omniscience, back into the reader’s now-expanded psyche, who is redeemed by the

26
hero’s sacrifice? Is it the reader, who until now has not been fully cognizant? Is it the
people of Zakwato’s village who were massacred—or, less metaphorically, the Bété
community, “a people who felt a special discrimination under the colonial system” and
against whom “since the colonial era, outsiders – both European and African – have held
pejorative stereotypes” (“Krou”)? Or, perhaps, can Zakwato be read as a redemption
narrative for Gbagbo, who in 2009, when Zakwato was published, had achieved enough
equilibrium within the Ivory Coast to begin scheduling the long-postponed presidential
elections? Perhaps Séplou can be perceived as having guided the country through an
awakening, a reckoning with the institutionalized legacies and carefully constructed
narrative of “Papa Houphouët,” even if the awakening has required a national self-
sacrifice?
Vauguy is not the only contemporary Ivorian poet responding to these years of
violence. Tanella Boni, writing from exile in Europe, produced a powerful collection of
spare lyrics that question the possibility of speech in the wake of the ethnic and civil
violence—L’avenir a rendezvous avec l’aube / The future has an appointment with the
dawn [my translation]. Marie-Danielle Aka’s Poèmes érotiques de guerre / Erotic War
Poems [my translation] does not address the specifics of the first Ivorian civil war but is
certainly grounded in the experience of that violence. Emmanuel Toh Bi’s Parulies
rebelles / As boils in the mouth, so rebels in our towns [my translation] addresses the
burden of rebel forces moving south during the country’s north-south stalemate. Josué
Guébo’s collection Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight responds directly to
international military intervention following the 2010 presidential election (Guébo, My
country, tonight). Henri N’koumo’s Morsures d’Éburnie / Bites of Éburnie is published

27
with Zakwato—the two collections share one book. N’koumo appends Countries dead
and living to his title. N’koumo, like Vauguy, ideologically positions himself at the
outset. His dedication includes a note to Charles Blé Goudé, a skilled provocateur who
headed the Young Patriots. Blé Goudé, who was arrested in January 2013 under a warrant
issued by the International Criminal Court, is famously quoted by an opposition
newspaper, Le Patriote, as saying in 2004: ”I’ve gotten to the point today where I don’t
believe anymore that Hitler was bad, or that Milosevic is bad. Because these same
sources that present Hitler and Milosevic as criminals, they tell me today that we Ivorian
patriots who are suffering in the rebellion, who are tortured, they say that it’s really the
rebels who are our victims” (my trans.; “Selon Charles Blé Goudé…”). N’koumo’s
dedications close with a note to Béatrice L., “for the days without sleep passed together
in defending the Republic at the side of the Young Patriots” (my trans.; N’koumo,
Morsures d’Éburnie; 61).
With the exception of N’koumo, none of these poets explicitly positions his or her
text alongside Gbagbo and his hard-line nationalism. Most contemporary Ivorian poets
continue to speak against the French, the West, and international governing bodies. None,
however, do so while maintaining such a local idiom as Vauguy. N’koumo reasons that
Vauguy’s “poetry ‘terroiriste’ knows how to serve the concerns of our time" (my trans.;
N’koumo). Langston Hughes, in the preface to his 1963 anthology, Poems from Black
Africa, writes, “[t]o understand Africa today, it is wise to listen to what its poets say—
those who put their songs down on paper as well as those who only speak or sing them.”
These poets are vigilant of the “emotional climate,” the stress fractures where revisions of
the imagination are forged (11). That is still good counsel.

28
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32
Afro-francophone Poetry and The Arrival of Josué Guébo, Poet of the “Second
Independence” Movement

Over the last several years Josué Guébo has emerged as a leading voice in Afro-
francophone poetry. With the succession of seven poetry collections published between
2009 and 2016, Guébo has risen to prominence quickly. And his emergence as a leading
voice in African poetry was signaled by the 2014 Tchicaya U Tam’si Award for African
Poetry, which he received for his collection, Songe à Lampedusa / Think of Lampedusa
[my translation]. All of his collections have been written in the context of ethnic conflict,
civil war, and political uncertainty in the Ivory Coast. His poetry’s principle thematic
concern has been reckoning with the impacts and sources of such instability—in the
Ivory Coast, but in other African nations as well. Guébo himself identifies this tendency
in four of his first five collections: “Dans mes livre L’or n’a jamais été un métal, Carnet
de Doute, Mon pays, ce soir, et Songe à Lampedusa, j’en appelle au respect de la dignité
et de la liberté des peuples d’Afrique que j’estime victimes de l’agression du système
économique de l’occident” (“In my books The gold has never been a metal, Journal of
doubt, My country, tonight, and Think of Lampedusa, I call for the dignity and liberty of
African people, who I believe are victims of the aggression of Western economic
systems, to be respected”) (my trans.; Guébo, “Pour une…”).
Guébo aligns himself with an anti-colonial tradition that is central to African
literature, but he also signals an important shift in perspective. The contest at hand is not
about territorial sovereignty, nor about establishing national identities, nor about creating
visions of African subjectivity in the context of postcolonial liberation. Already these
concerns have been made anachronistic. Or, rather, these concerns are still there, but the

33
reality is that a new enclosure has been built (Midnight Notes Collective). Former
colonial powers, which we might now designate geographically as the Global North,
geopolitically as the G7, or ideologically as the West (acknowledging the Imperial
project that “West” has come to signify), have developed new instruments of control:
market tools.
The economic principles that have guided globalization—namely, the application
of neoliberalism’s laissez-faire capitalism to “developing” nations in order to allow
foreign investment to access labor and resources while also defining regulatory
conditions—have made the concession of independence by former colonizers largely a
rhetorical gesture. Many former colonies are again—or still—under the thumb. Now it is
the thumb of the “invisible hand.” In the Ivory Coast, as in many other former colonies,
economic liberalization has been enforced by loan conditions set by the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), typically in the form of Structural Adjustment
Programs. Austerity measures, such as ending government subsidies for education, and
the forced privatization of industries and land have, in many countries, resulted in what
former chief economist at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, refers to as the “IMF riots”
(Palast).
When the military took over the Ivorian government on Christmas Eve in 1999,
and ethnic violence escalated en route to a civil war that lasted from 2002 to 2007, much
of the international media coverage focused on the country’s internal cultural and
political dynamics. The more Christian south was pitted against the dominantly Muslim
north. In the post-coup presidential election in 2000, the main northern candidate,
Alassane Ouattara, was disallowed from running by a constitutional revision. For many in

34
the north, this was seen as a move by the government, seated in the south, and historically
run by southerners, to exclude him because he was a northerner. Officially, Ouattara
could not demonstrate that he had lived in the Ivory Coast for the five years prior to his
candidacy, which the revision required. But also bound in his residency status was his
international resumé. Having obtained an undergraduate, a Masters, and a Doctorate
degree from universities in the United States, Ouattara is sometimes called Alassane the
American by his detractors. Working as an economist for the IMF, Ouattara was posted
within the Ivorian government in 1990, the year after the IMF implemented its Structural
Adjustment Program for the Ivory Coast. Ouattara was installed as the Prime Minister, a
position created by the President. As the aging President’s health failed, Ouattara ran the
government for stretches, responding to university student and faculty protests of the de
facto single-party political system with overwhelming force. In 1994, Ouattara assumed
the office of Deputy Managing Director at the IMF and, opponents speculated, he was
abroad more than he was in the Ivory Coast. The disallowance of Ouattara’s candidacy
left little viable opposition to the main southern candidate, Laurent Gbagbo, who had
been faculty at the main university, had created the country’s first opposition party in
1982, had lost in the first multi-party presidential election in 1990, and had been
imprisoned as a protest organizer in 1992.
With the violence that followed the coup d’etat in 1999, international news
organizations hustled to understand the country’s ethnic, religious, and political
dimensions, but did little to explain what had created such pressure in a country where
upwards of sixty ethnic groups, with an array of religious and spiritual beliefs, had
cohabitated for generations. Why did the country implode? Guébo’s answer: because

35
Ivorians have been “victims of the aggression of Western economic systems.” In a
country set up as a production zone for the Global North (the Ivory Coast produces forty
percent of the world’s cocoa, for instance), and in an economy forced by IMF mandate to
liberalize, thus creating masses of wage laborers, the competition for the remaining
resources led to widespread poverty and frustration. These are the generic conditions for
an IMF riot. In the case of the Ivory Coast, many Ivorians were compelled to seek land
for subsistence living, which created land tenure disputes. The division of the country
according to regional, religious, and ethnic affiliations, while often presented as the result
of quarrels over national identity, is more suitably explained by economic pressure.
Only months earlier in Seattle, by the lowest estimates, 40,000 people had
converged to protest the World Trade Organization (WTO). The protests grew out of
discontent with what was increasingly seen as an unelected global elite creating a legal
framework that let corporations do whatever they wanted to do, which was typically to
“globalize” at the expense of the unique governance that national borders intend to
preserve. People came to combat suppressed wages, unsafe imports (and, presumably,
exports), dangerous working conditions, and ecological disregard; they came to protest
the consequences of expanding neoliberal policies. Blood was being shed in the Ivory
Coast as a consequence of these policies. But where the international media covered the
Ivory Coast’s economic pressures, it focused on the inadequacies of resource
management. The decline in prices of agricultural commodities had crippled the
country’s economy, and this obligated the international community to intervene. This
narrative was accompanied by that of les bourgeoisie d’affaires, the political bourgeoisie.
These African big men lived as lavishly as other global elites! Ces grands types were

36
responsible for the mysterious shrinkage of aid and investment funds as they trickled
toward projects meant to improve living conditions. But how commodity pricing was
managed by G7 nations, and how that impacted countries such as the Ivory Coast, was
less spectacular than the bloodshed, than the final impact itself.
Vijay Prashad argues that the recalibration of the global market following the
post-independence boom for former colonies, or “developing” nations, clearly correlates
with the decline in trade value for agricultural products. The inability of the Global South
to coordinate meant that multinational companies, aligned with G7 interests, could create
competition between producing nations. This competition then depressed prices, in free
market fashion. Prashad reviews the origin of a trajectory that leads directly to the Ivorian
conflict:

If the 1970s saw a marginal rise in the price of certain nonpetroleum
commodities, by the 1980s there was an across-the-board drop in these prices.
Single commodity export-dependent countries lost earnings of as much as $290
billion between 1980 and 1991 as a result of the decline in their terms of trade.
For sub-Saharan Africa, the impact was gruesome. For much of the region,
nonfuel primary commodity goods amount for about one-third of the state’s
export earnings. The decline in the term of trade meant that these countries lost on
average about 5 percent of their gross domestic product, and thereby dampened
their state’s budgetary flexibility. The decline in the terms of trade in the 1980s is
not mystical. It occurred for a variety of reasons. Agriculture in the G-7 states
posed a significant problem, as these states both subsidized production and used
costly fertilizers and irrigation systems to enhance productivity. (227)

Anne-Maria Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen, and Stephen Jackson continue this
thinking. In the anthology Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African
Subjectivities, they write:

Consider the discourse of global “integration”—market integration, that is, and
less the assimilation of populations through free and unfettered movement unless,

37
of course, such migrations directly serve the needs of capital (Hardt and Negri
2000). Policies of “deregulation,” which imply an unobstructed passage for
commodities and flows of capital in a world primed in the generation of exchange
values, are one way in which markets are integrated. But deregulatory policy is
uneven. Some national markets are forced to relinquish sovereign control… . In
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the deregulation of the industrial
mining sector during the 1980s, encouraged by the World Bank, laid the
groundwork for the violent atomization of natural resources … during Congo’s
decade of conflict, beginning in 1996. Not the least striking effect of this radical
“opening up” of the Congolese economy was the immediacy with which price
shifts on international metal markets were experienced viscerally by artisanal
miners on the ground in eastern DRC (Jackson, this volume; see also 2002). The
United States’ agricultural export policy represents another example of
unevenness, hedge funds another. These operate in an almost entirely deregulated
space, effectively superseding and exceeding national borders altogether. Thus,
while the old command economy is gone, organizations like the WTO have, in a
sense, taken its place… . (4)

On the heels of the WTO protest, half a world away Gbagbo assumed the Ivorian
presidency after the disputed 2000 election. Gbagbo maintained the presidency through
the north/south civil war and a reconciliation period that culminated in a 2010
presidential election. Ouattara was now an eligible candidate, and he appeared to win by
a slim margin in an election that the international community validated. Gbagbo
contested the results and refused to leave office, leading to a second civil war that last
several months as rebel forces from the north fought to remove Gbagbo on behalf of
Ouattara. Gbagbo was defended by loyalist government forces. United Nation (UN) and
French military forces intervened, attacking the presidential palace in the de facto capital,
Abidjan, and removing Gbagbo, who was extradited to the International Criminal Court
(ICC) on charges of human rights abuses.
Gbagbo cast his presidency as a “second independence” movement. He cast the
movement as a populist reclamation, a reprieve from the kleptocracy that profited from
collaboration with international governing agencies such as the World Bank, the IMF,

38
and the WTO, a reprieve from the kleptocracy through which the returns from
international investment had been funneled. The populist message resonated especially
with the many southerners who had moved to cities looking for work, and with those
from the south who saw the fertile southern land as part of their ethnic inheritance, land
that had been leased, sold, or transferred informally. But the need to appease a base that
demanded immediate material gains led to the xenophobic aspect of Gbagbo’s campaign,
the implicit authorization to expel “foreigners” who did not have autochthonous claims to
the land. Simon Gikandi explains the insufficiency of the first independence movement
this way:

rarely do we confront the essential historical fact that with rare exceptions,
African states were invented at the conference of Berlin, that they were essentially
colonial structures, and that even in postcoloniality, they did not have legitimacy.
Painful and violent as they may be, the civil strife taking place in many African
countries is an attempt to reconfigure the map drawn at Berlin. (xv)

Guébo’s collection Carnet de doute / Journal of doubt, published in 2011, signals
his sympathy with Gbagbo’s ideology, though not with the xenophobic nativism.
Bypassing nationality as an authoritative identity, Guébo appeals for the recognition of
kinship between ethnic groups. Assessing that “Tous les hommes sont frères” (“All men
are brothers”; my trans.; 37), he then lists ethnicities that are not only from within the
Ivory Coast, such as the Gouro, but also the Tchaman in the south, who have their roots
in what is now Ghana, and groups beyond Ivorian borders, such as the Bambara, who
inhabit territory to the north in neighboring Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Guébo
ranges to Cameroon, naming the Bamiléké, and even to France, identifying the Bretons.
The nation-state model is, perhaps, punitive beyond Africa, an obstacle to fratenité. The

39
penultimate poem in Carnet de doute / Journal of doubt returns to a passage that Guébo
first presents mid-way through the collection of serial lyrics:
Les guerres de nos pères
Nous somment
Aux aires neuves
Réécrivent
Aux encres de nos temps
La forme
De nos armes
Aujourd’hui
Quitter le quai
De décennies
Avariées
Lunes
De partis-uniques
Lunes
De partis-revenus

(The wars of our fathers
Add us
To new areas
Rewrite
In the ink of our times
The shape
Of our weapons
Today
Leave that platform
Of Decades
Damaged
Moons
Of single-parties
Moons
Of the party-of-returns) (my trans.; 35)

Here Guébo is playing with the words “partis-uniques” and “partis-revenus.” Partis-
uniques refers to a single-party political system, where the ruling party simply imposes its
will. But the word “partis” also suggests the verb “partir,” to leave or to depart. In this
way, partis-uniques also hosts the notion of a one-way ticket—as in, to leave for a
singular destination, on a journey without return, to a dead-end. Partis-revenus is an

40
invented word. In partis-revenus, the word “revenus” refers to revenue or income, as in
politicians aligned less by ideology than by the shared belief that politics is a way to
make money. “Partis” again suggests the verb “partir,” to leave or to depart. And
“revenus” suggests the verb “revenir,” to come back. In this way, partis-revenus
additionally implies a political coterie that always finds its way back to power, and a
political fate that goes round and round.
For Guébo, this “second independence” movement is overdue. Particularly in his
collection Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight, published after Carnet de doute /
Journal of doubt in 2011, Guébo meditates on the wars of his fathers and proposes a
generational evolution in that struggle to truly and finally sever colonial attachments.
Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight is a direct response to the French and UN
military intervention following the 2010 election. Guébo portrays the UN as a snaking,
sexually predatory water. Guébo uses the term l’eau nue, which translates literally as
“bare water” or “naked water,” but also has the homonymic association to O.N.U., which
is the acronym for Organisation des Nations Unies—or, in English, the UN.

L’eau nue
Passant son chemin
Loin la souffrance
De mon peuple
L’eau nue
Glissant son lit
D’estivant
Pique-niquant
Ou plutôt
Piquant
Et niquant
Le long des trottoirs (14)

(L’eau nue
Plotting its course

41
Far from the suffering
Of my people
L’eau nue
Gliding into
Its guest bed
Pic-
Nicking
Or rather playing
Snatch
Grab
Along sidewalks) (17)

Guébo portrays the UN as a prostitute promising a good fuck. In the following passage he
uses the phrase “tossing its scarf,” which is an Ivorian-French idiom—an Ivoirisme. It
refers to the act of indicating one’s for-pay sexual availability by dropping a scarf in front
of a passer-by.

À foulard
Le fond des forages
À mouchards
L’eau nue mouillant
De ses foires à scandales
Le plus fluet
De ma foi
Au trust
Des mondes (15)

(Tossing its scarf
Promise of deep drilling
Amid the informants
Their carnival of scandals
L’eau nue dampens
My most slender
Faith
In the world’s
Trusts) (19)

42
The sexual innuendo, the promise of deep drilling, alludes to oil exploration. In Carnet de
doute / Journal of doubt, Guébo writes, “On ne célèbre pas / La naissance de l’or noir”
(“We don’t celebrate / The emergence of black gold”; my trans.; 5). Oil discovery makes
the country a target. He eschews this investor attraction, and the inevitable ecological,
social, and cultural degradation that accompanies oil extraction. The UN, l’eau nue,
practices the interventionist agenda on behalf of international agencies. It extends the
colonial offer: pleasure, ease, abundance for collaborators.
Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight maps a continuous line of exploitation
between the transatlantic slave trade, memorialized by colonial forts and former slave-
holding facilities along the West African coast, and the institutions abroad that determine
what resources African territories will yield and how these resources will be valued.
“Fermée / La gueule des régents / Décrivant quelque part / Sous un ciel / De givre / La
course / De nos soleils” (“Somewhere under a frosty sky / The closed mouths of regents /
Describe the trajectory/ Of our suns”), Guébo writes (28; 45). While Guébo is interested
in the questions of national identity that have tormented the Ivory Coast, he addresses
questions of ethnic difference by expanding the political discourse. When asked in a
December 2011 interview what he made of the post-electoral crisis in the Ivory Coast,
Guébo replied:

Il n’y a pas de crise post électorale en Côte-d’Ivoire. Ce qui se déroule sous nos
yeux est une suite logique d’un harcèlement séculaire. … et nous n’avons pas le
droit d’ignorer que ce qui se joue là a trait à la question de notre
autodétermination. Je ne nie pas le fait que, en interne, la Côte-d’Ivoire soit en
proie à quelques contradictions, mais je dis que quelques questions mineures ici
sont surdéterminées, pour occulter la problématique essentielle. Or, tous les pays
africains devront un jour revisiter le problème de leur rapport à l’occident.

(There is no post-election crisis in Côte d'Ivoire. What we saw unroll before us is

43
the logical result of a secular harassment … and we have no right to ignore what
takes place, these concerns about the question of our self-determination. I do not
deny the fact that Côte d'Ivoire is in the grip of some contradictions but I say that
some minor questions here are overblown to hide the essential problem. All
African countries will have to one day revisit the problem of their relationship to
the West. (my trans.; Grah)

For him, the violence must be addressed as part of a broader geopolitical negotiation.
Guébo sees Françafrique, the assimilationist policy administered by the French,
historically promoted as a generative postcolonial model, as profoundly ruptured in the
Ivory Coast. In Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight, Guébo invokes the martyrs from
“the wars of our fathers”—Thomas Sankara, Patrice Émery Lumumba, Ruben Um
Nyobé, Félix-Roland Moumié, each an African revolutionary leader who fought for their
nation’s self-determination, each assassinated. Through them he is speaking of Gbagbo
and his extradition to the International Criminal Court, though Guébo never names
Gbagbo in Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight. “You do not invoke someone who is
alive but not with you—as a form of protection,” Guébo explains (my trans.; Guébo,
Personal interview). Ouattara won a virtually uncontested presidential election in 2015
while Gbagbo continued to be held in The Hague for trial. Ouattara is currently trying to
position the Ivory Coast to become one of the continent’s largest oil producers (Mieu).
For Guébo, the international institutions that govern based on economic profit, such as
the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, with the UN and ICC as their mediators, are effectively
an international single-party system, a partis-uniques—a partis-revenus, a party of
returns.
…

44
African poets have contested multiple iterations of the colonial condition. The
oral tradition in African poetics contains an abundance of myths and histories that portray
cultural conflicts prior to European encounters—the Ozidi Saga of the Ijo in the Niger
Delta, which chronicles a succession of fights between the hero Ozidi and opponents who
threaten life in the kingship of the city-state of Orua, is a well-known example
(Okpewho, 63). The engagement with European colonization, however, begins for Afro-
francophone literature with the Négritude movement. It is often observed that, more than
being a poetry movement rooted in Africa, the Négritude movement was international,
emerging from the students and intellectuals who had gathered in Paris from French
colonies in the 1930s and 40s. Afro-francophone literary scholar Lilyan Kesteloot has
argued that Négritude poetry was the beginning of African literature, that it arrived out of
an awakening that comes from the shock that not only is one black, he or she is also non-
white. This shock-and-revelation arrives as one gains intimate familiarity with the white,
colonizing Other (Midiohouan, 193). The political and theoretical groundwork that
guided the movement was established by the Nardal sisters—Paulette and Jane Nardal.
Suzanne Césaire, the wife of Négritude’s most influential poet, Aimé Césaire, was also
critical to the movement. Along with Césaire, poets Léon Damas and Léopold Sédar
Senghor were crucial in rendering the inhumanity of colonial oppression and imagining
an emancipated future for black colonial subjects.
Following decolonization in the 1960s, literary critiques of the colonial legacy
were often directed at the unfulfilled promises of the national liberation states. The black
universalist agenda of the Négritude movement became outmoded as the newly
independent nation-states struggled to establish national identities. Engaging with the

45
projects of establishing national identity, many Afro-francophone poet’s explored their
local conditions—what did it mean to be a subject in their respective polities, in the new
geopolitical order? What were the domestic realities of a life lived amid the contortions
of independence, amid the struggles to create models of sovereignty that were appropriate
to existing and historic social structures? Early poetic attempts to move away from the
Négritude aesthetic separated in terms of theme more than style (Fraser).
Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam'si notably breaks from what Robert Fraser refers
to as “the African gallicism of négritude” (Fraser, 276). Fraser is pointing to a French
literary tradition that is still the literature backbone of school systems in former French
colonies. Requiring a style that would be legible to French readers in order to forward the
movement’s political goals, Négritude’s poets developed a written expression out of the
European Romantic tradition, in which a singular personality (think: the lyric “I”
speaker) controls the perspective, framing it for an unknown and removed reader—this in
contrast to the polyphonic speaker of African oral traditions, for example, who inhabits
and performs a plurality of personalities and voices, often for live audiences in a local
setting. With the appearance of Surrealism in the Gallic tradition, that Romantic
individualism yielded to a slightly more pluralistic perspective. From beyond the poet’s
conscious thought process images of a supposedly universal nature arrive; they are
reported from outside of the individual. Césaire wrote out of this influence—I will
elaborate on his adaptation of Surrealism in a moment—but even with its strain of
Surrealism the Négritude aesthetic assigned the poet the responsibility of speaking to
European readers, of speaking about a black cultural collective that the poet is removed
from rather than immersed in. After Tchicaya’s third collection, Épitome, appeared 1962,

46
Senghor tried to claim Tchicaya as an example of Négritude poetry (Fraser, 274). But
Tchicaya’s work does not have the African cultural certainty of Négritude predecessors
such as Senghor. Tchicaya’s speaker is full of contradictions and competing impulses.
His speaker is not a subject stabilized by his cultural inheritance. Tchicaya does not
mythologize African history, nor offer heroic models of colonial resistance. He explores
the interiorities, the soul condition, of an individual existentially wounded by the brutal
legacies of slavery and colonialism. And while his enigmatic imagery may exhibit the
traces of Césaire’s Surrealism, as Clive Wake explains, Tchicaya’s poetry does not
operate with the unfiltered spontaneity of Surrealist poetry. Rather, “[t]he structure and
imagery of all of Tchicaya’s poetry are very carefully controlled, and throughout his
work there is broadly the same recurring pattern of images, phrases, and themes” (Wake).
While Tchicaya interrogated the assumed wholeness of the individual subject
within the context of the newly independent nation, Mauritanian Oumar Ba moved away
from Négritude’s universalist discourse in order to render a specific ethno-cultural locale
(Fraser, 280). Ba broke from the Négritude practice of translating African cultures into
familiar poetic modes for a French audience—a practice that produced, as poet and editor
Paul Dakeyo phrased it in a 1973 interview, “la réalité folklorique des poèmes de la
negritude” (“the folklore reality of Negritude poems”) wherein African cultural traditions
are endangered by an essentialist portrayal risking caricature (my trans.; Dakeyo). Ba’s
1965 collection, titled Poèmes peuls modernes / Modern Peul poems [my translation],
drew directly from the ethnic heritage of the Fulani. Ba’s collections over the next dozen
years continued this focus, working in relation to written and oral Fulani traditions. He, in
fact, published several works in the Fulani language (Ba). Other Afro-francophone

47
writers during this period invested their creative energies in moving ethnic and
regionally-specific myths and tales into written versions and, in doing so, blurred
Western genre distinctions. Writers such as Frédéric Pacéré Titinga from Burkina Faso,
whose work across genres chronicles Mossi cultural practices, and Ivorian Bernard
Dadié, who recounts tales from the Baoulé, Bété, and other ethnic groups, extend the line
of Négritude-era writers such as Birago Diop, whose culturally specific work is typically
not placed in the Négritude canon.
Beninese-Cameroonian poet Fernando d’Almeida, starting in the 70s, dealt with
the postcolonial subject’s challenges in domestic spaces. D’Almeida’s imagery is often
opaque, and from within this opacity d’Almeida separates the speaker from the poem,
making rhetorical gestures that highlight the poem’s artifice, as if the poem itself is an
institution that governs the emergence of the speaking subject. D’Almeida creates an
opening for himself this way, and he comes and goes, recording the particularities of
daily life for himself and those he encounters—at home, at work. D’Almeida explores the
fissures between the personal and the social. As with Tchicaya, the lyric “I” is disrupted,
which the title of d’Almeida’s second collection, Traduit du je pluriel / Translated into
the plural I [my translation], published in 1980, indicates. The shape of d’Almeida’s
poems arrives from the music and rhythm of his language rather than from any received
formal conventions.
In the 70s and 80s, as African poetry reported the varying experiences of African
subjectivity in the post-colony, poets developed increasingly idiosyncratic styles. In
“Warriors of a Failed Utopia?,” Femi Osofisan describes in structural terms the shift for
African literature during this period:

48

High preference is given to syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies, such as the use
of sudden phrasal inversions, verbal inflation, ideophones, eccentric punctuations
and neologisms. A page may be semiotically riddled with absurd notations and
references, with stage notes like in a film script, with burlesque effects. The
notion of time itself becomes arbitrary, and selective, freed of its recognisable
moorings in calendar reality. (Osofisan)

Osofisan identifies a trend to be of the language, rather than to use the language to
mobilize social engagement—though certainly the poet’s engagement remained. And
here Osofisan is especially observing the work of Sony Labou Tansi. Labou Tansi, who
was a prominent playwright, as well as a novelist and poet, exploded form across his
ouevre. He, in his own words, was after “a vital laughter” (Osofisan). This “vital
laughter” was an expression meant to confront and wholly rebuke the socio-political
injustices that Labou Tansi witnessed around him. Labou Tansi was unflinchingly critical
of state oppression in the Republic of the Congo. But his derision, his mockery, extends
to language itself, which is another register of state oppression. Without this suspicion of
language, any literary expression would be lacking in totality, would be an incomplete
account of modern human bondage.
Though Osofisan does not mention Ivorian poet Nöel X. Ebony in his essay,
Ebony’s poetry fits comfortably within Osifisan’s description of the era’s aesthetic
priorities. Like Labou Tansi, Ebony was also a playwright. He was, additionally, a highly
respected journalist. He died in his early thirties under mysterious circumstances while in
exile in Senegal, before much of his poetry had been published. Ebony was deeply
attuned to social and political dynamics and the historical positioning of his speaker
within a poetry that was radically original. Kesteloot assessed Ebony as “le Soyinka de
l’Afrique francophone” (“the Soyinka of francophone Africa”; my trans.; Orban). The

49
poetry of Labou Tansi and Ebony combats a fundamental silence. Much of the writing of
this period has been characterized as testimonial literature, where anti-colonial sentiment
has been driven inward, and the poet-speaker is charged with asserting the humanity of
the individual.
In his introduction to the translation of Véronique Tadjo’s 1985 poetry collection
Latérite / Red Earth, African literary scholar F. Abiola Irele writes, “there can be no
question that our recent history imposed an especial burden upon our poetry, obliging it
to serve as a testimony of our experience of domination and of the ensuing trauma of the
post-colony” (Tadjo, Red Earth, ix). Irele makes this note in order to mark a transition in
Afro-francophone poetry, and African poetry more broadly, which Tadjo’s work enacts.
Her poetry—and, again, this genre distinction must be considered in its broadest terms,
able to include a collection such as Tadjo’s 1991 Le Royaume aveugle / The Blind
Kingdom, which might be described as a collection of serially-linked prose poems, or
vignettes with a narrative arc, or a fable told in glimpses from dual protagonists—in any
case, her poetry moves away from any obligation to explicitly engage the socio-political
dynamics of the era. The traumas of the post-colony are not forgotten, but Tadjo responds
by nuancing the affective terrain of the individual, where morality plays out
incrementally and by subtle gestures.
Ivorian poet Tanella Boni is likewise credited with extending the aesthetic range
of francophone African literature. As in Tadjo’s work, Boni’s socio-political engagement
manifests itself implicitly, enacted through quotidian details and the discreet dynamics of
interpersonal exchange. Boni, states Bruno Gnaoulé-Oupoh, is able to make crucial
assessments of “l’homme dans sa quête permanente d’un mieux-être” (“man’s quest for

50
greater well-being”) through her “détaché” (“detached”) but “remarquablement lucide”
(“remarkably lucid”) point of view (my trans.; Gnaoulé-Oupoh, 235). Odile Cazenave
and Patricia Célérier write in Contemporary Francophone African Writers and The
Burden of Commitment that “Tanella Boni cannot be said to be but a commited novelist
and poet because she has been very vocal on a number of political issues.” However,
Boni’s “literary production should not be collapsed into one precise category, that of
littérature engagée, nor understood essentially in terms of previous works in francophone
African literature that are deemed engagés” (49). Particularly with her poetry collections
Labyrinthe / Labyrinth [my translation] in 1984 and Grains de sable / Grains of sand [my
translation] in 1993, and her novel Les Baigneurs du lac Rose / The Swimmers of Rose
Lake [my translation] in 2002, Boni helped to dissolve distinctions between littérature
engagée and literature that steers clear of the political realm.
…
Tadjo and Boni were both in the Ivory Coast in the 80s and 90s. That country’s
relative political stability made its largest city, Abidjan, a center for post-independence
artistic development. Cameroonian writer and artist pluridisciplinaire, as she refers to
herself, Werewere Liking, settled in Abidjan in 1978. Her first book, a collection of
poems titled On ne raisonne pas le venin / One does not reason with venom, was
published in 1977. And in 1983 she published Elle sera de jaspe et de corail: journal
d'une misovire / It shall be of jasper and coral: journal of a misovire, which Liking calls
a song-novel. That same year, with Marié-José Hourantier, Liking set up Kiyi M’bock, an
artist village in Abidjan that produced experimental theater, practicing what they called
théatre rituel (ritual theater) (d’Almeida). Liking describes her genre-defiant style:

51

Dans les arts de la parole chez moi, il n’y a pas a pari ‘le conte’, a part ‘le roman’,
a part ‘la chanson’, a part ‘le theatre’. Dans le texte, qu ‘il soit de I ‘epopee
comme le Mvet, le N ‘dinga, ou des recits lyriques ou simples, ou des poesies,
tout est dans un tout. Quand on parte, on a beaucoup de niveaux de langue:
subitement ca peut devenir un dialogue, ca peut devenir un passage lyrique, et
puis ca peut devenir completement prosaique et narratif, case melange — c’est ca
le texte.

In the speech arts of my people, we do not have these separate categories between
what is ‘a story’, or ‘a novel’, or ‘a song’, or ‘a drama’. Our texts, such as the
Mvet or the N‘dinga, or the simple or lyrical narratives, or the poems, include
everything. Many levels of language are available for the oral artist: from
dialogue, he can move directly to a lyrical passage, and as swiftly into a prosaic or
narrative passage. Everything is mixed — that’s what the oral text is for us.
(Osofisan).

Liking was part of a broad Afro-francophone literary effort to find a place for
African oral traditions in institutional settings. Malian author and folktale archivist
Amadou Hampâté Bâ had moved to Abidjan in 1971. Bâ established the Foundation
Amadou Hampâté Bâ, which preserves a vast collection of West African oral traditions
that he dedicated his life to finding and archiving until his death in 1991. Along with
Liking, Ivorian poets Zadi Zaourou, Niagoran Porquet, Joachim Bohui Dali, and Jean-
Marie Adiaffi had been energizing the literary scene with their adaptations of oral forms.
Zaourou developed a theater form that he called didiga, or the art of the unthinkable. In
this form, the daily crosses paths with that which is beyond logic. Didiga includes
specific musical instruments as well as symbolic colors. The intent is to shock the
audience into a state of heightened wakefulness (Yépri). Porquet, who published two
poetry collections before his early death, Mariam et griopoems / Mariam and griopoems
[my translation] in 1978, and Zahoulides in 1985, also created the concept “griotique”
with Aboubacar Touré. The concept gained definition in 1981 as poetic recitals gave way

52
to what Porquet and Touré called a “total theater,” where the word was methodically
integrated with self-expressive movement and music (Siendou). These literary artists
were putting oral performance values in contact with Western stage and page
conventions. Bohui Dali’s 1988 poetry collection, Maïéto pour Zékia / Maïéto for Zékia
[my translation], for example, is a rephrasing of a myth that Zaourou had put into his
didiga form, a play that he titled La guerre des femmes / The War of the Women [my
translation]. It is a myth from the Bété ethnic group. Sometimes it is a funeral oration,
sometimes a war song. Bohui Dali adds a central character named Zékia, which is an
anagram for Zikéi, a name the author assigns to himself as the speaker. With the speaker,
the poet creates a voice around which he is able to transform the oral form’s polyphony
into a book-length lyric utterance. These literary artists were disassembling genres and
decolonizing literary forms. It was a movement approved by Kesteloot, who was there:
“This is a true ‘school’ with which French scholars are associated” (Kesteloot). For
Guébo, who was a young student in the 90s, the literary adaptation of oral forms was a
lively influence.
Zaourou, a dramatist, poet, and public intellectual, widely influenced this
generation of artists. According to Tadjo, who counted him as a friend and mentor,
Zaourou was central to cultural life.

When [first president] Houphouët-Boigny was around, there was a lot of stuff one
could not say. He [Zaourou] hung out at St. Jean to talk with gathers. You could
always find him there at Le Christophoro maquis—it was like a French salon.
Everyone talking. He was a leader of opinions. He’d taught other professors. In
the 80s and 90s, he was an intellectual brother-in-arms with Gbagbo. (my trans.;
Tadjo, Personal interview)

53
A maquis is an informal restaurant, often with seating out in a patio space, often with an
earth floor. Usually there is a roof secured on posts for shade, or for when the monsoons
pass through during the rainy seasons. St. Jean is a neighborhood in the Cocody district,
within walking distance of the main university, which is now called the University of
Félix Houphouët-Boigny. As Tadjo indicates, Laurent Gbagbo was also an important
member of the circle of artists and scholars that wanted to bring West African cultural
traditions into the center of intellectual life. His wife, Simone Ehivet-Gbagbo did her
doctoral dissertation on the talking drum, and, in the early 80s, Laurent Gbagbo had
directed the university’s Institute of History, Art, and African Archaeology after
receiving his PhD from the Sorbonne in France. Gbagbo had been active in government
protests prior to his PhD work in France, and had been imprisoned during the early 70s.
The university protests in the 90s followed strikes across most sectors in the late 80s over
reduced services, wage freezes, and corruption, with the continual demand for a multi-
party system that nominally arrived in 1990.
At the Lycée Cours Secondaire Protestant in Cocody, Guébo attended a high
school that was directly adjacent to the university campus in 1990. Student protests to
austerity measures and for better living conditions became highly charged that year and
were regularly suppressed by the police. During that year, Edouard Kpéa Domin, a
fourteen year-old student in Adzopé, a town 100 kilometers northwest of Abidjan, was
shot and killed by a policeman who claimed that his gun went off involuntarily. Domin is
elegized by Henri-Michel Yéré in the poem “Les Noyés” / “The Drowned” [my
translation] from his 2015 collection, Mil Neuf Cent-Quatre-Vignt-Dix / Nineteen-ninety
[my translation]. The killing raised tensions and the government closed all schools for the

54
1989-90 school year, "l’année blanche." Guébo was present for these protests and
participated in the student movement up to and through his matriculation into the
University of Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1993. In considering the vibrancy of a literary
culture that was moving between the page and performance, and an intellectual climate
animated by West African cultural traditions, it is imperative to keep in mind this socio-
political context. The mingling of protest and aesthetic production created a musical
style, or “genre of neo-orality” as Ivorian literary scholar Marie-Clémence Adom calls
zouglou—and zouglou would become an international sensation (Dérive).
Zouglou emerged alongside student revolts and discontent with the Ivorian
government in the 90s; it is sometimes compared to the emergence of rap in the US in the
80s. Adom notes that the music, in fact, evolved from another genre, woyo, or “easy
ambiance,” which originated with high schoolers in Abidjan at sporting events, and was
then adopted by university students (Dérive). Compared to the Alpha Blondy-led reggae
scene, which had situated Abidjan as the third reggae capital after Kingston and London,
zouglou was homegrown. Its unadorned musical style, its socio-political engagement, and
its language distinguish it.
Zouglou uses alloukou rhythms that are sourced from the Bété (McGovern, 75).
The Bété, one of the largest ethnic groups in the country, is, incidentally, Guébo’s.
Percussion is consistent and not intended to be overtly performative. A keyboard often
provides the main instrumental variations. The style’s most identifiable characteristic is
its polyvocality. One singer is supported by a chorus, or multiple singers sing in
harmony. Zouglou lyrics often feature the humor of street encounters. Artists tease
newbies fresh to the city and posturing big men. Lyrics often tell the tales of the

55
underclass. “1er [Premier] Gaou,” which was released by the band Magic System in
1999, became an international smash hit. The song tells the story of a broke youth whose
girlfriend leaves him for a man with money. Once the former beau is a successful singer,
the girl wants him again, but, as the chorus explains: “Et on dit premier gaou n'est pas
gaou oh / C'est deuxième gaou qui est niata oh ah.” I’m not an idiot for being fooled
once, but fool me twice… . Songs describe the unending hustle of city life, and the humor
is often an indirect approach to reckoning with the hopeless conditions in the city.
Zouglou artists express exhaustion with political promises and frustration with the
politicians who live above the fray. “The wives of presidents / They take their baskets to
go to the market in Paris / Madame the president’s wife / There’s a market in Agbata /
You remember president / It was the marches that brought you into power / So president /
Don’t forbid the marches” (Dérive). This is from the song “President” by Yodé and Siro,
from their 2001 album Antilaléca. They are offering newly elected president Gbagbo
some advice—remember where you come from, remember how you got there. These
local markets should be able to provide enough for all of us.
Zouglou’s socio-economic commentary depends also on the language
incorporated by zouglou artists: nouchi. Nouchi, which is seamlessly integrated into the
French, is the slang that developed, explains Simon Akindes,

as a medium of communication among illiterate labourers, house servants, shop
attendants, and other low-rank workers with little or no formal education, and
people originating from Burkina Faso. [I]t has grown into an urban language
nationwide that does not abide by the rules of French grammar, and it
incorporates words, sentence structures, images, and forms of expression from
local languages. More and more popular songs, plays and comedies, written by
literate and illiterate artists alike, use Nouchi for its spontaneity and to reach
larger audiences. (92)

56

In The Modernity Bluff Sasha Newell argues that nouchi is a sign of the process of urban
cultural integration, and a symbol of the rift between urban and rural that has been
responsible for driving violence around Ivorian identity (36). This seems to misrepresent
nouchi’s relationship to the conflict, or to simplify the conflict, however. Nouchi is
spoken ubiquitously in the Ivory Coast, and more widely in West Africa. It was originally
called “Moussa’s French” in the Ivory Coast. This name came from a comic, “chronique
de Moussa,” that appeared in an Ivorian journal, Ivoire Dimanche in the 80s. Moussa’s
character is rumored to have been written by Noel X. Ebony (Poller). While nouchi’s
deconstruction of French can no doubt be traced to immigrants with little formal
education in cities searching for work, syntactic distortions or phonetic approximations
are found where French is spoken in rural areas, too. French is nearly always a second or
third language—regularly a person will speak his or her ethnic language and, then, very
often, Dioula, a market language from the north. Dioula is closely related to Bambara,
the language spoken by the ethnic group called the Bambara, located in Guinea, Mali,
and Burkina Faso, that Guébo lists in the previously cited passage from Carnet de doute
(“Tous les hommes sont frères…”). It is not just immigrants, after all, who have had little
access to education. Nouchi incorporates expressions from a variety of ethnic languages,
as Akindes indicates. Having lived in a village in the center of the Ivory Coast as zouglou
peaked (“1er Gaou” sometimes still plays in my head), I can report that, at least for
twenty seven months, the music was played in rural locales in the north and the south and
the west—it was played on transports, in maquis, and over handheld radios between
reports of coups attempts and fighting. And with zouglou’s popularity and reach nouchi
became more collectively representative. This is, perhaps, why Adom has proposed

57
nouchi as a reconciliatory tool, a decolonizing instrument capable of advancing the quest
for a national identity and unity (Dérive).
Zouglou came to indicate a “vector of new conscience in the urban youth,”
Yacouba Konate writes in “Génération Zouglou” (my trans.; 781, 782). It is within the
context of this “new conscience” that Guébo’s poetry first gained visibility. Having won
a Radio France International writing competition in 1998, Guébo then won a poetry
contest hosted by the Ivorian Writers Association in 2000. His poem, “Noel, un fusil nous
est né,” mocks the military, which had overthrown the government on Christmas Eve
1999. Though he had no appreciation for the deposed president, Henri Konan Bédié,
Guébo, as part of the student movements of the 90s, had struggled for a multi-party
democratic system. And this transfer of power ignored such democratic principles. The
poem asserts that the General, the country’s new leader, is no savior. Guébo’s title plays
with the language of New Testament biblical passages that announce Jesus’s birth: un fils
nous est né, un sauveur nous est donné (a son is born, a savior is given to us). Guébo
teases the likeness of the word fils (son) to the word fusil (gun) to announce with his title:
“Christmas, a gun is born to us.”
The literary movement that organized in Abidjan, guided by Zaourou, which
sought to decolonize literary forms and to invest them with the performance values of
West African oral traditions, and Guébo’s placement within the politically engaged
“generation zouglou,” drive his poetics. Guébo is rather ambivalent about the relationship
between his poetry and zouglou proper. “Ensemble, mais pas complice”—that is Guébo’s
own assessment (Guébo, Personal interview). The two are, broadly, simpatico. To be
more specific, his poetics, though not derivative of zouglou asthetically, are shaped by the

58
same social, political, and cultural forces that shaped zouglou music. Their audiences are
definitely different. His poetry works in a less vernacular register. And, to be a bit
cynical, perhaps, zouglou’s folk register keeps its complaints local, aimed at Ivorian
society and politics. In this way it maintains an otherness in appealing to French and
international audiences that Guébo’s poetry resists. His work extends criticism to a
market system that commercializes the despair underlying the harmonics and brash
humor of zouglou music.
Though he works in a more formal register of language than zouglou artists,
Guébo’s commitment to local constructions of language is apparent in his poetry. This
can be seen in the earlier selection from Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight, which
uses an Ivoirisme to portray the UN as indicating its for-pay availability. While Guébo
does not use nouchi directly, such Ivoirismes similarly disrupt the semantic expectations
of conventional French. These idioms are structured in conventional French, but have a
meaning that is unique to Ivorian usage. Taking another example from Mon pays, ce soir
/ My country, tonight, the phrase couper le coeur might literally translate as “to cut the
heart.” Idiomatically, for Ivorians, this means to receive a fright or a shock. A nouchi
phrasing might have read “gbouka le coeur.” “Gbouka” is a nouchi word that does not
belong to any language, but is derived from an onomatopoeia. “Gbou” is the sound of a
blow. “Ka” being the sound emitted by that which receives the blow.
While such attention to popular Ivorian speech demonstrates Guébo’s attention to
orality, the adaptation of oral forms, as explored by poets under Zaourou’s tutelage, is
most immediately felt in Guébo’s light touch on the page. The poems do not sink the
reader into the thicket of description, into densely clustered syllabics, or into granular

59
details. The words seem only to touch down momentarily before they lift back up to the
reader. Lines are often just a single word; they are rarely more than six or seven. And the
reader floats along, bouyed on, entranced by, the short beats. The collections are typically
untitled serial poems that make one long utterance, in the vein of Bohui Dali’s Maïéto
pour Zékia / Maïéto for Zékia. There is an orator at work here, one who periodically turns
directly to his audience: “Arrestation / Déportation ? / Où donc est la moindre once / De
justice ?” (“Arrest / Deportation / Where is the slightest ounce / Of justice?”; 25; 23).
Though more orator than storyteller, Guébo creates allegorical dramas that pay
respect to the storytelling aspect of the oral tradition. In the way that Guébo transformed
the UN into a predatory water, a water that sneaks, rapes, and rains down destruction in
Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight, Guébo later in that collection portrays
collaborators, Africans who have been and who are seduced by the promise of affluence
and power, as belonging to the house of roundworms.
This maneuver—to create brief allegorical dramas—is most pronounced in Songe
à Lampedusa / Think of Lampedusa. This book responds to the 2013 shipwreck that
killed 366 Africans attempting to secretly migrate across the Mediterranean to Europe. In
Songe à Lampedusa / Think of Lampedusa, the sun, the winds, the waves, the oil spilled,
the flames, life itself—they are all transformed into actors. In a memorable three poem
sequence alluding to the dynamics of race and nationality, Guébo pits white bread, which
should be protected behind glass but is floating in the sea—“Ce serait du pain béni /
Qu’on ne couperait au couteau” (“It is a blessed bread not one sliced into”)—against the
black water of an oil spill, which, without a visa, is not even recognizable to the sky (15;
14). The oil spill advances eating whole pieces of white bread. But the bread does not like

60
this nibbling at its side. “Le pain se mettrait à vociférer que s’arrête la course des dents”
(“The bread begins shouting out / that it opposes such a race of teeth”) (13; 12).
These allegories, and their often whimsical nature, are an extension of oral
performance values. The playfulness, as Irene Assiba d’Almeida points out in her
introduction to the translation of Werewere Liking’s Elle sera de jaspe et de corail / It
Shall Be of Jasper and Coral, is a rare commodity in African literature (D’Almeida).
African literature has long served under the “burden of commitment,” as Cazenave and
Célérier title their book on the matter. In Guébo’s case, the playfulness, the whimsy, the
humor—it may be the effect of passing his formative years in the company of “generation
zouglou,” with its ethos of teasing corruption and despair. But his humor is sharper,
biting. And it is more absurd. Likewise, earlier examples of word play should not only be
attributed to the influence of the oral tradition, with its attention to the performance of
speech. The homonymic associations with l’eau nue, the multiple entendre of partis-
uniques or “Noel, un fusil nous est né,” and the invention of the word “partis-revenus”
demonstrate an exploration of the French language and of poetic forms that are separate
from these West African traditions.
…
While Guébo was immersed in this 90s cultural and political scene, his formal
literary instruction prioritized the French literary traditions. This was the standard at
Ivorian universities, as it remains with most education systems in former French colonies.
As his inclusion of the Breton in his list of ethnicities in Carnet de doute / Journal of
doubt indicates, Guébo is not anti-colonial purist. He is not expecting to expunge all
traces of the colonial presence. In Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight, while he

61
attacks the legacy of Françafrique, he also draws a comparison between Jean Moulin, a
prominent member of the French resistance during World War Two, and Guy Labertit,
who was an African delegate for the French socialist party from 1993 to 2006. Labertit
was critical of France for its military interventions in the Ivory Coast during its first and
second civil wars, and of the ICC for extraditing Laurent Gbabgo. “Jean Moulin / Lui /
Contre le fer ostrogoth / Pour ma cause / Ma cause / Guy Labertit” (“Jean Moulin / Him /
Against the Ostrogoth iron/ For my cause / My cause/ Guy Labertit”) (22; 33). Guébo
proposes a transnational solidarity beyond the framework of nationality, a solidarity that
must, ultimately, include, and, thus, reconfigure, the West. In this vein, Guébo’s work
with West African forms must be explained by the Western aesthetic that he is
integrating, namely Surrealism.
Guébo’s work recalls not only French Surrealists, but also their symbolist
predecessors. Guébo pays homage to Paul Verlaine in Songe à Lampedusa / Think of
Lampedusa. “Les sanglots longs / Des violons / De l'automne” (“The long sobs / of the
violins / of Autumn”; my trans., Verlaine) in Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” become
“[l]es radeaux lents des violeurs / De l’automne” (“[t]he slow vessels carrying Autumn’s
violators”) (44; 47). There is this reminder of Verlaine’s melancholia and musicality.
Rimbaud’s fever dreams, too, seem to linger atmospherically in these poems—that
ecstatic freedom is felt in this passage, for instance: Les vents vivraient / À même la ville
/ Dévoilant d’une même veine / Les volets / De masures verrouillées / À l’oeil torve / De
la vue / Je verserais ainsi / La libation de vérités viscérales // La montre ferait alors soleil
/ Plus haut que cadran” (“The wind would fly straight from the city / rattling the bolts on
shacks / and from the eye / of this grim projection / I’d spill the drinks that coax / the

62
more visceral truths // And the stopwatch would lob a sun / higher than sundials can
catch”) (28; 25).
It makes sense that this French literary lineage would resonate for Guébo, who is
writing in the context of globalization’s destabilizing impacts. Symbolist and especially
Surrealist poets were wrestling with the social and political ruptures in Europe that led to
World War I and continued through World War II. Surrealists Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon,
and André Breton refused conventional metrics and imagery and opened the poetic form.
They insisted on stylistic freedom. This was a reflection of their investment in defending
social and political freedoms; these poets also fought the encroachment of fascism.
Eluard and Aragon fought in World War I and participated in the Resistance during
World War II. Breton worked in the medical corps of the French army in WWI and in
WWII, until he was forced into exile during the German occupation of France. And
during that time in the US and the Caribbean, of course, Breton met Aimé Césaire.
Breton recalls his introduction to Césaire’s work, while in Martinique in 1941:

It was in these circumstances that, chancing to buy a ribbon for my daughter, I
happened to leaf through a publication on display in the haberdashery. Very
modestly presented, it was the first issue of a journal that had just been published
in Fort-de-France, entitled Tropiques. Needless to say, knowing what a year of
intellectual degradation had led to, and having experienced the lack of any
discretion characteristic of police reactions in Martinique, I approached this
collection with extreme suspicion ... I could not believe my eyes: what was being
said was exactly what needed to be said, not just in the best way but with the
greatest force! All those mocking shadows were torn aside and dispersed; all the
lies and derision fell in tatters. It was proof that, far from being broken or stifled,
here the human voice rose up like the very shaft of light. Aimé Césaire was the
name of the one speaking. (Breton)

Through Césaire, Breton would meet many of the writers and intellectuals who would
develop the Négritude movement. “We would meet in the evening,” Breton writes, “in a

63
bar that the outside light turned into a single crystal, after the high-school classes he was
then teaching about the work of Rimbaud, or at gatherings on the terrace of his house...”
(Breton). Breton would famously write the introduction to Césaire’s Cahier d'un retour
au pays natal / Notebook of a Return to the Native Land for a 1947 publication that
expanded the original, which had been published in 1939. Breton was part of a cadre of
French intellectuals who supported decolonization.
It will not be surprising, then, that Aimé Césaire is a dominant literary influence
for Guébo. Not only are Césaire’s aesthetics imbued with the revolutionary principles of
French surrealism, they engage the French colonial condition. Evie Shockley, tracing
lineages of black experimental poetry in her book Renegade Poetics, describes Césaire’s
adaptation of French Surrealism:

Aimé Césaire’s desire for liberty emerges out of the specific circumstances of this
status as a racialized colonial subject. He develops his sense of the liberatory
power of unconventional language and images, in the first instance, from his
reading of the very poets who also initially inspired the founders of surrealism—
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Lautréamont—as much as from
his acquaintance with surrealist writing itself (Césaire, “Poetry” 233-36, 239;
Gregson Davis 14). Having determined, in the process of writing his
transformative poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Notebook of a Return to
the Native Land, how he could use such poetics in his effort “to bend French” for
the purpose of articulating negritude, a few years later Césaire asserts the
compatibility of the politics of his (black) aesthetics and the politics of the
surrealist movement (Rosello 52; Arnold 88-89). (175)

While French Surrealism might have explored the capacity of the French language to
adapt to a changing European modernity, Césaire fashions a Surrealist poetics that is
particular to black colonial conditions. Addressing the problem of using colonial
languages to represent non-European perspectives immediately became part of
Negritude’s project. Senghor, thinking about how to express the varied and uniquely

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African cosmologies, beliefs, needs, and hopes in French, pointed out that the colonial
language has a “syntaxe et ce vocublaire forgés en d’autres temps…pour repondre à
d’autres besoins et pour designer d’autres objets” (a “syntax and this vocabulary forged
in another time…to answer to other needs and to shape other objects”; my trans.; Lafage,
227). In the postcolonial setting, recalibrating colonial languages has continued to be
concern African literature. Ivorian novelist, Ahmadou Kourouma (another of Osofisan’s
“warriors”), spoke in a 1970 interview about breaking the French language in order to
accommodate the Malinké language out of which he self-translated when writing:

Le français classique constituait un carcan qu’il fallait dépasser … Qu’avais-je
donc fait? Simplement donné libre cours à mon tempérament en distordant une
langue trop rigide pour que ma pensé s’y meuve. J’ai donc traduit le malinké en
français en cassant le français.

Classic French constituted a straight-jacket that I needed to slip … What, then,
did I do? I simply gave free rein to my temperament in order to distort a too-stiff
language until my thought was able to move in it. Like that, I translated the
malinké into french by breaking french. (my trans.; Lafage, 227)

This contortion of French has been an unavoidable requirement for Afro-francophone
writers. Much of Guébo’s use of the French to develop his unique style within the Afro-
francophone poetic tradition are undeniably tied to local Ivorian and West African
milieus. However, many of the structural disruptions within Guébo’s poetry are more
appropriately traced to Césaire, whose strategies for bending the language are specific to
his adaptation of Surrealist poetics.
Colin Dayan, who translated Césaire’s 1946 collection, Les Armes miraculeuses /
The Miraculous Weapons, notes the specific ways in which Césaire penetrates the
French. Césaire draws on Greek and Latin, hacking into the language’s origins to make

65
new words. He resurrects archaic words and brings obscure scientific terms into the
poetic vocabulary (Dayan). Césaire’s grafting alters the French at a genetic level. The
rich, dense language furrows through and emerges from a primordial substrate. Take, for
example, this excerpt from “Poème pour l’aube” / “Poem for the Dawn” in Les Armes
miraculeuses / The Miraculous Weapons:

les fougues de chair vive
aux étés éployés de l’écorce cérébrale
ont flagella les contours de la terre
les ramphoriniques dans le sarcasme de leur queue prennent le vent
le vent qui n’a plus d’épée
le vent qui n’est plus qu’une gaule à cueillir
les fruits de toutes les saisons du ciel
mains ouvertes
main vertes
pour les fêtes belles des fonctions anhydrides

(the mettles of vivid flesh
with summers spread from the cerebral cortex
have flogged the contours of the earth
the Rhamphorynchi in the sarcasm of their tails take to the wind
the wind which has no more sword
the wind no more now than a pole to gather
the fruit of all seasons of the sky
hands open
hands green
for the beautiful feasts of anhydrid functions) (Eshleman, 106; 106)

By entering into language at a procedural level, Césaire intends to alter the concepts that
the language is capable of producing. The linguistic outgrowths often present themselves
in the type of vegetal imagery that is featured in this passage. Joyelle McSweeney
characterizes this lush, earthy, nearly pre-lingual realm as “necropastoral,” and Césaire’s
poetry is central to her definition of the concept. McSweeney describes the necropastoral
as “a ‘surroundings’ rather than a place, syntactically multiple, a haptic, active sensory

66
zone… .” (8) In this zone “we never know what the ‘outcome’ is, the ‘outcome’ never
stops happening…” (14).
This “outcome” that never stops happening is akin to what Césaire’s wife,
Suzanne Césaire, recognized as Surrealism’s emancipatory potential. Suzanne Césaire
founded and edited the journal Tropiques with her husband, and was instrumental in the
articulation of Négritude’s political and aesthetic goals. In his book, Freedom Time, Gary
Wilder revisits Aimé Césaire’s and Léopold Sedar Senghor’s political goals in order to
see how unfulfilled aspirations might conceive alternatives for the post-colonial present.
Wilder discusses Suzanne Césaire’s belief in Surrealist poetry, through which

‘space is abolished…past, present, and future are merged [confundus]…[and] we
live in this undivided state that allows us to recover the plenitude and meaning of
the moment.’ In this way, ‘the poet becomes a prophet’ by tracing ‘yesterday’s
routes and tomorrow’s routes…where man freed from the fetters of duration [la
durée] and extension [l’étendue] by the omnipotence [toute-puissance] of poetry,
sees clearly… into his past which is at the same time his future. (27)

The Surrealist poet rests in the signifying potential of the language. For Suzanne Césaire,
the image, the heightened surrealist image, is where the diction and syntax shape the
psychic energy driving the poem.
Clayton Eschleman, in his introduction to Annette Smith’s and his translations of
Césaire’s collected poems, describes the effect of what he calls “Césairean syntax”
(Eschleman, 25). Césaire’s labyrinthine syntax creates a poetics that refuses semantic
predictability. Discussing the poem, “Your Hair,” Eschleman explains, for instance, how
Césaire leaves subjects and objects in ambiguous relation. In “Your Hair”

…the mistress’ hair is compared by means of the slightly archaic “dirait-on pas
(“wouldn’t you have taken it for”) to a beautiful tree, then to “the invincible and

67
spacious cockcrowing,” itself ready to depart for some witch’s Sabbath. The
modifier of the tree (“Bombarded by lateritic blood”) and that of the cockcrowing
(“already in invincible departure”) precede the things they respectively modify,
each time suspending the meaning to the next line. (25)

Césaire interrupts the chronological procession of the language, deferring resolution, at
least so far as resolution depends on confirming the relationship between the subject and
its environment, and on attributing actions to their sources of agency. For Césaire, there
are forces of creation at work that are not administered by this sort of Enlightenment
rationale, that are misunderstood when forced to reveal themselves according to explicitly
causal chains of relationship. In his poetry, as Eschleman explains, modifying clauses
estrange rather than connect. Often it seems as if the poem is made entirely of such
modifiers. They expand perspective and amplify intensity. Césaire refuses to yield a
singular meaning. Meaning, rather, is radiant.
Out of verdant diction, unforeseeable word combinations, and syntactical
disturbances, Césaire cultivates mutant images that have no precedent within a European-
visioned history (or, consequently, future). They are, as Suzanne Césaire explains, a stay
against time. Guébo’s poems play with the language to expand its semantic possibilities.
Consider again the homonymic associations, multiple entendres, and neologisms. But
Guébo’s more structural innovations, like Césaire’s, happen in the construction of
images, as syntactical fragments ask the reader to look forward while also looking back.
If Césaire’s fulsome language germinates an image within the space of a line, then
Guébo’s breathier, more weightless language unfolds the image as a panorama across
several lines.

68
In the same way that Césaire’s modifying clauses leave subjects and objects in
ambiguous relation, Guébo’s lyric fragments pile on or fall from a single subject. The
poem maintains a connotative stance as the lines do their work: “calling other pieces into
confidence / each word grabs the shoulder strap / of the word to come” (Guébo, Think of
Lampedusa, 20). The elements of Guébo’s allegories shape themselves, come to life, and
begin to circulate. Semantic definition builds elliptically, until the panoramic image
comes into focus and Guébo’s absurdist theater is staged.
But semantic resolution is never inevitable. As allegorical dramas find conclusion
the scenes sometimes tip toward a private idiom. In Songe à Lampedusa / Think of
Lampedusa, for instance, Guébo completes a drama in which the speaker arrives to a
market where “l’amitié prenne la main et la tienne au jour qui viendrait” (“friendship
instructs the one hand / to draw in the other of day”) and where the solstices are shopping
at the market stalls (60; 57). The speaker, who is at this point dead, affirms that “Une
nouvelle étoffe filerait le coton de nouvelles aventures / Et la langue qu’elle parlerait /
Tournerait sept fois ses maximes dans le palais de l’aube” (“A new material would spin
the cotton of new adventures / and the language that it speaks / would turn its maxims
seven times in the palace of dawn”) (60; 57). While there are external references, this last
phrase is quite hermetic. Guébo welds a French proverb to a trope that has become
thematically weighted over the course of the collection. The French proverb—turn the
tongue seven times —advises that it is prudent to take a moment before offering an
opinion. The equivalent in English might be “think before you speak.” “[P]alace” is an
established metaphor for the mouth, so that the maxims are mulled over here. And with
“dawn” there is an added dimension. The trope of dawn is developed to conceptualize an

69
event horizon for Africa, a dialectical turn that will bring Africa into a position of
equality within the global community. Thus, the “palace of dawn” hints that the mouth
verges on opening. The maxims turned “seven times in the palace of dawn” suggest that,
after long being silenced on the international scene, Africa is awakening, prepared with
its insights. While I have made this interpretation, I would also argue that it is not
immediately available. Rather, the power of the enigmatic image dominates. This is
heightened surrealist punctuation. This riddle is one example of Guébo’s absurdist
humor. Surrealism is certainly a satisfying explanation as an aesthetic root for that
humor—more so than zouglou with its situational, realist humor.
Particularly as Guébo’s allegories sometimes flare into high Surrealist
punctuation, readers benefit by attaching themselves to the rhythms, the cadence of the
formations. The rhythms begin to offer their own sense. Perhaps instead of saying that
meaning does not arrive it would be better to say that knowing is not the intended
outcome. Meaning can be allowed to stand as foreign, as something felt inarticulably.
Eschleman explains that in Césaire’s work the “percussive effects,” which “are definitely
influenced by African dances and voodoo rituals,” eventually make readers receptive to a
non-signifying logic. These rhythmic effects “affect us somewhat like a mantra technique
designed to weaken the resistance of the intellect. The accelerated repetition of some
words or phrases often permit an entry into the poem other than the rational one”
(Eschleman, 13). One would not mistake Guébo’s lines for Césaire’s. Impacted by the
oral tradition’s focus on performed speech, Guébo’s words do not stick to the page in the
way that Césaire’s dense, rich language sticks to, even seems to grow from, the page. But
Guébo’s short lines pop with the same percussive effect.

70

Pierre tombale
De Sankara
Pierres
Aux tempes
De Lumumba
Nyobé
Moumié
Pierres
Pierres
D’amitiés
Ophidiennes
Promises
À la chute
Chute
Inexorable
Inexorable (Guébo, Mon pays, ce soir, 39)

(Gravestone
Of Sankara
Stones
At the head
Of Lumumba1
Nyobé
Moumie
Stones
Stones
Of ophidian
Friendships
Guaranteed
To tumble
Tumble
Torrentially
Torrentially) (Guébo, My country, tonight, 67)

This style of meaning-making, in which rhythmics take the lead, is most constant in
Songe à Lampedusa / Think of Lampedusa. As in other collections, his lack of
punctuation lends emphasis to the rhythms created by his short lines. The effect is like
listening to the slap of waves, trance-like.

71
Here it seems worth observing that this overlap in terms of rhythmic sensibility
does not necessarily mark Césaire as Guébo’s exclusive predecessor so much as it
suggests that they have a common inspiration—the drumbeats that often enliven and give
form to ceremonies in many African cultures. But Guébo’s practice of making thematic
returns within a collection, and of repeating phrases exactly, thereby associating new
possible meanings and burying the developing phrase ever more deeply in the reader’s
memory, seems directly inspired by Césaire.
Césaire is a textural presence in Guébo’s work. But even topically, Guébo
confirms his kinship to Césaire. Returning to this passage from Guébo’s Carnet de doute
/ Journal of doubt—

Les guerres de nos pères
Nous somment
Aux aires neuves
Réécrivent
Aux encres de nos temps
La forme
De nos armes

(The wars of our fathers
Add us
To new areas
Rewrite
In the ink of our times
The shape
Of our weapons) (35)

—it seems clear that “nos armes” (“our weapons”), whose shapes are rewritten in “the
ink of our times,” refers to Césaire’s 1946 collection Les Armes miraculeuses / The
Miraculous Weapons. Dayan reports that Césaire “meant the ‘miraculous weapons’ to be
arms for the struggle against colonialism, as well as, in and of themselves, poetic

72
annunciation” (Dayan). The title of Guébo’s Carnet, or “notebook,” similarly references
Césaire’s Cahier, or “journal.” Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Notebook of a Return
to the Native Land signals the shift in consciousness of the black colonial subject that
precipitated the first decolonial movement. Guébo invites this text to haunt Carnet de
doute / Journal of doubt. As a result, Carnet’s commentary on the struggle of Ivorian,
African, and even, perhaps, Breton-ian subjects within the globalized marketplace poises
itself suggestively. Published months before the second Ivorian civil war, the suggestion
of another historic rupture proved, at least, locally true. Within the same year, Guébo
published Mon pays, ce soir / My country, tonight, confronting the role that the French
and the UN, as a proxy for the West, played in the Ivorian civil wars.
…
Inevitably, Guébo’s writing maneuvers are not entirely formed by one influence
or the other. His commitment to producing an improvisational style, with the cadence and
various registers of speech, suggests the influence of West African oral forms, from both
literary traditions and the popular “genre of neo-orality,” zouglou. Adom identifies this
zouglou consciousness in Guébo’s nearly real-time poetic responses to socio-political
crises (Adom). More formally within the poem, this spontaneity also dictates the
composition of his responses. Guébo lets meaning develop within the act of expression,
such that the semantic value of a phrase often arises from its sonic logic. The spontaneity,
in this regard, betrays the influence of Surrealism, particularly as developed by Césaire.
With practices such as automatic writing, and the type of absurdism found in Guébo’s
allegories, Surrealists hoped to bypass a consciousness beset with the demands to make
sense of a world that was failing to provide rational outcomes. Guébo confronts a similar

73
dilemma. How, after all, does one approach ethnic violence as a topic for poetry? How
does one address the droves of overcrowded rafts sinking in the Mediterranean—what
Guébo calls the “seasonal suicide epidemic” (“À coup de suicides / Saisonniers”)
(Guébo, Think of Lampedusa, 12; Guébo, Songe à Lampedusa, 10). How does one write
poetry during what the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres has referred to as
“a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced
displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen
before” (“Worldwide…”).
Guébo’s work strikes me as a kind of surrealist documentary poetics. His poetry
does not stylistically engage the social realism that is familiar to documentary poetics, but
his work unflinchingly confronts the colonial legacies and socio-political circumstances
that acutely impact daily life in the Ivory Coast, in Africa more broadly, and, one might
expect, in locales around the world. Describing Carnet de doute / Journal of doubt,
Dakeyo characterizes Guébo’s work as a “vibrant call to revisit African history in order
to better direct its people toward a new time under the sun” (my trans.; Guébo). Guébo’s
calling to aim Africans toward a new time under the sun means that, while he may not
favor a realist aesthetic, the facts of the matter, and even the statistics, must be reckoned
with. As he designs his imaginary in Songe à Lampedusa / Think of Lampedusa for the
366 Africans killed at sea, for instance, he thinks of the others who have died attempting
this crossing to Europe:

La fleur au rafiot
Et sa belle gueule de statistiques
Sur les océans du naufrage endémique
Les-uns pleurent
17 000 morts depuis 20 ans

74
Les autres
Seulement 3 000
Comme si chaque mort
Sur cette méditerranée
N’était de trop (49)

(The battered hull would begin to unflap
its beautiful mouth of statistics
This sea of endemic wreckage
Some cry seventeen thousand deaths in twenty years
others only three thousand
as if each corpse in this Mediterranean
was not excessive) (46)

Guébo is uniquely positioned to poetically envision a “second independence”
movement, and to illustrate agency for “African subjects [who] seek a future outside the
prison house of late capitalism,” to borrow a phrase from Simon Gikandi (Gikandi, xvi).
Gikandi is considering the ways in which African subjects are able to fashion livelihoods
out of the amalgam of traditional worlds, broken traditions, imposed practices, and
overlapping modernities. This Afromodernity is defined by the Camoroffs in Theory from
the South as a “hydra-headed, polymorphous, mutating ensemble of signs and practices in
terms of which people across the continent have made their lives” (7). Part of Guébo’s
ability to so directly confront the sources and impacts of the abstract single-party system
of the neoliberal regime comes from the fact that he is its product in a way that the
generation of Afro-francophone writers before him is not.
Critics often note that accounts of African subjectivity are made from a distance.
Often, Euro-American metropolitan intellectuals play the role of gatekeeper (as I am
doing here) and, even if unintentionally, limit what is available to diasporic or
postcolonial studies. The risk, as Crystal Bartolovich explains, is that “the very real
specificity of various forms of (post-) coloniality may be lost to view, and non-

75
metropolitan formulations and ways of seeing silently appropriated or obscured”
(Bartolovich, 12). There are, of course, many African writers writing from first world
perspectives as well. As Alain Mabounckou points out in “Immigration, ‘Littérature-
Monde’, and Universality: The Strange Fate of the African Writer,” there is no singular
or universal African subject position. African subjectivity should not be restricted to the
accounts of lives on the continent. But for those living on the continent, such
international perspectives may seem adjunct to the quotidian struggles for a future on
African soil.
Axelle Karera, discussing Achille Mbembe’s 2010 book, Sortir de la grande nuit:
Essai sur l’Afrique decolonisée, characterizes Mbembe as attempting to write Africa,
from Africa (Karera). Guébo, too, is engaged in this endeavor. Though, for Guébo, the
mission is not necessarily to solicit a non-African audience. He himself has described his
audience as literate Ivorians and the young who are being educated, as well as the Afro-
francophone literary community (Guébo, Personal interview). He is certainly part of an
educated class with a keen cosmopolitan awareness, but his work is grounded in the
Ivorian, and a continental, context. “I am not proud when someone tells me that I am
good at French,” he says. “I have to speak it to show that I can” (Guébo, Personal
interview). In Songe à Lampedusa / Think of Lampedusa, Guébo includes a song refrain
in his native language, Dida: “Sè ni mon-ni gougouli / Sè non houn hoo” (“You hurt me
in a way that I would never expect from you”) (24; 21).
Guébo came of age in the 90s as the impacts of a globalizing market system led to
protests and political instability in the Ivory Coast, and he matured as a writer in the
decade that followed as ethnic violence and civil wars dominated life in the country.

76
Conversations about reconciliation and stability revolved around the question of national
identity. But for Guébo, this question is a distraction—or, questions of national identity
cannot be answered without confronting the very real forces seeking to use nationality as
a tool of isolation. Any “second independence” movement must find a transnational
solidarity, or restore a transnational solidarity that was disrupted by a globalizing market
system that leveraged the nation-state model to create competition between Third World
communities. National identity is another ill-fitting Western genre, a distinction meant to
privilege one form of modernity over another, and to rationalize a tiered system of
economic distribution. Guébo urges readers to reject these terms of economic inclusion.
The terms are not being written in “the ink of our times.”
His poetry is both a call to action and an action itself, presenting scenes of
decolonial struggle and recommending that ruptured post-colonial relationships, such as
Françafrique, continue in tension. Without the fighting, he adds, such an assimilationist
policy swallows Ivorians, remaining more French than African (Guébo, Personal
interview). Though aesthetically Guébo’s work has been influenced by the two
generations succeeding the Négritude movement, his ideological stance reanimates what
Wilder presents as the central political ambition of the movement. Reassessing the
politics of poets and legislators Senghor and Césaire, Wilder sees the assimilationist
politics of Senghor and Césaire as an effort to explode the Metropole by taking seriously
its rhetoric of empire. Borrowing from Adorno the idea of “radical literalism,” Wilder
argues that the sum vision of Négritude’s political ambition imagined a de-centralized
French polity. Former colonies would no longer be extensions of France. Rather they
would exist in equal relation to other allied “French” countries. France would not be

77
European anymore than it would be Caribbean, or African. In pursuing the colonial
impulse into its increasingly abstracted terrain, where he confront “the aggression of
Western economic systems,” Guébo extends this vision of an equitable transnational, or
even de-nationalized, community.

78
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“Worldwide displacement hits all-time high as war and persecution increase.” UNHCR,
18 June 2015.

Yépri, Léon. “Intertextualité et productivité du texte poétique africain : Fer de lance.”

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83

CENTURY WORM

84
CENTURY WORM ~ CONTENTS

1

Zraluo, Côte d’Ivoire
Waiting in Zraluo
Waiting in Zraluo
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting
In Zraluo
Dancing around the sublime
Some part of yourself, then—vast, repeating—
Les bandits
Landscape with certain prospects
Landscape with certain prospects
Landscape with certain prospects
Landscape with certain prospects
Routine
Epigenesis
Danger could be any of the unusually wild flowers
Danger could be
Danger
Invitation at the beginning of the Harmattan
Invitation at the beginning of the Harmattan
Far between villages Adam’s motorcycle breaks down
Getting stoned in the mission, waiting for permission to leave Abidjan
Appraisal

2

Birth poem (a visitation triptych)
Birth poem (a visitation triptych)
Birth poem (a visitation triptych)
Anniversaire
In the grotto, for Sarah
To your listening
To your listening
Carving masks
Médicaments
Like the heart still beating on the page before
Soir
Eagerness
Eagerness
Eagerness

85
Eagerness
Eagerness
Kounahiri, Côte d’Ivoire
A simple thing
Gouro name ceremony
Simple thing

3

Waking, midlife
Waking, midlife
Waiting in Zraluo
Waiting in Zraluo
Waiting in Zraluo
Waiting in Zraluo
Rain off the Gulf of Guinea
Century worm
Departure lyric
Burning these rags
Heckling paradise
Heckling paradise
Heckling paradise
On the anniversary of the twin leaving
An explanation
In the city

4

Ivoirité
In praise of domesticity
Intransigence
Aid
Bar-hopping
Adam
Waiting in Zraluo
Waiting in Zraluo
Waiting
Waiting
History offers no instruction
Waiting in Zraluo
Approaching
Into easy cargo
Into easy cargo
Into easy cargo
North to Bamako
In the Cocody Marché

86
The sorting grounds
Pebbles from rice

87

[M]e and several other boat owners fished nine bodies out of the water; six men and
three women. Five of them had bullet wounds, mostly on the chest and arms. Three of
them were very young; around thirteen to fifteen. There was one fourteen-year-old
shoeshine boy I know.

When a nation is down and out, the IMF [International Monetary Fund] takes advantage
and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the
whole cauldron blows up.

“rest, my cruelty” I thought

my ear against the ground, I heard Tomorrow
pass

88

89

1

90
Zraluo, Côte d’Ivoire

That early rainy season I hid behind my door to catch the children stealing hairs from my
hammock to sell to Dinni-Jo, the sorceror performing in Dorifla.

At the market, the apprenti cinched rice sacks stuffed with green and red peppers onto the
badjan’s roof.

Two passengers leaned out a window and Madeleine handed them gallettes wrapped in
notebook paper. Red palm oil soaking through her son’s arithmetic.

Next to Madeleine a woman caught the girl lowered by her armpits—smiling, I think, the
girl and the woman. Air stuck to the pink underflesh

above the woman’s teeth, at her ridge of jaw, alongside the remaining nostril. Skin
clumped at the lower lid of her eye, as if it had been soldered against further retreat.

Clumped, I thought.
Charles mended my shirt.

Nestor bent through his rows of cotton
pinching bolls into a shoulder sack.

Jean Dic arrived holding an agouti by its tail,

checking its anus for maggots.

I waited there along the road for the second, the rainier, rainy season.

91
Waiting in Zraluo

Under the shop’s tin overhang

Ahmed finished midday prayer:
To the angel on the right, to the angel on the left…

Embers calved in the metal trough.
The water boiled in his teapot

drawing the mint leaves down.

92
Waiting in Zraluo

I pinched the tea box lid around the pot’s handle,
poured a stream that thinned as I lifted.

Froth filled the cups
and caught the tea leaves as we sipped.

I waited for the bread truck, which passed, and I did not go
to Kounahiri for what mail may have arrived.

93
Waiting

Instead I fell into the habit of laughing

at Papa Petite and Vieux Pere, boys
nicknamed elders—Little Papa, Patient Father—

as they laughed, faces splashed, hoisting
buckets of water
to balance

back to my concrete house.

Beside the well I coiled the rubber bladder in its rope.

94
Waiting

Forty minutes, a sandy wash, then three blackened roadside rocks.
Barefoot, machete brushing my leg, the daba’s scoop-blade.
I find

the path to my field
no longer strung between parting overhead grass.

A late Harmattan gust
and the clearing fires had overreached.

95
Waiting

I walk slow enough to keep from sweating, fast
enough to keep the flies off of my neck.

Each night I wait to hear the drums. I boil yams.
In my hammock under the constellations
that I have identified—Robotic Monkey, Big Baby Pisser,
Bush Rat Chased by Flames—I listen.

Vehicles rattled through the village carrying weapons that year.

96
Waiting in Zraluo

I waited for my malarial fevers. They came. They left. I waited for them again.

I watch the giant leaves
of the tree behind my house, clothes
dry on the shrubs. I watch my latrine
bake in the sun. Flies and spiders inside

arrive at some conjugal ratio.

97
Dancing around the sublime

On the outskirts of his village Adam
spits pink tubercular phlegm into his hands.

From the scaffolding, on its shaky wooden stilts, he calls:

Just tell me to get down and I will.

But I don’t tell him anything. I never talk again

which you doubt
against the possibilities of reading this poem.

He is drunk.
And I have disappeared into this, the stillest point I could find—

leave him.
At least while I’m here with him.

98
Some part of yourself, then—vast, repeating—

Sometimes I climb myself. I hear Sarah
holding her breath
so that her breathing does not obscure
the sound of the rain,
does not push our bedroom, like a paper boat,
out the window into the cedar boughs.

I am
waving black flags of sand,
blotting out the nights I truly was gone,
nights I’d hopped the high wall of my body
to travel that familiar labyrinth
back.

99
Les Bandits

As I pass I see—the boy face down in the ditch, arm
cocked above his head, dust
purling in my motorcycle’s mirror.

As if he had run through the hectare of cassava,
then dropped from exhaustion.
Or had been clubbed for the shirt on his back,
as if in this heat he’d be wearing one.

I don’t stop to help.

Bandits are known to play dead on this stretch, or to throw
nail-studded boards in front of the badjans.

The old men at this encampment
sit outside wattle-and-daub houses.
They turn their heads, barely,
to watch me, engine-whine,

approach, then recede like some ghost
previewing the next life.

Or entering more fully into this one.

I spit the sunflower seed shells into the gust over my shoulder.

Hours from Mankono and hours from Seguela.
The half-life of each moment shortens.

The boy stands, straightens,
walks into the purple, spare-leaved stalks.

100
Landscape with certain prospects

At the edge of the canyon we gathered
the dead bird in a box.

We set the box on the washing machine, and

I would say (are you ready, love?),
began to build our life around it.

That colt that followed us from the rim,
love-sick, biting at our supply horse.

And in spring, the mare twisted
in barbed wire near the seven mile marker,
bb in her eye

now clouded into a white cataract.

101
Landscape with certain prospects

That was the case for us, too, wasn’t it?

The sanctity of isolation

a dazzling blue river.

And we surveyed it side by side
like the halves of the canyon

until you rode Dante
down the bright green shale.

Because you were first to speak,
let me finish smoothing the tablecloth.

102
Landscape with certain prospects

Eyes dizzy from tequila,
let me say, I felt him too.

Blue pilot light flickering on inside you
while I picked confetti from your hair
while that girl in the plaza whirled out of her formal recital.

All week, this glacial blue sky.

Our son, older than he is now,
running from the barn, leaves a trail of woodchips.

All of the cliff’s faces are changing—

the rational, the wistful, the lavishing.

103
Landscape with certain prospects

He’ll have pinned you deep inside yourself
for months, and under this blue sky

reaches to wipe a bruise off of his knee.

Sometimes I think we would like to have gone on like that.

Full of the small hurts that had distinguished us,
ready to tear the fuck out of each other,

we stood, bitter, blissful.

104
Routine

The stalwart shadows
and their branches tangle
on the side of the barn.

Their projection against its boards
like wings lathering— no,

knees to grass seed, racing

to not lie down first.

105
Epigenesis

Besieged we would lie

sand and glare

resolving to a dull roar

each of us

waiting for what we whispered

to come forward.

106
Danger could be any of the unusually wild flowers

Dogs and wolves share a denning instinct.
To dig down.
The straw they dig is a calendar.
What I mean is, my memory

is like my best friend looking down.
His bed-frame torn
into a bed-frame for dawn.

107
Danger could be

I mean that these stones

are rank with seaweed crusted in the sun.

Bare feet, you have known me,
a child with brown leaves pasted beneath my toes,

balls of my feet scalded,
whorls smeared.

The hills come down.

108
Danger

The hills come down, and we fill our cups
to keep those childhood stitches

from coming loose.

Adam, maybe we were in love,

our fingertips poised
to save those two boys

slipping up the beach of wet stones.

109
Invitation at the beginning of the Harmattan

And the small white dove who knows not where to perch;
And so much else, so, so much else

Each morning the wives go to the well shivering,
sunrise like flukes of blood in their pails.

On my mattress on the concrete floor
my mosquito netting, dirty where it gets tucked under.

This breeze that curls the leaves in

is like a sentence the teacher has given you
to write over and over on the chalkboard: I will

be decent. Children stretch their shirts with dew,
collect snails in the tall grass.

The chef de terre is pushing back to sleep
in his wooden fold-out chair, pushing against

the memory or dream of French conscription,

flak at first light, the parachutes
snapping open around him.

110
Invitation at the beginning of the Harmattan

The dry season begins here in earnest.
Northerners, having sent their harvests south,

will begin arriving to recover their costs.

Zalu’s son slumps on my chest, heavy, then
lunges to pinch my first gray hair.

Sewn against the wry interior of the skull,
what patience does it have for me? What do I tell him,

that a growing market has given his hand to war,

that the dove is a scavenger? Does he already know?

111
Far between villages Adam’s motorcycle breaks down

I sit in the tall grass
and gather the wind in my hair.

Adam cools his body
in the length of my shadow.

The ants carry our whispers
away through the dust,

a black river that also takes the day.

112
Getting stoned in the mission, waiting for permission to leave Abidjan

Below the railing two Sisters hurried back into the courtyard to the squeaky well pulley.
In and out for buckets of water.

The brittle leaves of a vine from the veranda scratched against the wrought iron.

A red flower is grown up through a nest. It marks a grave near the well.

Make the flower whatever you like—hibiscus, bird of paradise.
The Sister’s lantern did not send light that far.

Let’s say it was hibiscus, and pushed up through the nest’s mud cap.

The embassies have warned: wait for reconciliation speeches
before returning up-country, wait for the stack of machetes to be cleaned,

for the blades to be wiped symbolically by the president’s handkerchief.

Down the street, someone’s trumpet skips across the senses, soaking each
strophe of the evening—this war-marrow, the whole directionless scar of it

mounding like a knot in the trumpeter’s throat.
It throws the night into isolation, electricity cut in the city two hours ago.
The only lights are the jeeps of gendarmes.

At the bars, at the outdoor maquis, the prostitutes have until 9PM. Beyond that curfew,
they must be with a soldier. At La Hacienda, Lynda, with her platinum wig and white
stretch pants

sassing the other women at the table, then gouges the waitress in a “pidgin”—
French from Guinea, here; English from Nigeria, Liberia,
Sierra Leone…hotels, streets and shacks, villages, bars, alleys. Taxi destinations.
It is their own language.

Adam poured rum and Cokes and Lynda announced to him, “You
are ugly like shit!” He smiled without looking up.

In a lower voice she spoke more clearly so that the words suddenly
distinguished themselves from passing taxis

and ex-pats hurrying home to their compounds, the guard that will pull open
the metal gate, kitchens with refrigerators, air climatisé…

In the safety of this mission, as France evacuates its non-essentials,

113
I am afraid of returning, back to the States, which exists for me like a phantom limb.

Moaning, the woman in labor down the hall… .

Am I lonely? You ask to annihilate your own loneliness.
As in, sex without love? I have
burned another joint, ballooning that solitude

like the lantern’s glass orb, but blown to immensity

until the flame at its center is merely
one more bituminous speck in the darkness.

Already I am just a voice hanging these pictures in my blood:

the burnt-over rainforest, feather-and-eggshell
fetish tied to a branch
where the last shacks meet banana trees
and the trail threads out

to shuttles of footfall in the fields of cassava and cacao.

I am waiting to go back to the tantis who sell tomatoes that slouch in the dust.

Those four boys who pass, shirts pulled overhead for shade,

pronounce my name: Stade, Tttchad, Chado.
I slap their hands, except the last littlest one. I make him miss
because he’s got no front teeth. He laughs and skips after the rest.

They throw rocks at a dog with scabby, fly-swarmed ears.

The birds with hooked beaks bob in long lines across the air.

Lonely?

I want two lives
that meet, at best. Does my longing require loneliness?

The woman giving birth down the hall has stopped, though no cries have replaced
her moaning. The trumpet has tailed off, mere reverie. A wedge of light
presses under the door.

One of the Sisters knocks. Monsieur, il faut sortir. The doctor must share your room.

I rub the smoke out of my beard with an old shirt.

114

I should say that Lynda is more violence than sass.
The scar that divides her face would tell you that too.

115
Appraisal

When I am a man will you make me a crown
dada, make me a shiny gold crown
so that I can join the circus?

116

2

117
Birth poem (a visitation triptych)

Driving in from the desert, the city’s lights glow.

Needing to piss, she is singing tinkle, tinkle little star
and I pretend to be drunk, weave across the empty lanes.

The frontage road is cracked and patched with tar,
then sandy and dies out

where it merges with the freeway. We know we are close.

Somehow the night has divided something other than night.

These rainbows in the dark keep happening, she says.
Buckskin, chestnut, broken off and scattered.

Planks appear out of the dust and rubble. A collapsing cliff wall.

In that silent valley between contractions
she is dying, and ecstatic
as Young Saint Sebastian holds the arm of a stranger into the night.

118
Birth poem (a visitation triptych)

No one could doubt Bosch
for countering disaster
with the calm movement of the eye. The raft
of daylight glides

out from the corner of the canvas.
Sebastian’s finger
trailing cuts a small wake.

She says her body is like helium.
The sound of my voice connects her cheek to the world.

And our son’s thrashing and blood-dripping.

Not feathered necks
over the edge of a basket, musks rouge and copper banded.

Not a vase of dandelions.

Tiny ants carry straw to the sparrow’s nest below the hospital window.
In front of the entrance, a man makes long, certain steps.

Long, certain steps. The automatic door slides open, and closes.

119
Birth poem (a visitation triptych)

In the land of the revealed she leans in to rest her forehead
against mine. I do not close my eyes and she blurs.

In the dark, epiphytic gardens outside of Eden
cave salamanders take thousands of generations

to go blind. Large, uninterested worlds
inscribe themselves on the walls. Our world is vanishing. I am paralyzed, listening
at the doors after they have taken her

for his cry.

That anything returns
after being submerged so long against the breath of God.

The travertine of our son’s forming face,
its insistence—

you rekindled him. Through

the reservation of salt and burning water, you retrieved him.

Our little green-tomato eater, garden-wreaker. Indifferent
as the deer.

120
Anniversaire

Rain on the full moon’s high tide, rain
on the bulb of driftwood.

The first time I want to hear a voice
any voice will do.

The birds peck you apart,
pole star

weighted
somewhere in their guts.

121
In the grotto, for Sarah

And, when I am speaking to myself, I am always looking
for who will die, who has already

died and forages those spans I was able

to crumple in my hands calling them
‘the past’ or ‘memory’

but that are no more present or absent

than your grief, your wishing me back.
I am here with no reference for judgment.

All day
grievances arrive in long lines, and I listen to them.
I close my eyes

and remember how my mother first attracted me—
those garish, blue fires
of heaven’s guilt, inflictable—sure now
that that child is gone.

122
To your listening

I dip my finger into the blackness

and swirl, blanken a whiteness into which
I stretch

a thick blue drop.

123
To your listening

I root myself into this soil

until the stumbling fades out.

Until the branches wrap
one more season around the trees

and you hold, dear, even graciously, against me.

124
Carving masks

A butterfly darkens. Lowers itself from the massive white cloud
migrating north toward the Sahara.

The jungle is cut and the desert grows southward.

Beneath the still, blue co-efficient of sky, ash

slivers down from the spire of smoke. The massive white clouds.

They make this heat feel like solitude.

The desert’s in-utero numbness—how involuntarily
the world forms around us: wood glue mixed with paint, the burlap frays sizzle.

Senoubi ages the masks in the fire.

I should not be so satisfied bothering this upon you, as if your own memory
could not conjure so simple a perfection.

Beyond the rows of rubber trees, another massive white cloud.

You can make hunger go away, but it takes everything with it.

125
Médicaments

From the woman with her table of expired comprimés
I bought quatorzes, amphetamines for working in the fields.
The quatorzes shrank my scrotum like too much caffeine.
To the pharmacist I wrote prescriptions for codeine.
I crushed it into blue powder and sniffed piles from my palm.
From the man behind the electronics repair shop, hashish.
I rationed it across bowls of ganja. I spirited my village,
surface of air fractalling wherever I touched—until I was
reprimanded by Santos the sorceror a few courtyards down.
Mefloquine, the malaria prophylaxis, caused nightmares
(psychosis, if one was prone to such). Eventually,
who could tell overdose from E. coli, giardia, tuberculosis,
what I ingested from what consumption I turned out to be?
That final shock as I yanked myself from those walls, my
trained obsessions; they began immediately to reconvene.
Like snow damming its own melt, the cold sweat of adrenaline.

126
Like the heart still beating on the page before

the shoreline ruffles. Under the hem of a slip
the sleeper

is pulled out in the middle of his most beautiful dream.

Tremulous,
a wisher who calls out our desires.

Stacks them,
then rolls us out to sea.

127
Soir

In the dream, Adam, we are in the backseat of a car with one woman, maybe two. You
are making me translate something about choice, choix, how the first time is different
from the second—this is a test to see if I remember French, and I do, but mispronounce a
word which becomes another word and I am embarrassed and the two women repeat it.

128
Eagerness

The sheep bleats and I see her lamb ready to dash across the road so that I know this
collision is inevitable. The metal fender of my motorcycle plows into the lamb’s head and
the back wheel bounces over its neck. I grip hard and ease the motorcycle out of the road-
rut.

129
Eagerness

The lamb wheezes, inhale… . The mother waits for the lamb to wobble up and I kneel,
pulling a knife from my backpack. A woman from the cluster of huts stops shelling
peanuts. She stands, unfolding her pagne and tightening it around her waist, and starts
toward the road.

130
Eagerness

Blood from the lamb’s nose makes a paste in the dirt. I am not sure if this is a village that
I’ve visited with a latrine-building proposal. The knife isn’t for protection. I didn’t want
that. My whiteness, the extra-nationality that it symbolized, was safe residence.

At first I believed that.

131
Eagerness

I press the blade’s tip to the neck. My weight will drive the blade into the carotid artery—
in order to put the lamb out of its suffering. I do not speak enough Gouro to tell the
woman, and she doesn’t know French. But approaching she flips her hand at me, “Ka go!
Ka go Bidjan!” Back to the city! Go back to Abidjan!

It’s no secret, I suppose. That if you can’t live with suffering, or ridicule, then the walls
of safety lap themselves around you.

132
Eagerness

I was impatient. I wanted to bleed the lamb to death in less a minute. My belief was that
beyond suffering there is something better.

I proposed a feast that was equal part loss. And all the knowing guests off

working in their fields.

133
Kounahiri, Côte d’Ivoire

Scapes sauté in the roadside kiosk.

The pleasure of a liver, rim of blood in its bowl.

Nescafé sludged in the can with lait sucré.

Let me tell you, the hours are not fantastic.

Talk of mercy outspends itself.

134
A simple thing

Like that unexpected instinct
toward fatherhood,

this innocence mixed with the fright of passing.

Daisies have filled the pasture
since the horse’s death

and they warp in unison with the breeze.

135
Gouro name ceremony

Shout for joy! But do not wake the other dead.

Our friends below the silence are welcoming you.

136
Simple thing

Time is too large for me. Space too large here.
It isn’t the bird

that is beautiful, is it, but the scale that it gives to the field?

137

3

[T]hey took our clothes, which were in a pile outside the entrance, set them on fire and
went around dropping the bits of burning cloth on our legs and backs.

138
Waking, midlife

See them—the beautiful young men,
the beautiful young women, cutting through

traffic. I want myself
by how much I might make them want me.

Suddenly aware that I am looking-out-from,

that my own body has finally formed.

139
Waking, midlife

But to seek
less than what the body is capable of,

that is to be cast
into lifetime after lifetime, always love’s most recent creation?

I was an expert at sleeping on dirt floors
and drinking from gourds. Expert

at severing the palm root, pushing over the trunk.

Draining its pith for wine.

140
Waiting in Zraluo

Palms blunt the shoreline. From
the field where Nestor and I have cut paille to replace his roof
the monsoon clouds are visible out to sea,
bunched with lightning.

First big drops scattering dust on the road—Plunk.
Plunk—on my tin roof.

141
Waiting in Zraluo

The rain hits so hard
that the drops bounce back up and land again, like static
beneath the radio’s news:

another coup in the capital.

Burned cars and barricades are no longer
removed from the radio station, which is always taken first.

142
Waiting in Zraluo

Elephant grass burns in a long line. The hood of smoke
ambles more voluminously. Rain harder, less

flinching. The women cross the courtyard hurrying their embers into their huts

as the children line buckets beneath my eaves.

The corrugated tin herds the water into strands.

143
Waiting in Zraluo

First smacking the plastic bottoms of the buckets

then the sound of water stacking.

Even with these monsoons, the waves roll out. Graceful
backbends of saltwater.

Leaving home
has made me gentler.

At night, I scratch my heels against the bites on my legs.

144
Rain off the Gulf of Guinea

This act of remembering is my greatest infidelity.

Long drift-away from Sarah who is scraping plates, checking phone messages.

Our boys feed the chickens, climb the pasture gates. They carry forward,

vitality and desire. But, for me,

grief becomes a measure of time, an oil slick across these calm days. I should

prune the raspberry canes, press the windfall apples into cider.

But memory is an elegant lure—the moon’s hook

stopped in the river.

145
Century worm

Courting gets consumed in the violence which becomes mathematical.

We station ourselves where the misery will be most dramatic so that we might be able to
cite heroism. The splinter of witness imbedded in our bodies; we are bound to such
tragedy, keep it present in order to remind everyone that we were partly victim and, yes,
partly responsible; heroic also in living with that shame. Though now, confess, any
memory will do. Any memory held under our gaze, let go, then praised steadily. Already
I am the size of a man I could not hold.

146
Departure lyric

Adam, I’ll check in Bouaké at that corner maquis—

hot, no awning. I’ll be there by the stack of plastic chairs.

Broken-slatted fence gaps. Flip-flops pass between. I’ll check for you.

I know you are okay. The kitchen curtain, hem orange from tanti’s finger-tips.

Chicken grease-n-gristle wrapped in cement-bag paper. Ah,

Shigga Shigga—I check one time.

Fruits scatter in the road, soldier crossing. I check

one time, then am gone.

147
Burning my rags

On the haunches of sleep, still dreaming

the ceremony of naming.

Exhaust fumes and sewage,

vapors and gases. The dust is stiffening.

Desire relaxes the feeding ocean—he

loves me, she loves me…

148
Heckling paradise

Adam, you remember how the zoo went unmaintained during the fighting, as northerners
fled the city—

remember in our villages, those cinder block houses, roofless since the economy stalled,
weeds inside higher than the walls?

I close my eyes and arrange what’s left.

The Frenchman who belched at the alligators then dragged his Ivorian prostitute away by
the hip.

Two lions that rolled their eyes on the broken concrete slab as I stuck my hand through
the bars.

The monkeys won’t even play with themselves, you said, won’t tug their red dicks?

I wanted to rip out my heart and throw it to them.

Would it be too much to add the civette, how it paced with one leg lost?

You said, life is dangerous under these blue skies.

149
Heckling paradise

And me with my slight smile—
scuttle, attrition… whatever is wild has been wild
by a series of permissions,

by its willingness to hurt and be hurt.

150
Heckling paradise

Sorrow, strangely, hasn’t turned bitter but instead thrown me more relentlessly into loves.
Maybe it was the visitors who came and fed the animals
in spite of the signs:

Interdiction formelle de donner a manger aux animaux
Amende: 10000F plus expulsion

Adam, I think we were like guests who have stayed too long.
Who have had too much to drink—
oblivious but, we think, forgiveable.

Continually practicing one goodbye with another.

151
On the anniversary of the twin leaving

Vanishing Twin Syndrome, the doctor told us.
“Fairly common.” But standing in line to pay for groceries
when blood began to smear the blousy pants to her thighs,

not yet knowing twins, or that they could separate—
even later miscarriages (spine and white tissue,
sea creature dissolving into toilet paper on my hand)—
have not made it feel “fairly common.”

Unfamiliar, even if human. Between hospital beds
I thought of blood-sacks being gored inside my lover

and of that blood gushing, gushing from her mouth.

Our heart-felts deteriorate.

They scatter like magpies from a carcass. Not so fragile, not easily offended.
We celebrate that chaperone spirit

and our five-year-old stacking coins on the rug.

Jasmine tea and dark chocolate. Moldavite incense curls into the sink.

His thumb freezes each coin’s face as it floats to the surface. He looks
up from fastening a broken net.
Buoys of hastily recycled bottles dotted with pontil marks.

“I put a rock here,” he says. “Now it is winter.”

152
An explanation

I wanted the hunger to drop so that the warm gnawing could become full-throated.

153
In the city

Passengers catch each other’s eyes to the point of acknowledgment
then turn away. Adam
waits with an unlit cigarette on his lip.
Links of his watchband slip
to his cuff, sleeves rolled to his elbows.
The inside of his wrist is tattooed.
He seems, like the day’s particular rain, a shy performer.

Every time he opens his mouth things are assumed against him.

Dusk sparks, triangulates something, some kind of judgment
as any perseverance is, or will become.

154

4

155
Ivoirité

-In Côte d’Ivoire, term that has been used to define “Ivorian-ness.” The concept
promoted an ethnic kinship for tribes in the south and was used to assign a permanent
immigrant status to northern ethnic groups.

I blow out the lantern and the moths stop.

Heat wrestles open cotton husks in the fields.

My body adjusts for how it wants to be.

Slowly, the school’s principal pronounced, “I-vo-rian.”
This is the pun about a northerner—
“Il vaut rien.” He laughs. “He is worth nothing!”

“Soldiers went house to house with a list of names, those villagers accused of feeding
rebels, and slit men’s throats, witnesses said.”

Carte d’identité?

Five-hundred CFA notes hoarded by taxi drivers
are slipped inside vehicle registrations for the gendarmes
or folded in with passengers’ IDs by bus drivers
arriving at checkpoints.

Carte d’identité?

Cotton floss blows across the sandy road, flutters in the cassava stalks.

“I gave my ID card and driver’s license to one of them and heard him ask his boss, ‘look,
this is a bus station worker from the local station.’ Then his boss replied, ‘I don’t care…,
just look where he comes from.’ When they saw I had a Dioula name, the boss said, ‘he’s
one of those Burkinabés who wants to burn the country.’”

156
It’s the ghost in me who wants to be the boy, the boy
who wants to sleep.

The beetles float downstream, shriveling in their shells.

I make room in the heart for this.

“They beat us in that place for about two hours. Then at around 4:00 they told us to lay
face down and said, ‘it’s your turn now—look up at the sky and then look down at the
earth...’”

I make room but get lost.
Memories fade while my voice is led away.

Carte d’identité?

It takes a while to know—

Scent of kerosene.

157
In praise of domesticity

I once ate a cat to celebrate Thanksgiving away.
Gave an American dollar
to a boy after he caught the cat, knocked on our gate.

And we were careful not to ask where he’d gotten it—me,
three other Americans, and the Ivorian who’d found the boy.

Later, when the embassy gathered Americans
to ask what was happening in the country
it was easy for each of us to be cynical, to imagine

the war as something emerging from ourselves.
Cruel and lonely, intolerable as we believed ourselves to have become.

Even with one person holding the cat’s feet,
and another pulling back its head,
we were all bloody with the knife’s first draw,

clawed and dragging the cat back from behind a pile of oven bricks.

Years later, instead of telling my neighbor about that cat, I tell her
about the sound of that boy’s fist on the metal gate.

Swish my gin and tell her how his knock echoed,
looping across the courtyard effortlessly

like concertina wire high on the embassy wall.

158
Intransigence

Isn’t the fist just a confused star?

Aren’t these black strokes

just two arms hailing the horizon?

Two arms making many?

159
Aid

I walked to the nurse’s home. Assi is a foreigner in this village too,
assigned by the government like all civil servants to a region, a town,
a village where his first language is inutile.

Today we treat the season’s temporary ponds for guinea worm.
We’ve found the marigots and will bounce on Assi’s motorcycle
through field paths until we are sweeping the webbed vines with our hands.

I will mix chemicals in a bucket,

broadcast the toxins across the water then tell the women hiding,
tell them loudly in French, to wait at least one hour. They have probably
walked…no, not that far. The ponds proliferate with these rains.

Assi’s daughter, Linda, who is four
and dressed, as she is every day, in a satiny dress,
lies in the dirt yard on her back. A boy her age, underwear at his ankles,
butt pumping—he rolls off her when I walk through the gate.

He says something that Linda does not understand, and that I do not understand,
something in Gouro. He takes a few steps and watches me from the gate post.

White. American. Still
with no explanation for myself.

160
Bar-hopping
-Abidjan

There are more empty lots
than bars in this city.
Language is kept lean
but allowed to breathe.
Adam and I carry ourselves
from silence to silence.
Crossing to Nandjelet’s,
the neon reflects on the lagoon.

161
Adam

Adams, Adama, I know you,
but we are gone. I knew you, but not now.
Or did not, but I am beginning to.

162
Waiting in Zraluo

Slow enough to keep from sweating
but fast enough to keep the flies off of my neck
I learned to walk in those years, which were endless years.

163
Waiting in Zraluo

Mothers yelled and I woke in the thick heat.
“Ka dah!” They clapped their buckets down the path.
The children peering over my window ledge

dropped in chase. I wipe sleep from the ledge
of my face, roll onto the concrete sweating.
A nannie bleats from this side of the path.

164
Waiting

The goats’ call-and-response will come next—
hear the kid’s panicked nattering? The heat
will have emptied my water basin, mineral rings like years

of scree-marks on an expanding shore, years
ticked like rice across the bottom of a pot. Let
yourself watch. “Ee dah ka fei blei nah!” Eat
here with me, I shout. Benét stops. Slosh sweating
down her wrists, the bucket, streaking her neck.

165
Waiting

Drops pock the dusty leaves, brush through which the path

squeezes. Consty bumps, spills, then wades a new path
around Benét. Her gaze follows me. For fourteen years
like some purple-winged bird twisting its neck
for my appearance. But I don’t show. With this ledger
pacing the schoolyard where the cacao is “sweating.”
At the scale until the beans grow weightless in the heat.

166
History offers no instruction

Maybe I was there. Pond now shrunken by the heat,
Benét, baby on her back, strays from the path.
“The gendarmes picked on a particular woman and
grabbed her breasts and started pulling her in circles…
then told five boys to get an erection and rape the woman…
took their penises in the palm of his hands and hit it,

hard, with the buckle of his belt.” Am I, I am, nicked.
But you, you’ve not heard how stout the heat?
The president fumbles the bouchon de liege.

167
Waiting in Zraluo

The new president promises a well-heeled path,
to outpace the past. If futures perform, increment per year.
If traders, and intervention. As technologies sweeten.

The nurse’s wet tin roof. The pump’s handle and neck.
The roof’s glare paints your eyes shut. Years stammer, heat

breaks. Rain stomps the path’s distance back to its single edge.

168
Approaching

the hour

that picks the glass from the beach.

The hour that beaches itself,
inhaling the dry land.

169
Into easy cargo

The long long road with no other cars,
apprenti hinged on the back door.
Foul odor of the old man who has died
shitting himself—his wheezing cough
as he leaned to let me climb past.
Those next to him prop him up,
even after he goes silent.

170
Into easy cargo

Where the paved road ended, where the whole overloaded ride
sways beyond my village into the occupied north.

With polio-withered feet
like boiled chicken necks
the woman crawls her tray of bouillon cubes
and freckled onions over to us.

171
Into easy cargo

Children have taught me
words for less than water. That
in water, abandonment is possible; and every desert,
once a sea.

172
North to Bamako

Toward midnight and the bluish careen of desert escarpments.

Mare foecunditatis; sea of fertility.
Mare crisium; the sea of storms…

the moon drains its bright center.

If I had ten rooms for each day. Morning light crosses the dunes.

If, like those overturned cradles, I had a thousand gold bees.

173
In the Cocody marché

We tried on masks in Moustapha’s stall.

Tapha the Zamble: sleek, black-snouted antelope; horns
stacks of triangles in fumigated oranges and yellows.

Me beneath the Flali: snake poised above its smooth forehead;
face expressionless but alert.

Two Rastafarians strutted outside
denouncing the indignity of this commerce.

“Nan sa hel,” Tapha added.
In Wolof, it means, “drinks the spirit.”

“This work, ça bouffe l’esprit.”

174
The sorting grounds

We sort the last of our scraps into bins.
Potatoes that are not entirely rotten. We can’t take anything.
I deposit a jug of kernels on the gymnasium steps.

Adam talks to you, dumping his music cassettes and CDs
as absent-mindedly as switching clothes at the laundromat.

Then your body next to me. I slide my hand to your navel,
a pitted olive—something I’ve sneaked out of my dream.

Adam pushes the jugs of kernels to the sides. I worry
about the sucking in my chest.

What good is there in shedding so completely?

To see how far each of us can go into…
but “death” is a word I no longer use.

I try to believe that this fear is
fear enough
to bring us together again.

As love generalizes.

As if keeping you too tightly in this life
means there will be less of you in another.

175
Pebbles from rice

The air is thick with the afternoon monsoon.

All of the men that have housed themselves inside of me

are asleep. The fromager’s distant limbs

lift their leaves to the clouds. One of the young men wakes.

Amidst the fields of cotton and yams, bananas

and cacao, the afternoon heat is cut for a moment.

Knock. I will answer.

If you say hallway, if you stay, I will leave the others asleep.

The one who has woken

watches red sand ripple on the bottom

of my water basin. He dips the cup,

begins to clean the rice. Husks, chaff, float.

Entrez-vous. Prends le tabouret.

Assieds-toi. Please, stay,

at least until we have eaten.

176
Notes:

The book’s first epigraph comes from a Human Rights Watch report: “The New Racism:
The Political Manipulation of Ethnicity in Côte D’Ivoire.” Vol. 13, No 6(A) August
2001.

The book’s second epigraph is from Joseph Stiglitz, who served as Senior Vice President
and Chief Economist at the World Bank from 1997-2000.

The book’s third epigraph is from Aimé Césaire’s poem, “The Thoroughbreds,”
translated by Clayton Eschelman and Annette Smith.

The title “Danger could be any of the unusually wild flowers” is a line from Carl Phillips,
from the title poem in his collection, Cortège.

“Invitation at the beginning of the Harmattan” references the conscription of Africans by
European countries during World War II. Mercer Cook, in “African Voices of Protest,”
writes that “[t]housands of Africans—166,000 with the British, 141,000 with the French,
according to the 1956 revision of Lord Hailey’s An African Survey—served abroad and
witnessed that crowning example of man’s inhumanity to man.”

The epigraph for “Invitation at the beginning of the Harmattan” is from a Bernard Dadié
poem titled “Noir sur blanc” (“Black and white”) in his collection Légendes et poèmes
(Paris: Editions Sénghers, 1966), my translation.

The epigraph for “Century worm” is a conversational note from Norman Dubie.

The epigraph beginning section three also comes from the August 2001 Human Rights
Watch report.

The poem “Ivoirité” quotes from the Associate Press: “Government Troops Accused of
Slaughtering 120 Villagers.” Toledo Blade (Toledo, Ohio) 8 December 2002: B2. Print.

“Ivoirité” also quotes from the August 2001 Human Rights Watch report.

The quote in “History offers no instruction” is also from the August 2001 Human Rights
Watch report.

177
Grateful acknowledgement to the following journals where many of the poems from
Century Worm, sometimes under a different title or in a different version, first appeared:

American Poetry Review, Anti-, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Connotation
Press, Elephant, Interim, Lingerpost, Maverick Magazine, The Nashville Review, Prairie
Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Slush Pile, Spillway, Talking River, and West Branch.

“Routine,” “A simple thing,” and “Simple thing” appeared as a single poem in the
anthology Poems for Obama’s First One Hundred Days.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Fredson, Todd (author)

Core Title Ivoirité: the aesthetics of postcolonial rupture in contemporary Ivorian poetry (critical dissertation); & Century worm (creative dissertation)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 06/21/2019

Defense Date 06/21/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 20th century poetry,African literature,Azo Vauguy,Black diasporic studies,contemporary poetry,Cote d'Ivoire,decolonial studies,Francophone African Poetry,Ivory Coast,Josué Guébo,négritude,neocolonialism,OAI-PMH Harvest,oral poetry,Poetry,postcolonial studies,translation,West African poetics

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Jackson, Zakiyyah (committee member), Nguyen, Viet (committee member)

Creator Email fredson@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-390013

Unique identifier UC11264109

Identifier etd-FredsonTod-5449.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-390013 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-FredsonTod-5449.pdf

Dmrecord 390013

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Fredson, Todd

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA