Village Journals
Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
Culture - Francophone Literature
The wave of prices the francophone writers, both African and Caribbean, have been winning the last years, has placed their works in the focus of world literature.
Renovation seemingly is the most eye-catching they have achieved, these famous authors as
Henri Lop?s and Sony Labou Tansi (Congo),
Ahmadou Kourouma (C?te d'Ivoire),
Patrick Chamoiseau and Rapha?l Confiant (Martinique) or Maryse Cond? (Guadeloupe), to mention just a few.
Its a generation which has put aside the authorative influence of the cultural phenomenon known as Negritude, flourishing in the Thirties, and as fundamental as it is controversial in the culture of the francophone part of the continent.
Negritude
The founders of Negritude were L?opold S?dar Senghor, Senegalese, and Aim? C?saire, Caribbean. Senghor, a poet, philosopher, theorist and politician, was the first president of Senegal (1960-80) and is today considered the major poet of the continent in the 20th century. Born in 1906, with a firm Christian background and educated in his own country and later on in Paris, became the first African to achieve a doctor title in France. He settled in Paris in 1928, where he began to write poetry about his feelings concerning being an African far away from his native country in the middle of a society where he didn't feel integrated. Melancholy and nostalgic memories of childhood fills his poetry. At this moment, he got to know Le?n Damas and the fellow poet and student C?saire. Together with them, he founded the journal "The Black Student" in which they laid the groundwork for the concept of Negritude. With this term they intended to refer to the culture characteristic to all Africans and all members of the African Diaspora, also including those the Europeans forcefully took to the Americas. In their own words:
"One cannot deny that Negritude is a reality, a culture: It's the entirety of all the economic, political, intellectual, moral, artistic and social values of not only the peoples of Africa, but also the minorities of America, Asia and Oceania."
The inheritance of C?saire in the West Indies
Searching for the "Creolity" or the quality of the Creole is the aim of this new Caribbean generation of authors. They don't consider themselves European, nor American, nor African, nor Asian, but what they are - they feel Caribbean and they proclaim themselves as Caribbean.
Authors like:
Patrick Chamoiseau,
Rapha?l Confiant,
Ernest P?pin or
Gis?le Pineau already in the 1980s established themselves as devoted writers within the Creole oral aesthetics and tradition.
In 1989 they published , in the form of a manifest, the "Tribute to Creolity". The common objective of this new generation is finally to portray the realities of the Caribbean identity, which C?saire did in his ideas of the negritude, with the means of a French all too classical, which didn't result sufficiently appropriate to tell the story about the Creole reality. At the same time. we are talking about a generation which is better informed about the African continent, realizing that the Caribbean culture doesn't have that much in common with the African, as the black intellectuals which studied together in Paris seventy years ago imagined.
To reach their goals, they saw it necessary to create a new language, a real language, though without forgetting the rules of the correct French rhetoric. As such, they allowed themselves to get influenced by the rich oral tradition of the masters of story-telling, and their special intonation of the local dialects. A mix which results in a comprehensive and seductive language, which Milan Kundera has called "the chamoisis? French" (from Chamoiseau, France).
Considering all this, and in spite of the different political convictions of these authors, they have created a literature characterized by a common subject. The central axis of their works is telling about the greatness and pride in which these humble people live, with all their traditions and ways of living in their insignificant slums and outskirts. With their strong female personalities being a source of admiration, were they move between suffering and joy. They tell in natural manners about their dark past, remembering historical chapters such as the slavery, but at the same time not forgetting presence, to defend their undervalued Creole identity and putting aside the incomprehensive "frenchness", which was brought upon them in such an injustice way.
www.kirjasto.sci.fi
Renovation seemingly is the most eye-catching they have achieved, these famous authors as
Henri Lop?s and Sony Labou Tansi (Congo),
Ahmadou Kourouma (C?te d'Ivoire),
Patrick Chamoiseau and Rapha?l Confiant (Martinique) or Maryse Cond? (Guadeloupe), to mention just a few.
Its a generation which has put aside the authorative influence of the cultural phenomenon known as Negritude, flourishing in the Thirties, and as fundamental as it is controversial in the culture of the francophone part of the continent.
Negritude
The founders of Negritude were L?opold S?dar Senghor, Senegalese, and Aim? C?saire, Caribbean. Senghor, a poet, philosopher, theorist and politician, was the first president of Senegal (1960-80) and is today considered the major poet of the continent in the 20th century. Born in 1906, with a firm Christian background and educated in his own country and later on in Paris, became the first African to achieve a doctor title in France. He settled in Paris in 1928, where he began to write poetry about his feelings concerning being an African far away from his native country in the middle of a society where he didn't feel integrated. Melancholy and nostalgic memories of childhood fills his poetry. At this moment, he got to know Le?n Damas and the fellow poet and student C?saire. Together with them, he founded the journal "The Black Student" in which they laid the groundwork for the concept of Negritude. With this term they intended to refer to the culture characteristic to all Africans and all members of the African Diaspora, also including those the Europeans forcefully took to the Americas. In their own words:
"One cannot deny that Negritude is a reality, a culture: It's the entirety of all the economic, political, intellectual, moral, artistic and social values of not only the peoples of Africa, but also the minorities of America, Asia and Oceania."
The inheritance of C?saire in the West Indies
Searching for the "Creolity" or the quality of the Creole is the aim of this new Caribbean generation of authors. They don't consider themselves European, nor American, nor African, nor Asian, but what they are - they feel Caribbean and they proclaim themselves as Caribbean.
Authors like:
Patrick Chamoiseau,
Rapha?l Confiant,
Ernest P?pin or
Gis?le Pineau already in the 1980s established themselves as devoted writers within the Creole oral aesthetics and tradition.
In 1989 they published , in the form of a manifest, the "Tribute to Creolity". The common objective of this new generation is finally to portray the realities of the Caribbean identity, which C?saire did in his ideas of the negritude, with the means of a French all too classical, which didn't result sufficiently appropriate to tell the story about the Creole reality. At the same time. we are talking about a generation which is better informed about the African continent, realizing that the Caribbean culture doesn't have that much in common with the African, as the black intellectuals which studied together in Paris seventy years ago imagined.
To reach their goals, they saw it necessary to create a new language, a real language, though without forgetting the rules of the correct French rhetoric. As such, they allowed themselves to get influenced by the rich oral tradition of the masters of story-telling, and their special intonation of the local dialects. A mix which results in a comprehensive and seductive language, which Milan Kundera has called "the chamoisis? French" (from Chamoiseau, France).
Considering all this, and in spite of the different political convictions of these authors, they have created a literature characterized by a common subject. The central axis of their works is telling about the greatness and pride in which these humble people live, with all their traditions and ways of living in their insignificant slums and outskirts. With their strong female personalities being a source of admiration, were they move between suffering and joy. They tell in natural manners about their dark past, remembering historical chapters such as the slavery, but at the same time not forgetting presence, to defend their undervalued Creole identity and putting aside the incomprehensive "frenchness", which was brought upon them in such an injustice way.
www.kirjasto.sci.fi