La langue francophone : d’une passion vindicative sur l’autorité coloniale du discours chez J.-L. Raharimanana

Abstract

For the francophone writer, to write in French brings a twofold passion into focus. On the one hand, it is an aid to self-representation, but on the other, it represents the return of violence of a vindictive nature, signifying the rejection of assimilation to discourse under colonialism’s authority (Mignolo). In the wake of approaches to the decolonisation of creation and language, the francophone oeuvre maintains one of two possibilities. Either it is a counter-narration, which revises the official historical archives and imposes an uncompromising restitution of memory, all the while frequently responding to the violence of domination, effectively a symbolic violence, borne by language, or it maintains an attempt to build up a different culture amidst the ruins of erasure subsequent to the imperial hegemony. If the more recent movement was in reality the birth certificate of the decolonisation of francophone literature, wrapped up in a desire for nationalistic edification, the first movement emanated from a keen awareness of the role of language in the shaping of the imagination and the creation of symbolic imperial authority.It is very likely in Jean-Luc Raharimanana’s work that that we see the crystallization of both a conscientiousness in the restoration of historical archives (Madagascar 1947 and 2011) and a recourse to language as the symbolic site where an externally subjected violence gets transposed upon the range of dysfunctional language usage (Za 2008). This study hopes to explore as much of the work of this Madagascan author as possible from the perspective of a vengeance that seeks to be a return to violence (Fanon), whether such violence is real (political torture), historical (French colonisation) or even symbolic (the authority of a system of language).