Poetry
Déjà vu
Not translated into English
Noël X. Ebony · 1983
Synopsis
Poems that invite travel and follow the paths of wandering, adventure and exile, where love, peace and tolerance are also spoken. The writing, disconcerting and unconventional, turns its back on the forms of Négritude to claim an identity made of encounters between cultures. The volume closes with Chutes, fourteen poems first distributed separately, on a folding leaflet.
Context
The collection appeared in Paris in 1983 from Éditions Ouskokata, founded by the American journalist Nidra Poller, who welcomed its originality in contrast to “the old négritude”; poorly distributed, it soon became unobtainable. The Belgian writer Jean-Pierre Orban had it reissued in 2010 by L'Harmattan, together with a second, previously unpublished collection. Jean-Francis Ekoungoun studied in 2014 the discourse of its publishers and the genesis of a poet of interculturality.
Who it is for
A collection of about two hundred pages, in French, in a style that its first readers judged innovative.
Prizes and reception
Lilyan Kesteloot saw in its author “the Soyinka of francophone Africa”; the book is regarded as a classic of contemporary African poetry.