African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (review)

Although, according to the Italian saying, translators are traitors (traduttore, tradittore), the translation offered by Chike Jeffers to help Anglophone readers have access to the seminal work on Senghor of his former professor, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, originally published in French, is ultimately an excellent piece that is true to the author’s luminous thought process.

There are, indeed, some variations in the translation. The original title, Leopold Senghor l’art africain comme philosophie (Paris 2007), is aptly, but not necessarily faithfully, rendered by the English title, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude. Two other variations are perhaps more significant. First, there is the addition of the word Idea to the concept of Négritude, which is likely to remind us of Senghor’s perennial contention that “ma négritude n’est point sommeil de la race mais soleil de l’âme, ma négritude vue et vie, ma négritude est truelle à la main” (my négritude is not slumber of the race but sun of the soul, my négritude is light and life, my négritude is trowel in hand–translation mine). Indeed, with Senghor and his Négritude movement, although philosophy may be understood as the quest for the true meaning of the world, the discipline can only be complete and worth its salt if it also implies the shaping of a way of being and a way of doing (la philosophie de l’action).

The second variation is the appearance of the name of Bergson, one of the great French philosophers and humanists who contributed to shaping Senghor’s mind. Indeed, of all the thinkers who had an influence on Senghor’s interpretation of reality and his worldview—Lucien Levy Brull, Marx, Engels, Frobenius, Picasso, Sartre, Pierre T. de Chardin, etc.—Bergson’s influence was the most forceful, seminal, and enduring because of the intellectual revolution brought about by his first book, Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience (1889). If, for Senghor, there is truth in African art that is itself a form of philosophy, it is truth that protects us from colonial negation. If, for him, African art is a metaphysics, a worldview, a feeling, a thinking, and a contribution to the universal legacy of humanity, this is so because African art is preeminently rhythm: rhythm not only as the quintessence of life but as that which subsumes and transcends life—Eden recovered for all humans and the reconciliation of all contraries. Life draws its energy in death, darkness heralds the emergence of light, and the whole world becomes a harmonious and melodious symphony of colors. That is why the oxymoron is a leitmotif in Senghor’s poetry. But then, oxymorons, simply because they merge and fuse things that otherwise are fundamentally incompatible, send this basic message about Senghor: the father of Négritude has never been an essentialist, in spite of the loud contentions of so many of his detractors.

African art is also the matrix of Senghor’s philosophy because of one of its major distinguishing features: repetition. The monotony in repetition is only apparent. Indeed, monotony is primarily incantation, the key to the hidden meaning of essential things: the hidden vibrations of the heart and soul pricked by the repetitious threnodies of the griot/djali but also the abstruse forces of the cosmos invoked and made visible by the priest/owner and energizer of words-become-Logos (the Word). Incantatory repetitions render the essences visible.

In this essay of the tutor very deftly translated by the tyro, Diagne has further entrenched his reputation as a clear-sighted thinker. This book will undoubtedly be listed among those that have done the most justice to Leoplold Sedar Senghor who, in his political and intellectual careers, strongly believed in, advocated, and practiced the via media, a middle course conducive...