Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Who is Neither From

Quote from Mahmoudan Hawad (source: here):
"The vast Sahara-Sahel area was ‘irrigated,’ in all senses of the word, by the art of creating networks of exchanges, of solidarity and of shared interests between communities with different languages, cultures, ways of life, and competences. This ability to weave links between worlds modeled a kind of man who is neither from the Occident, the Orient, the north or the south, but is a man-bridge, a creative man, that knows how to create original cultural syntheses. It is this nomadic imagination - dynamic and alternative, this staging of plurality in movement, that I put in play and which inspires my stories. A plurality condemned and mutilated by those States heirs to European colonization."

If I summarize his images. "We" can learn from him as nomad:
  • Weaving
  • Linking
  • Bridging 
  • Synthesizing
  • Moving ... between worlds, man, cultures and plurality.
I am wondering: what does he know that "we" don't (if anything)?  Don't we weave, link, bridge, synthesize or move? What am I missing? What space does his (spoken) language or poems have that we have lost (if anything)? Or is he just another 'romantic' soul longing for a youth, life or lifestyle that is lost in time and history? Longing for physical places that extends over several countries on planet Earth; not wanting to get frozen into one language, one country, one culture, one point, one place, one image or one way of expressing? Longing and demanding plurality by definition?
I ordered his book 'Furigraphie. Poésies 1985-2015' (2017) to find out what he is pointing at.

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