The Swahili coast as a literary contact zone and what we can learn from it

Clarissa Vierke (Bayreuth University)

This paper seeks to contribute to the discussion on a multilingual approach to world literature outside of a binary center-periphery model. By assuming a local perspective, I would like to question more far-reaching approaches to contemporary African literatures and highlight questions and aspects, which could inform further research.

The Swahili coast – the East African coast between Somalia and Northern Mozambique – has a famous, long poetic tradition. In the course of the 20 ^th century, Swahili was also turned into a national language in Kenya and Tanzania beyond the confines of the East African coast. Accordingly, forms of national literatures were created, so that not only hundreds of other African languages and literatures but also coastal Swahili poetry became marginalized in the context of a monolingual literary history, which was also largely reproduced by research. Still, on the coast, poetry has not stopped to play an important but also changing role; it is consumed and discussed by a huge part of the population – being hence anything but marginal.

The paper sketches out these changes of the overall linguistic scenario and literary sphere, by tracing its ambivalent effects and contrasting it to the repertoire and literary work of the Kenyan poet Mahmoud Mau. It seeks to counter the monolingual and teleological literary history by considering the poet’s points of references and appropriations, which suggest a frame of reference which is different from the national or even ‘global’ literary market.

By including a further Swahili poet from Northern Mozambique, the paper will try to sketch out an alternative “significant geography”. I will consider the Swahili coast from Northern Kenya to Mozambique as a historical and far-reaching literary contact zone, where texts and genres have been exchanged. So far, not only the circulation of African texts in the Indian Ocean more generally speaking, but more specifically, the networks between Mozambique and the rest of the East African coast have been neglected, given that they cut across the rigid boundaries of the Anglophone and the Lusophone world. Drawing on my experience in Northern Kenya and recent research findings from Mozambique, I will also highlight the differences: The two poets make use of Swahili and the same genre, but not in the same way and in significantly different linguistic and cultural contexts. Thus, I will highlight the differences of linguistic repertoires as well as the dynamics of appropriation and media.