Tobias Warner, PMLA, October 2024

This issue convenes a multidisciplinary conversation around the rediscovery of Mariama Bâ’s “FESTAC…Souvenirs de Lagos…” which appeared in translation last year in PMLA as  “Festac . . . Memories of Lagos.”  The reemergence of this poem has inspired readings by scholars of African and francophone literatures, Black internationalism, Global South feminisms, photography, media theory, ecocriticism, intellectual history, and print culture. The first exchanges took place at a roundtable at the 2024 convention co-sponsored by the Executive Committees of the Francophone and African to 1990 Forums. Many participants in that discussion have returned to expand their contributions here. The conversation has also grown to incorporate new reactions to the poem, including from Bâ’s own daughter.

Many factors conspire to make “Memories of Lagos” a promising meeting point. Not least among them are shared surprise and excitement at the recovery of something that no one knew was lost. Here is a new text by one of the most widely taught African writers of the twentieth century, someone who helped make gender central to the study of African literatures only to pass away in 1981 shortly after publishing her pathbreaking feminist novel, So Long a Letter. The reemergence of Bâ’s only known poem will change the way her works are taught and written about. But the text also unsettles some of the broader, commonplace demarcations that still structure the study of African literatures today: anglophone and francophone, African and its Diaspora, anticolonial poetry vs the realist novel, nationalism vs internationalism as horizons for political imagination.

For contributors to this conversation, perhaps the most generative aspect of Bâ’s poem is that it refracts an extraordinary moment of encounter and collectivity. The text is a dispatch from a crucial event in the history of pan-Africanism: FESTAC 1977, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, which gathered 16,000 people in Lagos, Nigeria, for a celebration of global Black culture. Bâ’s own positionality at FESTAC matters greatly. Not being an official delegate, she records not just the possibilities but also the fault lines she detects in a “gathering of this scale.” (Bâ, “Festac . . . Memories of Lagos” 1175) As many of our contributors highlight, women were often marginalized in both the planning and the archiving of pan-African gatherings, making Bâ’s Festac poem all the more precious as a site to stage fresh associations and revisionist interventions and invite new ways of relating to FESTAC’s pan-African visions.

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