Meeting Our Griots

Meeting our griots is an image and text-based project at the intersection of research, archiving and documenting.

‘The work of the black artist is also to preserve what was created before him… It is sending small tokens of affection to our old and ancients poets whom renown has ignored… We must revere their wisdom, appreciate their insight, love the humanity of their words.’ – Alice Walker, Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.

Kokoba, meeting our griots / à la rencontre de nos griots is a interdisciplinary project at the intersection of art, research, archiving and documenting. It is inspired by 'Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist', an essay written by acclaimed African American writer Alice Walker. In this text, she discussses the lack of black literary figures in school curriculum and how finding their works enriched her life as a black woman, a teacher and writer. Eventually, Alice Walker urges black artists to value and cherish the work of those who came before us and who laid the foundation for black storytelling and black intelligentsia.

Through Kokoba, I take on this advice, this duty, and go on a journey to meet African writers whose work and life are unknown or less celebrated in the contemporary literary scenes. I listen to them and learn from them. I collect their stories through recorded conversations and document their ordinary yet extraordinary lives on polaroid films in order to capture and share intimate fragments of their existence and what makes them who they are.

On one hand, this project cultivates transmission, human connection and transgenerational dialogues and is rooted in the idea that "In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library that burns down", a famous quote by Malian writer and historian Amadou Hampâté Bâ.

On the other hand, Kokoba reflects my own mythopoetic identity formation through which I used African literatures as means of self-understanding. Indeed, as an African women who grew up in an non-black country, discovering the literary works of African writers in the later stage of my student life has been very instrumental in defining my identity but also in recalling childhood memories linked to oral storytelling.

Kokoba is a tribute to Alice Walker and African writers whose words offered and still offer me refuge.

The following images are from my encounter with Togolese storyteller and scholar Rogo Koffi Fiangor who opened his home in Fontenay-sous-Bois (Paris) for Kokoba’s first Rencontre/Encounter. During this intimate moment, Rogo took me on a fantastic journey into the realms of African folktales, songs and storytelling. The written text (in both French and English) beneath each photograph is informed by Rogo's comments when discovering each polaroid one by one.