The Seydou I’ve became today is the upshot of these influences:
Cheikh Anta Diop, Pathé Diagne, and Ousmane Sembène
Ibrahima Wane: The first question, Monsieur Ndiaye, is in relation to the founding of Kàddu. Under what circumstances did you come across the Kàddu newspaper?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: It was at high school that I discovered the newspaper. I even lent a hand in selling it, for there was a sales point at the school. But this sales point, which was run by an old man, only worked out for one number. So, I helped out with selling it, but without having contact with the promoters. It was more in the spirit of supporting the newspaper. There was also the image of Ousmane Sembène who, for us, was close to a hero. He had just shot his film Taaw. So my discovery happened over several stages. I then came to know Samba Dione, and afterwards Pathé Diagne. But my collaboration was not yet undertaken in a very formal way. It was more in the form of small contributions, translations, since I was bilingual, for I had mastered Wolof and Pulaar. The formal phase was to begin in 1976. It was from that point that I was asked to help them out.
Wane: How did you help out? In translating texts? In writing?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: Yes, by participating on the reading committee. But it was not very systematic. It was not the big organization then. We felt Pathé Diagne’s presence, he played a fundamental role. But it wasn’t like in a classic editorial board.
Wane: And how was the distribution handled? You came across the newspaper at high school. Was it distributed everywhere, in Dakar, and so on?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: I didn’t have control over the distribution circuit. I noticed that the newspaper was to be found... But I know that Samba Dione played a fundamental role in how it was circulated. He also took care of the finances. He was at the heart of the system.
Wane: For you, how did Kàddu's contribute to promoting national languages in the awakening of consciences? What did the newspaper trigger in you? What has been its impact in the struggle for enhancing national languages?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: What I can say is that the Seydou I’ve became today is the upshot of these influences: Cheikh Anta Diop, Pathé Diagne, and Ousmane Sembène. From a practical standpoint, it is they who have tried to come into their own. For if we had limited ourselves to theory, it would not have been clear-cut. They’ve made a fundamental contribution, for example, with the anthology of literature published by Pathé Diagne, as well as the scientific articles. The newspaper was a trigger but Pathé’s scientific output was more decisive, as far as I was concerned. The newspaper was the most visible part of Pathé Diagne’s work. But, in fact, it was a whole, an ensemble.
Wane: Twenty years later, you launched the bilingual general information monthly (in Pulaar and in Wolof) that seems to be linked to Kàddu. How did that come about?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: Twenty years later?
Wane: Kàddu was launched at the end of 1971 and closed in 1978. Lasli / Njëlbéen appeared in 1998. 1978-1998 is twenty years after all!
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: That’s extraordinary! But it’s true! (Laughs). I thought it was just ten years! In fact, since 1978, I had made the decision to continue Kàddu. It was a very clear decision, with an awareness of the newspaper’s limits. I said to myself that it was a first step, even with its shortcomings. It wasn’t yet a real informative newspaper that collected news to disseminate. Above all it was a sphere in which to promote the national languages. My idea was that it was possible to establish a newspaper that meets conventional standards and that would look like a German, an Albanian, a French newspaper. For me, a newspaper is after all a newspaper. For me, it was necessary to have a press worthy of that name in our national languages. My dream was to continue Kàddu in a new form. Unfortunately, I was only able to realise that dream til 1998. Despite all its shortcomings, it was the beginning of a process. It really was a great experience. We celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Lasli / Njëlbéen newspaper in 2008. It was a good turning point, and we had to persist. Which is what we did we did until 2010, when the newspaper closed. But we are trying to re-launch it by drawing on lessons from the past and overcoming those shortfalls.
Dakar, 2017
Translated from the French by John Barrett
[...] "Baye Tine was referring to his oldest son Taaw, who was just stepping out of the little room, wearing loose cotton khaki pants, with a filthy black and green-striped towel flung over his shoulder. Baye Tine moved aggressively towards him, speaking in a loud, harsh voice.
"Instead of looking for a job, he just lounges around all day. Son of no good!"
Yaye Dabo held back her fear. Taaw, a spindly boy with protruding ribs, had a pot of water in his hand; he set about his morning aplutions, washing his face and brushing his teeth with his forefinger.
"Tchim!" the father taunted his son. And then he added in a low voice to his wife: "Did you know that he has gone and got Goor Yummbul"s daughter pregnant?"
"Taaw, don"t answer him", Yaye Dabo silently pleaded.
Amady the cartdriver, harnesses hooked over his arm, whispered. to his neighbour Sy, who was setting off with his two little boys for school: "Baye Tine·s blood has gone bad. He spent the night with his anger..."
"Sons must obey their fathers," Mr Sy rejoined distantly.
He gave the cartdriver a cold stare, and then added for the benefit of his sons: "You see what happens when you disobey? Come on then, on we go."
Mr Sy, who was an orderly at the new town hall and wore khaki, worked hard at being different from other people. Amady watched him going off and said to himself: "The old fossil thinks of himself as a government official. Doesn't he know that I've been lending his 'wife money? Poverty hardens our hearts."
In the meantime, Taaw finished washing, taking absolutely no notice of his father's abuse. Now they found themselves face to face.
Glowering, his eyes dark with unvented anger, Taaw stared straight at his father. Baye Tine was enraged by his son's scornful looks. His blood was boiling. He roughly pushed Taaw aside, crying, "Hit me again. You're good at that... Hit me! You've already broken one of my teeth. . . Why don't you knock the rest out too!"
Yaye Dabo, deeply distressed by this scene, looked around, beseeching help. Her eyes met her son's. She shook her head, as if to say; "Don't answer back!"
Just two years before, Taaw had come to blows with his father and broken two of his teeth. Arriving home from the late night movie, he had found his father beating his mother again. Yaye Dabo was screaming herself hoarse, crying for help. As soon as they saw Taaw, both his younger brothers, in tears, clung onto him. Taaw broke down the door.
Inside the candlelit room, Baye Tine was beating Yaye Dabo with his strap, pinning her to the ground with one foot on her back. Taaw grabbed his father and punched him a number of times before dealing him a striking blow to the head. Baye Tine collapsed and fainted."
Semène Ousmane, NIIWAM followed by TAAW, translated from the French by Lynn Scholtz, in collaboration with members of the French and English Departments, U.C.T., Capetown.
Negritude, as it became known, was originally a West Indian creation; African confiscated and monopolized it in post-colonial times! During the post-colonial epoch an entirely different interpretation was given the term negritude. Under this blanket term a flood of literature emerged, the content of which was clearly deceptive. In fact, as far as I can remember, the term Negritude was only applied to a literary or political current after Jean Paul Sartre's Black Orpheus written in 1948. Césaire coined the term but prior to the publication of Sartre's book I knew of no political or literary current which went under the name of Negritude. This was done only after, and as a consequence of Jean Paul Sartre's theorizations in Black Orpheus.
In the 1940s, along with Césaire, there were men of the caliber of Leon Damas, who was also anti-colonialist. However, Damas' role was smaller than that of Césaire, who in fact dwarfed everyone else with his intense commitment and action against colonialism. At that time there were other black intellectuals in Paris who were defending the colonial status quo with philosophical arguments. Their writings were indigestible to the mass of black students in Paris at that time. The difficulty today when evoking Negritude resides in the fact that certain people use Césaire as a cover to fend off attacks from those who consider the post-colonial utilization of Negritude as an obvious imposture. This is why all discussions on Negritude must begin with a separate appraisal of Césaire, the man the literary genius, the clairvoyant political agitator and determined anti-colonialist. All of us who know Césaire during those years and who have continued to relate to him since then have an immense respect for his work, his integrity and lasting contribution to the emancipation of black people. Césaire cannot be associated with anything other than the struggle against colonialism and the emancipation of black people. [...] Through his actions and works, Cesaire exercised a personal influence on all those who came into contact with him. He continues to do so today over the younger generation."
Le Seydou que je suis devenu aujourd’hui est le produit de ces influences: Cheikh Anta Diop, Pathé Diagne et Ousmane Sembène.
Ibrahima Wane: La première question, Monsieur Ndiaye, c’est par rapport à la découverte de Kàddu. Dans quelles conditions avez-vous découvert le journal Kàddu ?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: Je l’ai découvert par le lycée. C’est au lycée que j’ai découvert le journal. J’ai même participé à la vente, parce qu’il y avait un point de vente dans le lycée. Mais celui-ci, qui était tenu par un vieux, n’a fonctionné que pour un seul numéro. Donc j’ai contribué à la vente, mais sans avoir de contact avec les promoteurs. C’était donc tout juste par adhésion à l’esprit du journal. Il y avait aussi l’image d’Ousmane Sembène qui était pour nous presque un héros. Il venait de faire son film Taaw. La découverte s’est donc faite en plusieurs étapes. J’ai connu ensuite Samba Dione, et après Pathé Diagne. Mais ma collaboration n’était pas encore faite de manière très formelle. C’était sous forme de petites contributions, de traductions, puisque j’étais bilingue, je maîtrisais le wolof et le pulaar. La phase formelle commence en 1976. C’est à partir de là qu’on m’a demandé de donner un coup de main.
Wane: En quoi consistait le coup de main ? A traduire des textes ? A écrire ?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: Oui, à participer au comité de lecture. Mais ce n’était pas très systématisé. Ce n’était pas la grande organisation. On sentait Pathé Diagne, qui jouait un rôle fondamental. Mais ce n’était pas comme dans un comité de rédaction classique.
Wane: Et la distribution se faisait comment ? Vous avez découvert le journal au lycée. La distribution se faisait un peu partout, à Dakar, etc. ?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: Je ne maîtrisais pas le circuit de la distribution. Je constate qu’on retrouvait le journal… Mais je sais que Samba Dione a joué un rôle fondamental dans la diffusion. Il s’occupait aussi des finances. Il était au cœur du dispositif.
Wane: Pour vous, quelle a été la contribution de Kàddu dans la promotion des langues nationales, dans l’éveil des consciences ? Quel déclic le journal a-t-il produit à votre niveau Quel a été son impact sur le combat pour la valorisation des langues nationales ?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: Je peux dire que le Seydou que je suis devenu aujourd’hui est le produit de ces influences: Cheikh Anta Diop, Pathé Diagne et Ousmane Sembène. D’un point de vue pratique, ce sont eux qui ont tenté de démontrer. Car si on s’en était limité à la théorie, ce ne serait pas évident. Ils ont apporté une contribution fondamentale. Avec l’anthologie de littérature publiée par Pathé Diagne par exemple, de même que les articles scientifiques. Le journal a été un déclic mais la production scientifique de Pathé a été pour moi plus déterminante. Le journal était la partie la plus visible de l’œuvre de Pathé Diagne. Mais en fait c’était un tout, un ensemble.
Wane: Vingt ans après, vous avez lancé le mensuel d’informations générales bilingue (pulaar et wolof) qui semble avoir un lien avec Kàddu. Comment ça s’est passé ?
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: Vingt ans après ?
Wane: Kàddu démarre en fin 1971 et s’arrête en 1978. Lasli/Njëlbéen paraît en 1998. 1978-1998, c’est vingt ans quand même !
Sey Dou Nourou Ndiaye: C’est extraordinaire ça ! Mais c’est vrai ! (rires). Je pensais que c’était dix ans ! En fait depuis 1978, moi, j’avais pris la décision de continuer Kàddu. C’était une décision très claire, avec une conscience des limites du journal. Je me disais que c’était un premier jalon, avec ses insuffisances. Ce n’était pas encore un réel journal d’informations qui collectait les informations pour les diffuser; c’était surtout un espace de valorisation des langues. Mon idée était qu’il était possible de faire un journal répondant aux normes standards et qui va ressembler aux journaux, allemands, albanais, français, etc. Pour moi, un journal, c’est un journal. Pour moi, il fallait avoir une presse digne de ce nom dans nos langues. Le rêve que j’avais était donc de continuer Kàddu sous une forme nouvelle. Malheureusement, je n’ai pu le faire qu’en 1998. Ça a été le début d’un processus avec toutes ses insuffisances aussi. C’était vraiment une bonne expérimentation. On a célébré le dixième anniversaire du journal Lasli/Njëlbéen en 2008. C’était un bon tournant, et il fallait continuer. Ce qu’on a fait jusqu’en 2010, année où le journal s’est arrêté. Mais nous sommes en train d’essayer de le relancer en tirant les leçons du passé, en palliant les insuffisances.
Dakar, 2017
DIOP: Césaire showed where there was a definite cultural alienation among blacks, more pronounced in the West Indies than in Africa, which required special attention in the struggle agains colonialism. His aim therefore was to recover the lost cultural personality of colonized black societies. He attempted this through poetry. Hence. he extolled the psychic factor as a necessary component of a new African cultural personality and national consciousness. Let's say he rediscovered, or introduced, the psychic and cultural factor into the struggle of black peoples to regain their national sovereignty usurped by colonialism. Césaire thus wrote about how the black world lives, feels and suffers. He attached importance to the different psychology of Africans, blacks, as opposed to Europeans. The poetry of Césaire, his literary creation, centered on the convulsions of the "black soul" when subjected to the oppressive conditions of colonialism. Militant action was attached to the new form of poetry among black intellectuals. Césaire's poetry was definitely not an abstract literary effort but was rooted in the suffering of Africans, blacks.... . In a famous line of his extremely sensitive, beautiful, violent Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Césaire wrote:
My negritude is not a rock, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day.My negritude is not a film of dead water on the dead eye of the earth.My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral.It plunges into the red flesh of the earth.It plunges into the burning flesh of the sky.It pierces the opaque prostration by its upright patience.
Published in 1947, these lines were the words of a profoundly, committed militant.
By the third issue, however, Breton and his fellow editors staged a performance that would dispel any doubts. A page before Césaire’s poem “Batouque” begins, there is a photograph of the poet in a white suit, standing on a rooftop with a few buildings and mountains visible in the background. In the bottom lefthand corner is Césaire’s name, with a poem by Philip Lamantia on the page opposite. By turning the page, the reader comes across a photographic reproduction of a sculpture by Maria Martins, accompanied under neath by the beginning of Césaire’s poem. After four pages of single lines layered at different lengths, the poem ends with a full- page black-and-white photograph of the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, crouched in front of an oversize canvas and holding a paintbrush. Lam, who is pictured in his studio in Havana, painted La jungle after visiting the Absalon forest in Martinique with Césaire while en route to Cuba from Paris. He was on the same ship, in fact, that brought Breton to America, and the painting that he is pictured in front of was actually on display in 1943 in New York City, where it received rave reviews. In this instance, the photograph of La jungle gestures toward a shared experience together in Martinique as exiles and, as it were, the transformation of that experience into art: the painting for Lam, the poem for Césaire, and the magazine for Breton.
All of the ele ments for the exhibition within the magazine are here, including the remediation that makes it possible to incorporate reproductions of visual artworks on the printed page. Particularly striking, however, is the sequencing of the images: Césaire appears before his poem like the painters who pose in front of their canvases. In this case, however, his poems have already preceded him in the previous issues, and once readers get to see the black man behind them, another one is already in progress, surrounded on both sides by a network of artists working within traditions from Africa, South America, and the West Indies. This rapid-fire exhibit of artists effectively unites them, making the poet from Martinique part of a diasporic tradition involving the painter from Cuba and the sculptor from Brazil, and all of it is orchestrated by a group of displaced Frenchmen waiting out the war in the United States.
I mentioned before that the presence of exiles does not an exile magazine make, and the same point applies here. It is through the device of the exhibition within the magazine that exile gets staged, embedded into its very structure from the sequencing and arrangement to the formatting and photography. Césaire makes such a compelling case because of the way that his exhibit gets drawn out over time, and it was done in this way, I suspect, as a provocation, the delayed introduction to a poet, who, the audience eventually discovers, is black, the same one who, along with Senghor, coined the term négritude during these years to describe positively an ethnic identity and displaced historical experience of a population that exists within and beyond national boundaries. The Surrealists may have experienced exile concretely and collectively during these years, but it prepared them to understand the legacy of a much longer history of this condition, which was connected with the colonial realities of places like Martinique and of poets like Césaire, who chose to return.
Envoi(x). By appearing in VVV as an exhibition imported all the way from Fort-de-France, Césaire was effectively brought into the Surrealist movement as a fellow exile, but the affiliation also worked in reverse, identifying the exiled Surrealists with an anticolonial struggle that was gaining momentum during those years and that involved the ousting of the Vichy government from Martinique in 1943, followed by Césaire’s appointment as its mayor and the redesignation of Martinique’s status in 1946 from colony to département d’outre-mer . And if, as has been suggested, VVV was an explicit reference to the VV (Double Victory) of black Americans fighting in the war, I argue that the extra V identifies, more subtly perhaps, the voice [Fr.: voix ] of poets like Césaire, the one who Breton accidentally stumbled upon in 1941 when he picked up a copy of Tropiques in a bookshop in Fort- de- France and immediately noticed “la voix de l’homme n’était en rien brisée, couverte, elle se redressait ici comme l’épi même de la lumière.” It was the same quality, in fact, that Suzanne Césaire recognized in “la grande voix ” of Breton, the one who, in his exile, was quick to hear “à New York, au Brasil, au Mexique, en Argentine, à Cuba, au Canada, à Alger . . . des voix qui ne seraient pas ce qu’elles sont (timbre et resonance) sans le surrealisme.”
Fascists and Nazis, it turns out, couldn’t stamp out the little magazine no matter how hard they tried. And this same resilience would be required once again in 1975, when a group of exiled Arab Surrealists in Paris started Le desir libertaire , an antireligious, antinationalist magazine banned from the mail and bookstores in every Arab country. Published in mimeograph, Le desir libertaire used the freedom it found in France to take an oppositional stance against the religious and political hypocrisy it identified across countries in the Arab world. Once again, the little exiled magazine was symptomatic of an intellectual restlessness and a place of refuge for the imagination.
Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form, Columbia University Press, New York, 2017.
