时间：2025年10月29日（周三）9：45

地点：勤园8号楼403

主讲内容：

All readers of Swahili poetry know the verse that punctuates Shaaban Robert’s famous poem entitled “Kiswahili” published in 1960: “Titi la mama ni tamu, jingine halishi hamu” (The mother’s breast is soft, no other can bring satisfaction). By comparing the mother tongue to a nourishing udder, this image recurs like a refrain throughout the forty-three stanzas of the poem, bringing an imaginary which I would like to question from an ecolinguistic perspective. Putting language in relation to the needs of the body is a good way to defend a living space for the Kiswahili which is, at this time, not yet truly recognized as a major language on a global scale, despite the efforts of the colonial administration to make it the unifying language of East Africa. Through this famous poem, we can analyze how Kiswahili exists and develops in contact with moving bodies, in relation to environments and in permanent interaction with other languages.

主讲人简介：

Xavier Garnier is professor of African literatures at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and Senior Member of Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). His research focuses on the evolution of narrative forms in the African novel in French, English and Kiswahili from the colonial era to the present day. He recently published a book on African ecopoetics (Karthala, 2022).