The Power of the Word/ La puissance du verbe (review)

Judging from the front page cover boasting a Nagasaki scroll from the 1860s by a Japanese painter who emphasized the “three Perfections” of calligraphy, poetry, and painting, one is not prepared for a book on the African and Caribbean Word, which uses the “dialogue,” after Plato’s philosophical writings, to bring together African and Caribbean writers and artists across the French/English linguistic divide. But the epigraph to Èshù, god of crossroads and disguise in the Yorùbá pantheon, the presence of some of its devotees like Nigerian Biyi Bandele, and the Akan adinkra symbol signifying adaptability soon assure us that we are on familiar grounds. The venue is Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, where these colloquia took place in 2005, concurrently with the October Gallery exhibition in London, which featured artists from various parts of the world, including Beninese Julien Sinzogan, who is paired off, in the Fourth Dialogue, with the Gallery’s curator, art historian Gerard Houghton. For our delight, Houghton effortlessly shuttles between the Japanese scroll and other artworks, of which we can catch a glimpse from the montage on the back cover and, if so inclined, on the October Gallery website. Houghton’s commentary reminds us that if we were originally visually oriented beings, we have now become “enthralled by the power of words” (70).

These nine dialogues for which writers grouped themselves in pairs move through the above “three Perfections” in considering not only the vibrancy of music, theater, and poetry but also the implicit spectrum from the logos in the Gospel of St. John and the Word of oral utterance to the more lexical mot via (mostly) West African linguistic vagaries such as the Yorùbá òrò. As the bilingual book title indicates, translation is at work. Christiane Fioupou spells out (in the Second Dialogue) the problems confronting the translator of a tonal and stressed language like Yorùbá into French, whereas the inimitable George Steiner (in the Sixth Dialogue) suggests giving out awards for “non-translation” (108) to writers creating in minority languages. At times, the “dialogues” do not flow both ways, as writers often delivered their preset texts. There was a lack of call-and-response or conversational turn-taking, but the seamless transcription of the dialogues aimed at maintaining the oral feel of the colloquia.

The dialogues are supposed to be “chastening to the academic,” as the editor Tim Cribb tersely put it. Cribb’s deficit in empathy with critics is such that, he argues, the critic should be humbled by the vision of writers who operate without the hermeneutic tools of critical theory and literary criticism, which he calls “a second- order activity” (xxiv). Even though I agree that writers should not be academic fashion victims, the discourse of some writers, who are also academics teaching in universities, would have gained in complexity if they had been acquainted with their peers’ work. For instance, Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare refers to the “grey zone” (2) between English and Yorùbá as a form of Yorùbá sekuseye, that is, “playing-rat-and-bird” (2), without realizing that both rat and bird are fully identified and indexed species, along with the various ways in which Rat mercilessly devoured Bird in the process of glottophagia. Such a traumatic phenomenon is best illustrated by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s “Erosion,” a tree-trunk sculpture in which the chainsaw slashes in the decorative patterns symbolize the violence of European colonization.

To this overabundance of languages to choose from, the visionary doyen of Guyanese letters, Wilson Harris, in the Third Dialogue, opposes the void and the intangibility of the gnostic word, whereas Guadeloupean poet-novelist Daniel Maximin stresses the absence of the word and the silence imposed on the Caribbean through the slave trade, and the subsequent attempts, within a “failed paradise” (49), to repossess the word and thus reenact humankind’s primal act of resistance against silence...