Carrefour-Samaké, Serge Agnessan
Poètes de brousse, 2018
Each offers figures of resistance, of extirpation from an all-encompassing movement and, at times, from the movement of coming together. The inaugural section scans the fine line between the living and the dead, where the end is a circular street (the Carrefour-Samaké). The speaker stands outside of history, outside of nightmares rather than awakened from them. Instead of describing a socio-political situation, Agnessan describes the state of consciousness that is the result of postcoloniality and the reverse of the modernity of others, a state of waiting that anticipates a catastrophe.
In a second section – the second street that finds its end and continuation in the crossroads or roundabout – acts and speech are placed at the forefront. Like in the rest of the poem, tar (bitume) is used repeatedly to cover up the past, to create an artificial relationship to a new environment. Mummies and zombies are also creations, which inhabit a “senseless crossroads” (carrefour insensé, 43) or a nightmare; they are sometimes used to speak of others, sometimes used by the speaker to refer to himself and others like him. And sex appears as a promise of union and as a way to give oneself away, to renege on oneself. Reversals structure this section; and at a structural level the nightmare is an anchor, and reality as a whole is upside down, as a result of colonialism:
to the street as under the muck of the present of the in-between-there
a nightmare in sweat as sole anchor
I shouted: “my tongue?”
and I heard myself answer: “French!”
and my mother whispered: “There you are born backwards. I did not make
you their language-there before your head.”
à la rue comme sous la fange du présent de l’entre-deux-là
un cauchemar en sueur pour unique ancre
j’ai crié : “ma langue?”
et je me suis entendu répondre : “le français!”
et ma mère a susurré : “Te voilà né à l’envers. Je ne t’ai pas fait leur langue-là avant la tête.” (52)
In the third section, after a long quotation by Césaire, the movement stabilizes: the prose poems take on a similar form – a short paragraph – and focus on the themes of night and awakening and of the (small margin for an) invention of the self. The speaker elaborates his distance from the streets through a newfound consciousness, a renewal of the body, of flesh, a capacity to stand on his own, a lack of irony, a detachment that is not a departure. One of the strands of the novel, politics or rather the patriotism that is invoked by both sides in the conflict that has periodically reemerged in Ivory Coast since 2001, is made clear here: “I awaken from this people / I dreamt us and now I leave to meet myself” (Je me réveille de ce peuple / je nous ai rêvés et maintenant je pars à ma rencontre, 61).
The poem is carried by a sense of movement in the recurring figure of a grandfather on a bicycle circling the intersection with a radio blaring, a recurring feeling of vertigo and nausea, choreographies and dances, and repeated lines highlighting the fear that accompanies the appearance of tanks (real and metaphorical). Movement is also carried through the imagery of water, the intersection at times floating, at times submerged:
As a child, I ran naked under the rainfalls of your streets
tell me
on the scale of values of our dreams there, at what degree to hang your despair?
here, your asphalt darkens on mornings of great tide
Enfant, je courais nu sous les averses de tes rues
dis-moi
sur l’échelle des valeurs de nos rêves-là, à quel degré accrocher ton désespoir?
voilà que ton asphalte s’assombrit les matins de grande marée (26)
Fireflies, the “conjunction of the carnal and the disembodied” (la conjonction du charnel et du désincarné, 43), appear throughout and carry a multiplicity of meanings. The speaker waits for time to begin again so he may lick the ass of a firefly (51), maybe in an erotic hope, maybe like a child might lick a battery. The hope fireflies symbolize is at once grand and unbearable: “And what else if not a billion night roads lit by the ass of a prayed for hoped for waited for firefly?” (Et puis quoi d’autre sinon un milliard de routes de nuit éclairées par le cul d’une luciole priée espérée attendue?, 41)
And so there is no idealism in this poem. Asses (culs) pop up repeatedly, bringing a sense of playful ridicule while also carrying anger, creating a dialectic reversal – the light of fireflies comes from their ass, after all. The irony that surfaces throughout the poem is made clear in the scansion of “amen” after passages that would otherwise be overly earnest or overly provocative; they bring an anti-climax to destructive thoughts and easy answers. Bodily functions, most often urine, similarly bring a sense of disrespect and unpleasantness toward the reality the poem transfigures, forcing the gaze toward the realities of embodiment, instead of any hope for perfection.
The poem is part of a greater effort of a people to speak of its own life, to move away from the death in which it is mired, away from patriotism and “patroliotism” (patrouillotique, 56), away from fantasies of unity – an effort for a new kind of people to grow. It is an effort to create beauty: “a firefly is but a speck of dust that was taken with the electricity of our shouts” (une luciole n’est qu’une poussière qui s’est éprise de l’électricité de nos cris, 60).
