Republic of the Congo / All works
Poetry
Poèmes de la terre
Not translated into English
Marie-Léontine Tsibinda · 1980
Synopsis
This first collection, a sixteen-page booklet published in Brazzaville and never reissued, is described by no presentation and no study: neither its contents nor its themes are known. Only its last line has been quoted, by the author herself: “Spread out your mat and sleep, for tomorrow is another day”. She also says that everything in her poetry starts from her village of Girard and the Mayombe forest, land of legends and of the railway; nothing allows us to assert that this collection speaks of them.
Context
The slim volume appeared in 1980 in Brazzaville, from the Éditions littéraires congolaises, the year the author brought out a second collection in Paris with Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Her first poems had appeared in 1978 in the university's journal, thanks to Professor Eugène N'Goma. In 1987, she took the end of the collection's last line as the title of a book published by Silex. The collection is not in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Who it is for
Sixteen pages of poems in French, never reissued, which can now be found only in a few libraries.
Prizes and reception
According to the author, critics then hailed the first Congolese woman to dare poetry; a 2010 study of African women's poetry opens the 1980s with her.