ON THE BOSPHORUS — JOHN BERGER [1979]

"On the waterfront of the Golden Horn at Constantinople From the windows of the old Pashas palaces that fronted on this shore undesirable persons and harems that had become too large were reduced by being sewed in a sack and droped [sic] onto the Bosphorus." 1920.

For ten days I kept notes (after ten days we fast became ignorant habitués), with the idea of later being able to reconstruct my first impressions of Istanbul.
            The reconstruction was not so simple as it might have been. Political violence, including the massacre at Maras, had forced Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit to declare a state of siege in thirteen of the provinces.
            Why describe the tiles of the Rustan [sic] Pasa mosque—their deep red and green lost in an even deeper blue—in a city where martial law has just been declared?

In Turkish, the Bosphorus is called the straits of the throat, the place of the stranglehold. It has featured for millennia in every global strategy. In 1947 Truman claimed an essential strategic interest in Turkey, just as, after the First World War, Britain and France had done. But whereas the Turks fought and won their war of independence (1918-23) against the first claim, they were powerless against the second.

American intervention in Turkish politics has been constant ever since. Nobody in Turkey doubts that the destabilizing programme of the right is backed by the CIA. The United States probably fears two things: the repercussions in Turkey of the fall of the Shah in Iran, unless there is a ‘strong’ government in Ankara; and Ecevit’s reform programme which, though moderate, is not compliant with western interests, and revives some of the promise of Ataturk’s independence movement. Among many other consequences, if Ecevit is ousted, the American-trained torturers will return to thier prison posts.

When the ferry leaves Kadikoy on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, on your right you see the massive block of the Selemiye barracks, with its four towers, sentinels at each corner. In 1971—the last time there was martial law in Istanbul—many political prisoners (nearly all of the left) were interrogated there. If you look the other way, you see the railway station of Hayderpasa and the buffers, only a few yards from the water, stopping in the lines which come from Baghdad, Calcutta and Goa. Nazim Hikmet, who spent thirteen years in Turkish prisons, wrote many lines about this railway station:

A Smell of fish in the sea
bugs on every seat
            spring has come to the station
Baskets and bags
            descend the station steps
            go up the station steps
            stop on the steps
Beside a policeman a boy
—of five, perhaps less—
            goes down the steps.
He has never had any papers
but he is called Kemal.
A bag
A carpet bag climbs the steps.
Kemal descending the steps
            barefoot and shirtless
                        is quite alone
                                    in this beautiful world
He has no memories except of hunger
            and then vaguely   
                        of a women in a dark room

Across the water, in the early morning sunlight, the mosques are the colour of ripe honeydew melons. The Blue Mosque with is six piercing minarets. Santa Sophia, taking advantage of its hill, immense, dominating its minarets so that they look no more than guardians of a breast. The so-called New Mosque, finished in 1660. On overcast days the same buildings across the straits look dull and grey, like the skin of cooked carp. I glance back now at the bleak towers of the Selemiye barracks.

Thousands of jellyfish of all sizes, as large as dishes, as small as eggcups, contract and distend in the current. They are milky and half-transparent. The local pollution has killed off the mackerel who used to eat the jellyfish. Hence their profusion in hundreds of thousands. Popularly they are called water cunts.

Hundreds of people crowd the boat. Most of them commute every day. A few, who stand out because of their clothes and the amazement to be read on their faces, are crossing into Europe for the first time, and have come from distant parts of Anatolia. A woman of thirty-five, wearing a scarf over her hair and baggy cotton trousers, sits on the uppermost deck in the sunshine which dazzles off the surface of the water.

The plain of central Anatolia, surrounded by mountains, with deep snow in the winter and the dust of rocks in the summer, was one of the first sites of neolithic agriculture, and the communities were peace-loving and matriarchal. Today, eroded, it risks becoming a desert. The villages are dominated by the aghas, thieving officials who are also landowners. There has been no effective land reform, and the average annual income in 1977 was £10-£20.

Deliberately the woman holds her husband’s hand. He is all that remains of the familiar. Together they look across at the famous skyline which is the breathtaking, incandescent, perfumed half-truth of the city. The hand which she holds is like many of the hands resting on laps on the deck. The idiom of the popular male Turkish hand: broad, heavy, plumper than you would guess (even when the body is emaciated), calloused, strong. Hands which do not look as if they have grown out of the earth like vines—the hands of old Spanish peasants, for example—but nomad hands which travel across the earth.

Speaking of his narrative poems, Hikmet once said he wanted to make poetry like a material for shirts, very fine, half silk, half cotton: silks which are also democratic because they absorb the sweat.

A beggar woman stands by the door to the saloon on the lower deck. In contrast to the heaviness of the male hands, the woman’s hands are light. Hands which make cakes of dried cow dung for burning in central Anatolia, hand which plait the daughter’s hair into strands. On her arm, the beggar woman carries a basket of sick cats: an emblem of pity, off which she scrapes a living. Most of those who pass place a coin in her outstretched hand.

Sometimes first impressions gather up some of the residue of the centuries. The nomadic hand is not just an image; it has a history. Meanwhile, the tourturers are capable, within a few days, of breaking entire nervous systems. The hell of politics—which is why politics compulsively seeks utopias—is that it has to straddle both times: millennia and a few days. I picture the face of friend perhaps to be imprisoned again, his wife, his children. Since the foundation of the republic, this is the ninth time that martial law has been declared to deal with internal dissent. I see his clothes sill hanging neatly in the wardrobe.

When the ferry passes the headland, eleven minarets become visible, and you can see clearly the camel chimneys of the kitchens of the Sultan’s palace. This palace of Topkapi housed luxury and indulgence on such a scale that they percolated into the very dreams of the West; but in reality, as you can see today, it was no more than a labyrinthine monument to dynastic paranoia.

Turning now against the current, black diesel smoke belches from the ship’s funnel, obliterating Topkapi. Forty per cent of the population of Istanbul live in shanty towns which are invisible from the centre of the city. These shanty towns—each one with a population of at least 25,000—are insanitary overcrowded and desperate. They are also sites of super-exploitation (a shack may be sold for as much as £5,000).

Yet the decision to migrate to the city is not a stupid one. About a quarter of the men who live in the shanty towns are unemployed. The other three quarters work for a further which be by illusory, but which was totally inconceivable in the village. The average wage in the city is between £20 and £30 a week.

The massacre at Maras was planned by fascists backed by the CIA. Yet to know this is to know little. Eric Hobsbawm wrote recently that it has taken left-win intellectuals a long time to condemn terrorism. Today left-wing terrorism in Turkey plays into the hands of those who want to re-establish a right-wing police state such as existed between 1950 and 1960—to the enormous benefit of the aghas.

Yet however much one condemns terrorism, one must recognize that its popular (minority) appeal derives from experience which is bound to remain totally untouched by such tactical, or ethical, considerations. Popular violence is as arbitrary as the labour market, not more so. The violent outbreak, whether encouraged by the right or the left, is fed by the suppressed violence of countless initiatives not taken. Such outbreaks are the ferment of stagnation, kept at the right temperature by broken promises. For more than fifty years, since Ataturk’s republic succeed the sultanate, the peasants of central Anatolia, who fought for their independence, have been promised land and the means to cultivate it. Bush such changes as there have been have led to more suffering.

In the lower-deck saloon a salesman, who has bribed the stewards to let him sell, is holding up, high for all to see, a paper folder of needles. His patter is leisurely and soft-voiced. Those who sit or stand around him are mostly men. On the folder, which holds fifteen needles of different sizes, is printed in English HAPPY HOME NEEDLE BOOK, and round this title an illustration of three young white women wearing hats and ribbons in their hair. Both needles and folder were made in Japan.

The salesman is asking 20p. Slowly, one after another, the men buy. It is a bargain, a present and an injunction. Carefully they slip the folder into one of the pockets of their thin jackets. Tonight they will give them to their wives, as if the needles were seeds for a garden.

In Istanbul the domestic interior, in both the shanty towns and elsewhere, is a place of repose, in profound opposition to what lies outside the door. Cramped, badly roofed, crooked, cherished, these interiors are spaces like prayers, both because they oppose the traffic of the world as it is, and because they are a metaphor for the Garden of Eden or Paradise.

Interiors symbolically offer the same thing as Paradise: repose, flowers, fruit, quiet, soft materials, sweetmeats, cleanliness, femininity. The offer can be as imposing (and vulgar) as one of the Sultan’s rooms in the harem, or it can be as modest as the printed patterns on a square of cheap cotton, draped over a cushion on the floor of a shack.

It is clear that Ecevit will try to maintain control over the initiatives of the generals who are now responsible for the rule of each province. They politico-military tradition of imprisonment, assassination and execution is still a strong one in Turkey. When considering the power and decadence of the Ottoman empire, the West conveniently overlooks the fact that this empire is what protected Turkey from the the first inroads of capitalism, western colonization and the supremacy of money over every other form of power. Capital assumes within itself all earlier forms of ruthlessness, and makes the old forms obsolete. This obsolescence permit the West a basis for its global hypocrisies, of which the latest is the ‘human rights’ issue.

An man stands by the ship’s rail, staring down at the flashing water and the ghostly water cunts. The ship, seventeen years old, was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Govan, Glasgow. Until five years ago, he was a shoemaker in a village not far from Bolu. It took him two days to make a pair of shows. Then factory-made shoes began to arrive in the village, and were sold cheaper than his. The cheaper, factory-made shoes meant that some children in some villages no longer went barefoot. No longer able to sell his shoes, he went to the state factory to ask for work. They told him he could hire a stamping machine for cutting out pieces of leather.

A pair of shoes consists of twenty-eight pieces. If he wanter to hire the machine, he must cut the necessary pieces of leather for 50,000 pairs a year. The machine was delivered to his shop. There was only room for him to sit on his stool by the machine.

The next year he was told that, if he wanted ot keep the machine, he must now cut enough pieces for 100,000 pairs of shoes. It was impossible, he said. Yet it proved possible. He worked twelve hours during the day, and his brother-in-law worked twelve hours during the night. In the room above, which was a metaphor for Paradise, the sound of the stamping machine never stopped day or night. In a year, the two men cut nearly three million pieces.

One evening he smashed his left hand, and the noise of the machine stopped. There was quiet beneath the carpet of the room above. The machine was loaded on to a lorry, and taken back to the factory. It was after that that he came to Istanbul for work. The expression in his eyes, as he tells his story, is familiar. You see it in the eyes of countless men in Istanbul. These men are no longer young; yet their look is not one of resignation, it is too intense for that. Each one is looking at his own life with the same knowingness, protectiveness and indulgence as he would look on a son. A calm Islamic irony.

The subjective opposites of Istanbul are not reason and unreason, nor virtue and sin, nor believer and infidel, nor wealth and poverty—colossal as the objective contrasts are. They are, or so it seemed to me, purity and foulness.

This polarity covers that of interior/exterior, but it is nor confined to it. For example, as well as separating carpet from earth, it separates milk and cow, perfume and stench, pleasure and ache. The popular luxuries—honey-sweet to the tooth, shiny to they eye, silken to the touch, fresh to the nose—offer amends for the natural foulness of the world. Many Turkish popular expressions and insults play across the polarity. ‘He thinks,’ they say about someone who is conceited, ‘they he’s the parsley in everyone’s shit.’

Applied to class distinction, this same polarity of purity/foulness becomes vicious. The faces of the rich bourgeois women of Istanbul, sick with idleness, fat with sweetmeats, are among the most pitiless I have seen.

When friends of mine were prisoners in the Selemiye barracks, their wives took them attar of roses and essence of lemons.

They ferry also carries lorries. On the tailboard of a lorry from Konya is written: ’The money I make I earn with my own hands, so may Allah bless me.’ The driver, with grey hair, is leaning against the bonnet, drinking tea out of a small, gilt-rimmed glass. On every deck there are vendors of tea with such glasses and bowls of sugar on brilliant copper trays. The tea drinkers sip, relax, and look at the shining water of the Bosphorus. Despite the thousands of passengers carried daily, the ferry boats are almost as clean as interiors. There are not streets to compare with their decks.

On each side of the lorry from Konya, the driver has had a small landscape painted. Both show a lake surrounded by hills. Above the all-seeing eye, almond-shaped with long lashes, like a bridegroom’s. The painted water of the lakes suggests peace and stillness. As he sips his tea, the driver talk to three small, dark-skinned men with passionate eyes. The passion may be personal, but it also the passion you can see all over the world in the eyes of proud and oppressed minorities. The three men are Kurds.

Both in the main streets of Istanbul, and in the back streets where there are chickens and sheep, you see porters carrying bales of cloth, sheets of metal, carpets, machine parts, sacks of grain, furniture, packing cases. Most of these porters are Kurds from eastern Anatolia, on the borders of Iraq and Iran. They carry everything where the lorries cannot. And because the industrial part of the city is full of small workshops in streets too narrow for lorries, there is a great deal to carry from workplace to workplace.

Fixed to their backs is a kind of saddle, on which the load is piled and corded high above their heads. This way of carrying, and the weight of the loads, obliges them to stoop. They walk, when loaded, like jack knives half-shut. The three now listening to the lorry driver are sitting on their own saddles, sipping tea, gazing at the water and the approach to the Golden Horn. The cords with which they fasten their loads lie loos between their feet and the deck. 

Altogether, the crossing takes twenty minutes (about the time needed to read this article). Beside the landing stage rowing boats rock in the choppy water. In some of them fires burn, the flames dancing to the rhythm of the slapping water. Over the fires, men are frying fish to sell to those on their way to work.

Beyond those pans—almost as wide as the boat—of frying fish lie all the energies and torpor of the city: the workshops, the markets, the mafia, the Galata Bridge on which the crowd walking across is invariably twenty abreast (the bridge is a floating one and incessantly, almost imperceptibly, quivers like a horse’s flank), the schools, the newspaper offices, the shanty towns, the abattoir, the headquarters of the political parties, the gunsmiths, the merchants, soldiers, beggars.

These are the last moments of peace before the driver starts up the engine of his lorry, and the porters hurry to the stern of the ship to be among the first to jump ashore. The tea vendors are collecting the empty glasses. It is as if, during the crossing, the Bosphorus induces the same mood as the painted lakes: as if the ferry boat, built in Glasgow in 1961, becomes an immense floating carpet, suspended in time above the shining water, between home and work, between effort and effort, between two continents. And this suspension, which I remember so vividly, corresponds now to the destiny of the country.

John Berger, “On the Bosphorus,” in Geoff Dyer, ed. Selected Essays (New York: Vintage, 2003). Originally published in 1979 in the journal New Society.  

THE WINDING COURSE OF NEGRITUDE — RENÉ DEPESTRE



This text was originally a public address delivered by Depestre at the January 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana. It was published in that same year by the Moroccan journal Souffles.   
*** 
If one is interested in following the winding course of Negritude Haiti is the best country in the world to consider at present because, as Aimé Césaire said, “Negritude rose for the first time” in Haiti and because Negritude is now the ideology sustaining the most hideous tyranny in contemporary history. In light of the collective horrors Haitians have experienced, critical examination of Negritude can have profound meaning for oppressed blacks around the world. We know that every ideology, in its representation of reality and the objectives it pursues, tends to give imaginary value to particular social class’s aspirations. Marx called this process of deforming reality “mystification.” In Haiti, when studying the role of Negritude in our national history, pseudo-sociologists like Francois Duvalier have always scrutinized the concept in isolation instead of analyzing it within the context of the history of class relations. In separating the question of race from the economic development and social history of Haiti, and in giving it an absolute and mythical dimension, they have reduced Haitian history to a series of chaotic ethnic conflicts between mulattos and blacks, who from the time of our independence became the reigning oligarchy of the country. On a broader level this is also what happens when one separates racist dogma from the evolution of colonial societies: the history of colonized peoples becomes a series of conflicts between “Blacks” and “Whites.” In the case of Haiti, the question of race, far from being a determining factor in the development of Haitian society, has only led to mystification, which in the consciousness of two competing aristocracies has served to hide the real stakes and motivations of class struggle. 
And yet this question of race is a very important social reality in Haiti. We know that Marx, while denying spiritual dogmas a pivotal place in the historical process of a given society retains them as a social reality, so while they cannot change the general course of history, they can modify its shape, pace, circumstances. In its function as a social reality, racial ideology has influenced the unfolding of our national history and, at certain moments of acute crisis, modified the pace and circumstances of class struggle in our country. Since 1946, Haitian society has been in a general state of crisis, primarily because of the U.S. economic domination, and the color question once again occupies center stage on the political and ideological fronts and again ceils the reality of class struggle. Since 1946 people of the black petite bourgeoisie, like Duvalier, have been allied with landholding blacks and “comprador” mulattos. Together they control political power, use the notion of “negritude” demagogically, and have attempted to make the black masses believe that they hold power and that the “Duvalier revolution” is a resounding victory for Negritude. For the past ten years the atrocious acts associated with the Duvalier regime have completely destroyed the falsified image of this myth in the minds of our people. The horrible Duvalier dictatorship has led Haitians to question the ideas they have long had of themselves. In their eyes Haiti is no longer fixed as that mythical figure imprinted in school on the consciousness of every Haitian: Haiti, first Black Republic in modern history, homeland and myth to black men, cradle and “paradise” of Negritude! As a result of their intense suffering, Haitians have realized that power, whether in the hands of blacks, whites, mulattos, or indigenous groups in a semicolonial system, is always a brutal force that dehumanized people and their social and cultural history. For the past ten years as never before Haitians have seen what blacks and mulattos like them are capable of when they defend tooth and nail the interests of a small, privileged minority and a totalizing imperialism. Haitians now realize that the exaltation of any given race is pointless absurdity that always masks violent attacks on the oneness of humankind. Haitians see blacks and mulattos, tyrants, criminals with no shame, obscurantists, Nazis, tontons-macoutes, because they do not have any particular essence; they are bourgeois through and through. And in the era of the terrorist dictatorship of capital, they may be guilty of crimes as heinous as those committed by Hitler in the concentration camps or those perpetrated today by Yankee Pentagon officials in North and South Vietnam. Of course Duvalier’s tyranny provides a monstrous caricature of Negritude, and so one must not throw out the baby with the bloody bathwater and conclude that this concept was destined to lead to an assault on the human condition. As a doctrine, socialism aims to liberate man, but national-socialism was a means of exterminating man. It all depends upon how a dominant class uses an ideology to hide base and selfish ends. Today black bourgeoisies wield their power through neocolonial intrigues and violence in Africa and the Americans, and they have too hastily seized the concept of Negritude as their ideological weapon. They have done so because they know that at one point in history—in the works of such black writers as Jean Price-Mars, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain, Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, Nicolás Guillén, J.S. Alexis, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, etc.—this concept expressed very forcefully the double alienation of oppressed blacks. And so, this concept of Negritude belonged to an isolated moment in the history of decolonization, when the brutalized and humiliated black man offered his affective rebuttal to the white colonizer’s thorough disdain. Just as the white colonizer turned his privileged position in the systems of slavery and colonization into an epidermization of his supposed biological superiority, the black man, in his oppressed, pariah condition—of being alienated in one’s own skin—was led along a completely different path to epidermize his lamentable historical situation. In this way, at its best Negritude was a cultural movement through which black African and American intellectuals seized upon the worth and originality of the Negro-African cultures as well as the aesthetic value of the black race and the ability of its peoples to enter into the history that was forcibly denied to them in the colonial adventure. In its most legitimate expression, for instance in the poetry of Césaire, Negritude inspired the realization that the black proletarian is doubly alienated: in the first instance he is alienated like the white proletarian insofar as he provides a labor force traded on the capitalist market; in the second he is alienated because of his black skin, in his epidermic singularity. Negritude was thus the new consciousness of this double alienation and of the historical imperative to move beyond it through revolutionary praxis.  
One must not forget that, as a result of racist dogma, the great majority of Whites believed that the black man’s eternal crime (in addition to being of the proletariat) was his skin color. This despicable ideological mystification is still leveraged against Blacks in the United States, South Africa, Rhodesia, etc. The epidermic singularity of blacks or mulattos, instead of being one of the objectively random phenomena at work in the history of humankind, became and evil essence in the consciousness of all the slavers of the world, the sign of the absolute evil of the black man as a social being, the sign and the stigmata of an unassailable inferiority. Metaphysical and aesthetic meaning were given to the skin color of both blacks and whites. And, as if issued by divine right, it was irrevocably decided that only the black man is colored, whereas the “White: basks in the light. As Sartre has said, “the whiteness of his skin was another look, condensed light,” and it was thus the white man’s historical destiny to enlighten the rest of humankind with the luminescent virtues of his white skin. The desire to objectify the black man as a commodity found its rationale and pretext in the long colonial process of epidermizing the historical situation of black peoples. Negritude, in literature and art as well as in ethnology and history, was in its beginnings a legitimate form of revolt against the detestable manifestations of racial ideology in the world. By force, fire, and blood, colonization opened up the floodgates of universal history to the bloody white-black binary in order to hide and justify capitalist exploitation. Negritude postulated the need to move beyond this binary, not through a new mystification, but rather through collective revolutionary praxis. Unfortunately more often than not Negritude is used as a myth that obfuscates the existence of the black bourgeoisie, who, in Haiti as in numerous African countries, formed a dominant class. And just like any class that oppresses another, the black bourgeoisie relies on ideological mystification to hide in the real nature of social relations. Today, for both black and white mystifies, Negritude implies the absurd idea that the black man is endowed with a particular “human nature,” equipped with an essence that belongs to him alone. And so he is called upon, according to writers like Janheinz Jahn, to give to Europe and the West in general “more soul”—of which the West is apparently in great need. For the Senegalese president, the poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, “emotion is black like reason is Greek.” In this way all class contradictions are abstracted, and the black bourgeoisies from Africa and the Americans can, in all confidence and with the good blessings of neocolonialism, freely take advantage of black workers in the name of shared spirituality. That is what we find in the writings of the Belgian essayist Lilyan Kesteloot, who wanted to show “Negritude as being-in-itself”—the permanent and eternal state of a singular essence. Like other European “specialists” working on Negritude, Lilyan Kesteloot locks the Negro man in blackness and the white man in whiteness. She writes, “Understood in this sense, ‘black soul’ belongs to all time and has not been ‘surpassed,’ as maintained by Sartre and others whom he influenced. No more than Slavic soul, Arab soul, or French esprit have been surpassed.” According to this elementary and impudent logic, “Negritude,” far from articulating a revolution leading to dis-alienation and the total decolonization of Africa and the two black Americas, cannot hide the fact that it serves as one of the pillars supporting tricks, traps, and hypocritical neocolonialist actions. Abstracted from the historical context of the revolution in the Third World, and separated arbitrarily from the immediate needs of the global tricontinental struggle of underdeveloped people against imperialism and neocolonialism, Negritude has given rise to an unacceptable “black Zionism.” It has become a way of leading black peoples away from their duty to make revolution.


BLACK ORPHEUS IN THE REVOLUTION 

Twenty years ago, when the concept of Negritude was defined by the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in his unforgettable Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land] and Jean Paul Sartre in his famous essay “Orphee noir [“Black Orpheus”], whenever one turned one’s gaze, one could see this Black Orpheus taking the wind out of the white bourgeoisie’s sails. At that time in Africa “Black Orpheus” was not President of the Republic and did not drive around in a luxury Mercedes-Benz; he did not buy shares in the mines of the Upper Katanga; he did not align himself, over the dead body of Patrice Lumumba, with the most adventuresome speculators in international finance in order to obtain profitable shares. In the past twenty years the waters of the Congo have passes under many bridges, and it is not merely with Aimé Césaire’s poetic lyricism that Negritude has flowed into the sea. Cesaire’s Negritude was expectant patience. It was the necessary irruption of the rebellious consciousness of the oppressed Negro. It was an opening onto the specific requirements for a national liberation movement. Twenty years ago Sartre asked the following question: “What will happen then if he allows himself to be defined by only his objective condition?” Our response to Jean-Paul Sartre: look at Cuba and you will find the answer. Notice how Negritude has integrated the socialist revolution, and how it transcneds itself through historical process of dis-alienation through which whites, blacks, and mulattos are less and less opposed with every passing day and through which the dramatic outcome of their destinies resolve itself in the same obvious human truth: revolution. Not Negritude but rather this very real process of decolonization is alone capable of mobilizing all the energies of underdeveloped people on the three continents. Black Orpheus cannot find his lost Eurydice except through revolution, and in the revolution, which alone can, with the creative force of the people, annihilate all the hells humanity has constructed for itself. The new Black Orpheus will be revolutionary or it will not be.

René Depestre, “The Winding Course of Negritude,” translated from French by Laura Reeck, in Olivia c. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). The original French can be read here.