Turn Your Back On the Night: Ten poets from the French-speaking Africa and Arab World

This anthology aims to present English-speaking readers with poems and voices that enable them to deepen their appreciation of the wealth of poetry in the French language from the African continent, and serve as a point of departure to explore the writers in more detail. The starting point for this work was my anthology The Parley Tree, Poets from French-speaking Africa and the Arab World1, which endeavoured to provide the reader with a glimpse of the most representative voices of the poetic movements in these two regions. It was aimed primarily at doing away with the divisions and distinctions between countries of the same continent: Africa. For it is an anomaly to separate North Africa from Sub-Saharan Africa. This project was followed by a French-language poetry supplement in The High Window2, which presented further proof of the vitality of this poetry, across the generations, in these regions.