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INTRODUCTION
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Parce que je me dis que je prends cette langue que je vais utiliser et puis,
[Because I tell myself that I'll take this language that I'm going to use and perhaps I'll try to transform it, to say in French what it is that I want to say.]
— Tanella Boni
This collection of verse, The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn by Tanella Boni, is extraordinary, combining historical knowledge with skilled craft. But if it hadn't been translated from the French, you never would have read it, even though Boni is a renowned West African writer who has published widely. This is where we start, because any Western reader will ask why when offered the work of a non-Western writer.
Most American readers only consume literature published in English. This is especially true when it comes to African literature. African novelist and critic Ngugi Wa Thiong'o has been averse to writing in the European colonizer's language, and this remains an appropriate concern. The emphasis on English shields the lives of non-Anglophone Africans from American readers, but the practical issue is that many American readers are not fluent in other languages. (I am not, though I took those required two years of foreign language back in college.)
Translation is important, but history and cultural connections are too. For example, the Black Arts Movement ended more than forty years ago, and we are more than eighty years past the Harlem Renaissance. Writers of both eras were prolific, producing work that traversed waters to connect with others of African descent around the globe, and in this twenty-first-century moment, we bear witness to a (re)new(ed) literary era that privileges the lives, history, and political possibilities of black people. Here we are again, despite some critics' premature arguments against "race writing." It is an exciting time. However, although this current, racialized iteration resembles similar eras, for many in the United States, black poetry now means only North American poetry, and it does not refer to the rich, global diaspora of poets of African descent.
Consider French African writers. Few American readers are familiar with the Martiniquais Aimé Césaire, who coined the term "Negritude" to apply to African literature overtly concerned with African lives, or with the Senegalese Léopold Senghor, who dusted off "francophone," an archaic term, and repurposed it to apply to literature of French Africa. Along with Léon Damas, Césaire and Senghor are known as the trois pères — the three fathers — of the Negritude movement, which began in the thirties. Yet as unfamiliar as many American readers are with these men, even fewer know of Paulette and Jane Nardal, the Caribbean sisters who introduced African American writers to French African writers in Paris.
Even black readers in America mostly consume books in English, including when they read African literature, and most of the literature by Africans published (or made available) in the United States was originally written in English. One must be curious indeed to find African female writers translated from French to English, and even more so to find these writers' translated poetry — that eternal literary stepchild.
This is precisely why the work of Tanella Boni is so important. Her publication record is substantial, and she is critically acclaimed as well. Those qualifications represent obvious reasons for picking up this book. And I've argued that in this twenty-first-century black literary moment, a reconnection with African writers is needed, and not only those who write in English. As many American readers, black or otherwise, face the meaning of history, considering its impact on black people globally, Boni's work offers monumental concerns.
A richer understanding of Boni's verse arises with some background context, and fortunately her translator, Todd Fredson, has done a superlative job (along with presenting her poetry in English). His "Translator's Note" (included in this volume) gives an overview of contemporary history of Côte d'Ivoire and, in particular, the political corruption or discord in that country. Like earlier Negritude and Francophone poets, Boni is concerned with the Pan-African impulse, as evidenced by her poetry collection on Gorée Island. Although located in Senegal and not Côte d'Ivoire, Gorée continues to occupy metaphorical space for black folks, both in Africa and elsewhere. It is the ancestral site of a major slave-trading fort, through which many thousands — perhaps as many as a million — Africans passed, on their horrific journey on the Middle Passage into slavery. Another one of her books, There are no happy words (Il n'y a pas de parole heureuse), addresses the Rwandan genocide.
In this translated collection, Boni continues to distill history, and there are two ways to approach this book. One reader may prefer to follow the poet's verse without accompanying information; only after completing the collection will that reader go back and read the notes. Another reader might decide to examine Fredson's "Translator's Note," continue to Boni's notes, and only then enter the poems, searching out specific, historical allusions. I read Boni's collection several times and can testify that both approaches proved equally satisfying. First, I read the book without the notes: I wanted to experience the language before anything else.
The poems are grouped into brief sections, and no poem has a title. Within each section are several meditative, economical units. These units are self-contained, and yet, there's a story being told. Each unit connects to the preceding and subsequent unit, and each one carries sacred weight. This ephemeral device articulates the wisdom of proverb, with timeless images peppered by contemporary suggestions. Unidentified first- and second-person pronouns — We, our, and you — allow any reader of any nationality to identify with this place and its inhabitants.
At the beginning of the collection, an "Eden" appears, along with sacred ancestors who work and live off the land, happy in their innocence. The allusion is obvious, recalling creation myths of the Bible and the Qu'ran. (Both Christianity and Islam are dominant religions in Côte d'Ivoire.) The phrase "ribs of the aurora" evokes divine and corporeal foundations, the sky where the Abrahamic God resides, and the earth from which this God formed humanity, though here, Adam's body is reduced to merely a means for Eve's creation.
In later verse units, this Eden is violated and these first inhabitants lose their innocence. They hear "the speech of the hyena," that animal of misfortune, and the innocents are violated and perhaps killed: "our daily lives placed among the objects for sale / at the market rapacious for our distressed skins." An unidentified human tyrant violates this ancient people's unified understanding: "You construct the puzzle / of the city model you say / on the unknown sand of the ancestors." These lines allude to the building of a structure reaching to the heavens, and once again, Boni might be addressing the Tower of Babel in the Bible, while the Qu'ran mentions a similar tower. Though in each story, both structures are built by separate rulers, each man's arrogance leads to his downfall and sown discord among his subjects.
However, if we apply the historical information contained in the notes, the earlier-mentioned Eden might refer to a knowable locale, West African forests, formerly dense but now in danger of deforestation. Thus, this ancestral innocence would occur in the precolonial era, the time before slavery became a major economic foundation of West African economy. The violation of ancestors and their homes would refer to that trade, a practice that continues to concern Boni: "our daily lives placed among the objects for sale / at the market rapacious for our distressed skins / our history dreams of erasing these poverty lines." Certainly, we wouldn't be visiting a territory that carries the name Côte d'Ivoire, for we would occupy a time before the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, and the resulting Scramble for Africa, when the continent was divided among European colonists and the French took the lion's share of territory.
Other poems in the collection veer away from Africa. We enter the deposing of Charles X of France, the attack of Grecians by Ottomans, the use of Guernica as a Nazi bombing site. Yet though these poems address non-African locales and events, there is no disruption. Each place Boni encounters has its own innocence, and the speaker narrates with clear-eyed witness and restrained grief. The we and you still occupy these lines, and Boni's tonal consistency is impressive. The penultimate poem in the collection references the connections between these seemingly disparate places, territories to which she has not traveled in real life. But Boni is a moral navigator, challenged by her task: "How to speak the beauty of the world / when life's hope / crumbles like yarrow."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn"
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