Francophone Novels Research Articles

Revenge, Coloniality, and Hegelian Justice: Experiencing Geopolitics in Sub-Saharan Fiction

In his Outlines of a Philosophy of Right, Hegel contends that revenge is just in its content but wrong in its form. In other words, it is justified in its pursuit of recognition but wrong in resorting to acts of subjective will instead of mediation through state justice, which, he argues, is founded in a rational and objective expression of collective will. While Hegel’s argument may hold in cases of conflicts between individual subjects, it is harder to sustain when the wrong is committed by supra-individual entities (States, financial institutions) particularly in (neo)colonial contexts. In light of this asymmetrical complication, I seek to revisit the conception of justice associated with the Hegelian idea of the State. I do so by looking at four contemporary francophone novels in which episodes of individual revenge are construed as provocative indices that allow me to uncover the wrong in its asymmetrical setting, that is, to see and analyze offense as the personal, individual and intimately lived effect of a (geo)political wrong inflicted by (neo)colonialism. Ultimately, the assumption of State rationality is significantly qualified due to the influence of capitalist market forces and national sentiment.

Au-delà du miroir : Signe, référentialité et interprétation dans le roman francophone

At the origins of this study, we find an assessment of a problematic, implied relationship between the representation of the world in Francophone novels and the Francophone socio, historical-political reality. The proximity between the literary text and reality is assumed by too many critics and reduces the essentially interpretative function of literary texts, particularly fiction texts. This approach treats the text as a document without always realising that the dual language of the text acts as an invisible and distorting screen. Of course, this critical drift is certainly the result of the beginning of a relationship between reality, experience, praxis and representation. This relationship is important to be approached from a more holistic perspective in order to understand its inner workings, its structure. By necessity, the postcolonial Francophone text is a text in translation that invites translating reading. The question of interpretation and hermeneutical tools arises within the very textual production. This methodologically feeds a practice that escapes the philological frameworks imposed by the various political bodies that control the text. It is a fact that the reference world deployed by authors does not always correspond to that of the receiver of the text. This is particularly the case in texts which, without being explicitly translated, undergo constraints. To clarify our subject and approach, we must remember that the function of this dimension of the translator depends on the informal mother language and its visibility in the text. Using extracts from Francophone Maghrebi novels, we demonstrate the function of the linguistic sign and its referentiality in a very particular literary language.

(Con)Temporary Animals: The Transgressions of Human Narration in Alain Mabanckou’s and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires

(Con)Temporary Animals: The Transgressions of Human Narration in Alain Mabanckou’s and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires Graham L. Bishop (bio) Two Texts, Their Authors, and the Movements in Between To what extent is the contemporary a concept limited by human experience? What would it mean to imagine an experience of being contemporary that accounts for nonhuman or more-than-human means of accessing the present? Would such an endeavor be possible, not to say necessary in the “contemporary moment” of ecological catastrophe and mass extinction? This essay answers in the affirmative through readings of two contemporary Francophone novels that fall under the genre of “animal autobiography”: Alain Mabanckou’s Mémoires de porcépic (2006) and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires de la jungle (2010). Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the autobiographical animal in “L’Animal que donc je suis” and Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the contemporary subject, I read these novels as examples of a narrative temporality whereby humans can both follow after and be present with animal others. I attribute this temporality to the novels’ shared technique of metalepsis, defined in narratology as a transgression of the boundary separating a given diegetic “storyworld” from the world outside of (extradiegetic to) the narrative: Although both novels initially assume the form indicated by their titles—“memoirs” authored by animal subjects (a porcupine in Mabanckou’s text; a chimpanzee in Garcia’s) who recollect past experiences—the intrusions made by [End Page 912] voices of human narrators at the ends of both works draw attention to and undermine the artificial boundaries of this form. Readers thus encounter two alternative representations of contemporaneity, neither of which require the anthropocentric division between the speaking human subject, who manifests presence, and the mute animal other, who remains trapped within an evolutionary past. Born in Congo-Brazzaville in 1966, Alain Mabanckou published poetry through the 1990s before winning the 1999 Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire for his first novel, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge. He then became one of the Francophone world’s most successful contemporary African novelists, winning both the 2005 Prix des cinq continents de la fran-cophonie for Verre cassé and the 2006 Prix Renaudot for Mémoires de porc-épic. Animals make frequent appearances in his work, but Mémoires de porc-épic is his only book narrated from an animal point-of-view to date. In the style of an autobiographical confession, a porcupine named Ngoumba recollects his life as the “harmful double” of a young man named Kibandi: leaving the “animal world,” the porcupine follows Kibandi’s orders to “eat” the bodies and souls of his enemies. When gluttony drives Kibandi to eat a few souls he should have left alone—an infant, for example—the spiritual world takes revenge and kills him, leaving the porcupine without a human host. Pursued by outraged villagers, the porcupine flees into the forest. After following his “instinct” for a couple of nights, he comes across a baobab tree on the bank of a river he fails to cross (38–39) and decides to confess to it his crimes. Novelist and object-oriented philosopher Tristan Garcia was born in 1981 in Toulouse, France, but spent much of his childhood in Algeria. He won the 2008 Prix de Flore for his debut novel, La Meilleure Part des hommes (translated into English as Hate: A Romance), an exploration of AIDS and its impact on gay culture in 1980s Paris. As a philosopher, he is most known for his speculative realist work Forme et objet: Un traité des choses, published in 2011; he is also the author of Nous, animaux et humains: Actualité de Jeremy Bentham, an essay on utilitarianism and animal suffering published earlier that year. He received little attention in 2010 for his second novel, Mémoires de la jungle, a work of post-apocalyptic science-fiction narrated by a chimpanzee named Doogie. Doogie begins his story orbiting the Earth aboard a space shuttle, as an involuntary participant in a publicity stunt designed to save the failing experimental zoo where he has been raised. The shuttle crash-lands in the middle of the African jungle, where Doogie finds no...

Feminist Discourse about the Rwandan Genocide in two Francophone Novels from Sub-Saharan Africa: between Duty of Memory and Woman-Writing

On assiste de plus en plus a l’emergence d’un feminisme africain dans le roman. Des auteures africaines y ont trouve un espace fertile pour exprimer leurs sentiments face a des sujets comme les genocides. Celui du Rwanda en 1994 permet de comprendre les paroles qui divisent et les dangers qui guettent notre humanite. Cette etude analyse le discours feministe sur cette tragedie. Elle montre comment Veronique Tadjo dans L’ombre d’Imana. Voyage jusqu’au bout du Rwanda et Monique Ilboudo dans Murekatete, dans un langage de revolte, avec des mots crus, presentent un feminisme revolutionnaire.

Collision and Collusion: Contrasting Representations of the Translator-Author Relationship in Two Contemporary Francophone Novels

The article focuses on two novels (Brice Matthieussent’s 2009 Vengeance du traducteur and Jacques Poulin’s 2006 La Traduction est une histoire d’amour) which present apparently contradictory viewpoints on the role of the translator and translation through their distinctive use of both metaphors and meta-discourse on translation. Matthieussent’s novel is a revenge indeed, a postmodern tour de force where the notions of original, translation, source and target texts, author and translator, are blurred to the point of becoming irrelevant, shedding a whole new light on the concepts of faithfulness and creativity, and redefining typographical and cultural spaces. Presented as a translation by its narrator, Vengeance du traducteur is a discussion about translation, a metaphorical and symbolical deconstruction of the author-translator relationship, which creatively and cynically dissects power relations in the translation process, and questions the validity of the notions of author and translator, pointing out their absurdity. Poulin’s novel approaches the author-translator relationship more traditionally, portraying a young woman, Marine, the first-person narrator, planning to meet an author she admires, and become his translator. Though she is successful in this, few scenes focus on translation proper; instead the writer and translator must determine the owner of an abandoned kitten, using a cryptic note on its collar. They must find the right words to complete the clue, and also determine what these words truly mean. The cooperative, symbiotic connexion between the two outside their working relationship becomes a metaphor in itself for the process of translation; this in turn focuses a spotlight on the work of translating which is relegated to the background of this novel whose title announces it as central. Through careful dissection of all the novels’ elements, we will show how their mise-en-abîme of translating determines and undermines the perception and practice of literary translation.

L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine by Hanan Elsayed

Reviewed by: L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine by Hanan Elsayed Touria Khannous Hanan Elsayed. L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine. Paris: karthala, 2016. Pp. 180. Hanan Elsayed's book L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine analyzes four key Francophone novels and shows how each text draws on diverse religious, historical, and philosophical sources and legacies to prefigure the authors' own imaginative perception of the early Islamic period. These narratives, written by Assia Djebar, Anissa Boumediene, Driss Chraibi, and Salim Bachi, reimagine early Islam as they reinterpret and reread original Islamic sources. The book examines how these authors translate early Islamic texts into new kinds of readings that unsettle hierarchies, reimagine the Muslim tradition to make it more embedded in contemporary local settings, and position fictions at the center of history. Elsayed argues that while all these texts challenge original sources, they at the same time highlight the authors' degree of familiarity and partiality in their thematic and stylistic choices. The first chapter examines representations of early Islam in three narratives, notably the Islamiyyat, a multi-authored corpus produced in Egypt during the 1930s in order to challenge the misrepresentation of Islam in colonial discourse. Chapter Two examines Djebar's reading of the original sources of Islam in her novel Loin de Médine. Elsayed argues that it is ironic that Djebar relies on an interlocutor and attempts to recover the voices of women, while overlooking the figures of women in these sources themselves. Chapter Three centers on Anissa Boumediene's La fin d'un monde, questioning the accuracy of its historical sources, as well as the novel's recreation of the rule of the third caliph othman. what is remarkable is Elsayed's allegorical reading of the novel's reconstruction of othman's rule. Elsayed argues that the civil wars of early Islamic history are an allegorical representation of the civil war that engulfed Algeria in the late 1990s. Chapter Four examines Driss Chraibi's novel L'homme du livre, which takes place in the twenty-four-hour period prior to the angel Gabriel's revelation of the Quran to the prophet Muhammad. The revelation begins, as Elsayed notes, with the command to read, to which the Prophet responds that he cannot read. Elsayed's astute reading of the influence of Sufism on Chraibi's interpretation of the act of reading as a movement from the letter to the essence of meaning is commendable. Chapter Five focuses on Salim Bachi's novel Le silence de Mahomet, which draws upon four distinct narrative voices corresponding to historical figures from early Islamic history. Elsayed questions the reliability of the novel's sources, as well as the prejudices of its author. In L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam, Hanan Elsayed cogently analyzes important narratives from the Maghreb and beyond in a rare and timely study that explores representations of early Muslim history in texts shaped by a diversity of sources. The author's compelling presentation of a broader historical and political context sheds light on these texts' diversity of themes, voices, and generic forms, and she challenges their omissions, prejudices, and misrepresentations in a way that makes this book pertinent for a wide audience. Her contribution is a significant one, providing an important framework for further work on Islam and Francophone Maghrebin narratives. Touria Khannous Louisiana State University Copyright © 2018 L'Esprit Créateur

Les traductions néerlandaises des romans francophones camerounais

The Dutch translations of francophone Cameroon novels In the corpus of African francophone novels that have been translated into Dutch, some 50 titles in all, the contribution of Cameroon authors is considerable. Between 1960 and 2009, nine novels by five Cameroon writers were published in Dutch. This essay to analyses these translations using the methodology of Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury) and the sociology of translation (Heilbron and Sapiro Bilan). It examines how the Cameroon novels have been integrated into the Dutch literary system, what their position is, and most of all, to what extent the paratexts of the translated novels reflect this position. The detailed analysis of the reception of the Cameroon novels within the Dutch literary system reveals that there is a marked evolution in the way in which the publications have been selected and presented to the public. First, the classics of (post)colonial literature were translated, novels dealing with the (difficult) relations between the black colonised person and the white coloniser. At a later stage, the female perspective on contemporary challenges facing Africa becomes the sole focus of the novels in the corpus. What is less straightforward to define clearly, is the place of Dutch within the larger translation trends reflecting the international visibility of the novels. All the same, it seems safe to say that English, the most dominant global language, has not played a significant role in determining the translation history of any of the novels or authors under consideration. None of the novels in the corpus was first translated into English. In fact, the languages with a central position (Heilbron and Sapiro), German and Russian before 1989, appear to have been more influential. Three of the five authors were first published in a central language: Oyono and Beyala were translated into German, whereas Beti was translated into Russian. By contrast, two authors were first translated into a (semi-)peripheral language: Werewere into Dutch and Miano into Spanish. What appears to be important for the Dutch translations is that certain agents and promotors of translation played a crucial role in this. From that perspective, Magrit de Sabloniere, who translated the first two African francophone novels, certainly merits special attention, as do two book collections devoted to europhone African literature, De Derde Spreker-Serie and Afrikaanse Bibliotheek, as well as the people behind them, Sjef Theunis and Jan Kees van der Werk.

L'Effet Barzakh

ABSTRACTThe role of aesthetics has been widely debated in the field of Maghrebi Literary Studies since its inception in the early 1960s. Francophone novels from the Maghreb are often called upon by publishers to serve as sociologically faithful reflections of North African society. At the same time, such works have been routinely criticized by scholars for their lack of literary artistry. The twenty-first century arrival of independent publishing houses in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia has altered the flow of cultural capital across the Mediterranean, with new centers of literary production shifting the landscape of French publishing. These local publishers afford Maghrebi writers the space in which to create narratives that complicate existing paradigms for postcolonial fiction. My paper addresses the relationship between literary aesthetics and national consciousness in recent novels from the catalogue of Éditions Barzakh, Algeria's most important independent publisher. I argue that Barzakh has expanded the horizon of possibility for the roman maghrébin in the twenty-first century by publishing texts that skirt the realist/formalist tug-of-war to which literatures from North Africa are so often subjected.

Things Fall Apart—Achebe's Legacy, from Book to Screen

Literature has always inspired filmic adaptations and African literature has its films too, mainly sourced from francophone novels, some of which have been examined by Techeuyap in De l’écrit à l’écran, Anyinefa, and Mestaoui, among others. Nigerian literature, on the other hand, has inspired few adaptations, with the notable exception of Achebe’s first novel, published in 1958 and which has, over the years, inspired several adaptations—films and plays. This article will compare Achebe’s first novel with its main screen counterpart and will seek to highlight the reasons for the huge success of this televised program, revealing some of the ingredients behind the success of Nollywood films and helping to get a better understanding of their content and message.

Shaping futures and feminisms: Qur’anic schools in West African francophone fiction

This article examines the representation of female education in Qur’anic schools in a selection of West African francophone novels. I argue that in being the earliest form of education for most Muslim women and also a neglected topic of scholarly interest, the Qur’anic school shapes their feminisms in more significant ways than has been acknowledged since scholarly attention to Islamic education in West Africa has mostly focused on the experience of boys in Qur’anic schools, and since theories on feminism in Islam have primarily articulated feminism as a politically oriented project. Using Islamic feminism as a disposition that is not always coterminous with activist objectives within the sociohistorical context of Islamic education in West African Muslim societies, this paper emphasizes the need to focus on forms of female literacy other than secular education.

Sounding off: rhythm, music, and identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone novels

Sounding off: rhythm, music, and identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone novels

Subverting Social Customs: The Representation of Food in Three West African Francophone Novels

Food, eating habits, and culinary customs in West African societies are embedded with deep social symbolisms and meanings signifying kinship ties, friendship, political relations, and social status. This symbolism is defined as commensality, which means more than just sharing and consumption of food. Through a selection of West African francophone novels, this paper examines the trope of food, eating, and culinary customs to reveal the ways the novelists employ food items and habits to critique the sociopolitical situations of West African societies. In particular, these novelists delineate their social critique by detailing the subversion of the deeper symbolism of food and eating habits in West African societies.

Métisse Stories and the Ambivalent Desire for Cultural Belonging

The discourse of Empire imprisoned the métis (mixed-race male) and the métisse (mixed-race female) as inferior objects in the essentialised category of race. Mixed race individuals problematised the relation between the Self and the Other in colonised societies and their stories became inextricably intertwined with colonial histories of domination and exclusion. In the postcolonial era when the metis/métisse as object of gaze emerges as a liberated and a free speaking subject, alternative stories of mixed race experiences and new models of métissage (racial/cultural mixing) became available. In this study I examine critically the ways in which métissage and métisse subjectivities are expressed in postcolonial societies through a reading of three Francophone novels, whose main focus is “racial métissage” as experienced by women, and whose authors are all women of mixed-race. Specifically, I examine “Métisse Blanche” (White Métisse) (1989) by the Franco-Vietnamese writer Kim Lefèvre, “A l'autre bout de moi” (At the other end of myself) (1979) by the Mauritian Creole novelist Marie Thérèse Humbert, and “L'Etrangère” (The foreign woman) (1985) by the Vietnamese-Senegalese writer Anne Marie Niane.

BOOK REVIEW: Mireille Rosello.POSTCOLONIAL HOSPITALITY: THE IMMIGRANT AS GUEST. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

In a sophisticated and well-argued study, Mireille Rosello asks what issues might be at stake if the immigrant (legal or otherwise, and usually non-European) were considered a guest? Engaged with current postcolonial theory and with Jacques Derrida's essay Of Hospitality (Paris: Calmann-Lévy,1997; Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), Rosello's analysis combines a brief historical inquiry into the nature of French hospitality as a metaphor for public acceptance of the other, and close textual analysis of several recent French and francophone novels and films. As a result, Postcolonial Hospitality is a work that will prove to be invaluable to scholars and general readers interested in contemporary French society and immigration studies.

Francophone Literatures: A Literary and Linguistic Companion by Malcolm Offord , Nicki Hitchcott , Sam Haigh , Rosemary Chapman (review)

212 Reviews Francophone Literatures: A Literary and Linguistic Companion. By Malcolm Offord , La'ila Ibnlfassi, Nicki Hitchcott, Sam Haigh, and Rosemary Chapman . London and New York: Routledge. 2001. ix + 283pp. ?60 (pbk ?18.99). ISBN 0-415-19839-9 (pbk 0-415-19840-2). This collection of thirty extracts from key francophone novels since the 1930s? accompanied by textual commentaries?aims to provide an accessible introductory study aid. The books is divided into four major sections (respectively, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and North America), each of which contains a succinct historical and cultural overview introduced by a different specialist. The chosen, often lengthy, extracts follow on chronologically by date of composition, and have their own bibliography and literary commentary ('Text and Context') provided by the section specialist, followedby a 'Languageand Style' com? mentary provided by Malcolm Offord throughout. Offord's very detailed linguistic and stylistic analyses usefully illustrate the various methodological perspectives from which literary texts can be studied. The short introduction provides a rationale forthe exclusion of theatre and poetry (in order to focus on the novel), explains the choice of texts (based on the availability of set texts), and justifies the geographical limitations (Belgium and Switzerland are excluded) as enabling more detailed thematic analyses. The introduction provides the essential conceptual and methodological definitions for the linguistic and stylistic analyses. However, while the contributors make clear thematic comparisons between texts in their respective sections, the absence of a substantial thematic overview hinders comparisons across sections on (for example) 'space', gender power relations, and the critique of post-independence regimes. Such an overview would have made more explicit the link between culture and politics at the heart of many francophone novels. In her section on North Africa, Laila Ibnlfassi's very diverse and well-chosen range oftexts (among which Chraibi'sLe Passe simple, Nina Bouraoui'sL<2 Voyeuseinterdite, Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacree) reveal the extent to which the family condenses power relations present at the level of society as a whole?a theme echoed across all sections of the book. Two texts are also included by writers of Algerian origin born in France (Azouz Begag, Mehdi Charef). Nicki Hitchcott's section on Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean provides accessible explanations on, forexample, the colonial gaze (F. Oyono's Une vie de boy) and the epistolary novel (Miriama Ba's Une si longue lettre). There are some stylistically and linguistically challenging extracts (Ahmadou Kourouma's Les Soleils des independances and Sony Labou Tansi's La Vie et demie) that the commentaries explain very thoroughly. Sam Haigh's section on the Caribbean gives due attention to Haitian literatures (Dany Laferriere ,Jacques Roumain) as well as to those of Martinique and Guadeloupe (Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Conde, Daniel Maximin, Simone Schwarz-Bart, among others), particularly in relation to narratives of history, memory, and resistance in contexts where legacies of slavery and colonialism remain very present. At a textual level, the infusion of Creole is closely analysed throughout. In her section on North America, Rosemary Chapman does seek to link themes from francophone Canadian literatures to those from other, more recent, colonial contexts, notably via Antonine Maillet's Pelagie-la Charrette, which chronicles the Acadians' return to the Bay of Fundy in the 1770s after their forcible expulsion by the English. This collection succeeds in showing the development of francophone literatures from a chronological perspective and thereby constitutes a very timely addition to a growing field. University of Leeds JimHouse ...

Islam and Postcolonial Narrative (review)

In a survey of postcolonial literature one rarely comes across a writer of English expression grouped together with francophone authors. In Islam and Postcolonial Narrative, John Erickson has included Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses with three francophone novels by Maghrebian writers: L'amour la fantasia by Assia Djebar, L'enfant de sable by Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Amour bilingue by Abdelkabir Khatibi. What links these four writers, as Erickson is quick to point out, is not merely their Muslim background in countries that were once colonized by Western powers, but also the "mixture of genres" (29) that has come to characterize their writings. Drawing on Islamic and Western literary traditions, and using the languages of the people who colonized them, they have succeeded in honing a mode of expression that they have made their own. It is "an alternative discourse expressive of postcolonial sensibilities and perceptions" that dispenses with the "linear, closed worlds of Eurocentric and Islamic magesterial narratives and discourses" (95). These writers, Erickson makes it clear, are not influenced by the written word alone. Much of their writing, he says, draws "on a multitude of non-written sources" (166). The.reader often encounters in their texts extracts of poems and narratives, based both on religious and secular sources, a living testimony of the cultures they belong to and those they have adopted.

Mythologising the Algerian war of independence: Tahir Wattar and the contemporary Algerian novel

One could argue convincingly that no modern Arab national literature, with the exception of Palestinian literature, is as intricately connected to one national historical event as is Algerian literature. The rejection of French colonial rule and the quest for national liberation merged in the bitter struggle for independence, forever known as the ‘War of a Million Martyrs’, that began in 1954 and ended in 1962, and came to be the guiding force of a new independent Algerian nation, not to mention the greatest source of inspiration for its cultural life, especially its creative literature. Not only is the movement for national liberation deeply imbedded in both the real and mythological dimensions of modern Algerian history, but so too in every novel that seeks to call itself Algerian, beginning with the first modern Francophone novels of the early 1950s of Mouloud Feraoun, Muhammad Dib, Kateb Yacine, Asia Djebbar, and so on, and continuing into the next decade with Tahir Wattar (Tahar Ouettar) and Abdelhamid Benhadouga, pioneers of the modern Arabic novel in Algeria. Even the most recent Algerian novels written in exile draw in varying degrees on the Algerian War of Independence.

Glissements de langues et poétiques romanesques : Poulin, Ducharme, Chamoiseau

The Sliding of Languages and the Poetics of the Novel. The classic theory of literature by a minority in a dominant language sees its insecure practitioners constitute the latter as a « superconscience ». Yet, as three recent American francophone novels show, contemporary strategies exploit passages within a language, and from language to language, transcending or infirming this theory toward Bakhtin's plurilingualism.