Abstract
This interview with the internationally renowned Kenyan writer, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, conducted by PhD-student Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque, provides insight into the complexities of conceptualising “circulation” when its manifestations differ greatly depending on geographic, geopolitical, and cultural positionings. In the course of the conversation, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor touches upon matters of home and movement, discusses the necessity of crafting counter-narratives to dominant Eurocentric ones, and explores the concept of allowing the living to be haunted. Finally, in light of her most recent project, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor shares powerful insights into the history, present, and presence of coffee, and envisions more just ways to approach it.
After first meeting for a “digital coffee” during a winter semester marked by the pandemic in 2020, the following conversation was a welcome opportunity to hear more from the Cluster’s former Dorothea-Schlegel-Artist-in-Residence and new Advisory Board member, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. We sat down, albeit virtually again, to talk about movement, being—or finding—home, and whether homesickness is inherent to the human condition. We professed our love for maps and discussed the necessity of crafting counter-narratives to dominant Eurocentric ones, and explored the concept of allowing the living to be haunted. And, in light of her most recent project, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor shared some powerful insight into the history, present, and presence of coffee, and envisioned more just ways to approach it.
This conversation took place online on 11 April 2022 and has been edited for clarity and concision.
Home in movement, returns and tizita
‘What endures?’ This recurring question gives rhythm to Dust, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s second novel. In this and other stories—the third novel, The Dragonfly Sea, but also the shorter texts ‘These Fragments’ in the New Daughters of Africa anthology and The Fire in Ten1In Full reference in Zotero Library.—home is a central feeling and topic of conversation for many characters. And interestingly, in The Fire in Ten, Adhiambo Owuor speaks precisely of the connection between what endures and what one comes home to. So before getting to movement, I wanted to talk about home. ‘What makes home for you’, I asked, ‘and for the characters you write? What part of it is what endures, and how much of it is also what shifts?’
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: Oh, Raphaëlle—you know, what I find fascinating within the story-creating process is the kind of questions the texts show up with. I know there’s a part of the characters that should echo some of my own questions. But characters also have their own free will; perhaps they are the fragmented self that dares to ask questions from different prisms. So, I can’t give you a solid answer and say: this is what it is. But more and more, I’m beginning to enter into the idea of home as […] a site in process, and in progress; and to understand that, maybe it’s also culturally specific.
I’m just making peace with the idea of home as a place and site of movement. I’m very deliberate now when I use the word “nomad” because I come from a culture that was nomadic, then settled down along East Africa; but they were a people whose home was in movement. I’ve had the great fortune of interacting, and being with, pastoral people whose home—whose idea of home—is underwritten by this kind of fluidity. Suddenly, then, home becomes the sky, the trees, the animals you meet along the way. Home becomes the surprise of encountering unexpected people in the process of movement. Home is with the cattle, where the cattle settle down. There is a sense of the boundary-less and a continued bewilderment at the lines that contemporary society wants to draw upon the earth. It is such a strange thing for the desert and pastoral nations—the idea that land, and people, and places are divided and that there are rules about crossing.
I spent time with the Loita Maasai and it […] how should I say? It dissembled me. It broke a lot of my own presumptions. I had the fortune, also, of being able to enter the forests that they have preserved, and encountering people for whom, at some point of their lives, the forest is also home.
And I wonder […] at least for me at this stage, I don’t think I can lock down the idea of home, and maybe that’s part of my own restlessness. I’ve been trying to look for the tangible thing that says, ‘this is home’. But there are all these incredible and fascinating ways of being that also feel like home—that really do feel like home, yes.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: In reading your novels, I did feel precisely the sense that home is, or can be at least, a moving thing, and at the same time, there is a very strong sense of place for several of your characters. In fact, so much of the different stories within both novels are about returning—well, leaving and returning to these places. But even so, home, the place of return, doesn’t feel to me like an unquestioned, solid place. Instead, it’s where the characters are aware of, in tune with, the way home changes.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: Ah, that’s so beautiful. I love that.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: You write that ‘[a]ll departures are layered’. I feel that the returns are layered in a similar way. For characters like Ayaana [in The Dragonfly Sea] or Ajany [Dust], movement is what offers the “Elsewhere” or the “Somewhere Else”2See, for instance, in her novel Dust Full reference in Zotero Library: ‘She must chase after it until it takes her to Odidi’s Somewhere Else’ and ‘He had conjured up stories of Elsewhere […]’. that they aspire to at times, and simultaneously, it yields homesickness, or even questions the very existence of a stable home. Homesickness, for your characters, can be with, but also without, a defined object. Somewhere, you write of Muhidin that he feels homesickness for an unknown place.3‘From that moment, Muhidin would be struck with perpetual homesickness for an unknown place’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Is homesickness a characteristic of the displaced, or of those who leave, or would you say that maybe homesickness is, in your novels, a characteristic shared by everyone?
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: Beautiful question, Raphaëlle. There’s a fascinating Ethiopian idea called ‘tizita’. A lot of people link it to homesickness or nostalgia. People refer to it mostly around nostalgia, but nostalgia in a very occidental, very European sense; without realising, it also involves a longing for something that, perhaps, has not yet been born or may have been born but gotten lost. You can’t even give a name to it; you just know that your heart is crying for it. That has become part of my own quest, as I come to terms with the idea of my own nomadism.
So back to your question, I imagine that there’s a human condition. The fixed idea of what home should be is linked to that idea of fixed nationalities, and creates many tensions. As an East African, I know I cannot fit into the—especially European—categories of being. If I’m here, I have to become either Black or African—or Kenyan. It has to be really clear here, I can’t be all. I can’t be Black, Kenyan, Catholic, oceanic […] The pluralisms within me each have their own ideas of home. And my role, as a person belonging to the continent and the place I come from, is to reconcile those different ideas of home.
I wonder what others feel about home? The only people whom I’ve ever run into that seem to have found their own kind of settlement—a kind of groundedness of belonging—that I’ve interacted with for a long time, are those who are in the monasteries and convents. But you see, they inhabit another home, as well. The convent is merely a place marker for their home, which is heaven, and which they serve on the earth. The other ones I met were the people of the Loita—the Maasai, in particular. Maybe that’s why it was such an emotional site for me. It also accommodates both the place of return—you can go to your temporary home, your enkang—but part of your homemaking is that you can travel two weeks, two months with your cattle to another place. And take another two weeks, two months, three months, four months to come back. And that’s part of the idea: the fluidities of being.
I don’t know if that quite answers your question. But I think that human beings don’t want to admit to their own sense of homelessness, and I think it’s a human condition, and I’m feeling more and more strongly that it’s part of the reason why Europe, for example, pathologises migration, especially the migration of non-Europeans into their lands, while they privilege themselves with the right to migrate into other peoples’ lands.
A force that changes maps: navigation and undoing
When asked about maps, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor does not mask her enthusiasm: ‘I love maps’, she jumps in, as I describe the feeling her novels have left me with: that maps are not just tools of navigation but symbols of connection and promises of elsewhere, allowing us to locate home, whilst also, as Ayaana, one of her characters experiences, shrinking the world. Salvador da Bahia, being ‘[a]nother junction’ at ‘Brazil’s Atlantic Ocean’ Full reference in Zotero Library, or Saudade, a ‘crossroad’ Full reference in Zotero Library, are ways of undoing and re-arranging much of map-making. I wonder what kind of geography, what kind of map the author thinks her writing makes, or would like it to make, and am met with a warm laugh:
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: Ah, it’s one of those questions […] that means I’m going to have to kill you, because you’ve read my soul. Someone has said that ‘what the map cuts up, the story cuts across’.4See Full reference in Zotero Library.
The contemporary maps have been instrumentalised as weapons against entire societies. I don’t think it’s by chance, for example, that the depiction of Africa on most maps is so reduced, so minimised. It’s linked to a different mythology of being and “placefulness” in the world. Not deliberately, but in the process of writing, I have the idea of the maps in the in-between—the maps in and of the crevices. To draw those maps for another generation—to understand that what they find in the bookshops and in the libraries is not the whole story. Although not enough of it shows up in the book, The Dragonfly Sea was actually inspired by the idea of ‘poemaps’, those sea-navigational maps that are embedded in what sounds like poetry. Entire guiles of sailors could navigate from Zanzibar to Yemen to Kalikat, just by reciting that which they had memorised. When you hear the recitation, it sounds like poetry, even sounds like prayer. It takes a certain capacity to ask, to understand that what these sailors are reciting are maps. They are coordinates that connect the place where they find themselves in the middle of the open seas to destinations. They bring into one moment the stars, the wind, the kind of current, the feel of the water. And it’s an incredible way of knowing, Raphaëlle. I first met it in Zanzibar; I did not understand what I was hearing. Three years later, I met it again in Congo, in the DRC, and learnt about the Matadi people who navigate this way. They’re the only people who can do that. Up to now, people say the Congo is unnavigable. But the Matadi people move boats from the river to the sea, reciting these poemaps. So, there is this immensity of knowledge embedded in worlds that remain […] disregarded. If they were to be acknowledged, they would absolutely discombobulate that which we assume is the framework of knowledge and the framework of knowing. My texts are not quite poemaps, but in a way they are distant echoes of them.
‘Clarify this for the reader’: the publishing sector, translation, and audiences
Concerning the politics of translation5See Spivak’s 1993 essay, ‘The politics of translation’ in Full reference in Zotero Library.—the choice of what to translate, what to italicise—Adhiambo Owuor distinguishes between ‘the writer as artist’ and ‘editorial decisions’, which she calls ‘the demands of the publishing sector’:
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: I like the way words look on the page, frankly. In the case of Dragonfly Sea, the only time the italics show up, even when the person is speaking, is when I’m using words that are not mine; when the characters throw sayings and proverbs at people, those are not my words, those are the words of the deep and profound culture of the place. It was simply to highlight that. But when I submit my manuscript […] it’s going to be interesting: I’m working on one where there’s also a lot of French, which I actually don’t even bother translating. The readers are lucky that I have the editor I have, because she then squeezes in a couple of translations for people. Because they’re always thinking: ‘but the reader, the reader wants this, clarify this for the reader’. And I’m okay with that.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: So, who is that reader for whom we do all these things?
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: I write for […] I mean, it’s not even that I write for my continent. My reflections are inspired by—are moved by—the place. But having said that, the idea of writing for the continent points me to the question: then ‘who is the continent’? Because some of my most intense, most profound, and deepest readers are not always African, quite frankly. My own relationship with Germany, which surprised me, stems from the fact that my most enthusiastic readers are German. And what has endeared my heart is simply that our discussions, especially on the intimate places, aren’t discussions about the usual Africa tropes. They’re deep, human discussions. And they’re discussions about style and all those things that a writer always longs to have a conversation about. But as an African writer, especially when I go to the Anglo spaces, the primary questions are always about Africa and its pathologies and its insecurities and those tropes.
When I speak of having to claim my own nomadic heritage and identity, it also means that there seems to be a tribe that transcends nations and boundary, that makes up my readership. But then, it makes things also complex for me—in a good way, of course. It forces me to ask: who are these people? I don’t need to define them; I don’t want to define the human being anymore. The human being is too mysterious, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of typologising human beings. But I think my readers are a certain kind of people, and they’re struck always by—I know we’re going to talk about this later—a certain “haunted-ness”. So, in a way we end up understanding and seeing one another.
Circulating “the news” or countering it: the role of the storyteller
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: In both novels, there is a significant radio, which transmits the news—in Dust, it is the political news and in Dragonfly Sea, it is the news from the sea. These radios have very different destinies. One of them is being listened to extremely attentively and exists in a space of silence and calm, and the other belongs to the Trader, who is, in a way, tasked with mediating the information, or with circulating it. The Trader re-embodies circulation by travelling with the radio. He makes the circulation dependent on human, physical movement again, where one could consider that the radio is one of the early forms of dematerialising the of circulation of information and story. The role that the Trader has—to re-tell story and re-embody the way it circulates— made me think of the role of the writer, to be honest. It’s made me think of your role.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: Yes! Absolutely. I hadn’t seen it, but I can see it now. I’ll have certainly to think some more about it, but it’s so obvious, yes, you’re right. It’s as if […] we become the amanuenses for a force. And it’s not just dematerialised: the radio voice comes from somewhere. It’s a transmission device. It becomes an interpreter of messages received from these unknown, almost invisible spaces. And these are news of great, great, great importance. There’s a kind of prophetic impulse linked to that.
But in the case of the Trader, it’s tricky because he re-translates it to suit his own purposes. But isn’t that also, in so many ways, the history of the world? Or the history of our contemporary world: the encounters of missionaries, explorers, and traders on the continent, when, even if they come back with gold and arts that they have taken, they re-transmit the idea of savagery, of barbarism. And they become like the Trader. They go into these spaces and rewrite, re-inscribe the story of the place, the story of the history, the geography, and that which they have heard according to their own image, their own sense. And suddenly you’re making me think that what’s disturbing is that the echoes of these interpretations are still treated as reality to this day. Do you understand? They are. I’ve seen it often, and maybe this is just the consequence, the audience that reacts to that particular story: when the average European visits a place like Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, their first shock—and it’s a tangible shock—is that there is an airport. The message that was inscribed a hundred years ago by these people has become their reality.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: I recently read a collection of short stories that have been selected by Chimamanda Adichie and in the foreword, where she explains how she came to select these stories, she talks about stories that have news for us. Then she goes on to introduce the different stories as: this one has news about what it means to be a young poor boy in a working-class neighbourhood in Britain, and this one has news about this and that. That just came to my mind because we’re talking about the Trader bringing this news and interpreting it, and then we’re talking about the heavy, long, sustained, and ongoing work of colonial forces in bringing so-called…
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: News, yes!
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: […] as to what other places are. And then maybe, or at least that’s my hope, we’re also talking about the way that narratives, such as yours and others, bring news, counter-news perhaps, counter-interpretations […]
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: It is the subversion, it is the resistance. It’s the re-mythologising. Words become part of that war against a mythology that sought to consume. Then maybe, just word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence, we draw our little options, the things that contradict and counteract the lie. [A longer pause] Or is it the propaganda? It’s called propaganda, isn’t it?
Haunting and healing
When I mention I’d like to talk about haunting, or this form of circulation, this transtemporal one, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor notes: ‘transtemporal […] I like that word’. I explain that I prefer its use to that of ‘intergenerational transmission’, because I feel like the way in which transtemporality operates in Adhiambo Owuor’s stories is not a one-way, past-to-present street, but rather has a certain cyclical nature. To use the stories’ own terms: there are ‘remnants’, for instance, ‘of the colonized in Saudade’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Memories are ghosts Full reference in Zotero Library, and places are ghosts, too. So much of the novel, to me, is about capturing and releasing forces, many of which are inherited. Haunting shapes not only the plot, but also style, the very way that language is used. How would the author characterise the way that her characters are being haunted?
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: How do I describe it? I’d say that, on their way to wherever, they suddenly awaken to the idea that they have a companion. They have, even, a sense of that which that companion seeks, even though it’s a companion they can neither see nor touch. It’s almost as if they become very aware of the questions, and their obligation, in the relationship to that uncanny companion. And then their journey changes a little, in that it becomes part exorcism and part confrontation, and part resolving.
How would you describe it? I’m curious.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: Well, I like to think of different categories of haunting. I think that part of the haunting in your stories is much, much bigger than the people it inhabits: part of it is the historical forces; part of it is Safiya describing herself as having inherited her father’s unresolved guilt from the guerre d’Algérie Full reference in Zotero Library; part of it is things that happened on the land that one currently inhabits […] And then, the characters’ attention to haunting also allows them to welcome presences that they need, that they miss. The way I read it, it’s a force. It isn’t ascribed a value judgement. So, I guess the question for me is how do you deal with the fact that haunting, like most of life, is not inherently bad, nor inherently good?
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: In a way, you’re also helping me clarify things. Why do these forces show up in the text all the time? I think that it’s the idea of unseen worlds that leach into the contemporary world—the world of the characters. Their entire history is beneath the layers of that which we see. And maybe it becomes a call to a deeper way of seeing, a deeper way of sensing, a deeper way of relating. It also brings into play the notion of what it means to be human, and where does humanity end? Certainly, within my own culture, humanity does not end in death. The dead also have rights. And the dead also have moods and emotions, and they have questions, and they have things that they need resolved. ‘The dead’ are not just about the human dead; the land also responds to the questions of the unrequited dead. And since these are human questions, it’s a human being who can help resolve them, or reconcile them.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: Let me ask you about healing before we move on to coffee. In The Dragonfly Sea, Munira is being described as, or named, ‘kidonda’, a walking wound. Later in that same novel, there is a passage about inheriting and transmitting wounds. I wonder how you think about the role of writing—and offering, as we said, other narratives than the dominant ones—in a healing process? Is that an idea that you write with, and does that have consequences for how you write?
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: Not consciously. I guess it’s the hope. And the writer of Africa becomes very important because of the constant roiling and churning and the longing for a stillness—the longing for healing, so to say. Somebody on Twitter once said: ‘we need to stop calling ourselves “developing countries”. We need to call ourselves “healing countries”’.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: Wow.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: We’re countries in the process of healing. I thought that was the most beautiful idea. It says everything. I really, really, really love that notion. In that case, that makes me a citizen in the process of healing, and so my language and my words would reflect the restlessness, but also, even in the midst of the labyrinth, the darkness, the belief in the light, somehow. Even amidst the chaos—the mess—to defy somebody else’s mythology of our extinction. By saying we will live, and this is how we will live, and this is the language of our healing. This is the language of our living. Yes, healing is also about living, isn’t it?
Coffee’s presence: Teachings about circulation, reparation, and diaspora
Coffee is at the centre of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s current project, and right away, I fumble about trying to qualify it. Should I call it a ritual, or spiritual object? ‘Presence, presence’, she helps out, before delving into the rewriting of the entire story and history and meaning of coffee:
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: In the Kingdom of Kaffa, the story is told of a wandering forest spirit—like Ayahuasca, coffee is a forest spirit—and how it chose a tree, because part of its longing was for home, to enter the homes and lives of people. And in exchange, it would give harmony, and peace, and pleasure. That origin story gets lost when the Ethiopians provide shelter for the Arabs in Mohammed’s seventh Hijra, his escape. Those he escaped with, encountering coffee, craved it so much that they might have made up this other story of the goat herd: a goat herd watching goats frolicking and tasting the beans realises that coffee is something [valuable]. There may be commonalities between the stories, but that [latter] story, I believe it was some […] French person who then said, he ‘kind of made it up’.
You see, the difference between these stories is that the first one provides agency. Who has the right of first custodianship? It’s incredible how competitive this presence, coffee, is in the world. How people will die on the hill of being able to say it’s not African. It’s been incredible running into spaces where you think you’re having a logical conversation, and the other person is frothing at the mouth, and will find all sorts of reasons just so they don’t have to admit that that which they love has got African agency and African technology, and that the whole cult and culture of coffee is African, as well.
Then, there’s the whole process of the renaming. I think the Italians recently patented espresso. But espresso is something that has been in both the Ethiopian and the Coastal patrimony for centuries on end. The only thing they might be able to patent are the machines—but none of the process. Those things never come into consideration.
You want me to talk about the spirituality. The coffee spirit finds a way to become a part of families. You have to remember, in the Kingdom of Kaffa, each coffee area was allocated to families; so the men would cultivate and nurture the tree, and appoint the season when the berries were ready. Then, the women would take over. The whole production and delivery process was really feminised, including the ritual process: the one I’m calling the Coffee Mistress, the liturgist, is in charge of the ceremony. Coffee is served in four cups, and each one of these cups has got different meaning and different […] conversations. And I would not just serve coffee with anybody. Even if I was serving coffee to my enemy, it was as a declaration of my intention to heal whatever it was that was wounded between us.
The ritual is about the stimulation of every single part of our senses. You’ve got the incense, literally. It’s almost like a constant prayer. The conversation becomes also prayer. It’s a very spiritual, very profoundly spiritual and transcending [thing]. You talked about the transtemporal. It’s such a lovely line, it’s such a lovely word. This is transtemporality.
I think Ayahuasca, Eboka, and Coffee are the only ones who have been allotted the right of […] that are treated as human beings. But Eboka and Ayahuasca are therapeutic, they do not die. Coffee on the other hand dies; coffee is slaughtered. We don’t drink coffee, we slaughter coffee—there’s the idea of the sacrifice. That’s why, when we exchange coffee in that kind of way, what we are creating are blood relationships. It’s a covenant, not just an agreement. So, there is that part, the liturgy of the coffee.
The other part around coffee is the one that’s disturbing even the Jewish diaspora in Israel, which they called the ‘syncretic practices’ of the Ethiopian Jews that were settled there—the inclusion of what you call Zār ceremony. It’s an exorcist ceremony, again mediated by women, and coffee plays a very central role in it. It’s about the reconciliation and the pacifying of disturbing and restless spirits within. And again, coffee is burnt, coffee is drunk, its incense plays a role as well.
When finally it showed up in Europe, and one of the Popes was presented with it, he was told that this is the devil’s brew. And he baptised it. Coffee is the only plant that was baptised. Then, Bach created a coffee cantata. And [coffee] informed a lot of the revolutions that took place in Europe. The meetings in the Viennese coffee house […] Also, within the Islamic communities, there were rituals and things linked to—if you want—the sanctification of coffee.
In the West’s version, with the moral emptiness that’s linked to it, it is leached of its spiritual strength and value. It is commoditised. So, the greatest beneficiaries of the coffee industry are these coffee companies in Germany, in the U.S., and in France. But they re-inscribe a different social story. The feminine is completely removed from the coffee packaging, the coffee imaging. And now, instead, what you have is Juan Valdez, George Clooney […] you’ve got males, you’ve got strong males on the front. Whereas where it comes from, it balances: the males have their role around cultivation, but the whole ritual of presentation belongs to women.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: I’ve talked about models of circulation at the beginning of this conversation. It is no secret that one model of purported circulation, and a very dominant one, is extractive and commodifying in nature, and tends to happen to the advantage of the West. I think this is also part of the story you’ve just told us about coffee.
I’m curious about the place of the Americas in this story and history of coffee, in particular […] South America and Brazil. And perhaps this is me coming in with my own personal focus, but what kind of stories of the African diaspora, if we think about such a thing, can be told through coffee? And I’m sure there’s the good and the bad certainly, as well.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: I think it was you who pointed this out for me when we were having that conversation [during research area 4’s “digital coffee”]. And I corrected myself, I did. The Afro-Colombian character starts out wicked and literally comes in because he’s been assigned to take over a plantation. But, in the process of this—which he does execute remarkably and brutally, in the way that a lot of the coffee appropriation processes have always involved some brute force—it becomes his own journey into understanding not only what he has done, but who he is. So, it’s also a site of reconciliation, of acknowledging and reconciling. There’s a lot of that that is perhaps a metaphor for some of the things that we also need to do; both as a continent and with the diaspora. There’s a space where we need to have conversations, and I want to use coffee as that space, where that which was broken and that which was amputated […] That was the reason the coffee spirit had come, actually—in exchange for being among human beings, this is what Coffee has said it was going to do. So, the character of Coffee, then, shows up and creates this place of […] merging. It’s not just the reconciliation. It’s the coming home of families. And yes, seriously: if I were to do something with the African diaspora on the African continent, at the heart of it I would put fire and I would put coffee. I really would.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: We’ve been talking, throughout this conversation, about […] narrative forms of healing. Here coffee, as a commodity which is within the global market and circulation of goods, also has a very material dimension. And there are, I guess, ways to think about how to do things differently, materially, in the way that coffee is being produced and traded and sold, as well as in the transformation processes, which generate quite a bit of value and which tend already to be delocalised, if my vague knowledge is correct, from the places where the coffee is grown. I wonder what your conception is of how telling the story of coffee, or multiple stories of coffee, relates to the material aspect. Or is material too specific?
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: The story itself has suggested a solution. I love story because sometimes it reveals the possibility. Number one is the patrimonialisation. The same way they did with champagne. There is absolutely no reason why coffee should not be patrimonialised, for the simple reason of recognising the long history of its development, in the same way that the champagne province benefits greatly from the royalties linked to its methodologies, but also to the use of the word ‘champagne’.
Point two is the whole value production cycle. It just needs to be totally and absolutely re-organised. It’s not going to be reorganised without pressure and balance, unfortunately. Coffee is the third largest traded commodity in the whole world. It’s Germany’s fifth largest earner of foreign exchange. Germany doesn’t grow a single coffee plant. So, you understand that entire nations are built around, if you want, the vampirish exploitation of coffee.
But it’s not a revolution that will happen or be fought outside, it has to be fought from within the African continent itself; the enshrining of coffee’s philosophy, the understanding of its complexity, this process will start from the liberation of coffee’s own story, within the African continent. And after that, the policies and perspectives and campaigns can be organised around the return—you talked about homegoing and departures […] the return of coffee. It’s not a return that says that it’s not going to go elsewhere. But it will inhabit its original identity, without losing its power in the world. And it’s a very powerful presence in the world. But I think that the liberation of its story, especially, is the first step in this process.
Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque: Of course, the history of coffee is an example also of the value system that is tied with circulation in our current society or societies. I do want to ask you for a few words on this, because in many regards, circulation tends to be seen as something that generates value, including monetary; something that is connotated as enriching. But then, it so depends on what perspective one comes from. Coming from an Afrodiasporic literary tradition, my association with the movement and circulation of humans is, firstly, one of things being taken away, not of being enriched. In your texts, there are a lot of different answers to this. The things that are being circulated sometimes are guns and weapons, and sometimes are food and milk, and sometimes are radios and guitars, and sometimes are precisely humans moving and moving back. So how do you feel circulation relates to value?
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: It’s as you say. It’s not always enriching, it’s not. I think that at the heart of it is always the motive. Motive and meaning: why is this in movement right now? Linked to circulation is the point, is the place and the point of receptivity. And receptivity can move into hospitality, or into resistance, and each one of these accord a value. The circulating of the Ukrainian refugees is regarded as a plus and a benefit to Europe. The circulation of Afghani, Syrian, or even African refugees is regarded as a site of resistance and hostility. And yet, these are all human bodies in circulation. Of course, then, different values are [attributed]. And everybody is being shy about the truth, the tribalism that’s at the root of the resistance. So, linked to your question, at the heart of it, it all seems to point right back to the fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human? What does the humanity of the other mean for me? And I would also apply this to coffee. It’s not just ‘what does it mean to be coffee’, but also, ‘in my humanity, how do I receive this coffee knowing that there’s an incredible human history behind it’, as well. So, yes: what does it mean to be human? What does the humanity of the other mean for me? And that will let us understand that, apart from just the profitability, beyond and transcending this profit motive, is the moral motive. The moral value behind the process of circulation.