Nassuf Djailani came to literature through poetry. His new collection of poetry Daïra pour la mer, which has just been published by Bruno Doucey editions, is an invitation to travel, between land and sea. Originally from the Comorian archipelago, the poet sings of the humid sky of his native country, his men and women who dance to make “ bloom stars at the threshold of night “. Nassuf Djailani’s writing path.
The collection opens with the sea, the sparkling bay below the village and the fishermen who ” forage beyond the lagoon “. Daïra pour la mer is the new collection of poetry from the pen of Nassuf Djailani, a French author from Mayotte.
A volume of a hundred pages, comprising three long poems and, in the last movement, three elegies, solemn, moving in accuracy and nostalgia. These elegies feature figures drawn from the poet’s personal museum, in this case his grandparents Cheikh Hamada Madi and Habiba Ali, the grandmother. Djailani’s anthology offers a journey through life, from childhood to old age, passing through love, wisdom and resistance too.
With the first elegy evoking the memory of Boinali Souprit, we leave the family circle. National hero of the Comoros archipelago, Souprit was an infantryman during the Second World War, enlisted by force to defend the distant, colonizing metropolis. The poet restores the courage of this forgotten hero, the historical context also: “ At twenty or twenty-one / the fire burning the legs / the Masters came / Tsingoni had so much to receive / Enlisted, you had little choice / Gun in hand / there was no limit bravely… »
land of poetry
The Comoros are a land of poetry. We owe them some of the singular voices of contemporary French-language literature, which reveal to us the island universe, the hinterland where ” people are the most kneeled “, as Nassuf Djailani reminds us.
Journalist, novelist, playwright, publisher, the author of Daïra pour la mer is a man of many talents. But it was through poetry that he entered literature. His first poems date back to adolescence. ” It was perhaps very early, remembers the poet, at the age of the Koranic school. This is where the daïra entered me. I was in poetry without realizing it. Singing the daïra is also work on the tongue, so that the ear can receive it. It has to be beautiful, it has to be worked, the words have to ring out and make them carry all the tremor of the world. »
This tremor of the world crosses the poetic work of Nassuf Djailani. At 41, the man is the author of two novels, collections of short stories and six volumes of poetry. Collections of poetry with titles as programmatic as they are poetic: Spirals (2004), Cooing (2006), The Dream of a Probable Rebirth (2010), Hadith for a Republic to be born (2017), born here (2019) and today Daira for the sea (2022). ” I really want, explains Djailani, that from the title of the novel or the collection of poetry or the play, that we feel from the title that we are in poetry. It tickles the reader, it invites him to enter into poetry, to take the boat and go to Mayotte and to go towards these unknown faces “.
What is the Daira? In Mayotte, the Daïra is a mystical song, accompanied by dances. There is in the Daïra something of the whirling dervish, or the whirling dervish dance, stamped with a certain spiritual frenzy, imprinting the movement of the body in repetitive circles. ” It’s a dance in fact, adds the poet, which is danced in circles where people hold hands. It starts on your knees first. They sing prayers. It lasts all night. These are songs that I heard a lot, as a child, through the windows. We could hear like that in the distance the chanting of the daïra in the public square where the men were singing this daïra to heal themselves. It is a frenetic dance to empty oneself of all the defilement of the day to be available to receive the vibrations which come from the cosmos. »
“The night is a strange envelope”
It will be understood, the Daïra is a quest, a quest for oneself that is both mystical and social. It is at the heart of the new volume of poems by Djailani. This quest sometimes takes the form of militant, ecological resistance, as in the first poem in the collection where a woman rises up against the authorities, standing up in front of a bulldozer ready to uproot her mango tree. The tree had the bad idea to grow in the middle of the official route of the new road. The poem celebrates feminine courage: “ The women carry / proclaims the poet, in addition to life / the shaft brought up from the well / thus they go in life / each his insane passion / under the tree dug by time / fragrant flowers that bewitch the night… »
But it is love that inspires the Mahoran poet with the most beautiful text in his collection. Incantatory and passionate, it is entitled: “ The night is a strange envelope », a title in tune with the mystical quest of the poet. Nassuf Djailani’s poems tell stories of dissidence, forced enlistment, but also tales of love and passion for which poetry has been a privileged medium since time immemorial. As part of the line of poets before him, from Homer to Senghor, Nassuf Djailani approaches love from its dark side, and recounts its crumbling in contact with everyday life. He writes : ” The man dances in the wind towards the sea / nothing and no one stops him / when his steps lead him into a calm sea / he dives into it without saying goodbye / the night in the vigils / it is said that the sorrow of love/is an open wound/and that no one ever heals/except those burned by passion/who walk with their heads held high/towards beauties who are unaware of themselves. »
” The night is a strange envelope from which these verses are taken, recounts a breakup and its dramatic consequences. The man longs for the absence of his beloved. Mad with grief and pain, he plunges into the sea, but not without first scattering to the four winds, words of love, words of brotherhood. ” Beauty needs to be returned, shared “recalls the poet.
We will also read in these pages some texts in kibush, the Malagasy language of Mayotte, the mother tongue of the author. Quatrains that call to grow. They are short poems, they look like Japanese haikus, but imbued with the scents of spices and incense that we associate with the Indian Ocean. ” I write, confided the poet at the microphone of RFI, for the Comorian reader, the Mahoran reader, this reader of ocean and lagoons where I come from. But my actual readers are very diverse, from all continents. They touch me by the welcome they reserve for my rantings. »
Such is the magic of Nassuf Djailani’s poetry.
Daira for the sea, by Nassuf Djailani. Editions Bruno Doucey, 112 pages, 14 euros.