Devoir De Research Articles

Editorial craft and francophone African literature: The case of Malick Fall

This article considers Senegalese novelist Malick Fall’s 1967 novel La Plaie [The Wound] in the light of material from the archives of Parisian publishers Editions du Seuil. It explores to what extent and with what effect traces of editorial mediation revealed in publishers’ archives can be written into the history of francophone African literature. Fall’s long-neglected text is one of the earliest francophone African novels of post-independence disillusionment. Described by an early critic as the first African “existentialist” novel, its fragmented narrative draws on seams of poetic symbolism, burlesque comedy, and philosophical reflection to portray a vagrant protagonist. The complex structure and unstable narrative voice mark a departure from realist modes of African novels in the 1950s. Moreover it troubles any reductive account of a linear transition from realism to modernism. Yet Fall’s work remains much less known than the celebrated stylistic innovation of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances (1968) or Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968). Readers’ reports at Le Seuil, a publisher with clear anti-colonial sympathies, show how editors sought to revise Fall’s manuscript according to normative ideas of language, genre, and literary craft, tentatively pointing to the text’s modernist leanings without fully articulating what such modernity might constitute or imply. While clearly not exclusive to African or postcolonial literature, such stylistic tempering (or tampering) arguably shaped the text’s meditations on trauma, freedom, and alienation. This evidence leads to a revised, multivalent understanding of Fall’s literary innovation.

In het nieuw – Handleiding

Witness, victims, Truth and reconciliation commission, trauma, testify, slaves, refugee, concentration and extermination camps, the rebellious of 1917, rape, post-colonial, perpetrators, pedagogy and transmission, i nunca mas !, never again, museum, monument, minorities, memory, memory work, justice, Righteous Among the Nations, grey zone, humanitarian action, human rights, genocide, exodus, exile, ethnic cleansing, displaced persons, discrimination, devoir de memoire, deportation, dark touri...

(Beyond) ‘Devoirs de mémoire’ in Nancy Huston's L'Empreinte de l'ange (1998): Music, Trauma and Childhood

Nancy Huston's L'Empreinte de l'ange (1998) is part of a large corpus of recently published novels in French dealing with the Second World War, and the Algerian War. The relationship between music and transgenerational trauma is explored in the context of depictions of childhood, and the child in the text, and it is suggested that L'Empreinte de l'ange opens up readings that go beyond the French ‘devoir de mémoire’ framework. More specifically, it is argued that the oscillations between words and silence, trauma (physical and emotional) and healing, movement and stasis, highlight the challenges of writing about personal and collective moments of suffering. Analysis of depictions of cycles of violence and trauma opens up a nuanced picture of diverse post-war reactions and commentaries that goes beyond the specifics of the Second World War and Algeria, and that takes into account recent work by Todorov, Augé and Stora on memory and commemoration. Music is shown to help make sense of traumatic memories; music highlights processes of remembering and forgetting. Sometimes, music just simply accompanies us through the often fraught journeys out of and after trauma.

Le (néo)colonialisme littéraire: quatre romans africains face à l’institution littéraire parisienne (1950-1970) par Vivan Steemers

Huysmans’s “Carnet vert” taken during his walks in le Jardin de Ligugé become incorporated into his literary texts and the ways in which the abbey garden is exploited “pour le faire évoluer pleinement vers l’expression d’un naturalisme spiritualiste” (148). In “Huysmans et les Christs décadents,” Seillan traces the abundance of “les Christs aux ordures”in Huysmans’s works to the author’s“angoisse de la profanation” and his preoccupation with“la thématique obsédante [...] des hosties souillées et jetées dans les latrines”(186). The final cluster of articles,“Catholiques,”assesses Huysmans’s expressions of spirituality in terms of those of his fellow contemporaries of the faith, namely Barbey,Villiers,Verlaine, and Claudel. Contrasting Huysmans’s conversion to Barbey’s, Georges-Métral explains that whereas Barbey returns to his Catholic faith after a long spell of atheism,“la conversion spirituelle de Huysmans relève de la procrastination ” (201).Viegnes also adopts a comparative approach in arguing that while Verlaine’s Sagesse, inspired by nature and “une vision bucolique” became rhetorically transfigured into a spiritual tableau (250), Huysmans’s religious sentiment feeds on “une ambiance saturée de l’art et de littérature sacrés”(253). This anthology provides a thought-provoking read for Huysmans enthusiasts. Edgewood College (WI) Sayeeda H. Mamoon Steemers,Vivan. Le (néo)colonialisme littéraire: quatre romans africains face à l’institution littéraire parisienne (1950–1970). Paris: Karthala, 2012. ISBN 978-2-81110764 -2. Pp. 234. 24 a. Readers expecting in-depth textual analysis will be disappointed by this book, for the author’s objective is not the texts themselves, but everything that precedes, surrounds, and follows them. Taking her cue from Gérard Genette’s Seuils (1987), Steemers undertakes a paratextual study of four canonical African novels, representing two defining moments in Francophone African literature, its modern ‘emergence’ in the 1950s (Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir and Mongo Beti’s Le pauvre Christ de Bomba in part 1) and postcolonial literature’s first wave in the 1960s (Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances and Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence in part 2). Her project will, however, engage readers interested in the role the Metropolitan publishing industry has played in African textual production, both through the editorial process and in the anticipation and even construction of reader reception through marketing strategies and,at times,collusion with popular press book reviewers. Never far from Steemers’s concerns is the discrepancy between the ideological perspectives of African authors and those of a French readership avid for the exotic and reticent to confront the ill effects of colonialism. The introduction situates Steemers’s study at the confluence of three theoretical vectors: Orientalism (Said) and Africanism (Miller); the culture industry economy (Bourdieu); reception theory (Jauss). If the 238 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 239 introduction is undertheorized, subsequent chapters build on Bourdieu’s claim that cultural products emerge, and derive their symbolic value, from particular sociohistorical contexts.Producers of literature include not only authors but also ghostwriters, editors, publishers, book reviewers, and/or literary prize panels—for the impact that the latter have had on reader perception and the novel’s success. In each of the two parts of Steemers’s study, a brief introduction defining the prevailing Zeitgeist is followed by two chapters contrasting a bestseller playing to the reading public’s desire for the exotic and authentic—L’enfant noir for its content and Les soleils des indépendances for its style—with an iconoclastic novel whose anti-colonial rhetoric (Le pauvre Christ de Bomba) or suspect authorship (Le devoir de violence) discomforted readers and discouraged promotion. Authors’ trajectories are seemingly secondary (ample references to Adèle King’s Rereading Camara Laye and Christopher Wise’s biography of Yambo Ouologuem, for example, fill this gap) to the analysis of the publishers’history, ideological leaning and financial objectives. Steemers gives insights into the politics of publishing, revealing for instance that Plon, with its history of supporting the Catholic right and publishing for short-term gains, underwrote L’enfant noir because it promoted the universal values of France’s civilizing mission, while Mongo Beti’s corrosive critique...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la tension et le rythme par Arnaud Tripet

Reviews 239 introduction is undertheorized, subsequent chapters build on Bourdieu’s claim that cultural products emerge, and derive their symbolic value, from particular sociohistorical contexts.Producers of literature include not only authors but also ghostwriters, editors, publishers, book reviewers, and/or literary prize panels—for the impact that the latter have had on reader perception and the novel’s success. In each of the two parts of Steemers’s study, a brief introduction defining the prevailing Zeitgeist is followed by two chapters contrasting a bestseller playing to the reading public’s desire for the exotic and authentic—L’enfant noir for its content and Les soleils des indépendances for its style—with an iconoclastic novel whose anti-colonial rhetoric (Le pauvre Christ de Bomba) or suspect authorship (Le devoir de violence) discomforted readers and discouraged promotion. Authors’ trajectories are seemingly secondary (ample references to Adèle King’s Rereading Camara Laye and Christopher Wise’s biography of Yambo Ouologuem, for example, fill this gap) to the analysis of the publishers’history, ideological leaning and financial objectives. Steemers gives insights into the politics of publishing, revealing for instance that Plon, with its history of supporting the Catholic right and publishing for short-term gains, underwrote L’enfant noir because it promoted the universal values of France’s civilizing mission, while Mongo Beti’s corrosive critique of Catholic colonial missionaries left him the option of a peripheral if Paris-based publisher, Présence Africaine, a fledgling concern in 1956 under the direction of Senegalese writer and politician, Alioune Diop. Steemers’s research into the initial reception by press reviewers and book prize judges and how their relationship to publishing houses with vested interests and their own ideological positions inform their critiques adds to the interest of this rendering of the ‘backstory ’ of mid-century African literature. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Judith E. Preckshot Tripet, Arnaud. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la tension et le rythme. Paris: Garnier, 2012. ISBN 987-2-8124-0777-2. Pp. 184. 19 a. Tripet presents an insightful and readable study of characteristic themes that pervade all of Rousseau’s works. He discerns tensions between contrasting but reconcilable principles in Rousseau’s thought. The two Discours describe the loss of innocence and happiness in humanity as societies developed. The Contrat social, on the other hand, seeks to formulate an ideal society where such happiness and virtue can be preserved. While the latter work focuses on the human collectivity, Émile attempts to protect the same values in the individual. In the Confessions and Rêveries, Rousseau speaks about himself as the exemplification of his ideals rather than theorizing in general terms. The unifying principle in all these works is the idea of the loss and regaining of our natural purity and happiness. Rousseau in his own life went through the same stages that humanity as a whole did in its history. The greatest threats to one’s personal integrity are time and other people. The most perfect fulfillment is to be found in a timeless state where one becomes sufficient unto oneself, when one transcends the obstacles represented by the encroachments of temporality and the corrupting influence of others. Such a happiness was known by Rousseau in his childhood, during the years he spent with Madame de Warens, and on the island of Saint-Pierre in the Lac de Bienne. Memory is the binding force that insures the unity of self through the different stages of life. Moreover, it is in the inner self, in one’s individual conscience that a person comes to know God. Another theme explored by Tripet is that of love in Rousseau’s writings. Tripet emphasizes the influence of the death of Rousseau’s mother at the time of his birth on his relationship with women. He was constantly in pursuit of a maternal figure, and his erotic drives often became confused with filial sentiments. He developed a neo-courtly ideal of unconsummated love as the most noble and satisfying form of this experience. The greatest fulfillment lies in the unfulfilled. In his autobiographical writings, Rousseau presents a number of examples, like his Platonic relationship with Sophie d’Houdetot. In La Nouvelle Hélo...

Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen ed. by Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck (review)

Reviewed by: Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen ed. by Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck Yvonne Franke Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen. Edited by Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck. Cologne: Böhlau, 2012. Pp. 376. Paper € 49.90. ISBN 978-3412207649. The expeditions to the North and South Poles a century ago may have ended the investigation of unknown territory. Yet, the legendary histories and stories of the heyday of European expansion still continue. In recent years, these stories have been the focus of numerous texts in German language, including literature and film. The authors who contributed to Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck's edited volume Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen investigate this reformulated interest in narratives about the past and discuss new literary and filmic adaptations from aesthetic, sociopolitical, and imaginative points of view. The volume's contributions look at the tension between fact and fiction, generic conventions, colonial appropriations, postcolonial revisions, and their consequences for poetics and literary theory. The nineteen articles are organized in four thematic sections. The first section, "Über die letzte Grenze," focuses on cartography and the topographic figure of border drawings and crossings that are always preceded by myths and imaginings. Thus, the exploration of the allegedly "weiße Flecken" inevitably has always been a "Relektüre" and belie any claim of true discoveries. Accordingly, Bettine Menke's contribution "Grenzüberschreitungen (in) der Schrift, Exterritorialität der Pole" shows how literary journeys are strongly intertwined with physical explorations. Literary polar expeditions ("nachfahrendes Schreiben") precede actual expeditions ("Nachfahrten," 75). Because the latter have already been "vorgeschrieben" (53) through literary investigations, each text follows in the footsteps of its literary precursors, which bespeaks to the [End Page 686] "Un-/Erreichbarkeit" of both the poles and the texts (77). Wolfgang Struck's article, "Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd oder Die melancholischen Entdeckungen des Films," revisits the "Cold Case" (29) of three lost Swedish North Pole scientists from 1897. Struck demonstrates how Jan Troell's feature film Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd (1982) revisits this case by employing the "Poetologie des Scheiterns" (37) that brings forth a contradistinction from the original photographic documents and questions the alleged completeness of cartography. The articles on August Petermann's "Theorie vom eisfreien Polarmeer" and a close reading of Christoph Ransmayr's novel Der fliegende Berg and its transgression of territorial and generic borders complete this section. Hansjörg Bay's essay "Literarische Landnahme? Um-Schreibung, Partizipation und Wiederholung in aktuellen Relektüren historischer 'Entdeckungsreisen'" opens the second section of the volume, "Vor-Schriften, Nachfahren und Relektüren." At first, Bay focuses on how the genre of travel writing contributed directly to heroism and colonialism by way of following specific conventions marked by ideological stand points. The article continues with his investigation of contemporary "Relektüren" of (hi)stories of both arctic and tropical expeditions that have been thriving since the 1990s: Sten Nadolny's Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit, Christoph Ransmayr's Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Christof Hamann's Der Usambara, Ilija Trojanow's Der Weltensammler, and Thomas Stangl's Der einzige Ort. While Bay considers the North Pole texts from the 1980s as important predecessors for the current literary trend, he gives particular credit to the latter three, in which the colonial entanglements are conveyed through literature. Nevertheless, as he concludes, these recent texts participate in "eine[r] Art kolonialer Wiederholungszwang" (130), which adheres to the conventions of the genre. Bay convincingly demonstrates the usefulness of the ambiguous concept of "Relektüren" that lies at the heart of the entire anthology. The remaining articles in this part deal with nineteenth-century narrative strategies in rewritings of Le Vaillant, Christof Hamann's Usambara, Urs Widmer's Im Kongo, and Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de Violence. John Zilcosky's article "Unheimliche Begegnungen: Abenteuerliteratur, Psychoanalyse, Moderne" opens the anthology's third section on "Tropologien" that shifts the focus to tropical places and lets the geographical and rhetorical realms of the term interact with each other. Zilcosky analyzes examples of popular travel writing (Norbert Jacques' Heisses Land. Eine Reise nach Brasilien), seminal psychological and philosophical theories (Ernst Jentsch, Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud), and modern literature...

‘Devoir de mémoire’: The post-colonial path of a post-national memory in France

The expression ‘devoir de mémoire’ (‘duty to remember’) started to be commonly used in the French political discourse in the French political discourse in the 1990s, thanks to a reconfiguration of the ‘national narrative’. It implied two new obligations for the French state: to commemorate the memory of the victims for which France was acknowledging its responsibility (Jewish deportees during the Vichy Regime), and the recognition of a community (the Jewish one) victim of genocide. This new political contract also offers one paradigm for post-colonial memories as people sought, at the end of the 1990s, an official recognition of crimes against humanity such as slavery or colonization. These demands were elaborated and negotiated by new actors, carriers of these memories, by means of socialization with the expression ‘devoir de mémoire’. Through an exploration of this ritual of apology in France, specifically on how the ‘Taubira law’ on slavery was created and passed (1998–2001), this text intends to show how the use of the ‘devoir de mémoire’ led to interactions between different collectivities, mentioned as a ‘speech act’ meant to modify social relations through the official understanding of the national past.

Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In)Visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore's <em>Le Passé devant soi</em>

Since the genocide in 1994, very little fiction has been produced by authors from Rwanda. Of the small number of literary works that have emerged, the majority reveal a marked preoccupation with remembering and recording the "facts" about the genocide. These texts generally take the form of first-person witness accounts or testimonial fiction. The emphasis on commemoration, encapsulated in the now well-documented literary mission "Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de memoire" 'Rwanda: Writing as a Duty to Remember,' has been reflected inside Rwanda in the genocide memorials that have been constructed since 1994. At the same time, however, the Rwandan government's campaign for reconciliation has generated a national discourse of forgiveness and forgetting, which leaves genocide survivors in a difficult place, torn between the (often involuntary) impulse to remember and the duty to forget. This article will read Rwandan refugee author Gilbert Gatore's 2008 novel, Le Passe devant soi ( The Past Ahead ), as a fictional exploration of the survivors' dilemma. It will suggest that what emerges as the conspicuous absence of Rwanda in Gatore's text reflects the tension between remembering and forgetting that characterizes post-genocide Rwandan society.

Yambo Ouologuem’s struggle for recognition in the field of “African” literature in French

Since the early postcolonial period of the 1960s, there has been little change in the French literary field in regard to the way in which the Parisian capital of francophone regions implements an aesthetic norm based on ethnocentric criteria. The case of the subversive and anti-exotic literary strategy adopted by Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem in his prize-winning novel, Le Devoir de violence (1968; Bound to Violence), led to a literary scandal. The critical review of his case can help us to understand the dual operation of hegemonic power and symbolic value in the field of French literature over the past 40 years. It is still Paris that establishes aesthetic codes to which non-French authors conform, celebrating and valorizing their cultural otherness, rather than their “literariness” as measured on an equal basis with French literature. Highlighting the trajectory of Yambo Ouologuem in Paris and later in Mali, this article takes into account his different positions and oppositional strategies in face of the different instances of Eurocentric power he encountered in the literary field while aiming for recognition at an international, if not universal level.

Realism, Reception, 1968, and West Africa

This essay traces the critical history of African novels; it aligns “postcolonial reading” with the rise of poststructuralism in the United States and the United Kingdom. It correctively reads for realism three novels, all published in 1968 and not usually considered mimetic: Le devoir de violence (Mali), Les soleils des indépendances (Côte d’Ivoire), and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Ghana). Only Devoir has been particularly important to the conversation about postcolonial literature and form, thanks to Kwame Anthony Appiah. Andrade’s first claim is that the relation of African novels to realism is not simply naive. What happens when readers shift their attention away from the question of resistance that has so defined the field and ask instead: How does the novel produce its effects? Where does realism lie in this constellation of aesthetics and politics? Andrade’s second claim involves periodization and uneven development. The events that produced the 1968 social explosions in the global North are bound up with the earlier liberation movements of the global South. Thus the global South’s 1968, partially reflected in these novels, offers a perspective on the neoliberalism of the global North’s 1980s.

L’homme de Lyon by François-Guillaume Lorrain

and cocaine, his complicated relationship with his father, Jérôme, and his total admiration for his mentor, Michel. In short, this is a story of a privileged young man’s coming of age, yet despite the vibrant milieu and exciting cast of characters , the story rarely rises above the typical. Jérôme proved to be a loving father, but one unable to show affection overtly, a man who preferred the workplace to the home: “Il aimait la famille, mais pas la vie familiale” (182). He accepted his son’s sexual orientation, but preferred not to discuss it with him, and also did not appear to be particularly helpful to Mathieu at the beginning of his literary career . Perhaps that was indeed the case, but Mathieu mentions in passing that his father helped with the publication of his first book, and secured him a stage at Le Nouvel Observateur. This hardly appears to be an example of paternal indifference , and underscores Lindon’s advantages in the very competitive Parisian intellectual market. Lindon’s attitude toward Foucault is much less nuanced: “L’amitié de Michel est une des choses dont je suis le plus fier dans ma vie” (177). While the young man’s affection for the older is obviously deep, the portrait he paints of his mentor reveals little that is new, and nothing that is remotely critical. Foucault is unfailing polite and helpful, practically always smiling, and concerned to keep his young lapins at a distance from his kinkier sexual activities. Lindon’s obsession with explaining his attitudes and feelings toward the great man have the unintended effect of shifting the focus from the admired to the admirer. Ultimately, Foucault remains rather a distant presence. To some degree, the goal of this book was to expand on the idea that “il faut du temps pour comprendre ce qu’aimer veut dire” (15). Yet, to the extent this was the purpose, it really only applies to Jérôme Lindon. Although Foucault is clearly the centerpiece, if there are moving moments in this book, they occur as Mathieu struggles to accept his father’s tough love, and Jérôme labors to hold off death until he can express the depth of his feelings to his sometimes prodigal son. Ce qu’aimer veut dire might well have been a book Mathieu Lindon had to write, but perhaps not one he had to publish. Florida State University William Cloonan LORRAIN, FRANÇOIS-GUILLAUME. L’homme de Lyon. Paris: Grasset, 2011. ISBN 978-2246 -772118. Pp. 249. 16 a. Le devoir de mémoire suffit-il à colmater les brèches du passé? Kristallnacht, les pogroms, le Vel d’Hiv, Vichy. Après un long silence, la conscience collective se réveille en sursaut et le remords s’insinue avec ses “ismes”: révisionnisme, relativisme, apologisme. Comme l’exprime Paul Ricœur dans La mémoire, l’histoire , l’oubli (2000), nous souffrons à la fois de trop d’oubli et de trop de mémoire. Lorrain, agrégé de lettres et critique de cinéma—ce qui explique en partie la méticuleuse construction du récit, le sens du suspense et de l’image, le trait précis, malgré un cliché-couac de temps à autre—nous offre avec L’homme de Lyon son quatrième roman. Il y flotte un air d’autobiographie dans un encadré de polar. Sept ans après la disparition de son père, un fils reçoit un mystérieux paquet de lettres accompagnées de six photos. À partir de ce mince legs posthume, le narrateur va mener l’enquête pour reconstituer une chronologie des faits, mais aussi pour cerner la personnalité du docteur Guy Rolin, ce père distant et énigmatique. Il s’agit d’abord d’organiser les pièces du puzzle en identifiant les lieux (Lyon, été 992 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 1944) et les personnages associés à chaque photo. Sur une prise de vue de cette ville, alors sous la botte de la Gestapo et de la Milice, s’inscrit un message précurseur de l’intrigue: “C’est là que tout a commencé et que tout a fini” (33). Le...

Social Memories in (Post)Colonial France: Remembering the Franco-Algerian War

This article examines social memories in France over the last 10 years. There has been a significant amount of 'memory work' during this period, concerning various aspects of French history, including the World Wars, but predominantly postcolonial issues: the Algerian War, the legacy of slavery, memories of Empire and memories of Immigration in particular. The 'devoir de memoire' (duty to remember) and 'work of memory' (Paul Ricoeur) have taken on greater, and controversial, proportions. While President Jacques Chirac was for some the 'president du devoir de memoire' (President who championed the duty to remember), President Nicolas Sarkozy seems intent on ending what he sees as the trend towards 'repentance'. After a discussion of the wider memory culture in France, this article focuses on collective and social memories of the Franco-Algerian War (1954-62) Through an analysis of various 'vectors of memory' (Henry Rousso) it argues that the recent upsurge in 'memory work' in France is very much anchored in the present postcolonial social context in France. That memory work is however largely symbolic and in some ways unsatisfactory. It shows that much of the recent work of memory has been only belatedly and partially undertaken by the State, and with civil society in some ways yet to follow.

Vivre et écrire dans l'odeur de la mort ("L'Afrique au-delà du miroir" et "Murambi, le livre des ossements" de Boubacar Boris Diop)

The essay provides an analysis of the emotional and intellectual experience lived by the Senegalese novestist Boubacar Boris Diop in Rwanda in 1998, when he, among other writers, was involved in the initiative ecrire par devoir de memoire, an initiative aiming at reflecting upon the terrible events of the 1994 genocide. In his collection of essays, L'Afrique au-dela du miroir, Boubacar Boris Diop offers an intense reflection upon this experience which also iaugurated for him a new conception of history and a new notion of literary writing. As a testimony of this change, the novel Murambi, le livre des ossements reads like a funerary monument to celebrate the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Tutsi people massacred during the genocide.

1968: Crisis in African Letters

The year 1968 marks, without doubt, a critical moment in African Francophone literature. Two novels published that year bear testimony that indeed something new might be happening, something we may characterize as a break away from a more traditional African writing: annus mirabilis 1968 is the date of publication of two first novels, Malian Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence and Ivoirian Ahmadou Kourouma's Les Soleils des independances. Both Ouologuem and Kourouma made a thunderous entrance into the world of letters: in the very same year 1968, unknown writer Yambo Ouologuem was the winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, and Les Soleils des independances was widely acclaimed. When, in 2000, Ahmadou Kourouma won the Renaudot for his novel Allah n'est pas oblige (the book also won the Goncourt des Lyceens), it certainly can be said that the prize came as a crowning of a trajectory, of a way of writing that first struck the unexpectedly large audience that discovered Les Soleils more than thirty years earlier. With thunder also came sulfur. In the case of Kourouma's Les Soleils, the controversy was about its language. Should what some considered a literary promotion of francais debrouille (broken French) be saluted as innovative writing? What is the merit, they would ask, of a work of literal translation of an African language (Malinke) into French, of an art of speaking Malinke in French? It has to be recalled that at first the French publishers contacted by Amadou Kourouma did not want to publish a text in what they simply perceived as broken French. It was then published in Canada, precisely a non-French Francophone country, where the idea of working the language in such unexpected ways, from another language, found a warm welcome. Following that first publication, a few months later, Le Seuil in Paris decided to publish the novel which rapidly encountered great success. Sulfur is certainly a word to be used to speak of Yambo Ouologuem's novel: after the acclaim came the scandal when the Malian writer was lambasted and his work vilified as he was accused of plagiarizing many passages of it. The very incipit of the novel, it soon appeared, laid the cards on the table: a comparison between the first words of Le Devoir de violence: Nos yeux boivent l'eclat du soleil, et, vaincus, s'etonnent de pleurer, Maschallah ! oua bismillah ![...]. Un recit de l'aventure sanglante The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1-2 (c) The Trustees of Columbia University de la negraille--honte aux hommes de rien !- tiendrait aisement dans la premiere moitie de ce siecle ; mais la veritable histoire des negres commence beaucoup, beaucoup plus tot, avec les Saifs, en l'an 1202 de notre ere, dans l'Empire africain [...]. and the following passage from Andre Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des justes: Nos yeux recoivent la lumiere d'etoiles mortes. Une biographie de mon ami Ernie tiendrait aisement dans le deuxieme quart du XXe siecle ; mais la veritable histoire d'Ernie Levy commence tres tot, dans la vieille cite [...]. shows clearly the presence of Schwartz-Bart text in Ouologuem's writing. In addition to Schwartz-Bart, other writers had also been visited by Ouologuem, who borrowed and rewrote from their works: Graham Greene, Maupassant, and others. While a representative for Graham Greene threatened to take legal action, Andre Schwartz-Bart, with great elegance, declared: am especially touched, even overwhelmed, to think that a Black writer should have relied on Le Dernier des justes in creating a book like Le Devoir de violence. Thus Mr. Ouologuem is not indebted to me, but rather I to him. Yambo Ouologuem himself protested that in his original manuscript, the borrowings from other writers and texts were clearly indicated but that sounded just clumsy as the publisher was very quick to throw him under the bus as the saying goes, in order to put away possible legal issues. …

Afrique: Paroles d'écrivains by Éloïse Brezault

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...

Monstrous Fictions: Testifying to the Rwandan Genocide in Tierno Monenembo's L'aine des orphelins

Fiction, in its obliqueness, provides the space to say what history can only say in the mode of a pathos obscuring the ‘truth’ of the event. Trauma narratives feature performative language, which can have good and bad consequences, and maybe ultimately transformative psychotherapeutic ones. Monénembo shows us a profoundly traumatised child, whose symptoms match those of children suffering from attachment disorder. His text may not match the sobriety and directness of other texts of the devoir de mémoire project, but rather than stand in for direct testimony, it stands alongside the events. Faustin's narrative acts out the irreducible ambivalence of all traumatic memorialisation, which can only ever accede indirectly to the event, such that the event proper comes into being only as a kind of originary supplement (cf. Derrida on testimony). Our own devoir de mémoire is to remember that sharing in the work of remembering and mourning is an ongoing collective responsibility.

The Problem of Realism and African Fiction

Until recently, studies of postcolonial African novels emphasized the genre's relation to anticolonial critique and its expression of collective resistance. In response to the overwhelming assumption that novels from Africa were primarily anthropological artifacts rather than works of the imagination, literary critics sought to emphasize the palimpsestic nature of text by pointing to the unsayable and the indeterminate, and they devalued that which appeared mimetic, no matter what the text itself looked like. I explore the question of genre or narrative mode with special attention to realism, which I read as complex. African novels' relation to realism is not simply naive, as Anthony Appiah or Pascale Cassanova would claim. With complexity in mind, I ask what happens when readers shift attention away from the question of resistance that has so defined the field, and ask instead: how does the novel produce its effects? An answer to this question requires close attention to form because that is where the novelty of the novel lies. I look primarily at two novels: Le Devoir de violence (Mali) and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Ghana), both published in 1968.

Writing on Bones: Commemorating Genocide in Boubacar Boris Diop'sMurambi

During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated 50,000 people were slaughtered at the Murambi technical school in Gikongoro province. The school buildings now house a memorial museum where the exhumed bodies of some of the victims are displayed in memory of the Rwandan genocide. Four years later, Boubacar Boris Diop visited Rwanda under the aegis of the Ecrire par devoir de memoire project. Diop's trip led to the publication of the novel Murambi: le livre des ossements (2000) ( Murambi: The Book of Bones ), a fictional commemoration of the Rwandan genocide, based on the massacre that took place at the Murambi technical school. Reading the memorial text alongside the memorial museum, this article discusses the ways in which Diop's novel commemorates the extermination of around one million Rwandan people in one hundred days and, in so doing, implicates the reader in a process of remembering—and acknowledging—genocide.

<i>Islam, Ethics, Revolt: Politics and Piety in Francophone West African and Maghreb Narrative</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Islam, Ethics, Revolt: Politics and Piety in Francophone West African and Maghreb Narrative Aaron L. Rosenberg (bio) Islam, Ethics, Revolt: Politics and Piety in Francophone West African and Maghreb Narrative. By Donald R. Wehrs. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. x + 279 pp. $75.00. Donald Wehrs has provided a valuable addition to comparative literary scholarship with his recent volume on a group of novels from Northern and Sub-Saharan West Africa. Wehrs has conspicuously left out the work of Anglophone West African writers. He has also tightly defined his purview by focusing on only novelistic expression (albeit with frequent and extensive references to other expressive forms integral to Judaic and Christian ethical identity). It is clear that these scholarly circumscriptions were necessary to his project and prevent his observations from ranging too widely and thus losing their intellectual force. We can only hope that some other enterprising scholar will see fit to carry on Wehrs's endeavor by looking at Islamic narratives from this region (and possibly others) in other languages and other forms such as poetry, popular song, and drama. Wehrs's work stands as an important remedy to a lacuna in contemporary scholarship on West African literature. Stephanie Newell's recent volume entitled West African Literature: Ways of Reading (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), to take one current example, is a wide-ranging and well-organized volume which tackles important practical and theoretical issues in both Anglophone and [End Page 428] Francophone West African Literatures, although its scholarship on other languages of expression is less thorough. An additional weakness is Newell's treatment of Islam in literature. As Alioune Sow has noted in his recent review in African Studies Quarterly: "[Newell's] chapter on Islam is relatively short for what is an important and yet neglected aspect of West African literatures . . . the absence of figures such as Amadou Hampâté Bâ . . . or Yambo Ouologuem, with his devastating response to Islamic values in Le devoir de violence is questionable" (10. 1 [Spring 2008]). Even a cursory glance at Wehrs's table of contents reveals the extent to which his study remedies these oversights. His text considers the socio-cultural implications of works by authors who emerge from an Islamic environment. He devotes a chapter to unpacking the complicated messages of Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1968) and although Wehrs does not deal with Ahmadou Ba's famous novel The Fortunes of Wangrin (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), his choice not to include him in his analysis may have to do with the content of the novel and its inefficacy vis à vis his present project. Of more significance is Wehrs's ability to demonstrate the overlap between North and Sub-Saharan Africa through creative discourse. This is a task which he carries off admirably. That his focus on varied and intellectually divergent accounts of Islamic propriety and the systems of action that emerge from them is of a crucial, timely nature at present is underscored by recent events throughout the globe. The newly instated American president in his inauguration speech simultaneously expressed a willingness to "extend a hand" to governments willing to "unclench [their] fist[s] and emphasized his determination to crush Islamic insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere throughout the globe." President Obama also stated that "To the Muslim world we seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect." At other points, however, he invoked a strongly Christian tone; claiming that "God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny," and that "our security emanates from the justness of our cause." He even went so far as to claim that America's democratic ideals were spread because "we did not turn back nor did we falter and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations." All of this of course before he closed his speech with the following: "God Bless You and God Bless The United States of America" (my transcriptions). The mixed feelings and responses that Muslims are left with upon hearing such pronouncements are the logical outcome of this...

La Fracture coloniale (review)

Reviewed by: La Fracture coloniale Pascale De Souza Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire . La Fracture coloniale. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Pp. i + 311. Price: 20 euros. As its title indicates, La Fracture coloniale explores the fracture historique that occurred in the early 1960s as France lost most of its colonies and entered the post-colonial era. However, unlike in Great-Britain or the USA where post-colonial studies have emerged as a dynamic field of exploration, the French fracture remains under-explored, especially with respect to its impact on current issues such as the integration of minorities, the concept of francophonie or France's foreign policy. The exploration provided in La Fracture coloniale spans a period from the nineteenth century, with the independence of Haiti and the emergence of a humanist ideal contradicted by the reality of penal settlements and discriminatory laws, to the twenty-first century, as new or revamped museums no longer showcase la France de l'autre but apparently celebrate une autre France. The editors fully live up to their devoir de mémoire as they and their guest contributors help France emerge from its current amnesia or repressed memories. The first eleven essays gathered under the heading "Histoire coloniale et enjeux de mémoire" explore France and its republican ideals, the independence of Haiti, the war in Algeria, the overseas remnants of French utopia, the genesis and history of the affaire du foulard, the enduring occultation of post-colonial history both in research and high school curricula, the opening of new museums in Paris, the emergence of new debates and the attempts to 'rehabilitate' colonial history through a revision of textbooks. This first part aptly concludes with an interview of the historian Mac Ferro who has through numerous publications challenged some taboos related to suppressed colonial memories. The second set of eleven essays entitled "République, intégrisme et postcolonialisme" is more focused on contemporary France and its complex identities. Articles explore how France's inability to go from colonial power to cosmopolitanism accounts for some of its most glaring failures in foreign (African) policy, and they analyze the current rifts in French society as the melting-pot of medieval times gives way to the current fragmented mosaic pulling apart along racial lines. The representations of Arab France as divided between the threat of a veiled Marianne and the image of a fully assimilated beur préfet, the enduring discrimination against French people of colonial parentage, the suburban ghettoization, the ongoing need to see the other anew, the divided allegiance of French soccer fans as they root for France… or their country of origin, all these themes point to a need to decolonize imaginary constructs by drawing upon surveys such as the one conducted by the university of Toulouse. As Arnauld Le Brusq concludes in the epilogue, France has progressed from its Palais des Colonies firmly ensconcing colonies into stultified and stupefied stereotypes to its Cité Nationale de l'histoire de la migration, and yet the latter's slogan remains "Leur histoire est notre histoire." Such us-versus-them approaches to French (post-)colonial history remain pervasive… and persuasive, and they call for the publication of other essays exploring La Fracture coloniale. Pascale De Souza SAIS–Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 2007 L'Esprit Créateur