MANIFESTO

Caught by the tides of globalisation, the world of today combines both uniformization and fragmentation, two processes which, each in a way that is becoming more accentuated every day, render universal dialogue ever more difficult.

Every element which might serve as a basis for affirming a separate, specific identity and sense of belonging tends to become an insurmountable obstacle to dialogue, or even worse, proof and justification of its superfluity, illegitimacy and, in the end, radical impossibility.

Because we believe that current affairs are making it more urgent every day to know how to dialogue, we the undersigned support the initiative of writers from different backgrounds, working in the fields of literature, philosophy, knowledge and spirituality coming together in encounters entirely devoted to extensive dialogue: “CALAMI”.

We are profoundly convinced that the issues at stake in global civilization make it necessary for all of us to combine forces in making dialogue between the men and women of our time, wherever they come from, possible and actual, without fear of flaunted or hidden differences or the “cultural” distances which are treated as obvious, yet are reputed almost impossible to cross.

However, we know this only because such “cultures” are seen as pre-existing groups which are supposedly circumscribed, objective, self-sufficient, defined according to affiliations of civilization, religion, “race” and nationality, whereas we are all made or “woven” out of cultural exchanges - the heirs of exchanges made between humans from all over the surface of the earth for thousands of years. We know that no single culture can exist without the others which inhabit as well as surround it. We also know that all of us we are “woven” in our own, absolutely singular way, so that any encounter between two people might also be called an encounter between different “cultures”…

And what appears as a proliferation of differences is in fact the foundation of all forms of community…

 
 
World literature is proof in itself of the fact that there is no known text, no form of writing, and therefore no identity nor author which does not bear the deep and complex mark of communities of languages, lives and writings, in other words of a community of dialogue,

with an unknown and anticipated, unrecognised and repudiated other who is implicated nevertheless in the folds of the self’s own text.

Language is (in other words: languages are) our common asset : the inexhaustible collection of the invention of our singularities, the medium of our affects, drives and impulses, our imaginations and inventions, our workshop and tool, ourselves with others, where, as “authors”, we invent ourselves along with our work, at the very forefront of singular existence.

It needs to be stressed that no language, no culture stands alone. Languages and cultures are in no way individual. All of them consist of the exchanges which brought them into being, beyond all borders. Writing ~ as invention, celebration, criticism, knowledge, reflection… ~ combines the most extreme abandonment of the ego to the forces of collective heterogeneity carried by language, and the invention of the selfhood of self even in its absolute sense.

Without the inter-subjective, dialogic dimension which is intrinsic to every subject, to all speech and all writing, the understanding of a work, however it is viewed, risks being amputated of one of its essential parts. Look how it is inhabited, occupied, haunted by an other that is at once immanent and transcendent, interior and exterior, objectified in language itself, unattainable like the other which, present only by virtue of its absence, all writing has addressed, always, by necessity; look how it is subjugated, repudiated and silenced so that we may speak all the more readily on its behalf, unfathomable and intangible as it is, like the very outside of language where it remains yet, untellable and inexpressible beyond language, beyond truths forever sealed in their crypt, beyond words like black holes, held back forever more, and beyond texts forever ravished from our ken… If there were no dialogue, could we write ?

Anne Marsella, écrivaine (Paris), Christina Mirjol, écrivaine (Paris), Abdelaziz Errachidi, écrivain (Agadir),
François Devalière (La Source, Rabat), Antoine Bouillon, Directeur de Dar Raha Zagora (Zagora)

ENCOUNTERS - WRITTERS

We want to risk a type of – literary, philosophical, spiritual – encounter, having studied its organisation (venue, length, number, sequence, modes of exchange, translation facilities, media) to encourage an authentic dialogue between differences of all kinds : sex, generation, national origin, activities, sensibilities, beliefs, values and references, domains, genres…

Out of all of these, we wish to give pride of place to differences and communities linked to :

- the relation between the Maghreb and the African continent, and the indeterminate border which exists both internally and externally between what is known as “Northern Africa” and “Black” or “Sub-Saharan Africa” ;

- sexual difference, by presenting as many women’s texts and voices as those of men ;

- different generations, by giving ample space to the new generation alongside so-called “experienced” writers ;

- different ideas, approaches and convictions ;

- the intersection of creative domains transmitted prominently in written form: literature, philosophy, spirituality, science…

This is the meaning we wish to lend the two terms : "Calami” and “Encounters”.