Writing the Postcolonial Animal: Patrice Nganang's Temps de Chien

Abstract

Patrice Nganang introduces an animal character in his novel Temps de chien and the dog is the autodiegetic narrator who begins the story: “Je suis un chien,” (“I am a dog”) he says at the outset. Having a dog speak in a kind of canine autobiography is not new—Miguel de Cervantes (Novela del coloquio de los perros, 1613) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (Die neusten Schicksale des Hundes Berganza, 1814) did it before—but Patrice Nganang couples it with geographical transplantation: the story takes place in Yaoundé, Cameroon, which is a way of decentering the point of view onto another continent. Moreover, endowing animals with the power of speech has been fairly common since Aesop and in every oral tradition, especially in tales, but this practice is part of a strategy typical of postcolonial literature, which aims at reclaiming an oral tradition that had been muzzled by colonization for a long time, as well as at appropriating Western literary genres. As postcolonial studies tend to join environmental approaches and “animal studies,” this article aims at showing to what extent animal autobiography partakes of a philosophical and political projects which aspires to un-think Eurocentrism and to deconstruct logocentrism in the context of a literature which renews the pastoral and the fable.