English (anglais)

Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Japon.

The Dawn of Medieval Japan in Its Epics

Translated from French

The peaceful Heian period (794-1185) ended in a conflagration. Following battles of rare violence, two rival houses, the Taira and the Minamoto, successively ousted the court aristocracy, which possessed neither sufficient army nor police, and brought about the advent of the feudal regime. Thus begins the Japanese Middle Ages. This period of upheaval was such that “one would have to search in the German Middle Ages to find similar confusion.” The refinement of Heian feminine literature was succeeded by virile tales, full of “assassinations,” “stratagems,” “marvelous feats of arms” and “long-prepared vengeances” — “source of embarrassment and trouble for historians.”

With Rosary in Hand and Sword at the Belt

From this turmoil were born the “warrior tales” (gunki monogatari), which stand at the crossroads of historical chronicle, national epic, and profound Buddhist meditation. Their function was moreover less literary, in the sense we understand it, than memorial and spiritual: it was above all a matter of “appeasing […] the souls of warriors who had perished in combat” and, for the survivors, “of seeking meaning in the chaotic events that brought an end to the old order.” This function fell to the “biwa monks” (biwa hōshi or biwa bōzu), generally blind bards. Similar to our troubadours of old, they traveled the country, declaiming in a singing voice the great deeds of the past. Draped in monastic robes, doubtless to place themselves under the protection of temples and monasteries, they accompanied themselves with their four-stringed lute, the biwa¹, whose chords punctuated the melancholy of the narrative.

At the heart of the repertoire that these artists transmitted from master to disciple, a fundamental trilogy recounts the fratricidal struggles that tipped the archipelago into a new era: The Tale of Hōgen (Hōgen monogatari)², The Tale of Heiji (Heiji monogatari)³, and the most illustrious of all, The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari)⁴. The first two, while they may appear prosaic in describing how the Taira and Minamoto gradually insinuated themselves into military power until acquiring decisive influence over court affairs, nonetheless prepare the coming drama and already contain that “sensitivity to the ephemeral” (mono no aware) that will find in The Tale of the Heike its most accomplished expression:

“The world where we live
Has no more existence than
A moonbeam
Reflected in water
Drawn up in the hollow of the hand.”

Le Dit de Hōgen; Le Dit de Heiji (The Tale of Hōgen; The Tale of Heiji), trans. from Japanese by René Sieffert, Paris: Publications orientalistes de France, 1976; reissued Lagrasse: Verdier, coll. “Verdier poche,” 2007.

Impermanence as Destiny

A monumental work, a veritable Aeneid of the internecine struggles and bitter wars that tore apart the two houses, culminating in the Battle of Dan-no-ura (April 25, 1185), The Tale of the Heike nevertheless radically departs from Western tradition. Instead of opening, in Virgil’s manner, with arma virumque (arms and the man), the Japanese chronicle recalls from its first line “the impermanence of all things”: “The proud indeed do not endure, just like the dream of a spring night.” The characters, great and humble, are all swept away by the same whirlwind, illustrating to the point of satiety that, according to Bossuet’s formula:

“The time will come when this man who seems so great to you will be no more, when he will be like the child yet unborn, when he will be nothing. […] I came only to make up the number, yet they had no need of me; […] when I look closely, it seems to me a dream to see myself here, and that all I see are but vain simulacra: Præterit enim figura hujus mundi (For the fashion of this world passes away)⁵.”

Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, Œuvres complètes (Complete Works), vol. IV, Paris: Lefèvre; Firmin Didot frères, 1836.

Thus, The Tale of the Heike resembles a continual sermon, where all the vicissitudes in the lives of heroes serve to illustrate this law of impermanence (mujō) and the vanity of human glories. The case of Taira no Tadanori (1144-1184) is exemplary in this regard. Surprised by the enemy, he dominates his adversary, but some ordinary servant of the latter intervenes and cuts off his right arm at the elbow. Knowing his end has come, Tadanori turns westward and invokes the Buddha in a firm voice ten times before being decapitated. Attached to his quiver, this farewell poem is found:

“Carried away by darkness
I shall lodge beneath
The branches of a tree.
Only flowers
Will welcome me tonight.”

Hoffmann, Yoel, Poèmes d’adieu japonais: anthologie commentée de poèmes écrits au seuil de la mort (Japanese Death Poems: An Annotated Anthology of Poems Written on the Threshold of Death), trans. from English by Agnès Rozenblum, Malakoff: A. Colin, 2023.

A Mixed Legacy

This Buddhist sensibility, which permeates even the bloodiest scenes, is nevertheless not always sufficient to elevate a narrative that may appear slow, regular, uniform to minds formed by Western aesthetics. Like the sound of the Gion bell, the march of the tales is regular, too regular even, and somewhat monotonous. I regret that such illustrious narratives have not found an equally illustrious poet who might have fixed them forever; that they lacked a Homer who might have given them a variety, a suppleness eternally admired.

As Georges Bousquet notes, Homeric heroes often have “strange gaieties or weaknesses that let us touch their humanity with our finger; those of Taira never cease being conventional and cold.” While the naive Greek storyteller always lets a vague and fine smile show through behind the words, “the Japanese rhapsodist never leaves the epic tone and stiff bearing.” Where “the joyful expansion of the trouvère resonates like a fanfare, here one hears only the melancholic accent of the desolate Buddhist: ’The valorous man [too] ends up collapsing no more no less than dust in the wind’.”

15 min

Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Vietnam.

The Kim-Vân-Kiêu, or the Vietnamese Soul Unveiled

Translated from French

There are works that carry within themselves the tastes and aspirations of an entire nation, “from the rickshaw puller to the highest mandarin, from the street vendor to the greatest lady in the world”. They remain eternally young and witness the succession of new generations of admirers. Such is the case of the Kim-Vân-Kiêu¹, this poem of more than three thousand verses that reveals the Vietnamese soul in all its delicacy, purity, and self-denial:

“One must hold one’s breath, one must tread with caution to be able to grasp the beauty of the text [so much] is it gracious (dịu dàng), pretty (thuỳ mị), grandiose (tráng lệ), splendid (huy hoàng).”

Durand, Maurice (ed.), Mélanges sur Nguyễn Du (Essays on Nguyễn Du), Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1966.

The author, Nguyễn Du (1765-1820)², left the reputation of a melancholic and taciturn man, whose obstinate mutism earned him this reprimand from the emperor: “You must speak and give your opinion in councils. Why do you thus shut yourself up in silence and only ever answer with yes or no?” A mandarin in spite of himself, his heart aspired only to the quietude of his native mountains. He came to curse the very talent that, by elevating him to the highest offices, distanced him from himself, to the point of making it the moral conclusion of his masterpiece: “Let those who have talent not glorify themselves for their talent! The word ’tài’ [talent] rhymes with the word ’tai’ [misfortune]”. True to himself, he refused all treatment during the illness that proved fatal to him and, learning that his body was growing cold, he welcomed the news with a sigh of relief. “Good!”, he murmured, and this word was his last.

The Epic of Sorrow

The poem retraces the tragic destiny of Kiêu, a young woman of incomparable beauty and talent. While a radiant future seems promised to her alongside her first love, Kim, fate strikes at her door: to save her father and brother from an unjust accusation, she must sell herself. Thus begins for her a journey of fifteen years, during which she will be in turn servant, concubine, and prostitute, fleeing one misfortune only to find a worse one. Yet, like the lotus that blooms on the mire, in the midst of this very abjection, Kiêu preserves “the pure fragrance of her original nobility”, guided by an unshakeable conviction:

“[…] if a heavy karma weighs on our destiny, let us not recriminate against heaven and let us not accuse it of injustice. The root of good resides within ourselves.”

Nguyễn, Du, Kim-Vân-Kiêu, trans. from Vietnamese by Xuân Phúc [Paul Schneider] and Xuân Viết [Nghiêm Xuân Việt], Paris: Gallimard/UNESCO, 1961.

Between Translation and Creation

It was during an embassy to China that Nguyễn Du discovered the novel that would inspire his masterpiece. From a story one might judge banal, he knew how to create an “immortal poem / Whose verses are so sweet that they leave, on the lip, / When one has sung them, a taste of honey”³. This Chinese filiation would, however, become an apple of discord for nascent national pride. In the effervescence of the 1920s-1930s, it armed the criticism of the most intransigent nationalists, of whom the scholar Ngô Đức Kế became the spokesperson:

“The Thanh tâm tài nhân [source of the Kim-Vân-Kiêu] is but a despised novel in China and now Vietnam elevates it to the rank of canonical book, of Bible, it is truly bringing great shame upon oneself.”

Phạm, Thị Ngoạn, Introduction au Nam-Phong, 1917-1934 (Introduction to Nam-Phong, 1917-1934), Saigon: Société des études indochinoises, 1973.

In truth, beyond its borrowed or licentious passages, the Kim-Vân-Kiêu is above all the echo of the injustices suffered by the Vietnamese people. “The songs of the villagers have taught me the speech of jute and mulberry / Tears and sobs in the countryside evoke wars and mourning”, writes Nguyễn Du in another poem⁴. Throughout the epic appears this vibrant, often heartrending sensitivity of a poet whose heart beats in unison with the suffering that smoldered confusedly in the humble masses, as this passage testifies:

“The reeds pressed their equal tops to the hoarse breath of the north wind. All the sadness of an autumn sky seemed reserved for a single being [Kiêu]. Along the nocturnal stages, when a clarity fell from the vertiginous firmament and the distances were lost in an ocean of mist, the moon she saw made her ashamed of her oaths before the rivers and mountains.”

Nguyễn, Du, Kim-Vân-Kiêu, trans. from Vietnamese by Xuân Phúc [Paul Schneider] and Xuân Viết [Nghiêm Xuân Việt], Paris: Gallimard/UNESCO, 1961.

A Mirror for the People

The fortune of the Kim-Vân-Kiêu was such that it has left the domain of literature to become a mirror in which every Vietnamese recognizes themselves. A popular song has thus erected its reading as a veritable art of living, inseparable from the pleasures of the sage: “To be a man, one must know how to play ’tổ tôm’⁵, drink Yunnan tea and recite the Kiêu” (Làm trai biết đánh tổ tôm, uống trà Mạn hảo, ngâm nôm Thúy Kiều). Superstition has even seized upon it, making the book an oracle: in moments of uncertainty, it is not rare for one to open it at random to seek, in the verses that present themselves, an answer from destiny. Thus, from the scholar’s cabinet to the most modest dwelling, the poem has known how to make itself indispensable. It is to the scholar Phạm Quỳnh that we owe the formula, which remains famous, that summarizes this sentiment:

“What have we to fear, what should we be anxious about? The Kiêu remaining, our language remains; our language remaining, our country subsists.”

Thái, Bình, “De quelques aspects philosophiques et religieux du chef-d’œuvre de la littérature vietnamienne: le Kim-Vân-Kiêu de Nguyễn Du” (On Some Philosophical and Religious Aspects of the Masterpiece of Vietnamese Literature: the Kim-Vân-Kiêu by Nguyễn Du), Message d’Extrême-Orient, no. 1, 1971, p. 25-38; no. 2, 1971, p. 85-97.

17 min

In the Margins of Dreams: The Ghosts of Ueda Akinari

Translated from French

It is often in the margins that the most singular geniuses nestle. Son of an unknown father and an all-too-known mother—a courtesan from the pleasure quarters—Ueda Akinari (1734-1809)¹ saw his mother only once, when he was already a grown man and celebrated writer. Adopted by a merchant family in Osaka, his existence was marked by this original shame upon which his enemies never hesitated to attack him: “My enemies say of me: he is a tavern child; worse still, he is some offspring of an aged pimp! To which I reply: […] in any case, I am in my mountain the sole general and I know no peer there”. Added to this was an infirmity of the fingers² that prevented him from perfect calligraphy, paradoxically orienting him, the proud young man little inclined to commerce, toward a relentless intellectual and literary quest. From this troubled existence, from this raw sensitivity, would be born his masterpiece, the Tales of Rain and Moon (Ugetsu monogatari)³.

Of Sources and Dreams

Published in 1776, these nine fantastic tales mark a turning point in the literature of the Edo period. Akinari, breaking with the “tales of the floating world”, a frivolous genre then in vogue, inaugurates the manner of the yomihon, or “reading book”, aimed at a cultivated public to whom he offers a space of dream and escape. The originality of his approach lies in a masterful synthesis between Chinese narrative traditions and Japanese literary heritage. While he draws abundantly from collections of fantastic tales from the Ming and Qing dynasties, such as the Tales by Candlelight (Jiandeng xinhua), he never contents himself with a simple translation or servile adaptation. Each tale is entirely Japanized, transposed into a national historical and geographical framework and, above all, transfigured by a unique melancholy.

To continental sources, Akinari blends with consummate art the reminiscences of his country’s classical literature. The influence of nō theater is everywhere perceptible, not only in the gestures and physiognomies—vengeful spirits, warrior ghosts, desperate lovers—but also in the very composition of the tales, which skillfully arrange the distancing from the world and the dramatic progression up to the appearance of the supernatural. Similarly, the elegant and flowery prose (gabun) is a vibrant homage to the golden age of the Heian period, and particularly to the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari).

A Ghostly Humanity

What strikes in the Tales of Rain and Moon is that the world of spirits is never entirely cut off from that of the living. Far from being simple monsters, Akinari’s ghosts are endowed with a complex personality, often richer and more original than that of the humans they come to haunt. Their appearances are motivated by powerfully human feelings: fidelity beyond death, scorned love, devouring jealousy, or inextinguishable hatred. The specter is often merely the extension of a passion that could not be satisfied or appeased in the earthly world. Its voice, coming from beyond the grave, speaks to us with troubling modernity about ourselves.

Thus with Miyagi, the abandoned wife who, in The House Among the Reeds, waits seven years for the return of her husband who left to seek his fortune. Dead from exhaustion and sorrow, she appears to him one last night before becoming nothing more than a burial mound upon which this heartbreaking poem is found:

“So it was,
I knew it and yet my heart
Lulled itself with illusions:
In this world, until this day,
Was this, then, the life I have lived?”

Ueda, Akinari. Contes de pluie et de lune (Ugetsu monogatari) (Tales of Rain and Moon), trans. from Japanese by René Sieffert. Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Connaissance de l’Orient. Série japonaise”, 1956.

The fantastic in Akinari is therefore not a simple mechanism of horror; it is the magnifying mirror of the soul’s torments. Specters come to remind the living of their failings, the moral consequence of their acts. The vengeance of a betrayed wife or the loyalty of a friend who takes his own life to keep his promise are so many parables about the force of commitments and the fatality of passions.

The Chiseler of Chimeras

Akinari’s style is undoubtedly what confers upon the work its permanence. He combines the nobility of classical language with a sense of rhythm inherited from nō, creating a singular music that bewitches the reader. The very title, Ugetsu, “rain and moon”, translates this bewitching melody into an image—that of moonlight blurring in the murmur of fine rain, establishing an ideal setting for supernatural manifestations, a spectral world where the boundaries between dream and reality fade.

An independent artist, Akinari took nearly ten years to polish his masterpiece, a sign of the importance he attached to it. An intellectual independence that also manifested itself in his virulent polemics with the other great scholar of his time, Motoori Norinaga, a nationalist before his time. While the latter erected Japan’s ancestral myths as “the only truth”, Akinari mocked this ideal by asserting that “in any country, the spirit of the nation is its stench”. Thus, this son of a courtesan knew how, through the sole force of his art, to establish himself as a central figure, a “perfect anarchist”⁴ who, by playing with conventions, brought the fantastic tale to an unequaled degree of refinement. His singularities, which required particular courage in a Japanese society that erected conformity as the supreme virtue, did not fail to fascinate Yukio Mishima, who confesses in Modern Japan and the Samurai Ethics (Hagakure nyūmon) to having carried Akinari’s work with him “during the bombings” and admired above all his “deliberate anachronism”. The Tales of Rain and Moon are not merely an anthology of the genre; they are a reinvented image of storytelling in the Japanese manner, where the marvelous and the macabre compete with the most delicate poetry, leaving the reader under the lasting charm of a strange and magnificent dream.

8 min

Mappemonde mettant en évidence l’Iran et la France.

From Isfahan to Ménilmontant: The Journey of Ali Erfan

Translated from French

The Orient, with its mysteries and torments, has always nourished the Western imagination. But what do we really know about contemporary Persia, about this land of poetry that became the theater of a revolution that disrupted the world order? It is a window onto this Iran, steeped in contradictions, that the work of Ali Erfan opens for us—writer and filmmaker¹ born in Isfahan in 1946, and forced into exile in France since 1981. His work, written in a French language he has made his own, is a poignant testimony of rare finesse about the tragedy of a people and the condition of exile.

Writing as Resistance

In his art of probing souls tormented by tyranny and the absurdity of fanaticism, many see in Ali Erfan the worthy heir of the great Sadegh Hedayat². His writing, of implacable rawness, plunges us into a dark and oppressive universe, almost Kafkaesque—that of a society delivered to the terror established by the “hallucinatory philosophy of the imams”: whether it be the persecuted women of Ma femme est une sainte (My Wife Is a Saint), the oppressed artists of Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), or the cursed figures of Les Damnées du paradis (The Damned of Paradise). The death that permeates these stories is not that of violence alone, but of the totalitarian State that engenders it, this edifice that, to erect itself, needs a cement of bodies. It is this same cement that we find in Sans ombre (Without Shadow), a powerful testimony about the Iran-Iraq War, this “appalling charnel house,” comparable to the trench battles of the Great War, which drank the blood of hundreds of thousands of men:

“There were also volunteers who, with the idea of dying, excavated the ground to make holes like graves, which they called ’bridal chamber for the lovers of God.’

But it mattered little what meaning each gave to his temporary dwelling; he had to dig his hole in the direction of Mecca and not in relation to the enemy who was facing him.”

Erfan, Ali. Sans ombre (Without Shadow), La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “Regards croisés,” 2017.

If Ali Erfan does not have the joy of believing, that is his defect, or rather his misfortune. But this misfortune stems from a very grave cause, I mean the crimes he has seen committed in the name of a religion whose precepts have been distorted and diverted from their true meaning, faith becoming madness:

“He opened one of the thick files without haste, removed a sheet, examined it, and suddenly cried out:

—Lock this woman in a burlap sack, and throw stones at her until she dies like a dog. […]

And he continued, repeating the same gesture, tossing aside the writing of one who had traveled to God, seizing another […]. He suddenly stood up, standing on the table, and cried like a madman:

—Let the father strangle his son with his own hands…”

Erfan, Ali. Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), trans. from Persian by the author and Michèle Cristofari, La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “L’Aube poche,” 1990.

Of Exile and Memory

Exile is a wound that never quite closes. In Adieu Ménilmontant (Farewell Ménilmontant), Ali Erfan leaves his native Persia for a time to speak to us of France, his land of refuge. The novel is a tribute to the rue de Ménilmontant, that cosmopolitan quarter of Paris where he lived and worked as a photographer. It is a tender and sometimes cruel chronicle of the life of the “lost souls of the world,” those pariahs of life who, like him, have washed up in this refuge. However, even in France, Iran is never far away. The smells, the sounds, the faces, everything recalls the lost Orient. A memory that, to fight against oblivion, selects from the past the most salient features.

Each time he undertakes to write, Ali Erfan seeks the time of his early youth. He tastes the ecstasy of recollection, the pleasure of finding lost and forgotten things in his native language. And, as this recovered memory does not faithfully recount what happened, it is the true writer; and Ali Erfan is its first reader:

“Now, I know its language [French]. But I don’t want to speak. […] Madame says: ’My dear, say: jasmine.’ I don’t want to. I want to pronounce the name of the flower that was in our house. What was it called? Why don’t I remember? That large flower that grew in the corner of the courtyard. That climbed, that turned. It climbed over the door of our house, and it fell into the street. […] What was it called? It smelled good. Madame says again: ’Say, my dear.’ I cry, I cry…”

Erfan, Ali. Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), trans. from Persian by the author and Michèle Cristofari, La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “L’Aube poche,” 1990.

The work of Ali Erfan, at once singular and universal, plunges us into an oppressive Orient, where the leaden cloak of a tentacular theocracy weighs heavy. Certainly, one might fear that the writer of exile serves, despite himself, only to feed the clichés of “Western Islamophobia” — a thesis at the heart of “Is Exile Literature a Minor Literature?” by Hessam Noghrehchi. But whoever saw only this side of things would miss the essential point; for Persian culture has always made separation and exile the source of its purest song. Such is the lesson of Rûmî’s flute, whose sublime music is born from its stem torn from its native reed bed: “Listen to the reed flute tell a story; it laments the separation: ’Since I was cut from the reed bed, my complaint makes man and woman groan’”. The voice of Ali Erfan, like that of this flute, is thus born not despite the crack, but indeed through it, transmuting the brutality of reality into a poignant melody.

11 min

Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Sénégal, la France, le Cameroun et la Guinée.

Coups de pilon by David Diop, or the Word Made Flesh and Fury

Translated from French

The work of David Diop (1927-1960)¹, as brief as it was brilliant, remains one of the most gripping testimonies of militant negritude poetry. His sole collection, Coups de pilon (Hammer Blows, 1956), resonates with undiminished force, hammering consciences and celebrating the indefatigable hope of an Africa standing tall. Born in Bordeaux to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother, Diop experienced Africa less through prolonged residence than through dream and heritage, which takes nothing away from the power of a voice that knew how to echo the sufferings and revolts of an entire continent.

A Poetry of Revolt

Diop’s poetry is above all a cry. A cry of refusal in the face of colonial iniquity, a cry of pain in the face of his people’s humiliation. In a direct style, stripped of all superfluous ornament, the poet delivers his truths like so many “hammer blows” intended, in his own words, to “burst the eardrums of those who do not want to hear and crack like whip strokes on the egoisms and conformisms of order”. Each poem is an indictment drawing up the bloody balance sheet of the tutelary era. Thus, in “The Vultures,” he denounces the hypocrisy of the civilizing mission:

“In those days
With shouts of civilization
With holy water on domesticated brows
The vultures built in the shadow of their talons
The bloody monument of the tutelary era.”

Diop, David, Coups de pilon (Hammer Blows), Paris: Présence africaine, 1973.

Violence is omnipresent, not only in the theme, but in the very rhythm of the phrase, sober and sharp as a blade. The famous and laconic poem “The Time of Martyrdom” is the most poignant illustration, a veritable litany of dispossession and colonial crime: “The White killed my father / For my father was proud / The White raped my mother / For my mother was beautiful”. These unadorned verses, giving the text its striking force, have disconcerted some critics. Sana Camara sees in them, for example, a “simplicity of style that borders on poverty, even if the poet attempts to captivate us with the irony of events”. Yet it is undoubtedly in this economy of means, this refusal of artifice, that the brutality of the subject reaches its paroxysm.

Africa at the Heart of the Word

If revolt is the engine of his writing, Africa is its soul. She is that idealized motherland, glimpsed through the prism of nostalgia and dream. The opening apostrophe of the poem “Africa” — “Africa, my Africa” — is a declaration of belonging and filiation. This Africa, he admits to having “never known”, but his gaze is “full of your blood”. She is by turns the loving and scorned mother, the dancer with a body of “black pepper”, and the beloved woman, Rama Kam, whose sensual beauty is a celebration of the entire race.

It is in this dreamed Africa that the poet draws the strength of hope. To the despair inspired by the “back that bends / And lies down under the weight of humility”, a voice responds, prophetic:

“Impetuous son, that robust and young tree
That tree over there
Splendidly alone in the midst of white and withered flowers
Is Africa, your Africa that grows again
That grows again patiently obstinately
And whose fruits gradually have
The bitter taste of freedom.”

Diop, David, Coups de pilon (Hammer Blows), Paris: Présence africaine, 1973.

A Militant Humanism

To reduce Diop’s work to an “anti-racist racism”², to borrow Sartre’s formula, would be to misunderstand its universal scope. If the denunciation of Black oppression is the starting point, Diop’s struggle embraces all the wretched of the earth. His poetry is a clamor that rises “from Africa to the Americas” and his solidarity extends to the “docker of Suez and the coolie of Hanoi”, to the “Vietnamese lying in the rice field” and the “convict of the Congo brother of the lynched of Atlanta”.

This fraternity in suffering and struggle is the mark of a profound humanism. The poet does not content himself with cursing, he calls for collective action, for unanimous refusal embodied by the final injunction of “Challenge to Force”: “Stand up and cry: NO!”. For, ultimately, beyond the violence of the word, David Diop’s song is “guided only by love”, the love of a free Africa within a reconciled humanity.

The work of David Diop, cut down in full bloom by a tragic death that deprived us of his forthcoming manuscripts, retains a burning relevance. Léopold Sédar Senghor, his former teacher, hoped that with age, the poet would go “humanizing himself”. One can affirm that this humanism was already at the heart of his revolt. Coups de pilon (Hammer Blows) remains an essential text, a classic work of African poetry, a viaticum for all youth yearning for justice and freedom.

“That is already a lot for a work that is, all things considered, quite limited, for a first and—alas—last work. But there are texts that go to the heart of things and speak to the entire being. Lyrical, sentimental, expression of a personal demand and anger, this poetry ”launched gravely to assault chimeras“ […] is indeed one of those that will eternally, to plagiarize Césaire, defy ”the lackeys of order“ [that is, the agents of repression], one of those that […] will always obstinately remind us that ”the work of man has only just begun“, that happiness is always to be conquered, more beautiful and stronger.”

Société africaine de culture (ed.), David Diop, 1927-1960 : témoignages, études (David Diop, 1927-1960: Testimonies, Studies), Paris: Présence africaine, 1983.

7 min

The Dawn of Medieval Japan in Its Epics

With Rosary in Hand and Sword at the Belt

Impermanence as Destiny

A Mixed Legacy

The Kim-Vân-Kiêu, or the Vietnamese Soul Unveiled

The Epic of Sorrow

Between Translation and Creation

A Mirror for the People

In the Margins of Dreams: The Ghosts of Ueda Akinari

Of Sources and Dreams

A Ghostly Humanity

The Chiseler of Chimeras

From Isfahan to Ménilmontant: The Journey of Ali Erfan

Writing as Resistance

Of Exile and Memory

Coups de pi­lon by David Diop, or the Word Made Flesh and Fury

A Poetry of Revolt

Africa at the Heart of the Word

A Militant Humanism

Coups de pilon by David Diop, or the Word Made Flesh and Fury