Souleymane Bachir Diagne

1968: CRISIS IN AFRICAN LETTERS

he year 1968 marks, without doubt, a critical moment in African Fran- Tcophone literature. Two novels published that year bear testimony that indeed something new might be happening, something we may characterize as a break away from a more “traditional” African writing: annus mirabilis 1968 is the date of publication of two frst novels, Malian Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence and Ivoirian Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépen- dances. Both Ouologuem and Kourouma made a thunderous entrance into the world of letters: in the very same year 1968, unknown writer Yambo Ouo- loguem was the winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, and Les Soleils des indépendances was widely acclaimed. When, in 2000, Ahmadou Kourouma won the Renaudot for his novel Allah n’est pas obligé (the book also won the Goncourt des Lycéens), it certainly can be said that the prize came as a crown- ing of a trajectory, of a way of writing that frst struck the unexpectedly large audience that discovered Les Soleils more than thirty years earlier. With thunder also came sulfur. In the case of Kourouma’s Les Soleils, the controversy was about its language. Should what some considered a literary promotion of français débrouillé (broken French) be saluted as innovative writing? What is the merit, they would ask, of a work of literal translation of an African language (Malinke) into French, of an art of speaking Malinke in French? It has to be recalled that at frst the French publishers contacted by Amadou Kourouma did not want to publish a text in what they simply perceived as “broken French.” It was then published in Canada, precisely a non-French Francophone country, where the idea of working the language in such unexpected ways, from another language, found a warm welcome. Fol- lowing that frst publication, a few months later, Le Seuil in Paris decided to publish the novel which rapidly encountered great success. “Sulfur” is certainly a word to be used to speak of Yambo Ouologuem’s novel: after the acclaim came the scandal when the Malian writer was lam- basted and his work vilifed as he was accused of plagiarizing many passages of it. The very incipit of the novel, it soon appeared, laid the cards on the table: a comparison between the frst words of Le Devoir de violence:

Nos yeux boivent l’éclat du soleil, et, vaincus, s’étonnent de pleurer, Maschallah ! oua bismillah ![. . .]. Un récit de l’aventure sanglante

The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of

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de la négraille—honte aux hommes de rien !- tiendrait aisément dans la première moitié de ce siècle ; mais la véritable histoire des nègres commence beaucoup, beaucoup plus tôt, avec les Saïfs, en l’an 1202 de notre ère, dans l’Empire africain [. . .].

and the following passage from André Schwarz-Bart’s Le Dernier des justes:

Nos yeux reçoivent la lumière d’étoiles mortes. Une biographie de mon ami Ernie tiendrait aisément dans le deuxième quart du XXe siècle ; mais la véritable histoire d’Ernie Lévy commence très tôt, dans la vieille cité [. . .].

shows clearly the presence of Schwartz-Bart text in Ouologuem’s writing. In addition to Schwartz-Bart, other writers had also been “visited” by Ouo- loguem, who borrowed and rewrote from their works: Graham Greene, Mau- passant, and others. While a representative for Graham Greene threatened to take legal action, André Schwartz-Bart, with great elegance, declared: “I am especially touched, even overwhelmed, to think that a Black writer should have relied on Le Dernier des justes in creating a book like Le Devoir de violence. Thus Mr. Ouologuem is not indebted to me, but rather I to him.” Yambo Ouologuem himself protested that in his original manuscript, the “bor- rowings” from other writers and texts were clearly indicated but that sounded just clumsy as the publisher was very quick to “throw him under the bus” as the saying goes, in order to put away possible legal issues. Le Devoir de violence should have sunk, brought down by the scandal. After all, this was a frst novel by an unknown Malian young man and all could be just erased with some “it was too good to be true” type of wise conclusion. And yet, Yambo Ouologuem’s Devoir de violence proved itself to be unsinkable. These lines from a review saluting its re-publication by “Le Serpent à plumes” are eloquent enough about the way in which it resurfaced, surviving the scandal: “In spite of being controversial and, for a long time, impossible to get hold of, Le Devoir de violence remains a classic of African Letters like Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances or Sony Labou Tansi’s narratives of civil war and dictatorship. That is demonstrated by the critical studies devoted to the novel by prominent literary theorists, in particular in the US, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Christopher Miller, Thomas Hale, Henry Louis Gates Jr. They have seen in Ouologuem a pionneer of contem- porary postmodernism” (L’Humanité 20 February 2003). The reason why Le Devoir de violence “remains a classic of African letters” is double. There is, frst and foremost, the sheer talent shown by the narrative and the beauty of a writing that owes very little to the passages spotted as “plagiarisms.” The other reason is the fact that the rashness of the accusation of plagiarism became

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more obvious and the defense expressed by Ouologuem became more audible as more attention was paid to the very writing of the novel. The journalist’s review emphasized that Le Devoir de violence does not covertly “steal” from other works but openly constructs itself in conversation with other texts, not just with the ones loudly put forward— those, for example, of Graham Greene and André Schwarz-Bart, but also with texts by Flaubert and Maupassant, Arab chronicles, the Quran and the Bible. What also became manifest was that the novel marked a crucial departure from the traditional understanding of : the book proclaimed in its very writing the notion that a text is created from other texts (alluded to, winked at, appropriated, diverted, subverted, transformed, etc.)1 and not from some pre-existing “tradition” of which it is a transcription and that it is its main function to document. More generally: the crisis in African letters marked by Le Devoir de violence and Les Soleils des indépendances must be characterized as the shift from the paradigm of transcription to that of writing. It could seem paradoxical to consider these two novels as emblematic of such a shift, since Kourouma’s art is generally considered, in his own declarations even, as that of speaking Malinke in French, and Ouologuem’s book, with all the interjections and other markers of an oral discourse, seems to be a tribute to oral narration and per- formance. I will come back to these objections after a detour through which I will examine a similar paradigm shift, around 1968, in the feld of philosophy.

The period of the end of the sixties is also the time when what will be known as the criticism of “ethnophilosophy” appears on the African intel- lectual landscape. In Francophone , the criticism is associated with the name and the works of from Benin Paulin Hountondji. In the different articles he wrote in the late 1960s, Hountondji had been calling for a break from the way of doing philosophy in Africa following the model set by Reverend Placide Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy (frst published in 1945). The publication of P. Tempels’s La Philosophie bantoue, in 1949, by Présence africaine, the press newly created by Pan-Africanist militant Alioune Diop, was quite an event. The very title, associating “philosophy” with the name of an African people, the Bantu, was quite revolutionary: the science, considered the unique telos of the European mind, was something African peoples too could partake in. No wonder Léopold Sédar Senghor and many African and French intellectuals (Gaston Bachelard, for example) loudly saluted the book. A genre had been thus created by Tempels. In the wake of his work, many studies were published in the years that followed, with titles such as Yoruba

1. It is certainly important to remember here that the spirit of 1968 is about “collages” and all sorts of subversion and appropriation of existing texts.

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philosophy, Ibo philosophy, , the moral philosophy of the Wolof, etc. The criticism launched by Paulin Hountondji against Tempels’s book and the philosophical tradition it created is all in the concept he used (borrowing it from Ghanaian philosopher and statesman Kwame Nkrumah) to character- ize that type of work: ethnophilosophy. This is not philosophy, Hountondji argued, but a kind of philosophical rationalization of ethnological consid- erations resting primarily upon one highly objectionable assumption: that collective representations, unexamined by defnition, could pass for (African) philosophical thinking; one corollary of that assumption being that African people are unanimous in the worldviews they hold. Against such assumptions, P. Hountondji wrote in different articles that philosophy, in Africa as every- where else, is the production of individual minds that question and critically examine the assumptions and representations of their cultures rather than endorse them.2 Above all, Paulin Hountondji’s criticism of ethnophilosophy insisted on the consubstantial link between philosophy and writing. He did so in particular in an article entitled “Remarques sur la philosophie africaine contemporaine” published in the journal Diogène in 1970. In his most recent work, Struggle for Meaning, P. Hountondji recalls the shock he created by being dismissive of the sacrosanct African orature: “The readers,” he writes, “were frst of all surprised by the abrupt defnition with which the article opened: ‘By African Philosophy, I mean a set of texts: specifcally the set of texts written by Afri- cans and described as ‘philosophical’ by their authors themselves.’”3 P. Hountondji’s insistence on text and writing, his abrupt proclamation of “graphocentrism” against a tradition of extolling orality as the expression par excellence of Africanity (thus going against the notion that African authentic- ity lies in a continuous connection with the spirit, so to say, of orature), is a crucial aspect of the 1968 crisis in African letters. He states, on the philosophi- cal plane, what Kourouma and Ouologuem say in the language of fction: writing is not mere transcription. Is that the message of Les Soleils des indépendances, a novel often presented, as are all of Ahmadou Kourouma’s works, as the ultimate triumph of oral- ity—thus recognized as an African distinctive feature within Francophone literature? Let us try to answer the following simple question: in what sense is the book “oral”? Any response, obviously, would simply point to ways in

2. Hountondji has been accused by his critics of adopting a Eurocentric notion of philosophy. 3. Paulin Hountondji, The Struggle for Meaning. Refections on Philosophy, Culture, And Democracy in Africa, trans. John Conteh-Morgan with a forword by K. Anthony Appiah (Athens: Ohio UP, 2002) 97.

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which orality is evoked within and by the writing. Many texts in that sense, African or not, can be said to be oral, orality being an operation internal to the writing and not a reality external to it.4 This simple fact is too often lost in the assumption that African writing has or should have a natural connection to orality. There is nothing natural in the work of writing. To say that the presence, in the text, of Malinke language is what makes it oral does not make sense when we examine what we are thus affrming. Are we saying that Malinke is oral and guarantees the oral nature of Kourouma’s writing? To state that a language as such is oral is meaningless. The statement can only mean that a given language has no written tradition and certainly not that it naturally implies orality. If what is meant is that Kourouma writes in French like a Malinke person speaks in her tongue, we are back to orality as an operation internal to the writing. The conclusion we are fnally led to is that as for any literary text, Kourouma’s Soleils des indépendances is the invention by its author of his “langue” within the language (here French). Here we see that playing with the ways of speaking another language is how the author creates his “langue,” but such a creation is what all authors of all origins aim at, even within monolingualism.5 There are studies of Kourouma’s language by speakers of Malinke who track down the “original” Malinke ways of say- ing behind Kourouma’s writing. Of course they are not without interest. But ultimately they add nothing to the text as such, which is again a certain writ- ten “langue” within French as the translators of Kourouma’s works into, say, English, certainly experience. The event represented by Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence and Kourou- ma’s Les Soleils des indépendances has too often been identifed as a break with some previous “lyrical illusion” that supposedly characterized African literature before these works established some reality by describing things as they truly were: while Kourouma’s Soleils manifested the disenchantment following the euphoria of independences, Le Devoir de violence offered a more authentic picture of the African past. Ouologuem’s narrative of violence, crime, and cruelty was thus considered a revolutionary and courageous res- toration of the real “tradition.” The notion that what came before was a rosy picture of what Ouologuem depicted under a truer light would remain a vague assumption: which exactly are the novels of the “lyrical illusion” is a question that is not clearly posed. And what exactly qualifes Le Devoir de violence as a truer account of the African past? In other words, how does Ouologuem dispel the ignorance (or maybe the concealment?) of what the history of West

4. It is important to remember that Ahmadou Kourouma included in his literary ge- nealogy Louis Ferdinand Céline, whose art is certainly that of fabricating “orality” as his style of writing. 5. Derrida and Khatibi agree that within one language too translation takes place.

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Africa (Nakem in the novel) really was? That question is absurd? Indeed, it is the appeal to the very category of authenticity that is absurd. To celebrate the novel as the frst true African narrative is the same as claiming to have found an authentic African artifact in a shop at the airport. One simple truth that Le Devoir de violence makes manifest is the obvious fact that literature is about writing. The written text plays with other texts in the same way it does with what is called orality. Interjections, exclamations and other markers of “orality” are present, yes, but no endnotes are there to pretend that the truth of what is written lies in some other world behind it, that of orality; besides, many of the interjections are mere fabrications with no meaning outside their inscription in the text: everything happens within the writing itself. That is why, and this will be my conclusion, Derrida’s famous statement that “there is no hors-texte” could be evoked here to summarize the 1968 revolution in African letters expressed in Kourouma’s Soleils and Ouo- loguem’s Devoir de violence as well as in Paulin Hountondji’s graphocentrism.

Columbia University

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