Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard. Congo (1938- ).

Tati-Loutard was born in the Congo in 1938. He studied in Brazzaville, earning his degree a few years later at the University of Bordeaux. In 1966 he returned to Brazzaville to teach at the Centre d'Enseignement Superieur. With his rise in stature, he became a leader of the Congolese cultural movement, climaxing to a position of Minister of Culture and Arts in the late 1980s. Tati-Loutard made his mark on Francophone poetry as a leader of the generation that followed Leopold Senghor and David Diop. Where Senghor and Diop sought to use their voice to break away from the confining rhyming verse of the earlier works of Birago Diop and Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo in favor of a free rhetorical verse, Tati-Loutard has worked to develop the stature of Francophone African poetry through a return to more classical styles of un-rhyming meter. As a student of Aimé César's "Negritude," Tati-Loutard seeks a black voice to answer the challenges of the human condition.

Mere Life, Lines 17-23

At some corner of a dream, he finds his ancestor
Shouting 'Halt!' to the oncoming patrol of crows
Who inspect the earth where men have dropped
Before the folded arms of death.

What do you hold dear?says his ancestor to him:
In that garden with white feet,
No one has ever left that place.

Transformation Scenes: "Dawn" (part III of IV)

All the sea-dogs have deserted this shore
And drowse
Beyond the sun where we believe the dead.
Cradled by the breath of that gentle monsoon
That makes its pilgrimage towards the land,
The lovers caught in four lianas
Weave life again;
And in the rising dawn, the sea,
An old,weary beast of prey,
Treads among the gravel with dove's steps.

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© Copyright 1995-2005. Dan Reboussin, Africana Collection, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida . Last modified: December 18, 2003 . All hyperlinks verified as of May 28, 2004.