2024-04-14 14:54:16
Opening the work of an international conference on the story of origins and major dates in the history of African and diasporic literatures, organized by the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco as part of the activities of its Chair of African Literatures and Arts , Mr. Lahjomri supported his remarks with several historical, cultural and archaeological studies which confirm that since time immemorial, Africa is indeed the origin of the history of Humanity.
However, he deplored the fact that Africa’s cultural, literary and artistic works, as well as its heritage and multilingualism, are marginalized, which requires particular attention to intellectual and cultural ecosystems, as well as to the different aspects of writing and their link with questions of language and national identity, explaining that African literatures have traditions in the composition of written or oral texts.
Referring to research on African literature, Mr. Lahjomri said that it is essentially focused on questions linked to belonging and identity considered by some as “flabby” while by others as “lacking in ‘origins’. This says that these two points of view “take an interest in African literary and artistic productions as an African discourse containing a human depth which makes it possible to establish a historiography of African identity, fundamentally attached to its origins”.
For him, it is possible to speak of African literary stories in the plural and not in the singular, whether written or oral literature, noting that the multiplicity of discourses is essential to understanding the different social, cultural and political dimensions. of all narrative forms in their multiple African or European languages.
For his part, the Moroccan academic and writer, Abdelfattah Kilito, also a member of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco, focused, in his presentation, on deciphering the meaning of the phrase “We are language thieves!” , repeated by the Malagasy writer Jacques Rabemananjara.
According to Kilito, this formulation is a claim accompanied by a nuance of provocation, pointing out the appropriation of languages which takes place without the explicit consent of the legitimate owners.
For his part, François-Xavier Fauvelle, professor at the Collège de France and also a member of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco, gave a summary of his work “The Golden Rhinoceros” in which he reconstructs in a captivating manner the richness of African continent.
The history of Africa is neither more nor less than what history always is, he noted, maintaining that along the way, “the historian of Africa has the obligation to stopping to describe a golden rhino, an everyday object, a prestigious archaeological site or to do a geochemical analysis that will be interpreted later.
The historian thus takes part in establishing the vestiges of history and in doing so, it is he who traces his path in the documentary landscape, commented Mr. Fauvelle.
On the other hand, Dieudonné Gnammankou, Slavic philosopher and specialist in the history of Africa and its diaspora, focused in his intervention on the African dimension of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin “who constantly sang of his happiness in being Russian and who never hesitated to point out that he had a second homeland, namely Africa.
This cross-breeding constituted an important element of Pushkin’s identity consciousness and personality, he noted, stressing that we cannot speak of the universality of the Russian poet without a detour to his African roots.
This two-day meeting, marked by the presence of numerous specialists from Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Benin, Kenya, Ghana and Eswatini, aims to place in a historical framework the major narratological registers of the African and diasporic literary space to access the diversity of languages, sources, practices and arts of storytelling. The speakers invited to the platform of this conference are called upon to exhume these traces, these signatures and these claims to make legible the cartography of the literary constructions of a prodigious continent.
This conference is also an opportunity to place these literatures and this mega-narrative over a long period of time with the challenge of revisiting the multiple African cultural sedimentations, between endogenous productions and external contributions, whether linguistic, ontological or civilizational, which have integrated African cultural heritage or which have been recycled into the African corpus.
Created in March 2023, the Chair of African Literatures and Arts of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco aims to promote the literary and artistic heritage of the African continent. It reflects the desire to rehabilitate African novelistic and poetic production which has been “the victim of prejudices having established its isolation on a cultural level”. It also aims to be a space for university cooperation and academic partnerships open to world cultures.
2024-04-14 14:54:16