When I first contacted the Togolese Arctic traveller Tété-Michel Kpomassie, he told me it might take him a day or two to find the photos I needed for this article. They were in boxes. He had put his place in Nanterre, just outside Paris, up for sale. Anxious to return to Greenland, he was planning on leaving France, the country he had called home for many years.
I suppose this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Anyone who has read Kpomassie’s travelogue, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland (L’Africain du Groenland), will know that the Arctic land he left Togo for in the late 50s has always held his heart captive.
That said, France was actually the place he stayed the longest, where he had a family and worked for many years. “My children are French. So are my grandchildren. They live in the Parisian region,” he said. “I still feel attached to France.”
He left his homeland at the age of sixteen in 1958, fleeing the prospect of being forced to enter a traditional serpent priesthood after surviving a snakebite: an event that led his family to believe that this was the chosen path for him. In a bookshop run by missionaries in Togo, he came across a book about Greenland, a land so far off and foreign that it had awakened his curiosity and desire to travel.
Now, in his mid-eighties, that desire still runs deep. As Kpomassie prepares to leave France for colder climes, he looks back on his initial arrival in 1963, on his multi-year journey north to Greenland.
“In Marseille, everything went very smoothly, I was pleasantly surprised,” he recalled. “I presented my ID card and entered France.” After one night in Marseille, he took a train to the French capital. “Paris was a necessary stage, like Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Mauritania. I hadn’t come to live in France. No, I wanted to go to Greenland,” he said, a determined twinkle in his eye.
But what he hadn’t realised at the time was that this stepping stone would be the place where he would first consider the possibility of writing a book. “When I arrived in Paris, I was first taken in by Claude Géraudel, who lived on Quai Saint-Michel, in the heart of the Quartier Latin.
I met a lot of students, both French and African. I had many conversations in cafés and restaurants. That’s where I first became conscious of the possibility of writing something myself one day,” he explained.
After his stay in the Quartier Latin, Kpomassie stayed with a Frenchman named Jean Callault, who worked as a sales manager in a department store. He went on to describe Callault as his “adoptive father”. Callault displayed generosity and willingness to support Kpomassie in a mission he didn’t fully understand.
When Kpomassie arrived armed with a letter of recommendation, Callault took him in, providing the young man with accommodation. The bond was so strong that he even dedicated his book to Callault, following extensive correspondence while he was in Greenland. Upon his return to France after his voyage, Callault welcomed him in his home in the 17th arrondissement, an area Kpomassie still holds dear.
But Kpomassie’s relationship with France has always been complex. “It’s a double-sided relationship. Very mixed.” On the one hand, he recalls his first ID card stating that he was “a French subject”, despite never having set foot in the country. As a child, his only contact with French people had been through missionaries in the colonial era, so it is hardly surprising that he has mixed views.
But upon arrival in France, he began to appreciate the everyday Parisian rhythms and see parallels between the French capital and his Togolese village. “What I really like about French culture is the Sunday market. That even makes me think of my village. The merchants selling their wares, the way they shout out and talk, I love that human warmth.” With a smile on his face, he recounted how he used to enjoy watching the street vendors eating onion soup at Les Halles market. He used to do this after unloading wares for the merchants at 4 o’clock in the morning before catching the first metro.
These snapshots of everyday life, however, were not the thing that really changed Kpomassie’s relationship with France: it was literature. “What surprised me was that it was Flaubert who opened my eyes,” Kpomassie said.
“To me, white people had always seemed to be happy. But I realised that it was true that white people also suffered. Madame Bovary is an unhappy white woman. She even takes her own life in a horrible manner.” It was from this moment onwards that Kpomassie began to see France differently, “through the eyes of Gustave Flaubert”, who he describes as his “maître à penser”. He even went on a pilgrimage of sorts to Rouen to visit Flaubert’s childhood home, which is now a museum. “It was the best day of my life,” he said enthusiastically.
His love of Flaubert did not stop with Madame Bovary: “I’ve read all the works by Flaubert: not just Madame Bovary, but all the versions of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, Salammbô, Bouvard et Pécuchet, etc.” And Kpomassie even sees Flaubert as his writing master: “When I went to Greenland, I had all the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and the letters that he had written to his friends and to Louise Collet, who was his mistress. (…) What I’m trying to say is Flaubert taught me how to write.”
So, while Kpomassie’s relationship with France remains complex, it is fair to say that in his search for meaning, he found grounds for the transformation of perspective in French literature. Places don’t have to be the end destination to leave an impact; they can be welcoming, contradictory and thought-provoking while we move through them in transit.
Buy Tété-Michel’s book, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland, here.
Lead photo credit : Tété-Michel with his family in Ilulissat 1985 Photo: Tété-Michel Kpomassie ©
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