Enlightenment, essays on a life is an autobiographical story. Its author Bernard Mouralis (1), little known to the general public, was an unforgettable professor of African literature, now retired. Author of twenty books on literary Africa and literature in general, Bernard Mouralis spent most of his university career in France, but he also taught in African high schools and universities.
RFI: As one might expect, Africa occupies an important place in your memories. You didn’t know the continent, but you discovered it when you landed in Senegal in the mid-1960s. How did you find yourself in Africa at the young age of 24?
Bernard Mouralis: It happened very simply. After my studies, I felt more and more the need to change my living environment, to free myself from the intellectual framework in which I had grown up. In 1965, I filed a file with the administration to go abroad as a national service volunteer (VSN). In June of the same year, I was informed that my file had been accepted and that I was assigned from the start of the school year as a classics teacher at Malick Sy high school in Thiès, Senegal. At first, I regretted not being appointed to Dakar, but I soon realized that being a teacher in a small town was a great experience, because it allowed me to come into contact with the within Africa itself. It was, perhaps, less prestigious than a three-year stay in Dakar would have been, but the experience was – oh so – rich in encounters and discoveries.
As a specialist in African literature, throughout your life you have had many other opportunities to see Africa up close. What memories do you have of this first contact?
When I landed in Senegal in the 1960s, I discovered a Independent Africa. I had certainly not known colonial Africa strictly speaking, but I was sensitive to the assertion of regained freedom. This affirmation did not pass through any manifestation of national pride or pride of the Senegalese in having escaped the tutelage of the colonizer, but one can speak of a way of being, both subtle and emphatic. Above all, I found men, women and young people who were thinking, who were trying to give meaning to their lives. This is perhaps what struck me the most in this Africa of independence.
Can we say that it was partly this encounter with young Africans concerned about giving meaning to their lives that led you to call your memoirs of those years Lights ?
You will notice that it is Lights in the plural. I hesitated for a long time on the title. Initially, I thought of calling the book “Essays on a Life”, because it was intended as a collection of essays, but ultimately the idea of ”lights”, which constitutes the red thread of the experiences I have tried to bring together in this book, imposed itself on me. Among these experiences was the light in which the landscapes of my childhood bathed. I grew up in the south of Drôme, where we are lucky enough to live in one of the most beautiful landscapes there is. As a child and teenager, I was truly intoxicated by the light that marked the days with its enchantment, whatever the season. These luminous landscapes, I found them later in certain countries like Greece, but also in Mali and Senegal. The “lights” in the title of my book also refer to the light of the ideas, of the literature transmitted to me by my teachers, often exceptional, that I was lucky to have throughout my school career and university.
How did your interest in literature come about?
By discovering that literature creates concepts, which precisely make it possible to conceptualize the world, to pass a more rational judgment on the world. I give in the book a few examples of novels that moved me, including the maritime story of the American Thomas Mayne-Reid, À the sea. It is the story of a cabin boy who embarks on a boat because he wants to travel, but realizes on the way that he is on a slave ship. There is a chase with the English, who will seize the boat, since the slave trade is prohibited. We are in the years 1840-1850. Anxious to accomplish a good deed, the foam releases the slaves, without realizing that by freeing them, he condemns them to certain death, because the slaves throw themselves into the sea which is infested with sharks. It’s a terrible outcome, which raises the question of what a good deed is. This dilemma between morale and politics, I became aware of it very early on. I was young when I read this novel for the first time. He had upset me. The memory of this reading continues to overwhelm me even today. You may feel the emotion in my voice…
Your installation in Africa led you to take an interest in African literature. Who are the first authors you read?
Before leaving for Senegal, I went to the Presence Africaine bookstore, rue des Ecoles, in Paris, where I got hold of the first books that today constitute the “historical” core of my library. Among my first purchases were Nini Mulatresse from Senegal and Maimouna by Abdoulaye Sadji, The black child by Camara Laye, The notebook of a return to the native land by Aimé Cesaire, cruel city of Mongo Beti and The Ambiguous Adventure of Sheikh Hamidou Kane. I remember having also bought storybooks, poetry. In France, I had done classical studies. I was kind of at a crossroads.
Precisely, for a mind formed by classical studies, was not the discovery of French-speaking African literature, then in its infancy, a bit frustrating?
No, contrary to common practice in the academic world, I do not make a hierarchy between the objects of study. In my eyes, each object has its eminent dignity and the study of the African novel is no less interesting than that of the French novel. I also very quickly moved away from the tendency in critical approaches to African literature to see in texts written by African authors a kind of reflection of the sociological reality of the continent. Just like French or American novelists, Africans always speak more or less of the society in which they live, but they never present it as a pure reflection of this reality. They may even be harsh with her. I was struck, from the start, to see the great place that African authors accord to the individual, whereas, according to the accepted discourse, in Africa, the individual disappears in favor of the community. African novels often translate the experiences of unhappy individuals, out of step with their society. Suicide, the marginalization of women are major subjects of modern African literature.
When you arrived as a teacher in Senegal, five years after the country’s independence, the textbooks for teaching literature were the same as in France, but your students knew African literature well. The President of Senegal was then called… Léopold Sédar Senghor, a rather contested man in the 1960s. How did your students perceive this poet-president?
There was a certain pride in having a president who had culture, which was not quite the case everywhere on the continent. On the other hand, they were sensitive to the poetry of Senghor, to his reflection on negritude. His poetry, as we know, could be extremely violent in its criticism of colonization. My students had the maturity to understand that it was not because Senghor had made political mistakes, particularly in his relations with his Prime Minister Mamadou Dia, that everything he had written should be condemned. Whether it was the high school students I had in class in high school or at the Normal School where I also taught, they clearly distinguished between the politician and the poet. What also struck me about these young people was that they were extraordinarily sensitive to the beauty of literature, to the originality of the ideas conveyed by the authors, to writing. When they gave presentations or read poems aloud to the whole class, there was a kind of almost sacred respect for the text on their faces. Another important thing that I discovered during these African years was that the students did not distinguish between the European world and the African world. They vibrated with the poetic beauty of writing, wherever it might come from. At the same time, they could have a great deal of contempt for authors whose ideas they did not appreciate. Celine, for example, never aroused much admiration among these young people, at least not among those I knew.
Could you briefly come back to the great success you had at Thiès high school with Nerval?
It was without doubt one of the most intense moments of my professional life. I was doing a course, in front of a 4th grade class, at the Malick Sy high school in Thiès, on Malagasy poetry Rabearivelo. By association of images or ideas, I was led to recite the first lines of Nerval’s famous poem, “El desdichado”: ” I am the dark one, the widower, the disconsolate / The prince of Aquitaine in the abolished tower… “. From these first two verses, the students interrupted me and demanded that I dictate the entire poem to them. The request came from the whole class. They were captivated by the power, the beauty of Nerval’s poem. I also had some success with Corneille, prompting remarks like: Monsieur, you shouldn’t have Corneille studied. He’s too strong. African poets can’t write like him! »
What role did the discovery of Africa and its literature play in this genesis of the self which is the theme of this book?
An essential role, I would say. I think Africa has broadened my knowledge of the world and of life. She taught me to place the search for beauty, for poetry above all else. More generally, what I have discovered in talking to young African boys and girls is that men are not made to confront each other, they are made as much as they can to commune in something that exceeds them. I strongly believe that each time we can establish new solidarity between men and women from the different countries of the world, there is a little progress that is made. It may sound corny, outdated, but that’s basically the lesson I learned from my African experience.
(1) Reflection on African literature and the colonial memory of Bernard Mouralis in five titles:
– Counter-literaturesParis, PUF, 1975;
– The work of Mongo BetiEditions Saint-Paul, “African Classics” collection, Issy-les-Moulineaux, 1981;
– VY Mudimbe or Speech, Gap and WritingParis, African Presence, 1988;
– Republic and colonies. Between history and memory: the French Republic and AfricaParis, African Presence, 1999;
– The illusion of otherness. African literature essaysParis, Champion, 2007.