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Expressing Truth Through Fiction and Orality Through Literacy

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Expressing Truth Through Fiction and Orality Through Literacy EXPRESSING TRUTH THROUGH FICTION AND ORALITY THROUGH LITERACY: NARRATIVE VOICES IN FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN LITERATURE by ALTHEA DAWN HUBBARD (Under the Direction of Rachel Gabara) ABSTRACT This paper explores how Francophone African authors use techniques borrowed from orality to express African perspectives on history. Following years of colonization and racism, during which their voices were muted, African authors felt a need to express their own perspective on their experiences. Incorporating themes, stylistic qualities, or situations from African oral literature, through implicit and explicit references, these authors use their works to valorize an African culture and way of life while not hesitating to offer criticism as well. Orality affects the narration and substance of the novels, contributing to their distinctness and emphasizing their African perspectives on historic events. Outside sources, including anthropological studies, are used to contextualize and better understand the works. I focus on four different narrative voices: the griot’s voice, the woman’s voice, the child’s voice, and a plurality of voices. The griot’s voice in Le Maître de la parole by Laye Camara, Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue by Djibril Tamsir Niane, and Les Contes d’Amadou Koumba by Birago Diop emphasizes the importance of Africa’s rich traditions and orality. The woman’s voice as expressed in Mariama Bâ’s Une Si Longue Lettre and Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique points out the cruelty of that tradition towards those who hold little power in society. The child’s voice found in L’Aîné des orphelins by Tierno Monénembo, Allah n’est pas obligé by Ahmadou Kourouma, and Johnny Chien Méchant by Emmanuel Dongala reinforces the need for a connection to the past when looking forward. The final chapter focuses on two novels by Ahmadou Kourouma: Les Soleils des indépendances and Monnè, outrages et défis. In these novels Kourouma uses a plurality of narrators to tell the stories, allowing the reader to see different points of view on African history which leads to a broader understanding of an African perspective. The use of multiple voices in these texts highlights non-Western modes of understanding and validates an African perspective. INDEX WORDS: Francophone African literature, Orality, Historical fiction, Narrative voice, Laye Camara, Djibril Tamsir Niane, Birago Diop, Mariama Bâ, Fatou Diome, Tierno Monénembo, Ahmadou Kourouma, Emmanuel Dongala. EXPRESSING TRUTH THROUGH FICTION AND ORALITY THROUGH LITERACY: NARRATIVE VOICES IN FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN LITERATURE by ALTHEA DAWN HUBBARD BA, King College, 2000 MA, The University of Georgia, 2009 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2014 © 2014 Althea Dawn Hubbard All Rights Reserved EXPRESSING TRUTH THROUGH FICTION AND ORALITY THROUGH LITERACY: NARRATIVE VOICES IN FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN LITERATURE by ALTHEA DAWN HUBBARD Major Professor: Rachel Gabara Committee: Timothy Raser Catherine Jones Electronic Version Approved: Julie Coffield Interim Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2014 iv DEDICATED TO My parents James and Beverly Hubbard My grandfather Charles L. Hubbard My husband Lamarana Baldé Our children Alim and Lia And to the people of Kankalabé in Guinea, West Africa v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee who spent many hours reading drafts and sharing ideas and suggestions. From its very rough beginnings, this paper is what it is today thanks in large part to your help. To Rachel Gabara, Timothy Raser, and Catherine Jones thanks for all your hard work on my behalf. I’d also like to thank the other French professors in the department whose classes I took and from whom I learned so much about each of their fields, and also about teaching, research, and professionalism: Nina Hellerstein, Jonathan Krell, Diana Ranson, Francis Assaf, Jan Pendergrass, and also to Karim Traoré from Comparative Literature. I owe you each so much for my development as a scholar and a writer. And finally I thank my undergraduate French professors Aspasia Bishara, Kathleen Madigan, and Tracy Parkinson whose excellent teaching instilled in me a love for French literature and a desire to learn more. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 2 PUTTING WORDS ON PAPER: CAPTURING THE GRIOT’S VOICE .................17 3 SUBVERTING ORALITY: FINDING THE WOMAN’S VOICE.............................46 4 EXPRESSING LOSS: THE CHILD’S VOICE ...........................................................77 5 EXPOSING THE TRUTH: INTERPRETING PLURAL VOICES ..........................115 6 CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................170 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................175 1 1. INTRODUCTION Before the colonization of sub-Saharan Africa by Europeans, rich traditions of oral literature and history abounded on the continent. These traditions, which represent the heritage of today’s African authors, have intrigued outsiders almost from their first contact with them. Western scholars have studied and recorded African epics, poetry, myths, legends, folktales, proverbs, even riddles and jokes. Nevertheless, this oral literature has not always been understood or properly respected. As Isidore Okpewho notes, “The high period of ethnological research in Africa coincided with the period of European colonial activity, and some of the great ethnologists of that generation were colonial administrators: Roscoe in Uganda, Rattray in the Gold Coast (Ghana), Talbot in Nigeria” (8). Ethnographers affiliated with the colonial system saw Africans as inferior and sought to bring culture (in the sense of European civilization) to a “primitive” race of people. African oral literature suffered at the hands of these early scholars: “Apart from reducing the texts to bare summaries which contained mainly what were considered the essential points, the scholars also took the liberty to edit the texts so as to get rid of material they considered ‘unclean’ by European standards” (Okpewho 9). This summarizing and cleansing of texts led to the loss of their uniqueness as the voices of the oral performers were muted. When Africans began to write in European languages, they had a lot to prove. They needed to present an African perspective on the history of their continent. They needed to show through their writing that African literature was not inferior to Western literature. In addition, 2 they needed to set the record straight about African oral literature by portraying it in all its particularity. Because of a troubled recent past of colonialism, slavery, and racism, it is all the more urgent that African perspectives be understood and African voices be heard. Historical fiction written in French provides an entertaining and informative way to bring those perspectives and voices to the attention of an international audience. While creating fictional narratives African authors often have something to say about history – African history – from an African point of view and they have chosen to highlight the African character of their works by incorporating themes and structures into the narrative that point back to the orality of traditional African societies. In this way the fictional narrative, infused with orality, approaches history from uniquely African perspectives, finding a way to express orality through literacy and truth through fiction. History Before proceeding with an analysis of individual Francophone novels that demonstrate this expression of orality through literacy and of truth through fiction, let us take a look at some critical works which address the key theoretical concepts of this study, beginning with history. Roland Barthes’ essay “Le discours de l’histoire” sheds some light on the term “history”. While it is commonly held that one can place more confidence in the accuracy of the historical material presented in a history book than in a work of fiction, Barthes proposes that, in fact, there is little to differentiate between the two types of narrative. He opens his essay with this question: La narration des événements passés, soumise communément, dans notre culture, depuis les Grecs, à la sanction de la « science » historique, placée sous la caution impérieuse du « réel », justifiée par des principes d’exposition « rationnelle », 3 cette narration diffère-t-elle vraiment, par quelque trait spécifique, par une pertinence indubitable, de la narration imaginaire, telle qu’on peut la trouver dans l’épopée, le roman, le drame ? (417) Barthes goes on to demonstrate that historians, much like novelists, reveal themselves (and their biases) by way of various types of markers found throughout the texts. Embedded within the historians’ discourse, Barthes identifies what he calls “le shifter d’écoute”; that is, any mention of sources, witnesses, or gathering of information from other places; and “le shifter d’organisation”, how the historian organizes the discourse in time, moving forward evenly and chronologically or not, covering periods of the same amount of time
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