Imaginary interview with Léopold Sédar Senghor
by Charactorium · Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906 — 2001) · Literature · Politics · 5 min read
It is in the light of an afternoon in 1984 that Aimé Césaire meets Léopold Sédar Senghor, a year after his entry under the Dome of the Académie française. On the work table, a white boubou folded near a fountain pen and handwritten notebooks; in the distance, a kora waits to be made to sing. The two men have known each other since that day in 1928 when, as young students in the Latin Quarter, they already dreamed of a black voice. Césaire has not come as a journalist: he comes as a brother-in-arms of Négritude, to make the friend behind the statue speak.
—Sédar, even before our common dreams in Paris, you had already earned the agrégation in 1935. What did this first feat really cost you?
You who saw me at work in our student years, Aimé, you know that this agrégation in grammar was not a vanity. I was the first among us to cross that threshold, and I carried that weight as a debt to all those who remained in the homeland. In the high schools of the metropole, they looked at me as a curiosity: an African teaching French to the sons of France. I understood that day that mastery of their language would be our surest weapon, not to imitate them, but to answer them as equals. Grammar was my first political act. I was not defending an exam; I was defending the idea that a black man could, without renouncing anything of Joal, speak as an equal to Racine.
Grammar was my first political act: proving that a black man could speak as an equal to Racine without renouncing anything of Joal.
—And in 1940, a prisoner of the Germans in the stalag, they say you refused to be freed before your African comrades. Why?
What else could I do, Aimé? We were the Senegalese tirailleurs, those whom France sent to die and then forgot. In that camp, I saw my brothers humiliated, penned up, and they would have offered me to leave first because I was an agrégé, because I spoke their language? That would have betrayed everything we carried. I preferred to stay, to write behind the barbed wire verses I muttered under my breath. It was there, in the mud, that Hosties noires germinated — that funeral song for our fallen without tombs. Solidarity was not a posture: it was the only way to remain a man. One does not leave a prison by abandoning one's own to the night.
One does not leave a prison by abandoning one's own to the night.
—You yourself indicate, in your collections, that you must be read to the sound of the kora or the balafon. Why this need for music?
Because for us, Aimé, the poem was never a silent text placed on a page. Back there, in Joal, speech was born with rhythm, carried by the griot's voice and the string of the kora. When I write 'Femme noire', I am not writing a description: I am writing a cadence, a drumbeat that precedes meaning. European poetry has let itself be confined to the eye; ours keeps the ear and the body. That is why I specify the instruments: Chants d'ombre, Éthiopiques, all of it asks to be danced as much as read. Rhythm is the architecture of black emotion. Without it, my verses are but an elegant corpse. You, who write differently, know nevertheless from what common source we drink.
European poetry has confined itself to the eye; ours keeps the ear and the body.
—Remember our Anthology of 1948, prefaced by Sartre under the title 'Black Orpheus'. Have we won the battle of Négritude?
Won, I would not dare say, Aimé — but we imposed a word where there was only contempt. That Anthologie was our manifesto, and Sartre's preface gave it an echo worldwide. Remember our heated discussions in the Latin Quarter: we wanted a black pride that was neither hatred nor withdrawal. For me, Négritude was never a reverse racism; it is an awareness, a stone we bring to the Civilisation of the Universal. We do not shut ourselves up in color; we offer our values to the great meeting of giving and receiving. Some, like young Soyinka, mock our 'tigritude' and would have us acting rather than singing. But the tiger does not know why it leaps.
Négritude is not a reverse racism; it is a stone we bring to the Civilisation of the Universal.
—Does this 'tigritude' that Soyinka opposes to you wound you, you who have thought so much about humanism?
It amuses me more than it wounds me, Aimé. Soyinka says a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude: it leaps. The phrase is beautiful, but it misses the target. We never proclaimed for the sake of proclaiming; we named in order to exist, because we had been denied. When a people has been stripped of its face by three centuries of slave trade and colonization, it must first tell itself again that it IS. The cultural hybridity I defend is not a weakness: it is the audacity to take from Europe its reason without surrendering our soul. Assimilation wanted us as copies; we will be confluence. The civilization of tomorrow will be hybrid or will not be. That is my answer to the tiger: I prefer the man who knows why he walks.
Assimilation wanted us as copies; we will be confluence.
—On June 20, 1960, Senegal became free and you took its helm. That day you spoke in Wolof and French — why both?
Because a man does not have to choose between his two hands, Aimé. Before my people, speaking only French would have been speaking over their heads; speaking only Wolof would have been renouncing the tool that history had placed between our fingers. So I did both, and it was not a calculation: it was my truth. Independence was for me not an end, but a beginning — we had to build a nation, schools, a university in Dakar, an administration. I knew the path strewn with pitfalls; two years later, the crisis with Mamadou Dia nearly swept everything away. Governing a young state is walking on a tightrope over the void, endlessly. But I wanted to prove that an African democracy was possible, standing and proud.
A man does not have to choose between his two hands.
—In 1980, you did what almost no African head of state had dared: leave of your own free will. What decided you?
Wisdom, perhaps, Aimé, or the lucidity of a man who has read history. I had seen too many powers cling on until they rotted, too many fathers of the nation become its jailers. I wanted to offer Senegal something else: proof that power can be passed on alive, without coup or blood. So I handed over my office to Abdou Diouf, in order and peace. It was, I was told, the first peaceful transition in sub-Saharan Africa. I take more pride in that than in my poems. For a poem consoles, but an institution protects generations. And then, you see, I felt the call of notebooks and pen — it was time to become fully a poet again. One does not leave power: one delivers oneself from it.
One does not leave power: one delivers oneself from it.
—Now you are divided between Joal, Dakar, and Normandy. You, the Serer child, how do you inhabit so many places at once?
I do not inhabit them one after the other, Aimé: I carry them all together. Joal is my Serer childhood, the smell of salt, the tales of old women, the night peopled with spirits — it is my source, and no exile has dried it up. Dakar was my work as a statesman. And Normandy, where I now retire, is the French part of my chosen blood. Some see a contradiction; I see a harmony. I can say my Catholic mass in the morning and hear, in the evening, the drum of my village in my memory. The boubou and the dark suit are two faces of the same man. They wanted me torn apart; I made myself a crossroads. My identity is not an addition of pieces: it is an assumed, fertile, living hybridity.
They wanted me torn apart; I made myself a crossroads.
—In your latest poems, Élégies majeures, I sense a new gravity. What are you seeking now, when you write far from power?
I seek to settle accounts with time, Aimé. The Élégies majeures were born on the threshold of old age, when one no longer lies to oneself. I meditate on death, on those who have gone before me, on what will remain when palaces are dust. In the morning, with the pen, in the silence of Verson or Joal, I let the dead and the ancient rhythms rise. Poetry has become my true homeland again, the one without borders. You know it, you who never laid yours down: we have governed, militated, traveled, but it is through song that we will remain faithful to our twenty-year-old selves. I no longer write to convince; I write to give thanks. The rest belongs to God and to oblivion.
I no longer write to convince; I write to give thanks.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Léopold Sédar Senghor's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.