Inside La Bibliothèque des Possibles — An Altar Dedicated to African Literature

What if a library was an altar? A sacred space for the imagination and collective healing. A place where reading becomes a ceremony, and books are portals for transformation. For the fifth anniversary of KOKOBA: Meeting Our Griots, I curated La Bibliothèque Des Possibles, a roving study space conceived as an altar dedicated to African literature and literary arts. It is the embodiment of over a decade of research and experimentation based on decolonial practices—particularly those that explore learning and education as practices of freedom and healing.  La Bibliothèque Des Possibles challenges inherited notions of what a library can be, how it is curated and organised. It does not claim neutrality, nor does it seek to organise knowledge into categories that flatten its potency. Instead, it invites reverence. It calls for slowness, presence, and intention. Most of all, it invites readers to walk around its custom-built circular table and feel the gravitational pull of each book—as if drawn by a force greater than logic.

The curatorial concept behind La Bibliothèque Des Possibles draws inspiration from the visionary work of writer Chinyere Erondu, who reimagines personal libraries as altar-spaces. Their project, Your Library as the Altar, reminds us that our shelves can hold more than pages—they can hold strategies for survival, resistance, and collective liberation. With La Bibliothèque Des Possibles, this notion is expanded, grounded, and ritualised through the cosmology and healing traditions of the Dagara people of West Africa. Based on a sacred structure known as the Dagara Medicine Wheel, the library is arranged according to five elemental forces and their corresponding cardinal directions: water (North), fire (South), earth (Center), mineral (West), and nature (East).

Each of the 25 books selected—drawn from the KOKOBA collection—has been intuitively chosen and carefully placed within this circular configuration. Together, they form what I call a Wheel of Possibility—a literary constellation that is activated through intuition, memory, and ancestral knowledge. Guided by thinkers such as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Alice Walker, KOKOBA has long embraced literature as a praxis. In this spirit, La Bibliothèque Des Possibles becomes a site of world-bending, world-mending, and world-making. Through its sacred arrangement, literature becomes both a remedy and a roadmap for radical dreaming and worldbuilding.

Currently, La Bibliothèque Des Possibles is housed at La Manzane, a creative ecosystem founded by Oiseau Studio and located in Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire.

Five Books from La Bibliothèque Des Possibles

Water

Sidi Ghrib (2022), Abderrazzak Benchaâbane

Water moves. It resists containment. It rejuvenates. Sidi Ghrib takes us on an initiatory wandering—one that moves between languages, bodies, and geographies. This is not a linear pilgrimage, but a tidal one: ebbing and flowing between philosophical teachings, strangers’ generosity, and fragments of lost memories. Water, here, is both the question and the answer. A reminder that the path of the wanderer is indeed that of the mystic: submerged, searching, and endlessly returning.

Fire

Le Monde S’effondre (1972, French translation of Things Fall Apart), Chinua Achebe

Achebe’s fire is not only destructive—it is clarifying. Le Monde S’effondre ignites the page with its confrontation of rupture: the searing moment when colonial contact fractures the world of the Igbo people. And yet, within this combustion, Achebe refuses erasure. His language holds ground. His characters burn with dignity, resistance, and complexity. Fire, in this book, is not just an end—it is also the illumination of a history told from within. Achebe hands us the match and dares us to see what must be burned to see clearly.

Earth

pumflet: summer flowers (2019), Ilze Wolff

summer flowers is a seed-offering: part architectural meditation, part invitation to dig. Rooted in the land and histories of Southern Africa, the text unearths the silences and architectures of colonial urbanism while revealing radical alternatives through the work of Bessie Head. Earth here is archive, compost, ground, grief, and bloom.

Mineral

In Search of Yambo Ouologuem (2011), Christopher Wise

Minerals are the keepers of time—crystalline witnesses to buried histories. In this literary investigation, Christopher Wise seeks out the elusive Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, whose brilliance and withdrawal from the public eye remain shrouded in myth. Like digging through layers of sediment, Wise’s journey unearths fragments of truth, speculation, and silence. The mineral element speaks in the text’s sharp edges and buried veins—its quiet endurance of complexity. This is not a biography. It is a kind of excavation, reminding us that some truths are not found, but felt through pressure and patience.

Nature

Chaque aurore est une chance (1980), Fatho-Amoy

There is something forest-like in Fatho-Amoy’s writing—a language that grows quietly, persistently, across the page. Chaque aurore est une chance is both declaration and devotion: to new beginnings, to inner landscapes, to the resilience of poetic intuition. Nature here is not a backdrop, but a co-conspirator. The book breathes with the rhythm of sunrise, of cyclical hope, of a world in constant renewal. Fatho-Amoy doesn’t shout his truths, he trusts the dawn to carry what cannot yet be spoken.



Keren Lasme is a transdisciplinary artist, literary curator and founder of KOKOBA: Meeting Our Griots, a multimodal project at the intersection of art, research, archiving, documentation and education.



All images: La Bibliothèque Des Possibles at Blu Lab, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Photography by Zamzam Elmoge