Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry: “The art of griots nourishes my writing”

The glass door opens onto a garden that vibrates with all the greens of spring. Here, in the Vaudois countryside, above Nyon, we are very far, in time and space, from Moundou, in southern Chad, where Nétonon Noël Djékéry grew up in the late 1950s. father was a soldier. We lived in the garrison. There was the French part and the African part. My father had been recruited very young as a skirmisher. At the Battle of Monte Cassino he was wounded. He was part of the second Leclerc division which had tens of thousands of black soldiers. She was “whitening” as she went back to Paris. On August 26, 1944, during the parade on the Champs-Elysées for the liberation of the city, there were no longer any skirmishers. The Americans had demanded that we not see black people.