Afrique: Paroles d'écrivains by Éloïse Brezault

Abstract

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW Then, however, the speaker turns on himself: "What ifall thispassion is out of proportion to its subject? ... / thatshe should infect your day to the very marrow, / to hate the common lightand its simple joys / .. .old man in the dimming world." Derek Walcott's carefully nuanced, balanced, and multifaceted under standing of theworld gives these poems their maturity of vision; it's his supreme craft that gives them their beauty. FredDings UniversityofSouthCarolina Miscellaneous ?lo?se Brezault. Afrique: Paroles d'?crivains. Montr?al. M?moire d'Encrier. 2010. 410 pages. Can$29.95. ISBN 978-2-923713-20-5 From 2000 to 2005, ?lo?se Brezault interviewed eighteen African writ ers. While they come from several regions ofAfrica, all but three now reside in France. Ahmadou Kourou ma, interviewed before his death in 2003, is the best-known writer of the group, but the others are among the most widely discussed franco phone African authors. Perhaps the major omission isKoffi Kwahul?, a prizewinning novelist and dramatist from C?te d'Ivoire. Each interview isprefaced by a briefbiographical comment and fol lowed by a bibliography. Brezault's questions show close reading of the texts. The best interviewees speak with passion about theirwork and theaesthetic impulses thatgovern it. Kossi Efoui discusses the difference inhis work between writing novels and plays and how theuse of stage instructions can be incorporated into fiction.Nimrod speaks of how his novels show that he is a poet. Some authors?L?onora Miano and Sami Tchack, in particular?use the interview to explain theirworks at length. Among the recurringquestions is the relationship between a native language and writing in French. Gaston-Paul Effa says thatwriting in French allows him to "leave my country to reinvent it in language." Boris Boubacar Diop, who lives in Senegal, points out that95 percent of the Senegalese population does not read French; he has recentlybegun towrite in Wolof. Should the writer be committed politically (engag?)? Kangni Alem says thewriter should rather have the more noble duty to "bearwitness to his time." For Emmanuel Don gala, Abdourahman Waberi, Kossi Efoui, and Ken Bugul, although the writer cannot ignore politics, he or she speaks from a personal perspec tive, not as a representative of the "people." Often those interviewed find a new vitality inAfrican litera ture, as the writer creates the voice of an individual voice, not thatof the community. Since many of the authors interviewed were part of the 1998 project "Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de m?moire" (writing as a duty to remember), Brezault asks, "How can onewrite about thegenocide?" Diop admits that he misunderstood the genocide until he visited Rwanda, and thathis Le Cavalier et son ombre gives a wrong impression of the Hutu as also victims. Rwandans who escaped thegenocide were not always willing to let others write about their experience, but V?ro nique Tadjo found that she could write about Rwanda because life was coming back into the country. Several authors speak of using the perspective of a child, as does Tierno Mon?nembo in L'Aine des orphelins, one of thebest books to come out of theproject. The question "What is your reaction to the movement 'litt?ra ture-monde' (which wants to incor porate African writing into a larger global perspective)?" provokes vari ous replies (see WLT, March 2009, 54-56). For Alem, literature needs an anchor. Diop is particularly against "la litt?rature n?gro-parisi enne." Alain Mabanckou, however, writes in favor of connections across countries and continents: "Introduc ing theworld in your work avoids navel-gazing." The interplay of varied views makes this collection a valuable addition to criticism of contempo rary African literature. Adele King Paris Durs Gr?nbein. The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays. Michael Eskin, ed. John Crutchfield,Michael Hofmann, and Andrew Shields, tr. New York. Far rar, Straus & Giroux. 2010. xx + 323 pages. $35. isbn978-0-374-26062-0 The German poet Durs Gr?nbein knows what history is.These essays show thathe knows that thehistori cal discipline is akin to archaeology, to a geologist's core sample, even to the reconstruction of the scene of a crime.History is the past, and an uncomfortable one at...