Mosaïques is a pluridisciplinary event -cinema, literature, music, photo and food- celebrating cross-fertilization between cultures. It is now in its third year and spreads over 5 days (March 20 to 24). France, like Britain, spread out and imposed its language in far regions of the world. Today, these peoples have made French their own, enriched it with their own words, music and rythms. The writers invited to take part in Mosaïques reflect this richness in their styles. Their relation with France is a constant process of exchange: the diversity of the Creole world with Raphaël Confiant, the vibrancy of Algeria with Assia Djebar but also, and above all, their gaze onto our culture: Bessora's ironic comments or Mahi Binebine's painful tale. This neverending questioning of our perceptions of each other may help us understand our reciprocal cultures better and learn to live together in a newly defined multiculturalism.
Wednesday 21 March:
La littérature québecoise dans le contexte des littératures francophones
5.30 pm / in French
Professor Lise Gauvin, from the University of Montreal, is the author of Langagement, an analysis of the relationship of francophone writers -novelists as well as essayists- to French, real or adopted mother tongue, refuge or exile. This event is organised in cooperation with the University of Westminster's Francophone Africa, Caribbean and the Pacific Research Group.
A different kind of multiculturalism
6.30 pm / in English
Raphaël Confiant, one of our greatest Caribbean writers will be in conversation with Jatinder Verma, the first Asian to have been invited to direct at the Royal National Theatre, director and founder of Tara Arts.
Author with Patrick Chamoiseau of Eloge de la Creolisation, Raphael Confiant looks at the Caribbeans as a paradigm of a different sort of multiculturalism. He advocates a world tolerant of cultural diversity where one would not have to abandon his culture to belong and can share it with others, neither assimilation nor ghettoisation. A staunch defender of Creole, he writes both in Creole and French. His novel, Eau de Café, was published last year in Britain by Faber.
Thursday 22 March: David Macey on Fanon
7 pm / in English
Launch by Granta of David Macey's biography of Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique, taught by Cesaire, a psychiatrist, Fanon put his words into action and joined the Algerian war of independence. This inspired his major book, The Wretched of the Earth, prefaced by Sartre, which became a cult book among revolutionaries.
Saturday 24 March: Literatures
2.30 to 5 pm / in English and French
Assia Djebar is one of the greatest voices of Algerian literature today. Her pen name means the "healer", well chosen for a woman who has relentlessly "revisited the painful wounds and violent moments of the various histories that we inhabit and that ultimately inhabit us: country, sexuality, gender roles, religion, friendship and love" (Pieprzak for Wasafiri). Her latest collection of stories is at the core of our event: she revisits Algeria, bemoaning the loss of the multi-ethnic country of her youth, as well as looking at the story of the children of a Franco-Algerian couple and the questions of identity they experience. She will be in conversation with Jean Khalfa, Cambridge University.
Véronique Tadjo, a novelist, painter, poet, children's books writer, comes from the Ivory Coast. As the Crow flies, her first novel to be translated into English, investigates the importance and power of love. She writes of Africa, her emotions and hopes for this land torn between violence and tradition. Her last book, L'Ombre d'Imana, explores the horrors of the Rwandan conflict and reflects on human madness, resilience and courage.
Mahi Binebine is Maroccan. A writer, he is also a well known painter exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York. His poignant novel Cannibales tells of the fate of those forced to risk their lives to escape their country, economic migrants or asylum seeker, they all have one thing in common: despair. And the cannibals of the title, are the Westerners who eat them up. Not yet translated, this book is more than topical.
Bessora was born in Brussels of a Swiss mother and a Gabonese father, grew up in Washington, Paris, studied business in Lausanne and now anthropology in Paris. She writes with a ferocious humour about French society where the racist children of ruthless imperialists are forced to accept a multicultural world or die... Funny, quirky but also deep and moving at time, she delights us throughout.
Hoda Adib is a wonderful Lebanese poet and musician. Her enchanting works celebrate the turmoils of love, question the subconscious and acknowledge the arab tradition while giving a new musicality to French. Her readings will provide poetic interludes during the afternoon.
17 Queensberry Place
London SW7
Free admission
For more information or if you want to be sent the whole programme (including films), contact Géraldine D'Amico:
Tel: 0207 838 20 62