Campbell2010.Pdf

The Discursive Construction of the Ivorian Nation in the Period of Ivoirité by Cary Keith Campbell BA French, Linguistics, Brigham Young University, 1999 MA French Linguistics and Literature, University of Pittsburgh, 2002 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2010 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Cary Keith Campbell It was defended on September 15, 2010 and approved by Susan Andrade, Associate Professor, English Department Todd Reeser, Associate Professor, French and Italian Department Giuseppina Mecchia, Associate Professor, French and Italian Department Dissertation Advisor: Roberta Hatcher, Assistant Professor, French and Italian Department ii Copyright © by Cary Keith Campbell 2010 iii The Discursive Construction of the Ivorian Nation in the Period of Ivoirité Cary Keith Campbell, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2010 Nationalism in Africa has to deal with a conception of the category of nation as a mediator between self and world which is complicated by a number of competing factors. Colonialism and neocolonialism, ethnic, racial and religious considerations, and other supra-national and intra-national factors all vie for the power to variously define the nation or reject it. With a cultural raison d’être at the core of any nation‘s distinctiveness, I study five Ivorian authors‘ evolving conceptions of the Côte d‘Ivoire within their novels—their cultural products—from 1995 to 2006. This time period in the Côte d‘Ivoire is one of a civil war and the lead-up to it—a time of extreme tension on the national identity‘s definition. I argue that works from Amadou Kourouma, Kitia Touré, Amadou Koné, Véronique Tadjo, and Tanella Boni from this period all perform an Ivorian-ness which contrasts in various ways from the state‘s official doctrine of Ivoirité—a uniquely Ivorian discourse which reinforced a budding agonism in the conception of the nation on the ground and ultimately served to foment the exclusion of the Northern half of the country. Using tools taken by analogy primarily from Jameson‘s The Political Unconscious, I demonstrate that allegorical readings serve well as a basis from which to make deeper insights and reveal deeper traces of each novel‘s performance of its own conception of Ivorian-ness. In this way I show that despite its history as an imposed, artificial, and modern category of identity, the cultural agents and producers of the Côte d‘Ivoire are invested in nation‘s potential, not as a temporary step toward more global poles of mediation between self and world, not as an iv institution inevitably fraught with internal minorities and divisions, but as a positive unit of solidarity in and of itself. v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCTION – IVOIRITÉ, NATIONAL IDENTITY AND ALLEGORY ... 1 2.0 BONI – DELAYED CLARITY VS. THE MEN OF IVOIRITÉ ........................... 46 3.0 TADJO – LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL BINARIES .......................... 135 4.0 TOURÉ AND KONÉ – CLASS CONFLICT AND NARRATIVE CONTROL 191 5.0 KOUROUMA – IRONY, LANGUAGE AND ETHNICITY SUBLIMATED ... 231 6.0 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... 288 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 294 vi PREFACE My earthly praise to people for their connection in the accomplishment of this dissertation‘s completion is owed to a great many. To the dear friends, respected teachers, interested colleagues whose influence improved my work, I thank you. Special consideration should go to the Department of French and Italian who have bent over backwards with patience for me. And if patience and longsuffering are some key qualities which tend to produce quality in workmanship, then Roberta Hatcher has been mine. A true pedagogue, a true mentor, Roberta has known how to diagnose problems with sensitivity, how to plant seeds for my own thought to develop rather than offering instantaneous corrections, and how to inspire the best out of my arguments even when she didn‘t agree with them all wholesale. To her I extend my deepest gratitude. And to my wife, I offer my dedication. There on the metaphorical sidelines as teammate and coach, there in the stands as cheerleader and fan, the heart of my home, the peace of my mind, the love of my humanity, the happiness of my being—this work has been enabled by you more than anyone. Our eternity together will always be sweetened for me by the remembrance of all the freely offered support you gave me during this trying time of academic creation. I give this dissertation to you. vii 1.0 INTRODUCTION – IVOIRITÉ, NATIONAL IDENTITY AND ALLEGORY The nation as a construct poses a particular problem in Africa, in part because there are several other powerful alternatives as loci of group cohesion and self-identification in strong tension with the nation as a legitimate mediator between self and world. For example, the Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo, has a firm background in some of the key alternatives. Her doctoral work in African American literature highlights the role of race over nation. Her literary contribution to a project on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide focused her awareness on ethnicity over nation. And her place as writing from the Ivorian diaspora (currently residing in South Africa as she does) underscores a continental tone over a national one in much of her writing. And yet, her latest work Reine Pokou: Concerto pour un sacrifice, from 2004, begins with the following introduction: La légende d‘Abraha Pokou, reine baoulé, m‘a été contée pour la première fois quand j‘avais autour de dix ans. Je me souviens que l‘histoire de cette femme sacrifiant son fils unique pour sauver son peuple avait frappé mon imagination de petite fille vivant à Abidjan. Je me représentais Pokou sous les traits d‘une Madone noire. 1 Plus tard, au lycée, je retrouvai le récit du sacrifice, mais cette fois-ci dans mon livre d‘histoire…Abraha Pokou prenait ainsi la stature d‘une figure historique, héroïne-amazone conduisant son peuple vers la liberté. Pokou grandit en moi. Je lui donnai un visage, une vie, des sentiments. Plusieurs décennies plus tard, la violence et la guerre déferlèrent dans notre vie, rendant brusquement le futur incertain. Pokou m‘apparut alors sous un jour beaucoup plus funeste, celui d‘une reine assoiffée de pouvoir, écoutant des voix occultes et prête à tout pour asseoir son règne. (7, emphasis mine) This text, written in response to a crisis of internal division and civil war in the Côte d‘Ivoire, situates itself firmly within the domain of the national here despite the many alternative identitarian loci on which Tadjo is well trained to hang her identity hat. Note that the "notre" refers to the Ivorian nation, and not the Baoulé ethnic group associated with the Pokou foundational myth. Note that the re-contextualization of ethnic stories implies a re-thinking of national identity. Note how clearly literature, politics, and identity are all bound up together, for Tadjo, with a concern for peace on the national level. Tadjo‘s text sees itself as an intervention into the national identity on the ground in her home country, not, as some postcolonial critics would have it, as a diasporic voice from a ―third space‖ whose writing is merely about a third- world nation, but whose intervention is really meant as a corrective to first-world narratives of national belonging1. I believe that this apparent investment in the concept of nation over 1 Ibish finds Edward Said‘s Orientalism and Homi Bhabha‘s The Location of Culture to be participating in this logic. ―One of the principle aims,‖ he summarizes, ―of Postcolonial Theory, in fact, is to map out in detail the extent to which…the colonizing and colonized worlds constitute each other politically, economically and, above all, culturally‖ (221). Imre Szeman also finds that many of the canonically ―postcolonial‖ authors may write about the 2 ethnicity, race, religion, pan-Africanism, or any other locus of mediation between self and world in African literature deserves careful study and provides a potentially corrective perspective to discussions on the forms and functions of nationalism in Africa. In this dissertation, I analyze works of five novelists from the Côte d‘Ivoire from a specific period of national tension and civil war for the varying ways in which they represent their national identities. Tadjo‘s example text meets this question of the nation head on, introducing her novel as an exploration of how the national definition changes as the narratives surrounding its founding myths are transmitted and interpreted. The other authors in this study deal with the nation with varying degrees of directness. What they all share, however, is traces of the nation and its tensions in their deep structure. The fundamental literary question I submit the texts to, then, is: what shape, if any, does the nation take in the author‘s imaginary and how is it textually constructed? I chose the Côte d‘Ivoire for several reasons, not the least of which being that it is an African nation, and the very construct of the nation in Africa is an interesting topic which presents particularities with respect to received Western models. The period of crisis I define adds to the interest of the study, because it provides a dimension of urgent pressure to a literary study of questions concerning how text relates to context, and the concepts of nationalism at play in the imaginaries of these authors, throwing into relief the powerful grip national solidarities can have on the psyche of even those cultural agents who appear, on the surface, to oppose them. Most importantly, and most particularly, though, the Côte d‘Ivoire is a powerful case study because of its unique history, especially concerning a state-sponsored doctrine called ―Ivoirité‖ third world, but live and intend their writings for the first in his 2003 Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation.

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