"Senghor's Prefaces Between the Colonial and Postcolonial," By

Senghor’s Prefaces between the Colonial and the Postcolonial Richard Watts Voilà quelque cent cinquante ans que les blancs s’intéressent à la littérature des nègres d’Afrique, qu’ils dissertent sur elle, comme l’abbé Grégoire, ou qu’ils en donnent des traductions, comme Blaise Cendrars. Mais voilà que les Négro-africains de langue française veulent eux-mêmes manifester cette littérature, et ils se présentent en traducteurs le plus souvent. Over the last one hundred and fifty years or so, whites have expressed their interest in Black African literature, whether in critical essays such as Abbé Grégoire’s or in translations such as Blaise Cendrars’s. But now francophone Black Africans want to present this literature themselves, and they do so most often by serving as its translators. —Léopold Sédar Senghor, Preface, “D’Amadou Koumba à Birago Diop” 7 n the discursive field of francophone “colonized” and postcolonial literatures, the paratext—the book covers, illustrations, epigraphs, and, Iin particular, prefaces that surround the text—has a varied if somewhat checkered history. Used principally for indicating colonial approval of and control over a text in the early years of the literatures produced by so- called indigenous or colonized writers in the French empire,1 it later became in the hands of postcolonial writers such as Assia Djebar, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau , Werewere Liking, and Henri Lopes a space for signifying a break with colonial models of literary patronage. In the colonial and postcolonial contexts, the paratext is always about more than the promotion of literature. All paratexts inscribe the texts to which they are attached in particular discursive fields, but the paratexts to works produced in the colonial and postcolonial context do so in a way that renders the political use of the novel explicit. If the paratext in this literary field is always about more than the promotion of literature, it is not simply an instrument for expressing a politics (e.g., for or against French colonialism). The paratext has an underlying function, intralingual cultural translation, that is, in fact, closely related to its more explicitly political function. The paratext to colonized and postcolonial literatures translates—in a metaphorical sense—the text in abbre- viated textual form (prefaces, dedications, dust jacket copy, etc.) as well as in iconic form (cover art). This gives readers who might not otherwise be immediately able to “read” the text’s cultural difference access to it. This makes the text, lest we forget the commercial imperatives of the paratext, a more approachable and desirable commodity. Translation, a central trope of postcolonial studies, is the mechanism by which the unknown becomes known and the unknowable becomes knowable, and it is precisely this Vol. 33, No. 4, Winter 2002 Richard Watts 77 operation that the paratext effects. Although Léopold Sédar Senghor is describing the work of Birago Diop in the epigraph above, he could very well have been talking about his own practice as preface writer. When colonized writers begin writing prefaces for the works of writers who share the same subject position, they become the translators of this literature for its largely metropolitan French readership. The politics expressed by the paratext and the form of translation of the text it performs are intimately linked. For instance, the “colonizing” paratext of the 1930s and 1940s presents political positions that are pro- colonial and evinces, not coincidentally, a highly adaptive form of translation. In the earliest production of francophone literature, the paratext translates the difference of the work in question by presenting it in terms easily assimilated by a metropolitan French readership. The paratext exists in this context (as does the colonizer, for that matter) to render, as Horace put it, the Ogre Roman. For translation theorist Antoine Berman, this dom- inant mode of translation is ethnocentric (it subordinates the text’s values to its own), hypertextual (it positions itself above the text), and Platonic (it privileges the ostensibly universal meaning of the text over its particular form of expression) (26). The subversive, disruptive paratexts of the postcolonial writers cited above describe a political space beyond the opposition between the colonial and the anti-colonial and conform more, as a form of translation, to Berman’s literal alternative to the adaptive mode of translation. Whereas the adaptive mode of translation that I associate with the paratext from the colonial period is ethnocentric, hypertextual, and Platonic, the postcolonial paratext is closer to Berman’s literal translation, which is ethical (it accepts the cultural difference of the source text), poetic (it does not attempt simply to rewrite the form of the source text), and “reflexive” (it signifies through form as well as through content) (27). Most of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s prefaces to works of francophone colonized and postcolonial literature occupy the uncomfortable middle ground between the colonial and the postcolonial, in political and translational terms. The period of decolonization—whose precise beginning and end points are as notoriously difficult to pin down as those of the colonial and postcolonial periods, but which constitutes nonetheless an epis- teme—is marked by the emergence of a culturally autonomous literature in French from the colonies and postcolonies. It also happens to be the period during which Senghor writes the bulk of his prefaces to literary texts by (mostly) francophone colonized and postcolonial sub-Saharan African writers. Through his work as literary patron of novels, short stories, and collections of poetry from the late 1940s to the 1960s, Senghor was instrumental in marking out the contours of this literary field whose shape has changed since the mid-century but that still bears his mark.2 Although Senghor contributed prefaces to all kinds of works, most of which had some connection to his project of identifying and renewing the cultural and political practices of Africa and the diaspora, the greater part of his patronage was to novels and collections of poetry from francophone sub- Saharan Africa, with a few prefaces to works from the Caribbean.3 Senghor, 78 Research in African Literatures whose generosity does not need to be established here, contributed over thirty prefaces over the course of nearly fifty years to works of African and Caribbean francophone literatures, far more than the other two most active preface-writing patrons of these literatures, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edouard Glissant. He begins writing prefaces to the works of francophone colonized writers at that crucial moment following the Second World War when it becomes clear that the hegemonic colonialism of the interwar years is no longer possible. Increasingly large spaces for opposition to colonialism emerge in the immediate postwar years, and Senghor’s prefaces both reflect and help create these new openings. They also—and this is not the least of their virtues—promote a literature that will play a deter- mining part in the redefinition of the subjectivities of the (former) colonizer and the (formerly) colonized. However, even in their generosity they are marked by the ambiguities of the period of decolonization, and it is these ambiguities that I want to explore here. If Senghor’s importance in shaping the field of francophone literature is undeniable, it is less clear how his prefaces fit into the history of the reception or, more precisely, the patronage of the works that constitute this literary field. In other words, how are Senghor’s prefaces different from those that precede and follow his in the field of francophone literature? Understood as instruments of cultural translation, what is their politics of translation? Where do they lie on Berman’s spectrum of translational practices? For all the work that has been done to derive a Senghorian (read: African) literary criticism, philosophy, or cultural politics from Senghor’s prefaces, little has been said on their status qua prefaces. Although Daniel Garrot and Pius Ngandu Nkashama—to name simply those whose critical works focus most intently on Senghor’s prefaces—present, respectively, convincing accounts of Senghor’s literary criticism and his rewriting of mid-century phenomenology using the prefaces, both choose to ignore the position these texts previously occupied and the rhetorical implications of that positioning. This is at least partly the result of the paratextual repackaging of Senghor’s prefaces. The majority of Senghor’s essays, prefaces, and speeches have been collected in the five volumes of the Liberté series, and it is in this disembodied form that most critics read the prefaces. What I want to do here, then, is resituate Senghor’s prefaces as works of literary patronage that belong to a history of this practice. Senghor’s prefaces anticipate the paratext of the postcolonial period, but they do so while relying on rhetoric that occasionally has the ring of the preface from the colonial period. I want to show where these prefaces lie, from a translational perspective, on the continuum between the ethnocentric and the ethical, the hypertextual and the poetic, and the Platonic and the reflexive. What Senghor’s prefaces show is that a discourse that promotes literary, cultural, and even political autonomy can share the page with a colonial rhetoric, granting the prefaced text what amounts to a conditional free- dom. Before getting to the heart of the matter, though, I will make one last detour through the history of the paratext in the francophone literary Richard Watts 79 context in order to describe in more detail the colonial model of paratextual patronage with which Senghor was certainly familiar and in relation to which he developed his own paratextual practice. The paratextual framing of francophone African writers of the interwar years is characterized, as suggested above, by a nearly unavoidable recu- peration of the works of colonized writers into the colonial project.

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