I'd like to read some--
let's see, what do I want to read?
I want to read some excerpts from a long poem of mine,
but it's not going to be as long as what you just heard.
The poem itself is very long.
It's called "Impressions of Africa,"
a title I stole from the French writer Raymond Roussel.
It was a result of a trip I made to French Black Africa about
three years ago when I read my poetry in French
and lectured and so on.
And I knew all the time I was in Africa that my experiences were
so intense that I would have to write something about it
or I couldn't stand it.
And finally, after a year, I did.
The poem is divided into five parts
about the different places I was.
One's about Senegal, one's about Gabon, or "Ga-boon,"
as it's sometimes pronounced in English,
another about the Congo and Zaire, another about Kenya,
which is not French, but I was there on a vacation for a week,
and the other about Madagascar.
I think I'll read the poem about Senegal
and then a little bit of the African poem.
I'll explain a few things about the poem and about the place.
The poem is written in very short poems.
They're not exactly stanzas.
What I decided to do was to write a short poem
about every single idea or feeling
I had when I was in Africa.
That's why the poem is 70 pages long.
So they're all discrete, separate poems,
though I've grouped them-- all the ones
about the particular country.
Senegal is on the northwest coast of Africa,
it's one of the more prosperous former French colonies.
Its capital is Dakar, which is right on the coast.
Right off the coast is an island called the Île de Gorée,
Goree Island, which is famous, very oddly, as a tourist spot.
And what there is to see there is
something called the House of the Slaves, which
is the last place that the black slaves were
in Africa before they were put on the boats
and brought to America.
It's a very strange tourist attraction.
Let's see if there's anything else I
have to tell you about Senegal.
Léopold Sédar Senghor, whom I mention
toward the end of this poem, is a well-known French poet
and also was the president of Senegal for awhile.
Something I refer to in the first stanza,
there are a few French phrases here.
One is the Department de l'Encombrement Humain,
which is the Department of Carting Away Human Obstruction.
Actually, in Senegal, my French friend
there told me that there are lots of beggars
in the capital in Dakar.
And once a month, the big truck comes in and carries them
all out of the country.
And then they crawl back to the city after that.
OK.
King Behanzu, whom I refer to in the last stanza,
you can see a statue of King Behanzu disguised
as a shark in the Musée [? de l'Homme ?] in Paris.
King Behanzu disguised himself as a shark in order
to fight off the French who were trying to land in Africa.
Of course, he didn't succeed since the French had much
more firepower than he did.
Senegal, keep your courage up.
Walk down the street.
When the leper comes up to you, say, I am a Muslim.
Then give him a franc.
Soon, he will be carted away by the Department
de l'Encombrement Humain.
Go to the island of the slaves on Sunday,
said the Black cultural attaché, who
speeded me down hallways through consular doorways,
then suddenly back out onto the street.
At 5 o'clock, everything closes.
Or did he say 1 o'clock or 2 or 3 or 4 o'clock?
In any case, everything is closed.
But I find someone to talk to in a building, mauve,
past the horse, white.
A young man, tall--
high, rather-- and skilled at walking fast
and with his head on high comes past
at an amazing angle and an amazing rate.
Don't go to the bars, Jean-Marc said,
and try to talk to the girls.
This one is off-limits.
I am on-limits with my arms.
Why that man stuck with a tooth stick.
The Lebanese men go there with their sisters.
They start to fight if you talk to or touch one.
The Russians in Dakar harbor are not
allowed to get off their ship for fear
that they will be seduced by capitalism, he said.
It's the truth.
In Dakar, you are still pretty close to Europe.
But three miles out of town, you are burning in a pink lake,
unless you get out of it fast with your modicum of salt.
These modicums, grown additive on the lake banks,
show white and fair to a far-off who views them.
But up near, they stink, and the Salt Lake burns you.
And dad, I am leaving, you do not
say if you are a member of this tribe, this special tribe
of nomads who dredge for salt.
On the boat to Goree, how cruel these four Lebanese are,
led by this one young man who keeps calling to and then
laughing at a Mongoloid of maybe 25 or 30,
laughing at his clumsy gait and at his efforts to please them
in an absurd and helpless way.
That man on this boat looks like Mayakovsky, black,
his face showing his character and his art,
his violent, virile, and touchingly avant-garde,
futurist, lyric, poetic art.
Seeds on my head, sitting under a baobab, big, knotty, tree,
baobab, we're spreading all over,
like a Roman or Athenian map.
Everything is wrecked.
Misery, stoniness, and the color of sickness or dying
is dancing on it all.
Tu as le choc, you have the shock, said Jean-Marc.
Everybody get when come to Africa.
It goes away.
But it took more than two days going away.
For these two days, I hate life, Africa, everything.
Next day, a little better.
3 weeks later I met an enchantment, Kenya, Madagascar,
the sun shock under the place names, like skin under clothes.
Greater than the shock of the insects of the Congo,
greater than the clock of Madame N'Zambo's hair,
it's the shock of poor people, desperately poor,
wanting everything, which in their case is almost nothing,
everything.
The man sweeping the building after dark
is of a higher caste than the one who directs the company
and rules it from the topmost floor.
To his air-conditioned office suite comes Eng-alBaram,
and the president bows down.
The slaves were brought in this way and taken out this way.
Here is where they stood waiting for the boat
to take them to America in chains, where they would create
the characters of Darkie and Mammy, good slave, bad slave,
hanged man, mulatto, quadroon, and then
would change to underprivileged citizens, preachers, doctors,
violent transformations, while Africa stayed here all along,
visited by rainfall and heat spells,
with a different kind of energy and a different kind of change.
The partition of Africa takes place in 18th and 19th century
Europe on conference tables.
Here is the place where one Oolof will
wear a beret and the other a bush hat,
where one will drink wine and the other feel lost
without his tea.
In Dakar at night, Léopold Sédar Senghor
is sitting and thinking, just as Wallace Stevens
might have wanted him to.
But he finds he is not thinking right.
He eats some moospasla and goes to sleep.
Blue brave flash of the oceans water,
like a screen through which I see the street, the streets,
the teeming, busy, commercial, African, impoverished,
beggar-filled, lavish, horrible streets of Dakar.
The city has been left ajar, fortunately,
so that the breeze can come in, although Islam and the rest
of Dakar don't go out.
Senghor was president.
Poets here are residents too.
Fleeing from Haiti, Jean Brière and others
found a free literary haven in Dakar.
Oh, the part that's by the ocean, that's fine,
says Jean-Marc, the part that you see.
But in the rest of the country, it's horrible.
There's no water, dried out, death to the economy.
I am like a shark at the reef, said King Behanzu,
upon hearing that the French were debarking at Catarou.
And he delayed them, but he could not stay them.
Of King Behanzu's defense, there remains
a statue of King Behanzu as a shark: "At the Reef."