Maghreb--Sub-Saharan Connections

The commonly applied division separating the Maghreb from sub-Saharan Africa gives rise to innumerable problems since it denies the many forms of intertwining influence that exist. The Algerian writers Kateb Yacine and Nabile Farès refer to sub-Saharan aspects in their work. Hampaté Bâ, the Malian writer whose texts are infused with Sufism, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, a Fulani from Senegal, present themes that are quite similar to those of authors from the Maghreb. The Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi uses images drawn from sub-Saharan Africa while the painter Farid Belkahia, also from Morocco, is interested in the music of the Gnawa, descendants of former sub-Saharan slaves, incorporating techniques that come from Black Africa as well. Thus, the juxtapositions and shifting that the continent has known result in a communication of thought, which the arts and literature explore. On this subject let us quote Glissant:

Car en fait c'est de cela qu'il s'agit: d'une conception sublime et mortelle que les peuples d'Europe et les cultures occidentales ont véhiculée dans le monde, à savoir que toute identité est une identité à racine unique et exclusive de l'autre. Cette vue de l'identité s'oppose à la notion aujourd'hui "réelle," dans ces cultures composites, de l'identité comme facteur et comme résultat d'une créolisation, c'est-à-dire de l'identité comme rhizome, de l'identité non plus comme racine unique mais comme racine allant à la rencontre d'autres racines.

For the question, indeed, is this: the sublime and deadly notion that the peoples of Europe and the cultures of the West have exported throughout the world, namely that every identity is an identity with its own unique root, wholly separate from the next. This view of identity contradicts today's "real" idea of identity, in heterogeneous cultures, as a factor and result of Creolization, that is to say identity as a rhizome, identity no longer as a unique root but as a root moving toward other roots. (Introduction à une poétique du divers 23)

This phenomenon has been around for a very long time. It has allowed peoples to mix, to develop, to survive, and at the same time to delineate the special features that are theirs alone.

The African continent consists of more than fifty states that were born in the course of the twentieth century and of approximately eight hundred languages brought together under a few categories. The criterion of language does not define that a writer belongs to a culture and even less to a country. For practical reasons we speak of French, Indian, Chinese, or francophone African literature, but these are deceptive labels giving rather little insight into the work, even being harmful to it at times, and provoking any number of preconceptions from the outset that do almost nothing to elucidate the text. We speak of English literature and recognize the fact that it differs from American literature. But here, too, we run into problems since some authors stand between cultures. In most countries in Africa several languages are spoken, hundreds even (in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone there are more than three hundred). The creation of states brings together many ethnicities whose cultural differences frequently are great. Consequently, the choice of a language and its use are essential. They demonstrate an act that is marked both by the fervent desire to share thoughts within a community and by the pain that any choice in a multilingual context causes. We are familiar with the gesture of the writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, originally from Kenya and now living in the United States, who stopped writing in English in favor of Kikuyu in order to facilitate his people's access to his texts. However, few among the population are accustomed to reading literary works. Nevertheless, this decision is before all else a political and cultural act inducing a profound change that can...