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Sembène's Progeny: a New Trend in the Senegalese Novel Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 4 Issue 2 Special Issue on African Literature Article 4 1-1-1980 Sembène's Progeny: A New Trend in the Senegalese Novel Albert Gérard Jeannine Laurent Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Gérard, Albert and Laurent, Jeannine (1980) "Sembène's Progeny: A New Trend in the Senegalese Novel," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 4: Iss. 2, Article 4. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1081 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sembène's Progeny: A New Trend in the Senegalese Novel Abstract The growth of the Nouvelles Editions Africaines in Senegal has proved favorable to the promotion of a national literature whose grass-roots inspiration is in obvious reaction against the elitist proclivities of earlier writers trained in French universities. The younger novelists follow in the footsteps of Sembène Ousmane, depicting actual living conditions among the under-privileged and usually silent majority in present-day Dakar. Recent examples are Aminata Sow Fall's La Grève des battù (1979), Moussa Ly Sangaré's Sourd-muet, je demande la parole (1978) and Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre (1979). Such works are designed for a local readership, which is numerous enough because Senegal has the highest rate of literacy in French of all African countries. While the clinical realism of their narrative technique is similar to Sembène's in many respects, the characteristic feature of those writers is that they do not seem to have any political axe to grind: their detached lucidity and absence of bitterness makes their image of the African megalopolis all the more impressive and depressing. Keywords Nouvelles Editions Africaines, Senegal, Sembène Ousmane, Dakar, Aminata Sow Fall, La Grève des battù, Moussa Ly Sangaré, "Sourd-muet, je demande la parole", Mariama Bâ, Une si longue lettre, literacy, megalopolis, Africa This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol4/iss2/4 Gérard and Laurent: Sembène's Progeny: A New Trend in the Senegalese Novel SEMBENE'S PROGENY: A NEW TREND IN THE SENGALESE NOVEL Albert Gerard and Jeannine Laurent Africa's massive output of literary works written in European languages in the course of the last quarter century began in France in the fifties. Its prime motivation had been the negritude ideology, but its most lively source of inspiration, especially among the writers born after the First World War, was an understandably ran- corous anticolonialism which could be uttered with impunity now that independence was so obviously around the corner. In Senegalese fiction of this last colonial decade, both writers and pro- tagonists were usually privileged Africans, budding intellectuals thriving on government scholarships. Though their sympathy with the plight of the colonized masses was undoubtedly genuine,there was nevertheless something abstract and doctrinaire about it. Sembene Ousmane was a signal and most unlikely exception. A manual laborer first trained as a fisherman in his native Casamance, a stevedore and trade-union leader in Marseilles, he certainly did not seem to be the stuff that «artists» are made of. In- deed, his first novel, Le docker noir (1956), published in the same annus mirabilis as Dadie's Climbie, Beti's Le pauvre Christ de Bomba, Oyono's Une vie de boy and Le vieux negre et la medaille, could not but appear as an unconscionably crude story, faulty in structure and language, deprived of any verisimilitude, and oozing racial hatred, a book which had best be forgotten, except as a docu- ment for the literary history of Africa. But 0 pays mon beau peuple! (1957) and even more Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960) demonstrated that Ousmane's hitherto doubtful talent had unsuspected capacities for rapid development. 133 Published by New Prairie Press 1 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 4, Iss. 2 [1980], Art. 4 134 STCL, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 1980) Not only is the latter work of truly epic proportions, carefully con- structed and even well-written, but it also exhibits Sembene's un- common ability to exploit and interpret his own experience and that of his once fellow-workers, the small people, the under-privileged, the proletarians who had none of the lofty metaphysical scrupules that Hamidou Kane was to ascribe to the hero of L'Aventure am- bigue. These people formed the bulk of the population, their labor provided such wealth as the country might boast, and few of them were capable of articulating their own predicament. However, a sort of group impulse prompted them to claim a larger share of the concrete material rewards that they were producing. True to his non-conformity, Sembene was not affected by the syndrome which lulled most francophone writers of Africa into silence as independence was dawning. And while L 'Harmattan (1964) remained the only volume of an intended trilogy, the writer, beginning with Volarque (1962) proved that he had become a master of short fiction, producing closely-knit works, tightly struc- tured, packed with devastating irony, and aimed at the new privileged class. This class had partially inherited from the colonial administration and it was establishing in many countries a new social and economic inequality as gross, if not grosser, than the one which had prevailed under the French Empire. Nevertheless, for all the unquestioned mastery he had acquired of the French language and the literary techniques of narrative fiction, writing became for Sembene little more than a hobby, the bulk of his activity being henceforth oriented towards film-making. The reason is not far to seek. Although Senegal is the eldest African daughter of France, whose influence has been pervasive since the seventeenth century, and although it is probably the African country where the French language is most widely spread, the writers of the fifties could only reach a European readership and a paper-thin layer of highly educated black intellectuals. Thy could not hope to reach what is conventionally and somewhat repulsively called «the masses», that is, the millions of ordinary individuals, illiterate peasants and semi- literate clerks, not to mention the urban workers, still exploited by foreign companies, the unemployed and the beggars. To these Sembene managed to convey his message with movies, where he made abundant use of vernacular languages. When new writers emerged from the slumber that had sealed their elders' spirits, it was in a Colerigean mood of dejection as they disenchantedly surveyed the ruins of an African society and https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol4/iss2/4 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1081 2 Gérard and Laurent: Sembène's Progeny: A New Trend in the Senegalese Novel Gerard and Laurent 135 economy wrecked by tribal warfare and military coups, most pro- fitably pilfered by the unholy transactions of the new («national») leaders and the new overseas («multinational») powers, thus re- enacting the pattern that had prevailed in the part when the African kings sold their black prisoners to white slave-traders. This was the era of disillusionment, and the new novelists voiced their hopelessness in tones of pity (Malick Fall's La Plaie (1967), Ahmadou Kourouma's Les Soleils des independances, (1968) or of ranting resentment at the black man's inability to take his fate in his own hands (Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence (1968).' Although some half-hearted efforts were made to africanize the French language and to divest it of the rigidity to which it had been condemned by Richelieu and the old gentlemen of the French Academy, such ambitious works could only be printed in Paris: they had to be designed first and foremost for a western, or at any rate, a westernized audience. Although the disappointed starry- eyed idealism of Williams Sassine was counter-balanced by the more positive, more combative, more optimistic approach of two promising Congolese novelists, Emmanuel Dongala and Henri Lopes, and although the latter's works issued in Cameroon were the most impressive pieces of French prose fiction to have been printed on African soil, it should be pointed out that by the early seventies, when popular literature was thriving in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, francophone Africa had not yet produced writers capable of dealing with non-intellectualized modern milieux in sim- ple, straightforward language. Indeed,while Nigerian fiction was increasingly focusing on the predicament and experiences of the ur- ban common man, the basic unit in the constitution of the «masses», there was apparently little prospect of anything of the kind occurring in France's former colonies. Nevertheless, the foundation of the first two local publishing houses in French-speaking Africa-C.L.E. in Yaounde, and N.E.A. in Dakar/Abidjan-created the opportunity for a narrative art that would not be written solely with an eye on the French readership, even though no francophone writer, whatever his skin color, can help looking up to Paris for final consecration.' But whereas the C.L.E. writers of the sixties remained mostly concern- ed with the by now worn-out motifs of tradition vs. innovation and the culture clash in rural societies, the late seventies saw the emergence of several Senegalese writers who turned their attention away from such old-fashioned and increasingly irrelevant pro- Published by New Prairie Press 3 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol.
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