‘Nous étions sidérés’: ‘We were left dumbstruck’; or, ‘Fate – its sidereal influence, its unmasterable power to pull us apart, in repeated acts of outrageous disruption or interruption – struck once again’; or even, ‘Disaster, as ever, has the last word’. It would not seem inappropriate to render the final words from Sony Labou Tansi's Le Commencement des douleurs as a ‘writing of the disaster’, echoing Maurice Blanchot's powerful meditation on writing in its confrontation with disaster's infinite threat. With this in mind, it might also translate Achille Mbembe's efforts to write ‘la nuit-du-monde-africain-postcolonial’ (‘the nightof-the-postcolonial-African-world’). Postcolonial Africa is indeed, like Blanchot's disaster, a starless night, a place of catastrophic ruin, a time in which time itself has succumbed to catastrophe. As Blanchot says: ‘Quand tout est dit, ce qui reste à dire est le désastre’ (‘When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster’). The questions that haunt European literature and politics after the horrors of Auschwitz, which is the dominant point of reference for Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, are in many ways the same questions we feel compelled to ask about Africa, not only in terms of the historical trauma of slavery and colonialism, or the barely comprehensible ongoing tragedies afflicting the African continent, but also in relation to events that are directly comparable to the Holocaust, such as the Rwandan genocide of 1994. How is it possible to respond to such events, particularly for those who have somehow lived through and emerged on the other side of the trauma? What is our collective responsibility towards the memory of such events, whether as Africans or not, if indeed we are able to take the responsibility of confronting them? Is this to be done respecting the impossibility of representation, or with an urgent compulsion to speak or write? How do we weigh up both ethical and aesthetic imperatives? Who speaks, for whom, and against whom?

Such questions are at the heart of Blanchot's text, and indeed preoccupy his writing on literature and politics from the late 1950s onwards.