Narrating what cannot be repaired - Kossi Efoui as artist-in-residence at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE)

Over the past few months, conversations with the writer Kossi Efoui about the possibilities of narrating what cannot be repaired have deeply influenced the work being done at the Käte Hamburger Centre CURE. During his time in Saarbrücken, Kossi Efoui has also met with primary school students and appeared in a radio feature.

“Go build a life somewhere else and never come back” (Va vivre ailleurs et ne reviens plus)

This is what Kossi Efoui’s mother says to him in Une magie ordinaire (2023), urging him to flee Togo to escape political danger. Both mother and son grapple with what cannot be repaired – exile, the erasure of language through colonialism, and political repression. And both transform these “hard things,” as the novel calls them, into artistic expression: the mother through singing, the son through writing.

Research and knowledge transfer at CURE

Efoui, who has been living in exile in France since fleeing Togo, is spending the winter of 2024–2025 at Saarland University as artist-in-residence at CURE. The questions that drive him as a writer are at the heart of the centre’s research: How can irreparable personal and historical trauma be narrated? How might narration help shape a reparative future? Language, voice, and sound are especially crucial to these concerns. And it was these themes that Efoui explored in a public reading at the Filmhaus Saarbrücken, where he discussed Une magie ordinaire with Elara Bertho (CNRS, CURE Fellow 2024), CURE programme director Hannah Steurer, and an audience of around forty people. The event was part of the broader public outreach program for the exhibition THE TRUE SIZE OF AFRICA, whose opening at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte on 8 November 2024 also marked the launch of the Käte Hamburger Centre CURE.

Like the exbhition, the novel Une magie ordinaire examines the true size of cultural spaces fragmented by colonial borders. Redrawing these boundaries, the book also counters them through the story of mother and son – not least in the writer’s dialogue with his children. Their questions about genealogy and history shape the text’s rhythm. As Kossi Efoui noted in the discussion at the Filmhaus, the ordinary magic of the novel’s title serves as a formula for a poetic way of seeing the world. The everyday realities of hard things are, for him, both the foundation and the driving force behind literary creation.

Continuing the conversation from the Filmhaus event, Kossi Efoui and CURE fellow Andrea Allerkamp led a discussion in the centre’s working group on 30 January, focusing on excerpts from Une magie ordinaire and Solo d’un revenant (2008). The engagement with Efoui’s texts revolved around musicality and rhythm as reparative strategies of writing.

On 19 February, Kossi Efoui also met with primary school students from Saarbrücken’s Willi-Graf-Gymnasium to discuss how narrative texts and plays can serve as cultural practices of reparation. Why did he become a writer? How does he see the postcolonial relationship between France and Togo? What does it mean to write in a language that is not your mother tongue? In the conversation, Efoui emphasised that his texts function as a process of translation – between French and Ewe, between orality and writing, between mother and son.

Since 19 February, Kossi Efoui can also be heard on Saarländischer Rundfunk (SR). In the programme Literatur im Gespräch, he speaks with SR journalist Tilla Fuchs about his novel Une magie ordinaire, his time as CURE artist-in-residence, his perspective on cultural practices of reparation, and the connection between everyday political and social realities and the magic in a poetic way of seeing the world.

Author: Hannah Steurer