Background

“‘He came in as a cousin and left as a gendarme.’ Balladur visa, Kwassa Kwassa, (im)mobility and relational geopoetics in the Comorian Islands”. The book’s title already hints at the causal chain in the context of the Comoros Archipelago. In his monograph, Africa in the Indian Ocean. Islands in Ebb and Flow, Tor Sellström noted that, “The waters between Anjouan and Mayotte have been described as the ‘biggest marine graveyard in the world’ and the Balladur visa as ‘legalized genocide’ˮ.¹ The Balladur Visa, widely referred to in the Comoros Archipelago as “the visa of death”, was introduced in 1995 to curb the “migration” of people from Grande Comore, Mohéli, and Anjouan to the island of Mayotte, an overseas department of France, hence a member of the European Union on African soil. I am using “migration” in quotation marks because the term seems rather euphemistic in the context of the cruel realities on the ground.

In order to express the weird situation that drives a cousin to play the gendarme within the Comoros Archipelago, François Taglioni, a specialist in the study of the interaction of environment and health, used the metaphor of “balkanization” to highlight Anjouan’s low economic status within the Comoros nation state and the fact that Anjouan is the closest island to Mayotte. This proximity explains why the journey of adventurous, teetering and overloaded boats known as kwassa kwassa begins there. Initially, kwassa kwassa refers to a Congolese dance introduced in the 1980s and implies the idea of moving and shaking.²

In this book, I argue that kwassa kwassa constitute a kind of bricolage, social and survival engineering response to the Balladur visa. This visa can be considered a maritime wall along the lines of what Achille Mbembe calls “manners of demarcations that in many cases have no other function than to intensify the zoning off of entire communities, without ever fully succeeding in keeping away those considered a threat”.³

Since 1995, this new form of the Berlin wall erected between Mayotte and the other islands of the Comoros has been a hotbed for the manifestation of the tense relations between the Comoros and France. These manifestations have generated hundreds of scattered emotional reactions and were the topic of a few documentaries on France 24, Tv5, France Inter and Arte but they have not been the subject of systematic academic inquiry in terms of their manifold expressions in literary works. This book fills this major gap. I argue that selected authors use their artistic voices in order to draw a critical attention to this interdisciplinary issue of burning topicality, which I encounter every time I go to Mayotte as a visiting staff.

This book lies at the intersection of Europe-Africa political geographies; Indian Ocean Francophone literatures; the geopoetics and the geopolitics of sensibilities; literature as social agency, contemporary political sociology in the Comoros, and Critical African Studies. It addresses literary actualizations and representations of notions of territory as they play out in the Comoros Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Therefore, my work makes a substantial literary, cultural, sociological and political contribution to the global migration discourse, especially by focusing on a neglected part of the world with pronounced tensions in terms of territory.

My approach to literary studies has drawn on, and expanded among others, perspectives of decolonial aesthetics and critical poetics (Mignolo, Torabully); Black Skin, White Masks; (Fanon); Ambiguous Adventure (Kane); the politics of a better humanity (Mbembe); Homo Sacer (Agamben); the poetics of relation and mondialité (Glissant); the poetics of humanity (Chamoiseau). It thus offers opportunities for interdisciplinary synergies with other disciplines in the wider field of the humanities because the realities and the fiction displayed in the works in the corpus speak to many disciplines, such as history, geography, political science, philosophy and anthropology.

Corpus

The project analyses 18 works published between 2008 and 2017 and cutting across 5 genres namely: collection of short stories; collection of poems; a play; novels and a ‘texte-passerelle’ (a text that is a cultural bridge between Africa and Europe) by 20 authors from Mayotte, Anjouan, Grande-Comore, Mauritius and France. The diverse backgrounds of the authors already indicate the human, poetic and political concern with this silent tragedy that has been unfolding since a quarter of a century in the Comoros Archipelago. The corpus was finalised during field research in The Comoros Archipelago (Moroni, Anjouan and Mayotte) in August-September 2019.

Research Questions

The book asks the following questions:

1. How can works of imagination on “migration” to Mayotte constitute a kind of collective social therapy and social in(ter)vention (Arndt & Ofuatey-Alazard, 2014)?

2. What kinds of resources do authors rely on to decry the environment characterised by madness, hopelessness, social, physical, environmental, economic, political and spiritual decay?

3. To parapahrase Chamoiseau (Écrire en pays dominé), how can one contest French hegemony by using the major instrument of cultural power – the French language?

4. With regard to literary configurations, what resistance strategies and creative spaces do authors and literary agents from the stream referred to as “the youngest child of literatures written in French” (Ranaivoson 2018: 252) use to break free from the Parisian ‘centre’?

5. How do selected authors relate to, for example, authors and artists from the Indian Ocean and other French overseas territories such as the French Antilles?

6. What kind of research methods can do justice to this sensitive topic and corpus?

Structure of the Work and Some Key Findings

The work is divided into eight chapters built around three axes: 1. Space-time axis; 2. Agency (the role of authors, cultural agents, the economic and intersectional dimensions of the Kwassa Kwassa, and reflecting on my own privileged situation) and 3. The modalities of writing (aesthetics, poetics and ethics).

The space-time axis covers Chapters 1, 2 and 3. Here, I review the historical context and the juridical fraud that led to the current situation despite 22 United Nations resolutions against France’s presence on Mayotte. This explains the recourse to Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon); the idea of ‘(b)othering’ and being a stranger at home (Y.B); ‘bare life’ (Agamben); the Ambiguous Adventure (Kane) and the spectre of brutal, silent, shifty, psychic and intimate violence (Chamoiseau) against the other and the self. Here, the book shows how literary works aestheticize and interrogate the complex topic of space-place; territorial rights; (un)belonging; identity performance, and identity (mis)management within the Comoros Archipelago.

In Chapters 4 and 5, I present an innovative approach to the study of literary works produced in a state of emergency. Taking the texts back to their settings; exploring newspapers archives; laying hands on texts which do not circulate beyond the Comoros Islands; finding the traces of the (hi)stories; walking and feeling places described in the narratives; walking and talking to authors; listening to and learning from actors in the kwassa kwassa business chain which associates mobility, immobility and intersectionaliy (Chapter 5), and listening to painful accounts by witnesses and victims of the “Balladur Visa” politics who trusted me, and have helped me in developing a relational approach to African Comparative Literatures. This approach centers on field research as nourishing the theoretical approach and not the other way round.

I call this approach the Walking and talking et Tshapalodrome relationnel (Chapter 4). This approach also guides me further in rethinking my own positionality as a privileged researcher doing African Studies from two powerful institutions located in the ‘West’. I ask: what is my own ethical responsibility (agency axis) in the wider framework of Reconfiguring African Studies in which I have carried out this research? I ask further: how can I do African Comparative Literatures from the ‘West’ while avoiding to contribute to the neocolonial library (Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa)? These questions address both my research practice and my modalities of writing about the places in Africa where I have the privilege to do research.

The modalities of writing axis build the core of Chapters 6, 7 and 8. Language is on the one hand resistance, on the other hand, geopoetical and often an invitation to a different ethics of humanity. Here, the question of putting people’s sensibilities to the fore is crucial, which explains my choice of approaches by Mignolo (decoloniality); Marson (generic bricolage); Mbembe (the aesthetics of vulgarity); Torabully (coolitude) and Pessoa (intranquility). Furthermore, I fruitfully cross Chamoiseau and Agamben’s thoughts with those of Sambaouma and Djailani.

The final chapter recalls that despite the total decay and the collective wounds portrayed in the texts of the corpus, literature never stops HOPING for a different humanist world, a world of freedom, for ALL: a world of humanity! Chapter 8 focuses on one unexpected resource authors recur to in order to come to terms with this tragic situation: thought-provoking but humanistic humour. Basing my reading on “départenance” (Rosello & Bjornson) and the therapy of “Le Pleurer-Rire” (Lopès), I show that authors invite Comorians to unbelong while keeping smiling.

In using approaches suggested by thinkers familiar with the question of structural, epistemic and mental domination, selected writers have transversally positioned their works as testimonies and archives of the complex relation between the Comoros and France. Moreover, they have highlighted human rights issues in the Comoros Archipelago by dedicating their creative energy to “the contestation of existing power relations and the articulation of new political visions”.⁴ Finally, they have shed new light on literary works not only as acts of resistance against a given matrix of power, but also as spaces for intercultural dialogue and a means of politico-social in(ter)vention along the line of a dreamscape of a better “politics of humanity” (Mbembe) that will be characterized by open hearts and borders.

In Concluding-Giving Back-Carrying on, I argue for more daring and transdisciplinary research projects; projects which question mainstream ‘Western’ schools of thoughts; projects which deconstruct our situated positionalities; projects which, in any moment in the process, can answer the question: what has it got to do with reality out there; and, projects which sharpen our ethics of giving back to people in mostly insecure research settings which feed our generally secure careers in the ‘West’. These projects shall allow developping context-relevant methods in order to tentatively claim to study African Comparative Literatures that are essentially: multiple, intersectional and particularly relational.