Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- West Africa: State borders and principal ethnic groupings
- Introduction
- 1 From oral to written verse: development or depletion?
- 2 Ladies and gentlemen
- 3 The négritude movement
- 4 Poetry and the university, 1957–63
- 5 The achievement of Christopher Okigbo
- 6 Continuity and adaptation in Ghanaian verse, 1952–71
- 7 Two Ijo poets
- 8 ‘Psalmody of sunsets’: The career of Lenrie Peters
- 9 The road to Idanre, 1959–67
- 10 The poet and war, 1966–70
- 11 The poetry of dissent, 1970–80
- 12 The return to orality
- A guide to availability
- Index
3 - The négritude movement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- West Africa: State borders and principal ethnic groupings
- Introduction
- 1 From oral to written verse: development or depletion?
- 2 Ladies and gentlemen
- 3 The négritude movement
- 4 Poetry and the university, 1957–63
- 5 The achievement of Christopher Okigbo
- 6 Continuity and adaptation in Ghanaian verse, 1952–71
- 7 Two Ijo poets
- 8 ‘Psalmody of sunsets’: The career of Lenrie Peters
- 9 The road to Idanre, 1959–67
- 10 The poet and war, 1966–70
- 11 The poetry of dissent, 1970–80
- 12 The return to orality
- A guide to availability
- Index
Summary
In 1927 by a riverside in Madagascar a twenty-six-year-old Malagasy poet composed a sonnet comparing the water's course to his own growing skill in the language of his French masters. If only, he wrote, his lines might aspire to the grace and undulating curve of the river bank itself:
… que sa courbe épouse encore plus ta rive
beau fleuve auquel l'azur éternel se fiance
et sa souplesse aura la suprême élégance
de tes bords ténébreux que le soleil ravive,
afin d'honorer mieux cette langue étrangère
qui sait tant à mon âme intuitive plaire
et que j'adopte sans éprouver nul remords
[… I would have my song's course wedded quite / to thine, fair river, sky-betrothed, that thence / its suppleness attain the elegance / of thy dim margins which the sun makes bright, / and I may honour more that foreign speech / which with delight my instinctive soul can reach, / which I adopt, nor grieve upon that head]
The island of Madagascar had been a French possession since 1896. Already by the 1920s its educational and social policies were dominated by the policy of Assimilation which was to have so far-reaching an effect on the intelligentsia of francophone Central and West Africa in the years before and immediately following the Second World War.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- West African PoetryA Critical History, pp. 42 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986