Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi by Nasrin Qader

Abstract

designed to authenticate the facts in the story through references to other works on slavery and the slave trade, and to serve as a polemic against human rights abuses due to the horrors of slavery in general. The presentation by Olds is indispensable for an understanding of the text. In addition to offering important historical, social, literary, and political facts that help to situate this work and offer much food for thought for scholars interested in colonial writing and postcolonial reexaminations of those writings, Olds reminds the reader that this work was published just two years after Duras’s Ourika, providing an opportunity for comparative study. A twenty-first-century reader might feel that Paban’s sentimental tendencies overwhelm the perhaps more interesting details of what was known, at least by the author, of the culture of Benin at the time. There are many interesting questions left unanswered, questions pertaining to the accuracy of those details, and pertaining to the sources for the text, which scholars will be able to investigate thanks to this re-edition. Rider University (NJ) Mary Poteau-Tralie QADER, NASRIN. Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8232-3048-8. Pp. xi+ 238. $60.00. Nasrin Qader argues in this cerebral work that catastrophe is always an effect of language and thought and so is a creation of language itself rather than a simple description of events. Qader’s philosophical style can be dense, if the content of her work is always intelligent and learned. Her claim to sometimes need to argue furiously is perhaps evidenced in the polemical nature of her argument, during which she thoroughly addresses most major theorists of African literature, often disagreeing with them. Qader states in her introduction that African literature has been pushed to the margins of literary studies because of a tendency to treat texts from Africa as documents of a culture, representative of a tradition of “orality” that has not been of central concern to more theoretical approaches to literature in the West. Qader contests this notion, claiming that the relationship between African literary writing and orality is not one of uncomplicated reproduction, but rather one of a complex repetition; that is, retelling in slightly different ways over and over again. Qader’s work incorporates a more traditional focus in African literary criticism, that of storytelling, but from a rather unique perspective, and one that borrows from non-African traditions. For this, the author makes no apology, claiming that African culture has always borrowed from other cultures and that literature, as a product of language, should be approached as somewhat (if not entirely) autonomous of tradition and history. She refutes the idea of African literary works as only cultural texts, and seems to argue for the importance of seeing these as unique works of art in and of themselves. However, this argument about uniqueness is not a complete refusal to recognize the cultural context from which these works emanate. Rather, Qader seems to want to free readers of African literature from the anthropological strait-jacket that they might feel is imposed upon them by some suggested approaches, such as that of Christopher Miller, with whose ideas regarding the ethical importance of the study of the ethnic backgrounds of writers and texts she engages, among others. To reinforce her arguments, Qader refers to notions of the récit, which is 582 FRENCH REVIEW 84.3 associated especially with Maurice Blanchot. For Qader, récit is linked to the idea of catastrophe since both notions involve a distancing between the subject (whose experience is not to be discounted) and the story which (s)he is telling, due to the fact that both involve using language a means of both addressing and turning away from a particular event or set of events. In this way, Qader uses the work of Boubacar Boris Diop, Tahar ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi to present literature as a space that recounts catastrophic events yet allows for the inevitable silence and uncertainty involved in telling such traumatic tales. The fascinating conclusion of this text parallels the “feminine” as a category of excess with that of the slippery...