On the Trails of a Nomad

Mohamed Kamara

Between 2000 and 2003, Waberi published five major works. Les nomades, mes frères, vont boire à la Grande Ourse, a collection of poems, and Moisson de Crânes: textes pour le Rwanda (A Harvest of Skulls). Moisson de crânes, a mixture of short stories, essays, and travelogues, came out of a 1998 project that took Waberi and nine other African writers, a film maker, and a sculptor to Rwanda for two months. The project, “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire,” was organized by Fest’Africa, an annual festival of African literature in Lille, France. Rift Routes Rails, a series of thirteen texts on the themes of exile, nomadism, and search for meaning came out in 2001. This was followed in 2002 by a story for children, Bouh et la vache magique, and a novel, Transit, in 2003, which won the Prix littéraire de la ville de Caen in 2004. Waberi’s works have been translated into about a dozen languages, including English, Portuguese, German, and Italian.

The force, and modernism, of Abdourahman Waberi does not lie in his theme (politics, history, famine, war, exile, migrancy, etc.), but in his literary technique on the one hand, and in his ability to make style serve content on the other. A poet by temperament he is predictably poetic and brief – “J’évite soigneusement les longues élaborations…. Je suis surtout poète et nouvelliste. Je crois davantage dans la fulgurance et dans la concision.” He has the extraordinary ability to take the quotidian and elevate it through a seriously and ferociously innovative use of language: “The rain is here. The first mud. The Caucasians are turning over the soil of the yam fields in rhythm. All of them deep in mud. Same step, same sweat. The marsh birds in the Nile estuary count and recount themselves before migrating to the southern tip of the continent, much sunnier this time of the year.” (Harper’s Magazine, September 2007:29).

The above is an excerpt from Waberi’s most recent novel, Aux Etats-Unis d’Afrique, (J.C. Lattès, Paris, 2006) to be published as In the United States of Africa in 2008 by the University Press of Nebraska. As may have been gleaned from the excerpt above, the novel is a highly imaginative, fantastic, sometimes phantasmagoric, piece. It may remind one of, among others, the conclusion of the film, The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which shows American refugees in neighboring Mexico after the virtual glacialization of North America. While staying faithful to the usual Waberian themes of exile and immigration, In the United States of Africa’s focus on reverse immigration from a destitute and bloodied Euro-America to the wealthy megalopolises of the United States of Africa may well signal a new direction for the writer – one that favors a more universal vision of humanity.  He reiterates this shift when, in an interview with Afrik.com, he says “je suis humaniste et non afrocentriste.” Consistent with that, Waberi appended his signature to the July 2007 “Manifeste pour une littérature-monde en français”: Manifesto for a World Literature in French. The manifesto, signed by forty-three other writers, calls for the “Fin de la francophonie. Et naissance d’une littérature-monde en français.”

The 42 year old Abdourahman Waberi – who this year, together with Ahmadou Kourouma, Mariama Bâ, and Marie Ndiaye, got ‘inducted’ into the Nouveau Petit Robert de la langue française with a biographical entry –  is currently working on a novel on migration in the global age. If the past is anything to go by, we can be sure that a feast awaits us at the next bend in the road.