In the series "UNPUBLISHED TEXTS"
October 1996
© Micheline Coulibaly. Please refer to the Copyright page.
My birth in Annam, as it was then, was quite an event in the little town occupied by the French army. Children born of African and Asian parents were not as yet very common and everyone was curious to see the different being that had just come into the world. I was a curiosity like all those of my kind. As I said in my biographical notes to The Squirrel and The Pig (Hurtubise), being different was not an easy thing, especially in those days. Returning to Africa, I grew up "rocked by the sound of Annamite nursery rhymes with an African tomtom beat". I cried a lot because of my milk-coffee colour, or rather my coffee-tea colour � it depended on the whim of the speaker. I wanted to be black like my father and yellow like my mother. All of these sufferings were caused by ignorance and intolerance. As I grew up I became aware of my true worth: within me two civilisations were mingled, two worlds. This made me an exceptional being. For me, this was the start of a dream: a world without frontiers, a world in which all races would mingle.
Today I consider myself a child of Africa, of Asia, and of the world. I feel at home everywhere and I enjoy optimism in the face of hardship. It is this optimism, this joie de vivre, in spite of the life's problems that I want to share with the children of the entire world. They are the world because they are children.
Micheline Coulibaly
Mexico, Octobre 1996
Editor ([email protected])
The University of Western Australia/French
Last updated: Monday, 17-feb-1997.
https://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/AFLIT/IneditCoulibalyEN.html