Our book selection this week: “The Source and the Sign,” “Everything Connects,” “The Farewells,” “Elsa”…

THE MORNING LIST

This week, "Le Monde des livres" invites you to read Vincent Debaene's new essay, which brings the first French-speaking African writers back into literature; Stéphane Bouquet's poetry collection (but not only that), rich in beauty and emotion; Philippe de la Genardière's new novel, in which Césaire says goodbye to Sofia, in a face-off between life and death; an anthology of Malagasy poetry, with a powerful diversity of voices, styles and commitments; and finally a biographical novel on the great writer Elsa Morante, by Angela Bubba.

ESSAY. “The Source and the Sign,” by Vincent Debaene

In the masterful La Source et le signe , Vincent Debaene begins by making us rediscover a neglected corpus: the linguistic, ethnographic or historical information work carried out by the students of the Ecole Normale William-Ponty (Senegal), which trained, before independence, the teachers and managers of French West Africa.

The values ​​of the Black world were celebrated there – provided that the brilliant students who devoted themselves to it did not trade their knowledge for an autonomous, let alone literary, voice. It was therefore necessary to objectify the discourse of Black subjects, considered either as a "source" (for a future colonial science), or as a "sign" (of the indigenous mentality).

Vincent Debaene then discusses the development, between the 1920s and the 1950s, of an "indigenous literature of French expression", long considered an example of "alienated literature" . For him, the whole question is whether we are capable of seeing anything other than the traces of a colonial system. This is where the author's third ambition lies: to resolutely bet on the literary character of these texts.

This is the whole point of Vincent Debaene's gesture: to show that reading in a literary way, by aiming for the actualization that attention to the form of a text allows, represents a fidelity superior to the deep intention of its author – at least as understood by each reader, who pluralizes its meaning. That is to say, a fidelity to those who intended to sign their texts, even if they were prisoners of colonial constraints. J.-LJ

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