The poet and humanitarian Ismael Teta publishes a brief and decisive poem. Ten verses. Ten negative commandments that redefine friendship not by what it is, but by what it is not. Those who have read him in Réminiscences and Réviviscences know that this stance is not new to him. It lies at the heart of his poetic ethics. A reading by Baltazar Atangana.
I remember writing, some years ago, in La Pépinière review, that Ismael Teta’s poetic step is swathed in twilight and light, that he poeticises the past not to mourn it but to sublimate it. A Decalogue of Friendship confirms that his literary trajectory has not wavered. It has sharpened. The author of Reviviscences, the one who conjugated existence “in the pluperfect”, chooses here the present tense and the apodictive form to deliver something that resembles less a poem than a thesis on the condition of human bonds in a deeply brutalist world.
The formal structure of the text is itself already a position. Ten verses numbered in Roman numerals, each beginning with the same inaugural negation, “A friend is not…”. This repeated anaphora is not a surface rhetorical device. It is the very foundation of the thought. To define by negation is to refuse to reduce the object to a closed definition. Teta does not trap friendship within an essence. He frees it from its usurpations. There is in this approach something that recalls the apophatic method of the Neoplatonists, that negative theology Plotinus developed to approach the One by eliminating what it is not, because no affirmation can exhaust it. One finds this same gesture in Alain Mabanckou, who in Broken Glass also builds his central character through an accumulation of what he refuses to be, a series of negations that end up sketching a silhouette truer than any positive description could achieve.
Ten Verses Against the Confusion of Affects
What strikes the reader first is the catalogue of confusions the poem undoes one by one. The lover delayed by circumstance, the parent bound by duty, the restaurant always open for convenience, the obedient audience, the demanding confessor, the silent oracle, the digital assistant, the second self. Each of these figures is a usurpation of friendship, a form of relation that carries its outward appearance without possessing its substance. Ismael Teta proceeds like Socrates in the Platonic dialogues: he does not begin by saying what virtue is, he first asks what it is not, and it is within that space of refutation that something true can finally be said.
Verse II I read as a response to a widespread notion that hierarchises relationships by placing the romantic above the amicable. Teta inverts this hierarchy without violence. He writes that love may shake the soul for a season, but that friendship endures. One thinks of Montaigne, of course, of that “because it was him, because it was me” that remains the most honest formula the French language has produced on the subject. Teta does not imitate Montaigne. But he inhabits the same territory, that of a friendship which is not the consolation of absent love, but its elder.
I linger on verse III, which touches me personally in the light of my reading of the two previous collections. In Réminiscences and Reviviscences, I had noted that Teta refused all forms of constrained bond, that his poetry sublimated freely chosen attachments against imposed obligations. This verse is the clearest expression of that refusal: friendship is a freely given gift, not an endless debt. It is an ethics of the gift that meets what Marcel Mauss theorised about the difference between the offering and the obligation, which Teta transposes here into the intimate register with remarkable economy of means. I think also of Scholastique Mukasonga, whose narratives on communal bonds in Rwanda show how group obligations can smother precisely what Teta calls freely given friendship here. The two writings answer each other across a distance, one through narrative fiction, the other through ethical poetry.
The Dignity of the Imperfect
I cannot read this poem without dwelling on verse IX, the one most deeply anchored in the present moment. “A friend is not AI designed for seamless understanding; human affection is slower, imperfect, and sometimes errs.” This line is not a passing metaphor. It is a diagnosis. At a time when artificial intelligences are designed to anticipate needs, respond without delay, understand without effort, Teta reminds us that the value of a human bond lies precisely in its slowness, its failures and its misunderstandings. What a machine cannot do is not understand; it is to err, and to remain regardless.
This idea finds an echo among the Stoics, who distinguished elective bonds from bonds of necessity. Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that man is born for others, but that the quality of the bond depends on what one puts into it, not what one expects from it. Teta retrieves this intuition by a path that is entirely his own, that of the cosmopolitan poet and humanitarian based in Nairobi, shaped by questions of human dignity and the quiet ethics of everyday life that his literary biography has always placed at its centre. I wrote it after Reviviscences: with him, sublimation is never an escape. It is a transformed return toward the real. Achille Mbembe, in Critique of Black Reason, raised the question of what it means to inhabit the world as a human being under conditions that deny that humanity. Teta answers in his own way, poetically, by affirming that friendship is precisely the space where that imperfect humanity can be exercised without having to justify itself.
Verse X, finally, is a philosophical conclusion as much as a poetic one. A friend is not a second self fashioned in your image. The strength of friendship lies in what resists imitation. It is not the echo that binds, but the difference one learns to hold. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, already distinguished perfect friendship from friendship of pleasure or interest by saying that it presupposes the recognition of the other as other, not as an extension of oneself. Teta does not cite Aristotle. He has no need to. His verse X says the same thing with the concision of a poet who has learned to waste nothing.
A Decalogue of Friendship is a short text that thinks at length. It belongs to a trajectory I have followed since Réminiscences, that of a writer who refines, poem after poem, an ethics of human bonds that neither nostalgia nor sentiment ever overflow. Ismael Teta has the rare quality of poets who think without losing warmth, who reason without drying out.
Baltazar Atangana, noahatango@yahoo.ca
