I was born on the Atlantic shore, somewhere along the Gulf of Guinea, in that continent some still call “black” between quotation marks. And from my stretch of coast, writing has never been neutral. It has always been rebellion – against history, against tyranny, against silence, against the dizzying violence of the present. But also, rebellion against forgetting.
Writing is resistance. A refusal to vanish beneath the monotony of passing days. A way to wrest from time’s slow erosion a little piece of self. It is our humble, burning attempt to persist – to exist – before the weight of the world, and also before its unbearable beauty.
We write from fragile lands, still under construction. Lands gasping for justice, yearning for welcoming hospitals, for schools that breathe, for roads without potholes, for leaders who don’t mistake patriotism for personal gain. And we write not because we have solutions, but because holding the pen is sometimes the only way to hold the line. To hold the helm. In the storm. When we’ve lost the North Star. When the world no longer answers our dreams.
Because once again, like before, like a decade ago, or two – tyrants still sit on thrones of doctored constitutions. They slap us with the same force, the same smile, the same empty slogans. And yet – we write. As an act of patience. As Youssoupha once said, “Patience is not waiting. It is acting while waiting.”
What else can we do, if not write?
They’ll tell you writing is useless in a world that hungers, bleeds, and burns. But as the Togolese writer Anas Atagora reminds us : writing is enough. It is defiance. It is tyrannical love, to borrow Césaire’s words. Writing is love. Stubborn love. Writing says : we are (here). And we will remain. Long after the world forgets itself.
Our words are fragile nails hammered into the void, small sparks against vast darkness. Yet they glow.
Africa, to me, remains a field of hope – young bodies, frightened and fierce, still rising, still running, still dreaming. I believe in the magic of rain. I believe in the poetry of survival etched not in marble but in dust.
No dungeon, no chain, no cell will silence this fever of living, this fever of saying, this joy of laughing in tyranny’s face. Yes, we walk around with gags in our hands – sometimes to silence others, sometimes to silence ourselves. That, too, is the weight of oppression. But we write to face the sky and say, “We are here. We witness. We remember. We speak.”
I write from the Atlantic shore, but my voice reaches for those across the sea – on American, European, Caribbean, Asian coasts. We are moved by the same fever. The fever of youth. The desire to raise our fists and sketch a world fresher, braver, truer. A world where youth is not background noise, but a leading voice.
What is it to write in a waiting world ?
It is to hold the line. To summon the ancestral breath. To name the unspeakable. It is to stand, pen in hand, in defiance of silence.
I was born on this Atlantic shore, but I do not write for myself. I write for all those still searching for a voice. For the voiceless folded in the dark corners of despair. I write, as Césaire said, for “those without mouths.” For those whose grief has no sound. And I write because tomorrow is far, but the future is always close.
We write for us, for those before us, and for those who will come after. We leave behind not just hope—but our words. Words that may not save the present, but will shape the future.
What do we do to resist the tyranny of the now? We write. In a waiting world.