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REVUE INTER-TEXTUAL

Revue semestrielle en ligne des Lettres et Sciences Humaines du Département d’Anglais adossée au Groupe de recherches en Littérature et Linguistique anglaise (GRELLA)

Université Alassane Ouattara

République de Côte d’Ivoire

Directeur de Publication: M. Pierre KRAMOKO, Maitre de Conférences

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Lien de la Revue: http://inter-textual.univ-ao.edu.ci

ADMINISTRATION DE LA REVUE

DIRECTEUR DE PUBLICATION

M. Pierre KRAMOKO, Maître de Conférences

COMITÉ DE RÉDACTION

- Professeur Guézé Habraham Aimé DAHIGO, Professeur Titulaire

- Dr Vamara KONÉ, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Kouamé ADOU, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Kouamé SAYNI, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Koffi Eugène N’GUESSAN, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Gossouhon SÉKONGO, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Philippe Zorobi TOH, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Jérome Koffi KRA, Maître de Conférences

COMITÉ SCIENTIFIQUE

Prof. Azoumana Ouattara, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Coulibaly Daouda, PhD,Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Djako Arsène, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Francis Akindès, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Lawrence P. Jackson, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Prof. Léa N’Goran-Poamé, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Mamadou Kandji, Université Ckeick Anta Diop, Sénégal

Prof. Margaret Wright-Cleveland, Florida State University, USA

Prof. Kenneth Cohen, St Mary’s College of Maryland, USA

Prof. Nubukpo Komlan Messan, Université de Lomé, Togo

Prof. Séry Bailly, Université Félix Houphouët Boigny, Abidjan

Prof. Zigui Koléa Paulin, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

TABLE OF CONTENTS/ TABLE DES MATIÈRES

1. Kouadio Germain N’GUESSAN, GENDER HIERARCHY AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY: THE IMPOSED MASK.…………1 - 19

2. Goh Théodore TRA BI, HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NARRATIVE THEORIES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.…………………………………………20 - 37

3. Ezoulé Miézan Isaac KANGAH, BRITISH POLITICAL SCENE IN JONATHAN COE’S THE CLOSED CIRCLE.……………………………38 - 56

4. Gabrielle KEITA, UNCOMPLETED ASPECT MARKING FROM STANDARD ENGLISH TO NIGERIAN PIDGIN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY.…………………………………………………………………………57 - 68

5. Constant Ané KONÉ, REMEMBERING SLAVERY MEMORY IN GAYL JONES’ CORREGIDORA.…………………………………………………….69 - 88

6. Germain ASSAMOI, MODALITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE, BETWEEN RADICAL AND EPISTEMIC.………………………………89 - 105

7. Koffi Eugène N’GUESSAN, BRIDGING THE VALLEY OF NIHILISM IN AUGUST WILSON’S FENCES.…………………………………………106 - 121

8. Souleymane TUO, SLAVE REBELLION IN ANDRE PHILIPPUS BRINK’S AN INSTANT IN THE WIND.……………………………………………122 - 139

9. Dolourou SORO, A MARXIST READING OF ERNEST GAINES’ A LESSON BEFORE DYING.……………………………………………………………140 - 156

10. Tié Emmanuel TOH BI, POÉTIQUE TRAGIQUE ET TRAGÉDIE, POUR L’ESQUISSE D’UNE POÉTIQUE DU TRAGIQUE DANS LA POÉSIE NÉGRO-AFRICAINE; UNE ILLUSTRATION DU MICROCOSME IVOIRIEN DANS LA MÈRE ROUGE DE CEDRIC MARSHALL KISSY.…………157 - 178

11. Paul KOUABENAN, THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF ART: A STUDY OF CHINUA ACHEBE’S NO LONGER AT EASE, A MAN OF THE PEOPLE AND ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH.………………………………………178 - 192

12. Renais Ulrich KACOU, COLONIALISM AND RACISM IN TSITSI DANGAREMBGA’S THE BOOK OF NOT.………………………………193 - 203

13. Adiele Kilanko ZANNOU, THE AMERICAN DREAM IN LANGSTON HUGHES’ SELECTED POEMS.…………………………………………204 - 226

14. Jean Jacques Gnahoua SABLÉ, LA LITTERATURE COMME UN EXAMEN DE MEMOIRE, D’OUBLI ET DE RECONCILIATION.……………….227 - 235

15. Aliou Badara KANDJI, VIOLENCE, INCEST AND DELAYED DECODING IN THE SCOTTISH BALLAD, “EDWARD, EDWARD” (CHILD 13)...236 - 244

16. Pierre KRAMOKO, THE HOMELESS HOUSEHOLD: A REFLECTION ON THE FAMILY IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA AND SONG OF SOLOMON.…………………………………………………………………245 - 259

17. Désiré Yssa KOFFI, THE VOICE IN THE PERIPHERY: BLACK CULTURE IN TONI MORRISON’S TAR BABY.………………………260 - 272

18. Minata KONÉ, THE NGURARIO OR MARRIAGE IN FICTION AND REAL LIFE.……………………………………………………………….273 - 285

19. Daouda COULIBALY, THE DRAMATIZATION OF THE FEMALE BODY: DISCOURSES OF RESISTANCE AND POWER IN OF EVE ENSLER’S THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES.……………………………………………286 - 298

COLONIALISM AND RACISM IN TSITSI DANGAREMBGA’S THE BOOK OF NOT

Resnais Ulrich KACOU, Lorougnon Gbede University

Abstract: Colonialism does not only control the material resources of a country, but it also subjugates people by distorting, disfiguring and destroying the traditional African life. As if it was not enough, racial doctrines became the ideological cornerstone for colonial theories and policies. Racial oppression dehumanizes people, violates and attacks social groups: Blacks and Whites. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel The Book of Not is very close to her people and consequently their social realities: what they faced during British imperialism. As a result, this paper aims to show Dangarembga as a social critic who denounces the effects of colonialism and racism in Zimbabwe through the image of Tambu, the main character of The Book of Not.

Keywords: Colonialism, racism, oppression, domination, Zimbabwe, Africa, Black and White, postcolonial, colonial system.

Résumé : La colonisation ne contrôle pas seulement les ressources matérielles d’un pays, mais aussi elle assujettie le peuple en dénaturant, défigurant et anéantissant la vie traditionnelle africaine. Comme si cela ne suffisait pas, les doctrines raciales devinrent la pierre angulaire idéologique pour les théories et politiques coloniales. L’oppression raciale déshumanise le peuple, viole et attaque les groupes sociaux. C’est dans cette perspective que le roman de Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not, décrit une société Zimbabwéenne où les personnages sont opprimés à travers une discrimination raciale par le système colonial britannique. Cet article vise à montrer Tsitsi Dangarembga en tant que critique qui dénonce les effets du colonialisme et du racisme au Zimbabwe à travers Tambu, le protagoniste de The Book of Not.

Mots-clés : Colonialisme, racisme, oppression, domination, Zimbabwe, Africa, Noir et Blanc, postcolonial, système colonial.

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Introduction

The colonization of Africa by Western powers (France, Britain, Belgium, Portugal, etc.) brought the African continent into the world of perpetual suffering and exploitation as the colonial system has disrupted African continent beliefs, habits and customs. The colonial rule brought to Africa the European notion that black people are the inferior being on the earth which might be civilized through the crusade of colonialism. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines colonialism as “the belief in and support for the system of one country controlling another.”1 Whereas racism is “the belief that people’s qualities are influenced by their race and that the members of other races are not as good as the members of your own, or the resulting unfair treatment of members of other races. 2 Colonialism denotes a relationship of domination and, like other forms of oppression, is a structural system of hierarchically ordered and ranked relationships between at least two racially distinct social groups: Blacks and Whites. The supporters of colonialism advanced the following argument that African culture is inferior to European culture and the African people are of a different racial heritage from Europeans. For Michael T. Martin and Howard Cohen, racism determined “cultural superiority and European civilization was superior to blacks (Africans) cultures.” (Martin and Howard 1980: 35) European assumed the moral responsibility to “civilize” the bush peoples. As a result, racism became the ideological cornerstone for colonial policies and theories. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s second novel The Book of Not3 speaks eloquently of the notion of colonialism, racism and the attempts of colonial and postcolonial African writers to call them into question. Not only does much contemporary African literature offer resistance to colonialism and racism evoked by The Book of Not, but it also raises doubts about typical understanding of “colonizer vs. colonized” and “Western vs. African.” The Book of Not is concerned with the cumulative damage of colonialism and racism in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Because of the historically complex nature of these subjects (colonialism and racism), our task in this paper will mainly consist in examining separately each of these subjects in order to identify the necessary relationships between them in the matrix of imperialist domination on Africans in Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans being subordinated to Whites domination because of colonialism, their abused and oppressed conditions, is what Dangarembga castigates and battles against in The Book of Not. She displays certain

1 Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, (Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 233. 2 Ibid, pp. 1023-1024. 3 Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not, (Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarcke Publishing Ltd, 2006).

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inconsistencies reflecting colonialism and its double standard attitudes such as domination and freedom for Whites on the one hand, and the repression, oppression and enslavement for Blacks on the other. Ideology as a principle lead us to accept the world as it is. It constrains us to be submitted to a given order. And the order here seems to be the one dictated by the white masters in Zimbabwe. Considering the above mentioned criteria, the purpose of this article is to show the racial domination and oppression of Tambu the protagonist, implicitly the Zimbabwean by white colonialists. The novel, The Book of Not reflects issues of colonialism, racism, and denial during the violent transformation from white-minority rule in Rhodesia in the 1970s to an independent Zimbabwe in the 1980s. As a theoretical basis for the interpretation, we intend to utilize the postcolonial criticism and sociocriticism. In general “postcolonial theory’s perspective is to reclaim one’s own past by eroding the colonialist ideology by which that past had been devalued.”(Barry 2002: 193) Whereas sociocriticism is a methodological model which has been developed in criticism studies and which facilitates an in-depth analysis of “the social status of the text which interests the society that is to say, what the text says about the society.” (Zima 1995:11) The analysis of these concerns will be the focus of the first part of the present paper. The second and last part will deal with Dangarembga’s denunciation of racial attitudes of colonialists in Zimbabwe.

I. THE TRAUMA OF COLONIALISM: FANON’S THEORY

Frantz Fanon has long been a major figure for postcolonial theorists concerned with issues of race, colonialism, and identity. In his early but now much-discussed essay Black Skin, White Mask (1952), he drew on Freud’s understanding of trauma in his exploration of the “unconscious mechanisms of racism and colonialism.” (Kennedy 2008:90) He viewed colonialism as a widespread but specific historical condition that produces a deceptive psychology that compels the black subject to internalize as his own a European image of the Negro. As Fanon concludes: “I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognize that I am a Negro… I try then to find value for what is bad.” (Fanon1952: 197) When we closely analyse this comment, we get aware of the fact that for Fanon black people internalize the dominant culture’s representation of them as other, when otherness becomes an “inner compulsion.”(Kennedy 2008: 91) They can be said to not only oppressed but also traumatized by the colonial experience.

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Therefore, by colonial time, one recalls the period when for economic reasons, the European powers came in Africa to sell their products, to exploit some natural and mineral resources in order to develop their new industries. At their arrival, the Europeans ignored the existence of social structures (customs, laws, values, traditions and cultures). Africa was a continent which should be transformed. In the meantime, they imposed their civilization and vision (social, politic, economic, religious and cultural) to the natives. So, they established a new system and social order. The Book of Not is part of recent novel written by a woman coming from Zimbabwe, that is concerned with, among other things, colonialism, racism and its after-effects. Indeed, explaining why it took so long to write this novel, Dangarembga says “I find it difficult to write about race… having gone through so much as a result of it. I use the past tense, but racist supremacist practices still abound in Zimbabwe.” (Dangarembga 2004: 209- 212) Clearly, with the narrator Tambu, she used her novel The Book of Not to show all the atrocities the British imperialism done to her people. The issue of colonialism and racism raised many debates and debaters agree that it is the Africans who suffer too much at all levels. Tsitsi Dangarembga, straightaway writes: “I was being transformed into a young woman with a future. What I was most interested in was myself and what I would become.” (Dangarembga 2004: 3-20) By ascribing true and superior traits to both colonialism and racism, one can say that it has oppressed and dehumanized native people in a distinctly different way than we could think. The colonialism, by definition is racism and imperialism. But imperialism is just one expression of how a people define themselves in relation to others and the world. What is needed is a broader, more expansive perspective which encompasses the ideology of a people who affirm their superiority over others who are racially and culturally different from themselves. Michael T. Martin and Howard Cohen comment:

In all colonial relationships, a set of “normative” behavior patterns operate which are determined by structural dominance that regulate and define, to a large extent, the interactions between the two people in contact. These rules of interaction are defined for both groups by the colonialist. They constitute a system of authority which forms the basis of the legitimacy of the colonial relationship. (Martin and Howard 1980: 40)

Casually, in the suffocating atmosphere of the Young Ladies College of the Sacred Heart, Tambu encounters a system that disparages her village background. For instance, in explaining the solidarity of Shona people during the liberation war, she argues as follow:

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Sekuru took up a position halfway between my mother and her neighbours from the village, one knee down in the blood Mai had licked. Bo-bo! Bobo! Bobo! He began the ceremonial clap. Then everyone joined in bo-bo-bo-bo. (Dangarembga 2006: 16)

Tsitsi Dangarembga innovatively uses “irony, humor and farce to dramatize the absurdities of racism in a colonial society and the impediments to witnessing it, thereby bringing into visibility what is unspeakable in (post) colonial Zimbabwe.” (Kennedy 2008: 87) The Book of Not, opens with a scene in which Tambu the protagonist is positioned as a reluctant witness of British colonialism. In effect, when her mother, Mai, takes her and her younger sisters to a morari, a political, gathering that aims to raise support for the freedom fighters and still loyalty in the villagers. Before the morari, the narrator anxiously examines the homestead objects, “that break and cannot be fixed because the force of wholeness has abdicated.” (Dangarembga 2006:8-9) The impossibility of repair figuratively express what lies ahead for her and the Zimbabwean nation as the war legitimates violence and atrocities becomes common. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin have asserted that postcolonial literary criticism have “emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre.” (Ashcroft, Griffits and Tiffin 2002: 2) It is this which makes them distinctively postcolonial criticism. Then, on the way to the morari meeting, Tambu’s mother warns them: “whatever you see… do not say anything. Just sing…And answer as everyone else does. Otherwise, be silent.” (Dangarembga 2006: 11) As we can see, the colonial era in Zimbabwe was fearsome, alarming and threatening. These facts were observed at the rally, when Tambu’s uncle Babamukuru was viciously beaten for being a “sell-out… with all of us watching and doing nothing … Mai breathing in catches of satisfaction.” (Dangarembga 2006: 14) The cases abound in Dangarembga’s novel whereby, the negative effects of colonialism are felt on the main character (Tambu) in particular and the Africans in general. Indeed, as a student at a British school, she realizes that as “proof of my uncles’s dubious spirit … I was to watch the decimation of my uncle in order to instill loyalty in me.” (Dangarembga 2006: 6)

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The policy of the colonialists is to create disunion, fear, atrocity, manipulation and pain among the natives. When Tambu was shamed by the failure of the villagers to speak out, she follows her mother’s warning and remains silent. In an attempt to remain unscarred, Tambu says: “I tried not to look, so I would not make the mistake of saying I had seen anything when I return to school. I tried not to hear so I would never repeat the words of war anywhere.” (Dangarembga 2006: 12) To put Fanon’s analysis into the language of trauma and postcolonial theories, it could be said that the “deceptive psychological structure of colonialism make it difficult for the colonized to witness their own oppression.” (Fanon cited in Kennedy 2008: 91) But if we stick to the principle that in sociocriticism, the social is “reproduced in the text.” (Zima 1995: 10-25) Thus, the social reality lived by Tambu and her family and the Zimbabweans (Africans) is from another nature of colonialism which is war. This fact of using war to oppress Africans is not an aléa, it seems all planned by the colonizers to shock and traumatize masses. Right at the beginning of the novel, the beating of Tambu’s uncle is only stopped by another violent event. In effect, her younger sister Netsai, who has fallen in love with a comrade and joined the guerrilla war, steps on a landmine. Of the traumatic time of the explosion Tambu notes:

Up, up, up, the leg spun. A piece of person, up there in the sky…In the darkness Netsai’s leg arced up. Something was required for me!...Mai pushed her tongue into shiny patches where blood was mixed with earth… As it could have changed Netsai’s position in such a way as to accelerate the bleeding. (Dangarembga, 2006:3-6)

As a whole, it can be perceived as the older sister, she feels she should do something. Unfortunately she is too terrorized by these unexpected events. Indisputably, she suffers from deep physical and mental frustration, oppression, pain, injustice and plot that she thinks her reaction seems to be a failure to colonial system with its multiple tentacles. Undoubtedly, the new colonial institutions will contribute to the divisions of Africans among themselves. Things turn upside down and “things fall apart.” That is how Chinua Achebe described the consequence of the advent of the white man in Africa. Indeed, the African milieu was no longer the traditional African society. It was now the confrontation of two civilizations sand cultures. The traditional order was challenged by the new culture. Consequently, the dislocation and split of African communities (new religion, cult of money, new agricultural products, education, urbanization, etc.), in one word, the modernism.

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As Chinua Achebe points out, an appeal addressed to Africans through Ezeulu in Arrow of God: “I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there. (…) The new religion was like leper. Allow him a handshake and he wants an embrace.” (Achebe 1974: 42-55) Here, Achebe confronts the differences of two cultures. For him, African system of beliefs, social, political, religious, values and dignity are knowing mutations to the profit of the colonial system. That is why Achebe expressed his worries about the advent of western civilizations in African societies which will break up their community’s life: it is the “malaise” in African society. However, amongst these new malaises which are corroding African society mainly Tambu’s environment is racism. Racial discrimination or prejudice is another reality in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s fiction, The Book of Not.

II. ISSUES OF RACISM: A VISION OF SOCIAL STRUGGLE

In 1903 about racism, William E. B. Du Bois foresaw that the fundamental problem of the twentieth century would be “(…) the problem of the colour line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and in the islands of the sea.” (Du Bois1961:23) Accordingly, African people and precisely Zimbabweans could not escape from this prophecy of Du Bois. Thus, the vast majority of African people or people of colour remain in colonial and racism situation. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not is not informed by a cosmopolitan awareness of discourses of race, memory and colonialism as well as life experiences of being a black African in colonial Rhodesia and postcolonial Zimbabwe. The racial hierarchy or socio-racial structure determines the distribution of power, behavioural patterns and rewards accorded to each stratum in the colonial system. The Book of Not, juxtaposes scenes of racism in everyday colonial life of black and white students. This scene is well exemplified in the school dining hall where Tambu the protagonist and Ntombi share a table with their white classmates. Boungainvillea, a white girl speaking to her friend Tracey looks at the African girls ironically:

They’ve both got such fine hands… “You know what, Trace!” … “It’s not just those two! Have you noticed? It’s all of them!” … “Let’s have a look!” She raised an eyebrow with a practiced investigatory motion as she inclined her head forward. Ntombizethu stretched her hand out. “See!” … “Just look at the shape of that nail, and that crescent, it’s a perfect half-moon: Isn’t it wonderful?” (Dangarembga 2006: 37-38)

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Through this scene, Bougainvillea, the white cheeky girl dehumanizes her black African classmates (Tambu and Ntombi) by treating them as samples to be inspected and classified. This fact leads us to share the view of Frantz Fanon, illustrating that the black man (African) in the spirit of Europeans is a “slave” of his “appearance.” (Fanon 1967:116) In a similar vein, discussing problems of racism forced by black African students, Tambu observes that:

This happens… Ntombi’s cheeks sag until you think the will melt right off her bones like chocolate left out in the sun. I don’t look at her because I don’t want to see her melting, but Tracey looks and flashes once more. (Dangarembga 2006:45)

According to Barthélémy Kotchi, no work can be “antagonistic the socio-historical or institutional context from which it originates.” (Kotchi 1989: 66) So for him the relation which exists between the literary text and society is necessary relation. We concur with him throughout our reading of Dangarembga’s novel. Racial discrimination is rampant in Zimbabwe. Besides, there is for instance, a difference in the way in which the waitresses serve the African (black) and European (white) students. As the narrator mentions: “They move fluidly, but when they set a jug or a plate before Ntombi or me, they smack it down with a jut of the chin and spills, as though slapping a hard, crushing thing down on obnoxious crawling objects.” (Dangarembga 2006: 45-46)

Indeed, here too, the six African students are forced to share a room meant for four students, with a single bathroom between them. This passage enlightens us that Tambu and her African schoolmates face with another phenomenon; racial prejudice. It can be simply referred to as an unfair dislike that a given race has for another. In our concern, it is the barrier put between the Blacks ( Africans) and the British colonizers living on the natives land, and the African society in quest for welfare. The absurdity of racial prejudice and discrimination of relations between African (black) and white students produced through a transaction of a Nesquik. Clearly, Nesquik is a luxury product imported from South Africa and it is only the white girls can afford. Mortified that Ntombi should beg, Bougainvillea the white girl, Tambu is on a knife-edge, wondering whether she will touch Bougainvillea’s Nesquik, because she inspects black girls’ hands. ( Dangarembga 2006 : 40-46) On top of everything, we are of the view of Fanon who “proposed nothing short of the liberation man of color from himself,” ( Fanon 1952: 10)

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which is precisely the problem Tambu faces: how to recover from the damage of colonial education and be liberated from the systemic racism she has internalized. Furthermore, Tambu is forced out of a toilet which is only for the white students. Paradoxically, the Sacred Heart College which is supposed to be the temple of education is implicitly the symbol of black African girls suffering among which racial segregation. The six African students are forced to share a room meant for four, with a single bathroom between them. There is no foolproof model “uncomfortable, uncharacteristic giggle.” (Dangarembga 2006: 44-46)

As such, we can advance the thesis that there is a reciprocal relationship between colonialism and racism, and the structure of race relations. In fact, racial oppression dehumanizes people in a distinctly different way does class oppression. It violates and attacks social groups on the basis of equating of physical attributes with congenital inferiority. Commenting on the meaning and function of racism in colonial system, Albert Memmi put:

Racism appears, then, not as a consubstantial part of colonialism. It is the highest expression of the colonial system and one of the colonialist. Not only does it establish a fundamental discrimination between the colonizer and the colonized, a sine qua non of political life, but it also lays the foundation for the immutability of this life. (Memmi 1965: 74)

Memmi queries how the colonized could avoid reacting positively or negatively to racism through his portrait when constantly confronted with this image of himself, set forth and imposed in all institutions and every human contact. The colonized ended up recognizing such an image or portrait as one would a detested nickname, which has become familiar and loathsome. In this statement, racial domination as a colonial system which reduce black people (Africans) into a thing/property/slave is explicitly drawn to its logical conclusion. When in 1964 Cheikh Anta Diop, a man of an encyclopaedic erudition wrote his famous book entitled Nations nègres et culture,4 he was attacked from all sides, ridiculed and dishonoured because his vision of African culture and civilization dared to challenge the dogsmatic diagram drew up by philosophers such as Hegel5 and Montesquieu6 that makes Africans a “second zone” beings who could never contribute to the development of humanity’s heritage.

4 Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations, nègres et culture, Ed, Présence Africaine, 1964. 5 Friedrich Hegel, Leçons sur la philosophie de l’histoire, trad. J. Gibelin, Vrin, 1946 p. 84. 6 Charles Louis de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Tome 1, Paris : Edition Fammarion, 1748), p. 212.

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Nevertheless, if The Book of Not through its very act of dramatizing the daily conditions in which racism and colonialism thrives, it simultaneously illuminates the conditions that make acts of racism and colonialism unspeakable. In spite of the scars left by colonialism and racism, Dangarembga and the Zimbabweans were uplifted by a vision of hope and social struggle through winning independence.

CONCLUSION

As a concluding note to this dissertation, it would seem that Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not, as its title suggests is a novel of “unbecoming” of the loss of identity, feeling and attachments. It ends by questioning what the future holds for “new Zimbabweans”: it envisions the future as the site where new cultural and national identities would be forged far from colonialism and racism. Literature is only the aesthetic use of language to convey meanings. As such, it also appears as “social discourse,” (Fowler 1981: 12-23) aiming at making the society perceive the evils that undermine its harmony development. Through Dangarembga’s novel, it is the recurrent problems of colonial domination, oppression and racial discrimination which are revealed to us as interpreter-reader, whose job is to decode the message taking into account the sum total of our personal experiences. It suffices to thinks of the protagonist Tambu. The Book of Not as platform suggests that citizens of the postcolonial African nations must galvanize themselves to support the new social and political order. In place of distortions about Africa, colonialism and racism have brought about prejudice against black people and destructive acts by white people. Dangarembga advocates self and cultural identity to foster a sense of pride, solidarity, and community to promote African values. Despite the aggression that the continent undergone and all evils we suffered from, Africa is condemned to go forward.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dangarembga, Tsitsi. The Book of Not. (Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarcke Publishing Ltd, 2006). Secondary Sources Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974), First Published in 1964. Anta Diop, Cheikh. Nations, nègres et culture, Ed, Présence Africaine, 1964. Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

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Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester University Press, 2002). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. (Routledge: London and New York, 2002). Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Interview with the Author.” Nervous Conditions (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2004). Dubois, William E. B. The Souls of Black Folk (Connecticut, Fawcett Premier Book, reprinted, 1961), p. 23. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, (1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann, New York: Grove P, 1967). Fowler, Roger. Literature As a Social Discourse, The Practice of Linguistic Criticism.( Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1981). Hegel, Friedrich. Leçons sur la philosophie de l’histoire, trad. J. Gibelin, Vrin, 1946. Kennedy, Rosanne. “Mortgaged Futures: Trauma Subjectivity, and legacies of colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not” Project Muse (Volume 40, Number 1 and 2, Spring and Summer, University of North Texas: 2008). Kotchi, Barthélémy. Méthodologie et Idéologie.( Abidjan, CEDA, 1986). Louis de Montesquieu, Charles. De l’esprit des lois (Tome 1, Paris : Edition Fammarion, 1748). Martin, Michael T. and Cohen Howard. “Late Capitalism” and Race and Neo-colonial Domination, Présence Africaine, 1980. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York, Orion, 1965). Thérèse Assié-Lumuba, Ndri. Les africaines dans la politique : femmes Baoulé de Côte d’Ivoire, (Paris : Collection “Point de vue », Editions l’Harmattan, 1996). Zima, Pierre. Manuel de sociocritique. ( Paris, Picard 1995).

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