When I heard the news of Mariama Bâ's “Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos” (“Festac . . . Memories of Lagos”), I immediately saw its significance for contemporary African literature. As the editor in chief of Brittle Paper, an online platform for African writing and literary culture, I forwarded the message to the social media coordinator proposing an Instagram post. Brittle Paper needed to mark the discovery of a forty-six-year-old poem by a major twentieth-century African writer. Reflecting on the journey of this poem published in a print publication, obscured for decades, reencountered in a new century, a new millennium, a new technological context, and posted on social media, I realized that the discovery of the poem brings up a question about literary transmission that doesn't receive much attention. I'm interested in asking questions about the ways that digital technology might enable different readings of twentieth-century writers and their work. In this essay I address what I call mediated ancestrality, a term that highlights how our connection with ancestors is being adapted to a new media ecology. Bâ published “Memories of Lagos” upon returning to Dakar from FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos. What if Bâ had had an Instagram account when she attended the festival? I look at how such a hypothetical situation enables a reading of the poem—a documentary of FESTAC—as a mode of cultural documentation akin to that of social media. What would Instagram as a formal and aesthetic context illuminate about Bâ's poem and, in turn, what does Bâ's poem reveal about what connects digital technology to older media?
Indeed, mediated ancestrality is built on the idea that technological changes enable different media forms to coexist and influence each other rather than one simply superseding the other. However, this should not take away from the necessity of recognizing the unique aspects of new technologies. Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, cautions against naively creating continuities among technological modes, especially where a political and ideological critique depends on identifying what is “unprecedented” about the technology (12). Katherine Hayles warns that analyzing technological contexts in literature requires attention to the specificities of the medium being studied (6). I am thinking of these interventions when I link “Memories of Lagos” to Instagram. Like an Instagram post, the poem translates personal memories and experiences into social artifacts through an aesthetic and archival operation that involves representation by fragmentation and accumulation. What grounds this connection is an even more ancient technology and communication practice embodied in the griot, a West African order of poets and chroniclers known for their use of orality in making, transmitting, and conserving knowledge. I am suggesting not that Instagram and Bâ's poem are the same but rather that they share elements that allow them to illuminate each other.
Bâ exists for us as an archive. She is long dead, and what remains of her is her writing. There is a distance between us and her, not just in time but also because we can only ever know her through the work she left behind. Ancestors are mediated beings. They are imprinted in reproducible media, and as the means of knowledge production change, how ancestors can be accessed changes as well. They don't just exist in shrines and prayers, nor can they exist solely in printed pages. They need to live on social media where new reading publics are emerging and helping to set the terms on which what counts as the literary will be decided. Mediated ancestrality is a way of paying attention to these shifts and ensuring that ancestors continue to be legible no matter the medium. Kwasi Wiredu writes that African ancestrality is a dimensional condition. “The land of the dead,” while “geographically” present in this world, is physically inaccessible (139). Ancestors live in the world but in a different dimension, and the process and protocols of encountering them and communing with them are part of how we experience our relationship with them. These protocols and processes change.
Wiredu writes that the ancestors are not “the dead.” They are the “dead-but-living” (138). Bâ continues to live in the form of print artifacts like the one in which Tobias Warner discovered “Memories of Lagos.” But there is a need for work that bridges archives generated by different technologies so that earlier generations of African writers and storytellers connected to print and oral technologies can embody new presences within digital culture. This work could take the form of extensive digitization, which, as Warner notes, increases the discoverability of writings from the era of print (Watry and Nikos-Rose). It should not have taken forty-six years to find out about “Memories of Lagos.” But digitization is not the only way to think of what digital encounters with ancestors might look like. What I have in mind is a poetics, a practice of literary creation, a protocol of archival encounter that could bring something like social media into Bâ's poem in a way that makes her work legible in the context of digital culture. This approach expands the appreciation of her work outside the traditional understanding that Bâ only wrote about feminism and the postcolonial nation. It moves her work beyond the nation and the novel as the dominant discourses of twentieth-century African literature, extending it into digital communication technology.
I focus here on two moments where “Memories of Lagos” is closest to Instagram. The first is the moment where the formal foundations of the poem are least like those of Bâ's novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) and the second is the moment where the poem is most evocative of the griot.
Bâ and Media Technology
Mame Coumba Ndiaye, Bâ's daughter and biographer, first wrote about Bâ's attending FESTAC (Warner 1172). This detail was crucial in establishing Bâ's authorship of the poem, which was published under her married name, since Bâ was not an official delegate of the Senegalese government and her presence was not documented in official records (1173). The appearance of the poem is all the more important because it moves Bâ's presence at the festival from the domain of biography to that of historical record. Viewed in this light, the poem is more than a series of memories about an event. Though the French word souvenirs in the title is appropriately translated as “memories” in English, if the poem is considered through the lens of the English word souvenir, the word extends beyond memories as psychic experiences to memories as material objects that outlive the moment. As mementos, souvenirs evoke recollections of specific moments or experiences. But while a memento typically implies something private, meaningful to someone close to the experience, Bâ's souvenir is collective. It is intended to be preserved in the archive, bringing anyone who encounters it closer to the experience of FESTAC. What is most important for this study is how the poem makes FESTAC visible. Bâ's souvenirs are fragmented images that are meant to be accumulated since it is in this accumulation that FESTAC displays the multiplicity of the global Black experience.
In his study of nonnarrative forms in western literature and art, Umberto Eco identifies two modes of representation. The “epiphany of form” is an arrangement of elements to create a sense of unity (12). “[R]epresentation by accumulation” is an arrangement of elements as a series without presupposing a unity (231). Think of it as an “on-going encyclopedia, never finished, and never definitely capable of taking [a] rigid form.” Representation becomes a matter of creating an open context where a series of properties can accumulate. The use of letter writing in So Long a Letter, while not quite as coherent as Eco's epiphanic mode, is certainly not as diffusive as the accumulative mode and thus helps to show, by contrast, how the representation by fragmentation and accumulation of Instagram also characterizes Bâ's poem. So Long a Letter is a book about yearning to connect—and using technology to conquer geographic separation. The main character, Rama, writes letters to her close friend Aissatou to process decades of memories and to make sense of her life. In “Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre: The Vocation of Memory and the Space of Writing,” Shaun Irlam argues that the importance of letter writing as a form of communication technology for understanding the self and larger social forces is central to the novel.
If Rama lived in our day, her disjointed sensations and memories would not have needed to be synthesized in a long, private letter. Letter writing is a method of self-fashioning that privileges intimacy and subjective interiority. In contrast, the griot in the novel represents the voice of the collective, purporting to know Rama in ways she is not immediately known to herself. Although she values traditional forms of knowing, Rama finds herself more drawn to the personal, intimate knowledge produced through letter writing and how it centers her own memories, experiences, and desires. At the level of form, this places Rama's letters in the service of a narrative project in the sense that even though So Long a Letter embraces the fragmentation typical of epistolary novels since their eighteenth-century emergence, it uses the intimacy, secrecy, and bivocality of letters to gather Rama's disjointed recollections into a self, though a complicated one. This narrative process is the result of deep technological constraints—the fact that Bâ is writing in the context of print culture, that the story is physically held together in a book, and that it cannot escape the narrative imprint of the novel, a form with a structural and ideological fidelity to subjective interiority.
Today, Rama would have shared her scattered thoughts through text messages and social media posts, where the line between the subjective and the social are blurred and where fragments aren't waiting to be gathered up into narratives that express some kind of unity. Social media fragments are animate and constantly in flight, searching for visibility. They are units of information consisting of layers of metadata that enable them to individually circulate and be discoverable. Social media fragments are, thus, designed to proliferate endlessly in expansive, centrifugal movements. Like Rama's letters, they can be gathered, though not to articulate a self but to assemble an expansive archive where the self, intimately bound with the social, is a multiplicity. I wonder how differently Rama would have seen her past, her relationship with Aissatou, and her sense of self had she leaned into the chaos of her thoughts transcribed into individually powered media fragments that recast private experience as social artifacts. More generally, we live in a time when fragmentation has become a principle of form and knowledge making. In Friending the Past, Alan Liu points out that by the end of the twentieth century with the rise of electronic media in the 1970s, life had already become oriented to fragmentary forms, and Bâ's novel reflects that. What happens with the advent of social media is that fragmentation becomes the condition for social experience. “Twentieth-century anomie” becomes “twenty-first-century sociality” (Liu 27). It is possible to imagine a media evolution that goes from griot to letters to social media posts, from oral communality to narrative subjectivity to digital sociality. But technological shifts are never really clean breaks. The griot returns, even if in a ghostly form, in a digital culture with which it shares an emphasis on voice, sociality, and the sensory.
Instagrammable FESTAC ’77
Bâ's poem can be linked to Instagram by a route that passes through the figure of the griot. This is because Instagram appears in Bâ's work in those moments when, like the griot, Bâ's work centers the collective voice and blurs the lines between poetry and chronicling, art and reporting, the archive and memory. In 2013, the Afro-German artist Noah Sow created what she terms e-griotage. She would attend Black events in Germany and present a recap of the whole conference or festival through a live mix of synths and singing, performed and looped live. She describes it as “weaving an ongoing narration of our cultural public activities” and links it to the tradition of the griot (Sow 8:36–10:09). The Afro-German curator Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, drawing inspiration from Sow's work, began a similar practice in her curation of Afrolution, a festival of ideas in Berlin rooted in Pan-African thinking. During the final event on the last day of the festival, called griotage, a poet presents a miscellaneous and semiextemporaneous account of happenings throughout the festival in a spoken-word style. As an oral performance, griotage is a medium used to bear witness to an event. It implies an address where the poet communicates to the audience, “I was there, and this is what I saw, and this is why it matters.”
Both griotage and “Memories of Lagos” document and reflect on an event through a blend of personal and communal perspectives. This act of documenting and sharing experiences mirrors what Instagram users do when they post about events. Social media content is a kind of griotage in the sense that it uses media to communicate presence and experience and, by so doing, creates a shared cultural memory. Like griotage and Bâ's poem, the social media post is not a simple reproduction of the event. The process of cutting; layering on filters; adding on other sensory elements like music and emoji, stickers, and captions; the inclusion of metadata like hashtags, location tags, and user tags; the likes and comments all add up to making a post a unit of media content with multiple layers that blend aesthetic and technical elements. But griotage and Bâ's poem lack something that the Instagram post provides. Despite their detailed cataloging of experiences, the respective oral and print contexts of their composition mean they cannot capture the event as an extensive stream of granularities as Instagram can.
Instagram operates in a world where information is freed from space, unlike print culture, where narrative was a response to the “temporal delay” caused by spatial distance (Liu 22). In letter writing, for example, the gap created by spatial division was filled by a narrative that unfolded over time, whereas Instagram's instantaneous sharing allows for more fragmented content. On the surface, this sets Bâ's poem apart from an Instagram post, since the poem is a product of distance. The poem is about an event that took place in Lagos, which is now being recollected in Dakar. However, like Instagram, Bâ's poem uses fragments to create immediacy. On Instagram, fragments capture real-time events; in Bâ's poem, they replicate for the reader the sensation of being present. Perhaps this is why Bâ chose to write a poem rather than a news story. Fragmentation allows the poem to immerse the audience in the moment, creating immediacy rather than relying on the delayed temporality of a linear narrative.
Bâ's poem, with its miscellaneous form, gestures toward the kind of fragmentary representation of life made possible by social media. The poem is a catalog of fragments that highlight visual, auditory, and sensory details. As I read the poem, I couldn't help imagining all the reels, stories, and photographs pulsating under the stillness of the page. I can see all the ways that the scenes captured in the poem can be endlessly broken into smaller bits, mirroring how social media would have captured what was life-changing about an event that brought together sixteen thousand intellectuals, artists, and scholars from Australia to Johannesburg (Warner 1172). In other words, I can see the Instagram posts in the images captured in the poem, not because I am projecting onto the details, but because Bâ's poem is saturated with media references. “Memories of Lagos” is about sculpture, music, dance, film, and theater. The imagist and fragmentary nature of the poetry aligns with the fragmentary imaginary at the core of social media.
The poem opens with observations about delays: “Slowness of administrative formalities; slowness of luggage arriving! / Slowness again: the journey to the city.” These images of delays build a sense of anticipation—the calm before the storm—because when FESTAC appears, it is a visually overpowering experience for Bâ.
This everywhereness of FESTAC is sensorial; Bâ writes in the line before the passage quoted above that “the atmosphere of Festac surrounds me.” The function of something like social media would be to translate the sensory experience of that everywhereness into media artifacts, which it either disperses or holds together in various accumulative contexts. FESTAC is not so simple, fixed, or stable that it can be captured by contemplating a single image in the same way that something like the Mona Lisa's beauty can be captured in a kind of epiphanic appearance (Eco 231). FESTAC is articulated in the multidimensionality of accumulated images—badges, street decorations, street fashion, the whimsical shape of the national theatre, license plates, and even unfinished construction projects. This style of representation by accumulation that is so central to Bâ's poem is central to social media as well. But whereas the poem has to hold all the images in print on a static page, social media can break the images into mobile units of information that can circulate on their own or be accumulated on grids, hashtags, “story” highlights, “for you” pages, and so forth. I see social media's fragmentary imaginary in the ways that Bâ's poem displays a tendency toward brokenness. Instead of images that convey clear symbolic meaning, Bâ bombards the reader with fragments of images: “Masks with lips pursed, eyes half closed on an inner dream,” “gleaming bronze, / With nonchalant or hard lines,” “Black bodies . . . with smooth muscles,” “costumes, colors, feathers.” The final section of the poem is a series of auditory bursts:
The poem wants to break images as much as possible because it is in the proliferation of these images that FESTAC presents itself. Representing FESTAC requires a miscellany of scenes and an accumulation of images powered by a “[f]renzy of creative imagination.” In the idea of a frenzied imagination, echoes of social media's use of a kind of functional chaos to proliferate media objects can be heard because, like the poem, representation on social media is accumulative. Social media users generate images that, though trivial in isolation, become “important in aggregate, providing us a type of intimate and ambient awareness” of the world (Jurgenson 14).
The poem is about how the radical diversity of the Black experience is captured and the scale of its influence. As the poem states, FESTAC “is everywhere,” but so is Black life. To capture this everywhereness, the simplicity of a symbolic image won't do. Black life, as experienced in FESTAC, is a question of media proliferation. It is a question of assembling an archive. FESTAC was a big, fun party, but it was also the making-present of global Black life as an archival reality. It was a site for assembling media objects that captured Black life, history, bodies, joy, imagination, and so on. It is a library that countered the “colonial library,” a practice of knowledge making that posits Africa as exceptional to a norm that is European (Mudimbe 96). This is the library of “Black despair” that Bâ says is replaced by an imaginative principle fueling modernization built “on thousand-year-old modulations.” It is a new vision in which African worlds are rethinking modernity on the basis of a deep cultural and historical knowledge that binds Black people.
Warner points out the possibility of this poem's providing new dimensions to Bâ's work (1173). The study of her work has been centered on So Long a Letter and seen through a postcolonial critique of the nation. How can digital culture present a new context for Bâ's work to be visible? If writing, books, and letters are essential to self-fashioning in the twentieth century, what does digital culture and technology bring to the collective fashioning of Bâ as archive, especially following the reemergence of her poem? I have demonstrated one form this kind of engagement could take: an ancestral archive—the figure of the griot summons the context in which the old meets the new. And in this meeting of Instagram and Bâ's poem, new methods of literary creation and analysis come to light.
