A protean persona, Mohamed Aziza, author, poet and man of motion, creator of some twenty books, is celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Med 21 Programme.
You’ve simply completed writing your memoirs, retracing your lengthy and eclectic profession. How did you go about capturing the expertise of a lifetime?
I hesitated for a very long time earlier than embarking on the perilous train of writing a memoir. Certainly, it appeared to me that these introspective plunges have been reserved for ladies and men who, in several methods and in several fields, had influenced the course of their nation’s historical past or marked a major milestone within the tradition of their area.
The examples of historic figures, together with Nobel Prize winners, who’ve engaged on this train, writing their memoirs, are daunting if not dissuasive.
I gave in to the insistence of mates! In accordance with them, writing my memoirs wouldn’t be an act of infantile egocentricity, however would stem from a official need to cross on my work, notably to the youthful generations of my potential readers, keen to counterpoint their collective reminiscences.
I additionally wished to examine whether or not Albert Memmi’s judgement, when he gave one in every of his essays the not very encouraging title of L’autobiographie unattainable (The unattainable autobiography), was well-founded or not.
Writing a memoir is like plunging right into a stormy sea, hoping to withstand the waves of a complexity the place lived existence and dreamed existence feed one another, particularly within the case of writers like me, whose job is to revive a home fairy known as ‘creativeness’. Armed with a lifeline to disentangle the factual from the fictional, I threw myself into the waves, not with out taking the precaution of structuring my autobiographical narrative in three elements.
The primary half is dedicated to my life journey, from childhood to the current day.
The second half offers with my work in its two features, my private work as a author and poet, and my collective work as a builder of establishments.
The third half provides me the chance, as a witness, to specific my notion of the state of the world, of societies and of people.
As a person of tradition and motion, and a former UNESCO official for 25 years, how did you handle to discover a place for the poet and author within the midst of your many actions?
It was the poet and the author who discovered a spot for the diplomat and worldwide civil servant that I’ve been since 1973, once I joined the Basic Secretariat of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, after which the Directorate Basic of UNESCO in Paris.
There are numerous examples of writers and poets who’ve pursued occupations designed to beat the problem of turning their vocations right into a paid career able to satisfying their important wants.
Admittedly, this twofold funding shouldn’t be straightforward to tackle, however to rise to the problem you want organisation and self-discipline.
So far as I’m involved, I’ve to confess that I benefited from a convergence between my two vocations, writing and diplomacy. This has made it simpler for me to fulfill each, following the instance of prestigious predecessors, diplomats and writers.
What’s extra, immersion in working life usually has a constructive affect on literary or inventive manufacturing, taking it out of the realm of summary hypothesis and the in-between world.
In 2025, you can be celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Med 21 programme. Inform us in regards to the function of this software and the way it works.
I created the Med 21 Programme in Rome in 2010, once I was Diplomatic Adviser and Director Basic of a basis known as Osservatorio del Mediterraneo to the Italian Minister of International Affairs, Franco Frattini.
This programme consisted of twelve multidisciplinary prizes, every named after an emblematic determine within the historical past of the Mediterranean: Saint Augustine and Ibn Khaldun, Fatima Fihria and Lysistrata, Averroes and Sinan, Hannibal and Emir Abd el-Kader, and so forth.
These prizes are established in a number of Mediterranean international locations and hosted in a number of cities on the northern and southern shores of the widespread sea: Tunis, Kairouan, Fez, Valencia, Toledo, Paris, Good, Verona, Cremona, Istanbul, Beirut, and many others.
The winners of those prizes differ from different awards in that three or 4 winners are honoured on the similar time.
Posthumous winners are sometimes honoured to perpetuate the reminiscence of their contribution to the scientific, cultural, social or financial fields to which the prize refers.
The organising precept of this community is the partnership with a number of specialised organisations whose representatives make up, on an equal foundation, the governing our bodies of the prize.
At first of every yr, a plan of actions for all of the prizes is drawn up.On the finish of the yr, a report is introduced within the type of a retrospective, at which a consultant and a winner of every prize current an account of the prize-giving ceremony, illustrated by projections, to a big viewers.
We wish to prolong the scope of our programme to the ultra-Mediterranean areas, that are our neighbours and key contacts. For instance, in partnership with the French Nationwide Academy of Drugs and the Ibn Sina Basis in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, we now have created the Avicenna Prize, and we hope to create different trophies with our neighbours and mates in sub-Saharan international locations.
A challenge entitled ‘ Rose des Vents ’ is at the moment being studied to honour the educational and scientific diasporas of Africa, the Maghreb and the Arab world, and to spotlight their relationship with their host international locations and their attachment to their international locations of origin.
Actually, I’ve at all times thought-about the MED 21 programme to be a software of cultural diplomacy that brings a variety of gamers from civil society into the nice sphere of conventional diplomacy, and broadens the sphere of affect of political diplomacy, as a result of cultural diplomacy can serve varied features of sustainable improvement: exchanging and growing concepts, selling social insurance policies, boosting financial relations, stimulating intercultural and inter-religious dialogue, strengthening actions to construct peace and keep safety, and many others.
As an mental who’s within the instances and their convulsions, what’s your view of a area that’s pricey to you, the Mediterranean, notably in its Maghreb dimension, which appears to be frozen in political immobility?
Up till its first decline within the fifteenth century, on account of the rise of the Atlantic space following the ‘discovery’ of America, the Mediterranean was in a position to retain its centralityand protect its standing because the ‘navel of the world’, producing values and fashions of behaviour that proceed to information us, regardless of the upheavals that its tormented historical past has produced: colonial nightmare on its southern shore, the present decentring of its area in favour of the Pacific zone and asymmetry between the event of its southern shore and that of its northern shore, producing resentment, violence and dangerous migrations.
Does this imply that the Mediterranean has to develop into a periphery for importing international pondering and exogenous fashions of behaviour?
Is it condemned to just accept a disqualification that would cut back it to being not more than an open-air museum or a stopover on vacationer circuits, a area that was, within the phrases of Paul Valéry, ‘ a machine for making civilisation ’?
To rise to the problem of those declassifications, a simply and lasting resolution have to be discovered to the Israeli-Palestinian battle, which is colonial in nature, and an mental reassembling of the heritage of all of the cultures of the area have to be tried and achieved ‘ by pondering the Mediterranean and Mediterraneanising thought “, as Mohamed Arkoun and Edgar Morin, Albert Camus and Franco Cassano, the initiators of a ” considered the Midi ’, are urging.
The dream of a Better Maghreb uniting the 5 international locations of North Africa has, for the second, been pitifully aborted, revealing the immaturity of political leaders pushed by an emotionalism devoid of purpose or, extra merely, clear-sightedness.
For at a time when the age of Empires is making a brutal comeback, how can we hope to characteristic, even in a modest means, within the live performance of countries grouped collectively in massive ensembles: the European Neighborhood, the G7, BRICS, Alena in North America, Mercosur in South America, Asean in Asia, and many others.?
In my opinion, I consider that the fact of the stability of energy that can more and more govern relations between nations will eventually persuade the leaders and peoples of the Maghreb of the pressing must resume the method of constructing their unity. In any case, I fervently hope so.
The identical goes for Africa, to which I’ve each skilled ties, having been the spokesman for the Organisation of African Unity, and private ties, by means of the lengthy friendship with President Senghor.
I had thought lengthy and onerous in regards to the two conceptions of pan-Africanism that wanted to be constructed after the independence of the overwhelming majority of African international locations.
There was the idea of a gradual development of unity, preserving nationwide identities and regional buildings, defended by the Monrovia group, made up of average leaders like Senghor and Houphouët Boigny, and one other idea, advocating the development of fast and complete unity, defended by the Casablanca group, made up of radical leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou-Touré.
It was because of a compromise proposed by the previous Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, that the Organisation of African Unity was born in Might 1963.
Regardless of the passage of time, I nonetheless consider that the difficulty of constructing African unity is related immediately, because it may assist to withstand the appetites for domination of the Empires which can be re-emerging on the planet, prepared to hold out domination ventures by means of fragmentation, comparable to people who tore Africa aside after it was partitioned on the Berlin Convention in 1885.
On this period of indecipherable complexity, mental energy appears to be shedding its potential to suppose the world by means of. How do you analyse this example?
It’s true that the pre-eminence of latest technological technique of communication, similar to social networks, is decreasing the scope of mental energy, and that pretend newsand the misuse of synthetic intelligence are altering cognitive capabilities, mental capacities and social cohesion.
The technological revolution we’re experiencing is breaking down boundaries, making an attempt to standardise behaviour and taking us out of the ‘Gutemberg galaxy’ and right into a digital world constructed by what Giuliano de Empoli calls the engineers of chaos.
This appears to me to be the primary attribute of this indecipherable period that you simply point out, as a result of it appears to me to be marked by what I’d name ‘the paradox of modernity’.
At present, the world definitely appears higher related, however at the price of decreasing its residing complexity to a set of algorithms that make the microprocessor the regulator of our behaviour.
Technical advances in intensive agriculture, essential to fulfill the wants of billions of individuals, improve the usage of pesticides and infrequently result in soil sterilisation.
The struggle towards illness can result in the dangers of genetic manipulation. Progress in industrial manufacturing can have destructive results on the setting and high quality of life: desertification, deforestation, air pollution, fires, floods, and many others.
Progress in varied areas of human exercise appears to be paying the value within the type of an more and more pronounced archaism and a regression in social behaviour: strengthening of communitarianism, resurgence of populism, rise in violence, extension of the narcotics market. The result’s a return to authoritarianism and a rise in confrontations and wars.Defeated ideologies – communism, nationalism, third worldism, and many others. – appear to be giving option to closed identities which try to maneuver from the defensive and legit withdrawal of liberation struggles to the aggressive and offensive dynamic of violent fundamentalism, not shying away from utilizing reprehensible means similar to terrorism or hostage-taking.The dysfunction is basic and the antithetical duality between progress and regression is apparent.
The second attribute of those troubled instances appears to me to be the alternative of regulation by the stability of energy and the revival of the logic of empires.Within the aftermath of the Second World Warfare, a world order was established by the 50 representatives of the signatory states of the United Nations Constitution on 24 October 1945 in San Francisco.
Regardless of the holes left within the parchment of the treaties by many years of colonial follow, the precept on which this proposed contract between nations was based mostly was the regulation, which was to develop into, yr in, yr out, the regulator of worldwide life: the arbiter for the peaceable decision of conflicts and the recourse for ending crises and wars.
We at the moment are witnessing a spectacular shift from regulation to the stability of energy.
Warfare is reappearing in Europe, the Center East and Africa, and is threatening to unfold to different elements of Asia.
The temptation to dominate and enslave the weak by the robust appears to have develop into official within the eyes of leaders gripped by an uncontrolled hubris and a proclaimed choice for the usage of drive rather than the regulation.
It’s a dark prospect at the beginning of this cranky century!
So, in all modesty, we have to recall the phrases spoken by Albert Camus when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, summing up a knowledge that we will undertake as a rule of conduct for our lives and our actions.“Each technology, little doubt, believes itself destined to remake the world. My technology is aware of that it’ll not. However its activity is maybe higher. It’s to forestall the world from falling aside.
