A protean personality, Mohamed Aziza, writer, poet and man of action, author of some twenty books, is celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Med 21 Programme.
You’ve just finished writing your memoirs, retracing your long and eclectic career. How did you go about capturing the experience of a lifetime?
I hesitated for a long time before embarking on the perilous exercise of writing a memoir. Indeed, it seemed to me that these introspective plunges were reserved for women and men who, in different ways and in different fields, had influenced the course of their country’s history or marked a significant milestone in the culture of their region.
The examples of historical figures, including Nobel Prize winners, who have engaged in this exercise, writing their memoirs, are daunting if not dissuasive.
I gave in to the insistence of friends! According to them, writing my memoirs would not be an act of childish egocentricity, but would stem from a legitimate desire to pass on my work, particularly to the younger generations of my potential readers, eager to enrich their collective memories.
I also wanted to check whether Albert Memmi’s judgement, when he gave one of his essays the not very encouraging title of L’autobiographie impossible (The impossible autobiography), was well-founded or not.
Writing a memoir is like plunging into a stormy sea, hoping to resist the waves of a complexity where lived existence and dreamed existence feed each other, especially in the case of writers like me, whose job is to revive a house fairy called ‘imagination’. Armed with a lifeline to disentangle the factual from the fictional, I threw myself into the waves, not without taking the precaution of structuring my autobiographical narrative in three parts.
The first part is devoted to my life journey, from childhood to the present day.
The second part deals with my work in its two aspects, my personal work as a writer and poet, and my collective work as a builder of institutions.
The third part gives me the opportunity, as a witness, to express my perception of the state of the world, of societies and of individuals.
As a man of culture and action, and a former UNESCO official for 25 years, how did you manage to find a place for the poet and writer in the midst of your many activities?
It was the poet and the writer who found a place for the diplomat and international civil servant that I have been since 1973, when I joined the General Secretariat of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, and then the Directorate General of UNESCO in Paris.
There are countless examples of writers and poets who have pursued occupations designed to overcome the difficulty of turning their vocations into a paid profession capable of satisfying their vital needs.
Admittedly, this twofold investment is not easy to take on, but to rise to the challenge you need organisation and discipline.
As far as I’m concerned, I have to admit that I benefited from a convergence between my two vocations, writing and diplomacy. This has made it easier for me to satisfy both, following the example of prestigious predecessors, diplomats and writers.
What’s more, immersion in working life often has a positive influence on literary or artistic production, taking it out of the realm of abstract speculation and the in-between world.
In 2025, you will be celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Med 21 programme. Tell us about the purpose of this tool and how it works.
I created the Med 21 Programme in Rome in 2010, when I was Diplomatic Adviser and Director General of a foundation called Osservatorio del Mediterraneo to the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Franco Frattini.
This programme consisted of twelve multidisciplinary prizes, each named after an emblematic figure in the history of the Mediterranean: Saint Augustine and Ibn Khaldun, Fatima Fihria and Lysistrata, Averroes and Sinan, Hannibal and Emir Abd el-Kader, and so on.
These prizes are established in several Mediterranean countries and hosted in several cities on the northern and southern shores of the common sea: Tunis, Kairouan, Fez, Valencia, Toledo, Paris, Nice, Verona, Cremona, Istanbul, Beirut, etc.
The winners of these prizes differ from other awards in that three or four winners are honoured at the same time.
Posthumous winners are often honoured to perpetuate the memory of their contribution to the scientific, cultural, social or economic fields to which the prize refers.
The organising principle of this network is the partnership with one or more specialised organisations whose representatives make up, on an equal basis, the governing bodies of the prize.
At the beginning of each year, a plan of activities for all the prizes is drawn up.At the end of the year, a report is presented in the form of a retrospective, at which a representative and a winner of each prize present an account of the prize-giving ceremony, illustrated by projections, to a large audience.
We would like to extend the scope of our programme to the ultra-Mediterranean regions, which are our neighbours and key contacts. For example, in partnership with the French National Academy of Medicine and the Ibn Sina Foundation in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, we have created the Avicenna Prize, and we hope to create other trophies with our neighbours and friends in sub-Saharan countries.
A project entitled ‘ Rose des Vents ’ is currently being studied to honour the academic and scientific diasporas of Africa, the Maghreb and the Arab world, and to highlight their relationship with their host countries and their attachment to their countries of origin.
In fact, I have always considered the MED 21 programme to be a tool of cultural diplomacy that brings a wide range of players from civil society into the great sphere of traditional diplomacy, and broadens the sphere of influence of political diplomacy, because cultural diplomacy can serve various aspects of sustainable development: exchanging and developing ideas, promoting social policies, boosting economic relations, stimulating intercultural and inter-religious dialogue, strengthening actions to build peace and maintain security, etc.
As an intellectual who is interested in the times and their convulsions, what is your view of a region that is dear to you, the Mediterranean, particularly in its Maghreb dimension, which seems to be frozen in political immobility?
Up until its first decline in the 15th century, as a result of the rise of the Atlantic area following the ‘discovery’ of America, the Mediterranean was able to retain its centralityand preserve its status as the ‘navel of the world’, producing values and models of behaviour that continue to guide us, despite the upheavals that its tormented history has produced: colonial nightmare on its southern shore, the current decentring of its space in favour of the Pacific zone and asymmetry between the development of its southern shore and that of its northern shore, generating resentment, violence and hazardous migrations.
Does this mean that the Mediterranean has to become a periphery for importing foreign thinking and exogenous models of behaviour?
Is it condemned to accept a disqualification that would reduce it to being no more than an open-air museum or a stopover on tourist circuits, a region that was, in the words of Paul Valéry, ‘ a machine for making civilisation ’?
To rise to the challenge of these declassifications, a just and lasting solution must be found to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is colonial in nature, and an intellectual reassembling of the heritage of all the cultures of the region must be attempted and achieved ‘ by thinking the Mediterranean and Mediterraneanising thought “, as Mohamed Arkoun and Edgar Morin, Albert Camus and Franco Cassano, the initiators of a ” thought of the Midi ’, are urging.
The dream of a Greater Maghreb uniting the five countries of North Africa has, for the moment, been pitifully aborted, revealing the immaturity of political leaders driven by an emotionalism devoid of reason or, more simply, clear-sightedness.
For at a time when the age of Empires is making a brutal comeback, how can we hope to feature, even in a modest way, in the concert of nations grouped together in large ensembles: the European Community, the G7, BRICS, Alena in North America, Mercosur in South America, Asean in Asia, etc.?
For my part, I believe that the reality of the balance of power that will increasingly govern relations between nations will sooner or later convince the leaders and peoples of the Maghreb of the urgent need to resume the process of building their unity. In any case, I fervently hope so.
The same goes for Africa, to which I have both professional ties, having been the spokesman for the Organisation of African Unity, and personal ties, through the long friendship with President Senghor.
I had thought long and hard about the two conceptions of pan-Africanism that needed to be built after the independence of the vast majority of African countries.
There was the concept of a gradual construction of unity, preserving national identities and regional structures, defended by the Monrovia group, made up of moderate leaders like Senghor and Houphouët Boigny, and another concept, advocating the construction of immediate and total unity, defended by the Casablanca group, made up of radical leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou-Touré.
It was thanks to a compromise proposed by the former Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, that the Organisation of African Unity was born in May 1963.
Despite the passage of time, I still believe that the issue of building African unity is relevant today, as it could help to resist the appetites for domination of the Empires that are re-emerging in the world, ready to carry out domination ventures through fragmentation, similar to those that tore Africa apart after it was partitioned at the Berlin Conference in 1885.
In this era of indecipherable complexity, intellectual power seems to be losing its ability to think the world through. How do you analyse this situation?
It’s true that the pre-eminence of new technological means of communication, such as social networks, is reducing the scope of intellectual power, and that fake newsand the misuse of artificial intelligence are altering cognitive functions, intellectual capacities and social cohesion.
The technological revolution we are experiencing is breaking down boundaries, attempting to standardise behaviour and taking us out of the ‘Gutemberg galaxy’ and into a virtual world built by what Giuliano de Empoli calls the engineers of chaos.
This seems to me to be the first characteristic of this indecipherable era that you mention, because it seems to me to be marked by what I might call ‘the paradox of modernity’.
Today, the world certainly seems better connected, but at the cost of reducing its living complexity to a set of algorithms that make the microprocessor the regulator of our behaviour.
Technical advances in intensive agriculture, necessary to satisfy the needs of billions of people, increase the use of pesticides and often lead to soil sterilisation.
The fight against disease can lead to the risks of genetic manipulation. Progress in industrial production can have negative effects on the environment and quality of life: desertification, deforestation, pollution, fires, floods, etc.
Progress in various areas of human activity seems to be paying the price in the form of an increasingly pronounced archaism and a regression in social behaviour: strengthening of communitarianism, resurgence of populism, rise in violence, extension of the narcotics market. The result is a return to authoritarianism and an increase in confrontations and wars.Defeated ideologies – communism, nationalism, third worldism, etc. – seem to be giving way to closed identities which are trying to move from the defensive and legitimate withdrawal of liberation struggles to the aggressive and offensive dynamic of violent fundamentalism, not shying away from using reprehensible means such as terrorism or hostage-taking.The dysfunction is general and the antithetical duality between progress and regression is obvious.
The second characteristic of these troubled times seems to me to be the replacement of law by the balance of power and the revival of the logic of empires.In the aftermath of the Second World War, an international order was established by the 50 representatives of the signatory states of the United Nations Charter on 24 October 1945 in San Francisco.
Despite the holes left in the parchment of the treaties by decades of colonial practice, the principle on which this proposed contract between nations was based was the law, which was to become, year in, year out, the regulator of international life: the arbiter for the peaceful resolution of conflicts and the recourse for ending crises and wars.
We are now witnessing a spectacular shift from law to the balance of power.
War is reappearing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and is threatening to spread to other parts of Asia.
The temptation to dominate and enslave the weak by the strong seems to have become legitimate in the eyes of leaders gripped by an uncontrolled hubris and a proclaimed preference for the use of force in place of the law.
It’s a gloomy prospect at the start of this cranky century!
So, in all modesty, we need to recall the words spoken by Albert Camus when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, summing up a wisdom that we can adopt as a rule of conduct for our lives and our actions.“Every generation, no doubt, believes itself destined to remake the world. My generation knows that it will not. But its task is perhaps greater. It is to prevent the world from falling apart.
