Lecture given at the Musée d'Orsay, during the Dada Afrika exhibition from October 18, 2017 to February 19, 2018

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It was in 1972. Recently co-opted to the University of Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, I thought it good to announce a course on the discovery of African art by poets. I specify that at this date, The Negro Model, Jean-Claude Blachère's book, had not yet appeared. From the first class, explaining my project to show how French poets, from Apollinaire to Cendrars, Tzara, etc., had received African art, and especially how it had transformed their aesthetics:

"You walk towards Auteuil you want to go home on foot Sleep among your fetishes from Oceania and Guinea..."

I had barely had time to quote these verses when I found myself challenged by an Ivorian student who explained to me that what I took for art, or, worse, fetishes, was, in fact, an object of worship, and could in no case serve as support for aesthetic reflection. The objection was irrefutable. I then understood Picasso's reply, "Negro art? Don't know it", and, changing my approach, I dealt with Montaigne!

The following year, having to be absent, I entrusted my course to the general curator of the University Library, a Frenchwoman. Her first words were to declare: "Peoples without writing have no history". Booed, heckled, she could say no more. She was relieved of her duties, in favor of her own deputy.

These two misadventures show that young Africans know perfectly well the foundations of their civilizations, and that they know how to appeal to them when they want to disconcert their interlocutors.

So I must specify that if I use, throughout my intervention, the terms "Negro art", "Negro poetry", "Negro poems", it is quite simply because these are the syntagms used by Tristan Tzara and his contemporaries, because they designate a specific reality, referring to a given time. Moreover, such syntagms are now lexicalized, and they could not carry a pejorative connotation.

Still as a prelude to my demonstration, I claim the invention (in the legal sense of the term) or, if one prefers, the first edition of Tristan Tzara's collection of Negro Poems. Before my editorial work, there was no collection established by the author bearing this title.

Indeed, confusion reigned on this point, due to the poet himself. In the letter accompanying the acquisition of his 25 Poems by the patron couturier Jacques Doucet, Tzara indicated: "My first book of poems 'Mpala Garoo' which was to precede 'The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine', exists only in proofs, in a single copy. It was during the winter of 1916 that I decided to destroy the entire edition." He attributes the cause to a nervous crisis that resulted in a kind of abstract mysticism, of a cerebral nature. He concluded his paragraph thus: "This copy of Mpala Garoo must still be found in a trunk in Switzerland[1]."

All this resembled too much Blaise Cendrars' remarks on the same subject not to be seriously doubted. Hadn't the author of The Prose of the Transsiberian already claimed a similar disappearance?

I have always thought that a poet never lies. So I explored the Tzara collection deposited at the Jacques Doucet Literary Library, in search of a set of proofs entitled "Mpala Garoo", which I quickly found. Of twelve printed poems, seven appear among the Twenty-Five Poems; the other five, which I published in the first volume of the Complete Works, provided material for different poetic exercises during the Zurich period. Apart from the title, of African appearance, none of these initial poems relates to Negro-African poetry. This leads me to correct the confusion that Tzara maintained between "Mpala Garoo" and his "Negro Poems" which, in his manuscripts, constitute two different sets.

The matter becomes complicated when our poet confides to his patron: "As early as 1914, I had tried to remove from words their meaning, and to use them to give a new, global meaning to the verse through tonality and auditory contrast. These experiments ended with an abstract poem 'Toto Vaca', composed of pure sounds invented by me and containing no allusion to reality." In addition to his note on Negro poetry, which he gives as a bonus to the collector, he adds that he had, at the time, "translated more than 40 Negro poems". However, as I will have the opportunity to specify below, the poem "Toto Vaca", published in Dada Almanach, is indeed a Maori text. It is not forty Negro poems but double that I found in the Tzara collection, and published with my comments.

From the somewhat contradictory remarks made by Tzara to the purchaser of his first collection manuscript, three data should be retained:

A previous collection gathered all the poems saved from destruction under the generic title Mpala Garoo, Tzara dealt with about forty unpublished Negro poems. In 1922, he was not lying, these different pieces being still in Switzerland, probably in the hands of his companion.

Let's say it straight: Tzara was not the first to declaim "Negro poems" at the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire and subsequently. In the wake of the Expressionist Evenings, his Dada Movement companions indulged in it with notable and miserable success, one (Richard Huelsenbeck) pleading for the introduction of Negro rhythms and articulating "Trabadja la moukère" and other remarks punctuated with "Oumba oumba" to make the cabaret owner, Jan Ephraïm, who had traveled in African land, shudder; the other (Hugo Ball) composing imitative poems such as "Gadji beri bimba" or "Elefantenkarawane" [Elephant Caravan] which took on the appearance of Christian chants in his mouth.

That the specialists of the time included under the same term original expressions coming from Africa and Oceania, and that he followed them on this point, one could not reproach him for it. The truth is that he intended to borrow a path parallel to that of the painters by going like them to find "in the depths of consciousness, the exalting sources of the poetic function" (OC IV, 302). For this, the poet adopted the approach of the French sociological school by collecting his material not in the field but in the specialized works of Jean Paulhan (Les Hain-Tenys), Léo Frobenius (The Golden Bough), and even more of Carl Strehlow or Carl Meinhof, then treating it in three different ways, which I will examine here in turn:

transcription;
translation;
innutrition.

It is remarkable that we have been able to know all these poems, scattered to the wind of history, and nevertheless gathered by the poet, despite his tribulations. We must here salute the spirit of collection characterizing him, which led him to preserve the different states of his poetic creation, just as he endeavored to acquire extra-European works of art, from Africa and Oceania.

The programs of the first Zurich evenings, at the Cabaret Voltaire, clearly indicate the orientation taken by Tristan Tzara. From the first, he declaims Negro chants then he interprets simultaneous poems with Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janco, while hastening to translate some of his Romanian poems taken from his pocket. On July 14, 1916, he proclaims his first Dada manifesto which defines the new aesthetics, if one can say so, presents various new experiments, such as the movementist poem, the vowel poem, the noise poem, phonetic, as well as Negro poems. At the same time, he enters into correspondence with Paul Guillaume, the art dealer, who puts him in touch with Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy.

The same program of readings and experiments continues the following year. For example, on March 29, 1917, he reads Negro poems again. On May 12, the Dada evening entitled "ancient art and new art" gives him the opportunity to confront his own compositions with the Negro poems he has compiled, I will say how in a moment.

Due to the noise and uproar raised at each session, and the exaggeration inherent in narrators, we don't quite know how these readings, these declamations, these spatial arrangements were received by the public. On the other hand, the interpreters knew very well what each of them was aiming for.

One thing is certain: despite the literal identity, Tristan Tzara is not Tarzan. We don't see him beating his chest to declaim "Oumba, oumba" like Huelsenbeck. Conversely, he does not intend to let appear mystical tendencies like Hugo Ball wrapped in a cardboard costume, looking like an evangelist in partibus. In 1917, Tzara is one of the first poets expressing himself in French, with Apollinaire and a little before Cendrars, to turn towards African and Oceanian art, just as he will specifically treat, the following year, "Negro poetry". Note that the noun here is without capital letter, referring to the black color, of which it is said paradoxically that it is a source of light. Taken in itself, the formula clearly indicates an aesthetic program that must be explored in all directions, particularly in its transposition from plastic arts to poetry.

In February 1916, when Tristan Tzara mounted the small stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich to declaim "Negro poems", traditional French verse had been disarticulated for a good five years, notably by Apollinaire and Cendrars. However, it has never been attacked or contaminated by other languages, with very rare and singular exceptions (I think of this Hebrew verse "Hanoten ne kamoth bagoim tholahoth baleoumim" from "The Synagogue" which, says a certain critic, must absolutely not be translated!). We must put ourselves back in this context to understand the assaulting act to which the author of the Dada Manifestos will indulge by declaiming poems explicitly borrowed from African culture, copying thereby the gesture of the painters who had not hesitated, about ten years earlier, to draw inspiration from the "fetishes of Oceania and Guinea". He himself summarized the poetic situation at this precise moment, July 14, 1916 exactly, in his "Manifesto of Mr. Antipyrine":

Art was a game, children assembled words that have a ring at the end, then they cried and wept the stanza, and put doll's boots on it and the stanza becomes queen to die a little, and the queen becomes whale and children ran out of breath.
Then came the great Ambassadors of feeling
who cried out historically in chorus
psychology psychology hi hi
Sciences Science Science
long live France
we are not naive
we are successive
we are exclusive
we are not simple
and we know how to discuss intelligence well
But we Dada, we are not of their opinion because art is not serious, I assure you, and if we show the South to say learnedly: Negro art without humanity it is to give you pleasure, good listeners, I love you so much, I love you so much, I assure you and I adore you (OC I 82)

I quote here the text of the manifesto as it was declaimed by Tzara during the first Dada Evening and then interpreted in The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, specifying immediately that the edition of the Seven Dada Manifestos bears this transformation: "and if we show the crime to say learnedly: ventilator". Sacrifice to the Dada spirit? reversibility of things and beings? absolute indifference?

From the first category (transcription), I will only take the first verses of a famous example, published anonymously in the Dada Almanach (Berlin, 1920), which would be enough to prove that Tzara did not claim to appropriate this kind of poetry. It is a Maori text: "Toto-Vaca":

There is no need to be polyglot to guess what could have retained the attention of the scrupulous copyist in this chant (moreover very imitative), and what should have interested his listeners/readers, independently of a meaning they could not guess: the parallelisms, the repetitions of sounds, the cadence and rhythm[2]. Referring to his letter to Doucet, one could have believed that he had indulged in an exercise of pure abstraction. We understand the meaning of his research, conducted jointly with those of his painter friends for whom Dada tended towards abstraction. However, we had to put an end to the legend: just as there is no universal language (not even onomatopoeic) nor a first language, human language can only be abstract at a first level, precisely because it is articulated at two levels, phonetic and syntactic.

Here now, in the second category (translation), a poem from the Aranda tribe (aboriginal people of central Australia) copied from Carl Strehlow's work[3], translated and read by Tzara at the Dada Gallery on May 12, 1917, published in the first issue of the journal Dada. No scatology here, contrary to what you might think, the cacadou being a food cereal:

Cacadou Song here branch tips certainly here grains mixed with chaff certainly on the dug place put them heaps heaps put there many heaps put heaps heaps put large heaps put deep heaps put large heaps put on a heap pour germinated kernels germinated kernels germinated kernels lying brown germinated kernels lying brown germinated kernels want to rub germinated kernels want to lick round that on the sand hills round that on the sand pods are there with whipped scars there are many sleeping there in the pods are there arranged with pricked scars lying in order in lines "bite really oo white cacadou much much eat really oo white cacadou" (OC I 451)

Like the previous one, this farmers' chant rhythms a seasonal activity. Its deliberate repetitions translate the time of germination, growth, harvest, in familiar terms, with verbs in the present tense.

If we examine the entire dossier constituted by Tzara at this time, it appears that he was essentially interested in chants relating to two themes: works and days on the one hand, war chants on the other. In both cases, it is a question of opposing the expression of fundamental, essential life, to the symbolist researches still dominating French expression poetry at this time. In short, translation becomes a re-creation, a new poetic instrument. Starting from the juxtalinear translation provided by the informant, Tzara gives a text that is both faithful, in that it preserves the original syntax and structure, and relevant in the target language. This can be verified in detail in the Complete Works edition, where I reproduced in note the "Song of the Poet Akuesihu" collected by Fr. Witte in Anthropos, phonetically transcribed, translated word for word and glossed. This gives this in Tzara:

EWHE (Gè Dialect)

Song of Akuesihu He mocks his enemies and believes he will live a long time yet[4]. Iron become fire beats the blacksmith. Think of this blacksmiths of the earth. You leave him free. Akuesihu says "You leave him free this year again!" When Akuesihu was sick, the sorcerers said "He will die!" But laziness kills the Aasgeïer. The vulture itself says "it's like that a question of the body!" They say a broom for the millstones doesn't clean in the street. He will remain this year again! (OC I, 449-450)

Here is a beautiful assurance made to enchant a poet who is still looking for his way (and his voice)! The initial image accounts for a simple and everyday reality, while the whole deals with an existential question based on a proverb, a formula that Tzara will qualify as "collective little madness of a sonorous pleasure" (OC I, 411). Once again, it is the original structure of the chant, in Ewe language from Niger[5] that seduces the poet and inclines him to transpose it as faithfully as possible into French.

As in the first part we evoked abstraction; can we speak in this regard of "primitivism", in reference to the artistic movement of the beginning of the century, privileging themes, forms and colors of popular origin?

Jean-Claude Blachère[6] did not fail to point it out in measured terms. Tzara's general discourse could be taxed with reverse racism, or at least naivety (not to say paternalism), particularly in his Note on Negro Art: "My other brother is naive and good and laughs. He eats in Africa or along the Oceanian islands." (OC I 395). But we are far from any exoticism. On the contrary, in 1916, this irruption on the scene of Negro poetry, with its own words, has a detonating value. Through the shock must arise the revelation, not of the origins of language but those of poetic language, so that this primitivism becomes one of the attributes of the avant-garde as observed by Isabelle Krzywkowski[7]. In a Rousseauist perspective, it is obvious, for Tzara, that ethnicities little contaminated by civilization have preserved contact with immediate poetic speech, precisely because they are in direct relationship with nature, because they do not dissociate the physical from the mental. Proof of their superiority over the Western world which has embarked on a race to the abyss. The purity, the goodness that characterizes them become elements of opposable right, a mark of what they must bring to the white man in that they have preserved the essence of man. He will say it explicitly a few years later when it comes to replacing his approach in the historical framework:

To Apollinaire's aesthetic concerns who considered art as a more or less intentional product of man, somehow detachable from his intimate nature, Dada opposed a broader conception where the art of primitive peoples, embedded in social and religious functions, appeared as the very expression of their life. ("Discovery of so-called primitive arts", OC IV, 301)

Tzara's manuscript notebook of "Negro Poems" contains more than eighty pieces of which he has translated or adapted three quarters, but which he has given up publishing, without knowing why, insofar as he has never disavowed them since he has delivered some in Dada journals, up to Zagreb! Wasn't it enough for him to have proved that poetry could renew itself by drawing from this obscure source?

After transcription and translation finally comes appropriation or, better said, innutrition. Tzara will retain the structuring principles of this oral and first poetry, before writing and the conventions that derive from it, to make it the matter of his own poetic saying: abundance of substantives, ellipsis, asyndeton, simplified verbal system, etc. Here, face to face to facilitate comparison, the initial version of an ethnographic poem from the Congolese Mulumbu tribe and its transformation by Tzara for publication in this collection:

NTUCA Tropical winter The color recomposes flows between the spaces like a liquid hanged man swings the rainbow the light worms circulate in your diarrhea where clarinets grow pregnant woman toucanongonda like the green ball pregnant woman culilibilala satellite product the ringing slides under the boat burning green ball below the city flame bandages caressing the centrifugal wound squeeze squeeze strongly — up the bellies and infuse the acid of plants the feldspar shines in your inner speed angel guy guy mechanical O mechanic of obituaries she throws a bowl of vitriol at her husband's head let's go to the other meeeetéééérroooloooogies for example in Cambodia while the sun slides tangent of the atmosphere at poupaganda I slide halo ganda ganda gandanpalalou skating leading to the menagerie of carefree mammoths (OC I 453)

ANGEL [Mpala Garoo] the color recomposes flows between the spaces the liquid hanged men rainbow the light worms circulate where our durations are visible pregnant woman the ringing slides under the boat burning green ball below the city flame bandages wawawa squeeze squeeze strongly — acids of bellies and plant the feldspar shines in the inner speed angel ntata hozondrac mnatrapaz lacai ntata ntata nivar wararoum mechanic of obituaries menageries friends then she throws a bowl of vitriol at her husband's head let's go to the other mééééétéééééooooorooooolooooo-meteorologies giies the sun slides tangent of the atmosphere slides halo skating dimensions (OC I 677)

It is at least surprising that no commentator on this work, unpublished at the time, has noted the immediate ekphrasis character of this poem, as if it had been composed especially for a poet who is an amateur of art and partisan of a revolution of poetic language and an explosion of literary genres. Insofar as the characters and basic plot of The First Celestial Adventure... are already found there, I wonder if, failing to possess the original text collected by a missionary, we should not reverse the steam and consider this transcription as Tzara (very exactly from the Romanian period according to the date 1913 written by his hand) Africanized! In truth, Tzara operates only few modifications for his own composition, to which he confers a personal order.

Finally, for the pleasure of the eye, here is his definitive composition in the collection De nos oiseaux:

Angel

the color recomposes flows between the spaces the liquid hanged men swing rainbow the light worms in the steam where our durations are visible where clarinets grow pregnant woman of satellites the ringing slides under the boat burning green ball below the city flame bandages caress the centrifugal wound squeeze squeeze strongly acids of bellies and plant the feldspar shines in the speed angel mechanic on vacation windmill mechanic of obituaries Negro head staging of menageries and friendships then she throws a bowl of vitriol at her husband's head let's go to the others mééééétéééééooooorooooolooooo- meteorologies giies the sun slides tangent of the atmosphere slides halo skating dimensions As I pointed out in my notes of the Complete Works (OC I 661), it is clear that Tzara now rejects the brutality of foreign sonorities, privileging effects of a plastic order, as if he wanted to evoke the contemporary painting of Marcel Janco.

If the proofs of Mpala Garoo remained unpublished until 1975, it should however be noted that only five poems were not published by the poet in his later collections. Moreover, elements can be found scattered here and there, which confirms Anaxagoras' formula applied to poetry: "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed".

Indulging in all sorts of experiments destined to revolutionize poetic forms, Tzara uses, simultaneously, this African poetry by disseminating fragments of it in his own compositions, which is not without arousing unexpected reading effects. I will take as an example a reply from The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine which also dates from 1916. I admit that I have not identified the exact origin of these foreign elements set in the text. No doubt they belong to one of these African languages on which Tzara was documenting at the time[8]:

Mr. ANTIPYRINE Soco Bgaï Affahou the quietudes of oil-bearing marshes from which rise at noon the wet and yellow jerseys Farafangama the mollusks Pedro Ximenez of Batumar swell the cushions of the birds Ca204SPh the dilation of the volcanoes Soco Bgaï Affahou an irregular polygon the disgust at the jumping and beautiful weather sound (OC I, 80)

We see, by this brief example, how the opposition~integration system works. The words, the foreign sonorities to the base language have a double effect, of surprise (since they are heterogeneous and untranslatable) and of rhythmic structuring (by the effects of contrast, their role of sonorous punctuation). In the end, the amalgam has taken so well that we are as if in the presence of a block of feldspar, with its bright silica grains. Like contemporary pictorial experiments, the poet himself explained the meaning of his process:

I introduced into the poems elements judged unworthy of being part of them, such as newspaper phrases, noises, sounds. These sonorities (which had nothing in common with imitative sounds) were to constitute a parallel to the researches of Picasso, Matisse, Derain, who employed different materials in the paintings. (OC I, 643)

To conclude, I would like, once again, to warn you against "the unforgivable sin of anachronism" condemned by Lucien Febvre, on the one hand, and against the risk of distortion of poetic reality on the other.

The attention paid by Tzara to the set called "Negro poems" indeed falls under the aesthetic coup de force. It is indeed a violent displacement: to take these chants out of the scientific collections where they are locked up to make them heard as such by the cabaret public and, more so, to give them to read to poetry lovers; by this gesture, to show them that these are artistic works, beyond their performative value in context. Which was not self-evident, even in avant-garde circles!

Generalizing his discourse, Tzara will explain afterwards:

Dada advocated Negro art and literature, not only because the artistic and literary expressions of African and Oceanian peoples were considered primordial on the scale of human evolution, but also because Dada tried to identify its very way of expressing itself with the expansive mentality of primitives under the aspects of dance and spontaneous invention. (OC V, 509)

For him, this literature was a return to the origins of speech, before the functional distinction between poetry as "activity of the mind" and poetry as "means of expression", according to the dichotomy he will establish in 1930 in his "Essay on the Situation of Poetry". It was a concrete example of what Dada was seeking through what he called "Dadaist spontaneity". At the origins of art, it opened wide onto the human soul... We will not be little surprised, despite what separated the two poets, to see André Breton supporting the same opinion in the aftermath of the Second World War: "The European artist, in the 20th century, has no chance of parrying the drying up of sources of inspiration brought about by rationalism and utilitarianism except by renewing with the so-called primitive vision, synthesis of sensory perception and mental representation[9]." The detour through essence, in short, to which Tzara had indulged in 1916.

No anachronism, therefore, no error of perspective either. These virtual collections to which I have referred never appeared during the author's lifetime, by his own will. He only gave five or six poems in journals, as if these few examples had been enough for him to indicate the path, and stop there. The psychological explanation seems quite insufficient to us, the economic one too. The truth, I think I have shown it here, is that Tzara already had a very precise idea of his poetics of decomposition when he worked on this corpus of Negro poetry, and that at the end of his approach he no longer needed to state it to establish his own collections. Let's not behave like headhunters. Everything we have been able to find concerning this polyglot confrontation, we owe it to the poet himself. From the black of these school notebooks springs the light.

Henri Béhar

[1] Tristan Tzara, letter of October 30, 1922, in his Complete Works ordered by Henri Béhar, Flammarion, vol. I, p. 643.

[2]. See the study by Mirjam Tautz, "Dada, Merz, phonetic poetry", in the Dossier H, Dada circuit total, L'Age d'Homme, 2005, p. 472-485.

[3]. C. Strehlow, Die Aranda und Loritja-Staemme in Zentral-Australien. Frankfurt am Main, 1907 and 1908. 2 vol. See Mauss's review, Année sociologique, 1913, No. 10, p. 225.

[4]. These 2 lines given by Marc Dachy (op. cit.) had jumped from the Flammarion edition... ???

[5]. Ewe belongs to the Kwa language group of the large Niger-Congo Negro-African family. It is spoken in South-East Ghana and Togo. l

[6]. Jean-Claude Blachère, The Negro Model, literary aspects of the primitivist myth in the 20th century in Apollinaire, Cendrars, Tzara. Dakar, Abidjan, Lomé, Nouvelles éditions africaines, 1981, 234 p. Well-informed work to which I refer for a global analysis of the poetic phenomenon.

[7]. Isabelle Krzywkowski, Time and Space Died Yesterday. The 1910-1920s: Poetry and Poetics of the First Avant-Garde, Éditions L'improviste, 2006, p. 208.

[8]. We must be careful not to bring back every foreign element in Tzara's poetry to the "Negro poems", as shown by the formula "nu mai plange" from "The Great Complaint of my Obscurity" (OC I 91) which means "don't cry" in Romanian; but here, no mistake.

[9]. André Breton, Entretiens (1913-1952), Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 248.