With his collection Polo Kouman Polo parle, the Ivorian author HenriMichel Yéré makes a bold act of writing, choosing poetry at a time when romantic fiction wins all the votes. An approach that is all the more original in that its texts, written in nouchi, the popular Ivorian dialect, and in French, offer a double linguistic perspective.
“My word no longer holds in its plasma It fell into the trap of light The opaque morning of my birth
Koumanli is standing in plasmaLight has siri panpanli in maga-typedHarmattan gammait the day am born”
So says Polo, a mysterious speaker whose name, for those who know how to decipher, alludes to John Pololo, the most famous gangster in Côte d’Ivoire and man-lie in his time of President Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Through his words, Henri Michel Yéré expresses the discomfort of a large part of Ivorians, prey to the feeling of being misunderstood and unloved in a world that their elders have made difficult to live.
“I started speaking the day my father said he wasn’t my father, while my mother felt life dawning within her. At my first word, no echo; my words were not heard. Loneliness soon became a friend.
My tchapali stood up the day the Old man spoke that it wasn’t him, when I was starting to swarm in the womb of the Old woman. My first koumanli came out dry; that I spoke there: no one has science. I alone have become my sure guy. »
Absent trial
Beyond this questioning of previous generations, the collection stages the very issue of speech, its meaning and its power of persuasion, during a poetic contest in four parts. The trial in absence and irresponsibility of the elders that Polo opens will respond to another discourse: that of Tomorrow, in other words the future transformed into a character, which in turn will make its truths heard.
“Your ancestors let you down, like the chiefs who drank the libations, bought like supple spines at the purse of mindfulness (…) I, Tomorrow, I am expected to have pity on you (…) Me, it’s your sap that I want, the warmth of your blood
The old fathers have spoiled you, the same as the chiefs who have chomped on libations. It was cheaper as a spine we sell at the market. (…) They say, me, Devant, to have pity on you (…) Me Devant, it’s your sap I’m looking for sogbo. It is the warmth of your blood that excites me. »
Double pleading
The confrontation will follow this double pleading before a verbal resolution “all daggers out”, as if to confirm that poetic language can have the mission of being as loud and clear as political demands. “If I chose to write poetry, it is above all because it chose me and not to be an activist, however, explains Henri Michel Yéré. I have always read poets – Césaire, Neruda, Victor Hugo, Tchicaya U’Tamsi… – simply because this form of expression touched me. But I would never have imagined writing poetry myself, I placed this literary form too high to measure myself against it. Moreover, when I started to write myself, I first tried to compose a short story to express my point of view on the news at the time: the post-Houphouët democratic opening of the 1990s Returning to this text ten years later, I began to recompose it in fragments and images. It took on a poetic allure despite me. Over time, encouraged by literary personalities such as the great Ivorian poet Josué Guébo or the literary critic Boniface Mongo-Mboussa, I ended up trusting the sentences that come to mind, the rhythms and sounds that have always crossed. »
Three collections and a few distinctions later, Henri Michel Yéré takes the nouchi out of the street and gives it its letters of nobility, mirroring French, through a vibrant and moving text. “Even though I have been living in Switzerland for a few years, I am Ivorian, nouchi has always told me the reality of Abidjan, my hometown, where I have always felt a tension between on the one hand bling-bling, success, the outward signs of wealth, on the other the granite hardness with which millions of people are confronted daily who have to subsist in very difficult conditions. Written, poetized, my nouchi is perhaps a little fixed compared to the constantly changing one of the street, but it allows me to express this duality and to honor the whole population. »
This is how Polo’s voice manages to be heard from the Plateau district to the depths of Yopougon.
“It’s in the tongue that I’m going to lift you To contest freedom with clouds
It is in the koumanli I will sagba you; we alone. We will say we are light as clouds”.
