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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The newborn opens its eyes when it comes into the world. We close the eyes of the dead because they are no longer part of the world of the living. It is through looking that we enter the world, that we take possession of it, and that we leave it. We open or close our eyes to the living beings and things that surround us. Of prime importance among these living beings are other humans, who may resemble or be different from us, but whose eyes also look. From this perspective, to live is to look at other people and at ourselves. Artists, particularly those who work with light and looking, such as painters, photographers, or film-makers, show us that art is above all seeing life: we look at the other who has been painted, photographed, or filmed. At the same time a photograph or painting of this other tells us who we are and what type of relationship we have with the world. For looking is never neutral. Every look, from wherever it comes, is imbued with culture. In art, looking is part of writing. But, when we look at others, how do we see them? Do we see them? The blind may have poor sight, yet, because they have bodies, sensibilities, minds, and other faculties that enable them to enter into relations with others, they have a way of looking.
1. Kossi Efoui, La Polka, Paris: Seuil, 1998.
2. Ibid., p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 9.
4. As did the geographer La Pérouse.
5. René Caillé was the first to discover Timbuktu in 1821; Stanley, Savorgnan de Brazza, and many others explored every comer of Africa.
6. The poet Khal Torabully clearly shows this in his poems Cale d'étoile-Coolitude, La Réunion: Azalées, 1992, and Chair Corail, fragments coolies, Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge, 1999.
7. This is true of the five billion francs CFA given by France in April 2001, out of the thousand billion total that is needed to save the country. This was a breath of oxygen at a time when the political, economic, and social crisis was reaching the point of no return.
8. Catalogue published by Samogy, 1992. The exhibition comprised 310 posters, with notes and classified by theme. It was set up in 1985 and became a travelling exhibition in 1994, taken to Bénin, Burkina Faso, the Paris region, and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe by Marie-Christine Peyrière and supported by UNESCO.
9. See among others the article by Sylvie Chalaye, in Africultures 3, December 1997, pp. 37-43. ["Du dangereux indigène au cannibale sympathique : les images du théâtre à l'époque coloniale,"]
10. Présence Africaine was both a journal and a publishing house. It became a crucial pivot for black people's way of seeing themselves and their own cultures. The Société Africaine de Culture was also set up around this publishing house. In Dakar and Paris in 1997, Présence Africaine set up a conference attended by many intellectuals, writers, artists, and academics with the aim of assessing its fifty-year history and opening up new perspectives.
11. André Magnin, Malick Sidibé, Zurich: Scalo, 1998, p. 21.
12. A photographer the author knew well as a child. He recently had an exhibition at FNAC, in Paris.
13. Here we should mention the last two collections in the series of so-called "militant" poems: Soleils fusillés, Paris: Droit et Liberté, 1977; J'appartiens au grand jour, Paris: Saint-Germain des Prés, 1979.
14. Ahmadou Kourouma, Allah n'est pas obligé, Paris: Le Seuil, 2000. Winner of the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2000: the novel portrays a child soldier, who tells his story. Tierno Monénembo, L'Aîné des orphelins, Paris: Le Seuil, 2000: the author looks through the eyes of a teenager, condemned to death at the age of 15, in a prison for young people aged between 7 and 17, in Rwanda, during the genocide.
15. Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi, le livre des ossements, Paris: Stock, 2000, p. 229.
16. Kossi Efoui, La Polka, op. cit. p. 36: "After that we were always together. My life stopped. But it is not death. It is silence. When you smile just as the flash goes. I felt as though I was in a photograph."
17. Ibid., p. 92: "Iléo Para has never been able to recognise himself in any photograph, definitively rooting his anxiety in the idea that he remains in the paper and that his skin does not hold the light."
